After the group returned to Sanctuary, the priests of Helios immediately began efforts to resurrect the survivors, starting with Firenze.

There was a complication, though. Namely, his body was so badly damaged that standard healing magic failed to recognize it as a human body, being reduced to little more than a few bones and bits of flesh.

Normally, in resurrection, a priest would first regenerate the deceased body back to a healthy state, and then call the soul back from the afterlife, placing it back into the healthy body. But here, Julia had to improvise, calling Firenze's soul without a body to put it in.

She called out to Helios, making the request for his soul, and after a few minutes, his soul returned. Her priests immediately created a containment field that would keep the soul stable while she performed the necessary magic herself, and a few Resistance members gathered to watch.

Now, for the hard part. As the right-hand woman to Helios, Julia knew that souls contained some sort of innate 'blueprint' of their owner's body. Without such an innate form, their bodies in the afterlife would be unrecognizable. Daraken's resurrection chamber had likely exploited this property to rebuild his own body, and with enough aid from Helios, Julia could potentially do the same. But even if the theory worked, putting it into practice would be another matter.

She reached out for Firenze's soul.

Hello, Firenze.

what-what is… happening… Firenze's response was hazy, but it was present.

I'm going to need you to focus, Firenze. Focus on your physical form, on what your body used to be.

Firenze complied, and his soul seemed to slowly shape itself into a hazy humanoid form.

Julia, not knowing anything better to try, attempted to heal that form. Slowly, a skeleton began to take shape, starting at the head and spreading outwards. She managed to construct an entire skeleton before her energy was exhausted, forcing her to rest for a few minutes while the priests stabilized the ritual.

On the second pass, she restored Firenze's internal organs and muscles before being depleted again, leaving the body in a slightly horrifying shape.

It took a third pass to fully reconstruct it to the point where it was intact. Then, she had the priests finalize the process, bringing Firenze's soul back into his body.

Firenze awoke, fully resurrected. But despite that miracle, he would still need time to recover. He certainly wouldn't be able to go back into the field any time soon.

After that was done, Julia's priests moved to resurrect the others who died in the fight, while Julia went to discuss an oddity with Raiks.

Any lesser healer would not be able to reconstruct an entire body in just ten minutes. For a lesser priest, regenerating a missing limb would take an entire day, at least. If Daraken's resurrection chamber was capable of doing the same thing, if not faster, how was it powered? How could Daraken put enough energy into it to match Julia's power?

***

After about an hour, Saphus decided that spending the rest of her life in a small null-magic field would be so boring that it wasn't a life worth living. So, she stepped out of the field, and was pleasantly surprised to not die instantly.

Wait. Daraken might have something different planned for me. The last prisoner the Resistance captured had not only a kill-switch, but a trap that was used to attempt to kill Annabelle. Maybe she was being kept alive to release a secret weapon.

But if I was being used as a trap, wouldn't Daraken tell me about his plans?

Even so, it was worth checking before she screwed over her team.

So, she asked around, and eventually got an appointment with Turb, Sanctuary's apparent expert on curses.

And, after several minutes of scanning her with all sorts of arcane rituals Saphus couldn't understand, Turb came up with a result.

"There's no evidence of any sort of curse," Turb said, after surrounding Saphus in arcane rituals for several minutes.

"How sure are you?" Saphus immediately questioned.

"Daraken has been rewriting the applications of curses, but I can still detect them no matter how far he modifies them." Although, he didn't seem confident about that.

"Given that I doubt he would put such anything unusual on me without telling me, I think I'll just have to trust you on that."

***

"We need to launch an attack, now." Raiks declared to the gathered war council.

"In the middle of the night?" Derrin asked, to which Raiks nodded.

"I believe the advantages outweigh the disadvantages," Raiks said.

"I concur," Julia said. Raiks didn't even expect her to agree.

"Wait, I thought you were weakened during the night? Following the good of sun and all?"

"It is true that I would be unable to utilize some of my techniques without the energy of the sun to power them. But bright flares become significantly more effective against night-adjusted eyes."

"So, what's the plan of attack?"

"We have new intel on the tower," Raiks said, pulling up an image of the tower on the command table. "At some point during the repair process, the tower shrunk to a tenth of its size. It's still incredibly massive, but not by as much." As they could notice, it now looked almost reasonable in size compared to the rest of the city.

"Wait, what?" Everyone was confused by that.

"The tower has, or had, some form of spatial distortion, making it about ten times larger on the outside than it was on the inside." Saphus explained. "It seems that after the damage to the tower, Daraken was forced to deactivate that measure to repair the tower effectively."

"I'm still curious as to what purpose it served in the first place," Turb replied. "I doubt Daraken would invest so much arcane energy in a mere vanity point."

