Ghouls were more industrious than Nym had given them credit for. Three times now, he’d dropped tunnels behind them to slow them down, and each time they dug through it in under a minute. It wasn’t until Sakaro started working with him that they got defense under control.
She put up some barriers and obfuscation to give Nym time to work, and he built a shell of stone a foot thick around them. It had a hole in the back where the tunnel went, but it did force the ghouls to come around and attack from one direction. Ogric handled those though while Zerek worked on breaking down the next set of wards.
Other than the scrying wards, none of what they encountered was active, though Zerek assured the group everything was primed and just waiting for its triggering condition to be filled. Every single ward had the same trigger: something alive passing over the threshold. They’d barely advanced a few hundred feet down the tunnel and he’d already disabled wards that marked them for the undead to find, wards that would cause dizziness and fatigue, and wards that would just straight up explode.
Most annoyingly, there were trap wards mixed in with the regular ones that would attack Zerek directly when he tried to disable them. Those ranged from arcana injections to brain scramblers. The really serious ones, Archmage Veran stepped up to assist Zerek with some counter-wards to help protect him in case anything accidently got triggered.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group bought them time. They mostly worked in overlapping shifts, each one spending a few minutes fighting before rotating out to rest. No one was sure what they were going to find past all the wards, but everyone wanted to be fresh to face it.
“Got it,” Zerek announced. “Please let this be the last one.”
He moved up another few steps, stopped, looked down at his feet, and started swearing. “Okay, this is ridiculous. Who puts this many wards in one spot! How would they even power them all at once?”
“They couldn’t, I hope. Perhaps it would be better to trigger a few of the less lethal ones and let them drain the source of arcana so that the others fail naturally,” Archmage Veran suggested.
“Eeeeehhhhhh. If we weren’t down in this tunnel, I’d agree with you. We’re at the end of a blast cap right now though. If something blows up on us, then the best case scenario is we get blown through that stone barrier into the arms of the ghouls on the other side.”
Blanchet shook her head. “This strategy is not a winning one. In any battle against the undead, time is against you. You will get tired long before them. You will start to make mistakes. Even if you are many times stronger, eventually they will wear you down. And that is only considering things like the ghouls behind us. We have an intelligent enemy here, who undoubtedly knows we are coming and is preparing for us while we waste time on these wards.”
“I can’t do this any faster,” Zerek told her. “We can try to teleport past them I suppose, but if we were going to do that, there was no need for me to come along to begin with.”
“We can’t teleport,” Nym said. “I already looked into it. The place is warded against that too. It’ll probably be the very last ward we find too, right next to the scrying ward.”
The others regarded him for a second, then as one turned to look at the archmage. He nodded in agreement. “Nym is correct.”
Considering his main job was keeping an eye on the battlefield, Nym was a bit insulted that no one trusted his knowledge of what was going on. He felt like he’d proven himself competent already, but apparently he was the only one. The nasty, mean voice in the back of his head had a few things to say about the disrespect they’d shown there, but Nym shoved it aside.
“How confident are you that all of the inactive wards’ triggers are the presence of something alive?” Nym asked Zerek.
“Every single one has been so far. Why?”
“Do you think an elemental golem would trigger them?”
Zerek shook his head. “Not any of the ones I’ve seen so far. I can only speculate over what’s still ahead, but unless they’re devious enough to switch the ward triggers deeper in, no, I don’t think a golem would trigger them.”
“What are you thinking?” Archmage Veran asked.
“Air golem with a sensory link,” Nym explained. “Maybe we can get a look in there through the anti-scrying wards. They’re basically invisible too, so any lurking undead might not notice.”
A quick round of discussion and refining saw all of them safely behind one of Sakaro’s shields, which was being reinforced by the archmage’s own magic. Nym put together an air golem, gave everyone a warning notice, and sent it down the tunnel.
“Fifty feet away. Sixty. Seventy. It’s going around that bend now. I’m going to activate the sensory link.”
The air golem continued its journey, drifting over various wards without ever triggering them. Nym got a good look at what was coming up, including a lot of undead that were steadily trickling in and holding position. “They’re definitely preparing for us on the other end of this tunnel. I’m seeing geists clinging to the ceiling, probably two hundred ghouls lurking in various tunnels that are close in, an occasional wight in army uniforms mixed in.”
Nym conjured an illusion based on what the air golem was showing him and pointed out where each danger was. The others crowded around it and started discussing plans for who would take care of what. While they did that, Nym took the air golem up and down a few side tunnels so that he could provide more information and accurate head counts.
“I’m at the scry ward now,” he announced. “We’re about to find out whether or not it’ll block the sensory link.”
Nym held his breath, took one last look around the tunnel, and willed the golem to move forward. It went over the ward like it wasn’t there, and he was treated to a view of a dark, dingy cavern littered with rotting corpses. There were a lot of bones scattered around too, enough to make up a hundred skeletons at least.
