Rebirth of the Nephilim

Chapter 243: Knock on Wood

“Incoming!”

Someone shouted from behind Jadis. She wasn’t sure who, probably one of the soldiers. She couldn’t spare the attention to focus on them, not when she was staring down a veritable tsunami of bramble fiends.

There had to be hundreds of the things, a crawling, leaping mass of briar bundles that swarmed across the forest. They were pure chaos, a horde of creatures un-trackable as unique individuals, instead functioning like a hive. The only outlier among the mass being the singular tower that moved in the middle of them, a beacon to which the fiends flocked. The nithetre.

Tree of Malice.

“Keep them off our backs!” Jay shouted as she took a step forward, already starting to swing her hammer.

Jadis wasted no time. Without hesitation she cast her Mirror Shine spell, creating an effect that would draw the focus of the demons. Her bodies lit up with an inner white light, casting an ethereal glow that made her armor shine in strange ways. Everyone else around her within the radius of the spell seemed to dim, the sun’s light fading before it touched them.

The reaction from the fiends was instant. The leading edge of the horde, only a few hundred feet away, began to hurl themselves directly at Jadis’ selves. The balls of thorny aggression sailed through the air, spiky tendrils outstretched as they sought to wrap around their Nephilim targets.

Jay’s hammer swiped through the air and took out a dozen in a single attack. Dys’ axe bisected just as many as she swung in the opposite direction. Syd’s lance was less suited to hitting multiple targets, but she still skewered three of the demons in a single thrust. As many as Jadis managed to kill in one swift move, twice as many made it past her weapons to latch onto her.

Rope-like vines covered in thorns wrapped around Jadis’ arms, legs, and torsos. The fiends wrapped her bodies up; seeking to strangle and crush, their tendrils constricted with enough force to crush the neck of an ox. There was one problem for the demons, though.

Jadis wasn’t an ox.

Without pause Jadis continued to swing her weapons. As she moved, the vines wrapping up her arms and legs tore apart, snapping like twine under the force of a train. The thorns couldn’t bite into her thick armor, scraping against the dark steel fruitlessly as the fiends tried to stay latched on. Jadis didn’t even bother to try and pull the hapless monsters off. She just kept attacking the demons she could see. Cutting, crushing, and piercing the horde with as much speed as she could muster.

As the demons that tried to constrict Jadis were torn by the force of her movements, Thea and Bridget attacked them, putting the bramble fiends down with practiced efficiency. Syd could feel the heat of Bridget’s flaming attacks behind and on her left as the warrior’s flail burned the plant-based demons. Thea was less extravagant, though Dys could easily hear the sound of her shield knocking back the fiends to keep them at bay.

While the demons were focused on Jadis thanks to her spell, that didn’t mean there wasn’t spillover. With so many bramble fiends trying to get to Jadis, many were starting to spread out to her sides. The demons began attacking her flanks, and by extension they were attacking the rest of the expedition. Glancing back, Jadis could see that the soldiers were doing what they could, but they were hampered by their lack of armor and proper shields. The makeshift gear and looted weapons they’d taken from the dead bandits wasn’t ideal for their style of fighting and the bramble fiends were designed to overwhelm and restrict movement. Jadis couldn’t rely on them being able to take care of themselves.

Dys and Syd shifted their positions slightly, spreading a few feet further out and away from Jay who stood firm in the middle. By spreading out, Jadis hoped to cover a larger area with her Mirror Shine spell, thus keeping more demonic attention on her and her alone. It seemed to work as the demons that were spilling over to the left and right of the wagons refocused their attention on Jadis’ selves.

Everything had happened in only a few seconds, barely any time at all, yet a lifetime in the middle of a battle. It was at that point, the enemy having only just been engaged and the bramble fiends having been successfully drawn onto her, that Jadis was reminded of the one enemy on the battlefield that she hadn’t yet faced before.

Something slammed hard into Jay’s chest, hitting her with enough force to stagger her. As she stumbled back, her heavy boots crushing the bodies of dead and dying bramble fiends, a second something crashed against, this time hitting her in the left arm. The impact was bone-jarring, though with a concentrated effort Jay shrugged the attack off, squaring her shoulders to face the next blow. What came at her was not what she had expected.

