Ami hurtled through the air, following the river downstream towards the city. She didn’t have to worry about the dwarfs with crossbows behind the battlements, as she was moving too fast for them to hit her at this distance. Of course, she couldn’t jump far enough to reach the city in a single leap and soon descended towards the surface of the river.



As she approached her mirror image on the water below, she crossed her arms before thrusting them forward, and fired a burst of blue-glowing bubbles right at her predicted landing spot. An instant later, the ice of the newly-created platform cracked from the impact of her boots. She jumped off again before the ice floe could dip underwater, the recoil making it bob like a cork on the waves.



Leapfrogging across frozen platforms, she neared the wall. She was already staring up at the fortifications before its defenders could gather. The battlements loomed above her like a toothy horizon, and a few helmeted heads were visible against the backdrop of the sky. She could hear terse orders from above as well as the cranking noises of crossbows being reloaded.



From this point on, she would have to be wary of wards making her spellcasting unreliable, so it was as good an opportunity as any to show off.



A metal bolt buried itself into the ice at her feet as she paused on the last ice platform. The shooter ducked back into cover while others leaned around the battlements and took aim.



She released the power she had been building up for an extra-strong underwater Shabon Spray Freezing. Ice exploded upwards from beneath her, blossoming out into a jagged, tree-sized spire. She let the surfacing ice carry her higher, muscles tensing in preparation.



The mass of ice below her slowed, and she catapulted herself high into the air. Briefly, she came face to face with a wide-eyed dwarf as she passed him on the way up. He yelped and threw himself backwards, tracking her even as she vaulted over the battlements.



Immediately, she felt an odd resistance in the air that tried to fling her back. Her own magic pushed against it, and she tore her way through the invisible obstacle as if she was ripping a path through spider webs.



With a hiss followed by a loud pop, a protective rune that had been carved into the stone burst apart and caught fire. The resistance decreased, and a weird warbling alarm started howling as more runes lit up.



Having arrived on top of the wall, she took stock of the situation.



The nearby dwarfs were dropping their crossbows and pulling their swords, but most of the guards were still spread out along the wall and rushing towards her position. The ones already close to her were paling, their steps faltering and their gazes flitting back and forth between her and the wards placed in regular intervals along the wall.



She figured that the little symbols were not supposed to be smoking, melting, or exploding into splinters. It didn’t take a genius to realise that they were suffering a crushing defeat in the struggle to keep her out.



There was a metallic scraping noise behind her. The dwarf she had jumped past was still on his back, crawling away from her by pushing himself with his hands and feet. Reflected in the shiny metal of his breastplate, she saw a shadowy figure with burning red eyes, wreathed in a corona of writhing dark energy.



If she looked like that while her magic fought against the wards, then it was no wonder that he was backing away, oblivious to the danger of falling into the river.



She couldn’t just let him drown, so she had to stop him before he went over the edge. Hitting him with her staff would just push him farther. Could she use magic? He was wearing one of the chain belts that stopped spells from forming, but there was no ceiling above them and she was a Keeper. Her spells didn’t have to originate from her own body. In the secrecy of her own mind, she apologised to him as a bolt of blue bubbles fell from the sky and trapped his legs under a sheet of ice.



“Monob! No!” one of the dwarfs surrounding her yelled in dismay, prompted into action by the sudden attack. Foregoing caution, he charged straight at Ami.



The soldier behind him lunged at his back. “Down you fool!” he warned as he tackled him to the ground.



The second bolt of freezing magic from high above struck the floor close enough to frost over both of the prone soldiers’ beards.



Ami kept up her suppressive fire, raining weak Shabon Spray Freezing spells down onto the walls.



The nearest dwarfs scattered. Those advancing on her from farther away didn’t stop, but they were moving considerably slower with their shields held over their heads, trying to watch both the sky and their step simultaneously.



She figured that she had a few seconds before her opponents got organised enough to attack her seriously. “The Duke?” she mentally asked Torian.



