The first death came on the second day.

Jadis had not gone into the endeavor of attacking Kastoria with the impression that all who were allied with her would come out the other side alive and unharmed. War was war, and she had no illusions that blood would not be spilled. Still, after the first day’s march ending with barely any injuries beyond the unrelenting effects of the miasma polluting the air, a hope had grown within her that maybe, just maybe, they would make it all the way to the fallen city without losing anyone.

Aila’s greater ritual had kept the Demons who had stalked the night at bay, killing most who wandered near long before they came to the camp lines. A few had to be slain by arrows or spells, but considering that Demons did not sleep and were just as happy to attack during the night as the day, those small numbers felt like a gift, rather than a burden. In the morning, once the camp was packed and the ritual dispelled, the march began again with soldiers and heroes alike in high spirits.

It was a few hours later, perhaps an hour before the sun had reached its zenith, that Jadis received the news. The attacks had been light that morning, none of them rising above a low threat level, with most Demons coming on in tiny groups, or even solo. Perhaps that lack of activity had led to guards being dropped, but Jadis couldn’t say that anyone had done anything wrong from what she had been told. Bad luck could be blamed, though there was little point in doing so. Jadis doubted D would care either way.

A group of Nox archers, kinsmen of Kerr though none of any relation closer than distant cousin, had been responding to one of the low threat attacks along the southern side of the last third of the marching line. It was only five or six mire hounds, which was nothing that needed a Noll or a Severina to respond to. The four had ran out and shot the hounds down, killing them long before they could reach the marching soldiers. However, when the therions had gone to retrieve their arrows from the corpses, an essence leech had sprang from one of the dead mire hounds and wrapped itself around one of the men. With its lamprey-like mouth, it had latched onto the archer’s chest, attacking his health pool directly with its malign ability. The other archers had immediately tried to kill the leech with their swords and daggers, but their efforts had not been enough. Before they could slice the essence leech away, the mercenary’s health had been drained completely.

No blame was placed on the three who had lived. As Noll had explained to Jadis later, when they had a quiet moment, essence leeches did not just steal health, but a portion of the attributes of their victims, at least for as long as they were latched on to their target. That was why Jadis had had such trouble dealing with the leeches who had got their boneless jaws onto her; with her incredibly high stats, she was giving the Demons a huge boost in power. In any case, with how the essence leeches worked, unless one of the three had been a much higher CLR than the victim, or had a skill specifically suited to the task, they would not have had much of a chance of killing the Demon before it killed their kinsman.

His name had been Vaclav. Kerr had not known him, but he had been a friend of her brother, Timur, and he had married one of her many cousins sometime after she had departed the clan. There was no funeral. There wasn’t time or a place. But his body had been brought along in one of the wagons until they reached the second night’s campsite and his clan had given him what honor they could as they gathered around the burning pyre. Before giving him to the fire, they had taken his horn adornments and quietly packed them away in a small cloth, to be given to his wife one day. The smoke and ashes that disappeared into the dark night sky served as a somber reminder of what they could all expect to face as they drew ever closer to Kastoria.

Over the course of the next two days there were several more casualties. None were anyone that Jadis knew personally, but she did her best to honor the dead each night. She had many different duties pulling for her attention at any given moment, and even with three bodies she wasn’t always able to attend to every person or event that called for her. Still, she made the time to be present for the burning of the bodies, as she felt it was the only right thing to do. Some of her lovers and friends would join her, but they were all busy themselves and thus their presence could not be guaranteed. The only other person who stood silently at the side of the pyre with her for every single soldier was Wilhelm.

By the end of the fourth day of the march, Jadis had seen fourteen men and women taken by the flames. And just as surely as she hated to see each and every one of those pyres burn, she was certain that there should have been more.

“They have to be planning something.”

“Demons don’t plan,” Halvor said dismissively, his eyes focused on the edge of the large dagger he was sharpening. “No more than a wolf plans how to get at the neck of its prey.”

“Do they not…?” Alex asked, no sign of offense or contempt in her tone.

Halvor looked up into the neon-blue eyes of the Demon and grimaced. Motioning with his whetstone, he fumbled for a word before letting out a sigh.

“Alright, Demons can plan. But most of them are too vicious to think of anything more than a simple ambush.”

“While I am inclined towards putting my foot up your ass for your incredibly poor wording,” Dys scowled at the barbarian, “I get what you’re trying to say. Demons don’t usually do anything complex. They just attack head on or maybe throw an ambush if it’s convenient.”

