Adamant Blood

Mark floated in the sky, body solidly covered in adamantium scales. Whatever wasn't covered with scales was covered with black webweave. He had a few silver lights on his hands and feet so that people could spot him, but Quark would turn those off when the fight began. Team location and direction was a basic functionality of Union, when Mark used it, and they didn't need things like visual cues to fully understand each other, or keep track of each other.

With any luck, today would be a very simple kaiju kill.

And it would be a kill, absolutely; Aurora had already declared that.

The ethereal turtle was about 50 kilometers ahead, like a soft blue dome on the horizon, right atop the brown stretch of waters that was the Shine. It looked almost like a cloud. Projections indicated that it was not coming right for them, but it was headed right for the death cave, and no one wanted to know what would happen when it reached the death cave, so they were going to kill it.

Sam Ranger, hero name Nightbolt, father, and Kaiju Team Leader, was in his hoverbelt to the side, about 20 meters away from Mark. His Power was Threadmaker, which had a few basic forms. All of them had the same general ability, though. Sam made lines in the sky that monsters ran into and then cut themselves upon. Sam was really good at point defense, but he had a bit of a problem when the monsters refused to approach.

Which was why Lee Windhopper was here, Sky Shaper. Lee was not as good as Isoko's grandmother, the supervillain Wandering Sage, whose feats of strength included ending and starting hurricanes, but Lee was able to curl tornadoes out of the sky pretty fast.

Lee floated in the wind about 50 meters up, stabilizing the sky and the team. There had been a strong breeze flowing down the Shine, but now the breeze was soft.

They were ready for a kaiju kill.

The three of them were 300 meters above the kilometers-wide Shine, which was as close as any of them wanted to get to the water down there. It might not have any kaiju in it at this moment, but there were big fishes, and some could swim in the air. Most of them waited till things were close to the surface to snatch them down into those murky, silt-laden depths.

"ETA and full breakdown, Command," Sam asked.

"Category 5 kaiju, codename Ether Turtle, ETA 16 minutes," said Quentin, in Mark's ears, though Quark. "600 meters wide, 400 tall. Weightless unless it wants to be. Moves mostly via selective solidity. Mark has scared it off a few times by turning it solid for a few seconds and it went running. We want to kill it this time, while it is lured to the death cave. Aurora will be on backup if it looks to escape, or if Mark scares it off again. The death cave is being evacuated right now. The temporary seal is coming off of the cave, and we expect the turtle to hurry up when that happens. Possible ETA 5 minutes… But it looks like it's not moving any faster. ETA still at 10+ minutes.

"The turtle can slip under the ground, like all ethereal creatures. It hunts by turning itself solid when it wants to. Kaiju don't actually eat, though, so it only eats for pleasure or to rid its territory of something, or for magical reasons. It will eat you if it gets near you because it likes eating powerful things, and you three are powerful things, because it does use those powerful things as guardian beasts.

"Which brings us to its main power: This is a cat 5 kaiju living in the wild, so it has a whole bunch of ecology all around it, and that is dangerous. It did not leave that ecology behind, because whatever it eats it turns to ghosts. Flying ghost fish, mostly. Millions of small monsters, acting as a horde.

"It turtles and lets its monsters kill things when it gets in danger. You three should be able to take it easily. If the kaiju dies before the ecology dies, we estimate that the ecology will go crazy. Kill the ecology first." Quentin finished with, "Basic report, over and out."

The three men hovered in the sky, staring straight ahead.

Sam said, "This is your show today, Blackvein. I want that thing dead and not running away."

Mark took the lead, floating forward a little, the sound of his tri-toroid chopping the air lost to the background. "I'll poke its monsters and turn them solid. Lee is on battlefield control and wind flows, and on taking Sam's threads and turning them into a cutting storm. Overall: Make the turtle turtle, kill the ecology, and then kill the turtle. When we're ready to actually engage the kaiju itself, Sam will switch to solid, immovable cutting threads, and Lee will focus on moving us around the kaiju for cutting angles for Sam. Agreed?"

"Aye," Sam said.

"Aye aye," Lee said. "Beginning to seed the sky."

