Rebirth of the Nephilim

Jadis’ two other bodies had moved to grab her axe and maul the moment the confrontation with the two elite mercenaries had started. She’d also informed everyone in the headquarters of what was going on so they could come and assist. Not wanting an even bigger incident to come from the situation, Jadis had told Sorcha to stay behind and to watch Alex. She didn’t want the goblin witch to break some aspect of her parole, nor did she want Alex to get involved in a fight that could negatively impact public perception of her. Leaving those two behind, as well as her armor since it would have taken too long to equip it, Jay and Dys sprinted out of the guild hall to connect back up with Syd. Those who followed her into the fight were Aila, Eir, Thea, and Tegwyn.

Kerr, Sabina, and Bridget hadn’t been at the headquarters, out on their own business at an inconvenient time. Jadis didn’t know if the general was just targeting her or if the rest of her company were being accosted as well, so worry that her unaccounted-for lovers could have already been arrested filled a corner of her mind. However, Jadis had to put those thoughts aside for the time being. First, she had to deal with the assholes who were attacking her Syd self, and that meant dealing with her blindness.

“I can’t see,” Jay announced through gritted teeth, informing her companions of her sudden disability. “Some kind of spell hit me!”

“Put us down,” Aila commanded as she tapped on Jay’s shoulder.

Following her direction. Jay quickly slowed to a stop and put both Aila and Eir down. She’d been carrying them both since neither had the Agility to keep up.

“I think I can help,” Eir said, her voice shaky. “One moment.”

A familiar sensation coursed through Jadis’ bodies as her elven priestess cast Oracle’s Protection. The spell increased Jadis’ Resilience by eighteen points; not a huge amount, but considering the magic attack she was under, every bit of magic defense she could get would be of great aid.

Not immediate aid, though, as Jadis continued to remain blind. Blind but not without her other senses. Syd was under direct attack and she was still more than capable of fighting back, even if the difficulty had just gone up.

Twisting around and lashing out, Syd caught some part of the small man who was trying to break her ankle. She wasn’t sure what part of him she’d latched onto, but once she had him, she yanked with all of her might.

It was like trying to pull a tree out of the ground. The man had a vice-like grip and when she pulled on him, she only threw herself more off balance thanks to his hold on her foot. Abandoning that tactic, she switched to pure attack. She had worried at first about accidentally killing them, but if they were going to break her bones Jadis didn’t think she needed to hold back from doing the same.

Smashing her fist into whatever limb she’d taken hold of Syd heard the man cry out in pain as something loudly cracked. Grinning viciously, she twisted and yanked again, causing a worse cracking sound as the man released his hold on her leg. She took the opportunity to roll to her feet when abruptly her vision was restored.

The return of her sight was disorienting and it took her a second to come to grips with her surroundings again.

Looking around, Syd could see that she still held the smaller man’s right leg in her hand, the limb bent in such a way that told her she’d managed to break his femur. She doubted he had a convenient second body to shunt the injury onto, so she whirled and tossed him as far down the street as she could manage. Which turned out to be really fucking far.

As the small man sailed through the night sky towards the docks that were just faintly visible in the distance, Syd caught sight of a woman standing maybe fifty feet away in the shadow of an archway. She was an elf and definitely some kind of spellcaster going by the staff in her hand and the oddly traditional-looking pointed wizard’s hat. Her armored robe was similar in cut to what the two men had worn, dark cloth with an imperial crest on the breast. She was pointing her staff towards Syd and had an intense look of concentration on her purple-toned face.

Jadis’ instinct was to break line-of-sight with the elf in order to dodge whatever spell she was casting, especially since there was a high likelihood that she was the one responsible for her temporary blindness. However, there were two issues with that plan. The first being that a dozen large men in full plate armor were charging down the street coming from the direction she’d just tossed the smaller man and they were only seconds away from crashing into her. The second issue was the bear man. He wasn’t almost on top of her.

He was on top of her.

