Adamant Blood

Mark woke up feeling pretty decent, actually.

He rose, put on some basic sand-brown clothes, and walked out into the dorm halls where other men and women his own age or a little bit older walked around in white or grey. They were acolytes of the faith, and Mark was out of place. A few people looked at him because of that.

They had probably been looking at him for a week, hadn’t they?

Ah…

Mark walked down to the cafeteria and lined up with everyone else, grabbing a tray and then grabbing scrambled eggs, sausage, and waffles out of big trays of the stuff, while other acolytes worked the kitchens, constantly replacing trays with fresh food. There was no checkout counter; everyone ate for free. It was pretty much army accommodations.

As Mark sat down by himself at the end of one of the long tables, he realized that he was in the acolyte training halls. He had been here for a while, though he had only come out to get food recently. Maybe his first time was 3 days ago? Mark wasn’t quite sure. He didn’t remember much of the last 15-ish days, aside from racing away from the kaiju brawl after his Tutorial, and then a day or something ago, when Priestess Lola came into his room and told him it wasn’t his fault. He vaguely recalled giving testimony about… stuff. He wasn’t sure.

Maybe he should check up on that. See what he had said to the… people. Whoever they were. Mark was pretty sure he had talked to a lot of men and women in bright silver armor, so, paladins. Aside from that… What had he done? Who had he spoken to?

… Some other time.

Mark finished breakfast and put his tray up. With a few taps on his phone, he checked on the schedule for the next Introduction class today, and saw it was in another hour.

Mark decided to go to the gym, to go for a run. He always felt better after actually moving, so after he put his gym clothes back on, he went down the hall to the gym, to the rows upon rows of treadmills. People occupied most of the treadmills already, but there was one that was open in front of a television showing some cartoons.

Mark hopped on the treadmill and he started at 10 kilometers per hour. A slow start. A good speed.

It was surprisingly easy to run. Mark bumped it up to 15 kph and got a good pace going. He had longer legs now, and running was easier. Or maybe not easier, but at least faster. Mark had almost forgotten how good it felt to simply be moving, but here he was, running well.

He had missed this.

After the coma, he had worked hard to get back onto his feet, and then he had been given that Color Drop treatment and everything got easier. As Mark upped the speed to 20 KPH, he breathed in and then out, trying to sync his breaths with the strike of shoes against rubber. 20 kilometers per hour felt… pretty good, really. Way too fast, though, compared to everything Mark was used to. It was a little over 12 miles per hour, and that was a lot. That was a five minute mile.

And Mark was running fast and free.

Faster than most other people on the treadmills, actually, but there was a woman four machines down and a man at the other end who were running a lot faster — one of them was a speedster, for sure— so Mark didn’t feel out of place. Those guys were really focused, though. Mark just felt good running this fast, breathing in the good, exhaling the bad. Fans blew in air from across the gym, making the run breezy and free.

Good goes in, bad goes out. The world can handle problems that a single mortal cannot.

Mark felt good.

Half an hour later, Mark still felt good as he slowed the machine down and gradually tapered his run down to a walk. With a smile and sweating heavily, Mark left the gym to head back to his dorms.

Mark hopped in his private shower in his private bathroom, and almost started bawling again. He had no idea why he cried, but then again, he did.

He breathed some, under the flow of the shower.

Soon enough, he turned off the water, put on more basic sand-brown clothes, and went out to Introduction.

- - - -

Orissa had drawn a hexagon on the chalkboard with a bunch of concentric hexagons inside. They had labels, but Mark was still walking into the classroom. He found a seat in the middle front, alongside a few other people who had the same opinion about the best place to sit in class. None of them sat next to each other, though, and Mark probably sat too close to a guy on his right due to the threat of accidental power activation, but this was fine, right? There was a whole seat between the—

The other guy got up and moved a seat away.

Mark said, “Sorry.”

The other guy just shook his head—

“Greetings, students!” Orissa said, walking into the room from the back. She had an exceptionally perky attitude today, and even the light around her seemed to mirror her attitude. She seemed brighter. Literally brighter. With a wide smile, Paladin Orissa Turner strode up to the professor’s stage, saying, “And now we’re on to day 2 of Introduction! All about powers, talents, whatever you want to call them! I’m sure you all think you know what the various categories are, and maybe you do! But probably not. You!” She pointed at some guy. “What sorts of powers are there! What are the general classifications!”

The guy blinked, and then he tried, “Body, Kinetic, Mind, Spiritual, Demonic… Err. Sorry.”