The nithetre had not come much closer. It was still more than a hundred feet back, a towering, ragged tree-stump that stood tall on its many roots. The massive demon wasn’t still, though. The creature was slowly rotating, its trunk spinning in place as its root-tendrils moved in an undulating pattern. Large holes gaped in the side of the trunk, like something had bored its way into the wood. As Jadis watched, one of those holes lined up with Jay and from within something was launched out with incredible speed.

With a resounding thunk a bramble fiend crashed into Jay’s chest, rocking her back with astounding force. The demon was killed instantly, the impact splattering it like a watermelon against Jadis’ armor, but the attack was strong enough that Jadis had no doubt that anyone else hit by the demonic projectile would be crushed by the high-speed collision.

“What the fuck kind of ranged attack is that!?” Syd cursed loudly as she speared and stomped on the mob of demons.

Another fiend was shot out from the demonic tree a second later, the living missile whizzing past Jay’s head. The demon struck the wagon behind her, thorny vines splattering in a shower of shrapnel that forced Sabina and Eir onto their stomachs to avoid being struck.

“A fucking dangerous one!” Kerr shouted back as she released an arrow aimed at the nithetre.

The arrow struck the tree, the shaft burying more than halfway into the wood. However, the demon made no notice of the attack as it continued to slowly rotate, firing off more bramble fiends.

“I can’t damage it!” Kerr spat, firing off more arrows at the monstrosity. “I don’t know where its weak spot is!”

“Let me give it a go.”

Jadis barely heard Aila’s words over the sounds of so many bramble fiends, but her statement was enough warning that she didn’t flinch when a round ball of ghostly magic shot past her selves and into the horde. The sphere landed about a hundred feet away, maybe a few yards shy of the nithetre. In the moment the spell made contact with a single unfortunate bramble fiend, there was a ripple that seemed to warp the air for the briefest of moments. Then came the boom.

Aila’s spell exploded like a grenade, except there was no fire or smoke. The terrible destruction wrought by a sudden powerful explosion was completely visible thanks to the ghostly translucence of Aila’s pure arcane magic. Jadis was able to see more than a dozen bramble fiends that were caught in the deadly expanding sphere get shredded to pieces as the unnatural forces of the magical explosion blinked into existence before disappearing just as quickly. Hundreds of tiny chunks of vines and demon goo were tossed outward in the aftermath of the spell.

“Damn,” Aila scowled. “I’m out of range.”

“Holy shit!” Jay shouted as she briefly turned her head to look back at Aila. “Was that your explosion modification? That was fucking awesome!”

“How many more of those do you have in you?” Dys added as Jay was forced to put her attention back on the demons swarming her.

“Eight more!” Aila shouted over the noise. “But I need to get closer!”

“The lady wants to get closer to the giant tree demon that spews out smaller bush demons with enough force to kill a hippo,” Syd mumbled under her breath. “This is definitely part of why I think I’m in love.”

With the methodical, unstoppable might of three determined juggernauts, Jadis pushed forward. There were so many bramble fiends around her, both living and dead, that it was like she was wading through deep snow. Each step she took crushed fiends beneath her boots, popping them like grapes as her massive weight came down on them. Slowly, she drew closer to the nithetre, carrying the center of the battle forward with her.

Checking on the progress behind her, she saw that Willa had moved her troops up to flank her sides along with Thea, Kerr, and Bridget. They all worked together to kill any stragglers that fell away from her bodies, executing the injured fiends with ruthless efficiency. Vines whipped out at them, striking and tearing at the mercenaries and soldiers alike, but Eir’s healing magic closed wounds almost as quickly as they formed as she rapidly switched back and forth between targets, keeping everyone standing.

As soon as they had moved ten feet closer, Aila shot out another bolt of magical arcane energy. The spell struck the demonic tree stump in one of its larger leg-like roots. The attack blasted the root to bits. Chunks of rotted wood and foul demon blood were sent spraying across the battlefield as the nithetre rocked backwards, listing to one side.

