Thumb-sized chunks of ice fell down from a cloud that had distinctly not been in the sky before. The hail started slow, but within seconds it was pelting into the group. A low hiss filled the air, and I knew we'd been had.

"Get him out of that ice!" I called, reaching forward and swinging Fievel at the small half wall. The stone buckled like cheap wood under the Infused weapon, freeing the man along with a group of bricks still attached.

Hail battered against my helm as I cast and gave the least armored of our group protection against the elemental attack. As Daniela continued to melt the ice that had crept up the man's arm, I turned to look at the gators. A shard of ice the size of my hand exploded from below, clipping my armor and pushing me back on my ass.

I felt my Ichor drip where the attack had penetrated my , but I paid it no mind. I stayed hunkered down and slowly backed away from the broken half wall towards the rest of the team. Blind as I was, I focused on my vibrosense as much as I could and the picture arrayed around us wasn't great.

"Got a half dozen small boys coming in!" I called out. "Daniela, I want a bombardment!"

"Wisp away!" The brunette kept a hand on the thawing Stoneshaper and lifted the other to the sky. Steam hissed for a second, louder than the reptiles approaching our building, as her took to the air. Just the presence of the Q6 density summon alleviated the strain against the pelting hail, but when it hovered twenty feet above us it started to rain fiery hell on the lizards. When collided with the hail a lingering fog remained.

"He's good!" Sam said, placing his palm on the man's body. The Stoneshaper immediately jerked to his feet and I knew Samuel had hit him with his .

"Let's get out of here!" Clara yelled, not bothering with the comm-plant and releasing a veritable wall of caustic fog over the half-wall and towards the ground.

That's when the Q5s joined the mix. Like a train's rumble I felt the creature's approach. A blinding ripple of mass was all it showed as in my vibrosense, but the source was undeniable.

"Brace!" I yelled. "Shapers, compress the roof!"

The warning had been just in time for the half healed Stoneshaper, his leader, and myself to channel our passive mana into the roof. We did a bad imitation of surfing as the building below us crumbled under the elite gator's loping charge. The building only cut the gator's momentum by half, so we rode it the rest of the way into the treeline.

"Hit it with everything!" Clara called, releasing a smoldering ball of acid right into the gator as it realized we were somehow still on its back. A slew of attacks struck the creature in the hide. However, unlike the previous large gator we'd fought, we hadn't been able to interrupt its innate magic. Thick plates of ice hung off its body like hovering walls on the enormous creature. It laughed in our face.

The gator bucked its head, tossing us all into the air with contempt regardless of how much we tried to cling to the estranged hunk of roof. Magic still flew at the beast even as we fell, but it seemed just as ineffective. I flared my magic, covering everyone with a thin, locking even as my mana tanked below a third and my muscles creaked their protest as I funneled magic into my Amplified Skill. We hit the treeline like a torn sack of potatoes.

A chorus of groans sounded out behind me, but all I could feel was the giant gator turning towards us. I scrambled to come to my feet. The visage of death was less than two hundred feet away, forcing its way through the trees towards where our group had fallen. It would be seconds before the bus-sized monstrosity steamrolled us. It's not even going to need to bite us. My mind blanked for a precious second, but a flare of energy brought me back. Fight.

Fievil, I got nothing! A flashing image of me crafting my first Amplitude Item was the only response I got. As if vibrosense had been perfectly attuned to the Item's signature, its position just to my left quivered in my senses. It wasn't the only weapon discarded around me thanks to our fall, but I knew what to do with the Stinger Staff.

My armor cracked as I willed it to release its hold on my body. A stream of mana flowed from Fievil into my body as I grasped the staff with both hands. I didn't need my eyes, the Frost Gator was lit up clear as day by vibro. I dumped the rest of my mana, and then Fievil's, into the Item as I yanked the mental lever for .

Several things happened in quick succession after that. The first, very distinct one, was the feeling of every muscle and bone in me lighting on fire while simultaneously being turned into hand-crafted pretzel displays. I could vaguely see my Slurry Ichor blood vessels highlighted by an orange internal light that had no business being in my body.

