Underkeeper

Kustov, as it turned out, was going to be just fine—though not necessarily soon. He’d taken a deep puncture wound to the leg, and that tourniquet had probably saved his life. That healing potion helped a little too, but Bernt doubted it would have been enough.

By the time they reached the main guard station, Kustov was mostly back to his senses and cursing up a storm. The wound wasn’t closed, but Bernt supposed at least the nicked artery that had almost killed the dwarf was sealed.

“I don’t care if he’s stable, we need all the mages up and fighting—especially that one!” Palina, the senior guardswoman in charge, was furiously shouting at the quartermaster, demanding a better healing potion for Kustov. “I get why they decided to leave the breaches open, but that only works if we can actually repel all of the attacks. I don’t know where Janus is, or if he’s even closing them now, so I want Kustov here on his feet now!”

Grumbling, the quartermaster turned around and vanished into a small storage room for a few seconds before reemerging with a standard healing potion. It wasn’t as good as a superior healing potion, but it could fix almost anything within a few minutes. It also cost less than half as much as a superior potion, which made it the healing solution of choice for military officers.

“Uh… why did they leave the breaches open?” Bernt asked as Palina handed the potion over to Kustov, who downed it, still muttering curses to himself in Dwarvish. “The kobolds would have kept digging new ones, sure, but it would have been a lot harder for them to attack from multiple points like this, right?”

Kustov grimaced as he loosened the tourniquet and removed it from his leg. “It makes them easier to predict,” he explained. “Or that was the idea, probably. And I’m sure the army’s planning to use those same tunnels to go in—might have been orders from the general. Whatever the case, our diviners predicted every significant attack so far, as far as I know. They probably thought it wasn’t a big risk.”

Bernt stared blankly, but then shook his head. “What do we do now? I overdid it in that fight, putting out the house fire and then casting the firestorm—I can’t cast.”

“Don’t worry about it, you did the right thing. Probably saved a lot of people’s lives, doing that. You should be proud!” The other mage fumbled at a pouch at his belt, pulled out a small vial and held it out. “Drink this. It’s not going to fix anything, but it’ll kill the pain. If you stick to small spells and take your time, you’ll be fine. Don’t overdo it. Just cover my back and let me do the heavy work.”

“Thanks,” Bernt said as he accepted the potion a bit apprehensively. What counted as a small spell? “I’ll pay you back.”

The dwarf waved him off and rose, putting some weight on his wounded leg to test it out. It held. He nodded to Palina and the quartermaster.

“I’m ready to go. How many guards can you spare for me? And did anyone remember to grab my hammer?”

***

They’d barely left the guard station when they ran into another group of guards hauling a wounded Underkeeper—Sen. He was unconscious, deathly pale and being carried by three guards. Bernt’s group slowed down a moment to check on their colleague. He was bleeding from his side and one leg ended in a stump at the ankle. That would mean early retirement. There were limits to what a potion could do. Bernt wanted to stop and make sure he’d be alright, but Kustov put a hand on his arm and pulled him away.

The first breach they visited was completely fine. Dayle was manning it, and he’d managed to slaughter the entire attacking force before his supporting guards, or the paladin who was supposed to shield him, even had a chance to get involved. As far as they could tell, there hadn’t even been a sorcerer. The two mages closed the tunnel easily, and Dayle’s group joined them looking for more trouble. Bernt was already weakened and exhausted, but he knew it would get worse before it got better. Trumpets and shouts rang out from all around now, and dark smoke rose in the distance.

The battle went on for hours as they rushed from breach to breach, closing them up even as new ones opened—mostly in the sewers. Some came up directly underneath buildings, much to the dismay of the residents battened down inside. In one case, a house collapsed onto one unlucky kobold tunneling crew that had undermined a load-bearing wall, closing the breach before it even formed. As the only one qualified to help, Kustov had sent Dayle and his team ahead while he worked to pull the survivors out of the rubble. As he did, Bernt and the guards escorted them up to the nearest properly defended guard station.

Bernt did his best to cast as conservatively as possible, only attacking kobolds that managed to come close enough to threaten Kustov, himself, or his charges. Despite his armor and melee weapon, the geomancer kept back, concentrating instead on closing tunnels and fouling the terrain for entire groups of kobolds as they tried to break through barricades and swarm into the streets.

In more than one place, the defenses had been breached entirely, leading to running battles in the town. Fortunately, they weren’t working alone. Teams of mixed adventurers, guards, Underkeepers, guild mages, and the occasional civilian crossed paths, coordinating and exchanging information with each other as best they could to cover all of the enemy approaches.

From one such team, Bernt heard that Uriah had single-handedly cleared a breach by flooding it with sewage. From another, they heard that Janus, the most powerful geomancer in the city, hadn’t joined in to close the breaches. The reason for this was that he was, by himself, holding up the city wall against hundreds of enemy diggers. The kobolds had managed to undermine significant portions of the wall without anyone noticing—not until several sections started to crumble at the same time. Janus was under heavy attack from regular kobolds as well as a few sorcerers, but was enduring with the support of several other adventurers. There was no telling how long the fight would take.

For a moment, Bernt wondered where his party was right now. Were they out here, fighting? Or had they maybe taken a quest outside the city? He hoped, for their sake, that it was the latter.

Jori, Bernt knew, was supporting Iriala in much the same way that he was backing up Kustov. He didn’t have many details through the familiar bond, except that Jori, for some reason, was increasingly fascinated by Iriala’s glasses, stealing glances at them every few seconds. He’d have to ask her what that was all about.

