Dan launched a fireball at the closest lizard and was rewarded with little more than a flash of light as the creature’s spell shields absorbed the blast. It was hardly a surprise; his fireballs were much hotter and unleashed more concussive force than when he initially put together the spell, but they still weren’t all that much stronger than a grenade. Without a tank or the hellfire missiles from the Apache gunships, he didn’t see how they were going to be able to punch through the runes protecting the monster. The sword he had looted from Daeson’s mansion might be able to do the trick. With enough mana, it could cut through most things, including weak spellshields, but Dan wasn’t exactly inclined to get close enough to one of the gigantic lizards to test the sword, if he could help it. Even if he might be able to damage one of them, the rest of the candidates would be torn apart in the meantime.
Then, he felt mana rising to a crescendo on the back of both lizards and his gaze was drawn to their rearmost armored platforms. Each lizard had two armored platforms, one with a large crossbow on a swivel, not quite a ballista, but certainly bigger than something an average person could wield, tended to by three humans. The other had a waist-high silver wall, glowing with dense runescripting, protecting a single individual. On each lizard, that person stood before a glowing quartz crystal mounted on a silver pedestal. Both the humans and the crystals positively glowed with magic, with one feeling vaguely of light mana, while the other felt like wood.
“Get down!” He shouted, grabbing Jennifer by her arm and pulling her to the ground with him. A second later, a reddish beam of light passed overhead, fired from one of the crystals. Warmth washed over Dan, and behind him, some of the candidates started screaming.
That’s when the second spell discharged. Dan pulled himself up to his feet in time to witness the volleyball-sized wooden sphere slowly arc from the other lizard toward his group. His eyes followed it as it passed over his head, taking in the burned and maimed bodies of four of the Starshield candidates who had frozen in panic and clustered together before the beam of light ended them. Then the sphere hit, and with a barely audible hiss, it cracked into four pieces, revealing a hollow interior and a puff of rapidly-expanding dust.
He stared at the sphere in confusion. Given the amount of mana invested in the spell, it wouldn’t just fizzle like that. It had to do something–
Foreign contaminant detected. Purging.
WARNING: <USER> has been exposed to fungal contaminant. Please refrain from further exposure while the current incursion is quarantined.
That settled it. They weren’t even in crossbow range, but already, lizards were using laser cannons and biological weapons on them. The System sounded like it was handling the infection, but Dan shuddered to think what would happen to conventional soldiers without any kind of protection. It was time to run while that option was still on the table.
“We need to get the hell out of here!” He activated the communication function of the System. A couple candidates began moving, but many more were just staring at the charred corpses of their companion, horror in their eyes. “Now!” Dan punctuated his shout by turning to run. At this point, he didn’t have the luxury of providing training wheels for the rest of the candidates. Either they came to terms with the situation, or they would die where they stood.
“You heard Thrush,” LT’s voice sounded over the System. “Unless someone is packing anti-vehicle ordinance, and a lot of it, we need to get out of here now.”
A crossbow bolt almost a meter long, thudded into the dirt nearby, burying itself up to its fletching. Dan would’ve loved to inspect it given the opportunity, it was clearly enchanted with some sort of speed or sharpness rune, but there wasn’t time. After the barest of urgings, Jennifer was running beside him. Sam was half-dragging Ellie as the shell-shocked woman staggered after them.
Behind them, a couple of mana-drunk candidates took potshots at the lizards, but the spear of ice and bullet of force launched at them barely even caused the war beast’s spellshields to glow. The archers on its back responded, and Dan glanced briefly over his shoulder at a pitiful scream to see one of DarkStryke69xX’s followers pinned to the ground by three feet of metal, the bolt’s fletching sprouting like a flower from a bloody wound in the man’s chest. He grimaced and began to run faster, all thoughts of an orderly retreat leaving his mind.
