Adamant Blood

"It's fucking FIRE EVERY GODS DAMNED WHERE!" Lenny complained, as he held onto the railing of the transport hovership.

Tartu did not blame the guy for feeling like that, but he did press his hand to the mic in his helmet and say, "Coms clear. Also, the fire won't hurt us."

"And why isn't the fire hurting us?" Shawn asked, a lot calmer than Lenny. It was a facade.

"Because it's the fire of humanity!" Kardi said, happily.

A simplistic answer, but correct enough for good purposes.

The four of them were in hovership 1, along with a paladin of Freyala who wasn't anything special. He was just a guy who worked at the HVP, and who was here for the final episode of Attack the Gate. His name was Barry and he was mostly here to smooth out planning and coordination. Tartu felt uncomfortable with him at their back because of Mark's nonsense, but it was better to have him here than not.

Kardi's recruited heroes and a pair of paladins were in the other hovership over there.

The Darkshaper, Multi-shot gunner, and the Anti-Illusionist had names. Names were not great right now. Names added to confusion. They were getting called Dark, Multi, and Anti. The Castellan guy was getting called that, the Union guy was probably getting called Union-2, and Tartu shouldn't have learned Barry's name either, so he was going to call the guy Union. They all knew Tartu's teammates, though, and so did the people they were going to hook up with, so those names would remain active to keep confusion to a minimum.

The two hovercars raced across the golden flames and the sea of flesh. It smelled horrific. Any normal fire would have killed absolutely all of them already, through nothing else than the removal of oxygen from the atmosphere, not to mention the heat. But there was no heat. This was a Castellan fire.

Every human near this fire would be 'supported', and that meant oxygen needs and a bunch of other things.

Tartu had seen proper Castellan fire a few times before. Most recently when Mark broke the Winter Auroras and called three kaiju down to the settlement, and then that faceipede crawled over the walls while Aurora was still on the other side of the land. The faceipede had burned quite well.

It seemed kaiju calamari burned better and provided a much more stable energy source.

Tartu felt power thrum in his soul, his embedded spells ready for casting. They probably wouldn't even break when he used them. He had planned to use them against Mark, but he had decided to keep it together and let the gate be taken without a real fight. The real enemy wasn't Mark, anyway.

Tartu was pretty sure Mark was just a dragonist. Not a cultist or a hidden dragon. Just an enemy of the world in a misguided sort of way that meant he should never be allowed near real power… But if Tartu ever got a say in that shit ever again, it would be because everyone else higher than him had died and Tartu had been promoted.

Mark was out there proving himself, though.

And so Tartu was here, proving himself, too.

The hovercrafts raced across the burning land, tentacle turrets up and active and yet not striking the Lightgoblin. Good. Eliot had learned his lesson about that. Tartu could have told him that attacking the Lightgoblin with light was ignorant, but whatever. Looked like Eliot was doing some Castellan work to make some sort of… rockets? Though? Explosions were usually a good choice to injure something, even something as ephemeral as light.

Tartu focused some Domains on his eyes, allowing him to see across the ten kilometers separating them from the gate, from Eliot and whatever he was doing… Yeah. Rockets.

They took off like curving glows that slammed into the Lightgoblin and exploded, occluding the monster from sight, but more than that they disrupted the goblin's strumming of the gate.

The goblin burst the air like a bubble of light expanding, knocking down all of the occlusion, right in time for the second set of rockets to slam into his light. The goblin grabbed those rockets in suddenly-appearing hands that formed bubbles around the rockets. The rockets still exploded, but those explosions were contained.

And then the Lightgoblin started putting up barriers that caught the rockets before they could get near enough to bother him. He continued to strum the gate.

Kardi had her own binoculars on, staring forward as the ship raced ahead. She said, "He's desperate to open it faster, and he knows that attacking the people attacking him will cost him too much time. And he's right. He's too close to opening it."

And then Kardi did something crazy.

She pulled out a gun, aimed it at the console right in front of their driver, and she shot the hovership.

