“What?”
She held out a palm and shot a gout of hellfire toward the ground in front of Kylie, who instinctively shrank back as the grass and bushes in front of her burst into flame.
“What the hell?” she cried, taking a few steps back.
“It’s okay, my fire won’t hurt you!” Ashtoreth said, her eyes still fixated on the approached demons. “Drink it for [Mana]—just try, it’ll work.”
Kylie face was a scowl bathed in the violet light of Ashtoreth’s fire, but she reached out a hand and began to absorb the flames a moment later. “Oh,” she said.
Meanwhile, Hunter had disappeared, likely to cloak himself and hide in the branches of a nearby tree. Frost had moved forward, gun at the ready, to put himself between Kylie and the noises coming from the forest.
Ashtoreth grumbled and looked up at the skygorger demons. They were aerial spellcasters, among other things: they’d be more than capable of engaging from a distance. Within only a few moments they’d flown close enough to worry her, and so she stopped supplying Kylie and ran forward to hopefully draw their fire.
As she moved, she wondered how best to approach the situation.
Conjuring her cannon would mean dismissing her sword, rendering her immobile. It almost meant waiting to conjure a round to fire, and there was no guarantee she’d even be able to hit a moving, aerial target.
It was unfortunate, but with only one advancement spent on the cannon, it wasn’t an effective weapon in circumstances like these.
Her other options felt only marginally better, though. The demons were either waiting for their ground forces to engage, or waiting to bait Ashtoreth into attacking them with her semi-flight. For all she knew, the trees below them could be filled with devils ready to unleash a barrage of arrows, bullets, or spells as soon as she flew over them.
And yet waiting for the enemy forces to position themselves and converge on her allies all at once was surely folly. If she wanted to protect the humans, she had no choice.
A moment after she split away from Frost, the skygorgers hastened her decision . The tips of their pikes began to glow with a green light that quickly brightened, then flared and shot toward her as a pair of sizzling missiles.
She planted her sword, then launched herself high into the air, angling herself to fly over one of the skygorgers. A moment later the missiles impacted the ground where she’d been, simultaneously bursting and combining into a sickly green cloud of hellfire that scorched her back as she sped away from it.
As she sped through the air over the trees, she saw that she’d been right about the ambush. Two-dozen devils that were positioned amidst the trees launched a volley of arrows at her as she came into view, their tips infused with glowing red magical energy.
Ashtoreth was painfully aware of the fact that she couldn’t actually fly yet, and she’d deliberately aimed for a spot that was high above the nearest demon to give herself altitude that she could shed to maneuver before intercepting it.
She guessed that they’d anticipated she would fly lower, on a trajectory that aimed directly at one of the skygorgers. As it was, she had time to see them and adjust her course to avoid most of the arrows by yanking on her sword and shedding some velocity—just enough to alter her course and send her angling straight for the skygorger.
An arrow took her through one wing, and another struck her in the thigh. Both of them sent jolts of paralytic magic through her body, but her defenses were too high for the arrows to truly immobilize her. Two more might have knocked her out of the sky, but as it was they were just painful, nothing more: her muscles spasmed for a moment, and that was all.
She angled toward the skygorger, conscious that it had two choices: it could try and strike at her with its pike, dooming itself if it missed, or it could dodge.
The skygorger folded its wings back and fell toward the ground, dipping below her trajectory so that she sailed clear over it….
Ashtoreth launched a hellfire bolt at the demon to distract it, then reached out and pulled herself toward her sword, at the same time flaring her wings to stop herself midair. Her momentum began to reverse, and she spun in the air, angling her wings downward to dive toward the demon below her.
It turned midair, but couldn’t swing its pike around to face her fast enough. She collided with its torso, wrapping her arms around it to keep herself fixed to the creature as they both careened sideways in the air.
The creature bit down on her shoulder with a powerful set of jaws. She hissed, but dug her claws into the roots of its wings, piercing the muscles that she knew were necessary for flight.
It screeched in pain, the sound muffled by the fact that her flesh filled its mouth. Then it dropped its pike and struck at her face with two clawed hands—and Ashtoreth dipped her head so that they struck her horns instead, then pulled her claws out of its shoulders and brought them up to rake them across its face.
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It screeched, and she relaxed her legs where they clung to the demon around its abdomen, pulling on her sword so that she fell back away from it through the air.
She spun to face the ground as she fell, then felt a layer of leaves and branches breaking against her body as she hit the canopy of the forest a moment later. She made a hard landing against the ground, rolling and then stumbling to her feet. She saw an incoming flash, leapt back, and felt a sharp pain in her side as the point of a spear grazed her body.
