Adamant Blood

Mark breathed calmly as he sat cross-legged on a meditation pillow.

Inquisitor Lola Turner sat on a pillow of her own, a few meters away.

The room was rather private and small. It was just a normal meditation room in Healing Hall, used for the sorts of things that Mark was using it for right now. It had good ventilation. Before last week, Healing Hall had seemed like just another building to him; a place of classrooms and lecture halls and all that sort of junk. But this place had exceedingly good ventilation.

Fans on the roof, along with all of the air conditioning systems of Healing Hall, pumped and pulled air into and out of every room, cycling the air inside of every enclosed space rather quickly. This was because Union, as most people used it, was all about breathing in the good and exhaling the bad. In this way, a person was healed.

This sort of healing produced miasma, which was sort of like pollution smoke, cow farts, and old garbage, all rolled into one particularly terrible scent.

At least Mark couldn’t smell it when he was the one exhaling it… Not much, anyway.

Anyway!

Because of the way Union worked, and especially the versions that Freyala granted to her people, a priest of Freyala was always the first person healed on any battlefield. It was through this self-healing, that they then healed others. Mark had gotten pretty good at healing himself over the last 2 weeks of being here at Citadel Freyala.

But now it was time to learn the next step.

Lola breathed deeply, signaling the end of the preparatory meditation.

Mark did the same.

Between Mark and Lola, on the ground, were three potted plants that Mark did not recognize. They were the same species of plant; that was all Mark could tell. They kinda looked like sea sponges, but green. Maybe one of those aloe-vera plants that decided it would rather grow into tubes, than leaves. Or maybe a mushroom?

… Maybe they were actually mushrooms?

Nah. They were green.

Lola said, “You have advanced fast, Mark. Now that you have learned to use Union to heal yourself well, all that is left down that avenue is to expand your usage to full time, to learning to breathe positively despite surrounding miasmas, and other such impediments like being underwater, and to focus your healing efforts on speed and safety. All Union efforts are first focused on the user, so that we would never be the first to fall in a fight. From there, we can help others.

“That is what we will be learning today.

“What we have between us, in these three pots, are air plants known as cleaners. They come from Daihoon and they flourish in lands with miasma and pollution issues. They can’t survive all that well in normal environments. This is them in their baseline state.”

Mark’s eyes went wide. He recognized them now! He had seen them in a book of geography, in that self-learning course he was taking. “They use those in areas of nuclear fallout, don’t they?”

“You’re thinking nuclear cleaner. These are not those; those are much larger. There are hundreds of varieties of cleaner plants. Mages have been breeding them for various uses for thousands of years. These ones are ‘shelter cleaner’. They’re used in bunker-type areas to keep those places free and clear of the miasma of huddled humanity, as they wait out the kaiju overhead. All cleaner plants are highly magical, and they’re remarkably easy to maintain.

“These are some clippings from Healing Hall’s garden that I have grown into full plants. You will grow them further through directed application of Union. It will be difficult. They do not breathe like you and I, but they do have a constant flow.

“Now that I have given you a goal, tell me how you plan to enact this instruction, from start to finish.”

Mark had come a long way with Union, but he wasn’t sure how to breathe with another being, yet. He couldn’t start with animals, but he could start with plants, which is what he was set to do right now.

… But how?

There were potentially a lot of moving parts here, or not many at all. To use Union, all Mark needed to do was ‘breathe out the bad and breathe in the good’, which, according to Freyala herself, was more like ‘partaking in the union of life, where beings exchanged what they didn’t need with what others didn’t need, and thus all life thrived better’.

Mark started spitballing, “I would need to breathe slowly, I assume, in order to match the… the very slow movement of air through the cleaners— I assume that air flows into those little holes in the bottom and then out the top?” Mark put a hand over one of the plants. “Oh. The inside is warmer than the outside, so it moves up through convection… Or something. Okay… maybe… I need to stretch my astral body over them? Still not sure how to do that at all.”

