"So this is what fighting against nature is like, huh?" I grumbled, half crouched to keep my feet as the tower swayed under the assault of another gale of elementals.

"Let's say a tad less than this. They are getting riled up because we just brought three more Mana Shards to the party," Sharon said, stabbing her staff into the solid yet spongy surface of the tower. The head opened, and the light from her staff bathed the sky in beams of azure blue light and deep grey that punched holes right through the cloud layer with ease. I saw more than one of the Nash defenders slump with relief as the Shaman took over half of the elementals singlehandedly.

"What do you want from me!" I shouted, doing my best to be heard despite the roaring wind and spray of rain. "My magic isn't exactly compatible with fights almost two hundred feet in the sky!"

"You've got two assignments, squirt!" Sharon said, her voice even despite the chaos around us. "First is get over your fear of heights. If we are going to fight Eurus it's more than likely you are going to be airborne one way or another. Second, you need to work on feeding mana into your Shard and then taking it back to use. That's it. The process of you inevitably bungling those two things will be quite a contribution by themselves!"

"How do I take!? I've never done that!"

"Trial and error. I opened the door for you to talk to your Totem, come to an agreement that works for you!"

With that, the woman turned and plopped on the ground beside an unassuming lump on the ground. The magical suppression radiating from it, however, told me that it was likely where she'd left the 'chick' splintered from her own Shard. Her staff continued to laser any large clusters that tried to form all on its own, but the rate at which it happened lessened as the pressure on the whole operation lessened.

Is there a correlation with high Levels and borderline insanity? Of course, Fievil couldn't remain silent as I contemplated the situation and sent me a half dozen flashes of memory where I did something ridiculous for the sake of my goal. Like thrusting a at myself. He sent that one at least three times, until I huffed to clear him from my mind. Fine, I get the point. Okay, how do we do this?

Very unhelpfully, the mole sent a shrug back in response.

"Gahh! Let's start with what we know how to do and work from there," I grumbled, pulling the axe-hammer off my back. Blobby rolled closer from where the slime had been resting, poking my thigh twice before settling itself into a spot opposite the lift from the Shaman and her Shards.

I spent the first few minutes trying to come to terms with what I was doing. It was possible that I was in range of my friends and I could check in, but when I checked on any incoming communications the channels were silent. They were either caught up in something, or out of range. The temptation was there to reach out still, but I knew they had tasks as important, if not more, than mine. For all intents and purposes I was training rather than dealing with a problem. However, if Eurus really was a threat to the area then the whole fighting elementals provided both a risk and an opportunity. It spread us thin for dealing with whatever shenanigans the Aberrants were planning, but so far we'd been coming up empty on that front anyhow. If it wasn't for the sacrifice of the Tendril that spoke to Billy we would have been moving to cautious acceptance of the Ocalan status quo simply for the sake of avoiding major conflict.

Clearly listening in to my thoughts, Fievil made sure to flash the image of the Wildwood Memorial and the torturous existence of the Dreg Afflicted. Superimposed on that, he also threw Galloway and Sargon with the Death Crow and the Alligator Boss of Lake Weir looming over them. It was such a sharp image compared to the ones the Shard Weapon usually sent that I felt a wave of goosebumps crawling up my arms.

"You are right," I said, tightening my grip on the axe hammer. Arcane Sink exploded outward, slicing through the wind to envelop me in a bubble of silence that almost hurt compared to the roar of the storm. "We need power. It might not be the goal, but I think it would be disrespectful not to partake of such a feast when it is presented on such a woodborne platter."

Fievil's Totem sprouted from the head of the hammer. There was much more definition to the mole head --a factor of being within its domain if I had to guess-- and I could see him gnashing his tiny teeth in anticipation.

"Let's see... I can disperse them like Sharon wants, but if I give you control of can you do a repeat of our fight earlier?" I asked, glancing at the disembodied mole. The whole head nodded, and I shrugged. My mana had recovered to over half even with the formation of my stone armor. With a very deliberate use of my Offensive Imbue spell chain, I held it orbiting around the Totem. Instead of a single standard cast, I split the glyphs in half to leave two spell chains orbiting around the Totem perpendicularly. The exercise was slightly different from how I usually used , the strain making itself known as I fiddled with the controls for my Skills in my mind, but it was worth it. Pushing the envelope whenever possible was what had let us survive to be contenders in a city as big as Ocala.

I smiled as soon as I saw them maintain their position when I released them. There was a small draw from maintaining the Arcane Sink, but there was no degradation from the Skill itself. Better yet, Fievil pounced on one of the orbiting chains and gobbled it up. Out of the same muddy ethereal mass that formed its head, one of the mole's signature shovel-shaped clawed feet formed.

I'd intended for the mole to use the Skill to feast on the elementals, not to eat my spells. He didn't stop there, snatching the other from the air to acquire a mirrored copy of the claw. In all honesty, the mole looked like a mud version of one of those original ghost pokemon. It had been almost a decade since Sam, Danny and I completed the Gen 1 collection, but those were still firmly ingrained in my brain. I'd always been partial to graveler, but the Pokemon Tower was a noteworthy part of the games.