The second thing that I was only vaguely aware of was the monstrosity of a spell chain that bloomed out of my chest. The normal disk of was there, but it was quickly followed by the Amplified Skill I'd only used a handful of times. I hadn't even intended to cast that. Said Amplified Skill was further Augmented by Fire. The whole spell chain took on a sinister red glow, overlaying the original glyphs with the foreign Attunement. After seeing that transformation, I was almost sure of the reason why my body was fighting not to tear itself apart.

The last thing that happened was that the world got terraformed before my very eyes. Where there had once been an idyllic, if utterly trashed, forest that featured a massive death-intent alligator, there was now a miniature volcano.

A series of notifications flashed in the corner of my vision, briefly distracting me from the mind-numbing pain threatening to pull me into unconsciousness.

Just as I was processing what I'd done, another wrench was thrown into my thoughts. Namely the corpse of the Q5 Frost Gator with a sizzling hole in its abdomen. The remnants of its armor were sublimating even as they crashed all around us. I barely heard someone call out for cover. A thick, green-skinned arm hauled me back just in time to prevent one of the ice armor hunks from pulping my leg.

"As much as I appreciate the limb-for-a-life comedy of the situation," a voice grunted. "I think you need all of yours to be a good sparring partner."

"Igor..." I mumbled.

"Quiet, smart guy," the orc huffed as he propped me against a tree that had yet to be decimated.

From my poor vantage I saw our group recovering and forming a loose semi-circle with me at the center. Blobby peeled out of the shadows. The slime split into three smaller bodies, with two attaching themselves to me and the third moving to join the group of fighters. Clara wobbled over to where I'd apparently stabbed her staff into the ground, wincing as if the Item had been hot but gripping it nonetheless. "Shapers! I want a V wall. Hilda! Give me some thorns. New Hopers, I want eyes and triggers at the ready! Dundee, keep an eye on that last elite!"

"Oy, you don't need to tell me twice, missy," the lizardman clambered up a nearby tree and started letting loose with compressed blades of water.

I could hear the staccato of Daniela's still firing in the distance, but the woman was nowhere in sight. I tried to turn my head to look, but a spasm wracked my body. Had my slime companion not been literally glued to my chest, and legs, I would have fallen on my face. Instead, I was treated to a concentrated emplacement of forces as the three squads scrapped any semblance of individuality and started to attack the small wave of lower Quotient gators rounding the new geological feature I'd created.

The smaller lizards quickly showed themselves the culprits of the hail as the lingering cloud disappeared along with their numbers. That wasn't to say we were out of the woods, literally or figuratively, since the elite still hadn't shown. Not to mention the actual target of the mission.

Vibro was like a sputtering engine any time I tried to focus on it and I quickly realized what the problem was: I'd overdrawn my mana. What I'd associated as the steady pool dispersed across my body for my mana was like a raging storm of ripples and numbness. Just trying to perceive the energy using my Harmonic Sinews sent a renewed wave of pain through my body, but I had taken a peek at what went on under the hood of my body. More questions, not enough time!

I yanked my derailing mind back on track and focused on the fight. After having come to terms with vibro, I almost felt blind with it on the fritz. However, I barely needed my eyeballs to see the battle was really joined. The last elite had over a dozen of its smaller kin hanging from its mouth as it charged forward towards the defenses the other had set up. Small whirlpools of fog, water and snow orbited the creature and each flew forward towards our group, aiming to throw us into disarray.

Thankfully, Clara was an old hand at coordinating teams on the fly. With Igor at the head and the two other Weirdian orcs for support, they bodily forced their way through the whirlpools. The Stoneshapers continued to work the ground, creating drainage paths for the water to move away from where we'd hunkered down. Lilly, who I'd barely seen in a long while, was waving her arms in the air in something short of an interpretive dance just to keep the remains of the hail off our heads.

