A king with absolute control over birds and birdkind would be nearly impossible to defeat in battle

Not if you trapped him in a mineshaft.

The one who controls mammals, since he has control over humanity. He probably controls the other three kings unless they're not human.

lets say humans have special souls that render them immune to control

the king of insects

sheer numbers would make him powerful but the lack of complex neural systems would severely limit the complexity of the commands he could issue them
while say the king of birds could implant a complex plan into the mind of a crow getting a wasp to do anything other than "sting the shit out of that mofo" is gonna be hard

An army of birds would be beaten by strong winds, never mind an army of disciplined soldiers.

but what if they were carrying coconuts?

Let's not forget that a king of birds could put together vast networks of swift spies and messengers.

How do you defeat that? It cannot be done!

What if the soldiers have shields?

There are 200 million times as many insects as humans, and we're the most successful individual species at propagating our own biomass. Per acre, there is an average of 400 lbs of insect, and 14 lbs of human. Insect control would be insane.

well that depends on the type of shield and how it is supported as well as the speed of the coconut

The real question is, what if soldiers have coconuts too?

Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?

true but the vast majority of them would be ill suited towards combat with larger species
still control over insects is probably the second most powerful control possible, behind control over bacteria

Only by swallow.

I think that having control over chimps and other primates in general would still be an important advantage.

On the other hand, Bird King has the motherfucking corvids on his side and he should not be underestimated.

>Bird king
>head to Arabia and track down a Roc, or the Americas and find a Thunderbird

>Mammal king
>Take a boat to Death Island and find King Kong

>Bug King
>Locust swarms
>just fucking everywhere

>I think that having control over chimps and other primates in general would still be an important advantage
Only if they happen to be near you.

*places wire fencing all over the top of my castle*

Flock off mother feather.

>the bird king has fought countless battles with his army of birds
>his numbers are dwindling, but also his enemy has taken heavy losses
>his enemy musters his last reserves for the final battle
>the bird king awaits reinforcement from a far away land
>it's fucking pic related
How would you use this army to your advantage?

Are you familiar with Mountains of Madness by any chance?

That's what assassins are for. Eliminate the king, then attack with your army.

Wouldn't the suicide penguins from Batman Returns be more appropriate?

Either that or put little boots on them and start playing "These Boots Were Made for Walking" loudly.

One of the Lovecraft stories I didn't read for some reason. So no.

>the bird-emperor goes full Olga
>sparrows and other small birds begin the siege, setting fire to reserves and houses with small bags of flame
>bigger non-combat birds like albatrosses come in after them with pots of flammables and start strategic firebombings
>this goes on until the cities are laid to waste
>hungry, tired and demoralized by the bombings the people all let out a sigh of relief that it's over
>caw caw
>it's the shocktroops consisting of condors, eagles and geese
>the ground trembles
>organized squads of lightly armored cassowaries are seen charging from the treeline

Well, user who asked you is being a pedantic little shit and namedropping for no reason, because the penguins in Mountains literally did nothing except be vaguely unsettling due to having no eyes and being man sized.

Tell me, are you familiar with the motion picture Batman Returns?

they were used as a meat wall to slow the shoggoth down, an as an early warning system.

They were also 6 foottall albino penguins.

>absolute control over birds
>implying any man, woman or force of nature can control living embodiment of FREEDOM

You should read it, it's one of his best

The dude is like
>I am majestic and manly also oiled up
The bird is like:
>I don't even know this guy

Funnily, the king of singular-cell creatures could pretty much kill all life above that tier, no problem.

Their flippers apparently are pretty stiff and hurt like the dickens.

They will also shit everywhere, absolutely messing up the carpet.

Now I'm just imagining humans actively trying to exterminate life on earth.
How quickly do you think we'd be able to do it?

>absolute control over birds and birdkind

He'd compel his human subjects to mate with birdwomen wouldn't he?

>absolute control over your waifu
I donno if I want that kind of power

Dude, Eagle Control is the entire point of the Eagle Ceremony.

Don't tell me you didn't get your GED or General Eagle Diploma?

You know the rules

>Sneaking up on a man with every bird in the country looking out for him

The benefit of bird control isn't combat strength, it's information. Controlling all birds would give you the kind of information gathering abilities that the NSA couldn't even DREAM of having.