Sky Shaper acted on spaces the size of an entire sky, which meant that fine control was usually not that great. Making a tornado? 'Easy'. Making a tornado touch down exactly where and how you wanted? Near impossible.

When fighting kaiju, though, you wanted kaiju-sized battlefield options, and Lee was very, very good at doing that.

Lee prepared the arena with airy twists of his vector, his astral body so ephemeral, so thin, that even Lee's admittedly-large astral body was barely there. Lee's soft vector changed the wind in soft ways at first, and then the wind picked up ahead of Mark, small nudges compounding just beyond the maximum range of Mark's Union, maybe 2 kilometers ahead, twisting into something thicker. Something stronger.

The wind began to turn on itself, something sliding down from above, the world twisting upward from below. A cloud began to gather overhead as moisture flowed on great flows of wind, pulled up from the late afternoon heat of the Shine, as Lee desired. It was a kilometers-wide system, darkening the aurora sky directly overhead.

That's where Lee left it, for now. It took a lot out of him to do that, to seed the storm, but he could go all the way to real storm generation several times over before he actually got tired. Mark was already healing Lee's astral body; he wouldn't get tired at all.

When the fight actually started, when the turtle got here, Mark would do his thing and make it solid and Sam would cast his threads, and then the kill would happen like it should.

The Ether Turtle was a cat 5 kaiju, though. It was dangerous as fuck. Cat 3 was a basic monster but big. Cat 4 was a big monster with big magics. Cat 5 was a city killer, unless you could counter it without much worry.

Mark was very, very good at countering ethereal things.

This should be a by-the-book kill. Of course, they were making up the book as they went, so… It was fine.

It's fine.

Mark told himself it was fine, but his heart raced anyway. This was his first team lead and he was here for it. His scales turned sharper, his claws got longer as he flexed his hands, his heart beat darker, black curves pulsing away from his body, brighter curls flowing into his body. Mark was in a Union with the world and Sam and Lee, and it was time to kill a turtle.

The kaiju flowed across the water, 10 kilometers away, silent as a fog, big as a cloud. A fog inside of a fog. That was the kaiju's ecology all around it, too. Millions of ghosts and dead things, reanimated under the Ether Turtle's power. Some of those dead things were probably still alive, too, and hiding out in the turtle's power, and not actually subject to the turtle's power at all. That's how it always was. Small things living in the shadows of big things.

Like a storm front approaching, the battle was suddenly here, the ether turtle 5 kilometers away and preceded by a horizon-full of dead things, clearing the path. It was still silent. Nothing actually touched the world right now.

Lee spun up the tornado, the sky darkening fast as moisture flowed upward and then curled down inside of itself, twisting and spinning into a waterspout. A line of twisting mist shot from the Shine's surface to the sky overhead, starting thin but getting thicker.

The kaiju didn't care about that twist at all. It was going right through.

Sam held his hands forward and began firing off Thread Bolts. They were arcane bolts of energy that sailed down and out and up, toward the oncoming enemy, and the sky took them directly into the path, like plucked monowire sent twisting forward.

The ether turtle was a silent mountain, oncoming and quiet, its skyscraper-sized neck and face pointed right past Mark, Sam, and Lee, at the death cave located 15-ish kilometers behind them. The sky over there was black with released death, like industrial pollution.

Sam put out tens more bolts of thread, firing them out far, altering them so that the bolt itself went a hundred meters before it started to unravel into cutting death.

The turtle's ecology was a herald to the monster itself, like a cloud of mist, passing through those threads like so much water vapor.

And then Mark connected to the ethereal monsters, to their master controlling them, who was still 3 kilometers away and just about to run right through Lee's waterspout. But the turtle's astral body was already fully here.

Mark prepared himself. He would be using a Union of Adamant and Ethereal against already-ethereal monsters. Usually, this would be a bad idea. Making a fire-type enemy hotter usually made things worse for you. But all living beings had limits to their own Power; the point where to add more was to hurt them. And so they'd lower their own Power generation in order to not overload.

Mark could also just turn things solid, when he made those things part of the Adamant part of the horde, chopping parts of the horde into sections and using them against each other. Mostly, monsters didn't react fast enough to an overloading of their own Power, though.

Mark could strobe the various sides of his Union at the monsters, too, and that would really fuck them up.

