Adamant Blood

The morning dawned and wildlife died to Mark and Isoko’s weapons.

Mark and Isoko met people who wanted them to join them, but when Mark or Isoko spoke of their goals the people rapidly turned around, or they excused themselves, or they found some reason not to be involved. Mark did not blame them, but it was kinda funny.

They killed monsters, talking strategy the whole morning, dissecting what some flying frogs had going on with them, or why there were flying fish hanging out in the woods around a few different red-leaved trees. They killed some big black bears with a bunch of black bumps on them. Those black bumps burst whenever they were bludgeoned, and healed the bears whenever they got covered in their own fluids, which was quite weird. But deep enough cuts carved them up well enough, and soon they had carved the bears into bits and dispersed the remains into purity/impurity, killing them for good.

“Have you tried making, like, lines of adamantium?” Isoko asked, as they strolled northward, waiting for the next attack. “Eliot says that monowire is illegal in all known citystates, but you using monowire yourself has to be a good thing, yeah? Or is that too fine of a structure? Will you lose control of the wire like you would a needle?”

Mark said, “… I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

Mark took some adamantium and stretched it into a long line, about a hair’s thickness— The line split and turned into a bunch of tiny dots of adamantium, like water turning spherical in a zero-g environment. With some direction, Mark put the dots back into a solid line of adamantium, and then he made it thinner. He focused, keeping it thin, but the lines felt… unstable.

Mark floated the lines in front of him, saying, “It feels like holding onto a piece of cotton cand— Oh, yup. There. See that?” Mark had applied the barest bit more strength to the line, to hold it more secure, and it had flexed into droplets. “I held it too hard and it split.”

Isoko looked at the drops. “Can’t you hold two ends of a line, like a garrote, and leave the center unheld and super thin? Adamantium is usually used as tiny lines of the stuff, welded to the edge of a blade, anyway.”

Mark tried that, but… “No. I don’t have the center line of adamantium under my direct control. I feel like I’m going to lose it. I don’t like that feeling at all.”

“Ahhh… Yeah. Expensive shit!”

“Just a little bit!” Mark said, as he transformed the adamantium into blades again. “Two 4-inch scalpels is about as thin and small as I want to make it, but this much is more than enough.”

Isoko smirked. “It’s not the size of the blade, it’s how you use it.”

“Right! And it helps that I have two of them. That does more than enough… Why are you laughing? … And you’re laughing more? — OHHH… it’s a sex thing, yes. Okay.”

Isoko howled with laughter.

Mark rolled his eyes.

They killed more monsters as they walked Route NW-12 toward Wolf Bayou.

By noon, they hadn’t crossed much actual distance, but holy heck had they done some cleanup.

The monsters seemed to be running toward them, like no one had cleared this part of the woods in years, or something. It was starting to get crazy.

Mark tossed a monster body into the woods as he eyed the other monsters running down the road at them. Looked like a pack of boars, each the size of a small car. He asked Isoko, “You feeling good, right?”

“I am feeling fantastic!” Isoko said, her skin practically a mirror in platinum. She caught Mark looking so she did a pose, or something, tossing her palms up as she brought her arms in, smiling as she framed her face, saying, “How do I look?”

Mark laughed. “What is with that pose?!”

Isoko scoffed. “It’s a perfectly normal pose for the cameras! … It’s probably more Kpop than Jpop, though. I’m not sure if I want to be an idol… But platinum princesses should be idols, right?”

“Have no idea what any of that means.”

Isoko laughed— She stopped laughing as she looked ahead. “Looks like we got more monsters to serve up.”

The boars were not there anymore.

A school of flying fish was darting through the woods. Were they coming this way? Mark wasn’t sure. They danced in the half-light of the woods, like glinting silver dinner plates that flashed and flickered, little red glows on their fins and eyes almost looking like neon lights. And then they went dark. Non-visible, but not invisible.

Their vectors still pointed right at Isoko and Mark; they were hungry.

Isoko had seen them before Mark, but Mark was the first to know that they were headed their way. Before Isoko could ask about them vanishing from sight—

Mark said, “They’re headed this way, straight on. They’re just not visible from the front— Not much, anyway. 10 meters—” The school of fish split up, heading in multiple directions, floating on the air and each other’s astral bodies— No. Not the air. They weren’t air fish, they were lightfish. They were lightkinetics, Mark was sure. “Light kinetics! Lightfish! They’re circling.”

The fish circled, briefly appearing here and there in the light. Mark saw red fangs between flashes of silver flank, and that was all he saw. He easily sensed them, though.

Isoko’s eyes darted left and right, tracking what she could track.

Mark steadied himself, saying, “I kinda miss fighting with a spear, but I really like fighting with my ‘claws’.”

Isoko readied her wooden-yet-platinum sword, holding it close to her face, ready to slash at whatever came for her most ‘vulnerable’ parts. With a casual tone, she said, “It’s so freaking weird how you can feel through your adamantium. Grandma says she can feel through the entire sky on some days.”

