Holy Opposites 24

	Cavria froze when she came within sixty feet of the farmhouse.  There… she could just faintly sense something at the extreme edge of her perception.  She held up both hands to her shoulders to signal the stop, and the other soldiers paused.

	“Cavria?” Axio asked faintly.

	“Something.  Moving in the house.  Magic beast,” Cavria hissed.  “Big.  No idea what it is.”

	Axio nodded.  “Which floor?”

	“Ground, moving away from us,” she replied, her voice barely above a whisper.  Axio turned and relayed that to the Captain.

	The officer nodded grimly.  “Got it,” he said quietly.

	Axio waved a hand, and he and the two half-elves in the Captain’s Guard unit advanced with Cavria beside.  A female dwarf walked on her other side from him, and she kept her eyes to the ground as well.

	They closed within thirty feet.  The door was on the side facing to their left, and there was no access on the side facing them.  Axio looked back to the officer and nodded towards the front porch – he would attack there.  The Captain tapped his brow, and peeled off.  Axio and one of the Guard teams, a group of five humans, followed, while Cavria trailed behind them, watching the road in their wakes.  The Captain took fifteen more men to attack the front door.

	Axio paused at the bottom of the back porch steps and whispered some spells.  The Guard behind him shifted as they felt the divine power of Ryaire bleed into them.  “Protection from Evil.  Bless.  Heroism,” Axio muttered, making the requisite gestures.  Three of the soldiers behind him seemed to glow for a moment.  “Now we wait.”

	Moments later, the front door exploded.


	Cavria watched the path behind her as the soldiers under the Captain charged into the farmhouse.  She engaged her fiendish senses to their fullest.  There was still something mighty in that house, but it was moving quickly.

	Something tumbled out of a window and landed beside her.  She sprang back and leveled her glaive, but it was one of the Guards, looking stunned.  Cavria dragged him up.  “Here, stand watch,” she snapped, and she charged into the farmhouse.

	The front room was a cramped mess.  One Guard was sprawled against the wall, bleeding heavily, while two more were slashing at a cultist in tattered brown robes.  The majority of the room was engaged in a brawl between some beast and about half the living Guard.  The rest were nowhere to be seen.  Cavria slammed her glaive into the cultist’s midsection and delivered a blast of divine energy that knocked it back a step.  She felt her skin crawl as the cultist just stood back up, grinning like a madman despite the wound, and threw himself at her.

	Cavria’s neck tingled as something big landed on the wall beside her, but she couldn’t spare a glance.  She rocked the cultist back with a solid blow to his head, then one of the Guards drove her sword straight through him.  The cultist went down with a gurgle, and the screaming started.

	Cavria’s heart leapt into her throat as she heard a child screaming, somewhere close.  The thing that was fighting the Guards threw one out the same window as the other one had flown and charged, and suddenly she was locked in a duel.


	Axio kicked the back door down and charged.  A blast of metal shards deflected off of his shield as he ran through – a primitive scatter-trap.  He ignored the pain as one piece punched through his rib armor beneath his raised arm, and slammed headlong into the first person he saw.

	It was a dwarf in neat brown leather armor, wielding two short daggers.  Axio simply lunged sideways, head tucked, and caught the dwarf’s blade on his shield.  He nicked the shorter man with his sword, nothing more than a cut, but it was enough.  He focused his divine energy and sent a blast into the target as Cavria had moments before, and the dwarf yelped as a shock of radiant damage raced over his clothes, setting threads aflame.

	The enhanced Guard rushed in behind him and raced up the back stairs, where Axio heard somebody scream.  Axio swung his blade again and growled as the dwarf deflected it with his blades.

	“Stand down, cultist, and I will allow you to live,” Axio snarled.

	“Piss off.”  The dwarf kicked Axio in the shin and sent three short stabs into his midsection, somehow bypassing the shield with his speed.  Axio howled in pain as the daggers bit deep, cutting him.  He drove his shield down in retaliation, and one dagger clattered to the floor from the dwarf’s numb hand.

	“Then die!” Axio roared, and he swung the blade at neck height.  The dwarf screamed as the blade slashed his throat, and he collapsed, blood pouring everywhere.

	“PALADINS!” somebody upstairs screamed – one of the Guard!  Axio spun and rushed up the stairs, but skidded to a halt when he saw what he was facing.

