And (N)one Shall Remain

“This place is eerier than before for some reason,” Sister Mikaela heard Brother Artorius mutter under his breath. While some part of her – the part that was already annoyed by the pesky brother’s continued pestering for the past week – wanted to lash out on him for making that comment, she could not help but to agree with him to an extent.

 

They had passed this route before, fought and killed some of the lizard-like creatures that inhabited the dungeon along the way, yet it had not felt as eerie back then. Perhaps it was the relative silence, as their fighting must have scared off the dungeon’s weaker inhabitants and made them too afraid to get close to the path, but in such a condition, with her team practically isolated inside the dark forest, her thoughts often went wild with unlikely possibilities.

 

Like the way the shadows – there were plenty given the dense forest canopy above them – seemed to jump at her every time she took her eyes off them, or the way some of the bushes shook as if they hid some menacing predator about to pounce on her… only to reveal that the source of the motion was some tiny pest instead.

 

Those critters were pretty much the only few things that remained in the path the Temple Guards had taken, as their fight with the lizard creatures – most likely the top of the food chain in the forest – already scared off the other, weaker creatures with enough survival instinct to get the hell away from the battle of what seemed like titans to them.

 

On the other hand, the tiny pests were not only too weak and small for most larger creatures to bother with – they were the food of the food of the food that the larger beasts eat – but most of them likely wouldn’t survive if they scampered off beyond their home ground, so they instead hid in their nests and burrows and waited for the storm to pass.

 

None of that stopped their occasional movement and noise in the otherwise silent forest from being nerve-breaking for the already nervous temple guards, though.

 

Sister Mikaela would have felt more secure if one of the strongest of the temple guards like Brother Brodwick or Sister Maetel was with her. Hell, she would even settle for the dour, always frowning Father Poligenes if she had to. Anything was better than her current situation, where she was sent out without any powerhouse to back up her team.

 

Even if she knew that the route they had already taken should be the safest part of the forest, it did little to assuage her fraying nerves, and she kept expecting the worst at every turn.

 

Most unfortunately for her, her gut feeling turned out to be right in the worst possible way.

 

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Inside the forest, to the sides of the group of temple guards, six figures stealthily moved through the undergrowth. They barely made any noise, the only signs of their passage being the shaking leaves where they walked by, without the knowledge of any in their vicinity. Their unaware prey were waiting for them, and it would just be rude to let them wait for too long.

 

Val-Kas’j led the group to the left of the temple guards, which consisted of himself, Resitia, and Iryl. None of the three were that blessed when it came to hiding their tracks or moving quietly, lacking skills that would help with it like what Legisvula or Tiesya possessed, but they made up for it through sheer training and experience gained over the tumultuous last few months of their lives.

 

The three of them got into the agreed upon position, where the forest was just a bit denser, and waited there in readiness. Tiesya’s group would initiate the ambush, they had agreed upon that, and while the targets were distracted by her group, Val-Kas’j would take advantage of their distraction to deliver the killing blow.

 

After all, it was only respectful for a hunter to use their full power to bring down their prey, even if they could have taken on the prey in question with ease.

 

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A slight rustling of the leaves were all the warning the Temple Guards received before a short, bulky, thickly furred figure burst out from the undergrowth to their right and directly tackled Brother Artorius, who as the group’s priest was the one blessed with the divine skills… which included the way the alert the main group if they were to run into trouble that was beyond them.

 

Mikaela herself only had that moment to spare as the next moment, she hastily defended herself with her sword and shield as a pair of wicked-looking blades designed like the scythe-legs of some insects flashed towards her. She only barely managed to parry one blade, while the other left a tear on her shield, which gave her no illusions as to what would happen if she was to take a direct hit from those blades.

 

What jolted her more than the sudden assault, however, was the identity of the figure that held the blades. It was a slim, slender figure that was most definitely not a human, but one of their sworn enemies, the demons they had been fighting for countless generations. She recognized it as a Nevilosk demon, while the previous one was another type of demon called a Ragah-fiq.

 

“Demons! Rally to me!” she heard herself yelling in as stern a voice as she could manage to her companions. If they could rally together and pool their power against these demons they would be able to return alive, she told herself. She should just do as she was trained to do, and surely the Gods would bless her stand against the foul creatures, she thought.

 

Maybe even the noisy Brother Artorius might be blessed and live to fight another day!

 

She was rudely disabused from such thoughts by the sudden sound of violence and screams of pain from behind her, however. She risked a glance backwards to assess the situation, and all she saw just made her feel as if she had fallen into a deep, inescapable pit of despair right on the spot. 

