Adamant Blood

Mark switched his union of Alacrity and Slowness to Adamant and Weakness, running on all Unions, breath, blood, and brain. Black lightning flashed outward, threading through the world, into Titanfist in the distance, into his team.

Time resumed, fast as fuck.

Eliot, Isoko, and Sally all maintained composure, even through the time-stretched backlash of Alacrity, thanks to Mark already healing them.

Eliot slammed a fist onto a big red evacuation button.

Isoko broke from Mark's Union, connecting to Sally and Eliot and focusing on them.

Sally glanced upward, past the clear plastic roof, at the sky of kaiju octopuses.

Among Eliot's many preparations for the actual battle, he had made a lot of tools.

Mark had one of those tools around his waist, right now. It was a hoverbelt, scavenged from some gate-repair supplies kept in the security bunker. It wasn't perfect, and it certainly wasn't strong enough to survive a real fight, but it was good enough to get Mark into the air and he could use a propeller to do actual aerial maneuvers.

The hatch overhead blew open, exposing the hoverbattlestation to the sky, and Mark launched up and out, into the roaring morning light.

Below him, Eliot descended the battleship into the ground and the ground smoothed over as they all vanished, rushing down, down, into the depths of the world, into the bowels of Memphi.

Tentacle laser cannons began to curl up from the ground in every direction, all of them aimed at the monsters in the sky.

Mark focused on the battle in front of him.

The enormous kaiju cuttlefish reached for the biggest thing around, which was Titanfist, who was already swinging his sword and leaping backward from ten different grabbing tentacles. He severed and sliced and escaped the sudden confinement, his primary emotion an overwhelming worry because Mark wasn't connecting to him like he had before. Mark was about to, though. But the last time he had done that he had kinda lost himself while he also broke the world around him. Being a conduit of power between kaiju seemed to do that. It was dangerous.

But Mark would do it anyway.

Mark connected.

Mark became the flow.

Lightning connects to the kaiju in the sky, to the octopuses in the clouds, and to Titanfist, becoming a conduit of Union, taking adamant and giving weakness in turn. All the world becomes a collision of lightning and desire and Mark's hoverbelt breaks instantly, though adamantium propellers keep Mark aloft well enough, and the power! The power.

Enough to drown a god.

Slash! A million tons of sushi hits the tarmac.

Slam! A cloud hits a cloud and reveals themselves as many-eyed, many-tentacled abominations. Cuttlefish of the clouds! Clouddlefish.

Laughter! A man the size of a clouddlefish laughs in the face of death, even as tentacles grab his weapon and attempt to rip it from his hands. He carves away the tentacles instead. He spins! He leaps. He moves like he hasn't been able to move in decades, flesh breaking with every movement, and mostly healing back properly. It is the strength of a kaiju but granted to a human who is not a kaiju at all. He breaks himself to break the world, and he has been doing so for a long time.

Lightning! Black and giving and receiving, it strikes the clouddlefish and the man in turn, and heals the man in a way that actually works properly.

Screams! A clouddlefish becomes two, sliced in half, both halves trying to turn to clouds and succeeding. It escapes and comes around for another angle.

Sizzle! A hundred tentacles of chrome and light reach up from the gate district like this is the seafloor and they are bobbit fish. They focus on the clouddlefish coming up behind the man. Light bursts forth and scours the sky, diffracting, reflecting, refracting off of the hidden horror inside the fluffy white.

Light flashes against Mark's lightning, and Mark falls out of the flow, just a little.

His clothes were shredded. Adamantium danced across his skin, erupting from every vein that was close to the surface, and from the tips of every finger and toe. The absolute black metal flickered as it moved, becoming scales and then lightning and then scales again.

There were more scales than before. A lot more. The scales covered up to his elbows, up to his knees. The scales exploded into lightning again, and they came back as scales, as more of them.

Mark's propeller was gone. How was he flying? How was he hovering here, in the sky, connected to the battle—

"MARK!" Titanfist said.

Mark beheld the battle in front of him again, the vectors of kaiju like oceans warring with each other, three against one, but no. Not against one.

Mark was here, too.

Mark fell into the flow again, and everything seemed smaller.

He is a drone, flying in a scene in a movie, directing the battle with nudges of Union.

It is a small battle.

A simple man in a tight suit is fighting some flying fish with a big sword. If one was not aware that the 'doorway' over there was a half-kilometer high, and the 'trash' on the ground were all buildings and trees and places for normal sized people, then the scene between 3 clouddlefish and one warrior would look like any basic brawny fighting any monster ever.

Slash! Flash!

Tiny tentacles stick out of the solid sand and shoot at the monsters, like tiny laser pointers that cause even smaller fires where they touch. They are distractions. The flying cuttlefish are distracted.

