Using their mouths to swap mana

"Do you like what you see, Olrara?" Xylyla murmured, running her hands down her body as darkness itself seemed to flow out of her, hiding them away from the world.

"Oh, Mistress Xylyla..." Olrara whispered, but Xylyra cut her off with a delicate finger upon her lips.

"You needn't call me Mistress, dear Olrara. You know that you've always been my friend."

"As you wish, M... Miss Xylyra." Olrara drew close, lost in Xylyra's eyes. "Even so... I can't tell you how long I've wanted to kiss you..."

"Then kiss me," Xylyra said with a laugh. "We're all four of us going to be a lot closer after this little stratagem.
Your desire
Is required
To light the fire
In my soul..." she began, giving the other Succubus the opportunity to turn the verse into a couplet.

Meanwhile, Olrara's mind raced. Poetry? Now? Okay!
"Two souls alight aligned in flight rising from ashen peaks
Running from the morning sun, one listens while one speaks--"

"Oh, my!" Xylyra laughed, despite herself. Such an elaborate poem! And it sounded rehearsed! And probably quite long, judging from how fast she was reciting the opening lines. "I'm afraid we haven't time for all that, right now! Just kiss me, silly. I'll tell you when to stop."

Xylyra voluntarily lowered her guard, and allowed Olrara to touch her soul.

"Midnight... Gluttony," Olrara whispered, and kissed her.

Xylyra clutched at her fellow Succubus as she began to drain her power.

Meanwhile, outside that shroud of darkness and privacy, Shiroe and Amellia pored over the magical glowing map in the center of the room.

"Mana flow fluctuating... we're losing Imps... there! We've lost a hex... two hexes... there goes a Nexus! Stop now." But they lost another two hexes of land before Xylyra managed to push Olrara away.

"Don't be so greedy," she laughed, as the darkness fell away. "You'll get your fair share of land, I promise you! But right now, our goal is to remove one Node at a time!"

Olrara hung her head, embarrassed. "Of course, M... Xylyra."

Niki and Eva hefted their weapons and moved into position on either side of Olrara.

"Ready?"

"Yep!"

Olrara pulled Niki and Eva into her Demon realm.

Xylyra placed her hand on Olrara's skull, and an Illusion appeared behind her, showing what was going on inside Olrara's Soul. Imps toiled and played among an endless maze of trellises and gazebos beneath a sparkling azure sky. And across this vista ran two Adventurers and a Demon.

Imps scattered from Niki's path as she stomped across flower beds and crashed through hedges, blazing a trail towards the only pink spot in the sky as it slowly changed from Xylyra's color to Olrara's.

"Up ahead!" Niki shouted.

"I see it," Eva replied.

"Remember," Olrara said, "target the big one. If you can leave the Mephits alive long enough to surrender, they'll be useful later on."

Up ahead, they could see the Node, a massive monument of white marble, much like several they had passed in the garden. Only, this one had been thoroughly desecrated. Its statues were missing heads and limbs, and it was overgrown with a noxious purple moss. The Mana Nexus in the center of the sculpture glowed only a faint, sickly green. Near the base, a jet-black winged demon with a smoky trail instead of legs screeched incomprehensible orders at the Mephits which surrounded it. One by one, their shields and wards began to flicker and fail as they exhausted the Mana output of the five measly hexes they controlled in Olrara's Realm.

"Scatter, fools!" Niki yelled as she charged down the hill towards them.

"Magic Bolt! Magic Bolt!" as the missiles struck the shadow demon, the Mephits realized who the mage's target was, and scrambled to get out of the way. Niki slowed her approach, just as they'd planned.

"Fireball!"

"Fireball!"

Niki clobbered anyone who drew too close to her with a drawn weapon, but not many Mephits seemed motivated to take that risk. It was just as Xylyra had said. In general, the Mephits didn't care which Demon was in charge. They just wanted to get the fighting over with as quickly as possible so they could get back to their personal projects.

"Anybody doesn't want to get their toys smashed," Niki said, "get them the hell off my Nexus Node!"

Oh, well! Since she'd asked nicely... Dozens of pairs of clawed hands quickly stripped the desecrated monument of anything useable, valuable, or interesting. They scattered in different directions, each looking for a new place to hole up until the Quelling was over with.

"Good job," Olrara said, as the flowers began to grow to fill in the dirt around the base of the Node. "I think we're done here." She joined hands with Niki and Eva, and jumped with them back out of her Realm, into Xylyra's Mind Palace.

"One down," Shiroe said.

Each Succubus stole away one corrupted node at a time, which Niki and Eva promptly raided. Gradually, a few specific Mephits began to tag along with them, and then a few more, helping themselves to scrap and spell components as they moved from Realm to Realm, tearing down the defenses their brethren had built under duress.

While all this was going on, the other two Succubi could dive into their Realms and perform their own cleanup, putting out any fires and generally getting their forces ready to take on the next Node.

It was a simple overall strategy. Join the Realm. Rush in. Take down whatever overseers had been stationed at the captured node. Return to Xylyra's Mind Palace for healing while their Mana slowly regenerated. Rinse, repeat until victory.

After each 'batch' of three nodes had been processed, and everyone had gotten back from micro-managing their Realms, the four succubi would lay in a circle, siphoning mana from each other in a loop. Shiroe called this "homogenization," and apparently it was based on a food preservation technique where he was from. The idea was, if any of Gedeos's loyalists had gone to ground before the ****, circulating the mana ought to scatter them, their
subordinates, and any Imps that had been trained to fear them randomly throughout the four Realms. They'd be hunted down or converted in due time. What mattered in the moment was making it harder for them to communicate or meet up.

Of course, it also scattered and disoriented Xylyra's own Mephits, even as it had the beneficial side-effect of cycling out wounded troops for fresh ones, but Shiroe and Amellia took care of that as they pored over Xylyra's magical map of the Realm.

Shiroe planned and coordinated troop movements, keeping track of their hit points and abilities in his head, and shouting orders to be heard on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Amellia's fingers swept around the map nonstop, dragging homogenized Mephits back to the battlefield or manually distributing mana to spellcasters.

There really were a lot of Xylyra's abilities this map could bring to bear. But even Xylyra and her cohorts had only ever used them strategically. To resupply a certain group, for example, or to teleport a wounded unit to safety. But Amellia was fast enough to direct these effects tactically, adapting to the situation moment-by-moment. Almost as soon as a spare point of mana entered the system, it was instantly spent on something that shaped one of the engagements along the front lines.

And then, she started to get creative.

"What the hell do you call that!? Xylyra asked, flabbergasted. Amellia had zoomed in and was rapidly teleporting a particular Mephit around the battlefield, always making him appear behind a different Demon's back whenever the nearest Demon turned to face him. After a moment of startled confusion, the Mephit seemed to get the idea, and started stabbing whatever appeared in front of him as fast as he could. With a little practice, she found she could juggle two or three units in this manner.

Shiroe pushed his glasses up his nose.

"Back home, I believe we used to call that 'good micro.'"

Then they ran out of Mana.