Astral bodies were the way in which a person enacted their power upon the world, and they were only about double or triple the size of the person. That was all the range a normal person ever had with their ability to influence things, but there were lots of tricks to extend range. You could increase the size of an aura at the cost of density, but that was just a theoretical possibility to Mark as of this moment. He still didn’t know how to move his astral self, or even perceive his astral self, at all. He was using his Talents on instinct, without much direction.

That would need to change.

Lola nodded at Mark’s answer, then she said, “In the beginning, you will likely need to touch another to bring them into your Union. This is the same for almost all Powers. Your adamantiumkinesis only works at touch range at first. General body powers, like tactile telekinesis only work at touch range. Union works over vast distances because it can be made airy rather easily. Union’s normal nature is to be diffuse and ephemeral.

“But you will start off with touch-based communication. Try to establish a Union link with a plant now. Leave healing for a little later. Just go for a Union, for now. Figure out that part, first.”

Okay, so, Mark had jumped the gun quite a bit when it came to using Union on one of the cleaner plants. First he needed to actually establish a Union. Which. Fair. He had kinda glossed over that necessity.

Mark reached out and touched the plant on the left, putting two fingers onto one of the tube-like structures extending up out of the brown soil. The whole plant was about a foot tall and half of that wide, and made out of 6 differently-sized green tubes. It felt like touching a cactus; a little velvety but rather firm. It had a few succulent-like leaves poking out of the cracks between the tubes.

… Mark wasn’t sure what he was doing—

There it was.

Mark had no conceptual idea of how to frame what he was feeling-sensing-knowing, but he felt himself link to the—

And then it was over.

Blink and you’d miss it.

Just like that, Mark had been linked to the plant in a Union, and then he was knocked out of the link, somehow. What had chan—

Mark realized.

At least a part of him needed to be in sync with the plant, and since the plant breathed, Mark had been briefly linked to it through his breath, but then Mark had fallen out of sync, and thus the Union was broken.

… Did that flow of air up through the plant count as exhalation?

Mark slowed his breathing, matching the slow exhale of the plant—

It was like falling into a groove.

Mark breathed out his badness, slowly—

The plant started to glow and thrive. It even grew a little, the tubes of it expanding up into the air like a pipe organ growing taller.

Mark smiled as he carefully controlled his breath, letting it out slowly and carefully. When he reached the end of his breath, he lost the groove; the cleaner plant stopped growing and the glow soon faded.

… And then, on a whim, and thinking that maybe the slow flow of air was maybe an ‘inhale’, too, Mark reversed his flow. He breathed in the good.

The plant started to grow and glow once again as Mark matched his breath to the flow of air coming out of the top of the plant. And then a strange thing happened. The plant started to rush ahead of Mark, and Mark almost fell out of the groove because the plant was breathing a lot faster now.

Mark reached the end of his inhale, and the plant slowly lost its glow while Mark changed directions. When he exhaled the bad again, the plant resumed glowing and growing, underneath Mark’s fingertips.

Mark was linked to it, now.

He had no idea why it grew and glowed on both inhale and exhale, when they were very different actions, but he would figure that out later.

He knew if he pulled away, that he could maintain his connection, so that is the first experiment Mark did. Slowly, Mark lifted his fingers. For a moment there his connection faltered, but then Mark —somehow— reached out through his breath and reconnected to the glowing green tubes.

Mark looked to the other two plants, and wondered—

In that moment, without touching the other two, he felt himself connect to their own slow breathing—

He lost it.

Like a discordant note, the first plant stopped glowing and the small tether he had established to the other two snapped like spider silk. Mark coughed a little, but that soon passed. He was left looking at the three plants, one of which was easily 3 or 4 times the size of the other two.

For a long minute, Mark just looked at the plants, thinking.

Lola waited, and then she asked, “What do you think was the cause of the failure?”

Mark instantly said, “The first plant has a lot more air tubes so it breathes faster than the others.”

“Correct. How would you fix this issue? Speak your thoughts, please.”

