AN: Just a few quick notes...here's double release day number 3, I'm going to get started on the next two chapters shortly, unfortunately I AM going to be slowed down tomorrow, we have a 2 star general coming down because somebody fucked up a class that a Colonel was sitting in and of course... he complained. 'sigh' Soooo as a result I've got to give up my down time tomorrow and go give a class so that 'we' look good. The reward of good work is... more work. :D I'm a trifle salty about going in, but I actually do enjoy giving classes and public speaking, I'm just annoyed I won't have the time tomorrow that I thought I would, still, expect repeated double release days until the 5th of September. Longer if I end up having to skip days due to schedule shifts, but that 'shouldn't' happen very often.

Next up, I want to offer a special thanks to reviewer 'Maderfole' who gave me perhaps THE most detailed review I have gotten since I started this project, seriously dude, that is the kind of critical feedback every writer who's skin isn't made of onion peels, CRAVES, HUGE help and I really appreciate the time and effort you put into it. Not that the rest of y'all are chopped liver or anything, but holy shit his was the size of some chapters I've seen and it covered everything I wanted, the good and the bad.

I'm an OK writer, maybe better than OK, but I know my work isn't perfect, even if 'I' can't see the flaws, so seeing such an enormous amount of effort go in to detailing it all...my one criticism in return is...dude where were you four months ago? ;) Ah well, anyway, I'll have the next chapter up in about 5 minutes, if you don't see it, brew some coffee and come back after it's done. Now on with the show.

...Nazarick…

Ainz returned to his place in Nazarick to watch the rest of the battle unfold, though he considered turning the tide himself, he ultimately thought, 'No, I will not take their victory away.' Sebas had remained in place all but unmoving, but even without saying anything, Ainz could sense that Sebas was pleased that the young woman he'd watched over and saved from death once before, had seen her life extended beyond another moment.

Demiurge of course, was quick to voice his praise, "Of course, Lord Ainz! Your current plan makes much more sense! How could I not have seen it before?!" He touched his hand to his forehead at the revelation of the finely detailed plan his master had clearly laid out. "This is much better than allowing her to die!"

"Think nothing of it, Demiurge." Ainz said casually, choosing not to ask just what the archdevil was thinking.

"How is your 'head' project going?" Ainz asked, hoping for a distraction.

"Very well, My Lord. Our blood pumps with mana crystals attachments are keeping the heads alive and aware now and we have not lost anyone from the latest round of trials, I believe we're nearly ready for deployment into field use now." Demiurge said proudly.

"Good, Neia promised me the head of Remedios Custodio. It would be a shame to waste it. After she is dead, we'll restore her, remove the head, keep it alive, and give her over to the elves in the settled lands, put her under a curse in an elf village somewhere so that she must raise the alarm whenever a threat appears. That seems a fitting end." Ainz said casually. Demiurge was smiling for the rest of the day, overjoyed at the cunning and cleverness of his master.

...Prart…

When the sword came down and buried itself into Remedios's throat, Neia did not feel the relief she thought she would, instead her mind flew back to the assassin, the man who had tried to end her life as she slept, and the way he hanged for it.

She'd walked away from his corpse in the rain that day, she was alone, and all she'd felt was sadness for the waste. Now here she had buried blade through flesh so hard that the sword stayed erect in the ground, swaying back and forth as she let go of the hilt.

Remedios's body did not know it had died yet, it was still twitching as if there was still some human will to fight left within her, but Neia had killed enough to know that this was just 'the end' taking place, she would not rise again, not from this.

"Neia…?" Skana said as the pope looked down at the almost severed head, the pope looked up.

"I know." Neia said, and snapped her eyes around her, "Finish the rest!" She took up her own sword and alongside Skana, they began to move towards the fray. The fight had moved considerably farther from the gate now, heavy undead horses were terribly difficult to put down, though not impossible, they were closing in on the enemy camp, enough so that as they got halfway there, CZ had abandoned her position to join the pair and close the range.

"Better?" CZ asked as they moved their battered, exhausted bodies over the hellscape that was the battlefield.

"No." Neia answered grimly. Churned up frozen dirt had mixed with snow melted from the heat of human living bodies and the blood loss that changed them to dead ones made for a bleak and ugly view. Men and women groaned where they lay, whether they were lucky or not when compared to the unmoving was… debatable, to say the least.

Filth, cries and hands grasping out, calling for aid that none of the trio could provide, battered at their backs and would haunt the conscience of the pope. She remembered a book she'd read in her freetime when in Nazarick. "The comrade who fell and cried for aid, whom I moved past, I judge myself in the trial of my heart and am therefore guilty." She recited the words softly, but trudged on.