The man slices, dodges, seizes all attention, and he is untouchable, dancing through the air, leaping both a kilometer in the sky and just a few meters, spinning his sword and slashing outward. Some of the clouddlefish vanish into mist, and then they come back. They regroup, three monsters acting in concert—

And then, an event occurs.

Everyone senses it before it happens.

The world tilts and something screams out far, far away, and yet the scream reaches here, even here. A trace of fire lifts up from way over there, in the east, the southeast, like a faint line of white light pointed at the heavens at a steep angle. Mark wonders what it is, and a vision overlays his sight.

In the east, a jeweled beetle the size of a skyscraper glitters against a man in black and gold, who is like a fly fighting against a house. The fly raises a shield a thousand times his own size, right before the beetle explodes with a line of light directed straight at the city. The beam strikes the shield and the shield holds, deflecting upward. The black and gold dot holds, too, though he does flake here and there, skin and clothes turning to ash and dust.

The vision ends, and Mark is back where he is, looking at a titan fighting 3 fish, still 3 fish, while a line of light finishes being reflected into the sky way over there, to the east.

Why hasn't the titan killed the flying fish yet? Mark has no idea.

And then something shifts in the battle before Mark. A new player.

A goose on a hovercar flies where it ought not to fly, but this particular goose does what it wants, and what it wants to do is curse one of the fish. Their vector is a tiny thing. A weak thing.

Black lightning connects to the goose, and the goose is suddenly a whole lot more.

A curse goes out, like the great honking of a harbinger of death, and color drains from the fish that the titan, the simple man, is about to strike, and this time the strike hits true, the fish breaks in half, real flesh falling down, breaking the world, instead of false flesh turning to clouds and then vanishing again.

One down, two to go.

The second cuttlefish falls much faster.

How long has it been?

Mark has no idea. He is a conduit for power, for taking and giving.

The goose honks.

The clouddlefish loses all color.

The man kills the second clouddlefish with revelry in his heart and a smile on his face.

The third flying octopus dies, severed in half, directly down the middle.

Lasers lift up from the ground like eels from the ocean floor. They fire light into the corpses of the octopus and millions of smaller monsters burn like tissue paper in an inferno. The lightning helps to kill the masses—

But now the man is running, faster and faster, and the lightning brings adamantium to bear, to make a propeller. The flying knot of lightning spins a blade faster and faster, scales becoming wings so he could move properly, without twisting himself into knots.

Mark flies fast, doing what he can.

The titan runs, the lightning follows, the goose trails behind.

There is a river below but the titan crosses the river with a single bound. Somehow that seems crazy to the lightning, but the lightning is following the titan and he isn't sure how he's moving so well, either. His hoverbelt is completely gone. He is moving anyway.

The titan flows into a rich neighborhood overrun with clouddlefish. Two main ones. Millions of smaller ones. The smaller fish are getting into bunkers and eating people.

Lightning overwhelms, spreading, striking tiny monsters.

Lightning kills.

And now the titan is alone against 2 clouddlefish.

One goose's honk later and now the titan is facing one clouddlefish.

The last kaiju suffers a debilitating honk, and then it, too, is gone from this world.

The flesh remains. It will be a long time cleaning.

The flow kinda stops. Not much. But…

Mark hovers—

Mark hovered a kilometer in the sky, high above it all, but still well within range of Titanfist and Lawful Goose—

Lawful Goose was in Mark's ears, talking about something, and then another person said something below Lawful Goose, and it was kind of a jumble. Titanfist was standing there, surveying the scene. It was a nightmare.

This was a rich neighborhood, with houses like mansions on every hill. A few major apartment buildings stood over there, though, while a whole minor city center was over there. A few dozen buildings in total. Nothing taller than 5 stories. Big open spaces for parks and recreation. A kid's playground. The Mississippi River far over there, like a strip of winding, dark brown flat land. It was way too big to be a river, but that's what it was.

And in the distance, in the northwest, the Wall of Memphi, rising several hundred meters into the sky. Grey. Imposing. Broken.

The apartment building down below was on fire, half of it crushed under the weight of a kaiju cuttlefish. People were not dying anymore. Mark already healed every person and killed every individual monster he could. Mark had no idea how he had done that, but he had.

And the Wall was broken.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

That fact was the most horrific, at that moment. The words in his ears barely felt real.

Mark's lightning began to falter and the adamantium in the air all around him crashed into his body, forming scales that formed gauntlets and boots and a helmet, and nothing else. He started to fall, to tumble.

"Mark," Quark said, his voice cutting through the chatter in his ears. "Propellers. Stabilizers."

Mark twisted adamantium into a propeller and a stabilizer. It was not the best he had ever done, but he spun a 4-meter wide prop overhead as fast as he could, which was pretty fucking fast. Soon, he was hovering and spinning a little himself, but a second prop, much simpler and smaller than the first, let Mark maintain position.

