Adamant Blood

Mark stood off center of the base, toward the south. A wall held at his back and the holo display of the area floated in front of him. It was a mockup of the whole area.

The tower was at the center, at around 10 meters wide. A stone ring encircled the tower, giving Isoko 4 meters of space to fight goblins upon, while the edge of the ring sloped toward the pyramidal-spiked ground. Ten meters of that rough terrain continued along to the walls, which were only 3 meters tall themselves. An entrance in the wall stood open at the south.

The goblins hunted through the city just out of sight, just to the south. They spied from the windows of ruins. They lurked around broken corners, and under vines and bushes.

The sky was golden with sunset, and deep blue on the eastern edge. The night lurked, like the goblins, their reflective eyes resembling faint stars in the gloom.

On the holo display in front of Mark, the goblins looked like blue dots.

On the night vision cameras, Mark saw them clearly.

Big ears, big eyes, big teeth, tiny bodies. They looked almost like humans, but shrunken and violent. Some had noses, most did not. Mark had heard that some goblins cut off their noses so that they could bite better, so their noses would not get in the way. It probably wasn’t true.

… But some of the goblins were dripping blood from their nose areas.

Mark had a great range on Union; 160 meters, if he was only going in one direction. 80 meters if he had to go in multiple directions at once. He easily covered the entire base. He easily reached the goblins, who were only 40 meters away. He didn’t want them to think he had that good of a range, though.

The goblins looked like they were talking.

Mark turned up the volume on the sound sensors that Eliot had built on the roof. He heard goblins for the first time. Mostly, they were monsters. The goblins snarled. They chirped. They snapped and spat. They slapped at each other and giggled like gravel mixed in with the sounds of children.

One of the blue dots behind the walls commanded, in full English, “Go. Brats! Go. Get dinner!”

Mark felt a chill.

And then the smaller goblins in front started hissing, chittering, clicking. It was a horrible, nightmare sound, full of promised death and hateful, snapping teeth. It was also a laugh. A chortle. A good humor held in surety at the expectation of a good meal.

The first goblins snuck forward, darting past bushes and under broken rocks that Eliot had scattered out there to give the goblins known approach vectors. That guy truly did study base construction, didn’t he? Mark hadn’t known exactly how good Eliot would be at all of this, but he showed his stuff, for sure.

Eliot said, “Entering blinding range. Auto-lasers activating.”

The goblins peeked out into the night and were met with invisible light, slamming into their eyes.

It was not impressive.

The goblins blinked. Mark saw one or two rubbing their eyes, but they kept coming forward and—

It was a delayed reaction.

The goblins started to huff and blink hard and shield their eyes from a sun that wasn’t there. That seemed to help them some. They chittered at each other.

One goblin behind the big rock poked at the ones in front of him, and when the ones in front just shielded their eyes and slapped behind themselves, not wanting to move forward, the one behind shoved those two forward, into the invisible light. Overhead, at the top of the base, the blinding, ultraviolet lasers tracked the exposed goblins perfectly, burning their eyes. One went down, screaming, covering his eyes. The other walked around, eyes wide, trying to see where he was going. He opened his eyes wider in the dark, in the gloom, and he went blinder faster. Other goblins laughed at the blind ones.

And then they tried coming forward, shielding their eyes much better than those first two.

Mark applied a Union to them, draining their resilience, imparting them with weakness. Just a little. Just to see what happened.

Soon, any goblin who even partially looked up at the tower, at all, went blind almost instantly.

The first goblin wave of 10 attackers ended before it got near the wall at all with every single goblin trying to rush forward and all of them going blind. They were all still alive. Mark kept them as batteries of resilience while feeding them weakness—

David told Mark, “Kill them with Union, Mark. You need to make sure you know how.”

Eliot whipped his head toward Mark. His flying cameras mirrored his movement.

Mark winced, as he whispered, “Fuck.”

This was part of his training from Lola, that she had told him in secret and swore him to further secrecy.

