Tomb Raiding

  Marci tapped her thigh as she stared down at the Priory and the small town that y in the lee of its crag. Bells were ringing, and even from hundreds of meters up she could hear the screams and shouts of the vilgers. And why shouldn't they scream and cry? A Shardfort had come, the first one to be seen in the south in decades. Rumours might have reached them, an aethergram or two, perhaps a newspaper if they were close enough to a printing press, but they would never have guessed that they were going to be the first pce struck. Some, she could see, were hiding in their houses, others were running for the hills.

  Marci's heart lurched, and it was only through a force of will she didn't turn around and start to cry. She knew that she had to do this, that she had to save her friends, but this… this felt like crossing a line. Even moreso than what she had done back at the gcier when she'd buried her mentor and the small force mustered to attack her. This was a town, peoples homes, and, here she was, terrorising them. She knew that she wasn't going to let any of the townsfolk get hurt, but they didn't know that.

  "Are you ready?" said Marci, turning her gaze to the hulking female pit fiend who had seemed the most competent and least crazed of all the avaible options to lead the distraction.

  "Yes, Dark Mistress," she said, bowing her head.

  "And are you clear on your instructions? That you are not to enter the town, that you are not to kill anyone? If you need to subdue someone attacking you, take them prisoner."

  That was the compromise she had eventually come up with, that she 'wanted them alive and unharmed so she could use them as bour.' Of course, Marci wasn't a great person, but she had no intention of doing that. But appearances had to be maintained.

  The pit fiend grinned. "Yes, m'dy," she said. "We will capture you many sves!"

  Marci suppressed a cringe and tried to wave imperiously, although she felt ridiculous. "Only if you need to; your primary role is distraction."

  The hulking brute saluted, and then picked up an imp and a wrath demon, fring her wings and taking to the air along with several other demons, dropping from the battlements and streaking towards the edge of town where their orders were to 'cause a ruckus' and 'draw the guards away.'

  Marci watched them go, tapping her thigh more impatiently as she watched the small garrison rush to defend the front of the town near where the demon had nded and started throwing around spells, blowing up signs and shattering fences and causing damage that, hopefully, wouldn't be too bad for the locals to repair.

  "Alright," said Marci to the rest of the demons, 'Squad two.' "Follow me; and remember, casualties to a minimum. We secure the temple area—all we need are the bones in the crypt. If there are people, I want them taken alive, alright?"

  She took off, dozens of other demons streaking out behind her as she immediately dove, making for the Priory, which was directly below the Shardfort's eastern battlement. Well, what were currently the eastern battlements.

  As she flew, Marci summoned power, threading it together into a powerful, fourth level spell. Since she wasn't under time pressure, she used runes, letting them coalesce around we as she carefully adjusted the circuits to account for the quirks of the local arcane field, scaled up several of the containment matricies to account for the unusually rge amount of mana she was about to pump into the spell, double checked everything, then raised her hand.

  Demolish was a spell that did exactly that, demolished constructions. It was technically a facet of terramancy, but it worked on basically anything used in the construction of buildings. It had been developed to break fortifications which, in turn, had developed magic designed to frustrate and resist it—resulting in a spell that was interesting from a theoretical standpoint, but had very little use-case in most modern battles. Clearly, however, the Priory had not been constructed with withstanding sieges in mind, because Marci's horrifically overpowered version of the spell erupted from her hands, streaked through the sky, and obliterated the roof of the temple and reduced it to a cloud of mostly white dust.

  "For the Dread Lady!" roared Rafferty, who as 'head of her Infernal Guard' had insisted that it was his responsibility to lead the assault she would be taking part in, as he dove past her. Crashing down into the churning, billowing dust and moving to secure the archway that led deeper into the monastery.

  "For the Dread Lady!" screamed most of the other demons as they ploughed into the expanding white cloud.

  Through her links to them, she could feel that a few of them located terrified priests and nuns and monks, and she grit her teeth as she felt several of them being rather brutally subdued. But not killed. Not killed.

  That meant… that made it alright, didn't it? What she was doing? No permanent damage?

  That was what she was going to tell herself.

  She cast a slightly overpowered rank two spell, Gust, and cleared away the remains of the roof, revealing that the demons had already secured the room, and were grouping their bound and somewhat bloodied prisoners in the centre.

  "Tremble, worms, before the Dread Lady Marci!" said Rafferty, saluting as Marci floated down into the temple.

  "It's- it's you!" said a very white, dust-covered man, who it took her a moment to realise was the priest she had seen before. "The lesbian necromancer!"

  Marci winced. She didn't really mind being called a lesbian, even if it wasn't technically entirely accurate, but it was… 'lesbian necromancer' was not the title she really wanted.

  "You will address her Dread Highness with respect!" roared Raffery, raising a vicious hand.

  "Enough," said Marci, stopped him before he shattered the man's jaw. "Take him and the others to the cells. Unharmed, remember?"

  "Yes, your Unholy Eminence!" said Raffery, gesturing for some of the other demons to grab the assembled men and women.

  Marci tried hard not to look at the miserable figures as they were hauled off by demons and into the sky. She had instructed the kobolds to make the cells a bit nicer, to give them proper bedding and chairs and whatnot, but she knew that their time there was going to be awful, no matter how nice she made the accomodations.

  She pushed the thought aside again. She needed these bones to free her friends from Saxmoor prison. If she used exclusively demons against a proper garrison, then it didn't matter what orders she gave, it would be a massacre.

  A mental message to Likes Hammers, and flex of will, and the Dreadfort began to descend, looming lower and lower and lower until it blocked out the sun, its craggy, rocky base no more than thirty meters above them. Overhead, a newly constructed crane swung out, all gleaming steel and wire, and a rge ptform began to lower itself down and into the breached temple, loaded with kobolds with wheelbarrows and construction supplies, and overseen by Saoirse, who did have wings—bat-like ones that she usually kept tightly furled, but for whatever reason had preferred to ride the lift down.

  The Kobolds got off, and immediately sprung into motion, ying pnks on stairs, ripping out wide doorways, and racing down into the catacombs to ransack the interred remains of the holy.

  She checked on the distraction, gd to see that the demons were actually following their orders, dug in and letting the terrified and ill-equipped garrison shoot ineffectually at them with wildly inaccurate, likely outdated muskets. Slowly, the knot in Marci's stomach began to unwind.

  Yes, a few priests had gotten hurt, but as far as she could tell, no one had been killed. Her pn was working, going smoothly. The kobolds were fast workers, and soon they'd have the thousands of skeletons in the crypt safely tucked away on the Dreadfort. She'd be able to prune her demonic forces back to just the ones she thought could be trusted, she'd raise an undead army, free her friends, and… well, then the time pressure would be off. Everything was going well; everything would be fine…

  Then she frowned as she felt Jonda's mind cmouring for her attention, and shifted her focus back up to the elf, who was standing on the battlements above and pointing at a group of four gryphons closing in on them. With the elf's eyesight, Marci could make out a group of incredibly well-equipped looking adventurers, all gleaming, glowing pte, high quality robes woven with pulsing runes, and absurdly rge weapons that they held as if they were made of papier-maché.

  No, not just adventurers. The top echelon of adventurers.

  Heroes.

  "Fuck!" swore Marci.