The driver, of course, yelled 'what the fuck!' as any normal person would have done. But then he rapidly had to regain control of the suddenly-faster ship and they were going at twice the speed that they had been going. Warning lights came on everywhere.

Kardi simply said, "Limiter's gone. We'll be fine! Gonna want to bail with us though, driver guy."

"We won't be able to stop!" said the driver.

"It's fine," Tartu said. "Bail with us. Barry— Union-guy on coordination."

The ship rushed forward, rapidly outstripping the driver's ability to steer, to control anything at all except for a general direction. The speedometer upped past 350 kilometers per hour, and they were close enough.

Union-guy pulled them all together into a cohesive unit, the driver rushing up and out of his seat, Shawn hanging out of the vehicle's left door, making the whole thing spin toward the left, and which caused the ship to start to steer toward the right, which was up. The ship went up. Everyone else went down, right into a cushion Domain that Tartu stretched out forward, into the flames, into the rapidly vanishing flesh.

They landed directly into an empty patch of tarmac, the flesh already consumed to create rockets that fired over and over, trying to angle up and around the Lightgoblin's barricades. The laser turret systems were doing shit all.

They were 200 meters from the goblin.

The second hovership would get here soon, but not soon enough. They were still four kilometers back there.

Tartu opened coms to Eliot's team, saying, "Tartu to Eliot, over." He was right near one of the laser turrets, which was good enough for him. He walked that way and began weaving a Domain—

"Eliot to Tartu!" Eliot responded. "Sally is attacking the goblin right now! Send in melee!"

"Don't do that. I'm altering this Turret here. Use this one against the goblin. It won't do damage, but you'll figure out what it does soon enough. Everyone converge on this location."

There were a few things that worked very well against Light-based monsters and Darkness was one of them, which is probably why Kardi recruited a Darkshaper. But that guy was in the other transport. Tartu didn't need that guy to do this, though. This particular nuance was something he learned years ago.

Tartu finished with his Domain and he aimed it upon the emitter for the tentacle turret. Blackness enveloped the emitter and the stilled turret flickered to life, the internal programming coming under Eliot's control as he reached across the field toward them, feeling out whatever Tartu had done.

Several other tentacle turrets also flickered as Eliot tried to understand what had happened.

Eliot was way over there, in that razorship on the other side of the local gate space, but he was coming this way. It looked like Sally was on the roof, swords in her hands, ready for battle. Isoko was probably driving. Sally had not jumped yet, which was good.

Shawn was ready to fight, but he wasn't going in alone. He was waiting for Sally.

Lenny began to cast a few small buffing spells, enhancing his resistances. He couldn't do a whole lot right now, which is why he was doing what he could, which is why he had learned some buffing magic in the first place.

Kardi took aim with her guns, and she waited, too.

The goblin's Lightbody glanced their way, and then it went back to strumming the air of the gate, trying to unlock the potential that was already there because of the gate on the other side. The actual internals of the gate, the parts that allowed the smaller gate to expand into the bigger one, were not installed yet. The goblin would need to do a whole lot of shit to open up the bigger gate… but it might be able to do that.

Kardi whispered so only Tartu could hear, "Want to draw him this way?"

Lenny was four meters away. He did not hear Kardi, but he was in the thread of influence that was her Luck, when he asked in the coms, "Why haven't they self-destructed the gate?"

Tartu Looked at Kardi, who just grinned, as he said, "No one answer that if they know it. The goblin is listening."

The gate was missing its self destruct shit, of course, but the Mayor could install it all fast if needed. So the question was a valid one.

But beyond that:

It was not a big secret. It could have been for any reason that they did not destroy the gate. The largest reasoning in Tartu's mind involved the fact that the destruction of the gate was a failure state for Memphi, because it would prove that Memphi was not able to be a world power if they could not defend what they needed to defend from the demons. If they lost this gate, then this part of the world might become Magically Significant in a bad way, and trying to open or shut gates on purpose might simply cease to be a magic that existed in humanity's hands, in this area.

Which would be catastrophic.

