Magical Engineering

I stood up with a smile as all around me, shouts and screams in a language I could now entirely understand hit my ears. The yells about the strangers who had just appeared and my apparent strength spread across the collected orcs. It did not, though, stop them from immediately attacking us all. Corey made quick work of the orc in front of me while I recalled gravity reversal into the nearest group of raging orcs. At the same time, two blasts of lightning connected with several more orcs, and I spotted Cecile’s hoe having transformed back into the sickle, easily slashing through another handful.

In less than a minute, they were all dead, and there was barely a wound on any of us. Had I really been so worried about this fight for nothing? I know Earth had supposedly been a low-level Arena prize, but were these orcs even really capable of taking over the planet? We humans had a lot of weapons, and I could easily imagine an event like this being the long-desired cry to unify us against a common enemy. This just didn’t add up.

“Sanquar, how was this so easy?” I asked in my confusion.

“That was just a scouting party. They probably shouldn’t have even engaged you or me, but they thought they saw an easy prize, and now we have proven them extraordinarily wrong in their conclusions. The real fight will be with the one who won this planet. They’re in charge of this invasion, and hopefully, he’s coming directly for us now,” Sanquar answered. There it was; I knew this had been too easy.

“How long do we have until the big boss gets here then, and just how dangerous is he?” I asked. He had to be scary enough to have caused a worldwide panic, and from what I had seen in my mana backlash-induced dream, some of the orcs under him had to be pretty powerful in their own right. How strong did you need to be to be able to handle an anti-tank round? There was no way I was strong enough to survive a hit from a real explosive yet, especially not something like a nuke, but I also couldn’t imagine the military using them on occupied cities. Truth be told, I had no real idea of how this invasion was happening outside of my own very small corner of the world.

“He’s coming right now. Can you not sense him?” Sanquar asked. No, I couldn’t. Though now that I thought about it, I had felt something with the simulator enemies. Was there a way to detect cores that I just hadn’t learned about? It seemed my knowledge gaps would never end, even now.

“Timon, get the bus away from here!” I yelled. There was no sense in him dying with us if it could be avoided. Despite the visible damage from the crash, The bus returned to life and quickly disappeared down the dirt road that connected my house to an eventual highway.

“What the hell is that?” Cecile yelled out, pointing at the sky. I looked up and saw what he was talking about. It looked like a giant sword flying through the sky toward us. I squinted, trying to make out what exactly it was. There was something riding on it. Shit, that had to be the guy in charge.

“Scatter!” Elicec yelled. He was entirely right. We needed to be out of their direct sight. I dashed for the cover of the trees, hoping that would be enough, glancing back just as a sword the size of a car landed in the clearing where we had left the bodies of the recently slain orcs.

“So, there’s someone on this damned planet capable of a real fight! Show yourself!” the hulking figure of an orc said as it stepped off of the sword, which immediately shrank in size and floated to his hand the moment he was off of it. I had zero intention of listening to his demand, and based on the lack of responses, neither did anyone else. Instead, I focused on the chat window in my head.