Bernt threw a glance back toward the main entrance. Ed’s force barrier was gone and more demons flooded into the cavern, followed by rank upon rank of Duergar soldiers. Many of them carried obvious signs of disease like open sores and boils – whatever Lin had done to them, it wasn’t temporary. A second breach had opened nearby, and more of the gray dwarves poured out from it as well.
“Back up! Get inside!” Dayle shouted over the din – his magically enhanced voice so loud that it echoed off the walls. All around him, people began to move. Bernt stepped back with them woodenly, still trying to process what he’d just seen.
Was Ed dead? Did the big imp manage to drag him into the hells? Was something like that even possible?
Spells flew toward the enemy, launched by Dayle, Yarrod, and a few of the surviving warlocks, but nothing landed this time. The enemy had mages of their own, and more than a few warlocks who raised various kinds of barriers to deflect rocks, fire, force, and even shadows.
Where was Kustov? What about Fiora? Were they still in their side-tunnel, harassing the duergar as they advanced toward them?
Moving quickly, they backed up into the Underkeepers’ headquarters, where the remaining guards were already forming up into a new defensive line under Glim’s direction. Most of them didn’t look in any shape to fight, but more guards streamed in from behind Bernt, and he moved out of the way to let them through. Some of the warlocks worked in the back, administering healing potions, while others were armed and standing among the guards.
Dayle ran up and down the line barking orders like a general, but he stopped when he saw Yarrrod.
“Yarrod, I need you to foul up their geomancers. Can you do that?” The gnome nodded calmly, though Bernt noticed that his hands shook a little.
Dayle gave him a stern look. “Don’t hold back, now. If they take down this here wall, we’re done!”
“Good sir, don’t you worry your big head about it.” The gnome said, his genteel accent a stark counterpoint to Dayle’s drawl. “I have just the thing to put a burr in their shoe, so long as they don’t realize it’s there, it should slow them down good and proper. If I might borrow your shovel?”
Dayle looked a little bemused, but then offered the little man his focus. Yarrod examined the spade for a moment before hefting it in both hands and muttering to himself as he scratched at the stone wall in a line. Yarrod, Bernt knew, specialized in modifying fortune and probability. It was an esoteric branch of magic, and one that wasn’t taught at the Mages’ Academy at all. Bernt wasn’t sure exactly how that might help them keep the Duergar geomancers from bringing the walls down, but this wasn’t the time to question the gnome. He hurried toward the double-doors – maybe he could do something to slow down the attackers, at least.
Shouts sounded from outside as the last few guards filed in, followed by the clash of arms on armor. There was an odd sucking sound and the wall on Bernt’s right – the one Yarrod hadn’t started carving into, began to melt away right in front of them.
Torvald appeared in the remaining half of the doorway, hauling a staggering Palina back behind him. Bernt caught the guardswoman as Torvald leapt back and out of the way of an incoming duergar soldier. Purely by reflex, Bernt flung burning white plasma into the attacker’s face, who reeled back with a shriek. Nausea suddenly twisted in his guts as the stench of burned hair and flesh wafted in his face.
“Close ranks!” Glim barked, echoed almost simultaneously by Dayle’s order. “Spears down!”
Half of the outer wall of the Underkeepers’ headquarters was virtually gone at this point, exposing them. Torvald looked back at the defenders with a terrified expression, but then his head whipped up as he stared toward something at the ceiling. Bernt looked up, but there was nothing there.
His face suddenly firm with resolve, Torvald turned back toward the enemy and threw himself forward, ducking past a duergar soldier’s spear to ram his sword into a hellhound’s side. Fire erupted, but it missed him as he spun out of the way and began to single-handedly cleave his way through the first ranks of the enemy army. One of the duergar warlocks tried to throw hellfire at him, but it missed and struck one of their own instead. Torvald pushed deeper into the enemy, and the enemy shrank back.
It wasn’t skill – not just that, anyway. Torvald was good, but he was just a regular person. Or, he had been. Torvald’s sword was on fire, now. It had just happened, a second or so before, when he drew it out of the hellhound. At first, it just looked like hellfire, but then the flames changed color, transitioning from an angry red to a pure, bluish hue. To Jori’s eyes, the entire man had started to glow ominously and she hissed in alarm and shielded her eyes.
“Retribution comes,” he shouted, “to the wicked who would harm those sheltered in Her hand!”
Was he quoting scripture? What was happening? Was this what it was supposed to look like when a brand new paladin was chosen? Torvald didn’t even sound winded.