She wanted to look back at the bodies of her comrades, especially the merchant whose heart she'd pierced, but now was not the time, she felt his gaze on her nonetheless, piercing through her asking why she had not grown farther, faster.

They were halfway within reach by now. They could still hear fighting behind them, Neia didn't need to look to know what was happening, the gate security forces had seen the victory beginning in her location and had chosen to send aid, therefore her city's observers had chosen to sortie on their own to prevent an attack on the rear position or take advantage of the now depleted southern gate.

"CZ, take up a position as soon as you're in range." Neia said.

"No." CZ said.

"I'm sorry." Neia asked in surprise.

"No. I guard 'close' now." CZ said.

Another person might have thought she felt nothing, but after so long with her, CZ's very subtle inflections were an open book, and Neia knew when it was futile to argue. She sighed, "Fine. We don't have time to argue."

Neia took out arrows from the bodies she passed and put them back into her quiver, it wasn't long before they were within range, CZ was the first to fire, and bodies began to drop. Neia nocked an arrow soon after, walking and firing was no easy thing for most, but her skill had grown by leaps and bounds with countless hours of practice and real life and death experience. She knew to release the arrow at the most stable state of her step, ensuring it flew straight and true and deprived the target of their life. By the time they reached position, she had enough strength restored… and a lack of arrows, to rush to the fray with her sword out.

The fighting was thickest at the centre, but as both sides exhausted themselves, the fight devolved into battle pulses, where combatants would clash together for brief moments, perhaps a minute or less, then withdraw a few paces to breath, however there were those for whom this was not an issue. Lakyus had her whirling blades and she could reap a harvest of death as long as she had the means to sustain them, her own cursed blade was all but weightless in her hands, and her reputation alone meant that she had few eager to come to try to bring her down.

Neia's green armor was distinctive, as was the famous bow visible on her back, and her face bare to all so that her terrifying gaze could serve as armor in its own right. Also, she carried her runecraft blade which was as sharp as a comedian's wit and even if it was not her specialty, she was vastly more experienced than most of those she might face, and had the support of her wife on her left and her bodyguard over to her right.

Inch by inch, the recruits of Remedios Custodio were forced back and the wedge grew between them and the remaining allies of the Slane Theocracy. Without the very best of the best of the scriptures, their power was effectively halved or worse, and though they could even kill those of the famous hundred that had been with Neia since they'd begun guarding Tinamoc's trade caravan, neither the Holocaust nor the Black scriptures were trained to fight as part of an army, they fought as individuals or small squads at best.

With the equipment the select few had been given, the scripture threat was greatly elevated but even if the hundred could not bring them down, they could keep them on the defensive and constantly threaten the flanks.

Neia unleashed her voice, shouting down her enemies. It trampled the very clouds with its thunder, calling down terror and fear, while in her allies, it sprang up as lovely as flowers in spring, heartening them and filling their bodies with energy and courage to fight. Fluder's fireballs constantly hit one flank over and over again, concentrating his fire to devastating effect, and few angels were now left in the air. Those who had called them up had gradually expended their mana and been reduced to hand-to-hand combat. Arrows were all but nonexistent, few had any left.

Skana's sword dancing killed fewer than expected, but with her visible skill she was able to keep opponents off Neia's flank, allowing her wife to advance further and further into what was now the heart of the enemy encampment for the force besieging the southern gate. Carts overturned and fire sprung up everywhere as the sun began to dip below the horizon. Night turned the fighting into nightmare, fire illuminated friend and foe to give them faces like demons, and it was soon impossible to distinguish who brother or sister from dreaded foe.

Neia cursed. "Fall back!" She shouted loud enough to be heard, this did not, as she feared, embolden her enemies, if anything it seemed to embolden them to only do what they wanted to do, and that was to flee with their lives intact. The southern force began to withdraw themselves and from there they turned to rout entirely.

"We're not pursuing?" Skana asked in disbelief.

"We're drained, if we pursue, we'll be chasing them at night when they're desperate. Send word to the villages all along the way, I doubt they've been very good to those places they passed by, our militias will hunt down many of them out of revenge alone."

She bit her lip in thought and then added, "We'll dispatch cavalry as soon as we get back to the city and keep the pressure up, but our army here is wrecked beyond our ability to fight any further. Now we need to see to the rest of the walls." Neia's voice was filled with exhaustion as she gave her instructions and after wiping the blood from her sword, she sheathed it and looked around, the camp was a wreck, burning husks of wagons and bodies, fabric, barrels, everything ruined, bent, broken and shattered.