Castellan prevented Veil breaks inside city limits, and allowed humanity to function, but if they destroyed the gate then it would be very possible that humanity could not close the Veil in this location at all.

In a smaller way, it didn't matter if they destroyed the gate. The ritual around the gate was already strong enough to make this part of the world Magically Significant in a Veil-breaking sort of way. If the gate went down, the goblin would still be able to cause a Veil-break by doing some things that Tartu knew it could do, but which he wasn't sure the goblin knew he could do. So self-destructing the big gate was probably a stopgap measure to delay the goblin's advance, like how the smaller gate had obviously been destroyed.

If none of that happened, there was also the social issue of simply losing face among the cultures of the world if they destroyed the gate themselves.

On the plus side, if they lived through this, if they succeeded, as long as the gate remained up there, then this land would become Magically Significant in a very good way. Kaiju would simply not be able to spawn except on monthly gate openings, just like in Tokyo.

Tartu was absolutely sure that the public outcry over this whole event, over the powers-that-be allowing this shit to happen at all, would be very large. Lots of bitching. Lots of uninformed opinions. People were stupid like that. They were scared of war and monsters. That's why it was up to the strong to lead the way so that the weak could follow where they could not go themselves.

So drawing this Lightgoblin's attention was very important.

All of that flashed through Tartu's mind in an instant, as he formed the words that made the taunt that made the goblin look their way.

The goblin was listening, and it was listening very intently.

Tartu finished the full taunt, saying, "He can likely see and comprehend everything within his range of sight, which could be kilometers or more. He might not even be here, which is the real reason why he's tanking everything and not caring to fight. We're not actually injuring him, yet. But we can. Very soon."

And sure enough, the goblin looked directly at Tartu.

Many things came together in that moment.

Kardi stepped to the left, through the golden fire, fire twitching into her guns, and she fired. Blasts of Dark lanced outward, splashing into light barriers rapidly erected around the Lightgoblin, breaking them into shattered panes of sparks.

And then Eliot fired off the main cannon that Tartu had altered with a coating of Darkness on the emitter.

Eliot painted the world black in a straight line; a perfect calligraphy brush of ink. That brushwork shattered into the goblin, fracturing the lightbody like so much broken glass. The goblin had a weird, surprised look on it, as it broke apart.

It looked like it died.

It was still very much alive.

Tartu empowered his voice with a Listen-to-Me Domain on his mouth, making sure that everyone in a kilometer heard him, if they were able, "It's not dead. It's coming back, and it will attack here. It will attack us to get to the gate. Full regroup on my position."

Everyone looked around, reforming the squad, giving each other space. Union-guy was in the middle, heart beating with Good and Bad, if Tartu wasn't mistaken. Shawn backed up Lenny and Kardi aimed left and then suddenly right, her focus vibrating in every direction. If anyone was going to notice the goblin first, it was going to be her. And then Eliot and most of his team showed up, Sally crashing into the ground and stabilizing fast, her focus on everyone present and then Shawn and then outward. She took a flank with Kardi as Isoko leapt out of their vehicle and landed on the other side of the field, her Union pulsing strong, gathering the group together alongside Barry's Union.

Eliot crashed his vehicle into the ground where the turret was, everyone making room for him without saying a single thing, the group held together due to Union. It only looked like a disaster of a crash. The ship unfolded around the Darkened turret and then came back together underneath it all, with Eliot down below, inside, while the ship and the turret became a mobile tower several meters tall with a dark globe at the top. Eliot was probably doing a lot underground, too. Eliot did too much around Tartu's Domain, though, and the Domain shattered, piecemeal, revealing a clear disco ball at the top of the tower.

Tartu recast the Darkening over the obvious light emitter, and then he cast overlapping Domains in every direction, thin and serious, like the goblin had done with his light barricades. Those Domains were not actually solid at all until they were interacted with in a specific—

Kardi noticed it only a fraction of a second before Tartu's Domain revealed the Lightgoblin's Lightbody trying to sneak through the area, trying to get inside. It was five claws, each a meter long, coming out from fingers and a thumb that were only half there, half revealed. The goblin had come invisibly, then Tartu's Domain revealed it, and then Kardi fired.

