Adamant Blood

Mark was theoretically making good time.

He was certainly doing more than 30 miles per hour, too, so he should be at the Mississippi or the Ohio River before sunset, and from there… Maybe he could move even faster, once he wasn’t in such a wild area?

Finding a ‘less wild’ area didn’t take that much longer.

Mark came across bridges that were mostly wrecked, which led to streets that were completely overgrown, which he did not take. He continued on with the river, checking his map every so often, trying to figure out where he was.

Monsters started popping out of the forest, or the water, or even the invisible air itself, every now and then. Mark killed them all, and he felt so much better after every kill. So much more secure in himself, out here in the middle of nowhere. It would have been hubris to stay on Daihoon, so Mark was kinda glad that Addavein had thrown him back to Earth, but Mark would never tell him that. No no no.

Mark took out his rage on all the murderous monsters that he could reach.

Everywhere he looked, there were monsters.

Cat-type beasts in trees that wanted to take his head.

Deer-type monsters that looked innocent at first glance (hence the name of the type; these ones were technically bunny-shaped) but then mutated into hooked horrors that tried to eat Mark’s face.

Wolf-types that hunted in packs but did not resemble wolves at all. These ones were more scaled than furred and they had swords for tails.

Something slammed into Mark’s mind, trying to tell him to sleep, but Mark raged and found the spider on the tree that had tried to catch him in its web of mind magic. Mark killed that fucker dead. When Mark found a nest of the same spiders along with human remains stuffed into the bottom of a tree, he pulled out the remains, grabbed some backpacks, squashed bugs, and figured out how to run his adamantium through a tree fast enough and solid enough, like a blender in the middle of the dead wood, to make the tree catch flame.

Mark burned down a small part of the forest and killed every single mind spider he could find with a few pulses of Union of Brain.

The only things that really survived well in this hellscape were the prey beasts that multiplied fast; the rats, squirrels, bugs, and many small birds, and lots of fish. Everything else was just an offshoot of a previously-established monster species that either stayed the same, or had offspring that mutated in different directions.

Were there bunnies out here that weren’t collections of fangs, tongues, and mouths, on the inside?

Possible!

Mark hadn’t seen a single real bunny!

So far 100% of bunnies, over 80 of them at least, had tried to jump at him to eat his face. Those bunnies got real dead, real fast, and not to Union at all. Mark could whip adamantium through those little beasts easily enough, mincing them to death, without fear of losing his adamantium. So far, of all the monsters he killed, only the hydra turtle had possessed a strong enough astral body that he had truly blocked Mark’s adamantiumkinesis.

Everything else just fell apart.

Mark was using scalpels, though. Not needles. The scalpel shape allowed him to cut things up, instead of pierce things through. Piercing was stupid! Cutting was best! All the way.

He did experiment with grabbing big rocks and hitting monsters with those, but simple rocks were PL 0, while adamantium was PL 79; it was no contest which one was better.

Other discoveries included the fact that Mark much preferred using Union to heal himself and weaken his enemies, than to use it to kill his enemies directly. Somehow it felt dirty to kill with Union; to hurt with a power that was used to protect and heal. But adamantium, though, had a much more visceral, cutting/deadly/murderous feeling to it. There was feedback when he carved open something. He knew when he had hit something important. He could feel it through his adamantium. There wasn’t any feedback to Union.

“But that’s all kinda… true villain-ish,” Mark mumbled, as he flew down the river, which was rapidly getting wider and wider—

Suddenly the river opened up into a lake—

No. Another river. It was moving from right to left, and it was massive. Mark grinned.

“The Ohio River, I presume!”

The river was full of monsters, of course. They noticed Mark as he sped down the riverbank, but Mark barely noticed them, except by their tug on his Union-sense. Was Mark making too much noise? It didn’t seem like it. Maybe the monsters were just hypersensitive to displays of power, or something. Whatever the case, the southern bank of the Ohio River was rather overgrown and right up against the water, except for where normal animal/monster traffic had carved the land into sandy or rocky areas.

