Adamant Blood

Mark looked in shop windows as he walked down the road. The air smelled of cheese and bread, for a pizzeria was making a brisk business right over there, and Mark kinda wanted a slice, but he didn’t have that much money. But he did have 113 goldleaf, which was honestly not as much as he should have, right? What was going on there—

His phone rang.

Mark hadn’t gotten a phone call in… in a while? He looked at the number, which was restricted, and then he looked around. The phone continued to ring. Mark stepped to the side and answered the phone, saying, “Hello?”

“Mark! Brother!” said Addavein, the dragon. “You registered!”

Mark almost hung up.

In fact, he had pulled the phone away from his ear and had a finger almost ready to end the call… But he breathed in resilience and pushed away weakness, his heart beating black veins down his skin, and outside of his body.

He answered, “I did register… What…” He wasn’t sure what to say. He went with, “What are you… uh… up to?”

Is that really what he cared to ask?

The fuck?

Addavein happily answered, “I went back to Daihoon and killed a bunch of kaiju that had been hanging out for a while, unkilled. Talked to some dragons on some more equal footing than Dad had as an archmage. Killed some old threats. Came back. Killed some more old threats. I think the next few hundred years of humanity are looking up up up!” Addavein said, “There are always going to be problems, of course, and Endless Daihoon is impossible to clear, so more monsters will always come down the mountains. But the big enemies that are here are mostly dead. This is, of course, still a problem. Just of a different nature. And so now we’re at the ecological-conservation and ecosystem-organizing part of the process, instead of at the survival-of-humanity and threat-management steps. It’s a big step!”

Mark went with the flow of conversation, and asked, “So the Dominion of Okuana is getting involved, then? The ecosystem management stuff?”

“I’m trying to get them involved! A great deal of trying. They are unmoving, which is to be expected. It’s still better to kill the big enemies, though. I assume most places will experience some unknown hardships. Weird monster waves and the like. But they’ll pull through, and everything will settle down. It’ll be a great expansion!”

Expansions, huh?

Mark had a profound moment.

Mark decided to share something of his own… that Addavein probably already knew.

Mark said, “I’m joining an expedition out there… I think. A settlement thing.”

“I know! I heard! Those are always great learning experiences. I’ve done a few in my time. But do you know what’s an even better learning experience?”

Mark felt suddenly, very alone.

He was still on Worldly Road, in Citadel Freyala. The sun shone brightly. People were walking this way and that, though a lot of them were avoiding him, for Mark had a rather visible Power display going on.

But now, as Mark tried to sense the world, to get a feel for whatever Addavein was saying-without-saying, or possibly threatening, Mark’s black veins extended out even further—

There.

Above.

Far. Far above. Too far to see.

… But also not above Mark at all.

There was something above him, but it wasn’t actually there. It was not like the time when Addavein had been invisible, and then suddenly visible. This was… different. Weirder.

Mark tentatively asked, “What’s a better learning experience?”

“Finding your way to civilization yourself! Forging your own path through the woods. Killing anything and everything that approaches you. As a proper power does. As expected of a tri-Talent, and especially one like you, who I have chosen to call my brother.”

There was a beat.

And then something like illusionary lightning flashed down from the heavens, out of the clear blue sky, and slammed into Mark. It wasn’t lightning at all. It was a thread pulled from the very fabric of the world, unraveling light itself, revealing a land of forests and danger. Something like a strong wind poured over Mark as the not-lightning skittered across the ground, right at him, like a doorway swallowing him.

It had moved as fast as a blink.

And now Mark stood on grasses in the middle of nowhere, and the hole in the world vanished behind him.

He dropped the phone into his pocket as he stared upward, at a sky that held a dragon in it. He was big, silver, and with black spikes on his back and in the air around him, like normal. The sky itself was all fucked up, but Mark didn’t pay attention to that right now.

Mark yelled at the bastard, “THE FUCK, ADDAVEIN?!”

Addavein laughed loudly, vibrating the world, his mirth like a bomb going off far, far overhead. That shockwave slammed into the forest all around Mark and broke branches, and Mark’s eardrums popped from the pressure. It stung, and that was all.

