Those things are quick, Adon thought as the strix skated by Rosslyn, slashing at her with its claws.

  When she spun and kicked the bird before Adon could ready his mana ball to fire, he decided that he needed to get off of her and take advantage of being airborne. This fight was happening on his turf, in a sense. He had wings, just like the monsters. And he needed to use them to take his proper place in this fight.

  Adon flapped once and took off from Rosslyn’s shoulder, so he could get a more stable view of the fighting and prepare to help out.

  The strixes were already in retreat by the time he got into a position to better observe.

  That gave Adon the chance to take in what had happened above. It was mostly minor injuries—scratches to armor and occasionally the odd bit of bare flesh. Three knights had wounds that bled, none to vital places, none very profusely.

  He heard the screeching of the strixes at the same moment that Rosslyn did, but it took a moment for him to piece together what it meant. Everyone was shouting the same general sentiment in their mind at the same time, which actually slowed the butterfly’s reaction down.

  They are coming!

  The knights around Adon all shifted into battle ready positions again, no longer attempting to stanch bleeding or better stabilize their places on the cliff.

  Adon activated mental magic and accelerated his own thinking to better come up with a plan to attack the strixes himself. Clearly, the mana ball attack he had been charging before would not be viable—the monstrous birds were just too fast for that—so he had to come up with something else.

  And his brain quickly delivered.

  Adon pushed mana into his wings and flapped as hard and fast as he could, bursting away from the humans and the cliff face like a rocket taking off.

  Rosslyn must have seen him moving.

  Adon, where are you going? she thought in a loud, slightly flustered tone.

  Getting further away, attacking the birds, be ready to strike! he sent back breathlessly.

  To the group as a whole, he sent, Everyone, prepare to attack the birds, I will create an opening!

  He did not check if those behind him were moving. His eyes and mind were fixed on the strixes now. They surged forward in the dozens, no longer restrained or cautious with the confidence of their superior numbers.

  One of the upsides of Adon’s small size was that the birds seemed to be ignoring him completely. A little butterfly was just a non-factor when they had these other, much bigger fish to fry.

  The strixes would come to regret that line of thinking—if any of them survived.

  As the first wave of the bird monsters—a dozen of them—came within attacking range of the knights, Adon glided past, turned around, and unleashed a telepathic shout.

  Be still!

  He tried to infuse the words with the same kind of paralytic force he had managed to use on the mystic bear. The strixes all around him froze up, as if they had been jolted with electricity. The further away they were, the weaker the effects were, but he could still tell that all of the monsters near the knights had been affected. Even one or two of the knights seemed a little stunned; Adon had not been able to target only the strixes, because the attack required him to act too quickly, and the strixes were moving swiftly through the air at the time.

  Despite a couple of knights being sluggish, the next ten seconds were a bloodbath.

  Swords and axes slashed from multiple directions with great speed and precision, and over a dozen birds fell to the ground in pieces. Not just the entire first wave, but most of the second wave of attackers were killed in a matter of seconds, as the momentum of the birds closer to Adon carried them forward into the waiting grinder of weapons.

  Those birds in the first two waves that were positioned so as to be out of reach of the axe or the sword struck the cliff face instead, bounced off, and plummeted straight down. Adon felt a sense of great satisfaction at his contribution.

  As the next wave of birds passed him, heedless of what had happened to the strixes before them in the confidence of their numbers, he built up a bit of mana for a second psychic scream. Before he could use it, a gusher of ominous dark-colored liquid exploded in the strixes’ direction. Goldie had launched one of her projectile venom-and-silk attacks, and it struck about half the strixes, getting into open mouths and eyes—and perhaps more importantly, dousing their feathers in the sticky semi-liquid substance.

  The blend of fluids Goldie had employed this time appeared to be quick-drying, from what Adon saw. All the birds struck suddenly had to apply a lot more effort to fly, and the closest knights easily cut three of them down. The remaining strixes, seemingly recognizing the weakness of their position, pivoted to the other side of the waterfall and attacked Rosslyn.

  Her body glowed with an almost blinding amount of mana, and Adon watched with difficulty as she cut down one of the monsters and simply let the others’ attacks glance off of her body. They struck but seemed to fail to leave so much as a scratch on her armor—and she blocked the blows aimed at her head and neck with her arms, using the armor there to make her forearms into miniature shields. Adon tried to think of what he could do to help, but before he could move, the knights above her had descended and were providing support.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  That’s good. He turned his attention back to the front. Still more strixes were coming, of course—now taking advantage of the fact that the humans were embroiled in fighting the previous wave.

  But Adon saw good news soaring in from behind them: the griffins.

  The large, predatory half-eagle half-lion creatures were maintaining a certain distance. To Adon’s eye, it seemed as if the griffins wanted to make certain that the knights and strixes were really fighting before they joined in.

  It made sense, but he hoped that the griffins would actually jump in—ideally sometime before the strixes managed to find a way of adapting to the enemy they were fighting.

  The strixes adapted quickly.

  As more of them closed in—it seemed to Adon that all of the level’s population had showed up for this fight—the closest ones rushed in for glancing blows at any exposed bit of skin they could hit, not wasting their energy attacking armor. The strixes further back did not all rush in as well and mob the knights. Instead, they supported by charging and firing mana balls.

