Chapter 12: Chapter 12: No Solicitors

The bone demon was a gangly monstrosity, humanoid in the loosest sense. While it had a normal number of arms and legs for a man, two of each, they were all twice as long as its already elongated torso, each multi-jointed to an extreme degree. The arms ended in feet and hands as one would expect, however, the finger bones were also elongated and exceptionally sharp, closer to scythes than anything else. It also possessed four necks that split off from the shoulder and torso, each one long and winding with a different kind of skull on the end of each. One was human-looking, the other three were from horses or deer.

Jadis grimaced at the skeletal man-hydra, unhappy with the prospect of fighting something that had such greater reach than her. With its long arms and legs, it could take swipes at her with its wicked claws before she could get anywhere close to striking at the core. The multi-jointed limbs looked difficult to pin down as well, no doubt able to twist and bend and come at her from odd angles.

Still, Jadis had two advantages of the demon. First, there were two of her and only one of it. Second, it hadn’t spotted her yet.

She watched from her hidden vantage as the bone thief crawled along the outside of her hut, walking on all fours rather than stand upright, giving it an even more unnerving appearance than it already had. It snooped along the windows, scythe-fingers picking at the shutters. Its multiple heads clicked and clattered their jaws as it seemed to puzzle over the windows before eventually moving around front to the door.

From her position coming from the village, Jadis viewed the hut and demon at a right angle, the front door facing south. She would have preferred to have been completely behind it, but so long as the demon remained unaware of her presence than she could make do.

Slowly, the bone-thief pushed open the unlocked door, cautiously sticking two of its heads in to look inside. Jadis noticed that the other two stayed outside, looking around.

So the monster was wary of ambushes. Good to know, Jadis thought. She was also a little confused as to why the skulls mattered at all for vision. The creature had no actual eyes, after all. Did it really need the skulls to see and hear?

She chalked it up to magic bullshit and put the thought from her mind for the time being.

Jadis waited with building apprehension, holding her breath, desperately hoping the demon would move forward and go fully inside. There was no way she was going to miss an opportunity to kill the abomination, especially since the creepy thing could show up later in the night now that it knew someone was living in the hut.

As seconds ticked by, Jadis was almost certain the demon wasn’t going to go further in, but then, relief washed through her as the two skulls outside twisted their way inside and the demon moved further into the building. Jadis thanked D she had decided to close the two interior doors, assuming that to be the reason why the bone thief was moving in further to check the blocked off rooms.

Jadis wasted no time, stalking forward in a quick but careful trot. She tried to make as little noise as possible, doing her best to get the drop on the man-hydra while it was awkwardly stuffed halfway into the hut, only its legs still sticking out. If she could break the legs off, she was certain she stood a better chance at defeating the demon.

As she closed in on the hut, only a few dozen feet away, the bone thief must have heard something as it suddenly began to back out.

“Oh no you don’t!” Jadis cried out, both bodies rushing forward with clubs raised.

The left leg of the demon snapped out, whipping through the air like a deadly projectile, the blind attack missing her left body by mere inches. Before it could snap the leg around or back up further, Jadis was upon the skeleton. She swung both her clubs like baseball bats, both aiming for the leg that still had its foot on the ground. Her right self angled her attack by spinning a bit to the side, putting the heads of the stone clubs on a collision course with each other.

Any other duo of fighters would have had to have trained for years to pull off a pincer attack with enough precision and timing to hit two clubs counter to each other at the same point at the same time. But Jadis wasn’t a duo of fighters. To her, the maneuver was no different from clapper her hands.

The leg bone crunched to splinters as the stone clubs connected, pulped by the force of the blow. The rebound shook Jadis’ arms as she took a second to back away, but the damage to the demon was done. The whole right leg was severed from the coordinated attack, disconnected bones falling to the ground.

Jadis gave ground as the skeletal demon lashed out again with its leg, then back out of the hut. As she had expected, its unnatural number of joints allowed it to bend at odd angles and extract itself in moments, already turning to face her.

She had already struck the first blow, though, and crippled the monster to boot. A vicious grin broke out over both of Jadis’ faces as she started in on the demon.

“Not so fun being the one caught of guard, is it motherfucker?”

Jadis taunted the demon, uncaring if it understood her or not. The bravado was for her own sake.

Keeping to a hit-and-run strategy, Jadis would feint with one body, forcing the bone thief to swing its arm out at her. Once the arm was in motion, the other half of Jadis would leap in and strike, aiming at whatever part of the demon was closest. Missing a leg, the demon couldn’t cow-kick or take both arms off the ground at the same time, not without losing balance and falling to the ground. Jadis couldn’t have hoped for a more favorable outcome from her opening attack against the enemy.

