“What I don’t understand, “ said the Knight-Commander after the explanation. “-is why no one put the Adventurer’s guild on alert for unaccounted for dead elite-ranks.”

Casimir shook his head. “They were accounted for.” He explained. “The Soul-Devouring Dragon was a master of Negative Magic. He killed them with Soul Drain, they shouldn’t have been able to form into Revenants.”

The Knight Commander digested that information. “What about Necromancy? Could the dragon have kept the souls and turned them into Revenants?”

“Unlikely… but I don’t know enough to call it impossible.” Casimir replied. Necromancy was poorly understood, as experimentation was forbidden and what little information did exist tended to be locked away. The Archmages of the Negative Magic department might be able to assess viability. “The Soul-Devouring Dragon is dead, for one. I led the Hero-ranked team The Gold Hunters to its lair and we killed it within the week of Magnus and Luci’s death. They’d need to have both reanimated them and sent them away in that time frame, and given that they mentioned a master…” It was unusual all around, really.

“About that.” Knight-Commander Carpenter said. “Is that normal for Revenants? Having a master? If you ignored the fact that they shouldn’t exist, were they otherwise normal?”

Casimir nodded. “More or less. Revenants, like all intelligent monsters, have a certain amount of antipathy and sadism towards all life. As they still retain most of their personality, you should see more exceptions to the blind spots all such monsters have in common than you see, but you don’t. That said, masterless revenants have been known to kill themselves, if they were exceptionally disciplined or honorable in life. Usually, revenants are commanded by Crypt Lords, a monster that is, from an academic standpoint, not considered undead despite having so much in common with the subtype.” It was why Revenants were usually accompanied by many examples of lesser undead. “So I’d expect the main cavern of the warren to have a population of undead.” Maybe even additional revenants that Casimir didn’t have a personal connection to.

“Well, all we can do for now is incorporate anti-teleportation measures into our fortifications.” Said Knight-Commander Carpenter. “What limitations does she have on that spell? I was unaware that it was one of Helel’s miracles.”

“It isn’t.” Casimir explained. “Luci’s always preferred to gain an academic understanding of how spirit magic worked, and that allowed her to use nonstandard spells within the mana types provided by Helel’s connection. In particular, space magic from the Banishment miracle.” Casimir shrugged. “However, I suspect that she will only be able to teleport either herself or other durable undead, as she wasn’t able to teleport things consistently without inflicting some kind of damage to them.” It was a handy feature when one wanted to teleport bombs into the midsts of enemies, but it wasn’t useful for most things you would want teleportation magic for.

“Well that’s something.” The Knight-Commander said. “Wait, if she’s bad at space magic… I’ll need to talk to some of the Specialists.”

Casimir chuckled at the clear eureka moment. “Luci’s magic senses have always been somewhat mediocre, so whatever plan you have, it should work.” After a pause, he added: “Well, exactly what benefits Revenants get over their skills in life is far from being completely understood. But it’s worth preparing, I think.”

The Knight-Commander stood up and started to leave the tent. “Right. Lots to do, report first thing in the morning tomorrow for the assault.” He started calling out for his elite subordinates for the last minute preparation.

Casimir lazily saluted. “Yes sir.” Turning to his shamefaced students, Casimir frowned at them and sharply gestured for them to follow him.

They shrank a bit at Casimir’s withering expression, but dutifully followed instructions.

---------------

“-nearly ruined everything, to the point of getting everyone killed, with only blind fucking luck being responsible for our continued survival!” Casimir finished off his fiery, invective-laden rant at his students. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

The four of them glanced at each other, silently communicating on who would be the first to speak up. Eventually, Illivere cleared her throat. “We wished to contribute.”

Ugh. “You’re still novices. You should have just taken a normal quest and take on random monsters, something you can handle.” After a moment, Casimir decided to ask something of substance. “How did you get a quest for dogsteel, anyway? There shouldn’t have been any, given that the kobold issue was a military matter.”

After a moment of silence, Casimir sighed. “I guess it doesn’t matter. You wanted to fight kobolds, so you found an excuse.”

“They weren’t doing anything!” Peter suddenly shouted. “There’s a potential invasion and the army just sits on their butts and has you dive in alone to do their jobs for them?”

Why must he be cursed with students that were so stupid? “Even adventurers don’t wander into kobold warrens without scouting, Peter.” Casimir gestured in the direction of the warren. “When you have a problem big enough to call the military, like an infestation of monsters that aren’t native to the area, containment is important. I’ve been exhaustively cataloging every entrance and exit to that warren over the last week, and if you had the patience to wait until literally tomorrow, things would have been fine!”