“Crystal ball seven is straight above, eight to twelve provide additional angles,” the chief warlock replied.



She stepped behind one of the stalagmite-like mounds of ice created by her bombardment. Protected from the sporadic crossbow bolts coming her way, she focused on her Keeper sight.



Back in her dungeon, the warlocks were assembled in a large room, sitting at desks and staring into crystal balls. Torian was striding through the rows like a teacher supervising class during an exam, hands behind his back and a strict expression on his face.



It wasn’t hard to locate the orbs he had indicated, even without reading the large number affixed to each scrying station. The crystal balls in question stood out among the others because they were much more colourful, showing the surface rather than some dark underground place.



The crystal ball with the number seven displayed a pointed roof covered in slate shingles, with no distinguishing features that would allow Ami to tell it apart from the surrounding roofs. The other orbs showed the same house from different perspectives.



She was glad they all agreed on the same target. Finding someone underground was not trivial, and in this first phase, her warlocks had scryed on Duke Libasheshtan and then moved the viewpoint straight upwards until they could see the city. He was definitely somewhere below the shown building.



Unfortunately, that knowledge wasn’t immediately useful. She still had to find said building in the unfamiliar city.



She swept her gaze over the sea of roofs and façades that expanded before her. Within moments, she spotted groups of angry dwarfs bearing down on her location, but not her real quarry. Her viewing angle was too shallow to see past the other buildings and the occasional trees.



“Turn the view toward the river, please,” she mentally addressed one of the warlocks directly.



The greasy-heared man jumped in his chair and let out a surprised gasp. “Of course, your Majesty!” he said aloud, drawing interested glances from the other warlocks. In his haste to comply with her orders, he almost knocked the crystal ball from its socket as he reached for it. Nevertheless, he managed to bring the river-side part of the wall into view almost as soon as his fingers touched the device.



Ami had no difficulty figuring out her own location in the crystal ball. All she had to do was look at the section of the wall being struck by a hail of aquamarine meteors. Among the glittering mounds of ice left behind by her bombardment, she could see herself as a tiny but still distinguishable silhouette. Holding out her staff horizontally, she rotated on her spot like a compass needle until it was pointing straight at the crystal ball.



Now she had a direction, a rough distance, and a troop of pursuers out for her blood. It was time to start moving towards the imp closest to that location.





The dwarves were poorly prepared for dealing with a fast invader who could jump from rooftop to rooftop, bypassing the streets below.



“After her!” a frustrated voice shouted as Ami crossed a gap between buildings. Behind her, a roadblock that looked like a solid double row of shields and spears dissolved into its component dwarfs. They demonstrated impressive discipline by fluidly recreating their formation so that it was now facing her.



It was too bad for them that she was already two rooftops away when they started jogging after her, still in lockstep.



She skidded down the steep incline of a roof, grabbed onto a chimney with her left hand, and swung around it to change direction. Two iron bolts plinked against the square structure, nicking the smoothly polished stone.



The dwarfs were trying to adapt to her approach. The two snipers who had almost hit her were lying on neighbouring rooftops. One of them got handed a loaded crossbow while she glanced over, and he immediately started taking aim again.



Ami suppressed a flinch as another whistling projectile actually managed to brush past her hair. Being shot at was unnerving even if she knew that the worst she had to fear was punctured fake skin.



Unfortunately, the hail of bolts was growing denser and more distracting. Almost all of the groups of armoured dwarves in the alleys below were carrying ladders now. Ever-increasing numbers of the short, stout figures appeared on top of the surrounding buildings, ready to fight her.



Ami alighted on the gable of another roof, only to find it already occupied.



“H-halt, intruder!” a dwarf in leather armour shouted, waving his sword at her. He had one foot on the rain drain and the other leg bent at an uncomfortable angle so that he was leaning with his hip against the roof’s incline. His left hand clawed at the roof shingles as if his life depended on it while he awkwardly wobbled towards her.



Balancing easily on top of the gable, she shot him a pitying look as she walked past. If that was a representative example of the dwarven ability to engage her up here, then she mostly had to worry about them accidentally falling off the roof.



