“We should stop for the day,” Aila said, one hand briefly resting on Syd’s arm as they walked side by side. “I reached level twenty and got my second class. There’s no need to push for more levels right away when you’re injured.”
“Yeah, but you deserve to be strong. You’ve been waiting twenty levels to finally start casting spells. You should get more than one today.”
“That’s nonsense,” Aila shook her head. “You’ve saved me months of time in just a couple of days already. We can wait for tomorrow to hunt more. You’re hurt. You have a fifth of your health maximum. You’re struggling just to walk. There’s no need to take a risk fighting demons right now.”
Jadis and Aila were walking back towards Felsen, but Jadis wasn’t ready to call it quits just yet. She wanted Aila to level up her secondary class as quickly as possible. She needed to be able to defend herself with more than a single spell that she could cast four times at most.
Aila’s magic pool was one hundred points and her first spell cost twenty-five points to cast. Four casts of the spell and she was done. The cost wasn’t terrible, according to Aila, not for how powerful the spell appeared to be, even if it was a little short range. However, as Jadis had learned from Aila’s lessons on magic, each point in will equated to one point of magic refilled over the course of an hour. With ten points in her will attribute, Aila would take ten hours to refill her magic pool to full, or at least a couple of hours once she was depleted before she could cast her force bolt again.
There were ways of increasing the amount of magic points recovered other than raw will stats. Some skills could increase the regeneration speed, a few greatly increasing the speed while sleeping like her Knight’s Rest skill did for her health. There were potions and enchantments that could help, too.
Aila didn’t have any of those things, though. She had one level and one spell, nothing else to support the class. That was a state of being Jadis couldn’t let be.
“We’re not interested in fighting anything big like that sea bull,” Syd assured Aila. “We’re just keeping our eyes out for easy prey. If we spot any more small groups of wretches wandering out here without anything big to back them up, then it’d be dumb not to take advantage of easy pickings. I mean, when we fought those eight back there, we barely took any damage at all. I can stay back with you while Jay and Dys do all the work. Besides, don’t you want to test your new spell on a real target?”
Aila frowned worriedly, walking in silence for a few more steps before speaking softly.
“Don’t push yourself unreasonably, please. I’d like to keep you around, too,” she said in a mirror of the words Jadis had said to her before in the valley.
“I won’t. I plan on sticking around for a long time.”
Having already died once before, Jadis meant those words with more conviction than Aila could possibly guess.
As Syd and Aila spoke, Jay and Dys roamed several hundred yards out to either side. Both were climbing hills and scouring the area as they headed back east for any signs of demons. In a small concession to caution, Jadis made sure all three of her selves remained in constant visual contact, even if she didn’t necessarily need to. With her upgraded skill, the range she could separate from her selves before getting a headache had grown quite a lot.
There was one other factor to consider, as well. The guards.
After the two guardsmen had caught up to Jadis and seen the massive amount of death and destruction Jadis had gotten up to while out of their sight, they seemed even more determined to stay near her. Not content to simply watch from afar anymore, the two had stuck a lot closer to Jadis the second time around, even going so far as to voice their own polite concerns about Jay and Dys roaming so far out from Syd and Aila.
Jadis mostly ignored them, or at least she tried to. The two guards weren’t trying to intentionally interfere with her plans, they were just trying to do a job they had no choice but to perform. She was sure orders from the magistrate weren’t taken lightly, not with how scarily powerful that red-eyed elf had been. They’d been told to keep the three Nephilim safe and the guards clearly hadn’t, through no real fault of their own. They just couldn't keep up with her when she wanted to move fast.
In any case, she couldn’t bring herself to be rude to the guards when they were just following their orders and were still doing their best to be polite about it. That was at least part of the reason she was just walking with Aila, rather than picking her up and running off to cover more ground quicker. She’d let the guards stay nearby to soothe their wounded pride at not being able to defend their charge. Plus, they might even be helpful if she unintentionally came across another serious battle again. Jadis wasn’t sure what level the guards were, but they had to be at least somewhat strong if the magistrate thought they would be capable of protecting her. They could even help protect Aila, if necessary, which was another decent reason to walk slow and keep them nearby.
Then, of course, there was the fact that Syd really did ache all over from her injuries. Even with the salve Aila had applied to the wounds, Jadis was in a lot of pain. Syd’s body didn’t feel like it could run, not full tilt like her other bodies. In fact, if she did have to pick Aila up and flee for some reason, Jadis planned on one of her selves picking up Syd as well. Syd just wasn’t in any condition to properly fight or sprint, not with all of Jadis’ collective injuries focused onto her.
Not that Jadis thought she would need to run. Even if there was a pack of about ten twisted wretches charging their way from around a hill to the north.
“Incoming!” Jay shouted from her position atop a hill that gave her a view of the approaching hostiles. “I count ten!”
Her shout was purely for the sake of the guards who immediately rushed closer towards Syd and Aila, their shields and spears at the ready. As the guards closed in, Syd whispered a few words to Aila.
“I’m going to let them get close so you can cast your spell. Don’t worry about them getting to you, we won’t let them. Just focus on testing out what it can do.”
Aila nodded, her face a mask of cold professionalism as the battle drew close.
Dys ran up from the south, reaching Aila and Syd a moment after the two guards. Giving them both a frustrated look, she gestured with one free hand, making a shooing motion.
“If you two are this close you’ll drain some of the experience. Back off, please.”
The two guards looked at each other for a beat before the elf replied.
“Apologies, but one of you is wounded. It’s best if we stay nearby to prevent any further injuries or worse.”
