"Billy, help Ponzio lock down that owl!" I said through the comm-plant. I just barely felt the young elf peel off Jolene's back and turn into a churning column of clouds in pursuit of the sulfurous creature. "Jolly, do you think you can stall those beetles while I give the big one a smack down?"

"Is that even a question you need to ask?" Jolene scoffed, preparing herself as Blobby rolled over the first of the grubs carpeting the street. The slowdown was quick, but more than manageable for someone as skilled as Jolene. The woman front flipped, calling forward finger thin to conserve her mana. Each cleaved the lower Quotient grubs in half, drawing the bulk of them towards her in response. When they clustered, she dropped the hammer. Her and Skills rang out as she cleared the field and drew the attention of the giant bessbug.

"Back her up," I whispered to Blobby, standing in the saddle with only the slightest bits of wobbliness. I got a flash of Fievil placing a pair of flight goggles on his face while Amelia wrapped her talons around his shoulders.

The slime didn't hesitate, seemingly having tuned in to the Totem’s shenanigans. It twisted its body to jerk me into the air before turning into the greenest, blobbiest rendition of a speedy hedgehog it could manage. The moment the bessbug tried to extricate itself from the building it was eating, it got a face full of stone-encased slime at thirty miles an hour. That the creature's armor withstood the impact was a testament to its own strength, but it was buried back into the rubble of the building.

I wanted to keep an eye on both of the ongoing fights, but I had a big fish to fry. Before my giant behind could crash back onto the ground, Amelia slipped from the bracelet on my arm and right into my Hummingbird Charm. The possessed Item was already snugly fitted on my chest and she was able to keep up enough of a speed that I didn't need to worry too much about what my legs were doing. If she can manifest her wings, that would be fantastic. Too bad we are out of the elemental buffet with the hurricane gone.

Pushing the extraneous thought to the side, I slipped my arm into the shield at my back moments before impact. I tucked my whole body into a ball behind my shield, triggering Striated Dermis even with in place around me. It was the right idea, as the pulse of heat that washed out from my tower shield was hot enough to scorch some of my armor. The rest of the force imparted by my impact with the Armadillo's back circulated through my muscles. A small amount was added to it as Amelia let me drop to the ground to build up some more with my fall, only doing the minimal adjustment so I didn't fall on my face.

The building sized armadillo squealed, but the read I got from vibrosense told me that the beast had an advantage directly tied to its Refinement. Deep fissures stretched across the street and into the nearby buildings from the force the creature had been able to redirect into the earth. Even the localized blaze that my shield generated only left a whisper of damage on the armor covering the creature.

"A slugfest, eh?" I huffed. Before I could set my feet, vibrosense screamed a warning as the ground rumbled to my right. Fievil had just enough time to raise a that deflected the armadillo's tail to whizz right over my head. "Alright, I see how it is. Get me up there Amelia!"

With my rise to Q7 and the quantity of mana I'd fed to Fievil, I felt it was worthwhile to be a little less efficient than usual. My brief contact with the ground hadn't just warned me of the armadillo's counter, but of the approach of dozens of other creatures. Mana crackled through my body as I prepared a fun combo for the Compaction Armadillo.

", Fievil!" I shouted, passing my Freeform goal through our connection. The materialization of such a combination of and was cost prohibitive if I wanted to stay in the fight, but with Fievil the attack was viable. That the armadillo provided a giant target helped the attack be more effective than usual. A huge spur of selenite the size of my body materialized in the air in seconds, held in place by the brief moment my mana held it there before it started to fall towards the Tendril beast.

I watched the banded armor cinch tighter and the whole creature plopped to the ground in anticipation of taking the blow headed its way. Except that wasn't the whole present I had for the Tendril.

Sparks and sand crackled from my chest and up through my arm towards Fievil's hammer head. As Amelia positioned us over the falling spike, I drove the nail in. Many magical process happened in quick succession, but I'd already spent several days daydreaming about how best to synergize my abilities as a Totemic Warlock and abuse-enduring Earth Attuned. Not to mention how my increase in Containment and Refinement had affected my combat reflexes. As my Shard Weapon swung down, its Ballast Trait pulled the weight from my legs and as far out from my body as possible for the biggest angular momentum. Moments before contact with the mineral cone, Diffracting Tissue blew bits off my forearm off even with Striated Dermis' reinforcement. The broken bits of trailed in the air as the redirected force of my initial attack on the armadillo came back with a vengeance. To top that off, the instant my hammer made contact, my Air Augmented Skill triggered.

