Adamant Blood

It wasn't till he woke up in complete darkness that he realized that he had drawn his adamantium around himself like a shell… and it had been more comfortable than he had expected it to be. But Sally was in the kitchen, seeming very hungry, and Eliot and Isoko were in the living room, which meant that food was almost ready. Mark pulled back his adamantium shell and went upstairs.

"He awakes!" Eliot said.

"It's weird to sleep in a bubble," Isoko said.

"What if something happened?" Sally teased.

"How could you even breathe!" Isoko asked, also teasing.

"I don't know why I did that! But that was the best sleep I've had in a long time," Mark said, "And I would have woken up if I needed to. I can still sense vectors while I sleep."

Quark spoke up, "He had air vents that he opened every so often, and I still had reception there."

Sally said, "Glad to know we can count on Quark."

Mark scoffed, as he approached Sally in the kitchen, looking at the giant pots on the stove, asking, "What's for dinner?"

"Food!" Sally said.

"Oh boy! I love food!" Mark said.

Sally smirked. "It's pasta, pork— I think. Not sure what it was. Isoko bought it."

Isoko spoke up, "It's whitebeef! I'm not sure what it is, either. Some animal they raise in the islands across the Big Water— The not-Pacific." Isoko asked anyone who could answer, "Is it 'Big Water'? Because that seems weird."

" 'Big Water' was the standardized name for the not-Pacific after the Reveal," Quark spoke up, "Too many cultures called it too many things, so the Settlement of Xerkona offered a compromise, and it took."

"That's what I remember about it, yeah," Isoko said. "I think my cousins down in Nook called it something like… Breakwater?"

"That's one of the more well-known names of Big Water, Miss Kanno," Quark said, speaking over the loudspeakers now.

"Yes! Knew I got it," Isoko said.

Mark glanced at the well-lit darkness outside. It was maybe 11 PM? Something like that. Mark asked, "Anything happen while I was out?"

Sally happily said, "Aurora is making Will make 10 billion goldleaf worth of mana crystals, for free."

"He ain't getting paid at all!" Isoko said, laughing.

Mark burst out laughing.

Eliot chuckled. "That stuff is going toward replacing the settlement's normal supply, though, and it's already all spoken for."

"Holy shit," Mark said, having angry thoughts about Will, "I completely forgot about that guy until today… What was he going to do for you, anyway, Eliot?"

"Crystal conjuration, mainly," Eliot said, "Nothing that can't be replaced."

Mark still had questions. "Sally had some sort of prototype gun, yeah?"

Isoko answered, "He was going to replicate guns that would be attuned to Derek and then Derek would take the field in every direction. Derek was really looking forward to it, too, but now it'll take several days for the whole thing to come together."

Eliot waved a hand. "We'll get the crystals from Memphi instead. They're right there and they have a whole crystal-growing operation for what I need. Dad's Crystals have been growing those things since the 80's and they're very good."

Sally said, "Not as good as getting an army fitted in 24 hours, though."

"That guy's a jerk," Isoko said.

"He's worried about being taken advantage of," Eliot said. "Like Mark."

Mark scoffed. "I'm so much better than that guy! That guy's as greedy as a dragon!"

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Eliot said, "Like you."

Mark scoffed again.

Isoko teased Mark about his own tendencies to hoard money, and then Sally moved on to goblins. Dinner came quickly, now that Mark was up, and they all ate together while watching footage of goblins setting up villages and otherwise right outside of the settlement. The settlement burned them away if the goblins got within a kilometer, but most of the goblin villages were going up very fast, just 5 kilometers out.

"We've caught sight of at least 33,000 Tutorial flashes, too," Eliot said, as he adjusted the readout of the screen, showing a number in the right hand corner. "Deedee and Quentin are focused on that, the most. Backtracking through the records of every flash and trying to record who went into the Tutorial with what kinda pre-Powers. It's too much to sort through, though more people are getting on the task by the hour. We're offloading all information to Memphi, as well, so they're taking looks, too."

Mark asked, "How many are gonna make it back to… Well, they'd come back here, right? Not to Earth?"