Jadis bristled a bit at the guard’s refusal to step away, her opinion of them dropping from what it was just minutes before. Before she could angrily insist on them backing off, Aila put a hand on Dys’ arm.
“It’s fine,” she said, voice low. “If they split away from us, some of the demons might chase them anyway.”
That was a reasonable point, even if the guards’ attitude irked her. She didn’t need their help protecting her. But if the guards drew the attention of the demons and that forced them to fight, she’d lose out on even more experience for Aila. She’d just have to make sure the guards kept to an entirely passive role.
Jay ran down her hill, regrouping with her other selves. She was sure by then it was just one group of ten demons, nothing else to surprise her so far as she had observed. A moment later, the demons rounded the hill to the northwest, coming into view.
They were more of the typical twisted wretch variety of demons, mainly snow elks and boars, but she noticed that two of them had been horses previously. Seeing the cruelly distorted faces of animals she was far more familiar with rushing towards her on two legs was far more disturbing to Jadis than the other demons had been.
As the demons came within range, Jadis positioned her bodies in a mirror of the formation she’d taken when the guards had surprised her earlier. Jay and Dys took the lead with just enough space to swing their large weapons freely. Aila stood in the middle, hand raised in a gesture of readiness, while Syd stood behind her, lance raised high overhead and ready to impale anything that might get past the wall that was her other, healthier doubles. The formation was expanded however, with the two guards flanking on either side, elf on the left and human on the right.
Seeing the two guards stand tall with their shields facing the oncoming gang of wretches, Jadis briefly wished she had a shield, too. At the very least, the two looked far more the part of professional, trained combatants than she did. With how confidently they faced the charging foes, even the previously timid human woman, she imagined they could do more than look the part.
A burst of basketball-sized magic power leapt out of Aila’s hand and shot towards one of the elk-wretches that was running slightly ahead of the pack. The mostly invisible force struck its chest dead center, collapsing its torso inward and sending the demon flying backwards. The demon crashed into one of its ilk behind it, its corpse tripping the legs of the second as both crashed to the ground.
With one spell, Aila had struck down a wretch in less than a second. Jadis had to admit, she was impressed.
Aila must have been impressed with the effectiveness of her own spell as well, as she paused to look down at her hand in surprise.
There was no time to think about Aila’s spell power, however. The demon pack reached Jay and Dys moments later and the battle began in earnest. Both laid into the wretches with wide, arcing swings, trying to catch and damage each demon before they could spread out around them and force the two guards to get involved. Instant death blows weren’t strictly necessary, just attacks that would cripple and buy time.
As one demon fell to the ground off to the side, bones shattered from a sweeping attack from Dys, Syd stabbed down over Aila’s head and skewered the wretch’s chest at the same time the female guard did the same, killing the prone enemy. On the other side, a demon leapt back from Jay, only taking a glancing blow, and turned its spear on the elf to her left and standing further back.
The elf blocked the attack with his shield and countered with a stab of his own, piercing the taller creature’s stomach and forcing it back. A second later, Jay finished the job with a backswing that caught the demon’s head, snapping its neck like a cracker.
Jadis cursed inwardly that she wasn’t able to keep the guards out of the fight, but with how many demons were in the pack, they were able to easily spread out and surround. Even with three of her, Jadis couldn’t be everywhere at once.
On a bloody but brighter note, Aila got her second kill in as a horse-like wretch tried to go wide and come at them from the right. Before Syd could stab at the deranged monstrosity, another bolt of force blasted out and struck the demon’s head. Its long face crumpled inwards in a splatter of dark blood and shattered bone as its neck whipped backwards with enough force that it halfway ripped off the aberration’s shoulders.
The rest of the wretches quickly fell under the double assault of Jay and Dys, the two guards contributing as well. The last demon, the one that had tripped over Aila’s first victim, was finished off by Aila’s fourth force bolt, her final spell until enough time passed for her to regenerate her magic points. The bolt crushed the wretch just as surely as Jay’s mallet would have, sealing its ignominious fate as it didn’t even get to swing its rusted sword once before it was dead.
After taking a few breaths to recover, Jay and Dys turned to Aila and gave her a doubled proud grin. From behind, Syd patted her warmly on the shoulder.
“Fucking good job, Blue!” Jay praised. “Three for three on your first real battle! You did way better than we did in our first fight, too.”
“Hair isn’t even ruffled,” Dys chuckled, reaching out to muss Aila’s long locks playfully.
“Couldn’t have done it without you, literally,” Aila demurred, a pleased smile on her lips. “I feel like I could have done more whittling them down before they got close enough for melee combat, but once I saw I could kill with a single shot, I wanted to save my spells in case one of them started to cast their own spell to counter it.”
“What do you mean, first battle,” a shocked voice interrupted before Jadis could reply to Aila’s self-review.
The female guard was looking at Aila, aghast. The elf had a far better poker face, but Jadis had a feeling he was just as surprised.
“That was my first battle as a spell caster, yes,” Aila affirmed primly. Turning away from the guard, she looked up at Dys and calmly instructed, “Let’s gather what we can from these demons and get back to town. I leveled a couple more times from this fray and I’d like to discuss the options I’ve been given in private.”
“Yes ma’am,” Dys said as she and Jadis’ other two selves moved to collect weapons and demon eyes.
Jadis had a feeling Aila’s neutral façade was hiding an extremely enthusiastic woman behind it. After all, how couldn’t she be excited? She was already level three, less than an hour after getting her secondary class and unlocking spells. Jadis could only imagine she was even more eager than her to see what new spell or skill was being offered to her.
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