The only thing that kept Jaye from her natural flight response was the staff in her hand. The hum of power within it brought a rather different response to the fore in fact.
“We cannot help but notice that you are not moving towards the back exit as most of the rest of patrons are?” Shadow whispered to her.
It was remarkable she could hear him at all over the clamour of people fleeing, quite sensibly, for their lives.
Jaye was not interested in being sensible though. She’d been sensible. She’d tried to flee when trouble showed up. Trouble, however, had been prepared for her. Would she have been harder to capture as a young girl? It didn’t matter. Probably the Hunters would have been ready for that too. She wouldn’t ever know, but what she was painfully aware of was how sick she’d felt that even abandoning everyone else hadn’t been enough to save them or herself.
“There’s an Uprising out there,” Jaye said, both answering Shadow and preparing herself for what she was going to see.
Except there wasn’t anything that could prepare her for the chaos of the street outside the public house.
People were fleeing still, those still capable of fleeing anyways. It was mid-day and Riverbough had been busy with all the usual goings-on of a typical day. No one had been prepared for monsters to start emerging from pustules which belched forth from the earth. No one had imagined that this was the day they were going to lose a limb, or lose their home, or lose their lives.
“Skin of Mountain Steel,” Shadow said and weight pressed down on Jaye for moment, driving her to her knees.
When she rose, she saw a glimmer of light play off her hand as though she wore a translucent coating of metal over her entire body.
“If we are to partake in this melee, we shall do so with proper defenses in place,” Shadow said.
With the heft of the steel skin spell on her limbs, transforming was impossible as was flight, but that suited Jaye just fine.
As she’d seen before, the casting of a spell had not escaped the monster’s notice. Six of the creature from the Darkshard Uprising turned to face her, and coiled themselves up to strike.
And that suited Jaye just fine too.
“Heart of Lighting,” Shadow said and Jaye’s nerves blazed shaking her whole body but for only a hundredth of a blink as the spell accelerated her perception, slowing the world down around her.
“We’ll start with that. Those are Malvids if the books described them properly,” Shadow said. “Focus on avoiding their blows. The Steelskin will shield away most damage but any contact with them is perilous.”
“They need to die,” Jaye said.
“Leave that to us,” Shadow said. “Though we should perhaps take some care. Raining fire across the entire city would raise a disturbing number of questions and likely a response from the Ducal Regiments we would not find at all pleasant.”
Jaye considered if that meant she should run forward and start smiting the Malvids with her staff, but moving turned out to be unnecessary by virtue of the fact that the two nearest sprang at her after the shorted of delays.
Watching them move at perhaps a quarter of their normal speed was both heartening and terrifying. With her enhanced senses and speed, Jaye knew she could dodge their attacks, but with how fast the creatures still were it was painfully clear how impossible defending herself would have been on her own.
Each of the Malvids was roughly twice her size and perhaps three times her mass, though their bodies were irregular, with pale white and grey flesh marred by purple bruises set deep under the outer layer of skin, and the only other color on them the stains of crimson splashed on those which had already found a victim.
The Malvids which charged her did so on three legs, two stocky front limbs which didn’t so much bend as either flow or shatter from one position to another depending on some unseen elements which poked out from within them, and one vestigial hind limb which dragged along whipping at anything and everything with the spikes mounted along it.
Neither of the creatures had anything resembling a head, their limbs instead joining together into a massive single shoulder. A small nub of flesh rose above the shoulder but no head was attached to it. Instead there were mouths set at different angles all along the their forearms, each chomping at its own irregular pace.
In the center of what would have been a torso, a single giant maw opened into a space which formed a single transparent fluid-filled sack on their back in which swam a hundred smaller versions of itself.
Jaye had seen a Malvid stuff an entire Catkin boy into its central mouth for the swarm to devour. The memory and her recent meal did not at all agree with each other, but she was motivated to skip back and away to completely avoid the first Malvid that dropped at her.
The second was slightly farther away and whipped its left forelimb at her, which she batted away with the staff as she continued to retreat another step.
“Shatter,” Shadow said as the staff made contact with the limb and Jaye leapt back an extra step to avoid the shower of gore as the limb exploded.
The pouncing attacks of the first two hadn’t been meant to act as a distraction, the Malvids had awareness and ferocity but not even animal level intelligence. In battle though, overwhelming numbers create their own opportunities and so the third Malvid which leapt high over the first two in order to feast on a caster, was much closer to Jaye when it appeared than she had been expecting.
“Nope!” Telman said, diving at the creature as it was in midflight and smashing into it with his shield to knock it aside.
“Flare!” It was a woman who called out that spell, one of Telman’s party it looked like, sending a dart of light into the first Malvid which had attacked Jaye.
The creature wobbled on its forelimbs but also lashed out with its spiked tail, only for it to be sliced off by a woman who was moving as fast as Jaye was but armed with a greatsword instead of a staff.
The last member of Telman’s party was a boy, or at least appeared to be a boy, who hadn’t left the cover of the pub’s door and was instead firing arrows which did not seem to be obeying the normal laws of motion in the flight paths they followed.
“It seems they are an adventuring party after all,” Shadow said, just in time for Telman to cry out.