Overhead came a whoosh of great wings flapping. A reptilian shape soared past Dan toward the main camp for the marine regiment. He didn’t have time to focus on it as he tried to navigate his way through the remains of the encampment in the dark. He didn’t know how long he ran before he sensed a change. From the main camp, earth and fire mana built and combined. Whatever was going on back there, he didn’t want any part of it.
The spell finished, and Dan was thrown to the ground by a tremendous impact. Standing up, he looked back at the Fifth Regiment’s camp. The center of it was gutted, a fireball rising up in the air from the spell and lighting the night in hues of orange and red. Backlit by the fireball was a huge, winged reptilian form, flapping slowly in the air with a humanoid silhouette on its back. It let out a screech of triumph and rose in the night sky.
After taking a second to verify that there were no immediate threats, Dan paused briefly, heaving for breath to take stock of his situation. Of the candidates, approximately ten were still with him. He didn’t know where LT and his team were, or if the other candidates were alive or dead. On one hand, they didn’t know how to deal with the chaos of the mass attack. Hell, it looked like the actual military had been overwhelmed. On the other, there was so much chaos from the attack that it wasn’t impossible for them to escape notice in the confusion.
“What next?” Jennifer asked him, catching her breath next to him. He noticed that the rest of the team looked at him expectantly. Like he could just wave his arms and make the terror and confusion of the night go away.
Dan looked to Sam, but she shrugged. He opened his mouth to ask her a question, but then the lower corner of his vision pinged.
Private Message from <Sam the Great>: This is your show, Dan. I’m not going to undermine you by telling you what to do, especially in front of all of the recruits. Up until now, this hasn’t been real to them, and you’ve only been a teacher. You need to be decisive. Give them a reason to trust you.
Dan swallowed his words. He’d still need to talk to Sam later about the communication and chat functions that were part of the System, but she did have a point. Part of the reason why the three camps of candidates fractured was that no one fully trusted him. They had his account of what he had done on Twilight, but it didn’t seem real to them. To the security team, survivors of Indonesia, Afghanistan, and other more classified locations, he was just a kid playing around with new powers. He didn’t have the same background and formative experiences as them the way LT did. As for the other Thoth candidates, they didn’t know what to expect, and none of them were prepared for the sudden violence of the attack. He would have to earn their trust, and that meant decisive action rather than second-guessing himself aloud.
“We need to get back to the airstrip,” Dan tried to infuse his voice with authority. He wasn’t sure how effective it was, but at least it didn’t crack from stress. Small victories. “Air support seems to be much more effective than infantry against them. If any places have held out, it will be the airstrip.”
“But that’s almost five miles from here,” Ellie whimpered, her eyes wet and knuckles white as she clutched her short sword.
“I’m not saying it’ll be fun.” Dan shrugged. “We aren’t going to be able to beat one of those gigantic lizards on our own, and if we stay here, we’re liable to be caught up in a counterattack. At least we can run away from a lizard. I don’t really want to try my odds against a cruise missile or guided bomb.”
Ellie shrank back behind Sam once again, but the rest of the candidates nodded in either acceptance or agreement. After about a minute to catch their breath, the team began jogging once again. Dan led them for almost two miles through the dark before he sighted movement ahead. He came to a stop with the rest of the group raggedly slowing to a halt as well and casting confused glances in his direction.
“I have decent low-light vision, but nothing magical,” Dan addressed them. “I think I see something ahead on the path, but I can’t quite make it out. Does anyone have an ability that would let us scout ahead? I would prefer to not walk into an ambush.”
After a second of silence, a tall, skinny man raised his hand. “I have a light affinity.” The man spoke hesitantly. “None of my combat spells really do much; I just have something I named ‘Dazzle’ where I try to distract an enemy with a strobe of light to their eyes, but I do have a spell that lets me see in low light conditions.”
“Great,” Dan replied with a smile. “What’s your name?”
“I’ve always gone by FlameTalon1099 in World of Magic Online,” he answered, a little more confidence in his voice.
