Jadis’ health went up by nineteen points over the course of the night, putting her at one hundred and sixty-four. She supposed the damage wasn’t too bad considering how close she’d come to truly fucking up and getting strangled and beaten to death by demons. At least, her health seemed good enough that she didn’t feel the need to spend another full day of doing nothing but sleeping. She had goals to accomplish and didn’t feel like delaying.
Throughout the night, Jadis had heard the sounds of other bone thieves stalking the woods around her hut, along with the accompanying glow of at least a couple of them cannibalizing their fallen brethren’s bones. At least one had the thought to pry at the boarded-up window of her saferoom, but hadn’t broken in. As dawn came and Jadis came to full wakefulness, she could still hear the click-clack of a bony body patrolling around outside her front door.
“I need to pee,” Dys said crossly, bleary eyes staring daggers at the closed door with an unseen demon behind it.
“Well, that’s priority two.” Jay readied her club, bending her knees to crouch slightly, hand against the door. “We deal with this dipshit first, then we pee, then…”
“Breakfast?”
“Yeah, that works. What a fucking way to start a morning.”
The bone thief waiting outside for her was a squat, bulky thing with a second set of arms and legs coming out of its back that probably would have made it possible for the abomination to walk just as well upside down as right side up. An excellent defense against getting flipped over, she supposed, but Jadis didn’t test the theory.
Moving out from the opened door and rushing the demon head on, both Jay and Dys struck the enemy in unison. The power of the synchronized attack was once again boosted by Mirrored Strikes, blowing apart the demon’s bony shell to devastating effect. The bone thief was dead in seconds, core blasted to bits by a second coordinated swing of her clubs.
Standing over the defeated demon, Jay looked at Dys and shrugged slightly. “Not as bad as the bear one, huh?”
“Nope. Gotta say, I’m liking the Mirrored Strikes skill. Any other skills that come up that’ll power up our duality thing, we take. This is freaking awesome,” Dys finished with a laugh.
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” Jay agreed sardonically as together they scooped up the shell containing the demon’s dead core to carry with them. They were headed to the outhouse anyway.
Once the rest of Jadis’ morning routine was done, she decided to head to the village main road to check out the situation. She made a quick detour to drop of the bones from her first encounter of the day, pleased to find that no demons had found the cellar full of skeletons yet.
“We need a better spot for these, too,” Jay said with a frown, tossing an armful of bones into a corner of the room.
“Yeah, probably a good idea,” Dys agreed, tossing her own load down. “It’s starting to get full in here anyway. I mean, not exactly packed, but damn these are a lot of bones.”
Finished offloading the unwanted remains, Jadis resumed her trek, coming up on the side of the stone temple. Peeking around the corner, she spotted three more bone thieves milling around the pile of dead demons she had left in front of the temple. Their bizarre, asymmetrical forms stalked from side to side around the road, their empty skulls occasionally clattering in a staccato rhythm.
“Not that I’m complaining, but do you think we can handle three at once?” Jay asked, eyes locked on the trio of demons.
Behind her, Dys kept her eyes on the trees of the surrounding forest, watching for any bone thieves that might be trying to sneak up on her. A little smirk quirked her lips as she tilted her head.
“What did one prostitute say to the other?”
“Shut the fuck up, that’s bad,” Jay said, admonishing her twin self. “Besides, if we do this right, we won’t be the ones getting boned.”
“That’s an awful pun,” Dys shook her head.
“Yeah. Okay let’s—” Cutting herself off with a thought, Jay halted her imminent charge.
Jadis hadn’t gone through all that horrible trouble the night before to not learn to check her corners.
Jay popped her head through one of the broken windows on the side of the temple. As she had suspected, a fourth bone thief was inside, sitting curled up in a corner to the right of the large doors.
“Sneaky devil,” Jay and Dys said in unison.
Dangers identified and assessed, Jadis leapt into action before any more enemies showed up or any of the current ones noticed her presence. The two hopped into the temple through a broken window and converged on the bone thief as it came out of whatever torpor the demons seemed to enter when inactive.
The twin blows of her clubs shattered the skeletal monster before it could fully react. The sounds of stone cracking bone echoed in the open air of the temple, quickly drawing the attention of the patrolling demons outside. Before the first one could even reach the doors, Jadis had already slaughtered the bone thief hiding inside and had moved both her bodies to the open door of the temple.
The first demon to reach the doors was hit with a double horizontal swing from either side of the door, the mirrored strike bashing the creature’s bones and knocking it heels over head in a cartwheeling spin as it clattered to the ground inside the building. With that auspicious start, Jadis went into a whirlwind of attacks, slamming the downed demon and the two that followed shortly after.
The whole fight took a couple minutes, the end result being Jay and Dys breathing heavily and the bone thieves breathing no more. The two had not taken any damage at all, dispatching the demons easily thanks to Mirrored Strikes.
“Who needs a morning workout when you’ve got demons for neighbors?” Dys asked, nudging one of the broken open shells.
“Not us, that’s for sure,” Jay answered, picking up one of the larger bones that had been split clear in two by one of their double attacks. She eyed it dubiously; the huge bone was nearly as thick around as her forearm at its thinnest.
“What we do need, though, are new weapons.” Dys held up the club in her hand for inspection. She could see a crack peeking out from under the leather bindings she’d used to secure the stone to the wood, starting to run down the shaft of the club. “I don’t think these can take the power of our attacks for much longer before they break.”