“Good news is the link held. I can see past the scrying ward. Bad news is… there’s nothing really here? There’s a lot of bodies on the ground, most still rotting, some just skeletons. Four tunnel exits that I can see. Nothing moving.”
“Show us,” Archmage Veran said. “This cavern wasn’t so well protected for no reason.”
Nym switched his illusion up to show what he was seeing himself through his air golem. This time he projected it onto the wall so that there wouldn’t be six other people crowding around him.
“What are we looking at?” Leaf asked. “Why aren’t any of them moving?”
Blanchet pointed to a spot. “See this here? This is a disassembled bone behemoth. A tiny one, but that is what it is. As soon as something triggers it, it’s going to start pulling in meat and bones to form its shell. And here’s another here, and one over here. There might be enough material in the room for maybe one more, but I do not see a core for it.”
“Then what’s the point of guarding it if all it is is more monsters?” Leaf asked.
“That cavern is not the goal,” the archmage said. “It is merely another defense to be bypassed or overcome.”
“It’s underneath the mausoleum,” Nym said. “That’s the real goal. This is just our way in. We’re going to dig up through the ceiling.”
“There probably won’t be any digging,” Archmage Veran said. “The wards surrounding the mausoleum are spherical. This was the easiest way to access them. If we can remove the anti-scrying ward and the teleportation ward, I will relocate us directly into the mausoleum.”
Nym tried to send the air golem up through the ceiling of the cavern, but it couldn’t pass through solid objects and even though there were plenty of tiny cracks, none of them led to where he wanted to go. Eventually he gave up and sent it out exploring again to see if he could find any obvious arcana batteries connected to the wards.
“Blanchet,” Zerek said suddenly. “Could a bunch of wights be powering the wards?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “For this many though… thirty or forty just to keep the ones that are already active going. Hundreds more to power the rest.”
“What about something… bigger? Something reapier?”
“Reapier?” Leaf echoed.
“I don’t think that would work. These wards are human magic. Whatever undead was fueling them would need to be able to use arcana the same way we do.”
“I didn’t see any signs of dozens of wights standing around,” Nym pointed out. “Unless they’re in the mausoleum itself, I don’t think that’s what’s doing it.”
“The physical dimensions of the mausoleum would preclude that,” Archmage Veran said. “No, this is something else.”
The stone cracked behind them and a ghoul’s hand broke through. More rubble fell out of the hole and soon the ghoul was halfway through. Sakaro put up a barrier to hold it in place while Ogric started sending fire over and around the ghoul. “That is good. Hold it right there as a plug and I will cook everything behind it.”
“Hah! I think I found the teleportation ward!” Zerek announced suddenly.
“Keep the ghouls occupied,” Archmage Veran ordered. “Once we break this, we’ll switch strategies.”
“You’ll need to bring down the anti-scrying ward too,” Nym said.
“Yes, but we’ll teleport into the room you discovered and attack it from the other side. My belief is that it will be the final and smallest ward.”
That meant fighting those bone behemoths, but they had more than enough fire power that Nym had no doubt they’d make short work of them. At least, they would as long as all the undead lurking between their current position and that room didn’t swarm them all at once. There were four open entrances into the room, with the possibility of new ones being dug. That would be way more difficult to hold than their current position.
“We need to figure out how we’re going to split up defense while they work on cracking the last ward,” Nym said. “What do bone behemoths even do? I’ve never heard of them.”
“They’re generally made out of entire battlefields, so these ones will be tiny. They’re sort of undead siege engines. Not smart, but strong and very, very durable,” Blanchet explained. “Burning them doesn’t really work that well due to the sheer size. It might work in this case, but Ogric would be better on protecting us from incoming reinforcements in the tunnels.”
“How do you normally take one down?” Leaf asked.
“Break them into pieces until you dig down to the core. That’s vulnerable to physical attacks. We’ll want to break them as quickly as possible once we teleport in.”
“Right. I’ll take one, you take one, Tira gets the last.”
“Where even is she?” Nym asked.
“I’m here,” she said from right behind him.
“Gah!” He jumped in the air and spun to face her. If Ciana could have seen him, she’d have laughed herself silly.
“Another twenty wights destroyed,” she reported. “Several ghoul outbreaks have occurred up on the surface when the packs the wights were controlling went wild. The army is containing it for the time being.”
“We’re through,” Zerek said. “Get ready for the teleportation.”
The mages quickly divided up the tunnels between them, with Nym and Ogric each taking two while Sakaro supported them. Leaf, Blanchet, and Tira each knew where their target was. Everyone was ready to go.
Arcana poured out of Archmage Veran and the teleportation spell took hold. A moment later, they were standing on top of mounds of rotting corpses, ones that were shifting underfoot as they were dragged towards the pulsing cores.
