As you command, honored one, she replied immediately.
Get Darvon to form up at the entrances to the towers, he added. We can't let them get into the towers.
He's already done that, she replied, and then she retreated from him.
The quartet stopped advancing on the group when a Knight ran his sword through one of the Demons, and the exposed back of the other suddenly bloomed a spear shaft between its shoulder blades as a Legionaire skewered it from behind. They weren't alone long as one of the big ones, a glabrezu, howled in fury and advanced on them, its bloodstained pincers on its outer arms clacking in horrid anticipation. Behind it advanced a pair of cambisi, the night-skinned, scaly looking humanoid half-breed Demons brandishing bloody swords, using the much larger fullblood Demon as a shield.
Tarrin had them spread out with sharp movements of his paws, then raised his sword in both hands and squared off, challenging the glabrezu. He'd fought such a beast before, and he was aware that they were very fast, very strong, and were very dangerous. But then again, so was he. It bellowed when it reached them, and Tarrin barely registered the sound of steel on steel as the Marines and the Knight engaged the two cambisi as he slid aside of a plunging thrust with the sharp ends of its pincers on one huge arm, like a spear aimed at his chest, then ducked under the wide, sweeping blow of the other. The Demon recovered from its lunge fast enough to knock wide Tarrin's attempt to stab it in the lower belly; it was odd to fight an oppenent taller than him. He only came up to the Demon's chest. Unfazed by its defense, Tarrin reared back and swung his sword in a massive sidewards blow, turning it back in the same direction from which it had been deflected. The Demon tried to block it with the bony pincer, which usually would be an effective shield, but it had never faced a weapon like Tarrin's. The weapon didn't seem to be magical, but its edge was incredibly keen, and the inhuman power he could put behind it gave it awesome cutting ability. The majority of both bony pincers spun away from the arm in a wide arc as the Were-cat's sword neatly severed them, then Tarrin lunged in with the sword low to get inside the inevitable retaliatory strike from the other outside arm. He ducked under the two smaller taloned hands that ended the arms that stuck out of the front of its chest as they reached out for him, seeking his eyes, spinning slightly as he reversed his grip on his sword with one paw and let go with the other, so the blade extended from the outside of his gripping fist rather than the inside, which was the standard holding grip. Ducking down as much as he could, one paw on the ground to give him stability and lower his profile even more, Tarrin continued to move forward, slithering between the giant Demon's spread legs. It hunched over, its good pincer-arm aiming down to stab him with the sharp ends, but then it howled in a high-pitched, agonized keening as Tarrin's shifted sword sliced across the side of its leg, severing the tendons and muscles in the knee. Tarrin cleared out from under it as its lamed leg crumpled under its weight, and then, with a savage snarl, he flipped the sword back around into a proper grip and lashed out with it at the Demon's unprotected lower back, shearing through its spine and sending a good longspan of blade through its body. The Demon collapsed to the ground, its upper body swaying grotesquely without any bone to hold it to the lower part of the body, but Tarrin was on it before it could even roll over. With a vast overhanded chop, he separated its doglike head from its body with one precise, well-aimed blow.
He recovered just in time to parry a strong slash from one of the cambisi, backing up a step to give his larger weapon enough room to bring it to bear. One Wikuni was down and still, the other was kneeling on the ground with a hand to his chest, bleeding from a wide gash in his chest, and the Knight was defending his fallen companions from the other cambisi as it pressed him with light, precise thrusts and flicks of his serrated-edged longsword. The cambisi before him wielded his weapon lightly and surely, like a fencer, so Tarrin decided on using raw, elemental brutality. Quickly and without much finesse, he brought his sword down on the cambisi with vast power, staggering it back as it blocked a blow that would have split its head in half had it connected. The red-glowing eyes of the halfbreed flickered with shock and surprise as Tarrin swung again, then again, hitting it with such power that it could not recover in time to strike back before Tarrin was screaming that black blade right back at the Demon's face. With great, sweeping blows, Tarrin backed the Demon back almost into its companion, then quickly and deftly pinioned his weapon and slapped wide a desperate attempt to stab the length of its sword into his belly before he could rain down another punishing blow. Caught off guard by a quick and convincing display of finesse and fencing ability, the Demon did not recover in time to avoid Tarrin's club-like fist when it smashed into the Demon's helmet. He had learned long ago that he may not be able to do Demons any harm with such attacks, but the raw power behind the blow was something not even against which a Demon's invulnerability could protect. Tarrin had learned, the hard way, the magic went only so far when it defended one against the immense power of physics.
Stunned by the devastating blow, the side of its helmet caving in and skewing aside so it covered the Demon's eyes, and spinning in a full circle, the cambisi staggered back from the massive power behind that attack, staggering right into its companion, knocking its sword inward at a critically bad moment. The Knight pounced on his foe's momentary incapacity, crunching his glowing broadsword into the Demon's breastplate with a powerful thrust. Tarrin raised his weapon and drove it into the Demon's head, before it could right its helmet, and both foes dropped nervelessly to the ground.
"Sarraya, see to the wounded," he ordered of the invisible, lingering Faerie as the Knight gave him a wolfish grin. He raised his visor, and Tarrin realized that it was Ulger.
"You're as good as they say you are," he complemented. "Come on, boy, let's go get some more of them!"
"I'll do what I can for these two," Sarraya called from somewhere beside him. "I'll catch up in a bit."
"Be careful," he ordered.
"Always," she replied before he heard her wings buzzing, lowering her to the Wikuni laying on the ground.
The Were-cat and the Knight sallied forth from that battleground and became a mobile terror for the Demons, attacking those already scrambling in frenzied desperation to protect themselves from a pack of incensed Knights, Marines, and Legionaires that had revenge burning in their expressions and fury seething in their eyes. They gathered up more and more stragglers as they finished off Demons already engaged by other defenders, stragglers that were quickly forming up with other Demons to seek safety in numbers. The defenders had trouble attacking these large groups of Demons, so they too began to gather, and the most dangerous of these groups was Tarrin's. The stray Knights, Marines, and Legionaires that he and Ulger had picked up had formed something of a loose mobile wedge formation with Tarrin at its point and the Legionaires and their large shields and spears directly behind him to engage Demons not totally focused on the lethal Were-cat. The heavily armored Knights protected the flanks of the Legionaires, also protecting the Wikuni Marines that prowled the edges of the formation seeking to flank and envelop enemies struck by the wedge by giving them a secure base within the wedge to which they could retreat when necessary. They moved about the battlefield to engage any Demon that had been trapped by pockets of defenders from joining the main host. Tarrin would slam into the Demons with the Legionaires' spears jabbing at them from behind him, their shields interlocked to keep the Demons off the rest of the wedge as the Knights anchored the Legionaires' flanks and the Wikuni Marines flowed out quickly to surround the engaged foe. Though nobody had called out that they use that tactic, it proved to be devastating. All of them were seasoned, veteran fighters, and they had instinctively gathered into the most efficient and effective formation they could have used. The wedge grew wider and wider as more men joined it, each man going immediately to where his comrades were stationed within the formation, and the large moving formation quickly became a rallying point for all the other groups of defenders that had been doing their best to prevent the Demons from regrouping.