Rebirth of the Nephilim - Chapter 27

As Jadis watched her cum drip off of Jay’s chin, Dys’ cock still twitching, she wondered if she might have gotten into a bit of a rut.

For the past three weeks, Jadis had been following a fairly regular routine. Starting in the morning, after a breakfast of soggy hardtack and honey, she’d comb the abandoned dwarf village and the surrounding forest for bone thieves. She mostly found them roaming solo, but occasionally came across small groups of two or three. Regardless of numbers, she’d slaughter the demons, tossing their bones into the lake and their actual fleshy tentacle-eye bodies into piles around the area. Her hunt would last until late afternoon, at which point she’d visit D’s temple and thoroughly desecrate the holy ground by milking her two selves dry using every perverted sexual technique she could think of that didn’t involve penetration.

The temple was definitely starting to smell a bit musky.

After an hour or so of carnal pleasure, Jadis would finish the day by attempting to fish. She couldn’t say she was actually fishing, since she never caught a single damn gill-faced bastard, but she still tried. Any variation to her diet was a welcome one to Jadis’ thinking at that point. Even warming up the hardtack and honey mixture over a fire she’d managed to build in the smithy’s forge hadn’t improved the mush by much.

At the moment, Jadis was at the tail end of her almost ritualistic habit of pseudo-fucking herself in front of D’s statue. She wasn’t truly certain why pleasuring herself in D’s temple had become such an integral part of her daily life, but at the least she didn’t have to worry about making a mess in the room she ate and slept in. If she were being honest with herself, she knew the reason had nothing to do with practical concerns like cleanup. Maybe she really did just like the idea of putting on a show for someone?

“I’m such a freak,” both Jay and Dys said in unison, Dys punctuating the statement by licking a bit of the cum off of Jay’s face.

The two leaned back, seated on the steps of the temple dais, legs stretched out before them and hands supporting them from behind. They were both naked and covered in fluids, the culmination of both their daily hunt and daily pleasures leaving them slick with sweat and other things.

“Maybe it’s time we moved on?” Jay pondered aloud, leaning her shoulder into Dys. “I can’t say that I’m getting bored, exactly, but I feel like we might be stagnating.”

Dys leaned into Jay, reciprocating the gesture. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t think I can get bored of your, er, our bodies. But the bone thieves aren’t putting up much of a challenge anymore.”

“Definitely getting diminishing returns on experience,” Jay added, nodding along. “I think we might have out-leveled this place.”

Jadis had, from the start, set out with the intent to wring every last drop of experience she could from the bone thieves before moving on. Looking at her status menu, she felt she’d probably accomplished her goal.

Jadis mentally whistled in appreciation of her stats. The amount they’d gone up over the past few weeks of power leveling had been dramatic thanks to the skills she’d unlocked at levels thirteen and seventeen.

At level thirteen, Jadis had been offered two different passive skills by Oros’ system. Both had been similar, their differences only in the specific attributes they affected.

Choosing which of the skills to take had presented a minor dilemma to Jadis. She wanted both, since increasing even one attribute by five points seemed amazing, much less two of them at the same time. However, she didn’t know which to go with since they both represented interesting opportunities.

On the one hand, Knight’s Tenacity would increase both Fortitude and Resilience, two attributes she knew nothing about. Such a drastic jump would no doubt give her strong insights into what the two attributes did, though. Her only other way of figuring it out being putting her evened-number-level free attribute points into the stat one at a time and gauging the difference that way. Taking Knight’s Tenacity would let her skip all that.

On the other hand, Jadis knew exactly what Vitality did and increasing her health pool up to a solid three hundred practically made her salivate. Plus, as a bonus, Knight’s Resolve would also boost her Endurance up, which would let her know what that stat did. She already had her suspicions based off the single point she’d already put into that attribute, but Knight’s Resolve would be a nice fast forward button for her intentions.

She’d ended up stressing over the decision all night before getting frustrated with her own indecisiveness and impulsively picking Knight’s Resolve.

