Chapter 15

The door was open, and then the thumping stopped.

Both of them froze in response. Was that them or was that one of the semi-regular shifts of activity they had observed?

Cautiously, they stepped out from the stairwell into a posh reception office. From memory, this was some sort of accountancy firm.

Crack.

His attention focused immediately on where the thumping that had started up again was coming from and he tested the floor. It was more stable than he expected and, providing he moved cautiously there should be no need to navigate exclusively with anchor points. The bindings between himself and Carly fell away. The girl landed with a small curse almost tripping. His hand grabbed her before she went down.

“Daniel!”

“Sorry.” He righted her and noticed that she was struggling to see.

“It should be safe to create a light.”

She glanced at him in surprise.

“We’re nine floors up, we’re in the middle of the building, and any nearby monsters would have been killed by the flies.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but I’m not using animal sense to confirm.” One reason was because he wanted to conserve mana but the primary driver was he didn’t want to know. There was something terrifying about using the ability and discovering it was all for nothing.

“Why?”

Carly! He felt like screaming at her.

“I want to conserve mana.”

There was the sound of another thump.

Fly vs wood.

A small light bloomed behind them. The accuracy of his own vision improved as it greedily used the small amount of extra light to throw everything into sharper contrast.

“Follow me.” Daniel ordered. It sounded like the flies were trying to get into somewhere and given Iris while she had been wild had instinctively directed them to wipe out the humans. It stood to reason that was what they were still doing. That thumping meant there was hope.

He took off at a run toward that thumping sound there still carrying Iris. Carly was behind him and there was a glass door in the way. His mind ran at a million miles per hour. If he hit the glass with his foot or shoulder or anything flat, then it might hold. Daniel knew grown men could bounce off windows in these sorts of commercial settings. But if there was a point, then glass needed relatively little force to break.

A shoulder charge would be best.

He shared his ideas with his club and there was a thrill of agreement from it. Blood Drinker started transforming at the same time Daniel repositioned it onto his shoulder. It’s new shape was more like a specialised shield covering his shoulder right side with a single long spike coming out of the centre. It no longer looked much like a club, but it was perfect for right now.

Daniel crouched his body down to get as much of himself behind the impromptu shield and leapt at the glass. The spike slammed through it with a spider webbing network of cracks immediately radiating out to cover the entire door. By the time he was airborne and about to go through the glass, a ring about the size of a basketball was filled with dense cracks and beyond that the damage was still spreading but hadn’t reached the density of those at the centre. In fact, there were stretches of flawless glass at the top and bottom of the door.

But the cracks were still extending.

Then Daniel’s shoulder impacted fully.

There was a tinkling sound, and it was like jumping through a hanging sheet. A whisper of pressure which promptly vanished and then the door he hit was turned into thousand of cubes of glass that went everywhere.

Safe glass, Daniel realised with glee. There was no chance of him cutting himself.

He caught his balance as the noise of the bouncing, rolling and flying chunks of glass door assaulted him as the bits piece fell to the surrounding ground.

The room’s layout he found himself in was what he understood to be an open office. It was filled with desks facing other desks with barriers that were barely high enough to hide a coffee cup. How you could work with people so close to you was a mystery that Daniel knew with the new world that he would never experience. Not that he would have been likely to in the old world given his occupation and working desires.

Daniel pushed all of that out of his mind and focused on the noise. He saw the enemy in front of him. It seemed like there were hundreds. Subconsciously, he gathered electricity to his club.

Carly grabbed his hands. “No. Iris can take care of it.”

For a moment, he struggled with his emotions and the glow around the club kept going.

“Please. We have it under control.”

With a sigh, he forcefully suppressed the power and then his mind registered other details that he had initially skipped. There were at least two broken bodies near where the flies were smashing into the toilet doors. Off to the right, neatly placed against the wall were a further half a dozen more.

He started channelling energy to his lightning attack once more.

“Daniel!”

He shook his head and stalked forward while glancing at the bodies once more. It was like they had been placed in a church or morgue waiting for burial. Presumably they were victims of previous encounters, while the group mostly had control of the floor.

They were getting closer to where the flies were banging against the wood in an attempt to get through and more clues about what happened became available. All the desks in the space near the toilets had vanished, and he knew that because he could still see the imprints on the carpet. The missing furniture had been piled against the doors that the flies were hitting. Placed and since destroyed.

