Adamant Blood

"Sorry Mark. Tulo Khava is out for the day," said Katrina, Tulo's main assistant.

"Ahh… dammit," Mark said, as he gripped the box with the dagger in it. "He told me to show up whenever I wanted… Hmm."

Mark had shown up at the Builder's Guild at 10:20 AM.

Tulo Khava was not the overseer of the guild. That was Master Smith Rylan Drakemore. Tulo Khava, as the armsmaster of the settlement, merely had his offices and his people here.

It was a completely normal time for Tulo to be in his office, since he did paperwork in the morning and actual forging and building in the afternoon. So he should have been here. He almost always was. And he was always happy to talk to Mark, now that Mark had gone through a few months of self-study. Mark actually had good questions these days that actually required an expert's opinions.

… There were lots of other experts here in the building, though.

The Builder's Guild was where people made stuff that was not enchanted in any way, and because of that it was one of the busiest places in the entire settlement, now that the settlement was good and set up. The Guild actually occupied 3 whole city blocks, south of the lake, and there were classes for people learning new things all the time.

Most people with Tinker inclinations, or skills that were Tinker-like, like Eliot's Man-made Manipulation, were here. Or somewhere close by.

Mark considered….

Mark asked, "When will Tulo be back?

Katrina had a difficult moment and she almost lied to him, but then she looked back and forth down the hallway outside of Tulo's office. She saw no one, but she knew she was still being watched. This place was full of scanners and blockers and cameras and Tinkers; 'privacy' was an illusion. At this point, if Mark had felt anything untoward from Katrina he would have been worried. But she was just deciding how much she wanted to flaunt propriety.

And then Katrina quietly said, "I'm not supposed to tell people, but he would want you to know: He's down at Calmhaven. His school requested his presence, and he was putting it off as much as possible, but he gave in a few days ago. Tulo should be back in a few more days. 5 days at the most. Don't tell anyone. The armsmaster of a settlement is not supposed to leave the settlement, but Aurora okay'd it."

"Ah… fuck. Okay. Well… I still need help." Mark opened the box and pulled out the dagger with a pair of adamantium tongs, making sure he didn't actually influence the dagger at all with his adamantiumkinesis; that could disrupt the crystallization he had put on it. It was honestly an overkill of caution, but Mark was cautious right now. "So I made this and it seems maybe-good. I need professional opinions."

Katrina's eyes went a little wide at the dagger, and then she focused on it, and then her eyes went really wide. Her voice was curious as she said, "That's poison."

"Correct. It's for a Poison Body hero who constantly ruins his daggers as he flies around killing monsters. I'm trying to make him a dagger that will let him kill kaiju."

"… You know what!" Katrina tapped away at her computer console, and it started ringing as she said, "Tulo would want to be patched in for this and he will probably be grumpy, but it'll make him happy to see you got this far on your own— Oh! The dagger is for Eru-whats-his-name, from Australia?"

Mark chuckled. "Yeah? How did you know? I think his entire name is 'Eru', too; no last name."

The phone clicked to voicemail. Katrina dialed it again, saying, "Eru came through here asking for help with daggers and he said something about commissioning you, but he thought it was an impossible dream—"

"WHAT?!" came Tulo's voice.

"Put on your damned video chat. I called your video chat. Put on your video chat." Katrina turned the screen toward Mark, saying, "You have a visitor with a good question!"

"Godsdamned fucking… buttons… stupid fucking university bitching at me for funds… where is the FUCKING BU— oh. There it is." Tulo's face appeared and he looked both hungover and wired from too much coffee. And then his face changed to one of cautious surprise. "Mark?"

"Hello. I have a question about this thing I made. Is it good? Bad? Middling?" Mark asked, holding up the dagger with a pair of tongs. Tulo's eyes went wide, and then he focused as he rapidly stood up and moved somewhere else in his room, which looked like a hotel office, right next to his bed. Mark continued, "It's for a—"

"Don't tell me, don't tell me! Katrina! Get him to the scanning room. I want a detailed map. Mark! I'll call you back in 20 minutes. Don't go anywhere, please— Except for the scanning room! And for GODS' SAKES, do not let anyone touch that dagger at all— It's unenchanted, right?"

"Yes, sir," Mark said, a little happy.

"Good! Good. Then it's probably safe to be around. How old is it? Hours?"

"Maybe an hour by now."

"In about 12 hours it will start to emit a degradation effect. Might kill people all around it. Don't let it out of your sight. Go to the scanning room. Don't touch it! Call you soon."

Click.

Mark smiled as he held up his dagger in the tongs. "Neat!"

