Chapter 21

Daniel woke up to the feel healing magic flowing through him.

A sense of déjà vu hit him. He was back on the table, strapped so tightly he couldn’t move because of the shard of glass in his heart. Healers would be nearby on standby ready to heal him because even breathing had the potential to open up his wounds.

Then his brain caught up.

That problem had been fixed, and the surrounding were not wrong. Yes, he was mostly pinned, but that was not a localised containment in a larger room. He was bound because the space he found himself in was so small.

Daniel remembered the lizard, the collapsing roof, and the desperate construction he had created. Then those crushing forces.

What happened? He thought to himself as he tried to piece together events that had led to the current state. To help he shuffled his torso and used his eyes and senses to assess what state he was in. His body felt battered and all of it was sore except for his leg?

His leg? He couldn’t feel it.

Daniel shifted purposefully now that his brain was in gear and he catalogued his surroundings. The wood and popped fibrous patches from the air bag equivalents he had created surrounded him. Given the amount of sharp splinters and that chunk of concrete with a piece of metal reinforcement sticking out of it those natural based air bags probably saved his life. He did not want to imagine what the splinters or that chunk of building hitting him without protection would have done. He pushed up and tilted his down head to see the problematic leg.

Then he swallowed heavily.

It was bent at the wrong angle but it was still there, which was better than he had expected.

Daniel shivered as he remembered what had happened.

That tail.

The panic to build a shelter to survive tonnes of metal and concrete falling upon him.

The desperate gamble he had undertaken in trusting an unproven program to save his life.

All the frantic moments of the building collapse were printed in full glorious colour on his memory.

Especially the lizard. That tail, both its size and how fast it must have been moving to have done what it did.

To just blast a hole in a modern tower with a tail swipe.

Then the chaos that followed. A collapsing building and at the end Priscilla watching it fall.

Had it actually fallen on him and had he really survived that by using his mana pool and three seconds of focus?

He didn’t even need to think about it. The fact he was having these thought was the answer to that question. Yes, against the odds, he had lived.

Then he remembered Ivey had sent him for a purpose.

“Carly?” he called out, panicked. “You alive?”

“I’m ok.” Carly told him. “I was talking to Iris.”

Of course, she was, Daniel scolded his slow thoughts. Someone had been healing him. He had felt it when he awoke and the fresh blood on his chest without cuts was further evidence.

“I was uninjured. Your only injuries were your leg, a superficial gash on your abdomen, and your heart.”

“My heart? What happened? Has it got worse?”

“Yes, it was damaged. A consequence I think of the forces it was subjected to. I don’t think you’ve hurt it further, but you’re going to have to spend some time with Ivy to get it fixed. You need to book in half an hour with her a day for the next couple of weeks.”

“Tamara is going to love that.”

“Tamara will love you staying alive. She’ll support it.” He could almost hear the teenage petulance in her tone and the eye roll.

“I’m not taking relationship advice from a sixteen-year-old.”

“Fifteen,” she corrected him smugly.

“Do you know what happened?” Daniel asked, deciding to ignore her banter.

There was a chuckle. “You threw me in a cocoon of wood. Nothing happened for almost forty seconds and then everything went crazy.”

“How’s my leg?

“Attached, but badly broken. The bones are pointing in the wrong direction, so I haven’t healed that part. Once we’ve got more room, we’ll shift the leg, set the bone, and it should be easy enough to heal after that. Iris meanwhile lost a leg entirely.”

“Is she?”

“She’ll live. Legs are not that important to a silver fly.”

Daniel felt like bashing his head against a wall. On that first day, he had decided to avoid close battles. The mathematics was simple: you fight a hundred times with a one percent chance of dying then you were probably dead. He was supposed to be avoiding these types of engagements, yet they kept happening. “Another disaster.” Daniel muttered.

“If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.”

“Unless it’s a glass shard through your heart that leaves scar tissue that never goes away.”

“Ivy will fix that and then once she has done so, I’m sure you’ll be stronger from the experience.”

“Am I getting teased by fifteen-year-old.”

She laughed. “Yep, and you’re losing badly.”