With the stat boost, she was able to confirm that Endurance did what she thought, directly increasing her stamina. An interesting realization, one that had her reconsidering Crushing Blow. Stamina was still an invisible stat to her, though, so Jadis left that skill firmly on the backburner.

As it turned out, Jadis needn’t have fretted over her thirteenth level skill choice. At level fifteen, Jadis was offered two more spells.

While interesting, neither spell tempted Jadis. She didn’t have the magic to cast either, and in all honesty powering up her attributes just looked far more appealing to her. She ended up selecting Knight’s Tenacity, increasing the two mystery attributes of fortitude and resilience.

There was no immediate change as far as Jadis could tell after she brought both stats up. The lack of results had been more than a little disappointing for Jadis. In fact, she still wasn’t sure what resilience did. Fortitude, though, she figured out.

During one of Jadis’ fights with a particularly large bone thief reminiscent of the bear-like one she’d had so much trouble with previously, except this one had three heads, no tail, and extra long front legs, she had messed up. Slipping on a muddy patch, Dys had gone down hard on her side, leaving her wide open to a powerful strike from the demon that had sent her flying across the ground.

The attack had hurt and, if Jadis hadn’t had two bodies, she was fairly certain she wouldn’t have been able to get back up in time to avoid getting pounced on by the bulky bone beast. Still, Jay had been able to pop one of the demon’s skulls, acting as a good distraction while Dys got back up.

The fight had ended with another dead demon (with another oddly red eye inside), and with Jadis having taken less damage than what she thought she would have considering the blow she had been hit with. After some hesitant experimentation involving knives that Jadis was pretty sure would have had any therapist worrying about her mental health, Jadis had reached the conclusion that fortitude increased her natural resistance to damage. Nothing to do with armor, she was fairly certain, just her inborn ability to resist harm.

Once again, Jadis marveled at the frankly ludicrous videogame logic Oros seemed to operate on. How exactly was her skin somehow less susceptible to cuts because a number on an imaginary panel in her head went up? Yet, somehow, despite the apparent increase in toughness, her skin still felt exactly as soft and smooth as when she first arrived on the world.

Magic was weird.

The big change had come at level seventeen, which took nearly two weeks to get to after level fifteen. Per her expectations, she’d been offered two more skills. The first one had caused a few raised eyebrows.

A randomized boost to one of her attributes? Jadis had frankly been baffled. The skill was the most videogame-like of all the skills she’d been offered so far. Not that the skill sounded useless, or anything. Far from it. A fifteen-point increase to any one of her skills was massive. Plus, since it changed every half day, she could potentially use the skill to find out what all the mystery attributes she had affected. Not a bad skill at all in Jadis’ opinion.

Still, the skill was unstable. There was no guarantee that it’d boost an attribute that’d be helpful to her, after all. She didn’t know what the arcane and divine attributes did, but considering both were at zero and she’d been getting along just fine without them, she didn’t think boosting either of them up to fifteen for twelve hours would be horribly helpful.

Or maybe it would be? Maybe having a divine attribute would give her some kind of holy power that let her smite demons faster?

Well, whatever pros and cons Kaleidoscopic Boost offered, all consideration for the skill had gone out the window when Jadis had read the description of the second skill she’d been offered at her level up.

Jadis wasn’t a mathematician. She had, however, been accepted to university and into medical school and was thusly fairly confident in her ability to do basic arithmetic, including multiplication.

“A fucking fifty percent increase!?” Jay and Dys had both shouted at the time, utterly flabbergasted by the massive potential enhancement to one of her attributes being offered. 

After the surprise wore off, Jadis had taken the skill without hesitation. Nor did she hesitate overlong about which attribute she would boost. The was really only one stat that mattered when it came to how much damage she could dish out in a fight. Putting the bonus where it would do her the most good, Jadis selected her strength attribute when prompted by the skill, then watched with glee as her strength score jumped from thirty-six to fifty-four.

