Rebirth of the Nephilim

“Fuck!”

Syd cursed in pain as she crashed through the roof of the warehouse. Shelves and crates exploded into splinters around her as she slammed all the way to the stone floor, crushing everything in her way under her sizeable bulk. Unable to catch herself, she landed hard on her back, an impact that would have knocked the wind out of her if it hadn’t already been stolen. With one gauntleted hand wrapped around the blade that had pierced her stomach, Syd’s other hand was free to snap out in a haymaker punch at the side of her attacker’s head.

The punch was caught.

The spiked knight struggled against her, his smaller bulk straddling her body as his left hand held the sword staff he had speared into Syd’s gut. Holding onto her left hand with his right, the therion growled, straining against her, yet nevertheless, holding her in place as he bore down upon her.

With a hard kick against the ground, Syd rolled herself in a backwards somersault in an attempt to dislodge the knight’s grip. Rolling through the wreckage of the warehouse, her stolen sword staff was pushed further into her stomach, causing another involuntary grunt of pain to be ripped from her chest. The blade had pierced her high on her stomach, breaking a lower rib. From the pain and the feeling of wetness spilling outside her armor, Jadis suspected that her liver had been pierced. If she didn’t heal soon, there was a real possibility that she could bleed out. She had the means to heal herself, but unless she could get the blade out of her body, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.

Coming to a stop, they landed on their feet with her back to a wall. Having freed her left hand again, Syd grabbed at his head in an attempt to twist his neck. The moment she touched his helm, she felt the spikes of his armor pierce through her gauntlet like the metal and leather wasn’t even there. The jagged spikes cut deep into her hand, striking against the bone. Cursing again, Syd didn’t let go, stubbornly ignoring the agony of the spikes piercing her so that she could grab and twist at the man’s head. His hand on her wrist slowed her, but she kept up the pressure, forcing his helmet to one side as she slowly pulled against him.

“You’re strong,” the therion’s growl echoed from inside his dragon-faced helm.

“I’d be stronger,” Syd grunted as she struggled to both tear his head off and keep him from pushing the sword staff further into her body, “if you weren’t sapping my stats.”

Jadis had noted the changed the moment she had come within striking distance of the knight. There was an aura about him, something physically palpable that he exuded, that was suppressing her attributes. She felt slower, drained, like she was struggling to run through mud. She didn’t know if he was stealing her stats or just diminishing them, but either way the effect was weakening her. And by her, Jadis knew it was all of her that was affected, not just her Syd self.

“Bad luck for you,” the man grunted as he used his grip on her arm to fight back against her attempt at breaking his neck. “I have to kill you. I won’t let you get in my way.”

“Yeah,” Syd gasped through gritted teeth as she felt the blade sink another inch deeper. “I’m a real magnet for luck. Every kind of it.”

With a yell, Syd shoved herself off the wall, forcing herself and the spiked knight back towards the middle of the wrecked warehouse just as a shadow fell through the hole they had made in the roof.

Sparks flew as Noll’s blade slashed against the cultist’s back. Reacting faster than Syd had expected, the knight released his hold on her sword staff and punched the inner part of her elbow with his fist, forcing her arm to bend and allowing him to pull free from her grasp. In an instant he was away from her, his curved sword drawn and already parrying Noll’s next attack. As the two therions dueled in a display of superhuman swordplay that was almost too fast for her to follow, Syd ripped the blade from her stomach. The moment the metal was clear of her wound, Jadis activated her Ceremony of Licentious Regeneration. The burst of healing took her health, which had fallen by almost a thousand points, back up to full. In any other circumstance, she would have waited until her health pool was lower to use the one-time heal on herself since it could have healed more. However, with her liver and possibly other organs punctured and bleeding, Jadis knew that her Syd self would have been a constant drain on her health. Not a state she could afford to be in, not when going up against not one, but two powerful opponents.

Dys dodged to the side as the Erinyes raised her bloody hand, causing a pillar of unnaturally grown black vines to burst through the roof under her feet. The magically enhanced growths chased after her, swiping around in a wide, flailing motion that would have been child’s play to dodge, if Jadis’ attributes were not being suppressed by the spiked knight’s aura. As it was, instead of dodging further, Dys swung her axe and hacked the thick vine in half, cutting off the greater part of its extended length.

The moment she had chopped the dark vine, it stopped moving, turning into a stationary obstacle frozen in place, as though there had always been some awful plant growing through the restaurant’s roof. However, the Erinyes was already raising up another vine, this one coming at Dys from behind, forcing her to dodge again. Dys was only half of Jadis’ fighting force on rooftop, though, which was why the cultist was forced to fling herself to one side as Jay’s hammer slammed down mere inches from where she had been standing a moment before.

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While the drain on her stats was certainly affecting her, Jadis could tell that there was more to the reason she was having so much trouble finishing off the already wounded Erinyes. She didn’t know how powerful the woman was, but she didn’t think that she should have been able to withstand her assault, even a diminished one. There was something else at play.