Carefully, Daniel extended his plant senses, and it took him a moment to interpret what he was sensing. Most of the neat sphere he had constructed was gone. It had been broken and shattered by the forces that had struck, but Daniel guessed that was what it had been designed to do. All those smashed bits of wood were inter-spaced with building debris having absorbed the force of the falling ceiling which should have killed them. The building had absolutely fallen on top of them and popped his protective sphere like you would a balloon.

“Can iris communicate with any of her hive?”

“Not meaningfully.” Carly admitted after a moment of consideration. “She’s in contact with ten or so right at the edge of a range.”

“Has the lizard gone?” That was the question Daniel wanted answered. If it was still around, he would sit still till it departed.

Carly hesitated an instant and then nodded. “Iris seems to think so. It’s the only feasible explanation for why so many are as close as they are.”

She didn’t know, and her answer was pure guesswork. Daniel was torn about what to do, but decided there was no rush and he shouldn’t break out till both of their mana pools were fully recovered. But there was no reason he couldn’t get a better understanding of his situation, that and healing himself had to be the priority.

Small amounts of energy spread out and the first thing he did was to rearrange the space. He jerked his body up and sideways and his leg flapped into the space he had created. The lack of pain concerned him. Was that a backbone thing? Did he have wider problems? Did healing fix nerve damage?

“I can’t feel it.”.

“I’m numbing the pain.” Carly volunteered.

“Of course.” he muttered. “I knew that.” He was very glad that she had been, as it was easy enough to imagine how freeing his leg up as much as he did would have hurt if he had been feeling pain like normal. Given the angle, he was a little surprised that the bone had not pierced the skin when he had moved it.

“We need to straighten it before healing. You’re going to have to help because I lack the strength. And I sort of can’t get close enough, anyway.”

Daniel was getting sick of the concept of carrying out surgery on himself. In fact, he was pretty much over being frequently hurt. He needed to stop being intimately involved in every disaster that struck the group.

Then again, he was here because Ivey had seen a way to save the entire community and acted to do so. The downside was Daniel being injured, but that versus most of the innocent children being eaten was something that he would happily live with.

Daniel shook his head to clear it. “You want me to force the bone back into the right position myself.”

Carly grimaced when he put it that way. “Like you did with the heart. I think it’s for the best, because I don’t have the strength.”

His mind considered how he would do that. What commands to build into the intelligence to break the bone the right way or even if intelligence was the appropriate solution.

Blood Drinker communicated its desire to help.

He was startled at the intervention.

I help too. Priscilla immediately chimed in, sharing images of her using the plants to straighten out his legs and, if necessary re-break the bones to get them into position. Unlike the club, she had followed the full conversation and understood what was being offered. There was a sense of glee in the mouses thoughts.

Blood Drinker is better. He thought back hurriedly. Plus, the job is boring. He quickly clarified before she got upset. Good to give boring stuff to the club.

There was a thoughtful silence.

I’ll supervise then..

Good idea, he thought neutrally while telling Blood Drinker in no uncertain terms to listen to Carly. With its plant magic, Daniel was confident it could do what was needed and wouldn’t experiment like Priscilla might be tempted to do.

“My club will do it.” Daniel told Carly while moving Blood Drinker to be next to the strangely bent leg. The straight club’s proximity just further illustrated the unnatural angle.

Deliberately he looked away as Blood Drinker manipulated his leg. It knew more than enough about anatomy to direct these levels of basic realignments. There was the unpleasant sensation of sections of his leg moving and folding over in ways that they shouldn’t but Carly’s spell stopped him from feeling pain.

Carly was mumbling instructions the whole time and he couldn’t tune her out or block his ears because Blood Drinker needed him to interpret the directions.

“Left.” “Tighter.” “Good.” “No up, now down.” “Now squeeze.”

Daniel could feel Blood Drinker responding and he deliberately looked elsewhere. There was a rush of healing. He attempted to watch the magic, but it was too difficult, and the patterns slipped away from him. Maybe if she was trying to teach him and went slowly, it would be possible to gain some of that information, but watching it was like reading an unfamiliar language. He could see some patterns, could recognise the segments which were words, but did not know what it all meant.

