Even Thunderbird Emperor released His breath at that news. A Lovelorn Wind Seed was the highest tier of the Heaven Seeds of Air!

“IF YOU PULL A DIAMOND SALT SEED FROM THE FORMATION IN MICHIGAN, THAT SHOULD SUFFICE FOR YOUR BALANCE, SHOULD IT NOT?” He asked directly.

“This one certainly hopes so, Your Imperial Majesty!” I agreed.

“WHAT, THEN, OF LIGHT AND WATER, HEALER FAE?” Thunderbird inquired curiously.

His question hung in the air as I turned my eyes towards the setting sun to the west and south, far out over the ocean I had just spent some time on.

“This one does not believe a Heaven Seed of Water can form outside the depths of the oceans. Light Seeds do not form in this mortal world, so one must rely on a Contract to attain the benefits of one... and this one will not Contract to those Entities of Nirvana who would fain wish this one to do so, merely to gain the benefits of Light.

“That said, they are fools if they think they can monopolize the power of Light or Water. Both Elements are intimately connected, and neither the ocean’s abysses nor the Scrolls of false angels are the only places such things can be found.

“Consider, Your Imperial Majesty, a mountain stream. A tiny thing, tumbling down the endless stones, there to merge into brooks, then rivers, coming together as such things do. As it falls, it wears down mountains. Where it flows, life erupts with new vigor, giving rise to all things not of pure Elements... the natural world!

“And yet, every true mountain brook is born of ice frozen atop a mountain, vapor crystallized from the air or fallen from passing clouds carrying lakes of the purest water aloft on the wind... and melted by the passing sun, drop by drop, carrying the Light down as they gather and turn it all into every other form of Life, in time.

“Water and Light are very intertwined, and the Elements they are most connected to are naturally those of Plant and Healing.

“They may not gather readily, but that does not mean they cannot be made to gather together with the proper encouragement.”

“YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING...” Thunderbird Emperor’s amusement carried through again.

“There is a waterfall in South America, tumbling from a mountain on the edges of the Amazon. It descends more than three miles as it falls, streams from the mountain heights melted by the clearest rays of the sun, plummeting with their precious load of life directly to the green vitality below.

“At the bottom of that waterfall this one built a small Pyramid, there to gather the power of Water that carries Light and Life, a place where Healing magic swells in the presence of the Green.

“At the heart of the Pyramid, silver Burns, and draws The Light of Heaven into the Seed that is forming there.” I gestured, and Water coalesced around my hand, shimmering and shining with a Light not born of the mortal world, the same Light that in other places was often infused into crystal vials of sacred waters to form Holy Water!

“This one shall have Water and Light in time, Your Imperial Majesty. But this one is patient.” I held up the glimmering orb of Holy Water in front of me, a terrifyingly deadly force of annihilation to the creatures of the Netherworld, every bit as deadly as vivus... but of course, vivus could still be attached to it!

Thunderbird Emperor inclined His head just a fraction at my point. There was no rush on this, after all. When I got the Seeds, I got the Seeds. I wasn’t going to lust after them and alter what I needed to do for them.

After all, I had plenty of stuff to keep me busy!

---------

The Mick dropped seven Mana into the shell and pulled the trigger. His Shotgun screamed with the sound of a defiant eagle, and the fin-man with the gaping jaws and triangular teeth filling them inherited a hot violet charge of electricity right in the chest, punching through reinforced cartilage and into its heart, whereupon Tier-6 Adept pure lightning blew through its system, illuminating it from the inside as its nervous system and heart fried together and it died.

Hopper crouched, hopped, and kicked out with frankly startling speed, voltage dancing on purpled claws as suddenly a fin-man found its growling figure air-borne with parallel bloody streaks in its chest. Wings spun, filling the air with voltage that checked the charge of the fin-man’s compatriots, and then Hopper’s claw came over and down, slamming one to the ground.

The hammering spike of his beak coming down was like a thunderbolt falling. The finman under his claw convulsed and died even as the kicked one landed badly, and the Mick leaned over and blew its brains out with another shot.

The finmen backed up on instinct, ready to charge ahead and swarm over the land-bound Bird, the shark-headed anthros plenty able to rip even a Commander Bird apart with their sea-borne strength and terrifying jaws.

Hopper leapt back and gave them his tail as the Mick pulled the Thunderbolt down.

Twenty Call Lightnings going meant one Thunderbolt from above every thirty seconds. The blue-violet blast, screaming a Thunderbird’s fury, came down rimmed by dancing balls of Lightning, which spun wildly and exploded in every direction as it hit the ground, sending finmen flying in twitching bundles.

Hopper raced away as the squad of Redshore Marines charged up, Hot Loads in, and precise skull shots made sure none of the shark-folk were going to get back up.

The Mick glanced at the Heavens-Up Display, and indicated Hopper should turn at the next bend while the skies up above recharged for his finale. Another line of opportunistic Aquatics had come down towards the chokepoint there, and his Thunderbolt might find some good targets there.

Across the massive line of the display, the reds indicating Servants, the oranges and yellows indicating Warriors, and the greens and blues indicating Commanders were pouring ceaselessly forward across a long line, tens of thousands of the bastards and more driving into the bay and the community of farmers behind it.