He could see the remains of the barrier. The floor was covered with debris a mixture of technological parts and wood. Desks reduced to kindling, computers looking like they had been used in a pillow fight between metal golems. The door, while intact, was battered to where it wasn’t going to stay together for long.

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A fly shot towards the nearly broken door.

There was a flash of light.

Thump.

The insect bounced away. Daniel was reminded of Brian’s ability, though this was less powerful. Despite being reflected, the fly had still dented the door. A different fly hit the wall next to the door, and the concrete crumbled… There was no spark of magic. A few more strikes like that and it wouldn’t matter if the door held because they would have drilled right through the concrete.

“Move.” Carly shouted.

He looked down at her. Daniel hadn’t even realised that he had drawn to the stop while he struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. They needed to get the queen into action.

Strength, speed.

He triggered both of them simultaneously.

Then he plucked up Carly, taking care to shift her so that her neck rested against his shoulder to reduce whiplash, and then he surged forward.

Daniel tried to step lightly, but it felt like the entire building groaned as he closed the distance and he wondered if this was as sensible as he had imagined in his head.

It was too late. He was as good as there and slowed down.

A fly spun at him and he went to use Blood Drinker, which had transformed back to its normal form but the fly deviated away from its attack line well before it reached him as Iris did her thing.

Then in less than a second he stood in front of the wall and door the flies had been attacking.

Flies would rotate around and prepare a run before slowing down right as they hit five metres, and then they would quietly settle in a patch a couple of metres from them. It was like they were in a car park. Each of them perfectly aligned with the one next to them.

The relentless assault slowed, and Daniel just stood there, panting.

Right choice.

He had made it up in time for… His eyes looking down at the bodies almost at his feet and those on the wall there were more than he had expected. Two, five, eight, eleven…

There were those over there and the two that were closer. Daniel understood what had happened. It was these two that had placed all the debris in front of the doors to the toilets. They had built fortifications and then based on the dead wasps around them defended the door for as long as they could.

They had willingly sacrificed themselves to hold off the attack and to buy time for whoever was holed up in the toilets.

Between the two of them, they must have killed over twenty of the dangerous flies, which were super impressive. Then their defences had faltered and after that the flies had made sure that they weren’t getting up again.

Daniel’s ears suddenly perked up.

He could hear crying. It was the noise of a small kid sobbing.

“Hi, my name is Daniel. We’re here to rescue you.” he yelled out.

The growing hysteria he had heard stopped. There were sounds of rapid conversation.

“Is it safe?” a panicked voice asked.

Daniel looked around.

Carly was sitting cross-legged on the ground right in front of him with Iris on her lap. The queen offered them a five metre bubble of protection which clearly covered the ware the flies had been trying to break through. The effectiveness of the queen was clear because she had already gathered almost thirty flies to her. Between them and the dead flies, the crisis might already be over..

“Mostly.” Daniel answered truly knowing even as he said it that the smart choice would have been to lie. “We have a five-metre space around us that stops and captures any flies that get near. But that’s temporary.”

“Oh, no.”

“We can’t guarantee safety beyond that range,” Daniel ploughed on. “And the building is no longer stable, so we’re going to have to work together to get you downstairs.”

“Should we come out?”

“No” Carly said abruptly.

“What?” Daniel asked in surprise.

“They’re safe in there and there are wild flies.” Even as she said that, another fly zipped by and was caught by the queen’s power. “They should stay till you’ve built a way to get them down. Speaking of that. How many of you are there?” She yelled the last bit.

“Six adults, fourteen pre-schools and ten late primary schools.”

It was more and fewer than Daniel had expected. A large part of him had feared that they would all be dead, but those numbers told him that while that worst case had not been realised they had lost a sizeable proportion. His eyes went to the dead on the wall. There were a few children there but not difference between the quantities in his head and what had just been reported.

If he had got here earlier?

Then he stopped himself. He had been fighting or recovering continuously since the event had happened. There was nothing more he could have done, and he got here as quickly as he could and had saved twenty-five people because with those flies attacking there was no way they would have survived till morning.

“Stay in there.” Daniel ordered after a moment. “It’ll take me over an hour to build an escape route, and rogue flies might appear once we’ve gone.”

