Adamant Blood

Mark stopped rushing to simply walk into the room at the end of the hallway on the second floor of Healing Hall, room 217.

And Mark paused.

The overall setup was a private tutoring room with a bookshelf to one side, a large window overlooking the grounds straight ahead, and a table and chairs butted up against the remaining wall. A clock hung over the window, reading 10:29. Mark was 1 minute early.

He was the only one here.

Checking his phone, Mark saw that, yes, this was the right room. Was he the only one signed up for Healing Club 101, for people with Union? Er… He couldn’t be, right? Who was the professor, anyway? Er. Not named yet? Err...

Mark walked into the empty room and sat down.

He waited—

Lola stepped into the doorway, wearing her usual prim and proper priestess robes, cut in the Xerkona style. It was rather a lot like a kimono, actually. Ah! Right! She had offered to teach him!

Mark shot to his feet. “Priestess Lola!”

Lola smiled softly, giving a small bow. “Quite right, Mark. And you’re here for Healing Club 101 for Union users.”

“Yes, but I’m a bit confused?” Mark wasn’t sure where to start. “I thought it wasn’t a… a private club?”

Lola easily said, “Let us sit.” She went to a chair and sat, and Mark took the other chair. “There are two forms of Union in the world. One is the one granted through the Chosen system, from Freyala to her followers. That is an entirely different club than the Union club that you are in right now, which is for people who come to Union on their own, though no one really comes to Union on their own, you understand. I imbued it into you, and you got the full Talent. The one Freyala grants people still demands study, but the original Talent is so much more difficult.

“This was why I offered to teach you about this.”

Mark sat back in his chair. “Ah.”

“It means you have a much longer path ahead of you than Freyala’s Chosen, but also a much shorter instruction path, for what you learn on your own will be more than what anyone can truly teach another person. Furthermore, I do not actually possess the Union Power. I am an instrument of Freyala’s will and she has granted me full use of the power, but I cannot do what she can do.

“What you might be able to do, one day.

“Tell me: What do you think Union does?”

Mark knew a little bit about Union from simply growing up in the world and having gone to Freyala healing houses in Orange City, and inferring a lot of what he saw here and there, but he had grown up behind the Curtain, like all kids of Earth. So he was pretty damned unsure of everything.

Mark said, “Healing people, protecting them, and that’s pretty much all I know of Freyala’s stories. She cleansed plagues, so… widespread healing? I feel like I don’t really know anything at all, anymore. I didn’t know what Freyala’s power was called until now… but I know they didn’t call it Union— they just called it divine healing, without any specific name…” He realized yet another thing. “But that was on purpose.”

“Yes; it was on purpose. The name ‘Union’, much like the Talents of many famous people, is mostly kept out of writing, unless you go looking for it specifically.”

Mark huffed a laugh. Everyone knew what Freyala’s power was actually called, huh? He asked, “What is Glorious Man’s Talent called?”

“Supreme Body.”

“… Holy crap I didn’t expect you to have an actual answer.”

Lola grinned a little, then she put that away. “It might not be ‘Supreme Body’, but researching these things is rather simple if you know where to look, and ‘Supreme Body’ is rather the accepted name for Glorious Man’s specific Power, even though the man himself is rightfully evasive about such things. When you get to the top you have billions of eyes on you, and even a fraction of people interested in such things means that someone will uncover the truth eventually.

“Specifically with Glorious Man, his Talent has been seen before, a few times throughout Daihoon’s history, and that is where we get that name from.” Lola added, “That, and Glorious Man’s rise through the ranks of the Crystal Tower’s Japan division, back when he was still called Renjiru Furusawa, has his Talent on the records there. His military history is sealed now, of course, but it wasn’t always.”

Mark felt a little floored. “Wow. Okay.”

“But we’re getting off track,” Lola said.

Mark sat up straight.

Lola said, “The primary powers of Union are best used for healing and protection, and also corruption and weakening. We will be focusing on healing. Corruption and weakening are the powers of the Inquisitors of Freyala, and we will not be talking about those, though you should be able to put together how those work from what I explain about healing.”

Mark said, “Wait… Corruption and weakening?”

“Yes. I will show you how to use your power positively. For most of these applications of Union the ‘badness’ is a side effect; not the purpose. You could make the ‘badness’ the purpose, just as an Inquisitor does, but you will have to figure that out yourself.” Lola added, “Mind you, active power use on another, outside of accepted actions, is grounds for discipline. Experimenting on animals is also not acceptable. In a month, I will tell you to try some of this stuff on very small trees, and such. Not before then.”

