Jadis needed to put some pressure on that carpenter Sabina was working with to finish the wagon she’d commissioned, because her carrying capacity had seriously reached its limit.
Aila, Eir, Kerr, Thea, Sabina, and finally a surprised Bridget all had to be carried by Jadis’ three bodies in order for their growing group to get anywhere with any kind of speed. Two women to each separate self was definitely pushing things for her, not because of their weight but simply because of the awkwardness of trying to carry them all while still holding onto her weapons. If their group got any larger, it just wouldn’t be possible to transport them all.
Maybe she could have a backpack made with a built-in platform that a couple of them could ride on?
Jadis discarded that silly idea with a shake of her heads. No, she just needed to get that wagon done. It’d probably slow them down a little, but she was sure wheeling everyone around in the wagon was going to be way better than juggling them in her arms and on her backs. Though there was no way princess carrying was going to be entirely removed from their outings. That was too fun to eliminate completely.
“How far are we going?” Bridget shouted her question from where she clung to Dys’ back.
“To the border of the forest,” Dys answered. “More demons out there.”
“Don’t worry,” Eir said with a smile from where she was clutched in Dys’ free arm. “She—and her sisters—can run so fast, we’ll be there quickly and back again well before nightfall.”
“Okay, yeah, that I believe,” Bridget said over the clank and stomp of charging Nephilim. “This is pretty damn fast. But, uh, why’s that old guy following us?”
Jadis didn’t need to look over her shoulders to know exactly who the orc was referring to. Even though she had told the man that she had guild business that day and couldn’t train, Noll had still hung around and, after Jadis and crew had departed the hall to leave the city, he’d been following them step for step.
“That gentleman is their trainer, of sorts,” Eir told Bridget, framing the situation between them kindly. “He’s following to offer his advice and guidance to them, no doubt.”
“You need a trainer? Really?” Bridget addressed Dys directly. “But you three are so, so… strong! Why would you…?”
“We’re self-taught,” Dys admitted to the curious orc. “So we’re getting some professional lessons on combat. Never too late to learn, right?”
“Right…” Briget said thoughtfully.
It took a couple of hours to get through the Broken Hills and close to the edge of the Great Southern Forest, but once the gigantic pine trees were well within sight, Jadis slowed her pace and let Kerr guide them to a suitable spot for setting up some ambushes. Jadis planned on putting Bridget through her paces, but she also wanted to make good use of their time out in the field to fight and kill as many demons as possible. Even if the experience was being split many ways, if they killed enough of them then people with lower-level classes would still benefit. Luring the tentacled fuckers to a prepared position was the best way Jadis knew to safely slay high numbers of them.
Kerr eventually found them a hill with several large rocks sticking out of its slope that was facing the valley between the two cliffsides of opposing hills. The cliffs acted as a perfect funnel for anything coming from the north and the boulders littering the southern slope would make perfect cover for her backline companions. With their position chosen, Aila immediately set to work laying down dozens of magical spike and snare traps while Eir helped Sabina set up by one of the boulders.
Sabina had brought a new toy with her, something she’d apparently smashed together in a sleepless fugue the night prior. It was basically an oversized crossbow, one large enough that she needed a bipod stand to hold the front end up, but not quite at the point where Jadis would call it a ballista. The bolts were thick and the sharp steel heads looked particularly nasty; Jadis couldn’t wait to see the thing in action.
Kerr, Thea, and Bridget joined Jadis off to one side where they discussed how they were going to go about the coming fights.
“Unlike you, I actually know how to track things,” Kerr continued her argument. “You three just sit back here and wait, I’ll drag the vaches stupides to our little trap.”
“It’s still safer if we do it,” Jay argued back. “We’ve got the speed to outrun practically anything that’s out here.”
“Might as well run in circles. It’ll take you forever just to find anything.”
“M—maybe you can c—carry her?” Thea suggested when it looked like neither woman was going to back down. “B—best of both that way, ah, right?”
“Fair enough,” Jay shrugged after a moment.
“No fucking ‘princess carry’ this time though,” Kerr shook her finger up at Jay. “It’s business time right now and I can’t shoot a bow being held like that.”
“What, are you planning on shooting arrows while sitting on my shoulder?”
“Yes.”
Jay rolled her eyes but took the archer’s assertion in stride.
“Fine. What about you?” She turned to look at Bridget. “Once the fighting starts, where do you normally like to be?”
“In the thick of things?” The orc shrugged. “I need room to swing this,” she indicated her lantern flail, “but other than that, I’m adaptable.”
