All right. Step one: "Genesic Echo."

(They should've both taken a drink ahead of time, he badly miscalculated how fast this was going to get, but it seems like these creatures are very low on violence so it could be all right. Honestly though, it's possible they should just be drinking from Coventina every half hour. He can think about that later.)

For now, step two: "Fulmindash." A crackling trail lingers in the air, marking one edge of what will soon be a triangle around the perimeter of the elementally persistent zone. "Sky, to the runestone, and as soon as the creatures start crowding us again, pull them. Step through the lightning on the way to test how well your resistance holds up, and if it's tolerable I'll lay another bolt over you so whatever you pull gets crisped and you have plenty of mana to work with." He should mirror her Stormheart skill next time he levels; this is going to get tricky without that.

Sky scurries to obey.

She plunges through the wall of lightning and gasps as all of her muscles twitch and tingling heat crawls all over her skin and her metal skirt gets very uncomfortably warm... but she emerges on the other side feeling stronger, even if she's still shivering from the not-entirely-bad sensation. She fumbles with her skirt, gets it off and drops in on the ground, revealing her bare mound and slick lips for all to see, but it's not like she's the only one and things are too chaotic for her to be embarrassed.

"G-Greater Beacon Hallow!"

The range on this is significant, and pulls a lot of the monsters into the Echo zone.

"Sacred Greater Locus of Lust!" Sky blurts in alarm as a cabbage nearly nails her in the head.

The monsters slow their advance, forgetting about subduing her and going straight to filling her with phallic vines and mindlessly fucking her. One of the fruit vines 'plants' itself in her ass and starts producing grapes all over her body.

"Oh wow! That's how thatYIPE! Greater Solar Bolt!"

The mage girl sprays plasma bolts from her wands, bending and twisting as she shoots streams of bolts rapidfire into the mass of monsters crowding around Sky while also shooting down any other monsters that aggro her.

"Fulmindash Fulmindash Fulmindash," he says, completing the triangle and then dashing almost but not quite into the wall opposite the final corner, going straight through Sky in the process. Then it's time to start cutting down distracted monsters with his sword. He thinks he has another Fulmindash or two in him if he needs to get out of a jam, but he's really going to want that Stormheart skill next chance he gets.

Oh wow being electrocuted while she's already cumming is a very different experience than just walking through the lightning and if she had the brainspace to think about it she would definitely notice that she's not paralyzed! Instead she's having an orgasmic seizure but if she didn't have a plant-cock stuffed down her throat she'd still totally be able to cast spells!

After a dozen or so Fulmindashes, Laurent will start to feel the way the magic moves, feel how he can move it again, at least while its fresh. Subsequent links in a chain of Fulmindashes become truly instant, activating at the speed of reflex.

Laurent's party, if you include the tall mage girl, appears to actually be doing... considerably better than the rest of this disorganized mob of ostensibly higher-level adventurers.

Yeah, at this point it'll probably help more than it'll hurt. And the ground here is pretty solid, packed and dry and unlikely to get muddy very quickly.

Coventina raises a hand to the sky. "Rain of Mercy!"

The sky mists over, and sparkling raindrops begin to fall, healing all the non-monsters. The regeneration is nowhere near as fast as her milk, but it gives everyone a second wind and alleviates physical pain for the various adventurers who're getting fucked too roughly.

Fulmindash is a really pretty spell. He appreciates it very much, not just tactically but aesthetically, in the way it feels to cast the magic and the way it feels to physically move his body through the lightning and the blazing trail it leaves behind.

He's still being cautious, probably overly cautious, with his mana, but he gets a little bolder about those dash chains because they're just so lovely. And extremely tactically effective. And if he makes sure to keep some areas predictably clear, he can still maneuver a little without them.

It's good he's being careful, because maintaining Genesic Echo and dashing around that much... he'll already be able to feel the first hints of mana deprivation if he's paying attention, the slightest of misfirings of his nerves, his body showing the barest earliest hints of unresponsiveness.

The healing rain seems to have turned the tide of battle, though, making even the less-armored more eager to brave the assault of cabbages. The battle starts to wind down over the next minute, and people start harvesting the various fruits and vegetables that are growing on their fallen, moaning fellows. A few helpful souls are also cutting free the ones who look to be succumbing to mana paralysis, but there doesn't appear to be any organized effort toward that end either.

Once things have wound down enough that there isn't a next immediate threat, he cautiously pokes a bolt of lightning.

Ow! That hurt! Like, a lot! Why did he do that!

Well, now he knows how it feels. And... hmm, how does he take down the Genesic Echo... he's going to need it down if he wants to gather any harvestable items from inside the crackling hellscape. Definitely getting Stormheart at the earliest available opportunity.