The goblin's hand shattered and flowed away, a tiny yelp escaping from a surprised, invisible throat.

"Does that actually hurt it?" Isoko asked.

"No," Tartu and Kardi both answered.

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"We need a prognosticator," Union-guy said, tapping his helmet, "Requesting Counter-Seer from command."

Tartu told the guy what he was already going to hear, "They're too bus—"

"Fire around the other transport, Eliot!" Kardi yelled.

Eliot's tower of Darkness fired around the other transport that had yet to get here. Darkness sheared through flame and impacted the Lightgoblin, shattering the light, but the light maintained enough cohesion to rip the second transport in half. Tartu breathed calmly, though he was freaking out, as light eviscerated the transport.

But the Darkshaper in the transport grabbed the beams that Eliot had shot out and ripped through the light. Shots rang out from Multigun. And then the Anti-Illusionist shattered something in the air, revealing a monstrous being of light and fangs and claws with a very long tendril coming off of the back end. The tendril trailed off to the north.

The Darkshaper cracked the Lightbody in half and disrupted the form, even as the transport fell to the burning sea of flesh. The Darkshaper caught them all in a cushion of Dark, too. Tartu looked with Domain-enhanced eyes, and the Castellan paladin was dead; severed in half from the shoulder to the groin. Darkshaper held the other paladin in a blot of black, holding the guy together. He had been cut in half more horizontally. The other paladin would live.

Tartu ignored the horror that crashed into his mind.

Now was not the time to freak out.

The Darkshaper-supported group began flowing their way across the burning sea of flesh, all of them supported on Darkness that was moving them much faster than simple walking. They were a thousand meters away. They might make it.

Calmly, Tartu said, "The goblin isn't taking prisoners and he's targeting healers. Lenny, Barry, Kardi, into Eliot's tower. Help him—"

"Fuck no, fuck you," Sally declared, "There are traitors in Memphi and we're not exposing ourselves to your people, Tartu."

Tartu didn't bother arguing. He said, "Stand next to the tower. Back to the tower—"

A few things happened fast.

Kardi pointed at the second group, mouth open, about to say something.

The anti-Illusionist pulsed again and the goblin was revealed again, floating in the air with a tendril coming off of it, headed west-ish.

And Eliot fired beams of darkness at the Lightgoblin.

The Lightgoblin withstood the attack until Tartu recast the Darkness Domain on Eliot's emitter again and the Darkshaper gave up on running, turning to kill the Lightgoblin's projection.

And then a spear of light came in fast from the south, piercing the bisected body of the Union paladin that had been in the second group. The bisected body lost its head.

Dead.

Now whose fault was that? Obviously the monster's, but the Darkshaper or the Anti-Illusionist guy should have been on that. The Union healer was obviously at fault, too, but only because he was probably in extreme pain.

Tartu let those unhelpful thoughts float away as he took more charge, saying, "Covering fire, Eliot. They won't make it otherwise. Expect attack from the other—"

The detection Domains right overhead revealed spears of light crashing through, fast as fuck, right down into the sudden activation of Darkbeams from Eliot's emitters. It was a stimulus/response sort of action, that time. The counter-beams had become automatic.

That was why Barry survived and why Sally, who was almost a meter taller than everyone else, got a spear only through her shoulder, into her chest, and not much deeper than that. In that moment, Tartu realized that the goblin obviously did not have full Seer capabilities. It should not have attacked Sally at all.

Sally flickered gold, reflexive anger shattering up the length of lightspear like a lightning bolt following a trail of light that only became visible due to her Retribution. That Retribution did not head west. It went southwest.

Tartu looked that way, saying, "The goblin is getting closer to the gate again and masking its presence."

Eliot activated something and another turret popped out of the ground and it looked real and it was going to fire on the southwest, where the trail led, and Tartu was about to panic and cast an anti-light Domain over the new turret. The goblin would reflect a normal light-based attack. They could not deal with returning fire right now.

