The interplay between the two was not lost on Drew; but he moved past it, “Alright, who knows where we can get JP a military grade rifle?”
Looking around the room, Drew got a few shrugs, but no one seemed to know where to find one. “Alright, we’ll have to raid the exchange; there should be some rifles in there. We’ll send a few people. Arm as many people as you can; not everything is going to be immune to bullets, and we’re going to have a lot of people to rescue.”
They got into the depths of planning how to rescue the people left inside the DIA building. After discussing the location where everyone was being held and where the trolls inside were, the plan presented by JP ended up being the most popular one. Katie would create a safe location with JP, Daryl, and a few others acting as scouts, and the two illusionists would hide the building until Drew had managed to eat a hole into the wall with his acid dart spell.
If everything went well, they would be able to evacuate about half the people before any of the trolls even knew that they were there. The other half would require Drew to act as a defensive screen from within the building while Bill, Sarah, and the others healed anyone injured and evacuated everyone.
The first major problem was that there was no intermediate safe location before they got back to the stadium. There was no stopping point between here and there, at least, not one that could hold several hundred people. The mana storms had been coming every other night at this point, so that was their deadline to get back to the stadium.
The trip was only a few miles along a paved road, but they would need to find a way to guard against mana twisted creatures like squirrels and turtles harrying them until they got to the bridge. Then they would need to cross the bridge while defending against the squid, at which point it was only a few blocks through the patrolled area around the stadium until they were safe. The difficulty with the first portion was that they really only had JP and Drew that could stand against the creatures; the others would be armed with a few guns, the spears, and other improvised weapons they had made. The only workable solution they had for keeping safe along the bridge was for Katie to create a tunnel. It would take some time, with Drew and JP acting as a rear guard on the near end of the bridge while Daryl went ahead to ask for help from the stadium.
The plan of action decided, the group split up into their various tasks; Drew, Robbi, and Daryl headed north to ambush the trolls if they opted to do another food run. Despite what Ares had told him, Drew wanted to go alone, but even Katie and Sarah had insisted he take Robbi with him in case something got close. Daryl was going to be acting as their forward scout; his invisibility was invaluable for that kind of activity. JP, Sarah, Katie, and all the rest of the former prisoners went to the exchange and commissary to stock up on additional weapons, ammo, and food.
They waited in ambush in the same place he had two days previously, although this time he didn’t bother to hide as much. He was too worried they wouldn’t see him and would attack the other group. He spent thirty minutes pondering Ares’ words and the things that happened to him onboard the Olympus. If they could transfer a mind into another body like that, why would Ares need to send people to their deaths? Couldn’t they just transfer them into those fake bodies? Or was it a cost thing? Or a cooldown issue? Did his delaying sleep cause Ares to send some of his people to their deaths that otherwise could have been saved if the spell had been available?
The sound of gunshots to the south roused Drew from his reverie. He glanced south and realized that someone had sent up a flare; where had they gotten flares? He pushed himself up off the roof, blink stepped to the ground, shouting to Robbi, “The Exchange!” Hopefully, Daryl heard him as well, but there was no time to ensure the scout was coming with them. Robbi quickly caught up to him and kept pace with him, but his pistol wouldn’t be worth much against trolls.
Drew urged himself to go faster but was slowed by his lack of physical training and the heavy combat boots he wore. They were a couple hundred feet from the backside of the commissary. Katie’s group should be either in there or in the exchange still, which was another couple hundred feet of parking lot away from the far side of the commissary. As he ran, he continued to hear gunshots and he pushed through the stitch that was gnawing at his abdomen.
Rounding the southeast corner of the commissary to where they could see the parking lot, they found the source of the shooting. More than a dozen trolls were circling a group of humans. JP was shooting anything that got close, but there were too many people for him to be able to cover all sides, and the trolls looked like they were trying to separate individuals to carry off.
Drew skidded to a stop, slipping on the wet morning grass, but kept his footing and began to cast a frostfire storm to protect one side from the trolls. Robbi had stopped with him, but when he began casting a spell, he moved about ten feet out and pulled out another pistol, ready to defend Drew from any trolls that attacked.
The storm spell caught three trolls who had been jumping towards the group and cut them off from the west side of the humans. JP continued to unload his pistols into trolls that came close, but as soon as the spell went off, the trolls disengaged, moving away from their former prey. Drew shouted and launched a fireball at a troll, causing most of the trolls to look his direction as he began casting firestorm. The fireball missed the troll he’d been targeting but hit one behind it as the first jumped away.
They cried something in their own language and all the ones on the north and east side of the group turned their attention towards Drew, leaving JP to handle the ones on the south side of the group. Drew’s firestorm went off while the trolls were still relatively grouped up, catching all but two of them within its radius. Two trolls were still bearing down on him and about 175 feet away from him. Drew cast Dancing Blade, hoping that it wouldn’t get to the point he needed it, but not wanting to waste frostfire ball’s cooldown while they still were plenty far enough away to dodge the spell.
As they breached within 100 feet of him, Drew launched frostfire ball, targeting the one that was lagging, where it impacted above the troll, sending icy shrapnel flying. The leading troll’s jump faltered as he was impacted from behind by ice shards. Drew launched an acid dart at his face and then figuring that the cooldown was off, launched a fireball at it, causing the troll to disappear in the fiery explosion.
Taking a breath, he frowned, the adrenaline causing his hair to stand on end. Almost on instinct he blink stepped forward as far as he could and hearing the deafening crack of thunder behind him told him his instincts had been correct. The shaman who’d sacrificed humans had escaped from his ambush that first day, and he didn’t particularly like Drew.
Chapter Thirty-Two — Timer
Drew looked behind him to make sure that Robbi was still standing; he was running forward but was otherwise fine. Drew began running towards JP and the others while scanning around him for the shaman. Where had they come from? How had they gotten out of the DIA building? The west side of that building was open baseball fields and then the river, which would have been nearly impossible to sneak through. Which meant they would have had to go east, along the freeway maybe, and circled back?
Scanning the rooftop of the exchange, the only large building to the south, he didn’t see anything out of the normal They could be lying down, waiting for the spell to come off cooldown? The shaman was an issue, but his late appearance and single attack indicated that he was probably there for Drew. It lent credence to Ares’ statements about him being more important than everyone else and explained why the Go’rai had mostly ignored the group back in the dungeon. How could he leverage that? He needed to be able to flush the shaman out.