“No worries! No worries! You got the first 3 correct, but not really, and then I think you went off on a tangent in a way that is both deeply correct and not correct at all. How about this.” Orissa looked to Mark. “Give me a number. How many categories of power are there?”

Mark glanced at the hexagon behind Orissa. “Six.”

“Correct! There are 6 primary classifications of power, and 2 variations.” Orissa gestured at the— She paused as some student walked into the room, making noise as he opened the door. The guy stood there in the door for a moment, stunned. Orissa said, “Take a seat, please!”

The guy rapidly took a seat.

Orissa continued, “Now there are 6 classifications of power, and 2 variations. The variations are the most clear-cut and have to do with the nature of astral bodies themselves, so we’ll go over those first.” Orissa glowed with light, a white blob taking shape in the air around her. “Astral bodies are this sort of shape. Bigger people usually have bigger auras. The size of your aura is the space that you can affect. This is one of the big reasons why monsters like dragons and kaiju are so horrific, because their auras are commensurately sized. Most humans, no matter their size, cover about this much space with their power.”

Mark mentally noted how dangerous a dragon truly was in that moment.

“When you get really strong, you can cover larger areas, and you can even do this.”

And then he reevaluated his position in the hierarchy of the world, throwing his evaluation of himself far, far down the ladder, when Orissa shaped her light, somehow, into bubbles that expanded out from her body, her light fluttering far and wide, expanding throughout the entire room like she was blowing bubbles into a glass of milk. The white light filled the entirety of the room, crowding against the ceiling and the floor, filling the entire space.

Everything glowed with color.

Orissa smiled as she held her power out there, filling the room, saying, “This is the exact same volume as before, but I spread it out. This is a high level technique. This is a normal technique. This technique makes me very, very vulnerable, and is best used not like this, but like this:”

The light of the room vanished and came back together into a series of layers against Orissa’s skin, like form-fitting armor five layers thick.

With a much easier time speaking, Orissa said, “This is a defensive zone of mine. Pretty simple. Rather illustrative. Same volume as before, too. There’s density-of-power to consider here, too, but we’re not going to go over that today. That’s too complicated and individualized to be spoken of in Introduction.” She dismissed her light, and then wrote in big letters on the left side of the hexagon, saying, “I have the normal form of power! This is called Near! Also known as continuous, solid, or steady.” She stopped writing and said, “This is the power that 99% of people possess. Usually, people cannot act at a distance at all. If you see a person using their power at a distance, then you are seeing something like this.”

She held up a hand and a ball of light appeared around it. And then she threaded brightest light, like a laser, off of that orb, into the air on the other side of the professor’s stage. Another light orb appeared at that destination.

“This is how most people use their astral body at a distance. It’s not actually at a distance at all! As you can see, there’s a line between myself and the orb over there. But what if I do this?”

The line between the orbs vanished, leaving two orbs of light hanging in the air, one on her hand and the other over there.

Orissa pointed with her illuminated hand at a woman sitting beside Mark. The ‘disconnected’ light orb also pointed at the woman. “Point to where you think I’m still connected to the other orb.”

The woman saw this as a trick, and Mark did, too. She went with the trick, though, pointing between the light orbs, saying, “There?”

“Nope! Thanks for playing along, though,” Orissa said, as a line lit up in the air that went in the opposite direction of her illuminated hand and the orb in the air, circling around the entire room like a line of LEDs around the edge of the ceiling. Orissa dropped her power, and the light went out. “Most everyone in the world has a classification of ‘Solid’. The only reason this part of the lesson is taught at all is because the 1% of people who are not solid are called ‘Fars’.” She started writing names on the boards. “Reacher. Ether. Airy. Rares. Every culture on Daihoon has names for these people, but we most know them by their main use and Talent. Every single Far who ever goes through Tutorial always Awakens with the power that we know these people by, and which makes them invaluable and yet arguably the weakest member of any organization. These are the people who make or break operations in the field, and they need to be protected.

“The Seer.

“These are the people who can truly operate their astral body at a distance, and none of them are here in this class at all. All the rest of us just have to figure out how to use our powers at distances through tricks of aura control and astral body workings, and even then we’ll never be able to do what a Seer can do. You can try! But learned-mages —not Talent-mages— have a much easier time becoming Seers than anyone who has gone through Tutorial and had their powers set for them.”

Mark instantly wondered, if most people were solid-aura users, then how did healers heal at a distance? Was it a ‘bubbling-aura’ thing, like how Orissa had done? Well yeah. It had to be that, didn’t it?

