Chapter 85

Ivey started moving. Dave was immediately propping her up.

“Ruuka, ruuka.”

“I am fine,” Ivey answered tiredly, leaning back into the support of Dave’s arms. Energy abruptly shot through her, and her eyes snapped opened, fear and panic reflected in them. “How many?”

“Three,” Daniel answered from where he was sitting opposite her.

“How did I—”

“RAfacw rascvad.”

“Yes, Dave protected you and kept them away from you.”

“Did you?” Ivey smiled up at the hairy mutated human. She might have almost died, but with the new world’s healing, the only effect Daniel knew was that she would be hungry.

“Raraf.”

“You know—” Ivey was now looking at him. “He said that you saved the day.”

“How did you translate that?” he asked in confusion.

“ Rascvad is saving the day. The other bit is his name for you?”

“What is he calling me?”

“Umm.” Ivey had a mischievous smile on her face. “I think it loosely translates as Dickhead Druid.”

“Raraf.”

“Really, Dave?”

The man gave him a big thumbs up and a toothy grin. For the first time, Daniel realised Janice was hidden behind Dave.

“Janice?”

She looked out from behind her father.

“How are you here? I mean, I did not see you.”

“The spear you made.”

“What about the spear?”

“Rauoa ragaa.”

“It is sort of part of me, and it has magic,” Janice said, subconsciously hugging the long weapon to her chest.

“REar RAAVTAL.”

“The spear saved us all,” Ivey translated.

“Dave, let her talk.”

“When we were getting overwhelmed, it asked . . .” The girl blushed at using that description for a piece of wood.

“My club talks to me too,” Daniel said gently.

“It asked,” she repeated more strongly, “me to spin it really fast, and when I did, it sent out a wave of energy that knocked the moths back. Then Dad told me to run and pushed me toward the door. I stumbled past it and then there were termites between me and its safety. They were almost crawling on my feet and I froze, but the spear did something so that nothing could see me.”

Two skills, Daniel thought to himself, and powerful ones. Just what was he creating with his magic? His own club had at least three skills that he was aware of: the ability to adjust its shape, the spike that turned into egg beater to scramble brains, and of course the new lightning trick.

Ivey was looking intently at the spear. Her eyes went unfocused. “Seed spear level one. Possesses the wind tornado skill. Spin the spear quickly to generate a wave of air to knock away enemies. And child invisibility shield, which enhances the existing child shield to grant invisibility. That is amazing.”

“Ingrid,” Daniel yelled suddenly. “Is your bow doing anything special?”

The Swedish woman looked up from her conversation. “I think it is throwing little puffs of air to protect me from flying things. It knocked a mind worm away when we were saving Ivey and then later a moth.”

Daniel had missed that mind worm during the fight. Do you want to find the body? he thought to it.

There was a hum of excitement but nothing like the explosion of emotion that a live mind worm had generated.

The weapons he had created for other people had saved two lives. He needed to learn how to craft more of them.

“If you have cores and want a weapon, come see me,” Daniel said loudly. “I think I know how to create seed weapons.”

Everyone else looked confused apart from Ivey, whose eyes who went unfocused, and then she studied him speculatively before delivering a look that every guy alive would recognise. A promise to talk later. She mouthed the word “Cores?”

He grimaced, knowing that he was sprung.

“I get one from the first batch,” Tamara told him quietly. He leant back slightly at her voice, turning to face her and increasing the contact of their arms. Emotionally, he felt like she was regressing him to early teenage years’ status.

“Of course. I just need to make sure it is special enough.” Did he really just say that? “Is matched to your magic,” he corrected lamely, mentally assigning four magic-based zombie cores to the wizard staff—ice, earth armour, telekinesis, and he was not sure what else was available. Maybe speed or possibly a hulk one, as that seemed to have been the basis of all the other weapons he had created.

“I . . . thank you.”

He needed to get going.

Daniel stood up to create some physical distance. The longer this conversation went, the more stupid things he was saying.

Animal Sense reached out, and he had a single target. He searched for the termites. They had an amazing weak signature, but there were lots of them, and now that he had identified them, his power plucked them out and upgraded their strength from what Animal Sense insisted as weak to the threat levels he had observed when the wave of them attacked.

Despite the number of termites already destroyed, the hive was still numerous. He ignored the workers and looked past them, searching for the queen, because if they were hive insects, then they would have one. Termites’ colonies always had a queen dedicated to breeding. He just needed to find it. Frantically, in the confines of his mind, he focused on the concentration of the termites. They were densest on level thirty-seven, which was unsurprisingly the level that Ivey had been assigned and where they faced the strongest resistance.

In his mind, he followed the workers. Closer to the centre of the mass, there were stronger versions, or at least physically larger. He mentally tagged them as soldiers, and they were concentrated around a pair of rooms. He studied what he had sensed harder, especially the rooms the soldiers surrounded, but there was nothing there, only a void of animal life.

On a hunch, he expanded the strength of the spell, as the queen had to be there. Nothing else made sense. The spell suddenly had more of a kick to it. If he had wanted to, he could have reached the ground, but instead he focused on that one room. That suspicious emptiness.

Priscilla, without being asked, joined her magic with him. Peering right into the room, the extra magnification burst through the layers of defence.

The queen was massive. She filled an entire hotel room and her innate magic had hidden her.

No wonder they had succumbed to an unexpected ambush. The bloody bugs had powers specifically tailored to keep them hidden. Even the normal termites possessed it, which is why he had not registered the threat that they represented. The more important the insect was to the colony, the stronger the protections. He could see the soldiers . . . but barely. The queen and king’s protection was so dense that only his amplified spell combined with Priscilla had broken through it. If he had not known that termites had a queen, he would have missed them with his sweep.

He pinged his spell again to extract their skills.

The energy ran out, and the familiar headache of depletion hit him.

He stumbled, and Tamara grabbed him. “What?”

“I will need another ten minutes,” he told them, rubbing his forehead to relieve the tension that appeared. It was magically generated by his empty mana pool, so logically the action would do nothing. However, years of habitat were not so easy to ignore. “I know what happened,” he whispered so only Ivey, Tamara, and Dave could hear. “The termites have an ability that hides them from detection. We need to kill the queen and her guards, but I know just where to go.”

He shut his eyes. As mana trickled slowly back, the impact of the mana depletion faded.

He looked up and found everyone from before was still there. The entire area was packed, enhanced fighters fidgeting impatiently. Waiting for a chance to get revenge for their losses and kill to make community safer. As far as he could tell, no one had left. “Why are you all here?”

“We all want to fight,” the fire mage told him defiantly.

Daniel smiled at that. He had delivered a kick-arse speech, and given the number of shitty termites, he needed every weapon he could get.

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