Orbs of Power

Chapter Twenty

Be warned, it gets a little dark after the word "ALLISON!"

Once they had reached the other side of the 16-foot thick wall, the Demolition Squad fanned out, hands up and ready to fight any resistance they met.

But with their modern gear and imposing uniforms, the few Earths and soldiers that were posted on the wall simply screamed and fled in terror.

Jonathan Polly threw up his hands. "Man, I was hoping for some action but these old-timers just don't know when the party arrives!"

Edward O'Reilly sighed.  "I don't know what you expected; most of the others reacted the same way."

Kaitlyn Blount hit both men on the side of the head.  "Focus, you two. We still need to finish the mission and talk to their leader."

Michael Evans pulled up beside her, hands in his pockets.  "She's right, the sooner we liberate these people the better.  Cultural diffusion might take a while and we want to give them as much time to adjust as possible."

Jake Griffith snorted from a few feet away.  "Of course she's right! Blount's always right."

This garnered a few chuckles from the 6 gathered people, all save for Samantha Cole, who merely huffed.

"Guys, she's still our squad leader; show some respect!"

Blount herself was still laughing when she coughed out a reply. "Cole, calm down, I don't mind it."

She brushed herself off and stood up straighter.  "We can take a small break, since we did just work our butts off, but after ten minutes we are on the move again.  Make sure you don't kill anyone, guys, or things could get ugly."

A chorus of groans and "We know"s rang out over the clearing by the wall, and a few curious people tentatively watched from the shadows.

For all Majestät Croman's insistence that outsiders were all selfish, greedy, heartless monsters, these six seemed remarkably human.

-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;-

They passed many villages and cities, and it shocked a lot of them that they had de-evolutionized so much; it was almost like looking at the industrial era all over again.  Skyscrapers had all but collapsed and/or had been torn down for scrap metal, and the environment was choked with plant-life.  People were back to using oxen driven plows because the cost of maintaining a tractor or electronic plow would have been much too high for anyone farming.  A few houses could be considered nice, but they were in a class all of their own compared to most shacks it seemed families lived in.

The streets were no longer paved and it looked almost medieval. Some houses probably didn't even have electricity, it was so bad.

In one village, a house had been burned down, but it was largely ignored.

At one point they had sent Cole into a village to ask where their leader was, she had been met with distrust and hostility.  Still, one old woman who had no grasp on the situation happily pointed them in the right direction, so they set off again.

They normally would have taken several days to get there, but the thing about being an earth, it's that with little effort you could propel yourself across the ground at a much higher speed, and when you got tired of that, you could walk.  Therefore, they made decent progress across the large country.

They had gone from the wall near what was once Karlsruhe and it looked like they were going in the direction of Nuremberg, which was closer to the middle.