The Temple of Atal’Hakkar

6/1 afternoon

The assault on the Sunken Temple had been intended as a somewhat deep probe; unlike the Wailing Caverns, the Atal’ai were cornered. They had a finite population and no extraplanar sugar daddy providing them with an infinite supply of corrupted plants and animals. If this weren’t somewhat time sensitive I’d have happily ground them down into dust with repeated waves of demons, day after day, but I had better places for those demons to suicidally charge right now.

I might have done a full scale wave assault like I did in the Wailing Caverns anyway, but I wanted to try something a bit more experimental to start. I only had eight shadow priests that could cast and maintain mind vision. Coincidentally, that was enough people to keep permanent tabs on my entire squad of heavies plus two extra people. As such, an assault force consisting of Gina, Broll, Valeera, Aegwynn, Nathanos, Mary, Abby, Ysondre, and myself would be making the assault, supported by my full compliment of demons. Each would be carefully monitored the whole time through mind vision, and pulled out if they needed it. Well, I wouldn’t, but between hero resurrection and blink I felt pretty good about getting out of there if I needed to.

Valeera was the first person in; the entrance was obviously the most guarded part of the complex, and she was uniquely capable of sneaking past the defenders. Especially the violent wild animals and oozes that were less guarding than occupying the upper reaches of the temple; they might be corrupted by the nightmare, but they were still mostly just animals. She scouted around for a nice, isolated location to start summoning in my assault team. Eventually she found a spot that was essentially a supply closet; extra stone ceremonial knives and robes were all stored together. There wasn’t a lot of space, but there was enough for Valeera, Gina, and Mary to start the assault together as the rest of us were ported in.It was a slaughter initially, before the trolls properly raised an alarm. The temple was built like a stack of rings with extra rooms built off to the side and staircases serving as choke points. We placed teams of Satyr backed by Eredar healers around the stairs to hold off attacks from below; the temple was designed for a siege, so it wasn’t too terribly hard to hold a staircase from above.

I did start to realize a small hole in the team composition at this point: we had a front line but we did not have a tank. Gina was adopting the fury combat style; she was great when it came to dismantling a single person at a time, but she didn’t have any particular tools to stop someone from getting past her other than the admittedly potent desire to not turn one’s back on her. Broll was inconsistent; he was good at mass destruction with magic and he was good at turning into a bear and bashing people’s faces in, so he swapped between the two at his whim. This would be useful in a small team where everyone was great in melee combat, but I’d just added Calia, Abby, Aegwyn, and a humanoid Ysondre to the mix.

My spirit of vengeance, Nathanos, and I ended up running interference and acting as bodyguards to my clothies. More so they could focus than because they were in dramatic amounts of danger, honestly. I got some practice with venomstrike at first, but stopped bothering and focused on teleporting out our fallen enemies for processing after a couple minutes. Aegwynn was busily showing off how she got the title of Magna.

Bolts of violet energy lanced out and trivially blasted the heads off of a dozen trolls before I could shout at her that we wanted to take as many of them as possible alive. She rolled her eyes and started turning them into sheep at an only slightly reduced speed and a much higher mana cost. That created some confusion, but a panicked sheep was absolutely less of a threat to us than an angry troll fanatic. It seemed to be both a physical and mental change, because they showed absolutely no tactical sense or any other indication of intelligence; these were just sheep now. Thanks to wild talent, I was able to calm them down and teleport them to Raven Hill for processing along with the ones who were dead or bleeding out. They would make excellent additions to my own little Burning Maniple.

Abby was doing her best, but dominating undead is difficult in the middle of combat and she was alone. We picked up half a dozen or so zombie and ghost trolls before she tagged out and Eliza came in to take up the position, but far more of them went down to blades, arrows, and Mary’s magic than were poached for the cause.

Speaking of Mary, it appears Calia was a discipline priest. Meaning that her best healing came in two main forms: the finest goddamn shield spells I’ve ever seen, and pulses of healing energy released whenever she smites fools. Her smites looked a bit different than I was used to, acting more like bolts of light than the fire crackers I’ve seen before, but where I’d been expecting a pure defensive healer, I had gotten a magical artillery piece that healed and protected her allies in the process. Ysondre, for her part, decided to save her mana and focused on helping me capture our downed and transformed foes in between innervation spells for Aegwynn and rejuvenation, her equivalent to renew, for Gina and Broll.

The easy ride was not to last. We started to run into their champions, who were finally rallying a proper defense. Of course, the first team that really gave us trouble were also a buffet: six powerful ghosts who formed a powerful team. I called in a slightly rested Abby and Tara to help Eliza dominate them, and Ursula to break down their mental defenses.

They had a full team, and more importantly they had their living allies backing them up, so they outnumbered us three to one. Ysondre and I had to start taking our jobs seriously, as berserkers began charging our backline and Gina didn’t have the luxury of picking one enemy at a time to duel. In all honesty, prioritizing the capture of the ghostly champions was probably a bad tactical move, but I defend it as a strategic decision. Ghostly recruits with varied and powerful skillsets can only be good.Once they were eliminated, the lion’s share of the troll’s warriors were taken out. All that was left was high command and getting to Eranikus… who was unfortunately guarded by quite a large number of green dragons and dragonspawn, according to Valeera’s scouting report. Further, I was informed that many of our Satyr were being unsummoned: the enemy was breaking through.

I think we got enough data from this experiment, don’t you? We called in our half trained succubi to screen for Lividia and hold off the people from downstairs for a little bit longer, and pulled in the B team, Varian, and his Royal guards to help us make the last big push.

It was a good call; once the green dragons saw who was attacking, they went from passively standing guard to throwing themselves at us in a frenzy. In addition, when I said dragons I did not mean whelps. Four drakes, supported by almost thirty dragonspawn, charged out of the hall where I presume Eranikus was being kept with every intention of killing every person wearing one of my necklaces.

