Rebirth of the Nephilim

Two blasts of purple arcane energy struck both Dys and Syd with enough force to drive those two thirds of Jadis off course from her attempt at a pincer attack. Her Jay self, however, received only a glancing blow from the Demon Dragon’s spell. With all the force of her max speed behind her increased size, Jay slammed into the back of her foe. There was an audible crunch as some of the many large spikes lining the beast’s back were shattered by the impact. With as high as her Fortitude had grown, the natural bodily defenses of the dragon were nothing more than an annoyance to Jay as she flattened them with her weight. The unnatural defenses of the Demon possessing the dragon were another matter.

As the impact caused the dragon and Nephilim to tumble through the air, Jay was struck by a barrage of arcane magic spikes that flared up all over the flailing creature. These spell attacks were far more effective than the scale spikes that covered the dragon’s back. Part of that had to be due to the Demon’s power, but the other half had to be because of Jadis’ lesser Resilience stat compared to her Fortitude. It was still her weakest defense, despite her recent focus on shoring up the vulnerability, so her huge health pool took a hit.

Not that Jadis was going to let go of her prey now that she had it in her grip.

Ignoring the pain, Jay wrapped her legs around the Dragon’s lower torso while digging her left hand into the beast’s scales. Devoting another one hundred magic to the effort, she cast Crack the Glass, marking the Demon Dragon’s back beneath her. With supernatural speed, Jay began slamming her fist into the weak point created by her spell.

The dragon’s scales didn’t even survive the first punch. By the second, her fist had dug a foot into the creature’s flesh. By the third, she was up to her elbow in foul-smelling viscera. On the fourth strike, she had sunk all the way to her shoulder.

Despite the damage done to the beast, the Demon Dragon did not die. Rolling violently in an attempt to throw Jay off, the Demon within shot another blast of energy at her. She ignored the attack, despite the damage it had done, since her health pool had only suffered about five hundred points of damage so far. That was close to a fifth of her maximum, which wasn’t insignificant, but she had the raw numbers to tank those sorts of hits. To her mind, it was more important to put as much damage into the enemy as possible, as quickly as possible.

To that end, Jadis’ Dys and Syd bodies were rapidly pulling out of their tailspins so that she could hit the dragon from other angles. As far as she could tell, the dragon didn’t have strong defenses. At least, it didn’t have high Fortitude or any apparent skills to prevent damage. The Demon inside had tried shielding the beast it inhabited with its magic, but that had failed thanks to Break the Bulwark, so it had switched to more active countermeasures. Likely the dragon, in combination with the Demon, had a high amount of health points, but that was a paltry barrier to the amount of damage Jadis was capable of outputting.

Unless the possession Demon inside the dragon was a Greater Demon who had some kind of health-related skill similar to the one Alex had unlocked.

As Dys reached the dragon, she went for its forearms and the black globe that it clutched between its massive claws. Her punch into the side of the creature’s left elbow lacked the power of Mirror Strikes thanks to the Crack the Glass spell still active on the beast, but the power behind the blow was still enough to produce an audible crack as the beast’s bone fractured. A half second later, Dys was forced to duck out of the way as the dragon’s crocodilian maw snapped at her, nearly catching her head between its toothy jaws.

Dys backhanded the monster’s head, which drove it off for a moment, but in the next second as she went for another punch, the beast opened its mouth and released a gout of green flame. Dys didn’t ignore this attack, since she had no desire to be burned alive again, and dodged out of the way while keeping close to the beast’s body. The dragon’s head followed her, blasting its green fire in a continuous stream that Jadis only caught the edges of, singing her hair and clothes.

While the fire made it difficult for Dys to properly attack her foe, it had the unexpected benefit of throwing the Demon Dragon of course as its wildly flailing head messed with its trajectory. An advantage that Jadis was happy to accept, as the rain of bio-artillery had begun to reach their position in earnest.

Syd dodged around another giant acid blob as it flew by her, narrowly missing her other selves and the possessed dragon in the process. She wanted to block the ranged attacks, but she saw no good way to do so. She didn’t have her armor on, much less a shield, and she was fairly certain that if she used her sword staff to cut through the blobs, they would explode and coat her in the toxic gunk she had seen splatter on the ground below. She was more than willing to tank hits from the Demon Dragon as she tried to kill it, but she wasn’t stupid enough to treat her health like it was infinite. Falling back on old tactics once again, Syd dove out of the sky to grab a rock out of the churned earth so she could hurl it at any artillery blobs that might pose a risk to Alex and her other selves.

Swooping low, Syd grabbed for a rock that could fit in her hand and was met by the wide fist of an Unrelenting Simulacrum. She easily dodged the slow creature, even managing to grab the stone she had been aiming for, but the point was taken. The ground was swarming with Demons. Maybe not the most dangerous ones for her, but she wasn’t going to make the mistake of thinking she couldn’t be overwhelmed by numbers. Nor could she discount the possibility of more dangerous foes being fielded she had yet to see. Forcing the Demon Dragon down to the ground wouldn’t be an improvement over fighting it in the air.