Sudden pain flared in the back of her head as something sharp struck her from behind.



She spread her arms as she almost lost her footing from the unexpected push and barely managed to suppress a surprised squawk. Nevertheless, a loud cheer rose from the dwarfs who had seen her stumble, echoing through the neighbourhood.



Well, it was inevitable that some bolt would hit her eventually, Ami thought. The spot where the bolt had bounced off hurt a little, but she didn’t give in to the urge to poke at it. Perhaps protecting herself with a magical shield would be worth it, now that she was approaching her destination? There were too many dwarfs with warding chains nearby to cast a shield targeted at herself, but she had a good number of them in Keeper storage. Unfortunately, they deteriorated quickly when she pulled them out again because they weren’t meant to be disconnected from a mana source for even an instant.



Better to save them for when she needed them. Concentrating briefly, she hurled a burst of bubbles from the sky at her own location. Fog crept outwards, covering the roof like a blanket before rolling off its edges like a wispy avalanche. She followed the mist to the streets below, dropping onto the cobblestone road with barely any noise.



“What’s going on?” a dwarf asked, his head moving jerkily as he looked around. “Where are you? Anyone?”



Ami had landed so close to him that she could have touched his back if she reached out with her arm and leaned forward. Instead, she pressed herself against the wall of the building and crab-walked sideways.



“Cease fire! Stop shooting right now!” a different dwarf bellowed, both arms raised high. “You are going to hit your comrades like this!”



“S-sir, I can barely feel the ground beneath my feet!” the soldier standing right next to him whined, a complaint that was echoed by those next in line to him.



“Watch out, she’s up there!” a frightened voice shouted.



“Where? I can’t see anything!”



“Up there! Right there!” The soldier who had given the warning pointed to a first storey balcony with his whole arm, where a flag fluttered in the breeze.



“Give proper directions, soldier! We can’t see you pointing!” the commanding officer said, keeping most of the unease his face showed from seeping into his tone.



Ami, being able to see through the fog clearly, kept away from the soldiers who were instinctively huddling closer together for protection. With the way they were acting, they would only find her with sheer dumb luck. “Cathy, this feels too easy,” she sent a message back to her dungeon. “Have you noticed something I’m missing?”



“Looks to me as if they are throwing green troops at you and hope they get lucky,” the swordswoman replied. “Not as many as they could, either. They are keeping most of the troops on the surface in reserve near that area the crystal balls can’t see.”



“The entrance to the city below,” Ami clarified. Smoothed cliff faces formed a funnel pointed directly at the gate, allowing the defenders to rain death on invaders from the arrow slits above. Since she hadn’t brought an invasion force, the obstacle most relevant to her was the wide ramp leading down and passing straight through a temple of the Light. Her skin crawled at the mere thought of trying to move through the towering steel doors, currently open in order to admit the last of the city’s civilians to safety.



She wondered if the evacuation of the citizens meant that the surface parts of the settlement were considered expendable. To her, its architecture seemed as if it was meant to last while also being pleasant to look at. Even the façades of the simplest dwellings used blocks of different sizes and colours to create decorative patterns, and geometric engravings embellished the more elaborate buildings.



Under less hostile circumstances, she would have stopped and taken some time to give her surroundings the attention they deserved. In particular, the recurring motif of overlapping squares and cubes in repeating, complex arrangements made her curious. Perhaps she would get an opportunity to appreciate them at a later date, when the current conflict was resolved.



“That way, Sir!” one of the dwarfs in higher-quality armour said, holding something red-glowing with a set of pliers that was pointing straight at Ami. The closer he got to her, the more the glow shifted into orange, and a mild force started pushing against her.



With the bright light of the overstrained ward to guide them, a dozen or so soldiers were actually managing to establish a wide perimeter around her.



Ami frowned and drew on the darker portions of her mana supply, as if she was preparing to cast a corrupted version of one of her spells.



