Dee looked at the work going on in the mine. Just the presence of the mine itself had surprised her. The enemy forces were essentially hiding near the border until they could strike at the Four Winds, so having their forces conduct mining operations seemed a little counter-productive. The Rakshasa and a race of giants with four arms known as Hecatonheires were conducting the mining itself. Both of these races were the warriors of the enemy, so having them tire themselves while also preparing for an attack was not sound tactical thinking. That is unless there was another objective at play here.

The metal that was being mined was glowing with a weird greyish gleam, and Dee could not recognize it. What she could recognize was the fact that all the Rakshasa and Hecatonheires had a collar around their neck made of that same metal and it was decorated with several magical runes and glyphs. The collars floated in place around their necks and there were threads of power running from the collar to the insides of the bodies of those they controlled. Maybe the enemy had a very specific reason for coming to the Four Wind’s lands.

A thought started forming in Dee’s head. Maybe the enemy had trouble finding access to the metal they used to enslave their subordinates. Considering Dee had never even heard about the weird metal, it would stand to reason it was not widely found. The enemy had also created an alliance of sorts with the old owners of this area. Maybe there was a deal behind the scenes at play. Since the community that used to own these lands had lorded over them for a long time, it was likely they knew about this weird metal. Perhaps they promised to allow the enemy to mine that metal in exchange for aid against the Four Winds.

The enemy had also tried grabbing hostages from communities other than the Four Winds, according to what Dee had been told. Perhaps those other communities also had deposits of this weird metal. She didn’t know how much success the enemy had had with the other communities, though that was mostly because she had been worried about other things at that point. It stood to reason though that those other communities had fared worse than Four Winds, seeing as Four Winds had given a fair bit of effort to protect their sub-communities.

Dee looked at the collared slaves. They were not worked to exhaustion or physically mistreated, probably to help them retain combat readiness, but they weren’t exactly allowed to slack around either. There actually seemed to be three distinct types of slaves in this war camp turned into a mine. The dark skinned and large Hecatonheires were a rather mid-sized giant race with their average height around six mel. That said, they were all bundles of pure muscle and clearly trained for war. That wasn’t surprising as their kind was known to be very warlike. It was likely they had picked a fight with the enemy and had gotten enslaved for their trouble.

The other two types of slaves were both forms of Rakshasa. For some reason, they seemed to be divided into two roughly equal types. The more natural looking type seemed like bipedal leopards with four arms. They were between two and three mel tall with the females being a little shorter, and their light brown skin and fur was covered in darker brown spots. Their arms and legs were also covered in complex magical tattoos that were glowing with blue power. It seemed the higher ranked Rakshasa had more intricate tattoos that also extended further. Some even had them on their chest and head. The male had small brown manes that looked more like wild hair gone out of control, while the females had no manes.

The other type of Rakshasa all had dark blue skin with lighter blue magical tattoos. They almost seemed like they were not all that much different from the other kind, except there were a couple of important differences. The appendages of the blue Rakshasa were glowing with light blue energy, almost to the point that it looked like those arms and legs were made of the glowing energy becoming solid. Their eyes were also simply pits of glowing power. The brown Rakshasa gave the impression of being more natural in their making, while the blue ones seemed purely like creations of magic. Dee knew this to be somewhat false as all Rakshasa were created by powerful wizards eons ago as slave species. The blue Rakshasa simply made their magical origins more obvious.

All of the slave warriors in the mine were overseen by a group of wardens that seemed to control the slaves with long glowing canes. Or at least that’s what Dee assumed, as she had not seen any of the wardens use those canes since the slaves were not making a fuss or resisting in any way. The wardens were from the same races as the slaves, but yet different. Their skin and fur was all black, and there seemed to be a vacant look in their eyes. They wore no collars but seemed to be under a direct spell controlling them. She got a very eerie feeling from them and suspected they had been manipulated so long that they no longer needed any other form of control.

Dee sensed that the majority of the beings here were between ranks five and eight. Rakshasa made for great warriors, and Hecatonheires were giants bred for war after all. Dee was slinking from shadow to shadow in the shape of a tiny kitsune. She was looking for three things. The first one was the leaders of the Rakshasa community. She had already spotted some high ranking members of their race, and the deeper into the mine she went the higher their ranks became. The second thing she was looking for was the enemy. She had seen no sign of them so far and could guess that there was a good reason they enslaved other races. The enemy was likely small in numbers.

When she found the enemy, she would most likely also find the third thing she was looking for, which was a way to set the slaves free. If she really was forced into it, she could most likely shatter the collars around their necks with force, but she needed to study one to be sure how to do it without killing the slave. Those threads of power going inside the slaves worried her. Besides, it would be rather bothersome to shatter the collars one at a time, and the slaves would most likely resist due to the orders they had been given.