She supposed she should have raised her sword and shouted their victory, but she didn't feel as victorious as she thought she would.

"Return to the city, first and second, western wall! Third and fourth, eastern wall! Fifth, follow me through the city to the southern wall! CZ, Skana, Lakyus! You're with me!" Neia's shout echoed over the field, reminding them all that whatever had happened where they were, the fight might not be over yet.

"If our forces have broken off, do not engage! Return to the city, eat, and sleep! If you want to die, don't do it in the dark where none will see you! Die in the daylight, at least you'll have a goodnight's sleep first!" She shouted in the most humorous voice she could, eliciting grim and often forced laughs out of her audience.

It was a grim walk back, the ground wasn't that large, barely a mile, before it had seemed so endless, now it seemed like nothing, but it was a very grim nothing. When they got an eighth of a mile from the gate, Neia found Remedios's body, the sword still sticking out of the remains of the fallen paladin.

She looked down at the corpse, and knelt next to it. Lakyus placed her hand on Neia's shoulder. Neia closed the vacant eyes of the dead paladin. "You OK?" Lakyus asked with concern.

Neia stood up, drew the sword from out of the throat, raised it, and hacked down once, severing the spine and detaching the head. She picked it up by the hair and looked at it from eye level. Lakyus, CZ, and Skana were each at a loss to guess what thoughts lay behind the blank face. That was what bothered Skana, Neia's face showed absolutely nothing, even CZ's face has shown more emotion. The demon maid was looking over at Neia as the warrior pope let the head fall to her side and dangle from her grip, the maid demon's eye twitched ever so slightly as Neia said, "Come on, I need to see how Momon is doing on the other side." She said, not answering Lakyus's question.

The gates opened for them again and they passed through them, as they did, Neia passed the head to a guard, "Put that thing in a bag and have it delivered to the manor for me, I've got work to do." She said, and kept walking as the man looked at what she'd handed him so casually and realized he was gazing at a human head, he dropped it and jumped back against the wall in surprise, and drawing a somewhat embarrassing yelp from the poor man in the same moment.

Neia paid no mind to that, he would obey, they always did. Skana's thoughts turned elsewhere, she returned to thoughts of her early years before the war with Jaldabaoth, the plays that were put on by troops of actors that sometimes passed through her village, the occasional bard or singer who traded heroic epics for a night's lodging, a meal, and a few coins. She'd sometimes given the better looking ones a little fun as an extra reward. She still smiled at those memories, but in this moment she thought about how they talked about charges across long fields, they seemed so amazing at the time, but now? Now she wanted to laugh, she was worn out, the fighting had been intense and every muscle ached, if she tried to charge from one end to the other, she was quite sure she'd drop dead of exhaustion. She mentally promised the next time she heard a bard sing about a long charge over a field, she'd chuck a bread roll at their head.

The fighting they'd heard earlier however, had died down before they got halfway through the city, after so much… it was all Neia could do to stand on her feet, the silence, it was like she'd heard nothing but metal on metal, screams and death for an eternity, and then suddenly nothing. The silence was unnerving. She pounded on a nearby guard shack, several ready militia emerged. When the torch light hit her face, the fear nearly caused them to faint.

She wasted no time. "I need one of you at every wall. If tranquility reigns, have the command of each position meet me in the manor, I want to know exactly what happened." She turned to Skana, "Organize one hour guard shifts for the South Wall, minimal manning but everyone sleeps in full kit tonight, I won't have us taken by surprise, and…" Her eyes welled up, "Have… have someone bring Tinamoc's body in please, I want to see him."

"Yes, ma'am." Skana answered, rendering a salute as Neia turned to go back to the manor. CZ and Lakyus followed after her as she walked.

"Lakyus, do you want to go check on your s-... your team?" Neia asked with concern.

"They'll join us in the meeting hall." She said gravely.

"Mhmm." Neia said absently.

They were quiet.

Lakyus fidgeted.

"You were amazing." Lakyus said softly. "Like… like one of us, like a rose." She cracked a smile.

"Thanks." Neia said numbly. "I feel pruned." Lakyus rolled her eyes, it seemed to her that in addition to the Sorcerer King's power, she drew on his inability to tell a decent joke.

"What was that… the thing that happened earlier?" Lakyus asked with disbelief still in her voice.

"I don't know." Neia said, she looked over at Lakyus, her face was blank, but the familiarity that had developed between the two women revealed a hint of confusion that told Lakyus that Neia was being truthful.

"It felt like 'him'. Like the Sorcerer King." Lakyus said.

