As Pasha turned to Bentru, opening her mouth to say something else, Diore cut in. “Noise discipline. Eyes up. Shut your mouths. We’re not out of this yet, don’t get cocky.”
Pasha immediately grunted an assent and became all-business. Despite her personality quirks, Pasha was a professional and one dangerous lady. We all are, thought Nicole with a little bit of sadness, but a lot of pride. She hoped Tom would get away safely.
“Four coming from 3’o clock!” barked Diore. Bentru reacted instantly, shield up. Pasha and Nicole loosely lined up behind her for protection. Diore stood alone, confident in her armor and orb-Bonded abilities for protection as she ordered, “Nicole, kill the spiny thing. I’ll take the armored one.”
“Got it,” they all responded, and fell into an easy rhythm again. The familiarity of their roles helped Nicole deal with the horror of their surroundings, and strange feelings of guilt whenever they came across dead bodies. At this point, at least she didn’t recognize any more, or they were unrecognizable. Most had been gnawed on or partially eaten.
By the time they’d gotten close to the town square, the four of them were bone tired, even with Diore’s magic to boost their energy. The four of them had begun getting wounded more often, too. Diore was doing the best she could, but Nicole could tell she was running out of magic energy, especially from how often she had to cure all of them from the poisoned demon spines that the little creatures threw.
A trail of demon bodies marked the path they’d taken.
For the first time, Nicole began to question the wisdom of the team focusing on Diore’s advancement, feeding her spirit stones to rank up her orb-Bonded abilities. They’d even pooled their money and bought the spirit stone last year to bump her to third rank.
While it was true that Diore being so powerful had helped them subjugate dungeons, in this moment, it might be better if all four of them were second rank, or even first-rank orb-Bonded, but maybe not. Who knows? Nicole thought grudgingly. At least they were all still alive, which she felt grateful for.
One thing was sure, Nicole’s unfocused desire to be orb-Bonded both for more power and to attain longer life had just shot to her number one priority. In a large-scale attack like this, her dependence on Diore, or even Bentru, a mage, was painfully obvious.
Their path to the square had taken longer because they’d had to avoid entire areas of town that were too hot from fire, and they’d looped around to approach the square from the opposite side of the demon attack. The wisdom of this strategy was obvious as the four of them finally arrived.
Only a couple panicky, nervous teens holding improvised spears guarded the street they walked down, and when the two young girls saw the adventurers, they frantically waved them forward, glancing behind them the entire time. Without actually needing to speak about it, all four of the Dolos’ Chosen broke into an easy run, rushing past the two token guards, more lookouts than actual fighters.
The other side of the square was smouldering, with bodies piled high. A water mage or two seemed to be working full time to keep the fires away from the square. Defenders hung out of windows and fought on rooftops, with a large number of them actually blocking the street to the square.
Carts and other objects had been used to make a wall of sorts across the street, and the front line fought behind it. The town’s blacksmith, Gramie-shilla, stood with three others that Nicole didn’t recognize, two women and a man, and the four of them seemed to be the real reason that the sea of demons on the street beyond hadn’t flooded into the square. Those four were holding the choke point.
Gramie-shilla wore thick, articulated Mo’hali armor, the kind that likely cost a small fortune. If the woman had made it for herself, she was more skilled than Nicole had assumed. She held a giant shield and used a heavy halberd.
To the blacksmith’s sides, the other defenders were likely orb-Bonded, or at least mages. Maybe they were retired adventurers. Two of them wore masks and might have even been lower-ranked orb-Bonded. Nicole was shocked that a small town like Action had had so many powered individuals. Maybe the threat her group had gotten yesterday when they’d first arrived had been serious indeed.
Gramie-shilla’s fellow fighters fought with experience and ferocity.
A line of townspeople in cobbled-together, or old, ill-fitting armor helped the front line, adding weight and numbers to the four at the wall. A life mage crouched behind them, ready to heal the worst injuries or poison to keep that crucial line functional.