As the blood-soaked cultist raised another hand and a burst of finger-long red thorns sprayed against Jay’s armor, a flare of light caught her eye. It was just a flash, barely noticeable in the chaos of the battle, but one of the rune-marked strips of scrollwork that was pinned to the Erinyes’ robe had gone up in smoke as her spell went off. The scrolls had to be enchanted, or part of some strange spellcraft at the least. They had to be part of how the cultist was putting up such a fight.

Turning towards the Erinyes, Jay violently swung her hammer up with both hands, causing clay shingles and debris to fly at the retreating cultist. The movement took her off the roof, but more twisted vines rose up out of the building to act as footholds, preventing her from falling to the courtyard. As the vines lifted her up, Dys’ axe cut them down, causing both the rancid flora and its vile master to tumble. Charging forward, Jay swung her hammer at the woman as she fell back in midair, aiming to swat her down with all the force she could muster.

Jay missed.

It was not through any great saving action on the part of the Erinyes. No skill or spell from the woman interfered. Jay simply missed. Entirely. All the speed of her attack left her mid-swing, causing her to fail completely. Stumbling, all three of Jadis struggled to adjust to the sudden loss of all her speed.

Syd’s charge towards the spiked knight was met with a parrying swipe of his sword and a mule kick to her stomach that sent her falling to the ground. Rolling on her shoulder, Syd came up on her knee to see that both Noll and the knight were still fighting each other, but their movements were drastically reduced in speed, to the point where they no longer appeared superhuman, but instead like regular, ordinary warriors dueling each other. The moment Noll’s sword slashed through a six-inch wooden beam like butter told her that he still had all of his strength, and so too the spiked knight did, presumably. But their speed, as great as it had been mere seconds before, was gone.

Which meant her speed was gone, too.

Both Jay and Dys backpedaled as the Erinyes flung thorns and spores at them, enveloping her bodies in a cloud of toxins. Moving with a speed that Jadis couldn’t hope to keep up with, the white-eyed woman slashed viciously at the two of Jadis, her claws scraping against her armor while her spells kept Jay and Dys blind. Moving so that her two selves were back-to-back, Jadis tried to catch the Erinyes, but found that the woman was so much faster than her that all of her strikes failed to connect. When the cultist sent a tree-trunk-sized vine at her, Dys was still able to cut the malformed flora in half; her strength was seemingly unaffected by what the spiked knight was doing. She just had no speed.

As the Erinyes moved in again, her bloody talons flashing in the moon’s light, an orange blur streaked out from between Jay and Dys, moving so fast that she could barely keep track of it. The blur slashed at the attacking woman, forcing her back, then back again to avoid further rapid-fire stabs and strikes. As a wall of thorns rose up as a shield to protect the Erinyes, the orange blur fell back to Jadis’ sides and spoke in a voice that was almost as fast as Sabina on an excited rant.

“What the fuck is going on with you!?”

“I’m dealing with shit right now!” Jay replied to Maeve’s indignant question.

“Deal with it faster!” the Fetch demanded before darting forward, using her skill-boosted speed to leap over the thorns in pursuit of the wounded cultist.

Jadis agreed, she did need to deal with the shit around her faster. She just wasn’t sure how to do that. Well, except for one option. An option she would never take. She could run from the spiked knight, getting out of the range of whatever ability he was using to suppress her stats. But to do that, she would be leaving Noll to fight the knight by himself.

Fuck that option.

Syd roared in anger as she fell back on her basic training and stabbed her sword staff at the cultist knight from the side. All of their actions were slowed to a normal level, which only highlighted how much more skilled both the knight and Noll were compared to her. She felt like a neophyte compared to their obvious expertise. Both men were beyond well-trained; they were masters of combat. Jadis couldn’t compare on that level. However, what she did have in her favor was her reach. Even if she wasn’t using the long-hafted sword staff, she was still a giant, and she could jab at the spiked knight from a position far outside the range of his weapon.

As the two crashed through broken shelves and shattered crates, Syd kept up, always attacking from the side, disrupting the enemy therion’s movements and forcing him to continually fall back. As Noll feinted to the right, Syd struck from the left, aiming for the knight’s legs in the hopes of tripping him up. Lashing out with his free right hand, the spiked knight caught her sword staff and pulled hard at the right moment, causing her to lose her footing and stumble forward. The knight swung at her with his sword at the same time, aiming for her neck.

Noll’s blade bit into the underside of the man’s left arm, forcing his blow upward so that the blade skittered against the side of Syd’s helmet, cutting a deep gouge in the metal. Before the knight could recover, the veteran mercenary whipped his sword around and buried the tip a foot deep through the armpit of the cultist’s armor. Syd nearly let out a cry of triumph at what had to be a killing blow.

Except that it wasn’t.

Spinning around, the spiked knight ripped Syd off her feet and hurled her bodily through multiple stacks of ruined shelving, her flight not stopping until she crashed against the far wall of the warehouse with an impact that sent spiderwebs through the stone. Head ringing from the impact, Syd’s eyes searched frantically for the two therion’s, finding them only a moment after she realized that her sword staff had been ripped from her grasp. When she finally spotted them in the shadows of the warehouse, Jadis’ hearts went cold.

The knight stood over Noll’s fallen form, her sword staff buried through his chest.