It was truly easy to kill something with Union, especially if you overpowered them in body size, or resources. Using the ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ did not actually work that well for killing something, but that’s where most people went when they considered the idea. You could use ideas like that, sure. It just took a while to kill someone with that idea. Minutes. Days, sometimes, if they were big enough. You could kill a dragon by draining it to death, but it took a week. According to Lola, anyway, who had gotten that information from historical records on the fact, and who had no personal experience with that matter.

There were other ideas that Inquisitors used when they truly needed to kill something, and those ideas worked way too well.

‘Vein integrity’, and ‘vein decay.’

Mark breathed in ‘vein integrity’, taking all of that from a few of the goblins at a time, and then he breathed out ‘vein decay’, shoving that idea into them, into their veins.

Goblins gasped and drowned in their own blood as it spilled out of every vein in their body, bruising them from the inside out. Some died seizing on the ground as aneurysms burst in their brains. Others gasped and coughed up blood as their lungs filled. Some lasted longer than others.

It took two minutes to kill 10 baby goblins, but they were incapacitated long before that.

All died, all went still.

Mark frowned.

He hated how easy it was to kill. It felt so wrong—

“Good.” David nodded. “You won’t be able to do that against most enemies, but these ones are weak enough. Maybe a 5 in every category, across the board? You can make it more effective in the ways that Lola likely told you, and which I will not be repeating anywhere near cameras.”

Eliot whispered, “What the fuck did you do?”

David answered, “Freyalan Secret.”

Eliot shut up and looked away.

Mark knew how to make it more effective, for sure. He needed to drain their Body as far as it could drain, and he knew he hadn’t been focusing on that, so that was an area that he could improve. He also could have—

Isoko spoke up on the radio, reminding Mark that she was still ‘in the room’ if she wasn’t actually in the room at all. “How difficult was that?”

David tilted his head; Mark was free to answer that one.

Mark said, “I could have been a lot more effective with that one, in multiple ways. I didn’t include you two in that, and I didn’t include the big tree in it, either.” Mark went back to breathing in sustenance and breathing out deprivation. “I also could have…”

… And Mark should probably stop talking about it. Those goblins were weak; like David said at 5 in every category, or something like that. That was the only reason Mark had been able to kill them so easily.

Mark had been at PL 33 in Union, tier 3, when he came out on this mission. He had likely gained some strength in that already. So maybe he was PL35. Union was already hard for people to notice when it was being used on them. All of that meant that those goblins had no way to truly notice or overcome his Union. So of course he could kill them with a simple weakening of vein integrity.

It was pretty easy to accidentally kill a baseline with a Power use of any invasive kind, because baselines simply didn’t have any astral body at all, like Mark, back when Lola put him in a coma at his and Addashield’s request—

Mark shook his head a little. He said, “Anyway. That’s the first little group dead and killed. I can do that pretty easily to newborn goblins, Isoko. You’ll have to contend with the full grown ones…” Mark caught movement on the map that wasn’t just goblins milling around. One goblin started coming their way, and then another three followed, and soon the entire group was moving. Mark said, “Here comes another group, this time from the south west.”

Eliot stared at those blue dots as he typed at the air. He said, “Two streets down, one house west. They’re coming through the broken buildings.”

Isoko asked, “Can I get a heads up display of distant goblins, Eliot?”

Eliot was surprised for a moment, and then he started typing furiously. “Working on it right now. Let me know when you can see it—”

“There,” Isoko said.

“Good,” Eliot said, “I added another button to the side of your glasses. It will toggle between distant and near, and automatically revert to close when a goblin is within 20 meters.”

“Thanks, Eliot.”

Mark knew they were forgetting things. Eliot and Isoko knew it, too. The problem, Mark suspected, was that Eliot had a vast, vast library of knowledge to pull from for base defense, but he had never really done this before. Not in person, and certainly not with only a few hours of prep time. There were probably better ways to defend a location that would completely solve their problems, but all they had was Eliot and his limited, yet vast, ability to make things, and the restriction that as soon as those things were touched by monsters, they became unchangeable, or they simply broke.

