An average kobold scurrying about the dark would be tough to notice for a fearsome demon. The kobolds underneath Laz and Nib were not average kobolds. As they descended the mountain pass two hours later into the valley of milling demons they made no sound. Communications were made with hand gestures. The incredibly sharp eyes of the elite kobolds were amplified by the magic wooden tokens of Coralia and easily read each subtle signal.

They encountered their first sentry a hundred yards from the edge of the main force. Nib broke away from the troupe and closed to within twenty feet of the wary Maiphonian orc. He loaded a sharp wooden dart tipped with a tiny bit of iron and coated with the anti demon poison into a blowgun crafted by one of the elder kobolds. It was an incredibly accurate and quiet weapon and Nib favored it greatly.

With a strong exhale, the dart hit the demon in the belly and it brushed at the sting absently assuming it to be an insect bite. Within seconds the demon collapsed without so much as a groan. Four kobolds appeared near Nib and together they dragged the sentry’s corpse to a nearby juniper bush and concealed it.

With the door open, the kobolds broke into teams of two and three and infiltrated the bustling and foul smelling camp. Nib worked alone as he preferred. The others had objectives to determine the enemy food and water sources, chain of command and do as much as possible to undermine each. Nib’s mission was a direct one. Determine the army’s head, and if possible eliminate it. He passed hundreds of groups of lower demons, all seemed to be in grim spirits. He noticed one thing above all else. They were hungry. There wasn’t a scrap of food in sight, and later he witnessed an even darker truth.

A goblinoid imp nodded off to sleep in exhaustion, and two orc demons approached it. They each seized one of the imp’s arms and as one clamped their massive tusked jaws onto its small chest and shoulders. There was no fight, only two demons devouring an imp in mere moments. After their grisly unsatisfying meal they stalked off in different directions. Nib could only shake his small rodent head and continue on toward the center of the camp where he had seen the massive monsters before.

Nib listened as he crept near conversing demons. They spoke in a strange version of low common but he understood enough to gather the basics of the conversations. Their flying scouts had discovered the village and were going to sack it the following night. Others grumbled over a mysterious leader hoarding all of the food and plundered goods for himself.

He neared the center of the camp, and an energy in the air was making his fur stand on edge. As he walked it became so intense that his steps began to falter. As the center of the camp came into view, he saw the source. A ring of true demons, with ruby skin and fiery eyes surrounded a huge tent that seemed to be formed of stitched black skin, like that of the ebon dwarves. There was no way Nib could pass into that ring unnoticed, and doubted he could will himself to approach even if it were possible. Whatever was occupying that tent was on such a high level of malevolent power that the simple aura it emitted was enough to squeeze the heart of lesser beings.

Nib counted the elite demons and turned his attention to silently eliminating as many enemies as possible before making his withdrawal to the meeting area.

He targeted sleeping demons, and there were many. It was a simple affair to drip a tiny bit of poison into an ear, or nick a shoulder from the shadows. By the time he had exhausted his snake skin container, more than two hundred of them would never awaken. Better yet, any demons that fed on those would suffer the same fate albeit slower and more torturous.

When the guerillas returned to the rendezvous point, four thousand demons were dead and no alarm had even been raised. Twenty percent of the invading force in the valley was already dealt with as the guerillas began their journey to meet with the other villagers at location two. The mission was an overall success, the forces were thinned and would surely erupt in chaos when those slain demons were revealed. The army was already intending to strike the village so the follow up plan to draw them in was not even neccessary.

As planned, the guerillas first returned to the main village in order to debrief Coralia and receive further instruction. She was impressed by their success and instructed them to rejoin the others on the high eastern ridge where the second smaller village had been built as their first fallback location.

After they departed and the village was deserted, Coralia opened the secret hatch in her office that led to the tunnels beneath the village. In one rough circular chamber, a nearly complete rune circle was drawn on the quarried sandstone floor in charcoal. It was her ultimate work to date, testing her runecrafting magic to its absolute limit.

