Adamant Blood

Fires, dark clouds, the world leveling out to one horizontal plane.

Mark is in the flow, now.

Everything floating onto that plane. Bombs exploding. Kaiju worms roiling in every direction, swimming into the bubbled earth, the kaiju's hivemind vector following the worms and gathering, gathering, gathering underneath. The kaiju just wanted a place to come together and it found such a place inside the 1.2-kilometer-wide hole Mark had bubbled into the gate district.

Cultists rallying on the stone ground.

The lip of the depression is easily 40 meters up. The cultists aren't escaping by simply running, for Mark has already plotted to Union with Earth and Bubbles again, to make sure they can't use any underground tricks—

Kardi Shale, 289 meters away, according to Quark's rapid target acquisition system. And that is her. Her illusions are gone, for the moment. She is there, and looking frightened and happy, her vector full of delight and confusion, a big white handprint on her face. The handprint is glowing white.

There are other cultists.

Mark becomes a blender. Killing, killing, killing. Reba speeds away, knife in her hand. Mark has coated her knife with adamantium in the last however-long. He did not remember doing it. It has already been done.

Mark breathes Adamant and exhales Ethereal, his heart beats with the same, and life becomes harder for cultists. Some of them fade into the ground, trying to get away. Mark switches to Earth and Bubbles and the ground becomes an air hockey table with people bobbing in the sand and no earthmoving tech working like it should.

Brawnies can't even TT the ground well enough to walk away. So they swim instead.

Mark is a blender. A clash of blades becomes a sword two meters long that rips through the flesh of a cultist of a horrible god. Blood sprays, becomes bubbles in the air, as the body falls into the effervescent ground. Worms are there, and they feast. Another cultist opens up with a blast from a machine, lightning crackling. Lightning grounds on a spear of black that then punches through the machine and the cultist in turn. Punch! Punch! Heart and head have been made holey.

Reba can turn the ground solid where she is using some sort of Counter-Union to Mark's Earth and Bubbles, and she does so, allowing her traction that no one else can use. She is much faster than 5x. She lied before about that. 10x? 15x? Mark is thankful for the help. She kills like a professional, black blade carving through necks, delivering justice one person at a time.

Mark lets go of Earth and Bubbles and slams Ethereal/Adamant, and the entire crater solidifies with people stuck halfway in the muck. The kaiju in the bottom of the stone is unhappy. It roars psychically, vibrating the world, turning the world into a horror. This somehow affects the cultists. Mark wonders why kaiju scare them. Can they not stomach terror? They certainly dish it out enough themselves.

Mark uses the solid ground to race forward, swiping through people with blades, turning them into splashed gore. And then he switches back to Earth and Bubbles and Kardi, who had been getting away for the few seconds Mark had allowed her to, once again falls back into the stone.

Kardi points at Mark with a black-tipped wand, shouting, "It's okay, Mark! I forgive you!"

Mark jukes to the right.

Kardi was already shooting to the right.

A mirage-like beam strikes his astral body long before it strikes the center of his chest.

Mark's adamantium scatters from his body, leaving him nude. Quark falls to the ground, insensate and inactive. The world seems darker. Everything is hotter. Union stopped. Everything stopped. Heartbeat, braindance, breath in and out. Union is gone right now.

Mark is still in the flow.

He is 50 meters from Kardi.

She is the only one left.

Mark grips an adamantium claw and he runs right at her.

Kardi grins, right as light begins to flicker around her body.

A teleport? It's a teleport. Mark knows she is getting away and he runs faster. It's not fast enough. It would never be fast enough.

Kardi says, "But Mark! Leash told the world that you're adamant blooded when he publicly spoke of your mana being adamant. Anyone who was anyone knew that you were genuinely adamant blooded right then and there! And if you weren't adamant blooded, then all it would take is a few mutations to get you there! A few empire-sanctioned Wildings! Ha ha!"

Mark is close to killing her. Five steps away.

Light flashes.

Kardi is gone—

A flash of light blinks atop the crater wall, a few hundred meters away.

Kardi is waving at Mark while another flicker of light begins to build around her. Another teleport. A short range teleport? Some tool on her person? Or the same teleport system that was being used to move people all around Memphi that took 1 minute for a full recharge, but Kardi is abusing it for shorter jaunts?

