Adamant Blood

Eliot was overwhelmed, but he wasn’t in this alone, and he certainly never would have gotten this far without the others. He had been feeling overwhelmed for the last 4 hours, though, and the goblins hadn’t gotten past any of their defenses, except for the outer wall.

Watching a cohort of 120 goblins rush the walls, just out of sight, and dig into the base of the wall like it was nothing but particularly thick packing foam was a nightmare. They took down that wall like they were kids digging through dirt. And then the wall fell on top of them and Mark finished sweeping through them, dropping them one after the other. Eliot’s slippery acids were already striking them, like grenades shot from turret guns, to splash everywhere and burn the bodies. It didn’t work at all against the living, because the goblins were all PL 5 to 25 and the acids were PL 0, taken from the atmosphere and turned into materials to fire. But as soon as the goblins died they became PL 0, and the acids started to work. Goblin bodies began to turn to slippery, black sludge.

It was midnight, now.

The pyramid moat was absolutely filled with slippery black and clear fluids, the pyramids poking up like uniform stepping stones upon a black ocean. That ocean flowed outward in every direction, into the crater lake down the way, and all the way to the tree. The lake was dead now. The few monster fish inside of it had already flown off, back into the main Tiberranean river.

Stray acid wouldn’t have killed everything out there, if Eliot had been throwing it out there in normal quantities, but Eliot was practically raining acid out there. The tree seemed to love the slippery black goo, though. It was biodegradable, and would, in fact, become just a sludge of slippery polycarbons that became fertilizer after a few months.

Some bones were more resistant than others, though, and those bones floated on the mess of a battlefield like white sticks in tar.

And the goblins kept attacking.

Sometimes the bigger, stronger goblins made it all the way past the turrets, past Mark, the oils not slipping them up at all, Mark unable to touch them for he was dealing with tens of goblins on his own, only to crash into Isoko.

Eliot knew that they would have been lost without her, out there, in the thick of it.

She danced when she could, killing monsters left right and center. Mostly, she rested, and she talked, and Eliot loved her suggestions, and her attitude.

Isoko pressed the button on the wall next to her station out there, her platinum touch making all of Eliot’s machinery work a whole lot better, as she asked over the radio, “Flammable sticky napalm?”

Eliot shook his head, though Isoko couldn’t see that. “No. That’s the same problem as most of the suggestions.”

“Well yeah. It’s still tier 0. But fire still hurts and also blinds.”

Mark spoke up, “It changes their breathing patterns too much.”

Isoko said, “Ahhh… Not that one, then. I’ll come up with a new one that works! Just you watch!”

Eliot grinned— And then he eyed the map, and saw a horde. “Horde approaching from the west again. Looks like… HOLY FUCK. 230?! … Wait.” His stomach dropped as he saw the movement of the dots, and he made some connections he did not want to make. “Are they flying?!”

Mark had his eyes half-closed, as he said, “Mostly babies. They hit up a wyvern nest. I’ll take out the fliers first.”

Isoko looked to the sky, saying, “I can’t do shit against those fuckers.” She smiled, pressed the button faster, and said, “Good luck, team!”

Eliot refilled his machines as best he could.

- - - -

Isoko stood glittering in the spotlight.

It was a very fancy spotlight, and Isoko looked very tempting under that brilliant light. All the goblins watching from the distant, dark rooftops, only had eyes for her. This was by design. Eliot wanted her to look good for the camera, and also so that the goblins would attack along a vector, aiming at the target left out in the open.

As far as strategies went, it was a good one.

Goblins were incredibly dangerous monsters, but they were also rather predictable based on their hierarchy of needs. They needed to reproduce, most of all, and so, they went after anything that might offer their next generation a good leg-up.

Isoko was pretty sure they imagined platinum-skinned babies.

Let them try.

Isoko was not the one killing the most tonight, which was not how she envisioned her life as a hero, when she was a kid. Back then, she had thought she’d be like grandmother, shaping the sky into blades to kill and rend on vast scales. Tornadoes. Storms. Minor hurricanes. Maybe lightning if she could get really good at sky shaping. But that’s not what happened. Isoko had Platinum Body instead of Sky Shaper.

