"The wardstone is supposed to fry demons? Is that the thing Deskari picked up and threw?"

"That's the one, yes. There's a whole string of them around the wound, meant to keep demons from crossing over and terrorizing the rest of the planet, but something seems wrong with this one - besides the fact that it's currently sticking out of the building here and not in the temple of Iomedae, I mean. I'm worried it's not just whatever Deskari did to it either, because the demons started showing up before he did and I would have thought it would stop him from picking it up in the first place."

"Huh. Well, I don't know anything about magic engineering" YET "but if there's someone around who does I can at least keep the demons off them while they take a look at it?"

"We're not exactly swimming in divine artifact specialists at the moment, and I'm not sure how much good anyone who wasn't an archmage would do if there was a serious problem. The closest we have is the storyteller, and I haven't seen the elf since yesterday. We were mostly hoping the issue will be obvious when we get there or that once we clear the building someone will be able to figure it out with enough time."

"Would you like me to go look for him, or help you clear the building?"

"We'd appreciate the help more, if you're willing to offer it; Anevia says you're as strong as a greater demon, and judging by that fight she was spot on. We'd have to team up to take on enemies like that, so having an elite adventurer with us could speed things up a lot, whereas unless you're good at divinations I'd expect a search team to be better at finding people."

Yeah now that she thinks about it she was just looking for an excuse not to fight. "Makes sense; I'll come with you." She has a sudden sense that somewhere in the cosmos a bunch of teenagers are sitting around a table covered in bowls of chips and cups of Mountain Dew, introducing their characters to each other, Brenda the fighter and Anevia the ranger and . . . "Can I get your names?"

"Of course. I'm Irabeth Tirabade, you already know my wife Anevia, next to me is Staunton Vhane..."

She apparently knows the names of all her subordinates off of memory, though there admittedly aren't that many of them.

"Thanks." Between the headband and the friendship magic Brenda's odds are a lot better than they used to be. Also one of them is green and one's a dwarf, that helps too. She'll ask about copying them when they're done with this building maybe. For now: onward.

The rest of the floor is empty of demons other than one unfortunate dretch they happen upon, but at the stairwell they're met with a vicious barrage of arrows from a barricade at the second floor. Irabeth, Staunton, and a handful of their subordinates in the heaviest armor charge straight up the stairs to draw fire while the others follow behind, but they end up needing to channel twice just to make it to the top, to say nothing of breaking past the defenders on the ramshackle wall.

Brenda still has the armour she stole yesterday and can kick the barricade hard enough for that to be a meaningful attack on the people behind it. Channels continue to be very cool.

In that case, she'll make herself the target for some hostile spellcasting! She'll be tagged by 6 undodgable projectiles of immaterial force, each strong enough to knock a normal person halfway unconscious, and have to dodge or withstand a slightly slower moving but more powerful ray of fire.

She doesn't actually have more mass than any other weedy teenage girl in plate mail; it's not hard to blast her into a wall. She just pries herself out of the wall and comes right back at you. She's also getting better at dodging, with all this practice.

One of them will try shooting her with lightning, more as a matter of principle rather than expecting it to take her down, but when she shrugs that off and doesn't stop heading towards them he'll break and run. As though the dam was broken, his fellow casters are not far behind him, and denied arcane support and with fleeing allies the fighting starts to turn from pushing back at the breach Brenda made to a slow disintegration.

She hopes they actually run out of the building instead of just holing up at the next choke point where they'll have to go fight them again in a minute. 

Probably at least some of them will choose the latter, exact numbers depending on how scary they find her versus how scary they find their boss.

Also, given that all Kenabres is apparently a battlefield, even leaving the building probably won't keep them from getting in fight after fight until they either die or control the city. And she doesn't want them to control the city. So it's not like she's actually saving their lives by scaring them off, just getting them to die somewhere out of her line of sight.

At least if a lot of them run away Irabeth's team can get to the Wardstone quicker.

That sure does seem to be the result. The path to the third floor stairs is empty of cultists, a fact which was clearly not always the case judging by the hastily scattered books and papers in the small library they pass by. This next stairwell is also only lightly defended, with a much smaller swarm of arrows arriving to greet the crusaders and the archers in question falling back almost immediately; the reason why is almost instantly apparent, as the same style of barricade that walled off the last two floors only covers half the top of the starwell, the construction half complete when they arrived.

Instead, the forces on the third floor are over by the wardstone. The walls are dotted with unholy symbols to Baphomet and Deskari, and there a number of the more powerful demons from the initial attack -  especially Succubi, Incubi, and Vrocks - standing in front of the wardstone, who's golden surface is marred by a splotch of angry, pulsing red.

At the front of the group is a beautiful woman with long blond hair and a red dress. Her horns and tail identify her as demonic, but far more striking is the lack of eyes on her face.

"Well well well, if it isn't the crusaders here already, and Staunton darling came too! Oh, I'm so glad to see you've finally decided to stop running away from me; I promise you, I'll take good care of you. But I see Terendelev couldn't be bothered to show up in person? I wonder how many of you I need to kill to change that."

"Stay the hell away from me, witch! I'm not some toy for you to play with!"

His voice shows no fear, but his eyes flicker, tracking the distance to the exits.

"Or you could just go away instead of us having to kill you," Brenda growls somewhat more audibly than she intended.

"Now why would I go and do a thing like that? I promise, your pathetic goddess isn't going to save you from me, and you certainly won't manage without her."

This is not the time to get into Brenda's issues with religion, which are basically all about Earth religion anyway. Also if Staunton and Irabeth look like they'd rather not have this fight she's not going to be the one to start it. She glares at the demon's fucked-up half of a face.

"We're not prepared to kill a Lilitu. Eagle's watch, we're making a retreat. Form up and-"

"Did you really think I would make it that easy for you? Cut them off."

A few dozen demons teleport between the eagle's watch and the stairs they just came up, severing their line of retreat.