Mark doesn't know.

Kardi projects her voice across the sandy pit, "You think you could survive being taken into custody by the empires but you can't, because they would Wild you into a docile beast that didn't know the difference between a whip across your face and a gentle pat. Words spoken harshly would make you cower and words spoken softly would make you happy. You would be a monster for them to use in their adamantine gardens and you would never be able to escape that at all. That's what I'm saving you from, Mark. That's what Leash wants to save you from, too, but you gotta meet us halfway!

"We'll give you some more incentives, though! More than just getting rid of that talzarki of yours!

"I'm gonna set off some nuclear bombs now! Stay down there and you might survive long enough to see the true power of the True Gods! When you do see their power I'm sure you'll fall in line with the angels, too, and you'll help me kill all the rest of these ungrateful humans! Bye bye!"

Mark stares up at Kardi from the bottom of a sandy cliff.

Kardi waves from above.

Another flicker of light turns into another teleport.

Kardi is gone.

And then a trap goes off under Mark's feet, throwing shrapnel at him. It hurts like a mother fucker and then… it starts to really fucking hurt. A whole fucking lot.

Mark stares down at the shrapnel in his arms and chest and it is coated with silver liquid.

Mark had thought that the wand blast had cut him off from his Power temporarily. It had to have been a Wand of Destruction. Tartu had had one of those, so yeah, Kardi had it now. So Mark's Power had been there, in the background, like an injured animal waiting to rally.

His Power vanished completely under a shavallian haze.

Mark was cut off for days, at least—

Mark fell out of the flow completely, breathing too hard, too fast, emotions roiling as memories of being in a hospital bed came back to him, and as the enormity of everything began to take hold. Nuclear bombs? No. Not nuclear bombs. No no no no no—

And then Reba was there, holding Quark in one hand and pressing him against Mark's arm like pushing a dead jellyfish against a person, speaking with a golden voice, "We're going to learn how to cleanse shavallian now. This is probably a very fucking bad idea from an international legal perspective, but we're doing it. So I need you to breathe with me."

And then Mark really Looked at Reba.

There was a hole through her head, her heart, and her stomach. Gold light was in those holes, like a support structure made of divinity. This wasn't Reba at all. Reba was dead. Snipers had gotten her.

Mark felt a pit in his chest, like a boulder weighing him down. "When did she… what got her?"

Freyala said, "Snipers that she already killed. She's with me. Now listen to me, Mark. This is going to be painful. Shavallian triggers a quietude failsafe at the base of every strong power and you need to focus on that failsafe untriggering as you bring in Energy and expel Entropy. I'm gonna get you started, and you're gonna have to do the rest yourself. You can shorten the healing time of shavallian from 5 days to 2 minutes. Quark can reestablish you with Memphi once your astral body wakes up."

Mark knew he shouldn't ask questions. That he should do what he needed to do. But he had to know. "They would really Wild me into a beast?"

"We destroyed those adamantium farms, Mark," Freyala said, Reba's flesh disintegrating to reveal more golden skin. More of Freyala. Reba was a normal enough woman. Freyala was a goddess just below the surface. "Now breathe with me."

Freyala held Mark's shoulders and put her forehead against his, breathing out gold.

Mark found himself holding Reba's disintegrating arms as he closed his eyes to the light, and breathed in that gold.

It was a shock. A wakening. A rusted valve being opened and a trickle of water returning.

And then Mark breathed out, and it was the relaxation of a shock to a stream, a trickle becoming a flow.

Mark breathed in Energy and breathed out Entropy.

Gradually, Mark felt Quark's silver body disintegrate on his arm and then come back out of nowhere like a density in the air returning. Mark almost cried at that sudden return. He hadn't had time to process that Quark could have been really, truly dead, but Quark wasn't dead, and he couldn't be dead. Not as long as Mark was alive and able to summon him back.

And then Mark's heart shook with Energy and Entropy and he did cry a little as he felt his Unionsense return. He had no idea what he was doing 'untriggering a failsafe', but it was working, and Freyala was here, in front of him, like a knot of golden vectors, making sure it worked properly.

Mark opened his eyes and saw the last bit of Reba disintegrate, leaving behind a golden ghost of a goddess.

