She waits a few seconds to make sure they haven't been overheard, then gestures to go. Anevia can cleanly take down her first opponent in seconds, leaving them gasping on the ground, then go to grab the next one in a chokehold. Lann and especially Seelah are clearly less able but they're both physically stronger than the cultists and aren't caught completely by surprise. There are two people that Brenda will have to take down before they can scream if she wants to stop them from raising the alarm.

She can punch one in the stomach, then turn and kick the other while he's still drawing breath to shout. Once they've both had the wind knocked out of them she can figure out getting a hold of them before they recover. 

Anevia will jab the one that Seelah is trying to silence in the stomach, then start ripping up sheets for use as gags and ropes. It's much more ad hoc than she would like, but she thinks she can tie them tightly enough to prevent them wiggling loose soon, at least.

"Good work."

Then she continues to the group more quietly, stepping away from the prisoners.

"Do you think you want to stick around for the interrogation, or wait outside? I'm not going to torture them, but I'll probably have to threaten to kill them and may have to follow through, and it's probably not going to be pretty. I won't think less of anyone who doesn't want to watch."

Brenda is going to go be a coward in the hallway. 

Then Anevia can start with the most important looking cultist, holding a knife to their neck as she removes the gag.

"Scream and you die. Now, tell me more about what's going on here - how many cultists are there in the maze, who are your leaders, and where are you keeping the kids?"

"Fuck you. Why should I tell you shit, you're just going to kill me anyway."

"Do you think I care about some cultist goons? Sure, I'd as soon kill you as look at you, and I will if you don't tell me what I want to know, but I have bigger fish to fry. If you tell me what I want to know, get me in a good enough mood, you can end this encounter alive and you'll stay that way if you stay out of our way."

"You're crazy, bitch. You don't stand a chance against Hosilla, and then he'll torture you to learn who told you and then that's even worse for me than dying - he's way scarier than you. And at least then when Baphomet takes my soul he'll know I was his loyal servant until the end."

"Break me with torture? That's a laugh, kid. I grew up in Nidal."

Anevia rolls up her sleeve, showing off some of the intense scarification on her arms.

"Believe me, whatever he can do to you, I can do way worse. I bet even my parents hurt worse than he will, and they were soft on their kids. In fact, now that I mention it, I might not have all of my tools with me but there's some things you can do with just a knife.."

Yeah, that's fucking terrifying. The cultist will start talking like their life depends on it.

A few minutes later, Anevia emerges from the room.
 
"Good news is, I know where the kids are. Bad news is, whatever bigshot demon is running the show here is planning something that they don't want to be interrupted during, so the magical barrier requires both of this Hosilla fellow's 'hands' to open to prevent trivial matters from interfering; we'll need to track them down to take whatever key or token they have. One of them is apparently down dealing with some kind of flooding, and the other is overseeing construction of new rooms. There's also a bunch more cultists that have started taking up residence here recently, but most of them aren't any scarier than these fellows - I think the only actually dangerous one is probably Hosilla, who's apparently a cleric or inquisitor or something, though we shouldn't take the others lightly."

It's a Dungeons and Dragons universe; the fetch quest is par for the course.

"Thank you. Hm, construction guy first on the theory that we want the flooding solved, or flooding guy first on the theory that he's more likely to finish the job and go somewhere else quickly?"

"I say flooding. If it's easily fixed, then we should get there before they finish, and if it isn't we should deal with him before before it gets worse and we have more water to deal with when fighting him."

"Sounds good to me." She mentally flips through her list of powers for whether she has anything good for fixing flooding and concludes that she can't really tell without seeing the flooding, but at least her clothes might turn into a scuba kit if the occasion calls for it.

Once they start heading down the stairs, it becomes clear that the flooding is actually fairly serious. In the lower level rooms, the water comes up past their ankles, and has an unpleasantly cool temperature. Fortunately the cultists also seem to want to avoid it, and if they're careful to avoid making a lot of noise splashing in the water they can find someone rather better dressed than the earlier cultists carrying a glaive and looking nearly as harried as his subordinates. He seems to be trying to seal up a door without proper tools for it, and is not having a lot of success.

