Adamant Blood

It was horror.

It was death.

Isoko watched from her place in the hoverbattlestation, underground, as Titanfist fought 3 clouddlefish and Mark supported the superhero like some pillar of adamantium lightning. Eliot did what he could with the turret system the Mayor had installed the other day, splashing incandescent laser light here and there, distracting. And then Lawful Goose came in, honked, and the kaiju died.

Millions of tons of dead clouddlefish split open all over the place, releasing clouds of meter-sized flying cuttlefish. Mark killed most of them, but most was not all, and a whole lot remained, and they continued to evacuate the kaiju bodies like so many fleas leaving dead dog corpses.

The superheroes moved on.

The problems they left behind remained.

Isoko, Eliot, and Sally had remained underground and Eliot turned on some Castellan magic to fuck up the kaiju bodies, to set golden fire to it all, to kill some cuttlefish before they could escape the kaiju corpses, and now everything was on golden fire. Not a raging inferno, but it was enough. It was the most that Eliot could do right now, because directed assaults on the cuttlefish worked better, and yet the cuttlefish were fighting against those directed assaults, too.

There was only so much power Eliot could bring to bear on the cuttlefish, for these turrets were meant to be used against kaiju with superhero support; they were just tech. Strong tech, but still just tech. There were power limitations, to hear Eliot explain it.

It took 10 to 12 seconds to kill a single cuttlefish with the rates of power that Eliot was able to bring to bear. At that normal strength each turret could only handle 6 seconds of power, so two turrets were necessary to use against every single cuttlefish.

There were only a thousand emitters.

There were thousands of cuttlefish and mountains of burning flesh all over the gate district.

Lines of sight were difficult to achieve all the time.

But the kaiju were gone, and they weren't coming back unless the gate was breached, and having monsters too close to the gate was a possible failure state for the gate. So Isoko had suggested they take the fight to the monsters, and now they were doing that.

Isoko slammed on the gas on the new and improved hoverbattlestation, which was shaped more like a flat iron with blade ridges like a dorsal fin and like edges to the side. Everything was on golden fire everywhere. Cuttlefish flew across mountains of flesh like schools of soldiers. Turrets wiggled on the ground, aiming at cuttlefish and burning them, and then burning the small poofs of mist that they turned into when the cuttlefish were too hurt. Sometimes the turrets could burn enough to actually kill one, thanks to everything being on fire too, but that was a rare thing.

So there was Isoko's solution.

In the back of the vehicle, the focus of Isoko's Blood and Breath Union of Good and Bad, Eliot, called out, "8 o'clock!"

Isoko turned hard, the hovership turning on a coin.

Sally, sitting behind Isoko, tensed. Eyes wide, she was fearful of what lay ahead, exclaiming, "Burning flesh! ISOKO?!"

A minor mountain of flesh lay in front of them. A kaiju tentacle. Just the tip. Maybe a few tens of meters. Not that deep! Sally couldn't tell that it wasn't that thick, but Isoko could. It was still partially alive. It still had some vectors to it.

Eliot yelled, "Go through it!"

Sally focused hard, TT'ing the entire hull of the ship, but mostly the front edge, the blades that ran from the nose to the back, dorsally and like fins.

Isoko gunned it, right into the tentacle.

The screens in the ship could show nothing but burning golden flesh.

And then they were through.

Sally did some more pretty great TT as she flashed the entire hull and cast away the remnants of burning flesh like so much misted gore. That gore instantly caught on golden fire and evaporated into the sky, turning even more of the day darkened and cloudy.

The cleared screens populated with new information.

Isoko saw the problems assaulting this particular turret.

A trio of cuttlefish were attacking the turret. It was reduced to whipping back and forth and fending off the cuttlefish with physical strength. If the turrets remained underground then the cuttlefish simply tore them to shreds, but if they came up and flailed then they had a chance.

There were tens of flailing tentacles out there that the team had to rescue, and so they did.

