Step one was easy: capture as many spawn points as we could.

We sent Mongoose and the Ragtag squad to take our points and the beta node spawn points. The Grignarians had agreed to let us cap their points. We would then send everything toward the Vortali Alpha node.

Since Existalis was sending their own creep that way too, we should have a solid wave of minions approaching Vortali's node in a matter of minutes. In the meantime, Grandpa, Sage and I had reunited with Bill and Bob, loaded up on all of the grenades and single use items that Dwight and his crafters could give us, and headed across toward Vortali's island.

At low tide, a shimmering sand bank stretched between our island and Vortali's. It was almost a quarter of a mile long. The sand was sticky and wet, tugging at my feet as we went. It smelled of the seaweed that strewed its banks. We picked our way past broken chunks of razor-sharp coral. Sage detoured to look at a stranded starfish. She picked it up and hurled it into the water.

A small stream of cannibal pigs and skeleton pirates made their way past us, moving inexorably toward Vortali's node. If I stood in their way, they just detoured around me. They were on a mission, and I was here to help.

My mini-map revealed the location of the nodes here on Vortali's island, but we could have just followed their stream of creep upstream. They had unleashed a horde of brightly colored velociraptors. The beasts were covered in pink and green feathers. Sage squealed in delight as we passed a pack of them, their heads up, tails outstretched, running like giant ostriches south toward Existallis.

They had their own skeleton pirates too. Unlike most of ours, theirs were wearing rusty armor, Spanish conquistador style hats and breastplates. I Inspected them as we went. They had about three times as much health as the creep we were used to fighting.

I warned the team, "Don't take these guys lightly. We should be able to take out their spawn point and capture it, but it won't be a pushover. Remember, if you die, you end up back at our node, and it'll take you forever to get back in the fight."

"Don't worry," Sage said, brushing off my concerns. "You're the one who's always thinking death is a good tactic anyway, Shad. Dinosaurs first. I want an army of dinosaur minions."

So we headed a little to the west and found the dinosaur nest, or rather series of nests. The dinosaurs roosted in a jungle glen surrounded by fallen logs. A couple of large adults prowled around the outside as half a dozen nests full of eggs waited.

We paused and crouched behind one of the fallen trees, studying the scene. Every thirty seconds, one of the nests full of eggs would start shaking as all of the eggs began to roll around, developing large cracks. Baby velociraptors quickly emerged from the eggs, shook off the remnants of shells, and grew to full size in a couple of eye blinks.

"That's so cool," Sage whispered. "I want one, Shad. I want a pet dinosaur."

"It's not that kind of game," I told her. "Besides, what would you even do with a pet dinosaur?"

"Ride it into battle," she declared. "It would be my trusty steed Buckskin. A rodeo queen ought to have a worthy steed, don't you think? I could get a nice tooled leather saddle and..."

"Not the time, you two," Grandpa growled. "Let's get in there and plant the flags."

"Do we have to kill them before we plant the flags?" Sage whispered. “Or can we capture them alive?”

"I suppose it's worth finding out.”

“Right, I can throw two of my barrel points there and there," she pointed at points equidistant around the nest. "As soon as I go to the first one, you plant one of the flags here and then distract the adults. Maybe we can do this the easy way."

"Sounds good," I said, preparing to charge in and cast my taunt.

Grandpa took one of the claiming flags and handed two more to Sage. "Three, two, one, go," he whispered, and Sage disappeared. Grandpa shoved his flag into the dirt at our feet. I hopped over the tree and engaged Fastest Gun in the West, charging in, shouting to attract the dinosaur's attention.

I cast Call 'Em Out, and the four adults all made for me. Bill and Bob were on my heels, swinging their big guandao swords at the dinosaurs.

A minute later, Sage shouted, "I've got the last flag planted!" I had been about to shoot the nearest dinosaur, but I raised my barrel skyward and held my fire.

The dinosaurs stopped their charge. They looked around, and I Inspected them. They now read, [Subordinate minions of Misfits Guild.]

"You did it," I called, and Sage whooped.

"All right, turning the dinosaurs on their masters now!" She finished what she was doing and hurried over to me.

"One down, four to go," I said. The alpha node had five enemy spawn points active, not the three on our island.

"Smith and the others are done with their mission," Grandpa reported. "They're on their way to join us. Any word from the Grignarians?"

“Just that they would join us for the final onslaught.” I felt a little nervous. The Grignarians knew we would be throwing everything into this attack. If they wanted to attack our node, now was the perfect time.

I had left Juana and Dwight to defend, and they were certainly capable, but they couldn't handle an emergency. Well, if worse came to worse, I could just get myself killed and be back there in time to help with an attack.

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I kept an eye on my minimap as we converted the nodes one-by-one. No red dots. No blue dots. Just our green markers and the streams of creep moving inexorably north toward Vortali.

Step two: Join the creep.

The Vortali node was situated on a hilltop like ours. Unlike our outpost, this one was laid out with a grid pattern. It was a square about 30 yards to the side with gates on each wall. I could see the turrets and towers beyond making a labyrinth through which our creep was beginning to charge.

The whole outpost had a vaguely Asian styling to it, with blue-tiled roofs atop stonework walls. The towers were like tall, skinny pagodas, with flared roofs at each level. I didn't know if they represented something on Vortali's homeworld, or if they were still stealing Earth designs and inspirations. It didn't really matter, I supposed. The gates were topped with enormous red-stained beams, golden endcaps decorating them. Like us, Vortali had left their outer gates open. Presumably, their inner gates would be locked.

Our teammates had all joined us by now, Mongoose and Ragtag finding us as we surveyed the enemy. The Grignarians sent me a message. We see you. We are here. We will join your push.