The wild and unrestrained flight of the dragon had led the beast to soar high over the landscape. Instead of going straight towards the Demon controlled city, it had gone off course and ended up flying around the right side of Kastoria, into the fields and hills that surrounded the city to the north. Syd dodged several more bio-blobs as she sped to catch up but didn’t bother trying to destroy any of them since none were coming close to hitting the dragon and her other selves thanks to their increased altitude. What she did see heading on a crash course for them thanks to her perspective was much smaller.

Dys got her left arm up just in time to block the impact of a possessed stymphalia that crashed into her. The giant birds that had attacked her and the Leviathan upon their arrival in Glanum were large, had poison talons, and could easily carry a full-grown man of the ground with their powerful wings. They had proven no real threat to Jadis, though, as she had been able to easily slay any who came near while their talons raked uselessly against her thick armor. This time, she didn’t have the armor, or weapons, but the stymphalia still wasn’t much of a threat. The Demon inside was a different story.

Lightning crackled as it poured out of the possessed bird’s mouth like water, shocking Dys and eating away at her health. She should have expected any stymphalia that were defending Kastoria to be more powerful than the weaklings that had been sent as fodder against the attack on Glanum. She had been told that the entrenched Demons were difficult to dislodge, and that wasn’t just because of numbers.

As Syd sliced through a second and then third stymphalia that were trying to intercept her other selves, Dys was attacked by a fourth bird before she could even finish dealing with the first. With a curse, she let go of her hold on the dragon so she could better deal with the attacking raptors. While the magic attacks they were using weren’t devastating, they’d already done enough damage in only a few seconds to prove that she couldn’t ignore them.

While Dys and Syd dealt with the stymphalia, Jay continued her brutal assault on the dragon’s torso. By that point, she had fully torn into the creature’s body, tossing table-sized chunks of decayed flesh and Demon tentacles aside as she dug down into the cavity where the dragon’s internal organs should have been. There wasn’t much beyond rot and Demon inside, but she kept going, making sure to rip and shatter and crush everything she could lay her hands on. The Dragon Demon’s health couldn’t be infinite, and the damage she was doing had to be immense.

It was as the dragon momentarily righted its flight pattern that two things happened at once. The first was that the dragon’s lower body fully ripped away from its upper body and fell tumbling into the night sky. The second was that a man wearing black, spiked armor and wielding a huge sword leapt up from the beast’s back and charged at Jay where she hung onto the dragon’s torn torso.

“The fuck!?” Jay cursed in startled confusion as the man swung his oversized blade at her head.

While he was slower than her capabilities, the man was still faster than most people Jadis knew, so she dodged the blow rather than try to block it. As the greatsword passed over her head, Jay lashed out at the man’s legs with the intention of either breaking them or at least knocking him off the dragon. Instead, her right hand passed through the armored limbs like they weren’t there.

Because they weren’t.

“Can’t you ever get the timing right, you obnoxious cunt?” a man who Jadis had never seen before snarled as he squeezed out of the mass of rot and tentacles that filled the remains of the dragon’s chest cavity. “Your bad timing is infuriating!”

Jay swatted the man’s head like the stink beetle that it was, which was followed by an explosion of the same foul acid she had been dealing with earlier in the night in Glanum. As she shook the stinging, skin-melting substance off, more men squeezed their way out of the dragon’s interior while still others appeared on its back and charged at her. Some were illusions, but others were exploding body doubles, and there was no consistency between which was which. As Jay battled the Playwright’s army of clones, she almost forgot about the Demon Dragon’s more potent line of defense.

A green light entered her field of vision, triggering Jay to violently shove away from the decayed monster, narrowly avoiding a blast of green flame to the face. Her health had dropped to the low eighteen hundred range, which was still more than half her max, but she was taking more damage from the stymphalia than she would have liked. She couldn’t afford to keep taking hits from attacks she could avoid when she didn’t know what might be coming at her next. Her forceful shove had knocked the half-dragon into another spin, though, so Jay focused on reengaging with the beast while her other two selves dealt with the monstrosities that were catching up to them from Kastoria.

Jay flew at the dragon’s head, aiming to break its neck if she could get her arms around it, but another creature appeared in the air before her. It was a winged man this time, a Seraphim with red feathers and bronze-colored armor wielding a round shield on his right arm. Presuming he was another illusion created by the Playwright, or possibly an exploding clone, she maintained her course and used her right arm to sweep the winged falsehood away as she passed.

Rather than disappearing or exploding, the red winged Seraphim took the blow on his armored chest while he simultaneously struck her arm with a short sword he carried in his left hand. The Seraphim was knocked away, but a searing pain exploded along Jay’s right forearm where he had managed to cut her. A red and black flame surged up her limb, coating her in its burning agony as it ate away at her health pool directly.

