Drew watched Daryl sleep. He hadn't told the other man about his energize spell, but they had agreed to take turns and Drew opted to go first. He had no intention of waking Daryl up. The other man was asleep and invisible on a bench he hadn't seen behind the door. He shook his head as he glanced at the bed, where blankets in the form of a person sleeping under the covers lay conspicuously. Daryl had prepared his safe house by making navigating the hallway difficult enough that they would make some noise in the dark, which should wake him up. He then hid where he slept behind the door.
"There's probably some sort of long-term negative effect of not sleeping," Drew mused to himself as he looked out the window.
Glancing towards the HQ building he hoped that Katie and Sarah were safe during the night. He should have been back already and being held up unexpectedly by the storm made him nervous for the two women. They were probably fine; Katie's walls would allow them to hold off any attack until he got there tomorrow afternoon. After a few minutes he was able to dismiss his unease.
The storm had passed with the sun, the multicolored water leaving no trace that it had ever been there. It led to some interesting questions about how physics and mana interacted.
As far as he could tell, the energy and mass created by casting his spells came from nowhere, affected the world for as long as it was designed to, and then returned to nowhere. For example, all his water and ice spells created matter, but as soon as the duration of the spell was over, that matter disappeared. That broke the first law of thermodynamics unless it was pulling energy from a plane of existence or type of energy that humans currently had no sense for.
For that matter, what exactly was he seeing when he looked at the ley lines and auras around him? Was he piercing the veil into some alternative energy plane of existence that overlapped this one? Or was it just a type of energy that existed normally, and humans simply hadn't been able to detect it until now? What exactly was mana?
Drew realized that he only kind of understood electromagnetic force, one of the four (or five?) fundamental interactions. Even then, he hadn't been anywhere near an expert in understanding it. He probably wasn't going to be making any major breakthroughs on the principles of mana.
He ducked back from the window as a particularly large bug flew by, holding still lest it sense him somehow. The glass seemed like a flimsy defense against such things, and after waiting for it to move on, he stood up and limped back towards the bed and sat down next to the fake person on it.
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 frowned, 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.