Adamant Blood

Mark hovered in the skies above the settlement, his propeller holding him up.

Kandon hovered beside him, using a hoverbelt but with a grip on one of Mark's handles.

It was just the two of them. Sam was down in the command center, organizing things. Quentin was on the coms. Aurora and Lee were on backup, with Lee probably tapped out for a while due to mana strain. Kandon and Mark were probably good enough. More than enough, really.

And yet, the lands outside of the settlement were filled with craters and goblins. They came from every direction, at all hours of every single day. Mostly the goblins ran away, but things monsterized and goblins Bit those things, and more goblins spawned where once the land had been mostly cleared. This issue was a problem that was going to take some real effort to fix, because so far the settlement's best efforts merely stemmed the tide.

And now it was Gate Day.

Summoning a kaiju was better than having one randomly spawn, after all.

Mark asked, "So I was talking to Lola about goblin solutions… Have we considered poison?"

"There're lots of solutions. Poison is the general solution, but we might be doing an elemental blockade," Kandon said, and then he added, "If Lancer and Buckler can't solve most of the issue..." He wanted to say something more, but he reconsidered. He went with, "They'll be able to do enough. This horror will be over in a week, tops, just…" He frowned. And then he simply said, "Don't watch them when they're 'working'. Trust me on that."

Oh no no no. Not happening.

Mark instantly said, "Tell me."

Kandon struggled for a moment, then he said, "I'll put it this way: even die hard goblin haters have called them excessive because—"

The air flickered with vectors about 20 meters away and aimed at Kandon.

Mark didn't know what he was reacting to, but he reacted anyway, flicking an adamantium barrier between Kandon and the threat.

Kandon was also on the job, his True Brawny Tactile Telekinesis and even his normal Telekinesis filling the air around him and solidifying it to something almost as strong as adamantium.

Something bright and heavy, like a pillar of crystal, slammed into Mark's adamantium shield. That crystal slid forward all around Mark's shield like it was made of ten thousand needle-thick pillars, all of them crashing and crushing into Kandon's Tactile Telekinesis-enhanced Telekinesis. Kandon held. The shattering crystal pillar splintered and broke in every direction and then suddenly vanished—

Laughter. Human laughter.

Two guys stood in the air a few kilometers away. They were twins, maybe 38-ish, both of them. Blond hair, black and gold robes. Archmages. One had a red shirt underneath their robes, the other had blue.

Mark went on even-higher alert.

Kandon reluctantly called out, "Can't think of a better way to introduce yourselves!"

"Seriously?" Mark asked. He pulled his adamantium shield back, though he did not dismiss it at all. Those two had attacked as a 'hello' and Kandon was used to it enough to call back like he had. Mark didn't like it, but instead of doing anything about it, he just muttered, "Fucking seriously."

Quark labeled the archmages in Mark's vision. Red-shirt was Lancer. Blue-shirt was Buckler. Their Archmage Contracts were sealed by the Empire of Aluatha, and Quark had been trying to gain access to those Contracts, but he was still denied. Instead of bringing up their Contracts Quark flickered out some information about their known capabilities and demeanor.

Both of them were Force Shapers, which was sort of like Telekinesis, but more solid; shaped Telekinesis, basically. Exceedingly rare when it came to monsters, so Mark had never encountered it before. It was easiest (though incorrect) to think of it like Glass Shaper. Other than that, they were archmages, so they were very, very hard to kill, and it was easy for them to kill others.

Lancer focused on offense, Buckler on defense.

The pair of archmages flew forward.

"Hey-ooo~" Lancer called out, waving a hand and smiling. "I hear you got a bit of a goblin problem!"

"At least you're still keeping up with your response times, Kandon!" Buckler called out. "But Mark is faster!"

"Kid gloves, you two," Kandon told them, almost like a threat.

Lancer and Buckler were within 50 meters now, and Mark easily felt them out. They were chaotic and desperate, with an underlying need to kill, to sunder, to rip and bleed. The need of it almost overwhelmed. Mark's heart beat faster, because he knew these people were on the very edge of violence, and they needed to injure and kill something right now.

