Chapter 740: POV Druid

A fifteen-foot-long stone spike sliced through the air, crushing the corner of a stone building that happened to fall within its path. Meli dodged to the side, easily avoiding the massive projectile, though the debris of the partial impact scattered across her left side. The small stones were of no concern, especially with Aila’s arcane armor spell boosting her defenses, but Meli still took a moment to check on her passengers once they were out of the line of sight of the simulacrum matriarch.

“Are you both well?”

“Yes,” Thea answered immediately.

Her tone was stronger than normal, a change that Meli attributed to the battlefield environment. While the young human typically suffered from confidence issues that exacerbated her stutter, battle seemed to focus and sharpen her attention, giving her no time to think about what she sounded like. Meli could not say what exactly caused Thea’s stutter in the first place, but distractions certainly seemed to help clear it up.

“All good,” Aila answered in the second following Thea’s response. “What about you?”

Meli considered the question and took a moment to check her status sheet. Her health was fine, only a few points below its maximum, but it was also dropping slowly despite no active harm being done to her. She imagined that she had contracted some form of disease or had been affected by a poison in the air, which would require purging from Eir, though there were no symptoms noticeable enough for her to worry about having the issue addressed immediately. There were too many system notifications for her to do a proper review, but she had seen one appear earlier that informed her that her tertiary class had reached level eight, bringing her CLR to sixty-nine. Meli quickly put the single point she had earned from that level into her Vitality. Ten points of health weren’t much compared to the vast numbers that individuals like Jadis or Alex had at their disposal, but the small change could make a difference for Meli, should she for whatever reason have trouble getting to Eir for a healing purge later.

Aside from her likely contraction of plague, there was one other factor that Meli could tell was an issue, or at least, would become one soon.

“I need to replenish my stamina,” Meli informed Aila while holding out her hand to the redheaded human.

“Of course,” Aila replied as she passed one of the enchanted canteens she had strapped to her person to Meli.

Under normal circumstances, Aila usually flushed a bright red color whenever the fact that she carried around containers of Jadis’ seed for drinking purposes was referenced in any way. Meli imagined she found the idea to be socially embarrassing. She didn’t personally understand the issue; Jadis’ seed was an important part of Aila’s class function and had a legitimate purpose in her life, especially on the battlefield where the mage was casting large quantities of spells. Even if she didn’t have that class-related purpose, Meli still saw no problem with wanting to consume her lover’s seed. To her understanding, such consumptions were common among lovers. Meli certainly enjoyed doing so.

In any case, Aila was, like Thea, too distracted by the battle to present her normal social tick. Rather than comment, Meli set the observation aside for latter and removed the canteen’s stopper before quickly taking a large gulp of the contents.

The familiar taste of Jadis’ sweetness flooded Meli’s mouth. The strong flavor was almost enough to make her forget about their current circumstances; Meli even felt her core heat up a bit in a sort of learned response. Sex wasn’t the point of drinking Jadis’ seed at that moment, though. She needed the fluid to replenish her stamina via her skill Nephilim Transfusion. She might not have needed the boost to her reserves if she wasn’t carrying Thea and Aila on her back, but she was, and not doing so wasn’t an option, so Meli drank.

Passing the nearly empty canteen back to Aila, she noted that the mage emptied the last of the seed into her own mouth before recapping the container and setting it so that it was out of her way on her back.

“Only one canteen left,” she said by way of warning. “Once it’s out and I use up my reserves, I’ll probably need to be taken to Alex.”

“Try to make what you have last,” Meli cautioned as she edged forward around the corner of the building she had taken refuge behind. “I do not know when Jadis will be able to take you. She is very much engaged right now.”

Before Meli had even fully finished speaking, one of Jadis’ armored forms crashed through the wall of a nearby structure, causing the building to partially collapse from the impact. In the next second, she was out of the still falling pile of rubble, hammer raised in anger and a string of curses echoing from her closed helmet. Meli couldn’t quite understand what Jadis said as she flew back into combat with the simulacrum matriarch, but she thought she heard the phrase “flintstone hate-fucked a thing.” With all of the noise, she couldn’t be certain of what was said, especially since that combination of words didn’t make any sense to her at all, yet she felt that the strangeness was exactly the sort of unusual phrasing that Jadis would mutter to herself whenever she thought no one else was listening.

Shifting to follow after Jadis, two mire hounds came charging around the corner just as she reached the narrow alleyway and immediately attacked her. The leaping Demons did not last long. The leftmost one was blocked by Thea’s floating aegis shield and knocked out of the air. The moment its body bounced onto the ground, Meli stabbed its head with one of her legs, killing it quickly thanks to the power of her Magic Claw spell. The other Demon met its end on the tip of Thea’s spear. They didn’t linger, though there were more Demons coming. Leaping onto the wall, then the opposite rooftop, Meli hurried back to where the main body of the eastern advance was fighting, careful all the while to keep an eye out for any golden bolts of Divine energy.

