The only thing they were waiting for was the army to finish getting soldiers in place. They’d lost a lot of their earth mages, their combat mages, and just all-around soldiers in general, so there wouldn’t be any fortifications set up. It was going to be nasty up on the surface if the push into the tunnels was successful. Nym did not envy them that job.
Of course, it was going to be just as bad underground, if not worse. For one, Archmage Veran was not going with them. There’d been a round of objections when he’d announced that, followed by a second round once he’d informed the group that Nym would be taking his place. The archmage had ignored all of that and simply informed them that he had no choice but to personally attend to the tear and ensure that no reinforcements came through.
Nym wasn’t surprised. With so many third circle mages killed and reanimated as wights, there simply weren’t enough people to rotate through the ritual spell needed to hold the tear closed. The archmage had been personally picking up that slack to keep things from getting worse. Every day he looked a bit more exhausted, but he never complained about it.
He’d missed the introductions, but Nym was able to pick up who the two military people and the woman in the brightly layered clothes were through context. One was a communications specialist whose primary job would be coordinating with the above-ground forces, and the other was on disposal. He would be ashing ghoul parts with powerful heat spells that didn’t actually generate fire. The other woman was one of the original members of the team from twenty years ago who’d been called in to help by targeting wights.
Nym did not catch her name, but he did get the impression that both army specialists were a bit afraid of her. She rarely spoke or added anything to the conversation, and it was easy to forget she was there despite her bright clothing. If not for the occasional spark of arcana around her refreshing whatever magic she was using, he might have forgotten about her completely.
The army specialists, on the other hand, were quite formal and kept addressing each other as Major Stelton and Sergeant Grom. Stelton was the army mage in charge of communications and Grom did cleanup. They were both in their thirties, both looked haggard, and their uniforms were covered in patches and stitched up tears. They looked nothing like the personnel Nym remembered from his time working directly with the army.
The plan was simple, at least for their team. They would go in through a predetermined entrance, Babkin leading, and start carving their way through undead. Leaf would be on dismemberment and protection duty since Babkin would not be slowing down to make sure each ghoul was thoroughly chopped up. The sneaky woman would spearhead their primary objective: killing as many wights as possible.
Nym’s main job was live scouting and crowd control for Leaf. Babkin would be left to his own devices, per his request. Nym would also be backing Leaf up in the limb-removal front as well, and possibly helping Grom with clean up if he got too far behind, though he didn’t know the army mage’s heat disintegration spell yet. It wouldn’t take him long to figure it out, he was sure. As far as the rest of his team knew though, he’d be using regular fire and copious amounts of air magic to direct the smoke away from them.
They had a giant map of the forest pinned up on the wall with the results of Archmage Veran’s scrying on it. A huge, tangled web of lines sprawled across the forest and out into the surrounding countryside. It would take weeks or even months to walk them all, but fortunately they had a clear goal in mind.
In the center, underneath the mausoleum where the tear was, there was a spot that even the archmage himself couldn’t get through the wards to scry. That was their secondary goal, one no one expected to get close to this way. After they’d thinned the number of earth mage wights out, they had plans to tunnel down as close as they could to it to attack that way. That had been the initial goal of the excursion, but there were too many concerns about ghouls scattering in every direction, and army manpower had been devoted towards containment and sweeping instead.
It reminded Nym uncomfortably of his time under the snow, except that this time he wouldn’t be invisible to the enemy. Of course, he also wouldn’t be alone, and ghouls wouldn’t just pop out of the walls like the ice worms did. On the other hand, ice worms were much easier to kill. If ghouls would burn up from lightning bolts, Nym would be a lot less worried about the whole thing.
Since that wasn’t the case, he was glad to have Babkin standing in front of him. A hyperkinetic barrier was all well and good, right up until he was buried under a literal pile of squirming, writhing ghouls. Even then, he was sure he could teleport out, but the whole mission would be kind of pointless if they only made it a hundred feet in before they had to abandon it.
Eventually, Stelton piped up to let them know everything was ready. Archmage Veran gave them one last call to gather their supplies, and then teleported them into the forest. It was time to begin.