"Mark?" asked someone. "Yeah he's there. He's back."

It was Credenza on the line. That was her voice. Oh. Okay.

Mark said, "I never left."

"Un-fucking-true," Lawful Goose said, "But we don't have time to get into that. We're getting orders now—"

Mayor Ramierz spoke, "Mark. Pull your aura in completely and prepare for teleportation to the east to assist with Blackthorn and the jeweled beetle. Lawful Goose, prepare for teleportation to the south to assist with Sentinel and the grasshopper. Titanfist, prepare for teleport to the gate again."

Mark was already aiming toward the ground the second he was told to do so, to set down onto an open space. He landed on broken concrete. Something sparked and exploded behind that house over there. Vectors abounded, and Mark could feel those vectors now that he was closer.

Flying cuttlefish monsters, each of them a meter long, had been hiding in the bushes. They were not hiding now. They rushed a man who was running down the street, trying to get away.

Mark instantly struck at the cuttlefish with a Union of vein decay and strength and the cuttlefish faltered—

Light flashed all around him, failing because Mark's aura was out, because he was trying to save a guy's life, but Ramirez yelled at him to pull his aura in, and Mark rapidly launched four scales of adamantium at the pursuing cuttlefish, striking them—

Light condensed.

- -

Mark appeared in the sky over a blasted land where Blackthorn flew fast around a giant beetle that was all gold and jewels and shining, flashing light. Blackthorn waved a hand and vectors formed massive roots that shot out of the kilometer-wide kaiju, to wrap up and around its legs, to pull it to the ground.

The kaiju roared and its jewels flashed and the building-thick roots that trapped it all incinerated, turning to dust that flew outward on shockwave after shockwave of pulsing, hateful power. That wave blasted the world away, turning boulders and trees and everything within a hundred meters of the kaiju into broken dust. The roar attenuated quickly, but when it was over the kaiju was completely untouched, unharmed, unworried.

It was still moving toward the city. It had never stopped.

This was an apocalypse kaiju.

When the roar reached Mark it shredded what remained of his clothes, but his adamantium protected him better than webweave. Mark was suddenly, distressingly mad. He had tried to save a guy's life back there, and he couldn't. He had seen a thousand bodies today already, but he didn't want to think about that.

How dare these things? These monsters? How dare they come into his life, into his world, and try to do anything at all! Fuck this monster, and fuck the demons behind it all!

Mark's adamantium vibrated with a roar of his own, and then so did the world.

Mark fell into the lightning flow again, striking Blackthorn and the kaiju.

The kaiju vibrated without vibrating, trying to shake off the lightning, but the lightning remained, dancing inward, taking everything that the kaiju didn't want taken. The kaiju didn't like it. It focused on the knot of black lightning in the sky, it dug its legs into the ground, and it began to glow—

But Blackthorn was there.

There was a very human, very male laugh that was full of power. That laugh overlapped with a feminine laugh of pure, unadulterated pleasure. And then came whispered words underneath it all. Power threaded into power. Intent ritualized.

A different sort of vine began to grow. Black as the lightning, and just as fast, vines grew out of everything, out of the ground, the air, the sky. They wrapped the beetle before the beetle could do anything at all, and then they popped open, like the sound of a thousand machine guns, each pop the sound of a spike growing on the vine, of a thorn piercing into the kaiju.

The kaiju's glow faltered, faded, and the vines kept growing, the whispered words kept threading together with more and more power.

Soon, the kaiju was entombed in black thorns, its light gone completely.

It was still alive.

Mark fell out of the flow and he was nude again, because of course he was. Mostly. His excess adamantium had become scales that were good enough to cover his body. How much adamantium was this, now? Mark wasn't sure.

The scales covered his arms to his elbows and his feet to his knees. Some covered his crotch and all of his head, but it left all of his torso and most of his thighs exposed. It was layered adamantium scales upon pale skin that flickered with lightning, and he had no propellers holding him up at all, so how was he flying—

"Looking good there, Mark!" Blackthorn called out, from a few hundred meters away, in the sky. "And flying, too!"

"How am I flying!"

"Don't worry about it right now! How you feeling?"

"Exposed!"

Blackthorn and some woman laughed.

Mark ignored all of that and focused on the beetle, "When is this fucker going to die?!"

The jeweled beetle kaiju was still very much alive, even though its body was more black needles than flesh. The thing was basically entombed, but it was still alive.

Mark asked, "How is it still alive?"