Mark thought for a second, then began, “Well… I have felt you take control of my breathing many times, and maybe I could… force the first one to slow down, or speed up the other two, but… But that seems dangerous. In the future, I will have to link a whole team together and ensure that they are all healthy— Oh. Is my Healthy Body interfering in this whole thing?”

Lola said, “It is, but not to the extent you imagine, and yet also in very deep, profound sorts of ways. For now, just consider it a 5 to 15% proficiency boon. Different brawnies with different Body Talents have different numbers and influences they impart with those numbers. Continue on with your thought process. You have not confronted the main issues.”

Mark nodded a little as he looked to the plants. “I could force them to breathe differently, but that seems dangerous. I’ve seen the healers at brawny sparring link to the entire arena of people, and all of the people on the ground have slightly different breathing rates… but I suppose if you’re just breathing for them, then their own rates don’t matter? Is that what I need to do? Breathe for the plants? Only use that initial connection to force a proper breathing at the same rate?”

Lola smiled a little. She said, “You have linked to a plant, and now you need to realize that you are still linked to all the world. Once the plant is a part of your Union, when you breathe in, the plant takes from the world what it needs. When you breathe out, the plant releases the things it doesn’t need. Eventually, when you do this across enough of a system of living things, you will begin to feel your astral body like it is a limb you didn’t know you had, and you can let other people breathe at their own rates, for most things.

“That astral body is what is actually doing all the lifting in this whole endeavor; the breathing is a physical action that cements the astral action, but the astral action is the only one that actually matters. Your astral body is working in ways that are beyond your comprehension for now, but that will eventually change.

“When you understand your self, you will find that Union has a very large range, because Union is ephemeral. It is more like a whisper of wind, and not solid like a kinetic power at all, or locked to your body like a Body power.

“Eventually, you might be able to forgo using the physical action to create the astral action, but probably not. Not wholly. Instead, I recommend diversity. There are a lot of different rhythms of life you can fall into, to link yourself to others, to heal yourself and others at the same time. Before you try and forgo physical action, if you ever find yourself unable to work something fast enough, touch a new rhythm that you share with another and try to work Union through that.

“But for now, link with all three plants through your breath. Force the link. Breathe in the good of the world and then breathe out the bad.”

Mark looked at the plants and he breathed in, easily connecting to the larger plant, even without touching it. He felt it now, as he did that; he felt how he connected to the world, and to the plant, and to himself.

They were just there, part of a system.

It was almost like Mark had cast filaments of transference into the world itself, and those ‘spiderwebs’ had soaked into the first plant, allowing the plant to act over a much larger area than it otherwise could.

Maybe like roots, in a forest, allowing some trees to share nutrients with other trees that had less, so that invasive species couldn’t get footholds into their Union.

With that thought, adding in the smaller two plants was easy.

The smaller plants were a lot slower-breathing than the first one, but they took to the increased rate of breath easily enough. Mark was absolutely sure that the larger plant was getting more of a benefit from Mark’s ‘spider web’ of Union right now. But it was a large plant, and it had all the nutrients that the smaller plants needed, since they were all the same sort of plant.

All the plants glowed. All of them were growing.

Mark reached the end of his inhale. On the turnaround, the plants faded a bit, and then Mark began to exhale the bad.

All the plants resumed glowing and growing.

Mark smiled.

He went through a few cycles. He tried to figure out how to minimize the downtime when he reversed his breathing; to disengage the physical action from the astral body action. But he had no idea what his astral body was really doing except for ‘being there and allowing transference’, and that revelation didn’t seem to be enough to keep it going in the downtime—

Oh.

Roots sharing nutrients. Plants with sap that moved through their bodies.

A heartbeat, pumping blood.

Mark connected to the plants with his heartbeat, and just like that, he created a Union that didn’t need breath. Mark breathed in and out normally, without focusing on the good and bad, and his heart pumped blood and Union to all three plants…

Were there good and bad heartbeats?

Mark frowned a little, wondering about that. The plants continued to dimly glow and slowly grow, unconcerned with Mark’s question of what he was really doing, and if heartbeats could be good, or bad—

And then his heart skipped a beat and Mark reflexively breathed in the good to steady himself. The Union broke. The world narrowed briefly, black closing in, but Mark rallied and blinked and he was fully awake once again.

