After a short internal discussion with the Plains Keepers in my group where they provided directions to the surface we left the Plains Keeper city warren.
The surface had the ever-present chest high grass, but there was also half a meter of snow on the ground. There were lights around the exits of the warren that lit up the area for a few hundred meters, and a main road that ran from the south west to the south east, with a large wagon parking area that was half full with quiet wagons in the night.
We left into the darkness to the north west at a slow run for me, which was a quick sprint for our smallest members, the leprechauns. The half meter of snow wasn't much of an issue for me, and the Mountain Keepers seemed to prefer it, half running and half sliding over the top of it with their ski-like feet. But it would be an issue for the leprechauns, so I was dissolving a narrow path for us.
Ursula, running just behind me, was also doing something that made the grass in front of us sway to the sides. We were still trampling a path through the plains, but it was easy going.
I had my power soaked into each of us and I was refreshing the energy in our muscles as we ran, controlling our pace and gauging each person's tolerance for pain. The leprechauns were the most affected, having to exert themselves the most, but they also had a higher capacity for being refreshed. The Mountain Keepers had the lowest, then the mages, and the beast people had the highest not counting myself. I was able to withstand the most pain out of all of us without blacking out.
We were making an average speed of twenty kilometers per hour, our vision in the darkness being given by one of the Plains Keepers somehow, and four hours later we ran into a wall of fog that was moving over the plains from the west. We stopped before entering it, coming to a rest.
Jacqueline, the human woman, was a mage that specialised in air magics. She spent some time gathering and expressing mana, and was sharing the process with the simulation so I could see what she was doing. The mana was forming symbols in the air half a meter tall, sort of like warding but without being connected to each other or a mana source.
She spent a few seconds on each symbol and they hung in the air while she moved onto the next one. After six symbols she formed a straight line of mana in front of them, tapped into her large mana crystal, and pushed a flood of mana into the line while moving it into the symbols. The symbols lit up and a strong continuous stream of air rushed by us into the fog, pushing it west and up into the air.
The area cleared up and a blue glow could be seen a few hundred meters away. As the fog pushed back further a single line of snow men could be seen stretching from north to south into the fog bank on either side. They were walking forward slowly casting a continuous magic that everyone but me could see, and the frozen area of the plains was growing in front of them.
Behind them was a frozen wasteland of shattered grass. The wall of fog was only on the living plains side of the frozen line, on the other side it looked to be freezing and falling out of the air. One of the Plains Keepers sent me a ping and my perspective changed to an overhead view of the plains, the frozen border was five kilometers long and growing north and south.
I couldn't see any of the dragons, but the clear section in the fog was only one hundred and fifty meters wide.
"Okay, this is it," I said. "Though it looks less like they're here to fight and more like they're terraforming the place."
"Could someone clear the grass between us and the targets?" Conor asked. "If we can see them then we will be able to see their weak points."
The Plains Keepers both nodded and the grass in front of us began moving to the sides, compressing with the grass that was there. With the grass out of the way the leprechauns could see and the detail of the snow men in the simulation increased, including the placement of swirling balls of energy in different locations on each of them, the energy extending out through their bodies.
The nearest snow man was two hundred meters away, and the furthest that could be seen was about two hundred and fifty meters away. Outside of the range of all but the leprechaun archers.
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"Long range formation," I said, and everyone moved to their places.
We had five ranged damage dealers, three mages and two archers, three melee damage dealers, the beast people and the Forest Keeper spear user, and four support, both Plains Keepers and both Mountain Keepers.
Long range formation had me in front with my portal shield out, then the three mages behind me ready to attack when the enemy came within their range of one hundred meters. The leprechauns were behind them and to each side, giving them a clear firing line to the front, and to their sides they had the beast people for protection. Behind the mages and in the center were our four support personnel, with the spear user Forest Keeper facing backwards behind them to guard our backs.
One of the Plains Keepers, the one who had arrived first, was a diviner and had foresight. While everything is ordered and non-chaotic he can see into the possible futures and feed them into the local simulation. It works well with initial target selection and prediction, but as soon as people begin reacting and choosing between differing choices the range that he can see drops to almost nothing. He was also the one who had given us the ability to see in the dark while we were running, casting a light spell every few seconds in a future that he then didn't need to follow through on.
The snow men hadn't reacted to our appearance in any way yet, still walking forward steadily.
I sent a request to Chantelle for a God Banishment ward on a mana crystal. It wouldn't help for this battle, but if they were using powers from the winter god it would be a useful thing to drive back the frozen area. With everyone in position, and no threats around us, we were ready to begin.
"Fire," I said.
Conor and Jenny let off their first arrows, followed by several more. Different snow men lit up as they were targeted, starting from the furthest ones and moving in. The flight time over the distance was a bit under four seconds, and they had six arrows in the air before the first ones hit, collapsing the snow men into snow.
I had my power soaked into the pair and was refreshing the energy in their muscles as they fired. They increased their firing speed, not having to worry about conserving their physical strength, and pulling mana from their mana crystals, they got up to a rate of fire of three arrows per second. Thirty seconds after they had begun firing they stopped.
A few seconds after that the last snow man dissolved. Ninety arrows fired, eighty five enemies down. After the snow men had started dying they began to run towards us, but it was only near the end that they started to try to dodge erratically which led to some misses.
None of the snow men that were in the fog to the sides came out to face us, and the frozen area continued to push to the east everywhere along the line except for directly in front of us. Jacqueline called up another wind to blow back the fog that was coming into the cleared area.
I was considering taking us south along the line, taking out snow men as we came across them, when Conor sent me an alert, highlighting the frozen field two hundred meters away in the simulation. There were snow men phasing in, but this time they had equipment with them. Most had large shields of ice, and there were also twenty tripods with meter long tubes on top of them. There were three snow men for each tripod, two with shields and one behind it holding the handles that were there.
Conor and Jenny fired off an arrow each at the closest tripod's shield snow men before they had completely phased in, and the arrows went right through them. Every one of the tripods turned to face in our general direction, and once they had finished phasing in they opened fire on us. Hundreds of icy projectiles, the first of which would reach us in less than half a second.
I slowed our shared time perception to its maximum, shutting off access to our senses but giving us over an hour to react. I already knew what I would do if I were alone, my shield would cover me almost perfectly.
"Suggestions?" I asked the rest of my people.
"Their accuracy is terrible," Conor said. "We could buy several seconds to act by just laying down. All of the shards currently in the air would miss us entirely. Almost all of them will miss us anyway."
We had the trajectories for each of the shards, and he was right, a lot of them were going to miss to the sides of us, and of the few that were on target horizontally a lot would be going high. I played back the moments after they began firing and noticed there was a recoil that wasn't yet being corrected for. Some of the shard launchers had even aimed low, the trajectories raising toward us in successive shards as the recoil lifted later shots towards us.
"A wall build a wall," one of the Mountain Keepers said, the other nodding.
They gestured together and a low wall rose in front of us in the simulation, six meters wide and half a meter high.
"It would take me a few seconds to raise a wall that high," I said. "Though I could make it much thicker."
"We build," the Mountain Keeper said. "This high before... These shots."
Three quarters of the shard trajectories lit up in green, then the furthest shard trajectories lit up blue. The simulated wall grew a blue section on top of it, making it a meter high.
"This high before those," the Mountain Keepers said. "Then safe, make higher for rest to stand."
"The shards are moving too fast to have any real drop over the distance between us," Jenny said. "With that wall we can shoot over it and kill them all again. The thirty nine shots that will make it through on target before the wall raises is all that needs to be dealt with."