The bond still gave him a general idea of what was going on once they were close enough to each other. The imp was accompanying Iriala to the main breach, stopping to fight a few times along the way. To his surprise, Iriala didn’t use any big spells to fight—instead she cast magic missiles at an impossible pace, each one finding its mark unerringly, as if the spell itself knew where its target was going to be. It looked completely effortless.

Bernt lost track of time after a while. He grew numb to the sight of blood and the sounds of screams, too tired to worry about them anymore. He just followed Kustov and watched for danger. One breach after another.

Sometimes, rarely, a messenger would find them with instructions, sending them to this spot or that to do what they’d already been doing. He didn’t know how long it went on, but he was worn out. The numb, tingling pain shooting down his arm had spread to his entire right side now, and it was getting harder to keep up with Kustov’s punishing pace.

Eventually, he started seeing other people running down the streets. People wearing matching armor and gold-and-black uniforms. They were mostly humans, and they obviously knew their business. Their large groups moved confidently, sweeping through the streets and the sewers simultaneously. Who were they? Bernt had walked several blocks more before he finally managed to assemble the information into a coherent thought.

They were soldiers. The army had arrived.

Finally.

Bernt was looking for kobolds so intently as they walked that he didn’t realize where his group was going until they were standing in view of the command post at the main breach. Ed was there, framed in the doorway to the command post with Iriala on one side and a severe-looking man in his early forties on the other. He wore a crisp gold-and-black uniform and a sword, but no armor. A gold tassel was attached to his left shoulder. That made him a royal of some kind.

Concentrating on his bond for a moment, Bernt saw that Jori was further inside the building, keeping out of sight. He had no idea how she’d gotten in there, but he was glad she was keeping a low profile.

The breach itself was a mess. The hole in the street that led down to it was almost twice as wide as before, and the wall behind it now sagged perilously inward. The barricades were nowhere in evidence. Bernt couldn’t tell whether they had been removed or were buried under all the kobold bodies and debris.

Clearly the defenders had taken losses too, but the kobolds had it far, far worse.

They were winning.

Bernt’s head swam, and he sat down hard against the wall. A hand landed on his shoulder and he looked up to see Kustov’s face. The dwarf was saying something.

“…alright?”

Bernt nodded. He wasn’t hurt. He just… couldn’t think straight.

A short while later, his mind cleared again. Somewhat, anyway.

There were soldiers standing in the street now. Ranks upon ranks of them, holding spears and wearing short swords on their hips. They were just standing there, waiting.

Bernt heaved himself back to his feet. There was a shout to his left, over by the breach, and he raced toward it. Men and women in guards’ uniforms climbed up to street level alongside a heavily armored man dragging a massive two-handed sword, a cleric in badly stained white robes, and an extremely bedraggled-looking woman in gray robes—Fiora.

As they emerged, the remaining guards and adventurers outside the tunnels fired arrows and threw rocks to slow the pursuing kobolds pushing outward. But they weren’t just regular kobolds. A few of the creatures had wings, and one was much taller and broader than the others, carrying a runed staff—clearly a sorcerer, but different from those Bernt had encountered in the dungeon before.

The guards kept retreating, backing up further until the kobolds had control of the entire breach, past where the barricades had been before. He would have to move soon, at this rate.

Bernt couldn’t understand why. What was the point of letting the enemy gain a foothold like this? Why wasn’t the army fighting them yet?

The big kobold shouted and raised its staff as others streamed past him. It was casting something, Bernt was sure.

Summoning every last bit of focus he could, Bernt raised his wand and cast. He didn’t know why the army, the guards and Ed were allowing this to happen, but he couldn’t just stand by and let that horrible creature finish its spell.

His fire dart flew like an ember from a hearth and struck the sorcerer directly in the face. The creature flinched and swatted at his face as if stung. He didn’t know if he was just that tired, or if the big sorcerer had some kind of special resistance to fire. It raised its staff once more and began casting again. Well, at least he’d distracted him for a second.

Maybe it would make a difference.

Just as he had the thought, a spell struck the creature with a noise like cracking thunder. Bernt had only glimpsed it, but he thought it was a magic missile—If it could be called that. The force projectile had been longer than his arm and shone with an incandescent blue light. Bernt couldn’t even begin to guess how much force was bound into the spell.

The kobolds still streaming past the sorcerer were flung outward like rag dolls, slamming against their comrades, the wall, and even a few of the retreating guards. The sorcerer was just… gone.

Before Bernt could process what he was seeing, a massive half-dome of force went up, locking the entire kobold advance inside. He looked around in bewilderment and spotted the source of the spell a moment later. An entire team of ten uniformed mages with white bands around their left arms was channeling the spell in unison, each holding an identically carved straight staff.

Standing right next to them were Ed and Iriala, though only Ed seemed to be casting right now. He was weaving his pipe in an abstruse pattern—something complex, considering what the man could do with a simple hand wave.

He finished the spell with a simple downward flick of the pipe, and the ground shook with a deep, bone-rattling boom. That was followed by a silence only broken by the clacking of stray rocks. They rained down toward the breach from the sagging wall and bounced off the shield for a few moments before the team of force mages released the dome.

The kobolds were… dead. They were very, very dead. They lay completely motionless, strewn over the ground, not even twitching. Nothing came up behind them.

What kind of spell was that?

Bernt was still puzzling it out as another group of mages advanced on the breach—these wearing brown armbands. They were geomancers, Bernt realized as they, in the space of a few seconds, completely repaired the broken-down wall and cleared the path down into the dungeon. As soon as a gap was opened up, ranks upon ranks of soldiers started marching down, taking the fight to the enemy.

It was over. Finally.