She had hated Platinum Body.

Looking back on it, on the months she had spent at Citadel, trying to get Chosen by Freyala, always wondering why she had not been Chosen yet, even though she was already tier 3… She knew, now, why she hadn’t been Chosen. She had not loved her Power. She had been resentful, hateful.

Freyala didn’t want that from her people.

But here? Now?

Isoko was starting to love Platinum Body.

Isoko waited in the spotlight, pressing the button on the wall, as goblins fell out of the sky and dissolved in the ocean of clear acid, becoming black sludge. Other goblins raced across the tops of pyramids, aiming right for her. Many of those died, too. Mark was working overtime, doing The Most, as was his lot in life.

And Isoko was taking out the trash.

She stopped pressing the button for two seconds and the lights in the area flashed wide, illuminating her battleground stage up ahead, like a platform sticking out of the ground by just a meter. She slid down a short runway to that platform, her platinum feet skidding on the stone, and then sounding out tap, tap, tap, as she walked to the center of the platform.

She awaited her enemies.

Isoko hadn’t really gotten in touch with her Platinum Body before tonight, before this trial, before Inquisitor David had reiterated a lesson from Wandering Sage, from grandma, that Isoko hadn’t really understood until that repetition. Platinum Body encompassed the entire spectrum of Powers; Body, Kinetic, Mind, Natural, Soul, and Arch. It was still very much a Body Power. But it gave her strength in every single category. It meant she was able to defend in every category, but it was more than that.

She wasn’t sure how much more.

But she was learning.

The goblins came for her, leaping out of the black moat of pyramids and acid, slobbering and salivating with maws open wide.

Isoko danced.

She wasn’t sure why she danced, but it was probably due to Mark. He was here with her, right now, coordinating the entire battle in his Union. She was herself, but she was also an instrument of death. This is probably what it felt like to be truly Chosen by Freyala, and Isoko absolutely loved it.

She spun, decapitating a goblin and then kicking its body into another, sending them both into the acid.

She twisted, her empty hand carving through fangs and face alike, sending the body spinning outward.

She leapt and carved, her sword flickering full platinum, bisecting two goblins without stopping at all. It was like cutting through air.

She landed on a goblin’s head, smashing it, breaking its neck and body.

A twist and a spin completed the dance, killing four more goblins who seemed to leap right into her sword, right where they needed to be.

And then the battle was over.

Isoko kicked the dead goblins on the platform into the acid, where Eliot promptly targeted them with more of those acid guns of his, and they started to dissolve much faster. He also sprayed the platform, and Isoko, and Isoko’s button-pressing area with anti-acid stuff. It tasted terrible, but Mark was on the job, and soon she was purified of all possible problems, and that included the taste in her mouth and the orange oils on her body.

She walked up the stairs, not slipping at all.

Isoko got back to her button and started pressing it again, smiling, as she checked her visor and found all the enemies dead and dissolving in the clear acid that rested atop the black ocean. “So that was really good, wasn’t it!”

“It was good, yes,” Eliot said, “The waves are getting bigger, though. There’s 400 massing about half a kilometer to the north.”

Isoko said, “You’ve made a getaway plane yet?”

Eliot said, “I got the parts. Assembling can take a minute. I’m clearing off some stuff that got damaged by fliers now.”

Something loud crashed to the right, and Isoko nearly jumped, but she saw the splashdown of a turret and she laughed at it instead. She breathed a bit, and then calmed.

Isoko gestured at the turret with her sword. “They got past you both, huh?”

“Two of them did,” Eliot said, “It was enough to ruin one machine. I won’t put the parts up there for them to get destroyed in the same way."

Isoko nodded. Soon, the real battle would start.

Mark said, “It’s a group of 418, but it’s also 40% of what they have left. We will survive this.”

Isoko grinned as she pressed the button on the wall and looked up at the night sky.

