“We’re not going back!” Caera’s voice. She turned around and got to work, slicing a couple of remnants apart at the waist, and unlike Jes, she got all the way through. Blood rained onto the remnants below, lost in the chaos. “Get David!”
“That pole is going to break!” Jes gestured to the metal tooth. “David, get over here!”
“Not without Acelina!”
“She can handle herself.”
David looked down at Acelina and squeezed the metal until his knuckles turned white. It was all too scary how she dangled from the metal, like some sort of action movie where she’d slip and die. But not only did she start pulling herself up, she did it easily.
“Go,” she said.
David gulped, and watched the huge woman do a pull up, and then a muscle up, until she’d pushed herself high enough the bar was under her against her waist, both hands pressed down against it.
Of course, the huge metal tooth had already started to bend, and Acelina driving her weight down to push herself up was the tipping point. It broke, and the metal ripped out of the stone at the lip of the pit.
“Shit!” Gravity went out from under him, and the world turned upside down as both he and the huge demoness fell. They didn’t fall far. The metal pole only stuck out half a dozen feet from the edge, and the wall of the pit itself went down maybe forty-five degrees. But it was a steep enough angle David hit the layers of remnants, and rolled down.
Acelina didn’t roll. She hit the remnants and hit them hard. Unlike him, she managed to get right side up before landing, and her hooves ground into the remnants beneath her as she slid down the wall of flesh hard enough the remnants tore apart. She slammed her claws into the wall of gore deep enough she came to a stop, earning more death screams from the emaciated souls, and another rain of blood.
Her tail snapped out, and slipped under David’s arm. He grabbed it, and earned another shriek of pain from the demoness.
Daoka stood at the edge of the pit, clicking like an angry cicada and looking around in a panic.
“David!” All the Las yelled. “David! David! David! Da–”
Before they got to do anything about his problem, remnants crawled out of the hole, and created a new one. Dozens of remnants. Hundreds. Some groaning, some weeping, some shrieking like demons, they climbed out of the pit, stood with hunched backs and dragging limbs, and looked around with tear-filled eyes.
Movement underneath David yanked his eyes down. Remnants, half buried in flesh, rock, and blood, reached out for him. Fingers wrapped his wrists, his ankles, and arms hooked behind his shoulders and knees.
“Let go!” He pushed down against the sea of flesh, and cringed from head to toe as his fingertips slipped into soft things. One broke through someone’s skin on their cheek. Another pressed into organs sitting between the shoulders of remnants that’d rolled down from above. Another stabbed into one of their eyes.
The remnants squeezed, and bit into him. Their jaws were weak, and so were their fingers, but there were dozens of them directly underneath him, and each of them had him within reach. They bit, scratched him until their fingers ripped off, and pulled on anything they got their hands on.
“Climb!”
Climb? He snapped his gaze up. That was Acelina’s voice.
“Your tail–”
“I said climb!”
He clenched his eyes shut for half a second, and got climbing. Acelina’s tail already had a dozen hands pulling on it, and the remnants were pulling on David, too, trying to drag him down deeper into the huge pit. The moment he pulled on the tail, the demoness shrieked again, and her tail, thinner than even Jes’s, went rigid with flexing muscle. It was not a prehensile tail, and his weight, combined with all the remnants trying to pull it off, hurt her.
Every inch he pulled himself up her dark, leathery red skin, was torture. Every inch earned more growls of pain from her, and each sent a pulse of nausea through him. He hated it. God, he fucking hated hurting her.
“Acelina, you–”
“Shut up and climb you stupid child!”
He climbed. He pulled with one hand, pushed with one leg, and used the other limbs to rip and kick himself free of the desperate souls. Where his blood ended and theirs began, he didn’t know, but in the midst of clawing fingertips, gnashing teeth, and pouring blood and torn bodies rolling down the pit wall from above, he climbed. He broke their jaws and skulls with his heel. He broke their fingers. He climbed.
Once he got to Acelina’s back, she had a few spikes he could climb, but scaling up them wasn’t easy. The huge demon twisted and clawed at the remnants underneath her, and she slammed her hooves down against them as she fought to get her footing somewhere solid. There was nothing solid. Every swipe of her claws drew fountains of blood, only to expose more remnant flesh underneath growing from the stone. Her hooves found the same. She slid deeper into the pit.
Daoka clicked furiously from the edge. More remnants joined her, most ignored by the other remnants, as if they knew the only way they were getting out of the pit was if they stopped killing each other. It was easy enough for the satyr to shove them off and send them back into the funnel hole, or cut them open using the dagger, but each time she did, another one replaced them.
The Las ran around in a panic. Effortlessly light, all four of them jumped onto the teeth jutting out over the pit, and equipped with a piece of David’s armor in hand, they bludgeoned the remnants that crawled up the pit wall underneath them. Well, at least they were safe. Mostly.
“Jes!” David yelled. “Help Dao!”
“The fuck do you think I’m doing!?” she said, backing away around the pit until her back nearly hit Dao’s.
“Dao, get ready!” he said.
Daoka didn’t hesitate. She squatted down at the edge of the pit over Acelina, but out of reach of her. Acelina couldn’t risk lifting her hands to reach for her, not when every swing of her claws was a desperate attempt to keep her from sliding any deeper, and only half successful.
Now or never. Don’t think. Just go.
He got a foot on Acelina’s back, and jumped. With only his breastplate on, he wasn’t weighed down too much, and he got enough air to get the tip of his fingers to graze Dao’s. It was enough. She squeezed, clamped them around his fingers, and earned a yelp from him when she pulled on him. Another quick tug and she readjusted her grip onto his wrist before his fingers broke, and pulled harder.