 

Brother Edgar, the one she always remembered as the pious, energetic kid from the small village who was recruited by the temple partly because of that boisterousness of his, the mood maker of her group, was gurgling on his own blood at that moment. A smaller figure was nested against his back, clearly pushing some sort of blade into Edgar with unthinkable consequences.

 

Constantine, the older senior temple guard who claimed that he no longer had any dreams of advancing to the fourth tier and was brought to this expedition to help impart his wisdom to the youngsters, was pinned to a tree by a wicked spear that had gone all the way through his chest and a good bit into the tree behind him besides. He had a look of surprise and disbelief on his face as he looked towards the forest, probably looking at his attacker which Mikaela couldn’t see from the angle she was at.

 

Sister Adelia, who had been the little sister of the group, was similarly being pinned against a tree, though in her case, her attacker had bodily rammed her with a shield held up and pushed her until she was backed up against a tree and unable to resist. Mikaela winced as she saw the cloaked figure move their arm – which held a bloody hand spear – back and forth as they stabbed Sister Adelia over and over again while she was helpless.

 

What truly broke her resolve, however, was what happened to Brother Martin, the gentle giant of the group who everyone jested as looking a decade older than he actually was. She saw a brutish Ma’Varok demon directly bisect him from shoulder to waist with a fearsome polearm, in a single blow that gave Brother Martin not even the slightest chance to resist.

 

It was only then that she noticed how she had taken too long to look at the situation already and should return her attention to her opponent, yet couldn’t turn her head for some reason. Was her field of view always so wide? Sister Mikaela knew that she had good eyes, but she was still surprised that she managed to glance at the entire situation at the same time. 

 

Then she felt her view shift again at last, towards the Nevilosk that struck at her. The demon actually stood still for some reason, in a pose with one arm across their chest and their other arm extended forward. Sister Mikaela saw that the demon held one of the wicked blades in each hand, and that the blade on the extended arm was impaled through the chest of a headless corpse that seemed all too familiar to her for some reason.

 

It was not until her field of view began to drop and her consciousness started to dim that Sister Mikaela realized that the headless body was none other than her own.

 

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“Rare to see you need two strikes when we got ours in one, Ties,” teased Val-Kas’j as he walked over to Tiesya with a smile. The ambush had gone off flawlessly, with none of the temple guards able to react much before they perished under their hands. That Tiesya of all people needed two strikes to take down her target was the only surprise.

 

“Guess she was alerted by Nali rushing down their priest, or maybe she was just the good one of the bunch, who knows?” replied Tiesya with a shrug. She herself did not care that much whether she did the deed in one or two strikes. Her enemy was down without being able to alert the main group, and that was all that mattered.

 

“Maybe, I guess. Anyway, you all already made sure that none of them’s still breathing?” asked Val-Kas’j to the rest of their small group of six. 

 

“This one’s a goner for sure,” replied Iryl as she moved away from the temple guard she pinned against a tree with her shield. The temple guard’s corpse had been perforated over a dozen times, all in locations that they knew would be lethal to a human, so the chance of the temple guard surviving without some sort of utterly broken skill like [Respawn] was nonexistent.

 

“This one’s dead too,” stated Resitia as she yanked her spear out from the tree it was embedded in. She had thrown her weapon with a bit too much force which resulted in it getting embedded deeper in the tree than she liked. Once she got her spear freed, she swiped it across the dead temple guard’s neck and separated the man’s head from his body. “Just to make sure.”

 

“Oh, good idea, that,” noted Legisvula as he grabbed the hair of the temple guard he took down and raised the man’s head before he severed the man’s neck with his blade. “Always much safer when you get rid of their heads, so even if any of them were playing dead, they’d be dead for real instead.”

 

“Hmm… guess this’ll have to do…” muttered Nalihimatu as he looked at his mace and then crushed the young, chatty priest’s head into pulp with it. His weapon had no cutting edge so he didn’t have the option to cleanly remove the head off the corpse.

 

To be fair, the priest was likely too dead to complain anyway, as Nali’s charge and tackle had crushed his ribcage and driven many shards of bone into his vital organs before he made them burst apart under the excessive force of his charge and the impact it caused.

 

“Think we need to take the heads back so the Exalted One can take their souls?” asked Tiesya after everyone confirmed their targets’ deaths.

 

“I don’t think that’s necessary. The Exalted One sent one of her agents with us and she could claim them through him, I think,” noted Legisvula as he pointed at Dali’s barely visible figure, half-hidden by the leaves of the branch he was resting on, to the side of the path.

 

“Then let us return and deal with the rest.”