“I’m not calling you FlameTalon1099.” Dan immediately cut him off. “At some point, we might have call signs or something like that, but FlameTalon1099 is too much of a mouthful. What did your parents name you?”
“Would just ‘Talon’ work?” The man questioned, slightly despondently. After Dan shook his head he continued. “Fine. My real name is Raoul Boucher.”
“Well Raoul, you just became our squad’s scout.” Dan smiled and clapped a hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “Get us an idea of what’s going on ahead and report back as soon as possible. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. I don’t need perfect intelligence, just an idea of what’s going on ahead. I don’t want you to take any unnecessary risks.”
Raoul smiled faintly then crept forward into the night. Dan lost sight of him at about fifty paces, but before long the man came back. This time he was frowning.
“It’s human soldiers, about twenty of them,” Raoul began, shaking his head as he spoke, “but there’s something wrong with them. They were just standing there in the middle of the road, not moving or speaking. Some of them looked pretty badly injured, too, but they just stood there.”
Dan frowned and glanced at Jennifer and Sam. Neither of them responded, but both of their faces held pensive looks. He sighed.
“I’ll go ahead and check the situation out,” Dan volunteered. “Everyone should be twenty or thirty feet behind me and ready to help out if something happens.”
He walked down the path toward the soldiers. About a minute later he could see their forms, standing unnaturally still in a rectangle obstructing the path. Dan stopped and steeled his nerves.
“Hello!” he called out in English to no response other than a slight tremor through their forms.
Dan furrowed his brow and began calling out to them in other languages without response. Frustrated, he walked closer. About twenty feet away from the soldiers, he received his response.
They turned as one and began sprinting toward him. Even in the moonlight, Dan could make out strange growths on their skin and gaping but bloodless wounds covering their bodies. The entire situation was too alien for him. If the soldiers were even still alive, they were either possessed or mind controlled. Either way, he didn’t have time to figure out a way to take them alive or get them treatment. Dan launched a fireball into their front row, and the charging soldiers did nothing to dodge.
The explosion knocked them backwards, the first row of five aflame and unmoving. The light from their burning corpses illuminated the rest of their ilk. They most certainly weren’t alive. Their skin was covered in brownish gray protuberances that resembled misshapen mushrooms, and their eyes were clouded and grey. The wounds that he had spotted previously were obvious in the new light. Gaping slashes covered them with entire chunks of flesh missing.
Dan raised his free hand to gather the fire mana to form another fireball when he felt a series of impacts on his chest. Glancing down in horror, he saw three wooden darts embedded in his chainmail, even after penetrating the folded layers of force from his armor rune. The darts unfolded hundreds of tiny rootlike legs and began trying to burrow through the links of his armor. Dan quickly abandoned the fireball and ripped the darts off of himself and threw them to the ground.
He shivered. Those darts would have penetrated the skin of anyone without magical defenses, and even with his armor rune, it had been a near thing. He didn’t have any idea what would have happened if they reached his skin, but Dan wasn’t enthused to find out. He raised his spellshield and peered into the darkness as the misshapen soldiers crashed into the Starshield candidates that stepped up to assist him. A nearby tree blurred, and a form stepped out from it and began walking toward him, menace oozing from it.
At about twenty paces from him, it stopped and threw back the camouflaged hood that had been concealing its features to reveal a handsome elven face. The man broke into a grin, his blade-like teeth shining in the dark. He raised his staff and pointed it at Dan, three pinky-sized holes bored into it with a very familiar trio of thorns peeking out.
“I was told that there wouldn’t be casters on this backwards planet.” The elf spoke in a hard to place accent, likely an artifact of the translation runes. “Imagine my surprise when I find not only a caster, but a human mage. Leave your whelps to my sprouts. There’s no sport there for either of us. Come, let us dance beneath the moonlight. I simply cannot wait to taste your mana.”