Adamant and Ethereal beat within Mark, slamming out into the oncoming tide.

Mark drew Adamant from half of the horde, into him and Lee and Sam. For the dead fish, this made them less solid in that taking. Half of those monsters broke apart like so much ephemeral trash. Too much of their own ephemerality.

Mark gave Ethereal to the other half of the horde. Those that reacted fast enough, to turn off their ethereal nature, turned solid. Sam's threads began cutting those ones like so much monowire. The ones that didn't react fast enough got all the worst parts of Ethereal; the impermanence, the fleeting death, the destined-to-fade. Those ones fell apart, like so much Ephemeral trash.

Unions were dangerous in different ways to different things, and Mark was very, very dangerous to ethereal monsters, in every possible way, turning their very power against them.

Threads cut through the enemies.

Mark's black lightning pulsed through the fish, the threads, the sky that Lee controlled, and thus black lightning flowed through the expansive astral body of the Ether Turtle.

Mark had dug ten thousand claws into the kaiju, taking Adamant from it, and leaving it with the terrible part of Ethereal.

The turtle did not like this.

It halted instantly, turning solid, dropping its Power, and the entire swarm attacked as the kaiju screamed, vibrating the world with rumbling hatred and domination. It had gone from a cloud and smaller clouds of mist, to solid turtle, green and black and vibrant, shining white, and a million smaller monsters, all dancing to the deathly intent of the turtle.

This, of course, displaced a whole fuck ton of air and water, and all of that stuff exploded out of where it was, filling the air and disrupting Lee's storm.

Lee compensated.

Mark instantly knew, when the turtle eyed him with those cold, black eyes, that he would not have to do anything to get the turtle to fight. It was not fleeing, today.

The fight became a dance, punctuated with kaiju roars.

Mark flowed backward, on wind already sweeping them backward, and then to the west. A wall of wind pulled upward, between the team and the monsters. Sam shot threads down into the flowing updraft and the draft twisted monowire-strength streamers upward, into the oncoming flow of a feeding frenzy.

Lee controlled the battlefield in the largest of ways, moving the three of them backward, keeping Sam shooting into the storm, the storm twisting his power into cutting flows, while Mark puffed away what could be puffed away, disrupted what could be disrupted, and the whole battle fell into a trance. The turtle yelled as small threads spun across its body, across its neck, gathered up by the wind pulling up behind it. Those threads cut at exposed kaiju skin, but barely, and did nothing against the turtle's strong green shell.

Sam's bigger kaiju-cutting threads would work a few phases from now, though.

The turtle advanced, actually having to use its legs, which did not move too well at all. It was not used to using its body to move, which is why it always tried to turn ethereal and run. It wanted that death cave, though. It would not stop.

In 10 minutes half of the monster horde was gone and the team had flown around the entire turtle a few times, Lee's Sky Shaper moving them fast.

In 10 more minutes, Mark and the team had circled around the entire fight yet again, and most of the turtle's ecology was dead. A few twists of Union, a dance writ large between flows and fish, had those remaining fish cut down by strong threads that were not as strong as they could be, because they were still mobile threads.

Mark stared down at the turtle as the turtle eyed him, their eyes locked as they had been for the last several minutes. Neither one blinked. Mark softly spoke for the first time in 20 minutes, "Phase 2 begins. Sam for solid threads."

Lee adjusted the flight pattern of the entire team, going from playing keep-away to playing tag. They swooped in, and Sam shot a massive line of thread at the edge of the turtle, skimming its shell, right as the shell was moving toward the shot. The thread connected with the shell—

Several things happened at once.

The shell turned ethereal and ignored the thread. Mark's Union of Adamant and Ethereal wasn't doing much right now; the kaiju could turn ethereal at-will, and Mark's ability to affect the kaiju's etherealness just didn't matter at this moment. Mark was absolutely sure this act of power was actively hurting the kaiju, but it was fine with hurting itself a little bit.

Which was concerning.

The kaiju normally wasn't one for thinking at all, so its vector was completely exposed and mostly useless as a way to gauge the battle. The turtle was a stimulus-response sort of monster. A trap setter.

But Mark saw what it was trying to do one second before it did it.

