Godsforsaken

Chapter 49: Strixes

Had I mentioned how exhausting these damn clouds were to move across? Because they were.

The trek from Hestia's tholos over to Hermes' was far more annoying than it had to be but at the very least it gave me time to think, to distract myself from the way my feet were sinking into the clouds, if nothing else.

Our group was starting to get somewhat... big. Alisha, Selene, Yume, Anna and me were a perfectly fine group, the baseline for an average group of adventurers being four or five members. Add to that Athena and Melinoe and we were already a fairly large group. But now, with Hermes and Hestia along we were less an infiltration force and more of a small military unit. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been reassuring, strength in numbers and all, but as our primary objective was to stay undetected until we reached Hades' tholos a group this large wasn't necessarily beneficial.

I was already considering having us split up but there was no way I was willing to do that. I'd rather chop off my own arm than separate from any of my girls in a situation like this and Hestia and Hermes... Well, after what we'd seen of Hestia her loyalty was beyond doubt to me. If she were a traitor she wouldn't have been stuck the way she had been. Hermes, on the other hand? I liked the guy and his story did sound believable but there was still a nagging seed of doubt. If we let him run off on his own, could he be trusted or would he flit straight to the Holy Maiden and tell her about us? I wanted to believe the former but I didn't want to risk it. And so we kept on traveling in a group of nine, across these annoyingly squishy clouds.

Everyone was huffing and puffing, though none more so than Hestia and Melinoe. Evidently the two of them didn't usually get this much exercise. The only one who wasn't near exhaustion was Hermes, who was lying on his back with his head resting on his arms as his sandals carried him forward, flying just low enough that he could grin at us for having to walk. Did I mention what a spectacularly punchable face the guy had?

“That... does it...” Hestia gasped out in between huffs and puffs. “After this I'm getting a lot more exercise and a lot fewer tea cakes.”

“Don't make promises you can't keep, short stuff,” I ground out, trying not to let on that even with my now superhuman stamina this was starting to get to me.

“I... really... mean it... this time...”

“'This time' implies you've promised that before,” Hermes said.

Hestia growled. “Hermes... gimme... those sandals. I... promise you can have them back later.”

“Nope.”

“Then carry meee,” she whined.

“Absolutely not,” Hermes said. “Maybe if you hadn't eaten all those tea cakes.”

Hestia grumbled some more but didn't say anything else.

“Is it like this even when you don't have a gaggle of gods along?” Melinoe asked from my left.

“The silly banter?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Pretty much.”

“But isn't that kind of improper?” she asked. “Considering all the awful things happening on Olympus right now?”

“That's why,” I said. “The situation is bleak, yes. We're going to run into something spectacularly fucked up sooner or later, yes. But if we dwell on it we'll just lose heart.”

“You need to remind yourself of what you're fighting for every once in a while, is that it?”

“Precisely,” I said. “From that point of view, taking Hestia along might have been one of the smartest things we could have done.”

“As a mascot?” Melinoe asked.

“I mean, mascots aren't usually in the habit of wielding fire magic on the level of a deity, but essentially yes.”

And then she got a little bold. “So I'm not cute enough to be a mascot?”

“'Cute' isn't really the word I would use to describe you,” I said.

I could hear the arched eyebrow as she said: “And how would you describe me then?”

“Beautiful,” I said. “Fun. Slightly aggravating.”

I glanced over to see a faint blush coloring her cheeks.

I considered, then added: “The way you sailed through the air when you jumped down onto the clouds earlier was a little cute I suppose.”

“Jerk,” she hissed as she punched my arm.

“Feel less tense now?” I asked.

She was quiet for a long moment, then admitted: “Point taken.”

**

Eventually we reached Hermes' tholos. On the way here I had wondered what exactly the point of coming here was, after all Hermes was already free, but now it made imminent sense. Hestia and Melinoe looked exhausted and even the rest of us – minus Hermes – were more than a little winded. If we'd kept going until the next tholos on our way without rest we would have been wiped by whatever we would end up finding there.

“So,” I asked as we scaled the stairs up to the tholos. “Whose tholos are we headed to after this?”

“Ares',” Hermes said.

A low growl began emanating from Yume.

“I would have thought Ares' would be closer to Zeus',” I said. While I shared Yume's antipathy for Ares, it wasn't expedient right now. We needed the bastard's help if we were to have any chance of taking back Olympus. What the guy had coming would have to wait.

“We pretty much unanimously agreed that his tholos shouldn't be next to either Hestia's, Athena's or Aphrodite's,” Hermes said, “and Demeter and I drew the short straws.”

“No worries about letting him near Demeter?” I asked.

“Even he wouldn't touch my cunt of a grandmother,” Melinoe chimed in. “It's a good thing Zeus will fuck anything with a pulse or my mother probably wouldn't exist.”

“Ah, what a happy little dysfunctional family we have,” Hermes remarked as we scaled the final step to his tholos.