According to Nib’s report, the invaders would come the following night. All of the perimeter defenses in the village were prepared to deploy automatically. The room she was now in was directly beneath the largest and most luxurious building in the village. This was the ideal scenario. She had time to prepare a welcome that would ring all the way back to the hells.

She knelt before her nearly completed circle, which held more intertwined and layered incantations than had ever been assembled as far as Coralia herself was aware. When she stood in the circle, drew the final rune, and said the word to activate the chain it would draw nearly all of her mana but the results would be something that had never been seen before. She turned her gaze to once again ensure the perfection of each individual piece of magic. It was a symphony and one sour note could not only cause it to fail but destroy her completely in the process.

Greater Echo, Vampiric Touch, Titan Strength, Ultimate Freedom, Eyes of Agma, Total Resistance, Resist Negative Energy, Resist Poison, Penitence Brand, Aegis Aurora, Distort Light, Spell Stop, Greater Acceleration, Last Wish: Vengeance, Last Wish: Armageddon, Last Wish: Phoenix.

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Coralia’s eyes glittered with excitement. She had spent more than a week tirelessly crafting this spell chain after auditing her mana at full capacity she had determined she could pull this off though just barely. All three Last Wish spells cast in sequence was a wild fantasy never imagined and could only be achieved if Penitence Brand, Vampiric Touch, and Aegis Aurora each absorbed vitality, kinetic energy, and mana to their full capacity allowing her body to essentially become that of a god for a few scarce seconds when the Last Wish trinity was possible. All of the other spells would simply ensure that her body could withstand the onslaught she must endure to feed the three harvesting spells without perishing before the designated time.

She meditated then, aligning every cell of her body and unlocking the mana she kept aside for basic defensive channeling. She needed every last scrap of her mana for this finale. Hours passed by and Coralia’s energy continued to build as she consciously gathered it from every last corner of her being. She summoned up every raw emotion to amplify her building energy. Every sleepless night spent crying in a dark cave with a raw throat as she missed her family, every enraging atrocity committed by the monsters she had slain, she relived them all vividly for emotions were not but energy in motion and could be harnessed by a true master.

Around what her internal clock guessed to be midnight, a distant vibration alerted her to the perimeter defenses triggering. Demons falling into pits lined with salt coated stakes, demons blinded as bright light spells triggered, demons being eviscerated by restrained and poisoned blades on branches, the list was long.

The distant cacophony continued for many minutes. Finally she sensed true power amid the sea of small fry. Even beneath the earth, the foul and immense mana assaulted her mortal instincts. The feeling drifted closer and closer. Finally it settled just above her and she knew the time had come.

With a small prayer to anyone that might care to listen, Coralia closed the circle with a final small line of charcoal. She then stood in the center and braced herself for the sudden drain of her mana as she spoke the incantation to activate the chain.

The trivial Night Eye spell she had been maintaining suddenly failed and she was plunged for a moment into darkness and absolute agony. It was as if her bones had been replaced with red hot nails, and her blood had been replaced with broken glass that scraped along her every nerve. Worse was the sheer aching emptiness, the hollow pain that emanated from her very soul. One by one she felt the spells enter her body. She felt the strength to split a mountain, the freedom of the wind itself, the sight of a god, and when Total Resistance finally took effect she felt all pain immediately vanish (she resolved to put that one earlier in the order next time). Finally Greater Acceleration took hold and it was time to make her appearance.

No secret hatch was needed to reach the surface. Coralia bunched her legs beneath her and leaped. She passed through several feet of earth, the stone of the building’s foundation, an unfortunate greater demon that was turned into red mist, and the roof of the cabin. She moved with such force and speed that before any demon could register the meaning of the deafening boom, Coralia was a hundred feet in the night sky. She looked down at the sea of writhing angry demons and guided her fall for the village’s largest clearing where at least a thousand demons had gathered.