Quark must have felt Mark's own reaction, his elevated heart, his sweating, because he started populating Mark's vision with battle tactics and then narrowing down to a few necessities. The message was simple.

Don't get caught between them, ever.

And then Lancer was 10 meters away and smiling like he wasn't a man holding a thousand knives, his words an affectation to make his prey lower their defenses, "We're all friends, here!"

Buckler grinned, like a man pretending he didn't have a freezer full of human bodies at home. He said to Mark, "I heard you can make a mage really strong! I look forward to it."

Kandon deadpanned, "You're not in the Union yet, huh. Wonder why."

"Not yet!" Lancer said.

"Can't imagine why, though," Buckler said. "It was just a little love tap with a force lance~"

Mark tried to be personable as he asked, "So you guys are gonna kill goblins, right? Will you be able to actually put a dent in the problem?"

The twins grinned—

"AFTER," Kandon said, strongly. "After Gate Day, then you can go do whatever you want. I know you two. Work first."

Lancer waited till Kandon was done to smile as he told Mark, "With your help, my brother and I can clear every living thing in kilometer-wide swaths of land, all afternoon long."

Buckler said, "That's the peasant shit, though. The boring, near-civilization killing. We do our best stuff when the cameras aren't around. That's when we start killing 100,000 goblins per spell, and if you want to stick around for that, then we can do those spells all night long." Like he was guarding against his reputation, even though Mark hadn't brought it up, Buckler added, "It's only fair, right? They break so many of us from the inside out, so it's only fair we break them the same way."

"Or in pieces," Lancer said, conversationally.

"I like implosions, myself," Buckler said, "Also crushing."

Lancer tried to be conversational as he smirked and thumbed at Buckler, saying, "He's all about the paste. I never saw the appeal—"

"Stop terrifying the kid," Kandon said, lightly glaring.

Mark was not terrified, but being around these two was like being around… Ah. Yeah. Memories came back. Memories that Mark had mostly forgotten, like how one forgets a house is built upon a foundation.

It was like being around Addashield when the demon was in control. That's exactly what it was. Mark felt like he was flying beneath a kaiju with a hundred legs; who knew where it would stomp next. Mark did not respond to those sorts of threats with fear anymore, though. He responded with violence. Kandon knew that.

Kandon was making an excuse for Mark right now.

Mark was pretty sure that the demons inside Lancer and Buckler, and Lancer and Buckler themselves, knew what was up, though.

Mark wanted to kill—

"Awww, fine!" Lancer said, smirking at Mark.

Buckler chuckled softly, saying, "We can talk later, Blackvein, when the cops aren't—"

"Attention," Quark spoke up. "Gate Day will be happening in 5 minutes. This is your 5 minute warning."

"Go time!" Lancer said.

"Go go go time!" Buckler echoed. "Still waiting on that Union, though, Blackvein!"

Kandon sighed a big sigh, and waited.

… Mark connected to the archmages with Union—

It was like touching two sources of pure miasma. Mark's heart thrummed with Good and Bad, veins expanded beyond his scales and into his astral body, and both of the archmages shuddered as darkness leaked out of their astral bodies. That darkness twisted like unholy flames, coruscating into the air, into the world, turning the world a bit darker in their fulminations.

And then Mark cleared away even more pain, and he wondered, based on newly-uncovered vectors, if these guys just had a bad reputation because of all the pain they held inside. It was like each one of them was broken glass themselves.

As that glass healed, they seemed to shine.

Lancer held himself, holding his chest. Buckler breathed out as he held his knees to his chest, for but a moment. Lancer uncurled and Buckler followed, and they just breathed. In, out. Every breath out was poison released. Every breath in was light flowing inward.

Kandon raised an eyebrow as he watched the twin archmages, and also Mark.

Most of whatever damage Mark was healing was gone after two minutes. Lingering miasma flowed away, but the archmages came back to the moment, smiling and laughing a little.

