Chapter 498: Deliberate Reaction

Landing in the pit, Jay immediately killed a couple of mire hounds who were underfoot, then struck down a few more that leapt at her. The mass of piled up Demons was an absolute chaos of mud, blood, and dismembered limbs, making it hard to tell where a dead hound ended and a living one began. Even keeping upright was proving to be a difficult task, since the ground under her feet was literally her enemy. Still, Jay persisted in her life-or-death mission and headed in the direction she could sense her other two selves. As she moved, she took in the chaotic scene, keeping an eye out for allies as much as enemies.

The first thing Jadis noticed, other than the amassed mountain of live and dead Demons clawing at her, was Noll. Her therion mentor had managed to pull himself out of the muck during her scrabbling fight with the centipede Demon and, while he was looking rough, he was fighting just as hard as ever. Noll must have lost his sword at some point though, Jay noted, since instead of the usual curved blade he had two long, wicked daggers in his hands. The veteran mercenary was using them to cut and slash his way through the mire hounds surrounding him, no less destructive in his attacks despite the loss of his usual weapon.

Not just mire hounds from the pit, though. Demons had started rushing up to the intersection from the east, their presence no doubt the work of the Demon Prince resuming its duty as a bridge. There weren’t as many as before, but there were enough hounds as well as simulacrum and dead heads that Noll was rushing back and forth across the eastern side of the pit, cutting down enemies in an almost impossible to follow flurry. Occasionally, he would deviate over to the middle of the pit, where he would bodily throw huge numbers of Demon bodies away and off to the side, probably in some attempt to uncover Jadis’ buried selves.

When Jadis rushed towards him, Noll met her gaze with one eye, the other yellow orb squeezed shut and crusted over with freshly clotted blood. He bared his sharp fangs at her, then pointed first down at the pit of Demons under his feet, then to the east where more demonic reinforcements were starting to come from. The meaning became clear the moment Jay’s eyes looked to where he had gestured.

Thea and Bridget were standing at the southeastern side of the intersection, at the base of the building they had been on top of. The two had climbed down at some point, unseen by Jay due to the ambush she had been forced to deal with. With the shield-bearing soldier in the front and the flail-wielding warrior in the back, the two were rapidly crushing the Demons who charged at them from the direction of Vinea. Their efforts were strong enough that they were blocking off a whole avenue of approach that came from between some of the stone pillars that the Demon Prince had raised up in the road. However, their success was drawing the attention of more enemies, and since there were only two of them, it wouldn’t be long before the pair were overrun.

Noll’s unspoken question was clear. Either he could stay in the pit and help her dig out her other bodies, or he could go help Thea and Bridget who were trying to stop the tide of reinforcements. He couldn’t do both, not effectively.

“Go to them!” Jay shouted at Noll, having made her choice.

Jadis wanted help, especially since it wasn’t just her buried under the mountain of Demons, but she couldn’t ignore the danger that Thea and Bridget were in. Plus, if more of the invading force were allowed to pile on top of the muck pit, it would make it harder for Jadis to get her selves and Alex out.

Noll nodded once, then dashed over to the east side where he tore into the oncoming Demons and took some of the pressure off her two lovers. While Jay immediately turned to the task of digging down into the demonic shit pile, the sight of Thea and Bridget made her wonder where Kerr and Sorcha were. They had been on the roof of the southeastern building, last she had seen, but Jay and been too torn in her attentions to search the rest of her lovers out. She had assumed that the four of them, along with Meli, would have stuck close to each other. That assumption was shattered by the reality that her two front-line fighters were on ground level, with the others nowhere in sight.

As Jay began swinging her axe down at the many still living mire hounds that made up the surface of the overstuffed mud pit, a form rushed up to her that answered at least one of her questions, with the potential for more.

Meli dashed across the horrid, gore-caked landscape, her bare feet barely touching the squirming ground. Once she got within range of Jay, the Dryad did the unexpected and leapt into the air. With a surprisingly light impact, she landed on top of Jay’s back, her clawed hands grabbing hold of her shoulders for stability.

“I saw Alex dive in around here!” Meli shouted into her ear over the sound of combat.

“I know! She’s with my Syd self right now,” Jay shouted back as she continued to hack away at the living ground below her. “Where are Kerr and Sorcha?”

“Had to deal with some Demons in the collapse, already back with Aila and Eir,” the Dryad answered. Jay could feel her motioning with one hand towards the building behind them. “Must have missed you!”