We have equipment that will let us buff the creep, I replied. How about you?

No such equipment. It is not needed. We will take advantage of the distraction you cause to make our own way in.

Grandpa and I had talked strategy with tall Smith on the way in. The key, based on our reading of the outpost guide and our experience with our own outpost, was to overwhelm the defense towers. Presumably, Vortali had limited repair capacity, just like we did. If we took out as many towers as we could across the whole fortification, more and more creep would be able to penetrate deeper and deeper into the fortress.

Now Sage stepped up. “Ok, so the way we win this is we overwhelm their defenses. Their towers are designed to take out alpha-level spawn. The beta and delta creep we’ve added is nothing to them — unless they have to target everything individually. Then, they are going to run into trouble. So we have to take out their slowing towers, their multi-target turrets, anything that can hit more than one target at once or hamper our rush.” Her spawn buff vest had changed from the dull tactical look to a brown leather fringed vest with rhinestones picking out a flower design. With her rodeo shirt and good jeans on, she looked every bit a rodeo queen.

“Good tip,” Smith said. “Wish we’d been able to find some of those gaming experts Shad wanted, but I’m glad you studied up, Sage. This isn’t quite the sort of assault I’ve trained for.”

Jones lay flat on his stomach, new binocs trained on the outpost.

"Anyone have eyes on the Vortali combat miners?" I asked. I was only seeing three red dots on my minimap, inside the outpost’s defenses.

"Negative," Jones replied. "They're not here. Looks like they’re heavy on slowing towers, lightning damage, and ice damage.”

“Those work well together,” Sage said. “Ice chills, and lightning damage does double on chilled targets, plus it’s probably all chain lighting turrets. We need to focus on the slow and lightning towers.”

“Then let’s use the vests to buff our creep, make them resistant to cold,” I suggested. Sage gave me a quick nod.

“And keep sharp. The enemy might appear back here at any moment."

"Or they could go for a base trade," Sage chirped. "If they realize what we're doing, they might try attacking our base in order to force us back there."

"We'll worry about that if they try it," I said. I took a deep breath. "Let's do this. Mongeese, west gate. Ragtag, east gate. Team Twofeather has the South. Let's go."

Our waves of creep had already reached the outpost. They were funneling through the west, east, and south gates. The north gate, on the far side of the outpost, was relatively untouched, as the creep streams made for the nearest and easiest entrance.

Each of our vests was capable of buffing all creep within five yards. The buffs could stack, so we could either give three different buffs types or three times one buff. And that was per category: each vest could give one creep general buff, one damage type enhancement, and one special enhancement. Combine that and things got wild. Mongoose had three vests, and so did Ragtag. Ideally, toward the end, we’d all be close enough that our minions could have up to nine stacks active. I didn’t think that was likely. We were almost certainly to lose people before then.

For now, we were going with a range of different buffs, improving their strength, durability, accuracy, giving them shields, resistance to lightning, and then stacking all of the damage as fire. The fire damage added a small burning debuff to whatever it hit. The burning enemies, or in this case, structures, would continue to lose health until repaired. It was a way of forcing the hand of whoever was running Vortali's defenses.

I shrugged off my misgivings and stepped into the flow of creep. My instincts were telling me to get out ahead of them, that I didn't want to be pressing forward in this mass of skeleton pirates, spear-wielding pigs, angry dinosaurs, and the shambling zombies that had spawned from the Grignarians’ spawn points. But I was safer with them to take some of the shots from the turrets and towers.

The two gate towers zapped us with bolts of charged lightning. I felt myself slow. The lightning bolt sent unpleasant shivers up and down my body, but did very little damage, spreading out among all our creep and dropping all their health by five or so points. I checked to make sure my shield effect was active on all of my creep. It was. Sage switched her buff to a heal over time and threw out Raise Your Spirits for good measure. “Give me a minute!” she shouted. “I gotta get my pirates out!”

“We’ll cover you,” I said. Grandpa and I plunged forward. I loaded my last couple boom rounds and fired at the left-hand gate tower. My shot exploded it, setting it on fire. The topmost level began to smoke, and its armaments — cannons firing rockets — shot wildly into the air.

The creep followed up on my opening, hurling spears, throwing rocks. A crew of pirates with one of their figurehead-battering rams charged forward and began smashing the figurehead into the base of the tower.

Sage had deployed her Inflatable Pirate Squad, the one we’d looted way back at the start of the phase during our raid on the Beta node. She had spent the past weeks grumbling about not being able to use them — they were only effective against towers or creep, not the bonus mobs we’d spent most of our time fighting. Now she had them out and was instructing the dozen skeletons where to go. Their leader had a peg leg in place of his left shinbone, and a rusty metal hook. He wore an eyepatch across his grinning skull. I shook my head and turned back to the attack as the bonus pirates joined in the attack on the gate.

A squad of dinosaurs hopped up next to the tower, clawing and kicking at the tower with their spurred hind legs until it cracked and crumbled. I joined Sage in cheering as it fell.

We turned our attention to the next tower. The creep was taking damage slowly but surely. My first pack of dinosaurs all died. Sage let out an unhappy cry, but there were more to replace those. Skeleton pirates turned back to seaweed and dust. Pigs squealed and shrieked as they fell to the ground, despawning as their corpses hit the dirt. More trudged forward to take their place.

“Get it down!” I shouted to the creep, then felt like a moron.

Sage was in the middle of a pack of dinosaurs, urging them on. “Come on!” she shouted. “Men! With me!” Her skeletons fell in around her like an honor guard.

We took down the second gate tower, leaving the way clear for our creep. Even Grandpa let out a whoop. “Come on, you undead assholes,” he told the nearest skeleton pirates. “Let’s kick some alien butt.”