Mark healed himself—

In a moment of inspiration, he Union’d with Addavein, and his body turned solid as adamantium, probably. He felt strong. He felt invincible—

And then Addavein chortled and broke the connection, leaning down to look at him from a few hundred meters away, like a giant cat lounging in the sky. He whispered, and the world crackled with shockwaves. “You’re strong enough to be on your own, so go ahead and be on your own for a while. It’s fun! Your phone still works somewhat. I’m sure you won’t be out here in the wilds of Daihoon for more than a few weeks.”

“I repeat: THE FUCK?!”

Addavein grinned. “I’m glad to see you acclimated to your kinesis as fast as you did, because I really wanted to see you out and about on your own, instead of ingratiated to a bunch of nobles and such. I didn’t know if I would get an opportunity to do this before I went and slept, so I had to do it now.”

“… Sleep?” Mark asked, again, “The fuck?”

Addavein chuckled. “It’s really quite a funny thing! You see: Dragons hibernate when they use too much power. I always thought of it as something that only happened to older dragons, but I’ve been tearing it up out there, Mark.

“I couldn’t wait any longer.

“I need to sleep. Maybe for a few months. I’m not sure. Maybe half a year or more.

“You’ll be fine out here! You got your adamantiumkinesis up to an acceptable level, but it could always be better, and what better way to get stronger than being thrown into the fire! You’re in the fire now, but I wouldn’t drop you off without some real help.” He added, “And so: here.”

A tiny book slapped into Mark’s chest.

It was black, and it had a drop of adamantium on its binding. Mark instinctively grabbed for the adamantium but he felt some sort of resistance, but only for a moment. And then the adamantium was his. The little book was a thin thing that Mark didn’t get a chance to read—

Addavein said, “A bit more help with your adamantiumkinesis, or really, the whole Kinetic branch of magic. Broadly, there’s the actual kinesis part of it, but there’s also sensing, so you can learn how to sense deposits of the stuff. Good luck finding any, though! There are a lot of miners that look for metals of all kinds, and you’re not a miner; you’re ‘just’ an adamantiumkinetic! HA!”

Addavein giggled some, vibrating the world.

… He seemed not-okay.

Mark was still furious.

Addavein sighed, and then announced, “And now! I need to sleep! Before I turn hysterical and sleep-deprived. You don’t want to see a dragon like that. That’s when dragons start to get weird…” He paused. “Oh. I think I might already be sleep deprived.” He tried, “I preemptively apologize for this?”

“ ‘PREEMPTIVELY’? ‘Preemptively’ requires you to not have already started shit, Addavein! Put me back.”

Addavein giggled. “That’s not how this magic works! Malaqua does a much stronger version of this than I can manage, but he has the whole demon System helping him. You see, I summoned you— Oh no. I was about to go on a tangent!” Addavein chuckled again. “I need to go away and sleep for a few… whiles. Yes!” He stared at Mark, like a demon-dragon-god, filling the world with his power, his presence, as he said, “I planned this all out, yes! It certainly didn’t happen on whims. I’m not like those other dragons… Later!”

And then Addavein flew away, and all the world went flying at his exit.

Mark tumbled through the air. Rocks flew. Trees uprooted.

Being casually tossed around, Mark thought, as he was being casually tossed around, was not as bad as he expected it to be. Rocks slammed into him, tree branches struck his face. All of that happened. But Mark had a Body rating in the 50s. He managed to grab onto his phone and the black book that Addavein had thrown at him, and somehow he landed, or more like rolled.

Mark found himself blinking out dirt, in ruined clothes, dust settling down everywhere.

A boulder crashed. Trees finished breaking.

Mark uncurled on the broken ground. His phone was cracked but it was still illuminated. His AI Quark was still there. His Slayer badge was gone, though, along with most of his clothes.