"Hitting it!" Isoko said, as she raised her right hand.

Sally gripped the wheel in front of her, taking over the flight controls.

And Isoko slammed the button.

The front of the blade ship opened and Isoko's chair launched her forward, her black miniskirt ruffling in the wind as her sword came to bear, all of her turning from normal to platinum. She sped up twice as fast and she danced into the cuttlefish. One strike each! Whip crack fast!

Each cuttlefish turned into mist, to survive the death blow.

The flailing turret instantly controlled its failing as it focused onto the cuttlefish furthest from Isoko, turning on its laser fire full blast, scouring the cuttlefish mist into the flames. The mist turned to chunks of burning sushi that scattered onto the ground, to catch on Castellan fire. And then the turret did it again to the next cuttlefish.

Isoko swiped at the remaining misty poof cuttlefish and focused her own TT onto the wind, to the air among the mist, and it all turned a bit silvery. She ripped at that nearly-intangible monster and the mist turned to strips and chunks of flesh. The last cuttlefish died.

Golden fire burned the turret and Eliot's vector was already there, fixing up the turret, restoring it to full capability.

Isoko was already hopping back into the driver's seat of the hovership.

Fires burned everywhere and some of the cuttlefish were dying to that, their bodies roasting on the tarmac, and sometimes before they could get all the way out of the kaiju, but most were not.

Isoko slammed back into her seat. The front shut.

Indications popped up again.

"10 o'clock!" Eliot said.

Isoko drove, and this time she didn't have to go through a giant monster corpse.

This was, of course, when things went to shit.

"New monster detected," came a voice over the coms. It was Mayor Ramirez's voice, but it was not her. This was a subroutine that worked on her behalf. And then it was her speaking, "Lightbody goblin detected. It's at the gatehouse trying to activate the gate. Get there right now."

Isoko had a sinking feeling that matched the feelings of everyone else in the hovership. The Lightbody goblin from the goblin extermination at the settlement? The one that had taken the Tutorial to get away? That one? Probably.

Isoko whipped the ship around and gunned it, only avoiding the largest of burning kaiju parts.

They rounded a major pile of burning tentacle, and then they saw what the Mayor had seen, which had caused her direct involvement.

There was a shimmer in the air up ahead, held far above the golden flames, above the dead cuttlefish, in the center bottom of the main gate structure. It was a goblin the size of Sally and it was white and rainbow, and it was flying as it pulled at the space inside of the gate building, like it was trying to wipe away spider webs from inside of a doorway before it walked through.

Isoko got a terrible, horrible feeling, that it would find a spider web and that it would pull.

A hundred turrets, all of the ones active in the area, were either doing coordinated assaults on the cuttlefish that invaded the space, burning them to shreds, or trying to attack the Lightbody goblin. Eliot was already on the job, but the job was a failure. The burning laserfire from the central turrets struck the goblin and deflected back toward each emitter, or toward another turret, taking out that turret. The Lightbody goblin didn't seem to even focus on reflecting the lasers. It was just that easy for it to reflect the lasers. The laserfire died fast, for Eliot was not going to allow his turrets to be destroyed without being able to cause an effect.

But Eliot was a little terrified as he admitted, "I don't know how to handle that."

Isoko said, "Destroy the gate, focus on the fish incoming from the sides, ignore the goblin."

"RIGHT!" Eliot announced, and then his vector focused and dissipated, spreading far and wide. "We need to rescue enough turrets to be able to destroy the small gate with one strike, so the goblin can't prevent it. Go go go."

Isoko wanted to ask about self-destruct buttons, and surely the gates, both of them, had a self-destruct button. But surely Eliot would have done that if that were the case.

Sally's vector pointed up ahead, to the right, where a squadron of cuttlefish were flowing down from a mound of burning kaiju, headed toward tentacle guns that were already flailing to keep away their current cuttlefish problems.

Isoko agreed.

She gunned it.