Shaking off my haunter tangential thought, I refocused on Fievil. The Totem seemed to be grinning in a disturbingly human way as he looked at both claws before pinning his gaze onto a water elemental that was starting to reform on the floor of the tower. Slower than I knew the Skill could move, but faster than I expected, the Totem lunged for the glimmering core. The thick stream of living water sensed the incoming attack and retaliated with a blade of frost. Hilariously, Fievil dodged by just separating himself more. That move affected the cohesion of his Totem head, letting a few ghostly bits of mud drip and fizzle into nothingness, but not enough. The mole latched onto the elemental as if it were a delicious worm it had scavenged from the earth.

Then he tore the thing clear in half with the conjured claws in a vicious display that would have put the creatures in the Predator Territory back home proud.

The last bits of energy the elemental seemed to be controlling fizzled, and the glimmering core drifted in the wind ready to rejoin the storm. That wasn't enough for Fievil. The Totem left the dome created by the Arcane Sink, losing yet more of its solidity, but snapping up the glimmering jelly center of the elemental. Even as he lost cohesion, Fievil's ethereal grew more solid by a shade.

If that was all the surprises the engagement had to give I would have been thrilled. They weren't. I wasn't sure if it was an attempt by Sharon to teach me a lesson in really listening or if she wasn't expecting Fievil's progress or even how effective the Totem would be after his engagement with whirlpool elemental. As it was, the death of one of their number did not go unnoticed. Elements, at least in the storm, didn't seem to have a side as the entire western side of the storm pivoted in our direction.

To say it was frightening to see a force of nature contort unnaturally would be an understatement. The spin of the clouds increased enough for me to hear it through the Arcane Sink bubble and the edge of the darkest clouds reshaped into a horizontal funnel. The grey glow of Air elementals provided the speed, and a trio of almost totally coalesced Water elementals lent their mass to the sudden attack.

"Frenzy!" Someone on the tower shouted.

Flowers bloomed all along the floor, mopping up the water almost instantly and removing that as an avenue of attack for the elementals. A gentle glow radiated from within the bark that made up the floor. The Shaman stood, grasping her staff and leveling it at the heart of the funnel before letting another spray of mana beams. Unfortunately, that seemed to take out at least some of the elementals and a keening sound rose from the east. Another funnel, this one much frostier than its opposite, started to approach the tower.

Sharon let out a string of curses that would have left any self respecting sailor blushing before pivoting to the new funnel. The hippocampus head materialized around her staff and she peeled layers of frost off the storm to let them fall to the ground far below. The rest of the Life Attuned seemed to be channeling their magic right into the platform to make vine cocoons for themselves.

"I can't do that!" I complained, watching the inexorable approach of the two funnels ready to pinch the tower with wide eyes. I promise! I won't bully the elementals anymore!

Even as I cursed my lack of biological magic, I tugged on Fievil's connection to bring the Totem back to the axe hammer. I didn't expect the mole to turn into a brown bolt of lightning and zip right into it at my call, but I wasn't going to complain. Instead, I sent a mental apology out to whoever was going to repair the tower and drove the axe side of my weapon into the ground. With the amplified heat produced by the chitin edge, it sunk up to the haft.

The edges of the funnel battered me, threatening to break my grip on Fievil. Grunting with the effort, my Slurry Ichor locked up my fingers even as I took a knee to combat the rising winds. A wet sucking sound sent a chill down my spine, but it wasn't coming from the enraged elementals.

"Blobby!" I shouted, squinting against the eye-watering wind until I spotted my slime friend struggling to resist the force of the winds. The gelatinous creature seemed to be desperately attempting to convert its mass into stone but rivulets of its green body were streaming away under the force of the storm. Every piece it managed to turn to rock got torn clear off before the slime could draw it in to increase its weight. "Ah shit."

Grinding my teeth, I reached deep into my mana and spun up a half cocked structure that might help the slime out. A quarter powered slab took most of my mana to form, but I didn't stop there as I sprouted micro until the slab took hold instead of sliding on the bark flooring. Almost ten feet of bark got shredded by the magical version of cleats and Blobby lost some of its mass when the slab collided, but it provided the slime respite. With a final hurrah of my mana pool, I fed more mana into two of the in the hopes of securing their hold and my friend’s cover long enough for it to turn into a big ass rock.

A primordial roar shook the platform as Sharon brought down a storm of her own atop the eastern funnel. With a spine tingling grind like two angry buzz saws trying to see which had more teeth to spare, the elementals and her attack collided in the air. Just to make my comparison more apt, spatters of blue and grey light erupted from the contact point as the very essence of the spell chains and mana creatures contested in the most literal Gift Wrestle I'd had the misfortune of witnessing.

Credit to the badass grandma, the Shaman of the Nash ground the funnel full of elementals into glorified snow cones.

Not credit to myself, my struggle to secure Blobby and watching the magical engagement distracted me from the other funnel headed right for where Fievil had gobbled the elemental.

The downdraft of the horizontal tornado hit me like a ton of bricks. Thanks to my Trait, I was able to keep hold of Fievil even if the strain shot painfully all the way to my shoulders. Until the force of the wind grew enough to lift me off the ground despite how much weight I'd gained thanks to my Traits. With my performance as a human flag put to the test, Fievil's edge proved to be the opposite of helpful. My eyes widened with horror as the axe hammer broke off the chunk of bark holding me to the tower and my body took flight.