Adamant Blood

The path through the wilds to Wolf Bayou was a theoretically straightforward path.

Mark expected complications to arise in the form of monsters. Of bats that shot lasers, or rabbits that unfurled into gaping maws of teeth and stomach acid. That would all still happen, for sure, but the first complications came in the form of other people. Honestly, Mark should have expected that most of all.

Mark and Isoko jogged through the linking tunnel that ran below the Mississippi river, connecting the eastern shore to the western shore outside of the walls of Memphi. The tunnel was kinda crowded at this hour. A lot of people were going home, and the night guard was moving out. Getting through the tunnel itself was a straightforward affair, but foot traffic slowed down and Mark heard people yelling up ahead, but then traffic resumed.

Mark never found out what the problem was up ahead.

The tunnel itself was rather unremarkable. It looked like someone had simply used some stoneshaping Powers to drill a hole through the ground and then reinforce it here and there, while some other people had installed some glowing rocks in the sides of the tunnels, and the ceiling. Maybe the same person, actually. Probably part of a team of rock shapers. Cities had a lot of those on call, all the time.

People saw Mark and Isoko, and some of them had scanners that went wild on Mark, and some people looked at him funny, their eyes going wide in recognition, or some other emotion that was too obtuse to properly understand at a glance. Most people looked at Isoko, though, with her silver breastplate that was clearly Freyalan in design, and they wanted her as a healer on their team.

Isoko got propositioned for a teammate slot twice in the trip underneath the Mississippi River. She said ‘no’, both times, though some people did ask for some healing and they got that healing. Just some cuts and bruises; nothing special.

The two of them made it out the other side of the tunnel soon enough, into the open air on the western bank of the Mississippi. That’s when they encountered their first real snag on the ‘easy trip through the wilds’. The setup over here was pretty much the same as the setup on the other side, with a big gate with multiple smaller gates in the wall, and a well-beaten series of footpath roads that led out into the wilds to the north. Mark barely got to look around before there was an ‘emergency’.

Some guys were running down those footpaths, toward the city. One woman with a group of 5, 2 women 3 men, spotted Mark and Isoko, or rather, they spotted Isoko’s breastplate.

“There’s a healer! Holy shit— Can you cleanse infections?” The woman got right into it, coming over, saying, “We’ve got an infection we’re controlling. We need it purged.” She gestured to a man behind her with his hand wrapped around his stomach. He was clutching severed leather armor. The woman said, “It’s some sort of egg-thing. Plant-based, we think. Can you do it?”

Based on their vector states, Mark believed them. The guy with the infection had some sort of weirdness to his own vector states, and not just in his belly, like a bunch of worms pointed in other directions, but also in his left arm, under his bracers. Another woman in the group had something weird going on with her own vector states on the back of her right leg. It was like each person was a single vector, mostly pulling toward Isoko and a little bit to Mark, wondering who he was to have a healer with him, and then they dismissed Mark, but their smaller, foreign vectors were all over the place, and mainly focused on the person they were attached to and trying to quietly eat.

It was not a pleasant set of experiences to feel. Mark bet it felt worse for the afflicted, for sure.

Isoko quickly said, “I’m not that qualified. He is.”

Mark was on it.

He connected himself and Isoko to the entire group of five people and experienced multiple things in that moment. Connecting to Isoko was different this time. It was a lot nicer, actually. Before, when Mark had gone onto his training mission with Isoko and Eliot, connecting to them had been like connecting to any normal person. But now, with Isoko being a part of the Chosen System, with a Union of her own, connecting to her was like connecting to the people in Healing Club. Instead of reaching out and touching Isoko, he reached out and grabbed hands with her.

Isoko jolted a little. She had felt that, too.

She reached back to Mark, and ‘held his hand’ as well. She had some experience with what Mark had just done, then? That was good.

Mark focused on healing the party. His heart beat hard, black veins flickering into the air all around him, pulling in resilience and purging weakness. He breathed in purity and breathed out impurity, and soon, the team was both worried, looking at Mark and wondering what he was doing, while soon feeling good. Their shoulders relaxed. Their muscles untensed. All of them had small health issues right now, probably due to spending all their healing items and single-use magics on healing the infected, but Mark was better than a single-use item. He healed them all, fast enough.

“Oh wow,” said the guy holding his stomach. He chuckled a bit as he breathed out, “That’s so much better. Thank you.”