Someone pushed past Bernt, breaking him out of his stunned state. It was Nirlig, bleeding from a nasty cut on his face. “Come on, he’s not going to keep that up forever!”
The goblin ran forward, running his spear into the side of a dwarf who wasn’t even looking their way anymore, too preoccupied by the mad spectacle that Torvald offered. Not to be outdone, Bernt followed and threw white plasma at the nearest staff-carrying mage as he wove together the spellform for banefire with his left hand. Torvald didn’t have to do all the work. Behind him came another goblin, followed by Glim and then Josie with her claws out.
The enemy mage struck at the incoming flames with his staff, but only succeeded in splattering it into a thousand liquid droplets that ignited violently along the patterns carved into his staff and armor. “Don’t go too far!” Bernt called after Nirlig. “We don’t want to get isolated.”
All the while, Torvald continued to carve his way through the enemy in a wide loop. He hadn’t stopped quoting scripture, and Bernt would have thought it was silly in any other situation. Here it seemed… strangely appropriate. He should have gotten bogged down and killed immediately, running directly into the enemy army like that. But he didn’t. They cringed back from him hesitantly, sensing that something was wrong even as Torvald moved through them as if following a well-practiced dance. A few enemy spellcasters threw force, fire, and stone at him, but they couldn’t seem to hit him and stopped, realizing they were just injuring their own soldiers.
Focusing on what was in front of him, Bernt cast a fire shield in front of himself to burn the oncoming soldiers as he searched for more enemy mages. If he could only find enough of them, then maybe they could turn all his around. Maybe. He found one, and a few moments later, another. Both tried to shield themselves from Bernt’s attacks, and both died seconds later with white fire licking up out of their mouths and eyes.
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Unfortunately, that got someone’s attention. A rock struck his left shoulder so hard that the entire arm went numb for a moment and Bernt reflexively activated his thorn skin amulet. Was it broken? There hadn’t been a pop or anything. He cursed himself – he should have done that the moment this started! Determined not to make a similar mistake, he activated his spirit-infused belt as well and tried to raise a force barrier with his right hand.
The spell failed.
Another rock shot toward his face, but this time he saw its source. One of the soldiers, a beardless dwarf, held a hammer instead of a staff, like Kustov. He ducked, hoping that nobody behind him was tall enough to be hit by it. There was a crack as it shattered against the remains of the wall behind him. Before he could rise, though, something heavy barreled into him, bearing him to the ground. Bernt pushed back as hard as he could with one hand, forcing whatever it was up and away from him. The duergar soldier flew backward a few paces and crashed into those behind him, bowling them over.
Seizing the advantage, Bernt pushed himself up and followed up with a handful of white flame from his right hand. The fire struck the offending dwarf directly in the face as he tried to rise, igniting his beard with natural yellow flame even as he tried to scrape the white plasma from his bubbling face with a horrified scream. Bernt couldn’t see the mage anymore. Where did she go? Raising his aching left arm, Bernt hastily cast a force barrier. It was only a pale imitation of what Fiora or Ed could do, but it would stop a single rock – he hoped.
Jori, who’d gone flying from his shoulder when the duergar soldier struck him, hissed angrily and threw hellfire into the crowd. That was too much for the soldiers pressing in on them, and they tried to back up. All but one. She brought the hammer down on the ground at an angle, and shards of stone shot toward him with unnatural power. Bernt flinched and raised a hand. Something struck him in the side and he felt it as Jori was hit on the side of her head, sending her spinning.
With a panicked lunge, Bernt rammed a poorly controlled dribble of mana through the investiture in his right arm and smacked his palm down on her chestplate with no visible effect. For a moment he thought the spell failed, but then her eyes grew wide and she gasped as she began trying to tear off her armor. She didn’t have enough time. An agonized wail tore its way from her throat as her face distorted with terror. Bernt looked away, disturbed.
There was a gash in his robes, but the stone shard hadn’t made it through his armor after being slowed by his force barrier. Jori was already climbing back up to his shoulder.
It felt like it had been only a moment, but when he looked back to see how the others were doing, the battlefield had been transformed. The duergar mages were proving to be mostly ineffective, for some reason. On a hunch, Bernt glanced back behind their lines and sure enough, there was Yarrod, busily flicking a wand this way and that, tripping up enemy spells nearly as quickly as they could throw them. How long could he keep that up?
The duergar were still pushing in, but not nearly as enthusiastically as before. The Solicitors had joined the fight in earnest now, scattered among the guards. Josie’s claws inflicted an effect even more extreme than her scream, to the point that her victims’ hearts gave out more often than not. Bernt had seen it kill before, but he didn’t realize that other warlocks had similar methods. In fact, she was one of the less effective fighters among them, since she had to get in close and get her hands into her enemies’ unarmored skin.
