Will used 5 AP with Construct to create a cuboid shelter that contained everyone inside. It had one open side to funnel the enemy into, blocked off by Nix. Everyone else crowded near the back to give her space, humans and chimps alike.
They waited, silent, weapons at the ready. It wasn’t long before they could hear shuffling footsteps in the dark beyond the flickering light of their still-burning fire. Footsteps and wet, animalistic growls.
With his superior Senses, Will could see them before the others. Large shapes moving through the trees, then coming to a stop to watch them. More and more gathering. He had a hard time counting individuals, but there were certainly more than twenty.
“Be ready,” he said. “They’re coming.”
Nix lowered herself into a deep crouch, fingers and toes digging into the dirt.
One of the creatures shambled out into the light, followed by a second, and a third, and a whole heap more all at once. Some were runty and crooked, but most stood at least as tall as a man. There was no sign of uniformity in their design, just animal features slapped grotesquely onto humanoid frames. There was a man with the head of an eagle and hooves of a horse; a woman covered in matted fur, with a snout like a pig one long hooked claw at the end of each wrist instead of hands; a man who hopped on his hands and feet with the warty, leathery skin of a toad and the huge prismatic eyes of a fly.
There were great sections of poorly grafted flesh that rotted upon their bodies and discharged a brownish ooze. Their smell, the metallic stench of spoiled fish, immediately asserted itself.
“Aw, fuck me,” Mongrel said, his rifle dropping a hair. “These things aren’t right.”
“What do you want with them?” Nix asked, motionless.
Mongrel glanced over at Will, then shrugged. “Uh… kill them? Quickly, please?”
“Certainly.”
One of Nix’s thorns, about the length of a hand, shot out of her body with a dry hiss. It impaled the nearest amalgam, a creature with two goat heads, through the chest. It burrowed its way inside until it was all swallowed up, blood spewing out of the ragged hole it left. The creature fell on its knees, producing a discordant bleating while it pawed uselessly at its chest. There was one silent moment, then the projectile burst back out of its torso, making a second hole in the process. It slithered back through moss and bush in the shape of a stubby serpent, and leapt onto Nix to merge into her body once more.
Nix repeated this process as more of the godless freaks came into view. She fired controlled bursts of thorns without ever moving an inch from her low, ready crouch. The dark blurs of her flying projections cut through the air, while the undergrowth was filled with her wriggling spawn crawling back to her.
Soon, a tidy pile of the creatures had built up before their hardlight shelter, further impeding their comrades trying to get through.
Will let his pistol drop. His assistance would not be needed, it seemed.
Thank god for demons.
Pigeon’s traps went off with flashes of brilliant silver and gold that made day of the night for a split second, shredding unholy forms and sending others scrambling with fear.
The stream of amalgams abated before any of them even made it to Nix. They waited for a minute once the forest went quiet and still, then went about making sure they were all dead, allowing the demon a bit of rest.
“That went pretty well,” Will commented, kicking a wriggling six-limbed monstrosity onto its back so Number Two could thump it to death. He looked up at Mongrel, who was standing at a healthy distance from the carnage while coordinating his chimps. “How’s your woman doing?”
“Winded, but all right,” Mongrel grunted in reply.
“Can she keep going like this a while longer?”
“I reckon, yeah. We should try and take some slack off her when we can, though. Keep her from running dry.”
“Understood.”
They went through all the amalgams and finished off the ones that weren’t dead already. Thirty-one dead. Oatmeal put out the fire, and they kept moving north, going by the ghostly pale light of Will’s lantern.
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*****
It had been a while since Bee had really gotten to push herself, moving as fast as her legs would carry. She swallowed up ground, sprinting as fast through the difficult terrain as a man might on flat ground. Even so, she could tell that Pigeon was slowing her stride so that Bee could keep up.
The Jeweler had thrown a ball of light into the air that hovered above them, lighting up enough of the forest so that they could at least tell where to place their feet.
They kept that pace for a long while. The two women moved in silence, not a word passing between them. Bee settled into a comfortable rhythm, staying in constant motion. It felt good to stretch her legs.