Orissa looked around the class, noting as people understood what she was saying, and then she moved onto the chalkboard, saying, “And now we’ll go over the 6 classifications of powers.” She started writing down in big letters as she said,

“Here at the bottom left, we have the start of the hexagon! It’s Body! All the physical stuff. Speedster, Brawny, etcetera. It’s typically thought of as blue!

“One up from that, we have Kinetic! Pretty self explanatory. All shaping powers go here. This is green.

“At the top we have Mind! Thinking powers go here. Tinkers, telepaths, etcetera. Yellow.

“Top right, we have Natural! All the weird powers are here, from plant control to healing to witchery. If you’ve got a witch, they’re probably a Natural of some sort. This is the most varied category of powers. This stuff does not conform to natural laws; only individual laws. Orange.

“Bottom right, we have the Arcane! This is where the mages come from. Everyone with a Mage power, or a specific subset of Mage, like Necromancer or Enchanter, comes from here. Whereas the Natural follows individual ideas of power, the Arcane follows the laws of the soul which have nothing to do with the ideas of humans at all. This is the realm of demons, for they wrote those soul laws long before anyone else came along. You, who mentioned ‘demon’ as a category of power, were thinking of Arcane because of that fact. For those of you with a mind for connecting dots, ‘Arcane’ is also known as ‘Soul’. This is red.

“Three of the main categories are Body, Mind, and now Soul.

“The very bottom of the hexagon is known as Arch. All reality-warping powers are located here, in the space between vast physical power and vast soul power. The ability to move the world through pure action is the domain of the Arch. Arches used to be known as Mystics, but that’s an outdated name. Arch is typically colored purple.

“Now, taken all together, we have Body, Kinetic, Mind, Natural, Soul, and Arch. That’s the hexagon. If you think your Power or Talent exists outside of this, you’re wrong. I won’t argue with you. You’re wrong. Absolutely everything you can think of is covered in this space, and if it’s truly weird, it’s probably just somewhere in Natural and maybe a Seer is doing it.

“We’ll save questions for later— Ahh. Maybe not. I see at least two of you are experiencing a spontaneous activation.”

Mark wanted to look across the room, to see who Orissa was talking about, but when he tried to move his head all he managed to do was lay down on his desk in front of him. Everything was too heavy. He could barely breathe through the weights somehow holding him down. He did manage to look left, though, and with eyes still open, he saw a woman floating out of her chair, into the air. She desperately grabbed onto the desk to hold on, but she kept flying upward. She yelped a little, but it was a soft thing. And then she couldn’t hold on to her seat, to her table anymore. She floated up into the air, and then came down like a dead body, right into Orissa’s illuminated light.

Orissa set the unmoving woman down, saying, “There, there. You’re okay.”

Mark couldn’t move.

He was deeply scared, and he hadn’t realized it until then. His heart beat hard—

And then he heard Orissa’s voice from right above him.

“Don’t worry about passing out. You’ll be fine. She’s fine, too. This right here, class, is the usual result of a kinetic experiencing a spontaneous activation for the first time. I imagine the young woman is an airkinetic, and this young man is something else that he’s already touching, right now.

“I’ll go over this phenomenon while they can still hear me, but I imagine both of them will go unconscious soon enough. It’s nothing to worry about.

“A kinetic is attuned to a certain thing, and they can move that thing around like it’s their body. But touching those things weakens them, because their aura automatically latches onto that thing. It’s like they’ve automatically attached a new limb and they’re trying to figure out how to use that limb. Like a baby trying to move around too much; they tire fast, at first. If they stop touching those things, then they don’t have to support the weight of that new limb, but these two, just like me, seem incapable of not touching their designated kinetic material.

“I had to be shut away in a dark room for a week when I first Awakened.

“Many of you will experience a spontaneous power activation during today’s class, if you haven’t already.

“Some of them might be dangerous to others, but none of them will be dangerous to yourselves, because 99.9% of Talents are like that, and we make sure that those who Awaken dangerously do so under much more controlled situations than this.

“When you have an activation, if you can, you will excuse yourself, because that is the official end of Introduction for most people. If you want to come back to another setting of this class with some other teacher, then you can, but you can just go on to normal classes with normal teachers at that point. But as for this class, here, we’re getting through everyone’s questions today until they experience a power activation, and then this Introduction is over.

“Falling asleep at your table is fine, though. I’ll move you to some cots I’ll set up while…”

She kept talking, but Mark couldn’t hold on to consciousness anymore.

He slept.