Adamant Blood

Eliot Cybersong dashed down the narrow street, heart pumping, feet pounding, the broken streets of Abandoned Rome coming alive with mimic spiders. The small ones didn’t matter at all. The larger ones, the size of dinner plates and boulders, were major problems. Personally, Eliot was 50% sure he could make it back to the car.

But he acted 100% sure for the cameras.

“Looks like I’m in a bit of trouble, guys! Pray for me! Haha! Hashtag blessed!”

His drone silently hovered behind him, its cameras spotting every problematic spider as it came out of hiding, as they discarded camouflage in favor of aiming butts at Eliot. Eliot had started off with 10 drones and a lot of trinkets. He still had one drone and a whole spool of fishing line under his control, so he guarded his drone and whipped that fishing line out into the air to catch those webs before they reached him and could threaten his escape. The very second the webbing touched his fishing line he lost control of the line, but the spiders lost control of their web, too, so that was a fair trade. Eliot clipped off another several meters of his fishing line and kept running.

He had plenty of fishing line remaining.

But they were hunting him, weren’t they! In the daytime! What the fuck!

They were coordinated, too.

That was the scarier part.

There had been no spiders on this path when he had come this way earlier. And then suddenly the spiders were here. Eliot had thought he could finally visit the ancestral home, but apparently he had come out too soon. This was supposed to be F-grade monster territory! Not D grade!

They shot webbing at Eliot as he ran, five of them shooting at once in a volley. He caught that volley with another length of fishing line, and taunted the spiders for the camera. A sixth spider shot webbing at his drone, but Eliot moved the drone out of the way and that webbing ball hit the ground.

Eliot burst out into the open, onto clear ground. It might have been Rome at some point in time, but the place was ruined and vegetation grew over everything. It might as well have been any ruined city on Earth.

Eliot would have to splice in some pictures of vine-covered columns in post.

His hovercar was straight ahead.

A giant spider, large as a horse, stood on top of the hovercar. It was fuzzy and the same color as the car, and some would have glanced at the hovercar and imagined it was just a very tall hovercar; such was the nature of the large mimic spider’s camo. Maybe a lot of people would have noticed the discrepancy, but the street behind Eliot disgorged a whole lot of spiders, out of every building and down every wall, and most people would have just kept running.

But Eliot Cybersong was a Manipulator, and his Talent was for man-made everything, and that hovercar was of humanity and still fully functional, no matter what spider might be laying on top of it at the moment.

With a whip of intent, Eliot connected to the car, though he almost panicked when his astral body couldn’t thread between the spider’s fur.

Lights blinked on inside the vehicle. The spider on the outside rumbled and moved, trying to understand what was happening. It understood enough to let loose with two giant fangs to try and pierce the metal. It could only dent the metalglass windows. It kept trying.

The car could take a lot more beating than that.

Eliot overrode the car’s innate safeties all at once and rocketed it upward and then spun it fast. The spider went flying off to the right, trailing webbing to the car. Another flick of intent turned on the shields and broke the webs.

Eliot had the car meet him.

“Daring escape complete! Remember to like and subscribe! And keep watching this space for more action later!”

He escaped just fine, making sure his drone captured footage of the whole thing, and then look over to where the spider had landed, sending his drone that way—

Grey tarantula-like limbs appeared on the feed, briefly, and then came a fang, and the drone was gone. It was fine. Eliot smiled as he made sure the footage was fine and as he flew into the sky, inside the car. He also checked out the car for hidden surprises. A quick scan of the car, using the car's own systems, revealed five little mimic spiders, one of which had crawled in while Eliot broke the car’s seal to get inside.

It was currently nestled under the dash and colored black like the plastics down there.

Eliot flexed the car’s very existence and ripped apart the mimics, then he made sure the car was now fully Of Humanity. He set the car on auto, to Citadel Freyala, then he got one of his spare phones from a bag of them in the back seat and got to prepping his first ‘adventure’.

He was not famous yet, but he would be.

He’d be uploading his first ever adventure to three different social media sites. He already had those accounts ready and waiting for their first video, but it took Eliot a little while to actually make the video. Do you keep this part where the spiders lured him in? Do you do it like a horror video? Horror videos were not popular, but they were good study guides, and honestly, Eliot’s call to journalistic integrity demanded he include the horrible parts.

In the end, it was easy for him to splice together all of the various parts of his trip to his ancestral home. What was harder was knowing which site would actually get him a following, so he opted for a shotgun approach, publishing them all at the same time.

With his heart beating almost as fast as it had when he was running from spiders, Eliot pressed ‘publish’ three times.

“And now, we wai—”

His phone rang.

It was Mom.

“Ohhh…” Eliot said to himself as he held the phone, and watched it ring. “She’s gonna be maaaaad.”

Eliot opted not to answer—

Nope!

He had to answer her.

He answered the phone, “Hel—”

“You’re grounded. I don’t give a damn about your ideas of being some sort of ‘popular delver’. You have no team and you have no backup systems and you’re not even Fully Awakened and some smart camo spider almost killed you!”

Eliot smiled, saying, “So you already watched my video! What parts did you like?”

The phone clicked off with a rage.

Okay. Well.

Eliot went into this knowing that this would be a problem—

The car went outside of his control and plotted a course straight for home, moving at top speed. Even the air conditioning and radio went out of his control. Eliot rolled his eyes and moved the dials to change the station, but the only thing showing up was Radio Freyala, being broadcast from home in the Citadel.

Eliot could have taken control of the car back from his mother, but in this case retreat was the wiser course of action. Eliot did take control of his phone back, though, so he could watch as the ticker counters on his posts started going up.

The ride home would have taken an hour.

It took 20 minutes to get the first comment.

‘LOL idiot! Going out without a team! Get spider-ate!’

Eliot frowned.

Eliot called his mother.

She answered with a singsong voice, “Yes my lovely, wonderful child who almost died today?”

“Are you messing with my video comments.”

It was less of a question and more of a statement.

“Absolutely not! Maybe your video just takes 20 minutes to get through because it’s 20 minutes long, dear.” And then her voice turned serious again. “I’m glad that comment disappoints you, though, because that’s what they’ll say about you if you go out with that amount of recklessness ever again. Delete that video and reupload it to make yourself not look like an idiot, please, if that is even possible. Your first video has to be good, and that one is shit that you only spent 20 minutes editing. Spend a day on it and then try again.”

Eliot argued, “The whole point is to put it out there as fast as possible with minimal editing! This is real-life adventuring—”

“That is a terrible word and you should void it from your lexicon.”

Eliot did not rage. That was below him, just like how rage was below Mother.

“… I’m hanging up now, Mother. Love you.”

“Love you, too. See you for dinner.”

Eliot hung up.

… He left the video up. In the future, it would serve as a testament to how far he had come.

… He did need a team, though.