Mark instantly said, “Of course, of… of course.”

Using Talents on other people?

Did people actually do that—

Oh. Well. There was that Villain Program that they did in some of the higher tier cities, but that was basically just sparring with people. Mark didn’t consider that ‘using talents on other people’, though.

Lola nodded. “The first lesson is breathing. I heard that you already had this lesson with Holy Mother Juila Garin, but we will be healing actual wounds today.”

Mark had put together a few things based on what he had seen of Freyala’s healing, since coming here to the Citadel, and especially since Lola removed the adamantium from his body through ‘breathing for him.’ But he had still kinda thought that the High Priestess’s ‘lesson’ on breathing was just a meditative thing.

Mark was rapidly reevaluating that idea, though.

The first part of Union truly was breathing… But that felt incorrect?

Lola noticed Mark’s uncertainty. “But I see you have questions?”

“Is breathing really how this works?”

“Not at all, but it is what I will be teaching you.”

“… Oh! Well. Okay.”

Lola gave a polite grin, and then said, “Breathe with me, in and out, in and out.” She breathed in deeply.

Mark breathed in deeply.

For a brief moment, Mark saw, more than felt, as their breathing was separate—

And then Lola matched Mark, and the two of them breathed together.

Mark had no idea what he was feeling, or seeing, or the weirdness he was sensing between them, but after several breaths, Mark understood that he was in a… a low area?

No!

A groove.

Lola was making a groove in the world, and Mark was following along in the track she was carving. They were a Union of breathing, with Lola as the lead bike in a race, and Mark following along in the pocket of air behind her. Or maybe like she was the lead duck in a V formation in the sky, and Mark was trailing on her wings. It was easier to breathe with her, than it was to breathe outside of her actions—

And then the moment was gone, and Lola took a sharp inhale of breath when Mark was only halfway through his own. She finished the bike race before him, getting full of air, and Mark was way too far behind to catch up. The moment broke.

Lola separated their actions.

Mark breathed on his own.

Lola grinned a little.

“That was Union?”

“Yes. A rather noticed example of it, because I was trying to make it noticed, but most applications of this Power go unnoticed. You’ve been to a healing house, yes?”

Mark connected a few dots like a flash of lightning.

The healing houses all had healing rooms. You went into the room, stayed for a while, and you exited healed. Mark had never felt what happened in those rooms at all, but he had gotten cuts, bruises, and even a fractured bone, healed by just going into those rooms and waiting around for a while.

“Behind the one-way mirror!” Mark said, “That’s where the healers would sit and breathe with the people in the waiting rooms, wasn’t it.”

“Correct. Now that you know that is how it works,” Lola said, taking out a small knife from a pocket in her kimono, “We will begin with a small application of active healing.” She dipped the knife into the meat of her open palm and then she set the knife in front of Mark. Her palm welled with blood. “Watch me, and then we'll talk, and then you will do the same to your own palm.”

Lola breathed in, her chest expanding, and then she breathed out, and the cut on her palm slipped a little shut, a scar appearing along the edges of the fresh wound. Mark wondered what else was going to happen. She breathed again and as she exhaled the wound closed up entirely, leaving just a spot of blood that had collected on her open palm, and a trail leading to a scar.

She breathed in and out again, and this time the scar vanished, her skin tightening up and then loosening to a perfectly normal palm, but with blood on it.

Surprisingly, she breathed again, and this time she blew onto her bloody palm, and the blood flowed away into the air, like dust vanishing into nothing at all.

Lola held up a healed, clean hand, and said, “That was about as fast as a healer wants to go with this sort of healing because there are many things that can go wrong with this.

“The first lesson is to connect to the world with your breath, to breathe in the good, and breathe out the bad. Do NOT focus on anything other than the ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

“The second lesson is this one, here and now, to actually heal yourself.

“Do not attempt to focus your healing on anything in particular, until you grow stronger and more knowledgeable about what it means to heal. Set aside all manner of ideas of bones needing calcium to grow, or blood needing iron to move oxygen, or even ideas of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Focus, entirely, on the idea of ‘breathing in the good’ and ‘breathing out the bad’.

“Too many students go way too complicated with this to start, because there is a lot of efficiency to be had if you know what you are doing. But you, Mark, do not know what you are doing. So start slow, and small, and only use your breathing to connect to the world, to yourself, to start.

“The third lesson will be healing others, and we’ll get to that some other day, in a few weeks.

“Pick up the knife.”

Mark paused for a moment… “I’m not going to have a weird activation like with kinesis, am I? It’s not going to knock me out?”

