Each one of them was a non-Awakened undead with an almost full red blood core and centuries of experience.
The Courts couldn’t risk someone having cold feet at the last minute and defecting so no one had been forced in any way to take part in the mission and the members of the assassin squad were free to walk away until the mission started.
Each one of the undead had accumulated so much life force that their mass was on par with an Emperor Beast and even though they could only use true magic for the elements their undead species was naturally attuned with, they had survived the encounter with bright violet cored mages.
The fake mages were all dead and buried whereas killing an Awakened was harder, but the convened undead had all put down more than one cocky Council member each during their undeath.
Despite all of that and their prized enchanted equipment, the undead were nervous. Very few of them had faced a Divine Beast in the past and surely not an Awakened and bright violet-cored one.
Those who did, had a bad memory of the encounter and counted themselves lucky for surviving to tell the tale. Their experience was priceless in knowing how to deal with beasts that big and how to counter their bloodline abilities.
The squad had been assembled so that they would be able to take down a Dragon or a Phoenix in his own nest. It was unclear what a Tiamat was so the leaders of the Courts had preferred to not take risks.
Rakshu’s communication amulet projected a hologram of the Verhen Mansion depicting the blueprints of all the internal rooms and corridors. The blue-colored holograms were the paths they were certain about because they had been verified by their unwitting accomplices during Elysia’s birthday Gala.
The grey holograms were those the undead had acquired from the Royal archives after bribing several clerks, but those paths were marked as uncertain and dangerous. The Royals liked to plant false information to lure their enemies into traps and smoke out corrupted officers with one move.
“The problems start right outside the park.” The Ghoul explained. “We have to dodge the magical beasts, the Emperor Beasts, and the Golems. Demons depend on Verhen’s strength.
“During the night he’s supposed to be asleep and the Demons to be slumbering inside his feathers but we’ll act as if we expect them to patrol the mansion as well.” Rakshu stopped for a moment until everyone nodded.
“The Golems are just two and they need to recharge at regular intervals. We have timed how long they last and we’ll move out as soon as one of them leaves for a charging pod. It should be any minute now.”
He checked an enchanted clock where several countdowns progressed at the same time.
The one about the Golems was nearing the zero and in fact, Trouble turned around in mid-air and landed on the roof to recharge its power core while keeping a vantage point for observation.
High ground was pointless against someone who moved from below so it actually played out as the undead wanted.
Rakshu used his powers as a Ghoul to make the ground soft despite the earth-sealing arrays surrounding the Mansion, allowing the assassin unit to reach the first line of defensive arrays unnoticed.
At that point, it was the turn of Ghiaro the Lamia and Argo the Korvak, the two best Wardens among them. Lith had learned a trick or two as a Ranger, making the array field of his house similar to the Golden Griffon’s.
It would change at fixed intervals, swapping the order and kind of overlapping magical formations, requiring a specific and different deactivation sequence after every reset.
How Lith did it was a mystery even for the Royals since permanent arrays were supposed to be, as the name implies, permanent. Changing one of them meant that the Warden had to alter the spell matrix of the formation and rebalance everything as a whole.
It was something long, hard, and expensive to do even one time, yet the arrays of the Verhen Mansion changed about once every 24 hours. The undead had waited for the reset before moving, to avoid ending up trapped inside an unknown sequence of arrays and being exterminated.
Ghiaro and Argo spent a few minutes studying the magical formations with their array sensing spells and thoroughly discussed their strategy before implementing it. Below the arrays air magic still worked and it carried their words.
Undead didn’t need to breathe which allowed the rest of the group to wait instead of suffocating to their deaths. The two Wardens needed all of their combined skill to breach the magical protections without triggering any alarm, but they succeeded.
At that point, instead of coming out and moving through the Mansion, Rakshu followed his plan and kept digging a way leading to the internal garden. It would allow them to move past a huge part of the building while never leaving the cover of the solid ground.
“This way, we can make sure that none of Verhen’s contingency plans for the contingency plans has triggered and we can still abort the mission with no losses.” The Ghoul said and everyone agreed.
Before coming out of the ground, Ghiaro and Argo checked with their spells again, discovering that the sabotaged arrays were still sabotaged and that there was no new array or unknown living presence inside the area of effect of their life-sensing arrays.
The undead came out of the ground two at a time, establishing a perimeter and checking for traps and guards before letting the others leave the safety of their burrows.
Rakshu came out last, ready to run away in case things went south so that at least one of them would survive and use the data for a new attack.
‘Demons. Demons everywhere.’ Zamo the Nightwalker pointed in several directions where his natural affinity for the darkness element revealed the presence of dense masses of energy slightly tainted by Chaos.
Undead had no mind links and the air sealing arrays were still in place but they had developed a sign language for situations like that. Ghiaro signaled Rakshu who brought out his amulet again and the Lamia put red dots where the life-sensing array perceived the beasts.
Zamo did the same, putting black dots on the map where his mystical senses spotted the Demons. The moment they were done, Upha the Vampire traced several colored lines indicating the routes at their disposal that allowed them to avoid the sentinels while also keeping open at least one retreat path.
The undead pointed in unison at the quickest yet riskiest option, knowing that prudence would ensure their survival, but only boldness could lead to victory while in hostile territory.
The longer they remained under Lith’s roof, the higher the chances that something would go wrong and at that point, the mission would snowball fast, going from killing to damage control in a jiffy.
‘Remember, you can kill whoever you want, just don’t touch the baby girl.’ Ruksha said via signs. ‘If we meet any of the Verhens, keep them alive but don’t waste time trying to use them as hostages.’
