The plan was pretty simple: the first thing that Casimir does disables any mechanical traps that they have set up, but you usually didn’t see that in the main chamber, so all Casimir had to do was disable two hastily constructed ones in the floor with a trio of enchanted spikes Propelled through the stone.

Any actual ambush attacks towards him was to be blocked by one of the domain wizards, who bent the stone domain into a crushing force effect right ahead of Casimir, which made the massive wave of dogsteel bolts plummet down from the air and into the ground, ruining the traps even further.

With that out of the way, Casimir spared a moment to examine the battlefield as the knights rushed into it. Kobold warriors typically had a decent sense of what tactical situations favored them, and strived to fight only in those situations. Unfortunately, the more common kobolds they commanded were easily distracted at the opportunity to fight and kill, so you usually saw a quick charge whenever you engaged kobolds, even when the advantage was yours. The rest used those idiots as a distraction to disengage and fight on more favorable ground, typically.

The thing was, this fortified cavern represented the best possible conditions for battle, and they knew that. So all of the less intelligent kobolds charged the formation of knights en masse, ripe for the slaughter. In these conditions, the knights deemed the bets combination of shaped arms and armor to be the same setup that Faron had used in the initial battle: force armor to make the universally sharp and dense dogsteel weapons unable to penetrate, and water weapons to allow for rapid reconfiguration and to minimize friendly fire as the kobolds did their best to either stay at reach with spears or to slip within the guards of the knights to knife them in the gaps of the shaped armor.

But that wasn’t what Casimir needed to worry about, as the knights had things well in hand when it came to the bulk of the forces. The cavern was a typical example of kobold engineering, the layout being a single large shaft surrounding a metal pillar that had ladders on all sides. The shaft held four floors, with the entrance the group had used being on the second floor. Kobolds used a hexagonal layout for each floor, with three to six rooms on each one, depending on the warren’s needs, but no matter what there were six metal bridges connecting the central pillar to the rooms. The Revenants were not immediately visible, so Casimir immediately assumed Magnus would be in the most inconvenient possible location: above them.

“Watch for collapses!” Casimir called out to the domain wizards, as he leapt out towards the central pillar, activating a few of his mobility curses to allow him to easily scramble up the ladders as he scouted things out with his physical eyes, as mana sensing beyond the borders of a domain you were inside was unacceptably difficult.

As expected, the kobolds didn’t like him doing that, but his senses were able to detect and avoid any attempt to spoil his footing and he was too nimble for their uncoordinated volleys to accomplish anything. He mumbled as he observed the kobold’s positions, using the enchanted nose ring that he had been provided to convey his messages to the Knight-Commander. “Second floor, full excavation with four sections. Sorcerer support in section two…” Casimir leapt to the kobold sorcerers, allowing them to form a spiked barrier to impale him… before using that same barrier as a pivot to redirect the force of his movement upwards magically, bouncing off the ceiling to get inside their protective circle and decapitating all four of the magical support with two swings of his sword. “...neutralized.”

Casimir grabbed the back of that spiked barrier and swung it around, injuring many but killing few of the other kobolds that were supposed to protect the sorcerers. With that bit of breathing room, Casimir leapt out of the area just in time to avoid the stalagmites that suddenly formed in an attempt to perforate him. “Too slow!” He announced to Magnus as he scrambled back onto the central metal pillar, which drastically reduced Magnus’s ability to attack him.

“Now where are they?” Casimir mumbled, climbing the central pillar to check the other floor. Activating the enchanted nose ring again, he started rattling off troop dispositions to the Knight-Commander. “First floor, six segments, mostly clear. Just a few emplacements that they’re reloading in segments two and five. “ At Knight-Commander Carpenter’s confirmation, sent to the enchanted earring he was wearing for this operation, he continued. “Third floor, three segments… Revenant spotted!” Magnus had attempted to conceal his position by hiding in a private hutch, but the domain that the knights were pushing forward recoiled in a way that it only would when a competing one was there, and the magic that wraiths used to animate their distributed body parts was essentially a small domain, so that was a dead giveaway… or a decoy.

Still, if he doesn’t have line of sight, that was an opportunity. Casimir ran across the air, creating tiny platforms of force rather than touching the ground, his weight curse making him light enough to travel on such weak barriers without pause. There were a few kobolds that were a bit higher tier than normal in the same area, but it was a work of seconds to dispatch them.