"At least it's not evil laughter," Quark privately told Mark.

"Holy FUCK," Lancer said. "Gods! It's really as good as Walaria said it was. Holy... watch this, bro!" He conjured distortions into the air in front of him, in front of his eyes. "That goblin encampment we spotted earlier!"

"Oh yeah!" Buckler said, conjuring similar eye-based distortions into the air in front of his own eyes. "Do it, bro!"

Lancer grinned and then pointed.

Kandon quietly said, "Lancer."

Lancer didn't care.

Quark flexed Mark's vision, and Mark could see into the distance, too. It was a goblin village. One of the larger ones. It was one of the many, many such villages that popped up when Mark or Lee stopped killing, and when the kill squads passed; the goblins organized fast. It looked like this one was using some wood magic to grow trees into various defensive structures.

The trees were glowing green with giant green fruits… Ah. That wasn't a defensive structure.

It was a goblinfruit tree. Goblins could Bite the fruits and create several basic goblins from each fruit. Those goblins born of the fruit were little more than slaves to the rest, though. Goblinfruit trees had an incredibly low rate of any of the goblins being a problem, but still, Aurora had told Mark, if you rolled the dice enough then you were bound to hit good rolls eventually. Goblinfruit-born goblins could get truly fantastic plant-based powers, sometimes. Mark didn't know nearly enough about those trees, though, and Aurora hadn't talked about where they come from… Or maybe she had. The last several days had been a blur.

Mark sighed, "Where the fuck do they keep getting goblinfruit trees? Do any of you know?"

Buckler answered, "They ritually sacrifice one of their own and make a tree! It's just so evil! Love it!" And then, as though he was speaking with his entire soul, he said, "I love an enemy that I can kill and not feel guilty about."

Lancer had been casting a spell all this time, and now, it triggered.

The goblintree village was 22.5 kilometers away, according to Quark. It had three 100-meter tall goblinfruit trees, and an estimated 3,900 goblins. It was a large collection of problems for the settlement, and for all humanity, really.

The air flexed over the central, largest tree. An air-shimmer flexed down into the tree. Mark had trouble understanding what was happening, but he saw the effect well enough. Something lanced down through the top of the tree, disturbing the canopy, and then pushing through the rest of the tree, like invisible lightning. It followed the direction of the heartwood and pushed out of every branch-tip and through every unripe goblinfruit, cracking everything from the inside.

That force cracked down into the village underneath like ten thousand lines of near-perfectly-clear glass, striking into the head of every goblin within visual range. And then the clear glass burst out of every goblin, aiming at every other goblin in the area.

Mark could only see the force when it caused an effect, like breaking bark, or when covered in blood or fruit juices, but he saw the overall action perfectly. Most goblins didn't die right away. Most lingered, holding on to life, spears of force lanced through their stomachs, their necks. But then the main goblinfruit tree broke and crashed down like heavy mulch onto the dying goblins, and the other goblinfruit trees did the same—

"My turn!" Buckler said.

Mark watched as a massive hunk of glass, maybe 200 meters by 200 meters square at the base, and who-knew-how-tall, crushed down from the sky, onto the goblintree village. Mark could only see the parts that impacted the village, and then even that was obscured as a shockwave cracked out across the world and a great cloud of dust rose from the air.

And then Buckler crushed the place again.

Mark pulled back and watched as Lancer and Buckler's vectors calmed down, a lot. As of this moment, post-killing, they were more like normal people, instead of people on the edge of committing mass murder. Lancer was fully engrossed in watching Buckler do his thing, though, with Buckler slamming the ground several times, laughing each time.

Kandon gave Mark a small Look.

Mark understood a lot of Kandon's feelings about the archmages, but also… Mark asked the archmages, "You two still have more gas in the tank, right?"

Lancer smiled wide and said, "Of course we do!"

Buckler stopped stomping goblins and said, "I will once you make it all better!"

Mark was already doing that. Mark almost wanted to ask what it was he healed earlier, but instead, he asked, "How much did that goblin village take out of you?"