Jadis hadn’t been using her free attribute points she’d gotten at levels fourteen and sixteen. With the Knight’s Tenacity and Knight’s Resolve skills, she’d seen three of her mystery attributes get boosted significantly, giving her solid information on at least two of them. Instead of putting the points directly into an attribute, she’d decided to hold off on bumping any of her other stats up, banking on the idea another skill might come along that’d let her increase her other attributes. She’d save the free points she got at even levels until she saw a good reason to use them.

Mirror Knight’s Might felt like a good reason to use them.

Testing the numbers and how the skill affected them, Jadis spent a free point on her strength and saw it go from fifty-four to fifty-five. At first, she thought the skill had been a one time wonder, multiplying her total strength score at time of skill acquisition and nothing more. But when she put her second free attribute point into strength to be sure, the number jumped up to fifty-seven.

Thirty-eight times one-point-five was fifty-seven. The multiplicative skill worked off of what her strength score would be before it multiplied the numbers. The system just seemed to round down with fractions, or so Jadis guessed.

Thrilled with her new skill, Jadis had been eager to test out her newfound strength. Her strength score had nearly doubled compared to what it had been when she’d first arrived on Oros, and it showed.

The temple pews that Jadis had been tossing around before were now about as heavy as paperweights to Jadis. She found that rocks that she was certain had to weigh hundreds of pounds could not only be moved but lifted over her head and tossed around like sacks of potatoes.

A single strike from one of her makeshift mauls was able to blow right through the average bone thief now, no Mirrored Strikes needed. The few times where she did get a double attack off on a hapless demon, her target had been literally mulched.

“Yeah, I’m liking this whole strong as shit thing,” Dys said with a smile. For emphasis, she reached a hand under Jay and cupped her ass, then lifted. With minimal effort, she had Jay balanced on one arm.

Grinning down at her mirror, Jay laughed and said, “We have got to be at superhero levels by this point.”

“Eh, maybe a B-tier superhero,” Dys shook her head, setting Jay back down on the stone stairs. “We’ve got to be stronger than anybody back on earth is, easy, but I don’t think we can stop speeding buses from running over distracted kids or anything like that.”

“Yeah, well, we can stomp on demons like the chumps they are now, though.”

“Which does bring us back to the point, doesn’t it?” Dys sighed, standing up and stretching her arms overhead. “I don’t think we should hang around this old dump for much longer.”

“Agreed,” Jay nodded, getting up to stretch as well. “It took, what, nine days to go from level sixteen to seventeen? That’s a huge drop compared to how fast we were leveling a month ago. We need to find some new demons to fight, some that’ll give us more of a challenge.”

Hooking her thumb over her shoulder, Dys motioned to the statue behind them. “I doubt D was interested in watching us bash empty skulls for this long, anyway. Even if we are spicing it up with a little hanky-panky.”

“Mmm,” Jay hummed, “True. Guess we should start figuring out how we’re going to transport our stuff?”

Dys nodded. “Sounds good.”

Both gathered up their scattered armor and weapons, then headed out of the temple, passing by the pile of dead and decaying demon squid bodies that was now as tall as they were. Jadis had lost count as to how many bone thieves she’d killed since arriving on Oros, but for the past few weeks she’d been killing more than a dozen every day, the numbers only rising with time.

“I still wanna know why some of them have different eye colors,” Jay said, passing the stinking corpse pile with a grimace. She hadn’t bothered putting on her armor and was just carrying it bundled up in her arms, same as Dys. There was no sense in putting it on when she planned on taking a dip in the pond to wash up as soon as they got back to their house.

“Another mystery for another day,” Dys shrugged. “Maybe we can figure out some way to test a few demons, later.”

Jadis shook both of her heads at the thought as she returned to the mining camp. It was not all that long ago that she’d been terrified of the bony monstrosity that had snuck up on her that first day on Oros. Now she was dismissing them as trivial, no real threat at all.

Leveling up and growing stronger truly was amazing. Jadis couldn’t wait to see just how powerful she could become.

