Chapter 19

The building creaked yet again, and Daniel jumped slightly. The volume was not alarming, but remained disturbing. Everything settled once more and except for the occasional incidents of tortured structural supports complaining it was peaceful up here.

Tamara had kissed him!

It had been a long time since something so innocent had affected him this seriously. It was like he was a schoolboy again. His mind was jumping from topic to topic at a hectic pace. Threats to their life, the challenge of shaping the burgeoning community, Tamara, the kids they had saved today. His mind focused on that for a moment. After witnessing the state of the building and then all the bodies, he had mentally prepared for the worst. There had been a small amount of hope caused by the noise of the flies crashing into a barrier. The slight chance that they were trying to get to people rather than being dumb insects had buoyed his spirit. But he had resigned himself to discovering only corpses and been overjoyed to find humans alive. In the end, most of the trapped children had survived. It was almost a miracle. This survival rate of the building’s occupants, despite the dire straits they had been in when he had made it to the ninth floor was actually better than elsewhere.

His senses registered when Tamara exited the staircase below him and he stood up and had one last look at the desolation surrounding him. The weaving of wood with concrete to keep this section of the building stable. Ivey had said it would last to winter, but he wasn’t so sure. The destruction the flies had wrought was too extensive for that. Even if left undisturbed and the flies did no more damage, small chunks would fall from the holes, the flies had already created. Eventually, one of those pieces would start a chain reaction and a catastrophic collapse.

But hopefully not today. He rushed down the flimsy steps and was not at all concerned about his creation giving way because he monitored it continually.

When he reached the garage, it was bedlam. A waft of smoke hit his nose and went down his throat. His eyes watered from the acrid taste. There was no panic anywhere, so it must have been a deliberate fire and he could smell fried meat as well. Someone was cooking breakfast and given the only meat was devil dog he decided to wait till he got back to the hotel. Still generating that much smoke in an underground space had to be dangerous, but he assumed people smarter than him were monitoring the situation.

Daniel assessed things further. The place was controlled by chaos, with people running everywhere. He focused on finding someone to explain what was happening and his eyes fell on the large group of people they had rescued. Jasmine had informed him of the numbers involved, but until now he had not actually understood what that meant. When they were rescuing them, he was busily fighting or reinforcing the stairwell and he had only dimly registered the actual people walking past him to use the stairs.

There were kids everywhere! They were corralled and forced to mostly sit in the same spot, but there were more than he expected, and almost all of them seemed starved. They looked like the famine or war survivors he had seen on the television. All of them moved haltingly, shell-shocked with wide eyes. They had also thankfully clumped around Jasmine and Maysa sitting in the space near the fire door, and skewers of charred meat were being brought over to the kids.

They were tearing into the meat even as they were cautioned to eat slowly because too much would make them sick. Maysa tried to bring order. She had found a scrap of metal from a car which she was operating as a platter. A dagger that he recognised as created in the blacksmith’s forge was in her hands. She must have borrowed from a fighter and was using it to slice the chunks into more edible pieces.

“Wait your turn.” She snapped at one of the older kids who had snatched a falling chunk just before a toddler’s grasping hand reached it.

Other small hands snagged other pieces that fell. There was no question about only serving the properly cooked sections. He saw bloody chunks dropped that were consumed with the same gusto as the cooked ones. Jasmine was telling them to go easy and there was plenty of food. They didn’t seem to care all of them trying to snag their own bit.

Daniel forced himself to look away.

Kids, starving children who had seen most of their careers die and hadn’t been comforted by their parents for over a week. It wasn’t right. It was horrible more evidence that this was not a fairy tale. This, in a way, was a natural event and nature, when it acted was never kind. Daniel was thinking about tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic explosions, then his thoughts turned to the weather. Flooding and drought could have just as much of a devastating impact as the above. This alpha physics event, or whatever they called it was on the scale of all of them combined and it didn’t play favourites.

He searched for someone to talk to and spotted Tamara coming from where the fire had to be. She was bringing another handful of skewers to the kids.