She did not get out of the vehicle this time. Not against 25-ish cuttlefish. She barreled right through the worst of them, Sally's TT heavy on the hull, misting most of the cuttlefish with one pass. In the distance, Eliot redirected all of the turrets this way, killing at least 80% of the fish, turning them to shredded, burning flesh. The lack of fire, of flailing, upon all of the other smaller groups caused the other cuttlefish to advance, to attack those turrets.

Eliot changed the turrets back to their previous mode. The ones under current attack turned to flails. The ones further afield began misting and then killing cuttlefish one by one. It was slow. It was all they could do.

Isoko drove, and where she went damaged turrets suddenly came to life again as Eliot enacted rapid fixes, faster than Isoko had ever seen him fix anything else. Usually she had to drive slowly for Eliot to build things. That was not the case right now. Isoko knew what was happening when she actually took a second to focus on Eliot.

Eliot had golden fire in his vector, as well as all across the land.

Hearthswell was with them.

Isoko aimed at the next squadron of cuttlefish and knew that they could not full-clear this one, either. She barreled through them anyway, Sally's TT doing wonders to keep the ship intact and a threat. Cuttlefish misted where they struck and the cuttlefish mostly came back together. This was not the best way to kill them. Isoko needed to leave the ship to kill them properly and quickly, to fully clear a place, but they couldn't do that right now.

She drove faster and Sally killed what she could.

They cleared 30 turrets in twice as many seconds—

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Something flickered in the world.

A distant rage.

A present horror.

A deeper meaning, a call to death, an end.

And then it was over and Isoko found herself staring toward the gate while a thread of the opened Veil closed once again and the Lightbody Goblin, all 10 meters tall of him, floating above the 5 meter gate, looked pissed off. Angry. And then he started plucking at the gate with both hands.

Isoko felt there was no time to do anything else, to actually explain, so she made that feeling felt without words, her vector entangling with the vectors of others. She couldn't direct a battle as well as Mark, all silent and serious and sending out influence and smoothing out distraction so much that it seemed like he dissociated every time he got really into it. But she could do some small things, like tell people that something needed to be done right now.

Eliot suddenly controlled every single turret around, blasting the smaller gate itself while the Lightbody goblin was still furiously plucking at the threads of it all. Brilliant focused infernos lanced into the rock and metal and magic of the smaller gate, instantly burbling it, turning it into splashed stone and metals.

Whatever the goblin had been trying to do, it suddenly could not.

It raged, and then it just sat there in the air, looking at the remains of the smaller gate. It contemplated.

With the brief intermission from fire, from flailing, all of the cuttlefish all around the gate got to attacking turrets again. The turrets went back to killing cuttlefish as fast as they could, but there were always more. They boiled out of flaming kaiju flesh. They attacked. They never ended.

This was a kaiju attack and a monster wave at the same time, and they were losing ground with Eliot needing to kill the smaller gate itself. What was that fucking goblin doing now? Isoko glanced that way over and over, watching the goblin think while she kept driving fast, running right through cuttlefish. It was going to do something terrible, for sure, and—

Slowly, horrifically, the Lightgoblin looked up, at the larger gate.

It waved a hand through the air of the larger gate, trying to 'clear cobwebs' from the larger gate.

Isoko's heart seemed to stutter, the world seemed to dim.

Oh no.

Oh no.

"Holy fuck it's trying to open the big gate now," Sally said, also recognizing at the issue.

"Eliot!" Isoko yelled. "Self destruct it all! HOLY FUCK!"

The gate should have had an internal explosion system so they could drop whenever it needed to not exist anymore. But—

Eliot said, "It's still not working!"

