Rebirth of the Nephilim

The army remained at the farmland camp near the collapse for an additional two days before striking out again. In that time, the focus for the troops was on recovery as well as reinforcement of the makeshift fortification that they had built out of the camp, turning it into a stronger defensive location for the ground-based reinforcement and resupply train that came behind the main force, as well a place where future Demon eradication forces could be stationed when the surrounding lands needed to be cleared. Truthfully, the work was assigned to the soldiers more for the act of keeping them busy than because the generals had many plans for the site. As Salvius explained to Jadis, idle soldiers were prone to spreading rumors and more susceptible to harmful vices. Better to keep them active and focused than unoccupied and lax.

For the generals, those two days were spent replotting the planned route to Kastoria. With the flaw of their direct, thirty-miles-a-day strategy so thoroughly exposed, Salvius and Ovinius both agreed that a change was necessary. Scouts were sent out and new locations added to the map at variable distances. Some days would be shorter, going as little as fifteen miles, while other days would be longer, pushing the army to march as far as forty miles, which would have been impossible if it weren’t for the skills and spells being used by both the soldiers and the avatars supporting them. Most importantly, the directions were varied enough so that while the army would always be marching towards Kastoria, they would not always be heading in the straightest line and would in fact angle and curve the path more often so that their end point for the night would not be so obvious.

As for Jadis, her lovers, and her companions, the time was used in two primary pursuits: power leveling and raiding.

The bombing runs, as Jadis thought of them, were largely performed by her alone, with Alex and Severina as passive passengers acting as magic support but not coming within range of Kastoria. Over the course of those two days, she made sure to attack as often as possible, but not on any kind of regular, predictable schedule. She did not want her air raids to turn into a trap for herself. With careful planning and execution, Jadis managed to attack the Demon-controlled city another twelve times before a defense was mounted against her that gave her some pause.

At first, the Demons tried to use their aerial units as scouts or an early-warning system once they realized that Jadis’ attacks were not going to stop. That didn’t work, since Jadis was so much faster than the stymphalia and other winged monstrosities that the Demons had on their side, she could fly in, dive bomb the charybdis or whatever other targets she saw, and be out of range of the city long before the flying Demons could even get back to Kastoria to give their warning. Besides, Jadis and Severina took the flying foes as an opportunity to weaken the enemy, picking them off wherever spotted.

After finding their air forces woefully incapable of handling her, the Demons began to turtle up. The charybdis, which Jadis had thought incapable of movement, crawled out of sight, hiding their massive bulk inside of the buildings and under rubble, making it much harder for Jadis to target them. Magic shields were also employed, covering the vulnerable acid launchers to mixed levels of success. However, what finally forced Jadis to stop, at least for a short while, were the Demon domes.

On her thirteenth bombing run, Kastoria saw Jadis coming. She wasn’t sure how; Sorcha had continued to use her wand to cloak her in semi-transparency. Sure, it wasn’t true invisibility, and the glow of her wings could only be dampened so much by the stealth spell, but with how fast and high Jadis approached the city she was certain that spotting her with mundane means was extremely difficult. The Demons were not restricted to the mundane, though, just as she wasn’t. And if there was one word Jadis had to use to describe Demons, adaptable would be high on the list.

Upon her approach, powerful bolts of lightning began to shoot out into the sky. While none of them struck Jadis, she found that they had enough range so that if she tried to dive in the same way she had in the past, she would most certainly be struck. Interestingly, the bolts of electricity did not just shoot off randomly into the air but arced between several impenetrable Demon shells that were stationed around the walls of the city, inside and out. Further, there were several towers inside the city that the lightning both arced to and originated from, which Jadis took to mean that sacrificial obelisks had been set up inside of those towers by whichever of the Demons or cultists were pioneering the rapid advancement in malign enchantments. Using the opportunity to perform reconnaissance, Jadis counted a total of fourteen domes and three towers linked to the lightning cage that had been set up to protect Kastoria from her attacks.

