by Xander Boyce
What did all this mean? Electronics ceasing to work and spells that caused energy to be created and destroyed in an instant. What was the connection there? He felt like it was relevant, something that would help him in the upcoming fight. But he dismissed it as something he couldn’t really make any progress on currently. His eyes drifted around the room and he saw a family photo on a wall, a father, mother, and two kids. Were they still alive?
The base had been relatively protected and well organized, and even then, Daryl said the monsters had killed 50 percent of the people before the end of the first day. They hadn’t even sent scouts off the base; the general having considered it too dangerous.
Was this all because they were close to the primary nexus? He stared at the ley lines glowing under the ground and concentrating in DC, considering the nexus as he pondered what exactly it had done to the humans in the region. Were the enemies stronger here? Or just more numerous? Did the extra and more powerful xatherite they had gotten put them in a better spot, an equal spot? Or had it not even compensated them for the extra danger?
The problem was the lack of information. Drew had spent his high school years at the cusp of the mobile phone revolution. He remembered the days where you would knock on your friend’s door without knowing if they were home, and called the house phone of a girl you liked, having to talk to her father before you could ask her out. He had also grown accustomed to the instantaneous information stream modern society had allowed and the sheer depth of knowledge contained on the internet, all accessed through a device you carried with you into the bathroom because it was convenient to look at memes while you used it.
That world was gone; he couldn’t even get accurate information from outside the walls of the base’s gates. Daryl had gone out a few times, but only after the fourth day, looking for survivors. They had either been gone or too well hidden for his cursory search. However, he had also been too afraid to start shouting for fear of attracting monsters. Could they all have hunkered down in their houses to hide from the world? What about the loss of life due to the storms, people that got stuck outside and then just disappeared? Daryl had told him about the one person he had seen out during a storm: he had been dragging belongings into the commissary but had dissolved before he could reach safety.
He shook his head away from that grisly image. Even if humanity did survive, almost an entire generation had been killed. Xatherite apparently didn’t activate until sometime after puberty. All the kids younger than about 15 had been told that due to their maturity, their personalities hadn’t developed enough to determine the state of their grid, and their beginning xatherite allowance had been deferred. It made the children even easier targets to the monsters, and the loss of life of those under 15 had been almost absolute, even before the Trolls had appeared.
How does a society recover from that, especially when it likely wouldn’t be safe to raise children for years to come? He ran a hand through his hair as he considered the implications to Earth’s humanity. In a week, half the world’s population had died; at the rate they were going, they would be lucky to have ten percent survive the year. Then they would face the issues of a population that was getting increasingly older with almost no new workforce for decades to come.
Magic might be able to keep people active for longer, healing the aches and pains and allowing for an older generation to still be relevant in what was bound to be a more physically demanding society than what 21st-century western civilization had required of its citizens. Even then, how were they going to feed their severely diminished population? How many people even knew how to grow a crop? How did you defend a crop from nocturnal bug invasions?
They would have to go back to being nomads.
Suddenly not feeling safe, Drew stood up and cast his buffs. His leg and hands still hurt quite a bit from the day’s injuries, but he was reasonably confident he would be back up to full mobility in a week, if he survived that long. Although honestly, if they didn’t find a healer tomorrow, they were probably all dead anyway.
Drew reviewed the plan again. Really, it amounted to nothing more than throwing a fireball at the trolls and hoping they chased him like the orcs had. He’d be far enough away that he could cast a storm between him and them, and Daryl said he knew of a good spot where they would be confined between two walls and unable to spread out. Meanwhile, Daryl would throw some Molotov cocktails at the trolls from invisibility; hopefully, the mundane fire would work as well as the magical kind had.
Once the storm had passed, Drew would take out the stragglers. They would hopefully be infuriated by the presence of a red mage. The logic was that the stragglers would think all his spells were still recharging, causing in them a desire to charge him. Fireballs, frostfire cone, and lightning bolts should be enough to take out those last few that remained. As a plan, it sucked. It relied far too heavily on things going the hopeful way and having not developed any ranged options of their own in the past few days.
He could think of dozens of possible ways for this to go wrong, but he couldn’t think of a better solution with their assets at hand. Even if they did win…what then? When they ambush the trolls successfully, then kill more trolls and rescued everyone, then what? Was he going to be responsible for all these people just because he saved them? That’s what had happened with the group at HQ. He had come in and because he could fight, they had depended on him. Because of that, Juan and Mitch were dead, and Sarah might as well be.
He began pacing despite the pain in his leg. He was in so far over his head that he didn’t even know if there was air up there anymore.
“Nervous?” Daryl asked. Sometime while he had been lost in thought, the man had sat up and was staring at him, visible again.
Drew nodded his head, “Everyone I’ve tried to help since this whole thing started, they’re almost all dead. I’m...I guess I’m just afraid that if we fail tomorrow, I’m going to let down a lot of people. I’m also worried about my friends. They expected me to be back yesterday. And if I don’t make it back, they’re going to be mostly helpless and stuck.”