There hadn't been any sounds coming from it and so I wasn't too surprised to find it empty of foes. Evidently he had annoyed them so thoroughly that they hadn't even bothered to guard a tholos he was clearly not staying at. You know, either that or they weren't guarding his tholos because he was the traitor. I didn't want to believe it but I wasn't going to trust him blindly.

Either way, Hermes' tholos looked entirely different from Hestia's. They had the same basic shape, certainly, but the decor was so completely different that it completely changed the look of the place.

While Hestia's tholos had essentially been a modest apartment with an unreasonably high ceiling, this one was more like a jungle gym. Large vines snaked their way up from the ground, wrapping around the marble columns and spiraling up into the air, towards the ceiling. The vines and the columns supported intermittently placed platforms, the few of them that I could see strewn with Hermes' various interests. The one closest to the ground held a miniature version of Anna's laboratory, the one above that held a stack of scrolls. The ground floor meanwhile was barren except for a large icebox and an enormous hammock.

It fit the flighty bastard perfectly and in times of peace I could practically see him flitting from platform to platform, indulging in his various interests while occasionally darting down to the icebox to get himself food or drink. And even when sleeping he evidently didn't like to be bound to the ground.

“Help yourselves to the contents of the icebox,” he said. “Maybe something in there hasn't gone bad yet.”

Hestia rushed over to it and threw the door open. Sure enough, a lot of it had gone bad in the months of absence, lending credence to the idea that he truly hadn't been here in months. At least the drinks still looked good. Hestia grabbed a bottle and examined it.

“How do you open this?” she asked, staring at the bottle. It had a flip top and I wasn't surprised to see that a sheltered goddess like her hadn't encountered them before. I grabbed another bottle, caught her eye and then opened it properly. She tried opening it the same way with a skeptical look on her face and immediately her bottle, too, opened with a loud 'pop'.

I turned away from everyone for a moment, pulled out my poison-detecting magic item and tapped it against the bottleneck. Nothing happened. I hadn't expected it to but I wasn't going to chance it. Sure that it wasn't poison I took a swig and, sure enough, it was simply excellent beer.

“Hermes, you've got to tell me where you got this.”

“Once Olympus is safe I'll bring you there myself,” he said and I saluted him with the bottle.

Hestia, seeing my obvious satisfaction with the drink, leaned in and took a tentative sniff of the bottle, then recoiled. “Beer? Really?”

“Ambrosia gets old,” Hermes said. “Bacchus' wine, too.”

“I don't suppose there's anything sweet in that icebox?” she asked wistfully.

“If there had been it would have turned sour by now,” I said.

Hestia grumbled until Alisha took pity on her and handed her a slice of dragonberry. Hestia accepted it with a bit of trepidation but once Alisha took a bite of her own slice the goddess bit into it and started cooing in delight.

“It's not cake, I know, but...” Alisha began but Hestia cut her off:

“No, this is great, thank you so much!”

“So, are you going to drink that?” Anna asked, eyeing Hestia's bottle.

“Knock yourself out,” the goddess said.

Anna took a swig and I did likewise, enjoying the cool, refreshing taste. It wasn't bitter and it didn't have the metalic tang that a lot of beers had, making it go down quite pleasantly. I considered how long we could afford to rest here when an ear-splitting shriek interrupted our rest.

“What was that?” Hestia asked.

“I know those shrieks,” Hermes hissed. “Shit. I should have known they had eyes on this place. Were probably waiting for me to come back. If I'd known I wouldn't have brought us here.”

“What's coming, Hermes?” I asked. “Talk to us.”

“They're...” he began. “I don't think they even have a name. They have wings and goat heads and razor-sharp talons. They've been hounding me for months.”

I finished the bottle, drew Helios Edge and stared out into the distance. Or I tried to, but a moment later that shriek came again, much closer this time, accompanied by a whirring sound like when a large moth flies way too close to your ear at night, and a moment later two dozen things landed on the island surrounding the tholos.

The creatures were horrid, ripped straight out of a nightmare, and I had to agree with Hermes. In all the books I'd studied on Outsiders – and that number had grown by several orders of magnitude in the last few months – I had never even heard of creatures like these. But I suspected I knew what they were. They looked like someone had turned a group of harpies into wendigos.

Harpies were among the rarer of the mortal races to see in public as they usually kept to themselves. They weren't evil, not at all. They were quite pleasant in fact. It was just that much of our modern world simply wasn't made for them.

They had a basic humanoid anatomy, with often very attractive female heads and torsos, but their legs were enormous bird-like talons and their forearms were huge wings. As such, they could only grip things with their feet and their arms could at best hold things in place. In a society all about walking, sitting and wearing clothes, harpies simply did not fit in and as such they mostly kept to themselves.

Wendigos, meanwhile, were creatures of Shub-Niggurath, something that happened when a person was lost in the woods and starving, when they turned to cannibalism to sustain themselves. They were emaciated creatures with bloated bellies and sunken faces that resembled deer skulls with glowing orange embers glimmering in their nearly empty eye sockets. They were also ridiculously fast and had unreasonably sharp talons instead of hands.

