The command center of Ashwick was a mess. The room was usually orderly, with people moving in and out to deliver reports. The mood was different today.

Mara stood with her back to the wall, her arms crossed over her chest plate. She watched the five people at the central table. They were Senior Knights, and right now, they weren’t acting like it. They were losing their calm.

“We still have no signal from Drecht,” Paladin Halloway said. “They must be dead. Too much time has passed since we last heard from them.”

He was pacing back and forth inside the room.

Mara observed the group. They were going into panic, which was visible in the restless tapping of Halloway’s fingers against the table.

Though they held the rank of senior officers in name, they had spent too much time stationed safely behind walls, accustomed only to issuing orders rather than facing combat directly.

She had seen this before. Officers who froze as soon as their commander wasn’t there to shield them. They needed someone to tell them what to do. Without that, they would fail. They would just stand there, unable to decide.

Mara pushed off the wall and walked to the table.

Her eyes fell on the map of Ashwick spread before them. The city was designed as a fortress: fifty-foot walls of anti-magic granite, garrisoned by thousands of soldiers. Yet these officers were prepared to retreat over the disappearance of just a few people.

It was, she thought, truly pitiful.

“They’ve been dark for twenty-four hours,” Mara said. “Drecht is arrogant, but he adheres to protocol. Isadora is obsessive about updates. If they haven’t sent people to report, there is only one logical conclusion.”

“They are dead,” Mara said. She didn’t say it with malice or sorrow. It was just a fact, like stating the weather. “All of them. Wiped out. The question is, were they killed by monsters or by something else?”

“Impossible,” Halloway said. “Drecht is Level 365. He had a full squad of Paladins. Who could kill them all with no one noticing?”

“Reidar Miller,” Mara said.

The name sucked the oxygen out of the room.

“The Archdeacon is in the cave now,” Mara said, looking at the map of the city. “With Drecht gone, the chain of command falls to the senior officers.”

She looked around the table. Halloway was a logistics officer. García was a drill instructor who hadn’t seen real combat in a while. The others were bureaucrats in robes. They were Level 320s and 330s, high on paper, but not really, really strong, as most of them had been carried.

“We need to evacuate,” Halloway said. “If Miller is here, and he killed Drecht, he’s coming. We need to take the Archdeacon and—”

“You want to interrupt the Archdeacon during his ascension?” Mara asked. “Go ahead. Knock on the door and see if he doesn’t vaporize you for breaking his concentration.”

Halloway paled.

Mara sighed. This was too pathetic.

“I am taking temporary command,” Mara said.

“You don’t have the authority,” Garcìa said.

Mara didn’t move, but her mana flared. She was at level 362, basically the strongest person here.

“Status,” Mara said, ignoring his objection.

Garcìa froze. He looked at the others. They were looking at Mara with relief. They wanted someone to tell them what to do.

“Perimeter defenses are at 80%,” Garcìa said, sighing. “The patrols have nothing to report.”

“Not anymore,” Mara said. “Triangulate the last known position of Drecht’s party. I want to know exactly where they died. Second, I want you to double the guard at the Gates. If Miller is coming, he’ll try to breach the gates. He is not stupid enough to do something against the walls themselves. He will either use some kind of flying summon or strike directly at the gates.”

She then thought.

“And seal the grates,” she said. “Weld them shut. I don’t care if it backs up the sewage into the streets. Nothing bigger than a rat gets in or out.”

“And the Archdeacon?” Halloway asked. “Shouldn’t we warn him?”

Mara paused.

“We buy him time. I doubt Miller knows about the cave. Our job isn’t to kill him. Most likely, we can’t. We just need to resist long enough for the Archdeacon to come do the job for us.”

She looked at the trembling officers.

“Move. Now.”

—[…]—

The creatures followed the orders of their creator. Their bones snapped and shifted as their armor plates slid over each other, and within seconds, the Vorathid Sky-Hunters shrank from the size of men to the size of large wasps.

They hummed as they hovered over the rooftops of Ashwick, and because they were so small, the city’s defense systems couldn’t even see them.

The summons stayed low as they passed over the central plaza, flying just above the heads of the people running below.

The streets were full of movement. Officers in uniforms stood at intersections, shouting commands. Soldiers in full armor ran past them as they headed for the walls. A bell rang in the distance, and more soldiers came out of the barracks.

The Vorathid Sky-Hunters flew through it all, tracking every detail: the positions of the officers, the gaps between patrols, and the weak points in the city’s response.

They kept note of it all, even though they had no way to transmit the information back to Lena and Jake.

Then they flew over a group of crossbowmen on a roof who were loading bolts to look for flying threats, then the Sky-Hunters sped up and headed for the north gate.

There were thousands of soldiers below. Fighting them would be useless. The creatures bypassed the buildings, banked sharply, and reached the north gate.

It was a massive structure that stood thirty feet tall, and it used gears and pistons controlled by the guards to move. There were eight guards on the ground and four more in the control room.

The swarm landed on the wall and crawled into the shadows. The guards were Level 330 and wore full armor.

They watched the forest, looking for an army, which they expected because of Reidar. They didn’t know the creatures were right above them. The Vorathid Sky-Hunters spotted the weak points in their armor: the neck, the eye slits, and the openings under the arms.

They slipped inside the gatehouse. Inside, guards stood near a big winch.

“Command wants us to lock it down,” one guard said. “They think the Summoner is nearby.”

“The walls will hold,” the other replied.

The Vorathid Sky-Hunters crawled across the ceiling until they were right over the guards.

They needed to kill the personnel before an alarm could be raised, then release the lock and open the gate.

The swarm let go of the ceiling, and as they fell, they grew from the size of wasps back into their wolf-sized combat forms. The guards didn’t even have time to scream; they just looked up and saw the monsters falling on them.

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