Freyala looked like a supermodel, and exactly like all of her depictions. Tall, dark-skinned even in the gold light, though some people liked to make her look like a red-haired white woman. Smooth hair. She had been a nurse in France in the Reveal, wearing scrubs and fighting monsters and healing people, but she wore golden light now, and she was focused on Mark. This must be the version of Freyala that Reba believed in.

"You've got the hang of it. Tell no one how it works, exactly. Shavallian is about the only safe way we have to lock down people who need locking down, otherwise we have to kill them, which is rarely the right solution. If someone tries to wring this information out of you, though, kill them. Now cry for a bit if you must, but heal yourself of all the smaller poisons they pack into shavallian, heal your body, and then retrieve your adamantium and get back out there. Your friends survived their ambush. They are coming your way now."

And then Freyala vanished, a knot of gold unwinding.

Mark stared at everything for a long moment, from the white worms flopping over the edges of the crater to the sandy ground, to the dead bodies back the way he had come, to the fires over the crater edge, and finally, to an adamantium-coated dagger laying in the sand where Reba's body had been standing.

Mark breathed, heartbeat, and braindanced with Entropy and Energy, his astral body waking up once again, shrugging off the shavallian bit by bit. He rapidly hit a wall of lethargy and horror that might have been caused by the 'smaller poisons in shavallian', and so Mark healed himself with Good and Bad, exhaling black smoke from his mouth and nose, then breathing in the scent of fresh blood and fire. Bits of shrapnel fell out of his skin and his skin healed—

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He connected to the first hivemind kaiju worm and then to all the rest, black lightning shattering out of him, slamming into the worm kaiju. Worms desiccated and died underground, under the weight of so much sand. The kaiju's main mind had moved on elsewhere, though, once the land underneath turned out to be inhabitable.

Mark healed.

Mark also raced forward, running on sand, with only the adamantium claw in his hand and the adamantium-coated dagger floating around him. He picked up more black metal with more and more of his waking astral body, like so many black petals flowing through the air to join his skin as scales once again. And then he ran on adamantium caltrops, moving faster and faster, his astral body waking quickly with every passing moment, his range increasing with every beat of his heart.

And then his range was all the way to the edge of the crater, and Mark had grabbed every bit of adamantium he could, his body layered with black scales that seemed to absorb all light.

Mark turned and put on speed, racing back to where he had seen Kardi on the edge of the crater—

Isoko, Sally, Eliot, and also Tartu and Shawn. Their vectors were right up there. They were running this way—

Quark woke up and shocked himself through Mark's helmet, into his vision, reading out: Nuclear Warning! Nuclear Warning! Get to ground! Get to ground!

Mark connected to his people and also Tartu and Shawn and he filled them with as much strength as he could take from the hivemind kaiju. They ran faster.

It wouldn't be fast enough.

Mark became as solid as the Earth in order to Union with Earth and Bubbles. The ground dropped away in every direction, eating right under the feet of his team. Mark cut it as soon as that happened and he raced forward.

Isoko soared right over the expanding edge of the crater, already falling, carrying a blue and white webweave Tartu over her shoulder and a similarly clothed Shawn in a platinum grip. She fell. It was 30 meters to the soft sand. Sally rushed right after her, running on stumps and rocks that turned to exposed bone and sand, falling to the ground. Eliot was right there with her, in a container like a brass bowling ball the size of Sally's torso.

Mark raced toward them, switching to Adamant and Ethereal, his strongest personal Union, connecting to his people—

Light flashed overhead, singeing the very air itself—

Tartu and Shawn screamed, but Mark was already healing them. They were dosed with shavallian. He would heal that if they survived—

A rumble.

Eliot flashed his Manipulation outward, into the sand that Mark had made, turning it into a dome that waited only a fraction for Mark to get close enough, and then Eliot closed the dome, his bronze container expanding and changing. Lights flooded outward, illuminating the dome, revealing Eliot was only half of a person right now. Left arm gone at the shoulder, body sheared from his left ribs to his right hip, missing a few fingers in his right hand. His injuries were extensive, and his temporary repairs were just as extensive, from tubes in his chest to plastic containers around his broken parts, keeping his body together. He was missing an eye and it had been replaced with silver metal.