Once she detected that she was relatively close to the end of the mine, she halted her advance to wait in the shadows. She had thoroughly searched the other parts of the mine and had not found what she was looking for, so it was a safe bet her targets were hiding in the deepest part. The problem was, the deepest part was too heavily guarded for even her to slip through unnoticed. There were almost a dozen high ranking guards blocking the path, though they were not the problem by themselves. The problem was that the whole place was filled with hundreds of detection spells of various kinds. It was almost impressive how thorough the enemy had been, as many of the spells would even work on psions like her. Whoever had created the spells was clearly paranoid.

Luckily this possibility had been taken into consideration. Dee had not come here directly and had instead shared her information with the Four Winds first. The Four Winds had been especially interested in the information about the previous owners of the land that they now occupied. Of course, they had not taken the words of the Zabaniya leader on pure faith and had instead done some discreet investigations of their own, before giving Dee the go-ahead to come here. Those investigations had confirmed the information as accurate, which incensed the Four Winds. A Day city community allying with a slave holding Night city community for revenge! Seeking revenge was not uncommon in the third circle, but not to this extent.

So a plan had been hatched. The Zabaniya leader had promised to make sure the rampaging Saurians would distract that community, and at the same time, the Four Winds would launch their own attack on the community. That way they would be struck on two fronts, and the Four Winds were not planning on leaving them the chance to seek revenge again. Majority of the immortals and forces of the Four Winds had been dispatched on the punishment expedition in order to create an overwhelming force.

That, of course, would leave the Four Winds vulnerable to an attack from the enemy Dee was now stalking. A distraction was needed, both for Dee to do her thing, and for the enemy to not notice that the majority of the Four Winds forces were dispatched elsewhere. The distraction had to be big enough to draw their attention but not so big as to give away the weakness of the Four Winds position and drawing the enemy into a large battle. Luckily they had just the thing.

The Four Winds had managed to restore the flying ship they had taken as bounty from the Githyanki that had ambushed Dee’s group. The ship’s magic nullifying abilities would make retaliation more difficult, especially since they knew the enemy relied heavily on magic and enslaved warriors that were unable to fly. High ranking warriors would be able to get to the ship, but they would be without support and at the mercy of the Four Winds while doing so. The ship was manned by Razark and the psionic members of the Four Winds like Moirai and Nyx. Additionally, the ship was also crewed by the magically barren Dagon, who could both defend the ship from ki attacks and bombard the enemy below with their own.

Dee was simply waiting for the ship to show up, as she had been given ample time to get into position. This mining base would not be the first one hit by the ship either, just to avoid undue attention being placed here. Apparently, the word traveled fast though, as the guards seemed to receive some sort of a signal and started quickly moving to the surface long before the ship even appeared. It seemed they were preparing for the attack to come here. Dee allowed the guards to go on by without stopping them. She was about to go further in but stopped as she sensed several other beings moving towards her.

She was preparing to strike at the enemy from her hiding place but received a rather large surprise as the enemy stopped before even reaching close. An eerie voice spoke loudly. “Alright little rat, it’s time to show yourself. You don’t think your little methods would hide you from one of our glorious kind.”

That caught Dee by surprise. They had detected her? And even before they were in sight? She was using her Authority to hide herself as well. She had suspected that Xinglong had been the one to practically feed the Authority to her, and that turned out to be true. The information she had received from the dragon not only helped her better use the Authority but also confirmed her suspicions. That made the situation even weirder as even a psion using Mindscape should have been unable to detect her while she was actively utilizing the maximum power of the Authority.

Her questions were soon answered as she rounded the corner and finally got a look at her enemy. A single glance was enough to show their foul and aberrant nature, which was saying a lot on Pantheon. The grotesque floating sacks of meat were the stuff of nightmares. Matters were not helped by the large central eye or the large gaping maw just below that eye, nor were the numerous stalks with more eyes on the tips any more comforting. All of the spheroid floating Beholders were hideous and disturbing with their varying appearances, yet Dee was grinning as she saw her enemy. The leader of Zabaniya had been right. These really were just the type of enemy Dee was perfect against. Magically gifted but useless in close combat.

Beholders were by their very nature aggressive, hateful, and greedy. They dismissed other beings as lesser, and for some unfathomable reason considered themselves as the pinnacle of physical perfection. No one was entirely sure where they came from, best guesses assumed them to be from some other plane, and no one even wanted to know how they procreated. Luckily for other races, these aberrations hated each other almost as much as the other races and were few in number. Usually, a group of them were only held together by a powerful tyrant ruling over them, or a common enemy. They were also, as a rule, the most paranoid beings in the universe. It was not strange for their kind to see through Dee’s stealth.