Mark almost fainted.

Mark maintained.

He shuddered.

Lola waited.

Mark collected his thoughts, and then said, “So… Not sure what happened there.”

“What did you try to do? Go through it step by step.”

“Well…” Mark said, “I got the breathing thing right, and linked them all, but then I tried to minimize the downtime during the breath-turnaround, and I realized that plants share nutrients through roots and they have blood-like systems, and that I have an actual blood system. So I linked the beat of my Heart to their beats and… oh. My heart slowed way, way down, didn’t it.” Mark looked at his chest and felt his heart, and said, “It felt fine, though?”

Lola nodded. “You won’t kill yourself with a normal application of this power, since Talents naturally insulate their users from the worst backlashes of their use. But you can certainly injure yourself. From being unable to lift adamantium, so you lay there under the astral weight of it all, to having your heart slow down so much that you pass out and your Union automatically deactivates; these are normal sorts of failures that you will experience. Other than that, I am rather proud of you, Mark, for arriving at heartbeat-linking all on your own, and to have such a good first try.”

Mark felt a little brighter at that comment.

Lola continued, “Breath-linking is the first step to learning how to use Union on other people. Somewhere in there, a person usually learns how to protect as well as heal, though heal always comes first. You have skipped a step or three, and arrived at blood-linking. This is about a month earlier than I had anticipated, but everyone progresses at different rates and I can certainly adjust to your pace. You might discover other ways of linking, but for now, we should work on blood-linking and breath-linking and leave all other ideas on the table.

“These two forms of Union are more than enough to see you very far.

“A standard acolyte of Freyala gets Union of Breath for healing and protection.

“A cleric or someone who has become a solid member of the church gets Union of Breath and a little of Blood.

“A priest or paladin gains a stronger Union of Breath and Union of Blood. Sometimes they even gain the offensive versions of these magics.

“There are other, deeper and more dangerous forms of Union gifted to Inquisitors and otherwise, but I would ask you not to explore those yet, or to even really consider them. They can be dangerous, and you have not even touched upon protection magics yet. You need those protection magics because they can help insulate you from fainting like you almost did. Protection magics will likely become the way in which you most use Union for the rest of your normal life.

“As for healing magics: I asked you to forgo focusing on things other than ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to start, for you are not a doctor and you don’t need to go treading into things like how blood works, or how plants actually breathe.”

Mark felt like he had found and crossed a milestone without even realizing how far he had come. It felt great. He smiled a little, and said, “I can promise that.”

Lola nodded. “Thank you. Now, since you have advanced to this point, we should go back to breathing, and work on protection magics. This time, instead of working with the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, I want you to consider the ideas of ‘durability’ and ‘weakness’. Breathe in durability, breathe out weakness.

“I do not want you to focus on specific durability, like in the skin, or in the bones. Don’t focus on specific weaknesses, either, like expelling the weakness of your astral body, like you have learned already.

“Just use the words ‘durability’ and ‘weakness’ in your breathing efforts, and gradually expand what you consider to be durability, and what you consider to be weakness.

“I have no doubt that you will find better words later in life to provide better, more precise effects. This is especially true if you decide to learn the magical languages of Daihoon. But I ask you to forgo other possible words at this time. Focus on the lessons I have given you, and what you have already uncovered.” Lola took out a small knife from the interior of her robes. It was not the mithril knife, for that one had all sorts of simple adornments on it. The one she held was not a normal knife, though. It was red. “I will be cutting the plants to test your ability to protect, when you are ready.

“Intake durability, expel weakness.

“Begin.”

Mark nodded, and then he started breathing and linking the air plants into his Union.

That much was easy enough. Every inhale and exhale caused the plants to grow and glow. The green bundles of tube-like cactus spilled warmth up into the room through their central vents.