The world rumbled and rumbled overhead, shockwave after shockwave passing through the world like an ever-rumbling horror. Eliot expanded the thickness of the dome, though, thicker and thicker, and the sound attenuated.

Eliot spoke from a speaker, "Defense on me."

Eliot was probably heavily drugged, but he was Manipulating hard, turning the sand of the ground into solid stone, the bodies of dying and dead worms into golden fire, lining the inside of the new bunker with a few lights.

Sally glowed with tiny spikes of gold, even as she crashed out onto the floor, her bones sticking out of where her ankles and her arms had been severed.

Isoko said, "I'm on sustenance." And she was.

Mark was already healing everyone but it got a lot harder as more and more worm kaiju died out there. Eliot was burning the dead for Castellan power, though, so it was a trade off. Mark switched briefly to Energy and Entropy, to clear out the shavallian on Tartu and Shawn, at least a little. He felt them 'turn back on' after only two seconds, and then they were on low-power.

Mark asked, "Tartu? You got limb-regrowing magics?"

Tartu groaned, "Yes. It's not great, but it speeds up the process."

Mark changed his mind, saying, "Then do plant growth stuff everywhere you can and we can Sustenance easier with that and I can regrow body parts."

Tartu was maybe half-power by now, if Mark's guess was right. He nodded, and then he began setting up whatever Domains he thought might help around the perimeter of Eliot's rapid base. Mark wasn't too sure what he was doing, exactly, but cleaner plants sprouted out of nothing at all, succulent-like tubes growing tall and thick, expelling clean air and drawing in dirty air. The cleaner plants gave off a little bit of light, adding to the green-ish lights of the room.

Eliot switched some green lights to white, full spectrum, and the plants did even better.

Mark kept up his shavallian-healing until Tartu and Shawn were both at 80% and then he switched to limb-restoration. It was a combination of several different Unions and it started with Healthy Bone/Unhealthy Bone, and rapidly moved on to Healthy Flesh/Unhealthy Flesh and a few others. Isoko was on Sustenance, so at least Mark didn't have to do that one. He just juggled the healing Unions, mixing in a Full Union of Good/Bad whenever necessary in order to keep it all working properly. The cleaner plants loved the miasma Mark was threading into them.

Tartu did some Domains; Mark wasn't sure what. It made the regrowth a lot easier.

Eliot was looking a lot better after only a few minutes. His tubes had disconnected after Mark regrew his organs, and now he floated in a vat of numbing goo, oxygen mask on his face, all of his attention on the bunker all around them. Sally was in a similar tub of numbing goo, breathing through a mask, a thousand unhealed wounds finally getting the attention they needed.

Isoko focused on Unions of Sustenance.

Shawn lay on a mat on the ground, staring at the ceiling, saying nothing. He was almost catatonic.

Tartu stood, looking at the screens that Eliot had put up around the place, looking at the devastation outside. No one had spoken for several minutes by then, but Tartu spoke now, simply saying, "That's a mess." And then he asked, "Anyone got any marching orders yet?"

Mark instantly wanted to say something about finding Kardi, wherever she might be, and murdering her to the best of his ability. There were probably better options, though.

Mark diverted his attention from healing broken bodies to ask, "Quark?"

Quark said, "Memphi is about to fall. I am not sure what more can be done and the Mayor is not responding. She has been ousted from her home, from her connection to Memphi."

The videos on the walls flickered and changed.

A map of the city came online, showing several zones that were now bright red and labeled 'nuclear zone'. The wall was broken in 12 locations, mostly in the south and north. Two of the impossible kaiju were still alive, including the ice one and the river one. A list of dead heroes populated another screen. Frozenfire, Kraigen Steele, and Sentinel were the big ones.

… Sentinel was dead? KIA by Grey Phantom, too. The father had killed the son.

Wow.

And then there was the image of Kardi, standing atop a collection of glass-covered metal tubes and pipes and wires. It was Mayor Emilia Ramirez's true self, her technorganic core. And Kardi was waving a checkered victory flag over the corpse. The flag had a white handprint on it and Kardi was smiling.

How did she even get there so fast?

A secondary teleporter? Or did the cultists co-opt the main teleporter for the city, giving Kardi unlimited range?