Then an arm swiped at her out of nowhere, and Bee slid onto her knees to dodge. She came back to her feet, axe in hand, and heaved it into whatever had tried to get her. She felt the squelch of flesh and the crunch of bone, and a body of hideous visage slumped forward. It let out a long howl before she silenced it with a second blow to the back of the neck, severing its spine.
There were more of them standing among the trees. Moving towards her, running as best they could on lumpy, mismatched feet.
“No time for that!” Pigeon shouted. “Ignore them! Move!”
Bee kicked the closest one, a thing with the face of a man but the antlers and hooves of a deer. She put her axe through the top of its skull, burying the crescent of steel down to its brow, then pulled her weapon back and retreated from its encroaching compatriots with a growl of reluctance.
It felt cowardly to avoid a fight, but she told herself that she wasn’t running away, but running towards greater prey.
Bee and Pigeon outpaced the monsters without much trouble, and they soon receded into the visual noise of the forest.
She checked in on Will through their bond. He wasn’t hurt, nor did he seem overly alarmed.
How’s it going over there? she asked.
<
Good work, babe. Keep it up.
<
Still working on getting to the wayshrine thingy. I’ll let you know when something happens.
Dawn had begun to break, the sky turning an ugly purple bruise, when they reached a large clearing. Pigeon stopped on a dime atop a rock and sat back on her haunches. With a snap of her fingers, she put out her orb of light.
Surprisingly, Pigeon was breathing hard, despite the fact that Bee hadn’t strained herself overmuch. She probably didn’t have many points in Toughness, then—if any.
Bee approached the Jeweler’s vantage point and saw her looking out over a crumbling, vine-choked ruin made from off-white stone. It stood at the far end of the clearing, set into a low cliff. Numerous fires burned between them and the structure, with more of those foul creatures milling about them.
None of them had anything more sophisticated than a wooden club for a weapon, but their claws and teeth and beaks would likely do plenty of damage on their own.
There were maybe twenty of them around the clearing. Occasionally, one would come in or out of the gaping black portal that served as the main entryway into the ruin.
“I’m guessing you want us to sneak through,” Bee said. The amalgams were quite a ways off, but she didn’t know how good their hearing was, so she kept her voice low.
“Correct,” Pigeon replied. “Especially now. If the wretcher is already alerted to our presence, it will either be organizing a defense or preparing to flee. We need to move fast. Can’t afford to get caught up on these ones.”
“How do we get past without them seeing us? I’m not a trained scout like you. As in, stealth isn’t exactly my forte.”
“That won’t be a problem. Wait for my mark.”
Pigeon removed her clogs and placed them inside her black void. Then, picking up a rock off the ground, she used 2 AP and tossed it way off to her left, through the trees.
Nothing happened.
Bee waited a moment, then cleared her throat, rocking on the balls of her feet. “All right, now what?”
A long, ear-splitting scream echoed through the woods from their left, like someone was drowning a bag of cats. It kept on going, and Bee had to force herself not to put her hands over her ears.
The amalgams in the clearing perked up. A good half of them hurried in the direction of the noise. The rest stayed with their ears pricked, ready for a fight.
“Should be enough of an opening,” Pigeon said. “Come on, follow me. Don’t fall behind.”
They skirted the edge of the treeline, moving right to avoid the attention of the monsters. Pigeon broke out into the clearing and cut across the flat ground, moving at a light jog yet still almost completely silent. Bee followed suit, noticing every whisper of grass against her boots and every branch snapped underfoot.
The monsters didn’t notice, and the two women slipped inside the mouth of the ruin. They met an amalgam right at the entrance, but Pigeon had a knife through its chin before it could make a noise. She withdrew her blade, and stuck the thing a handful of times through its ribs as she lowered it to the ground. Its lungs punctured, it could only glare balefully up at them until it finally expired.
It was dark in there, so Pigeon conjured another mote of light to follow them. She was down to 9 AP.
They were in a narrow corridor, with paths leading left, right, and straight ahead, with the last one sloping into a steep staircase.
Pigeon took them forward, and they began descending into the depths.