But a glut of resources and options was a better problem to have than a dearth of the same.

Mark studied the holo display, watching as the goblins crawled through the buildings. It was a whole pack of them, a whole little tribe. Maybe 25 of them—

Eliot said, “Movement in the northwest, too. They’re coming down that street, too. 27 in the south, and 34 in the northwest.”

Isoko asked, “Can you get a scan on them, Eliot? Actual Power Levels?”

Eliot said, “They’re pretty much the same; newborns at tier 1 and a few older ones at tier 2.”

“I imagine I should go to the north?” Isoko asked.

Mark said, “Wait to adjust location, Isoko. Let’s see how many they send for us and that we can take out before they reach us. I’ll go after the northern one first.”

“Understood,” Isoko said, sounding a bit relieved and yet tense in a completely different way.

The goblins came in twos and threes, skulking through the twilight, and the deepening night.

Mark saw them all, but only because of the scanners, and the display, and the camera feeds to the side. Gradually, imperceptibly, he connected to them all. It was not easy. Mark stretched his astral body to the limit, to try and connect to way too many individual beings at once. They all had different heart rates. They all had different breathing rates.

But just as Badaira had shown Mark at Sparring Club, when she had the entire Healing Club start to fall into rhythm with itself, as a whole, instead of all breathing or beating together, Mark fell into sync with the whole advancing goblin tribe from the north. In a flash of insight, Mark realized that the goblins and the humans were two halves to a whole, both sides aimed right at each other. And Mark connected.

If they noticed him, they didn’t alter their movements or their approaches.

In those small groups, Mark breathed in all of their vein integrity, and gave them all vein decay in the return breath, while simultaneously beating his heart with a Union of resilience and weakness. He could not affect them all. He could not stretch himself that far. But it was enough to start.

Burst veins in heads and lungs did a number on anyone.

The small ones, the young ones, took 3 breaths each to falter and fall, but even just one breath was enough to inflict a young one with hacking, blood-filled coughs.

A very large goblin, with strange blue coloring, located in the back of the northwest group, took 13 breaths to kill, which was nearly 25 seconds, but it was the most important one to kill, Mark assumed. This proved to be maybe-true, for the northwest group fell apart as soon as that one died. They blinked, they looked at each other, and they started splitting off from the fight, snapping at each other as they yelped/roared.

Mark had killed a Hive Mind goblin, and he realized it instantly both in the way that the group fell apart, and how his Union frayed here and there. The Hive Mind goblin had been gathering up his people into one group, and making it easy to bring them into a Union.

Mark reconnected, but the goblins had reached the wall by then.

The southern goblins had already reached the opening in the wall, where the stone-spike-pyramid moat began. The lasers kept them behind those walls, and behind those boulders that Eliot had put out there, but they were already learning to shield their eyes—

Mark realized he should, instead of using just the 4 of himself, David, Isoko, and Eliot, to overpower the groups, he should use the biggest life out there, the monster tree, to truly crush the goblin packs…

But that might wake up the tree, turning it from sedentary and sentient to active and sapient, so Mark put that idea to the side, for emergencies, and decided to use 15 of the northern goblins to kill the other 15.

Mark switched gears, and the results were instantaneous and dramatic. Like switching a car from neutral to forward.

Mark realized something very deep in that moment.

Goblins worked together, but they were also in vast competition with each other, all the time.

That innate competition was probably the only reason why Union was able to take the 15 Mark had grabbed and use their nature to crush the smaller group with the extra draw, the force of 19 bodies working against 15 bodies. Mark, his people, and 15 goblins, took all of the resilience and vein integrity of the other 15 goblins, and gave them back weakness and vein decay.

One particularly weak goblin practically melted into a puddle of blood, all of his integrity leaving him, all at once.

The goblins panicked, and then Mark switched the division of Union again, using 7 goblins and his own people to kill the other goblins. Rapidly, Mark went through the entire northwest grouping, killing them all to a goblin, destroying them before they even reached the walls.

