"There's plenty of food for everyone. No need to brood on an empty stomach. Whatever you choose, you'll need strength." She pointed at the six empty chairs, one for each guest plus one for herself.
Baba Yaga was about to sit at the head of the table when she perceived a low rumble in the atmosphere.
"He comes!" She said as her eyes turned into blazing fires of mana.
A wave of her hand created a double of the dining room, sending the children and the Mother away to let them dine quietly. At the same time, the Crone and her guests watched at the events unfolding on the surface through what looked like a surveillance mirror that had appeared in mid-air.
"He who?" Phloria asked, feeling hope for the first time since she had walked inside those damned mines.
"My daughter Dawn calls him the Blackest Knight, while the Beasts know him as the Scourge. I prefer calling things as I see them, so he's the Destroyer to me. You, however, I believe know him as Lith Verhen." Baba Yaga said.
***
The flaming black meteor covered the last few kilometers separating it from the mines in the blink of an eye, without ever slowing down. Even though it was clearly visible on the horizon, the people at the camp were too busy either trying to kill or survive to bother looking at the sky.
'I don't know what's going on down there and I don't care.' Thanks to his enhanced senses, Lith could see humans, thralls, and undead fighting together against regular humans.
'Solus, any trace of Phloria and the others?'
'None, but there's a mess down there. Their energy signature might be cloaked by one of Orion's rings, covered by their enemies, or worse. Are you sure you want to do it?' Solus asked.
'I am. As long as no witness remains alive, we don't need to care about hiding anything of our strength. We can go all out and beyond. Fighting so close to such a powerful mana geyser is a unique opportunity and our best chance to save my friends.'
Solus slipped off his finger and reached the ground first, landing behind a small hill located a few hundreds meters away from the camp. Her drop point was exactly in the middle of the raging stream of world energy coming from below that gave birth to the crystal mines.
She shapeshifted into her tower form and then Warped away.
Meanwhile, Lith crash-landed, opening a deep crater in the ground and killing all the nearby undead in the process. He was back in his human form and wore his Archmage robe, wielding supreme authority over the soldiers who were miraculously unscathed from the impact.
"Phloria Ernas, where is she?" Not even the dimensional sealing array could lessen the pressure that his seething anger exuded.
Traitors and thralls quaked in their boots at Lith's sight whereas the soldiers cried with joy. That together with Life Vision showing him traces of the blood cores the thralls bore, allowed Lith to sort friends from enemies.
Seeing his hands move, the traitors pointed their weapons and wands against Lith. The formers hit his robe and cracked as the hands wielding them became numb from the impact.
The latter released spells that were instantly overpowered by Lith's own, without buying their owners a single second before Checkmate Spears killed all those who had raised a hand against the Archmage.
"Phloria Ernas, where is she?" Lith repeated the question to the soldier who was now clinging to his deep blue robe as if it was their lifeline.
"You need to help us! We almost died at the hands of the traitors and their undead allies…" A young soldier said until spirit magic choked her along with the whining of all her comrades.
"I didn't ask for a report. Ernas. Where?" Lith would have gladly abandoned them to their fate, but roaming the entirety of the battlefield aimlessly was beyond stupid when there was intel laying everywhere.
"I don't know." She said amid tears when the pressure on her neck lessened and the other soldiers nodded like parrots with a seizure.
"They are supposed to be in the command tent. It's located that way. I haven't seen them since this morning though." The young soldier pointed where the battle was at its fiercest, her voice begging to be spared despite her uselessness.
"Fine. Run away or die, the choice is yours." Lith threw them toward the path that his arrival had cleared.
Both the humans and the undead nearby were too focused on him to care about the survivors, giving them a chance to escape.
"Is he insane?" Nandi was flabbergasted. "The army's reinforcements alone amount to one thousand men and the undead are at least half that number."
"No, he isn't." Baba Yaga couldn't understand Lith's behavior as well and looked at the surveillance mirror with confusion.
"There is great power in him, yet his life force is broken and he is but one man. Not even an Awakened can walk away easily from such a battlefield, unless…" Everyone turned toward her, but Baba Yaga never bothered finishing the sentence.
She was too busy thinking back at Dawn's describing her defeat.
Solus Warped back above the crystal mines and this time she stayed there. The Sentries swarmed out of all the tower's doors and windows, looking for clues about their missing friends.
The Sentries were surveillance devices that looked like a sphere of glass the size of a basketball. They could scan everything that reflected on their surface and share with Solus all of her mystical senses, allowing them to identify someone based on their energy signature.
Baba Yaga followed Solus's arrival on another surveillance device that only she could see.
'A life force coming from a building? That's a cursed object for sure. It matches Dawn's description and explains Verhen's guts. A mage tower is the most powerful tool a mage can wish for.' She knew it well since her hut was actually a mage tower shaped in accordance to its master's will.
'Yet he is too young to have crafted a tower and I know them all. Then where the heck does that ruin come from?' Baba Yaga had seen Menadion's tower more than once in the past, but she failed to recognize it nonetheless.
Just like Solus had told Lith in the past, together they had discovered things about the tower that Menadion herself was unaware of, but that was just an assumption due to Solus's ignorance about herself.
By fusing a person with her tower, Menadion didn't create a cursed item so much as a human-tower hybrid. Normal relics were incapable of growing outside their maker's design, but Solus was a living being and so was now her tower half.
The more Solus regained her powers and learned about magic, the more the tower could reshape itself according to the most recent magical development. They grew together because Awakened naturally refined their own bodies thanks to the mana coursing through them.
Meanwhile, Lith darted towards the command tent while ignoring all the attacks aimed at him thanks to the combined protection of the boosted Skinwalker armor and his barrier ring that blocked the hits he failed to dodge.
"Ranger Verhen, how nice of you to join us." A somewhat familiar voice belonging to a somewhat familiar beanpole said.