Really, that was overstating things. Knowing that there was an unknown but potent stone magic using monster and knowing that there were at least two elite-ranked revenants supporting the warren were two very different things, and as a result, their fumbling actually provided valuable intelligence.

But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a stupid move on their part. How to punish them? …Has he ever had to punish them before? There was the usual ‘succeed in training or get more training’ stuff, but actual punishments? Not really. “Your gear.” He eventually said. “There is to be no adventure, and to that end, all of your gear will be locked inside Master Southwind’s residence. Then, you will report to Professor Thorne with the instructions that he put you through as much physical training that is magically possible.” Given that Casimir and Thorne had actually theorized what such a regimen would look like, they would be kept busy for days.

With Casimir’s judgment rendered, Faron saluted sharply, accepting the punishment with grace. Hanna, on the other hand, looked like Casimir had instead ordered her to chop off a limb in penance. Peter was somewhere in between, and Illivere’s impassive face was as rigid as stone, the ordeal ahead of her enough to crack her ironclad composure and paralyze her with stress.

“Get going, or I’ll tack on something else.” Casimir said, shooing them away. He didn’t bother threatening them further to ensure compliance, Faron will make sure of it. If not, he’ll just expel them. He spent way too much time on threat assessment for this kind of mistake to be acceptable.

Now it’s just a matter of dealing with the monsters wearing his friend’s faces. This is going to suck.

----------------

Anima, as an island nation, did not have the largest army in the world. However, Casimir would dare anyone to find a nation with a more elite force than the mage-knights. Each one was trained thoroughly both physically and magically, utilizing shaping magic to create weapons and armor with enough power to render themselves basically invincible against any combatant not backed up with magical augmentations of some kind.

On top of that, the army included many powerful wizards with more specialized magical roles, and each mage-knight was trained in collaborative casting to allow those specialists to unleash truly massive spell effects.

There were still less elite troops, naturally, only capable with basic magic and equipped with enchanted arms and armor, but those usually just manned guard posts and the fortifications that the specialists created.

So when Casimir learned that the unit of mage-knights that were sent to assist numbered three dozen, with four specialists, his first reaction was “These kobolds are hosed.” Sure, on an individual basis Casimir could take any two of them, but when you have forty full fledged wizards working in concert, there were very few monsters that were both organized and powerful enough to defeat them.

Besides, if any of those things show up Casimir will just kill it himself. The Revenant’s presence caused the plan to bait a few hundred kobolds out for slaughter outside of their defenses to be scrapped.

Instead, they skipped straight to the part where he leads the group and handles the traps, so he was still in front. Not that this was an imposition, as two of the specialists were domain wizards, and the first thing they did once they entered the underground was, with the help of a literal barrel of alchemically stored stone mana, establishing a Stone Domain, flooding the area with stone mana and shifting it slowly to follow the formation of knights. Within this doman, the tunnels flexed wider, to allow the knights to move with ease, and the attempts for Magnus to seize control over the stone around them were rebuffed with the ease of warding off an insect. As a powerful Wraith, it wouldn’t be nearly as easy when the revenant was close or within the area, but from a long distance like this? It was overkill.

That said, domain magic was incredibly powerful, and was not easily contested… but there was a reason it was considered primarily a defensive discipline, as when the magically reinforced and heavily trapped entrance to the warren came up, the domain’s advance halted like water meeting a dam.

Knight-Commander Carpenter noticed immediately when the otherwise innocuous dead end failed to bend aside to their advance. “Time to earn your pay, Toomes.” He said with a savage grin.

“On it.” Casimir said as he shifted a section of wall aside, grabbed the lever, and pulsed mana to double-check if the mechanism had changed. Casimir hummed. “They changed the settings, give me a minute.” It needed to end in that state in… three moves. The lever had four positions, each tick doing that, that, that, and that… so four ticks there, three there, that’s a flip operator, triggered by pushing in that position… what order? Three steps, six possible combinations… definitely not that one first… “Got it.” He pulled the lever down two thirds of the way, pulled it left, let it click four times, ignored the magic trap priming, put it back to the top, shoved the lever into its own base, pulled it back to the two-thirds position, pulled it right, let it tick three times, finishing by letting go so the lever could snap back into its rest position while the primary bolt clunked open.

“How do you do that?” One of the mage knights that Casimir didn’t catch the name of asked.