“Drew, sit down,” Daryl said with some emphasis. And when he obeyed, Daryl looked at him, “You’re getting pre-battle jitters, it’s understandable. You were in the coast guard; all of your combat was reactionary. You didn’t have hours to think about all the things that could go wrong. When I was in the army, my first couple weeks in Iraq, I was just like you are now. Eventually, you learn how to deal with it.”
“But here’s the thing you have that I didn’t. You’ve already been in a ton of fights, and you came out alive. You’re not going to freeze up when you realize that your life is in danger, and I’m gonna guess you’re one hell of a scrapper.” Daryl looked around, “I know the plan has a lot of things that could go wrong, and stuff probably will; it always does. But we’re going to rescue all those people, and we’re going to be fine. We’ll do this together.”
“I just, I’m not the guy who should be doing this. I’m a nerd,” Drew explained, “My hobbies are Pathfinder, WoW, and playing with my dog.”
“Yeah? So, what? You fought your way out of a dungeon and then stopped a cultist sacrifice. I think that sounds exactly like what you would do in Pathfinder or WoW. Your experience is relevant here; heck, you’re a mage in real life now. Who cares if those were just games? Think of them as battle simulations that all trained you for this,” Daryl said with a bit of a laugh, “Hell, I wish I would have played more of them; maybe then I wouldn’t be mostly worthless in a fight.”
Drew shook his head, “You’re not worthless, you’re just…specialized in a different way. Against a foe that could be hurt by weapons, you’d be deadly. You’re built to be an assassin. Just because this is a paper and scissors fight doesn’t mean there won’t be fights down the road where you’re the rock to their scissors. That’s what I learned in Pathfinder; there’s always a counter.”
Daryl raised his hands in surrender, “I get it.” He looked at Drew and then f
rowned, changing the subject, “What I don’t get is why you don’t look tired. You can’t have slept in at least 20 hours and you look damn well rested.”
“I...might not have been completely forthcoming about what spells that I have,” Drew answered cautiously. “I have one called refresh, well, energize now, that keeps me from needing sleep.”
“Damn, when was the last time you actually slept?” Daryl asked.
“Other than slotting xatherite? The day before advent.” Drew supplied the answer while studying the other man’s face.
Daryl stood back up and walked over to the window, considering what Drew said, “I get why you wouldn’t trust me.” The night was still dark, but the occasional shriek of a bat could be heard outside. Drew didn’t want to consider what a bat that fed on these massive bugs would be like. “I just want my wife back, Drew. I’ll do anything to get her back, and...you’re my best, my only hope for that.”
“Did you just Princess Leia me?” Drew asked incredulously.
Daryl smirked and sat down in the chair, “Can you cast that energize spell on me? Since I’m up, might as well talk a bit more.”
Drew nodded, “Sure, I can do that, just give me a bit, it’s still recharging for another fifteen minutes or so.”
The two passed the time joking about movies; they both had similar tastes and talked for some time about Shawshank Redemption and The Bourne Identity.
An hour later the sun was starting to rise and both men, now much more comfortable with each other, set out from the house, getting the bottles of alcohol, rags, and lighters needed for Daryl's portion of the event while Drew cleared their ambush site of the remaining night critters. He was happy to discover that the new lightning bolt could two shot most of the centipedes and other insects that lingered through the dawn.
Once the area was cleared, he made his way to the peak of a roof and began the final bit of waiting.
Chapter Twenty-Three — Burning Trolls
Wedged in between two roof segments, Drew wished he had taken the time to nail in a board or something. The shingles were loose, and his footing was slightly precarious, but it allowed him to keep a low enough profile that he didn’t think anyone would see him before he started launching fireballs. Daryl said the trolls normally came out about two hours after dawn, so he had plenty of time to get bored.
He started aiming his fireballs off towards the Potomac, trying to measure how far they traveled before disappearing. With trial and error, he determined that at around a thousand feet out it started losing power, and then disappeared completely somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet. It was hard to make accurate assessments of distance without a marked range, but those were his best estimates. He tested his other spells but found the only other one that had a long enough range to be effective was acid dart.
It meant that he was well within the effective range of fireball for this ambush. But depending on how close the trolls guarded the humans, he might have issues with catching a human in the blast. He pushed that thought away and looked around for a spot where he could lay down to take pressure off his leg.
The whole situation was somewhat uncomfortable. The morning sun was incredibly hot, especially reflecting off the black tar of the shingles. The leather vest and dark blue ODU’s he wore under it didn’t help either. However, they did protect him from the grit on the shingles. He laid down and his leg twinged slightly in pain as he bumped it a little too hard in the process. “Should probably get shoes instead of boots and a pair of shorts for the heat,” He said, thinking out loud.
Running a hand through his hair, he realized that he would need to get a haircut too. Chief would start yelling at him for being out of regs within a couple days at this rate.
He laughed until he realized it was bouncing eerily around the abandoned housing complex. The reverberating echo sounded unnervingly like someone mocking him. How strange it was to have such normal thoughts like haircuts and shoe shopping while he was waiting to ambush a bunch of trolls with magic. It was comforting at the same time to have had such normal thoughts.
