[Wilderness]
Following Darganth's shout, the silent forest became abuzz. To his left, an entire section of the ogre's formation was thrown into chaos by the beast's attack that had struck it, with those ogres that had survived it with minimal wounds still scrambling into cover, something that was made more difficult by the tamed beasts that had been sent into a rampage by the sudden attack.
Soon, this panic also spread to adjacent parts of the half-finished encirclement. Though the main portion of the left flank had luckily already passed through that area by then, there were still over a dozen ogres within only a hundred meters of the annihilated stretch of forest. Seeing the devastation and the wounds their brethren suffered from close up, even if all but two did survive a direct hit from the beast's magic, a brief hesitancy spread throughout their ranks.
On the flip side, the right flank was rustling with movement even before dozens upon dozens of ogres burst out of the forest moments later. Each wielding one of the massive throwing spears the expedition had brought along, they charged out of the treeline, accompanied by the rattling of the massive chains connected to their weapons.
Unlike what was happening on the left flank, all of this happened in relative unison. As such, when the first ogre threw his weapon after building enough momentum, his actions were shortly followed by dozens more spears being flung into the beast's direction. Though slowed down by the chains trailing after them, the projectiles still trailed through the skies in a perfect arc.
Like a tidal wave, this cloud of projectiles came crashing down onto the beast. Barbed tips dug into its skin while chains fell onto its back from the throws that flew past overhead, causing the beast to roar in anger as its body became entangled.
To further worsen the situation for their opponent, Venrie then unleashed her first spell of the fight. Mobilizing her mana, she let it explode outward in all directions. For a brief moment, the air around her shimmered with power before all of the gathered energy surged toward the ground. There, the earth burst open to meet it as a towering tree taller than even the beast shot up from the hole and grew to its full size in under a second.
With this tree at her back, Venrie then pointed her staff forward. Immediately, the entire forest answered to her intent, with mana crystals bursting away as trees twisted to accommodate new branches, thorns, and various other smaller tree parts that rapidly grew out from beneath their bark. Once fully grown, these new outgrowths were then shot away in a small explosion of built-up pressure, filling the air with thousands of projectiles just a second after Venrie had lowered her staff.
Peppered by this hail of attacks, the deer-like beast reared up with a furious shout. Thrashing against the chains binding it, the beast opened bloody gashes across its own body as barbed chains and javelins ripped through its fur and dug deeper into its skin.
But just as it was starting to find success with this, the first few ogres from the left flank regained their bearing and joined the assault. Mirroring their kin on the opposite side of the mana spring, they charged out of the crystalline forest and onto the clearing around it with massive javelins in hand.
Launching them at the beast in a far less coordinated volley, their attack nonetheless proved effective. Striking the beast's flank, the bolts passed through the net of chains from the attacks that had previously missed the beast before striking its flank. Due to this, when the beast continued thrashing after they hit, the two sides' chains struck against each other. Though this usually only caused a disorientating high-pitched clang, when the collision happened just right, the barbs on both chains got tangled with one another and interlocked.
As such, with each second the beast struggled, the web of chains holding it down tightened further. Not only through the existing chains that tangled more, causing each of its tugs to be spread across more chains and thus more anchor points to the ground, but also through new ogres that emerged from the forest and launched new waves of attacks.
With the beast already restrained, they were all thrown high so that they sailed past it above. In the process, they struck the ground at a better angle than the earlier misses, causing the bolts that the chains were trailing after to embed themselves into the ground. The other end of the chains was meanwhile grabbed by the ogre that had thrown the projectile as they returned into the forest, where they then anchored it around any stable tree they could find.
This situation naturally wasn't an opportunity Venrie would miss. Shifting her focus away from manually aiming the projectiles the forest was spitting out and leaving her spell to follow her target on its own, she projected her mana forward into another spell.
Initially appearing as a glowing green symbol that perfectly mirrored the central part of the invisible spell circle before her, her spell briefly pulsed up as a circle finished forming around the central symbol, announcing the completion of its casting time.
With it, Venrie called out the spell's name as a warning to her allies, "Verdant singularity."
Hearing her words just in time, the ogres holding a chain at the moment almost all made the hasty but correct decision to let go of it. Because not even a second later, the ground beneath the beast burst open, revealing a tree whose trunk was as thick as the circle that had glowed in its place moments before. Rapidly growing upwards, its canopy almost instantly reached the deer-like beast's belly, though it didn't stop there.
Pushing onward, the tree soon lifted the beast into the air. Meanwhile, its branches moved on their own and wrapped around its target, pulling it deeper into its canopy. Trapped like this between chains that dug into its back and a rapidly growing tree, the beast took a moment before it realized that Venrie's spell wasn't merely holding it in place. Instead, its branches siphoned both mana and life-force everywhere they touched its body, with the realization of this causing fear to creep into the beast's expression for the first time since the fight started.
However, to the disappointment of Venrie and the rest of the expedition, this fear wasn't from helplessness at the situation.
Recognizing that she had to take the fight seriously, the feral beast channeled mana into her antlers. Though not sapient, it nonetheless could deduce that Venrie was the main source of its current troubles, so it simultaneously started ignoring the ogres and their attack in favor of focusing fully on her.
Thus, when its innate ability started forming between its antlers a moment later, the beast didn't hesitate and aimed it at her. Centered around its antlers, a blinding, silver colored glow burst forth and flooded the entire clearing. Obscuring both magical and mundane vision by forming a dome of magical energies across the clearing, it kept Venrie from noticing that she was being targeted by an attack until it was too late to dodge.