A lot of things used the water—

“Ah!” Mark said, “Right!”

Mark was rushing down a riverbank on a major river, where predator and prey often gathered in order to drink, and in some cases, be eaten. Of course everything was looking at him, even if those things were far away. They were threat-assessing him. Most of those things out there just took one look at Mark, and though they all had brief ideas of ‘kill kill kill!’ or ‘eat eat eat!’, Mark was too fast for them.

They ignored him when he got out of range, which happened rather fast, and Mark was already ignoring them to start with, for they were too far away to kill and they didn’t try to attack him first.

Maybe Mark could have crossed the land and gotten away from this transitional area, but that seemed like even more of a crapshoot for true danger. At least here at the riverbank there was always tons of movement, all the time, so it was expected for things to be dangerous. Not like in the woods, where spiders could prepare traps, or turtles could become demigods in their domain and actually defend their territory.

Mark sped along, down the riverbank, though he did note a few places on the map where the riverbank curved hard, and it would be easier/faster to cross half a mile of land, than it would be to cross 5 miles of curving riverbank.

He took a chance on one of those detours.

When Mark popped out the other side of the one land detour, he even managed to find the same river again. Which was a miracle! A small miracle, really. It was still incredibly cool to be able to read a map, plot a shortcut, and then actually achieve that shortcut.

Mark chuckled and kept flying, hoping to make it to a city before nightfall.

He had to be flying at 35 or 40 miles per hour, unless he was wildly overestimating his speed, which was completely possible. He knew that he couldn’t run with his real legs at half of this speed, though.

Maybe the turnoff to the Mississippi River would be soon?

And then Memphi would be around one of these corners.

Maybe they’d have towers out this far, though.

Memphi was a major metropolitan area—

“HALT! FLIER! HALT!”

Mark laughed at the voice, which came out of a bundle of trees and bushes to the left, and at the four different pulls on the fabric of reality, aiming his way. He had noticed the pulls a while before he got here, but he was rather visible, running out here in the open, and many different things had been looking at him with intent to harm, so he hadn’t paid any attention to the pulls. Whatever was in those small woods could stay in those small woods; Mark wasn’t falling for it.

Mark kept on flying, shouting back, “Listening to voices in the wilds is a bad idea!”

But then the air froze around Mark, ice rapidly crashing up and around him.

He had sprung a trap.

Mark adjusted the threat from ‘weird voice’ to ‘credible problem’.

He reached out with everything he had, spinning his knives through the ice, shattering the developing cocoon, launching himself toward the threats, reaching with Union into the four people and sending three of them straight to their knees—

The fourth one just toppled over, face planting into the dirt—

Oh shit.

People.

Metaphorical ice stabbed into Mark’s chest even before he rapidly reoriented, healing the people and flicking away the ice around him with some purity/impurity, healing the women on the ground (probably brain injury, fuck!) and righting whatever wrongs he had done to the other people. They were all wearing normal wilderness gear, but they also had yellow and black armbands with ‘M’ on them.

Mark took a moment to look at them; a very fast moment.

It was four people, two men and two women of various ages. The women looked cleaner than the men, but one of the women, the much younger one, had just plopped into the mud. She was coming around though, groaning and holding her head. One woman stood in the back, looking maybe 50-ish years old. Mother to the one who had fallen over? Maybe. But she wasn’t making any moves to help the fallen woman. She was staring hard at Mark, and so was everyone else. The woman that Mark had downed groaned, as she got herself out of the muck. The two men were just a pair of guys, maybe 25 or 30, hard to tell. They watched Mark. Brown hair was watching Mark’s adamantium flicker around, the other was just watching Mark.

To Mark’s Union, they were… something adjacent to hungry? Some weird emotion? But also scared and reorienting and very human. Those were human emotions, for sure. And then came the anger.

