I didn’t quite know how to break down all of what was displayed, but it sounded like that at most, we had less than 24 hours of portals left. That really made me wonder if our mana free environment was the very thing fueling the portals to begin with. Unfortunately, I had no clue what was fueling those portals, that was just a guess, a guess about as good as any other. It also meant that the demons were going to double or triple down on their pushing through the portals in the USA. They were on a clock to getting their forces onto our planet. This next 24 hours was going to be brutal. We could lose tens or even hundreds of millions of lives during that single 24 hour period. How many millions was dependent on our citizens and our government to work together.

  I sat down in exhaustion. The day started early, and it wasn’t exactly easy. I haven’t been shot or stabbed yet today, so I had that going for me. I wasn’t sure why I was exhausted, but I was. We’d had multiple gunfights, negotiations, draining my mana a few times to get items, and just everything. My new chant for the day was, ‘24 hours to go!’ I didn’t say it out loud yet. I didn’t want to jinx us. I wanted to rest more, but I had way more to do today.

  It took us a little while to make a safe walkway over the wall to the train yard. I wasn’t sure why so much work went into this particular walkway, but I was reminded by the arrival of the first civilians. This set was in good physical condition, but there were others that were older and still injured that would take time to both get this far and to get onto a train car. I assembled Nora, Frank, and what we had from the first squad to go meet the people in the train yard.

  I was not the first one up the walkway, that honor went to Frank. When I reached the top I saw two soldiers on the other side, stand down at ground level. Both were geared up in full military kit. They had on more than any national guardsman. One was a shorter Caucasian guy, while the other looked vaguely Arabic in descent. I used assess as a matter of habit.

  Human, Special Forces Specialist, Level 19

  Human, Special Forces Sergeant, Level 17

  What the fuck! How did these guys have all these levels. Even if Frank, Nora, and I fought pretty constantly for five days solid, we wouldn’t be level 10. It appeared that after level 6, the rate of level gaining slowed down quite a bit. Only Nora had maintained a very high rate of experience gain. She attributed it to have each of the six stats as an affinity, in addition to her other ones. She was only level 7. How, just how had they gotten all these levels? This made zero sense, but I really needed more information to go on.

  “Good morning gentlemen.” I waved. I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of them being more than 3 times my level. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Nora pause and mumble something before she took a serious look at them. I wasn’t sure what she did until I saw the faintly glowing light to her eyes: Detect Mana. That was an odd move, but I wasn’t going to use it just yet.

  “Captain Cassland,” the Caucasian sergeant greeted me. “I’m Sergeant Hamm, glad you guys finally got here. We heard all the gunfire on your side of the wall, but we’ve been fending off intermittent orc patrols.”

  “Orc patrols? Interesting.” I hadn’t seen orcs patrolling, but just in massive groups in large fights. This was new information, and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant yet. Orcs had been problematic unless we had an excessive amount of gunfire, or enchanted weapons. Yeah, something wasn’t adding up. I stepped down to ground level from the little ramp we made to go up and down the gravel piles. We arrived in a parking lot. There was a huge warehouse ahead of us, that I was now realizing wasn’t the rail yard.

  “So, how much further to the rail yard?” The soldiers smiled. I was not reassured in the slightest.

  “Two and a half kilometers at most. We hope any engineers or similar people are coming in the first group. It will take a while to get there. We’ve cleared the area of all those wolf boy packs.” He paused for a moment, “So we don’t expect any surprises from them.” Didn’t he just jinx us.

  “Understood Sergeant. Any train minded folks should be along shortly. We needed to clear the lupin from our side before we ushered any civilians on through.”

  The two soldiers looked at one another, “Oh. So, you didn’t have them nearby while clearing out the dog boys?”

  “No. We kept them back at the first building while we moved forward to deal with any demons. I thought we were closer to the rail yard. In hindsight, I probably should have been bringing them up a building or two behind us as we advanced.” I shrugged. It really couldn’t be helped.

  Both the special forces guys looked at each other and nodded, “Rookie mistake.” They said it nearly simultaneously.

  The Arabic looking man immediately followed it by, “Jinx.” He smiled at his brother in arms who frowned and shook his head back at him.

  We only waited a few minutes while the group of experts arrived: one of the rail yard janitors, two train enthusiasts, the front desk admin to the rail yard, and a college engineering student that grew up at the train yard. We had quite the dream assembled. All that was missing was an actual train engineer, or guys that worked on coupling and decoupling the train cars. However, as long as we had Nora, I thought we’d be okay. She is my troubleshooter. Right behind the dream team of train enthusiasts came Natalie and her cameraman. The cameraman was recording everything while she spoke.

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  “This is continuing coverage of our journey. Special Report: Live with Natalie Snowe. We’ll be back to you soon with updates on our harrowing tale of survival.” The light on the video camera went out as the cameraman lowered the item from his shoulder. She had been doing the whole bit while walking backwards up and down an improvised walkway. She turned to face me all smiles, “Neal, this stuff will be as good as my interviews of you.”