She landed in their midst. She held no weapon. In this state there was no need for one. Her hands glowed with a sickly red light and she wasted no time tearing into the demons with wild abandon. Most began to scatter in sheer confusion, not understanding what was happening. Vampiric Touch Filled her with further power and deepened her bloodlust, and she filled its capacity to absorb within a few seconds.

Next she had to allow Aegis Aurora to absorb hostile attacks. She stood and invited the hundreds of demons to counterattack. They hesitated but then rushed in all at once. They hacked and bludgeoned and did everything they could to break the woman’s defenses, knowing that all defensive magic had limits. It certainly did, and Coralia needed to steel herself for what was to come next as Aegis Aurora hit its capacity and Penitence Brand took over. Penitence Brand harnessed many times the energy of the attacks it absorbed but required actual damage sustained to work. Total Resistance was a phenomenal way to resist pain but there was little it could do as the demons began hacking into her flesh, causing real and serious wounds.

As she was beaten and battered she felt Penitence Brand filling quickly, and only hoped it would be full before she fell. Suddenly the attacks stopped.

Eyes of Agma allowed her to see the approaching being even though both of her eyes had been turned to jelly. She choked on blood, and every one of her ribs was smashed to bits. The leader of this force had halted the onslaught and stood before her. On the very edge of death, Coralia stood and offered a disfigured smile with the few teeth she had remaining.

It was not a large being, just a bit taller than Coralia herself with plain and blank features seemingly molded from grey clay. It had round black eyes that offered nothing, and a thin, long, lipless mouth. Appearance aside, it was immeasurably powerful.

With no pity, no cruelty, no seeming motive at all it raised a grey shapeless hand and shot a beam of crackling white energy through Coralia’s torso, erasing her heart without a trace.

“Just. Perfect.” She offered with her last words.

The demons began to gather around to inspect the body of the wild creature but then something began to build. As if the universe itself was heaving and vibrating, as if the fabric of reality was being stretched and shaken, something was about to happen.

Last Wish had the most extreme casting cost of any type of spell, for it required the caster to die.

First came Vengeance, every demon that had damaged Coralia directly suffered that damage multiplied by a factor of a thousand, causing explosions of overlapping force that cascaded through all the nearby demons. The strange leader felt the blasts keenly but was not outright disintegrated like the many lesser and greater demons around him. It was a terrible blow but it remained unshaken. Then the spell repeated somehow. The being felt that one much worse as his heart was assaulted once again by an attack a thousand times more potent than the one he had used to extinguish the human.

The now seriously injured commander began to stand and take stock of the damage, certain it was now all clear.

Second came Armageddon. Hundreds of feet in the air for a thousand yards in every direction, massive flaming boulders the size of houses began to fall towards the great demon army. Their impacts sent dirt and debris high into the sky and left the landscape a torn wasteland of smoking craters and fire. Few demons had survived that. Even the flying creatures could not escape the onslaught, most clipped or driven to the earth and obliterated. Then Greater Echo triggered yet again and Armageddon repeated. The lake was reduced to steam and all life in the massive spell’s area of effect was extinguished.

Finally, Last Wish: Phoenix triggered. Coralia was resurrected from an egg formed of brilliant flames within the crater. She was naked, but completely rejuvenated. It had worked, but unfortunately Last Wish wouldn’t be available to her for a full year from the moment it was triggered.

“Worth it.” She said to herself, walking barefoot in the direction of the trail head that would take her to location two where hopefully they weren’t too rattled by her little performance.

Mathael, Elisif, Hurstag, Laz, Nib, and the rest of the villagers were indeed rattled. The display of apocalyptic magic from their high vantage point far away was unlike anything they could even begin to wrap their minds around.

“This is her power bared?” Elisif finally whispered in shock. “An army wiped out in a moment.”

None of the others could even summon the words to answer, they merely stood staring with slack jaws.