"Did the spatial distortion make the tower harder to destroy?" Varn questioned.

"Given that they had to deactivate it after taking damage, that's doubtful," Faris replied.

"Right…" Varn accepted that statement for a bit. But then, he realized something. "Wait, if the tower's size is reduced, that will reduce the collateral damage caused by the tower's collapse."

"Well, that's good," Raiks said. "Given that our objective will be to collapse the tower."

"Even with the tower's reduced size, collapsing the tower will likely still cause significant damage to the city. There are still enough civilians in the city to-"

"That's why everyone not participating in the main assault will be evacuating the rest of the city."

"And how will we even collapse the tower?" Derrin asked.

"The tower has sustained heavy damage at the halfway point, about the fiftieth floor based on the intel from Saphus," Turb explained. "If we plant explosives and arcane disruptors at that point on the inside of the tower, we have a good chance to finish the job."

"They could also use Bouldos's help," Firenze added. "He might struggle with enchanted stone, but if the reinforcing enchantments at that level are weakened…"

"It would be a suicide mission for whichever team was planting the explosives," Derrin warned.

"I can resurrect every member of that team. It might take some time to do it, however. Especially if their bodies are destroyed."

"And it would be an incredibly difficult mission, fighting an uphill battle against respawning apprentices in their own tower."

"My Crusaders will be leading the charge," Julia declared. "With support from me, and the strongest members of the Resistance, we should be able to complete the mission."

"What of the former Black Legion members, those willing to aid us?" Derrin asked, glaring at Lunima in the process. "Some of them have returned to us early after hearing news of the conflict, but others haven't. And, I suspect many of them won't return at all, even knowing the stakes."

"When I made my decision, I was not aware of Julia's decision to move up the battle plans, or of the tactical intelligence gained by Saphus's aid. I am sorry."

"You better be, Lunima."

"I don't think her decision makes as much of a difference as you think it does," Raiks said. "And, by showing goodwill, you've likely made it much easier for us to re-establish governance of this region after Daraken is defeated."

"There are at least a hundred men that-"

"Were any of them elites?" Raiks asked. "The tower is a narrow space, and extra manpower in the tower won't provide a significant advantage, and will just lead to more deaths when our plan succeeds. They are only going to be able to help with the evacuation, and I think our current forces already have that handled."

Derrin though about that, before admitting that no, most of them weren't elites. "But there is one group, the Harpies. A squad of about a dozen of them decided to join up at Nexion earlier this evening. They say that they could potentially run night operations."

Raiks was unsure of how to react. He hadn't truly commanded an aerial force before. "I think I'll be able to find some way to work with that."

**********

A portal opened into the high atmosphere, several kilometers from Garnoth. A dozen harpies dived through the portal, took flight, and set course for Daraken's tower, before the portal closed behind them.

The Harpies had been hand-picked out of the Black Legion's footsoldiers for their skill and loyalty. They originally held that loyalty to Daraken, a man who had done great things for Garnoth and who turned it from a scattered collection of cities into a major power in the world. After his apprentices took over and abused his legacy for evil, most of them defected in a heartbeat.

But now, with rumors that Daraken was reborn, they weren't entirely sure where their loyalties lied.

As the Resistance-aligned Harpies approached the tower, they spotted and were simultaneously spotted by other Harpies, those who had apparently decided to stay with the Legion. The loyalists rapidly formed up into a group of six, and then the two groups flew towards each other, glaives and bows at the ready.

But as they closed in on each other, there was a moment of hesitation. The two groups broke off, hovering about a hundred meters apart.

"You were loyal members of one of Daraken's most elite forces. Why did you defect?" one of the loyalists said.

"Whatever is in that tower isn't Daraken," a rebel replied. "At least not the Daraken we know."

"Sometimes, a few sacrifices have to made for the greater good."

"It's not a move that makes sense from a strategic standpoint," Raiks said, with his message echoed by one of the Harpies he was communicating with. "Daraken wouldn't make such a poor tactical move, and if it was an apprentice acting unilaterally, he'd kill that apprentice for disloyalty."

"What do those merits matter?" the loyalist replied. "It isn't our place to question our commanders. Knowing his intelligence, he likely has some scheme cooked up based on that."

"And you're willing to just let him kill civilians to advance his agenda? An agenda that solely benefits him, and not those working for him."

"I think we're already going to hell for our opposition to Helios," another loyalist replied. "Daraken offers a chance of a better afterlife."

"There's still time to repent, a rebel replied. "You just have to move aside."

"We give the same offer to you."

"You're outnumbered here," one rebel replied. But others, doubting the enemy's tactical sense, scanned the night sky.