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The kaiju instinctively snapped, moving its head across the sky faster than anyone thought possible, right at Mark and Lee and Sam; it was big enough to get all of them in one bite.

For a moment, Mark saw down the gullet of the turtle, past the beak, past backward-facing spines, to glowing black fires deep, deep within.

Mark inverted and changed his Union. He took everything that made the kaiju Ethereal, but in a positive way. Untouchable, unaffected. The ability to shrug off everything. The ability to ignore speed limits. The ability to ignore physical limitations like gravity and shear stress and g-forces. He gave the turtle everything that was Weakness, in a specific direction. Not 'Adamant'. Mark did not use that key word to give the turtle anything at all. The turtle got Weakness in the form of stiffness, slowness, heaviness, and deeply affected by gravity.

The turtle had no idea what happened after the fact, only that it stumbled, just enough.

All of the guys gained a small sheen of white iridescence to their bodies, their Power, and Lee twisted the air, yanking them out of the snapping jaws of the turtle and a quarter of the way around it, all at once.

Mark adjusted his Union back to something more normal; something that would allow them to actually fight the turtle, instead of passing by each other like clouds in the sky.

It had been a thrill, really. People in the command center were probably freaking out and then shouting with relief.

Mark stayed frosty.

Lee exclaimed, "Holy fucking gods! Hahahaaa!"

Sam breathed out as he recollected himself and adjusted his flying belt, slowing down a little slower than Mark and Lee, who had direct control over how they flew. Sam said, "Too close."

"Not a kaiju battle without some ability coming out of nowhere," Mark calmly said.

Quentin spoke in their ears, his voice half-calm, "Recalibrating known powers… It seems it has a bite attack. It has never displayed this before."

The turtle was still facing toward the death cave, and now its path was clear. It tried to turn ethereal again, the water all around it sinking back into where it had just displaced, but Mark slammed it with a disrupting Union and the ethereal turtle turned solid once again. Water and air cracked out of it like a great thunderclap.

The entire group got blown away, but Lee was already compensating for the disruption to the party's displacement and to the shock to his storm system. The disruption was minimized. Mark and the team recalibrated—

The turtle lurched forward a full 100 meters, toward the death cave, moving so very fast that it didn't make any sense at all.

Mark seriously asked, "How the fuck?"

Quentin replied in their ears, "Working on it!"

Quark replied only to Mark, "Collaborating efforts, sir. Preliminary talks look like a support monster, a human controlling the kaiju, or an artifact. Look for secondary vectors."

"Lee," Mark said, "Relocate efforts to attack from here. We're not going in front again. Major threads, Sam."

The sky shifted.

Sam was concerned about Mark's ability to handle team-lead, but he wouldn't have done any different, and Mark was going off of his and Lee's unsaid recommendations anyway. It irked him that he wasn't leading, since he was the Kaiju Team Captain, but this was Mark's monster to kill since Mark was providing the only real way to respond to the kaiju's power flares with any sort of direct counter-action at all.

And then they were in a new battle position, lower to the water but not too close, thanks to Lee and Mark.

Sam released a major bolt with a thin thread that soared through the wind, right between the bottom of the turtle's shell, through the space between the right-side legs and out the other side. It was 600 meters of thread, locked to reality; it wasn't going anywhere. Lee's Sky Shaper had kept the line-laying bolt on track, right where it needed to go, and Mark had coordinated the whole effort without words—

Now.

The kaiju tried to leap forward again, activating a burst of super speed, trying to activate its ethereal nature, and Mark disrupted the ethereality fast enough that the kaiju came back to reality right in the middle of the thread. The cutting line did not cut through the front of the leg, but it absolutely clipped out the back of the leg, about 3/4ths of it, right through the central bone and a great deal of accompanying stabilizing bones.

The kaiju screamed as its leg broke and then fell out from under it, the whole monster toppling hundreds of meters to the Shine, its back end too heavy. It took almost a full minute to collapse, and by that time the team had relocated to a potentially-dangerous location; front and to the right, on its injured side.