Radast stood near the center and his shadow flickered out from him wrapping individual enemies in darkness and leaving behind pale corpses with wide sightless eyes and mouths agape with screams that never came..
While the duergar warlocks seemed to favor fire and the direct support of demons that fought alongside them, the Solicitors relied on less visible, but no less potent abilities. Bernt shivered at the sight. A few had abilities like Josie’s, while others incapacitated their victims as the whisperer had done up on the surface weeks before. Only one of them, the old woman, cast hellfire at her enemies. The duergar who saw pushed back and away with disturbed expressions on their faces, trying not to get too close.
Bernt heard a shout and barely managed to cancel his fire shield in time to avoid burning Nirlig, who came stumbling sideways into the space it had been. Another balding, gray-haired goblin raced forward, pulling him back in time to keep him from getting skewered. It was Morix, Nirlig’s father. The older goblin loudly scolded his son, but Bernt couldn’t make out the words. The pressure was off him for a moment and his attention was drawn to Jori’s senses, who had noticed something on the far end of the cavern.
Sitting on his shoulder, the imp was head and shoulders above every dwarf in the attacking army and had a clear view across the cavern. The painful light that marked Torvald had made its way to something else that registered sharply in Jori’s senses. A cart, sitting near the middle of the Undercity Market. Bernt could see it with his own eyes, and it was just a big crystal of some kind, but Jori’s sight told a very different story. It glowed with unimaginable power, and Bernt knew as sure as the sun rose that drinking it in would taste like icy spring water on a hot day. To Jori, at least.
The newly minted Paladin was clearly making for the crystal and still shouting as he did, though the words didn’t carry far enough to make out over the din of battle. Several demons were clustered around it, as well as a contingent of armored duergar and a group of robed spellcasters, probably warlocks. One, dressed in ornate armor, was standing up in the cart and rested his hand on it.
Jori could see the power shift inside the crystal, and Bernt didn’t wait to find out what it would do. He wasn’t sure what they meant to use it for, but it couldn’t be good. Focusing as quickly as he could and doing his best to guide the mana along the right pathways in his arm, he cast a fireball with his right hand. If he could hit the enemy warlock, maybe he could solve this problem right here.
The incandescent projectile flew true, but the dwarf didn’t stay put. Instead of doing whatever he was going to do, he stood up and stepped back, neatly sidestepping Bernt’s attack and exposing a robed figure behind him. The fireball struck the figure in the side and broke apart, splattering flames over several other Duergar behind. While those were also burned, only the robed figure truly caught fire – the warlock had likely been wearing enchanted armor.
Taking the time to cast a fireball came with a cost, though. He’d had to take his eyes off the fight right in front of him, and now found a broad-shouldered Duergar soldier rushing him, shield first. Jori had seen him coming and flung hellfire at him, but the flames slid right off the shield’s dwarven runework. Backing up a step, Bernt kicked down at the shield as hard as he could, breaking the soldier’s arm and awkwardly scraping his leg against his weapon as he did. Both went stumbling in opposite directions, but Bernt caught himself quickly while his attacker crashed back into his fellows as Jori flung more fire at them. That belt was worth every copper Grixit had charged.
Bernt looked back toward the crystal and found his target up on the cart still hadn’t even realized that he was under attack. He pointed in entirely the wrong direction, shouting something, and Bernt looked. At the main entrance to the cavern, tall figures poured in, wearing black and gold and forming ranks.
Bernt suppressed a sudden urge to laugh.
“The army is here!” he cried. “It’s Arice’s people!”
Others were shouting, too, and he could see the duergar line shrink back under the renewed fury of the defenders. Inspired, Bernt began quickly casting burning glue cantrips with his left hand, holding the retreating duergar back and tripping them up to be cut down by the Underkeeper guards. With his right, he kept pooling mana and flinging it into the enemy while he worked more complex spells with his left. He wasn’t as effective as two mages, but he was casting two different spells at the same time. After a fashion, at least. And his mana network didn't feel strained in the least.
For a moment, it was going so well that Bernt forgot what Torvald was doing. Then there was a flash of light so bright it made stars dance in his vision. At the same time, a loud crack reverberated through the cavern and the light dimmed. In Jori’s vision, a blazing comet flew over the enemy army and landed hard on the ground some distance away from the battle, rolling to a stop a few seconds later.
It was Torvald.