With how chaotic the battle had become, Jay could easily imagine missing Kerr and Sorcha as they rushed to link back up. She didn’t have the time to confirm Meli’s report, though. She had to focus on getting her other selves out of the pile, and Alex for that matter. That brought on another question, though, one that she couldn’t help but voice even if Meli was unlikely to have any answer for her.

“How the fuck did Alex get over here!?”

“I don’t know,” Meli replied. “She just came slithering out of nowhere after the wyrm buried you in living shit!”

Jadis had already been making the comparison in her own mind but hearing someone else refer to what had happened to her two selves as being buried alive in feces was really driving home the point. It wasn’t even an empty analogy, really, since the mire hounds were made largely of mud and smelled like a swamp mixed with dumpster water. The attack wasn’t just powerful, it was cruel. Cruel to the point that it seemed to sacrifice efficiency. Couldn’t the Demon Prince have used some kind of mega stone spike spell or something? This crushed-under-a-pile-of-shit-Demons attack felt almost like a purposeful insult.

Jadis wasn’t sure if Vinea would bother to do something like that or not, and it was hardly important at that moment, but the idea stuck in the back of her mind like an irritating thorn.

As Jay continued her efforts, Meli jumped off her back. Without asking, the Dryad began picking up the bodies of her the dead mire hounds and tossing them away from where Jay was digging. The woman was built for speed, not hauling corpses that had to weigh more than her, but Meli still managed to help Jay clear a large hole in the foul mass of rancid mud and Demon flesh, to the point where some of the more active mire hounds from other areas of the pit were rushing over and trying to impede their progress. Jay had to split her attention between hacking at the floor and knocking away the Demons who threw themselves at her with reckless abandon. However, in what felt like simultaneously far too long and very little time at all, Jay saw a familiar wiggling sight.

One of Alex’s blue-tipped black tentacles was poking up out of the muck and gore.

Tossing her axe away, Jay took hold of the strong tentacle and began hauling Alex up with all her strength. Her demonic lover, covered in black blood and other, less wholesome, debris, emerged from the pit of Demons. Her arms were wrapped firmly around Jadis’ Syd self, clutching her giant lifeless body to her smaller frame. She even had Syd’s sword staff wrapped up in a tentacle. As soon as Syd was clear of the muck, Jay ripped the helmet from her other self’s head and Alex silently caught the piece of armor, holding onto it for her. Smeared with mud that had leaked through the visor, Syd’s pale face was motionless and unresponsive. Without hesitation, Jay scooped Syd into one arm and Alex into the other. With a tremendous push of her legs, she leapt through the air to reach the rooftop where Aila and Eir were.

The fact that Jadis wasn’t currently standing before D and explaining to her Patron God how she had died told her that, despite two of her bodies losing consciousness from lack of oxygen, getting knocked out to the degree of she had been didn’t count as total death. A glance at her status sheet informed her that her health was rapidly depleting, likely representing the brain damage being done to her, but she was still revivable. So long as she got her bodies to Eir quick enough, Jadis believed that she’d pull through. That, or she was completely screwed already and was just going through the motions before her inevitable death, but she wasn’t about to stop trying.

Landing on the roof, Jay was pleased to see that Kerr and Sorcha were indeed with Aila and Eir, the duo looking like they had just come running through the hatch in the flat roof that led to the room below. While Sorcha looked none the worse for wear, Jadis noted that Kerr was covered in the black blood of a Demon and her chest armor had some deep gouges in the leather material.

“Here,” Jay set her other self down on the scared surface at Eir’s feet. “I’ve got to get back down there.”

“I’m coming,” Kerr immediately announced as she hurried over. “I’ve got the Strength stats, I can help dig.”

“I need you to watch over everyone up here,” Jay shook her head, already turning to leap back down. “Keep everyone safe. Alex, you stay—”

“No…” Alex cut her off, her tone sharper than Jadis had ever heard from the Demon before. “I follow… You…”

Lacking the time to argue, Jay simply let Alex latch onto her before jumping one more into the fray.

Back down on the surface of the overflowing pit, Jay scooped up her axe before heading to the spot that was directly above her deeply buried Dys self. Meli was already nearby, circling the pit and killing any Demons who had escaped Aila’s initial blasts of arcane magic. Without Jadis’ senses, though, the Dryad had no idea where to dig. When she saw where Jay sprinted to, Meli immediately joined her and started pulling the corpses off the pile and tossing them away.