“Okay, well, we’ve got priorities. Before anything else, let’s make sure there aren’t any more demons loitering around in the village.” Jay said, immediately setting out the temple doors. There was a lot to do and not enough time in the day.
By mid-morning, Jadis had run a sweep of the village, killing three more bone thieves with the same ease as the first four she’d found in the village. The sixth demon killed had been enough for Jadis to reach her next level, bumping her up to ten. Without debate, she immediately put the free attribute point into vitality, rounding out her total health pool to two hundred and fifty.
With the village cleared out of any immediate threats, Jadis spent the rest of the morning addressing her living situation. She wanted a building that was safe and secure, preferably with a door she could lock while she was out and about, but at the same time she didn’t want to spend too much time and effort on it. Jadis had every intention of leaving the little dwarf village and pine forest valley. Her planned stay was a temporary one, just until she felt she’d milked the bone thieves for every drop of experience she could wring out of them.
With her future plans in mind, Jadis settled on the smithy in the mining compound as her new base of operations. It had the boxes of food already there, easy access to water, and lots of wood to use for barricading or starting a fire.
Jadis looked forward to having a hot meal that night, fully intending to make use of the tinderbox she’d found.
Moving all of her supplies from the old stone hut to the smithy took some time, longer than it should have only because she ran into two more bone thieves in the woods around the hut. They were dispatched with little fuss, relatively speaking, the main time sink being the time it took to dump the bones into the cellar.
With all her resources moved, Jadis then took the time to set the building up for defense. She blocked the side door off completely by putting the anvil in front of it, closed and barricaded the windows, and even replaced the broken piece of wood that acted as a kind of old-fashioned sliding door lock. It wasn’t a perfect fix, but she could secure the door from inside.
Locking the door from outside was a trickier proposition, one she didn’t have an easy answer to. She was no carpenter, much less a locksmith. Her eventual solution was to take a length of rope, tie one end to the exterior door handle, then tie the other end to a small tree growing nearby. It absolutely would not stop a determined bone thief from breaking in the door, but if one of the demons did so, the sapling would snap, giving Jadis an easy to spot visual warning.
For the rest of the day, Jadis searched the mining compound for anything she could use as new weapons, or to make clubs better than what she already had. She even went so far as to venture into the mouth of the cave that she now neighbored. It was within the cave entrance that she found her greatest treasures of the day.
A dozen or so paces into the cave, partially hidden by the dark and the curving cave walls, was some kind of waystation; Jadis wasn’t sure what else to call it. A shed made partially of wood and partially of cut stone blocks, it sat at the absolute limit of how far Jadis was willing to enter the cave without a light source.
Fighting demons in the moonlight was one thing. The pitch dark of an unlit cave was a different beast all together.
Within and around the waystation were various scattered mining tools, from shovels to sledgehammers to pickaxes. Most were in poor condition, but a few of the tools were in decent enough shape that Jadis was certain she could use them for combat if needed. They were still on the small size, though, clearly intended for people maybe half her size. Thus, they lacked the reach she would prefer.
Amongst the typical tools Jadis would expect to find were items that she did not know as much about, not being a miner. Their use for digging out stone escaped her, but their potential for weapons struck her in mere moments of examination.
There were various sizes of solid iron wedges stored in the waystation. Some were on the small size, but a few were quite large. Jadis picked out two of the wedges, each one easily twice as large as the heads of the sledgehammers she’d found so far.
“Time for an upgrade,” Jay and Dys said with mirrored smirks, clinking the two heavy pieces of metal together like champaign glasses.
From the rest of the miscellaneous scattered supplies found in and around the cave entrance, Jadis found a stack of cut logs that had probably been intended as columns and bracers for cave ceilings further in. They were a bit too large for her purposes, but were thick and solid and already had oblong holes cut into the top ends, she assumed for the easy fitting of cross beams.
With her steel hatchet, and daggers, Jadis cut the wooden shafts down to size, shaping them into appropriate sized handles. She did screw up on one of her attempts and had to toss the broken remnants into the cold furnace of her new temporary home. Fuel was fuel, after all.
It took much of the afternoon to get them they way she wanted, but before the sun had reached the western mountain peaks, Jadis had crafted herself two new iron-headed mauls.
Unlike her old stone clubs, which she had pulled apart to repurpose the leather and twine, the new weapons were longer and heavier. The stone clubs had been about the size of baseball bats to Jadis’ estimates. These new weapons were three handspans longer. The iron wedge heads were not exactly sharp on the front, but they were certainly closer in nature to an axe than a club. The mauls could be easily reversed, though, with the back end of the wedges serving as extremely blunt instruments of demon doom.
To add to the weight and strength of the clubs even more, Jadis had fitted a few of the iron horse shoes around the bases of the clubs, directly below where the wedges sat. Even with a couple test swings in the air, Jadis could feel the power and momentum behind each pass of the heavy mauls.
“Fuck, I think we could probably crack open real armor with these,” Jay said with some awe in her voice, proud of the deadly instruments she’d cobbled together.
“Yeah, no kidding.” Dys agreed. “Actually, let’s try a little test, here,” she said, walking over to a head-sized rock on the side of the lake.
With a grunt, Dys swung the maul overhead and brought it down onto the stone. The rock shattered with the blow, bits of stone splinters spraying everywhere.
“Nice!” Jay and Dys said in unison, both giving little fist pumps.
Now that Jadis had her preparations complete, she was ready to go to war. The bone thieves wouldn’t know what hit them.
551