Farmers with guns, ammunition they’d made themselves, and totally willing to fight for their homes. Any of them who could be Awakened had been, and they’d been taught one spell before any others at that time.

True Seeking.

The bonus to hit of the Divination spell meant that there was no spraying and praying. If Buffed up with Eagle Eyes and Arrowflight on top of that, well, one unit of farmers with firearms was basically taking down a Servant with every single shot, at excellent range.

That was what was happening to the multitude of weaker creatures tramping, slithering, crawling, hopping, leaping, cavorting, and otherwise making their way over the very chopped-up, rough and broken ground from the turbulent seas they’d crawled out of, hungry for some Human meat and the fruits of their harvests.

The Mick had been told it was actually totally malice, as there was no way that Humans were worth in food value what the creatures were losing in their own people. It was pure territorial war and population control, nothing else.

Vivus cleaning up the dead was making even the illusion of hunger and feasting a lie, as they didn’t even get to harvest their own dead, now.

Hopper pulled up before the scuttling horde of six-limbed things somewhere between a crab and an eel. The Mick had never seen them before, so he painted them into his Visual File and sent them off to be analyzed by the data guys, holding his fist tight as Hopper raised his wings and pumped some voltage.

The Tempest Runner’s underslung Gatling slug-throwers crackled to life, and now a whole screaming flock of unseen Raptors shrieked their anger as blazing lines of blue-violet lanced out, Hopper perfectly tracking the line of Lightning Mana extending from the barrels of each of them and playing the armor-piercing slugs through the mass of creatures like an artist, herding them together and clustering them up...

The Thunderbolt came down with the Mick’s descending fist, and eel-crabs blew apart steaming in every direction, carapaces shattered, blood boiling, and exoskeletons twitching.

“Over the top!” he shouted, pointing left, and Hopper obligingly jumped thirty feet to the top of one of the barrier walls, zipping down the way towards a blue dot there that needed some attention.

None of the Aquatics had spells, but some of them could spit spines, teeth, or poison, and Hopper made a fine target as he raced down the wall, drawing a lot of sudden missile fire in doing so. The Mick’s Shields crackled and spat and dealt with pretty much all of them, and the shooters all inherited at least three shots each as the closest squad callers pointed them out and the shooters on higher points in overwatch reached out and swatted them.

He saw the giant-sized finman, looked like a Whitetip Shark Tribe, wading forward through the churning mass of its kin, head and shoulders above them. It saw the Mick coming, roaring and leaping for him with incredible strength... and King Gravity glanced down in irritation and sent the Beast sprawling awkwardly into a mass of its own people as, incredible strength or not, it simply didn’t have the speed to jump that far without a lot more power behind it, and there was no cheating with magic.

The Mick had never been aware of just how much a lot of Magic Beasts relied on magic to move with extraordinary speed until he’d seen how they performed in Stillflight Fields and Inertial Zones, the anti-motion fields that didn’t allow magic-aided movement. The monstrously fast and unearthly powerful speed and attacks of Magic Beasts slowed right on down once they couldn’t use magic to boost themselves willy-nilly.

He brought a Thunderbolt on top of the thing before it could squirm free, the whirling vortex of Ball Lightning attached to it only aided by the paralyzing scream of his new Stormcrown Lightning Soul Seed. Far overhead, if you were looking up, you could see the shadow of a great eagle’s head in the sky flashing with each Thunderbolt coming down, and its cry now echoed in every bolt of Lightning the Mick threw.

He switched barrels, bumping, drawing down the Lightning Leyser on the half-stunned Commander down there trying to shake off the massive slamming impact of the Lightning, writhing coils of voltage still snaking all over it as Fire Mana kept it ‘burning’ for a few extra seconds and forced it to expend more Mana and power to expel the magic.

The grenade shrieked and fell, and the Commander Finman looked up in time to see an arc of writhing blue-violet-purple Lightning, circled by a dozen Balls of the same, come down upon it.

The grenade hit it square in its massive chest as it took the hit, and the swirling Balls instantly spun in and collapsed on it, just like real explosive bolas.

The blast of Lightning was blindingly bright, but neither the Mick nor Hopper looked away, Devasight alive and active on their eyes. Bands of Lightning spun in and tore the Commander Finman to pieces, then it was blasted into burning bloodspray and misting meat in all directions.

Oddly howling finmen converged on them, and Hopper danced backwards along the wall effortlessly, spreading his short wings as they lined up nicely, and then the Bird’s Guns crackled to life once more.

Murderous crossfire took out any survivors of that little action. The Mick felt the familiar surge of a major spending of Earth Magic as Swampy (Bjorn pointedly took the nickname from Lady Fae as a point of pride, as none of the rest of them had gotten one from her! Driver Sam was more like a title...) activated a trap set some time ago, and a quarter-mile square of rocky terrain suddenly exploded with ten-foot, steely-hard, and razor-sharp quivering crystalline nails.

Thousands of dots on the HUD winked out in the same moment, their corpses draining of fluid on the Saltstone nails. The ones in that area that didn’t disappear lasted at most ten or fifteen seconds longer, scattered sniper fire helping them on their way.

The Salt Seeds were proving their worth very effectively, as normal!

Hopper obligingly reversed course so they could get more attackers back into range of the Thunderbolts, not wanting to waste them...