Adamant Blood

Aurora looked at Eliot and Yoro saying, "Seal it."

Eliot must have known what to do, because the room's walls flickered and suddenly the rest of the world vanished. All that existed was this room… And some of the light coming out from a mostly-covered window over there, and Mark could still hear stuff on the other side of that door, but his Unionsense was contained, and all of the voices were unintelligible. Eliot had activated some sort of Castellan thing, for sure, because his vector was in the walls and holding steady, and a bit golden.

Aurora looked to Yoro.

Yoro said, "Preliminary analysis of the keystone located in the Ether Turtle's shell is done. It was a controller module, as Analyst Quentin said."

A lot of people in the room knew what that was, with Lola frowning, Walter being Walter, and Aurora humming discontentedly, but Mark, Isoko, and Sally did not know what that was.

Eliot knew. He muttered, "Shit."

Mark asked, "What's that? Mind control? Body control?"

"Maybe some of that, or none of that," Yoro said, "All we have are images of the item, so we cannot know what it was truly designed to do, but we know it was designed to do a few things; It might have given the kaiju bursts of speed, but maybe not. It absolutely detonated the kaiju instead of letting it die like normal. That was a cat 5 so its capabilities were always going to be weird ones when it got into an actual fight, but we thought we knew all there was to know about it. It had been sitting 250 kilometers up the Shine for many years by now, nothing able to kill it at all, and not moving much at all, either.

"The gate openings drew it here, of course, but then Mark poked at it and it backed off. It was controllable. So, we wanted to keep it around. It kept that part of the world clear. And then the death cave opened up and that was already suspect, but then the kaiju came running." Yoro told them all, "That kaiju was designed to come here and then take out whoever showed up to kill it. If Mark hadn't displayed the ability to take the kaiju's own best defense for his team, which included ethereal fast travel, then whoever went out there would have died if they managed to actually kill it. If the kaiju had made it to the death cave then… We're not sure what would have happened."

Walter spoke up, "It would have detonated itself on purpose and wiped this place out that way."

"That's one option," Yoro said.

Lola asked, "Was this a targeted attack at the higher ups, to remove defenses to make us softer for later, or a general kill?"

"No idea," Yoro said, "What it looked like was minimal resources expended to try and achieve an effect. That control module might have only given the kaiju a sense of where the death cave was, because there was absolutely no way that a kaiju, even one death-aligned, would have come running that far out of its territory for the cave. It could not have sensed it at that distance. So the module was probably an alerting module and then a catastrophic self-destruct button." He asked Mark, "How easy was it to affect with your Union?"

"Disrupting its ethereal nature was just as easy this time as it was before. It did not have much self awareness, either. Its vector was just as calm this time as it was last time, and though it stared at me a lot, it was like a rock staring at me, until it suddenly decided to act."

Yoro zeroed in on Mark, asking, "It stared at you without a vector?"

"Yes. Like a trap monster."

Aurora said, "The superspeed bite was likely something we never saw because it never needed to use it."

Walter said, "Too taxing unless it was going after a bigger prize." He looked at Yoro. "Probably a cheapo controller. Something that size can't make a kaiju suddenly gain superspeed. You need bindings all across the monster or inside the monster for that, and an ethereal turtle would just drop such things as invasive things. But a control module that can turn ethereal with the creature and tell the creature that something tasty is somewhere? Very possible. The most possible of possibles."

Mark was suddenly very aware that it was possible to give a kaiju superspeed, if you really wanted to. That was a chilling thought. Otherwise-slow kaiju 'suddenly having' superspeed was a lot less abnormal. Mark wasn't sure how that worked, but he had seen it a few times already and especially among the slow monsters, like turtles.

Aurora told Lola, "Talk about the death cave."

"Clean up was difficult before the turtle," Lola said, "There are some strong forces in there beyond the death slimes, which are still multiplying. It's a death disaster zone, and the fact that it's so close to anything at all, and that it wasn't noticed till now, means that it was building for at least a week, under a strong seal. Probably longer. So either someone was cultivating death crystals as close to civilization as they felt they could get away with, and something broke and the system went into cascading, compounding failure, or someone did this on purpose. Yesterday, the first option was the smart choice. Today… I believe the whole cave was intentional, and to act as bait for the turtle. To what end? I do not know.

"As for the nature of the cave itself, it looks like a normal 150 meter long, 70 meter wide, 20 meter tall hollow in the ground made by water erosion due to underground rivers. The entrance is at the top middle of the cave. That's the one that the team fell into, or opened. We're not sure which happened, exactly. The Shine is the most likely creator of the cave itself, though. The cave might be a few years old. Doubt it's older than that. Someone, or some death monster, found the empty cave and made it into a cultivation chamber of a sort.