  “I’m glad your enjoying yourself. By the way, my dad texted me about a conversation with your dad.”

  She said nothing. She just smiled and bounced her eyebrows up and down once. What was she playing at? We haven’t gotten back together yet. Wait, why am I thinking in terms of yet. Crap! I guess I really was falling for her harder than I thought I would. She is smart and beautiful after all. I shouldn’t be surprised that I was having that kind of reaction. No one could debate and argue with me quite like her. Fuck! I guess I will have to deal with that at some point.

  Both of the special forces guys stood up straight and almost saluted her, “Ma’am, we would be honored to escort General Snowe’s daughter to the train yards.” The both looked somewhere between awed, respectful, and smitten. I couldn’t begin to parse my way through the convoluted mix of body language and word inflections. There was too much to unpack there. All I needed to know was they clearly recognized her and were some sort of fans of hers. They knew who her father was, which was a positive, I hoped.

  We all followed the two high level soldiers. With the way they walked and stepped around hazards effortlessly, I wondered what their stats were like. Someday my assess would give me details like that, but not yet. In the meantime, I got to simply be amazed at how smooth they were. They looked around occasionally, but looked relaxed while doing it. I guess this is what happened when stats reached close to human maximums. Combine that with high skills and magical gear, and they were more dangerous than any of the monsters we had fought. I still didn’t understand how they had reached those levels. Joe was in the field everyday scouting and killing demons, and he hadn’t hit level 8 yet.

  The two soldiers led us into a long building that looked like it was a warehouse of some sort from the outside. I could tell this must be the employee entrance. There was a sign for Brand’s Corporation. As soon as we stepped inside, my suspicions that it was a warehouse were confirmed. I kept my thoughts on the soldiers to myself, but Nora let me off the hook. She blurted out, “How do you guys have mostly magical gear, including enchanted fatigues, enchanted assault rifles, and even enchanted combat boots?”

  The man that looked slightly Arabic, but gave no name as of yet replied, “Classified.”

  Nora ignored his response, “So this means that the USA has known about other dimensions and magic for quite some time. Your issued gear is enchanted. Your god damned belts are enchanted. You guys move to smoothly. Your stats and skills are probably through the roof.”

  Both the soldiers sighed. This time the Sergeant responded, “Classified.”

  I chimed in, to help support Nora, “They are also level 17 and 19. Just to support your hypothesis, Nora.”

  Frank mumbled, “its classified, y’all need to stop arguing.”

  The Sergeant spoke again, “Major Grant warned us about you. They said one of you has an intelligence that is already past standard human numbers. I guess that is you short stuff?”

  She rolled her eyes, “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  They both chuckled, then the sergeant continued, “Major Grant would want us to somehow detain you separate from everyone else, but we’re not going to do that.”

  I had to ask, “Why?”

  The Arabic guy replied this time, “General Snowe is now in command of all forces regular and specialist in Missouri. We’re not pissing off his daughter, or doing anything against people she knows. Major Grant being upset is small potatoes versus pissing off a General. I know who I would rather have annoyed with me.” Both soldiers seemed pretty relaxed while talking over their shoulder at us. The kept leading us through the warehouse. There wasn’t much worth taking from here unless I was really in need of a bunch of school supplies or women’s purses.

  The first squad was no longer with us. They stayed behind to help get groups onto the warehouse side of the wall. So it was down to Nora, Frank, Natalie, her cameraman, and me. We had the dream team of train people with us, and all led by our two affable soldiers. I didn’t know how to feel about all of this. These guys were proof that our country knew more than they were letting on. Did we initiate all of this invasion to begin with. Our President is dumb enough to order such a thing. I was under no illusions that George W. Bush was a genius. He was smarter than Dan Quayle, maybe. I knew these guys would hide behind “classified” until we grew tired of asking questions. I kept thinking about this as we simply walked through a near kilometer long warehouse. There were other things as we moved to different sections. I know I saw some golf cart looking things that would be really useful about now, but I didn’t bother asking if we could go back and use those. I really needed to know what was ahead of us, at the very least. That is the thought I settled on after my mental wandering.

  “Sergeant, what is the full situation up ahead?”

  He paused and looked at his fellow special forces brother. He sighed, “Captain. There are two other special forces operators back near the entrance to the train yard. We have with us 6 guys from a squad of regular army. There is some rich woman and her 3 bodyguards. Beyond the billionaire, there are close to 200 other civilians. We have cleared out all the dog boys, and fought off any random orc patrols, but when they show up in force, we are in trouble.”

  He paused for a long moment before continuing, “Some of us have ideas about how to couple train cars together, but the logistics of moving undesired cars out of the way, and hooking all the appropriate ones up fairly quietly has been a challenge. Several civilians have helped. However, we need someone who can figure out the parts that none of the rest of us knows. There is a control room, as well. We just need an expert is all.”

  I looked at Nora, “That shouldn’t be a problem, gentlemen.”