Unfortunately for the other races, the Beholders were powerful magicians that also happened to be the bane of other magic users. Not only were they capable spellcasters, but the eyes of the beholders also had innate magical abilities that they could use at will. The powers of each Beholder varied, but they did have one thing in common; those caught in the sight of their large central eye were unable to use magic themselves, making them the bane of mages and clerics everywhere. Even Dee could feel her holy power becoming sluggish under the stare of the five Beholders floating in front of her.

Yet she was not worried in the slightest, even though one of the Beholders was an immortal and the four others around rank nine. Ironically, she too was the bane of mages, and the innate powers of the Beholders fell under that same category. Even though Dee would be unable to use her holy power to cast spells, that didn’t stop her from being able to counter the spells of the Beholders. And as it happened, the Beholders were in effect floating targets for her psionic abilities. ‘Croestia, full power to magic resistances if you don’t mind.’

“Well, well. What do we have here? Some sort of fox monster delivering themselves into our grasp. We didn’t have one of your kind as a slave yet, so how very kind of you to volunteer.” The lead Beholder’s voice dripped with contempt, as it was unable to sense any real power from Dee.

Dee, on the other hand, was not interested in witty repartee, and several dark pearls floated around her, as her metallic halo appeared. The Beholders also realized something was seriously wrong, and wasted no time in shooting various beams of power out of their eye-stalks. Dee could sense everything from paralysis and petrify, to disintegration and domination spells. The head beholder started casting a more powerful spell, and Dee had to give credit to how fast the aberrant being was with its casting, especially considering the power of the spell. Not fast enough to get the spell finished before it was flushed away by an oppressive wave of holy power, but still. The beams, on the other hand, hit several floating black shields that seemed to almost absorb them. One of the petrification beams hit her, but Dee was able to shrug it off, and the dark brown tail that resisted earth magic waved behind her happily. For once it became useful.

In return, Dee fired the dark pearls at the floating sacks of meat. The Beholders managed to somehow freeze a couple of the pearls in place, but that still left most of them to punch fist-sized holes in their bloated bodies. Dee had purposefully aimed at the weaker Beholders, and as the magical protections sprung into place around them, she opened her Domain and shattered those protections with her suppression just in time to allow the dark pearls a free passage.

The immortal Beholder was able to identify a Domain when it felt one and was already prepared to escape. It might have been an immortal but only barely, while Dee seemed much more powerful. Dee, in turn, grew in size and flashed right on top of the beholder, using her claws to push the floating form into the stone floor. She had not been gentle either. As the eye-stalks quickly turned to target her, her tails returned the favor and wrapped around them, ripping them right out of the Beholders body. “Now. As you might notice, you’re at a bit of a disadvantage. You have information I want, and I’m going to get it, one way or another.”

The Beholder gave a mirthless chuckle. “You think our glorious kind is susceptible to torture like you lesser creatures? I will not tell you anything. Do your worst!”

“Oh, I’m so glad you chose to resist. I have some new abilities I’d like to test, and you just volunteered. In case you didn’t notice, I’m a psion. I’m going to get what I need, even if I have to rip it from what will be left of your mind once I’m done.” Dee gave a feral grin

-----

The Beholder had done its best to resist. In all fairness, their kind really wasn’t all that susceptible to physical torture, so that part had not lasted long, which was good since Dee didn’t have endless amounts of time. The mentality of a Beholder was much more fragile than one would expect though. They were dark beings shunned by other beings of darkness. They represented the type of chaos and change that gave the others such a bad name. There was no creation in their desire for change, only destruction, and self-satisfaction. That said, their paranoia made their minds fragile to Dee’s advances and she managed to dig out the information she needed.

Some of it was good news and confirmed her suspicions. There really was a rather easy way to remove the collars without hurting the slaves. There were only two more Beholders ahead of her, and both of them were fresh immortals like this one. The whole enemy community only had a little over a hundred Beholders, and most of their strength relied on the slaves they kept. A large portion of the Rakshasa royalty was made up of powerful immortals, some of which were here as well. That meant that with the slaves released the enemy would lose most of their strength. This mine was only one of many and Dee would have a lot more to do, but the method of freeing the slaves would work on all the mines once Dee was done here.

But there was bad news as well. The leader of the Beholder community was a rank twelve immortal, and Dee would find it difficult to defeat it as easily as she had dealt with these Beholders. If the assumptions this Beholder had made were correct, then the leader was in possession of a very powerful Authority. Not all of the powerful Authorities were all that heroic. Villains and evildoers could create lasting legends as well, and the leading Beholder had apparently gained possession of one of those ironically named Hero Authorities. Though Dee supposed that was a matter of perspective as well. A demon king would be a villain to many, but a hero to the demons.