The way her eyes soften when she got close, and the children scrambled around her. She was a kind person. At their urging, she allowed herself to be pulled down. A small girl desperately clung onto Tamara’s neck and she responded by engulfing the tiny toddler in a fierce cuddle. The girl must have been no older than three. Another two sat on her lap and a couple of the older kids took the skewers, claiming one for themselves and passing the others to Maysa.

Daniel spotted Alex and rushed toward him and then realised that Alex was returning the favour.

“Can you please break down the garage door?” Alex asked instantly. “I need it open in five.”

Daniel went to work even as Alex was yelling for everyone to be ready to leave in five minutes.

A little recklessly, he burnt his mana to break the links faster and then with his job complete he stepped away as the rest of the fighters swarmed in to wrestle the chunks of the barrier away to open up a path. He froze when he heard arguing.

“Carly,” Alex said, sounding exasperated. “You can’t take the whole hive.”

Daniel immediately walked over to them. His magic was no longer required as all the key wooden links had been broken and now it’s just a matter of muscles.

Alex, Richard, and Carly in the middle of the garage were in the midst of an animated discussion.

“Carly,” Richard said, sounding frustrated. “I know your pet wants to bring the entire hive. That’s only natural. But it’s not happening. You need to tell her firmly. I won’t allow us to have a medium-sized silver fly hive close to us. What happens if something happens to Iris? We’ll lose our control of the flies and if they’re right next to us, it’ll be a bloodbath.”

“As you said, it’s only an issue. If something happens to Iris. It’s not like she’ll be going out hunting or anything like that. She’ll be safer than she was here and to be truthful Daniel was only successful because we got lucky timing. Another day of maturity and he wouldn’t have got near her. Not only will she strengthen her defences and I’ll be there to protect her and all of you too.”

“I know you want to do what’s best for your pet.” Alex replied calmly. “I understand the desire, but Richard’s argument stands. He has the best grasp of the capabilities and risks of Alpha creatures and if he says it is too dangerous, then we listen. Otherwise, what’s the point of having experts?”

“Ivey?” Daniel asked abruptly when he saw that his ex-girlfriend was interested and had come over to join the conversation like he had. “What’s your view?”

“Not my call.” She answered with a shrug. “Plus, how can I say this? There’s not much difference between the two options.”

“See,” Richard said immediately. “We all know that Ivey’s the most gung-ho of all of us. If she doesn’t see the benefit of repositioning the hive, it’s not there.”

“It really depends on what you think of the croldlics.” Ivey interrupted unhelpfully.

“I think they’re our biggest threat.” Daniel said quietly.

Richard rounded on him with a look of exasperation on his face. “How can you make that judgement? How much do you know about their racial ability, strengths, and risk factors? Their territorial behaviour? How they respond to a coherent threat?”

“Not much more than what you have told me.” Daniel admitted. “But if I said that there’s over a hundred of these at the level of strength of the one we killed what would you say? Would that change your assessment?”

Richard went a little white. “I would say you’re exaggerating or just plain wrong.”

“But that many would change things?”

Richard nodded.

“Those sorts of numbers are possible, aren’t they?”

The old man inclined his head in agreement. “Theoretically.”

“And if there were that many, then would you decision on the hive location alter?”

Richard, to his credit considered the question. “I think we wouldn’t have a choice but to bring the hive closer. If there were indeed a combined number of croldlic hunters over a hundred, then we’d need the flies combat power to survive against raids of that size.”

“Well then, that’s your answer.”

“But there aren’t a hundred of them. It’s easy to make poor decisions if you start with incorrect assumptions.”

“Agreed.” Daniel said with a grim smile. “I saw a pack of about thirty hunting something two nights ago.”

“A single pack?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure, because… um… I was imagining five or six.”

“You should have clarified further. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure that night I saw a separate group of them, but they were too far away to get positive identification. That’s not a hundred, but it’s getting close to halfway there and it’s only what I saw. I don’t have vision over their whole hunting range. The fact is, we know there’s at least thirty. But we don’t know if there are thirty, sixty, a hundred or five hundred only that it’s over thirty. We will not be planning for them to be at the minimum of that range. Unless behaviourally they only ever send out a single hunting pack?” Daniel queried. “Because if that’s the case I can admit I’m wrong.”