Ghouls were more industrious than Nym had given them credit for. Three times now, he’d dropped tunnels behind them to slow them down, and each time they dug through it in under a minute. It wasn’t until Sakaro started working with him that they got defense under control.
She put up some barriers and obfuscation to give Nym time to work, and he built a shell of stone a foot thick around them. It had a hole in the back where the tunnel went, but it did force the ghouls to come around and attack from one direction. Ogric handled those though while Zerek worked on breaking down the next set of wards.
Other than the scrying wards, none of what they encountered was active, though Zerek assured the group everything was primed and just waiting for its triggering condition to be filled. Every single ward had the same trigger: something alive passing over the threshold. They’d barely advanced a few hundred feet down the tunnel and he’d already disabled wards that marked them for the undead to find, wards that would cause dizziness and fatigue, and wards that would just straight up explode.
Most annoyingly, there were trap wards mixed in with the regular ones that would attack Zerek directly when he tried to disable them. Those ranged from arcana injections to brain scramblers. The really serious ones, Archmage Veran stepped up to assist Zerek with some counter-wards to help protect him in case anything accidently got triggered.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group bought them time. They mostly worked in overlapping shifts, each one spending a few minutes fighting before rotating out to rest. No one was sure what they were going to find past all the wards, but everyone wanted to be fresh to face it.
“Got it,” Zerek announced. “Please let this be the last one.”
He moved up another few steps, stopped, looked down at his feet, and started swearing. “Okay, this is ridiculous. Who puts this many wards in one spot! How would they even power them all at once?”
“They couldn’t, I hope. Perhaps it would be better to trigger a few of the less lethal ones and let them drain the source of arcana so that the others fail naturally,” Archmage Veran suggested.
“Eeeeehhhhhh. If we weren’t down in this tunnel, I’d agree with you. We’re at the end of a blast cap right now though. If something blows up on us, then the best case scenario is we get blown through that stone barrier into the arms of the ghouls on the other side.”
Blanchet shook her head. “This strategy is not a winning one. In any battle against the undead, time is against you. You will get tired long before them. You will start to make mistakes. Even if you are many times stronger, eventually they will wear you down. And that is only considering things like the ghouls behind us. We have an intelligent enemy here, who undoubtedly knows we are coming and is preparing for us while we waste time on these wards.”
“I can’t do this any faster,” Zerek told her. “We can try to teleport past them I suppose, but if we were going to do that, there was no need for me to come along to begin with.”
“We can’t teleport,” Nym said. “I already looked into it. The place is warded against that too. It’ll probably be the very last ward we find too, right next to the scrying ward.”
The others regarded him for a second, then as one turned to look at the archmage. He nodded in agreement. “Nym is correct.”
Considering his main job was keeping an eye on the battlefield, Nym was a bit insulted that no one trusted his knowledge of what was going on. He felt like he’d proven himself competent already, but apparently he was the only one. The nasty, mean voice in the back of his head had a few things to say about the disrespect they’d shown there, but Nym shoved it aside.
“How confident are you that all of the inactive wards’ triggers are the presence of something alive?” Nym asked Zerek.
“Every single one has been so far. Why?”
“Do you think an elemental golem would trigger them?”
Zerek shook his head. “Not any of the ones I’ve seen so far. I can only speculate over what’s still ahead, but unless they’re devious enough to switch the ward triggers deeper in, no, I don’t think a golem would trigger them.”
“What are you thinking?” Archmage Veran asked.
“Air golem with a sensory link,” Nym explained. “Maybe we can get a look in there through the anti-scrying wards. They’re basically invisible too, so any lurking undead might not notice.”
A quick round of discussion and refining saw all of them safely behind one of Sakaro’s shields, which was being reinforced by the archmage’s own magic. Nym put together an air golem, gave everyone a warning notice, and sent it down the tunnel.
“Fifty feet away. Sixty. Seventy. It’s going around that bend now. I’m going to activate the sensory link.”
The air golem continued its journey, drifting over various wards without ever triggering them. Nym got a good look at what was coming up, including a lot of undead that were steadily trickling in and holding position. “They’re definitely preparing for us on the other end of this tunnel. I’m seeing geists clinging to the ceiling, probably two hundred ghouls lurking in various tunnels that are close in, an occasional wight in army uniforms mixed in.”
Nym conjured an illusion based on what the air golem was showing him and pointed out where each danger was. The others crowded around it and started discussing plans for who would take care of what. While they did that, Nym took the air golem up and down a few side tunnels so that he could provide more information and accurate head counts.
“I’m at the scry ward now,” he announced. “We’re about to find out whether or not it’ll block the sensory link.”
Nym held his breath, took one last look around the tunnel, and willed the golem to move forward. It went over the ward like it wasn’t there, and he was treated to a view of a dark, dingy cavern littered with rotting corpses. There were a lot of bones scattered around too, enough to make up a hundred skeletons at least.