The rest of the team was working in concert to cut down the smaller creatures and keep the elite gator busy. The third bus-size creature we'd encountered in as many hours seemed to be done with our attacks, because it inhaled only to exhale the mouthful of alligators it'd been holding along with a chest thick stream of water. Some part of me vaguely associated the whirlwind of scales, tails and maws with a poor idea about sharks that had way too many movies made, but that was all the warning I got before it started raining gator.

Blobby was a deadly pincushion as the slime shifted me out of harm's way and impaled the gator that flew on a perfect trajectory, mouth agape, towards my immobile form. Beyond me, Rommel put himself to work.

Whirling disks of fire left after images in my eyes as the orc spun in circles. What didn't cleave the lower Quotient gators or dispel the whirlpool attacks from the elite gator, struck the creature directly in the side. Slinking amidst the deadly choreography of offense and defense, Sam and the Weirdian satyr dished out heals almost as fast as our group accumulated damage. A bush would grow out of nowhere and it would be followed by a touch-range heal from one of them.

Godfrey suddenly blocked off my view just as Daniela rocketed into the elite gator's side. "We need you mobile, Ron."

The dwarf didn't say anything else as he pinched my nose and jammed half the contents of one of the jam jars down my gullet. I sputtered for a second as the thick substance made its way down my throat, but I could almost instantly feel it jumping into action.

It tasted like rainbows and candies had been drowned in a sea of cavities. It also tasted like eating a live battery and waves of energy flowed through my torn muscles. Blobby released its tight grip on me, allowing me to stand against the tree with help from Godfrey. I was vaguely aware of buffeting gusts of biting winds and scalding gales, but the overall temperature was dropping.

"What... What's going on?" I asked weakly as the energy of the potion petered out to a mild buzz.

"Dundee and Daniela have the whirlpool gator in hand, but the mom is waking up," Godfrey said, casually slapping a tree out of my way with his shovel hammer.

"The ... Mom?"

"Yep. We wanted eyes and boy did we get them. All we had to do was kill her biggest kids," the dwarf said, voice dripping with sarcasm. "Easy peasy."

"But wait, then--"

"Focus on walking, Ron. The squads are dealing with the little ones and Clara is burning our trail. Well, Daniela is, but Clara is the one keeping the thing ."

"You... Need to make sure... They loot the elites," I managed. My Implant was just as out of whack as my vibrosense and it made me realize how much I'd come to rely on it. "Deny them food."

"Oh crap, you're right," Godfrey said, pausing. His eyes glazed over in the familiar looking-at-my-Status face. "Clara wants to know why you had me tell her instead of you."

"Overdrawn mana," I mumbled, flagging along with the potion's effect.

"Crap! I'm losing him. Kill the elite and get them out of there Clara!" Godfrey yelled at nothing. The shout actually attracted the attention of an anole that had been hiding away in a tree. Godfrey almost casually pancaked its head with a swing of his weapon before bearing down on me. "They warned us about this, but I don't think I have much choice. If your muscles ache like mine do, then this is going to double suck."

Godfrey proceeded to shove the rest of the jam into my mouth while also encasing me in sand. Blobby looked alarmed for a second, but when the sand started to shape itself around me and my body started to move like I was being puppeted, I realized the man had cast an adjacent Skill on me. What I also realized was how much it hurt.

If drinking the first dose of the healing jam tasted like eating a lightning bolt, then the second was the whole storm. At the same time, however, my body protested any kind of movement. That's where the strange sand suit came into play as it nudged me to take step after step away from the conflict. It took all I had not to shriek nonsensical curses.

Even through this, I could feel a chill crawling lower down my spine. Godfrey's and my breath were crystal clear in the air. The boss gator was moving.

A bellow that was equal parts agony and deflating air mattress shook the air behind us. The temperature dropped noticeably and Godfrey paused. With a jerk he course-corrected towards the same path we'd taken to get to the rec area, but several hundred feet to the west. A few seconds after, a haze of iridescent Pith blindsided me through the trees.

The combination of Dreg-filtered-Pith, healing potion and overdrawn mana was too much for my mind. The world swirled down the drain of consciousness. I was vaguely aware of screams, a flash of a concerned mole and Godfrey reaching for my collar.