Richard shook his head. “No, having heard that such a large exists… well it changes everything. That’s about the biggest hunting pack they’ll send. The tribe needs to be hundreds strong for that.”

“So, the hive moves.”

“Fine.” Richard conceded.

“It’s not fine.” Daniel snapped. “It’s far from fine. I should never have to be involved in making these decisions.”

“If you had mentioned thirty earlier, you wouldn’t have been.” Richard shot back.

“It’s not about the thirty. There shouldn’t have even been an argument, anyway. Nothing I’ve observed since the world went to hell makes me think that we’re about to get good news. Based on what we’ve seen so far, if there’s a chance of them being a hundred or ten, you don’t bloody well make your decisions assuming the best possible outcome.”

“I agree.” Richard said, sounding defeated. “But the flies are deadly. Establishing a hive near us is an enormous risk.”

“But it’s not,” he repeated with frustration. “Even if they’re wild, we can hold them off. I can create a layer of leaves using alcohol to make a surface impenetrable. They’re not a threat to us.”

“A queen can make them go through that.”

“The queen in this scenario.” He pointed to Iris. “Is dead. They’re not going to suddenly get another one. And if they don’t have a queen, just putting them between us and the bay would work. They would become a natural hazard that locks down a block or more.”

“There’s no point talking about it now.” Alex declared impatiently. “The decisions has been made. The only question left is how to execute it.”

“Get the kids back first.” Daniel answered without hesitation. “Then a smaller team Can escort Carly back here. She can grab the hive and we can be done.”

“Agreed.” Alex said brusquely, and then started barking out orders.

Tamara reluctantly separated from her new fans, explaining to them that she needed her hands free to cast magic. Alex organised them into his preferred travel formations, and they marched out onto the street. The kids and everyone that had been rescued were put in the centre and together they moved through the middle of what used to be a relatively major thoroughfare, weapons magic at ready to destroy anything that dared to challenge them.

Nothing did or at least nothing material challenged their numbers. One and then a second half a block passed with the worst animal they fought being some sort of mutated house cat, which is the size of a doberman but significantly faster.

Once more, the convoy was protected by the accuracy and speed of the tanks that had been in a positioned in a loose circle around everyone else.

Games and books, from what Daniel could tell had got things very very wrong or at least Alex had implemented a vision that was quite different to the traditional setups. The tanks they had were not the type to be dressed in thick plate mail and be nigh-on unmovable and excruciatingly slow like the popular version. Instead, Alex’s adaptation was faster than most melee fighters and relied on a magical ability that effectively allowed them to absorb the charge or blow of something far larger than themselves.

Some also had a way to annoy a monster into focusing exclusively on them, but that was an optional extra. Mainly, their method was higher battlefield speed.

It was a simple setup and to Daniel’s perspective a much more sensible fighter construction than his usual view of those filling the tanking role.

They continued onwards, and they were two-thirds of the way there and the tension reduced slightly. This close to the hotel a lot of the monsters should already have been cleared.

“Lizard.” Alex yelled out suddenly.

That was a babble of reaction and Daniel looked up at the hotel tower. The flag had changed to the colour that showed the lizard was on its way. Run, hide and shelter was the instruction.

“Everyone speed up.” Alex yelled. “Run, we can make it to the hotel in time.”

Daniel jogged to keep pace with the group, but Ivey reacted grabbed his arm and then Carly’s yanking them both to a stop.

“What?” Daniel demanded.

“It won’t work. The lizard will get us. We need to split up or all of us will die. Teams three and four on me!” Ivey yelled.

Alex slowed to a stop and looked back in confusion.

“It’s necessary,” Ivey insisted. “We have to be bait and lead the lizard away. We do this and we can all survive.”

Alex hesitated, and then nodded. “Teams three and four obey Ivey.” Then he sprinted to catch up with the running group thought he slowed to scoop two younger kids into his arm and put an older boy who was limping onto his back.

Without another instant of hesitation, Ivey scooped up Iris and shoved it into Daniel’s arms, and then she took off at a run. “Keep up,” she yelled over her shoulder. “We’re sheltering back in the basement.”

Tamara, despite not being in teams three or four stopped and joined their team. Together, all eleven of them and one silver fly queen being carried ran after Ivey. She was short, had poor attributes, but nor was she holding back. Daniel found himself forced to lengthen his stride and push physically to match her pace.

