Bait and Switch [Marian & Fenris]
Marian had caught sight of Fenris a few times searching about the room whilst the two Hawkes stayed in constant movement each fighting their own battles. Carver was thrashing about the place laying waste to the shades, but they seemed to be an endless spawning. It was only out of the corner of her eye that she saw Fenris… walk through a wall.
That made her pause for a brief second, which was just enough time to allow a blast of magic from one of the shades to lance into her side and a blow to fall into her chest from another. Reeling from the blows, she heard the battle cry and watched as Carver charged across the room and flayed both shades with a crushing blow of his sword allowing her to regain her feet and shake off the blows.
The wounds were superficial, and she still had all her movement, so she lurched back into action in hopes that their compatriot was searching for the caster behind all the demons; otherwise, she feared that this was not a battle they could win. Eventually both she and Carver would tire. Perhaps he even chose to just leave the situation and save himself. It wouldn’t have been the first time that he put someone else’s life in danger to save his own hide for his own reasons. Wasn’t that how she ended up in this mess to begin with?
It didn’t matter; she could only hope for the best and keep on fighting. The massive swarm of continuous demons finally pinned both her and Carver into a corner where they were fighting back to back in order to keep themselves protected and keep the beasts at bay. It was hard to actually hear anything over the din of the room, all the magical energy floating about, but she thought she heard a gunshot. And – the next stab went through the demon and sent him to ash where he never recovered.
It was as if the magic fell out of the demons all at once. They began falling to their blows and turning to blackened soot that never came back to life. By the time the last one fell, the dust had kicked up to near blinding density. Tearing two pieces of cloth from a nearby tapestry, she passed one to Carver, whom took it great fully and held it over his mouth as they headed in the direction of the barricaded door, now shrouded in the black mist.
As quickly as she could, she kicked the chair from the knob and threw open the door to an empty hallway and a trail of blood leading to the room at the end of the hall. There was nothing but silence in just about every direction which was a little unnerving, but at least now that they were out of the haze, she couldn’t tell between the ash and blood whether Carver had been injured or not. So, she busily set to work checking him for wounds as he bemoaned her with insistent ‘I’m fine’s’. After a thorough checking, he seemed to have only a few small wounds, one of them being a small gash to the head where most of the blood had come from.
Bending down for her bag, she got a clean bandage, a bottle of water, and a rag, which she doused in water to clean the wound and then bandaged up before beginning to head down the hallway following the trail of blood. It was there that she found Fenris and a gore filled room with what looked like the remainder of a body, but she couldn’t quite tell.
“Are you hurt?” she looked over Fenris who appeared to be covered in soot and blood, but whether it was his or someone else’s she wasn’t certain. “I take it from the look in your eyes that you didn’t find who you were looking for.” Her brows raised in a question even though the words she spoke were a blanket statement.
Fenris had no time to spare for certainty after his gunshot. He was too occupied by the foes which boxed him in. Once he'd busted out of the shade he'd phased into, he shot the one before him in the face and used the hole such a blow had created to pushes his arm in without phasing, tearing it down through the creature's throat.
The battle seemed to be letting up, which meant that his shot had rang true. After all his remaining enemies lay defeated, he could just make out the sight of the blood mage's head, tilted back, bullet wound splintered through her jaw.
He fell to his knees, coughing mouthfuls of ash from his throat and spitting it in clumps on the floor.
And what of those you dragged into this mess?
A brief, insistent panic flared in Fenris, but he heard footsteps in the hall, and seconds later Marian and Carver had pushed their way into the last room with him.
"Not critically, though whether I am to suffocate on filthy demons' dust is yet unclear," he responded, voice hoarse. "How have the both of you fared?" He had expected a battle of the magnitude they had encountered, or /worse,/ yet he felt as though he had not quite prepared them for it. For that, Fenris felt guilt--a sentiment of which he was not fond.