Beyond the spotlights, and the lights trained on the sky, and all of the illuminated land around them, the sky was black and dotted with stars. The moon positively glowed up there, in the sky; a ball of platinum inscribed in glowing gold. The Demon City of Arakino.

Isoko thought, for a moment, about demons, and what demons could do for a person.

As one of the demon’s lesser-regarded, but still important abilities, when a demon linked to a person, that person gained an astral body that was strong in all respects.

Just like Isoko’s Platinum Body.

Isoko had never really thought about her Platinum Body in that way, but maybe… Maybe she should have thought about it like that. Like she was truly strong. She flicked her estoc through the air and it turned platinum in a down stroke, easily carving several inches into the stone at her feet.

She grinned as the gash in the stone healed over.

Eliot was on the job, and Mark was, too.

- - - -

Mark abandoned all pretense at careful killing when 418 goblins came for them from every direction, except for the slice of the north where the big tree grew.

With eyes closed, he sifted through the sky, linking to every heartbeat out there, and swaths of goblins died. The weakest first. The strongest next. The fliers fell from the sky and the strong ones faltered into acid baths. Blood turned to slick and goblins rushed over their falling fellows to get traction, to reach the base.

Mark became the wind, held to his body with the barest of tethers.

He tapped into the big tree and pulsed with life, drawing in all the goblins near the tree, and then elsewhere. The tree groaned as it grew fast on the lives Mark reaped from the horde. Bark healed over, and goblins died faster and faster.

The horde died and the tree gained half as much height as it already had, twisting into the sky with roots flickering out into the waters, into the goblin horde, grabbing them and drawing them deep. It even started to grab the living goblins. The north became a death zone, doing A Lot to protect the tower, but soon the tree would encroach on the tower, and become A Problem.

Mark cut off his connection to the tree when the tree started to grow directly toward the tower.

418 goblins had been reduced to 65 by then. They had reached the moat. They were aiming at Isoko. Isoko stared back at them from her platform where she danced, cutting them down. Mark was one with the air, with the Union of it all, and the goblins died. He helped Isoko when he could, but mostly he killed goblins, which was exactly what everyone was doing as much as they could.

Ten minutes after the combat started, it was over and the humans had won.

Mark blinked as he came back to himself, though he couldn’t hear very well and he couldn’t see very well, either. He breathed in the good, and exhaled the bad, his astral veins pulsing hard, black miasma threading away from him, like shadows clearing, and soon he could see again.

Mark blinked some more and looked down at the holo display, and at the world around him. The bunker was safe, right? Yeah. All the walls were intact, and the lights were on, and David was there by Eliot, who was fixing up some machines that had turned red on the display. Some goblins had gotten through, onto the roof.

Mark looked out at the cameras and saw Isoko on the roof, kicking a goblin away. For a moment, he thought he should have felt panic, but he was too relaxed right now. Too worn thin. He asked, “So some goblins got to the machines? We still okay?”

Eliot looked at Mark strangely.

Isoko chuckled. “You sound kinda threadbare there, Mark. You doing okay?”

Mark said, “I think I am. I think I woke the tree up, too.” And then the truth of that statement slammed into his mind, as he fully woke up, as well. “Oh shit. I woke up the tree. Is it growing toward us?”

Eliot said, “Yes, but it stopped. I don’t think you can use it again, Mark. It’s already tapping at our base.” He changed the holo display to show the red roots of the tree. Two really big roots were already growing this way. “Those two roots weren’t there half an hour ago. It knows we’re here.”

Isoko said, “They’re down to something like 500 goblins, right? Should we counter attack before they can replenish their numbers? Will they attack with only 500 left?”

Mark wasn’t sure about any of that. He said, “If they come at us with newborns I can kill them without using the tree. The problem is the older ones who get up to a higher Power Level. It takes concentration to kill those ones.”

Eliot said, “I could rebuild away from the tree in the morning… Though maybe not. Look.”

Eliot flicked the map, and the map changed.

Everywhere nearby was tainted with some sort of color. Mostly goblin-blue. A bit of red for the wyverns. Green for the tree and to a remarkable distance, far beyond the underside of the tower and even a good hundred meters to the south. That thing… Mark had mostly awoken it. Damn.

