An Owl's Rise

Evelyn and the burrowing owls After spending hours making plans and going over them multiple times until they were better refined, finally had everything ready to go.

As it turned out Evelyn's slow and steady approach was not going to work as well as she would have hoped.

There was one major factor that was going to get in the way of this and that was the magic spring within the burrowing owls' former home.

Once it became active again it would allow the ospreys that were still a bit weaken from the battle to massively increase their strength.

Their lower ranked members would get exponential stronger, and their overall forces would swell past the point of where the burrowing owls had any chance. Even with Evelyn's help.

This gave them only six days to enact any plans before they would have to storm the former home of the burrowing owls or give up on it entirely.

'Still if we play it right, we should be able to at least get our forces to around equal before then and we can try and take the base in a less disadvantageous fight. But it will all depend on how many forces we can take out prior to the final battle.' Evelyn thought once they had finished making their plans.

She had also figured out something else while conversing with the burrowing owls. They were all pretty simple and straightforward.

It seemed that they were not capable of much in the way of deception and Evelyn could get a read on them all pretty easily.

Thankfully this helped her in making her decision to assist them. If she felt like they were difficult to get a feel for she would be worried about being backstabbed the entire time.

For the most part the majority of the burrowing owls looked at her with a bit of reverence and even the worst reaction she found was indifference coming from the couple that seem to have already given up on reclaiming their old home.

With her part done for now Evelyn left the temporary base that the burrowing owls had made and told them that she would meet back up with them the next day.

The first part of the plan involved the burrowing owls having scouts watch the comings and goings of the ospreys to get a more accurate read on their numbers and their patterns when leaving the nest.

Naturally, Evelyn, being quite large and having plumage that stood out in the desert was not part of this mission and was going to make her own preparations while the burrowing owls gathered information for her.

Then after three days it would be time for her to shine when they began attacking the ospreys that left their base to hunt.

'In the meantime, I have more pressing matters to work on.' Evelyn thought as she took off and flew back towards the cliffs that she had conquered earlier.

She figured this would be the best base for her since the other inhabitants of the desert already knew this area was owned by powerful beasts and would be less likely to come by.

When she got back everything was still quiet and she got to work.

The burrowing owls had less numbers and average rank than their enemy. That meant they needed to make up for this difference in any way they could.

'I have enough crate enough a few different potions and pills for each of them without bringing my stock of ingredients too low. I just wish I could use the caldron Melisandre left in my room. The one I have stored is not very high quality and my brews will be less powerful.'

Pulling out her alchemy supplies, Evelyn got to work on creating items to turn the tide in favor of her and the burrowing.

For the next three days this was pretty much all she did other than checking in with the burrowing owls each day to go over the information that they had gathered from watching the ospreys' movements.

On the fourth day, however, it was time to put what they had learned to use and start whittling down their enemy.

Luckily the intel that the burrowing owls had gathered was quite helpful in this regard.

The ospreys for the most part would leave in groups of three or four to go hunting and only two groups were ever gone at one time.

They were normally led by one of the same four high tier awakened rank osprey that were the flock's sub leaders.

As for the two that were at the peak of the awakened rank, the burrowing owls never saw them leave once during the last three days.

This could have been for a number of reasons but what Evelyn and the burrowing owls surmised was that the ospreys did not want to leave any chance of being unprepared in case of an attack.

The magic spring was simply far more valuable than any of the beasts they might be able to hunt or items that they might be able to gather in the desert.

Along with this information the burrowing owls had been able to observe at least twenty-five unique individuals among the osprey that were at the awakened rank. Of course there were likely more than this with some not having left in the last three days.

Most of them had been low tiers like the burrowing owls, but their number of mid and high tiers were in greater numbers than what the burrowing owls had.

The scouts had also observed a number of peak fined beasts occasionally going out with the hunting parties, but Evelyn pretty much disregarded them since their strength in the coming battle would pretty much be zero.

The difference between a fiend beast and an awakened beast was massive in most cases.

For Evelyn the only reasons she had been able to stand up to beasts above he rank was thanks to her intelligence from formerly being a human in another world, the heavenly flame, and the Aethersphere.

Had she been missing any one of these she likely would not have been able to go toe to toe with so many awakened rank beasts while she was only a fiend beast.

The burrowing owls themselves had a number of lower ranking beasts among them as well but using them in the battle would be akin to having them act as cannon fodder.

There was simply no reason to do so, especially if the burrowing owls were to make a comeback after the battle was over.

"Now we need to take out as many of the osprey as we can before bringing the fight to the home, they have stolen from all of you. To do that we ideally need to kill at least two of their hunting groups to even have any chance. In order to do this, we need to strike when at least two groups are out and split our forces accordingly. I will lead one strike team while your leader Otis will take the other. This is going to be the decisive factor in whether we can win or not. Now scouts go back and wait until a party leaves the nest and then come back and inform us. It is time that we hunt the ospreys instead of the other way around."