The extra vectors inside of the team, and inside their clothes, vanished quickly, but not because of Mark. Mark’s purity/impurity purge only got rid of the putrescence or necrosis that the worms were doing, he was sure. The worms themselves were still there, unable to be cleansed away that quickly. They were living things, after all, and Mark was not going to be purging away living things unless he was sure he was killing what needed to be killed.

And yet, the worms started dying anyway, or maybe purity/impurity made them weaker enough for the infected guy’s body to kill them? Maybe the guy had taken some antiparasitic meds, and those were finally working?

Mark wasn’t sure about anything that was happening right now, but he knew that if he continued on this slow healing path, that they’d all be fine soon enough.

But to try and diagnose what he was seeing, Mark asked the guy, “You a brawny? You’re clearing up faster than I expected.”

Brawnies healed really easily, as soon as they got any healing at all. Even basic parasites were no match for them. Maybe that’s what was happening. The guy looked pretty normal, with light armor, a sword at his right hip and a gun in a holster on his left hip.

The guy said, “Basic Brawn, yes sir. Fuck, that feels so much better.”

Mark smiled a little, glad he had been right. He said, “Glad I could help. You have something under your bracer there, too, but it’s weakening. You still need to take that off and clean it up.”

The man got a concerned look to him, and then he pulled off his bracer. Some worms and eggs fell out and the guy freaked out a little. The other people in their group almost said something to him—

But Mark looked to the other woman in the group, saying, “You have something stuck to the back of your leg— No. Other one. Yup. Right there.”

The woman pulled off her outer leather armor instantly, cursing as she revealed a gathering of worms and eggs in a big cut in her armor. “Fuck! When did those— Oh fuck.” She showed her backside to one of her partners, scraping away the worms and eggs even as she, asked, “Did they get through the webweave?”

The first woman poked at the back of the other woman’s legs, saying, “No…? No. Doesn’t look like any cuts in the weave.”

The other woman chuckled. “Oh thank the gods.”

A different guy on their team smiled as he said, “With as much as we paid for this shit it should be good against worm burrowing.”

The team began to talk among themselves about their encounter with some ‘worm pigs’ which were, as far as Mark could tell, feral pigs that were infested with some symbiotic worms. As the dead and dying worms inside of the first guy flaked away into impurity, cast off into the air, into the world, they scraped off and stomped on the living ones, and then those ones vanished into the miasma as well. Soon the team was fully clean.

“Thank you so much, again!” said the guy who had had the worms in his guts. “I didn’t think they had gored me that deep, but I guess they had. The skin just fucking healed over it too fast... Oh! Why aren’t you wearing a breastplate, too? You’re a healer too, right? You two need a team?”

The woman who had spoken first, spoke again, smiling wide. “We have 5, but we could do 7!”

“No thank you,” Isoko said, “We’re out here on a mission to hunt bandits, who might have simply been opportunistic almost-killers.” As the team of 5 all jolted at that, Isoko continued, “Do you know of an older woman Mind Controller, a younger woman Ice Shaper, and a pair of 28-ish year old men who might be a Mesmer and a Brawny?”

The five people kinda all had a moment.

The newly-uninfected man frowned a little, saying, “I don’t know anyone like that. Sorry. Thanks for the healing, though.”

The others had similar small words of non-knowing.

Mark smiled professionally, saying, “Thanks anyway. Good luck hunting.”

The team of five got going, but at a much slower speed now that they were done with their emergency.

Mark and Isoko attempted to walk north.

They got stopped by another team that needed healing almost right away.

Mark and Isoko ended up stopping several more times, either individuals or teams experiencing emergencies in the shape of this, that, or another thing. All of them had been racing toward Memphi to get healing at some station just beyond the big gate, but when they saw Isoko out there, they asked her first. Mark and Isoko dealt with broken bones. One guy had a medical patch on his stomach that held his guts inside, but Mark and Isoko healed that problem perfectly. One person was just the upper half of a body, strapped into a backpack, carried by another. That half-body dude was already healing, but really damned slowly, so it wasn’t an emergency to get him back to Memphi too fast.

As Isoko healed the half-there guy, Mark stood with the partner who had been carrying him. Mark looked down as a spine regrew in a sploosh of blood and viscera, followed by slowly spooling guts. A liver came next and the guy’s arm regrew.

As the guy’s first finger came into being he scratched his forehead and nose and then his stomach and chest, moaning in comfort as more and more fingers joined the scratching. He gurgled out words that Mark eventually recognized as, “Fucking hell, the itching is the worst part.”

