“Get back, back back!” Jay shouted as her three selves retreated from the burning nithetre.

Her companions and the soldiers complied as quickly as they could, backing out of the carnage-covered roadway to regroup at the wagon. Movement was hampered, however, by the massive amount of dead bramble fiends covering the ground. Jadis found it hard to pull out herself, the many dead demons causing her to slip and stumble. She desperately wanted to get clear of the rough terrain before whatever the source of the screaming was reached them since her footwork would be hindered. Unfortunately, by the way the screams were rapidly increasing in volume, it didn’t look like she was going to have the time.

Sabina was one of the first to see it. She couldn’t be sure if she was the very first, since she wasn’t looking back at her, but the scream that came from the smith was unmistakable. In almost the same moment more screams and curses resounded behind Jadis, but by that point she had spotted what the others had and she had no attention to spare for anyone else’s shouts.

From the right side of the road, its approach having been obscured by the dense black smoke of the burning tree, charged a giant four-legged abomination. It was huge, at least as large as a grundwyrm, yet it moved low to the ground and with surprising speed. Long, widespread legs launched it forward as it swept out of the trees and smoke to attack Dys. A worm-like head on a long, thick neck snapped at Dys with a powerful set of wide jaws. Thick, sharp teeth dug into Dys’ right arm before whipping her back and to the side, tossing her more than twenty feet to the side before her flight was halted by smashing against the wide trunk of a towering pine tree.

Reactions were instantaneous. Jay and Syd both moved to strike the demon even as it tossed Dys. Jay’s gigantic maul struck the creature in the side as Syd’s lance pierced one of its arms. The thing was rocked back by the blow, huge body stumbling away as an arrow from Kerr and a bolt of force magic hit it a moment later. The next second after the demon let out an ear-splitting wailing, like dozens of people were screaming in pain before it suddenly leapt backwards and away through the smoke, gone as quickly as it had come.

“What the fuck was that?” Kerr shouted.

Jadis echoed the sentiment internally, having only gotten a brief glimpse of the demon from the brief encounter. She’d barely begun to process what she’d seen when more movement came from the northwest.

Twisted wretches, between fifteen and twenty of them, came charging towards them. The screaming beast hadn’t come alone, clearly, just as the nithetre hadn’t. The group of lesser demons leapt into the fray, forcing everyone to defend themselves as they attacked wildly and rabidly.

Jay’s hammer killed two of the wretches with a single swing as she sent the demons flying, their bodies crushed by the powerful blow. The rest of the demons slipped by her, aiming for the rest of the expedition.

Confused as to why she was being ignored, Jadis briefly wondered if her Mirror Shine had worn off. The spell did have a five-minute duration. Attempting to reorient the demons onto her, Jadis recast the spell, making sure that the strange inner light was shining brightly from her bodies.

To her surprise and horror, the wretches continued to ignore her. In the following moments, she saw them leap atop the soldiers and her companions, mangled jaws and crooked claws tearing at armor and at flesh. Several of the demons started glowing sickly green as their foul magics were cast, acidic bile and choking miasmas pouring out of the mouths as they tried to melt and burn their targets.

Syd’s lance went through the back of one demon’s head, skewering it before it could vomit acid at Bridget who was doing her best to protect Aila. By the same token, Aila had cast her force shield and was blocking another demon from attacking her and Eir at another angle. Kerr’s bow sang as she shot arrow after arrow in rapid succession at the demons around them, while Thea’s shield first blocked an attack from slavering wretch, then sent the monstrosity stumbling back with enough force that it fell backwards into a pile of dead bramble fiends, the thorny vines tangling up the wretch’s limbs.

A lot was happening all at once, not the least of which Jadis saw were the efforts of the soldiers who were handling the attack with their usual professional competency. She briefly noticed Willa slice the head of a twisted wretch off of its shoulders while Gunnar blocked another wretch from attacking the captain’s flank with the use of makeshift wooden shield. Her companions and the soldiers could handle themselves, which was a good thing, since Jadis had a bigger problem on her hands.

As Dys rose up from where she’d been tossed, a shadowy movement came at her from the corner of her eye, barely visible thanks to the limited vision her helm offered. However, she ducked at just the right time to avoid the worm-like head of the screaming demon from grabbing her thanks to Jay seeing the attack coming.

Counterattacking, Dys spun and slashed with her axe, bringing the blade up to cut at the demon’s neck. To her shock, the gray flesh of the monstrosity resisted her attack, her blade barely cutting through the thick skin. In the next instant the demon’s huge left hand caught hold of Dys and slammed her onto the ground.

With a flying leap, Jay hurled herself out of the bramble fiend death pile and towards the demon attacking her other self. With her hammer raised high overhead, she planned on bringing it down hard on top of the back of the monstrous beast. Except, as she cleared the smoke and saw her target in the full light, she found that there were dozens of terrified human faces looking up at her.

“Save us!”

“Help me!”

“Please, for the love of the gods save me!”

“I don’t want to die!”

“Valtar help me!”

“Don’t hurt me!”

So many voices cried out at once that Jadis could only make out half of what they were saying, yet what she heard and saw made her stomach turn. As the arc of her leap brought her to the demon, she reflexively pulled back, horrified, turning what would have been a powerful slam into the demon’s back into a glancing blow that barely grazed the creature’s side.

The demon’s right front leg swung out slapped at Jay, knocking her back several feet though she quickly recovered. As Jay righted herself and raised her hammer up to fight, she couldn’t help but let out a curse at what she was seeing.