All of them looking really fucking pissed—

Anger turned to hate. To harm. A lot of intent to harm. They didn’t move to enact their desires, but Mark recognized that pull on Union. There was something else in there, though. Some sort of pull that Mark didn’t recognize. That hunger-adjacent emotion was right there, and Mark couldn’t tell what it was.

The muddy woman was still in pain, and now she looked at herself and shook her arms out, saying, “Fucking mud every fucking where!”

Mark flashed out purity/impurity in a Union of Brain and all of them cleaned up in an instant, and then Mark pulled back his cleaning and simply healed them, drawing power from the world and from all the monsters lurking quietly in the Ohio River. In that instant, all of them jerked, all of them realizing that they were clean… Or maybe they had needed to go to the bathroom, and now they didn’t.

The younger woman was surprised, and then she was looking at Mark with a weirdness in her sight.

Mark hovered about 20 meters away, feeling simply terrible. He said, “I’m so sorry about the attack. I did not mean to react with such… force.” He kinda just stopped there, because now the team was rallying and they must have had a Thinker in them, or something, because Mark felt something strange happening in the fabric of the world.

The team was all Union-pointed at each other, the vectors of their existence wrapped up all together, bouncing and—

And then they Union-pointed at the bits of adamantium that Mark had floating around.

Suddenly their drive to kill Mark went through the roof—

And then the older woman’s vector slammed into Mark, making a wedge, prying him apart, just a little.

Just enough.

The old woman’s voice was the nicest thing, as she asked, “You can give us some of those metal trinkets, can’t you? We’re so poor, and we need so much money to pay for my son’s cancer treatments.”

… What the fuck?

Mark, of course, wanted to help them with their money problems, but he was just as poor as them, and it was crazy to ask for someone’s weapons. That was just an insane request. Completely off-the-wall wrong. Did you ask for someone’s sword in the middle of the wilds in order to sell it off to a city and pay off debt, or some shit like that? No, you did not.

The request honestly made Mark a bit mad.

… But Mark still wanted to help them.

Mark smiled a little as he got closer, asking, “How about I heal the guy’s cancer? I’m pretty sure I can do it. Any Freyalan could, really…”

Mark quirked his head to the side a little, as that truth of cancer healing felt pretty true.

… But of course there were truly dangerous things out there that Union couldn’t heal, and you needed a True Healer for.

They probably had one of those bad cancers; the magical ones.

Mark said, “I have an uncle in the city that does True Healing, if you need that instead. Maybe I can talk to him on your behalf! How close are we to the city, anyway?”

The old woman stared at Mark, and her eyes were the world.

But Mark still sensed the two men walk to the sides, their vectors of KILL KILL KILL moving to flank Mark, while the younger woman stood there, and the air got chilly. Supercooled, maybe? But not really. The young woman was pointed in every direction, all around Mark, specifically not pointing at him, for the moment. But all of her chilly winds curved through the air. They were guns aimed in Mark’s direction.

Mark looked to the old woman, though. She was the only one that mattered…

But now the young woman was pointed at Mark to KILL KILL KILL, too.

Why were they so scared of him? They didn’t need to fear him.

… He probably did look pretty scary, though, hovering here and with black veins pulsing into the air around him. And also almost nude. He was wearing shorts, though! And he had a backpack. He was clearly a good guy ‘out for a day run’—

The old woman spoke with the most pleasant of voices, “We have our own contacts, honeydew. We just need some money, and our scanners tell us that you’re truly rich. You wouldn’t mind sharing, would you? Just a little bit?”

“I can’t,” Mark said, feeling a bit of anger over being asked to sell his weapons for these people. Of course, if they wanted actual help Mark was right there for them, but even kindness had limits, right? “I’m not rich at all. I can help you find some people to heal yourselves, though— Oh! Do you need an escort? It’s dangerous out here.” Mark smiled. “I can help escort you back!”