"Let's go to the big scanning room," Katrina said, powering down her workspace and putting up a little 'back in 1 hour' sign. "If anyone is using it we're kicking them out."

- - - -

"That's a weird formation there," Master Smith Rylan Drakemore said, as he maneuvered a camera to focus in on a black spot in the space between the monowire-mess and the punching tip of the dagger. "You see this?"

"I see it, but I don't see what you're seeing," said Tulo Khava. "Move the camera out some."

Rylan did so.

Mark watched from the sidelines.

The Builder's Guild main scanning room was slightly better than the one Eliot had made for Mark. The biggest differences were a few Tinker-enhanced trinkets and an artifact or two. Those were things that Eliot couldn't replicate without actually being there to work the machines, and Mark's forging room was made for him to operate without Eliot at all. So the Builder's Guild was better.

A little.

Mostly, it had people who knew their shit.

The dagger floated above a scan table, while wrist-thick crane arms moved like spider legs around the whole thing, with cameras and scanners on each crane 'hand'.

Four people stood around the room. Mark and Katrina, of course, but also Master Smith Rylan Drakemore, the actual branch leader of the Builder's Guild, who had been in this room looking at something else until Katrina barged in, and also Rylan's apprentice, a Mithrilkinetic and Mithril Blooded woman Mark's age, who he had met a few times before. Her name was Andria.

Rylan liked Mark but Mark hadn't interacted with him much, so the unwanted disturbance of his time with his apprentice was still an unwanted disturbance, but then he saw the dagger. He had gotten really interested in the dagger.

Andria had gotten really interested too, but in a scared sort of way. She stood near to Mark and Katrina, and far away from the dagger. She had asked for a pardon for that weird action; she wanted to stand next to the person who could survive poison-form adamantium the most.

That was when Mark actually started to get concerned about what he had made.

But Andria had relaxed and now she stood beside the scanning table, looking at the dagger alongside her master. She was focused and interested.

Tulo Khava was on a screen to the side, some crane-arm operated cameras moving around the suspended dagger, as he focused on whatever he wanted to see.

Andria got into it, too, pointing out things with a camera and taking a shot of it, asking, "Master? Is this part here what I think it is?"

Rylan looked at the picture Andria had thrown onto the wall of images, and he nodded. "Yes. That's a common flex transformation."

Mark had no idea what that was, so he asked, "What is that?"

None of them even realized he had asked a question.

Katrina leaned toward him, saying, "They're too focused. You have to yell at them."

"… Maybe."

They hadn't given Mark any answers at all about anything. Not even a general 'yeah, a Poison Body flying guy could use this quite well'. It had been 20 minutes. Mark had been circumspect about his questions at first, but at that moment he decided that circumspection was not getting him anywhere.

So Mark half-loudly said, "I want to give this to that flying Poison Body guy! Eru from Australia. Will it allow him to infect and injure kaiju?"

The room was quiet. It got quieter.

Rylan's vector went inward.

Andria looked and felt concerned.

Katrina had no real idea what was happening, but she was really glad that she had thrown her weight around to get this problem before the people in charge. Because whatever Mark had done was clearly in the 'problem' category.

Tulo Kava looked pensive in his projection on the wall, as he set down his smaller screen he was using to control his camera on the scanner. He looked toward Mark.

And then Rylan looked Mark's way, and he pulled back from investigating the dagger.

Andria stepped back.

So it wasn't that they hadn't heard him; they were actively choosing to ignore the question, until now.

Tulo asked, "I'll go first, Rylan? I'm sure your stance will be more thorough than mine."

Rylan said, "We are likely of the same mind on this."

Tulo nodded, and then began, "This is most definitely a cursed item."

Rylan nodded. "Yup."

Mark winced. "Ahh… Fuck."

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Mark had heard of cursed items, of course. Who hadn't? They were a thing on Daihoon and not on Earth because the lack of mana pressure in Earth's atmosphere had a way of killing most magical items. Cursed items were everywhere on Daihoon, if you went looking in certain places. On desecrated corpses, mostly. They always looked like some amazing great find, but if a warrior died with a perfectly intact sword laying on top of his horribly mangled corpse, and if the sword looked cool, then you needed to at least give a passing thought to 'maybe it's cursed'.

" 'Ah fuck' indeed," Tulo said.

"What happened?" Mark asked.

"I can only tell you what I see, and what I see is a crazy amount of adamantium used in a novel way that has a bunch of markers for mana mutation." Tulo asked, "How did you make it?"

Mark said, "The same way I showed you a while ago; mana crystallization trying to make a function into a form. I got lucky with the actual crystallization process this time and it went… I thought it went well."

