This one was dangerous! Drawing himself up, Tarrin reached into the Weave and strangled the strands in the local area, choking them off and leaving them incapable of conducting Wizard magic through them. The Demoness blinked and started, and then her dark eyes seemed to focus on Tarrin as he rushed up from the south. But Tarrin saw that the damage had been done, for the black-uniformed men whom the Demoness commanded were rushing forward with great shouts, running through the ditch as the fire burning the logs in the breastwork died away, almost as if by some kind of cue. The ki'zadun were rushing towards the hole left behind by the spell of the marilith, seeking to gain a foothold on the inside of the fortifications and split the defenders in half. Knights and Vendari reversed their retreat the instant the fire died away, and the first of the enemy forces to jump over the charred logs found not a hole, but a thin line of Knights and Vendari seeking to prevent the enemy from penetrating any further. The twenty or so Knights and Vendari fought with furious desperation as the others in the line charged to support them, but their noble stance ended in death for all the Knights and many of the Vendari, swarmed over by superior numbers. But the ki'zadun found that for every Knight or Vendari they killed, another would rush up to take his place, preventing them from advancing more than a step for every enemy they cut down. But those steps quickly began to add up, as the lines of the defense bulged dangerously around the breach the Demoness had formed in their defense.

Then the Demoness appeared at the forefront of her forces. Each of her six arms held a sword, and she crashed into the Knights and Vendari like a whirlwind of death. Their weapons bounced off of her scaly snake body and her soft flesh upper torso harmlessly, but she killed a defender with each wave of one of those six swords. The ki'zadun formed up behind her, making her the point of a wedge, and they began to overwhelm the defenders in short order.

Tarrin sprinted forward, literally knocking defenders out of his way as he circled around to where the Demoness would come face to face with him. He watched her even as he moved, saw how competent and deadly she was with those six swords. He realized that trying to fight her one on one was suicide, even for him. He had one weapon, and no amount of weaving and dodging would keep him out of the reach of those six weapons for very long. But yet, what choice did he have? By blocking her Wizard and Demonic powers, he prevented himself from using Sorcery; it would be too strenuous to try, given how tired he was. He had to confront her physically.

He couldn't use Sorcery.

Tarrin stopped, reaching within, through the Cat, and touched the eternal, endless energy of the All. He remembered clearly some of the spells that Sathon taught him, and one of them would work perfectly in this situation. He formed his intent and image, though the image was little more than his own body, and then pushed his will into the All. It read his intent and responded to his request, and he felt magical power surge into him, through him, infusing his body with its power.

And the world began to slow down. Not apparently at first, but the Knights and Vendari began to move slower and slower, the sounds of the battle became lower and lower pitched, sluggish, and even the dust in the air began to swirl lazily. It became more and more apparent, until men hung in the air for impossible amounts of time between footsteps, and arms and legs moved like dandelion fluff floating in the still air.

Tarrin had used Druidic magic to accelerate his body, to increase his speed beyond natural limitations. The spell ususally came a a dreadful cost to humans, for it put incredible stresses on the body and caused it to accelerate its aging during the time it was sped up. A man could die of old age within ten minutes if the accelerated state was maintained, so it was something Druids usually used as a last resort. But Tarrin's body was immune to the effects of age, so it would be safe for him to use, at least for a few moments. He hoped that a few moments would be all it took.

Tarrin blazed through the men and came face to face with the Demoness. She moved much faster than the men around her, but she was still very slow to him as he engaged her without any warning or challenges. The surprised look on her face was very apparent to him, but he concentrated on keeping those six swords away from his body. He moved like lightning, but he was using a single weapon against six, and found himself parrying blow after blow, coming from above, below, in front, the sides, and every angle in between. The Demoness used the six swords in complete, total harmony, and Tarrin was hard pressed to do anything but defend against her, despite the fact that he could move more than twice as quickly as she. He barely managed to parry a stunningly complicated and fast series of slashes that came in from every angle at once, and he hissed in pain when one of the edges of those weapons slice across his waist, leaving a bleeding slash wound nearly five fingers long in his side.

Tarrin backed off, realizing that he was using the wrong weapon. He traded his sword into the elsewhere for his staff, a single weapon whose two ends and middle would give him a great deal more versatility and options against this dangerous foe. He came right back at her fearlessly, holding the staff in the center-grip, and she again unleashed a stunning series of interwoven slashes and thrusts that would have killed three men in seconds. But Tarrin used the entire staff to slap those attacks away, spinning it in his paws so quickly it whistled through the air with every movement, and it forced the snake-bodied Demoness to stop advancing forward as he turned and attacked her, knocking wide two weapons on her left side, parrying a third from the right, then turning the staff and driving it point first into her belly, just above where the mottled scales of her snake body began, jamming the staff's butt right into her navel. She actually slithered back a few spans, giving up the ground she had won as she struggled to take a breath, but Tarrin waded right into her, literally right into the wedge formation she headed, keeping the Demoness off balance and not giving her the chance to recover.

Tarrin's stand gave the defenders a chance to regroup themselves, and they fell on their smaller or more lightly armored foes with a renewed fury. They smashed into the wedge formation, crushing its left side and bending back its right as the Vendari and Knights drove the wedge back into itself. The Demoness hissed sibilantly at Tarrin, but then he sensed something on the edge of his awareness, and realized that the Demoness was communicating telepathically with her troops. They began to pull back, retreat as the Knights and Vendari threatened to encircle them and cut them off from the troops still coming over the fence and through the ditch, to reform their lines and attempt another breakout. Tarrin killed a few of the ki'zadun that tried to block him away from the Demoness, and then re-engaged her as the rest of her troops retreated behind her. She fought with a renewed vigor, moving faster than she was before as she took him very seriously, and he could see the look of intense concentration on her face as she sought to cut off his paws with her swords, attacking not his body, but the staff and the paws holding it. Tarrin spun the weapon precisely before him, parrying those attacks on his paws and fingers, but she got closer and closer with every new slice. They traded furious blows as Tarrin tried to disarm her even as she tried to disarm him, a dazzling display of weapon handling as two masters of their respective weapons wove intricate designs before them in a contest not of strength, but one of delicate nuance and skill, a contest where a miscalculation of a mere finger's width could spell the difference between victory and defeat.