The old woman frowned, her voice taking on a deeper edge as she bled from her nose and eyes—

A familiar tone. A familiar look. A familiar face.

Mom was here.

Mom stood on the grassy bank of the Ohio River, saying, “We just need some money, son. Can’t you spare some? Maybe some of that metal you have flicking around, pouring out of your veins? Spare some money for your mother, son.”

No.

Unreal.

Impossible.

The illusion did not break, but Mark knew it was an impossibility, anyway.

Sure. He could accept his mother was alive and wanting money. That wasn’t the issue.

But Mom would never want to kill him, or disarm him in the wilds. This woman and her companions were all angled toward Mark, looking to make a kill. And that was impossible to accept.

Mark backed away—

Mom’s face turned ugly as she snapped, “Now!”

Mark simply flew away.

That had always been a choice, it seemed.

The air turned to ice, but Mark crushed the ice and purified it away.

A sword stuck into his side, through his stomach and organs and toward his heart, but he barely felt it, though he did feel it when he hacked off an arm attached to the knife; it was like running a finger through gelatin, but with frozen bananas inside. The bananas must have been the bone.

Something confused the world, turning up to down, and down to up, but Mark still understood where his body was in relation both to his adamantium caltrops and his sense of Union with the world. There was a big river with monsters over there. The grass grew strong underneath him. The people who wanted to kill him were still everywhere around him, though he was leaving them behind rather fast. That was more than enough to let him know which way was which.

Mark ran away, down the sky, over the river, up the mountain and down the canyon, though none of that was true at all.

That illusion broke when Mark got far enough away, and then he was just on the grassy river bank, rushing forward.

Trying to forget the angry face of his mother.

He barely remembered pulling the sword out of his side, but it came out and Mark healed up the wound.

The severed hand fell to the ground.

Mark held on to the sword for whatever reason. He wasn’t quite sure. It was shiny and silver and looked valuable.

And Mark flew away from the fight. Away from the face and voice of his mother. Away from the first real conflict he had ever had with other people.

He had no idea how to process it.

As he flew, he began to realize all the little bits about what had been wrong back there.

They had tried to kill him for their own gain. They had used their Powers to try and force him to give them money. MONEY! Just for monetary gain! They had tried to kill him for money!

That had been a real, actual attempt on Mark’s life.

Not just a scammer, like what Addashield had done to all of his previous apprentices, and how he decided not to do with Mark, to let Mark go with a tri-Talent and a few words wishing him well in his life, and to take the dragon-shaped exit from his demon Contract. It wasn’t anything like what Addavein had done, either, who had shoved himself into Mark’s life and then summoned Mark across the world and into Daihoon on a whim, and then sent him back to Earth on a different whim. Addavein was going loopy from lack of sleep… or something. That sort of shit could almost be forgiven. All of that shit was just really big things happening around Mark. Big, global events.

Was it even wrong to hate a demon for what it had done to his parents? Demons were just demons, after all. They were completely amoral.

… No.

It was okay to hate demons, because they were amoral.

Mark held onto that hate just fine, it seemed.

But those people back there, with those black and yellow Memphi armbands, had just tried to kill him, straight up, for his adamantium. They were not monsters trying to eat him, which was pretty normal for monsters so Mark didn’t begrudge them that; not really. They weren’t demons, that had forced Addashield to do a bunch of truly horrible shit, and which caused Addashield to finally kill himself and dragonize when he found a good opportunity.

Those people on the shore of the Ohio River were just people.

And they had tried to kill him for reasons of greed.

That had been that hunger-adjacent emotion he had been sensing.

Greed.

They hadn’t been wearing basic browns, either, so they were already above the poverty line. Memphi was a tier 4 city, with a whole lot better basic amenities than Orange City, so those people should have had good lives… right?

Mark had no idea how to process what had just happened.

So he flew faster, as the sun began to lower in the western sky.