Eliot turned all of the turrets on to the left side of the gate and let it rip. Light, bright as the sun, impacted stone, and the stone of the true gate began to melt—

The goblin yelled and then it moved, fast as light, into the light. It reflected those powerful beams like a collector dish, gathering it all and then zipping that inferno death through tens of the turrets at once—

Something broke in the system, because all of the turrets suddenly faltered, their light dimming until they were just flashlights and not death-dealers—

"Fuck! Major overload!" Eliot said, "Fuck fuck fuck fuck…"

His voice trailed away as he focused and as the goblin hovered there, waiting for something else to happen. Cuttlefish advanced and ripped into downed turrets—

For one horrific moment, Isoko felt the goblin looking at them. It was hard not to notice the hovership, of course. They were the only human vehicle in the area, and they had been killing cuttlefish and wherever they went the turrets came back online. Kardi had even warned them to beware the light. Isoko had purposefully not directly engaged the Lightbody because of that warning. No one had suggested she directly engage it, either, and probably because of that warning.

The goblin decided to ignore them, though, as it went back to the center bottom of the gate, to pluck at cobwebs, now that the turrets were fully down—

A massive hand with black and yellow webweave on the wrist reached forward, to the goblin—

The goblin flickered and sped away, yelling something that Isoko didn't catch.

"A LIGHTBODY ELDER GOBLIN? THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT! FUCKING HATE LUCKY POWERS!"

Isoko had never felt such relief before.

Titanfist was here and he stomped the ground even as he complained about the Lightbody monster. His stomp ripped across the land and the air became a million, a trillion bullets. The flash of a kaiju-sized vector. Isoko could only sense the part nearest to her, but it was like a wave of a vector that flashed through the world and broke every living thing that was not them.

Burning kaiju flesh became a wave along with a lot of suddenly-dead cuttlefish, and that wave crashed outward, away from the gate, rolling ever larger and larger as more and more burning flesh rolled every direction that was away from the gate.

Eliot was instantly on the coms, saying, "Titanfist. This is Eliot in this car down here. I need you to please stomp the ground again and bring a small layer of kaiju flesh across the entire land. Half a meter deep if you could, please."

Isoko's eyebrows went up. The burning flesh must have been power for Castellan—

Titanfist did not ask questions, which either meant that he had done this before, or that Eliot's request wasn't unusual, or that he trusted Eliot. He just stomped the ground.

A wave of flesh rolled in, meters high, and then it slipped down and across the land like a liquid. It even splashed here and there. And then it was all on fire, all over again, and the fires raged high and hot—

"Isoko, follow the lines on the screen," Eliot said. "I can fix the turrets if we get through the whole thing in 10 minutes."

The screen of the hovercraft shifted with lines and an overlay.

Isoko started driving fast, even before the lines fully materialized.

Eliot's vector slammed into the ground and spread through the golden flames. Flesh disintegrated into fuel. Eliot began weaving that fuel into power, into the land where Isoko drove. Faster and faster she went, and Eliot's Manipulation poured into the ground, stuff happening far out of sight—

"Can we get the gate self-destruct back online?" Sally asked, feeling impotent right now, her focus only on keeping the hull of the ship structurally sound.

Eliot's voice was distant, echoey, "There is no self-destruct machinery in the greater gate structure. There are no gate spikes in the greater gate structure, either, so it cannot be opened because it was never set up to be opened. Not yet. Not for real. All of that was taken from the gate by Mayor Ramirez and put into the turrets in the ground… I see that now. That's where these tentacle turrets all came from."

Isoko strongly asked, "So the gate can't be activated at all, right?!"

"I'll be able to take it down again if I need to, but…" A woman's voice came through Eliot's, "It would be a delaying tactic to destroy the gate, and thus it must be used as a delay, when the enemy is trying to go through again, to force them to reconsider it all. Thus it was with killing the smaller gate and forcing a reconsidering, thus it must be with the larger gate."

That was Hearthswell's voice.

And now Hearthswell was gone.

Eliot was here.

… And Isoko realized that even if the gate wasn't able to work at all, it could still work. That was the implied statement in there.

Everyone realized that.

And now, they all knew that there was no self-destruct inside the gate at all.