Mark stared at the whole event happening on the ground, and he never stopped staring. It was so fucking morbid, but the guy wasn’t in any real pain… Maybe?

Mark asked, “You’re not in pain?”

The guy laughed, his insides flexing on the bare ground as he gurgled, “Ain’t no way! I’m on them good pain meds! Pain meds are cheap as fuck!”

The guy’s partner scoffed. “This bastard is just a fucking regenerator so he—” The guy spoke loudly down at his friend, “—He thinks that means he can get up close and personal with the big ones.”

The guy waved a regrowing hand, dismissive— He gasped as his insides passed a pain threshold, or something, and he grinned, his voice turning more normal and understandable as he said, “Ohhh! That’s so much better. Thank you, ma’am.”

Isoko was focused on healing, but she managed to nod a little.

The guy’s partner scoffed again. “I’d say he deserves the pain, but I always carry around an extra pain inhibitor for occasions like this, and he saved my life today, so I can’t really fault him… Much.” He looked to Isoko, saying, “Thank you for healing the idiot. Mom hates it when he gets hurt like this.”

Isoko nodded again, still focused on her breath and her heartbeat to heal the guy. She was doing this one all her own because she wanted to stretch herself, but Mark felt like he should step in to help soon.

“Brothers, then?” Mark asked, watching as the guy’s pelvis started to regrow, as his skin started to stretch down onto that regrowing pelvis.

“We are!” said the regenerator— The guy stared at his brother. “Don’t tell mom.”

“I wasn’t about to!”

The guys talked amongst themselves.

To the side, Mark asked Isoko, “You doing good?”

Isoko nodded, tersely, as she managed to say, “I’m good.”

Mark saw her struggling, but healing this guy here was just about throughput, and not about doing anything special at all.

Soon enough the guy was able to put on pants, so he did, and Isoko looked to Mark with a small need in her visage.

Mark stepped in, helping Isoko finish off the healing, and Isoko breathed easier.

With freshly regrown feet sticking out of basic brown pants, the guy stood up under his own power, and soon he was walking by himself, with his older brother at his side, softly yelling at him. The guy thanked Isoko again, and the brother did, too. Soon, Mark and Isoko waved goodbye and headed north, to the intersection of a dozen different roads.

Was there going to be another delay?

Maybe, maybe not.

A great big sign awaited them in the center of the dirt roads that led off into the wilds. The roads were labeled from Route NW-1 to NW-12, with Route NW-1 labeled twice, since it was the return route for many of the others, with the return route between NW-9 and NW-10. Mark had seen a similar setup on the other side of the Mississippi, at the Northeastern Rivergate.

All of these routes were just the starter routes to a hundred smaller trails all throughout the wilds, all across the entire northwestern quadrant of the lands outside of Memphi. The roads had lengths between 50 miles, and 250 miles, with those 250-mile-routes seeming to be the most prevalent of the routes. They crisscrossed and meandered out there. Most of the trails between the roads were unmarked and warned to be full of monsters. Among the warning signs was a sign that requested people make new trails if they could, for the wilds would grow to 100 meter tall trees and truly dangerous lands if Memphi let them get that bad.

‘Burn the forest if you can! You probably can’t.’

Mark said, “So I think we start—”

Mark felt a flash of someone’s vector slam into Isoko, who was standing beside him.

“Hi. Sorry. Are you a healer, ma’am?” said some guy, walking this way, currently bleeding from a bunch of bandages wrapped around his legs and side. His team stood behind him. Two guys were holding a stretcher with a woman laid out on that stretcher. “Sorry to impose. We have some wounded, and we know we could go to the healing center beyond the wall, but—”

Isoko looked kinda worn out and anxious even as the guy was talking.

Mark cut off the guy’s request, saying, “I got it.” He pulsed with healing, black veins extending into the air. The veins didn’t extend all the way to the group of wounded, but his astral body did. In a few heartbeats the people holding up the stretcher, and the woman on the stretcher, were all looking better.

The man who had spoken first smiled a little. “Thank you so much!”

Mark conversationally asked, “What’d you run into out there?”

The first man grinned, saying, “Cat-types. They literally just appeared out of fucking nowhere. Probably a Veil-slip. Damned unlucky of us. That was 70 miles ago, and the injuries weren’t so bad, but they took out our scouter. Broke the damned thing, even though it was made out of tier 3 materials. I think the alchemical silver batch went bad—”

“It was a fucking tier 5 cat, Gerald!” The woman on the stretcher was sitting up now. “The silver batch was perfectly fine…” She sighed out, breathing deep and feeling better, as she said, “And they were sparkle seekers. Of course they went after the shiny silver scouter.” She grunted in slight pain as she started standing up.

