This place is overrun with dark mages and gunpowder squads. If you still have anyone using the Excalibur artifact, now’s a fine time to swap it for something else. Similar to how last map we couldn’t rely on MC’s squad, this map takes away Diana’s squad. However, we don’t have to race against her, so there’s no reason to modify Diana’s squad before the chapter begins.

You are surrounded to start, but you can deploy up to 20 squads all together to counteract the 10 squads in the room and four squads to the east. You should be able to neutralize all ten in the room, or at least render them non threatening. I recommend some cavalry squads near the east side so you can hit and run into the additional four squads there.

Once the initial ambush is resolved, proceed west then north and split 2-3 squads off to the left passage to free Diana. I sent three squads after the treasure to the east as well, so I wouldn’t have one squad getting too separated.

Beware staying in range of the assassin squads in the shadowed right passage and try to engage them in the next room. Even with an armored back line I used exemplar here, as I ended up having to fend off two assassin squads with a cavalry squad. You could elect to leave your chosen assassin tank squad in the mouth of the passage to only tank one enemy instead, assuming you don’t wipe them on enemy phase and attract the second one anyway.

Free Diana while you clean up the assassin and necromancer room and then send Diana over to rescue Alex while you have MC press on towards Casamir. At the start of turn 6, assassins will show up as reinforcements from some of the passageways leading off the map, so it’s quite useful to have the three treasure squads together to fend them off.

Diana’s squad should make short work of Kuroda, who flees yet again. It doesn’t matter who you confront Casamir with, but I chose to use the MC. It feels like the appropriate end to his reign.

Interlude

I recruited a lightning hussar to augment Lt Archibald’s light cavalry and picked up a leaf of magic stat bonus item. I have quite a few arena tokens built up again, including the gold one Casamir drops, but I’m going to press on to chapter 29 and use the tokens before the finale instead.