“It’s just a number puzzle.” Casimir said, waving the question off. “Once you learn what the gears mean, it’s just math.” He couldn’t even take credit for the discovery on how the bloody things worked, he just read the book some long dead wizard wrote and spent two hours a day solving paper examples of the puzzles for weeks until he could do it all in his head. That was back during that big kobold population explosion back when he was a fresh veteran-rank, though. “If you want to do this for a living, talk to me after this is over and I’ll point you to some books.” Some adventurers liked to say kobolds were too stupid to change their designs even if adventurers could bypass them, but honestly the list of people who could solve them in less than twenty minutes of careful examination and without taking out a chalk slate to solve it was quite small. It was still a very effective defense.

Especially as the second he stepped through the door, Casimir signaled for a stone wall from the domain wizard as he had to stop and jam enchanted metal spikes through the stone and into vital parts of the other traps that were going to go off despite him having opened the door without setting any off, as the kobolds armed them while Casimir was working. “It’s clear.” Casimir said as he leapt up to perch on the ceiling, allowing the knights to charge right into the oncoming wave of kobolds after the stone wall, riddled with metal crossbow bolts, receded.

As the battle continued, Casimir dropped back down and disarmed the jammed traps properly and recovered the enchanted spikes. After discarding half of them that were broken back into his loot bag with some of the salvaged trap parts, he set the spikes back into the leg holsters he added to his ensemble for the quest and looked at the bored-looking Specialist wizard that was hanging in the back. “They do anything yet?”

“Nope.” Replied the taciturn wizard. “Not a single mote of space magic, and nothing beyond tremorsense from the wraith.”

Troubling. “Maybe they’re rabbiting?” He could only hope.

“I’ll be ready when they do.” Said the wizard. He put his hand out, his skin looking even darker in the poor light of the cavern. “Specialist Coralblade, by the way.” Casimir shook the elf’s hand as the knights finished up their battle.

“Elite Adventurer Toomes.” Casimir replied, although he was 90% sure the elf already knew his name. With that, the two lapsed back into silence.

“Alright Toomes, you’re up!” Shouted the Knight-Commander. “Lead us to the main chamber.”

The entire area was reinforced by Magnus’ wraith, so the domain wizards had to actively fight off each attempt to attack the group through the terrain rather than just taking control of the local stone and blocking any attempt for Magnus to stop them. In other words, they were waltzing into a completely different stone aspected domain, and that really slowed things down.

Fortunately, despite the annoying loud thrum of Magnus’s attempts to prevent the group from penetrating their defenses and the even louder scraping noises of the domain wizards defending against it, Casimir was still able to use metal mana to sense the traps, examining their shape and disarming them with the same ease as before, although he had to leave his enchanted spikes behind for expediency's sake. Small groups of kobolds tried to do a flanking maneuver or five, but they were easily repelled by squads or even pairs of knights before retreating.

But that was why he had the mage knights supply him with two hundred of the bloody things over the week, as they really weren’t that special to make, they just used higher quality steel and enchantments than one would normally use for something disposable. But if you really had to disable traps quickly, jamming or breaking mechanisms normally protected by two inches of solid stone was the best option. The reinforcement of the stone that Magnus provided made re-using them an iffy prospect anyway, half of them were dulled enough to break the etched enchantments after a single use. Even his mithril-gilded set would likely require reforging after three or four uses under these conditions…

“Clear.” Casimir said after one last strike with his trap kit’s hammer, driving yet another spike into a spring-loaded blade trap, preventing it from resetting after he deliberately triggered it. “It’s right through here, big column with four floors, this is the second floor, central shaft with rooms around them. Can’t tell exactly how many kobolds are in there…” All the interference from the domain conflict dulled Casimir’s ability to sense the subtle mana of monster cores. “Hundreds at least, though.” He also couldn’t tell what was there beyond the kobolds, as Magnus’s presence was overwhelming everything in the section of the room he was in. “Wraith’s a level or two above the entrance, can’t tell what’s around him.”

Coralblade, having slightly better senses than Casimir, called out a correction: “The Mummy’s done something with space mana, can’t tell what, but it’s lasting. Can’t tell where, either.” Is that what that high-pitch whine his mana senses is detecting is?

Casimir thought for a moment. “No idea what that is.” Usually she restricted herself to using the Holy Sword miracle before a fight, as Helel was rather light on appropriate spells. Pun intended.

The Knight Commander grinned at the impending violence. “You all know your parts in the plan. For the glory of Anima!”

Everyone there, Casimir included, shouted as they charged into the enemy’s base.