One of them spotted a flying apprentice, and sensing the trap, immediately charged forwards. That apprentice fired off a burst of magic missiles, but the Harpy withstood the hits and impaled the apprentice on his glaive.

Then, a second apprentice blasted that Harpy with a fireball, incinerating her wings and causing her to drop out of the sky, lifeless.

That second apprentice was nearly taken out by an arrow, but some form of magic shield blocked the projectile. The loyalist Harpies, realizing (or being instructed on) the tactical implications of a mage on their side, assumed a defensive formation, flying around the apprentice in such a manner as to ward off direct attacks.

"We need to form up, rush him in a large enough group that they can't defend the apprentice," the lead Harpy said.

"Bad idea," Raiks warned. "Group up and a fireball will wipe all of you out at once."

As he said that, the apprentice threw another fireball, which detonated in midair, almost catching another Harpy in the blast.

"Wait. Engage their Harpies in close combat," Raiks ordered. "The apprentice doesn't have your eyesight, he won't be able to tell the two groups apart."

Even before Raiks completed his explanation, they charged forwards, fighting their counterparts. It was a highly unusual fight for them, given that the Black Legion prioritized training them to fight ground targets, but their opponents were just as untrained for this fight, and also outnumbered.

The apprentice managed to identify and take down another Harpy with a salvo of homing arcane bolts, but then he lost track of targets, and could do little other than retreat as his comrades fought in midair.

A bow-equipped Harpy managed to disengage from the fight and fire another arrow at the mage, but his magic shield deflected the arrow again. The mage spotted her attack and retaliated with a fireball that she barely managed to dodge.

Then, after a quick direction from Raiks, she improvised, attaching an explosive device to her arrow and firing it at the mage. Again, it impacted the shield, but this time it detonated, the blast overwhelming the mage's shield. The mage was knocked aside, but their levitation magic nullified gravity and kept them upright.

The Harpy unsheathed a sword, closed in, and impaled the apprentice before he could regain consciousness. Then, she looked back to the battle, and shot the last enemy Harpy out of the air.

They had taken no losses while dispatching the enemy, leaving ten of them able to bombard the tower. They flew towards the centerpoint of the tower, but as they approached, they were suddenly hit with the full force of gravity.

"There's an anti-flight zone around the tower," one of them reported. "We'll have to change approach."

For a normal flying wizard, having their flight disrupted at this altitude would prove fatal. But though Harpies couldn't stay in the air without the aid of gravity reduction, they could still glide and control their fall. They controlled their descent and circled away from the tower, before regrouping for a second run.

This time, they started the attack run from a higher elevation, and aimed to dive past the midpoint of the tower before exiting the gravity and re-entering flight on the other side.

As they passed the tower, they threw their payloads, each Harpy throwing an explosive charge at the damaged stone walls.

"That left a few marks," Turb reported from the ground.

"But the tower isn't dead yet," Raiks said. "Hit it again."

**********

At the same time as the Harpies' diversionary attack, the Resistance's main force advanced on Fiora under the cover of darkness. They made it to within a few hundred meters of the city before they were spotted.

Suddenly, they heard a series loud bangs coming from the city, and flashes from the guards up on the walls, followed by projectiles impacting in the sand around them. One man took a direct hit, and his leg was shattered by the impact, but a healer immediately rendered aid.

"That would be their guns," Raiks said. "It seems they have mass-produced them."

"This would have been useful information to know before they fired on us," Julia said angrily.

"I miscalculated," Raiks admitted. "I knew they had the technology, but I underestimated their ability to rapidly produce it. However, it doesn't change our strategy. I still suggest waiting until close range to blind them."

"Why?"

"At this range, they still aren't accurate enough to down people faster than we can heal them."

Julia followed the advice of Raiks, and held off on using her main attack until they got closer.

Then, once they approached one of the main gates, she unleashed her magic, channeling the light of the sun towards the guards, blinding them and forcing them to duck into cover.

Then, rather than attempt to break through the metal gate, Bouldos instead collapsed the ground underneath it, creating a passageway underneath it for the Resistance to invade. The Crusaders led the charge, and emerged on the other side. There, they discovered no opposition.

While other members of the Resistance split off to climb the gatehouse and capture the guards up there, Julia, the Crusaders, and the elite members of the Resistance rushed towards the main objective.

They reached the inner gate, and were fired upon by more gun-equipped guards. This time, Julia fired focused beams of sunlight at each guard to knock them out, while Bouldos again dug a passageway underneath the gate to allow the team to get past. Raiks ordered the berserker Scars to lead the charge, and though Julia wasn't sure why, she had her Crusaders hold back for just an instant.

Scars ducked down to fit underneath the gate, and then jumped out onto the other side. Immediately, a dozen heavy infantrymen charged out from their hiding places behind the walls.