Gerald, the first guy, rolled his eyes and dropped the topic.

Soon, those guys walked on.

Isoko and Mark were left staring down several roads.

Route NW-11 was the road they wanted; the one directly to the left of 12.

Route NW-12 went northward alongside the Mississippi, at about 200 meters west of the river, before the road curved off to the west at around 50 miles down the way. Route NW-12 was a mirror to Route NE-1, on the other side of the Mississippi. When Mark was coming back to civilization, if he would have jaunted about 200 meters to the east, he might have seen and walked back home on Route NE-1, instead of what he had done, which was following the river and hitting all of those monsters on the coast.

They wanted Route NW-11 because that’s what their route calculator had said… Hmm.

Mark looked past the sign, to the land… It was like a parade ground. Everything was trampled to sand and dirt, with small bits of grass here and there. This close to the gate, there were no clear roads to take.

But there were signs on poles indicating routes.

Isoko looked at a pole down the way that read Route NW-11, saying, “That’s the one, right?”

“Yup!” Mark said, as he started walking that way. Isoko walked with him, and Mark said, “So I didn’t expect to be asked to heal out here, but I guess you did. I completely forgot that breastplate’d healers were basically advertising that they were healers.”

Isoko smiled a little, looking away before she turned back, saying, “It was nice to heal people. Nicer than I thought it would be, actually.”

Mark grinned. “It was, wasn’t it!”

Isoko said, “I need to practice more because that took a lot out of me, but…” Her voice trailed off as she looked northward.

People were coming into Memphi, carrying loot in bags on their backs, with blood and viscera on their clothes and smiles on their faces. The sky was gold and the road ahead was mostly dirt and green. Night was a few hours away, but Isoko and Mark could make it all the way to Wolf Bayou by tonight if they wanted to make it; if they ran. Both of them were fine with camping out in the wilds, though, and both of them were looking forward to doing just that. Unless they were harried by monsters, then they had plans to carve out some place for themselves and rest when it got too dark.

But tonight was supposed to be a good night to be in the wilds! Lots of moonlight.

The clouds were a bit thick overhead, though. Maybe they’d clear away?

Most people coming out of the wilds were coming down Route NW-1 and NW-12. They were done with their week in the woods, or their few days, or however long they had been out there. It was easy to see the relief on a lot of the faces of the people, as they looked up past the tree line to see the wall of Memphi looming above the greenery.

Isoko had a grip on the handle of her wooden sword, smiling as she said, “I’m finally out in the wilds, like a real hunter. A real ryoshi. I’m so fucking excited, Mark!” She said to Mark, “You need a breastplate, though, because I’m not healing every single case that comes our way.”

Mark grinned. “No way to grow stronger if you don’t do the work.”

“Ha ha,” Isoko sarcastically said, then she said— She paused. She went, “Oh.”

“... What?”

“I, uh, just realized—” Isoko ordered her thoughts, then kept walking. “Okay. So. I was told that under the Chosen System, and as long as I’m presenting like a healer, which means the breastplate, that I need to heal anyone who comes to me with obvious problems, as long as other duties are not more pressing. Technically, we’re on a mission and there’s a healer station just beyond the gate back there, so none of those people actually needed my help. But I was told that I needed to heal people if they came to me like that, and I’m glad to do it, and that I should expect requests like that all the time, as long as I’m wearing the breastplate.

“However.

“You are not in the Chosen System, so… I think they should have paid you or… something. You’re a private healer. Not a paladin who has accepted the capabilities and the duties to heal others.”

Mark went, “Oh.” And then he waved a hand, saying, “I’m not accepting money for healing people, but… Do you want more of my help to fulfill your own duties?”

Isoko thought for a second, then said, “Some would be good, I think. The throughput on that regenerator case was a problem. How did you do it so easily? Was it just a matter of knowing the right way to hit the problem, or… or what did you do back there?”

Mark said, “He was a regenerator, which is something I didn’t really know existed, so his biggest issue was a throughput problem, as you identified. To solve that you had his astral body that was supporting his regeneration, which needed to be supported, which is what I did with a Union of Blood for resilience/weakness, to make his astral body stronger—”

“Yes. Did that,” Isoko said, nodding.

“—But he probably has some sort of nutritional needs, as well. So while I did a resilience/weakness Union of Blood, I also did a sustenance/deprivation Union of Breath, and that made the whole thing a lot smoother.”