“Good news is the link held. I can see past the scrying ward. Bad news is… there’s nothing really here? There’s a lot of bodies on the ground, most still rotting, some just skeletons. Four tunnel exits that I can see. Nothing moving.”
“Show us,” Archmage Veran said. “This cavern wasn’t so well protected for no reason.”
Nym switched his illusion up to show what he was seeing himself through his air golem. This time he projected it onto the wall so that there wouldn’t be six other people crowding around him.
“What are we looking at?” Leaf asked. “Why aren’t any of them moving?”
Blanchet pointed to a spot. “See this here? This is a disassembled bone behemoth. A tiny one, but that is what it is. As soon as something triggers it, it’s going to start pulling in meat and bones to form its shell. And here’s another here, and one over here. There might be enough material in the room for maybe one more, but I do not see a core for it.”
“Then what’s the point of guarding it if all it is is more monsters?” Leaf asked.
“That cavern is not the goal,” the archmage said. “It is merely another defense to be bypassed or overcome.”
“It’s underneath the mausoleum,” Nym said. “That’s the real goal. This is just our way in. We’re going to dig up through the ceiling.”
“There probably won’t be any digging,” Archmage Veran said. “The wards surrounding the mausoleum are spherical. This was the easiest way to access them. If we can remove the anti-scrying ward and the teleportation ward, I will relocate us directly into the mausoleum.”
Nym tried to send the air golem up through the ceiling of the cavern, but it couldn’t pass through solid objects and even though there were plenty of tiny cracks, none of them led to where he wanted to go. Eventually he gave up and sent it out exploring again to see if he could find any obvious arcana batteries connected to the wards.
“Blanchet,” Zerek said suddenly. “Could a bunch of wights be powering the wards?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “For this many though… thirty or forty just to keep the ones that are already active going. Hundreds more to power the rest.”
“What about something… bigger? Something reapier?”
“Reapier?” Leaf echoed.
“I don’t think that would work. These wards are human magic. Whatever undead was fueling them would need to be able to use arcana the same way we do.”
“I didn’t see any signs of dozens of wights standing around,” Nym pointed out. “Unless they’re in the mausoleum itself, I don’t think that’s what’s doing it.”
“The physical dimensions of the mausoleum would preclude that,” Archmage Veran said. “No, this is something else.”
The stone cracked behind them and a ghoul’s hand broke through. More rubble fell out of the hole and soon the ghoul was halfway through. Sakaro put up a barrier to hold it in place while Ogric started sending fire over and around the ghoul. “That is good. Hold it right there as a plug and I will cook everything behind it.”
“Hah! I think I found the teleportation ward!” Zerek announced suddenly.
“Keep the ghouls occupied,” Archmage Veran ordered. “Once we break this, we’ll switch strategies.”
“You’ll need to bring down the anti-scrying ward too,” Nym said.
“Yes, but we’ll teleport into the room you discovered and attack it from the other side. My belief is that it will be the final and smallest ward.”
That meant fighting those bone behemoths, but they had more than enough fire power that Nym had no doubt they’d make short work of them. At least, they would as long as all the undead lurking between their current position and that room didn’t swarm them all at once. There were four open entrances into the room, with the possibility of new ones being dug. That would be way more difficult to hold than their current position.
“We need to figure out how we’re going to split up defense while they work on cracking the last ward,” Nym said. “What do bone behemoths even do? I’ve never heard of them.”
“They’re generally made out of entire battlefields, so these ones will be tiny. They’re sort of undead siege engines. Not smart, but strong and very, very durable,” Blanchet explained. “Burning them doesn’t really work that well due to the sheer size. It might work in this case, but Ogric would be better on protecting us from incoming reinforcements in the tunnels.”
“How do you normally take one down?” Leaf asked.
“Break them into pieces until you dig down to the core. That’s vulnerable to physical attacks. We’ll want to break them as quickly as possible once we teleport in.”
“Right. I’ll take one, you take one, Tira gets the last.”
“Where even is she?” Nym asked.
“I’m here,” she said from right behind him.
“Gah!” He jumped in the air and spun to face her. If Ciana could have seen him, she’d have laughed herself silly.
“Another twenty wights destroyed,” she reported. “Several ghoul outbreaks have occurred up on the surface when the packs the wights were controlling went wild. The army is containing it for the time being.”
“We’re through,” Zerek said. “Get ready for the teleportation.”
The mages quickly divided up the tunnels between them, with Nym and Ogric each taking two while Sakaro supported them. Leaf, Blanchet, and Tira each knew where their target was. Everyone was ready to go.
Arcana poured out of Archmage Veran and the teleportation spell took hold. A moment later, they were standing on top of mounds of rotting corpses, ones that were shifting underfoot as they were dragged towards the pulsing cores.
