They weren’t small birds like common chirping beasts; they were colossal flying monsters, each easily reaching the size of a small dragon.

Yet, even with such massive, heavy bodies, they could fly with incredible agility and move at speeds that defied logic, thanks to their species mastering the wind element in a few distinct variations among their flock.

The pure lightning-based monsters would work as the main brute strength and bulk of their aerial army, while the highly agile, wind-based monsters would act as their tacticians and flock leaders.

William knew that the lightning-based birds would naturally surround their massive bodies with a dense, crackling shroud of electricity to defend their flesh against any incoming ground attacks.

Trying to focus his offences on them using his raw darkness element wouldn’t properly work right away; the opposing elements would simply cancel each other out, and it would take far too long to yield any tangible results.

Instead, he wanted to tactically target the wind-based birds first. Getting completely rid of the leadership units that were continuously providing vital speed and wind boosts to the rest of the flock would instantly change the entire equation of the battle.

Deprived of their wind-element slipstreams, the lumbering, thunderous birds wouldn’t be able to move as fast as they usually should. They would inevitably stagnate in mid-air, their reflexes becoming sluggish and predictable.

On top of that, without the wind leaders managing the atmospheric pressure, the heavy lightning landing from the high skies would begin to backfire and disrupt their own formations, causing massive gaps to naturally appear in their electrical armour. This would directly lead to their swift, crushing downfall.

William knew that executing such a highly coordinated plan was incredibly complicated. It needed multiple distinct stages to be flawlessly set up, and it required leaving a few capable spirit masters behind on the surface to manually operate and aim such localised defences.

He couldn’t simply time the traps to trigger automatically based on a magical setup, because the variables of an aerial attack were too unpredictable. And that meant he would need to thoroughly lecture his guild masters about the exact right way to handle the artillery and defensive lines while the vast majority of their side was deep in meditation.

That logistical reality also meant the guild masters wouldn’t be able to simply train all at once; they would have to train in a successive, calculated order, with a few designated squads taking turns to stand guard on the surface before swapping places with the others to resume their own training sessions.

"Aside from these aerial birds, we also have the underground giant worms to watch out for," William cautioned himself, his eyes scanning the cracked earth beneath his feet.

Unlike the loud, flashing threat in the sky, these subterranean leviathans were a terrifyingly silent threat. They would suddenly burst through the crust without warning, completely crushing everything on the surface with their immense body mass, before immediately returning to vanish deep inside the safety of the ground. To survive here, their new trench base would need to be reinforced against the sky, the horizon, and the very earth beneath them.

Such underground worms were practically impossible to detect beforehand, completely hidden beneath the shifting crust of the earth until the very moment they struck. They were only truly attackable during the painfully short periods of time when they forcefully breached the surface to lung at their prey.

That grim reality meant William had to pragmatically accept the fact that they would likely take physical losses in return for actively attacking the worms. However, there was one absolutely vital asset that he was completely unwilling to risk losing in such a brutal confrontation: the structural integrity of the trenches his guild masters were currently digging. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

If those colossal underground worms managed to tear through the defences, they had the terrifying ability to utterly ruin that protective trench network, ending up leaving his vulnerable masters completely exposed to the relentless waves of shadow monsters prowling the surrounding wasteland.

During the upcoming foundational training, his followers would inevitably unleash heavy, concentrated torrents of raw spirit power into the atmosphere for a prolonged period of time. Without the shielding buffer of the trenches to keep the horde at bay, the sheer volume of attracted monsters would ensure they would all be dead in no time.

"I’ll absolutely need to lay specialised sensory and bait traps for these worms at a safe, significant distance away from the perimeter," William envisioned, mapping out a sophisticated tactical solution he had once read about in one of the ancient, dusty records belonging to a long-fallen force.

"And within the trenches themselves, I’ll need to lay down a highly coordinated offensive circle of traps that will automatically attack any worm trying to breach the line from the outside.

As for any of those monsters that manage to bypass the outer arrays and unexpectedly appear inside the base itself, the resting masters will just have to rely on high-yield explosive arrows and heavy grenades to take them down fast, while simultaneously repairing the structural damage dealt to the trenches as fast as they physically can..."

He didn’t particularly like the high-risk nature of the plan, but it was honestly all he had to work with for now, given their limited manpower. On top of that, he was fully aware that he was currently standing in a literal treasure trove of upper-realm resources, but it was a gigantic, chaotic treasure trove.

He possessed no map yet for the complex distribution of resources within this forbidden zone, let alone the mysterious areas directly adjacent to his current position.

Not to mention, many of the high-grade resources out here required substantial time, specialised tools, and the right chemical preparations to safely get excavated and gathered without destroying their efficacy.

William knew he simply had to make do with whatever raw materials he could personally find within this incredibly tight three-day window. Without his expansive spirit sense to freely spread across the sky and cover huge geographic areas in seconds,