Mark couldn't tell the exact health of someone's astral body, but he had a collection of clues telling him that these two had spent way too much to do what they had just done. Buckler breathed pretty hard, though he was grinning, too. Lancer seemed a lot better off, though he wasn't doing so hot, either. He sweated. So Mark braindanced with Good and Bad, and both of the archmages sighed in relief, black miasma flowing away from them, into the world.

Kandon said nothing. He just watched, while trying not to glare too much.

"Oh come off of it!" Lancer told silent Kandon, while grinning. "We got Mark here! And—"

"30 seconds," Quark said to everyone.

Mark relaxed back down to a normal level of Union, and the team formed around him as its center, with the archmages to the left, Kandon to the right, and Mark in the middle.

Down below, a hundred ships waited for the go-signal, and for the gate to open.

Everyone who wasn't still fighting goblins was waiting, anticipating.

The walls of the settlement were on high alert, turrets already up and active, lasers already firing at goblins that poked up out of the soil. Braziers glowed bright red every 100 meters on the wall, but one by one, they began to glow gold instead. The air charged with power. Street lamps that were inactive during the day, and which only shone with electric light at night, began to blaze with Castellan fire.

The air ripped in a small way, far down below.

Mark looked down at the gate. He was a few kilometers above the settlement, but the gate was massive; about 500 meters square, like a door frame out in the middle of nowhere—

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

And then something poked at the world, itself.

The small gate had opened. It was easy to see that, to feel that. Soon, the big gate to Earth would open, and the mana of Daihoon would rip through that opening like they had broken a hole in a planet-sized dam.

It was a scratching at a door. A thrumming of the walls. A monster rumbling just beyond the thinnest barrier imaginable.

And then that barrier ripped open.

Mark fell into a flow as he watched the world transform from normalcy, to necessity. The kaiju call went out from the broken Veil, and this time, knowing what it was, Mark could practically hear the demand of the demons to come and close the hole in reality. But Mark wasn't going to do that. He was going to kill those that came to close the door. But where… Where would it come from? Mark couldn't really hear it...

There.

Over there.

Almost lazily, Mark turned and looked to the Shine, to the West, before the kaiju even appeared.

Mark had gotten pretty good at sensing the kaiju before they came out. Lancer and Buckler watched Mark turn that way, both of them wondering something deep about him, their vectors too closely guarded to really understand. Kandon reoriented toward the direction Mark looked at, though.

Quentin called out, "Kaiju sign detected at the Shine, west north-west."

Mark angled a bit more northward. He had been a little off, because the echo of the kaiju call had been rather muted.

"How many do you think, Mark?" Kandon asked.

Mark sighed and grinned. "Only one. Low cat, too." It was still forming, and it might take a minute. Mark asked, "Memphi?"

Quentin responded, "Memphi is currently experiencing 2 kaiju signs. Estimated cat 3 and 4. They're not requesting help at this time— Aurora is telling Lawful Goose that his services are not needed at this time. We're only showing 1 kaiju sign here, and it's a low level."

Mark nodded. "Seems fine to me— Ah. Here it comes… Fish?"

It was a big fish, all eel-like and bright green and snapping its jaws as it floated out of the Shine like a thing that had no idea how to work its body anymore. It was floating, and it tried to get back to the water, but it was 700 meters of fish and it had a better time flying in the sky as opposed to trying to get back into the water… And then it saw the glorious glow of the open Gate, only 7 kilometers away, and it suddenly knew how to fly.

Mark was already flying toward the kaiju, to intercept the flying eel.

It would probably be an easy kill, if Sam rushed up here to take over for Kandon, but that decision was up to others. That might not be necessary.

Quentin said what Mark was already seeing, "Flying Eel. No mana signatures. No special powers seen. Basic speed and strength."

Sam spoke through the coms, "Kandon on main, Mark on support."

Kandon said, "Lance."