Thoughts of her future and where she would travel to now that she was finished with the abandoned village danced through Jadis’ heads for the rest of the evening and night, only occasionally interrupted by the sound of a few bone clicks echoing in the forest outside. Jadis paid those clattering bones little mind, though. The demons could wait until morning, when she’d crush them just as she’d done to all the others that she had come across.

It wasn’t until shortly after dawn, as Jadis was stoking the fire in the forge to start on breakfast that she realized something was terribly wrong.

From somewhere outside of the stone workshop, a cacophony of clacking noise resounded, like dozens of drummers have taken wooden blocks and started smacking them together in a discordant symphony of dissonant sounds.

Wincing, Jay ran to the door and threw it open, trying to see where the terrible noise had come from. Dys, meanwhile, quickly started throwing on her armor, as Jadis couldn’t imagine the noise was coming from anything friendly or harmless. From the door that faced the cliff and cave mouth, Jadis saw nothing. Stepping outside and taking a look around the corner, Jadis froze in shock as she spotted what was making the noise.

From the other side of the stone dam that contained the pond, crawled a massive monstrosity of bones. Only its head and shoulders stuck up over the dam, but what she could see was enough to dwarf her. Dozens upon dozens of skulls, all of them humanoid, were clustered together into a giant bouquet of macabre spectacle. As Jay stood staring at the creature, the skulls seemed to all turn in her direction, locking on with empty eye sockets. Another deafening clatter of bone against bone shattered the quiet of the morning, the vibrations powerful enough to send ripples across the surface of the pond.

“Well fuck you too!” Jay screamed back at the behemoth, giving it a double middle finger.

“And fuck you, D!” Dys screamed from inside the workshop, pointing up at the ceiling. “This isn’t what I meant by a fucking challenge!”

