Those watching, however, noticed it instantly.
Her obviously human appearance, now that the foreboding black and grey covering was gone, combined with her target selection, changed everything in an instant.
Simone looked up, recognizing the girl she had only just begun to know, and felt both relief that the girl lived and the despair she had felt begin to fade. Elan was alive, and that meant that there was a good chance Caleb had survived as well, but more than that…she could feel the sense of defeat lifting.
“Open that hole!” she ordered as loudly as she could, shaking people from their shocked state. “Get our people clear!”
The flagging morale reversed almost instantly, though, really, the odds and chances hadn’t shifted much at all on the surface. One person, with a single infantry weapon…no matter how great, really couldn’t significantly affect the material status of a battle like this…
But battles were not won or lost on merely their material status.
As the humans surged forward again, fighting with both renewed hope and the knowledge that there was nothing left for them to lose, the demons were suddenly caught between a vicious enemy and a mythic goddess from stories told to frighten the young and the gullible.
Terror and despair were the emotions they felt, and it showed in their reactions.
The hole opened as the human lines surged, and people began fleeing through it.
*****
“Get to the leader of the humans,” Merlin told Elan, his voice holding a tinge of urgency the likes of which felt out of place for him.
“What? Why?”
“Just do it. If you want anyone there to live, do what I say,” he ordered tensely.
Elan didn’t really have any objections to the plan. She’d intended to fight her way to Simone anyway, and from a glance it seemed like Simone was the leader Merlin wanted her to reach.
“Fine. You will tell me what this is about, eventually, I hope?” Elan asked sarcastically.
“I won’t have to. You’ll see it for yourself,” he told her, his tone a disturbing mix of cold and amused.
She shivered.
“Suddenly I’m not certain I want to know,” she mumbled.
“Too late for that, I’m afraid. No going back now.”
That just confirmed that she didn’t want to know what he was talking about. Still, she had her goal, and Elan set out to achieve it. She only had to redirect slightly, as she had been aiming for a slightly less direct route originally, but Simone was on the move.
“Run,” Merlin advised her. “Time is short.”
Elan broke into a sprint, charging right into the biggest mass of demons on the bank, and plowed through them like a machine. In close, she used the blaster faster and without waiting for the green flicker to confirm her target. There weren’t any humans in the way, and she couldn’t have missed if she wanted to anyway.
Between the blaster and her elbows, knees, and other bodily weapons, Elan sent the filth of the demon forces scattering as she used the lean of the land to her advantage and fought her way through the ranks until she burst out over a ridge that dropped away to the riverbed below.
Elan landed in a crouch, three demons slamming into the ground around her somewhat less gracefully.
She got to her feet and sprinted to where she spotted the red hair she knew to be Simone’s. Some men got between them, warily and with swords drawn, but Simone waved them off.
“Let her through,” Simone ordered over the din of fighting. “Keep our people moving.”
Elan came to a stop. “You need to get everyone back down to the shore.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Simone said. “There are obstacles, you might have noticed.”
“You don’t know half of it,” Elan growled. “Most of the demons are arrayed upriver. Far more than we can ever fight. You have to get to the shore.”
“Then what? If there are that many, they’ll just run us down,” Simone said. “We can’t outrun them.”
“Convince her,” Merlin said tersely in her ears.
“You won’t have to, Simone.” Elan grabbed her by the shoulder. “Listen to me. Unless you want everyone to die, get them to the shore. As fast as you can.”
Simone looked into the crystal blue eyes, swallowed a shiver of cold fear, and nodded. “Alright. Fine. Nothing else I can do anyway. I just hope we have enough to fight through.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Elan said grimly, repeating what Merlin was telling her. “Just remember, when you get to the shore, look for an outcropping of rocks to the north. Get to them. You’ll know them when you see them. Get to them.”
“Go back to the north? That’s right back into their territory!”
“Just do it, Simone!” Elan snapped. “Just…just do it.”
Simone stared at her for a second but, frankly, they had nothing left to lose.
“Fine.”
Elan turned away, looking to the lines that were holding for now as men and women rushed by, carrying children and elderly and the injured. Behind them, flashes of energy could still be seen from the hilltop where she had spotted Kaern battling earlier.
“I’ll do what I can to buy you time,” Elan promised, “but get to those rocks. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Wait!” Simone grabbed her arm. “What about Caleb? Is he okay?”
Elan smiled. “He’s around.”
*****
“There’s a lot of them,” a man with a bow in his hands said softly as he crouched beside Caleb, looking over the riverbed from their observation point.
“Yeah, and every living one of them is going to try and kill our people,” Caleb said grimly before adding, somewhat belatedly, “and us.”
He laughed, a little dark, he supposed, but it was what it was.
“I guess we do it to them first,” Caleb said. “Get everyone into place.”
The man nodded and crawled back, leaving Caleb to look over the swarm of demons alone.
Caleb didn’t like being alone. It left him with too much time to think about what he was doing, and what he maybe should be doing. He should be training with Simone. Those days now felt like a distant memory though, playing games with his sword training, like it wasn’t serious.
Well, it was serious now.
Caleb withdrew from his position and crawled back to where the others were waiting.
He didn’t like being alone, but Caleb looked around at the determined faced who were waiting for him and he knew…
He wasn’t alone.
“We’ve been afraid of the dark for a long time… I believe,” he said, feeling younger even than he was as older eyes looked to him for orders, “that it’s time we remind the demons why they should fear the light.”
They did not cheer—it was too important to remain quiet—but the gleam in their eyes told him that they knew what he was saying and understood.
*****
Kaern slammed back into a tree, hard enough to likely have crippled a human, but he was able to move enough to dodge the follow up that was aimed to take his head off. He was cut and bleeding from a dozen places, at least three serious, even for him. In exchange, three of the lord general’s guard lay dead or injured to the point of being unable to continue and unlikely to recover.
The remaining nine, however, were quite intent on making him pay for that.
“You truly must be one of the Forsaken,” the female he’d crossed blades with gritted out, bleeding from several spots herself. “No one else could take on the twelve of us and last this long.”
Kaern laughed scornfully. “Nine now, but don’t flatter yourself. I’ve not done anything yet that a skilled human couldn’t have managed. You lot have gone soft. Haven’t met a real fighter in five centuries, I would bet, if ever.”
She hissed at him. “Arrogance.”