Lance visibly shivered as he flexed his hands and legs wide, and then he smiled with anticipation. Buckler's eyes were wide and happy. And then Lance asked, "Let's suck all the adamantium out of it! Wadda ya say, Mark!"

"Fuck yea!" Buckler said.

And then Lancer threw a 20-meter-wide column of glass-like air overhead, at the kaiju.

The glass-air sped up, turning into a thousand individual pillars slamming forward.

The first strands hit the kaiju and the kaiju screamed as the glass went inward and shot outward, like the force lances had done with the goblinfruit tree. Everything splattered. The kaiju went down screaming and very much alive.

Lancer hit it again, and the second round was a whole lot more secure.

… Mark waited for the drop, but nothing happened.

The flying eel kaiju displayed no other actions in the full minute it took Mark to fly close enough to start draining it for adamantium. Mark could have gotten there faster, but he didn't want an unexpected problem.

Soon, Mark was hovering over the dying thing, draining it for adamantium, while Lancer laughed and drove more and more spikes of glass-air into the beast, pinning it down. Lancer hemorrhaged power, but Mark kept him healed and strong.

"I love it!" Lancer honestly yelled, as he put pin#7 into the kaiju. "No weak spots!"

Buckler happily informed Mark, "Usually things have organs and shit, you know. You've killed lots of monsters. But kaiju aren't really like that. So we really can pin a weak one to the ground and draw it out! Usually there's no reason to do this outside of personal reasons. But with you we have a reason! This is awesome." He asked, "So how much more adamantium do you have now? Can we get some!"

Mark looked down at the dying kaiju, and then over at the gate district, where ships were flying through the north side of the gate to enter Earth, and ships from Earth were flying out of the south side. Mark looked back to Buckler, and said, "You can go through Metallic bank?"

Buckler didn't like that, but he didn't show it at all. "For free! We want adamantium for free! You're getting a lot more than normal, right? It's kinda why we're here; to get adamantium and solve goblin problems for the Empire."

"… How much more adamantium do I have, Quark?"

Quark spoke up in Mark's vision; not aloud at all. "You currently have about 6.5 more kilos of adamantium thanks to the flying eel. I need to know how close it is to dying before I can give full estimates on final take. Could be it dies in 1 minute and you get another 4 kilos, could be an hour and you get 20 more kilos."

Mark estimated how close the thing was to dying… And he had no real idea. It felt just as strong as before, though it was currently pinned to the land and unable to move at all. Goblins were nipping at its bloody flanks now, too. They'd have flying eel goblins soon… blegh. Lancer kept pinning it down, though, and now his lances shot through toward the many goblins trying to get a Bite in.

Mark asked, "How close is it to dying? Anyone?"

Aurora was there in Mark's ears, and on the coms, saying, "Don't give them anything, Mark. And tell them I said that."

Buckler grinned at Mark, waiting for a good answer.

Mark said, "Aurora has ordered me to deny you this request."

Buckler scoffed and threw his hands up and then said, "Bro! She ain't letting us have any adamantium!"

Lancer stopped throwing lances and turned. He paused. "What?!"

"No adamantium!" Buckler repeated.

Lancer exclaimed, "WHAT! No! We want some! You'll give us some, right, Blackvein?!"

Kandon floated upward and said, "This is basic-ass Right-Of-Powers. You have no right to request anything his Powers have given him, unless he is actually selling his services, so—"

"Oh stuff it, Rainbow's Little Brother!" Buckler said, and then he raised his hands again, and this time he was calling down force, his voice echoing as he intoned, "We get it! No adamantium for killers! Fuck you!"

Pillars of glass-like Force, a hundred meters in diameter, stomped down from the sky, ignoring all the pins of force already in the flying eel, crushing down a god stomping in a vat of grapes to make wine. Blood, guts, brains, bones; all shattered from the head of the eel toward the tail, in a series of crushing stomps.

In 10 seconds the entire 700-meter-long length of flying eel was more paste than fish. It was also very dead. And then Buckler's invisible pillars raised up into the air, just a little, and did a rapping against the crushed flesh, pulping it even more and spraying foamy pink stuff everywhere down there.