“Samleos, you sick fuck, how could you?”

The demon’s gray body was large and round, almost like a turtle except without the shell. Its large ribs were clearly visible under its flesh, its round, flat torso making up the bulk of the creature. The long legs that stretched out to the front and back of the demon were thickly muscled and looked more like human arms than an animal’s legs. Each one ended in a hand that had at least twenty long, almost rectangular fingers that were capped with yellow nails. The long neck ended in a worm-like head with no sign of eyes or nose, just a mouth that opened up wide to reveal a single row of sharp, triangular teeth. No part of the thing was pleasant to look at, but the truly horrifying aspect of the demon was its back.

There were people on the demon’s back. At least thirty men and women, many humans, some elves and orcs, and at least one that Jadis hoped was a gnome. They were all of them sprouting from holes in the demon’s flesh, black tendrils worming up into their visible torsos and holding them in place. Each person stared at Jadis, eyes wide with fright as they screamed and begged for help, pleading to be saved. They reached out towards her, their bare arms pushing against each other as their grasping hands begged her to take them.

In the brief second that Jay stared at the horrendous sight, the demon attacked. It dashed towards her, closing the distance in a single move. As it lunged, it tossed Dys out from under its foot as she was sent tumbling across the ground for several yards.

Jay’s hammer came up in time to block the demon’s bite. A mouth large enough to swallow Eir whole bit down on the steel hammer head. Pulling back, Jay struggled for a moment with the demon as it tried to rip the hammer from her hands. She pulled back, stretching its neck out for a moment before the abomination abruptly twisted about in a circle. It lifted her weight easily, taking her for a spin before releasing its hold on the hammer and sending Jay flying.

With a crunch Jay banged into the side of the Behemoth, wood cracking under the force of her impact before she fell to the ground with a loud clatter.

Syd was already moving to intercept the huge demon, but in the second before she could get there it turned again and rushed at Dys.

Dys had only just barely gotten back onto her feet, the dizzying toss having sent both her and her head spinning. Somewhere along the way she’d lost track of her axe, the weapon slipping out of her grasp. Just as she spotted it lying amidst the pine needles a few feet away, the demon was upon her. It knocked her down again, her armor protecting her from the full force of the impact it leapt on her. A huge, toothy maw snapped down at her head, but Dys grabbed hold of both the upper and lower jaws of the demon and held it back, keeping it from getting its teeth around her. She didn’t know if it had the strength to chew through her neck armor and she wasn’t willing to find out.

As Dys stared into the open mouth of the demon mere inches over her face, she noticed that the thing didn’t have a tongue, just a wide-open throat. Its gray inner mouth was also covered with thick pustules of varying sizes that seemed to pulse in time with each other. Except, were they pustules? They had long slits across the middle of them and—

One of the larger bumps abruptly opened up, the flesh splitting apart in two equal halves. Within was revealed a single eye, a light bluish-purple in color. It stared down at Dys, pupil dilated, her reflection mirrored in the dark surface. Then all the pustules split open and the demon’s mouth was filled with dozens of eyes, all of them focused on her.

“You are one disgusting piece of shit,” Dys hissed up at the leering demon.

The demon made no verbal response. Instead, its front arms grabbed hold of Dys’ legs, one in each hand, and started yanking on them. Hard.

Dys’ body strained under the sudden pull, her joints popping as she resisted the tremendous force being exerted on her. The demon’s head reared back, pulling Dys up off the ground as it held onto her legs, stretching her out wide as it tried to either force her to let go or tear her limb from limb. Probably both.

Syd reached the back of the demon, lance in hand, but once again hesitated. As the demon stood on its back legs, the dozens of screaming people were forced directly into Syd’s face. Their pleading cries and grasping hands reached out towards, begging for salvation. Jadis’ gut reaction was to hold back. She didn’t want to hurt the captured people any more than they already were.

But were they simply captured? Or were they something worse? Jadis had seen firsthand that demons could mimic a person well enough to pass a casual inspection. Jana, the mercenary who had been possessed back in Alawar had been her prime example. Jadis had no time to think about it, she was in the middle of a life and death struggle. However, in the scant moment that she took to analyze what she was facing, she realized that odds were strong that these people weren’t hostages, but were instead possessed bodies, no better than living corpses.

Fuck she hoped that’s what they were.

Syd lunged, her lance striking deep into the demon’s flesh, though not without first passing through the chest of an emaciated older-looking human woman.

“Save me, please, save me!” the woman continued to scream despite the fact that she had ten-foot-long polearm sticking through her breastbone.

“You aren’t fooling anyone anymore, bitch,” Syd growled as she twisted her weapon hard and pulled it back out.

“No! No, no, no, no!” The old woman wailed, the tone of her voice changing from terror and panic to rage and frustration.

Syd recoiled as the multitude of moving corpses sticking out of the demon’s back began to scream curses and obscenities, their pleas for help transformed into insults and accusations. Their begging hands continued to try and grab at her, only this time their intention was no longer to pull themselves away from the demon, but to pull Syd in closer.

“Eat dick, you cunt!”

“Suck my shit!”

“I’m going to eat your tongue!”

“Bloody piece of trash, just die!”

“Samleos take your soul!”

“Fuck you!”

With a snarl of her own, Syd rammed her lance back into the screaming demon again, the blade slicing the head off of a shrieking corpse.

“Fuck you too!”