Rebirth of the Nephilim

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.

For the next few strenuous seconds, all Jadis could do was toss the demons off and away from her as they repeatedly tried to leap on top of her. Some would go low, trying to take her out at the knees while others would charge straight in, relying on momentum and bulk to try and knock her down, but she was able to knock them back and away, shoving with her mauls or kicking with her bare feet if she had to. Eventually, opportunity presented itself and Jadis pounced on it.

Hurling two bone thieves off of her selves, a third moved in between Jay and Dys, bony claws reaching for Dys’ leg. Striking in unison, Jadis had both her bodies swing their mauls like golf clubs, straight at each other with the demon in the middle.

The resulting explosion of mushed bone thief splattered bone shards and purple flesh-goo all over Jay and Dys, but it brought the demon count down to four.

From that point, Jadis went on the offensive, putting space between her bodies so there was enough room to swing at full extension. Each of her blows shattered bone, sending limbs flying as she put all her strength into finishing off the four remaining demons as quickly as possible. She hadn’t forgotten about the true threat looming in the background. She couldn’t see it from where she stood, but the sound of its clacking bones was growing closer and closer.

With a decisive downward blow, Dys finished off a third demon, breaking open its shell in a messy splatter. With synchronized timing, she blindly swung her maul up and around, spinning towards where Jay had shoved the lopsided demon into the path of her attack. With a huge crash, the demon was sent careening into the warehouse wall where it struggled to right itself for only a moment before Jay put her hammer to it. As the number of assailants dwindled, Jadis had an easier and easier time of dispatching what was left. Working in perfect unison, the powerful blows that Jay and Dys could rain down on the demons made short work of them, especially whenever she could coordinate a Mirrored Strikes attack against a target.

 As the last of the demonic vanguard was slain, a dark blue pulse of light flashed from the other side of the smithy building. Jadis couldn’t help herself. Ducking to one side, Jay stuck her head around the corner to see what the huge bone thief was doing.

In one of the bone behemoth’s hands was a pile of skeletal remains, dripping with water. Another pulse of light emanated from the space around the demon’s head as arcane symbols appeared in mid-air, outlining some kind of deformed star. As the symbols faded, an opening formed in the solid mass of bones that made up the abdomen of creature and a small blot of darkness dropped out, a faintly glowing orange eye resting in the center.

Jadis watched as the behemoth tossed the bones onto the ground before the naked demon, a new shell quickly forming around its fleshy tentacled body and eye. In mere moments a newly born bone thief was rising from the ground, three legs lifting it up as it turned towards where Jay watched from the building corner a few dozen yards away. A sharp clatter of bone on bone was its roar of challenge as it immediately started rushing her towards her.

“It’s fucking breeding!?” Jay and Dys shouted, dismayed to see more demons being created.

Even as the new foe was charging towards her, the huge mother demon was raking its front limbs through the ponds waters, dragging out more and more of the bones Jadis had tossed in there as it created more demons to wear the skeletons like suits.

“Okay, you know what? No, that’s a big fat fucking no!” Jay screamed as she met the oncoming bone thief with a swing of her maul, crushing it to death less than a minute after it was born.

“We cannot let that thing keep sending its spawn to chase us!” Dys continued, running back into the smithy. “It’s going to fucking flood us!”

Grabbing hold of her target under one arm, Dys ran back outside as Jay swatted another newly made bone demon aside with her maul. Two more bony abominations were already being formed at the feet of the behemoth as the mother monster used both hands and magic to collect more and more bones from the water. With weeks’ worth of bone-thief hunting to fill the pond with skeletons, the supply it had to work with was plentiful, to say the least.

Tossing her maul to the side, Dys grabbed hold of her package in both hands. Like she was in the hammer throw event in the Olympics, Dys swung around one of the dwarven anvils. She’d never been in much for track and field, nor had she ever tried a swing around and toss before, but with the size of her target, Jadis had confidence she’d hit something.

With a fierce shout of effort, Dys finished her spin and loosed the several hundred pound missile, sending the mass of hard iron flying through the air.

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.