The Crusaders unleashed bursts of bright light, but the infantry held their charge and ran their glaives into Scars, impaling him.

But that wasn't enough to kill him, especially not when he was being healed by the Crusaders behind him. With one arm, he grabbed several of the glaives impaling him and ripped them out, throwing them aside and disarming almost half of the enemy infantry.

Then, with his other arm, Scars drew his greataxe and swung forward in a huge arc, cleaving through three enemies in a single stroke.

The other infantry attempted to push back against him, but his wild swings and disregard for his own health allowed him to easily cut the rest of them down.

Then, they rushed inside the tower. Other guards on the walls saw them and opened fire, but failed to cause any damage.

"Look what we have here."

The voice seemed to come from every direction at once.

"Show yourself." Julia illuminated the room, revealing four apprentices.

"Daraken has spent a decade fortifying this tower. You won't get past the tenth-"

The apprentice that was monologuing was blasted out of the air by a well-placed gunshot from Robin Heartseeker (who, despite having his training in longbows rather than the closer-analogue crossbows, still ended up being the Resistance's best gun user), and the battle for the tower began.

**********

Shortly after Julia entered the tower, Raiks lost contact with her, and the rest of the assault team. One of the tower's defenses must be disrupting his communications link.

That was worrying, but not completely unexpected. They could still complete the mission on their own, after all.

Raiks scanned through the rest of his forces.

On the ground, there was no more combat. The few guards present outside the tower had been killed or captured, and the evacuation was well underway. The only worry was making sure that they evacuated themselves before the tower was destroyed.

Will Julia's team initiate the collapse as soon as possible, or will they wait? And if they do wait, will they wait too long?

Whatever the results of that, Raiks couldn't control it. He reluctantly shifted his focus away from that and onto the aerial battle.

The Harpies had enough time for a second bombing pass before a response was launched. Four more apprentices teleported out into the airspace around the tower, just as the Harpies were making a third and final run. Before the Harpies could abort and retreat, four of them were blasted out of the air as bursts of lightning arced across the sky.

Raiks ordered the Harpies to dive towards the ground, and as they did so, the apprentices followed. One of them pursued into the wrong area, and was immediately shot down by a coordinated strike from the ground forces, but the other three realized their mistake and retreated back up to around the midpoint of the tower.

Raiks was in the middle of figuring out the next plan of attack for the Harpies when he heard a deafening bang.

A high-speed projectile impacted command table, shattering it and causing the images on it to flicker out.

Raiks quickly analyzed the impact, determined where the projectile came from, and looked in that direction while putting a hand on his weapon. There was a small hole in the roof, and a small bead of energy launched through it.

Raiks, acting on instinct, leapt away from the center of the room, just before the fireball impacted and detonated. The explosion, a blast far stronger than it had any right to be, blasted Raiks straight through the command center's walls.

When Raiks regained consciousness, he was lying in the pile of rubble that was previously his command center. He had severe burns across his body, and a few broken bones, but he still managed to get back on his feet.

"This is over." That was Daraken's voice. In Sanctuary.

It shouldn't have been possible, but when Raiks looked up, he saw Daraken, hovering in midair. He was brandishing an odd-looking mage staff, and surprisingly enough, he hadn't taken the chance to finish him off yet.

"Raiks? What the hell is going on?" That came from approximately a dozen sources at once over Resistance comms.

"Code Unthinkable," Raiks replied, giving the code for a direct attack against Sanctuary.

From here, he had two options. He could either have his forces attempt to return to Sanctuary to fight Daraken, or he could have them scatter and continue the Resistance, potentially with the aid of Dustreach.

Daraken's staff glowed blue before releasing a blue antimagic pulse. Raiks' communication system was disrupted for a few seconds, and when it recovered, he heard reports that all of the Sanctuary's open portals had been deactivated due to the generator disruption.

Raiks knew that they were likely doomed. At most, the Resistance might be able to sabotage Daraken's tower, but then Daraken would be able to remake his base inside Sanctuary's impenetrable location concealment, and it would only be a setback for him.

Wait. If it was truly impenetrable…

"How did you find us?" Raiks asked.

Surprisingly, Daraken gave a response. "Your Sanctuary may be resistant to tracking, but the island you dropped my soldiers on wasn't. After finding that, it didn't take too much more effort for me to find your main base."

Raiks thought they had placed Redemption Rock distant enough from Sanctuary. Clearly, he was wrong. And now, they would suffer for it.

But he wasn't about to go down without a fight. He slammed his fist into a healing orb on his belt, triggering a burst of healing. Then, he grabbed his Arcane Bolter, and prepared to make a last stand.