Eliot said, "Those numbers are beyond me."

"Quark?" Mark asked, "Got some estimations?"

Quark spoke through the house speakers, "The Monster Tutorial is set up for monsters to fight monsters, so of the estimated 33,000 goblins that enter, less than a tenth might make it through past the initial monster kill rounds. Of those estimated 3,300 goblins, 95% of them will pass the Tutorial, but only 1-in-100 might become issues, so 30 of them will have something strong, like Rank A Power of some sort. By pure numbers, there is a non-0 chance that this event spawns Rank S, superhero-level goblin that will make it to a strong adulthood. 16% is the current estimate of the chance that this event spawns an S-goblin, like the Lightbody. If we multiply the initial estimated Tutorial takers by a factor of 10, which is very possible because most of our sensory equipment out there is gone so our numbers are off by a factor of at least 5 to 25, then we expect between 1 and 7 superhero-level goblins."

"… Huh," Mark said, unsure about a lot. How did that answer make him feel?

Sally said, "That number has to be way, way lower than 1-to-7? The human rate is 1 in a million? What Quark just said was 1 in 300,000, yeah?"

That was close to Mark's feelings on the matter, but not quite there. He nodded a little.

"The superhero rate is pretty high for goblins," Eliot said, "When the breeder target is pure, like a strong Light Shaper monster that's also big, or like any of the large mana crystal targets we have cultivated around here, there are something like 20-30 goblins per large beast. So that's 25-ish chances for one of the goblins to have a really good base. From there, they just have to do the Tutorial… And known calculations break down a lot, by that point. We don't know what we don't know. Even the full numbers on the Human Tutorial are off by maybe 10%." Eliot offered, "We could go to the Church of Malaqua and beseech numbers from the Stone God, but he won't answer. We could still try."

Mark hummed, then said, "Nah. I don't really care that much about numbers. It is what it will be. I do want to go back to Mage Society, though, and talk to Professor Redline and the Grand Mage and see about securing all of Mage Society as one. I think it'd be really nice if we all got on the same page about doing Unions of Understanding, because we are in a war now. Surely some Unions of Understanding among soldiers is a good idea, right?"

Isoko said, "Redline certainly liked you, too, so that's a good in-road to smoothing worried feelings."

"I think she's a fan of Blackvein," Mark said. "But yeah. She seemed open for talks… And maybe she already had some!"

- - - -

"I completely agree that some Unions of Understanding are necessary for the settlement, Mister Careed," Professor Redline said, hiding her anger as she stood to the side in her office, checking the books on her shelves. "Believe me, I have been made aware about the needs of war triumphing over the needs of personal safety."

Mark was glad he had come here.

Redline's attitude had inverted sometime in the last 24 hours. Her inner thoughts were actually quite hateful of Mark, this time, while her exterior actions were in-line with the needs of the settlement. That happened sometimes when people met people they idolized, though, and Mark not sticking up for her during that meeting probably hit her hard.

Mark wasn't about to police anyone's thoughts, though. The settlement had certain needs, and people were falling in line across the board, or they were getting kicked out, like Will Birch had almost been kicked out.

Mark tried to be polite, though, saying, "I apologize for how it happened. I wished we could have had real cooperation. But needs must, and all that. I am sorry, though."

Redline sighed, and then she looked at Mark. "I talked about it with the other professors and this is a warzone, so as far as I'm concerned the entire arcanaeum will work toward facilitating your Unions of Understanding, Mister Careed."

… She was stiff and professional. Her vector was full of hate.

She did not feel like a loving teacher at all, but she probably had a lot of reasons to have a big change of heart. Being 'made aware' of the needs of war had probably been an awful conversation behind closed doors.

Mark decided to give a tiny bow, and leave, so he did that.

There were goblin villages to kill. Quark even had 5 of them targeted for Mark already. They were villages with primitive flying machines being built in the middle of their ramshackle houses, with goblins aiming to fly over the wall to get to the humans inside, to Bite them.

Mark got back out there, back into the killing churn.