* * *
“This doesn’t look like much,” the sneaky woman said. All six of them were standing in front of a shallow cave, maybe thirty feet deep, plus another three army mages working under Grom as part of the fire team. Another twenty soldiers were waiting nearby to advance into the cave and hold it against any ghoul spillage once things got hot.
The sneaky woman glanced back at Nym. “Scrying tell you anything?”
“Cave wall is only about two feet thick at the back end, and most of that’s hard packed dirt instead of stone,” he reported. “I can have it open in a minute or less.”
“Good. Babkin, you’re in front. Leaf, keep an eye on these guys for me. Last thing I need is Veran whining about getting his apprentice killed.”
“I’m not-”
But the woman was already gone. Even watching arcana twist around her, Nym was still surprised to lose sight of her. “Huh, well then… should I open this up now?”
“Do it,” Babkin said. He pulled a pair of small axes off his belt and took a deep breath, then strode into the cave.
Nym didn’t need to be all that close to work with the earth. He reached out past Babkin with his magic and broke through the thin stone shell easily. Then it was just a matter of shifting the dirt out to finish forming a doorway into the underground. It wasn’t quite big enough for the towering berserker to walk through, but Babkin didn’t even slow down. He just hunched a bit and walked into the darkness.
Nym could see a sullen red glow forming around the man already. It brought back memories of Nym’s own duel with Babkin, memories still vivid enough that his nose hurt just thinking about it. He could almost pity the first ghoul to encounter Babkin. Almost, but not quite.
The others flowed in behind the berserker, with Leaf in the lead and Nym clumped up with the two army mages in the back. He sent a scrying anchor out to scout down the tunnels and quickly found the first ghouls lurking in it, but there were no surprises he could spot.
[Communication link is up,] Stelton’s voice echoed in his mind.
[Keep chatter to a minimum,] the sneaky woman said. [Advancing two hundred feet down the tunnels. Nothing but ghouls.]
[No sign of wights so far,] Nym added.
Rather than words, a tangled snarl of emotion burst through the link. It wasn’t hard to guess the source. Up ahead, Babkin’s aura flared up and the sounds of metal slashing through flesh filled the tunnel. The rest of the group moved up behind him, with Nym casting perfect sight on himself to make sure he didn’t miss anything. Stelton was providing lights for Leaf, and presumably the other mages, to see by, but they weren’t bright enough to see that far ahead.
Babkin was already a hundred feet down the tunnel, and dozens of ghouls were twitching on the ground in his wake. They were starting to pull themselves together, and Leaf snapped out through the link, [Keep those parts separated and ash them.]
It wasn’t an order that needed to be said, in Nym’s opinion. He was already using greater telekinesis to gather them up while keeping them from reconnecting, and Grom had started pouring arcana into a construct that made a miniature furnace in the air in front of him. His assistants worked on either side of him to feed more power to the spell, while Nym chucked the parts in as quickly as he could.
A roar echoed down the tunnel from up ahead. Nym exchanged a glance with Leaf, who nodded back. “Not much point in being quiet then,” he said. “Alright, let’s pick up the speed on this. Even Babkin won’t survive a hundred ghouls at once without backup. Probably. Maybe.”
“Working as fast as I can,” Grom said. It was actually quite impressive how fast the ghouls were disintegrating inside their magic, but Nym was gathering parts to feed him faster than they could keep up. The weak link in their plan had become obvious almost immediately, but no one was really surprised. It was common knowledge that cleaning up after the ghouls was the most time-consuming part of the job. Even with three of them, they weren’t fast enough.
Nym’s mastery of elemental fire was still the weakest of the four elements, but he’d learned a lot from Jharn and had plenty of time to practice while he was out hunting ghouls solo. He started cooking them from the inside out, which was almost as fast as the army’s new method, though it did create far more smoke.
A bit of elemental air control took care of that, and soon the group was moving again. They made it about a hundred feet before they had to stop for another clean up. Babkin himself was even farther away. Leaf groaned and shook his head. “We need at least four more mages on clean up to keep up with him.”
