Naomi stood alone on a small platform, prepared to observe the battlefield. The grand priests were casting blessings and spells, while General Serator was busy giving orders. And Naomi was observing, horrified, how people were dying everywhere. Most of them were already dead, but it was easy for her to imagine them as living persons. And what was worse, necromancers don’t care about anyone's age, so there were a lot of children among the zombies. She was crying while lying on the bed in her quarters, but through her golem, she could express her grief only by clenching her fists.

  While she wasn’t sure, and the battle was far from over, the number of zombies and cultists was shrinking. Grand magic was comparable to the bombs from modern Earth. Each explosion could kill dozens of zombies. And riflemen were mercilessly killing necromancers commanding the undead. And finding the next target was quite easy, because the enemy commanders were sitting in a sedan chair or even had platforms carried by the undead. In many places, necromancers formed protective rings around themselves and stopped attacking. Only zombies freed from control or belonging to the grand lich were attacking.

  Now all they need is for the lich to escape. Naomi started silently praying.

  “Please run, you can’t win,” She whispered.

  As if to answer her, a powerful explosion occurred from the place where the grand lich was, and a column of darkness rose. Foul mana consumed cultists and zombies alike, and Naomi could swear that their bodies were disintegrated. The only grace was that adventurers and sun elves were far away enough not to be killed, but the aura of dread intensified drastically.

  “Sound a retreat!” General Serator ordered. “Mages, conserve your mana and prepare your shields!”

  “What is happening?” Naomi asked Tarron, who had just run out of mana.

  “Lich decided to use all her mana to start some twisted ritual. No one knows the details, but sometimes, when they were cornered, they would do that to kill as many knights as possible. Usually, everything within a radius of dozens of meters will be covered in miasma that will kill anything alive.”

  “And that is the grand lich, which meant it will be a magnitude worse.” Naomi realised.

  “Yes. That's why the general ordered a retreat. The lich is probably counting on surviving the ritual and rebuilding her army after killing most of us.”

  Naomi looked at the battlefield and realised that most of the warriors had no chance to run on time. They were still engaged in fierce fights.

  “Can this spell be broken?”

  “The simplest way is to kill the lich, but for that, someone needed to go through that vortex of miasma, which kills anything made from flesh and bone. Another method is overpowering that ritual and breaking it, through massive bombardment.” Minotaur grand priest explained.

  “Shit.” Naomi cursed, then realized something. “You said flesh and bone?”

  “Yes, Dungeon Mistress, anything alive will be consumed and used as a fuel for that ritual.”

  “Then I have a plan. I go there, break the spell, and we are done.”

  “Dungeon Mistress, you can’t!” Minotaur grand priest shouted, shocked by her proposition.

  “On the contrary. This is a golem. There is nothing alive inside of it. That is our best chance to break the spell, or buy enough time for everyone.” Naomi disagreed.

  “Dungeon Mistress, you most likely will need to kill a lich. Just going there will not be enough.” Tarron’s words made Naomi pause.

  “Ok. Change of plan. I’m going there to persuade her to run away or surrender. You concentrate on evacuation. I will raise my right hand when she agrees. Oh, and if necessary, shoot through the golem. I can build dozens of them if necessary. And if this golem is destroyed because I'm too stupid and overconfident, I'll run to you and tell you.”

  “Dungeon Mistress, no, it’s too dangerous.” Jathur pleaded.

  “It’s not. You forgot, Grand Priest, I’m actually not here. I’m a fraud pretending to stand with you, while lying on the bed comfortably, while you are risking your lives.” That statement shocked the gathered.

  “Dungeon Mistress, make her decision.” General Serator announced. “Mages, clear the path for Dungeon Mistress!” He bellowed, and one more salvo landed on the battlefield, thinning the remnants of zombies.

  The general stopped Naomi, who was about to step onto the battlefield.

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  “Dungeon Mistress, you are not a coward or fraud. You are one of the bravest people I have ever met. You, despite your fears and inability to be with us, found a way to stand among us.” He told her.

  She looked at him with an absent expression, too preoccupied with thinking about what would happen.

  “Thanks.” She answered.

  “And now go, Dungeon Mistress. Be the sword of the gods, that will bring peace and justice!”

  “Right, no pressure,” Naomi muttered, then started marching.

  At close, the carnage of the battlefield was even more horrifying. Bodies, usually decapitated, lay everywhere. Thankfully, Naomi didn’t see anyone in a knight's armour. Paladins fight in a tight wall formation, protecting each other. They switch positions with other knights waiting behind them when injured, so they can tend their wounds and get back to fighting.

  The further she goes, the worse it becomes. Dismembered, burned, and unrecognisable body parts become the norm. Contrary to the golems, targets made from flesh and bone were much more fragile, and local mages train to have their spells as powerful as they can. Otherwise, they won't even be able to scratch the golems' armor.