Speeding over the length of one long rooftop, Meli saw that a wave of unrelenting simulacrums were pushing in from the south, no doubt attempting to support their brutish mother. Or was it too much to assume familial loyalty among Demons? Alex certainly held no love for her matriarch, though Meli wasn’t sure that Alex was a good example considering her radical departure from how most Demons behaved before Jadis came to Oros. The other Demons that had been taken into custody by Jadis and shown mercy were also seemingly unconcerned about the fate of their matriarch, though again, Alex wasn’t certain if that was a Demon trait or something specific to them. Regardless, there were dozens of the stone-bodied simulacrums rushing towards the eastern breach in the wall and they would not be visible to her allies until they were on top of them.

Leaping fifty feet to cross the gap from building to city wall, Meli ran along the flat vertical surface, using her spider-like lower body to her advantage. The maneuver forced Thea and Aila to hold tightly onto her, yet they still refused to let her web them to her back for a more secure connection. Reaching the edge of the breach, Meli jumped over the line of embattled soldiers and landed near the small group of healers and mages in the middle of the formation.

“Simulacrums coming up from the south, that street!” Aila called out an order to the soldiers, saving Meli from the trouble of explaining. “Get ready!”

The shouts of assent from the men and women on the line seemed to be enough to Meli, but Aila turned her staff upon the street corner where the Simulacrums were soon to arrive. She cast a spell and, after a short delay, a massive rune circle fifteen feet wide appeared in the middle of the lane. Meli presumed that the spell circle was so large because it was a modified trap version of the arcane pillar that she had used to disable five of the impenetrable Demon Domes.

Aside from the first two that had been destroyed on the western side of the city, Aila’s spell had been used to destroy a third on that side after the main army had arrived, as well as two more on the eastern front. Sirio and his band of specialists had destroyed the first one on that side of Kastoria by means that Meli did not understand, though the wrecked remains showed that the method was effective if nothing else. That meant three domes destroyed on each side. Naturally, the army had moved into the western breach since they were already on that side of the city, which only made sense to Meli. However, a smaller group had been sent to the east side via air, sea, and sprinting runners and they were attacking a breach in the wall in order to split the attention of the Demons. Meli had felt that doing so was foolish, since it also meant that their own forces were split, therefore there was no advantage gained. However, she had been proven wrong so far. Most of the Demons were focused on the main body of soldiers, while only a few had come to defend the east. Those few, however, had been the strongest ones, like the Unrelenting Simulacrum Matriarch. That fact was definitely to their side’s advantage, since it just made it easier for Jadis and Noll to kill the powerful Demons without causing collateral damage.

A hulking stone form crashing into a distant building, its form blazing with azure flames, seemingly just to prove that Meli’s assessment was accurate. The Demon Matriarch lashed out with a stone fist that crushed an already broken wagon into splinters but missed Noll’s agile form entirely. Slipping under the wild attack, he used his curved blade to aggressively strike the Demon’s other front leg, cutting deeply into the stone and doing far greater damage thanks to Bridget’s fiery spell. With how incredibly tough the matriarch was, that added damage was absolutely necessary.

Performing a forward roll that shattered the paving stones of the streets, the titanic simulacrum forced Noll to dodge away. However, there was no respite for the Demon. In the same instant, two of Jadis’ bodies slammed down onto the matriarch from above, crushing its back into the ground and shooting stone splinters in a halo of destructive force that even reached as far as Meli in the middle of the formation a hundred yards away. Still the titanic Demon was not destroyed, its incredible durability allowing it to weather a storm of damage that had to be counted in the tens of thousands.

A second later, the flames coating the matriarch’s body winked out of existence. Meli saw Bridget’s blazing form glide out of the shadows of a broken building, her intent clearly to renew her damage-enhancing fire. However, before she could see the result of that attack, a great crashing noise on her left dragged Meli’s attention away as she spun to the side to face the noise.

The fifteen-foot-wide rune circle in the street had been replaced with a semi-translucent formation of sharp crystals, rising like a miniature mountain out of the ground. The formation was not as tall as the pillar of the unaltered spell, and it was much wider, but it seemed that it had appeared with just as much force, simply from the bottom up instead of the other way around. Multiple simulacrums, along with a few hapless mire hounds, had been either impaled on the sharp crystals or tossed into the air and scattered like leaves by the power of the trap. A few seconds later, the transparent crystals faded away, leaving the impaled Demons to fall to the ground where they were soon trampled underfoot by the those who had been charging behind them in their haste to get to the line of soldiers waiting for them.