Rylan almost said something, but he stopped.

Andria was wide eyed and watching.

Tulo said, "It did go well. So well, in fact, that you managed to give adamantium a whole bunch of toxic-mana flavoring. See, adamantium is actually mana. Like not mana-imbued metal, but real mana. It just looks like metal. And the thing about mana, is that shapes are important. You took adamantium and made it toxic-mana shaped.

"I see corrosive mana shapes in there. Cutting-poison mana shapes; which is a weird thing to see with the wires, but there it is. And hemolytic mana shapes. A lot of that, actually. That's what all those glass-like shards are. I'm not sure how you got any of that in there, but you did, and you made a cursed item out of all of it. The crystals are too perfect. Look at these charts right here."

Some images flickered onto the screen.

It was the dagger at a few different timestamps; when it was first scanned, then 10 minutes later, and then 5 minutes later. Not a whole lot of difference, but there was some difference.

The first image had a green tint here and there. The next one had a bit more green; deeper green. The last one had a lot more green. Comparatively. Not really.

Tulo Khava said, "The green here is a change in ambient toxic-flavored mana that has adhered to the surface of the metal. The curse is growing, Mark. I suspect that in about 10 hours it will start to create its own astral body and kill things around it with its very presence. You cannot give this away. This thing needs to be destroyed soon, before the imposition you have put into it becomes permanent, and it becomes adamantium that is unusable in any way other than this." Tulo finished with, "And that's the most I can say about it. Rylan?"

Mark said, "I need an ambient mana collector scanner thingy."

"It's an artifact," Rylan said. "We'll send you one and bill you for it, and I agree with everything Tulo said, but I think that what you've done here is not just a natural crystallization-accumulator, but something that might have been caused by your Familiar, Quark, even if unintentional."

"What?" Mark asked, surprised.

Quark beeped words into the air beside Rylan. "What! No. No?"

Rylan didn't see Quark's words, of course; they were only in Mark's vision. Rylan continued, "You have a lot going on, Mark, and you're also learning magic. Elaria tells me you're doing well. I'm not going to go over any of that, but I will reiterate what she has already told you: The more spells you have locked into your body, the more they will influence all of the magic you do. More magic means it's harder to do other magic, and at the same time, when you do other magic, it is all influenced by what came before.

"And this solid dagger here obviously has some growing aspects to it, like Quark. It's a solid thing that will eventually develop a life, if left alone. I understand Quark is shackled, but this thing is not shackled at all. You should destroy it right now, Mark. And hey! If we're wrong, and this won't turn out horrible, then you should have no problem both destroying it, and then remaking it later. But I bet the shape you have imposed on this solid mana here might make it not fully qualify as adamantium anymore."

Andria had a question that she desperately wanted to ask, but she was not going to speak up.

Mark asked, "What's Andria thinking?"

Andria flinched. "Sorry. I was just… thinking about a problem I was having."

Rylan hummed, then said, "You can tell him. Ask him. I don't think it will help you, though. His methods will not be your methods."

Andria instantly asked, "How did you start off your crystallization? Mithril is shit for solid form or function, but you easily locked down both."

"Ah…" Mark was thinking about a lot, and about how creating the dagger hadn't been easy at all, but he answered the question, saying, "A thread of Union expelling toxins from my own body into the liquid adamantium, and then careful pulling away, letting the crystals form from the center however they wanted while I imposed 'Dagger' onto the whole thing. Eventually the toxic part of it solidified and the rest of it came out as a hilt and the dagger point. How do you do it?"

Andria's mind whirred for a moment as she thought about Mark's words… And then she stopped, and frowned, and then said, "I don't think I can do it that way. I crystallize the mithril into a flow—" She waved a hand and mithril flowed out of her astral body, into a tumble of water-like metal that became a curving dagger, in only the broadest of senses. The hilt was too short and the back of the blade was too thick, and there were pearls of mithril here and there in the whole thing like bubbles in the silver-white metal. "—like this."

Mark was a little bit jealous of how Mithrilkinetics could store all of their metal as ethereal ideas inside of their astral body, until they wanted to use them. Mark had to carry around his metal all the time.

Andria continued, "And then I use a bunch of mana-infused hammers to strike the metal, to gently bend the mithril into the shape of the mana it needs to mimic. It's most of what you were doing but you skipped the function-forging process entirely." Andria asked, "Because you can't really hammer adamantium into shape at all, right?"

Mark said, "Yeah, I can't hammer it at all…" He stared at the flowing dagger. "You were really fast with that crystallization of form."