"I know. For a moment, I thought it was his wrath falling on me for killing Tinamoc but… then I realized that wasn't it, something was different, but I'm not nearly as powerful as he is, instead I think I… I don't know, borrowed some part of him, and even doing that was tearing my body apart, I couldn't contain it and…" Neia went very quiet again. She couldn't say 'I almost died.'

She didn't need to say it, Lakyus had been at hand and had tried to reach out and touch her, to yank her back, she knew her friends and her wife had tried to help, but she was glad they hadn't pressed too hard.

"Don't do that again though, promise." Neia implored, momentarily throwing Lakyus off, "Don't try to… pull me out of that." Neia clarified.

Lakyus pursed her lips. "I can't make that promise." She replied.

"Promise me." Neia demanded firmly. The warrior pope's eyes had frightened kings and dragons, she had stood in a whirlwind of killing intent and smiled at the one who tried to terrify her as if he had been a mere child, yet now, even with the death shadow blackness gone from her eyes, they were powerful to look into. Not, in this moment, because Lakyus found them terrifying to her, but because it seemed that behind them was an ocean of tears held back only by sheer force of will. Lakyus had seen pain, she had felt pain, but… she had never been forced to kill a loved one, and Neia had done exactly that only a candle or so ago. Nor had he been the first of those she valued, that she had been forced to strike down.

Neia might as well have been saying, "Please don't make me kill another of my friends." It was tragic, but it was also touching, and so it rent the heart for Lakyus to reply as she did.

"No." Lakyus said firmly.

"Lakyus, please… I've killed enough of my friends, if that happens again, I don't want to lose another, if I… just don't, OK?" Neia asked gently, "I don't know how that happened, or how to control it… yet, but if it happens like that, things are bad, very bad, and it's better to use me as a weapon that protects my friends, than let me be the living accident that destroys them." Neia's voice was not a hammer, it was a gentle falling rain that caressed the skin, there was a deep well within that blank face.

Lakyus's voice was patient, gentle, and noble, every syllable bespoke her good breeding. "Neia, maybe when we first met, we were just client and client representative. But for better or worse, we've helped each other, we've fought together, we live together in that manor, we're friends, so I know what you're asking and why you're asking it. And given a reversal of our positions I'd ask the same as you, and you'd say 'no' the same as I am now. I'll promise not to take undue risks, but you can't ask me to just stand aside and watch my comrade's body get ripped apart." It hurt to have to say it, to deny such a heartfelt request, but as Neia looked into the noble eyes of her commanding counterpart, she saw in turn, a sadness that mirrored her own, at the thought of abandoning a comrade.

She did not ask again.

Neia glanced over at CZ.

"Don't ask." The demon maid answered in advance, and shut her down at the outset.

"So this is what it is like to feel frustrated and proud at the same time." Neia said, cracking a very small smile. It might have been forced, but it was there.

Both Lakyus and CZ shrugged casually. "I still can't believe it." Neia said, her hushed voice a stark contrast to the neutral mask on her face as they mounted the stairs leading up to the manor.

"What?" Lakyus asked.

"Remedios is dead, she's finally dead. All this time, all the horror, all the blood, and one thrust and a quick hack later, then she's dead and her head is probably in a potato sack headed this way by now. I should feel happy, relieved, I should feel lots of things, but honestly, I just don't know what I feel, maybe I don't even feel anything at all." Neia's voice was confused and troubled as she spoke, the doors opened and she rendered a return salute to the guards.

"Well, you have time to figure it out, Remedios doesn't, and that means she won't be lighting anymore people on fire, you have to feel pretty damn good about that." Lakyus said emphatically.

Neia let out a genuine smile, "You know, put that way, about that at least, I do." She said as she entered the meeting hall and took her seat at the head of the table. A few minutes later, the rest of Blue Rose, Momon, Ulthis, and Skana entered and took seats at the table. Right behind the last of them came a guard who was carrying a potato sack, he approached Neia and held it out to her uncomfortably. "Thank you." She said to him, "Sorry I made you tend to this, I thought I had to go make more of these, you're dismissed, soldier." She gave him a wane smile, then a salute, and as he returned the salute, she let him leave, which he did, very quickly.

When the last of them were seated, Neia stood up, reached in, took the head out of the bag and held it up for the whole table to see. "We've solved one big problem today, but now I want to hear how it went for the rest of you." She said, letting them look long and hard at the head of Remedios Custodio, before she set it back in the bag and then on the floor, she put her boot on top of the head, and wished that Remedios could feel it. "Lord Momon, would you go first?" She asked, looking directly at the raven black hero.