Everything had gone great. More than great! Ideal, really.
Well… almost.
"We. Do. Not. Tank. Attacks. Directly!" Every word was accompanied by a thunk as Mia did her best to poke her finger right through my armor.
The armor which now had pale marks gouged into it by the Baron's horns.
I understood her 'concern.' To leave marks like that on Yules' armor, the horns had to be some kind of natural weapon developed through a demonic trait. Getting gored by them without my armor on would have been deeply unpleasant.
I may have gotten a little careless towards the end of that fight.
Not that I was going to admit it, of course.
"You're right. I promise I'll be more careful." My dazzling smile was met by an angry snarl. "I promise, okay?"
Mia huffed and turned away, tail twitching. I had a distinct sense that things weren't over on that front.
It was a good thing, then, that Glaustro's voice cut in through our mental connection. Even if he did sound like he was seething.
"I need the two of you out here. There's been an… issue."
"An issue! An issue, he said," I hissed as I dodged a spell. It splashed against the ground, producing an ominous sizzling sound as the dirt began to melt away into a rapidly growing pit.
It seemed that only our part of the plan had gone 'great.' The spies had all been drawn to the tavern, trapped, and neutralized. With relative ease, I might add. (Gouge marks on my armor notwithstanding.)
But that was only half the plan. Because of course the spies weren't working alone. Each had their own nice group of infiltrators hidden in our ranks. Glaustro, Bronwynn, and Methialia had led troops against the three biggest groups, while some of our other officers had been sent to take down the others.
And they had all, apparently, encountered… issues.
Chaos reigned ahead of me. A unit of our demons surrounded a decently sized standalone building, inside of which I could barely catch sight of vague figures moving around. Their silhouettes blurred every second, making it impossible for even my demonic senses to keep track of them.
"What happened here?!" Mia shouted at the leader, a panicked greater demon who looked like he wanted nothing more than to disappear back to the Abyss.
"We had them surrounded inside," he stammered. "The intel said they were nothing but superior demons and a single greater. The greater was our target, but when we tried to approach him, one of his rings suddenly broke, and —"
The demon's voice caught, his eyes drifting back to the numerous partially dissolved bodies that lay between us, the temporary stone wall someone had raised as a shelter, and the building itself.
"He went insane. Started attacking immediately! We retreated outside and launched a counterattack. We tried to bury him along with the building, but we had no idea his unit had put up wards all over the place. Our spells just splashed against those and opened us up to retaliation. We didn't think he'd be able to make wards that strong, but he's not a greater, he's a —"
A bellow of rage from the building cut him off as a new wave of hideously green projectiles slammed into our makeshift stone shelter. I watched in disbelief as a hole began to form in the nearly foot-thick wall.
I could feel it, too. Billowing in an angry cloud and churning with Menace, the soul of a Baron burned inside the building.
This one was stronger than the guy I had taken down so recently, too. If anything, he was actually ahead of both me and Mia. His soul felt like it was near the peak of the rank.
"You said one of his rings broke?" I cursed at our officer's nod. "Sympathetic enchantment. He was probably connected with one of the spies in the tavern… Mia, think you can sneak us in there?"
She eyed the indiscriminate shower of poison projectiles coming from the building. "I can try. They've got some kind of a ward, though."
"Yep." I studied the silhouettes again. "Question is, what does it do beyond just obscuring our ability to target them? Well, no time like the present. Give me a minute to check if I can protect us from this nonsense, and then we can make an attempt."
She nodded, and I threw a sizable bit of mana into a working. Crystal sprang up all around the building, quickly forming a bowl-like shape that effectively shielded our demons from the poison spells. I made the crystal as nonreactive as I could, but my sensory connection to my creations told me the sizzling poison was having an impact.
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My barrier couldn't hold out forever.
Thankfully, the restoration runes I'd embedded into the crystal for a very rough and dirty enchantment were doing their job. The crystal was getting dissolved, sure, but just slow enough to let its regeneration counter the effect.
"Okay, we're good on the defense front. You'll need to spend even more mana, but I can keep us shielded."
A brief smirk lit up Mia's face. I had just enough time to feel apprehensive before I got swept off my feet, and then Mia's mana was churning around us as she jumped us both right over the crystal barrier.
I bit back a startled shout and focused on casting a thin bubble of crystal around us, hoping that would be enough to block the enemy spells while still letting us see clearly.
Not that I should have bothered.
Mia's face was the very picture of strain as she ran towards the oncoming enemy spells, but she did not show a single sign of worry. I braced for impact, ready for my shield to be tested, and then…
The poison spells passed right through us.
I admit that the sight of the spells just passing through my crystal gave me a mini heart attack, but when they whizzed through our bodies, I couldn't help gazing at Mia in pure admiration.
That was when I realized just how much mana she was giving off.