“Fair enough,” Jay nodded. “Thea, you take our left. Bridget will take up position on our right. We’ll stand our ground there, at the end of the traps Aila is putting down. Also, don’t step on one of those by accident, Bridget. It’ll fuck you up.”
“Noted,” she answered with a serious nod.
“Kerr, set up wherever the fuck you want, just try to stay near Aila, Eir, and Sabina, please,” Jay pointed at the therion. “I doubt anything will get past us, but just in case, you’re their backup defense.”
“Yes sir!” Kerr snapped off a sarcastic salute but didn’t argue.
“Noll,” Jay finally motioned at the old man who was standing nearby, his arms folded across his armored chest. “You do you, I guess. Try to give us some space?”
“Hmph,” he hmphed before striding away and up the southern hill, no doubt to get a better view of the coming battles.
That was a good enough acknowledgement as any as far as Jadis was concerned. With their plans and positions in place, Jay swept Kerr up to sit on her left shoulder then headed north, her two other selves following closely behind. As they made their way through the now liberally trapped valley, she overheard Bridget ask Thea a question.
“What’s that that Aila is drinking? Some kind of magic replenishment potion? It’s gotta be with all the spells she’s put down, right?”
“Ah, uh, i—it’s, ah, um,” were the last stumbling words Jadis could hear coming from the embarrassed shieldsworn before she got too far away to overhear.
Jadis judged it to be late morning, not more than an hour before noon by the time they had set up their ambush. It wasn’t until it was a good hour or two past noon when Kerr finally guided her to a pack of demons that they could lure back. Not that they went without coming across a single demon for several hours. No, they ran into exactly seventeen of them. The problem was, they were always in small numbers of two, maybe three at most. Nowhere near the mob of monsters Jadis was looking for to kite back to the ambush. For such small threats, Jadis and Kerr simply killed the demons on the spot and took their bounties to save time.
Kerr’s tracking skills did come in handy though, as she spotted the signs of many demons moving in a pack towards the west, basically parallel with the forest border. Just as Kerr had predicted based on the footprints, the mini horde was made up almost entirely of bone thieves. There were thirty to forty of them, put together in all shapes and sizes. The pure chaos of so many oddly and asymmetrically formed bodies was unsettling. Just watching their various modes of locomotion, from bipedal to quadrupedal to even larger numbers of limbs, was mesmerizing in a trainwreck kind of way.
“Okay, get ready to hoof it,” Kerr warned Jay with a rap of her knuckles on the side of her helmet. “I’m going to take out that one twisted wretch mixed in with the bone heads. Once they’re on us, we’ll need to lead them a long way, so don’t go too fucking fast or they’ll string out and we won’t get them all in the ambush.”
“Fire at will,” Jay said as she readied her selves for a long jog.
Getting up to put her knee on Jay’s shoulder, Kerr carefully took aim with her enchanted longbow. The mob of demons had to be more than a thousand feet away, far outside the range of most longbows, but Kerr didn’t ask Jadis to get any closer. As she slowly released her breath, she let the arrow she’d nocked to her bowstring slip free. The missile was launched at a high angle and flew with the speed of a falcon. Three seconds passed before her arrow found its target, but miraculously, Kerr’s shot hit true.
At that range, the wretch was just a tiny figure on a distant slope, one dark figure mixed in with the many yellow-white figures of the bone thieves. But Jadis could still see when the arrow hit the demon. Its body abruptly slammed to the side, skewered by an oversized arrow that had literally pinned it to the side of the hill.
| Congratulations! Twisted Wretch Defeated. Bonus Experience Points Awarded for Defeating a Demon Spawn of Samleos. |
“Fucking nice shot!” Jadis exclaimed from all three of her selves. “Glad I didn’t bet against you making that!”
Kerr stilled for a moment before cursing loudly.
“Shit! Why in Valtar’s balls didn’t I bet on that!? Wait a second, double or nothing I make a second shot like that.”
“Hup, too late,” Jay pointed at the charging crowd of bone thieves. “They spotted us. No time for games. It’s business time, remember?”
“Fuck you, throwing my own shit back at me,” Kerr groused as Jadis started jogging back towards where the others waited.
It took some time to lead the demons along since she couldn’t go too fast or she risked losing them. Following Kerr’s advice, Jadis moved at half her normal speed, just fast enough that the demons couldn’t close the distance but just slow enough that they were never more than a few hundred feet away. She led them around in a large, arcing path towards the north side of the prepared valley, careful to make sure that they were following her from the right direction so that they wouldn’t end up circumventing the trapped lane Aila had set up.