It actually falls as soon as he wonders that. There's been a kind of weight on his mind this whole time, easy not to notice in the same way one can forget completely about a clenched fist if they're doing something complicated with their other hand. But he's been holding the spell up this whole time, and as soon as he notices that enough to 'let go', the spell fades.

Neat. Magic is so tasty.

Right, order of operations: check on Sky, harvest her fruits, get her disentangled from all the plants that survived the lightning long enough to fuck her, give her a shot of lightning if she's paralyzed. Sounds good.

Sky is not actually paralyzed, though the combination of orgasms and electrocution has left her completely incapable of walking. In the course of freeing her, they will find several gallons of fresh grapes on their hands, as well as a few other fruits and vegetables that survived the lightning.

Once they get her free, she clumsily grabs her fallen skirt with a shaking hand and suggests, "Can turn it into a basket?"

The mage girl is busy grabbing cabbages and stuffing them into an improvised sack made from her cloak.

"Oh, good idea!" He attempts to turn the skirt into a minimally skirt-damaging container configuration that can hold all their grapes. It goes reasonably well.

And indeed, the next thing he does is look around for the mage girl. "Nicely fought!" he calls out to her. "You really helped us out at the start there. What's your name? I'm Laurent."

"Eelesia!" she calls, cinching her cloak-sack closed and hefting it onto her shoulder.

She comes over and smiles at him. "Lady Eelesia Rustiness, at your service!" she says brightly.

"Wow that worked even better than I imagined I don't know why that isn't a standard strategy for Druid team ups that would actually be much better than the usual tactic of crowd control and fighting each mob one on one except I guess that strategy allows the application of a wide variety of skills while the synergy you've discovered is rather specialized and would only work with a small set of skills but I bet it would work with my Ruinous Ray and really any spell that creates a wall of effect when passing through Genesic Echo so actually don't you think it's weird that the tactic isn't used more?"

"It did get a little tight in there once I'd been dashing around for a couple of minutes; I think you need resistances to your own elemental effects to really bring the tactic to its full potential. And in my party's case both I and Sky would need resistance to whatever elemental effects were going in the pot, since I'm the one who has to dash around to bring the lightning, and she's the one who has to sit in the middle to bring the monsters. It's an intriguing idea, though. Do persistent elemental effects have any synergy of their own—would anything interesting happen if we combined persistent Ruinous Ray with persistent Fulmindash? Something else to look into."

As the crowd starts to head back into the city with their spoils, Eelesia stays glued to Laurent and his party without even seeming to notice how she's almost hanging off his arm as they walk.

"Well Ruinous Ray is a force-based spell while Fulmindash is electric and while I've read some theories about deep interactions between lightning and fields of force I don't recall any accounts of those two elements interacting in interesting ways? There are some interesting interactions between other elements though! I wonder how many effects you could get that way because there aren't a bounded quantity of named elements and to map the interactions between all of them you'd have to record millions of intersections I bet that's why no one's done it systematically but I kinda want to try and also that's a good point I didn't realize your tank had Stormheart but its obvious now that you said it because that would be a necessary pillar of the strategy and maybe that's why its hard to pull off in a natural stochastic distribution of adventurer abilities because you'd need an elementally aligned cooperation between the three pillars of the strategy coming from three different people, and that's very unlikely if you didn't plan it in advance," she says, nodding sagely.

"Either that or someone has to be classless but there is a baffling scarcity of classless adventurers! I don't understand it! Magic is so pretty! I'm going to spend my life in a quest for an infinite skill point hack so I can learn every skill in sight and play with all the shiny toys."

Eelesia giggles in delight.

"Oh gosh could you imagine. I don't think that's ever been done before at all but it would be so spectacular if it was possible. I kinda had to pick Mage to start out with because I was useless without those first three skill points but I can see your point in the general case there are plenty of people who become adventurers and are already tough enough to get to level one on their own so I dunno!"

"I definitely needed the help of my teammates but I'd hope that at least some beginner adventurers also have friends!"

Being carried in Coventina's arms is embarrassingly comfortable. She's so glad she's petite enough for it.

"You'd think so!"

Eelesia pauses, noticing that they've arrived at the guild hall and blinking in slight confusion as last she was registering her surroundings they were still outside the gates.

There's teams of workers set up in the cul-de-sac outside, organized by type of produce, ready to catalog and pay the adventurers for their haul.

Oh! They're so organized!

"Have you mostly been a solo adventurer so far yourself?" he asks Eelesia as he surveys the layout looking for the correct place to bring their grapes.