Eliot said, “There’s almost no place to build, inside of a kilometer. If we leave the base then we risk getting caught out in the open, and it won’t be a small attack like before, that David saved us from. The goblins are all out there now, securing the land.”

Isoko said, “We can defend this spot. You’re still not using your Blood Union to inflict that killing, are you, Mark?”

Mark had considered that option, but he had dismissed it, because, “We need to keep up our Powers, and Blood Union is the best way to keep you in Full Platinum mode, and Eliot able to work his machines so well. Breath Union doesn’t do that nearly as well, and all these other possible Unions I’m looking at in every battle are kinda… less solid than blood or breath. Good for moving around general ideas of combat, maybe some control of combat, too, but not much more than that.”

Maybe if Mark was out there himself, in the thick of it, he could more accurately get into the flow of battle, and truly orchestrate the fight. But he was here, inside a bunker, feeling out goblins with ephemeral tendrils of Union, and working his astral body in disconnected ways. It was probably better this way, though. They needed big-killing power, and Isoko was doing well as bait. If Mark had to be bait, too, then he would have fucked up somewhere, he was sure.

Things were looking good, though, as long as the other goblins didn’t attack.

He had achieved two big things tonight.

He was able to feel where creatures were with his Union, and he was able to move combatants around, like how Badaira and Lola had told him he could. Grand Healer Badaira wanted him to become a commander of armed forces and city defense for good reason, while Lola wanted him to be an Inquisitor for other, just-as-good reasons.

Isoko said, “Try doing the death-thing with blood Union, Mark. This is a training mission. We’re not going to die. We’re just going to fail if you can’t live up to your full potential.”

Mark winced... but yeah. He couldn’t use the monster tree anymore. It was already too close for comfort.

David spoke up, “I agree with Isoko. Though failure here will not be a simple thing to recover from, I am still confident I can get all three of you out of here should the need arise.” He stressed, “I would rather not do that. Please take this seriously.”

With a strong voice, Isoko said, “I am taking this extremely seriously. Thank you, Instructor.”

David didn’t comment.

Eliot said, “There are some things I could try. They’re more experimental than actual, though. Nuclear reactors with lightning dischargers can kill small goblins, but they’ll only paralyze the larger ones. That’s kind of… ambitious, though. Or perhaps a better idea…” Eliot said, “I can make a flying platform with the oils and plastics I’ve collected, and the plane parts I have stored upstairs. Maybe more of an offensive vehicle than an escape vehicle. We could go hunting.”

Mark liked the idea, but there was a problem—

Isoko spoke of it first, saying, “The actual, big wyverns will spot us if we’re not fast, and we won’t be fast, hunting from the air. You can’t make a real hovervan, can you?”

“I cannot,” Eliot said, “Those require special materials from Daihoon. Levistone and gravcrystal and a bunch of smaller things. There are lab-created alternatives, but I can’t make those, either, since we have no magical materials to start with, and I cannot turn monsters into magical materials, either. I can make a hover platform with some masking sound-makers and holographic mirage displays. It won’t be a fast or strong vehicle. You won’t be able to go Full Platinum, either. I’ll be straining weight requirements, as is.”

Mark asked, “How about a sometimes-flying platform? Something with spider legs that can set down anywhere?”

Eliot glanced at the holo display as he thought. Mark looked at the display, too.

The goblins were out there, but they weren’t coming this way. Not yet.

Isoko spoke up into the silence, “I like that idea?”

Eliot started saying, “It’s the same problem as power armor. I know David said something about that earlier in all of this, but all of this stuff is Power Level 0. Earth is Power Level 0. All of this steel breaks unless it’s empowered by a person, and my stuff specifically cannot be empowered by me unless it’s fully human-made.