Half of the southern goblins had already raced across the stone pyramids, most of them able to navigate the pyramids by standing on the sharp tops and race across them, grinning and baring fangs all the while. Some faltered and fell, struck by lasers and missing a step on the pyramids, to fall, crashing and bleeding to the ground. The ones that stayed up laughed at the ones that fell, all while they shielded their eyes from the lasers.

Isoko was fighting two big ones, her estoc slashing. She had already killed one big fuzzy-ish one, with big spider eyes.

Mark fully switched to the southern incursion, ripping out their resilience and giving them weakness, focusing on the ones standing by Isoko first. Those ones faltered hard and Isoko rushed in with her estoc, stabbing the enemies in their brains and then kicking one body across the incursion, making it smack into its comrades.

The southern incursion had a Hive Mind goblin, too. It was big, with blue markings, hanging out behind the boulder, outside of the wall, watching the whole fight and coordinating the whole thing.

Mark left that one alone to make the killing easier.

Mark focused half of the goblins in the back on the half that had passed the pyramid moat, popping them one after another, each breath making one of them spill out, into their own body and out of their mouth, nose, and even anus. Each kill took 2 seconds of inhaling and 2 seconds of exhaling. Mark kept eyes on the Hive Mind goblin most of all, and when that one looked like it was going to bolt, Mark switched to him, focusing everything on that one.

The blue-striped goblin took two steps and fell onto his face, bleeding out internally.

Cleanup took another minute, with Isoko cutting down three goblins before her estoc snapped and she cursed the blade.

Mark switched to sustenance/deprivation breathing after the battle. The black veins coming from his body and filtering into the air never stopped beating with resilience and weakness.

And then it was over.

Mark sweated, so he breathed purity and impurity, making sure Isoko was okay. Had she taken any wounds at all? Mark didn’t think so—

“Holy gods,” Eliot exclaimed, as he surveyed the battlefield, making sure everything was dead. A drone dropped a new estoc to Isoko and she caught it as Eliot said, “You killed most of them, Mark. That was amazing. Can you do more?”

David asked, “And yes; is that the extent of what you can do?”

“Thanks for the purity,” Isoko said, over the radio, as she flicked her new estoc through the air, testing it. “They didn’t get me, though.”

Mark said to Isoko, “Better safe than sorry.” He told his team and David, “I could do more, but I don’t want to involve the monster tree. I could wake it up. Other than that, I am stretched thin, here.”

Isoko hummed in thought, on the radio.

Eliot went wide-eyed, looking worried.

David said, “It’s an okay limitation for now. You should expect to use the tree later. For now, stress yourself until you don’t need to use the holographic crutch. I suggest you glance at the hologram for but a moment to find the general locations of the goblins out there, and then focus on the exterior to feel out how many bodies are in an area. Count the bodies you connect to, and then look at the hologram again. Learn how to find things without your eyes. I believe you’ve tried to learn scouting in Healing Club.”

Mark nodded. He had tried to learn how to scout with Union in Healing Club, yes, but he had never gotten far with it. It had never been this dangerous before, either.

David moved on, looking at Eliot. “Eliot. I suggest you consider things like frictionless coatings to make the environment more hazardous to the enemies. It’s not a method that is useful most of the time, but carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen is everywhere out there, and hazardous terrain is always sometimes useful.”

Eliot was already typing away at the air, focusing on the first floor below them, even before David finished. He muttered to himself, “Fuck! I forgot about that! Would sticky bombs work— No. I don’t have enough materials for that. Ultraslick guns it is— I should do acids, too, to clear up the bodies… Acids that turn bodies into frictionless slime?” He looked off into the air, asking himself, “Does such a thing even exist?”

David was already speaking to Isoko on the radio, saying, “Isoko. You’ve done a fine job. Have you been able to feel that your Platinum Body can extend to your weapon? This is how you should be envisioning your tactile telekinesis.”