But then Tartu saw the new turret was made of nothing but golden fire.

The new turret burned with the light of Castellan and burned the southwest, near the western pillar of the gate, igniting a massive patch of the burning sea of flesh in an explosive conflagration. It reminded Tartu of the videos of underwater nuclear explosions.

It was a lot of fire.

Lightbody ran to the side, burning all the while, looking like a glimmer of white covered in gold as it escaped into the burning sea again, plunging into flesh to—

"It occurs to me," Kardi said, at the same time Tartu and probably a few other people were thinking the exact same thought in the exact same moment. That's what Kardi did with her Luck sometimes, to draw them all together, for she was very good at timing and wording. Kardi pointed at the sea of burning flesh. "Goblin venom works on all living flesh, right? And kaiju cells don't die right away."

Ah.

Kaiju-spawn goblins.

Eliot said, "Probably mist-cuttlefish goblins. The kaiju flesh is mostly dead. Lots of highly injured and hiding cuttlefish out there."

Tartu said, "I agree. Expect illusionary goblins coming en masse."

Darkshaper, Multi-bolter, and Anti-Illusionist guy made it to the open land where Eliot had used up all of the kaiju fire fuel. They were 50 meters away, then 30, then they were in the group, and the Darkshaper yelled, "Aggggghh! FUCK!"

He was clearly upset, tears streaming down his face.

Multibolter exclaimed, "There are goblins out there!"

Tartu hadn't even noticed the—

Oh.

Yeah.

"I see them now," Eliot's voice came through the coms of the short tower he had made, while new drones released from the tower to join other drones already in the air. "They're at 80 meters out and closing fast. They're swimming in the burning flesh. Most are dying. Some are turning to mist and not dying at all."

Tartu said loudly, loud enough for the Lightgoblin to hear, "All we have to do is delay. Delay and we win, because then reinforcements will be here and—"

"They're coming," Isoko said, right as the Union guy said, "Here they come."

Goblins with tendrils for beards and fins for lower bodies floated on the air, garbling and burbling like they were roaring and not able to do it right. They might have been kaiju-based goblins or cuttlefish goblins and there were perhaps millions of them, but they were young and weak and made in the last hour, goblin magic spreading just as fast as the Castellan fire. Lightbody was very fast with his Biting, it seemed.

Many things happened at once.

Tartu held himself in reserve to patch up holes in the defense.

Eliot did the second-most, ten emitters tendriling out of the ground near his tower and pushing up and out before taking aim at the goblins, to sweep arcs of burning light at the incoming horde. Goblins garbled screams as they burned in the intense light. It was just light, though. Not Castellan fire. Eliot was holding that one back for the main threat. All he was using was electricity and probably a nuclear generator or four; not mana.

How much had he built underground to support that? Probably a lot. Maybe he had just taken over the substructures of the original gate bunker. Tartu assumed they were somewhere near that place, but who could fucking tell, right?

Sally waited for the drop.

Isoko supported with Union and with her sword in her hand, joining Sally in protecting Eliot's turret and Eliot himself. Lenny and Shawn were there, too, doing the same.

Darkshaper threw out knee-high arcs of black like scything knives, cutting down tens of goblins at once.

Anti-Illusionist guy blasted the sky and the land with bursts of Skill, uncovering spear after spear of light, just beyond Tartu's detection-Domains, all of them getting ready to blast down into a target. Each uncovered spear got a crack of Dark through it, courtesy of Eliot, and Tartu renewed his Domains as necessary.

Kardi aimed at the empty sky here and there, shooting every so often. Every time she shot the light flickered as the invisible Lightgoblin, which had been hiding in the sky, moved fast enough to get away from her shot. The Lightgoblin became visible in those brief moments.

It was going okay.

The biggest surprise was Multi-Bolt.

He only had revolvers and his costume was Old World Texan, which was kinda weird, but he was competent as hell, and with a bit of help from Tartu creating a Domain of Aiming around him, the guy could have easily solo'd the entire horde of goblins.