Mark stared at the dusty sky. Dust kept raining down, and, since the air was rather horribly full of debris, Mark was careful about breathing in purity and breathing out impurity, all so that he could cleanse the air directly around himself. As he continued to do that, dirt and dust continued to rain all around, but the sky started to clear. Mark didn’t feel nearly that dirty anymore, even as dirt continued to rain all around him.

Mark had a complicated set of emotions.

Mark stood up, muttering, “I can still hate someone who does good things for other people, yeah? It wouldn’t be ridiculous to hate him for doing this, would it? No. I can and should hate him over this…” Mark looked to the sky, and he felt a sense of wonder. He whispered, “And yet…”

He was on Daihoon, now.

The sky was blue, the clouds were white, but the entire atmosphere was also ten million ribbons of light, like auroras, but more solid. Here and there colors appeared, as though soft fabrics were twisting in the sky, allowing their surfaces to be seen when those surfaces were at shallow angles. It was like watching clouds, of a different sort. There was movement. It was slow movement. The fabrics shifted and moved. The fabrics layered, and unlayered, catching on the light of the sun and dimming the sun, but only just enough so that Mark could look at the sun, directly, without hurting himself. It was strange, the light of the sun, here on Daihoon.

Everything was so beautiful.

Gradually, Mark’s sight turned back earthward, or rather, to Daihoon.

For this was Daihoon, but this specific part of Daihoon was plains and open land, with mountains or something like that over in that direction, and something like… Mark wasn’t sure, more plains? in that other direction?

Everything was thoroughly ruined by Addashield’s passing, though—

The dragon was on the horizon again, and he was coming this way.

Mark hadn’t noticed him with his eyes, but he had noticed him with a gentle pull of Union, telling him that he was being targeted. At least it didn’t feel like a dangerous target… Not intentionally, anyway.

Mark steeled himself, his heart beating with the world, drawing in resilience and expunging weakness. Mark almost expected that Union on Daihoon would have different results than on Earth, but nope. Union of Blood and Breath both beat with a normalcy that Mark had come to expect from his Power.

And Addavein returned.

Wind carved across the world, rushing and twisting, and then a minor hurricane blew at Mark, but Mark was ready for it, this time. He held up his adamantium slivers and widened them out to small wind blockers. He secured himself to the ground with his other bits of adamantium. Dust and stone slapped against those tiny shields, like rain off of a tin roof. Most of his body was still fully exposed to the dragon’s wind. Gravel struck, and bounced, and Mark healed up the tiny wounds that Addavein caused.

And then Mark stared at Addavein, at his ‘brother’, up there in the sky.

Addavein spoke, and he was unable to modulate his voice. His voice boomed like a roar and a rage, and yet it was just a voice. Mark’s eardrums popped again, but he healed them up and reinforced himself against vibrational damage. Union seemed able to do that well enough.

Addavein’s voice turned softer, intelligible.

“—Ah. You didn’t hear the first things I said. Uh,” Addavein said, “To repeat: I shouldn’t have summoned you like that. I just now realized that this is the exact same shit that made us all stand together and oust the dragons the first chance we really got, late in the Reveal and during the Rise of the New Pantheon. In my defense, I did pick out a good spot here!

“I can send you back to Earth, but I can’t pick the spot.

“If you want me to send you back, you’d end up close to here. It’s in North America! Pretty central to the continent. Here on Daihoon you’d find the Not-Mississippi River to the East if you went that way. We call it The Shine, here. Do you want to stay? Or go back?

“To help you make this choice: Daihoon civilization is about 800 kilometers north for some settlements around the Not-Chicago area, 2000 kilometers southwest for the beginnings of the Aluatha Empire, or just follow the Not-Mississippi down south and you’ll run into something smaller eventually.”

Addavein waited.

Mark asked, “Are there big monsters around here?”

Addavein turned in the sky, looking this way and that— He flinched a little, then he hummed, and then said to Mark. “Maybe some… too-big ones, yes. But you could run from them. Probably even shut them down.”

Mark wasn’t happy about it, and his phone died in his hands which made him even less happy about it, but he was hopeful, and he really, really wanted to kill something. Anything. Something needed to die!

So it was fine to be here!