In reaction, the symbol flared up bright and exploded. The tongs went flying, and their wielder yelped in surprise as sharp shards pinged off his armour. Eyes wide, he ducked behind his shield even as his comrades asked him what happened.



Hidden in the mist, she darted past the frightened soldiers who were trying to spot her through the grey, billowing clouds. Her destination was an oak tree, surrounded by a few benches and small flower beds. She hopped up on top of a low-hanging branch where nobody would accidentally bump into her.



“Torian, I am about to spread the lights,” she informed her chief warlock. “I want to know the location of the shallowest non-warded rooms and the position of Duke Libashestan as soon as possible.”



“As you wish,” Torian sent back. In her Keeper sight, she saw him bow reflexively before he relayed her orders to the assembled warlocks.



She dismissed the image and closed her eyes, focusing her attention on listening to the underground. With all of the soldiers and civilians rushing about, the tolling of the bells, and the howling of the alarm wards, she wouldn’t have been able to make out any details even if she tried. Instead, she searched for echoes and let them guide her to zones where the sound wasn’t dampened by earth and rock.



With no need for subtlety, she immediately began casting spells at any hollow underground areas she uncovered. The vast majority of her workings disappeared without a trace, their effects crushed by dwarven wards just as thoroughly as if she had directed them into solid stone.



She didn’t let the failures deter her and kept up her rapid-fire casting, placing her spells at random instead of painstakingly searching for weak points. The dwarven city was too big to protect every single part of it, and occasionally, she felt one of her spells turn into a cherry-sized sphere of light.



“We are getting something now,” Torian informed her cheerfully.



The warlocks back at the dungeon were waving their hands rapidly over their crystal balls as they ran search patterns underground, trying to find the chambers Ami had revealed before some dwarf wizards could come and snuff out the lights.



One of the scrying devices went dark, and the warlock glaring at it slammed his fist onto the desk. “A bucket? Seriously?” He rose from his chair and called out to Torian “Hey, tell the Empress that she needs to make the light spells larger! Those midgets are putting stuff over them!”



“Your Majest-“



“I heard him, Torian,” Ami answered immediately. Admittedly, placing containers over her light sources was a pragmatic way for even non-wizards to render her light sources useless. She could compensate for this easily enough, but she wasn’t too happy about having to switch to creating glowing spheres the size of her torso. The increased power requirements were an inconvenience at worst, but it was harder for larger spells to fit into gaps between wards.



“We still don’t have a visual on the Duke, but he is between the orange and the blue lights,” Torian reported.



“Good. Keep me informed if he moves,” Ami ordered. She was deploying her lights in differently-coloured layers to indicate depth, and now she knew where she needed to go. She programmed the Duke’s estimated coordinates into her palmtop computer.



A small green marker appeared on her visor, along with an estimated distance. She turned her head to look at the soldiers rushing past her tree, and the indicator remained stationary relative to its surroundings. Now certain that she would be able to track her target even if she got turned around in labyrinthine underground tunnels, she focused on her dungeon once more.



She smiled at the sight of several crystal balls shining in tones she had used near the surface. “Torian, which of the cyan or white lights are closest to my current position?”



“That would be number twenty-four,” the chief warlock replied as he glanced over at a large, window-shaped scrying device that showed the entire city straight from above. Imps were moving little numbers across its surface, indicating which part the corresponding crystal ball was looking at. A small Mercury symbol marked Ami’s own location, right in the middle of the cloud of fog that had swallowed a city block.



“It looks suitable,” she decided. She left her hiding spot to find the imp she had hidden nearby, her progress largely unimpeded by the dwarven soldiers. There were fewer of them around for her to avoid simply because those who found the edges of her fog were reluctant to re-enter it.



Soon, she reached a well surrounded by a low wall, with a bucket on a chain just waiting to be lowered. She pushed it aside so she had room to slip into the gaping hole. Air rushed past her as she dropped into the darkness, growing colder the closer she got to the bottom.