Shaking his head at the incongruity, he looked around. He was positioned on a roof back a little way from the road that the trolls took every morning. Between him and the road were two housing units that formed a narrow corridor with a small playground in between them. The trolls would either come straight through the corridor or circle around the two buildings to respond to his attacks. Like most of the plan, it wasn’t perfect.
Scanning the road, he poked his head up a little higher and looked over at the DIA building. They hadn’t yet exited the big building, but they were due any time now. He then glanced over at the soccer field where the ritual had been performed. He kept thinking that he should see bodies, but they had disappeared either during the night or in the storm. He couldn’t tell which he thought was more disturbing: insects capable of eating dozens of bodies, bone and all, overnight, or rain that dissolved bodies in an instant. The fire was also empty, but he could see the reflective shapes of their long daggers in the grass. They were the only thing indicating that a battle had taken place there yesterday.
A flash of light in his eyes caught Drew’s attention and he saw Daryl pointing the mirror at him, their signal to indicate the trolls had left the building. Drew focused his attention on him as Daryl flashed Morse code at him: a short, then four longs, then a pause. One. Three long and two shorts. Eight. Another pause, and then a single long. 18T, eighteen trolls. Another pause, and then a short and four long again: one. Four long and a short meant nine. Then a short, two long and a short. The letter P. 19 people with the trolls. Drew raised his hand to indicate he had received the message and Daryl disappeared.
Drew realized that he didn’t exactly disappear; from his perspective, the body went invisible, but a faint shadow still followed where he must be as it walked to the other side of the road to prepare his portion of the ambush. How did his invisibility work anyway? Did it just bend the light around him? If that was the case, him still casting a shadow made sense? Maybe just a distortion on the ground from where the light had been bent? The shadow was too indistinct not to be affected at all; in fact, against something other than the white pavement of the sidewalk, Drew doubted he would be able to see it at all.
Drew did a quick relaxation technique, tensing and releasing his muscles, trying to limber up for the fight. It would still take fifteen or twenty minutes for them to walk all the way down the road to where he was, and he had a feeling it was going to be one of the longest fifteen minutes he’d ever experienced. He then recast all his shielding spells and hunkered down to wait.
Wiping sweat from his forehead, he waited. Finally, three trolls came into view around the house; they were standing close enough together that Drew wasn’t afraid of hitting the humans. Standing up, he launched a fireball slightly ahead of where the three were currently. To Drew, the ball seemed to move in slow motion, and one troll caught the movement out of the corner of its eye. Turning to look, it began to shout but was cut short by the explosion that engulfed all three.
Only fifteen trolls left. Four more had come into view while he took out the first group; they were on either side of a group of humans. One shouted something in a language Drew didn’t understand, and all four began to charge towards him. Drew launched a frostfire ball at the first one, but it dove out of the way, taking only glancing damage from a shard of ice that embedded itself in his shoulder.
Acid dart targeted the now prone troll, but its damage didn’t seem likely to add much of value to the exchange. He could now see nine trolls, all of which were charging towards him while shouting, and he began to cast frostfire storm. He felt reasonably safe since he was three stories up, that was until one of the trolls in the middle of the pack jumped to the top of the playground in a single bound and pulled something out of a pouch at its side.
Frostfire storm was ready right as the troll drew his arm back to throw whatever he had retrieved. Deciding the one
on the playground was the most dangerous of the group, he centered it around him, catching five within the blasts of ice, fire, and lightning. Three, including the one who had fallen prone, were caught behind the storm, but the leading troll was still moving towards him. When he was about 60 feet away, he leapt into the air. His trajectory looked like he would land right next to Drew, but a lightning bolt knocked him back and off course. He landed with a cracking sound on the ground 40 feet below.
Switching to cast another storm to get the three stragglers, Drew targeted it near the mouth of the alley, hoping the humans had moved away from it by now. Daryl should have telepathically warned them to back up already, and hopefully, he’d lit a few trolls on fire.
The jumping ability of the trolls had caught him by surprise. He scanned the two surrounding buildings to ensure that they weren’t trying to flank him while his fingers went through the motions of casting the storm but didn’t see any. When the spell was done, he fired another lightning bolt at the downed troll for good measure.
Twelve of eighteen down, that left six to guard the prisoners. Daryl could probably only take out two or three of them, so Drew backed up to the top of the roof and with a gulp of air, he began running down the slope, trying to ignore the pain in his leg as he jumped when he was a few feet from the end. The distance between the houses was around 50 feet, which was just past the edge of his blink step range. When he reached the apex of the jump, he triggered blink step, stumbling a landing onto the eaves of the house’s roof. He scrambled but lost his footing as his boot caught on a shingle, tripping him.
Rolling off the side of the roof, he reached out to grab the gutter, managing to get one hand on it and arresting his fall, but wrenching his shoulder painfully. Kicking off the side of the building, he tried to pull himself up, but the lack of a good handhold prevented him from making any progress. He could feel the winds of the frostfire storm and he looked down; realizing he was twenty feet up and over a concrete pad, he redoubled his efforts to scramble back onto the roof.