>Deep Crows

>armored cassowaries
please god no

Why didn't the eagles fly Frodo to Mordor?

The Crows were using them.

Does this man have an effective range on his powers? Can he control birds anywhere on the planet, or just within his kingdom? Does he usually just let them do their own shit, or does he have the brainpower to control birds on a mass scale individually? What's the extent of what is considered a "bird"? Does he consider birdlike reptiles or dinosaurs birds? Flightless birds? Featherless birds? Flying manmals? Mammals thanlay eggs? Can he control birdlike aliens or birds from other planes of existence?

True, their only weakness would be fighting someone that is not small prey.

Do you know the mass of a flock of starlings?

Imagine a ton of bird dropping on you, only it has claws and sharp beaks and it knows your ever secret and has seen your every sin and they're everywhere and blotting out the sun as they descend, their wings deafen you as they land upon your weak, featherless form, RIP! TEAR! They gouge your eyes, and pull the tongue from your mouth as you try to scream but your scream finds you mouth filled with starlings, furious squaking trashing shredding starlings that pummel you into a bruised puddle of meat upon the ground beneath the weight of the thousands of black and white lilliputs that strive with ever ounce of their individually miniscule but massed and organised bodies to strike down the giant that is you and humble you before their collective might.

...

I think we can assume planetary range and all birds

So he could destroy a planet by commanding all the pigeons to proceed to rapidly breed until the planet is replaced by a sphere of pigeons the side of jupiter's orbit.

Well, we know that if he rallied the emus, he could conquer Australia.

animal armies get BTFO by fire. The only reason the eagles were so strong in LOTR is because tolkien wrote the series as a loose satire for ww2, and the eagles represent America.

There's no way bugman wouldn't win with planetary range/all creatures of their domain.
Birds can't land if all bugs swarm to the surface and eat anything that moves

whichever of those 4 groups contains the most apex predators. I'm thinking reptiles.

>implying you need any orders beyond "sting the shit out of that mofo"

Just send the nastiest motherfuckers you can to invade the other kingdoms. I'm talking velvet ants, bullet ants, giant hornets, yellow jackets, tarantula hawks, bombardier beetles, the whole nine yards. Assuming that they survive the onslaught the other kingdoms will be going to war with eachother just to see who gets to surrender to you first. If you feel like being a real dick you can also send a shit ton of stink bugs into each kingdom too just for shits and giggles.

15 minutes. We can launch 1,185 megatons of nuclear weapons within 15 minutes of the decision being made. If that doesn't strangle Earth to death, give us four hours and I bet we can arm almost every nuclear weapon worldwide.

We also need to crash the ISS to ensure that no life eventually returns to Earth. I'm pretty sure it will burn up nicely in our upper atmosphere.

Will this kill all life? Probably not, there's bound to be an underground cave that we missed that's fairly self-sustaining, and some single-celled organisms eventually end up repopulating the Earth after the fallout dissipates.

But for tens of thousands of years, we can erase all life on the surface of the Earth. There will just be a barren wasteland of radiation and nuclear winter. Mankind's only mark on the universe will be a record somewhere in space, a probe that left the solar system, years of radio signals and communication attempts, a set of white flags and tracks on the moon and 15,375 large craters.

Forgot to mention that you could also have locusts and all manner of caterpillar decimate the enemy's crops, termites to fuck up the wood surrounding the area as well as any wooden structures, maybe go full horror mode and start having botflies lay eggs on everyone's clothing.

I don't know why but that post is beautiful. God humans are glorious destructive bastards.

Worm, the web serial, has a good display over what insect control can do. With proper knowledge of the insects at your disposal, you can be a nasty motherfucker.

came here to post those hellspawns

How based are owls?

>But for tens of thousands of years, we can erase all life on the surface of the Earth
I doubt it.

The total direct destructive area of every nuke in the world is something like a mere 0.82% of the world's land surface. Even if you consider the damage from nuclear fallout you still have significant gaps in the lethal area, or huge gaps if you want oceanic coverage as well. Of course the 'nuclear winter' will starve a lot of life to death but most of the calculations I've seen show it unlikely to last more than a matter of weeks. I'd be very surprised if that managed to wipe out all macrocellular life on the earth's surface, let alone tardigrades (which are immune to insane levels of radiation and up to 30 years without food or water) and unicellular organisms.