“Done. Can’t tell it was ever broken.” Carly said in a satisfied tone.

“Thank you.”

She waved off the compliment. “It’s my job. That and,” she patted Iris. “Defending the entire community. What can you do, Daniel? Only bash things?”

Daniel smiled. “And build bomb shelters. Don’t forget about that.”

“Speaking of that.” She glanced around pointedly. “We survived. How do we get out?”

“It’ll be easy enough,” he assured her. “I’m making sure my mana’s is topped up and give the lizard a chance to go away and then we’ll break out.”

“Daniel? What happened back there? I know the building’s collapsed. But why? And how did you know it was going to collapse?”

“I was worried about the lizard chasing us in here and if it did, it was pretty clear the whole thing would cave in, so I was sort of preparing. Then,” Daniel stopped talking as the sheer power of the tail swipe stole his words and his brain freeze once more.

“What?”

“It didn’t follow us in instead it swung its tail through the building. A single blow cut a gash through most of the fourth floor that wasn’t already hollowed.” he stopped talking for a moment. “There was nothing supporting the upper floors, so the whole building collapsed.”

“The lizard?”

“Yes.”

“So the flags on the tower, Ivey saying it was following us. None of that was exaggeration.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“And straight through the building. Is that even possible?”

“It absolutely is. Priscilla shared her vision. I saw it with her eyes. Otherwise, I would have said no.”

“You know I’ve seen it from a distance.”

“Most of us have.” Daniel agreed.

“It was terrifying though it was a kilometre away.”

“Worse in person.” Daniel assured her.

She shuddered next to him.

“I’m sure it’s gone.”

She smiled weakly. “I’m happy to wait a little longer down here even if it is uncomfortable.”

Another ten minutes passed and fully topped up he was ready to start his escape.

Daniel let his magic spread out. He had already taken command of a lot of the wood nearby and from those pieces tendrils sprouted. They wove through the broken shattered fragments of stone and in short order broke through to the surface.

It confirmed his suspicions they were only buried under about five metres of rubble. In pure distance, it was not far. Four or five steps but simultaneously the volume of debris was massive. It was a matter of perspective. The weight of that much rock would crush him even with his enhanced vitality if he was not protected within a cave. Vice versa if that lizard had tried to get them the layer of broken building would barely slow it for a minute.

It was what it was, and Daniel focused on survival. Plant sense did not support a long-range version of sight so he couldn’t confirm that the lizard had left, but at the very least it was not lurking nearby ready to pounce. Plus, if it was on the debris he would have expected to have felt the thud of its footfalls. His assumption that it was gone remained in force and he kept working to extract the four of them, himself, Carly, Priscilla and Iris, while resolving to be as secretive as possible.

Could you check? He asked the mouse, imagining her going to the surface and scanning to see if the lizard was nearby.

Plant tunnel? She thought along with images of him forming a shaft that she could run up similar to what he had done in the hotel.

Daniel sighed. She wasn’t keen to push through the dust and with her large core she was not a normal mouse. She couldn’t squeeze through gaps like she used to be able to requiring holes as large as her to get through. He mapped out a path that he could use to create a Priscilla sized corridor but decided it was almost as easy to bust out himself and between his own senses and Iris’s observations he was relatively certain that the lizard had gone. Even from observation of it, the creature was not the type to spend a long time in one spot especially this far from the centre of its territory.

With a thought, he engaged the engineering program that Ivey’s interface had gifted him and spent a minute expanding out the tendrils. He had to fully sense the structure of the rubble and map out as many chunks as possible.

“Are you doing anything?”

“Yeah. I’m gathering the information I need to escape.”

With the processing power he supplied to supplement them, the four tiny chips of Ivey’s interface went to work. Daniel senses the billions of calculations being executed in building a solution. Finally, the engineering program gave him the green light. It had mapped all the individual chunks of rock above him and created a model that accurately predicted what would happen when he did certain actions.