It wouldn’t have been a problem if they could get Babkin to slow down, but all attempts to communicate with the berserker were ignored. Eventually, Nym switched from wight spotting to tracking Babkin down with a scrying spell. He was so shocked at what he saw that he almost lost the spell.
Babkin was standing in the first big underground cave on the route, maybe two hundred feet ahead. There had to be thirty or forty ghouls attacking him, and the crazed berserker was laughing as he mowed them down. He was a whirlwind of death, axes flashing around him in a blur. Any ghoul that got within five feet of him started losing limbs, and half of them couldn’t even keep up with him as he darted around the cavern.
There were dead wights there too, though none of them bore the kind of wounds Babkin was dealing. They’d been killed before Nym had even scried them out. He mentally upgraded the sneaky woman to scary sneaky woman. He didn’t see any sign that even a single spell had gone off from the wights.
“Why are we even here?” Nym asked Leaf seriously. “Those two are tearing through everything without our help.”
“Mostly to clean up after them,” Leaf said. “So not much has changed. They have… specific skill sets. Neither is good at much besides extreme violence, though Tira’s is more directed. It was always like this whenever it came to a fight. Just keep cleaning up the ghouls. Uh, Stelton, maybe you could help with that too?”
“Me, sir?” she asked. “I’ll try, but it’s not really my area of expertise.”
“Just go as fast as you can. I’ll keep you guys safe.”
They got to burning, while Nym swept his scry spell around the cave Babkin was fighting in. He kept expecting the berserker to be overwhelmed, to retreat, to call for help, or even to just slow down a little bit. None of those things happened, of course. Every now and then a new wight would enter the cave, but Nym was quick to spot them and call them out for Tira to kill.
The real problem with Babkin’s rampage was that he was so far ahead that ghouls he’d already gone through were putting themselves completely back together before the fire team could get to working on them.
“How do we get him to slow down?” Nym asked.
Leaf just shook his head.
The only thing they were waiting for was the army to finish getting soldiers in place. They’d lost a lot of their earth mages, their combat mages, and just all-around soldiers in general, so there wouldn’t be any fortifications set up. It was going to be nasty up on the surface if the push into the tunnels was successful. Nym did not envy them that job.
Of course, it was going to be just as bad underground, if not worse. For one, Archmage Veran was not going with them. There’d been a round of objections when he’d announced that, followed by a second round once he’d informed the group that Nym would be taking his place. The archmage had ignored all of that and simply informed them that he had no choice but to personally attend to the tear and ensure that no reinforcements came through.
Nym wasn’t surprised. With so many third circle mages killed and reanimated as wights, there simply weren’t enough people to rotate through the ritual spell needed to hold the tear closed. The archmage had been personally picking up that slack to keep things from getting worse. Every day he looked a bit more exhausted, but he never complained about it.
He’d missed the introductions, but Nym was able to pick up who the two military people and the woman in the brightly layered clothes were through context. One was a communications specialist whose primary job would be coordinating with the above-ground forces, and the other was on disposal. He would be ashing ghoul parts with powerful heat spells that didn’t actually generate fire. The other woman was one of the original members of the team from twenty years ago who’d been called in to help by targeting wights.
Nym did not catch her name, but he did get the impression that both army specialists were a bit afraid of her. She rarely spoke or added anything to the conversation, and it was easy to forget she was there despite her bright clothing. If not for the occasional spark of arcana around her refreshing whatever magic she was using, he might have forgotten about her completely.
The army specialists, on the other hand, were quite formal and kept addressing each other as Major Stelton and Sergeant Grom. Stelton was the army mage in charge of communications and Grom did cleanup. They were both in their thirties, both looked haggard, and their uniforms were covered in patches and stitched up tears. They looked nothing like the personnel Nym remembered from his time working directly with the army.