Isoko said, “I’ve gotten glints of that, but not much. I feel like I’m missing something basic, and important.”

David nodded. “Consider that Platinum Body boosts all aspects of the 6 categories. Perhaps you might have an easier time thinking of your Body skill as less of a Body skill, and more of a ‘whole being’ skill.”

There was a tiny breath on the other side of the radio.

And then an, “… Oh.”

Mark glanced at the camera that was trained on Isoko. He saw the moment when Isoko’s estoc flickered to full-platinum, just like her skin.

Isoko whispered again, “Oh.”

And then suddenly Isoko faltered, her skin fading to grey as she had to catch herself, almost fainting.

Mark rapidly infused her with as much resilience as he could, taking away her weakness in turn and giving it to the world.

Isoko breathed deep and righted herself, blinking out exhaustion, her skin turning back to full platinum.

For a moment, Mark thought about a ‘Union of Blinking’, and then he filed that away for just a different type of ‘dance’ to use sometimes.

Isoko whispered, “Holy shit, that was… A lot.”

David grinned. “I am a little surprised that no one told you about that yet, though.”

“Grandmother said the same thing but…” Isoko said, “I never really got it. But I think I got it—”

“Found it!” Eliot announced, laughing. “New turret being made! I’m going to dissolve those bodies out there and turn them into slippery goo.”

Isoko asked, “It won’t affect me, will it?”

“I’m making the anti-slip goo, too. I’ll deploy that in sprayers near the tower; for use if needed— Shit. Incoming from the west.”

Mark watched as three more groups of goblins began to advance in from the west, all of them coming together, and yet separately. Maybe 50 goblins total in packs of 18-ish a piece. He started to focus in that direction, closing his eyes, ‘seeing’ if he could target them before they got close—

David told them all, “Good first showing, everyone. Good improvement on designs. Keep it together. There’s about 1,300 of them out there, but that number will only grow. It will never get smaller until we go out and start killing them directly, and it will only get worse when they decide to truly attack, in full force.”

Mark cracked open his eyes and looked at the holo display.

There was a lot of blue out there.

David said, “They will expect you to break, because everyone always does. If they came at us all at once, we would fall. But you can win this. You won’t win this in a tower, but you’ll figure it out. The nights will be the worst.”

As new turrets went up on the roof, and plastics moved upward—

Eliot said, “Oh shit fuck me. I should be using atmospheric CO2 condensers for more material.”

David nodded. “As I said: there is lots of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen out there.”

Isoko flicked her sword outside of the bunker tower, the whole length of it flickering solid platinum with every stroke, and then fading back to plain steel after the cut. As she did that, she asked, “Can I press buttons to make it count as ‘human made’, Eliot? I need something to do while waiting for them to show up.”

All the blood drained from Eliot’s face. He muttered, “Ah. Yeah. Fuck. That helps a lot, too. I should have… thought of that.”

Isoko said, “City defense is a topic that takes 20 years to truly learn, Eliot, and you’re new at this. Don’t beat yourself up that much.”

David grinned at that.

Eliot relaxed. “Yeah… I guess… Thanks, Isoko. I’ll put some buttons out there for you now.”

On the cameras, some buttons appeared on the wall near Isoko.

She pressed it, asking, “That helps, right?”

Eliot said, “That helps so very much, actually. It always counts as more ‘human made’ when other people make the stuff. Just… hit the button whenever you want, please.”

Mark looked to the sides of the room, on the third floor, where clear, foot-thick tubes were filling up with some sort of thick, honey-like clear-ish liquid, and frosting over at the same time. Mark wasn’t sure what was going on with that, but those were probably the condensers condensing stuff from the atmosphere. That frost up there was sending clouds of vapor down to the first floor—

And then a barrier of glass appeared between the floors, blocking off this second floor from the top floor. Vents appeared in the walls, and cool air billowed through.

Mark almost chuckled at that. “I forgot to ask you for good ventilation. Thanks.”

Eliot nodded.

Mark got back to feeling out goblins.