The Seraphim had caught her with a Divine Smite.

“Motherfucker!” all three of Jadis cursed as the flames spread across her bodies.

The spell affected all of her, distracting her with pain and damage as her bodies were lit up like candles by the malediction. When the effect wore off a few seconds later, Jadis could see from her status sheet that the attack hadn’t done too much damage compared to how bad it had felt, but it had still eaten away well over a hundred points from her remaining health. That wasn’t Jadis true concern, though. While she had been distracted, the Demon Dragon had put distance between her and it again.

Roaring like the dragon she was chasing, all three of Jadis’ bodies chased after the beast as it sped towards Kastoria again, this time from the north. The monster didn’t have much of a lead, but it had one all the same, and it could be enough to put it inside the city’s walls.

Jadis ignored the magic attacks of the stymphalia that pursued her, eating several hits without dodging as she sped after the monster that still carried the black sphere. Dys was closest, and from her angle, she felt she had a more than reasonable chance of catching up to the dragon in just a few seconds. However, as she rocketed towards it, the same red winged Seraphim from before swooped up from below to get in her way.

Dys tried to dodge around the almost certainly possessed Seraphim without slowing down or letting him touch her, but the man attacked in an unexpected way. With a flick of his arm, he launched his bronze shield at her. The defensive item turned projectile struck her in the side, hitting with surprising force. Dys tumbled for a moment, losing direction and momentum as she was forced to correct her course.

Syd struck the Seraphim from the side a second later, her blow cutting through both of his legs as his attempt at avoiding her was only partially successful. She didn’t slow to finish the job, though. She needed to get to the dragon before it—

A sound like shattering glass echoed across the sky, interrupting the urgent thoughts swirling through Jadis’ refracted minds. In the next instant, as the ravaged Demon Dragon began its dive towards the city walls, blue flames erupted across its remaining body. As Jadis watched, a dark figure with neon-blue highlights crawled across the creature’s neck, dragging the beast’s head upwards with powerful tentacles, pulling it out of its dive. As the two creatures struggled, Jadis saw bursts of Divine flame flare off the dragon’s scales accompanied by the sounds of whipcracks as multiple tentacles struck it repeatedly, creating a burning tableau in the nighttime sky. With another audible crunch, the tentacled woman used a huge set of monstrous arms to tear the dragon’s neck away from its body, only to let the long neck and head fall away like unwanted chaff.

Congratulations!

Covetous Miser Defeated.

Bonus Experience Points Awarded

for Defeating a Greater Demon Spawn of Samleos.

As the body of the dead dragon fell out of the sky, Alex let go of its ruined form. Arms and tentacles spread wide around her like a halo, she free fell towards the center of Kastoria, where countless monstrosities waited below. She wasn’t looking down, however. She had her back to the corrupted city and her face pointed to the heavens.

Which was why Jay was able to see her smile as she caught her.

“I knew… You would… Save us…”

“Always,” Jay panted into her lover’s ear, taking an indulgent second to revel in the feel of Alex’s tentacles wrapping around her. “I’ll always save you.”

She couldn’t let the moment linger, though. There were still more stymphalia chasing after them, and she’d lost track of the red Seraphim. There were more flying creatures coming after them from Kastoria as well, and the huge globs of acid being fired from the walls had yet to cease. Even though a part of Jadis cried out at the idea, they needed to flee. She had no confirmation that the Playwright was dead, but that wasn’t what was important. The safety of her lover and the child within her womb mattered far more than revenge.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jay said as she cradled Alex in her arms, an act made easier by her currently increased size. “I need more magic if you have any to spare. I’ll need to recast my wings in a few minutes, and I don’t want to lose them when we have so many enemies on our tails.”

Her Dys and Syd selves were already running interference, killing any stymphalia or other strange things that rose up into the sky within her range. While Jay turned back to the southeast, flying high to avoid the demonic artillery, she tried to get her bearings. As her eyes looked for the distant horizon, her gaze was drawn back down to Alex by a gentle yet firm hand on her cheek.

“Jadis… We must land…”

“What? No, that’s a bad idea,” Jay shook her head. “The dragon’s dead, and I’m sure I can outfly anything else the Demons have to send after us.  We can come back to kill these assholes another day.”

“No…” Alex shook her head. “You do not… Understand…”

Alex’s human-sized hands fell across her belly in a meaningful gesture.

“She is… Coming…”

“She is… What?” Jay repeated, her brain refusing to comprehend the words coming from Alex’s mouth. “What are you talking about?”

“She is coming… Now…”

“Now?”

Alex nodded.

“Now…”

Jay’s draw dropped open as she struggled to breathe for a long moment.

“Here? Right now!?”

“Jadis…”

“That motherfucker was right. This bad timing shit is infuriating.”