Tears and snot ran down Jay’s face as she made her way out of the dust cloud that had enveloped her when the tower had collapsed. There was no way for her to wipe the nastiness off of her face so long as her helmet visor was down, but at least her vision was clearing as she exited the haze.
Blinking rapidly, Jay scanned the north side of the fort for a few seconds before spotting the two figures lying prone in the mud. They were hard to spot, even disregarding the shit in her eyes, since they were partially translucent. Some kind of half-assed invisibility spell? It reminded her of the hydra back in the caves, though clearly not as powerful since they were still at least partially visible. Jadis wasn’t sure how the effect was achieved, but whatever the means, the attempt at a stealth attack had probably cost the fuckers their lives.
Jadis’ adrenaline was surging through her as high as it had when she’d been almost killed by either of the matriarchs, or the Burning Rancor. Someone had tried to kill her by dropping a building on her head. A fucking building. Who the fuck would do that? And it had almost worked, too. If Jadis didn’t have an insanely high Agility stat, she probably would have been flattened by the falling tower. As it was, she’d been able to dodge and roll out of the way just in time, though not without taking a few hard knocks from flying rubble. She was going to kiss Sabina once the ambush was dealt with. The plate armor had probably saved her life, what with several hundred pounds of stone slabs banging against Syd.
As Jadis had reeled from the surprise attack for a moment, the irritation in her eyes and hacking in her lungs made only worse by the dust cloud, she heard the sounds of people around her. Not just the screams of her companions, who she could hear rushing forward from a distance outside of the fort, but the sounds of people moving right next to her three selves. Not that she could see who they were. At first, she’d thought that they were Willa, Jaxton, and Landry. The three had been nearby, though not close enough to be squashed by the tower like her.
Then Jadis heard the sounds of fighting. A shout from Willa. A grunt of pain and a curse from one of the orcs. Something that sounded a lot like steel on flesh.
If those sounds hadn’t been enough, the feeling of something, or someone, trying to slip a sharp point through a gap in Syd’s armor as she knelt on the ground made the truth clear. They were still under attack.
Moving as quickly as her considerable speed and strength allowed her, Jadis began blindly attacking the air. Swinging her hammer wildly in a circle, she felt it connect with something and send it flying. As Dys did the same, her axe meeting a brief resistance followed by the sound of something wet hitting the ground nearby, Syd grabbed at the thing that was trying to stick her.
It turned out to be a person, a woman at that, if the yelp of pain was anything to go by. As she held onto the unknown assailant, the sound of bones breaking under her tight grip, someone else suddenly crashed into her side, a red-hot knife of pain emanating from some sort of attack that somehow got through her armor.
With an angry growl, Syd forced herself to her feet while swinging the assailant she’d held onto like Jay’s hammer. The woman’s body struck someone else with a crunching sound before Syd tossed her away in the direction of the other person Jay had whacked.
With Syd back on her feet and Dys at her back, Jay stalked forward and out of the cloud to see who she’d tossed around. There were still people somewhere in the haze attacking Willa, Jaxton, and Landry, so her two selves moved in their direction, cautious of any invisible attackers. However, Jadis wanted to see who it was she was fighting. She still had no idea what she was dealing with, and if a couple dozen more ambushers were about to charge them from the north side of the fort, she wanted to know before her companions got bogged down in the dust cloud.
Jadis had never killed a person before. She’d killed many, many demons. She’d seen a lot of people die, too, some in particularly grisly ways. Still, the act of taking a person’s life, an actual human person, was foreign to her. As Jay stomped closer to the two bodies she’d broken, she wasn’t sure she could still claim that distinction.
The man on her right wasn’t moving. His arms had been practically liquified, no doubt by her hammer blow. The one attack might have killed him outright, but at the minimum he’d been knocked out cold. That would be a kindness, she supposed, since if he had been conscious, he would have been in absolutely unreal amounts of pain.
The woman straight ahead was in slightly better shape and was trying to crawl out of the gate. The sight made Jadis’ stomach do a little turn. She didn’t know the woman. In fact, the bitch had just tried to kill her, at least twice. Still, this was a person that was desperately crawling away from her for her life. As Jay came to a stop just behind her, the woman looked at her over her shoulder, pure terror in her eyes.
Fuck.
This wasn’t anything like fighting demons. The hate-filled, mindless, fearless monsters were one thing. A person, even an asshole that had almost murdered her, was a lot harder to kill out of hand. Glancing around, Jay didn’t see any sign of a further ambush. With a sigh, she reached down to pick the woman up and carry her back towards Eir. They probably wanted these people alive, anyway, to interrogate them about why they were out here and why they were trying to kill them without warning. Mercy was a virtue, right?
As Jay bent down, reaching for the clearly terrified woman, a shout came from her right, surprising her.
“Shit me sideways!” the high-pitched voice screeched, catching Jadis entirely off guard.
Looking to her left, Jadis saw a nearly invisible figure leap out of the shadows and point something yellow and glowing at her. She barely had time to register that the tiny person had big ears and green skin before an overwhelming pain crashed through her body.
All of her muscles cramped up at the same time, causing her to freeze in place. Her teeth clenched and her bones creaked as she was paralyzed, unable to move. As Jadis struggled against the painful petrification, she realized that it wasn’t just Jay affected, but her other bodies had been locked up as well. The tiny caster’s spell didn’t just affect the body in front of her, it affected Jadis as a whole.