Isoko had a dawning expression of ‘duh’ on her face, as she said, “Ahhh, fuck. I should have— I wasn’t doing the sustenance thing at all.”

“You didn’t get much time at Healer Club, right?”

“A few days is all. All of the lessons are online, but actual experience is missing. I don’t have Union of Life, either, but you didn’t use that one?”

“I did; just a flash for purity/impurity in order to clean him up.”

“Have you ever tried purity/impurity against a monster? Designating them as completely impure?”

Mark paused, not sure how to tackle this issue, directly. “I did, just a bit, but I also don’t want to purposefully use purity/impurity to kill things. I used to clean up the worm mess, mainly, and allow the body to attack the worms directly.

“I have an idea of what purity/impurity means and I want to focus on that meaning instead of ruining the meaning by designating certain living things as impure.

“My mother… Mom had a cleansing magic that she gained from a year in arcanaeum. I’m not sure how Union purity/impurity works, exactly, but I think it works along the same lines, and Mom ended up with some odd sideways-magics when she worked her cleansing. I used to think that moths had gotten into all of my clothes when I was younger, but nope! It was Mom, accidentally cleansing holes into my clothes because she pushed too deep with the magic… Or something. I wanted to ask her about what her specific issues were, but I never got the chance.

“I have talked to Lola about this very same issue, though, and she has said that purposefully staying away from living things as a purity/impurity target is a good limit to that magic.”

Isoko said, “… Huh. That’s probably a good lesson, yeah.”

Mark smiled a little. “Yeah.”

Isoko asked, “So do you really want to spend the night in the wilds? Or are we running?”

They were maybe a half a kilometer from the gate. The other roads had peeled off left and right, while up ahead were signs designating this dirt path as Route NW-11, and with a list of mile/kilometer markers indicating distances to other roads and paths. They wanted to get off of this road about 100 miles north of Memphi…

Mark paused at the final signs before the parade grounds turned into roads leading into the wilds.

The one for Route NW-12 had a small sign underneath it that read ‘Wolf Bayou and assorted Exile Settlements’.

… Shit. Were they on the wrong road? Were the directions Mark had picked up wrong?

Isoko noticed the sign, too.

“Why do we want to take Route NW-11?” Mark asked.

Isoko hummed.

Mark pulled out his phone and Quark flickered silver on the screen, as Mark asked, “How do you get to Wolf Bayou from here?”

Quark spoke in a plain male voice, “The road to Wolf Bayou does not exist, but most people headed out of Northwest Rivergate would take Route NW-12 up to mile marker 90 and then cut off north into the wilds. Then you walk another 17 miles before you reach Wolf Bayou, which is rather visible in the dark and in the daytime. Wolf Bayou often clears a road between NW-12 and itself, and there is a big tower in the woods at that location, indicating the turn off.”

Isoko turned right.

Mark quietly thanked Quark and put the phone back into his backpack as he followed Isoko, toward NW-12 instead of NW-11.

Soon, they passed under the first trees of the route—

A vector appeared directly above Isoko and a slime dropped directly onto Isoko’s head, but she turned full platinum and she ripped the offensive thing off of her head.

Mark paused.

Isoko said, “So I guess that’s on me. They say not to walk under trees without looking up, but I did it anyway.”

Some guys walking nearby chuckled.

One of them called out, “You can be a part of our team! We’ll protect you from the slimes!”

Isoko smiled and said, “No thanks!”

Isoko was doing a purity/impurity on herself, but Mark flashed a Union of Brain, instantly evaporating the problem, making sure her backpack didn’t degrade. Isoko paused. “Ah. Thanks.”

“I didn’t see them either.”

“Not even with your vector sense?” Isoko said, as she swiped her wooden sword —which flashed platinum— through another drop slime that had been almost-invisibly clinging to the underside of a low branch. The slime splattered as she struck its semi-solid core, killing it. “I can’t get any sense of vectors yet, but I can tell something is there.”

“Ambush monsters,” Mark said, and then when that wasn’t enough for Isoko to understand, he said, “They’re not directed attacks. They’re attacks that are triggered by proximity.” Mark grabbed a big, fallen stick with some adamantium and then floated it forward, smacking trees in their path. Slimes just started dropping, and when they hit nothing, they crawled back over to the trees and climbed them again. They were slow about it, but they were there. “See?”

“Ahhh! So I don’t feel bad about not sensing them yet.”