Perhaps sensing the poor position it was in, the demon suddenly scrambled up and away from Jadis, climbing up onto the roof of the hut. It didn’t do so without taking another blow from her club, cracking one of the remaining leg’s bones, but not breaking it off.

From atop the roof, the demon used its long reach to swipe both arms at her, aiming to slice her with the claws. Jadis backed off, her crippling maneuver somewhat invalidated. The bastard demon had made it so it no longer needed to stand, lying on the roof and using the hut as a defensive position to strike at her from.

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Jadis could still reach the core if she tried, what with the stone hut not being particularly tall, but she couldn’t get in that close without taking potentially devastating damage from the demon’s scythe claws. She needed to change tactics. Adapt. Running away wasn’t an option; the demon would just use its magic to reattach the broken leg and come after her.

A mad plan came to Jadis. Immediately she dismissed it as an utterly ridiculous idea, one that would probably get her maimed, if not killed. Yet, continuing the fight as she was would almost certainly produce the same result.

Fuck it. Jadis preferred a mad plan to none at all.

While one of her selves kept up the attack, swinging her club at the demon to keep it distracted, the other ran back to the trees where she had left the spoils of her morning looting trip. In seconds she had grabbed up two large leather squares and carried them back to the battle.

The scant moments it took to do so were costly, the demon partially coming off the roof to press an attack on a lone Jadis. But the demon missed the opportunity, not reacting to the changing battlefield fast enough. Jadis successfully kept it cowed with several wild swings, one of which broke of a couple of the demon’s bony fingers. It settled back down on the roof as the other half of Jadis returned.

Jadis kept piece of leather in her off hand, giving the other to her other half and doing the same. She got closer together and waited for the right moment, which did not take long to come.

The demon swung at her again, arm swiping through the air. Jadis dropped her club and used both hands to catch the limb in the sheet of leather. As she had hoped, the bone-blades were not sharp enough to cut clean through the thick treated leather. Jadis quickly grasped the arm and pulled, using her full strength to hold the creature’s limb in place.

Predictably, the bone thief reacted by slashing down as the Jadis holding its arm, but she was ready for that. The other Jadis leapt in and grappled that arm with her leather as well, grabbing hold and pulling. In unison, both of Jadis’ selves yanked hard, dragging the demon off the roof, but not only that. Both yanked in different directions, left and right. The end result was the demon’s core was suspended between the two pale warriors, unable to resist the strength of her arms as she pulled hard on its limbs.

If any outsiders had been present, they might have thought the scene was perhaps the most bizarre form of tug-of-war ever enacted.

Despite the success of her mad plan, the demon was still alive, which Jadis had to admit was a significant flaw. She had immobilized the monster, but not permanently. It’s remaining leg was still kicking, too, lashing out, not able to reach either of her but certainly making it difficult for her to maintain a solid grip as it pushed against the ground and against the walls of the hut.

“Now what?” she looked across the struggling bone demon at herself.

“Well…” she grunted, fighting to maintain her hold of the deadly arm, “I think I remember playing a game called red-rover.”

“Say no more,” she said to herself, a maniacal grin blossoming on her faces.

Jadis started running. It was tricky to keep her grip on the struggling, squirming arms of the demon, but not so difficult she couldn’t build up some speed, which she needed. Sprinting in unison, she ran for the closest tree, aiming to pass the pine between the two of her, right where the demon’s core hung.

At the last moment, the demon swung its leg out and kicked to the side, throwing Jadis’ aim off. The force of the collision was still enough to shatter bone and the left side Jadis went tumbling to the side, the demon’s arm torn off and instantly scattering to pieces.

The other side of Jadis maintained her footing well enough to run forward a few steps, but was caught in the side as the demon curled its arm in and bashed against her with its core.

Still, she did not go down. Reacting to the momentum of the attack and her own sprint, Jadis whipped around and swung the demon off and away, sending it sailing through the forest for a greater distance than she would have thought she’d been capable of. The bone thief crashed into a pine tree with a clatter, collapsing to the ground. Missing both an arm and a leg, it struggled to get up off the forest floor.

“Time to finish this,” Jadis panted, second self jogging up the self that had just tossed the monster away.

“Fuck yeah,” Jadis growled. The thrill of combat had her blood pumping and ears ringing, her breath heaving in her chest. She loved it.

The two of her fell upon the demon with clubs swinging. Bones shattered and splintered, bits scattering amongst the pine needles. Skulls broke, limbs were smashed, and finally the shell core split wide open, a demonic orange eye staring up at two beautiful, snarling faces.

“Came to the wrong neighborhood, fucker,” Jadis said before swinging two unified clubs down for a final time.

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