As Jay followed suit, Alex slipped from her side and, with a worrying lack of concern for her own safety, dove headfirst into the demonic mass of mud. In no more than a second, Alex’s many arms and tentacles allowed her to push her way through the surface of bloody muck and out of Jay’s sight. Jadis knew she could have stopped her, but under the circumstances, she wasn’t sure she should. As worried as she was about the safety of Alex and their child, she truly needed her help.

“That is a very strange ability,” Meli panted out as she tossed another body away from the deepening hole.

“Yeah, I didn’t know she could do that,” Jay answered as she hurled more mud and gore away. “It’s never come up before.”

“I can’t imagine that this—this is a common occurrence. I hope.”

As Meli struggled to aid Jay in removing the Demon corpses that were piled on top of Dys, a wave of relief passed through Jadis’ mind. Not because of the woman’s words, but because she could feel a third of herself stir back to life.

“Syd, can you hear me?”

Syd’s eyes opened, the simple task proving to be somewhat challenging as her eyelids had been crusted over with the foul fluids that had seeped through her armor and onto her face. When she did open them, her vision swam for a few seconds before focusing on Eir’s lovely purple eyes. When she smiled up at the vision of elven beauty, the priestess let out a choked sob of relief before kissing her. As much as Jadis wanted to reciprocate the gesture, she was still covered in filth, and didn’t want any of it to get into Eir’s mouth.

 “Thank Lyssandria you’re healed,” Eir gasped, tears in her eyes as she pulled back from Syd’s lips. “Your brain was damaged, and my version of healing magic doesn’t always work to fix that.”

Beyond the worrying confirmation that the lack of oxygen had caused damage to Syd’s brain, Jadis wondered how Eir was so certain that she was okay now. Then she remembered that Eir had a spell that informed her of any positive or negative health conditions that the target might have. The Divine magic the elf could channel must have given her a clean bill of health, relatively speaking. Then again, if her Dys self was still being smothered under the lethal dogpile, wouldn’t that part of her still be suffering from brain damage and therefore wouldn’t Eir sense as much with her spell?

Jadis answered her own question by presuming that since she was all one person, Eir’s healing must have fixed the damage being done to Dys in the moment. Though without oxygen, Dys was still being actively harmed, as evidenced by her continually dropping health pool. At least the level of damage had decreased, since Syd was breathing again.

“It’ll take more than a couple thousand Demons to take me down,” Syd said as she got to her feet. “Where’s my—oh, thank you.”

Sorcha stood nearby, her expressive face showing a mix of worry and relief. She had Syd’s discarded helmet in her hands, and her sword staff at her feet. Offering the helm up to her, Sorcha gave some commentary of her own.

“I think the fight between the Seraphim and the big demon worm thing is getting bad,” the goblin said as she motioned with one hand after Syd took her helmet. “Or has gone bad, or is going to go bad, or bloody fuck I don’t know. It doesn’t look good!”

Syd’s gaze was drawn to the east where she could see the signs of powerful magic being cast. It was hard to see exactly what was going on with the sightlines purposefully obscured, but she could tell that the fighting had intensified since the last time she had looked.

“We’ll have to get over there soon,” Syd announced as she took up her weapon. “But first—”

“First you need to get your ass back down there so you can pull your other ass out of all that shit!” Kerr called out from where she was standing with one foot on the raised lip of the roof.

“Going,” Syd acknowledged the truth of the statement.

Before leaping off the roof, Syd did a quick scan of the surroundings. Kerr was standing on the edge, overlooking the battle but not firing nearly as many arrows. It looked like the therion was down to her last quiver and was trying to conserve ammo. Sorcha and Eir were grouped together nearby, and it seemed the elf was restoring the goblin’s health. No doubt Sorcha had blown through a lot of her vitality via her Minor Health Oblation spell and Eir was restoring her to full health. Beyond those two, Aila looked like she was concentrating on her inner status sheet again, likely going through some more level options while waiting for her magic reserves to generate. Jadis wished she had the time to do so as well, it was a great idea, but with a third of her bodies still out for the count she didn’t feel she had the mental capacity to focus on something so important while also dealing with attacking Demons.

There was something about their surroundings that felt off to Jadis. She wasn’t sure what it was, though, since all four of her lovers looked as safe and healthy as they could be under the circumstance. Wanting to trust her instincts, she hesitated before jumping off the building, taking one more look around her. The more time she wasted getting her Dys self out of the muck, the more time the Demons had to converge and overwhelm Noll, Thea, and Bridget below, and the greater the chance that Severina would get hurt while fighting the Demon Prince with limited backup. She needed to get moving and lingering on the roof because of an uncertain hunch was only making things worse.

