Adamant Blood

"Tartu," Mark said, standing in the early morning light, in fresh snow.

"Mark," Tartu said, being all sorts of punchable, without really trying.

"You're looking quite punchable this morning."

"Funny. I was thinking the same thing."

"… We got real issues happening now; not your stupid fucking vendettas that make no logical sense at all, so you're not thinking of breaking out shavallian and potentially fucking us all, are you?"

"You're not going to cripple us right before the kaijus come, are you?"

"… No, I am not," Mark said, pulling back his anger. It was difficult to pull back, especially when it was him and Tartu, within punching distance of each other, and their teams were right behind their leaders, at about 10 meters away. But he pulled back anyway. Anger clouded the early morning and Mark let it go as best he could, saying, "This time it will be a normal fight. No tricks against each other."

"We both know it's more complicated than that. We're not letting you take this space at all, Mark. If we do, then the kaijus will overwhelm us all." Tartu said, "So fail in your assault and allow the Collective to take you in."

Mark's anger blossomed again, barely restrained.

There had been sort of a plan.

The outline had gone thusly: Mark+Co assault the gate, ousting Tartu and defenders because they were caught unaware. And then Eliot's turrets would be put up all around the place and they'd hold off probing attacks until Tartu+Co came back with actual people to take the gate. Then the real battle would happen however it happened. If Tartu+Co won, then Mark would end up in chains and hauled off to the empires. If Mark+Co won, then they would sell the gate back to the city for X amount of stuff/agreements/whatever.

It was a loose plan with real consequences.

Tartu didn't want to follow the plan at all.

All of his 'and kaijus kill us all if you win at all' nebulous shit was really, really angering.

But, just to be sure, to make absolutely damned fucking sure that Tartu was being Tartu, being a zealot with only one way of seeing the world, and not telling real-truths…

Mark asked, "To be clear, you don't want to go with the 'we win, then you come back with real forces and try to win' plan? There is some sort of true worry about the ritual of it all and the kaijus coming?"

Tartu spoke through gritted teeth, "It's really simple, Mark. If you win the first part of the event, then you would be in this place and time and at the center of it all when the kaiju start coming out, which means it would be you and only you as a defense to be taken down by the kaiju, for them to take the gate. Since you cannot do this alone, you will fall and the demons will win. Since I still believe you are a hidden dragon— stupid fucking costume by the way with all those dragon scales— I believe you would open the gates for them—"

Mark closed his eyes and let Tartu's words batter him.

He did not want to see the guy's face.

"—but if we take you in, take you out, then when the kaiju come it will be humanity and the heroes in the center place, and we will win against the kaiju, as we always have. The only danger present today is if you were to take the gate at all, so we cannot allow that to happen." Tartu finished with, "Please open your eyes and see reason."

Mark's breath was black in the morning cold, as he said, "Death to all monsters."

And then he walked away, dark lightning flickering from the surface of his new costume. You couldn't really tell because it was all black, but it was there.

"What the fuck does that mean!" Tartu yelled at Mark's back.

Mark raised a hand, giving Tartu the bird as he rejoined his team.

"… Very well then," Tartu said, his voice lost in the morning wind.

Tartu and his team went toward the low, monitoring building that was built into the ground, in front of the gate, while Mark and his people went across the frozen surface of the gate district, toward an open space far afield. Drones from the HVP flew around them, catching every angle and word, just as they had when Mark met with Tartu out there in the middle of nowhere.

Mark was wearing his real costume now. It looked much like his original one, but instead of the whole thing being a print atop webweave that had been cut and burned into the proper shape, it was now woven and solid, with raised high-PL plastic adornments, like shiny black diamonds all over his chest, his back, and where the sleeves of his webweave ended at his elbows and below his knees. His skin was painted super-black where his forearms and lower legs were exposed, where he kept his adamantium stores against his skin. The adamantium was still darker than the super-black body paint, and if looked at closely, you'd see all of his adamantium was scales atop his skin.

He didn't cover much of his body with adamantium. Less than half a liter of adamantium was only enough to give him a few inches of coverage over his ankles and wrists, when he still had his whole helmet made of adamantium, too.

Mark was wearing his adamantium as scales now, and it felt strangely good to do that. It felt good to piss off Tartu even more by wearing scales openly, which was a new emotion for him. Mark was still figuring that one out.

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Isoko was wearing black lipstick, eyeliner, nail polish, and her black miniskirt costume.

Sally was in her skintight black suit that was fully solid, with her boob window and with exposed thighs. It did not look like her original costume, the one that made her look like she was covered in thorns. This one looked almost gator-skin-like, with the edges of her 'rough skin' being windows down to her actual skin. She was still fully covered.

Eliot wore his Techie Operative outfit, with his trench coat that was full of lights on the inside. He looked happy, even comfortable, as he said, "I'm so looking forward to making turrets that can't be destroyed by simple touches, when they counter assault us. You guys have no idea how annoying it is to fight monsters and have your Powers simply fail the second they encounter the enemy. This is gonna be great."