As they neared the valley, Kerr suddenly sat up on Jay’s shoulder, leaning forward with her cow-like ears twisting every which way.
“Shit, Jadis, they’ve already got company. I hear fighting!”
“Fuck,” was the only curse Jadis spared any breath for before she shifted from her loping jog into a full sprint.
At max speed, it only took moments for Jadis to reach the valley and the sight that greeted her did not make her happy.
Aila, Eir, and Sabina were in the middle of the valley, surrounded on their left and right by the traps Aila had laid. At the south end, Thea and Bridget were fighting against eight twisted wretches. The two were holding the demons off and keeping them from getting to the vulnerable backline, but they were clearly being overwhelmed just by the sheer number of assailants. Jadis could see many more wretches scattered across the ground beyond them, their crippled or slain bodies littering the southern hillside as well more dead or trapped by ethereal magic on either side of the valley walls.
“Kerr!” Jay shouted. “Off!”
Without argument Kerr leapt to the side to land on her feet at the northern entrance of the valley, an arrow already being drawn. Jadis didn’t see any more of Kerr’s actions after that though, as her whole focus was centered on getting to her imperiled companions as quickly as possible.
Activating her Knight’s Daring Charge skill, all three of Jadis’ bodies rocketed forward at breakneck speeds, closing the gap between her and the rest in a thunderous sprint that echoed loudly against the stone cliffs. She made no attempt to slow or order the others out of her way as she neared; with how many demons were assaulting Thea and Bridget, there was no way they could have safely stepped aside anyway, not without exposing themselves to potential lethal attacks. Instead, right before Jay reached Aila, Eir, and Sabina, she jumped.
Even before taking into account her massively boosted Strength and Agility stats, Jadis had quite the vertical leap. Back at the village she’d been reborn next to, she could easily leap high enough to grab hold of a second story window and could jump far enough to clear several dozen feet without much issue. Now, with over a hundred points in both key attributes, Jadis was able to soar over all her companions even while wearing several hundred pounds of plate armor.
Like giant-sized cannonballs, Jadis’ three bodies slammed down on top of the pack of twisted wretches. The weight and force of her landings sent torn and broken bodies flying in a gory mess. In one devastating attack, the eight demons that had been engaged with Thea and Bridget had been neutralized. Definitively.
Unfortunately, the reckless move had not been without its consequences for Jadis. Crash landing on top of a bunch of demons wasn’t the safest way to land, nor was it easy to recover from. Jadis’ selves tumbled in multiple directions as the uneven surface of many squashed wretches sent her slipping and sliding.
Syd wound up smashing face first into the ground, her helmet the only thing keeping her nose from being flattened as badly as the demon she’d crushed beneath her. Jay ended up falling in the opposite direction, the treacherous ground moving underfoot and sending her sprawling backwards, her massive frame nearly falling on top of Thea who had to scramble to get out of the way. Dys ended up with the worst of the results, though. As she rolled to the side, wretch bodies broken beneath her, she slid partially into one of Aila’s spike traps. The ghostly spike struck her right arm at the elbow, hitting it with enough force that a loud crunching sound echoed in Jadis’ ears a second before the pain reached her. Dys’ elbow was snapped back in the wrong direction.
“Is everyone okay?” Jay shouted as she looked at Thea upside down from her prone position. “What happened?”
“W—we’re fine,” Thea said, moving to help Jay to her feet. “No casualties.”
“A horde of those fucks came on us from the east,” Bridget called out as she too moved to help Jay up. “Had to fall back or we’d have had our asses pounded. Uh, shit, I mean, or we’d have been overwhelmed.”
“Aila?” Jay shouted, then saw the arcanist approaching with Eir and Sabina. “Eir! How’s the magic power? Do we need to flee? Because there’s another thirty or more bone thieves headed our way.”
“I still have half my magic power,” Eir answered as she rushed to Dys and gently took hold of her broken arm. “This will take a minute to fix.”
“I’m topped off but out of reserves,” Aila answered, shaking her empty canteen.
“Fine,” Jay said while helping Syd quickly clear her helmet of the dirt blocking her sight. “Don’t hold back. Blast away before they get here.”
“Because here they come,” Syd continued as the last large dirt clot fell from her visor.
Turning to look, Jadis’ companions saw Kerr sprinting towards them from the north side of the valley, several dozen demonic bone monsters a hundred feet behind her.
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