As Syd started to step forward, Aila’s voice calling out to her caused her to freeze in place.

“Jadis! The centipede Demon! Where is it?”

Syd spun around, focusing on the spot where she had left the sneaky fuck’s corpse. Aila’s arcane lance was still in place, pinning the Demon’s crushed head to the stone and stucco roof, and most of the large mass of its long body was lying in a gory pile by its speared skull. However, when Syd took a second to look closer, she saw that there was a lot less demonic mass to the carcass than she recalled there being a minute before.

“I didn’t get a kill notification!” Aila continued to say as Syd rushed over to the corpse. “It’s not dead!”

Syd immediately slashed her sword through the remains of the centipede, though there was no visible reaction to the attack. She didn’t think there would be, but at that point, she had to be sure. What she noticed above all else was that the back half of the centipede, the half that had been trying to wrap around Jay while they struggled and ultimately fell limp when Aila lanced its head, was gone. Just to be sure her guess was right, Syd looked over the edge of the roof to the back alley behind the tall building. There was no sign of movement, other than the trickle of a visible trail of dripping black blood smeared across the white stucco wall, leading all the way down to street level, where it disappeared into the shadows.

“The fucker got away,” Syd growled in frustrated disbelief. “Fucking again!”

“What do we do?” Aila asked, coming up next to Jay.

“It might be back, or it might be gone until it can regenerate all that damage we did to it,” Syd surmised. “Either way, we can’t chase after it right now. Let Kerr know and keep an eye out for it. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Understood,” Aila answered, all business with the fight still ongoing. “We’ll be fine. Go.”

Knowing that she still had a powerful enemy stalking the shadows nearby didn’t make Jadis feel any better about the situation, but she really didn’t have much choice. The quicker she got to Dys, the better.

Without further words, Syd dashed to join her Jay self in her own rescue efforts.

Things were, at least, progressing at a decent rate. Jay and Meli had dug deep into the mound, slaughtering Demons left and right while tossing their bodies away. The Dryad’s movements were starting to slow, her thin arms shaking with effort, but Jadis made no attempt to stop her. By the look on the woman’s face, she knew that even suggesting Meli take a second to rest would be met with a fierce rebuke. When Syd joined in the efforts a second later, their progress down increased exponentially.

While many of the mire hounds had not survived their violent expulsion from Vinea’s depths, and more had been slain by Aila’s explosions, there were still large numbers of the Demons alive inside of the pile. Every hound that Jadis killed and tossed out of the way revealed another Demon, clawed hands reaching towards her to tear at her flesh. Having to kill the persistent bitches slowed them, but it could have been worse. The trio at the east entrance to the intersection were doing a good job of keeping new Demons from flooding into the area, which meant that they at least didn’t have to worry about enemies piling in on top of them from behind.

“I’m close!” Jay shouted, more for Meli’s benefit than anything else. “Almost there!”

Jadis could feel her Dys self moving up to meet her, even if she could no longer sense anything from that part of her directly. Alex had to have found her and was pulling her upward as quickly as she could manage. After another few frantic seconds, both Jay and Syd pushed their arms deep into the writhing mass. When they felt hard steel under their fingers, they grasped and pulled.

Dys’ limp form was dragged out of the carnage, with Alex firmly attached to her side. Relief washed through Jadis at the sight, since it meant that she could not only get her third self over to Eir where she could be properly healed, but that Alex could hopefully be shooed away from the frontlines now that the immediate danger had passed.

That thought wavered as Jay took in the way Alex was latched onto Dys. Something told her that her lover wasn’t going to be in a very cooperative mood.

“Come on, let’s go!” Jay said as she lifted Dys and Alex into her arms while Syd motioned for Meli to join her.

“Your hammer…” Alex said as she used her tentacles to wrap around both of Jadis’ forms.

Jadis wasn’t sure what the Demon was talking about at first, until she noticed that the massive maul that Jay normally wielded wasn’t present. The weapon had been in Dys’ hands during the attack, and had no doubt slipped from her fingers when Dys had lost consciousness. That meant the huge weapon was still buried in the pit somewhere, along with Noll’s curved greatsword.

“Forget it,” Jay said as she made her way out of the hole they had dug and started for the roof where the others were. “I’ll tear the Demon Prince apart with my bare fucking hands if I have to.”

Alex nodded in solemn agreement as they hurtled through the air. Her words were filled with a true, vitriolic emotion that the Demon rarely displayed. If Jadis didn’t love her so much, the tone would have sent shivers up her spines.

“I will… Help…”

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