Isoko drove and Eliot rebuilt what he could and Sally quietly panicked, hypervigilant, watching for the other shoe to drop. Something was going to happen. Some traitor was going to appear, and then Sally would—

"Team Mark," said Mayor Ramirez, "We're taking Titanfist back. If you have a final request for him then make it now. We spot more cuttlefish coming in from tens of kilometers away. I suggest you settle your rebuild and then ask for another stomp."

Eliot was already pulling together threads underneath the speeding hovercart, flaming flesh vanishing into power, into the land, into the turrets underground. Everywhere they drove, all 2,500-ish meters of the path they had made around the gate, was devoid of flesh, the power used to fix up whatever the hell Eliot was doing underground.

Titanfist said, "OTHER DUTY CALLS SOON!"

Eliot called out, "Titanfist! Another stomp, please! Meter thick, please!"

The kaiju-sized man stomped.

Liquefied flesh spread far and wide, golden flames softening in the turmoil before the fires blazed into an inferno.

Isoko kept on track, racing fast, but her eyes were on the side view, on Titanfist as he suddenly shrunk, like a man flying upward, very, very fast, leaving behind his stretched-out costume to flutter into the gore. He shrunk to where his head had been, and then there was a flash of light, and he was gone.

"Where did he go?" Isoko asked, not really caring about the answer. It was just something you asked in these situations where nothing was as it should be. Basic information gathering. She wanted to ask about Eliot's burning-kaiju-flesh-for-power, too, and why didn't all kaiju kills end up burning for Castellan power, but that question wasn't going to get answered now and maybe not for a very long time.

Sally was able to speak a bit more freely than Eliot, though.

She had a golden glow in her vector, Drakarok was in the house, so she was able to confidently say, "Titanfist went to be a countersink for Mark and Blackthorn and the apocalypse beetle. They can kill it in 15 minutes. All of the other heroes that are still alive are dealing with some impossible-to-kill kaiju located elsewhere. We have to defend the gate ourselves for 15 minu— Goblin's back."

There, in the air above the ruins of the smaller gate, was the 10 meter tall lightform of the Lightbody goblin. It was white and green and orange and solid. It clawed at the larger air of the larger gate, like a very tiny glowing person grabbing at cobwebs.

"I got a plan for that!" Eliot announced. "Don't let it reach us, Isoko!"

Isoko was still driving fast, but not at full trying-to-escape speeds. She was still following the path through the sea of burning kaiju flesh Eliot had laid out on the screen. Isoko asked, "What are you gonna do— Oh. Okay!"

Isoko felt Eliot's vector thread into the ground and twist into the dead flesh like veins of golden fire. Where he touched the flesh decayed into more fire that then soaked into the ground like seeds being planted. The fire suddenly erupted, and plastics and metals gathered out of the very air, spiking out of the ground, and Isoko imagined Eliot pulling materials from very, very far away, because there was no metal in this land that wasn't already being used. The monster flesh was being turned into ash and smoke, so that made it qualify as man-made, Isoko assumed, and from that smoke came a bunch of plastics. Maybe it was all plastics!

Who knew!

Spike after spike appeared, and then they took off like rockets, tiny fins sticking out with drone propellers on the fins.

Rockets.

Eliot was making rockets.

Isoko gunned it, going fast, and where she left Eliot pulled rockets out of the ground that flew off toward the light goblin. While tens of rockets were in the air, Eliot somehow connected to the turret system and all of what was broken suddenly came online. The augmented reality path on the window in front of Isoko pointed a slightly different way, to hit a bunch more turrets underground, and she moved that way.

Sally stood from her chair, TT holding her onto the ground, holding the ship's surface under her power, as she said, "Worry about setting the stage, Eliot; not fighting." And then she grabbed her pair of swords to the sides, saying, "I will fight it directly, when the reinforcements arrive."

Isoko wanted to laugh. She asked, "We're actually getting reinforcements?!"

Freyala spoke in her ears, 'Not as much as you want, but hopefully as much as you need.'