Dream mana was ephemeral at the best of times. Even I could barely sense what she was doing, and I was being affected by it. Best I could tell, she had rendered us completely… well, dream-like. Nothing could touch us. Considering none of the spells were targeting us, I could only assume that no one could see us, either.
Then Mia ran straight at the wall of the building.
I braced myself once again, but our bodies barely shimmered as we passed right through the solid construct. This time, though, I keenly felt the sudden and sharp drop in Mia's mana reserves. She stumbled and almost dropped me on my ass. Only my quick reflexes saved me from that indignity.
"Are you alright?" I demanded, drawing her into my chest as I frantically looked around.
The ground floor of the building was almost completely wrecked. Furniture and a few bodies were strewn all over the place in pieces. The windows had been barred by swatches of rock, jutting right out of the ground.
Four demons stood at the front door, heavy shields in hand, all focused outwards. Thankfully, they seemed entirely oblivious to us.
"Just… drained myself too quickly. I can phase through regular materials easily enough, but mana-rich ones? Not so," Mia wheezed, reminding me of how she'd chosen to jump over my crystal enclosure. "The wall wasn't magical, but it did have a couple wide-range protective enchantments laid into it. I think they just strengthened it and then heavily warded the entrance."
"Makes sense, it's cheaper. Take a moment to rest while I deal with those idiots."
I nodded towards the guards, and she gave me a tired smile in response, with no protests.
The guards were in a good position and had the wards against outside threats, but it was pretty obvious they were there just to keep an eye on our troops. Now that we were inside, I could feel the souls and mana signatures of the whole unit. Most of them were overhead. I sensed they were all in a major casting together, fueling the Baron's poisonous rampage.
They were about to get one hell of a nasty surprise, though.
Flaring up my mana, I used Mia's technique to teleport right behind the four guards before any of them could even blink. My soul blade lashed out at the neck of one guard as I simultaneously buried a spike of crystal into the back of another's skull. The spike promptly exploded, killing that guard and showering the other three in densely packed crystalline slivers.
My sword had gone right through the first demon's neck. Kicking the body aside, I buried the blade into his friend's face. The last guard collapsed to the floor with a whimper. The crystal slivers had perforated his back so thoroughly, he was bleeding out like a sieve, not that I needed him alive for long.
Or at all.
A single stomp shattered his skull, my mage shield sparing me from the resultant spray.
"Can't be a little… cleaner?" Mia groused, grimacing at the splatter her own shield had stopped. She was already looking much better, a mana crystal in hand and several spent ones littered around her feet.
"Sorry? Anyway, I think they sensed that."
She scoffed. "You think? You weren't subtle."
She wasn't wrong. I could feel the frantic shifting of the souls above us, along with swelling spells and humming wards.
"Charging up there would likely be unpleasant," I noted idly, enjoying the way her lips twitched in amusement.
"Likely."
"Then let's not, yeah?"
"That would be preferable."
That was all the permission I needed. I swept her aside and stood close to the wall, summoning the majority of my mana as I did.
A seed of crystal formed in the center of the room. It grew swiftly, spiking wildly in every direction before the material was forced back into a ball about a foot in diameter. When I finally couldn't pack more matter and mana into it, I let it explode.
Not literally, of course. Instead, massive spikes of branching crystal erupted skywards, shearing straight through the ceiling and into the floor above. The crack of concrete and a shower of rubble came right before the screams.
I conjured a small dome to protect us as my constructs literally demolished the separation between floors, spearing through everything in their way. A shower of cement, metal, wood, and a few recognizable pieces of furniture all collapsed onto the open-plan ground floor, revealing sixteen demons suspended on crystalline lattices.
Most of them were dead or dying, with the exception of one remarkably lively individual.
A demon with dusky orange skin writhed, impaled like the rest, yet actively managing to tear his way off the crystal. I noticed that he didn't bleed like a regular demon would. Instead, globs of noxiously green and purple substances dripped out of him, corroding my crystal faster than even the spells had. Not fast enough for his liking, obviously, since he was practically bisecting himself to get free, but still.
He saw us, paused, and dropped those efforts. His arms came up to refocus the aim of his spells.
Mia put an end to that quickly enough. She flashed across the room as her sword sliced through the air, parting his forearms from the rest of him.
The demon's mouth parted, but whether to scream or curse or cast some sort of spell, I would never know. Mia simply stuffed an overlarge spent mana crystal right in there, to the uncomfortable sound of a jaw cracking too far open.
"No," she said simply, glaring at him like a mother scolding a child.
"I… you know what? Amazing work," I gushed. "Ten out of ten. Still, I can't bloody well believe this is the second Baron we've had to take out today. I mean, we did it, but…"
"But they snuck up on us." She kept glaring at the defeated demon, the venom in her voice making him flinch. "And I'm looking forward to finding out how."