Adamant Blood

The book of Understanding Shaper Magic was all pretty normal stuff. It was just a primer at a mere 10 pages long, or 18 actual pages, front and back, with some pictures scattered throughout.

It was still hella informative.

Mark stood tall like the picture suggested —he glanced down at the book he had propped up on a rock to read— and then he held up a hand and moved the adamantium around his hand, using only his kinesis. He watched as he moved his body to make the black needles move, fingers twitching, hand slightly turning, and he was surprised. He hadn’t even been aware he was moving his body to move the metals. Mark hummed. He picked up the book and read a bit more, and moved his adamantium around a bit more.

He tried specifically not moving his body at all as he moved his metal, and that was tougher for some reason.

“… Huh. Looks like I am mixing up my body with my astral body.”

Moving one’s body while moving one’s designated material was a common pitfall of many early Shapers. Almost everyone had to be trained out of it, too. In almost all cases, a person did not need to move their fingers or toes or even their eyes, to properly shape their material.

Mark read about the next test, which involved taking some small bits of adamantium and then holding it out as far away from himself as he could. A ‘good distance’ was usually ‘an arms distance away for every tier of Power’, though denser materials like metals usually had a shorter range, and lighter materials went very far, because the airyness of one’s astral body directly contributed to the distance one could achieve.

A person’s astral body was about 2 to 3 times the size of their body, and though there were a lot of tricks to extending one’s range, one’s range was pretty much set by the size of their astral body.

With his feet firmly planted on the ground, Mark stood with his arms to his side and with a big drop of metal hanging in front of him. He moved the metal forward, meter by meter… by meter by meter… Okay. Now the metal drop was a good 10 meters away, which seemed too far, but Mark knew he could go further. Easily. 10 meters was as far as Mark wanted to go with it, though, for now. It still felt firmly like a piece of him, so he didn’t think it would fall out of his influence, but he didn’t want to accidentally lose the metal drop; to have it drop out of his senses and fall into leaf litter. It was currently floating over the river bank, so Mark could probably find it easy enough if it did drop out of his control.

In fact, he waggled the droplet around and found it easy to move back and forth, and rather secure.

Obviously, something was going on between Union and Adamantiumkinesis to give him this range, that was plain to see… or maybe it wasn’t plain to see at all, because there was no visual indication that Mark’s range was that far, but it felt right—

Mark waggled the stone a bit too far, and then something broke in an ‘I accidentally held my cup at the wrong angle and all the water spilled out’, sort of way.

The stone went flickering into the water and Mark shouted, “NO!”

He raced for the stone, rushing forward across rocks and leaping over an embankment. He dashed into the water and felt—

There.

Up to his thighs in cold water, Mark laughed as he kinetically pulled the adamantium stone out of the water. It had drifted downstream a few meters, but Mark brought it right back to himself. Mark’s heart was racing, darkness threading into the world all around him, but it calmed down fast enough.

“Holy fuck,” Mark said… And then he paused. “I think I might have a skewed idea of what is scary, or not.”

Talking to dragons? … Also terrifying! But Mark was ‘getting used to it’.

Losing treasure? Truly terrifying!

Mark plodded out of the waters, onto the shore. With the sun shining brightly overhead, Mark started walking back up to where he had left the book.

Ya know? It honestly felt pretty great being out here, alone, wearing just a loincloth. Very ‘manly’. Primal, or something. Dangerous, in a fun kinda way. The sun felt great, too. Mark would have expected monsters, and yeah, there were monsters out there. Probably. None had disturbed him yet. Other than that, Mark expected bugs. The outside world was sometimes full of horrible bugs that—

Mark slapped the bug dead, splattering goo, before he even had a moment to realize what was happening. A beetle-like thing had been trying to eat Mark’s thigh, but it couldn’t do anything but try, and now it was splattered green and black goo.

With a soft breath of purity and impurity, Mark cleaned himself off—

That’s when he heard the buzzing.

On the shore, beetles lifted off of the banks, revealing bones. What Mark had thought were river rocks were actually beetles, and yeah, that’s what Mark had been scared of when he thought of monsters outside of city walls. Swarms of bugs that could consume creatures whole, that that swarmed even harder when one of them died—

Union twitched, and Mark felt the world kinda flow, but not really, a thousand tiny pulls in reality aimed in his direction. The beetles saw him, and they wanted to eat him. Also maybe vengeance? Mark was feeling weird things with Union.