“You activated Union with the Holy Mother when you visited her. I believe you activated your Healthy Body when you went running yesterday. There should be no strange activations.” Lola added, “Apologies; your movements are being tracked.”

“… Oh. Okay! Well… Sure. Uh. Is Healthy Body going to interfere with this?”

“Yes. You’ll learn to work around it. I imagine your ability to heal others will be vastly improved from a baseline person’s abilities. We get lots of brawnies in here, as you can imagine, and they always make the best sorts of healers because they have extra depths of ‘good’ that they can share with others,” Lola said. “But that’s a lesson for another day. For now, cut yourself on your palm. It is a very sharp knife. Shouldn’t be too painful.”

… Mark picked up the knife, and… Well. He held it to his left palm, and he… He froze.

And then he breathed, focused, and poked the knife into his hand.

It was a very sharp knife.

Mark pulled the knife out, having barely felt it go in. It hadn’t gone in deep at all, but— Oop! There’s the sting. Ouch. Okay. Mark set his pain aside as much as he could, and then he breathed in and out. He stared at his hand, and he breathed.

In with the good, out with the bad.

In with the good, out with the bad.

In wi—

His wound itched a little as it started to close!

Mark smiled—

“Keep going,” Lola said, also watching.

Mark breathed in and out, and what was maybe 15 breaths later, or maybe something like a minute and a half later, his wound was gone and so was the scar. The blood was still there—

Lola pulled a tissue out of the box on the table, handing it to him, saying, “Don’t try to do more than this right now. We’ll go over cleansing breath another day, far from today.”

Mark cleaned up the blood.

Lola said, “Some suggestions: The amount of air you breathe in and out correlates to how much you heal. You were breathing maybe at 70% capacity. That is a good amount for general applications, but you were trying to actively heal, so I want you to do it again and this time breathe in and out fully. We’ll practice short and constant breathing methods later. Perhaps you will find you can use one method better than the other, but for now, do it again, in and out all the way.”

Mark stabbed himself with the knife again. It was easier the second time. A good minute and a half later, with only 11 breaths, Mark’s fresh cut was gone and he wiped up the blood with a tissue. Mark smiled wide to see his healed hand, saying, “That’s amazing.”

“Looks like you got the basic hand of it. That’s good. I estimate that if you didn’t have Healthy Body then you’d have to do an extra 10% breathing. Healing the cut on your hand would have taken you 12 or 13 deep breaths to fully achieve, instead of 11. You’ll get better with time and experimentation.

“As for that experimentation, I have some warnings.

“Do not breathe with anyone else.

“Do not take in the bad and expel the good.

“Do not focus on anything besides basic healing, for now.

“Do not breathe in confined spaces that have no ventilation. Smoke is especially bad for this technique, but you can get through most of that problem by rolling up your shirt and breathing through it, using it as a filter for the smoke.” Lola said, “Now repeat that to me.”

“Don’t try to breathe with anyone else, don’t reverse the flow, don’t get specific, and always breathe in a ventilated area.”

Lola nodded. “Very good. Now let us continue. We’ll go until you can’t heal anymore, and then I’ll finish healing you, and then we’ll go to the full scan room and you can get a private readout of your Power Level. It should be a few numbers higher in each category now that you are Fully Awake.” She gestured at the knife. “Now stab yourself again. Meat of the palm. If you don’t like that, then you can slice on the top of your forearm. Put your arm onto the table if you want to do your forearm, so that I can clean up the blood more easily. Let’s not get any on the floor if we can help it.”

Mark chose to put his arm on the table, to slice on top of his forearm, for damaging his hands seemed like a really bad thing to do, in general. The knife slipped through the meat of his arm like a pizza slicer; fast and mostly thorough. It took a moment for the pain to happen. That was when Mark realized he couldn’t move his middle finger. Mark's eyes went wide as he looked at the five inch cut in his flesh, as blood slipped out, onto the table.

His arm spurted.

“Oh shit. I went too dee—”

“Breathe, Mark,” Lola said, putting tissues down to slow the spread of blood, like surrounding a house fire with a moat. “You’re fine. Just breathe.”

Mark started breathing on purpose. A good five minutes later, with blood on the table sticking his arm to the wood, Mark looked down at his perfectly healed flesh. He lifted his arm out of the mess and looked at it, flexing his fingers and feeling… great? Just fine?

“It’s good?” Mark asked, but even as he asked that it felt weird to move his fingers. “Or not?”

Lola put down a few more tissues, wiping the side of the table where some blood threatened to fall down, as she said, “You have some lingering damage. Continue breathing with purpose.”