"!" I shouted.

A huge part of my blow was transferred into the ground as a plume of sand rippled out of the armadillo along with veins of mana. Several of the grubs Jolene was fighting were outright blown away by the redirected wave of earth. The selenite chipped on impact with the Compaction Armadillo's armor, but the force of the attack wasn't to be denied. The mineral spike caught on one of the bands of armor and wedged itself a foot into the armadillo. Cracks spiderwebbed from the impact point, but nothing much more happened. With contact properly established, sand blasted into any seam that could be found in the creature. Then the lightning struck, a force the armadillo could do nothing but endure as the building size creature twitched under the force of my Q7 mana. While it wasn't anywhere on the scale of what had hit me from Eurus' entourage, it was very cathartic to use a lightning rod offensively. The lightning soldered the sand, securing the mineral spike despite the armadillo's thrashing.

The whole attack had taken only 40% of my mana, but the effect was clear. The confident stance of the Tendril beast was no more, and the spasms that wracked its body left openings in its banded armor that I wasn't going to ignore. Amelia made short work of any attempts to strike me that the armadillo made, and I used Fievil's axe head to strike the openings in the creature's armor. When mana rippled into the earth from the creature, I opposed the working of magic with zero holds barred.

Fievil's Arcane Sink washed over half of the creature, disrupting the connections of the spell chain the armadillo had tried to use. The mana effect still triggered, but half of it was empowered and the other was not. Bullets of stone flew in a chaotic spray that struck the armadillo as much as they were aimed at me in the sky. Thanks to my increases in size, courtesy of my Corporeal Threshold Traits, my strategy to buckle down behind my tower shield was less effective than I would have liked.

Nevertheless, my was up to the task. My armor flaked with each strike, but it perfectly imparted the force without leaving anything but a slight bruise on my body. With the attacks adding bit after bit of energy to Tremor Frame, I welcomed the weaker attacks. After the magic ran its course, the armadillo was squealing like a stuck pig and thrashing around in an attempt to present me with a side of its armor I hadn't done a number on. Its short legs were furiously working at the ground as if it could dig a burrow to hide in while a predator was right on its tail.

I suppose that is probably exactly what it would normally do, except the predator isn't having as much trouble getting through its armor as it should.

"God, I love being higher Quotient," I mumbled, squinting at the long pointed nose the armadillo was sticking right into the ground. . Fievil footed the bill with gusto, unleashing a spire of compressed stone right in the Tendril's face fast enough to tear a hole right into its snout. It sprayed blood a shade lighter than my own Ichor as its beady eyes stared around in a panic. I cracked my fingers, making a slashing motion across the Compaction Armadillo's neck while tying my visualization to my magic. I pulled the lever in my mind, and answered. Even half powered the Amplified Skill cut through the ground like butter with Q7 mana as fuel and in the comfort of Fievil's Earth mana domain.

My Skill hit the opening between the plates at the creature's neck with enough force to cleave halfway through it. So, I detonated the in its side with a clench of my fist that released Fievil's hold on that spell chain. Fragments of jagged selenite needled the creature's insides while blood gushed out of its neck. It slumped to the ground, not to try to redirect the force of any of my attacks but at the behest of its failing legs. Its long claws easily cut grooves in the earth as it tried to move, but it was too burdened by the burning cuts on its body, its pulped insides and the neck it was failing to keep attached.

As I got ready to go in for the kill, the first of the true monster wave rushed the downed creature like rabid beasts. My eyes widened in alarm as I watched a small horde of mice crawl wholesale into the wounds I'd carved into the armadillo. A trio of hawks dove for the open wound on its neck only to get into a fight with a pair of higher Quotient vultures that were eager for a bite of carrion of the highest quality.

"Coming in hot!" Billy called through the comm-plant. The elf did indeed come in hot, as burning wisps of sulfur trailed the clouds he was using to try to keep the owl at bay. The great horned owl itself was a yellow cloud, bleeding red and burning blue all over the field. The smell of rotten eggs pervasively invaded my armor, and it was only the muffling effect of Fievil's still ongoing domain that kept the toxic fire from spreading further down Billy's cloudy coattails.