However, those seconds were an opportunity that Magnus used to notice the anomalous movements of his guards and open up his hidey hole, exploding out a bunch of stone shards that unerringly traveled straight to Casimir rather than scattering and hitting his minions.

Casimir immediately leapt upwards towards the ceiling, preparing a stone wall to block the homing shrapnel spell. Unfortunately, the stone was too strongly held fast by Magnus’s aura, and Casimir instead was forced to rely on his armor and reflexes to minimize the damage.

“Who’s slow now, eh?” Shouted the floating collection of rocks that impersonated Casimir’s old friend. He attempted to use that ceiling to entrap Casimir, but a small mana void inserted into the stone with a tap of his finger slowed down Magnus’s spell long enough for Casimir to leap clear.

“Still you.” Casimir replied as he used more tiny force barriers to remain at least half a meter from any stone surfaces as his sword flashed as it served death to the kobolds. In response, the wraith gathered more mana and used Magnus’s favored strategy: armoring up and advancing to put boot to ass personally.

Where the hell was Luci? Casimir couldn’t detect a hint of hostile mana beyond stone and metal from the kobolds and Magnus, so this probably wasn’t a trap, just typical monster arrogance.

The wraith moved forth on a wave of stone, moving the ground to move himself rather than dropping his stance. He shaped a hammer of stone, runed and intricate like one would see in a mural of a legendary battle, and began to attack Casimir with it, his wide swings simple to dodge as Casimir sheathed his sword and reached into his secondary space-magic satchel, which held only one thing.

“You know Magnus, becoming a nigh-immortal wraith isn’t going to change the fact that you suck at fighting anything that’s not a crowd or ten times your size.” Casimir commented as he brandished his ax.

Now, Peter’s hand axes well good pieces of work for most situations, not ideal of course but the enchantments allowed even those tiny things to pack enough of a wallop that the normal issues for using lighter weapons were minimized, and allowed him to become more comfortable at the kind of skirmishing that Casimir is best suited to teach.

But a set of enchantments that allowed a forearm sized weapon to hit like a lumberjack’s swing was even more effective when one used an axe so large that it was typically considered to be appropriate for executions instead of combat. Granted, such enchantments also required a lot more mana to power when dealing with such a large weapon, but that’s why he only uses it when he really needs a big hit.

Casimir twirled the feather-light weapon, deflecting a barrage of stone chips that Magnus tried to sneak past him as he advanced once more. Casimir swung his axe, forcing Magnus to back off and abort his swing or else get bisected. “You’re using that thing?” Questioned Magnus. “You can’t hit anything with that that you don’t practically tie down, why bother?”

“I wanted to give you the chance to dodge.” Casimir replied glibly. “It’s not like you could dodge a thing that didn’t send a letter a day in advance.”

At that insult, Magnus roared as he built up his stone armor even more, switching from the configuration he called ‘Stalwart Gate’, with straight lines and broad facing, to instead his ‘Grand Golem’ configuration, which incorporated so much stone that he needed to constantly reshape it in order to move properly, as he looked exactly like a statue of himself if he was triple the height. His new hammer was also just as intricate as before, but the runes were instead configured in a way to allow him to enchant the thing on the spot, a truly advanced sorcerous technique. When Magnus was alive, it was an exhausting spell that amplified his strength, defense, and even speed to tremendous levels, enough to match a dragon blow for blow.

As a wraith, the rules changed a bit. They were one of the closest one could get to being a spirit without actually being one, so breaking their spells forcibly caused pain, which made them slower and less efficient repairing shaped armor than someone of flesh and blood.

Casimir ducked a swing, rolled to avoid a kick, and then leapt away as the tearing sounds of space magic put him back into panic mode. Such instincts saved his life, as Luci fell through the space rift she had created, sword first.

“Damn it!” Cursed Magnus. “You screwed it up!”

“You’re the one who wanted to ambush our scout!” Retorted Luci as she re-assembled the various tears and distortions space rift travel caused in her ragged, desiccated body. She gestured with her glowing sword, clearly based on Helel’s Holy Sword but instead of light aspected mana, it gave a foreign whirring and grinding sound that Casimir belatedly realized was space-aspected mana. He definitely didn’t want to touch that.