One huge paw of a hand wrapped around Syd’s left bicep. Twisting around, Syd slammed her fist into the bear’s face. Except, in the last possible instant, the man tilted his head and changed the angle so that her blow struck the top of his skull instead of his cheek or snout. Hitting that thick, unmoving skull was like punching an iron block. While it didn’t hurt Syd, not with her level of Fortitude, it did mean that she’d wasted a precious moment on an ineffectual attack. A moment that the bear capitalized on.

Using his mace to once more sweep at her legs, Syd lost her footing as his weapon connected with the side of her knee. She used all her speed and training to try and recover, but the man’s fluid motions flowed from one into another. Twisting at the waist, he yanked on her arm and suddenly she was airborne.

In a strange moment of mental clarity, Jadis realized that she was about to experience the same thing she’d just put the smaller man through.

The bear launched Syd into the air, only instead of trying to toss her far away, his move shot her straight up at a nearly ninety-degree angle, clearing the rooftops of the three-story buildings around her and then some. There was nothing Syd could do; once she was in the sky, her speed and strength were neutralized. All she could try was to twist her body around midair so that she could land on her feet and be ready to fight when she landed. At least Eir had healed most of her injuries.

And then her world went dark again.

Jadis cursed the timing as she floundered both in the air and on the ground. The witch or whatever she was had caught her with the spell again. Based on how long the blindness had lasted the last time, Jadis guessed that she was going to be without sight for ten seconds at least. She was going to hit the ground far before her vision came back.

At least her other two bodies and her companions had made it to the other end of the street.

Jadis couldn’t see what was happening, but she could hear the sound of Tegwyn’s hooves clatter against the cobblestones as the transformed Dryad charged into the fight. Before she’d lost her vision again, Jadis had seen that Thea had leapt onto the back of the tree-goat, her spear and shield at the ready. She hadn’t had time to get her armor on either, but she had a massive amount of Fortitude, almost as much as Jadis herself. Jadis had to trust that the guardswoman knew what she was doing.

Eir kept her hand pressed against Jay’s side, channeling healing and supportive magic into her. The elf was uttering a constant litany of prayer, her words washing over Jay in a comforting way that helped center her mind. Aila, on the other hand, was silent as she cast her spells. Jadis couldn’t see what she was doing, but she could feel her presence next to Dys.

“Brace yourself!” Aila abruptly commanded, her voice as cool and level as ever.

Not thinking about it, Jadis curled Syd into a fetal position, head between her knees. She knew she’d been falling for a few seconds but had no way of knowing how close she was to the ground. An instant after she braced herself her whole body was jarred by a powerful impact that shook her teeth in her head. It wasn’t from hitting the ground, though. Something else had struck her, the small but painful impact point numbing her back with convulsive electrical shock. Her stomach lurched as she felt Syd rocket off in an entirely new direction, the change fast enough to make her feel like her insides had just been scrambled like eggs.

A second later Syd collided with wood and stone, her body breaking through a barrier that did little to slow her down. The second barrier she hit did halt her progress, though, and she let out a grunt of pain as she bounced off of what she assumed was a stone wall. As much as Syd wanted to just lie there for a moment and maybe retch up her stomach contents, Jadis knew she couldn’t waste that kind of time. The fight was still happening and her companions were involved now. Worse, she couldn’t truly aid them. Not until the blindness spell she was under expired.

It was a terrible feeling, being rendered so helpless while her companions fought around her. It reminded Jadis of when Sorcha had paralyzed her with that witch spell of her own. Considering how much her Resilience had leveled up, she was damn well upset that she was still so vulnerable to magical attack. With over a hundred points in the attribute, she had thought that she’d be far more resistant to any kind of debilitating spells. Then again, considering who she was working with, the witch or whatever she was who had cast the blindness spell on her was probably a lot higher level than Sorcha. Maybe she was also someone who had surpassed level one hundred?