“Unless they have someone clever leading them,” Aila pointed out. “Then you get things like the winter assault on Eldingholt.”

“That is true,” Ludger agreed as he spooned some of the savory gruel that had been prepared for the evening meal into his mouth. “They can wait patiently for orders, still as stone. So long as they have someone giving them direction.”

“Which they most definitely do,” Jay murmured as she stared into the fire.

Jadis had no doubt that Demon Prince Desire was controlling the Demons in Volto. The vile and murderous bitch had shown a greater sense of purpose than most of her mindlessly violent allies and a willingness to experiment and learn. She had to have been behind the impenetrable shells, sending one out as a test and then improved versions as both a test and a vehicle for a successful infiltration. No more shells had been thrown at Volto’s forces since, but Jadis did not think that was because Desire had run out of materials to build them, or ideas to improve the design.

“No scout has reported any sign of Demons massing in great numbers ahead of us,” Aila sighed, her big brain visibly working on the problem. “But if the Demons are underground in myrmidon-built tunnels, there would be no sign on the surface. Or if there were signs, I don’t know how they could be told from the rest of the destroyed landscape.”

“Should I… Try talking… To the loyal… Again…?”

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“I don’t think so,” Jay shook her head at Alex’s question, smiling at her tentacled lover. “Maybe if we catch one of the bigger Demons.”

Unlike the people of every other Demon invasion in history, Jadis and her allies had the advantage of being able to interrogate the enemy. Unfortunately, that advantage wasn’t proving to be particularly useful. The mire hounds and scythe wights that they took alive throughout the day would not say much to Alex. What little they would say were accusations of betrayal on Alex’s part, and declarations of their own loyalty towards Samleos. Threats of death didn’t work on Demons; to them death was just returning to the halls of their father. Threats of pain did not fare much better, and frankly, Jadis found that she didn’t have the stomach for torture. She had done so in the past, blinded by her anger and exhaustion, but it was a lot harder to purposefully put a tentacle to the coals with a clear mind.

“I will not spare the sniper for questioning,” Halvor stated flatly as he put his sharpened dagger in its sheath. “When I catch it, I will kill it.”

“No argument from me,” Dys agreed with the man’s grim statement.

The skull blob Demon had continued to snipe at their lines at random times and from unexpected directions. She never stayed in one place for more than a second shot, firing at targets of opportunity before disappearing down whatever tunnel she had poked her distorted mass out of. The confusing thing was how random her targets were. Sometimes, a black and gold bolt of malignant energy would be fired at one of the roving bands of elites, like Ludger or Bridget. Other times, the shot would be aimed at the mages at the front of the line. Still other times, the shot would be made against a random grouping of soldiers, which was how five men had died just that morning. There was no sense to those attacks against the common soldiers, no rhyme or reason. Jadis could understand why the Demon was attacking anything that looked strong, but taking shots against random foot soldiers? What was the point?

If Jadis could catch and kill the skull blob, she knew that the safety of the march would be in a much better place, but realistically, it was just one enemy among many. There were much bigger considerations to focus on, not the least of which being what she would do on the next day.

Tomorrow the Roc would be returning from its trip to Eldingholt. Nevan and Orla had acted as the airship’s pilots, while Tacitus and several more Seraphim had been its guards. They would be bringing a load of supplies on the ship, food for the troops and alchemical reagents for Amarantha and others in the army’s elite who needed them. As soon as everything was unloaded and a new crew switched out, the Roc would be heading back to Eldingholt again for more supplies. The question was, would Jadis go with them?

Of course, Jadis couldn’t be gone from the march for five days. She was too important to the defense of the troops to leave for that long. But she had reached a point in her progression where she could fly at supersonic speeds. It was entirely possible that she could fly from Volto to the heart of the empire within a few hours and be back again before nightfall. However, that was only possible if she took Alex with her, since she didn’t have enough magic reserves to recast her wings constantly. With a fifteen-minute time limit on each instance of Succubus wings and fifteen hundred magic points in her reserves, plus a Will attribute of one hundred and four giving her that much magic back every hour, Jadis could fly outright on her own for two hours straight, casting the two-hundred-point spell eight times, so long as she did not use her magic on anything else. Jadis was certain that at the speeds she was now capable of flying, she could cover a massive distance in two hours. But was that enough to reach Eldingholt?