The turtle eyed Mark and everyone fully expected it to try its biting-head attack again—

It opened its mouth with a burst of super speed and bright light appeared—

Mark was already Unioning with Ethereality and Weakness. The team slipped down and around the kaiju's skyscraper-like neck, getting really fucking close, while all the world out there looked to be moving so very, very slow. The turtle's mouth blazed with ghostly-black and a beam of death shot out across the world like a slow-moving tunnel of souls.

Wordlessly, coordinated and frosty, Sam released another big thread, Lee guided the team up and away and behind the kaiju's head, and Mark kept them in the ethereal flow to avoid the sudden superspeed of the turtle, as it turned its head right at them, like they weren't inside some sort of 'ethereal time'. Mark didn't know what was going on, exactly, but he knew something was helping the turtle, and that vector was somewhere out there.

Also, the turtle was paying attention to them now. It had a vector, and that vector was focused on Mark and the guys.

Slowly, but also really fucking fast, the turtle directed its breath-beam attack toward Mark and the guys.

The thread Sam had released was the only thing seeming to move in normal time; it wasn't moving much at all.

Mark, Sam, and Lee, spun around the beast's head, staying out of range of its power, as the turtle spun its head a whole fucking lot more than 180, and then 360 degrees. Black death carved a line across the sky and across the top of the turtle's shell, scattering black death fire across the land and all over itself, like cloying fire.

The team maintained focus. They spun around the head again, keeping ahead of the head.

The turtle ran out of steam first.

Everyone knew that getting distance would make them easier to hit, so Lee brought them back around to the back of the kaiju's head, by about 200 meters. That seemed a good distance.

Mark relaxed his Union and rapidly switched to a more normal Union of Adamant and Ethereal, making sure that the ether turtle's ethereality was fucked up with bad, self-destructive ethereality. If Mark needed to switch the Union to keep the turtle locked down, then Mark could do that on instinct.

And Sam's thread zoomed fast, spinning around the kaiju's neck in a long, looping spin.

"That death fire beam explains the desire for the death cave," Sam quietly said, holding his hands together, getting another thread ready.

"It's a lot weaker by doing that," Mark said, feeling out its vector. "It's half dead. How's that fire looking out there? Problem, Lee?"

Black fires full of screaming souls, like chopped up vectors all screaming for release, burned everywhere in a great big line across the Shine, and across the nearest several kilometers of forest beyond on both sides of the kilometers-wide Shine. Stuff died. Then that dead stuff turned to more death fire. The fire spread some, but it was a very, very violent fire. Mark didn't expect it to do anything but burn itself out, very fast. But what the fuck did he know about death fire? He was only getting an impression that it was fine due to Sam and Lee's impressions, who showed little concern for the flames.

Lee's Sky Shaper was already pushing the flames down and away from them, as he said, "Won't affect us—"

"There," Quentin said, in all of their ears. "Shell piece right over the neck ridge. That capstone-like block lodged into the shell. Highlighting it on your HUDs now. Controller module."

Mark saw it easily, once Quark highlighted it. It had been practically invisible before; green on green and only really visible because various water plants hadn't regrown over where it had been installed. Maybe they could investigate it when the kaiju was dead.

Because the kaiju turned its head and got caught on Sam's thread.

It was like hard, green cheese, filled with gore, being pushed across a wire knife.

The kaiju's head lolled a little as it tried to stop itself, but stopping its already-cut flesh from cutting further was like stopping an avalanche, and the kaiju was not a smart kaiju. Sam's thread broke, of course, but it broke halfway through the beheading, especially when the kaiju tried to retract its head down into its shell.

That made the shower of gore a lot worse.

The kaiju gurgled as it died, great gouts of death-fire breaking free of its body like a seal had been punctured, a threshold of containment crossed.

Sam and Lee both knew to get the fuck out of there, right fucking now, which was only a second before the same message came through the coms. Mark was already on it, using the last vestiges of the kaiju's ethereality to give them all the speed they needed to fly away super fast.

They made it all the way back to the settlement, like an ethereal trio of jellyfish, right in time for someone to activate the Castellan city wards on the walls.

Mark connected with the massed vectors powering the city, flowing Adamant into Lee, who turned the sky on a speedster-flicker. Honestly, Mark wasn't sure what he was doing, but Lee was freaking out and Sam was not doing much better, and someone was saying something like 'death bomb' on the coms.