“This feels like a mistake.” He called out to Ivey.

She ignored him.

“Faster.” she ordered. “It’s coming after us and not them, but we still have a chance.”

“Why now? Why is the lizard noticing us now?”

“Bad luck, and Alex was stupid. We know it sometimes comes this way in the mornings. We should have waited too the afternoon before travelling with such a large group. But he didn’t listen and was too scared of the building collapsing.”

She sped up.

“Do we have a plan?”

Ivey hesitated a moment before answering the question. Her eyes went unfocused, and distracted she tripped, but by engaging strength we could pluck her up, cradle her with one arm and keep running.

She finished her internal consultation. “Plan has to be to drive it away instead of hiding.”

He could distinctively remember the lizard hunting those men on top of the car park and how fast it had been when it wanted to move and how tiny the humans had been. “How?”

“Carly and you need to get control of the main swarm. The rest of us will hide in the south-west corner of the basement. Given the structural damage to date, if the building falls that area should be safe. You take Carly upstairs, she claims swarm, and you gather all the wood you’ve got set up there to create a wooden barrier that can survive the upper floors falling on it.”

“What?”

“It’s doable.” She insisted. Daniel glanced up. He had only twenty seconds before he needed to make a choice between basement and the upstairs area.

“I don’t have anything with structural integrity. It’s all plywood.”

Her hand reached out to touch his face.

Once more, they shared memories. She was actively trying to suppress random ones and keep things professional. But the Tamara kiss slipped through. That unbidden generated a burst of joy from her. She approved, but was embarrassed by the lack of control.

The link settled, and the indiscriminate emotions stopped being passed.

Then the details she was actually trying to share were passed.

There was the structural model of the building. The mathematics were mind blowingly complex, but there were multiple models of how the lizard could cause collapse and in nearly all of them the corner they were targeting would survive.

Then there was the analysis of the lizard. The hive would target it with everything they had. The flies couldn’t kill it, but they could annoy it sufficiently so that burrowing for humans was not a sensible use of its time. That was how they would drive it away by tickling it to distraction. The odds of that being a success were nearly a hundred percent, with the only assumption being that Iris could get in touch with her old hive in time.

Finally, there was the framework which he had put up and calculations of what would happen if that wood was collapsed around him and the building then fell on top of those defences. Probabilities flashed up. Most of them were green, but his part of the three prongs that had been considered was the most risky.

Though a lot less risky than stopping running and letting the monster catch him. That probability was certain death.

The connection broke as his foot hit a stray bit of building material and almost made him fall flat on his face.

He activated Speed and corrected his balance.

Ivey was watching his face for a reaction. “And?”

“This is ridiculous.” he muttered.

Ivey didn’t say anything, and the building was looming closer.

Daniel placed her down. “Go,” he ordered. “I’ll do my bit. It’s not like we have a choice.” There was a choice and both he and Ivey knew about it. They could have sent Carly alone to trigger the hive and drive off the lizard. Daniel would be safe in the basement and Carly… Well that was why he had chosen that path.

Now Tom understood the reason for the plan he agreed wholeheartedly with it. There was no way to validate those models, but the fact he was still alive said more about Ivey’s help than his own abilities.

“Carly, we need you to gather the hive and tell them to attack the lizard. Drive it away from the building.”

Her chest was heaving, but she nodded to show she understood.

All he could do now was hope that everything they had planned worked as well as they hoped.

The main group sprinted towards the side street and the garage entrance while Daniel, Carly and Iris went straight into the main building. The signs of their battle from the previous day were still visible. Hundreds of dead fly carcasses on the ground and there was a significant amount of structural damage near the emergency stairs.

The thirty flies accompanying Carly suddenly spiralled up and headed for the corner of the restaurant from where the flies had previously emerged from upstairs.

“What?” he asked even as he burst through the fire stairs door into the well-worn fire stairs that he had traipsed up and down multiple times the previous night.

He stormed up the stairs with Carly next to him.

“They’re going to gather the non-rogue flies to us.” She answered as she sprinted next to him. “By the time we get up all the hives Iris control will find us for new instructions.”