She struck the water feet-first and pushed through its surface like a dart, only slightly slowed by the impact. Fully submerged, she continued descending until her boots touched solid ground. Despite passing through the water, she was still going fast enough that the landing would have broken her legs if she hadn’t been transformed. Rising from her crouch, she searched the unworked rock all around her for an opening.



Above her, hidden just below the surface of the clear water, the wall had a dark hole. Its irregular edges showed that it had been dug out in a hurry. Understandable, since the imp she had tasked with the job would have had to come up for air regularly.



She swam up and squeezed herself into the narrow tunnel, wishing that the imp had at least taken the time to make it large enough to crawl on all fours. Instead, she had to wriggle her way through the entrance like some kind of caterpillar. Then her staff, too rigid to bend, wedged itself against a shallow notch. She almost got stuck and was glad it was too dark for anyone to scry on her. Was the imp farther down the tunnel snickering at her?



With a few contortions and a lot of brute force, she managed to clear the narrow entrance and emerged from the water. The rough corridor was tall enough for her to stand, barely. With her visor’s night vision mode, she could see its uneven ceiling only in monochrome tones, which was enough to avoid bumping her head.



Her imp was waiting for her with a grumpy expression, standing in a puddle of water that had dripped down from her wet overall. A trail of puddles led to a pond at the other end of the tunnel, wider than the well. The little worker tapped her mining pick against the ground, watching Ami through half-lidded eyes.



Ami could understand that her worker was feeling impatient. With water closing off both ends of the corridor and no connection to a dungeon heart, the oxygen in the air would be depleted eventually. Sure, an enchanted mining pick could produce more while digging, but she doubted her imp was smart enough to think of that on her own.



On second thought, the imp was probably just irritated at getting orders she couldn’t complete because there was a layer of groundwater-conducting rock in the way.



Ami briefly wondered why the dwarfs were fine with living underneath an aquifer. Perhaps the added protection from digging invaders was worth dealing with a constantly leaking ceiling? Then again, for all she knew the bedrock could be impermeable. In any case, she needed to reach the city, and her imp couldn’t work in a water-filled pit.



Fortunately, the bulbous-eyed creature could dig through ice with no trouble.



With Ami’s frost spells keeping the water out, the imp was able to mine a steep shaft through the aquifer, towards the chamber her warlocks had indicated.



Ami walked right behind her, a little surprised at the depth of the wet layer. It came as welcome relief when water finally stopped seeping from the walls and she no longer needed to cover them in a layer of ice.



With a quick gesture, a Shabon Spray Freezing shot from her hands and blocked the passage behind her from floor to ceiling. She focused on calling up more power and struck the section behind the ice wall repeatedly with Keeper lightning.



Steam hissed and rock liquefied under the repeated attacks, its red glow visible even through the thick ice.



She only stopped when she was sure that the way she had come was now sealed with a water-proof plug of solidified lava. While she was willing to bet that the dwarfs had protected themselves with floodgates against water-related accidents, she wasn’t going to risk their lives unnecessarily.



Her imp had kept digging deeper and deeper into the bedrock. She was now letting out an unhappy squeal with every furious strike of her pick.



Walking closer, Ami spotted the problem. Sparks flew whenever the metal tool struck stone, and progress had slowed to a crawl. Not as much as if the imp was trying to shatter a fortified dungeon wall, but still enough to hint at magical defences. She was reminded of the dwarven railways constructed from reinforced stone.



“Your Majesty? Dwarven soldiers are pouring into the chamber you designated as your ingress point,” Torian messaged her.



“Thanks for the warning,” she sent back. Her imp’s digging hadn’t exactly been quiet, but she still had hoped to avoid serious fighting for a while longer. Well, too late to change things now. She transported the imp to some neutral meadows outside the city and focused on her magic.



With a resigned sigh, she slammed the bottom of her staff into the ground. The hardened stone shuddered, cracks spreading outwards as the quaking intensified. With a thunderous groan, the floor crumbled below her, and she fell towards a forest of raised spears.