There was also something else. The Beholders alone would have found it extremely difficult to enslave so many powerful Rakshasa and Hecatonheires. The Beholders had the ability to charm and dominate enemies in small groups, and with the slave collars, they could keep them under control. But that didn’t account for how the Rakshasa had been defeated and enslaved in the first place, and the Beholders didn’t seem to have the ability to enslave all of these powerful beings. That is unless they had help. This Beholder was not sure about the exact nature of that help, but it was something old and powerful. If the Four Winds wanted to root this trouble out for good, this would become trouble. And as she was the one at the forefront of dealing with the Beholder problem, it would be trouble to Dee as well.

She quickly moved on from the now cold corpse of the Beholder. She had timed her attack with the arrival of the Four Winds distraction, mostly through luck, but her brief use of her Domain would have been felt. The guards might be coming back, and although she could deal with them, she’d rather set them free instead. The two remaining Beholders would also be on their guard. On the other hand, they were Beholders, so they would always be on their guard. Paranoia was kind of their normal state.

Since sneaking was less likely to succeed, she chose to move forward openly instead. She changed her appearance to resemble her old original form, as that was the one closest to a Rakshasa. She wasn’t sure if the slave Rakshasa would recognize her as one of their own, but it was worth a shot. Even if they did, it might not make a difference considering they were probably ordered to deal with any intruders, but maybe they would be less enthusiastic about it.

One of the good things she had learned from the information she had practically torn out from the now dead Beholder’s mind, was that the collars had trouble dealing with immortals. The immortals could resist their influence to an extent, so it took more effort to command them to do something. As a result, they were not assigned to do any real work and were only called out to do battle. This resulted in them being housed separately. As Dee reached the small crossroads in the mine, she knew to pick the path leading to the den of the Beholders instead of the one leading to the enslaved Rakshasa royalty.

Unfortunately, things don’t always go according to plan. As Dee used her telekinetic powers to blast the door from its hinges, she was greeted by the sight of the two immortal Beholders that she was searching for, but also a pair of rank nine Hecatonheires and three immortal Rakshasa. The two blue Rakshasa were also around rank ten, but the tattoos on the brown furred female Rakshasa Rani clearly showed her as a rank eleven warrior.

The eyes of the Rakshasa all narrowed as they recognized the blood inside Dee. They didn’t attack immediately but were preparing to do so when commanded. Dee needed a plan and fast. The lead Beholder already started a spiel of some sort, but Dee had tuned it out. The words that came were largely irrelevant until it ordered the slaves to attack Dee, and she would be able to read that in the air around the slaves. Her eyes quickly scanned the room, and she noted the master rod on a table near the back. She would have to get past all of the enemies here to get to it. Or would she?

Dee took three actions almost simultaneously. She casually tossed one of her black gems towards the most powerful Rakshasa accompanied by the casual word: “Catch.” The underhanded toss made the gem move on a leisurely trajectory towards the chest of the Rakshasa. At the same time, her telekinesis reached for the master rod. She knew this might fail, so she also tried something new.

The Beholders noticed her telekinetic power reaching for the rod and laughed. Magical runes flashed around the rod and cut the rod off from Dee’s attempt to reach it. The Beholders were about to mock her attempt as the gem reached the Rakshasa Rani who instinctually reached a hand to catch the object. Too late she noticed something very wrong with the small gem, and specifically the space that suddenly seemed to twist around it. The gem became so heavy suddenly that the hand the Rakshasa had used to reach for it was twisted at a weird angle and most likely broken. She wasn’t about to let the object impact her chest though, as she backpedaled fast enough to avoid the contact. She was way too sturdy to actually die so easily or even get too badly injured by the gem, but the little maneuver would slow her down for a few precious seconds. She could recover quickly and would attack Dee, but by that time the whole thing would be over.

The master rod had been given a small push by the power in the runes protecting it activating, and it rolled just a little towards the shadow it created due to the flash. As it did, the shadow seemed to consume the rod, and it suddenly popped into Dee’s hand on the other side of the room. She at least had the ability to move objects through the shadows, even though it was still questionable if she could move through the shadows herself. At the same time, her two other hands flashed forward and two small balls of black unnatural flames were launched towards the Beholders, who retaliated with their eye-beams. Those got deflected by several floating shields or resisted by Dee.

The two Beholders could feel the air around them screaming at the appearance of the small fireballs and took the attacks in all seriousness by erecting the most powerful magical protections they could manage. Unfortunately for them, that was entirely useless as the flames simply slipped through the shields, hitting them directly on the central eye. They had already considered it impossible for magical flames to suddenly appear under the influence of their central eye, but unfortunately for them, this flame was a natural ability of Dee.

The dying screams of the two beholders were loud enough to shatter a normal being’s eardrums, but none of the feline beings present paid any attention. The two giants had not moved a muscle during the events, as they had not been ordered to do so, while the two blue Rakshasa Raja dashed at Dee with blinding speed, but were stopped by Dee pointing the master rod at their noses. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to attack the holder of this rod.” She looked at the Rakshasa Rani instead.

“How would you like to get those collars off instead?” She asked with a smile