Mark slammed into them with a Union of vein decay, at the speed of thought, taking all of their vein integrity in turn. Black lightning briefly connected Mark to every single bug, and every single bug dropped dead, some of them even popping as Mark somehow destabilized their entire insides. Or something. He wasn’t sure what happened to make them pop, exactly. Perhaps they were set to pop if they ever died, so that they could stink up the air and make their brethren realize that something had killed one of them.

And now the shore was strewn with dead beetles and the bony carcasses of deer and other woodland things. Some bugs had splattered onto him.

Mark did another round of cleansing, and then he went back to his book.

Mark told himself, “I feel better now that I have seen a monster. Less anticipation. Less worry.”

Over the next hour, Mark found out a few things about his kinesis.

Number One; he had to break himself from using physical cues to achieve astral movement.

This was the same problem as his Union, though. According to Lola, Mark should be able to divorce physical action from astral action. He should be able to ‘breathe’ with his Union, and only Union, and not have to actually breathe, with his body, in order to make his Union breathe. But also according to Lola, most people don’t achieve that break for a very, very long time.

So maybe Mark was okay with having physical action inform his kinesis, at least a little.

But that was when he ran into the next problem.

Number Two; he couldn’t maneuver his astral body as fast as he should be able to, because it was still linked to his physical body.

Mark made a spinning blade of adamantium and tried every trick in the (very small) book to get that propeller to spin fast. It was like trying to rotate his hand fast, but without the limits of his physical body, so that he could actually rotate his entire hand around, if he wanted. This was not a fast speed, though. This level of speed barely allowed Mark to make a breeze with the fan.

He tried to make needles rotate around his body fast. This was like trying to move his hand fast. Sure, he had range, and that helped with speed. Mark could swing a needle around quite fast at 10 meters out, but if he struck anything with that needle, like a tree or a rock, or whatever, the needle went out of his control 5 out of every 10 tries. Mark rapidly found out that anything within 4 meters was a lot more solidly attached to him.

Mark also discovered that the fear of losing his adamantium was a lot less powerful as he continued to fumble the adamantium when it was too far from him.

Mark swung a hand, just like he had seen kinetics do all the time on shows and movies, and the single needle he was concentrating on whipped through the air, as if he had an arm 4 meters long and only existed at the needle. With a crack and a loud ‘tok!’ Mark punched down at the river, the needle crashing through a large river rock. With a yank—

Mark tipped forward, for whatever he had struck held on to the needle.

Some compensation later, with some other needles turned into coins that Mark pressed against other stones to hold himself secure, and Mark pulled back. The thrown needle was heavy as fuck, but Mark pulled and his quarry came up from the waters. Stones tumbled in the river, burbling dirt and bubbles into the flow—

And then a small boulder crested the waves, spilling other rocks and water away from it. The rock was brown and it had a hole in it that spiderwebbed across the surface. Mark yanked the rock around and then smashed it onto another boulder. The rock eventually shattered, releasing the black needle. Mark kinda smiled a little, feeling really good. That had been a very weighty rock!

“Rock yank,” Mark said, chuckling…

A moment passed in thought.

A breeze drifted through and the sun felt warmer for a moment.

Mark went back to reading the book.

He had gone through the testing phases of a ‘new kineticist’ and now he was moving onto actual applications.

Mark swung his fist, swinging three needles around his body, slamming them into stone and then ripping them out of stone, each in different directions so that they didn’t counterbalance him. He soon found out that he needed to throw down three of his needles into the ground so that he could get some better angles for the three needles he used to attack, but that was fine.

So that was how you attacked with Shaper Powers.

Now for movement.

Mark slammed the needles sideways against the ground, and he lifted himself up off of the ground, unsteady at first, but then he started moving forward— and then backward. He struggled. He tossed himself around way too much. He fell on his ass, knees, and back to his feet a few times because the orientation of the needles sometimes made them punch into the ground, instead of laying on top.

6 needles was a bad idea.