“Meli, please, hold still for a moment,” Aila asked in a stressed tone.

She was talking to two of the mages, one of whom Meli knew carried one of Sabina’s enchanted communication bracers. Aila was probably passing along information to the rest of their allies or was receiving an update herself. Meli began to turn her attention back to the fight against the Unrelenting Simulacrum Matriarch when her brain caught up with what her ears were hearing.

“—she stormed the Opaline Palace on her own! Lady Severina has gone after her, but—”

“Meli!” Aila shouted urgently, reaching out over Thea to grab hold of her shoulder. “We need to get to Jadis, now!”

She was already moving.

Launching herself forward with a powerful leap, Meli cleared the forward line of elite Voltonian soldiers to bounce off of a building, then another, before landing on the roof of a partially collapsed structure near the fight between titans. She could see that the fight against the giant rock Demon had turned to their favor in the short few moments that Meli had been distracted. The matriarch was on her back, the arm that Noll had sliced into completely gone. The other one had been pulverized, and the back legs weren’t looking much better. Still, despite all three of Jadis’ bodies standing on top of the Demon’s chest, repeatedly slamming their weapons down onto the fallen foe, the matriarch was still alive. Not even Noll’s blade cutting through the stone of the Demon’s throat seemed to be enough to end the stubbornly enduring creature.

“Get out of the way!”

Aila’s shout was followed by the flash of her arcane pillar in the sky above, and the scramble of Jadis clearing the area. The ephemeral crystal crashed down in the next second, causing a massive split in the Demon’s chest that opened like a log being split by an axe. When the pillar disappeared, Jadis immediately dove at the crevice, attacking the opening with her usual intensity.

Meli leapt off the roof, landing just to the side of Bridget, who was herself busy crushing another simulacrum with her flail.

“What are you—!?” the orc shouted as Meli grabbed hold of her floating, flaming form and dragged her along as she rushed to Jadis’ side.

Mentally, Meli recognized that a notification for the death of the Simulacrum Matriarch had appeared, accompanied by further notifications that indicated an increase in the levels of at least two of her classes. She ignored those notices. They hardly mattered.

“Alex went after Twisted Desire!”

Aila’s shout immediately caused all three of Jadis to turn towards them.

“What!?”

“She left the army formation and flew into the Opaline Palace!” Aila pointed at the structure that rose to their west. “She said she’s going to kill Desire! Severina went after her!”

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” all three of Jadis cursed as she turned to look towards the tower. “She didn’t—”

“What happened?” Noll asked as he joined them on top of the dead Demon’s chest. “Where did Alex go?”

“She went after—” Aila began to explain, still pointing towards the tower.

Then a gigantic, three-headed mud dog crashed through a building behind to the north of them.

“Never mind!” Noll shouted as he turned to face the charging Mire Hound Matriarch. “Go get her!”

Jadis did not hesitate. Without looking back, her wings spread and she took to the sky. With a crack that rippled the very air itself, she sped off to go after Alex in the Demon-held palace. Her speed was so great, and the distance so short, that before even a few seconds had passed, Jadis had already struck the lower east side of the building’s tower, crashing through in a cloud of dust and debris.

“What do we do?” Thea asked, her tone as tense as the grip her legs had around Meli’s waist.

“Go, get after them,” Bridget said, her enflamed form floating above the titanic corpse beneath them. “Meli, you can catch up. Jadis and Alex are going to need help!”

“What about you?” Aila asked the warrior.

“I’ll stay here and help Noll,” she said as she looked past her shoulder at the therion fighting the Mire Hound Matriarch. “If we all go, the soldiers here could get overwhelmed, at least until the Roc gets back here with more reinforcements. I’ll tell Maeve what’s going on and see if we can get Wilhelm or Halvor or someone over here, then I can come after you.”

“That… is sensible,” Aila said after a slight hesitation.

Meli agreed. It was a sensible course of action, one that she had not expected to come from Bridget. However, the plan was incomplete.

“Tell Noct,” Meli advised. “She is with the Roc. She can get to the palace faster than you can go on your own.”

“Right,” Bridget agreed with a nod.

Then, not wasting any more time, she took off for the defensive formation where the communication device was held by the mage.

Meli wasted no more time either. Jumping up to the closest intact roof, she raced across the buildings that lay between the eastern city wall breach and the Opaline Palace. She could see the still cloudy hole where Jadis had broken through, but she could not go directly for the same spot. There was a large open area between them, a town square of some sort, and a great deal of Demons filling that space. So, following the line of rooftops, Meli carried Thea and Aila along as fast as she could run, curving around the building to come up from the south.

