Chapter 90: Caravan Cleanup

The guards marched forward in lockstep, shields forming a mobile wall. Working with trained coordination, their spears struck the bramble fiends with precise thrusts that skewered them before tossing them to the side. Any demon that leapt at them was repelled by their shields, knocked back and away with surprising force. As they pressed forward, one of the guards spoke a word and his spear lit up in flames, each of his attacks burning the plant-based demons. Another guard’s shield grew stone spikes; every time he bashed a fiend with it, the shield briefly doubled in size, magically conjured stone appearing to toss the attacking demon back before quickly fading away.

Jadis couldn’t spare much attention to the skill of the guards, fighting in the thick of the demons as she was, but she could see that the battle had become a foregone conclusion. The shield wall of soldiers was eating through the fiends methodically, steadily crushing them as they moved as a unit. The only real question was how many of the caravanners would still be alive when the fighting was done.

With the guards backing her up, Jadis pushed forward towards the front of the caravan.

Syd stepped over dead fiends to reach a man swarmed with spiked demons, thrusting and slashing her lance through their thorned bodies. There was blood everywhere, on him, on the ground. She wasn’t sure if the man could survive the blood loss, but his legs were still kicking so she did what she could to free him. The trouble with the bramble fiends was that even in death they were dangerous. Dead vines could still stay tangled around bodies and limbs, and their thorns lost none of their sharpness.

Dys brushed past Syd, sweeping the ground before her with her maul. Each demon she sent flying lessened the pressure on the guards around her. She didn’t bother trying to kill the fiends wrapped around the aurochs, focusing instead on protecting the guards and drivers as best she could.

Jay stopped to help a man who had fallen, his legs constricted by brambles. He wasn’t a guard, not with his lack of armor, nor did he look the part of a wagon driver. His clothes, despite the blood, looked too fine. To save him, Jay squashed the demon’s round body with her mallet, its black blood gushing out and splattering the man.

The richly dressed man looked up at her with a mixture of alarm and gratitude, pain evident in his eyes. Not waiting for whatever it was he was trying to gasp out, Jay grabbed hold of him by the front of his shirt and bodily lifted him off the ground. The dead fiend was still lashed around his legs, drawing cries of pain from the man as it dangled heavily from his lower limbs, but there was nothing Jay could do about that at the moment. What she could do was put him on top of the wagon, away from the chaos and out of the way.

As Dys and Syd drew closer to the fore, she could hear the shouts of the horned woman ever more clearly over the sounds of battle around her. She was cursing up a storm, using all manner of profanities. Some of the words Jadis didn’t recognize, possibly coming from languages foreign to her. A few actually sounded like obscenities she did recognize from other languages native to Earth.

“Eat my urkska-damned phlegm you motherfucking puttana! Your Samleos-fucked mother can drink my ass sauce!”

Jadis had to admit she was impressed.

Arrows flew from the woman’s bow with unerring accuracy, striking down demon after demon, though some took two or three shots to kill. She had a stack of quivers on top of the cart with her, along with two hand axes stuck into the wood. As one bramble fiend leapt up onto the wagon after her, the horned archer spun and swept up an axe with one hand and in the same motion threw it at the demon, killing it in one blow.

The archer could take care of herself, clearly. Jadis focused on the other combatants instead. There were guards on the ground or pinned against wagons, struggling to free themselves from their constrictive demonic bindings. Their thick scaled armor had likely saved their lives, but they couldn’t hold out forever.

Jadis did what she could to kill the vine demons and free the tangled guards but even as she killed one fiend after another, she could see that some of the men were already gone.

Dys crushed a demon latched onto a man lying on the ground, his body partially under a wagon, pulling the flattened fiend away to reveal unblinking eyes staring back at her. A jagged puncture wound went through his neck, no blood left in the body for any to pour out of the hole.

Jadis paused for but a moment at the grisly sight. Clinically, she registered the signs of death, her face drawn closed at the realization that she hadn’t been in time for this unlucky man. She suspected that if she had come across the dead man in any other context, she would have reacted far differently. But in the heat of battle, her mind focused only on what mattered. This man was gone, but others weren’t. She had to move on.

Jadis stepped away from the corpse and turned her fury upon the remaining demons. There were less and less of their number as the seconds ticked by. Their swarm was not unlimited, their spikes not infinite. Each of Jadis’ bodies left piles of them dead in their combined wake.

Jay crushed a demon that had latched onto an auroch, freeing the poor beast from the demon’s vines. As she swung around to kill the next fiend, she found none living near her. There were none left alive near Dys or Syd, either. She had ended up at the front of the wagon train, her guard escort a few yards behind her. There were no more bramble fiends to kill.

No cheer went up from the victorious survivors. There were only gasping breaths and groans of pain coming from human and beast alike. With no demons left to kill, the three of Jadis stood unmoving, at a loss now that there was nothing left to vent her anger on.

Her appointed guards didn’t waste time. Several pulled swords or daggers from their belts and began cutting the injured caravan guards free of the fiends that still clung to them. Others ran back towards their horses to pull packs from their saddles, retrieving healing salves, bandages, and healing potions to use on the wounded. At a distance, Jadis could see Aila and Eir both running forward to join in the rescue efforts.

Jadis shook her head, reorienting her mind. She knew what to do in trauma situations. Theoretically at least. She got to work. Jay and Dys set about pulling the dead demons off of the injured and stopping the bleeding. Syd, however, had her own bleeding to stop. She went to meet up with Aila and Eir.