The other Action citizens fought the massed horde of demons too, launching arrows, Molotov cocktails, and even the occasional magic at the screaming mass of demons.
Nicole understood how so many bodies were littering the square itself after a hail of poisoned barbs fell from the sky, and a handful of demons even managed to break through the front line. As she watched, the two that had vaulted over the brave people blocking the street were almost immediately cut down, but they weren’t the only demons to get through. Some of the surrounding buildings seemed to have holes, letting through the occasional demon. The defenses for the square were more or less holding for now, but already had weaknesses.
“This is a rotting shitshow!” swore Pasha. “I thought I killed more of them than this. Were there really this many before?”
As Pasha spoke, the sky behind them grew a deeper crimson, and Bentru’s shield came up as she moved forward to join the four on the street. “Doesn’t matter,” said Bentru. “I’ll be over there, it’s where I’m needed.”
Diore nodded absently and watched her go.
Nicole asked, “Shouldn’t we stick together?”
“No, this is a battle. Actually, you’ve never seen a real battle, have you?” Pasha asked.
After a quick pause while Pasha’s eyes scanned their hellish surroundings, she explained, “Okay, it’s like this, Nicky. If that wall of big, burly daughters of bastards goes down, we all die. If she stayed with us, Bentru could protect us, but up there, she can protect everyone, and protect us even better.”
Nicole nodded slowly, figuring the explanation made sense. But what she was really wondering at the moment was how her friends could maintain their composure so easily with the town burning around them, and a shrieking horde of demons probably only being moments away from ripping everyone to shreds. How could Pasha calmly give a near-shouted explanation while someone was literally dying a stone’s throw away, frothing at the mouth from poison? Nicole was barely hanging on. Some of the Action residents she could see had actually lost it by now too, either screaming, crying, tearing their hair out, or puking their guts out.
As her eyes moved over the scene, she noticed more bodies of townspeople, and swallowed. Probably almost half the town was already dead. Among the bodies, she spotted a few more familiar faces, including Maggie, the woman she’d met at the blacksmith.
Her stomach roiled and she thought she might be sick, but held it down. She would have never imagined she could still get queasy like this after being on Ludus for years. Violence wasn’t new to her anymore, but she’d never seen anything like this.
Pasha turned to Diore and said, “So what do we do? This situation looked rotten, like, should we actually try running after all? There don’t seem to be any demons the other direction, just that crazy red lightning. If we stay here, what can we do? I only have one magic stone left in the gun. Even if I want to use it, if I stick my head up, I’ll probably get hit with a dozen poison barbs even faster than last week’s lover—”
Diore cut her off. “Shut up, Pasha, I need to think. Let’s get under cover right now in case more poison comes down.”
“Okay.”
The three of them hurried over to a covered produce stall. Then after a few seconds that felt like an eternity to Nicole, Diore said, “We have to stay. We don’t know what’s going on out there, and the four of us are not going to survive alone out there. Nothing has changed from the last time we had this conversation other than the situation itself.
“It looks like there are a lot less demons now, but some of the big things are still coming this way, and I haven’t seen any of those robed bastards for a while. They might push here, and we’ll be needed.”
Pasha said, “But how do we know how many there are? What if they keep coming?” Nicole decided that she had a good point.
Diore seemed to think so too. “That’s a good point, but some of those things run faster than a zebra gallops, and again, we don’t even have zebras anymore. Getting here was tough, and that wasn’t out in the open where Dolos only knows how many demons could spot us and pile on top of us. No, we need to stick this out. One thing this experience has shown me is that we need better weapons for crowds. Dealing with smaller dungeons like we usually do, all of our weapons other than the lightning rifle are precision tools.”
“Yeah, I’d like a freakin’ nuclear bomb right about now,” muttered Nicole in English.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Diore nodded and said, “I am going to heal and support you two. You are going to wait behind the front line to cut down any demons that get through, stop them before they can get into the square. We’ll protect the other fighters and healers in the square and relieve that pressure. If we do that, they can focus on killing the demons out there in the street. Some of these folks are ex-military or adventurers, but most of them are about to break.”