In the distance, she could see the battle on the western front raging. Flashes of magic, booms of explosions, distant cries of pain. It was a cacophony of chaos, one that made Meli wish for the peace and quiet of her simple flower grove, or even the murmuring solitude of her family’s forest to the north. However, she did not shirk her call to battle. Jadis and her companions were worth fighting for. Perhaps even dying for.

Hope did not deserve to grow up without both of her mothers.

Cresting one of the rooftops that was near the southern steps of the palatial structure, Thea shouted a word of warning, telling Meli to look up.

“The t—top of the tower!”

Meli saw nothing. Then, a burst of golden light. The divine sniper Demon? No, there was no projectile. Another flash, this time clearly coming from one of the upper tower windows.

“It’s Severina’s smite!”

Thea’s assertion was less certain to Meli, but she trusted her to know what she was talking about. If Severina was on the upper floor, then that meant Alex was likely nearby, since the Seraphim had gone chasing after her. That could also mean that Demon Prince Desire was there as well, which would explain the repeated smites flashing visibly just inside of the tower.

That would also mean that Jadis had gone entered the tower in the wrong location.

The choice was between going after Jadis or going to where Severina and possibly Alex were located. Instinctively, Meli wanted to go to Jadis. However, when she considered the situation for more than a moment, she recognized that going to Severina was the better option. Jadis was much more capable of taking care of herself than anyone else, not only because of her extremely high attributes, but also because she carried Eir’s Reliquary with her. Severina and Alex were in far greater danger. Besides which, if they located Alex first, they could bring her to Jadis, or wait for Jadis to come to her, or convince her to retreat with them and then notify Jadis so that she could withdraw as well. No matter the following step, the next step that seemed best was to reach Severina.

Fighting Twisted Desire as anything other than a group effort had never been the plan; they all held a grudge against the evil Demon. However, it seemed that Alex had been holding onto a far greater grudge than any of them had realized. In a way, Meli couldn’t blame her, even if the decision was terribly unwise.

“Hold on,” Meli warned her passengers before bolting for the tower.

Climbing up the side of the palace did not take long. The tower was not as tall as some of the others in the city, just wider with an impressively engineered dome. Passing by several sets of windows, Meli heard the sounds of chaos and fighting, but it was only when they reached the floor that was next to the top that she heard Severina’s familiar voice grunting and groaning in extreme effort. And pain.

Entering through a window, Meli paused for only a moment at what she saw. Inside was a room destroyed, its contents broken and scattered as though a storm had raged inside the contained space. Near the middle, not far from a central pillar where a curved staircase was built, stood two figures.

Severina and a therion in spiked armor stood face to face. Two swords, one broken in half and the other curved, lay on the ground at their feet. The knight had his large arms around her, pinning her wings against her sides. Severina had her hands against the man’s chest and was desperately pushing against him, keeping only a small space between their bodies. The spikes covering his armor had pierced through her hands and blood was pouring down his rust-colored chest plate. The spikes on his arms had done the same to Severina’s wings and sides, causing more red to stain the Seraphim’s visage. Slowly, inexorably, she was being pulled closer to the man, where she would be pinned against his spikes, to either bleed out or be crushed under the pressure.

Meli moved, stepping inside so as to go to Severina’s defense. However, even as she had been climbing the tower wall outside, she could feel the effects of the spiked knight’s aura sapping away her attributes, making her feel weak and slow. Fortunately, she didn’t need to do anything to fight the therion other than step inside.

Aila’s magic would do the rest.

A terrible pain pierced through the bulbous abdominal rear of her spider form, causing Meli’s next step to falter. She heard both Aila and Thea cry out behind her, but she did not pay attention to any words that may have been said. Instead, she leapt forward with all the strength and speed she had, which was still considerable even with the therion draining her stats. Lurching forward and then spinning to the side, Meli used one of her many legs to toss a sticky net of webbing behind her, hoping to catch whatever or whoever had struck her.

Thea’s aegis rang as a Divine smite rebounded against it. The sticky webbing caught onto the edge of the floating shield, but also the side of a figure that moved behind her through the window, tying the two together, at least for a moment. The red winged form wore terribly ruined armor that was broken and twisted, revealing a body that was rent open and pulled back together by unnatural means, a pulsating, bloody mess of flesh with black tentacles running through and holding the viscera in one piece like a badly woven wicker basket. The front half of the once shining helmet was gone, revealing a face that had been carved into two pieces, with the left side eye socket and cheek hanging open to the jaw. A strangely familiar arrow through the back of the head, with the point piercing the flesh through to just below the chin.

“Go save Severina,” Meli ordered Aila and Thea as she shook them both off of her back. “I will handle Vitus.”