"Purge it!" I shouted, instantly forming a trio of with Fievil to send at the owl. Billy did as I asked, flaring his cloud magic to push it around the owl before severing it and flying to my side. I didn't try to hold the forming Skill back, the moment they were in the air I detonated the hunks of onyx, amethyst, and soapstone that formed. A bolt of lightning raked across the owl, causing more of its deep red blood to spray into the air and fill the morning air with cerulean wisps of flame. The screech that followed sent goosebumps down my spine, but with all the obfuscating things in the area the sound barely transferred to the ground and I was able to keep my wits about me. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Ponzio leveling his arm in the direction of the owl while he kept a knee firmly on the ground.

"It's only solid while I hit it!" The elf shouted through the comm-plant, clearly winded.

"Then let's make it count!" With a minute pulse of mana, I attached my shield to my back and placed my hand on Billy's shoulder. "Let's free us up to help Jolly."

The elf nodded, pivoting to face the owl that was trying to extricate itself from the tangling mess of smoke, clouds, and sparks we'd buried it in. Fievil easily followed my command, remembering the gift we'd given the Shaman while fighting Eurus. I whispered, " - Triple."

"!" Billy shouted, his voice reverberating with the absolute dump of power I'd lent his next attacks.

"Now, Ponzio!" I shouted. The lightning, logically, struck first. Burning blood once more sprayed up from the owl only for its cries to change pitch as the first attack landed. The sand imbued into the wind blade had not only given the attack mass but added abrasiveness to its already significant cutting power. Then Billy realized that the three halos forming on his back still had juice to give and he committed, fine-tuning his attack into a true combination Skill like only a few of the Implanted had been able to learn to do.

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"!" If I'd thought his voice reverberated, it was like thunder striking with each word as I held William in place. Both of his hands snapped back with near enough force to dislocate his shoulders. With each, he'd managed to launch the halos like person-sized chakrams of death. The first bisected the owl while at the same time sucking up the tainted clouds and lingering sulfur blood into its blade before continuing forward into the ranks of creatures chomping at the Compaction Armadillo. The second quartered the creature while it was still returning to the ground before continuing forward to kill one of the vultures, dozens of mice and grind to a stop several feet into the armored side of the dead armadillo.

Billy slumped, gasping for air as I held him up. His face started to turn blue as he hyperventilated and I laid him down on the ground. Ponzio blipped to my side, uncertain of what to do.

"Mana side effects," I said, frowning. I hadn't thought the effects would affect him since Fievil had been the one to pay the costs, but that might not have been strictly true. When I gave Sharon those spell chains, she was also hit by a backlash. The difference was she had her Totems to bear a portion of it. Something to look out for when lending someone a whole mana pool's worth of magic from someone with my considerable Containment Attribute. "Can you keep an eye on him?"

Ponzio nodded, glancing towards the two giant corpses now being ravaged by wild animals. I knew that was a problem to come. At the very least, every other creature that tried to eat the Sulfur Great Horned Owl died enroute to the toxic bird.

As I turned to head towards the block of town Jolene and Blobby were using for her fight, I paused for a moment. The sand my Imbue Skill had conjured was acting strangely, sliding towards the armadillo before falling limply. There were so many magical effects overlapping each other as the animals tore into the high Quotient Tendrils that I wasn't surprised one of them was causing the strange effect. The weird thing is that the earthen movement is blending perfectly with the ripples vibrosense interpreted... I shook my head. If there was another Earth Attuned creature, they were going to end up pancaked anyhow.

"Daniela says to answer your messages!" Ponzio called out aloud.

"Unless she's dying, tell her I'm busy!" I shouted, nonetheless glancing at the string of messages from the brunette.

They spelled out their success in collecting the Joe and the siblings, but they'd run into hordes of hogs that had been driven mad by the call the shattered Entity was putting out. A group of Breakers was working to wrangle them back without killing them all like Daniela had suggested. Since they didn't have any way of flying around the problem, they were going to be delayed. Especially because Samuel had spotted several flying creatures trying to harass one of the apartment structures and had taken Joe along to clear out the creatures. "At least Anthony is getting some good food tonight." She'd added, interspersed between the half dozen insults and names she called me for not answering the comm-plant.

I almost wanted to check in with April, but the old Faction Leaders were right. The priority was to shut the problem down at the source, and I had all the confirmation I needed that the attack had been Aberrant driven. I wasn't sure where the three heavy hitters had come from, but the attack on the Ward smelled of opportunism. When the strongest members of the city were discussing the future and how it pertained to the Aberrants, suddenly there was chaos.