Mark breathed in ‘durability’, and felt kinda strange doing that. He wasn’t sure how to understand what he was feeling, but he knew he didn’t like it. Not really. Did he feel… stiff? Mark moved his fingers as he breathed in durability, and found that he was a little numb. So that was wrong.

The plants seemed to love this, though. They glowed brightly and parts of the plants that had been growing oddly, suddenly straightened up. Mark hadn’t even noticed the plants were growing oddly until they got better, their tubes smoothing out, the lights evening to a full-gentle brightness, like teeny-tiny LEDs illuminating under the surfaces of the tubes, and the leaves.

Mark reached the end of his inhale of durability.

He expelled weakness, which he was much more familiar with, since he had been doing that for weeks now. That was one of the first things that he had learned about Union on his own, when he considered the idea of ‘weakness in his astral body’ to be a problem. Every so often, his power would just fail, because he had reached the end of his astral body’s strength. But Mark found he could speed up the recovery time of his astral body by expelling weakness. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing when he did that, but he thought it might be a ‘lactic acid leaving the muscles’ sort of thing, or maybe ‘muscle damage leaving’ like how he assumed healing magic worked.

Mark breathed out weakness and a thin mist of miasma flowed away on his breath—

Something very weird happened.

The miasma he exhaled usually smelled like death, and it usually got everywhere, like how the smell of burnt toast spread fast. But this time, Mark’s gentle exhale of smoke threaded through the air, to vanish into the world. That miasma came back out of the air, though, like smoke guided into the intake holes at the bottom of each cleaner plant. The plants began to practically glitter. The lights inside of them shimmered. Mark was giving up what he didn’t need to the world, and the plants were taking that out from the world and using it for their own benefit. Was there power even in weakness?

Mark supposed so.

It was magical.

Lola took her red knife and sliced into a thick leaf on the side of the middle plant. It was so quick and final that Mark would have missed it had he not been looking. It was like cutting into green-skinned gelatin. The exposed thickness of watery insides glowed like a fiber optic wire, and water dripped. The clipped-off bit of green plopped onto the dirt in the pot.

Lola said, “Keep going.”

Mark breathed in durability.

The plants turned solid. Mark did too, in an uncomfortable way. He did as instructed anyway.

Lola swiped her knife through another big succulent-like knife, and the knife skidded off the leaf.

Mark’s breath caught, which threw him out of Union.

Lola grinned. “Good job, Mark. Very good. I am sure you have questions, so ask them.”

Mark said, “Durability feels stiff. I do not like it. The plants can’t really like it either, do they? I mean… they’re sure glowing a lot, which I think is a good thing, but they can’t like being that stiff.”

Lola smiled gently. “That is a nuance of working with plants, and one that you will figure out how to fix when you advance to working with other people, though working with other people will give you a whole different set of experiences to solve.

“I will give you another hint, though, and that is to broaden your idea of what ‘durability’ means, as I have already advised. Personally, I use two concepts the most. The first is the ‘good/bad’ dichotomy, for healing. The second is ‘durability/weakness’, for protection. My concepts of those various ideas are very large, and so I do not have the stiffness you are experiencing when I use protection for plants. Tell me: what does durability mean to you?”

Mark had never really thought about that before, but he supposed…

“Durability means resistance to damage?” Mark asked, “It feels like ‘durability’ isn’t the best word to use here, then? Would something like ‘resilience’ work better?”

Lola said, “You might find better success with that word, but the reason for the common split of good/bad for healing and durability/weakness for protection is because —unless you have a strange idea of what the word means— ‘resilience’ is about the ability to recover quickly, and that cuts into the concept of ‘good/bad’. What you need in your protection magics is more resistance to damage in the first place, and ‘durability’ does that quite well.”

Mark’s eyes went a little wide. “Oh!” He thought. “… Should I add the concept of ‘resilience’ to ‘good/bad’?”

“Unless you come to Freyala with a Mind Talent, a person only has so much personal capability with stretching their mind. Neither you or I have a Mind Talent. Personally, I have found it best to have three beneficial modes and a host of specific injurious modes. Of the beneficial modes: I heal, I protect, and I do both at the same time, though doing both at the same time is not nearly as powerful as doing one or the other in full. The injurious modes are something we will cover at a later date.” Lola looked to Mark, to see if he understood.

