My Skill stretched, covering Jolene slowly as the first of the birds hit. Its beak tried to drill into my chestplate and pricked at my skin, but thankfully it was a mundane attack as far as I could tell. A second crashed into my shoulder and then I lost count as I kept feeding mana into to keep us protected. Overlaying my tower shield to cover Jolene wasn't difficult, if painful, since I didn't trust the mermaid could take as much of a beating as me.

What the avian pests weren't taking into account was that I had a nifty new Trait that I'd assimilated. By the time the sixth bird hit, the ripples of force had had enough time to flow through me and then back into the head-sized creatures attempting to fill me full of holes. To say we were showered in gore would be an understatement. Their loud squawks were music to my ears as I eyed my Health and the 10% they'd managed to shave off.

"Hold your breath. !" Jolene huffed from beside me.

One second we were dry, the next we were in a bubble of water. I hadn't had time to take a breath, but I at least managed to clap my mouth shut before aspirating. The gore, corpses and live birds that had been trying to find an opening suddenly found themselves suspended. Then the water surged radially away from us. I sputtered as I got slapped around by the sudden current, this time Jolene holding me in place as her fins flapped open with the muffled sound of cracking stone and her gills flared to take a deep breath. Her voice rung clearly through the water somehow. "!"

Suddenly, the water ejected us in the direction of the walls. With a heavy crash, we landed twenty feet away from where the birds had attacked us. There was a fine drizzle in the air as Jolene's rained down around us. Unfortunately, now that I had my feet back on the ground I could sense the steady thrum had turned into more of a warbled wave. Multiple somethings were coming, and they were big.

Shaking the water off like a dog, I scooped up Jolene who'd had a much rougher landing even with the bits of clinging to her and sprinted for the wall. Streaks of lightning, gusts of wind and balls of fire were exploding from the wall as the Guard responded to the aerial attack. Another bird crashed into my back and I almost missed a step. Fievil! Burst the Arcane Sink if something tries to hit us!

It wasn't an efficient use of mana, but getting caught outside would be worse than being low. The mole screeched in delight at being given a task, immediately drawing mana from its reserves to turn some of the water in the air to mud. A pair of swooping birds veered away, not injured but not getting to peck at my defenses.

"Stop-- Princess-- Carrying-- Me!" Jolene ground out as I thundered forward. She swapped to the comm-plant with a groaned complaint. "Sack of potatoes! I can snipe them as you run!"

With the ease all my 2.25 Strength gave me, I flopped the woman over my shoulder, careful to put her on the side without the chitin blade of Fievil. It took Jolene a second to get her bearings before a salvo of started knocking birds out of the sky. An unintended consequence of firing while Fievil had the Arcane Sink active was less power, but more mass as the jets turned into muddy streaks.

One of the gusts of wind from above brought one of the birds down with a broken wing long enough for my Implant to identify it.

"It just had to be wind," I growled. I can hardly be surprised. They are birds.

When we approached the wall, I didn't hesitate as I put my trust in my body and magic. The visual crystalized the closer I got. "Hold on, Jolene!"

The woman stopped firing her magic as I lobbed my tower shield like a discus over the wall, fingers crossed no one would get a smackdown. If throwing Fievil wasn't guaranteed to accidentally decapitate someone the Shard Weapon would have followed. I skid to a stop, bounding over the ditch, and stopped myself with my palms on the wall. flared on my hands and I drove them into the mana formed wall. It was like pushing through molasses, and I realized I hadn't used the Skill to mold mana formed stone from other people. Despite that, it wasn't something I could worry about right then. Just like most things, I just threw more mana at the problem.

Umber light flickered as I scooped handholds, which turned into foot holds, for myself. The wall was a solid twenty feet of smooth stone, but that didn't matter too much to an Earth Attuned. Yet another chilling realization that had gone from the world of hypotheticals into reality. My Slurry Ichor pumped as I commanded the stone. A pair of hands plucked the mermaid off my back and I had a much easier time flopping over the top onto the ramparts. The squad there was giving me off looks as my lungs worked like a bellows, but Jolene wasn't nearly as impaired.

"Get firing, or get off the wall!" she shouted, face scrunched into a serious scowl. Her button nose was quite cute when it wrinkled like that.

That absent thought was banished by a surge of blood boiling energy coated in a refreshing wave of relaxation. My eyes found the vine coiling its way around my ankle. Sam's voice rung through the comm-plant, and I added the man to my Party on instinct. "We need you back in this, Ron!"

Thanks to the and , I felt ready to knock some heads. With a quiet groan, I rolled over and up to my feet. The squad that had helped us had indeed turned their focus to above. I noted arrows had joined the defense, which meant we were conserving mana or we were out. Neither of which I liked with the numbers I'd seen. Jolene shivered beside me and I finally noticed slush had formed in her hair, her fins twitching as if trying to fight back the cold. I hadn't thought about it, but the mermaid had been chunking through mana quickly and even if it didn't show on her face it was clear from her body.

"Warm up. I don't think this is it," I sent the woman. The thrum had taken on several levels of loudness on vibro no matter how much I ignored it. I'd hoped it had been caused by the flock moving through the forest, but most of the birds I could see were in the quickly forming murmuration above the camp yet the vibrations continued.

"Figured you dropped this," Sam sent, a vine hoisting my shield up to the ramparts. I glanced at the map and saw that Sam was actually poised in the observation tower, poking his head out of the window I'd busted in the building's side. I could see the green and gold glow of magic from the wall, and I spotted air attuned rushing to and from the building with bundles of arrows and makeshift javelins. I thanked the man before turning my focus to the birds.