I’m going to be fighting on my own? Nicole’s heart jumped in her throat, and she almost protested, but held her tongue. If there was any time it was appropriate to stand on her own two feet on Ludus, to be able to fight alone, it was now.
The three of them hurried to their positions, carefully watching the sky for any more poison attacks from the demons. Nicole wasn’t sure how long she waited under an awning, moving out to kill any demons that got into the square, but time just seemed to pass. After a while, her mind felt numb, and her world went mute. It was like she was doing a job, working at an assembly line. The actual act of firing her pistols as fast as she could, using a spear to stab nightmarish creatures if they got close, and reloading her weapons with shaking hands was all like a movie she was watching, like someone else was doing it.
At first she truly believed she was going to die, that it was hopeless, but then the demons on the other side of the line began to thin out. The other side was running out of bodies. We’re winning, she thought in surprise, her brain moving slowly. Then she screamed in triumph, the cry being taken up by others around her.
Movement to one side made her turn to see Tom. The strange man was walking around the square slowly, looking at all the dead people and even turning them over to see who it was. As he got closer, Nicole could see that he was crying, the tears running into his dirty hair. Tom stopped at Maggie’s corpse, pausing for a long time before suddenly beating his chest, screaming in rage and pain.
Nicole was so surprised she watched him a moment longer as he walked among the corpses in a daze, pausing here and there to pick up jewelry, or pieces of armor. It seemed like a ghoulish thing to do, but maybe he was mad with grief. He was likely not in his right mind.
“So is he going to fight?” she wondered out loud. Her head snapped around as another demon broke through the line, and suddenly she had more important things to worry about. She had just killed the thing, shooting it in the head, when her world went sideways. The ground came up to slap her, and she lost all of her breath. Something cracked in her head and it felt like her teeth were breaking on each other. Her ears weren’t working too well, either.
For a while, she couldn’t figure out what had happened, but she slowly came to realize that she was lying on the ground. She groggily rolled over to see what had happened.
The front light of fighters on the street were...gone. A new, ragged crater smoked in the cobblestone right where the defenders had been. The demons had slowed down, moving at a walk now, and two black-robed people traveled down the street among them. One of the robed people’s hands was still held out. Magic. Behind the cultists, Nicole saw demons so large and terrifying-looking, her blood ran cold.
Bentru, she thought in panic. In her dazed state, it was hard to find her friend, and when she did, her heart shattered. A few of the brave, front-line fighters had been blown into a heap, and Bentru’s body was shattered. She was unconscious, her armor damaged, and one of her legs ended in torn and ragged flesh just below the knee. Nicole blinked, trying to will away what she was seeing, but as Diore stumbled over to their downed friend, applying emergency healing magic, she had to accept it was real.
The solid wall of advancing demons was near the downed defenders now. Diore looked like she might pick up Bentru and run, but she gently set down their friend, squared her shoulders, and leapt forward with superhuman strength. She’d only cut down a handful of demons with her giant sword before she was pressed on all sides, demons actually trying to jump on top of her to pin her down. Diore whirled, trying to make space for herself.
Then almost like it traveled in slow motion, a fireball of some kind lobbed from the rear of the demon horde sped towards Diore. The orb-bonded woman turned in time to see it, vaulting away, but she hadn’t been fast enough. When the magic attack detonated, it destroyed a few demons, but also lifted up Diore and flung her sideways so hard, she punched through a wooden wall into the building beyond. One or two of the demons in the street darted through, chasing after her.
Nicole screamed. In the corners of her vision, she noticed most of the remaining Action defenders break. The rest were down, or bloody. It was clear that the two recent explosions had knocked some of them off their feet, or shattered windows that cut them up.
A few demons were in the square now, chasing around survivors, but the majority of the enemy was still in the street. Enough demons remained to wipe this town from the face of the map.