It was so obvious I almost wanted to laugh. Instead, I drew 20% of my mana into . The dome of swirling sand picked up debris from the demolished buildings as the attack clustered behind me. It left me enough in my mana pool to lock down the beetle.

Jolene had been doing an amazing job fighting against the Rot Bess Beetle. One of its legs was entirely gone, replaced by a half frozen green slurry that was dripping onto the closest grubs and turning them into muck at a frighteningly visible rate. Considering we were short on the healing front, I definitely didn't want anyone in our group to take a bloody hit. Figuratively and literally. Jolene danced atop the beetle’s carapace, having abandoned the fight on the ground against the grubs to a gleeful Blobby. She kept the bess beetle's attention from drifting to the slime, while the slime kept the grubs it was turning into puree and immediately eating from reinforcing their matriarch.

In addition to dodging the creature's attempts to clamp down on her with its mandibles with the help of her and Skills, the merwoman had managed to shift the entire field to her favor as mana-formed water had started to pool into a muddy mess that impeded even the beetle’s impressively spiky legs from getting a good step. There were downsides to being massive sized and not Earth Attuned.

"Making an opening!" I shouted, both aloud and in the comm-plant. Jolene locked her emerald eyes with mine for a beat before before she backflipped off the creature, kicking right in the joint between its head and thorax to little effect. The insect hissed, spinning to point it’s disgusting insectoid eyes at Jolly. A growl escaped me as I called on a Skill I'd only tested once before. It wasn't from either of my Amplitude Items, and it wasn't a flexing of my Freeform chops. Instead, it was the manifestation of one of the shackles on my soul-- per Gec's dramatic interpretation.

"You aren't the only one with a big bite," I said, smashing Fievil into the ground as my focus clamped down on the upgraded spell chain for . It was a bit of a doozy, taking up a whole 'third' of my mental switchboard for Skills. Unlike the others I'd visualized as a way of tweaking them with Freeform, this one was a giant breaker switch. It bucked my hold, unlike every other Skill I used, but I clamped down on it. Orange and brown sparks sprayed within my mind as the last forty percent of my mana drained down. A spell chain that matched for size appeared below the enormous Tendril insect. "!"

My roar was matched by the earth yawning wide. Slowly, spikes started to grow from the edges of the fissure, but that was for the end. The sucking mud hole that Jolene had prepared drained quickly into the opening I'd created, dragging the bessbug in with its sheer weight. Unfortunately, even the two-story deep crag that my Skill created wasn't enough to swallow the bug whole. However, its front legs pawed at the ground wildly in search of purchase. That's when the bite came. A dozen snapped out of the earth like spring loaded blades; more than half missed but four found their target in the creature's slightly softer belly chitin. Then the earth started to close in. Thanks to the strength of the bug's carapace, the crushing effect was minimal by the time the last of the Skill's mana had run dry but it still left the thirty foot creature stuck in what amounted to a supersized bear trap.

Acrid blood started to ooze from the wounds I'd inflicted and I could see the beetle trying to muster a murky green spell chain that flashed black every few seconds. Thankfully, Fievil was on the case, shaping the domain on his own to encompass the whole of the magic and leaving it intertwined with mud brown highlights. The new sections of the spell chain seemed to collapse before the hissing beetle was forced to remake them, only for them to be corrupted by the Arcane Sink again. That brought a number of questions to mind, but it wasn't the time to explore the effects of a higher Quotient domain on the magic of a lower leveled creature.

"Did you want to finish it?" I asked, turning to Jolene. The woman had used her mana to slice a path through the carpet of grubs to arrive at my side. She quirked an eyebrow, glancing over my shoulder at the dome of sand I'd generated in preparation for the beetle.

"It looks like you already have the bullet in the chamber," Jolene said.

"I can transfer it to you," I said. Pausing for a second, I made a 'so-so' gesture with my hand. "Well, probably. It is a lot of mana and it seems some of the burden gets passed along."

"Your thoughtful gifts of insectoidal death are very much appreciated, Ron," Jolene said, patting my arm. "But I would much rather get out of this gory mess as quickly as possible. Please kill this rotten thing so we can fight all the other things that are going to bleed all over our persons. Yeah?"