Maybe, but maybe not. Jadis hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the woman’s armored robes to see if she had the same symbol the bear man and his small companions had on their armor. Still, if she was working with those two, she was at least an elite caster who had unlocked her tertiary class, something that granted a huge power spike for anyone who managed it. Following that line of logic, that meant that if Jadis didn’t have such high numbers in resilience, she probably would have been even more vulnerable to the spell. Instead of blindness for a few seconds, it could have been minutes…

With that thought, the spell finally wore off and Jadis regained her sight. The second time wasn’t as disorienting, so the moment she got her vision back she took in the situation as quickly as possible. She needed to act decisively to end this brawl before she was disabled again and one of her companions was seriously injured.

Jay and Dys could see now that Thea and Tegwyn were down the street where Syd had first been accosted by the two men sent by Egilhard. They were partially surrounded by the dozen heavily armored soldiers that she had briefly seen running up the street. All were wearing plate armor, though there were some subtle differences in style for a few of them. Not enough to give them a mishmash look like some mercenary companies had; the Roiling Reavers being one and her own Fortune’s Favored being another. These men were more uniform than that. But their armor had clearly been customized to the individual’s needs. The men also had a variety of weapons on them, but Jadis could now see that none were wielding any kind of bladed weapon. All had clubs, hammers, or maces of some kind. Not exactly non-lethal, but it would be a lot more difficult to accidentally cut off a head with a club than a sword.

At least it looked like Egilhard was trying to take her alive.

Regardless of their intent, Jadis had no intention of being taken anywhere by the general’s goons. With vision restored, Jay and Dys both immediately sprinted down the street to join the melee. Thea and Tegwyn were holding their own for the moment, but they were greatly outnumbered and the heavily armored soldiers weren’t rank and file fodder. They were clearly elites, attacking with coordinated strikes that her two companions weren’t going to be able to defend against for long.

Jay immediately launched herself into a trio of the armored men, knocking them back with her massive maul. Two of those three were able to react quickly enough to turn her attack into a glancing blow and recovered quickly, though the third was hit full-on. The man’s armor was crumpled by the blow and he went flying to the left, crashing into the ground where he was immediately wrapped up in spectral chains from a snare trap spell that Aila had cast. More and more of those traps were appearing on the ground around their feet and Jadis would have to be careful where she stepped. But she knew her lover and where she liked to place such traps. These assholes didn’t.

Dys didn’t join the melee. Instead, she rocketed past the cluster of combatants, her aim intent upon the spellcasting elf.

The woman’s bright gold eyes widened in shock from the speed at which Dys moved towards her. Reacting to the attack, the woman rapidly threw one hand up in front of herself, some kind of gemstone visible in the palm of her glove. A translucent purple barrier appeared in front of her, ten feet across in every direction, the shield spell blocking off any forward approach to the witch.

Dys didn’t hesitate. Her axe crashed into the obstacle with the full force of her Knight’s Daring Charge. A terrible shattering sound echoed off the stone walls as the magic barrier shattered like glass. Dys acknowledged a slight pain as the skin on her arms split from the shards of the spell flying through the air, but otherwise she pushed on, crossing the distance in a split second. Before the elf could cast another spell, she had the blade of her axe held just an inch away from the witch’s throat.

“You’re done,” Dys growled at the panicked mage.

If she had wanted to, Jadis could have lopped the elf’s head off and ended her threat permanently, but Jadis didn’t think it was wise to do so. These people weren’t Demons or bandits. They were soldiers who had been sent on a mission to arrest her. They were just doing their jobs to the best of their ability, no matter how misguided. Jadis wasn’t going to kill them for following orders.

Beat the shit out of them, yes. But not kill them.

Dys easily ripped the staff from the woman’s hands and tossed it far away where it couldn’t do any harm before taking hold of her wrists and holding them together behind her back in one hand. She’d take the woman over to where Aila was so that she could be restrained with a spell. Once that was done, Jadis would have to decide where Dys needed to be. Not an easy decision, because while Jay was helping Thea and Tegwyn deal with the dozen armored soldiers, Syd had her own threat to deal with. One that had followed her all the way into the building it had tossed her into.

“Submit!” the bear man bellowed in a roaring rage as he collided with Syd.

“Eat shit!” Syd screamed back into the bear’s face as she met him head on.