The only ones remaining on the attack were the dying creatures that were too weak to join their murmuration. A few stray bolts of lightning or overeager icicles followed them, but most just peppered the mass of birds with arrows while everyone tensed to see what they would do. That birds that small didn't tend to be predatory could be easily explained by mana causing them to eschew a foraging nature. Their losses and apparent retreat might even indicate they felt we weren't worth their sacrifice. The growing thrum in the ground, however, made me attribute to intelligence what could be easily attributed to instinct.

"What's the status?" I asked, tapping into the call I'd set up with Sarah.

"We've got three injured and are working to resupply the air attuned with arrows," the orc woman said with no preamble. "I've got the Shapers making cover where they can, but we've cleared them out of the base. Thanks for the heads up."

"Something else is coming. The earth is whining to the west. There is something foul in the air," I said, eyeing the murmuration as it folded in on itself and swooped into range of the base. Lightning and fireballs cut into the flock, but they quickly veered away before losing too many of their number.

"Damn it, Ron," Sarah growled before she separated from the call.

As if startled from their watch, several people started to scurry to the wall focusing on the western side. The spread focused on water, earth and death attuned as the fire and air were focused on keeping the birds back. If my guess was correct, the tower was the fall back point, with the healers concentrated there and trying to contribute wherever else. I saw dots in the distance sprinting down the Ock Bridge-- reinforcements.

"Ronan, what can you tell us?" Jolene asked, her hands gripping the railing as she glared at the birds above.

"Right," I said, taking a deep breath to center myself before tuning out my other senses as much as I could. Tremor Frame built on Harmonic Sinews, and I intended to use every last bit of it. I thumped my fist against the wall in a steadily increasing pattern and my ripples slowly washed away the nervous movements of the defenders and those approaching from within the base. After a few seconds I actually slowed my thumps as I realized the reflected force from Tremor Frame was adding extra, stronger ripples to my sense. As I tweaked vibrosense, the steadily growing wave of ripples grew more defined. The evenness was redefined into a sporadic mess that I could track much more accurately as it collided with my own.

Without opening my eyes, I started to walk the perimeter of the wall. Jolene shouted something, but I was too focused on my other senses. The comm-plant, I knew, could cut through my focus during combat like a plasma torch but she didn't reach out through it. Instead I walked all the way to the north path that followed the road towards Ocala and the signature all but disappeared. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw that my mermaid squadmate had sniped no less than five birds that had tried to take me out.

That, in and of itself, was concerning. As I relayed the concentrations of whatever was getting ready to attack us, I rushed back to the far side. The murmuration reacted, coiling in on itself as it attempted to seek me out from the masses. Magic and arrows cut into their numbers, repelling the attack, but it all but confirmed something funky was going on. On a whim, I hoisted Fievil over my head and the murmuration went wild. With the support of the defenders, the overeager birdbrains punished.

"Ron," Sarah said not unkindly after I told her what had happened. "I very much need you to step out from the wall. If something else is out there, we want to reduce these birds and maybe bait out the attack while we aren't ragged. Can you manage?"

Sam, who'd been part of the comm-plant conversation, immediately jumped into the conversation to list in detail all the ways in which that particular plan could go terribly, terribly wrong. All I did was send a huff in her direction. Samuel continued to work himself up into a frenzy of logic and increasingly horrifying ways in which I could end up maimed or worse. A chill of fear swept through me as I stared at the hundreds of birds above, but I roughly slapped it aside. I was Q6 and I had my full suite of Skills to smash some puny Air Attuned.

"No better time than now I suppose," I mumbled to myself as I let flow into my helm. My mana pool, which had mostly regenerated since my mad rush to the wall, immediately dropped by two thirds. The unfamiliar Skill slapped some heartburn straight into my chest, but that was old hat. The fact that I hadn't tried to overcharge or undercharge it had actually worked in my favor as the spell chains formed as naturally as an Amplifying Item could manage.

My eyes glimmered as they landed on the notifications I usually ignored for the other Skills I was more familiar with. "How dramatic..."

Despite the dramatic name, I found it highly appropriate as the usual halo formed behind me. Instead of just a large circlet of sand, however, the very dust in the atmosphere seemed to be gathering behind me. Pebbles and scattered rocks that had been created thanks to the relentless attacks of the Gleaning Thrashers joined the sand and my halo turned into more of a localized sandstorm. Jolene and the other defenders on the wall had to take several steps back as halo turned into more of a dome of shifting earth.

"I love magic," I said, grinning as I felt the power of my attunement resonate strongly within me. Fievil hissed at the flying creatures, urging me to activate his Trait. He seemed to be what they wanted, so why would I deny them? "I suppose you can come out and play..."

I jumped down from the wall, to the gasps of alarm of those around me. It was a shorter fall than the tower, so I knew I'd be safe. Instead I focused on Arcane Sink and let Fievil have free reign of the remaining third of my mana pool. Having something tugging on the source of your power was an odd feeling to say the least, like tickling yourself but actually feeling the urge to giggle. My smile turned bloodthirsty as I watched my feet leave craters as they touched down, feeling the irony that Tremor Frame caused me fits of giggles and here I was making tickle analogies.

There was something about tapping into every bit of power I had that was intoxicating. I didn't have to hold back. I didn't need to use my powers to build and I didn't need to worry about the repercussions of my actions. The tortoise had been tough, but since the fight against the sturgeon and Galloway I hadn't felt pushed. Now, faced with hundreds of birds willing to flock to the slaughter... All I could do was roar with laughter.

Thankfully, I didn't let my primitive brain totally hijack my body so I only went fifty feet from the wall. The murmuration writhed as it course-corrected to target me. A few straggling birds that hadn't rejoined the avian mass tried to make passes at me, but I avoided them easily as the Arcane Sink caused them to veer off course on contact.

"This might go terribly or great," I told my axe-hammer. The mole living rent free in my mind clapped his clawed hands like an excited seal. How did my life get so twisted?