Mark nodded with no small amount of comprehension.

At its base, Mark understood that Union was about creating a unified system to rapidly exchange resources and otherwise with each other, and with the world, based along ephemeral ideas of intent and meaning. He also understood that he was still starting off with this stuff, and it would take a lifetime to fully understand Union.

Let’s not try to work in dealing damage just yet.

Lola continued, “Now, let us return to the concepts of durability and weakness, and what they truly mean. Durability is the ability to resist damage. You should try including ideas of resisting the damages of all of the various Powers out there, based on the idea of a high Power Level in all categories, of Body, Kinetic, Mind, Natural, Arcane, and Arch.”

Mark’s eyes went wide again. “I saw some ‘shielding stock’ in a store in Central Citadel that promised to increase a person’s defense against Powers to tier 2. Is that actually an application of Union?”

Lola said, “I am unsure which place you are referring to, so I can only give a guess, and say that it is possible. Highly likely, really. Power shields are one of the primary items that the Church of Freyala sells, but there are many different ways to accomplish a shield. If someone was selling them in an open market here then they probably have a Talent for making items, and they got Freyala’s blessing. The church, however, donates them to acolytes and cities all the time, and rarely sells them on the open market.” After that short explanation, Lola nodded toward the plants.

Mark got back to it.

Soon, Lola was clipping her red knife into the tubes of the plants whenever Mark inhaled, and occasionally whenever Mark exhaled. The plants might have sparkled a lot on the exhale, when smoky miasma flowed from Mark, so they obviously liked that, but Lola’s knife dug into them quite handily whenever Mark was expelling weakness. It was only on the inhale, on the intake of durability, that Lola’s knife skidded off of the green plants.

Eventually, Lola told Mark to try incorporating blood-Union into the mix.

Mark almost-fainted twice.

He ‘fixed’ that by bringing the plants up to his own speed of heartbeat.

The plants exploded.

It didn’t seem like they were going to explode, but the event had started off with the plants venting sap and clear gel and seeming to bulge and twist and then they exploded in a gooey mess.

Mark sat there, goo on his face.

Lola sat there, goo everywhere.

And then Lola started chuckling.

Mark smiled and laughed.

It was good to laugh.

Lola grinned, and then gestured to the plants. “So do you know what you did wrong?”

He wiped the goo out of his eyes, saying, “I brought them up to my level of heartbeat so that I did not faint, and they could not handle that at all.”

“Correct. This can be an offensive form of Union, in this sort of situation.”

Mark’s eyes went wide. “Oh! Shit!”

Lola grinned. “Oh shit indeed.” She said, “Your own Power will insulate you quite well from your own Power, as all Powers do, but it will not insulate others, and especially not the mindless. Mindless plants cannot fight you. An Awakened person could. A baseline could not. You will not encounter this specific problem when healing or protecting other people, unless they are very weak, so the old or infirm, but this explosion always serves as a good lesson to people with the true Union Talent, or to people like me who have been given a large portion of Freyala’s original Power.” Lola gestured at the plants again. “They’re still alive, but heavily wounded. Heal them to full, healer.”

Mark nodded and got started, slowing down his heart through astral body control (still didn’t know how he did that), to link more cleanly with the cleaner plants. The cleaner plants spurted, but Mark controlled himself more, and soon he was breathing in ‘good’ and breathing out ‘bad’. On a whim, and because it felt right, he included the idea of ‘healing the damage of suffocation’ to his idea of ‘good’, and suddenly a small weakness of consciousness vanished from his mind, and Mark was fully awake once again. Mark had only barely recognized that he was on the way toward fainting again, and then the problem was gone. The plants grew better, Mark didn’t faint even though he breathed way too slow and his heartbeat was even slower than it should be, and soon, the plants were fully healed. When the cleaners were once again 2-foot tall bundles of green-tube cacti, with a bunch of succulent leaves on the bottom and glowing internally, Mark cut off the Union.