The plan was simple, at least for their team. They would go in through a predetermined entrance, Babkin leading, and start carving their way through undead. Leaf would be on dismemberment and protection duty since Babkin would not be slowing down to make sure each ghoul was thoroughly chopped up. The sneaky woman would spearhead their primary objective: killing as many wights as possible.
Nym’s main job was live scouting and crowd control for Leaf. Babkin would be left to his own devices, per his request. Nym would also be backing Leaf up in the limb-removal front as well, and possibly helping Grom with clean up if he got too far behind, though he didn’t know the army mage’s heat disintegration spell yet. It wouldn’t take him long to figure it out, he was sure. As far as the rest of his team knew though, he’d be using regular fire and copious amounts of air magic to direct the smoke away from them.
They had a giant map of the forest pinned up on the wall with the results of Archmage Veran’s scrying on it. A huge, tangled web of lines sprawled across the forest and out into the surrounding countryside. It would take weeks or even months to walk them all, but fortunately they had a clear goal in mind.
In the center, underneath the mausoleum where the tear was, there was a spot that even the archmage himself couldn’t get through the wards to scry. That was their secondary goal, one no one expected to get close to this way. After they’d thinned the number of earth mage wights out, they had plans to tunnel down as close as they could to it to attack that way. That had been the initial goal of the excursion, but there were too many concerns about ghouls scattering in every direction, and army manpower had been devoted towards containment and sweeping instead.
It reminded Nym uncomfortably of his time under the snow, except that this time he wouldn’t be invisible to the enemy. Of course, he also wouldn’t be alone, and ghouls wouldn’t just pop out of the walls like the ice worms did. On the other hand, ice worms were much easier to kill. If ghouls would burn up from lightning bolts, Nym would be a lot less worried about the whole thing.
Since that wasn’t the case, he was glad to have Babkin standing in front of him. A hyperkinetic barrier was all well and good, right up until he was buried under a literal pile of squirming, writhing ghouls. Even then, he was sure he could teleport out, but the whole mission would be kind of pointless if they only made it a hundred feet in before they had to abandon it.
Eventually, Stelton piped up to let them know everything was ready. Archmage Veran gave them one last call to gather their supplies, and then teleported them into the forest. It was time to begin.
* * *
“This doesn’t look like much,” the sneaky woman said. All six of them were standing in front of a shallow cave, maybe thirty feet deep, plus another three army mages working under Grom as part of the fire team. Another twenty soldiers were waiting nearby to advance into the cave and hold it against any ghoul spillage once things got hot.
The sneaky woman glanced back at Nym. “Scrying tell you anything?”
“Cave wall is only about two feet thick at the back end, and most of that’s hard packed dirt instead of stone,” he reported. “I can have it open in a minute or less.”
“Good. Babkin, you’re in front. Leaf, keep an eye on these guys for me. Last thing I need is Veran whining about getting his apprentice killed.”
“I’m not-”
But the woman was already gone. Even watching arcana twist around her, Nym was still surprised to lose sight of her. “Huh, well then… should I open this up now?”
“Do it,” Babkin said. He pulled a pair of small axes off his belt and took a deep breath, then strode into the cave.
Nym didn’t need to be all that close to work with the earth. He reached out past Babkin with his magic and broke through the thin stone shell easily. Then it was just a matter of shifting the dirt out to finish forming a doorway into the underground. It wasn’t quite big enough for the towering berserker to walk through, but Babkin didn’t even slow down. He just hunched a bit and walked into the darkness.
Nym could see a sullen red glow forming around the man already. It brought back memories of Nym’s own duel with Babkin, memories still vivid enough that his nose hurt just thinking about it. He could almost pity the first ghoul to encounter Babkin. Almost, but not quite.
The others flowed in behind the berserker, with Leaf in the lead and Nym clumped up with the two army mages in the back. He sent a scrying anchor out to scout down the tunnels and quickly found the first ghouls lurking in it, but there were no surprises he could spot.
[Communication link is up,] Stelton’s voice echoed in his mind.
[Keep chatter to a minimum,] the sneaky woman said. [Advancing two hundred feet down the tunnels. Nothing but ghouls.]