Buckler looked relaxed as he turned slowly back toward Mark and Kandon, saying, "We get it! It's whatever. Now we're gonna go and murder goblins in the distance—"

"We're flying around the settlement and killing goblins," Kandon interrupted, "And especially those ones down there trying to eat the kaiju flesh."

"Sure! We can start right here, in front of the settlement," Buckler said.

"Kilometer-wide kills," Kandon said. "Let's get a move on. Mark on support."

"On it," Mark said.

Buckler grinned saying, "We're gonna be best friends, Mark! Just you wait. We're a little prickly to start, but for you? We're on our best behaviors, absolutely."

"Best behavior!" Lancer said.

"And if you feel like giving us adamantium soooooomeday, then that's good, too!" Buckler added.

Kandon simply said, "Goblins."

"Fine fine fine!" Buckler said.

"Kill! Kill! Kill!" Lancer said.

Mark supported while Kandon watched the archmages, and the archmages went to work.

For the next hour and a half, Lancer did the majority of the work. It was a 'simple' killing spell, as far as Mark could tell, and it was damn effective.

Lancer floated upside down, pointing at a goblin down below, and then he let loose with a flex in the air. The first part was a spray-and-pray spell that barely hit anything, except for that first target. Sometimes the spell clipped other goblins, though, but only due to pure luck.

But each time a small force lance struck any part of a goblin it shattered into more force lances that shot sideways, through every goblin nearby. Every spell was a spray of blood and bone, with holes drilled through every goblin. As far as Mark could tell, the first target hit became the target for all the sideways-lances, because tiny little Veil-pops started to happen, as they had for Mark for the last week, and grasshoppers turned 5-meters long, or worms inflated to 20 meters long and began burrowing into goblin flesh to eat, and various other monsters suddenly popped into existence. The sideways-lances never killed those things, even when those other monsters popped up inside the kill zone.

Mark watched as random monsters were left in fields of dead goblins, and as Lancer got better and better at his spell, and also calmer. Buckler was calmer, too. Mark wasn't sure exactly what was happening there, but both of the twins were connected, somehow, because Lancer might have been the only one casting magic right now, but both of them produced miasma after Lancer cast his spell.

It would explain how Lancer could cast such wide-spread selectively-destructive magic, though; he was casting for 2 people, and probably 2 demons, too… Or maybe 1 demon for both twins? Who knew.

… Aurora and Kandon knew, for sure.

Mark would ask them about it, later.

And all the while, Gate Day proceeded just fine.

Eventually Kandon called it quits for the archmages, for now, and the four of them settled down onto the wall, to watch the ships go through. The archmages conjured beds for themselves and slept in the shade of a quiet turret, which was weird, but they seemed okay with it? The turret was silent, after all. Everything had stopped now that the goblins were dead. But was this really okay? To sleep up here? Who the fuck knew.

Mark almost asked a question about that—

Kandon shook his head.

Gate Day ended up being rather uneventful except for the archmages stealing the show, and soon the big gate was closed. Soon scanners were out and about, floating everywhere, as shipping people from the settlement poked over every ship from Earth.

The archmages woke up from their conjured beds when the big gate closed. They yawned and their vectors turned excited.

Buckler floated in front of Mark, smiling as he offered, "If you want to kill more goblins, we're gonna do that, now."

Mark said, "Right now I want to sleep. Are you guys topped off, though?" Mark switched to another Good/Bad Union. "You seem topped off."

Lancer breathed deep and exhaled miasma, saying, "Gods, that's so much fucking better than a normal Union. Shit, bro. This is good. I'm glad we came here."

Buckler said, "And he's gonna be doing Unions of Understanding at the Society too! We lucked out!"

Soon the archmages were flying away, out of sight.

Mark and Kandon descended to Castle South, to the Kaiju Squad room.

Aurora was suddenly there, looking at Mark as he touched down, asking, "How are you going to treat those two from now on?"