“So me getting into a power armor is just asking to be trapped in a tin can that I cannot move, and which is eventually crushed against my body, as soon as the monsters touch it.” Eliot looked to Mark, saying, “A flying platform can be taken down with rocks thrown by monsters, or by webbing cast through the air. Those spider goblins have webbing. The flying goblins can hold onto the spider goblins. We already saw that once, and they’re not dumb. So a spider-like transport with legs that are in reach of the monsters? That’s just asking to get those legs chopped out from underneath us.

“There are reasons why I haven’t suggested a flying platform yet, and… And those reasons are myriad. And yeah. There’s the actual-wyvern problem, too. They’re out there. The long range sensors have picked up on them. But they’re mostly day hunters. I’m sure we’ll have to fight them once night is over, but Mark can probably kill one of those on his own… Might take him a while, though. They’re strong. Body 6. And there won’t be wyverns to use against other wyverns when we’re fighting those.”

So that was a lot.

Isoko paused pressing the button on the wall as she went, “Ahh.” And then she continued to press the button on the wall.

Mark asked, “So how about a spider with legs that are like… pillars that you can extend from plastic tanks that you keep on the platform, to continually make new legs?”

Eliot frowned a little as he thought.

Isoko said, “That’s the weight problem again, right?”

Mark asked, “Big jumping spider platform? Only stays aloft long enough to get to a location? How about parachutes that you aim fans at, like those paraglider things? Ever been in one of those? I went once with my Dad for…” Mark frowned. He shook his head. “Does that help with planning?”

Silence, save for the whir of computer fans downstairs, the burble of collecting oils beyond the plastic layer that separated floor 2 from 3, and the low droning of the air conditioning units blowing air through the space. The air smelled clean, and fresh, and Mark made sure that everyone felt that way too, even Isoko, who was outside of the space.

Eliot had added a few cooling fans to Isoko’s space out there, but it was a pretty nice night, all things considered, so Isoko had shut those small fan vents herself.

More silence.

Isoko asked, “How about just drones? A drone army? You said something about the spider goblins dropping lines, but how about you do that? Can you make mono-molecular kill-lines?”

Eliot said, “Those are banned for use on Earth and other places, and I can make them, but I’m not going to. They stick around forever, so they’re a war crime. I’ll do expanding degradable foam on bomb drones, instead. Should be able to trap up some gobbos for a little bit. Delay tactics.” Eliot smiled a little bit. He said, “Actually. Yeah! This is good.”

Mark glanced upstairs as a vat of the oil burst and then began transforming into plastic parts as Eliot’s eyelids fluttered, his mind focused on his astral body control of his magic. In the corner of this second floor, a clear tube that led from the first floor to the third floor filled up with little metal bits, traveling on their way to the drones up above. Some camera drones and stationary cameras angled upward to watch the show.

Mark asked, “Are you running out of metals?”

Eliot said, “I have enough for one more big push and a get-away vehicle. We will need to go out and get more in the morning. It’s kind of truly hard to go out and gather more metal through drones, or else I would be doing that. There’re problems of efficiency in automatic systems all over the place, that I can only truly bridge with my Power, and car-cutting drones cross that line. Sending out car-cutting drones is nearly impossible. Sending out drones that can drop exploding foam bombs? Easy enough— Oh shit. They’re sending that last 500 at us, aren’t they?”

Mark whipped back toward the holo display. At 200 meters out they were surrounded by goblins on all sides, except for the direct north where the monster tree grew tall. They had been milling around at that distance for a while now. But now, they advanced.

Rapidly.

Running.

Mark’s heart sunk a little.

And then Mark prepared himself to become an agent of death—

Eliot rapidly crunched numbers and said, “The big Power signatures are stopping at 190 meters! All the rest are advancing!”

Isoko chuckled, teased, “They figured out your max distance!”

As Eliot commented, “They figured that out on the third push.”

Mark said, “I’m doing the blood kill, this time. It’ll be hard to protect you from stray shit, Isoko, and your mind protection is going away when I do this, Eliot.”

Isoko said, “Heard and understood!” She hefted up a big steel shield that was sitting to the side, saying, “Shields up!”

Eliot stared at the display, whispering, “Shields up.”

Mark became one with the world.