As Jadis watched her cum drip off of Jay's chin, Dys' cock still twitching, she wondered if she might have gotten into a bit of a rut. For the past three weeks, Jadis had been following a fairly regular routine. Starting in the morning, after a breakfast of soggy hardtack and honey, she'd comb the abandoned dwarf village and the surrounding forest for bone thieves. She mostly found them roaming solo, but occasionally came across small groups of two or three. Regardless of numbers, she'd slaughter the demons, tossing their bones into the lake and their actual fleshy tentacle-eye bodies into piles around the area. Her hunt would last until late afternoon, at which point she'd visit D's temple and thoroughly desecrate the holy ground by milking her two selves dry using every perverted sexual technique she could think of that didn't involve penetration. The temple was definitely starting to smell a bit musky. After an hour or so of carnal pleasure, Jadis would finish the day by attempting to fish. She couldn't say she was actually fishing, since she never caught a single damn gill-faced bastard, but she still tried. Any variation to her diet was a welcome one to Jadis' thinking at that point. Even warming up the hardtack and honey mixture over a fire she'd managed to build in the smithy's forge hadn't improved the mush by much. At the moment, Jadis was at the tail end of her almost ritualistic habit of pseudo-fucking herself in front of D's statue. She wasn't truly certain why pleasuring herself in D's temple had become such an integral part of her daily life, but at the least she didn't have to worry about making a mess in the room she ate and slept in. If she were being honest with herself, she knew the reason had nothing to do with practical concerns like cleanup. Maybe she really did just like the idea of putting on a show for someone? I'm such a freak, both Jay and Dys said in unison, Dys punctuating the statement by licking a bit of the cum off of Jay's face. The two leaned back, seated on the steps of the temple dais, legs stretched out before them and hands supporting them from behind. They were both naked and covered in fluids, the culmination of both their daily hunt and daily pleasures leaving them slick with sweat and other things. Maybe it's time we moved on? Jay pondered aloud, leaning her shoulder into Dys. I can't say that I'm getting bored, exactly, but I feel like we might be stagnating. Dys leaned into Jay, reciprocating the gesture. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I can get bored of your, er, our bodies. But the bone thieves aren't putting up much of a challenge anymore. Definitely getting diminishing returns on experience, Jay added, nodding along. I think we might have out-leveled this place. Jadis had, from the start, set out with the intent to wring every last drop of experience she could from the bone thieves before moving on. Looking at her status menu, she felt she'd probably accomplished her goal. Jadis Ahlstrom Race: Nephilim Primary Class: Mirror Knight 17 Secondary Class: None Tertiary Class: None Combined Level Rating: 17 Health: 299/300 Magic: 10/10 Attributes Strength: 57 Dexterity: 10 Agility: 10 Vitality: 30 Fortitude: 20 Endurance: 21 Arcane: 0 Divine: 0 Eldritch: 70 Focus: 1 Resilience: 15 Will: 5 Jadis mentally whistled in appreciation of her stats. The amount they'd gone up over the past few weeks of power leveling had been dramatic thanks to the skills she'd unlocked at levels thirteen and seventeen. At level thirteen, Jadis had been offered two different passive skills by Oros' system. Both had been similar, their differences only in the specific attributes they affected. Knight's Tenacity Passive Skill. Increases the Fortitude and Resilience attributes by 5 points. Knight's Resolve Passive Skill. Increases the Endurance and Vitality attributes by 5 points. Choosing which of the skills to take had presented a minor dilemma to Jadis. She wanted both, since increasing even one attribute by five points seemed amazing, much less two of them at the same time. However, she didn't know which to go with since they both represented interesting opportunities. On the one hand, Knight's Tenacity would increase both Fortitude and Resilience, two attributes she knew nothing about. Such a drastic jump would no doubt give her strong insights into what the two attributes did, though. Her only other way of figuring it out being putting her evened-number-level free attribute points into the stat one at a time and gauging the difference that way. Taking Knight's Tenacity would let her skip all that. On the other hand, Jadis knew exactly what Vitality did and increasing her health pool up to a solid three hundred practically made her salivate. Plus, as a bonus, Knight's Resolve would also boost her Endurance up, which would let her know what that stat did. She already had her suspicions based off the single point she'd already put into that attribute, but Knight's Resolve would be a nice fast forward button for her intentions. She'd ended up stressing over the decision all night before getting frustrated with her own indecisiveness and impulsively picking Knight's Resolve. With the stat boost, she was able to confirm that Endurance did what she thought, directly increasing her stamina. An interesting realization, one that had her reconsidering Crushing Blow. Stamina was still an invisible stat to her, though, so Jadis left that skill firmly on the backburner. As it turned out, Jadis needn't have fretted over her thirteenth level skill choice. At level fifteen, Jadis was offered two more spells. Tilted Mirrorland Active Spell. Warp a single target's perception of the landscape around them, causing confusion and vertigo. Cost 