She’d landed in the midst of the archers. They were taking up close-quarters weapons, spears and curved blades, and cautiously fanning out to surround her.
Ashtoreth sent plumes of hellfire out around her in all directions, then dropped to all fours and bounded through her wall of distracting flames to tackle one of the blade-wielding devils as he moved into position.
She brought him to the ground, pulled herself up onto his chest, then caught one of his hands as he drew a knife at his waist.
With her other clawed hand, she drove two fingers into each of his eye sockets, curled them to grip under the inside of his skull, then planted a foot on his chest and heaved, tearing away the part of his skull between his eyes and mouth.
She rose in a spray of gore, and at the same time she drove the barb of her tail through the hole she’d made in his face. Then she ignited his corpse with her [Hellfire Consumption] as the rest of the devils converged on her, flames spreading across the ground around her in a pool.
The oncoming devils plunged two spears into her chest, but it didn’t matter: with her high [Defense], even the needle-sharp points of the diabolic weapons only buried themselves one or two inches into her flesh.
She grabbed the spears, pushing each of them away from her and out of her body, then leapt up and yanked herself along the length of one of them to drive both her feet into its wielder’s face and affect him with her [Energy Drain].
The force of her kick knocked the devil onto the ground and threw her backward, where she hit the forest floor and rolled to her feet, still facing the devils.
She began to conjure her greatsword….
They were disciplined, coming at her despite the pain they must have felt from the hellfire that burned all around them. They fought as any squad of devils should: some of them kept her on the defensive, pressing her with blades and spear-thrusts, while other fanned out around the violet pool of hellfire, drawing their bows.
Worse, she saw the remaining skygorger demon descend into view, the point of its spear flaring as it prepared another spell.
She conjured a burst of hellfire to hide behind as it brandished its weapon to throw the missile, then dodged by leaping in the direction it would least expect: forward, toward the devils.
One of them impaled her through the abdomen with its spear, and she pulled herself along the haft of the weapon, grabbing its wielder’s hand and affecting them with her [Energy Drain]. With the spearhead jutting out of her back, she flexed her abdominal muscles, then grabbed the haft of the spear with both hands and snapped it in half, hissing in pain.
An arrow struck her in the shoulder, and a brief flash of their paralysis spell rippled through her body….
One of the devil’s allies took advantage of the momentary distraction to thrust at her with their spear, but the paralysis from one arrow was too ineffective. Ashtoreth dropped to the ground to avoid the attack, winding her tail around the wrist of her first attacker at the same time.
As she fell, she reached for the haft of the broken spear that was thrust through her body with one hand and for the ground with the other….
In one smooth motion, she pushed herself off the ground, yanked her attacker off balance with her tail, spun once as she came to her feet, and tore the broken spearhead out of her back with a reversed grip to bring it around and drive into the devil’s eye as it widened in an expression of shock.
Her enemy burst into hellfire a moment later, his other eye flashing and gushing out of his skull as a tongue of violet flame before his skin and bones followed a moment later. His ally’s spearpoint drove its way into her side, and another arrow struck her abdomen, but these things mattered little to Ashtoreth.
What mattered was that she’d finished conjuring her sword.
She drew hellfire into the weapon and struck with a [Mighty Blow], cleaving her other attacker in half and bursting their corpse into even more flames that she drew into herself as she finished healing her wounds.
She rushed toward the rest of the devils, intent on seizing the initiative now that she was surrounded by hellfire and had her favorite weapon in her hand.
But before she could lay into them, another figure burst forward out of the bushes with a shriek of rage.
It was the other skygorger demon, the one that she’d torn out of the sky. She’d expected it to heal its wings, then take flight again. It was a process that would have taken thirty or more seconds for the skygorger, which lacked her vampiric regeneration.
Instead it had likely seen where she’d fallen and decided to attack her on foot, knowing that they needed to overwhelm her quickly or be overwhelmed themselves. Its clawed hands flashed green, and a bolt of magic power sped toward Ashtoreth.
She dropped her sword and pushed herself away from it, needing the counterforce to dodge a projectile that had been hurled from such a short range.
She hit the ground, rolled to her feet….
And then a second bolt of acid-green power, one hurled by the other skygorger demon, struck her in the shoulder.
Its magic flashed and spread through her body, and she suddenly felt as if she were encased in a block of solid steel, completely immobilized. She pushed against the force of the spell, straining herself to her limit but failing to move even an inch.
Fortunately of the devils were now behind a wall of burning hellfire, and couldn’t take advantage of her frozen state.
But the skygorger with the bloodied wings was a different matter. The demon bore down on her, its wings still hanging limply behind it, mere moments away from tearing her apart.
Ashtoreth strained….
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