[No sign of wights so far,] Nym added.
Rather than words, a tangled snarl of emotion burst through the link. It wasn’t hard to guess the source. Up ahead, Babkin’s aura flared up and the sounds of metal slashing through flesh filled the tunnel. The rest of the group moved up behind him, with Nym casting perfect sight on himself to make sure he didn’t miss anything. Stelton was providing lights for Leaf, and presumably the other mages, to see by, but they weren’t bright enough to see that far ahead.
Babkin was already a hundred feet down the tunnel, and dozens of ghouls were twitching on the ground in his wake. They were starting to pull themselves together, and Leaf snapped out through the link, [Keep those parts separated and ash them.]
It wasn’t an order that needed to be said, in Nym’s opinion. He was already using greater telekinesis to gather them up while keeping them from reconnecting, and Grom had started pouring arcana into a construct that made a miniature furnace in the air in front of him. His assistants worked on either side of him to feed more power to the spell, while Nym chucked the parts in as quickly as he could.
A roar echoed down the tunnel from up ahead. Nym exchanged a glance with Leaf, who nodded back. “Not much point in being quiet then,” he said. “Alright, let’s pick up the speed on this. Even Babkin won’t survive a hundred ghouls at once without backup. Probably. Maybe.”
“Working as fast as I can,” Grom said. It was actually quite impressive how fast the ghouls were disintegrating inside their magic, but Nym was gathering parts to feed him faster than they could keep up. The weak link in their plan had become obvious almost immediately, but no one was really surprised. It was common knowledge that cleaning up after the ghouls was the most time-consuming part of the job. Even with three of them, they weren’t fast enough.
Nym’s mastery of elemental fire was still the weakest of the four elements, but he’d learned a lot from Jharn and had plenty of time to practice while he was out hunting ghouls solo. He started cooking them from the inside out, which was almost as fast as the army’s new method, though it did create far more smoke.
A bit of elemental air control took care of that, and soon the group was moving again. They made it about a hundred feet before they had to stop for another clean up. Babkin himself was even farther away. Leaf groaned and shook his head. “We need at least four more mages on clean up to keep up with him.”
It wouldn’t have been a problem if they could get Babkin to slow down, but all attempts to communicate with the berserker were ignored. Eventually, Nym switched from wight spotting to tracking Babkin down with a scrying spell. He was so shocked at what he saw that he almost lost the spell.
Babkin was standing in the first big underground cave on the route, maybe two hundred feet ahead. There had to be thirty or forty ghouls attacking him, and the crazed berserker was laughing as he mowed them down. He was a whirlwind of death, axes flashing around him in a blur. Any ghoul that got within five feet of him started losing limbs, and half of them couldn’t even keep up with him as he darted around the cavern.
There were dead wights there too, though none of them bore the kind of wounds Babkin was dealing. They’d been killed before Nym had even scried them out. He mentally upgraded the sneaky woman to scary sneaky woman. He didn’t see any sign that even a single spell had gone off from the wights.
“Why are we even here?” Nym asked Leaf seriously. “Those two are tearing through everything without our help.”
“Mostly to clean up after them,” Leaf said. “So not much has changed. They have… specific skill sets. Neither is good at much besides extreme violence, though Tira’s is more directed. It was always like this whenever it came to a fight. Just keep cleaning up the ghouls. Uh, Stelton, maybe you could help with that too?”
“Me, sir?” she asked. “I’ll try, but it’s not really my area of expertise.”
“Just go as fast as you can. I’ll keep you guys safe.”
They got to burning, while Nym swept his scry spell around the cave Babkin was fighting in. He kept expecting the berserker to be overwhelmed, to retreat, to call for help, or even to just slow down a little bit. None of those things happened, of course. Every now and then a new wight would enter the cave, but Nym was quick to spot them and call them out for Tira to kill.
The real problem with Babkin’s rampage was that he was so far ahead that ghouls he’d already gone through were putting themselves completely back together before the fire team could get to working on them.
“How do we get him to slow down?” Nym asked.
Leaf just shook his head.