40 magic. Duration 30 seconds. Nightmare Reflection Active Spell. Warp a single target's perception of you to that of a terrifying entity, causing panic and fear. Cost 25 magic. Duration 10 seconds. While interesting, neither spell tempted Jadis. She didn't have the magic to cast either, and in all honesty powering up her attributes just looked far more appealing to her. She ended up selecting Knight's Tenacity, increasing the two mystery attributes of fortitude and resilience. There was no immediate change as far as Jadis could tell after she brought both stats up. The lack of results had been more than a little disappointing for Jadis. In fact, she still wasn't sure what resilience did. Fortitude, though, she figured out. During one of Jadis' fights with a particularly large bone thief reminiscent of the bear-like one she'd had so much trouble with previously, except this one had three heads, no tail, and extra long front legs, she had messed up. Slipping on a muddy patch, Dys had gone down hard on her side, leaving her wide open to a powerful strike from the demon that had sent her flying across the ground. The attack had hurt and, if Jadis hadn't had two bodies, she was fairly certain she wouldn't have been able to get back up in time to avoid getting pounced on by the bulky bone beast. Still, Jay had been able to pop one of the demon's skulls, acting as a good distraction while Dys got back up. The fight had ended with another dead demon with another oddly red eye inside, and with Jadis having taken less damage than what she thought she would have considering the blow she had been hit with. After some hesitant experimentation involving knives that Jadis was pretty sure would have had any therapist worrying about her mental health, Jadis had reached the conclusion that fortitude increased her natural resistance to damage. Nothing to do with armor, she was fairly certain, just her inborn ability to resist harm. Once again, Jadis marveled at the frankly ludicrous videogame logic Oros seemed to operate on. How exactly was her skin somehow less susceptible to cuts because a number on an imaginary panel in her head went up? Yet, somehow, despite the apparent increase in toughness, her skin still felt exactly as soft and smooth as when she first arrived on the world. Magic was weird. The big change had come at level seventeen, which took nearly two weeks to get to after level fifteen. Per her expectations, she'd been offered two more skills. The first one had caused a few raised eyebrows. Kaleidoscopic Boost Active Skill. Increase a random attribute by 15 for 12 hours. Cannot be activated a second time until a full 12 hours have elapsed. A randomized boost to one of her attributes? Jadis had frankly been baffled. The skill was the most videogame-like of all the skills she'd been offered so far. Not that the skill sounded useless, or anything. Far from it. A fifteen-point increase to any one of her skills was massive. Plus, since it changed every half day, she could potentially use the skill to find out what all the mystery attributes she had affected. Not a bad skill at all in Jadis' opinion. Still, the skill was unstable. There was no guarantee that it'd boost an attribute that'd be helpful to her, after all. She didn't know what the arcane and divine attributes did, but considering both were at zero and she'd been getting along just fine without them, she didn't think boosting either of them up to fifteen for twelve hours would be horribly helpful. Or maybe it would be? Maybe having a divine attribute would give her some kind of holy power that let her smite demons faster? Well, whatever pros and cons Kaleidoscopic Boost offered, all consideration for the skill had gone out the window when Jadis had read the description of the second skill she'd been offered at her level up. Mirror Knight's Might Passive Skill. Multiplies a chosen physical attribute by 1.5. Attribute selected when skill is first chosen and cannot be changed. Jadis wasn't a mathematician. She had, however, been accepted to university and into medical school and was thusly fairly confident in her ability to do basic arithmetic, including multiplication. A fucking fifty percent increase!? Jay and Dys had both shouted at the time, utterly flabbergasted by the massive potential enhancement to one of her attributes being offered. After the surprise wore off, Jadis had taken the skill without hesitation. Nor did she hesitate overlong about which attribute she would boost. The was really only one stat that mattered when it came to how much damage she could dish out in a fight. Putting the bonus where it would do her the most good, Jadis selected her strength attribute when prompted by the skill, then watched with glee as her strength score jumped from thirty-six to fifty-four. Jadis hadn't been using her free attribute points she'd gotten at levels fourteen and sixteen. With the Knight's Tenacity and Knight's Resolve skills, she'd seen three of her mystery attributes get boosted significantly, giving her solid information on at least two of them. Instead of putting the points directly into an attribute, she'd decided to hold off on bumping any of her other stats up, banking on the idea another skill might come along that'd let her increase her other attributes. She'd save the free points she got at even levels until she saw a good reason to use them. Mirror Knight's Might felt like a good reason to use them. Testing the numbers and how the skill affected them, Jadis spent a free point on her strength and saw it go from fifty-four to fifty-five. At first, she thought the skill had been a one time wonder, multiplying her total strength score at time of skill acquisition and nothing more. But