Shouts of alarm and panic echoed through abandoned Alawar as the workers and mercenaries all reacted at once to the appearance of the twisted wretch matriarch. As the five men of the retrieval crew began a panicked sprint down the street, the mercenaries and guards did what they could to slow the advance of the oncoming demon matriarch.
An arrow and a bolt from Kerr and Jana each struck the demon in the chest, piercing deep enough to reach the fletching but provoked no outward reaction. A second later Aila followed suit with her own ranged attack, sending a force bolt at the mother wretch. Dark green swirls of light and energy appeared in the air between them and seemed to catch the force magic like a net, dispersing the power of the attack before it could even reach its target.
“Fucking hell,” Syd cursed, scrambling back and away from the lethal cloud emanating from the matriarch.
“Let’s go!” Aila shouted, one hand tugging Jay’s. “We don’t have the right magic or skills for that thing!”
Being at a disadvantage had never stopped Jadis from succeeding before. Seeing that the crew had left the carts and their loads behind in their panic, Dys grabbed one of the sturdy metal pipes that they had been transporting. Hefting it like a spear, she hurled the long piece of steel at the approaching demon with all her might.
With unexpected speed, the mother wretch caught the pipe in its deformed right hand.
“Well fuck me,” Jadis said under the breath of all three of her selves.
Almost nonchalantly, the demon reared its arm back, then hurled the piece of metal forward, sending it spinning through the air like a helicopter’s blades rather than a spear. The partially crushed pipe whizzed by Dys’ head, barely missing it by inches as it continued down past her with enough force to smash through the wall of a building hundreds of feet away.
“We need to go!” Ealdread shouted, his guards still standing with Jadis but clearly ready to run. “This is not a fight we can win!”
“Fine! Fuck it!” Jay shouted back.
The poisonous mist had almost reached them by then and considering what it had done to Thurstan, a melee-oriented warrior, she did not want to see what it would do to a person with low vitality like Aila. Or Eir, for that matter. The low-level cleric was completely out of her depth in this situation. Jadis abandoned all attempts to fight as she turned and ran, picking up Aila and Eir in Jay and Dys’ arms, respectively. The guards followed suit running after her, the rest of the mercenaries already retreating back towards the docks.
Behind them the matriarch never increased its steady pace, slowly moving down the sloping road like an implacable force of nature, spewing out a constant stream of noxious gas that flooded the surrounding buildings and alleyways.
With her speed, Jadis quickly caught up with the rest of the fleeing retrieval team, their group already around the bend and heading down the stretch that led to the village docks. From what she could see, the merchant guards were already pulling back, themselves retreating towards the ship, and with good reason. A dozen twisted wretches were assaulting them, some vomiting out sprays of noxious bile, others attacking wildly with whatever random pieces of club-like debris they had found amongst the abandoned buildings. Even in just the few seconds Jadis observed the fight, she could see things were turning south quickly. From the waters below them a long, chitinous crab-like pincer reached out and grabbed one of the guards’ ankles, dragging him off his feet and off the dock to disappear in the dark waters with a quickly silenced scream.
Jadis couldn’t pay much attention to what was going on with the merchant guards though. A dozen or more demons were rushing up the roadway to block her and the rest of the retreating crowd.
“Clear the way! Don’t let them get to the workers!” Otwin shouted out another command as he charged ahead with his shield, slamming bodily into a boar-like wretch.
Jadis joined him with her Syd self, lance spearing through another wretch and tossing it to the side. Movement slowed, Jay and Dys set Aila and Eir back down so they could focus on striking down anything that got close on the sides, keeping the two women and the five workers between them. Douglas, Mounce, and the city guards moved to the front, hacking and slashing away at the demons that tried to block their path forward while Kerr and Jana sniped at anything that moved that they had a clear shot to.
Checking on her companion, Jay saw that Aila was laying down an expanding series of force spike traps behind them, turning the road into a death trap for anything that might come charging behind them. Already she was sipping from her flask of Nephilim essence she’d collected the night before, using it to power more and more of the spell traps. The amount of damage so many traps could do would be devastating, though having seen what the twisted wretch matriarch was capable of, she wasn’t sure the dozens of spells would be enough.
She couldn’t waste time thinking about what Aila was doing. There were too many other things to grab her three-way attention.
A bramble fiend leapt from a shadowy open window to wrap its spiked vines around one of the workers, thorns digging in deep. Dys slammed her maul down on it, killing it but causing more damage to the screaming man as the spikes tore at the flesh of his arms and chest. Fortunately, Eir was at his side immediately, pouring her healing magic into the man to close the wounds as quickly as they had been made.
More injuries were taken, however, as the group pressed forward to reach the docks. The demons were relentless in their assault and the mercenaries were panicked by the unexpected arrival of a foe so far beyond their capabilities. The balance of power had shifted dramatically and Jadis’ allies were taking a toll. A bone thief’s club-like arms slammed hard into Mounce’s leg, buckling it and sending him to the ground. A wretch managed to spew some noxious bile onto two of the guards before being killed, slowing them down as they desperately fought through the pain.
Otwin got a hand under Mounce’s arm and got him to his feet, shouting out commands to keep everyone together.
“Almost there! Stay together! We aren’t meant to meet the gods in their halls just yet!”
The knot of combatants pushed forward, passing the harbor master’s vacant building and making it to the open space of the wharfs. As they neared the middle dock where The Silver Breeze was still berthed, Douglas made a sudden charge forward and knocked two of the twisted wretches off the edge and into the water below.