I called for backup, and my undead were marshaled and started warping in, starting with Stitches in his full armor. Almost immediately, one of the dragons was yanked out of the air by Stitches’s hook. For obvious reasons, our first priority after general survival was to take out the dragons and put necklaces on them. Aegwynn burnt through the last of her mana placing the dragons in temporal stasis for around thirty seconds each; enough for me to collar them. Without the support of their masters, the dragonspawn were forced to fight on equal footing with my own. They didn’t stand a chance, especially with some of them trying to break off and finish the drakes.

We tried to go for Eranikus then, but his chamber was locked behind a magical barrier. We didn’t have time to figure out how to breach it, so we changed tack and got back to hunting the Prophet with our tracker. He was hidden in what I can best describe as a bunker crossed with a cathedral, filled with powerful magic users and insane zealots. My best guess were that these were the high clergy and their personal bodyguards, hoping to ride out the assault without risking their own skin, or interrupt their rituals.

Obviously we couldn’t allow that, and we couldn’t rely on Aegwynn anymore. She was recovering her mana as quickly as she could, but she had let herself get carried away on sheeping the chaff. I heard the deafening musical tone of Lividia blowing herself up in the distance. We had a few minutes until the unwashed masses got here, and I wanted to succeed on at least one of our missions.

“Take the cathedral, we can hold it if we do!”

My spirit of vengeance would be our last disposable blockade. We had deliberately kept the body count low when possible, so the vengeful spirits were a bit anemic. It would have to do.

The Atal’ai had blockaded the door; busting through wouldn’t be easy, and anyone the high priests could see through the doorway would only last a few seconds with a shield. Without one, they’d be torn apart no matter how tough they were. Broll had tried to break through the circle of axe wielding warriors just inside and while he killed three with one mighty sweep of his claw, their spirits had leapt out at him and torn him apart as their more lightly injured comrades cycled out to be healed and shadow bolts burnt through his thick hide. Now we really had to take the chapel; I was not losing Broll’s body.

I regretted that we didn’t have any of Doan’s students ready to go; a shielded blast wave would be just the thing to bust through this blockade. Instead, I did something stupid; if this surprises you, hello, you can call me Erich. I gave a few orders, and then teleported into a spot just behind the line of high priests with a shield up. The priests were very distracted by a storm of daggers being flung into their collective backs. I did my best to dodge their panic fire and lay out a bit of damage over the course of around five seconds; they were distinctly startled, but they were disciplined enough that their shock only lasted a short time. I only managed to kill one, but while they were healing themselves and trying to kill me, they weren’t watching the doors. Gina and Darcell could last much longer if they weren’t worried about a barrage of dark blasts, and Ysondre could line up her chain lightning spell. With just a few seconds of safe casting, half of their warriors were toasted or skewered and my champions faded back out the door.

The prophet managed to tie me down with ropes of shadow that sprang up around me; if I hadn’t blinked away from that, I would have likely been incinerated by the huge pillar of fire he called down. I left a surprise behind me, skulking in the shadows. Once the Atal’ai reoriented themselves back to the task of supporting their guardians, leaving just a few trolls as lookouts, Valeera made her move.

The prophet’s bodyguard suddenly fell asleep right as the blonde elf lunged at Jammal’an. He was stabbed in the chest, but responded in a very unexpected way: he laughed. “Come sister! Join us! Drink in true power!” As he said this, he grabbed her wrists and Valeera seemed to change. Her skin darkened and she grew tall and muscular, her eyes went hazy, and then to Jammal’an’s clear disappointment, she fell to the ground clutching at her head. She had somehow been transformed into a troll, undoing millennia of mana addiction and mutation even as it flooded her body with dark power. I found out later that it was only the combined efforts of mind defense, corruption defense, and Kathra’Natir that stopped her from pledging her soul to Hakkar and trying to kill all of us right there to prove her devotion.

Jammal’an turned away in disgust and began casting a flame strike to punish my retinue for trying to get through the door, still clutching at his wound but relying on his regeneration to pull through it. He was very shocked when Valeera, thanks to a magic purging spell from Mary dipping in with a shield of her own, leapt to her feet and plunged her blade through his entire chest, with the magnified strength he had just given her, her entire fist coming out of his back. He died almost instantly.

Around half of the priests tried to turn and take her apart, but she dropped a smoke bomb and vanished; it’s extremely hard to target someone you can’t see with magic. In the confusion I popped back in and let out another flurry of knives. I idly thought that I needed to teach some more of my warriors how to blink. It’s an arcane spell; I’m sure I saw Aegwynn use it while she was showing off.

Eight of my royal guards charged out of the smoke, and the fight was pretty much over at that point. The high priests were deadly if they had space, but with their guards all dead they went down to my warriors blades easily enough. The only question now was whether we push to the end… and that was hardly a question at all at this point.

“Hold the door.” I turned to my amulet and gave Aelthalyste her orders. “Bring in the available Farstriders, the Deathguard, and Whitemane. We need reinforcements. Check on Aegwynn, too. We need her again if she’s ready.”

The Atal’ai Rabble weren’t a trivial threat, but compared to everything else we’d faced a bunch of tired trolls fighting fresh troops in a fortified position was barely worth noting. Sally was able to resurrect our troops, Broll included, though it tired her out… which didn’t matter offensively. In Heroes of the Storm, only one of Sally’s abilities actually cost mana. She was able to participate quite nicely in the rest of the battle. Her healing was a bit anemic, but Mary and Ysondre had it covered.Once the assault was over, we were able to make our way over to Eranikus. Hopefully all the trouble was resolved now. I’m usually that lucky, right?