"Cleanup was projected to take 3 more days. Now it should take absolute priority before all the dead things killed by the ether turtle's death fire rise with the moon and flow into the dark to grow much stronger."

Aurora asked the room, "Will breaking the cave open via massive crushing force be a good or a bad thing?"

Lola said nothing. Yoro wasn't sure. The other guys were just there for…

Oh.

Mark realized what was happening right now, and he had been a fool to not recognize it before. Of course, it was very obvious in retrospect.

Everyone here was either a paladin, or paladin-adjacent, or a major intelligence operator. This was an Inquisitor operation. This was sussing out an enemy of humanity that had attacked them, that the people in this room were going to kill when they found them.

Oh.

Well, yeah.

But also: 'Oh'.

… Cultists?

… Thrashtalon and the demon Leash? It had been a few months since they were active around Mark, so it might be time for Leash to try again.

First there was Leash's attack on Sally and her former girlfriend, to get information on Mark. That had happened right after Mark's Tutorial and Addavein's birth. Then it had been a few months before Leash went after Mark directly, through the first human Mark had ever killed, Mary Getty, and then Leash had turned her body into that horror inside the lightbox demon containment zone. And then it had been a few more months before the step onto Daihoon, the creation of the settlement, and then the Attack the Gate program that ended up in the Battle For Memphi…

Was this Leash?

Mark's instinct was to say 'no', and yet Leash worked through intermediaries until it was time to show his horrific demonic self, and a 'control module' seemed like someone working through distant intermediaries.

Which is probably what a lot of the higher ups here were actually thinking, now that Mark was here, and realizing what this was about. Why else would they invite him and his team into this meeting of Inquisitors? And also Derek was here, too. That seemed like a security leak… On purpose? Or not? Either way, this invitation here had been to talk about stuff that directly affected Mark, Addavein, the settlement, and the greater War For Life against the demons.

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A kaiju-sized bomb had been directed toward the one person who could defuse it easily.

So yeah.

This was a thing, of some sort.

Walter said, "They might be trying to bait you out, General Valen, as all great enemies of humanity wish to do with all of our top talents. Normally, that turtle alone, without any enhancement, would have required your intervention, or a rapid call to Memphi to request unusual backup. Mark got baited out for that one, though, and they knew he would show, because he had deterred the turtle in the past. Maybe they were looking at Mark and waiting for him to get hurt and for you to step in? That's my guess, but who the fuck knows. Baseline: I don't think you should show yourself at all, General Valen."

"I agree with that assessment," Yoro said.

Aurora's vector was flexing this way and that as she took in a lot more information than Mark was able to see, and sense. She was using her Telepathy to pass notes between people, or maybe to uncover words that people were choosing not to say. Lola, Walter, and Yoro were certainly capable of saying more than they were actually saying, and Aurora was responding to those concerns.

She did not state any of those larger concerns, though.

Mark watched and sensed as Aurora made a decision like checking off a bunch of boxes on a list.

Aurora said, "We'll keep an eye on all of it and play reactionary. Kaiju Squad is confined to the city, but you, Mark, go out and lance any pools of death gathering near the walls. Whatever is in your range. Don't leave the walls. I'm diverting the Shine over to the death cave and washing it down south. Walter and Lola, you're coming with me. We're done here, for now."

Soon, Mark watched Aurora ascend to the sky with Walter and Lola floating on rainbow twists with her, Lola connecting them into a Union and strengthening them all while Walter was there for… for whatever reason he was there. And then they flew off to the west.

Mark rushed to the western wall as soon as he could, because he might as well start on that end. A bunch of other people went that way as well. Most of them ended up standing on rooftops, but Mark, alongside Eliot, Isoko, and Sally, were on the 300 meter tall wall itself, looking outward to the west. They had a really good view of the land between the settlement and the Shine, all covered in pockets of flickering black soulflames, and the Shine itself, like a flat expanse of muddy brown water.

And then there was Aurora.

It was like the auroras in the sky reached down, like the finger of a god or a drill bit twisting deep. It started a little bit to the right of directly west of the city, on the other side of the Shine. It was noise and light and bright, shining detonations of dirt that cascaded into the air. Auroras drew a line of power through the world, from the Shine to the kilometers-away death cave that billowed black into the sky like a distant kaiju fire—

The black billowing vanished under the onslaught of the Shine.

