“Gods dammit all!” Jadis roared as she flew forward. “Fucking dammit!”

Hearts pounding in her chests, panic threatened to overwhelm Jadis. She remembered the helplessness of being buried alive in a deep pit under thousands of pounds of mire hounds, choking on muck and blood as she struggled to breathe, barely able to move, blind and alone in the cloying dark. Jadis rarely had nightmares, but the sensations she experienced that day had revisited her on more than a few nights.

Fortunately for everyone who had the ground fall out from under them in a very literal sense, there was no Demon Prince looming over all ready to vomit out an endless tide of mire hounds onto their heads. It was only the pelting rain pouring down on them, creating a muddy, churning mess that would make standing in the collapse a challenge, never mind fighting. Then again, the Demons did not need one of their princes to carry their horde over a river to fall upon their enemies’ heads when the land was open to them. The force rushing in from the northeast would be at the edge of the collapse in just a few minutes, and Jadis had no doubts about the ability of mire hounds to fight in a muddy environment.

With all three of her bodies in the air, Jadis flew at two points and purposes. Dys, who had been with General Salvius in the forward half of the marching line, aimed to reach the collapsed area of farmland. She didn’t know how many soldiers had been caught in the trap; maybe a few thousand, which was bad enough, but not the total calamity it could have been. However, Alex and Bridget were in that mix, as was Tiernan. Additionally, Ammy’s location was unknown. The Lares tended to float through the front lines, using her alchemy to reinvigorate as well as to purge the air of the miasma. Jadis had no idea if she had been caught in the collapse as well, only that she had not been near Dys when the fall happened.

Jay and Syd aimed to fly over the pitfall, their weapons drawn against the oncoming horde. Jadis could see the flash of Wilhelm’s golden blade through the dark and the rain, but he was just one Hero against thousands of Demons. He wouldn’t be able to stop them all. Any who got past him would pile down into the pit and the soldiers and mages within would be easy prey for their viciousness.

A part of Jadis recognized that without her, the generals and, by extension, the rest of the army and all of their elite forces would not be able to communicate as effectively without her. They would be forced to rely on runners, which would cause delays compared to her instantaneous relay. In the same instant that she had the thought, Jadis put it out of her mind. Yes, she had been serving as a glorified radio thus far, but that was not her true purpose. She was a CLR one hundred and four warrior who had slain literally thousands of Demons, including Greater Demons and even a Demon Prince, over the course of a single year. She was a fighter. It was time for her to fight.

Rocketing over the heads of soldiers who were still reacting to the sudden ambush, Dys headed for where she had seen the blue light of her two lovers flashing before the ground collapsed. There was no sign of their light in the moments since, but only a few seconds had passed. She ignored the fear that tried to find purchase in her hearts and reminded herself how powerful her lovers were. They would be okay. As Dys crossed the distance, she saw the effects of the collapse on the few thousand soldiers who had been caught in it blur beneath her. It looked to her like many were struggling in the mud, half-buried but at least not totally submerged. The collapse wasn’t uniform, though, and some had fallen deeper than others, with the dark shadows of deeper tunnels spotted among the wreckage.

A flash of blue light caught Dys’ attention and she adjusted her course, slowing down as she shifted to the left. She wasn’t sure if the light had come from Bridget or Alex, but the two had been next to each other, so finding one would mean finding both. Before she had flown more than a handful of yards in the direction of flash, a figure burst up out of the ground and into the sky before her, wreathed in a circle of red flames.

Dys almost attacked the figure but managed to hold back before swinging her axe as she recognized Tiernan’s diminutive form.

“Where are they!?” Dys shouted as the gnome turned towards her, his flaming spell keeping him aloft.

“I don’t—”

A bolt of golden energy streaked with black exploded in the air mere feet away from Tiernan. Dys hurled herself away from the sudden explosion, the edge not quite catching her. With her tendril wings fanned out around her, she prepared to lunge forward and catch the gnome, presuming there was anything left to catch after being struck dead-on by one of the skull blob’s destructive spells. However, when the sphere of malignant divinity faded, Tiernan was still floating on his ring of fire, the glow of an arcane shield fading from around his body.

“Go find them!” the Arch Mage shouted while pointing down to where he had come from. “I will deal with the Greater Demon!”

Without waiting for her response, Tiernan immediately blasted away to the south towards the source of the golden sniper shot, but Dys didn’t watch him go. She was already diving to the ground, eyes and ears searching for her lovers and finding, to her concern, a swarming mass of myrmidons and other Demons waiting for her.

The sound of a sonic boom reverberated across the rain-soaked landscape as Jay broke the sound barrier. With her hammer held lengthwise in front of outstretched arms, she plowed through the herd of mire hounds, cutting them down by the sheer speed and force of her unstoppable mass. It was only a few seconds, but the maneuver had brought her through the main mass of the horde, injuring or outright killing hundreds of the Demons in a visible line. As Jay pulled back up into the air and spun around to see her trail of destruction, Syd performed the same maneuver crosswise to her other self’s path, cutting an X into the attacking force that doubled the number of their casualties.

Prepared to fly down again and cut another swath of Demons down, Jay paused at the sight of several more flashes of light. From her position high in the air over the northeast side of what had become a battlefield, she could see the army organizing themselves in response to the ambush. Thousands were forming lines and marching slowly around the edges of the collapse. Even in the spare second she took to overwatch their progress, she could see that they were not foolishly rushing forward. More pitfalls were possible, and the army was carefully checking the way as best they could. Not that Jadis was sure what they could do to check for the ground’s stability, but that was not her concern at the moment. Instead, her eyes were drawn to the signs of mages and elite warriors who had split off from the main body of the army. Some were diving into the pit to fight the Demons and save the soldiers who had been trapped within, others were rapidly circling around to reach the incoming enemy attack. Jadis realized that soon she would have more than just Wilhelm to worry about hitting on the ground, so she put her mind back to charging through the Demon masses before allies made the maneuver too unsafe to attempt.