Mark did so.

Lola set down a few more tissues, her hands bloody now, as she asked, “Has anyone talked to you about the various magical metals?”

“No,” Mark said, “I heard of them… You know. Before. But that’s about it.”

Lola nodded. “Have you heard of the tiers yet? And how they are used for injury calculations? It’s usually on the second day of Introduction, but you might have fainted before that.”

Mark said, “Never got that far.”

Lola thought for a second, and then said, “Power Levels and tiers are important to know in a general sort of way, but also not really. Did you ever hear about how adamantium is tier 7, when you spoke with Addashield, or anyone else?”

Mark was suddenly unmoored at the mention of ‘Addashield’… And then he came back. “Yeah. I think I heard that.”

Lola paused, and then she asked, “How about the mohs hardness scale for gems?”

Mark grinned. “I used to collect rocks. I stopped when I was 16 but I had a whole collection…” Mark stopped talking.

His collection was gone.

Blasted away by nuclear fi—

“Glad you know about it!” Lola said, her voice insistent and ripping Mark back to the present. “You know how a piece of glass can’t scratch a diamond, but diamonds easily cut glass? That’s what the tiers mean. Tier level actually goes from 0 to 100, but that is the Power Level rating. People usually just use ‘tier’ to indicate something like... Tier 2 is actually between 20 and 29 PL. As you increase in the correct tier, it will be harder to cut you with baser metals, but metal will always have an easier time hurting you because you are still made of flesh.

“Adamantium is naturally a tier 7 material, with a mostly physical form, so its rating is mostly compared against the rating of the Body number. Adamantium is also Kinetic and Arch… But that is complicated, and not necessary to know for now.

“Adamantium is really a 079 on the Power Level scale that goes to 100. The scale ends at 100; just as diamond is ranked 10 on the Mohs hardness, astral bodies can only get up to 100.

“You can only increase in tier by working against harder and harder enemies, or harder problems for your power. Unless your astral body is stressed, it cannot grow.

“This, by the way, is why you are completely incapable of handling adamantium right now. Adamantium is PL 079. You’re at, what, 004? 005? Whatever the case, you’ll get there eventually. You have a clearer path to power than most. Once you’re strong enough to actually pick up that weapon and train with it…” Lola thought for a second, and then she said, “I’ll stop there with that. It’s not something you have to worry about too much. Power levels aren’t everything, after all. They’re just…

“Well. We use adamantium swords against kaiju because kaiju bodies are all at Power Level 95-ish, and you need a hard material to even begin to affect them. That, or a whole lot of power. A hammer made of glass might shatter a diamond just as much as the careful application of pressure from another diamond.

“Anything at Power Level 50 or above will begin to affect a kaiju’s astral body alongside its physical body and…

“It gets very complicated, very fast, with number-versus-number calculations and all sorts of things going on behind the scenes. Kaiju battles are a quality game just as much as they’re a quantity game. You don’t have to worry about that right now. I’m just telling you now so you can keep it in mind. People want you to be able to battle kaiju in the future, Mark.” Lola asked, “Is that something you want, too?”

Mark was enthralled to hear all of that, though he was pretty sure he didn’t understand some of it. Even so, Mark strongly said, “I want that more than anything.”

And he always had.

If anything, he wanted that capability more than ever.

Maybe not to kill Addashield’s dragon, not yet, not before he proves himself as a horror to the world, but Mark would definitely never allow himself to be vulnerable like that around someone like that ever again.

Lola nodded. And then she gestured at the knife. “That’s a mithril knife. Tier 6. Power Level 065, if you want to get technical, but anything more than a 10s classification is kinda obsolete out in the field. If you’re within a tier or two of an enemy then you’re good to go for basic tactics… Hmm. For you, that is true. I have seen how you train…” Lola paused. “I don’t want to give you any weird ideas about the true concerns of battles against monsters, so I will leave it there.” She grabbed a small wastebasket and swept the bloody tissues into the basket.

Mark watched her do that, like she had done it a hundred times before. “Should I get… uh? A towel?”

“Unnecessary.” Lola started putting down more tissues, saying, “You’ll have replaced your blood through your healing breath, so don’t worry too much about blood loss, but try not to cut up your veins that much. You would have died of blood loss had you not healed yourself. Aim for the meat, not the spaces between the meat.”

Mark felt himself pale.

With deadly seriousness, Lola said, “Yes. This is dangerous. I will add another rule to this training: Do not practice like this on your own. I’ll show you easier ways to practice later.” With an easier tone, Lola tapped the table as she said, “Knife up! Again.”