In the next moment, a bolt of lightning ripped through a line of bramble fiends, killing off a few dozen in an instant. The lightning strike reached all the way to the nithetre, hot electricity burning up the trunk in a sizzling display that made Jadis’ eyes water. As soon as the flash faded, Jadis could see fire burning up the side of the tree, the spell having burned the wooden shell.

“Thanks for getting me in range, too!” Nora called out. “I hate not having my staff!”

Now that both mages were in spell range of the nithetre, Aila and Nora unleashed a torrent of spells on the oversized angry log. Jadis and the others continued to act as a shield for the two as they dealt with the thing, blocking the increasingly depleted swarm of bramble fiends as well as protecting them from the wild reaction of the nithetre. And wild indeed was the tree demon’s response to being exploded and burned.

As the spells struck, the nithetre flailed wildly, its many roots thrashing the ground and anything unfortunate enough to be nearby. Its slow rotation was turned into a mad spiral as it spun in an ever-increasingly erratic fashion, the taller part of its broken trunk tilting at greater and greater angles. From within the knotholes in the trunk more bramble fiends were launched, the lesser demons flying off in random directions. Soon, the force of those fiendish missiles was diminished, their firing from the holes looking more like an escape than an attempt at an attack.

Finally, one well-aimed exploding force bolt blasted apart three of the nithetre’s legs on an already weakened side. The demon lost its balance and, with a resounding crash, collapsed onto the ground in a smoldering heap.

There was no cheer of triumph from Jadis, Fortune’s Favored, or the soldiers. While their numbers were greatly diminished, there were still many, many bramble fiends swarming all over the three Nephilim. For several more minutes, the group worked tirelessly to cut down the remaining demons. The ground grew wet with the blood of so many demons slain and the air became choked with black smoke as the toppled nithetre continued to burn.

Eventually the horde was depleted completely and Jadis found herself standing in the middle of a rancid-smelling scene of absolute slaughter. Hundreds of dead bramble fiends surrounded her three selves, their thorny bodies turning the ground into practically impassible terrain for anyone other than extremely well-armored giants.

“That thing is still alive!” Kerr called out as everyone else was staring around at the carnage, looks of disbelief visible on their faces.

Checking where Kerr was pointing, Jadis saw that the burning nithetre still had roots squirming around, trying to find purchase in the ground. Stepping forward, Jadis approached the disabled demon to get a closer look.

Nora’s lightning and Aila’s explosions had badly damaged the outer bark and wood of the tree demon, large swathes of the shell having crumbled apart. In some of the now exposed sections of the trunk Jadis could see large dark tentacles squirming around inside like grubs that had burrowed into wood. From out of one of the knotholes poured a stream of smoke, an internal fire burning inside the tree. It did not look like the demon was going to survive much longer.

With a massive overhead chop Dys slammed her axe down onto the nithetre. Hacking away at it like it was no more than a simple log, she split apart the trunk until the squirming insides spilled out like rotten guts. As the vile tendrils poured out into the open, a single enormous eyeball, yellow green in color, emerged. It shifted through the mass of tentacles, staring up at the three giants looming above it. Slowly, it started to worm away from them, the ungainly mass barely able to move outside of its wooden shell.

Syd’s lance skewered the eyeball in a single thrust.

“What a nasty piece of work,” Syd grumbled as she flicked demon blood off of her weapon.

“Everyone okay?” Jay turned to look back at everyone else.

“We’re fine,” Aila called back. “I think that was all of—”

“Hey, no, shut up!” Kerr abruptly cut Aila off. “Don’t you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Jadis asked.

Even as she said it, Jadis realized she could hear the same thing that Kerr had. Recognition shot through her, as it did with everyone else. She could see their expressions change as they, too, became aware. Over the sound of the burning Nithetree and the wind in the trees, there was a high-pitched noise. A terrible, keening noise that sent a chill up Jadis’ spine. It was the sound of many people screaming.

And it was getting closer.

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