As a test, Jadis still made a dive at the city and released her stoney payload. Unfortunately, performing the maneuver at a height that kept her out of range of the lightning affected her accuracy. She aimed all three of her rocks at one of the domes that was outside of the city walls, just to see how hard it would be to deal with the structures. One missile missed entirely, striking the ground several yards away, which was quite the impressive whiff considering the size of the domes. The other two rocks were more accurate, though neither hit the target in the end. One was intercepted by the lightning, causing it to explode in a shower of shrapnel that probably shredded any Demons on the ground below, if there had been any unfortunate enough to be in the area at that moment. The third boulder made it past the lightning, but as Severina observed at a distance, multiple magic shields went up around dome, protecting it from the brunt of the damage. Not completely, as the rock still broke through and caused some relatively minor destruction to the dome, but not enough to knock it out of commission. It was hard to tell at a distance, but Sev had said that different types of shields had appeared and possibly from different directions. Upon conferring with the others, they had decided that it seemed likely that Demons capable of casting shields like dead heads had been assigned to protect the domes, though further scouting and attacks would be needed to confirm.

At that point, Jadis had scaled back her bombing runs, only making a handful more and at very great heights. She needed to give some thought as to how to deal with the lightning bolts, since removing those domes and towers would be a necessity before the army came within range of Kastoria. She had time, though, and many allies to help her with the problem. And even if the struggle between their forces was escalating, Jadis and her lovers were growing stronger.

The multiple attacks on Kastoria, which had been essentially solo-missions, had actually given Jadis a much-needed boost to her CLR. Aside from the two levels she had gained in her primary class during the ambush, she had gained another four levels overall from the raiding. One was in Mirror Knight, one was Perverted Ritualist of D, and the last two were in Progenitor of the Succubi. Since the additional level meant another skill unlock in her primary class, Jadis had two more Mirror Knight skills to choose from, which were interesting to review.

Oversized Stone Ordnance

Passive Skill. The damage you inflict with improvised boulders as ranged ammunition is increased by 0.25. The boulders must weigh a minimum of 500 pounds to receive this benefit.

Yes, Jadis had to admit, she used rocks as weapons. A lot. And yes, there were probably better options, at times. But she had gotten her first kill with a rock, and she had also defeated a lot of enemies with rocks and boulders over her short yet extremely active career as a warrior. Rocks were not to be underestimated as a weapon, so far as Jadis was concerned. That said, giving up a valuable skill slot for a passive skill that increased boulder damage by a quarter did not appeal to her. Maybe if the damage ratio was higher, or the increase applied to small stones as well. But as it stood the skill was a pass for her.

Interestingly, Aila pointed out that Oversized Stoe Ordnance appeared to be a close derivative of skills that catapult operators received. So, if Jadis did take the skill, she could have some strange and interesting siege weapon skills available to her in the future. Still, the answer was no one that one.

Mirror Knight’s After Image

Active Spell. Become invisible for 1 second. A perfect illusory copy of yourself will be created at the exact point where you cast this spell, static and unmoving. The image will disappear at the same time your invisibility wears off. Cost – 100 magic. Duration – 1 second.

It was an anime spell. There was no other way to interpret it. As Jadis reviewed the details of the illusion-type spell, her thoughts could only focus on the idea of D at that anime convention on Earth, watching martial arts shows. For fuck’s sake, the name was literally After Image, how much more obvious could the damn god be making it that he was weighting the scale on her system?

Still, it was a good ability. Great, even. In a high-stakes battle against enemies with the power to keep up with her speed and strength, having a spell that could let her act for one second without being seen, and give her foe a false target to focus on, was insanely useful. Jadis had to take the spell, even if she knew the only reason it was being offered to her was because her patron god was a total weeaboo.

Even as she took Mirror Knight’s After Image, Jadis had to swear to herself not to start practicing certain stances in the hopes of shooting energy beams from her hands. She had already embarrassed herself enough as a child doing that.

…and maybe as a teenager.

 With Mirror Minification and Mirror Knight’s After Image added to her growing arsenal of spells, Jadis looked at her Perverted Ritualist of D options with some anticipation. Her spell offerings as of late had been great, so she was hoping for a fun and powerful new ritual to perform with her lovers. However, no new rituals were offered to Jadis at level thirty-seven of her secondary class.

Anatomical Alteration

Passive Skill. You will be better able to accommodate the size of your sexual partners.

Voluminous Emissions I

Passive Skill. Increase the amount of seminal fluid you produce during each orgasm by 0.5 your normal rate. Fertility is not affected.