Mummies were the rarest kind of revenant, as the churches were quite invested in performing proper funeral rites to their clergy. As such, the exact capabilities of that subspecies was rather thin on the ground. Luci’s tacit admission that her magic was because of an alternative spirit that empowered mummies was quite useful, even if it’s unclear whether it works the same for wendigos and hungry ghosts, or monsters in general. What is known is that while they generally can cast any miracle of their former patrons, they also gain the ability to cast warped versions of those same spells. It was why Casimir preferred the theory that the revenants just understood the spells they were using and just cast like a wizard would instead.

Activating his nose ring again, Casimir mumbled a message to the Knight-Commander: “Both known revenants are with me.”

His earring provided the commander’s near-immediate response.”First two floors are secured. Expect support shortly.”

Their argument over, Luci flexed the fingers of her off hand into the familiar prayer mudra that indicated that she was preparing to use some kind of magic in an instant, although as spirit magic didn’t build mana in the same way as more manual magic, Casimir could only guess what effects she had readied, beyond the knowledge that it was a spell granted by her patron rather than manually casting. Magnus presented the base of his hammer, and after leaping onto it, Magnus launched Luci forward before charging himself in her wake.

With a quick gesture, Casimir stuck his ax into the ground, and instead of falling back, he cast a mind curse in an eyeblink, which didn’t actually do anything important beyond making her unable to perceive his ax, but it didn’t need to, as it forced Luci to make the decision to either commit to her attack pattern before Casimir could capitalize on whatever he just did or to abort so as to not fall into whatever trap he just laid. He was prepared for either option.

Seeing him apparently prepared for her, she immediately picked the latter one, holding out her space sword in front of her, only to use it as a pivot to change her direction, as if it became locked in place for an instant. “So that’s what that does…” Casimir noted. It looked useful.

Magnus, assuming correctly that cursing him through that armor would be prohibitively difficult, continued on his attack vector, preparing to crush Casimir with the several tons of stone he was walking around with.

Casimir instead picked his ax back up, measured his swing, and zipped in the opposite direction that Luci went in to avoid the overhand swing, expending the accumulated mana in his armor’s force absorption enchantments to do so as fast as possible, and after catching himself and channeling that force into his swing, made the feather-light ax instead weigh about two tons as it expended its internal reserve of mana.

Needless to say, when you swing something that heavy, even a multi-ton construct of mana tends to just fall apart. Casimir cursed as Magnus moved his monster core just in time to avoid the cutting force, but the top half of his golem body was still shattered and scattered towards Luci, who had to abort whatever she was going to do in favor of deflecting the barrage.

Despite that, Magnus still needed a moment to recover from that blow, so Casimir was able to use a followup swing of lesser but still impressive power to cleave his wraith body in half, although frustratingly the revenant’s core still moved out of the way just in time.

Luci wasn’t idle, either, as she used the Light Body spell to partially turn parts of herself into light, significantly increasing her speed and forcing Casimir to escape and stow away his ax, or else find out what a space-aspected blade can do to someone.

Despite the learning experience that was sure to be, Casimir chose the former option and allowed the knights that had finally arrived to rush the pair of revenants, swapping out their water weapons for metal hammers, good against the stone armor.

Luci was still hilariously dangerous, however, so it was a good thing that Casimir focused on cursing her as Specialist Coralblade came up the ladder. Luci grunted as Casimir applied a large weight curse, followed by a spasm curse on her arms, forcing her to focus on keeping hold of her space blade.

Luci arrested her weapon’s position, invoking her patron’s miracles to break the curses after a second of delay and a set of four mudras, ones unfamiliar to Casimir. As she grabbed her space blade again, Coralblade finally accomplished the task he was brought along to do: completely ruin any magic the revenants decided to cast.

The space blade immediately started to destabilize, forcing Luci to concentrate on keeping it from exploding in her hand, eventually releasing the mana in some kind of spatial cutting spell… which was also countered by the negative wizard the army had attached to the operation.

“Magnus!” Luci shouted. “Back to the Master!” On cue, the animate stone that was being suppressed by the knights halted all motion, and the malignant lights in the mummy’s eyes faded, her flesh dissolving into dust as both magical cores vanished to Casimir’s senses.

…How did they do that!?