(What unpleasant temperature? Brenda's boots are both waterproof and nicely insulated. And they match her backpack.)

If it doesn't look like he's doing better than any of them could do, they should probably take him out and go through his pockets. Unfortunately with the water level "take him out" basically means killing him, doesn't it. That or doing a lot of loud splashing around carrying him back up to the dry areas, which may not even be dry much longer if they don't get this over with and fix the flooding.

She reminds herself that he abducts kids and hands them over to demons, and that he'd probably be happy to kill her if he needed to go through her pockets for something, which helps a bit. If nobody has a clever idea, she can take his head off with his own glaive, because if she's going to be making this kind of decision she should actually make it and not hide behind other people.

Does anyone else look like they have a clever idea.

Does killing him painfully count?

Brenda doesn't share Camellia's sense of humor. She sneaks up behind the cultist and takes his head off with his own glaive. There's blood on the door and blood in the water and no blood on Brenda or her clothes.

He had better have that plot coupon on him.

His corpse has:

A magical-looking key.

A handful of healing potions.

A golden unholy symbol of Baphomet, set on a steel chain.

A paper sheet with orders from Hosilla written on it, instructing them to do something about the flooding, get the maze expansion back on schedule, and find a better hiding place for the paladin sword.

Healing potions get passed around to anyone with inventory space appropriate pockets or bags, magical key goes in Brenda's pocket because so far Dressing Room has done an excellent job of protecting Alpina from various hazards, everything else can go wherever, now how do they stop this flooding.

"Actually, do we need to stop the flooding? Obviously we do if it will endanger Neatholm or another city but I don't know the geology around here. Lann, Wenduag, you're the experts, how high is the water likely to get?"

“We’re currently further down than the lake’s surface, so I think that means there would have to be a lot more water than there is now before we notices? It depends on how high it’s going to get; if Kenabres has another lake on the surface that’s causing the flooding, that might be bad.”

“Well there is the Sellen, but it seems unlikely that the flooding is caused by water coming in from there; you’d expect the higher up floors to spring a leak first. Probably they just hit the water table, though in that case I have no idea why they were trying to seal the door instead of whatever wall is letting water in.”

"If they hit the water table that's not going to make the lake rise, unless the lake is fed from above. I guess the other risk is if it gets high enough to cut off access to the surface but I get the sense you don't really need access to the surface very often anyway." She's not going to push for a final decision either way; it's not her city.

Lann is perfectly happy to leave it, he's mostly just here to rescue the kids. Maybe it'll be an issue later or maybe not, he's already at the extent of his knowledge here.

Time to go back up and look for the construction area, then. 

Getting to the under construction area of the maze requires passing through the central area, and one room they can't avoid has the distinct negatives of being too open to sneak through and filled with armed cultists. Nobody seems to have sounded the alarm yet, so they aren't specifically readying themselves for battle, but unless Brenda has a plan to get them to move aside there's probably going to be a fight about it.

Someday she's going to be a wizard and have twenty different species powers and be able to avoid so many fights, but today what she has is the ability to ambush people and punch them.

Anevia has seen Brenda's takedowns, and while she's really even better than Anevia is at it there's no way she's going to clear this large a room before someone can sound the alarm. Add in the fact that she's not sure they can take this many people prisoner... Anevia calls for lethal force in the surprise attack, with priority targetting on those near the far door. If Brenda thinks she can take down her opponents safely that's fine, but for everyone more squishy holding back in this kind if fight is an easy way too start losing people.

That's very reasonable and she absolutely doesn't want to get her allies killed over what's not even a principled stance against killing so much as a persistent sense that she should be able to do better. She will punch to kill. (She's not using the angel sword for this.)

With lethal force on the table, the cultists are a relatively easy foe; one of them turns out to be a cleric, but none of the people engaging in melee combat are vulnerable to a panicked first level negative channel and the same isn't true for his comrades. The one Seelah is in the middle of stabbing drops like a rock instead of successfully blocking, and the other ones aren't much happier about it. It's frankly a bizarre room once you get past the corpses; there are four incredibly garish pictures hanging on the wall and a magically-maintained pool of what looks to be blood at the front of the room. If this is the design sense of whoever runs this place, it's definitely for the best that it's still under construction.