Once the crude jokes, indignation, and laughter had died away, Jadis had been left with a somewhat challenging choice. Yes, Voluminous Emissions was incredibly lewd and patently ridiculous in its premise. That said, Aila had at least two regular uses for Jadis’ cum that were legitimately important. Having more output would actually be helpful, not just a part of a weird fantasy. Then again, Jadis already came like a firehose, so the idea of increasing the amount of seed she could spready with each climax by fifty percent came across as ludicrous. Also, it was just a part one of a multi-part skill series. Did she really want to go down that slippery path?

Anatomical Alteration did not have any practical use at all. Sure, it would help her own body out if she were to have sexual relations with someone of greater size than her body would normally be able to handle, but that hadn’t really been a problem thus far for her. Then again, considering how the number of her lovers asking to be magnified in size during some sex acts was increasing, and thinking about how she had just gotten a spell that could let her be shrunk down, and looking at how well-hung her lovers tended to be…

Without taking any further notes from her lovers, Jadis chose Anatomical Alteration as an act of self-preservation. She knew what monsters she had created. Best to be prepared for what was inevitably coming.

The two levels Jadis had gained in her progenitor class had taken it from twenty-four to twenty-six. That meant, aside from the two free attribute points, Jadis had one final skill selection to make. Once she saw the options, there wasn’t even a debate in her mind about which one she would take.

Biotic Congruity

Passive Skill. The non-avatar mates you breed with have an increased level of compatibility with your bloodline, significantly decreasing the chance of your offspring having malformations and guaranteeing that they will not be born infertile. Your offspring will also be more compatible with their mother’s biology, substantially decreasing the chance of pregnancy difficulties.

The idea that Jadis’ children might have birth defects due to her being an entirely different race from her lovers was not something she had given much thought to. In truth, she should have expected there to be some chance of an issue. Avatars didn’t seem to have any problems breeding with each other in that sense, but non-avatar species certainly had the potential to have problems. Violetta, the half-elf, half-gnome apprentice enchanter who worked under Sabina was proof of that. The woman was a “mule” as the local term went, having been born infertile due to her mixed parentage, a result of gnomes and elves being just close enough on the biological scale that they could have children, but far enough apart that their children couldn’t continue to propagate as a hybrid species.

Jadis didn’t want that to happen to her children. She didn’t think it would, but she wasn’t going to take the risk if she had an option available to her that would guarantee that it wouldn’t happen, so even if the other skill option offered to her hadn’t been a simple ten point attribute increase to her focus, she would have chosen Biotic Congruity. Besides, the skill had an equally important secondary effect. After all, considering the size difference between Jadis and Sorcha, the concern had been raised about what a late-stage pregnancy would look like for the diminutive goblin. Perhaps then it was a very lucky thing that Sorcha had not yet been impregnated. Biotic Congruity would have a major impact on that account.

With all the skills chosen, all that was left for Jadis to apply were the stats. She had received a total of five free attribute points, which had naturally been shoved right into her increasingly massive Eldritch stat. When all the points were added and her attributes accordingly adjusted, her status sheet showed a fair improvement overall.

Jadis Ahlstrom

Race: Nephilim

Primary Class: Mirror Knight (47)

Secondary Class: Perverted Ritualist of D (37)

Tertiary Class: Progenitor of the Succubi (26)

Combined Level Rating: 110

Health: 3690/3690

Magic: 1560/1560

Attributes

Strength: 602

Dexterity: 244

Agility: 1170

Vitality: 294

Fortitude: 329

Endurance: 276

Arcane: 0

Divine: 0

Eldritch: 1170

Focus: 126

Resilience: 115

Will: 110

   Jadis’ selections did not happen all at once. Over the course of the two days that the army recuperated and adjusted their plans, and that she went on her bombing runs, Jadis leveled up where she could, discussing her options with her lovers in the privacy of the Leviathan when they had time. She was, of course, not the only one leveling up, either. While she put her effort into taking the fight to the Demons in Kastoria, her companions were scouring the land around the campsite, fighting every hostile Demon they could find in a concerted effort to increase their own levels.

By the end of the second day, when they all gathered together to review, Jadis could not have been prouder of their results.