Jay frowned in thought as she looked at Alex. With her lover’s help, it wouldn’t be a problem. But pulling Alex away from Tiernan and the other mages, even for just a few hours, would drastically slow the ability to create the safe roads that the soldiers needed to cross the desolate expanse of Demon-ruined territory. Then again, with Ammy around, the Mystic might be capable of keeping the Arch Mage and his willing minions’ reserves filled; the boost Jadis had given to her with Lewd Lover’s Bond had definitely increased the potency of the catgirl’s potions. If she had the ingredients for those high-tier magic replenishing potions. Which, from what Ammy had been telling her, was not the case. She had been expending mass amounts of potion components just to combat the effects of the toxic miasma and keep the mages and soldiers energized. She wouldn’t be able to keep Tiernan and the others going for a day with the diminished stock she had left.

But those stocks could be refilled, depending on how much of Ammy’s shopping list would be arriving within the cargo hold of the Roc. Even then, should there be enough supplies to keep Ammy happy and Tiernan casting, would it be wise for Alex to leave the march? Would it be wise for Jadis to go at all?

How much risk was worth seeing her daughter for a few hours?

“I want to do a flyby over Kastoria,” Jay said abruptly, breaking into the quiet conversation Ludger and Aila had been having about her greater ritual. “Tomorrow, early in the morning.”

“You don’t trust the reports the scouts have been giving us?” Aila said after a moment, her blue eyes assessing Jay.

“It’s not that I don’t trust them,” Jay explained. “I just feel like I’ll have a better understanding of the situation if I see it with my own eyes. Depending on how it looks could make a difference in whether or not I make a day trip to Eldingholt.”

Her statement was met with silence, though not rebuke. The idea of Jadis traveling back and forth from Eldingholt was not new; such trips had been worked into the plan from the beginning. It was just that, now that they were all in the field, faced with the realities of what was needed, Jadis had no doubt that the prospect felt different for them all.

“Do you want to take anyone with you?” Aila asked. “To Kastoria, I mean.”

“I will go…” Alex stated firmly. “So that… You will… Have all… Your power…”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Jay shook her head. “I’m not going there to fight. I just want to get a look from above. I’ll speed in, hover above for a few minutes, then I’m gone. The Demons don’t have anyone or anything that can catch me if I’m flying.” 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

“Also, if I do get in a fight of some reason,” Dys added, “having a passenger just makes it harder. I’m better off on my own in those situations.”

“It would be safer if you had someone with you,” Aila insisted. “Severina, at least. She can keep up.”

“Not when I’m going at my full speed,” Dys stated calmly. “I suppose I could carry her, and she can fly on her own if we get into a fight.”

“Good,” Aila nodded, the issue settled in her mind. “You will take Sev with you. If something happens, you’ll be safer together.”

“It would be convenient if you could send just one of your bodies to the city and spy on the Demons from above,” Ludger said idly as he finished off his third bowl. “Then you could tell us what the miststücke are doing over there all the time. The perfect scout! A shame you cannot go that far.”

“Yeah, that would be nice,” Jay smiled at the blond man. “Maybe someday I’ll get a skill to let me do something like that.”

“Or maybe today I’ll give you one!”

Jay turned her head at the announcement, one eyebrow raised in confused curiosity. Sabina stood a few feet behind her, a happy grin on her face. The mad smith was covered in some kind of sooty substance that had a slight green tint to it, and one of her large leather work gloves had been charred to a crisp. Behind her, just out of sight behind the tents that had been set up in their section of the camp, Jadis could see an ominous green-blue glow coming from the little workspace Sabina had set up on the ground for smithing purposes, so as not to start any fires inside of the Leviathan.

“Well, not a skill,” Sabina continued while holding up something that looked an overly large bracelet in her hand. “I can’t give you skills. The gods and the system can, and I guess you can influence what you get for yourself with your own choices, but I don’t think anyone can just give you a skill. But I can give you this, which is almost as good! Or maybe better! Or possibly the same, depending on what skill you might have gotten, I guess, but either way it’s still a great replacement for a skill because making it gave me a level! So, it has to be good!”

“What is it?” Jay blinked as she tried to process Sabina’s rapid-fire speech which had, once again, gone beyond her ability to easily keep up.

Sabina excitedly held the bracelet-like object close to Jay’s face, her whole body practically vibrating with excitement.

“It’s a tell-me-phone!”