Mark switched out 3 of his 6 needles for 3 large rings.

The rings worked a lot better as ‘feet to stand on’, up until the rings started slipping off of surfaces.

Mark adjusted his tools again.

3 caltrops and 3 needles.

The caltrops worked remarkably well, actually. Each one was basically two smaller needles bent at 90 degrees, and then stuck onto each other by their centers. They were kinda small, but 3 of them supported Mark’s weight, and while they pressed easily into the ground and they sometimes got stuck, Mark could use his moving bodyweight to yank them back out of the ground just as easily as they went in.

Soon, Mark was floating forward and back and this way and that, figuring out how to move, to pluck his caltrops back out from behind him, and then shove them forward to support further forward movement. It was bouncy. It was uneven. Mark had no shock absorbers, except for learning how to manually move his astral body to absorb his bounciness.

Mark crashed into a tree.

He fell into dirt when a caltrop went into the ground instead of on top of the ground.

He tore his loincloth from one particularly bad crash, but he fixed it back up, and then he kept going. It was weird to have his skin and body be a whole lot stronger than his clothes, but the whole experience was weird and fantastic.

An hour after he began learning how to move around with his caltrops, Mark tucked the Shaper book into his loincloth-belt and made a plan. Addavein had spoken of the Not-Mississippi in Daihoon being close to where he had summoned Mark, and how he couldn’t return Mark all the way to Citadel Freyala, but how he could put him on the other side of the Veil, somewhere around the Mississippi.

Mark was next to a small river.

Since the Mississippi River was the largest river in this part of the world, this tributary, or river, or whatever it was called, probably went to the Mississippi… Maybe. Probably. Adding to that: the river flowed that way, to the west, according to the sun moving in that-ish direction, in the sky.

So that meant that the Mississippi River was probably in that direction, and so civilization was probably in that direction. And if not, then people usually camped out or built cities at the mouths of rivers, as opposed to upstream.

“So we follow the water!” Mark announced to himself, as he lifted up from the ground on semi-steady ‘legs’. And then he tilted forward and started racing forward, laughing, shouting, “WOOOOO!”

Flying, even if it was technically just advanced-hovering, was the most exhilarating thing Mark had ever done… Except for maybe hopping around in that spider-glider thing that Eliot had built. That wasn’t fun past the first few jumps, though.

But flying with kinesis?

Pounding caltrops down, pushing off the ones in back, and then slipping forward to hover across uneven stone and rock, and fallen wood terrain? Almost flying? Flying, but only a meter off of the ground? This was fantastic. Newly-learned movements rapidly turned from fledgling-faltering to rushing-racing. Mark soon pulled apart one of his needles to make another caltrop, taking him down to 2 needles but giving him 4 ‘legs’, and suddenly he was off to the races. Barreling over rockfalls, slipping a bit but also catching himself just as fast. He rushed over fallen trees.

Something in the forest suddenly tweaked his Union-sense, but Mark was outrunning whatever it was, and that unknown thing back there didn’t even make an appearance, its tug on reality lessening and then vanishing. Mark raced on. Mark’s heart beat hard and he swore that even the plant life all around him seemed to blossom with the thrill that Mark was feeling, in that very moment, as he flowed across the ground.

He reached a cliff and waterfall. From this, upstream angle, it looked like a short drop. Mark went for it, racing across the edge—

His heart thrummed as his eyes went wide, as he realized that the ‘short waterfall’ was actually about 20 meters down to a large rockfall. Mark giggled as he pushed all four caltrop ‘feet’ at the rockfall, directly ahead of him.

It was like landing on legs he didn’t know he had; he absorbed the entire fall, not even striking the rocks with his body. But he did push off with his feet, breathing hard, heart thrumming, as he launched himself back into the air, just a meter.

Mark kept flying.

The next cliff came up fast. Mark aimed at the edge of the cliff and hunkered down as he leapt—

Mark skidded off of moss, his caltrops gathering a big hunk of slippery moss and some sort of algae. He flopped over the edge of the cliff, which was only 3 meters tall. He landed on a leg and a hand, and also all of his rapidly reoriented caltrops, laughing as he righted himself. Stone sparked under adamantine grip.

Mark chuckled.

And he flew.