Mark, Aurora, and Kandon were the only ones here, in this space.

Mark let his real thoughts be known, "I'll treat them like their they're fucking psychopaths! The FUCK? How has the Inquisition not killed them already?!" Mark added, "But at the same time… They seemed okay, after a while? What's going on with their Contracts? They were sealed by the Empire?"

"Lancer and Buckler are not okay. They're on short chains," Aurora said.

Kandon angrily said, "Those chains should have remained in Crytalis."

They didn't talk about the Contracts at all.

"Well they're here now," Aurora simply said to her brother. And then she said to Mark, "You had the correct impression of them in the beginning, Mark, and then your healing muddied the waters and your impression was dulled by a few hours of working together. I will lay it out simply: Be polite, and nothing more than that. Do not let Sally talk to them."

Mark easily said, "Oh absolutely. Sally is not getting near those guys at all."

Aurora added, "They won't kill or hurt humans. Their Contracts preclude that. But, if they have to, they will absolutely turn their own minds inside-out so that they don't see certain humans as human anymore."

Ah… yeah.

Mark asked the big question, "Is this really the best solution to the goblin issue?"

"It's the one we have," Aurora said.

"They got better once they killed goblins… But holy gods, Aurora," Kandon said, "You saw how much miasma they had in them to start. What the fuck? How long since they got their fix?"

"Walaria told me 3 years," Aurora said. "But then Goblinhome pulled shit, and now we got Lancer and Buckler on the job. They're the Empire's response to goblin aggression, and they are a good deterrence."

Kandon had a lot of mixed feelings about that.

Mark asked the suddenly bigger question, "Are they gonna Fall?"

Aurora honestly said, "They're not going to Fall."

Kandon grumbled.

"… Okay," Mark said, choosing to believe that Aurora knew most of what she was doing.

"Go home. Sleep. And then get back to it," Aurora said. "The Force Twins will be a lot less volatile when they come back. They might even act like normal people to those who know their true nature. It'll still be an act, though. Never forget that."

Mark signed off and went home.

He instantly told Eliot, Sally, and Isoko never to be alone with the new archmages.

Sally had a clear, almost golden look in her eyes, as she responded, "Ah, yeah."

And then Sally went over to the couch and sat down. She stared off into space, her mind a million miles away.

Mark, Isoko, and Eliot looked at her. Then they looked at each other and then back to her.

Eliot stepped a bit closer and ventured, "Are you okay, Sally?"

"Drakarok has judged them to be an acceptable risk," Sally said, still staring off into space.

Mark muttered, "Well now I'm judging his judgment."

"Totally fair," Sally said, not even bothered with a bit of reasonable blasphemy.

Isoko asked Eliot, "Can you, uh, check on their activities in the distance? Like… we still have cameras, right?"

Eliot winced. "The cameras pointed that way are already under the Seal of the Empire, so…"

Mark and Isoko both gave him a Look.

"... One sec."

Eliot looked away and his vector went distant—

He slammed back into himself, eyes wide, vector spooked, as he said, "Holy shit fuck— Lancer was cutting goblins inward, starting at their fingertips and toes, and the other one was smashing parts… and I put the seal back."

Sally shuddered.

Mark and Isoko shuddered, too.

That conversation kinda dropped, or at least Mark stopped talking about it.

Mark changed the subject, asking, "Anyone seen any supergoblins yet?"

"No, and it's freaking me out," Isoko said.

Eliot said, "The estimations for Rank-S goblins are going down everyday, and it might be because very few people were goblinized. Only 32 people died that day, and only 28 since then. So even if a goblin was born with a Rank S Power, they're too stupid to grow into it, or to use it right. Overall, the threat assessment from last week is believed to have been way, way too high."

"Ah! Good news!" Sally said, though her vector was still distant.

Mark honestly did feel a bit better hearing that, though. It was a good enough thought that Mark slept easy, and not inside his adamantium bubble at all.

Mark ended up with 7,120 grams more adamantium that day.