Andria smiled brightly. "Mithril can do that! Adamantium is a lot more solid, though. If I try to form anything slowly or methodically it simply doesn't form. It bubbles and breaks, like water being stretched in zero-gravity. So I have to go fast."

Mark nodded as he thought about his dagger...

And then Rylan asked a fun question, seeming on the spur of the moment, saying, "So the dagger you made must be destroyed, Mark. But if you want to try something interesting, you could try a collaborative project with Andria here. Mithril and adamantium go together very well. Adamantium forms the seed, and then Mithril fills in all of the gaps. That's why we use mithril cores for kaiju blades with the adamantium edges to form the basis for those blades. Simply flowing some mithril into all of the poison parts of this dagger might prevent spontaneous crystallization, and turn it into a usable weapon for the Poison Body guy."

Andria looked a little pale at Rylan's suggestion, but she was on-board, fast.

Mark was not. He was kinda really busy all the time and not willing to collaborate on anything yet. "Maybe later. I want to go as far as I can on my own, first."

Rylan said, "Understandable! So you should destroy the whole thing now. You can always come back, though, if you change your mind. Andria is very capable, and she knows how to forge function into a form."

Mark nodded a little… He looked to Tulo. "Can I do that, myself?"

Tulo spoke up, "I suggested it was impossible for you to use hammers and traditional forging techniques a while ago, Mark, but that was mostly when you didn't have much adamantium. These days you have a lot. You could make an adamantium hammer and anvil, and imbue them with some forging-functionality. From there, you can make a bunch of such hammers using different seed manas at their cores to do the same sort of training that Andria is doing, to learn how to imbue function into a given form."

Rylan said, "Ah! That's a good idea, too. You can obviously do the form well, but the function needs a lot less importance given to it than what you have done. Otherwise you risk this curse-growing action. Forging adamantium is only more expensive and difficult than forging mithril, and you've bypassed the main hurdle, so there are a lot of lessons you could learn from normal magic metal forging. It might be time for you to consider a master/apprentice situation."

Mark felt like a light had gone on. Not about the master/apprentice thing, but about the rest. Mark nodded. "Thank you. You have given me a lot to think about. And as for this thing..."

He grabbed the dagger with his kinesis and… well. He tried to turn it into a blob of adamantium, but it remained a dagger with a noxious swirl of toxic shapes at the center. But Mark applied some pressure—

The dagger cracked, like suddenly phase-changing an ice cube into water. The dagger broke into parts, the monowire flexing outward in a deadly sort of way, and then sucking inward to become wires bobbing inside black metal. Hemolytic glass-shard shapes floated in the black for a moment before they, too, crushed down into black blobs. It had taken a moment, but the adamantium was adamantium again.

Mark hummed as he inspected the blob, and he said, "All blob again." He turned the blob back into part of his chest plate. "Seems fine now."

Rylan exclaimed, "Huh!"

Tulo said, "Maybe only 3 hours from being born as a cursed item."

"Maybe 2," Rylan commented.

Andria said, "If you ever want to work together, I would love to work around your schedule."

Mark smiled a little, to be polite, and said, "Thank you for the offer, Andria."

And then he thanked Tulo and Rylan and Katrina, and he walked out of there.

On the way back to the house, Mark said to Quark, "So that was informative and weird."

"Quite, sir," Quark said, "I must apologize for my interference with your forging efforts. It was not my intention."

Mark said, "Hmmm… Sure, I guess? But it's not your fault, Quark, so you don't have to apologize. Adamantiumkinesis and adamant blood and everything that I'm doing with this forging stuff is different than how it's normally done. Sure, there is a lot of basic overlap, but that dagger certainly didn't feel cursed to me at all. It felt like it would have matched Eru very well. Of course I'm going to defer to Tulo and Rylan, but… I don't think they have the full picture."

- - - -

Rylan sat in his office with the blinds closed and he called up Tulo.

Tulo answered, "I don't think we made the right call. It might have been a good dagger for a Poison Body guy."

Rylan said, "Better safe than sorry. I wish the kid could have made a breakthrough with any other kind of weapon… Why do you think he did so well with poison mana shapes?"

"Offense over defense, all the time; that's Mark."

Rylan thought about that as he pulled up the images from the scans, saying, "Maybe so, but I doubt that is the full story. Mark is a very capable young man who will be a world anchor one day. Maybe when he tempers himself, perhaps… Anyway. You have the images in front of you?"

"Yes. Where do you want to start?"

"Let's start with the one I labeled #5…"

They spoke for a few hours about self-accreting mana crystals and cursed items.