“Oh goddess, you’re injured!” Eir cried out upon seeing Syd. Immediately, her hands began to glow as she cast a healing spell, grasping hold of her still bleeding hand.

“Are you alright?” Aila asked, pulling bandages and her supply of healing salve from her bag.

“I’m fine,” Syd told her, then repeated the phrase more firmly as she gently tried to push Eir away. “I’m fine. Eir, listen to me, I’m fine. I still have two thirds of my health pool. Stop healing me.”

“What? No! You’re injured, Miss Syd! I need to heal you, to keep you whole and perfect! I have to—”

“You have to stop and listen,” Syd interrupted.

Sticking her lance into the ground, she freed her right hand to grab hold of Eir’s small face, her long fingers wrapping around her cheeks and chin.

“Listen! I have plenty of health left. Aila has bandages and salve I can use to stop the bleeding. There are men behind me that are injured far, far worse. Some have already died. Please, go stabilize them first before you attend to my wounds, okay? Do that for me?”

Eir looked up into Syd’s violet eyes, tears forming in the corners of her dark purple orbs. She blinked them away, her face taking on a mask of determination as she drew herself a little taller.

“Yes! No one else will die today, not while I have magic to heal them.”

“Good girl,” Syd said, letting the elf go and giving her a gentle pat on the head.

Eir rushed forward and past Syd, kneeling down beside a caravan guard who still had a fiend latched around his arm. She drew a knife from somewhere within her robes and began cutting the dead demon off while magical light radiated off of her hands, healing as she went.

Syd turned towards Aila, the redhead’s face composed in her usual neutral mask. She looked up at Syd and clucked her tongue.

“You just can’t leave the city without finding some kind of disaster, can you?” She said pointedly, drawing her canteen out to wash some of the excess blood off of Syd’s left hand.

“I guess not,” Syd shrugged, a wry grin finding its way onto her lips. “At least I gave the guards something to do, huh?”

“That’s not a good thing, considering our goal of getting rid of them.”

“No,” Syd sighed, “but at least it wasn’t a grundwyrm or a corrupted sea bull. These bramble fuckers aren’t quite as scary, relatively speaking.”

“Except I’ve never heard of them being in the Broken Hills before. They’re normally something the mercenaries in the north-east deal with, deeper into the forest,” Aila explained, dashing Jadis’ hopes of these demons being a normal threat for the area.

“Well shit,” Syd cursed, letting Aila dress the wounds on her hand.

While Syd and Aila talked, Jay and Dys lent their help to any injured they could, though it quickly evolved into the city guards taking over the first aid efforts while the two giants cleared the carts and surrounding ground of the dead bramble fiends.

As Dys bent down to pick a dropped sword off the ground, an unfamiliar voice growled at her from the side.

“So, what the fuck are you supposed to be?”

Dys straightened, looking up into the green elliptical eyes of the feral archer.

“I’m a Nephilim. What the fuck are you?” Dys answered and asked, meeting the unblinking gaze of the woman.

She grinned widely, showing Dys a full display of extremely sharp teeth.

“I’m a Therion.”

Dys swept her gaze over the woman. She sat on top of the wagon, her bow held in one hand, an open canteen in the other. The therion truly had a feral look to her, from the large black horns arching backwards from the sides of her forehead to the cat-like eyes and fanged grin. Her hair was a shaggy mess of gray and looked closer to animal fur than human hair. Her ears were decidedly inhuman, long and somewhat floppy, almost like a cow’s ears, also covered in gray fur. Looking further down, Jadis could see that the woman’s fingers ended in sharp claws rather than nails. A slight movement behind her drew Dys’ eye. A long, shaggy tail gently thumped the roof of the wagon, swishing back and forth in small movements like a dog’s tail.

“Get a good eyeful?” the therion inquired, tilting her head to one side, her sharp teeth still on display.

“Mostly,” Dys answered with a slight shrug. “I could stand to see more.”

That response drew a wider grin from the archer.

“How about now?” she asked.

One clawed hand reached for the hemline of the padded shirt she was wearing and roughly pulled it up, exposing the bare toned flesh beneath and giving Dys a good view of the therion’s perky left breast.

Dys grinned back. “Why, thank you, I was wondering if you’d have two or more. That’s one question answered. I’d reciprocate the gesture, but this is harder to pull up,” she said while rapping her knuckles against her steel breastplate.

“Maybe later then,” the archer said, letting her shirt fall back down. “Never heard of a Nephilim before, and I pride myself on having known every race out there.”

The way the therion pronounced the word ‘known’ left no doubt in Jadis’ mind about exactly what the woman meant.

“Maybe later,” she agreed. “But for now, we’ve got a lot of shit to clean up before the sun sets.”

“Ugh,” the therion said, her grin dropping as she scowled at the dead demons and general battlefield chaos all around them. “Yeah, guess so. Merde. I hate cleanup.”

The archer hopped down from her perch on top of the wagon. Standing at full height before Dys, she could see that the woman was taller than most, but still a few inches shorter than Aila. However, her large horns gave her a whole extra foot in height, making her seem even bigger than she was. Before she knelt down to begin extracting arrows from the slain demons, she tossed Dys another toothy grin.

“Name’s Kerr. Catch me at the Tipsy Mule and I’ll buy you a drink.”

Dys threw back her own grin and a nod. She would have loved to have continued the conversation with the interestingly vulgar beast-woman but her earlier statement was a true one. There was a lot to clean up and a lot to do to get the wounded caravanners back to the safety of Felsen before night fall. She wasn’t so sure the wagons could be brought back, not with several of the aurochs dead.

Then again, what good was all her strength if she didn’t put it to use?

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