The soldiers will rush through the gateway! Considering the speed they're moving in armor, under ideal circumstances an aperture this size could let about fifteen people through every second, for a total of maybe one and a half thousand per casting; under the circumstances, her subordinates seem to have decided to avoid any fancy maneuvreing for straight blocks of soldiers moving through the gate, and are managing maybe half that total when accounting for various people bumping into each other and places where the formation isn't as tight as it could be. All told it takes 12 castings and almost 20 minutes to get all her soldiers into Elysium, and more accounting for the baggage.

From one perspective, this is a fantastically long time to ask her to concentrate on the spells, and a profligate spending of gates. From another, even accounting for longer delays when heading somewhere less welcoming, she can transport thousands of people anywhere on the planet in an hour.

Gate. Gate. Gate. Concentrating on the spells uses neurons that would otherwise go to pre-battle jitters so that's great actually. Un?fortunately? with the headband she has plenty of spare neurons. Gate. Now there's a thought; does the headband modify her brain to have more neurons or more synapses or faster synapses or what? Gate. (They should have done a day of just drills; everyone is going to trip over each other on the way out and get killed.) Or is it more like an extra RAM stick in a computer: an additional place for thoughts to happen that passes data back and forth with the rest of her brain? Gate. (What if a couple of demons sneak through one of the exit Gates and wreak havoc in Elysium next week?) Gate. Would it be possible to distinguish those possibilities with an MRI? Gate. It's too bad she can't deal with the Worldwound and simultaneously go to Almas University and simultaneously go to an Earth university. Gate. (She originally came up with this idea so the soldiers wouldn't have to do so much marching and now they're all going to wish she hadn't but they won't complain because they're not allowed.) Gate. Gate. Gate. 

There is no external sign of most of these thought processes. Just Gates, with the Kenabres end in the same place every time and the Elysium end moving occasionally so everyone has clear space to step into.

And then when everyone is in good order in Elysium: Gate to right up against one of the fortresses, close enough to the wall that the soldiers will be hard to aim at from the ramparts, angled so they're coming out parallel to the wall and there's space for a continuous stream of them to run out and turn to the attack.

All told, it takes almost thirty seconds for the demons on watch to raise the alarm. The attack wasn't remotely expected, either by this method or this soon, and the walls haven't become less undermanned in the last twelve hours, but that's only half the story - the other half comes from the fact that the crusade sent its best in the vanguard to take as much advantage of the surprise as they could, which in this case takes the form of a dozen hasted archers firing blessed and enchanted cold iron arrows at every demon with line of sight on the Gate. Their swiftness negated by surprise and their hardened skin by the arrows, all that remains is a clash between demonic toughness and mortal weaponry, which the latter handily wins. These soldiers are then followed by a second wave carrying ladders, which they set against the now-undefended walls.

Unfortunately, while the arrows take a toll on any demon they can reach this does nothing to prevent other demons from seeing their perforated corpses, and many of those happen to have solid stone between them and any intrepid archers seeking to send them to join their fellows. The discordant tone of Baphomet's horn sounds from one of the gate towers, and demons drop what they're doing to scramble for weapons or scan for the attackers. There's clearly some panic taking hold among their numbers, but the majority seem willing to keep fighting for the moment.

Gate. Gate. Gate. They talked about this; she's more useful keeping the reinforcements coming than joining the fray personally. Gate. The faster everyone gets through the sooner she'll be able to help more directly. She should probably shout something inspiring but she doesn't have any ideas. Gate. 

Luckily, she has people for that! Calls come out from the officers extolling the men in the name of the queen, Iomedae, Mendev, and glory, and between their words and the lack of organized resistance the soldiers continue to stream through the portals in high spirits. There are casualties, yes, but for the moment far fewer among the crusaders than among demons and many of the fallen prove capable of getting back up when supplied with miraculous healing. Archers take positions on the near wall to suppress any efforts to organize, and an elite team takes the gatehouse and opens the fortress for soldiers to stream in directly. 

Golarion has had both fortresses and attempts to take them by magic and arms for thousands upon thousands of years. It should perhaps be unsurprising then that there are countermoves to almost every strategy that can be devised, such as building walls higher to prevent ladders or in multiple layers lined with metals to prevent spells like stone shape or passwall from instantly bypassing them. Some of these methods are secret, of course, but not most of them - there are major tradeoffs between keeping something from being known and being able to use it. Why, then, can any fort be taken without overwhelming force?