Blackthorn said, "It's a cat 5, Mark, and it has this vibrational destruction thing going on. The only reason my magic is actually reaching it is because I'm taking your adamantium strength for my own and casting it into this spellwork here, but if we stop then it will be out of there in a minute. Holding it down is literally all we can do right now, but if we let it go then it will start flying and enter the city and start blasting apart… a lot!"

That felt really bad. Ominous.

Mark commanded, "Battle status report, Quark."

"Four kaiju are left. All of them are impossible-to-kill cat 4s, like the ice elemental that Aurora had to turn into steam to make it go away, but it was still alive when it departed. Three of the impossibles are locked down through various forces. The heroes and villains are focusing on a river elemental impossible to the south."

Mark thought fast, and he had an idea. "Is Titanfist available? I need a countersink to use against this jeweled thing."

Quark began, "One moment—"

The Mayor's voice came through, "Mark. Titanfist will be available for transport in 4 minutes, but if you cannot kill the jeweled beetle in a minute, then I will be returning him to the gate. Something tried to attack the gate while you were all gone, but your team was able to fight it off with the turrets I put there and when Titanfist came back then the attacking force went away. We believe it was the Lightbody goblin you reported last week— Teleporters ready. Titanfist appearing in 30 seconds."

Mark's heart beat hard with worry—

"Focus, Mark," Blackthorn said. "The apocalypse beetle is getting free."

Mark felt the vector of the jeweled beetle —the apocalypse beetle— begin to struggle more and more. A few thorn vines, like bandages surrounding the thing, snapped and broke. Gold and glimmering jewels appeared, only briefly. And then Mark focused and more vines appeared, and more needles stabbed into the beast—

A minuscule vector appeared in the air far behind Mark, and then that vector expanded and expanded.

Titanfist crashed into the ground a good 800 meters from the apocalypse beetle, happily saying, "REPORTING FOR DUTY!"

Mark focused.

He dipped his toes into the flow once again.

Some minor scrapes disappeared on Titanfist and the beetle began to die, but way too slowly.

This was going to take more than a minute, for sure. In Mark's ears, Blackthorn talked about how this was working, and the Mayor wanted a timetable, and someone else spoke up with 12 to 15 minutes—

"The gate is under attack again," said an operator.

Mark wasn't sure why he was hearing this. He had a job, and this was a distraction. He was terrified of his team being there without him. They would be okay, right?

Ramirez commanded, "Who can we send?"

"Against an elder goblin?" asked someone.

"Team Tartu and the second string for the second half of the Gate scenario," said another guy.

"Do it," Ramirez commanded.

"Focus, Mark," Blackthorn said, blackthorn vines snapping on the apocalypse beetle like so many high-tension cables.

Mark refocused, draining, empowering, killing.

His team and Tartu's people would be fine. They had paladins there to help, and whoever had been slotted for the second half of the gate attack scenario was there, too. Surely they had some other heroes with them. Mark and his team had recruited Titanfist and Grey Phantom, but Team Tartu had a few extra people too, right?

- - - -

Tartu tapped the side of his helmet, and then he breathed deep.

He was deep underground, in a bunker far below the surface of the gate district. People were everywhere all around him, from Noel and the writers, to the other people of the HVP. The bunkers were extensive and made to last a long time, with cleaner plants in every corner of the place and growing in a tall column in the middle of the main room, providing light and air to all 162 occupants of the bunker. The bunker was made for 250 people, like all the common bunkers in this area. There was a lot of space.

Most people were crowded around him and some screens on the walls, waiting for him to speak, to make a plan, or watching in horror as superheroes fought some of the worst kaiju any of them had ever seen. The wall was broken in 5 locations. Thousands were dead already.

And that beetle was an apocalypse kaiju, and Tartu still didn't comprehend that. He probably never would. It did not feel real. That Mark, Blackthorn, and Titanfist could take it down themselves didn't feel real, either.

But a Lightbody elder goblin attacking the gate? Trying to force it open and maybe cause even more kaiju problems? That was a smaller problem. A workable problem.

A Tartu-sized problem.

Light-based magics were easy to counter, and Tartu had studied the Lightbody goblin that got away after Mark let it get away.

Kardi, Shawn, and Lenny were ready to go, as well as a few other paladins that Tartu barely knew. Shawn was a paladin of Drakarok, but they needed more healing tonight, and they'd get that healing. They'd also have more power in the form of a few people that Kardi had recruited when Tartu had been sitting with Lenny and Shawn in the hospital.

Some gunner guy, some Dark Shaper, and an anti-Illusionist who was more of a paladin of Freyala than his anti-Illusion power. They were strong.

With the confirmation that they were facing that Lightbody elder goblin that got away from Mark and them, the array of people that Kardi had signed on to help with this scenario made a whole lot more sense. More sense than before, anyway.

Tartu said, "We're headed back up there, Mayor's orders."

Kardi was the only one not worried.