Even assuming you could wipe out everything on the surface I expect the vibrant communities around the deep-sea geothermal vents would be almost untouched. That depth of water should protect them completely against any immediate effects of the blast I most of the fallout should be passed through enough half-lives to be pretty safe by the time it filters down to the sea floor. The strontium and cesium isotopes might be exceptions but I doubt there'd be enough radiation from those to wreak havoc on the vent communities, especially if nukes were confined to land detonations which they'd pretty much have to be to get sufficiently dense coverage. My gut says that even the macroscopic fishes, eels and octopuses down there would be able to survive.

>tl;dr Life's a lot more resilient that we give it credit for. Humanity has enough nukes to end humanity but the rest of the world will go on.

If a goose is stupid enough to try going head to head with a predator 8 times its size it doesnt deserve to live.

What would he use these tiny cuties for?

Parrots are already the most bro wild animals in existence.
>cockatiel is chilling
>looks at my mom and makes his danger chirp
>leaps at her hair
>rips something out of it
>it's a huge fucking moth
>they start wrestling
>he eviscerates it
>waddles to his cage
>I hand him a cheerio
>he dunks it in his water bowl and eats it

But you already have that
< · > ·
Medli was my first crush, you have good taste friend

agreed,
gas the skies bird war now

>Gas the skies
Asia is on it.

Not if his opponent was a queen who controlled cats and all cat kind.

>armored casowaries
Ffffffff- they're proper fucked. No buildings to hide in, no walls to separate them, no high ground to attack from, they're just fucked.

>implying

They're hardly that bad. Like a smaller, more colourful emu, but they won't come after you unless you actively threaten them.

Hi Alfred Hitchcock, I'm a huge fan of your films.

If the control implies communication, Bird King always wins since he'll know the other kings moves, and that is a way better advantage than having expendable animal soldiers.

Amed and armoured humans can kill basically infinity times their own number in animals, apex predator mammals like bears or tigers or whatever would be useless in the field since it's impossible to feed them all (there's a reason those predators have fuckhuge territories) and amphibians or reptiles are much too climate sensitive to ever be a threat if you can just chill in the mountains or the north.

The most powerful weapon out of the animals would be rats, since someone who controls them can spread plagues and ruin harvests, which makes them the potentially most powerful, but this is countered by control over birds since they fucking love rodents and would keep them in check.

This leaves the intelligence gathering advantage with Bird King, so he wins.

>The benefit of bird control isn't combat strength, it's information. Controlling all birds would give you the kind of information gathering abilities that the NSA couldn't even DREAM of having.
Indeed, there isn't a spot on this planet that doesn't have both Humans AND birds living there...

>>implying any man, woman or force of nature can control living embodiment of FREEDOM
FREEDOM!!!

No, it's Eagle BONDING!!!
Fucking Ex-pats...

as an Indonesian, excuse us for making the preemptive strikes

A guy with absolute control over 666 beasts would be nearly impossible to defeat in battle.

Rat King, always bet on Rat King.

Morale officers?

Just so long as he doesn't implement a no Falcons policy, I'll be fine

You have to not be a cassowary to post on here.

>They're hardly that bad. Like a smaller, more colourful emu, but they won't come after you unless you actively threaten them.

Not to mention you keep a couple of insects at your side and give them the order to 'shag like there's no tomorrow'.

By the time the other kingdoms have grown new war elephants or crocodiles, you'd have... Well I don't know how many newborns you'd have, but it would be a shit ton!.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=e0jbHCZ4I6U

Holy shit, there's an image for everything.

Depending on the insect, we're talking about billions of them.

I mean, to be fair, how many wars have cassowaries won?

Was killed with a pocket knife, iirc.

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't said knife used by a kid whose power was I can kill anything?

That image looks very nearly transparent.

It was more of a curse than a power, but yes. The irony is sill there, tho.

With the ancient technique of drawing shit, the whole world can be your canvas.