“Come on,” he grunted loudly, turning back and waving the rest of them forward to run down the pier.
Jay and Dys moved up with the guards, blocking the demons that were attacking from the sides, making a corridor of safety. Syd and Aila moved up as well, striking down several lesser demons that tried to break through the perimeter that the guards had made with their shields. Given a chance to flee, the workers broke away and sprinted full tilt down the wooden walkway, but as they did, a shout of despair and a scream of pain spun Jadis’ bodies back around.
From over the top of the three-story building came an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare. Ten enormous black legs stretched out from a bulbous black core, its thick black shell blending into the shadows of the waning afternoon light. An arachnoid mouth dripped venom from fangs as long as Aila’s forearm while two dozen beady black eyes were set in a wide arch over the face of the monstrosity. Each of its gigantic legs were covered with spikes as sharp as razors. From one of those terrible legs dangled Mounce, blood dripping from where the tip had pierced through his shoulder, lifting him off the ground like he weighed nothing.
“Mounce!” Otwin screamed, rushing forward and leaping up to grab the half-elf’s leg, discarding his shield in the process.
Jadis didn’t hesitate, rushing forward to aid the two men. Dys made her own high leap, slamming her maul into one of the giant spider’s legs as it reached to impale Otwin. Her blow wasn’t able to crack through the tough shell, but it did knock the limb off trajectory and caught the demon-possessed monster’s attention.
At the same time, Jay jumped and caught Mounce and Otwin in her arms as they dangled more than twenty feet in the air. The sound of Mounce’s armor and flesh tearing as her weight pulled him off the spider’s leg made her wince, but there was nothing else that could be done. The three of them landed in a roll yards away from everyone else, further back up the road. The half-elf’s blood splattered across them, leaving a morbid trail behind them.
“Shit,” Otwin panted out as he grabbed at the gaping wound, trying to stop the now unconscious man from bleeding out. “Watch my back!”
Jay didn’t have the time or breath to respond as there were more demons charging them, taking the opportunity to attack them while they were vulnerable. She had to put all of Jay’s efforts into blocking the bone thieves and wretches from getting to Otwin and Mounce, and she had to do it without her other selves.
Dys and Syd had a giant spider to deal with.
While four of its huge legs hung onto the side of the building, piercing straight into the stone of the walls, the other six of the monster’s legs beat out an asynchronous staccato rhythm as they struck the ground, attacking in quick jabs at the two giants. The legs moved fast enough that she could barely manage to dodge them, much less hit them back. The times that she did manage to strike with one of her bodies or the other, the blows were glancing and seemed to do little to the monster. Jadis was sure if she could get a Mirrored strikes attack off on the beast it would be a different story, but she couldn’t manage the timing.
Jadis had no time to concentrate on anything but the two-front battle before her, but in the moments she could spare a glance for what the others were doing, her heart sank.
More demons had come out of hiding to attack the guards and other mercenaries. The eight guards were holding a semicircle formation led by Ealdread and were trying to push towards her three selves but the dozen and more demons were blocking them. Eir was flitting between them, laying her hands on each as they were injured, healing them in small bursts as she tried to keep them alive. Kerr was firing arrow after arrow into the horde, thinning the numbers down as they rushed from either side of the wharf but she was only one woman. Aila was judiciously doing the same with force bolts, but Jadis knew her companion only had so many of those spells in her and she’d already expended much of her magic power and likely her reserves as well.
Looking further down the dock to where the workers had retreated, Jadis caught glimpses of Douglas fighting something large and crab-like, his cleaver cutting great gouges into a round blue shell. She couldn’t see much past him or much of whatever crab monster he was fighting, but by the sounds of it she guessed the workers had made it to the ship. Where Jana was, she had no idea.
“I need to get him to the priestess!” Otwin shouted, hoisting the unmoving Mounce into his arms.
“Go! I’ll cover you,” Jay shouted back, her mallet crushing the row of skulls on an attacking bone thief.
Heralded by an unfamiliar whistling sound, a ballista bolt the size of a tent pole suddenly appeared in one of the giant spider’s many eyes, causing it to recoil in pain. The ship, she recalled, had been equipped with a couple rear-facing ballista. Jadis was glad to see some action on their part.
Taking advantage of the momentary reprieve, Dys and Syd backed away from the building to turn on the demons attacking the line of guards, cutting down several and tossing them aside, making way for Otwin and Mounce to get through.
“We need to get to the ship!” Jana shouted from somewhere unseen behind her. “They’re pulling anchor!”
Pulling anchor? Jadis spared a few seconds between her different selves to verify and to her horror, saw that it was true. The last of the merchant guards were swinging up on ropes to get on board, the retrieval crew having already boarded, and the vessel was starting to pull away as the men in the towboats began rowing.
“Fuckers,” Jay cursed, dealing a deathblow to the bone thief harassing her.
There wasn’t any time left. She had to get moving before the ship pulled too far away from the dock. As Jay turned to go, her other bodies and the rest of the mercenaries retreated off the stone path and onto the boardwalk, leaving Jay as the last to stand in the open, exposed and surrounded by a sea of corpses. Before she could take more than two steps, a sickly glow lit up the air around her as a yellow-green light seeped out of the wounds of the various demon carcasses scattered across the wharf and roadway.
Aila’s scream of warning was the last thing Jay heard before every single one of the lifeless bodies around Jay exploded.
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