It had to be illusions, right? They were propping Kardi's image up a lot, then?

Or had she really moved a hundred kilometers to the city center that fast?

It didn't feel real—

"It's not real," Shawn said, sitting up, his vector all sorts of calm. "It's not real."

… Oh. Yeah.

It might not actually be real, except...

Mark had seen this before. He had even experienced it himself, once upon a time. Back when he was recovering from the Tutorial and all of that shitstorm, when he was recovering at Citadel Freyala and trying to make sense of everything that had happened, and why certain people had allowed it to happen.

Shawn said the words that they all knew were coming, "Timeweaver will erase this timeline. We're just the first timeline. We're not real. This isn't going to happen."

Tartu countered, "We're still going to act as though this is the final timeline because it just might be the final timeline."

Mark wanted to believe, and yet… "He can only go back 10 hours, right?"

Mark had read a lot of conflicting stories about what Timeweaver could do. All of those stories had the 'Redo Hero' as a total asshole who only did what he wanted, when he wanted, and he made sure that people died every time he did his shit so that the world wouldn't rely on him for any but the biggest of horrors. This was a pretty big horror though, right? Addavein had been a big horror too, though…

Fuck.

Was this a fake timeline?

"I don't know," Tartu said. "And it doesn't matter."

Quark said, "Timeweaver's exact capabilities are unknown."

Tartu couldn't bring himself to say anything else.

So Mark spoke for the group, saying, "It doesn't matter what Timeweaver does or does not do. We're going to find and kill every cultist in Memphi. Where do we go, Quark?"

Quark said, "Organizing response… Please wait."

Tartu spoke up, "First thing we should do is get reinforcements from the settlement. I can open the Veil and get Aurora here, so I should do that. Can I get some help, Mark? I'll tell you what to do. It will be simple for you; I have to do all the work."

Go get Aurora?

Oh, shit. Yes.

Yes.

Mark solidly asked, "What do I need to do—"

"Hello. Sorry to interrupt, but this is an inflection point, and so I am here," said a posh gentleman standing to the side who had not been there before. He was a put-together Arabian man with a pinstripe dark brown and gold suit and a bowler hat. He held a dark wood cane with a gold tip. He was Timeweaver, and he said, "Please don't get the Dragonslayer. Just go on and do whatever else you think you need to do. Good day!"

And then Timeweaver vanished.

Mark didn't even blink.

The Redo Hero was simply gone.

"Was that really him?" Isoko asked, bewildered.

Tartu said, "I don't fucking kn—"

"Yes," Eliot said. "Several backups came online and I'm in contact with the Mayor right now and she has confirmation that Timeweaver is going around right now. We're one of several spots he just hit up, all at the same time."

Shawn started laughing hysterically as he fell to the ground, to his mat. He curled in on himself, mumbling, "No. No… This can't be the right timeline. Lenny can't be dead for real. No… No…" He mumbled to himself the same word, over and over again. "No, no, no."

Isoko just watched. Sally was awake now, and she was watching, too. Sally had most of her feet back and all of her arms. Eliot was most of a person, floating in his vat, though he was still missing below the knees. Eliot was too busy doing stuff out there to care about Shawn right now—

Eliot said, "I've been granted central control of the city's defensive tech. Mayor Ramirez is on the line and helping me coordinate a response… Ah. A lot of people are pinging this way. Uh. Okay. Connections overloading. I need more… Uh. One second people! Please!"

Mark watched as vectors began to crowd into Eliot's bunker, flowing in from elsewhere. Computer systems literally popped into existence in every direction, and then they rapidly filed into towers and the bunker expanded backward and downward, the floor turning into glass and showing more and more floors down below. Vectors, strong and solid, crawled through the new computers. They were AI systems and they were making a home here—

Eliot asked, "Mark? What would you be doing if Tartu hadn't suggested Aurora?"

Mark easily answered, "Find Kardi and murder her."

"That's what several people have figured," Eliot said, a main screen coming online, flickering to show something else. "Because Kardi —or at least someone looking like her— is waiting for you atop the remains of Central Command, atop the mayor's old tech mind, and the cultists have delivered your uncles to her. They were found and kidnapped from their bunker an hour ago."

"… Ah," Mark said, vision turning red. "Ah. Okay."