Lee got the sky moving pretty quickly, actually.

The turtle detonated upon the Shine in a conflagration of black death, ripping and screaming souls, and roiling, expansive fire. The fire rose in the air like a mushroom cloud, a shockwave of burning pain passing across the world. A tumbling sky and golden fires on the wall broke the shockwave.

Glass windows still burst all across the city.

A lot of things happened very fast.

Mark worried about Isoko, Eliot, Sally, and Lola, in roughly that immediate order. He half-voiced that worry and Quark was already responding with some comforting statistics. 98% of teams were inside the city, and that included Mark's most important people. Mark sort of relaxed after that, but not really. There were death fires burning everywhere, and not all of those fires were outside the walls.

There was work to be done.

The settlement was like a kicked ant's nest. Warning lights went on. Most people were underground already, but the ones that were on the surface were told to get underground, and fast. Some very big scanners popped up over the whole city, probably due to Eliot and a whole bunch of techies and artificers working very fast, and scans went out. They discovered death fires undulating almost invisibly in the lake, on few of the islands far away from most things, and also on the tops of several buildings.

Mark started purging those death fires alongside other paladins, with Lee controlling the wind so that the air pulled the fires directly up instead of allowing them to spread sideways. Mark purged vectors full of Death with Life, and the fires died out soon enough. It was mostly bacteria and a few birds that were infected with Death, but now they were birds full of tumors and dying fast. Lola suspected something in the water would eat them. It was 'fine'.

Twenty minutes later and the fires inside the city were gone.

Death fires raged outside of the city, though Lee had been keeping those low and calm, and he tried some rain on them, but, as Lola and others explained in the rapid response meeting to solve the crisis, rain didn't do shit against death fire.

Castellan fire worked well against death fire, though. The walls were fine. They were burning gold, and they were fine.

Eventually, the largest, most concerning of death fires, outside of the city walls, put themselves out as they ran out of things to infect with death.

Mostly.

There was that big death cave still smoldering on the horizon.

"The big problem comes tomorrow," Lola said, as she stood in Central Command beside High Paladin Azocar Sanchez, of Hearthswell, and Sir Galen Greene-Shield, High Priest of Verdago. "The death fire killed a lot of things, and those things will rise again as ghouls, zombies, and ethereal ghosts. The ghosts are probably going to be the most common, due to the nature of the Ether Turtle. I have not fought many monsters like this, but it is my understanding that most of those ethereal monsters will not have the energy required to sustain their existence, since ghosts sustain themselves on death mana and there is not going to be a lot of that out there at first.

"We're probably looking at a month of death-based monsters surging across the land, trying to establish footholds where they can actually birth more death-based monsters, and that is when the ghosts will become a real problem. But mostly, the monsters will kill themselves. We should keep lookouts for the ones that survive all the other monsters out there, and I suggest that Mister Careed take the lead on clearing out the biggest clumps of ethereal problems." She ended with, "The death cave is still active. It will now become incredibly active, and will become a source of deep problems for the settlement, as it is already a powerful node of death mana in the area. Most of the settlement's resources should go to solving that issue right now, or within a few hours."

She had a lot more to say, but she wasn't going to say it in a public space.

Colonel Kandon Valen stepped forward, saying, "I agree with Inquisitor Lola's assessment, but Mark is staying in the city for reasons I will not go over right now. All of the Kaiju Squad will remain in the city. Whatever Mark can reach from the walls is good enough. Whatever Lee can push away from the city is also good enough, and he'll be on ship escort for as long as this death mana issue persists…"

Kandon, as the second-in-command and organizer of all armed city responses, began to describe a change in the general battle plan for the city.

While Kandon was planning out the defense of the city in the coming month, Lola gestured to Mark, and he and a few other people left the meeting to go to a different room.

Yoro Windrunner, the head of Reconnaissance and Aurora's probably-spymaster, was in that room, alongside Aurora and Walter. Derek was there, alongside some guys Mark had seen in Inquisitor Hall. A blond woman and a red-headed guy, both in their 40s. It was mostly Hallmaster Joon that Mark recognized, though; Mark didn't know the other guys by name yet.

Mark, Eliot, Isoko, and Sally, all followed Lola into that room, and the door shut.