Huge, tentacled monsters at the rear, possibly the strongest demons in the horde, marched forward. Nicole could feel their footsteps through the ground. Why hadn’t they led with those things? she wondered. It was obvious at this point that Diore had been right, that people were...controlling these creatures. Now, even though she was going to die, she couldn’t help questioning the logic of how the cultists had fought this battle.
I guess we’re lucky they’re stupid. The thought was funny in the darkest way possible, but Nicole hurt too bad, in body and soul, to manage a chuckle.
Pasha was still standing, and went to meet the advancing demons with her strange battle cry, “Alala!” Nicole could barely hear it, with her ears ringing so loudly.
The horde of demons surged forward toward the solitary woman running directly at them. Nicole tried to struggle to her feet, but stumbled and fell, hissing in pain as all her weight slammed onto her elbow. She’d never felt so weak or helpless in her life. “Pasha!” Nicole screamed.
With more bravery than sense, the fool woman ran toward the enemy. Nicole winced, tears running down her dirty cheeks as she fully expected to watch her friend die, but Pasha abruptly stopped, dropped her swords, and swung her lightning gun from her back. She shrieked as she fired the enormous rifle only about a half-second after stopping.
At point-blank range, and against a mass of enemies, the lightning gun, even at half charge, was decimating. After the blinding flash of light, Nicole’s eyes cleared in time to see Pasha’s smoking, limp body sliding across the ground. When her friend came to a stop, Pasha trembled and groaned, so at least she was still alive—for now.
Pasha’s attack had taken out a staggering number of the remaining enemies, even one of the robed cultists. As the demons moved forward again, this time more cautiously, a new robed figure materialized at the rear of the group. To Nicole’s sides, around the square, scattered groups of surviving townspeople fought and died, but she couldn’t stop staring at the demons coming down the street.
I’m not going to die like this, lying down, Nicole thought. When she’d first come to Ludus, she would have never thought this way, but she
was a different person now. She snarled, and slowly rose to a sitting position. The town of Action burned and died around her. It felt like half her hair had been singed, and her hearing hadn’t completely returned yet, but she began mechanically reloading her pistols, preparing for her final stand.
Since she had her eyes locked in the direction of the approaching demons, she saw Tom move forward, stopping near the fallen Pasha to pick up one of her swords. “No,” Nicole croaked. “She’s the sword’s third owner, it will just fall to dust, so—” The words died in her mouth as nothing happened, the enchanted sword remained whole, and Tom made a couple of practice swings with the weapon. He ignored the oncoming demons.
One of the cloaked cultists raised a hand, casually shooting some sort of magical attack at Tom. The attack didn’t connect. Tom had stepped to the side, still idly swinging the sword in his hand. As he did, his fingers and wrists glittered. Nicole spotted jewelry that hadn’t been there before, and some had the telltale sheen or luster of enchanted gear.
What— thought Nicole.
As the wall of remaining demons was about to meet Tom, he hopped back, his arm flickering, and a demon lost its head. The moment hadn’t looked real, the demon had died so easily, and the movement had been so fast, Nicole hadn’t been able to track it. She blinked rapidly; all of her attention focused on the ragged man holding her friend’s sword.
The cultist who’d lazily attacked before leveled her hand again, but Tom had already done something with one of his rings, holding his arm out and delivering a burning beam of light that drilled through the cultist’s chest. The scene seemed to stand still for a breathless second before all the demons ran forward again, their complacency gone. Screams, bellows, and other terrible noises bounced off the walls, filling the square.
Tom danced among the demons, effortlessly killing the creatures around him. Nicole was spellbound in a way only a seasoned adventurer could be. She could actually recognize the incredible level of skill being employed. As Tom darted around, severing limbs and making it look easy, he also dodged magical attacks by the cultists. One even pulled an air pistol, aiming it at Tom’s back, but the moment before the projectile struck, he whirled, blocking it with some sort of magic shield projection. A bracelet on his wrist glowed.
Delvers LLC- Surviving Ludus Page 39