I chuckled, looking up and down at her person for a moment. She was spotless. Other than a few points where her clothes had been decayed by the beetle's blood, Jolene looked as presentable as she had when the conference had started. Not wanting to leave Ponzio and Billy alone for too long, I trudged through the mass of grubs to get closer to the bessbug. I had thick skin, literally, and the attempts to eat me ended with a casual swing of my red-hot axe blade. I wasn't particularly a fan of getting bug guts between my toes, but it was the price paid for my very useful sixth sense. I didn't want to waste the mana, even if I could have made a cheap , so I rushed over to the very part of the beetle Jolly had jumped from.

Thanks to , it was almost at eye level. With a little boost from Amelia and an application of Diffracting Tissue, I blew up my forearm again to strike the beetle with the hammer head. Since I was hitting directly on a creature, the crystal spikes of the tortoise shell that made that part of my Shard weapon activated for extra poking prowess. The hammer penetrated up to the haft on the massive monster, which started thrashing harder than ever. Before I was forced to dodge one of its front limbs, pulped it for me on the way to the opening I'd made. As the sand ground up the beetle's neck and filled its exoskeleton with a house's worth of sand, I jogged over to where I'd left the elven pair.

"Blobby! Don't get too bogged down with snacks that something catches you off guard!" I shouted to the slime as I ran past it where it had actually mitosed into Blobites to hunt down the grubs that were doing the best they could to escape now that their big buddy was gone. The main body, which was now more slime saddle than slime, waved an appendage in my direction before focusing on digesting the grub in its body as quickly as possible. Bubbles hissed to the surface of the slime's body as it scrunched to try to compress and digest faster. I shook my head, focusing on the growing chaos of creatures to the west of town. "That's going to be annoying."

"You can say that again," Ponzio sighed.

"That's going to be annoying," I said, smirking as the Zebelos elf glared in my direction. "Complaining is nice and all, but it isn't going to kill the mosh pit in front of us."

"No, it isn't. Are you sure you don't want to drop a geomagical bomb on them?" Jolene asked.

"You might not believe it, but I've been trying to be frugal with Fievil's mana. I have a sneaking suspicion this is just going to be the beginning, and I won't have the time I did to recharge my Totems."

"Fair enough," Jolly sighed. The woman cracked her neck, adjusting the Gator Gauntlet on her hand. "No sense delaying, then."

"Billy, make sure you are totally okay before you join in, okay? If you need help, make sure to call out," I said, glancing at the elf Partial. His color was more normal but not totally there. He was still breathing heavily.

"U-understood, Master Terrigan," Billy said, nodding his head even as he rested on the ground. His Djinn Legs were still wispy at best, but they were recovering visibly.

Keep an eye on him, will you Amelia? The Totem, still possessing the Hummingbird Charm, detached from my armor to hover protectively over Billy. All I could picture was an angry hen, threatening to peck any hands that tried to get at her chicks. The fact that the chicken was actually an ethereal manifestation of magic and the pecks were physical manifestations of that same magic only made it more frightening.

"Looks like it's back to the old days of killing things by hand," I said, releasing my chitin tower shield and limbering up my arm as Fievil finally retracted his domain. That seemed to be the thing that had been deterring the monster horde from rushing us down, as snarls, hisses, squawks and a dozen other different animal sounds changed in volume the moment they weren't covered. I felt eyes aplenty on me, but I felt confident. My armor was already restored, along with my Health, thanks to Geocardium's Tribulation ability, my back was covered by a gorgeous merwoman and a teleporting elf, while a magical mole spirit was rubbing his claws together in anticipation of an upcoming meal. Things had come a long way since Daniela, Samuel and I had raided Fire Ant Territory for a few scraps of power and Materials.

When the closest bird leapt into the air, I roared and rushed forward to break the momentum of the rushing wave of monsters. I was the bow to our ship of carnage, and our destination was a hurting Entity. Not for the first time since coming to Ocala, I felt my goals align with our mission as Dreg Warriors. It was dirty work, but someone had to do it.

My axe blade bisected a mouse actively growing in size before my eyes before I splattered a Life Attuned deer against a boar that had snuck in to snack on the creatures. When a hawk tried to claw me with a fly by, a bolt of lightning that roared just a tad louder than usual turned the creature into rotisserie. As the press of bodies got closer, the implosion of a water bubble gave us some breathing room while turning lower Quotient beasts into pulp. Snakes, cardinals, vultures, smaller armadillos, anoles, sparrows, geckos, turtles and tortoises, squirrels, skunks and all manner of insects all blurred by into a mess of gore I was forced to compact with my mana just so we kept our footing.

The wave crested, so our bodies and magic crashed against it again and again.