When it comes to the failures of efforts to build an impregnable fortress, some people point to magic. At the highest levels the arms race between spells to break down walls and spells to reinforce them is one that offensive spells have decisively won, and any effort to overturn this paradigm amounts to throwing away money for security at increasingly poor exchange rates and then losing anyway - only suitable for people who expect to be vastly wealthier and more capable than their opponents, or who consider buying a few more moments to react so precious it's worth the obscene price tag. This is true, but even were there some level of defense that could not be broken, it would do nothing about the far bigger issue of price. Mendev was unwilling to spend enough to make this fort a masterwork, and no demons were willing to put in the time to even keep it at that level of defensiveness. If this fortress is to be held, it will have to be held by the defenders within it.

In this case, that takes the form of dretches launching stinking clouds into the advancing ranks of the army behind what is hopefully adequate cover while a few Brimoraks try and use fireballs to hit them while they're concentrated. The demonic forces seem wholly unwilling to meet the charging crusaders in a melee, and those with wings are largely already taking to the sky in the hopes of escape.

Seelah isn't officially part of the army, having judged it a better idea to stay available for following Brenda into whatever excitement crops up, but the only reason a unit would turn down an appropriately leveled paladin would be if they were a well-coordinated machine and didn't want anyone who hadn't trained with them. These units are nowhere near that point and it was easy enough to find a group at the front who were happy to have her along. Now she's on a wall, stabbing demons back to back with someone she never exchanged names with. 

Paladins are good at killing evil things, and the first few times a day they're the best in the world. In short order the wall is clear of demons - about half from cold iron poisoning, and the other half from demons deciding that the crusaders are a lot scarier than whichever superiors are still alive and sticking around, and deciding to jump and take off running rather than fight it out. By now there's enough cavalry out and around to start running them down, but at least some of them will probably manage to go to ground.

For those trapped inside the fortress, escape is a pipe dream. The main gate is packed with crusaders going the other way, the walls are held against them, and a stone wall sprang up in front of the keep to stop more than a handful of them from taking refuge there. With escape not on the table, they try to fight it out, but all their magic isn't enough to do more than slow the advance and when it runs out it's all over but the dying. Here and there a demon manages to lay out a crusader with a hit, but there are plenty more to take their place and against enemies without the time to double-tap magical healing can work wonders. All told, there's less than fifteen minutes between Brenda opening the first gate and the crusade's flag flying over in the fortress. 

That's substantially longer than it takes to get everyone out of Elysium, though if and when they repeat this maneuver again it'll probably go a lot faster for having had one run worth of practice. Brenda gets all the supply wagons out, which is simplified by not needing to put them well back from the fighting, and goes to rendezvous with her staff. She could see a fair bit of how things went through the Gates, and it's definitely a good thing how one-sided the battle was, but it leaves her feeling like they should have been more prepared to take prisoners. 

Her armies were perfectly prepared for the number of prisoners they ended up taking, which is none! If she wants to change that, though, yeah - some preparations are probably in order. 

There's enough discipline not to break ranks to celebrate just yet, but the mood is very upbeat. Whenever a unit catches sight of Brenda she's greeted with spontaneous cheers, and her command staff seems quite optimistic at her arrival.

She's not sure under what conditions demons would be responsive to demands to surrender, but the conditions today seemed like a good candidate such that it might have been worth trying.

She smiles and waves at all the cheering people because they did an awesome job.

Seelah falls into step with her and grins. "The Inheritor was with us today! Everyone who hears about this battle is going to think it's an exaggeration."

"Well, if the demons don't believe it that's all to the good, I suppose."

"Hah! I guess so! I expect they'll be more prepared next time, but so will we." She peels off as Brenda arrives where the command staff are gathering; she's not one of the brass and doesn't want to be.

They've commandeered one of the more intact buildings inside the fortress - the keep is hardly fit for human habitation just yet, but the old chapel was largely avoided by demons beyond wrecking it even once they evicted the crusaders and there were plenty of spells left over to jury rig it into something usable. Not all her senior staff is there - WIlcer Garms is busy getting all the logistics sorted out after the sudden relocation, and the clerics are helping put the walls back together, but Harmattan, Irabeth, and Nurah all managed to join the Baroness and a pair of adjutants are standing by for note taking and any required fetching now that there's no longer a point in keeping the gates need-to-know.