Daniel expressed his wish. He wanted out with the least amount of external disturbance as possible. This time, the calculation window was small. Within seconds, a plan to tunnel out presented itself and he got to work. His tool was the surrounding wood. In some places, it grew, lifting a rock slightly, while in others it shrunk away to allow the stone to shift downwards. If he was doing these manipulations unaided all he would have done was move rock from one orientation to another and maybe crush himself in the process as everything settled downwards. But with the engineering program controlling the coordinated plant activity had a different impact. Rocks started shifting perfectly into the gaps he had created. That produced space and Daniel’s cocoon, like a cork released beneath the surface of the ocean rose into those gaps.

With jerky abrupt shifts upwards and periods of stillness, they inched skyward with the space below filled with rocks that shifted in from the sides that was in turn followed by stones above them sliding into the new position and throughout that all they rose a metre by metre toward the surface.

There was another rumble, and a large boulder sifted half a meter to the right and then settled. The wood that still encased them fell apart and sunlight shone down into their small cocoon.

“We’re here?” Carly asked in amazement.

“Yes.” Daniel grabbed Blood Drinker and prepared to defend himself as he exited. There was no need of course. Now that Priscilla had a simple route to the surface she had already popped out and ensured that they were safe from any immediate threats and was currently carefully checking the surroundings.

“It’s amazing. We were just rising through that rubble.” Carly said.

“Yep. It’s like I’ve got a second brain for calculating that sort of stuff. All I did was communicate that I wanted to go up, and it did the rest to get us here.”

“That sounds fantastical.”

“In this world?”

“I know. It’s just a skill I haven’t heard of.”

“Probably.” Daniel agreed. “You know how Dave’s mutated?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I am too.”

“I know,” she rolled her eyes.

“Oh, you can see it when you identify me.”

She nodded in agreement.

“What that means practically is that I didn’t get an interface when the event occurred. Instead, there’s a whole lot of um. Let’s call them partial spells floating around. I absorbed bits and pieces of those around plant growth functionality. This is one of the functionalities I must have gotten. And the stress of the situation enabled me to unlock it.”

It was a bald face lie of course. Somehow, in that moment that Ivy had touched him and shared the plan of how he could survive. Her interface had inserted a complicated self-correcting machine learning algorithm to guide the shifting of a lattice of objects. Daniel was awed by the power of that calculation engine. A luxury that, with his other skills allowed him to sit back and give instructions so that even while only using his Mana regeneration, he could effectively tunnel up through the rock by creating tiny shifts in the wood he had laced throughout it. Growing a little here. Removing a bit there and then between friction and gravity the right piece of stones would shift into the created spaces or be dislodged to slip just the perfect amount necessary to create space for them to move up into.

His mouse scout gave the all clear, and Daniel pulled himself out onto the rubble pile. He was not in the centre but off to the side and had emerged about halfway down the mound with a reasonable slope on either side. Seeing it like this, he could have triggered a mini avalanche to get out quicker, but the way he had done it was probably better. At the very least, it had been quieter and was less likely to attract the lizard’s attention.

Daniel studied the world he had emerged into and recognised some of the surrounding buildings. Across the smaller street was the three-story building that he had launched the trapped Iris into, miraculously.

The row of elm trees that had fuelled the power to spring that trap had not escaped unscathed. Half of them had been wiped out by the tonnes of falling rubble that had spilled over the top of them. The main road they had advanced down was dotted with heavy chunks of rock. The houses that had bordered the building on the fourth side had been totally crashed. It reminded him of earthquake pictures.

Daniel’s gaze fell upon the corner where that third path out of the basement had been. There was only a light scattering of stones down there. The collapse had been down and then out, but only in three directions. The spread, as predicted by the engineering program shaped by the giant hollow the silver flies had created. Down there, near that third path, was the area that had benefited from the lack of symmetry. Only secondary bouncing rocks had landed there. If Ivey’s group had gotten far enough that was where she had been intending to wait out the collapse. The garage under that section had like forecast survived. Only the very corner, he realised as he spotted a spot closer to him where rubble had settled deeper than the ground floor, which meant the garage underneath the rest of the building must have crumpled.

Tamara was down there. Now all he had to do was dig them out.