A myrmidon soldier with scything jaws leapt at Dys, latching its man-crushing pincers onto her left arm and shoulder, biting down with the screech of blades on metal. Ignoring the attacker, Dys swung her axe down on the head of another myrmidon, one of the worker varieties, and split it in half down to its chest before it could strangle the mage whose legs were stuck under thigh deep in mud. With a flick of her arm, she tossed the corpse away, letting it splatter in the muck. The mage who she had saved might have called out his thanks, but Dys did not hear the words over the sound of her fist crunching the sturdy exoskeleton of the soldier myrmidon that had latched onto her shoulder. Before the dead creature had even fully fallen away, she was already moving, searching for any sign of her lovers.

The blue light had just flashed nearby, and yet Dys could not see Alex or Bridget in the roiling mass of mud and bodies. Everywhere was chaos around her as soldiers and mages alike struggled against the Demons who had lain in ambush under the surface of the farmland. Sudden bursts of fire and ice flickered in the peripherals of her vision; in one moment, a pillar of stone rose twenty feet high on her left, carrying a mage and four soldiers with it to safety. In the same second, a woman’s scream that came from somewhere behind her was cut off in a gurgled exhalation. It was hard for Dys to know where to even look, as there was no line of allies or enemies. All was mixed together in a morass of blood and ruin that masked who was friend and who was dead.

Reaching out with her left hand, Dys pulled a flailing arm, freeing a man who had been trapped in the collapse. Doing the same for another arm that was sticking out of the mud, only for a blood stump to come out of the sodden dirt. Letting the severed limb drop, Dys whirled at the sound of shouts and screams. Through the rain she saw a large, inhuman figure breach through the ground like a whale in the sea, a soldier’s legs caught between reptilian jaws. She almost started towards the arching form of the beast, but the blue glow of arcane light flickered to her right and she instantly spun in that direction.

There, twenty or so yards away, was the shadow of Bridget’s flame. With a great flap of her white wing tendrils, Dys darted over to the blue glow. As she approached, she saw that the source of the light was coming from inside one of the tunnel mouths that dove deeper under the ground. Just as she reached the entrance, she recoiled as azure fire roared from out of the hole, searing the air with an explosive burst of flames.

The moment the fire died away, a second burst exploded out of the tunnel. Then a third. Then a fourth, and even a fifth. Muddy earth was instantly dried out, cracking into fired clay that was just as quickly soaked by the rain again as two more bursts of arcane flame baked the tunnel opening. Then, as Dys had resolved herself to dive into the hole, fire or no fire, a sustained blue light came roaring out of the shadows. Only this time, the flame was accompanied by the roar of a familiar war cry.

“Get the bloodyfuck out of my way!”

Charred insectoid parts flew out of the tunnel, the smoke of their burning innards mixing with the steam of boiling water. Bridget came leaping out of the haze, her body cloaked in the blue of her Flame Aegis. Even through the fire, Dys could see her lover was panting like a bull, great gusts of steam exiting her open mouth. Her helmet was indented on one side, like she had taken a hard blow, and there was a blackened husk of something demonic wrapped around her right leg all the way up to her hip. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

“Bridget!” Dys shouted with relief, drawing the orc’s glaring attention. “Are you okay? Where’s Alex?”

“I’m fine!” Bridget shouted fiercely, a growl to rivel Noll on his worst night in her voice. “I lost her! We were separated!”

Dys wanted to question Bridget on the details, but the circumstances weren’t ideal for conversation of any kind. Thus, her words were limited.

“Where!?”

As Bridget pointed back down the tunnel, the percussive sound of rocks exploding burst against Dys’ ears. Both she and Bridget turned to their left to see the sloped ground of a slightly raised part of the collapsed landscape explode outward. From out of the rubble slithered a nightmarish, many-tentacled creature of war dragging the bodies of two mages in monstrously clawed arms.

“Alex!” Dys shouted, recognizing her demonic lover immediately.

The paladin turned towards, neon-blue eyes flashing beneath the black helmet she wore. In full armor, Alex was an imposing figure, made more so by the two unconscious mages she had slung under her second pair of arms. Without even looking away from Dys, one of her many tentacles struck out, smiting an ambitious mire hound that thought to sneak up on her, causing the smaller Demon to burst like a rotten melon.

“Jadis…” Alex called out. “Bridget…”

Instead of rushing forward, Alex pivoted on her three largest tentacles, sliding further away and to the side. In the next instant, the monstrous creature Jadis had seen breaching the ground moments earlier exploded out of the opening Alex had just exited. Jadis saw the divine light of Alex’s smite strike the no-doubt possessed beast in the side as it missed her, but instead of melting like bad pudding under her attack the beast slammed its long, snake-like body into her as it passed, knocking her away with a force that did not match the casualness of the motion.

Dys and Bridget charged together, wings and flame spreading out to either side as they went to help Alex. Being the faster of the two by far, Dys was several yards ahead of Bridget when the flash of a golden light pierced the dark of the rainstorm, blinding her.

“Fu—”

Dys’ curse was cut off as unbearable pain bloomed in her chest and stomach. Blinking away the tears that stung her eyes, she got back just enough of her vision to see down the length of the three ephemeral golden lances that were piercing her torso to gaze into a yellow peaking out of the black mud at her feet.

“—ck.”