	Axio stared in horror through his eye slits at the beast that was fighting the Guards.  It was a Bodak, a monster of undead energies that could transform anybody which made eye contact with it into more of itself.  One of the Guards was reeling in the corner, dazed by something, while the other two were grappling with the monster.

	Behind the Bodak, though, was something worse.  A pair of adult humans and a Halfling had a child strapped to a blood-soaked bed and were driving pins through its arms.  The child was screeching in agony.

	Axio’s heart pounded into his throat.  “RYAIRE!” he screamed, charging the monster.  The Bodak saw him coming and grabbed a Guard, flinging it at the Paladin.  Axio tucked his feet up to his chest and vaulted the body, landing without breaking stride.  The other Guard sprang back as Axio rushed past him in the narrow hall.  “DIE, FILTH!” Axio roared, sounding more like a banshee than the scion of a goddess.  He drew his arm back and lunged with every scrap of his Chosen strength.

	The Bodak wailed as the sword plunged deep into its sternum, but Axio wasn’t done.  With a roar of magic, his sword nearly exploded with a torrent of shifting, liquid radiant light.  Streams of energy writhed over the Bodak’s body as Axio dumped fully half of his divine power into a singe, massive blast.

	“SMITE EVIL!” Axio bellowed, and the back of the Bodak simply exploded.  Pieces of the undead scattered over the macabre scene in the bedroom.

	The humans dropped their pins and charged him, swinging bodkins, but Axio was beyond enraged.  The halfling quickly drew its own weapon as Axio bull-rushed the humans.

	“I bring RUIN to you, scum!” Axio screamed.  The child’s noises suddenly ended in a heart-wrenching wet sound, and Axio’s limbs spiked with adrenaline.  Axio drove his still-glowing blade through the first human’s right shoulder, taking its blade arm clean off, and shoulder-bashed the second into the doorframe.  He stepped over it and ran, already knowing he was too late.

	The halfling sneered as he turned to face the Paladin.  “Did I keep you waiting?” he chortled.  The child behind him was lying still, with an ornate dagger lodged in its heart.  Already, black mist was pouring out of the child’s slack mouth and eyes.

	Axio clenched his teeth so hard his jaw creaked.  He reversed direction, sending his elbow into the wounded human’s head, knocking him cold.  The other human died as the two remaining Guards cleaved him with their swords.  The Halfling sprang for the window.


	Below, Cavria was in worse shape.  She was fighting the monster in front of her, but her own senses were distracting her.  It was clearly a golem, but her divine senses and fiendish senses alike insisted she was fighting a daemon, the neutral evil monsters which inhabited what was left of the Blood Rift.

	She swung her glaive upwards in a sharp, straight swipe, then followed through with a spin towards the monster and an armored backhand.  It took it on its disgustingly fleshy chin, and lashed out with a whip-like arm that knocked her back two full paces.  Cavria shook the pain away and swept her blade laterally, slicing through its ropy body and drawing a gruesome brown ichor.

	It bellowed and sprang sideways with shocking speed, knocking a Guard Sergeant clean off his feet.  The monster wrapped its tendrils around the wooden beam that held the ceiling aloft and tugged, bringing wood scraps and dust down on their heads.


	Axio stumbled as the floor dropped an inch.  The halfling fell to his knees and rolled towards the window.  The Aasimar bellowed in wrath as he saw his target slipping away.

	A tiny hand shot out of nowhere and grabbed the halfling’s leg.  It shrieked and tripped, and Axio was on him in a second, crushing the little man’s legs with his armored boots.  Axio looked around wildly for the source of the bloody arm he had seen trip the cultist.

	A pair of wide, teary, brown eyes peeked out at him from inside a burlap sack on the floor.  Axio immediately calmed his blinding rage and lowered his sword.  “Thank you, child,” he said in the gentlest tone he could manage.  He looked over at the bed and choked.  The dead child’s body was barely even there.  The black mist had desiccated its body to dust.  “I’ll get you out of here, I promise.”

	The halfling on the floor writhed and groaned, and Axio knocked it cold with a savage stomp.  He was sure the child wasn’t better for seeing that, but at this point, he was a bit too far gone in righteous rage to care much.


	Cavria sliced her glaive downwards and severed the tentacle holding the support beam up.  The golem squealed and tried to entangle her, but a Guard officer stabbed deep into its heart from behind, and it slumped over dead.

	The Paladin fiend had an instant’s notice.  “DOWN!” she screamed, and the golem exploded.