And the things we were facing looked like someone had gone through great lengths to turn a flock of harpies into wendigos. They had the wings for arms and claws for feet that harpies did but their wings looked like the same pink, grotesque flaps of skin that Jabberwocks had for wings and their clawed feet looked like pointy wendigo talons. Their heads were those same nearly skeletal deer heads, elongated and with gnashing teeth showing and with proud white antlers jutting out from the tops of their heads.

Their bodies were emaciated, their breasts flabby and their crotches were... They were split open from groin to navel and pink, fleshy tendrils quested out of the open cavities and I just knew that freaks like the worshipers we'd found at the Temple of Zeus would consider these beings the pinnacle of sensuality.

But their grotesque appearance did not make me forget about how dangerous these would be. If they were anything like real wendigo they would be blindingly fast and their talons could carve through flesh like Helios Edge cuts through butter.

“Form a circle!” I bellowed. “Casters in the center! These things are lightning-fast!”

Everyone obeyed, even the gods, and moments later my words were proven correct. That whirring sound I'd heard? I quickly learned where that sound came from as some of the beings began flapping their wings. Well, flapping isn't really the right word but it was the only one I had. They began beating their wings at the same ludicrous speed that wendigos ran at, so fast their wings turned into ugly pink smudges across reality, creating that whirring sound. It took them a few moments to gather momentum but when they did they shot at us like arrows.

Selene, Athena and I had pulled out shields and Anna had both of her crystal wings out, ready to defend against them, and a good thing too because a moment later the beasts were on us and they would have shredded us without the shields. The creature that attacked me sank its talons into my shield and I was horrified to see the talons piercing several inches into the metal before getting stuck. Even worse, the fleshy tendrils extending from its crotch wrapped around my shield, anchoring the creature in place and questing around it, trying to reach my skin. I didn't know what those tendrils would do to unprotected skin and I sure as shit didn't want to find out.

And so, when the thing was good and anchored to me I rammed Helios Edge into its sternum, the blade sinking in with hardly any resistance, and then used an informal working of Qi to amplify my next motion as I yanked the blade upward, slicing through its upper body and bisecting its head. Even then the creature did not go limp immediately, its claws and tendrils clinging to me for a few more uncomfortable seconds, making me wonder if I would need a proper Qi technique to kill it, when it finally went slack and dropped to the ground.

I took a moment to take stock of the battle and saw that the rest of us were doing quite well for themselves. A few of the... no. I couldn't just keep calling them 'things'. 'Goat harpies' wouldn't do, either. I supposed, given that they were bird-like creatures that had come about through cannibalism... strixes. Yes, that fit. Strixes were exceedingly rare creatures, flesh-eating nocturnal birds. I had never encountered one but I had read about them, had read of how evil they were, so I felt confident in appropriating the name.

A couple of strixes lay charred on the ground, still burning with bright orange flames, clearly the work of Hestia and not Yume with her blue flames. Yume had not been idle, either, given the multiple bisected strixes strewn about. Athena hadn't so much stabbed the strix that had attacked her as much as she'd torn it apart, a hole nearly the size of its torso blasted through it. Anna was busy using her wings to smack the strixes away from our casters but still found time to harry them with quick stabs of a crystal sword. Melinoe was using clouds of purple magic to hold the things in place so that Hermes could hit them with globs of quicksilver magic that tore the things apart like the disintegration blasts that water mages were capable of. But the most impressive one was Alisha.

Alisha had understood the situation well. She knew that, if even one of these things escaped, it would report back and jeopardize the entire operation. And so, instead of fighting them directly, she had decided to make sure none of them would escape. My little elf was surrounded by a layer of gray-green magic two inches thick, the butterfly wings that her aura manifested as as opaque as I had ever seen them, and she actually levitated a few inches off the ground. Meanwhile an enormous funnel of air had surrounded not just the tholos but the entire peak it stood on, enveloping us in a storm that would not let anyone out. We were safely inside the eye of the storm and little could happen to us but anything foolish enough to step into the storm proper would be shredded in an instant.

“Good girl,” I muttered. Alisha had understood precisely what was at stake and how to make sure things didn't go awry. This time we wouldn't need a god to show up in the nick of time to catch enemies that had escaped us.

At the same time, the battle was not won yet. There were still a few, just a few, of these things around.

I saw one of them soaring overhead, trying to blindside Anna so it could strike at Alisha and Hestia, but before it could swoop down I drew a throwing knife, slammed Qi into my arm, and launched it at the creature.

Even with perfect reflexes and skill honed by decades of training this thing would have been able to dodge a throwing knife if it had been thrown with mere human force. This knife, however, infused with Qi, soared through the air so fast the strix's speed only just allowed it to swerve an inch, letting the knife strike it slightly off-center from the eye I had aimed at. The beast careened towards the ground, on course to hit our casters and evidently trying to cause damage in its final moments but I dropped Helios Edge and jumped after it with a Qi Burst, then punched it out of the air to smash into one of the tholos' columns.

I stalked after the creature to make sure it was dead only to discover that the impact with the column had turned its head to mush. I looked back at our group only to see that I had slain the final strix. We had won.