The guy shot his revolvers out at the sea of goblins and each shot became 5. He had replaced his ammo with Darkshot, probably at Kardi's suggestion, and so he traced lines of black across the field, five at a time, right into the foreheads of every goblin he aimed toward. And he kept firing, one shot a second becoming 5, each individual shot killing one young goblin. He was a storm of bullets with no need to refill. Every shot he fired took a second, and every second another bullet materialized in his guns. He did not tire thanks to Isoko and the other Union guy—

A spear of light appeared from the south, from the direction of the gate. It only appeared because of the detection Domains Tartu had put up. That spear became a jagged thing, like a bolt of lightning, even as Eliot's Dark-based automatic-reprisal tried to hit the jagged spear. Eliot did not hit the target. The spear jerked to the side as it jerked inward, into their defenses. It continued forward to cleave right into the Anti-Illusionist's right arm, because Kardi had shot the spear at the last moment and it jerked to avoid her shot, and so the spear had aimed too wide to hit straight on.

The Anti-Illusionist screamed in lancing pain, even as he sent out a pulse of power that swept to the south and uncovered a tendril of light that headed right to the center of the gate, 250 meters up, revealing the goblin with two big grips inside the world itself, like a man trying to hold open an elevator with both hands.

And then the goblin wrenched, and the gate opened—

The sound of kaiju ripped across the world, blasting away the Castellan fire—

The stone gate exploded with internal fire, like charges set off every 10 meters inside the entire length of it all. It was a self-destruct.

The forming Veil-break in the middle of the gate suddenly flickered and died and the goblin roared in hatred, even as the gate continued to explode from the inside, as it continued to fracture and fall. It would take most of a minute to fall; it was that large.

The goblin tore at the world anyway, at the separation of powers, at the Veil, grasping for what he had touched and what he could still touch, even though it was vanishing. Fingers of light, claws of power, wrenched at a crack in the Veil that was rapidly vanishing.

Well fucking hell, Tartu thought. A self destruct should have been able to delay the goblin longer than that.

The goblin was already bringing back the lost gate through pure determination, twisting the ritual of the gate into something larger. As the goblin pulled, Eliot fired blasts of Dark its way, as much as he could, but barrier and barrier of light appeared and the Dark could not reach the target. Tartu was pretty sure that a hundred different illusions were already in the air before them, and those illusions were only getting thicker. Anti-Illusionist was too injured to dispel the illusions, too, and the illusions were 300 meters away, anyway.

Clouds from burned flesh hung heavy in the sky, darkening everything.

Goblins died to Dark-infused bullets.

And the falling stone of the gate seemed to disappear as a second sun in the shape of a gate appeared where the stone gate was still falling.

It was bright.

It was the Veil itself, revealed.

The goblin pulled at the Veil.

Tartu made a decision.

It was better to turn this ritual into the death of crossing magic in this area, than to allow this to continue.

Tartu pulled out a wand from the several he had in his bandolier of wands at his lower back. It was a black-tipped wand. One of the ones he had made from Mark's adamantium. It was a Wand of Destruction, and it would disjoin all magic upon a target and disable more spellwork of the same for a few seconds. It was magically significant in this space, in this ritual, and it would have been Tartu's trump card against Mark.

He was using it now.

He just had to give it some oomph, first.

Tartu pointed the Wand of Destruction at the Lightgoblin's false body floating in the air, like a spec of light in the middle of a gate of light, as he cast a Domain of Anti-That-Specific-Goblin upon his wand. It would be better if he knew the goblin's name, but this would still work—

Something slapped his foot wide, and Tartu's shot went wide. Way, way too wide.

Tartu's heart felt like it stopped.

"Fuck."

The Wand of Destruction sent a narrow beam of mirage-like distortion a full 300 meters to the left, not even hitting the illuminated gate itself, but hitting the area outside of the gate, and then the shot continued on into the smoke-filled sky.

Wasted.

The goblin opened the gate of light.

The world shattered into a screaming, kaiju-filled Veil Break.

A full rift.