Telman had knocked the Malvid into the wall of the Counting House which was across the street from the traveler’s pub and had been rising to his feet when the creature’s spike tail had wrapped around his shinguard and sliced through the leather armor on the back of his leg.
He dropped to his other knee, fighting to keep his shield raised and slashing out with his sword to drive the creature back, but, though he was larger than Jaye, it still outmassed him.
“Sanctum Obscura,” Shadow said, his casting words a whisper which called a dome of darkness to pulse outward from Telman, knocking the Malvid onto it’s back. “We must get to him immediately.”
Jaye didn’t need explanation or repetition. She covered the few steps between them in a blink, passing through the Sanctum spell without pause to find a startled Telman waiting for her.
“Flames of Purity,” Shadow raised his voice to more than a whisper and added to Jaye, “Touch his wound. We can’t let the infection spread.”
From the name of the spell, Jaye had expected searing heat to burst from her hand when she clamped it over the injury but the warmth was much more subdued.
At first.
“Hold it for as long as you can,” Shadow said.
That did not prove to be terribly long as the heat went from ‘mild summer day’ to ‘steaming tea’ to ‘burning iron bar’. Telman screamed when they got to the last stage but Jaye held on for half a moment more, grinding her hand into the wound to make certain the treatment worked.
When she pulled her hand back she expected to find Telman’s leg charred to the bone and her hand reduced to ash but both were fully intact and, oddly, free of blood.
“We wove a simple restoration spell as well,” Shadow said. “Apologies for the pain, but thoroughness is important to be sure no infection sets in.”
Before Jaye could ask for any details on the infection, the rest of the half dozen Malvids were on them. She caught Telman’s gaze, who nodded in reply to show that he was fine, and the two of them stepped forth from Sanctum.
The rest of Telman’s party had been pushed back into the pub with the greatsword wielding swordswoman holding off the Malvids with continual spinning strikes while the caster and the archer harried the creatures from inside.
Telman nodded his thanks and then charged the creatures.
Jaye started to charge after him, but checked her step.
Did she really want to help a band of adventurers? No. A band of HUMAN adventurers? Ugh, definitely not. Demonstrably, she already had of course, but that had been returning a favor for a favor. Hadn’t it?
Would Telman have leapt to save her if he’d seen a Ravenkin about to be eaten by a Malvid? Would he have leapt to save the Deerling man?
From the end of the street, six more Malvids appeared, each covered in crimson.
Just like they had been in the Refuge and fresh rage entered Jaye’s heart.
“Kill them,” she said pointing her staff at the new arrivals, and Shadow did not disappoint.
“Death’s Icy Grasp,” Shadow whispered and razor sharp talons of ice sprang up from the ground beneath the new arrivals.The slashing wounds they inflicted were not the real danger however. Anywhere the ice talons made contact with flesh almost all heat was dispelled.
Midstep, the Malvids turned from stalking horrors to frozen statues, which creaked and strained and shattered, the fluids in their back sacks crumbling to dust along with the swarm within it.
Did Jaye want to save humans? No. Humans sucked. Telman had been nervous and kind in his own awkward manner though, and if she was going to feed him to a Malvid, it would be for something he’d actually done or said.
Of course, based on the difficulty his party was having, ‘feeding Telman to a Malvid’ would be largely the same whether she actively tossed him to one or simply walked away. With Shadows help however she was pretty certain she could swing the tide of battle safely.
Which seemed to be the signal for the battle to grow more complicated. From the alley on the far side of the Counting House, more screams ran onto the main street. Screams from an elderly Foxkin woman and the three Foxkin kits she was herding in front of her.
Telman couldn’t see them, but he heard their screams and began to turn, opening himself up to an attack from one of the Malvids fighting at the door. The greatsword wielding woman did see the Foxkin though and paused not even a instant.
“Fall back,” she called out to her team and vanished, flashing from the defensive position she was holding to appear behind the Foxkin, her whirling blade passing just over the elders head and sweeping low to drive back the Malvid who’d been pursing them.
Blasts and arrows intensified as the Malvids at the door tried to surge forward but Telman halted the progress of one of them by virtue of dropping his sword and grabbing it by the tail.
The other weathered the hail of spells poorly but pulled itself forward, mouths chomping uncontrollably, until Shadow spoke.
“Bones of the Earth,” he whispered and the ground erupted again, this time with bands of rock which wrapped around the damaged Malvid and the one Telman was wrestling with. The rock bands slammed the Malvids to the ground and continued pressing them downwards as the bands swelled in size.
Jaye wasn’t sure if the Malvids popped before they were dragged completely into the dirt, or if the stone shell which surrounded them had grown inwards as well. All that mattered were the sounds which indicated that those particular Malvids were never going to endanger anyone again.
“Hey,” the Greatswordswoman asked, closer to Jaye than Jaye had noticed. “I know you’re not in our party, but you seem pretty damn capable. Could you make sure these people are okay?” She gestured to the Foxkin who were no longer being threatened by a Malvid by virtue of the fact that it had been cut in half and was steaming into goo.
“No. Thank you. We’ll be okay,” the elderly Foxkin woman said. “If you can help, please, go, save the others! There are people near the Darkshard! Don’t let it eat them!”