Chapter 42: Mapping the Path (1)
It didn’t take long before Reidar went down to the meeting room. Malcolm and Kate sat at a makeshift table, spread out around the same salvaged city map they used earlier to explain the situation to him.
"Ready to go save the kids?" Malcolm asked, his tone businesslike but not unkind.
Reidar nodded.
"But thorough preparation is important. I don’t know what the exact situation here is. The number of monsters can be variable, and roaming groups can get bigger or smaller depending on a myriad of reasons, so I suggest we go farm a little on the way to the school. We won’t be able to surprise the sprites at the school anyway."
Malcolm nodded. "I figured you wouldn’t want to rush in blindly. I’ve already started getting the teams ready, but a full mobilization takes at least a day. We need to coordinate movements, set up supply lines, and reinforce buildings so we’ve got somewhere to fall back if things go south... You get the idea."
Reidar appreciated Malcolm’s measured approach; this wasn’t by any means a matter of simple brute force. If they rushed things, the rift sprites might really attack the school and devour the kids. They didn’t until that point because either they didn’t realize there were humans inside or because they were too stupid for something like that.
The rift-sprites were smart compared to monsters but would at best be comparable to a very low-IQ human.
"What do you have in mind?" Reidar asked.
Malcolm tapped a finger against the table. "Three Lakes is more of a multi-sector battlefield than a plain area. The lake... it’s not just bigger; the shoreline swallowed entire sections of neighborhoods. Water levels rose about fifteen feet. There are still buildings in those parts, but they are no longer easily accessible. The Eastern sector of the city is almost entirely submerged."
Malcolm circled several areas on the map with his finger. "We control the department store along with eight other key locations in the western sector. That makes a total of 11 points. The streets in between are patrolled, marked with my team’s symbols. The individual sprites are killed or forced away from the nest, meaning on the west, in our territory. This section is relatively safe, for now, but if the rift-sprites keep increasing, it won’t be for long."
He pointed towards the middle of the map. "Then there’s downtown. It’s a total wreck there. High-rises collapsed; everything’s overgrown. Many packs of sprites wander around in groups of five or fifteen at a time." He stopped for a moment.
"There are abandoned vehicles acting as barricades in some places, which you might find useful. The municipal building in the center appears to be turning into a nest as well, due to the banished rift-sprites. We guessed that the ones at the school are getting too many for a single nest to contain them all. We saw about two hundred sprites near the city center. It’s completely unsafe there, and it is also the area where our problems start."
Finally, Malcolm pointed eastward, toward the looming expanse of the merged lake. "This is where the danger starts to increase significantly. The school sits on higher ground, about half a mile from the new shoreline. But as you might guess, the number of Rift-Sprites there is enormous. The closer you get, the more their numbers increase."
Reidar nodded.
Kate leaned forward. "The sprites around the school are significantly stronger than those in the west. I’ve been there myself." She paused. "Getting there wasn’t easy by any means, but I did so with a little stealth. The problem was that once there, I saw they were at least a couple of levels stronger than me."
For Reidar, monsters two levels higher than Kate were not a problem, but he could not take care of so many monsters alone. He needed the other survivors, but for them, who were still at levels 3 and 4, the Rift-Sprites were significantly stronger.
Malcolm tapped the map again, outlining a route. "We’ll move northeast initially, through the territory we secured in these two weeks. Main Street for the first half-mile, passing two of my reinforced buildings. We will be able to rest a little there and patch ourselves up if we get injured. Of course, if someone can’t keep fighting, then they can simply stay there until one of my people goes to fetch them."
Kate pointed to a small mark on the map. "This is the church. You can see the spire from here."
Reidar looked outside the window, and he really saw the spire of a church in the distance.
"It should be visible from most of the route. Use it as a navigation point in case you get lost."
"Yes, but I should not have problems since I won’t go alone."
Kate nodded. "There will be people with you, and they will know their way to the school."
Malcolm went on, "Past that, we’ll hit the old industrial area. A fallen overpass makes for a tight spot. There’s a whole graveyard of rusted machines—conveyor belts, giant silos, you name it. But it’s crawling with sprites now, the ones that took over downtown. Thirty or forty of them, levels three to six."
"Past the overpass is the residential area," Kate said. "The houses turned into small sprite nests almost as soon as the monsters showed up. They patrol in groups of eight to twelve every twenty or thirty minutes. We think they’re hunting for food."
"This is starting to feel like a war movie."
"In a sense... The problem is that all areas in this town are filled with those fucking monsters. If we do not have a good idea of where we are going, we will just risk getting ourselves killed."
Reidar nodded. "I know; it’s just that it is a tad ridiculous."
"Go tell it to the monsters," Kate said.
"So if we go past the overpass, how far will we be from the school?"
"Not much, but the problem is that we would need to pass through the residential area, and the houses there are dangerous because of the Rift-Sprites. Many are unstable to begin with."
Malcolm pointed to the eastern edge of the map. "When we get past the residential area, we should be in a rather normal part of the city. The problem is that with the lakes merging, most of that area became a sort of swamp. The school is in that area, although it wasn’t touched by the water lakes themselves. We will have to go through waterlogged terrain. It makes fighting much harder."
Malcolm leaned back. "That’s just the part about getting there, of course. We’re assuming we make it with no trouble, but the number of sprites could be even higher than we thought."
Reidar could see it. The Nest at the school was made of more than a thousand sprites. They were bound to have left it when their numbers increased too much for the nest to sustain them.
"If things are really that awful," Reidar said, "it’s pretty likely those Rift-Sprites have hit level ten by now. You guys know that, right?"
Kate and Malcolm exchanged a look. "We know," Kate said. "But it’s not like we’ve got any other choice."