when she put her second free attribute point into strength to be sure, the number jumped up to fifty-seven. Thirty-eight times one-point-five was fifty-seven. The multiplicative skill worked off of what her strength score would be before it multiplied the numbers. The system just seemed to round down with fractions, or so Jadis guessed. Thrilled with her new skill, Jadis had been eager to test out her newfound strength. Her strength score had nearly doubled compared to what it had been when she'd first arrived on Oros, and it showed. The temple pews that Jadis had been tossing around before were now about as heavy as paperweights to Jadis. She found that rocks that she was certain had to weigh hundreds of pounds could not only be moved but lifted over her head and tossed around like sacks of potatoes. A single strike from one of her makeshift mauls was able to blow right through the average bone thief now, no Mirrored Strikes needed. The few times where she did get a double attack off on a hapless demon, her target had been literally mulched. Yeah, I'm liking this whole strong as shit thing, Dys said with a smile. For emphasis, she reached a hand under Jay and cupped her ass, then lifted. With minimal effort, she had Jay balanced on one arm. Grinning down at her mirror, Jay laughed and said, We have got to be at superhero levels by this point. Eh, maybe a B-tier superhero, Dys shook her head, setting Jay back down on the stone stairs. We've got to be stronger than anybody back on earth is, easy, but I don't think we can stop speeding buses from running over distracted kids or anything like that. Yeah, well, we can stomp on demons like the chumps they are now, though. Which does bring us back to the point, doesn't it? Dys sighed, standing up and stretching her arms overhead. I don't think we should hang around this old dump for much longer. Agreed, Jay nodded, getting up to stretch as well. It took, what, nine days to go from level sixteen to seventeen? That's a huge drop compared to how fast we were leveling a month ago. We need to find some new demons to fight, some that'll give us more of a challenge. Hooking her thumb over her shoulder, Dys motioned to the statue behind them. I doubt D was interested in watching us bash empty skulls for this long, anyway. Even if we are spicing it up with a little hanky-panky. Mmm, Jay hummed, True. Guess we should start figuring out how we're going to transport our stuff? Dys nodded. Sounds good. Both gathered up their scattered armor and weapons, then headed out of the temple, passing by the pile of dead and decaying demon squid bodies that was now as tall as they were. Jadis had lost count as to how many bone thieves she'd killed since arriving on Oros, but for the past few weeks she'd been killing more than a dozen every day, the numbers only rising with time. I still wanna know why some of them have different eye colors, Jay said, passing the stinking corpse pile with a grimace. She hadn't bothered putting on her armor and was just carrying it bundled up in her arms, same as Dys. There was no sense in putting it on when she planned on taking a dip in the pond to wash up as soon as they got back to their house. Another mystery for another day, Dys shrugged. Maybe we can figure out some way to test a few demons, later. Jadis shook both of her heads at the thought as she returned to the mining camp. It was not all that long ago that she'd been terrified of the bony monstrosity that had snuck up on her that first day on Oros. Now she was dismissing them as trivial, no real threat at all. Leveling up and growing stronger truly was amazing. Jadis couldn't wait to see just how powerful she could become. Thoughts of her future and where she would travel to now that she was finished with the abandoned village danced through Jadis' heads for the rest of the evening and night, only occasionally interrupted by the sound of a few bone clicks echoing in the forest outside. Jadis paid those clattering bones little mind, though. The demons could wait until morning, when she'd crush them just as she'd done to all the others that she had come across. It wasn't until shortly after dawn, as Jadis was stoking the fire in the forge to start on breakfast that she realized something was terribly wrong. From somewhere outside of the stone workshop, a cacophony of clacking noise resounded, like dozens of drummers have taken wooden blocks and started smacking them together in a discordant symphony of dissonant sounds. Wincing, Jay ran to the door and threw it open, trying to see where the terrible noise had come from. Dys, meanwhile, quickly started throwing on her armor, as Jadis couldn't imagine the noise was coming from anything friendly or harmless. From the door that faced the cliff and cave mouth, Jadis saw nothing. Stepping outside and taking a look around the corner, Jadis froze in shock as she spotted what was making the noise. From the other side of the stone dam that contained the pond, crawled a massive monstrosity of bones. Only its head and shoulders stuck up over the dam, but what she could see was enough to dwarf her. Dozens upon dozens of skulls, all of them humanoid, were clustered together into a giant bouquet of macabre spectacle. As Jay stood staring at the creature, the skulls seemed to all turn in her direction, locking on with empty eye sockets. Another deafening clatter of bone against bone shattered the quiet of the morning, the vibrations powerful enough to send ripples across the surface of the pond. Well fuck you too! Jay screamed back at the behemoth, giving it a double middle finger. And fuck you, D! Dys screamed from inside the workshop, pointing up at the ceiling. This isn't what I meant by a fucking challenge!