PERFECTLY FINE!

Mark declared, “I can survive this! I can thrive here!” He said, “But you need to not pull shit like this. See you in some months or a year. Have a good nap.”

Addavein smiled some— He paused. “Oh no no no. You’re way too vulnerable here. I have to send you back.”

Lightning descended again, and Mark popped out of a hole in the world.

Daihoon vanished.

Mark landed on his ass on stone and water, splashing down into some sort of tributary or small river somewhere, in the middle of some forested-like place, in the middle of nowhere. His phone sparked in the water and then fully died. His shirt was completely gone and his pants broke all the way, his belt snapping and his underwear snapping, too. Where were his shoes? No idea. They probably got knocked off in the first gust of wind.

There was no time to be mad, to process what had happened. Not yet. Not right this second.

Mark stood up and pulled off the tatters of his shirt, and there went his pants, falling off without him needing to even pull them off. They got tangled on his left thigh, though, so he did have to rip at that, and off they came. Tatters of clothes in the water. Fun.

This was why heroes wore webweave, taken from spiders at big farms and all of it at least PL15, for about a year. A brawny with tactile telekinesis could even use normal clothes. But Mark didn’t have TT, and those tatters had been basic browns.

And now that Mark was up and uninhibited by tangled clothes, and there were no visible monsters anywhere, Mark allowed himself to think.

Mark made one decision, first.

Mark roared at the sky, “FUCK YOU, DRAGON!”

That felt good.

Mark decided he was going to be mad at that fucking dragon for a long time. Not anxious, when he inevitably showed up again. Not scared at his size, or his… everything. Just plain mad. Mark could be personable for the fate of the world, but he’d be mad as fuck at that fucking fuckhead, and for reasons completely unrelated to the tangled mess that was demon-afflicted Addashield, who had killed his parents.

Mark took a breath.

He looked at the empty land all around, at the normal, Earth-blue sky with its normal clouds and no fabric-like auroras at all, at the clear waters of the small river, and at his slowly-flowing-away tatters of clothes—

Addashield’s little black book was in the water.

Mark sighed, then muttered, “This is certainly one way to avoid thinking about my life and where it’s going.”

Mark slipped into the waters to grab some fabric to try to save his dignity as much as he could, and he picked up the wet book, too. The water was cold, but the air was… cold. Mark had a Body in the 50s, though, so he was okay.

Surprisingly, the book was okay, too. No water damage at all. Mark didn’t really look at it yet, though, because he was nude in the wilderness, and that seemed like asking for some monster to chomp at parts of him he didn’t want chomped.

He was going to fix some of his clothes… if he could.

The belt looked… difficult to fix. It was severed at the right hip where something had clipped Mark’s hip and broken his clothes. He had barely felt whatever it was, but he was pretty sure that it probably should have cracked his pelvis, or maybe broken his skin some, because the cut line was pretty clean.

Mark had some extra metal, though, and not his adamantium. He needed that to defend himself. The belt had two rings that held the belt together, so Mark grabbed the metal clasp and pulled at it… Nope. Not strong enough for that. Mark used his adamantium to break the clasp, though, and that was much easier, though it was still kinda tough.

Healthy Body didn’t give Mark any sort of extra strength, but he would have assumed that he could… he didn’t know… bend metal with his fingers? But no. Adamantium and his Kinesis, though, were good enough to bend the small metal rings that made up his belt. From there, with some applied pressure and slipping on the rings a few times, Mark managed to remake the ‘belt’. It looked stapled together, but it was fine!

This was fine.

Several minutes of small crafting later and Mark was missing Eliot a lot, but he had, like, a loincloth, or something.

It functioned.

Parts that dangled were now firmly secured.

That’s all that Mark needed it for. He wasn’t going to be one of those guys who got lost in the woods and made it back to society all grubby and nude and with parts missing… Though that was the general theme of getting lost in the woods outside of cities…

Because it was incredibly fucking dangerous to be out here, unprotected…

Alone.

Mark hummed and worried about his safety.