  These projectile attacks could be deflected by the knights by empowering their armor or their body with mana, and the knights did this—but if they were struck in several places while engaging a strix in close combat, Adon saw that they often failed to fully reinforce themselves. Slowly, burn marks and scratches began accumulating on the outnumbered human warriors.

  For his part, Adon turned completely invisible and periodically hit the strixes with his telepathic scream. But it seemed to be having little effect on the fighting now. A few of the birds struck with it were killed in close quarters with the knights, but the main flock was hanging back now, using mana attacks.

  The birds within that group, if struck by the telepathic attack, would lose control of the mana they were charging and begin to drop in midair, but there was a long way to fall, and they regained control over their bodies sometime between Adon’s height and the ground.

  These were intelligent monsters, as Adon had described in his report, and it seemed that mental attacks would be of only momentary effectiveness against them.

  The knights were holding their own, but the strixes had slowly turned the fight into a battle of attrition, in which their human opponents were dangling from a wall, slowly losing their strength, while most of the birds were gliding around outside of attacking range—for the knights outside or those behind the waterfall—and occasionally throwing mana attacks to distract whichever specimens happened to be attacking at any given moment.

  The first knight dropped from the cliffside after ten minutes of this. He fell from above Rosslyn, and the Princess quickly managed to throw her sword, hilt first, at the knight. He snatched the grip, and she managed to catch the blade between her boot heels, holding his entire body weight dangling above the ground with her feet, as both of her hands held onto the cliff for dear life.

  The other knights defended her for a few key seconds, until he had a hold of the cliff face again, and she had pulled her sword back into her hand.

  Then it was back to visibly exhausting exchanges with the strixes that made the sweat pour from Rosslyn and the knights’ faces, with occasional fatal blows typically achieved after Adon had used his power to throw a monster off-balance.

  The humans were growing noticeably less effective as combat wore on. The situation had begun to seem perilous.

  It was at that point that the griffins swept in.

  The only warning for the strixes was a mass of shadows overhead. The birds turned to look up at the predators, and several of them had their necks caught in eagle jaws. Others were pounced on by griffins eagerly throwing their full body weight onto the smaller birds.

  Adon heard the strixes screech in panic, attention ripped away from the knights.

  Took you long enough, the butterfly thought.

  A second later, as if on cue, the knights let loose a flurry of projectile attacks into the airborne melee of feathers and fur. Adon saw both arrows from the knights who had remained behind the waterfall—now poking their upper bodies out from the sides to take better aim at the more distant targets—and heavy chunks of rock ripped from the cliff face and enhanced with mana to do more damage.

  The tide turned, and in less than thirty seconds, the strixes that had been content to wage a war of attrition were either dead, dismembered, or fleeing, rushing away to their dens—pursued by the majority of the griffins.

  “Thank the Goddess!” a knight exclaimed.

  “The Goddess,” murmured the others. Both the tone of voice and the general vibe around the knights was gloomy, Adon observed. Even though they had won the fight without losing a single man, they looked much the worse for wear. Most knights had blood streaming from multiple wounds, a few of the wounds gushing in a manner that screamed “hospital” to Adon. One older knight had lost his helmet at some point and appeared to have been partially scalped, blood streaming fast from under a flap of loose flesh above his eye—and the eye was either swollen shut from some related trauma, or he simply could not see with it due to the river of blood.

  Mostly, everyone seemed tired. Even Rosslyn and the young lords looked bushed. Fighting while dangling from the side of a cliff was just as tiring as it looked, even for professional fighters whose bodies were fueled by magic.

  Adon made himself visible again and flew back toward the group, interested in seeing if anyone needed a heal that he might provide. Despite having spammed his telepathic shout, he had hardly begun to tap into his mana reserves for this fight. There just had not seemed to be much that his magical attacks could do, unless the birds were willing to stand still while the butterfly threw fire at them. He had determined that the best way he could help this time was in a supporting role.

  Well, this will make quite a story for you fellows, won’t it? Samson was asking as Adon fluttered over. Fighting monstrous birds in a dungeon, dangling from a cliffside, holding your ground until the cavalry—a cavalry of monsters, mind you!—arrived to save the day!

  There were some chuckles at that, and mutters of agreement, some begrudging and some amused. A few knights thanked Goldie for her contribution. One older fellow thanked Samson for inspiring him with an idea for his next tavern story.

  Adon had to marvel at his brother’s ability to spin the unpleasant events of the dungeon into gold. Samson was with the young lords’ group, too, so none of these people were Rosslyn’s. Getting them to see things in a positive light was probably crucial to the success of the whole expedition. Knowing Samson, that was part of why he had made this special effort to be charming.

  Well, I can only do what I can do, Adon thought.

  The social butterfly stuff was still beyond him. He was just the sacred magical butterfly with telepathic powers. That would need to be enough.

  The butterfly landed on the head of the knight who looked to have been partially scalped.

  I’m going to heal you, all right? he sent.

  Without waiting for an answer, Adon set to work.