Chapter 110 Bastard.

Chapter 110: 110 Bastard.

The next three nights were annoying as hell, and I say that as a man whose annoyance threshold had gotten pretty high lately.

Night one gave us something that looked like a rhinoceros from hell. It was like... the final boss of a nature documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman, pitched down two octaves.

The thing was the size of a Jeep Wrangler, covered head to tail in interlocking stone plates that made it move like a bulldozer that had somewhere to be

Ayra hit it with everything she had, bless her puppy heart. Her hammer rang off the stone plates with a sound like a church bell, and the vibration traveled up her arms hard enough that she dropped the hammer and had to shake feeling back into her hands.

She picked it back up and went for the leg joints instead, swinging three times, then four, and on the fifth one a plate finally cracked. The creature stumbled, which gave me an opening to drive my sword into the gap.

It took us nine minutes. Nine goddamn minutes for one creature. We weren’t in any real danger, but nine minutes of hacking at what was basically a living boulder was about as fun as it sounds.

Clementine and I ran a well-timed Mounted Charge during the fight. Our first few attacks barely dented the thing.

The Charge, though, combined with Juniper freezing the cracked plate to make it brittle and Ayra hammering the same spot over and over, finally punched through.

Elsa called the kill shot from her position, lying on her side with a pillow, and when I drove my blade into the exposed flesh underneath the broken armor, the thing bellowed and went down like an ugly ton of bricks.

We were all tired afterward—especially Elsa for some reason, but that was kind of just how she was. Clementine was back in her human form and bent over with her hands on her knees, horse ears flat against her skull.

I had monster blood on my shirt and my arms felt like someone had been using them as jump ropes.

"That took way too long," Clementine said between breaths. "And we had to go at that thing hard."

"I feel like there’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’m too tired to find it," I sighed.

Elsa was adjusting her tiara from her command position, yawning dramatically. "The horse is correct. We exerted ourselves much too long this night."

"You just lay there, though," Juniper muttered under her breath. No one acknowledged it, thankfully.

Ayra examined her hammer head. "I think I scratched my war hammer. Master, if my weapon is damaged, does that mean I need to be punished for improper equipment maintenance?"

"Your hammer is fine, Ayra."

"It doesn’t look fine! Look! Look! Oh, fear quivers through me as I anticipate your cruelty!"

Nobody had the energy to engage with that.

Night two was annoying in a different way.

Instead of one big target, we got a pair of things that fought together like they shared a brain, maybe linked to each other similarly to the Shadow Wolves.

That, and other recent events, made it clear that Black Lazarus found some loopholes through which he could occasionally send more than one monster at a time.

They were built lean and fast, quadropeds, with dark fur. The velociraptors from Jurassic Park came to mind in the way they moved their necks, except these were on fire and didn’t have the courtesy to open doors first.

Ghost Rider’s dog walker had really let things go. They reminded me of the Shadow Wolves from a few weeks back.

Every time I committed to one, the other would swing around behind us.

Clementine’s speed was the only reason I didn’t have to deal with getting clawed in the back, because she felt the attacks coming a half-second before they landed and adjusted her gallop to dodge them.

Her reactions had gotten impressively fast with the bond sitting at AMICABLE, and she was reading the field through me while I read it through her.

Together we were faster than either of us had any right to be, which was pretty cool even if the circumstances were tedious.

The irritating part was that the creatures adapted.

After the first few minutes, they stopped attacking the same way twice. They watched what we did, processed it, and tried something new on the next pass.

When Juniper hit the left one with frost breath, the right one circled wide to flank her. When Ayra set up to hammer the right one, the left one feinted at her to pull her out of position. It was a pain in the pooper.

"They’re smart!" Juniper shouted. "Kill them fast!"

Elsa broke through the noise. "Grey! Drive the left one toward Ayra! Funnel it between the fence posts! Now!"

I banked Clementine hard left. The flame-dog tracked us, just as Elsa predicted, and its pursuit angle funneled it between two fence posts where Ayra was waiting with her hammer cocked back like she was about to hit a nasty homerun.

The impact sent the thing cartwheeling across the field, and Juniper finished it with an arcane bolt while it was still in the air.

The crowd went wild. The crowd in this case was Elsa, who clapped twice from her stump, then lay back down. "Good job! Mmm. So sleepy."

The second one broke and tried to run. We chased it down in a matter of seconds, and Mounted Surge activated first.

Clementine went from fast to absolutely batshit insane, taking on a three-second burst of supernatural speed that made my eyes water and my lips flap.

Then I put my sword through its spine at full speed. We overran the body by forty yards before I could even think about pulling up.

We won handily enough, but Juniper’s forearms were a little red from a flame burst she’d had to block up close, and Ayra’s hammer arm was sore from all the impacts.

She kept flexing her fingers and making a big deal out of it, whimpering cutely.

"Good call earlier, Princess," I told her as we walked to the house.

"Yes, it was. But I hope that one day I will find a way to participate a tiny morsel more frequently," she sighed dramatically. "I wish to earn more of your adoration."

I chuckled. "You have lots of my adoration, princess."

"I want more adoration, though," she pouted.

I changed the subject before she could spiral further. "Juniper, what’s your read on the trend? These fights are getting more obnoxious."

She didn’t answer right away. She walked beside me with her tail leaving a wide track through the frosty grass, and I could see her thinking it through. "They’re definitely getting tougher," she said. "Nothing we can’t handle, but the time commitment is going up. And the variety is increasing, which means we’re spending more energy adapting to new threats every night instead of steamrolling the same old ones. It’s... a little more stressful. But we’ll manage."

"Still, it’s going to keep being a pain in the ass," I sighed. "It would be a lot worse if I was still doing this by myself."

"You will never be by yourself again, Master!" Ayra giggled. "Arf!"

It was pretty true. Sometimes Ayra would follow me into the bathroom and sit on my feet when I wanted to take a poop.

Night three was the one that actually had me swearing up a storm in annoyance.

The portal opened and something came through that didn’t register as a physical creature at first.

It was a mass of dark energy shaped roughly like a man, but taller, thinner, and distorted at the edges. It drifted across the field almost serenely until it reached Ayra and passed straight through her body like she wasn’t there.

She yelped and stumbled backward, shaking her head hard like she’d just gotten splashed with cold water.

Her tail went taut, and she dropped her hammer, pawing at her own face with both hands. "Ugh! That was awful! Master, it put bad pictures in my head! I saw myself eating kibble from a bowl on the floor, and it wasn’t even a good brand!"

"A psychic assault!" Juniper called, throwing up a barrier spell between herself and the entity. "Don’t let it touch you! It digs through your head and pulls up whatever bothers you the most!"

The thing drifted toward Clementine next. She transformed instantly, and her horse form reared and backed away with a neigh. I felt her flinch as the thing probed at her, pulling up memories she’d rather not revisit.

Get it away from me, her mental voice said, more pissed than panicked. Grey, this thing creeps me the fuck out. It’s telling me you’re going to ghost me again. You wouldn’t do that, would you?!

"And say goodbye to our facesitting sessions?!" I roared indignantly. "Never! THAT BASTAAARD!" I charged it on foot with my sword, but the blade passed through the energy mass without any sense of penetration.