  “Treat this as a horror movie. You are not there.” Naomi muttered to herself as she marched steadily forward. While she held her sword drawn, she was glad she didn’t need to fight with anything. It turns out that earlier suspicions based on various reports are correct. Golems were the undead’s nemesis. Well, zombies to be exact. Hard to say about wraiths, and others, higher undead. The zombie remnants completely ignored marching Naomi, and it was something she strongly hoped for.

  But after a few hundred meters of unbothered marching, she met her first challenge. Behind the wreck of a sedan-chair was a necromancer.

  “You! I, Great Master Zurik, command you to stop!” Necroamcer shouted at Naomi, who continued her march. She didn’t answer because she was too terrified for that. Instead, she began muttering to herself.

  “Shit, shit, shit. What to do, I don’t want to kill him.”

  “For disobeying this Great me, you will die now!” Necromancer shouted and cast a basic curse on Naomi. But because the target was a golem, not a living person, the spell just fizzled out despite hitting her in the middle of her chest. Cultist blinked, surprised. “It turns out I ran out of mana.” He commented without checking if that was true. “So be it. I will kill you in the old-fashioned way, then!” He announced. He stood up and grabbed his scepter, made of bone and gold. Naomi still doesn’t say anything, frantically trying to decide what to do. The necromancer charged and made a swing with his scepter. Naomi’s trained reflexes kicked in. She dodged effortlessly, even in her half-finished golem, and punched cultists in the guts. Then she realized she had forgotten something. She made that punch with a fist made from metal, and the mage was a weakling with no armour. Necromancer folded itself in half and dropped on the sand. To Naomi’s relief, he was alive. He lay on the sand, curled, holding his guts.

  Naomi silently thanked the gods that it worked out and resumed her march. With every step, there was a smaller number of dead bodies. And not that fights don’t reach that far. There were dark tendrils of miasma crawling over the sand, looking for anything made from flesh and bone, preferably alive. After a few hundred meters, she finally reached the dark wall of miasma surrounding the lich. Naomi extended her hand and touched it. She felt some pressure, as if it were a strong wind, but otherwise nothing happened. The spell was targeting living beings with souls. Naomi’s golems were the opposite of that, and her soul was hidden deep underground. Naomi smiled. She realized she was the lich herself. Her golem's body was separated from her soul, and whenever her golem was damaged or destroyed, she could build a new one.

  “Well, there is that saying that sometimes you need a monster to fight a monster. So maybe to fight a lich you need a lich too?” She said and stepped in.

  “That woman is crazy!” King Alduin shouted when he saw that. He was sitting at the top of the dune, preparing to kill the lich immediately as he saw any opening.

  “What happened?” Itylara asked. She wasn’t near when the messenger informed Alduin about Naomi’s plan.

  “Dungeon Mistress decided to challenge the lich directly. She just entered inside that wall of miasma.” He answered, and Itylara, with a few sun elves nearby, stopped, shocked. Then Itylara started laughing.

  “That lich is as good as dead!”

  “You forgetting, my dear, that Dungeon Mistress, while she can fight, she never killed anyone.”

  “Then you'd better be ready to help her with that,” Itylara answered.

  “According to the messenger, it’s exactly her plan.”

  “Good. In the meantime, I will check if everyone gets away as far as we can. After the death of a lich, the explosion of that amount of mana will be enormous.” Itylara said and went to do that.

  The spell surrounding the lich was trying to kill the intruder. For the first few meters, it tries to melt its skin, rip apart flesh, and crush the bones. Nothing worked because that thing didn’t have anything like that. The spell switched to mental courses. At first, it seemed to have finally won, only to be completely ignored. Naomi’s mental connection with the golem was quite deep, and the spell caught glimpses of her memories and fears. And it started showing them to her to crush her spirit. Naomi was at first surprised to see glimpses of her past failures. But then she smiled. Yes, those memories were bad, painful even, but she long ago got numb to them. And some of them help her remember the good parts of her past. While in the past she wasn’t allowed to walk her path, her past life wasn’t devoid of happy moments. Even her work in the supermarket, as mundane as it was, wasn’t bad. Her coworkers weren’t bad, and even her boss was ok. Her reaction made a spell flicker for the moment, creating a first crack.

  On the other side of the wall of miasma, there wasn't a sun to be seen. It was more like the day with heavy clouds before the storm than the pitch blackness of the spell.

  “Hello! I presume you are the Grand Lich?” Naomi’s sudden appearance and introduction almost made Joana lose control over the spell.

  “What? Who? How?” She stammered incoherently, simultaneously stabilizing the fluctuating spell.

  “Right. I didn’t introduce myself. I’m the Dungeon Mistress of On Taram Dungeon. Normally, I would say nice to meet you, but after all you had done and trying to do, I can't say that.”