Mark felt pretty awesome, and the plants looked… Well. They looked amazing. Mark had never been one for plants and there was still goo on his everywhere and all over the room, but this was pretty cool.

Lola looked upon Mark with a kindness. She said, “You did very well today, Mark. Exceedingly well. But this is where we should stop.” She began to stand. “You can help me get the big plants back to the nursery, and I’ll clean up the mess once we’re out of the room.”

“Thank you for the lesson.”

Soon, Mark had a plant in both arms as he stood outside of the room. Lola moved the third plant out of the room for a moment, before she turned back to the space and used a cleansing breath to wipe away all the exploded plant parts from the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the furniture. Mark almost wanted to ask her how she did that, but he’d get there eventually. Not right now, though. He had a lot of things to practice.

As Lola held one plant in her arms and Mark held two, they walked down toward the nursery, with Lola talking about the session and Mark asking questions about this and that. When they put the plants back in the nursery, Lola suggested another scan.

“Will my numbers really improve that much?”

“I suspect today will be a large jump in Power Level across the board.”

“… Oh!”

Well that was exciting.

Soon, Mark stood in the closet scanner and got a readout.

Body, Healthy Body: 011

Shaper, Adamantium: 010

Mind: 8

Natural, Union: 016

Soul: 7

Arch: 6

Mark’s eyes went wide at his readout, floating in front of him in the scanning closet. He had been at 8, 6, 2, 9, 2, 2, just earlier today. And now he was tier 1 in three different categories. Union had nearly doubled.

Mark dismissed the floating words with a wave of his hand and stepped out of the scanner room, saying, “011, 010, 8, 016, 7, 6. Tier one already? Even in the stuff I wasn’t focused on?”

Lola grinned. “Sounds correct to me. You reached for and achieved a big milestone today, Mark. Now we should talk about what comes next.”

Mark felt she had skipped past how much he had grown in a single day, but maybe not. Maybe this much was normal. Power Levels would taper off when he began to fully understand himself, and then not go much further beyond those expected ‘maximum levels’. Power Levels weren’t all that important until they vitally were, but even in combat people just used scanners to read the tier and category of monsters in order to move their teams around to survive and exterminate the enemy; they didn’t care about specific PL’s.

Mark asked, “What comes next?”

Lola said, “You’re going to be here at Citadel for a while, and you eventually desire to fight the biggest monsters in the world, so I advise you to sign up for Social Club. I believe I spoke of that a while ago, but I am bringing it up again. You cannot fight alone, and you need people who can match you for power, and so, the Social Club is where they gather, or are gathered.

“But! To begin with, we have Xerkona Etiquette, which is the Social Class to the club. The Class takes place in the afternoon, in the residential district of Citadel, at the Clubhouse. You must participate in the class and get a pass for the club. In the participation of those classes, you will learn how to move in the circles you want to move within; the leaders and the superheroes, where they decide which kaiju to kill, which dragons to parlay with, and what parts of the world need to be blown up that week.”

Mark felt the world crystallize.

Ah, he thought.

My biggest fears and my biggest ambitions, all in one place.

Mark asked, “Surely I don’t need to… uh… do that right now?”

Lola nodded knowingly, and then she dropped a bomb, “Usually, a tier 1 acolyte is eligible to participate in training missions. You’re still under demonic observation for the next 7 months, but you can still go on training missions. That means venturing on short trips past the wall, into the wilderness, to hunt monsters while being a part of a team and under the observation of some accompanying paladins. So join Social Club and make acquaintances with some people for the purposes of training missions, if nothing else.”

Mark’s social anxiety evaporated.

Mark easily said, “Those are very good reasons to join Social Club and the etiquette class.”

Lola slightly smiled. “I’m glad you agree. The class meets in 30 minutes at the Clubhouse in the residential district. If you run, you can make it.”

Mark blanked.

And then he started running, saying, “See you later, Lola!”

Lola gave a little bow.