"I was afraid I was setting my expectations too high for the gates, but this is right up there with my most optimistic ones. Congratulations are definitely in order, for what I expect is the most one-sided engagement of this size since the first crusade."

"Depending on your exact definitions there are a handful of battles in the fourth that might count, but I'm inclined to agree. The only problem with making this a PR coup is people not believing it, and there are enough witnesses that we can overcome that easily enough. I'll do some workshopping on catchy names once we're finished here and then make sure our version hits just long enough after the rumors for the best effect."

She has gotten a good grade in war, a thing that may or may not be reasonable to want but is apparently possible to achieve!

"Thank you. And you as well, your excellency; I did the Gates but the details were mostly your plan and it worked great. I don't know how much the reduced surprise will make it harder next time, but since we're not planning on doing it again for a while it'll be less than completely predictable."

Congratulations all around then; she can also name a few of the junior officers who she thinks distinguished themselves well in the battle for commendations, though she'll still have to keep an eye on them afterwards to make sure it doesn't go to their head. She's also got a preliminary list of their losses, if Brenda seems interested, but she honestly doesn't much expect it and is happy to just spend whatever time she's set aside for this talking about their next moves.

She does want to see the list of their losses. "And we should have some kind of policy for determining when to resurrect people, but that's probably a conversation to have with Fiducia Rathimus and the Quartermaster. Considerations for our next moves--how fast to go, how far to go before we start moving Wardstones inward and how heavily to fortify them if we plan to move them again, and how to handle the ravines at Leper's Smile. I'm inclined to leave a garrison here and get moving again within a couple days if I'm not missing something that makes that unrealistic, to keep the demons on the back foot."

Their losses are immensely cheering from a military perspective, which is to say that from any other perspective they're rather disheartening. About a dozen dead, several times that missing limbs or otherwise too crippled to fight, and a still unclear number more more suffering from various burns, nausea, and demon plague of varying seriousness that could put them out for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. The primary metric tracked is combat effectiveness, though, and those numbers suggest that by this time tomorrow their army might well be stronger than it was before the attack.

"The official policy from the fourth crusade was to raise paladins at second circle and clerics or wizards at fifth, but drops in funding meant we weren't reliably hitting that at the end unless they could pay part of it themself. Even at a more generous policy, though, I don't think we have any particularly good candidates since all the deaths were unempowered infantry. A few people I wouldn't mind having Jhoran regenerate if he hit seventh, I suppose. After the success today I definitely want to move as fast as we can to get ahead of the news of our coming; there's an argument to spend a full day regrouping so all our clerics have their spells and channels for any attack on the march, but there are few enough people injured that we patch most of them once we know for sure we don't need the channels to deal with a counterattack and everything else can come from clerics on garrison duty without leaving them dry."

She wants to raise all of them. She wants to promise that nobody who dies under her command will stay dead if they don't want to and she can help it. But she can't let on that they can afford it. The first "anonymous donations" have already started arriving in the crusade account but it's very possible the quartermaster hasn't found out yet and he definitely doesn't know how much more is coming. And even if everyone involved knew they had the money, they don't have enough clerics yet.

It's not as bad as people dying on Earth, she tells herself. Most of them were probably good or at least decent people, and they all died heroically fighting demons, and probably they're fine. Mostly. She can get a scroll of scrying later and check. 

"That policy seems reasonable for now; we can adjust it later as circumstances dictate. Will we be able to get moving again tomorrow, or do we need longer than that to get a garrison organized?"

"We can get moving by tomorrow - it'll take time to sort things out, but it's not even noon yet and we can do most of the work before the evening meal. I plan to pick out a green company that didn't take any losses today, stiffen it with a squad or two of veterans and a cleric, and then leave them here with those too badly injured to travel until the caravans start flowing. I don't expect any demons to try something for at least a few weeks but that's not a reason to leave defenses that would topple if they did."

"Excellent. Will that be enough to cover our supply line between here and Kenabres as well, or will we need to detach separate people for that, or is the Kenabres end expected to handle it?"