Sally was concerned, saying, "That whole… scenario he described doesn't bother you? With us as the ritual center of humanity?"

"He's a zealot, and though he has support he is still wrong," Mark said, still furious about it all. "The truth is that we're all on the same side and he's causing division, and no matter who is at the center of this shit we're all going to work together when it comes down to it. He just wants to win. Him and Kardi and… And the other two are along for the ride. They're not really making their own decisions right now."

Mark didn't glance backward, but he almost did. Quark somehow knew what Mark wanted, and he turned on a camera on the back of Mark's helmet.

All four of Tartu's team were matching in their white and blue costumes, with their individual colors to each of them. Kardi was pink, Shawn and Lenny were yellow and green, while Tartu was white.

Tartu and Kardi were walking away strongly, short capes flowing in the wind, while Lenny and Shawn were a lot less strong, both of them trying to appear whole and healthy, but pain lanced through their lower bodies and up their spines with every step they took. Mark was already healing the two guys, but not Kardi or Tartu. Those two guys should be fully healed by the time they got out of range.

Really good healing was difficult to come by on Earth, even for heroes, so it was the least he could do for them since he caused the problem in the first place. Did they even know it was him? Probably.

While Kardi spoke to Tartu and Tartu said something in response, their vectors tying together even stronger, Lenny and Shawn walked a pace apart, feeling scared about everything. Neither of them were cut out for a real war with kaiju. Not many people were. Tartu and Kardi certainly weren't; they just weren't there yet. But they wanted to be, and so they acted like they could handle it. Shawn and Lenny wanted to believe their old friend, and so they did.

Isoko strongly said, "They'll all do the right thing when the shit hits the fan. They'll rush to basic positions. They'll fight properly."

"I want to believe that, too," Mark said.

They walked in silence to their staging zone, which was up ahead.

All of the land around the gate, for 15 kilometers, was paved and piped with the expectation that this entire place would eventually be used for shipping stuff. The largest portions of it all were simple staging zones for final checks on ships headed through, or coming this way. One zone on the east side for exits, and one zone on the west for arrivals

Mark and them headed to a drainage ditch on the east side that had been enlarged into a full-on tunnel with the expectation that it would become an underground railway opening eventually. All of that stuff was still at least a year away, but some workers for the HVP and then Eliot had turned the drainage tunnel into an actual construction zone, with bare concrete pillars that might eventually hold up some upper floors for something, and a big hole and tunnel in the ground that might eventually lead somewhere. The only actual in-use part of the place were a few 'shipping containers' off to the side that hid a workstation for Noel and other writers and drone operators.

Drones floated all around.

Titanfist, as Punchman, leaned beside one of the pillars, wearing his usual loose gangster outfit and an unusually tense expression. He was playing a lot of roles right now, but he was just himself, as Ben, as he said, "First rivals are always terrible."

Isoko snorted. "They're not usually that bad."

Mark chuckled. "That would have been nice."

"True enough. Usually they're a lot better than him." Ben asked, "Do you trust him to stab you in the back, or to kill you?"

Isoko, Sally, and Eliot all tensed.

Mark was thrown for a loop, too, but he rapidly said, "Stab in the back, for sure. No murder."

Ben smirked, saying, "So pretty normal, then. Not catastrophic." And then he said to everyone, "You kids ready to get this show on the road?"

They were.

All of them walked into the tunnel into the ground, into a smaller staging area that wasn't anything more than one warm-ish stone room. The scenario that Noel had outlined for Mark and them was on the wall over there, and it was pretty much what Mark already expected. Tartu would have had the same sort of outline on the wall of his prep space, too.

Tartu didn't want to do any of that, though.

Fuck him, and Kardi.

Mark breathed out once more, and then he breathed in, and Blackvein intoned, "Time to secure passage back to my future kingdom."

With a hint of demand in his voice, Punchman said, "We're not actually triggering the gate. I didn't sign up for that sort of shit."

Blackvein walked forward, out of the warm tunnel and into the drifting snow, saying, "Of course not. I'm not insane. We'll simply capture it and control it for a while."

The gate loomed ahead in the brightening blue of the morning light, like black skyscrapers joined by an arching bridge at the top.

Platinum Princess walked beside Blackvein, her skin a mirror of the land all around them, saying, "And sell it back for a lot of money."

"As much money as possible, before we secure the agreement to go back," Miss Masher said.

"And if they don't like it, I'll tear it down," VeryHuman said.

… What?

Everyone looked at VeryHuman, who was very much Eliot in that moment.

Eliot simply said, "They built it without me. That's offensive."

Blackvein smirked, his mouth exposed under his helmet. "Fair enough." And then Blackvein strode out into the open land, the sky just beginning to turn from blue to yellow. Dragonscales slipped off of his legs like petals to turn into caltrops and press down on the ground. Blackvein rose into the air, floating forward, saying, "Time to go."