The battle rages on. Woljif is down. Thall is down. The halfling cleric is down. The archers take down yet another enterprising kidnapper and this one crushes its passenger under its weight. Seelah is still standing, barely, but no matter how hard the gargoyles claw at her she doesn't go down. People keep dropping, and probably most of them are alive, but even a selective channel would still hit a dozen gargoyles—

A gnome in the black-spiked armor of the Hellknights charges into the fray, with several others behind him. Further back, some of the Sunrise Sword archers take shots at the gargoyles.

Thank all the Lawful gods for Hellknights! Blai wrangles his way out of melee to start striking key people with his healing ray thing.

With the forces fighting together, the gargoyles quickly notice that this fight is not going their way and take to the wing, though a few of them, who apparently have not learned any lessons from their compatriots, stop to pick off a captive from the edges first. Less than a minute after the Hellknights arrived, the fighting is over.

Can they snipe at the fleeing gargoyles?

They can! Two of them go down, and one more drops it's prisoner, but it's harder to aim for a specific gargoyle with all of them flying away at once; two keep flying away with their prisoners, a Sunrise Sword member and one of the Crusade's handful of Erastilian clerics.

They're... too bloodied for it to be wise to send the faster subdivision to give chase. Time to round everyone up for channels.

He's alive! Hooray!

So is he!

The guy who was crushed under a gargoyle is dead. The halfling cleric is dead. One of the Hellknights is dead, cut down in the last moments of the battle. A few others, scattered throughout the battlefield. Not an unusually high number, all things considered.

The rest get up with the channel.

Who's got the bars on their coat to be in charge of this outfit, they should chat before dawn distracts everybody for an hour.

There are ranks above Paralictor in principle, but Derenge is identifiable as the one in charge of this detachment.

"Paralictor. I'm Select Artigas. Do you need anything non-obvious here?"

He has no visible external reaction to that fascinating combination of name and title.

"A summary of the aspects of the situation familiar to you and not to us would be appreciated, but I can get it from Ankelle if you have other priorities."

Artigas isn't that uncommon a name and he doesn't think he's ever met Paralictor Derenge in person to be recognizable by face. "I don't think we should march back to rejoin the rest of the army until after the dawn hour; this is a defensible place to pray in a way nothing we passed en route is. So there's some time. We received Ankelle's report and marched out once we knew what we'd be looking at -" Another aspect of this fascinating combination is the thing where he's got twenty years of Worldwound experience and definitely knows what should go in this kind of briefing.

He nods. "If minor reinforcements would be useful for your aims I expect my detachment can secure permission to accompany the Crusade, although considering our lack of positive channels we will be more effective if the surviving members of this Sunrise Sword detachment are incorporated into our unit as well."

He turns to Yaker. "Ankelle. Without your actions, we would have had few or no survivors, and you will receive commensurate bonus pay in accordance with your contract. Nonetheless, for abandoning your post without permission, you will also receive one hundred lashes, spaced appropriately so as not to risk permanent damage to the Godclaw's resources."

Blai's just gonna not evince an opinion about that. "I'd want to confirm this arrangement with whoever is commanding the Sunrise Sword unit but have no specific objection. Who is meant to garrison this outpost?"

Regill can provide a brief overview of the history of this outpost (which was formerly a fort under an older version of the Wardstone lines, but abandoned when the lines were moved outwards). In his opinion it could be a strategically useful fort if an attempt at moving the lines inward were sufficiently successful but would be difficult to hold until that point. Fortunately, the demons did not particularly attempt to retain control of it, permitting his detachment to retreat into it when necessary.

All right, if they don't need to leave anybody to man the outpost he can attach the Hellknights and the Sunrise Sword unit to the army if they're agreeable. Do the Sunrise Sword in fact want to go on being attached to the Hellknights?

...The Sunrise Sword is conflicted about this. (The specific person previously in charge of their detachment is dead, and their command structure has Mendevian levels of clarity.) ........Does the Crusade have a policy about the circumstances under which the Hellknights would be allowed to kill them in the field?

...they should certainly not attach them in a way that makes that count as "internal discipline by a signatory" and then there's some verbiage about enchantments and if you get turned undead and stuff but the answer would largely be that they cannot do that. Do they have specific reason to be concerned here?

......Well, so, the thing is, when they ended up attached to the Hellknights it was (temporarily, not in a way Blai would be beholden to) in a way that meant that counted as internal discipline, and then when they were trying to retreat into the fortress, they were carrying a couple of their people on stretchers because their legs had gotten really messed up beyond what a channel can fix, and it was slowing them down, and one of the less injured people raised the possibility of the Hellknights helping to cover their retreat while they got everyone inside, and instead the Paralictor just ordered the severely injured guys be beheaded. And they would like it if that didn't happen again. They'd otherwise be perfectly happy to attach to them! They seem like — not perfectly nice people, but perfectly respectable allies! But ideally they would like to attach to them in a way that doesn't allow that to just go happen again in the future.

 To be fair, if he hadn't done that, they probably would have all died, rather than just those two? And that would have been worse. 

  It's not okay to kill innocent people just because it'll have good consequences!

Wow, yeah, he can see why that would cause friction. ...why did they possess stretchers, seems like weird field equipment to either have in the first place or spend crisis time constructing. Anyhow, they can re-ratify the arrangement in a way that does not have that problem, it is legitimate to take even very severe risks to save your fellows if you are not specifically beholden to a plan that commits you otherwise. He'd just swap them out but the army's opinion of Hellknights seems possibly even more negative than that and he doesn't want his paladins Falling, or have a lot of spare Abadarans and the extra money to convince them it's a good idea, or think the Hellknights will work well with the Chaotic-leaning Gorumites, etcetera. But he can ask around for anyone who thinks they'll get along with Hellknights all right if they decide in the course of the re-ratification that actually fuck this.