He was on a big rock sitting to the side of a river, half in the shade half in the sun. Mark had picked this spot because it offered vantage points to everywhere, and his Union was running strong, allowing him to sense if anything was aiming his way. Mark wasn’t sure how his Union sense actually worked, but he was working his Union well, to ‘scout’, and nothing was ‘aiming his way’. Sometimes, Mark even got feelings associated with that ‘aiming his way’, which was really helpful. Feelings like ‘kill kill kill that thing!’ or ‘I need to eat that thing’, seemed like normal monster feelings to have, with regard to humans.

Maybe there was a better way to use Union to scout, but Mark hadn’t been taught that secret yet. Knowing that some monsters were ‘pointed at him’ or ‘pulling on the fabric of reality in Mark’s direction’ was good enough, for now.

And speaking of ‘good enough’!

Mark tapped his feet on the warm stone underfoot, and he could feel the stone, the heat, the sharpness of that part right there, but his feet were perfectly fine. He leaned down and made a fist and lightly punched the stone, and his hand felt fine, too. He punched the stone harder. Still felt good? Still felt good. Mark reared back and slammed the stone with maybe half-strength.

He thwacked the stone good, and it stung, but Mark was inundating himself with resilience as he expelled weakness, so it didn’t hurt that much at all. As he stood up, Mark felt that his feet were perfectly good for ‘shoes’ right now, which was kinda weird, but also really cool.

He looked at himself, at the black lines tracing down his entire body and into the air. It looked like a really bad magical infection, but it wasn’t too out-of-line with what a person, alone in the woods, might look like when they were actively defending himself. His adamantium needles kinda blended into the black vein-like structures, too…

Mark breathed in sustenance, then breathed out deprivation, connecting to all the trees and plant life all around. He had no idea how long he would be out here, or where ‘here’ even was, but he certainly wasn’t going to get caught flatfooted or starving out here in the woods. In the wilds.

Mark grinned a little.

“This was not how I wanted to explore the world, but…” He chuckled. “This works?”

Sure. This works.

How to get around, though?

… Well…

Mark grinned as he turned his adamantium needles into flat sheets of metal, each about 5 inches square.

He wasn’t going to walk.

He was going to fly!

… Or probably just hover, really. Hover-run? He wanted to stretch out the adamantium into, like, wings or something. But there was not enough here for that at all. So! Pressing-against-the-ground running!

Mark pressed the metal against the stone—

He caught himself as he flopped to the side, because he forgot to do a three-point push against the ground. Also, one of the sheets slipped. Maybe a sheet wasn’t so good for movement…

Hmm.

Mark looked down at the ground, at the little black book that Addavein had given him.

With a sigh and a reluctance, Mark picked it up and looked through it. It was wet, but not really. It was 10 pages long, with rather average-sized print, not script, and it was densely packed with ‘Understanding Shaper Magic’, according to the front text. There were even little pictures. It was not a book that Addvein had made himself. It was a mass-produced copy, and it came with all-too familiar warnings in the front against allowing people under Curtain Protocol to read the book. Some of those warnings even spoke of how the book was ‘ancestral quality’ and ‘made of mage paper’, which meant PL 50, tier 5, if Mark was recalling a bit of Daihoonian trivia correctly. So the book was just a bit weaker than his skin.

This was a mass produced booklet of tips and tricks for all Shapers, of all kinds, and it was meant to be a primer and in-depth overview of Shaper Magic, that was meant to be passed down through generations. It was probably very expensive. Tier 5 paper? Yeah, that was expensive as all heck.

In a way, Mark was a lot happier that Addavein had given him a basic Shaper/Kinetic book. It seemed less insidious, or whatever.

Less maleficent.

Mark looked around some more, judged himself fine right where he was, so he started reading a bit more in depth.

Surprisingly, nothing bothered him while he read. It had been mid-afternoon at Citadel Freyala, but over here, the day was much younger. It might be noon in a few more hours. Mark had plenty of time to read and absorb the book and then figure out what to do next.

He did not think too much about Addavein.

He was in a survival situation, now… Which he kinda loved.