Bursting forth from the interwoven strands of elementally charged mana that marked the edge of the beast's obscuring dome, the spell first appeared to Venrie as a mass of metal elemental energy that suddenly appeared well within the range of her mana sense. Entirely unrefined, its form kept fluctuating as the elemental energies beyond the veil were only loosely bound within the mana that guided them, making it difficult for Venrie to make any calculated decisions in the short moment before the attack reached her.
Despite this, she didn't panic and quickly weighed her options. Deciding to play it safe, she rocketed backward as quickly as her flight spell allowed. Simultaneously raising her staff, she completely abandoned her offensive and conjured half a dozen barriers between herself and the attack.
When the attack reached the first of these barriers a moment later, her decision to focus on defense was proven correct. Slamming into the row of parallel trees that formed a floating wall in its path, the mass of unrefined elemental power rippled as its form shifted the moment it met the barrier. Flowing into even the tiniest flaw in Venrie's spellwork, it then abruptly hardened into a solid metal spike that burst apart the wooden.
However, after destroying the first barriers, the projectile itself also broke apart. Erupting in an explosion that cut its surroundings apart, the second stage of the beast's attack still tore through Venrie's second barrier, yet it failed to even force her to use her personal shields.
But before she could breathe a sigh of relief at this, a second, completely identical projectile shot out from the dome obscuring the clearing. Tearing into the third barrier and destroying the fourth just the same as the previous attack did with the first and second, it took Venrie by complete surprise with its mixture of quick casting time and destructive potential.
Internally admitting that she had started to underestimate her opponent due to the first two exchanges, Venrie made the snap decision to drop her last two barriers. Instead pointing her staff at the incoming attacks, she guided her mana toward its tip. There, a spinning green sphere of mana attuned to the nature element formed, hovering in front of her staff for a brief moment before she fired it at the spot where her opponent's attacks were emerging from.
A moment later, the two opposing attacks met. Appearing from within the obscuring dome, the beast's attack struck Venrie's spell head-on, causing the latter to erupt into an explosion of energy. From the dust of this clash, the beast's attack emerged, noticeably smaller but still intact and heading toward Venrie.
Recoiling in surprise, Venrie became nervous after this result. Quickly pushing her flight spell to carry her higher, she tightened the grip around her staff as she unleashed its ultimate feature.
Like a swarm of insects, hundreds of leaves flew off from the top of her weapon. Circling around it as if carried by a strong wind, they followed along when Venrie reeled back her staff before launching forward when she brought it back down in an overhead swing.
Cutting through the air before her in a vertical slash, they erupted with the power of various nature elemental spells wherever they collided with something. For hundreds of tiny leaves, this was the feral beast's attack, with each piercing into the mass of metal attuned mana before erupting into the spell stored in it. By the time the first forty did so, this had ripped the beast's attack apart completely, leaving it to collapse in on itself while the remaining leafs flew past. Striking the ground soon after, these missed projectiles erupted with energy as they struck, causing a row of explosions that crept closer toward the clearing before abruptly cutting off mere meters away from it.
Despite this success, Venrie didn't dare to relax. Still pushing her flight to its maximum speed, she watched as the next projectile flew out of the dome with a frown. Though flying on a trajectory that would pass far below her, it was aimed higher than the previous, causing it to strike the tree she had conjured near its tip. In the ensuing explosion, a full fifth of her construct was blasted to pieces as the silvery burst of metal magic cut the wooden trunk to mere particle-sized pieces.
Recognizing that she wouldn't be able to escape the blast of a better aimed attack with her flight speed, Venrie slowed back down with a frown. Weighing her options between her staff, which had already lost a full third of the leafs in her previous attack, and the mana intensiveness of deploying multiple barriers, she briefly hesitated before raising her empty left hand and pointing it forward.
At the same time, she held her staff out to the side and channeled whatever mana she could spare into it, causing dozens of human-sized thorns to appear all around her. Readying them for a counterattack, she waited for the next attack while hoping that her barriers would hold.
To her surprise, when the beast's attack appeared moments later, it wasn't heading toward her. Briefly watching with fear as it pushed out of an entirely different part of the dome, Venrie's worry turned to confusion when she quickly realized that it also wasn't aimed at anyone else from their group. Instead, the silver projectile missed entirely, flying past far to her left and exploding harmlessly a few kilometers away.
Only briefly following its trajectory with a confused glance, Venrie's attention was soon pulled elsewhere as the dome obscuring the clearing faded. Though unsure how it happened, a grin flashed across her lips as she caught this happening from the corner of her eye.
Raising her staff with a wide swinging arc, she was just about to slash down with it and launch her prepared spell when a look at the clearing made her freeze mid-motion. While the beast still stood in front of the chasm into which the waterfalls from the floating islands disappeared, practically everything else had changed during the seconds the dome had obscured her senses.
Firstly, there was the tree she had conjured and, to a lesser extent, the grass that surrounded it. Before, the latter had been covered in the same crystals that had encased the forest. But when she now looked at the lush green that filled the clearing from forest to the few meters of stone-covered edge near the chasm, it looked as if a storm had passed through it. Grass was pressed flat, and shards of broken crystal lay strewn around, while the ogres' chains were scattered all around.
But all of this was nothing against how the tree she had conjured looked. Or rather, its lack of an appearance, considering that all Venrie could find from it were an empty spot where it had stood and splintered pieces of wood that had been thrown across the entire clearing.
Though what stopped her from launching the attack was the sight of Yldra biting down on the beast's right antler. Despite not having turned into her full size, the dragoness still towered above the beast by a factor of two. As a result, the beast's head was being dragged down by her weight, twisting its head to the side, and having caused its last attack to miss by such a wide margin.
At the same time, Darganth was hovering on the beast's left with his wings wide open. Clawmarks that started about a hundred meters away from the beast marred the ground in front of his current position, with a few broken scales on his shoulder showing where the beast had caught him when he had lunged at it.