Chapter 28: The Behemoth

Chapter 28: The Behemoth

Jay rushed back inside the smithy, scrambling to get her gear on as Dys finished pulling her on her own. Jadis had no illusions about trying to hole up in the small stone building and hiding from the huge bone demon, she was in a fight or flight situation and flight was looking like an exceptionally good option.

“What the fuck even is that!?” Jay shouted as she squeezed her armor on. “It’s got to be bigger than a god damned whale!”

Dys tossed broken crates and furniture aside, throwing open a shuttered window to look at the approaching monstrosity.

“Shit, it’s coming this way,” she cursed, grabbing a hold of her maul. “And it brought friends.”

The bony behemoth continued its slow climb over the edge of the stone dam, stalking along with half of its legs in the water. The creature was almost crocodilian in shape, with legs splaying out to the sides the way a reptile’s would, only it had six legs instead of four. A long, snake-like tail whipped the air behind the long body, tipped with a spiky ball of crushed bones the size of a barrel. Its full size revealed, Jadis judged the body was as long as a bus, not counting the tail that nearly doubled its length, and had to be as tall as an elephant.

From what Jadis could see, it wasn’t made of giant bones, but was instead masses of normal sized bones clumped and stitched together into shapes that approximated what a creature would actually have, anatomically. Jadis could only imagine how many hundreds of dead bodies it would have taken to make such a creature.

Not that the details of how the demon was put together mattered at the moment to Jadis. What did matter was that the huge thing was slowly making its way towards her, along with about half a dozen smaller bone thieves.

The bone thieves were not actually small. They were normal sized, matching the general looks of many of the other skeleton-stealing demons Jadis had fought and killed over the past month. They only looked tiny next to their giant friend. Regardless of relative size, however, there were still six of them charging around the pond shore, heading on a direct path for her little stone house.

“I don’t think we can outrun those,” Jay said, finishing getting the last of her makeshift armor on.

“Maybe the big guy, but we’ve got to deal with small fry first,” Dys agreed, already rushing out the door.

Jadis hated to do it, but she was going to have to run. Fighting a creature that big was a stupid idea, a needless risk that would almost certainly get her killed. She’d lose all the supplies she’d gathered up, but it was better than losing her life. She’d take care of the faster moving bone thieves first, then make a break for it.

As Jay exited the smithy, the fastest of the charging demons reached the corner of the building where Dys waited for her. With a powerful horizontal swing, Dys slammed the four-legged, predatory looking bone thief to the side, crushing it between maul and wall. The blow wasn’t enough to kill outright, but the follow-up overhead swing from Jay as she emerged from the stone smithy squashed the demon’s core.

“That’s one,” Jadis growled from both her selves, turning to meet the oncoming pack of silent attackers.

The other five arrived shortly after, throwing themselves at Jay and Dys in a confusing barrage of thrashing skeletal limbs. A bone thief with a vaguely humanoid shape leapt on top of Jay, causing her to stumble back from the momentum, though with her greatly increased strength she was able to toss the monster off and into an eight-limbed abomination that was trying to get at Dys from behind while she swung at a lopsided bone thief that had charged her head on.

Realizing her error, Jadis backed off from the scramble, letting the demons push her back until she had both her selves with backs to the wall of the warehouse. She was already outnumbered; things would only get worse if she let the demons surround her and attack her from all sides.

As Jadis had hoped, it struck the bone behemoth, cracking against its shoulder before thumping to the ground, fortuitously landing on top of one of the several partially formed bone thieves, crushing it. As deadly as the heavy projectile had been to the unlucky smaller demon, it didn’t seem the anvil had done much more than put a few hairline cracks in the massive monster’s skeletal shell.

It did, however, get the demon spawner’s attention.

In a move familiar to Jadis, the behemoth whipped around with surprising speed for something of its size. Instinctively, Jadis dove to the ground, both her bodies dropping prone as a heavy weigh whizzed through the air over their heads. A tremendous crash echoed around them as the bone-spiked tail crashed into the wall of the smithy. Unlike the bear-shaped bone thief Jadis had encountered before, however, when the behemoth’s tail hit stone, it didn’t bounce off.

The huge morning star tail tip went right through the wall without stopping, knocking out a whole corner of the building.

“Shit.”

Jay and Dys both scrambled to their feet as they hastily backed away, Dys grabbing up her weapon, the two trying to keep out of range of the wrecking ball of a tail attack the behemoth had. She had succeeded in getting its attention, though now that she had it, Jadis was drawing a blank at what to do next.

As her two selves quickly rounded the corner of the warehouse, another deafening clatter of bone-on-bone vibrations filled the air. The awful din eclipsed all other sounds, even making it hard for Jadis to think as she put some distance between her and her enemy. Unable to hear anything else, Jadis failed to notice a bone thief charge at her from the side before it was too late to react.

The low to the ground demon tackled Dys from the side, slamming pointed antlers into her abdomen with its charge. Knocked to the ground with a scream of pain that couldn’t be heard over the thunderous clamor the behemoth was still emitting, Dys tried to toss the demon away from her, but one of its sharp antlers had pierced through her leather armor to her ribs.

Before the demon could do more damage, Jay struck it from behind, knocking off its rear end and cracking open the core. With a roar, she jammed her hand into the open shell and ripped the still squirming demon out, tossing it away to splatter on the ground in the mostly open hill of the slope that lead down to the village from the mining compound.

“Shit in a hand basket,” Dys hissed as she ripped the antlers from her body.

With a mental glance, Jadis saw that the attack had dropped her health from a full three hundred to two hundred and fifty-three.

“We need to keep moving,” Jay shouted, her ears ringing as she helped her twin self to her feet. It was an instant later that she realized she could hear herself talking, indicating the behemoth had stopped its sonic attack.

Acting on instinct as an ominous feeling loomed over her, Jay and Dys both dove to the side as the massive tail of the huge demon smashed into the wall near where they had been standing half a second before.

Crawling over the top of the warehouse roof, the behemoth looked down at the two with its countless skulls, its long tail having whipped over the top like a scorpion stinger. One of its huge hands reached towards the two, barely missing them as they desperately rolled away across the ground. With a casualness belying the enormous strength of the bone behemoth, it pulled its tail from the hole it had put in the wall and began clambering down the building, giving chase to the two as they got to their feet and ran for cover behind the wooden barracks on the far edge of the compound.

“We are going to fucking die!” Jay and Dys screamed as Jadis wracked her brain for some idea of how to slay a giant.