The past few days had blurred together for Stephen, truth be told. He'd been in terrible shape when he'd left the camp, but he knew he'd had no other choice. For all his talk about teambuilding and trust and all the other platitudes he liked to throw around, Steve Rogers hadn't even shown Stephen enough respect to accept his medical opinion on Peter's condition and had, instead, dismissed it as a simple matter of Peter being just like the rest of them even when he clearly was not. So Stephen couldn't trust him enough to understand his own situation, let alone act in Stephen's best interests. So in the end, he'd done what he had to do to preserve his own health and not endanger the rest of them. Either they understood why he'd done what he'd done or they didn't. In the end, it didn't really matter. And judging by what he'd seen of the battle at the camp, his absence didn't matter in the slightest.
Could he have stayed at the camp? Possibly. But not being able to perform the basic daily tasks of living would have made him dependent on others for the simplest of things and what right did he have to burden any of them with caring for him? None. Not to mention that such care required a level of trust that Stephen couldn't give to people he didn't really know, no matter how kind and understanding Sabrina Spellman was. As for the others, they were strangers to him, and it was never wise to depend on those you didn't know.
So he'd opted to go with Theo and Loki because when it came down to it, they respected each others' areas of expertise to know when was the time to question and when was the time to accept the statements given. They were similar in temperament, but vastly different in magical skill and having the chance to travel together had provided them with a perfect opportunity to engage in discussions on the esoterica of magical theory and practice from their very different types of magic.
They'd found no other human settlements on their journey thus far, just the scarred and burned remnants of the once-great human civilization that had existed here. They'd come across the injured coyote, and Stephen hadn't been able to resist the urge to care for it. It had repaid their kindness by alerting them to dangers they hadn't detected, particularly snakes, and at night, they camped in the Mirror Dimension, and he listened to Loki's stories about his life in Asgard and his adventures with the TVA. Loki, it turned out, was a truly gifted storyteller.
Then, the Conductor had given them a mission, to destroy a cargo convoy, preventing it from uploading data to Skynet beforehand, and to leave no evidence behind. It gave them a task to focus on and a way to help the rest of the bus passengers and the other prisoners, wherever they were now.
He nodded. "We're on the right highway. The transport should be coming in this direction," he replied. "As for handling it, I think the best way for us to prevent a data upload is to create some sort of electromagnetic energy to fry the tech. Wiping everything out after that isn't going to be much of a challenge for us, I should think.
So what we're looking for is something lightning-based. I've got the Bolts of Balthakk. They're not as precise as a lightning strike, but they're more powerful. Is there a way we could focus that power in a straight line? Some sort of guiding spell?"