They emerged into the cleared space in the middle of the building. Now, in the day’s light or at least late dawn, the space looked totally different. The staircase he had created appeared ridiculous. A series of stacked cylinders covered in purple leaves that went upward at an angle that made the whole thing look like ramshackle, precarious construction.

Which to be fair, was exactly what it was.

His mind remembered what Ivey had shared with him.

She thought the building had a good chance of collapsing and before it did; he needed to build protection for the three of them.

He pulled Carly behind him as he entered the bottom of his constructed stairwell holding Iris. His body was moving on autopilot as his mind had already plunged into the network he had created. Carefully, he mapped the connections and calculated how to get the wooden mass above him to collapse gracefully on top of him.

Priscilla hopped off and manoeuvred to get her own direct connection to the construction and Blood Drinker added its own wisdom.

The three of them working like a well-oiled machine. To collapse the whole thing was pretty basic. All you had to do was to sever the handful of connections to the roof.

To have it fall so the bulk of the mass fell upon them was not that much harder. That involved tweaking the sequence that the anchor points were released.

A chaotic collapse was likely to do more harm than good and it would be better if they could up with someway to fold the entire stairwell down slowly. Daniel focused on that concept.

Abrupt Alarm spiked from Priscilla.

Then time froze around him!

One second, he was puzzling out whether the solution to the problem was algorithmic instructions and the next Priscilla was no longer helping and instead was sharing the image of what was coming through her eyes.

She was looking at the centre of the building. Not the centre of the hollowed-out section, but the actual geographical centre of the entire structure. It was visible because flies had extended their hollowed out central hive space a few metres beyond that spot.

In frozen time Daniel’s mind struggled to register, to comprehend what he was seeing. He would have thought that he would be over this rush of crashing emotions by now.

He had seen so many things that were ridiculously strong and confounded his understanding of how the world working. That super feral which had taunted him had power that defined reality, the lizard eating that man. The speed it had possessed when it had acted and even briefly the octopod when it first brought it telekinetics into play and most recently the croldlics through their danger was more in numbers than individual power. They were all monsters of immense power that had hardened his heart from surprises.

He thought he had gone beyond the possibility of being surprised. The epiphany when he had realised the truth of how magic worked and a path to leverage his own unique gifts to make himself the most powerful person in the world and capable of fighting back against the monsters and inflicted this new reality.

That promise.

He had experienced it all but frozen in time Daniel realised that once more he was wrong. The assumption that his power curve would let him face a monster like this was wrong.

The still image that Priscilla was presenting to him changed everything.

It was here. The lizard was not a figment of the flag user’s at the hotel’s imagination.

No, it was very real and as casual as you would like it had punched its tail through the building. Thirty metres into the building! And twelve metres straight up.

That simple image Priscilla was showing him revealed the depths of the difference between a true Alpha monster and the height that he had briefly imagined that he could ascend to.

The tail was here. Less than ten metres from him.

A flat, sharpened triangular end that was the size of an office chair coming out of the flesh of the tail that was thicker than he was. It was only the tip of a much larger appendage.

Time slipped a fraction of a second.

The tail continued sweeping through space.

Tom could now look through the shattered walls that were behind the tail when he took advantage of an area free of debris where the tail had existed for a fraction of an instant earlier. That gap would not last. Tom could already see that the walls above were crumbling, and they would collapse to fill that space, probably with rocks but failing that with dust.

The consequences of what he was seeing were clear. It was like a sword whipping through a cake that was also precariously balanced because a kid had scooped out large parts of it. There was no question that the cake, or in this case the building was going to collapse.

Daniel wondered if Tamara had got safely to the corner of the basement?

He speculated if Iris had communicated with enough of a hive to harass it into leaving?

How much control did the Queen have?

Did it matter?

The hive couldn’t hold up the construction, let alone fight the lizard that had casually wrecked such havoc with a single tail swing.

Focus. Priscilla’s clear thoughts broke through the paralysis that had fallen over his mind.

Defence, create, build, survive, live.

With a curse Daniel let all of his worries disappeared. And focused on the one thing that mattered.

He needed to construct a shell capable of surviving a building fall on it. Everything else was beyond his