The boom of thunder crashing behind him was the least of his worries as his stomach rolled up into his chest, and he began spinning end over end as he fell, the ground beneath him approaching rapidly. Drew cast gravitas, but still landed with a hard roll, his shoulder smashing against the ground as a wave of pain rolled over him.
Sitting up with a groan and then promptly vomiting from the pain, he stared at the chunks of beef jerky that now decorated the grass in front of him. Placing both hands on the ground caused another wave of nausea to roll over him, his stomach clenching. He removed his right hand and the pain went away, giving him enough strength to push himself to his feet. Looking around himself blearily, he shook his head, trying to get rid of the ringing sound in his ears. Green men were running towards him, though they were still a long way away, maybe a couple hundred feet? He realized there were muffled noises coming from behind him and he turned around.
JP had braced his rifle against an overturned shopping cart, the muzzle flashes the only indication to Drew that he was still firing. Bill was also waving his hands and it looked like he was shouting, but Drew still couldn’t hear anything over the ringing. He stared at the shattered tree behind JP and Bill, split down the center with two halves still clinging together by the mass of branches and leaves, but visibly sagging away from each other. Wait, was JP shooting at him?
That didn’t seem right, and he focused back on JP again. No, he should be shooting at the trolls. The trolls! Drew turned around to look behind him, but he spun too fast and the pain in his arm moved from a dull pounding to a sharp stabbing. The green men, no the trolls, from before were coming closer. Drew raised his good arm, and pointing at the trolls, launched all four of his long-range spells, one each from the fingers of his good hand. Fireballs and acid arrows shot out towards the trolls and he watched them in a detached manner. Did they seem to be moving faster than normal?
The trolls didn’t dodge away from any of the projectiles and all four of his targets went down. Vaguely he could hear a voice, though it couldn’t quite compete with the ringing in his ears. He probably shouldn’t be out in the open like this. He turned back towards JP and Bill more slowly this time, so as not to swing his arm, and began walking back towards the strange sloped building that was under the trees.
He stumbled a few times, he knew it was because he wasn’t paying attention to the ground as much as he should be, but he couldn’t really seem to bring himself to care. Bill and another person started running towards him. He should know all his people’s names at this point. He should ask them that, maybe after the ringing stopped.
He stopped. It was too much effort to walk and Bill was coming towards him anyway, he sat down, too tired to keep standing. Bill reached him, and Drew looked up; he was talking, but it was all so muffled that he couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then he hugged Drew and the world came back into sharp focus. The ringing in his ears and the fugue over his brain went away, replaced by the sharp pain in his shoulder from the hug.
Drew grunted like he had been punched, “Drew?” Bill asked.
“I’m okay, shoulder still hurts though,” Drew said, moving to stand up, but Bill kept him down.
“Yeah, you dislocated it, lay down and I’ll pop it back in,” Bill said, gently pushing him down while the other man moved to press against Drew’s good shoulder while Bill braced his legs against Drew’s side and neck, and then moved the arm out and towards him. With a sigh of relief, Drew could feel his shoulder slide back into the socket. “Don’t move it yet,” Bill said, and then he leaned over and hugged Drew again. Instantly he felt the muscles in his arm knit back together, the trauma of the dislocation being removed.
“Alright,” Bill said, and the other man released Drew. Sitting up, Drew glanced back towards the Trolls, now only a hundred feet away. He pointed his hands at the nearest and again launched four spells, targeting a clump of three with both frostfire ball and fireball and allowing the four acid arrows to target a single individual each. His spells caught all their targets; the shocking acid arrow targets collapsed and began convulsing while the two normal acid arrow targets merely became staggered for a second. It was just long enough for JP’s bullets to take one of them. The three hit by the fireball variants disappeared, a cloud of debris and body parts billowing out away from him in their wake.
He moved to stand up and both Bill and the other man helped him, “Get back to the shelter,” Drew said as he began casting frostfire storm. Bill headed back, but the other man didn’t, he just drew the wavy kris from his side and set himself between Drew and the approaching Trolls. Drew was slightly annoyed when he blocked his vision, but a half step was enough to see where he wanted to cast.
The seconds trickled by as the trolls got closer. Drew could see their eyes, and for the first time realized that instead of whites, their eyes were surrounded by a bright neon blue sclera. In their rush to get to him, they had clumped up, the hate visible on their faces. He idly wondered where the manaborn came from-were they conjured out of thin air, or transported from their homes by the system? He felt a moment of pity for them if they had been transported away from everything they knew to this new world. He wondered what sort of planet had created these green jumpers.
The spell finished casting, but two trolls were within 50’ of him and had jumped. The world seemed to slow down for a moment; he targeted the spell beyond where the two closest trolls were, catching many of them within its radius. The blast of air pressure as the storm appeared knocked Drew back half a step, and he could feel the tremors in the ground as the fire and ice bombarded the area so close to him. The blast of air threw the two leading trolls off target, and one of the airborne trolls he shot with a lightning bolt; the kinetic energy of the blast threw it back into the storm and to its certain death.
The second troll sailed through the air unobstructed and the man in front of Drew moved to attack it. Drew cursed because it was close enough for a cone, but the man had moved to block his line of sight again, meaning it would hit him as well. Drew shifted slightly trying to get a better angle, but the troll had landed gracefully, its thick legs pushing him directly towards Drew and the man in front of him. He could hear the crunch of the impact, and the man’s scream mingled with Drew’s own cry.
A report rang out and the troll burst into flames. His arms were entangled around the man, causing both to erupt in flames. Drew watched as the man who had tried to save his life caught on fire. The grass around him also began to burn, no doubt treated by the chemicals Katie’s group had scavenged up earlier. Drew stumbled away, angry and annoyed that he had another death on his conscious, and this one completely unnecessarily. If the man hadn’t jumped in front of him, he could have easily killed the troll. Angry at himself and at the man, but more than anything at the trolls, he turned back towards the bunker, shielding his face from the heat of the flames.
Reaching a small wall that Katie must have created for him, he turned around with fury in his eyes as he willed more trolls to appear. He heard voices behind him, but he brushed them aside, refusing to allow them even a moment of his focus. “No one blocks my line of sight.” His voice rang out loud and clear, the hardened fury causing all the chatter around him to taper off.
Waves of fury radiated off him. He felt something within him stirring, some force being drawn to his rage, a bubbling burning fire of ice that filled him with a clarity and rage he had never felt before in his life. It seemed to fill any cracks in his personality, burning away the pity he had felt for the manaborn just a few minutes ago and replacing it with a cold surety. It was calling for death and destruction, tightly controlled for now, but that was only because there was no target for his rage yet, no outlet for the power that filled his body.