If a scream could have left her clenching throat, Syd would have let one loose as another red-hot stabbing pain struck her, this time in the back of her left thigh. Again, she was armored there, so no blade should have been able to cut through to her, but this one did. Worse, there was nothing she could do about it as she struggled against her paralysis.
“The bloody fuck are you?” she heard a male voice mumble behind her before another stab pierced into her, this time catching her lower back.
With bulging, watering, unblinking eyes, Jay watched the small, shadowy figure rush up and wrap an arm under the injured woman, partially lifting her up and helping her stagger away. As she did so, Jay could see the translucent mage gazing up at her with a horrified expression on her face. Her huge eyes looked positively gigantic, the fear more than obvious even though the spell she’d cast on herself made her details difficult to distinguish. As the two put distance between themselves and her, another voice shouted out, loud and strong and full of confidence.
“Good sodding job, Sorcha! Time to fell this freak!”
Suddenly there was a heavy weight on Jay’s back as someone landed there. She couldn’t turn her head to see, but she felt it as someone clung onto her from behind. Hands fumbled at her helmet’s clasps before undoing them and tossing it off of her. A moment later, Jay felt hard steel wrap around her neck as someone hooked a spiked chain around her from behind, pulling it hard and cutting off her air supply as the sharp points dug into her skin.
“Tough freak, aren’t ya?” the man grunted as he pulled tighter, strangling her with his considerable strength. “Rotten luck for you. Never should have come he—”
The man’s words were cut off abruptly as he let out a cry of pained surprise. He fell forward and to the side, landing hard and revealing his fat, balding visage to Jay. The spiked chain around her neck pulled free, allowing Jay to breathe again but not without tearing at her flesh as it dragged against her.
“Fils de pute!” Kerr shouted from somewhere behind Jay. “Get the fuck off my girlfriend!”
The fat man rolled forward, breaking the arrow that was lodged in his shoulder but avoiding the second shot Kerr sent his way. As he tumbled to his feet, Jadis felt the spastic clenching in her muscles relax as whatever spell she’d been put under finally expire. With a roar of pure, unadulterated rage, Jay swung her giant war hammer up in a wide arc at the fat bald man that had been choking her to death.
In a surprisingly adept move for a man of his size and girth, the man spun and dodged out of the way, the hammer missing him by mere inches. As Jay recovered from the missed swing, her balance thrown off by the awkward position she’d attacked from, the fat man lashed out at her with the chain in his hand.
The long, spiked chain swung out like a whip and wrapped around Jay’s left ankle. The man yanked hard and the spikes screeched against the plate armor. Jay’s left leg was pulled out from under her and she toppled backwards as the man readied another strike.
Except, before either Jay could hit the ground or the fat man could swing his chain whip again, Dys came charging out from the murk and launched herself at the assailant.
“Bloody abyss!” the man shouted in a gravelly voice as Dys’ axe grazed the skin on his bare head. “Two on one ain’t fucking fair!”
“Fuck you!” Jay and Dys both shouted back, spittle flying from their mouths as they both went after the man at the same time.
Surprising Jadis, the man threw himself backwards in a double backflip, a feat of agility that again caught her off guard considering the guy looked like he spent all day eating cake and drinking beer. As he landed, rather than counterattacking either Jay or Dys, he turned around and ran away without another word.
“No you fucking don’t!” Jay shouted as she and her other self charged after him.
At the same time, another arrow shot by Kerr arced through the air towards the runner, but instead of hitting the mark, the fat fuck took a spinning step forward. Jadis nearly laughed at the sight as the arrow was deflected off of the man’s huge, rippling belly.
The spectacle was so bizarre that Jadis nearly missed it when the man made a quick change in direction the moment he landed, suddenly diving through an open window in the front of one of the buildings along the wall.
Jay and Dys both skidded to a stop as they followed him. Dys, slightly ahead of Jay, passed the window just slightly. As she slid to just before the door of the building, the ground under her feet disappeared as the thin layer of cloth and dirt hiding a pit trap collapsed. With a yelp, Dys fell down into the trap.
The drop was more damaging to her ego than her body. Ten feet deep and filled with wooden spikes, Dys’ heavily armored form crushed the timbers that simply weren’t sturdy enough to pierce her. Her footing was still thrown out from under her, though, and it took her a moment to pull herself out of the mess she’d fallen into.
Jay wasn’t about to wait, though. Swinging her hammer like a wrecking ball, she didn’t bother with knocking down the door. She knocked down the whole damned wall of the building.
Stones and mortar flew everywhere as Jay made a new entrance into the abandoned shop the fat man had dove into. Forcing her way in, she looked around, squinting in the dark to find the piece of shit.
“Where is he?” Jay heard Kerr call out from behind her as the archer jogged up, her bow ready to fire.
“He’s fucking gone,” Jay growled as she slammed her hammer into the back wall of the building.
There, set low to the ground, was a hole in the wall that was wide enough for the average person to fit through, and apparently just enough for the lardass too. She could see that the escape tunnel led outside the wall. The bald strangler had escaped.
“Shit,” Kerr said as she knelt down, looking through the hole. “Want to get outside and track the meatball down?”
“Not yet,” Jay said, turning and stomping out of the destroyed building. Dys leapt up and out of the pit as she did so, her axe at the ready. “There’s still someone in that fucking dust cloud stabbing Syd. And I am going to shove my fist down their fucking throat.”
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