“You’re not going to leave us here! Are you?” The hysterical voice asked.

“No.”

“Tell her we’ll be back regularly.” Carly urged.

“We’ll try to loop back every ten minutes to make sure nothing is getting it into their head to attack you again. But navigating this building is difficult, so I’m not promising anything.”

“But you’ll save us?”

“Yes, we’ll get you to safety.”

“And you’re from the hotel?”

Daniel nodded and then caught himself. She couldn’t see him. “Yes, we are. It’s been a painful twelve hours to get here.”

“I understand. Please make sure you come back. We’re sort of packed like sardines in here. There isn’t enough room to sit.”

“Do you have food we haven’t–?”

“No.” Daniel interrupted. “We don’t. But we’ll be able to get back to the hotel in the morning and we have as much food as you could want there.”

“We’re going now.” Carly called out.

“Both of you?” the original hysterical voice asked.

“Yes.”

“We would feel–”

“We can’t do it,” Daniel interrupted, again. “I’m needed to navigate safely and Carly to keep the flies under control. We’ll be back as soon as possible. Help is on the way.”

They didn’t wait for another response. Carly walked behind him and then Daniel heard a buzz as all those flies that had been lying there meekly lifted into the air to follow them. Given how terrified he had been of them a few hours earlier, it was a strange change to his mindset. He realised to his surprise he trusted Carly. She had control of the flies and if she wanted to bring them, then that was fine with him.

While he headed back to the staircase to get downstair Daniel considered how to save the trapped group. He needed a way to get pre-schoolers down safely.

If the flies didn’t exist, he could do it with a series of vines, but the flies existed, which made it considerably more challenging. He did not want to be lowering a kid and have a rogue fly just returning hit them mid-way down.

Daniel swallowed and redirected his thoughts elsewhere.

That was not a pleasant image at all.

He needed an enclosed structure that everyone could walk down, including pre-schoolers. Factoring in the damage to the upper levels it was going to need to be a standalone staircase.

“And flies won’t smash into solid objects?”

Carly hesitated. “Iris is young. She doesn’t know. If they’re trapped, they will or if the queen orders it, but generally no.” Carly confirmed. “But that’s only solid objects.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, they won’t whack themselves into a solid metal wall, but a window or a window replaced with a chipboard. They’ll go through that like it’s not there.”

Daniel did the maths and did not like the conclusions. “How thick would the wood need to be to dissuade them?”

“Well, if you can make a piece I can have Iris test…”

While they were talking, they had navigated their way to the level three. There was plenty of wood around in the mounds of debris, and he grabbed a part of a heavy table. He focused and formed a piece a centimetre thick. “This.”

Carly, Iris and a single fly studied it.

“No.” Carly declared.

Daniel grimaced and thickened the wood. Carly shook her head. He kept going.

“That’s it.”

He looked down at the piece of wood in despair. It was almost four centimetres thick.

“Won’t work,” he sighed, putting the wood down on the ground. “It will take too long to build a staircase. Maybe an elevator.” Then he thought about what that would require. Large gears, long thick ropes and what happened if a fly attacked a rope.

He noticed a support arcing up from where it had been secured to a sizeable chunk of reinforced concrete. “What about them?” He pointed. The supports were only half a centimetre thick. They looked incredibly thin.

Carly looked at it. “Too the flies, it appears solid.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He studied the material. To his unobservant eyes it did not look any tougher than wood. It had a sap or harden plastic over it. Daniel dug his fingernails into the substance. It was soft not hard.

Maybe that was the cause. Maybe they coated it with a special vanish.

“Is it this substance?” He scraped off a small amount and showed her.

Carly looked on helplessly.

Daniel shrugged and started scraping the material off and transferring it to a two-centimetre-thick piece of wood.

“Yes,” Carly said suddenly. “It’s solid now. Whatever that sap is it makes it feel solid. We need to coat whatever you build with that.”

“Do you know how to make it?”

Carly shook her head.

“Can the queen help?”

Another vigorous shake.

“We have two ways to do this. First is to work out how to make that?” He touched the substance that seemed to stop the flies from banging into the supports. “Or we cut up these beams and secure them to the outside of what we’re building.”

Carly beamed. “Yes.”