Aurora's line of power kept going, circling back into the Shine, far south of where she had started, 10 or 15 kilometers south; Mark wasn't sure.

The death cave did not billow into the sky anymore, but Quark magnified what Mark was seeing and gave him the images of the cave from a mere 500 meters away. The new detour through flood lands of the Shine was a deep canyon collapsing in on the rushing water. Black 'ink' billows under the water, and the detour was fully black past that. Black death-ink rejoined the Shine far away from anywhere that it would 'be a problem' for the settlement.

Aurora came back to the city like a glowing ball of radiance and rainbows 50 meters wide, floating in the center, with Walter and Lola inside the sphere with her. They landed over at central command. People watched them fly the whole way, in awe.

Mark felt a bit of that awe, himself.

Sally said, "Maybe I need to get back to learning that size-changing magic Blackthorn told me about."

Isoko snorted a great big laugh. "I think digging that ditch would have taken Titanfist at least a few days!"

"Well yeah; I couldn't do what she just did," Sally agreed, "But the option to do big things would be neat. Are you telling me you wouldn't want to Sky Shaper canyons into the ground?"

Isoko said, "Oh I am so right there with you, Sally. That would be so fucking awesome."

Sally grinned.

"I could have done it in a month," Eliot said. "25 days, maybe."

Mark said, "Don't think I could ever do that."

"Bah!" Isoko said, "You could do that sanding aura. Turn the whole death cave into sand and collapse it inward."

"Maybe I could have done that, yeah," Mark said, "But she upended at least 50 meters of dirt at the deep end of that trench, and the cave itself—"

Mark cut himself off as he looked to the south, where the flaming black detour of the Shine rejoined the Shine, where black death-ink met pillars of black soulfire. It was bombs, again. Black and billowing into the sky, detonation after detonation suddenly twisted into the sky, like distant, rumbling glitter.

Mark felt like Death had passed over him, waved, and then kept going.

Sally said, "Oh yeah. That turtle kaiju was meant to be one great big fucking bomb."

Isoko breathed out, "Holy fuck. That would have been a really big nuclear bomb going off only, what, 15 kilometers from the city?"

"We could have taken that blast wave," Eliot said, absolutely sure of himself. He tapped his feet on the wall, and golden fire flared under his feet. He smiled. "We could have taken it, right girl!"

The city walls glittered gold.

Eliot happily said, "Right!"

Sally said, "But then the concern is what comes after, yeah?"

Mark hummed. "Well sure, but I want to know what kinda death mana reacts with death mana. Isn't it all the same? Obviously not, but is it a shape to the mana that makes it different? The kaiju's death mana is clearly flame-like. Was the death cave… gasoline-like? It was all inky when the Shine washed it down."

Eliot asked, "You got a big complaint waiting for you back at the house, by the way. Some mage guys from the Arcanaeum showed up, saying that the Builder's Guild delivery to you was improper and outside of Mage Secrecy and it never should have happened."

"I'm keeping the scanner," Mark instantly decided.

Eliot shrugged. "I'm just saying! Something to deal with later."

"Later," Mark said, and then he looked out across the little flickers of black death, smoldering out there, down beyond the wall. "This first."

Mark got to work on the pools of death fire flickering out there beyond the wall, Unioning with them, but really he was Unioning with whatever monster or animal or plant was currently burning. Cleaning up Death was pretty easy, but time consuming. It was one of those weird Unions, too.

It wasn't the healing Unions that Mark had done with the guys who found the death cave.

Mark beat his heart with Life and Life, drawing Life inward and beating Life into the animals-or-whatever was down there. Mark was just a conduit for life, in all its weird and varied messes, from sickness to health, from birth to growth, from tumors to multiplication. Mark had to switch back to a Union of Good and Bad a few times, between the spots of death he cleaned up out there, but then he went back to Life and Life, to wash away Death with Life.

The fires broke and whatever was in them kinda popped, like so much broken, rotting flesh, or plant matter. Once the Death was gone, life returned, and then promptly died a natural death. It would rot out there and stuff would eat it, and that would be fine. They wouldn't zombify on rotten flesh, and that was the big thing to avoid.

Mark could have done a similar cleansing with a normal cleansing Union; Purity and Impurity. But this particular Union worked the best for this.

Mark and his team took a full 3 hours to make a full circuit of the settlement, with the three of them using a railcart on the wall to eventually move faster here and there. But when they were walking, golden fire glinted under their feet, Castellan keeping the death at bay until Mark broke it up to nothing.