High Priest Vorlagos was a man possessed. The calming aura of Oakhaven had stalled his holy crusade, but it had not broken his spirit. Retreating beyond its influence, he had regrouped, his divine fury rekindled. And now, he had a new plan, bolstered by a mysterious and astonishingly wealthy new benefactor.
Anonymous donations had poured into his coffers. Crates of high-quality weapons had arrived at his encampment, left by "sympathetic merchants." Coded maps detailing the weaknesses and patrol-gaps in the Crimson Vanguard's quarantine line had been delivered by a crow in the dead of night. Vorlagos saw these as signs from the Unblinking Eye, clear proof that his holy cause was just.
He had no idea he was being armed and funded by the Demon King Xylos.
"The enemy's tranquility field is a weapon of sloth and complacency!" he thundered to his re-energized followers. "We cannot march through it; our sacred fury would be dulled to apathy! But we need not march. We shall fly!"
His new plan was audacious. He had used his benefactor's funds to hire a fleet of smugglers and mercenaries who owned and operated a small armada of rickety, barely-flight-worthy airships. They were cargo haulers, sky-barges powered by wheezing elementals and patched with tar. They were loud, ugly, and an affront to aeronautical engineering. They were perfect.
"We will bypass the land quarantine entirely!" Vorlagos declared, pointing a dramatic finger at a map. "We will approach from the sky, from the heavens themselves, like the Eye's own tears of righteous judgment! We will descend upon Oakhaven in a glorious festival of faith before Dros and his lapdogs can even react!"
His followers roared in approval. Their divine rage, carefully nurtured outside the calming aura, was at its peak.
The plan was for Sir Kael and his knights to create a loud, messy diversion on the southern perimeter, drawing the bulk of the Crimson Vanguard's attention. Under the cover of this distraction, Vorlagos and a thousand of his most fervent zealots would sail their creaking armada over the northern mountains and make a direct aerial descent on the town.
It was a stupid, chaotic, and incredibly noisy plan. King Xylos, watching from his scrying pool, couldn't have been more pleased.
The new Imperial doctrine, as dictated by Inquisitor Caelia's report, was in full effect. The quarantine was no longer a passive filter. It was a paranoid, hyper-vigilant containment field.
When Sir Kael and his knights launched their "diversion," a clumsy frontal assault on a heavily fortified checkpoint, the Imperial response was not what they expected.
The Crimson Vanguard did not rush to meet them. They did not engage in a glorious clash of steel. Instead, a company of battle-mages, following the new "minimal engagement, maximum containment" protocol, simply erected a five-hundred-foot-high wall of solid, impenetrable force-magic in front of them, then went back to their tea.
Sir Kael and his men found themselves charging headlong into an immovable object. The "diversion" was over before it began, ending not with a bang, but with the comical bonk of a hundred zealots running into a transparent wall.
The southern approach was contained. All Imperial assets were now free to focus on the true threat.
In the Imperial Command Bunker, the Sentinel Commander watched the tactical display. The clumsy diversionary attack was noted and dismissed. What his sensors were now screaming about was the fleet of rickety airships lumbering over the northern peaks.
"Airborne bogies detected," an analyst reported, his voice tense. "Approximately twenty, low-altitude, poor-quality craft. IFF reads as... unregistered cargo haulers. Their flight path is erratic, but their trajectory is a direct line to the Oakhaven Sanctum."
The old doctrine would have been to hail them, to warn them off. The new doctrine was different.
Caelia Vance's logic was absolute: the Librarian was a master of infiltration and asset acquisition. His followers, the Heretics, were his unwitting pawns. Therefore, this airborne assault was not a pilgrimage of idiots. It was a Trojan horse. A cleverly disguised airborne insertion of elite enemy agents under the cover of religious fanaticism.
"They are not pilgrims," the Commander said, his voice cold and hard as steel. "They are hostile assets attempting to reinforce a rival power. The Emperor's new directive is clear: Isolate the board. Deny him new assets. With extreme prejudice."
He looked at his weapons officer. "Launch the Interceptors."
Up in the lead airship, the Divine Fury (formerly the Turnip Trader), High Priest Vorlagos stood on the prow, the wind whipping through his robes. He could see Oakhaven in the distance, a peaceful little jewel in the valley. Victory was at hand. They would descend, sing their hymns of praise, and their god would surely welcome them with open—
He was interrupted by a sound. A high-pitched, piercing shriek that seemed to come from all directions at once.
"What is that?" he demanded of the smuggler captain.
The captain, a grizzled man with a mechanical eye, squinted towards the horizon. "That, Your Holiness," he said, his voice suddenly very nervous, "is the sound of Imperial Griffon Knights unlocking their wings for a high-velocity dive. And they seem to be heading right for us."
From the clouds, they appeared. Two dozen elite riders on armored, screaming griffons, their sunsteel lances gleaming. They were the Empire's premier air superiority unit. They moved not with the clumsy gait of the airships, but with the lethal grace of striking falcons.
"They dare to interfere with a holy pilgrimage?!" Vorlagos shrieked, outraged.
But the Griffon Knights weren't hailing them. They weren't issuing warnings. Following their new, ruthless orders, they simply dived.
FWHOOSH!
One of the knights flew past the Divine Fury in a silver blur. A moment later, the elemental engine that powered the airship sputtered, coughed out a puff of green smoke, and died. The smuggler captain stared at his controls. A perfectly circular, three-inch-wide hole had been bored clean through his primary power conduit by a lancer's precisely aimed kinetic bolt.
They were not trying to destroy the ships. That would be messy, and the wreckage might fall into the Sacred Zone.
They were disabling them.
One by one, the Griffon Knights performed acts of surgical, airborne vandalism. Power lines were severed. Rudders were shattered. Support cables were snipped with pinpoint accuracy. The great, lumbering armada was being taken apart in mid-air, piece by methodical piece.
One airship, whose captain tried to fight back by firing a rusty harpoon gun, was instantly and ruthlessly punished. Two griffons flanked it, launched grappling hooks, and simply tore the entire rear stabilizer fin off the ship, sending it into an uncontrolled, terrifyingly slow spiral towards the mountainside below.
Vorlagos watched in abject horror as his glorious holy crusade was turned into a demolition derby. His fleet was crippled, his zealots were screaming in panic, and his grand plan was falling out of the sky in large, slow-moving chunks.
They hadn't even been recognized as worshippers. Caelia's cold war logic had reclassified them.
To the Empire, they were not a pilgrimage of idiots.
They were an enemy air-fleet. And they had just been swatted out of the sky.