Mark scoffed. “The entire sky! How big is your grandmother’s astral body? Or is it just diffuse?”

Isoko stepped to the left, avoiding the snapping jaws of a flying fish as she almost-casually cleaved through the flank of the thing. The fish went down and the entire school attacked.

Mark and Isoko were sashimi chefs for a little while, though he was sure that they’d be fired if they were preparing real fish for dinner.

Soon, they had destroyed most of the school of flying fish. The remainder scattered before they were turned into meat.

Toward the end of the fight, as they were fleeing, Mark took extra care to grab and carve up one particularly nice-looking fat fish, as he also started preparing a fire to the side.

Isoko smiled at his preparation, asking, “Wow you must be hungry!”

“It’s lightfish, Isoko!”

“I mean, well… Yeah. But is it safe to eat?”

“Oh yeah,” Mark happily said, as he opened up the fish and found deep pink flesh. “Oh my gods, look at that flesh. That’s perfect. Wow. It’s practically glowing, too… Er. Dammit.”

The pink flesh glowed, which was fine, but the white spaces between the muscles and inside the striations of the muscles were already wiggling. Which was bad. Fish flesh should not wiggle.

Mark just about cursed.

Isoko looked at the fish and winced. “Bad luck.”

White worms wiggled everywhere inside the fish’s flesh. The worms even glowed, just like the flesh, but now that the fish was dead the flesh started to lose its pink illumination, and the white worms stood out even more. The entire thing was absolutely infested with parasites.

Infested!

Mark hatefully tossed the fish into the woods and chopped up his attempt to start a fire.

“FUCK YOU fucking lightfish! Full of fucking parasites,” Mark said, as they walked on, leaving the carnage behind. “That looked like a tuna variant, too!”

“It really did,” Isoko said, agreeing.

“I bet it would have been delicious.”

“Absolutely, yes. One of those fish, uninfected, probably would have fetched, like… 500 goldleaf apiece? I’m not sure.”

Mark had a moment. “500? Really? That much? The going rate for good flying fish back home was only 50. Mom and Dad would have had a private feast on a fish like that if they ever caught one, but you couldn’t sell them without a license so we never tried catching any.”

“50 has to be the wholesaler’s cost, right? Or maybe Orange City was less expensive?”

“Tokyo does a lot of fish too, I thought?”

“Oh sure. The Japanese nations are all about fish. But we’ve also got 250 million people to feed, so the cheap stuff is cheap, but the expensive stuff gets really fuckin’ high.”

“Ahhhh… yeah. I can see that.” Mark thought for a second about where their conversation had been before the fish, and then he asked, “So is your grandmother’s astral body really damned huge, or something?”

“Diffuse. Grandma usually can’t feel through the sky. She has to concentrate to feel things. You just naturally feel through your adamantium though, right? Is it because it’s dense?”

“Oh. Huh. Well that’s neat. And yeah; I think so?”

“What's it feel like? To feel through the adamantium?”

As they walked Mark poked at a rock with his metal, trying to understand how he felt that rock, and then he touched his fingers to each other, gauging the difference. ‘Finger to finger’ didn’t feel like a correct analogy, so he touched an elbow, and that didn’t feel quite right either. But then he touched the inside of his wrist, and decided, “It feels like using the insides of my wrists to touch stuff.”

“... Huh.”

The afternoon rolled around.

Sometime around 2 PM, maybe 90 miles north of Memphi and 30 miles away from Wolf Bayou, or something like that, Mark and Isoko found themselves fighting in rhythm. She rushed forward, blocking monsters trying to attack her, carving through claws and faces, and Mark secured her physicality while he swiped at the monsters who tried to flank them, cutting off heads and severing limbs. It was a dance, and more dance partners showed up with every passing mile, the forest absolutely teeming with raging, gnawing, swallowing, venomous, leaping, clawing monsters.

They danced for half an hour, and the monsters never stopped coming.

It was exhilarating.

And the monsters kept coming.

Mark tossed bodies to the side as Isoko kept killing.

They breathed in sync with each other, and with the world.

And they sped up.

Mark wasn’t sure how it happened, or when it had started, but he had entered a flow, and Isoko was right there with him. The monsters did not stop coming. They only got denser. Mark and Isoko practically ran down Route NW-12 toward Wolf Bayou, and the monsters ran right at them, toward their deaths. The beasts roared and charged and they ignored each other as Isoko carved limb from limb and Mark killed with just as much precision.

This dance was not just them and the monsters.

They were dancing with the world, drawing in monsters and somehow avoiding all the people around them—

… Where were all the other people?

That thought is what threw Mark out of the flow. The flow faltered. Mark kept killing, but now he wondered where the people were. Had they seen anyone for the last hour? The last two hours? How long had they been killing an endless flow of monsters?

Was Mark the one driving people away with Union? Gently guiding them to get gone, and for all the monsters to come their way? Or was there someone out there directing the fight, sending monsters at them?

Mark was about to say something—

Isoko spoke first, carving through a wolf-like monster and stepping into the path of some wolf-shaped malformation, saying, “Is this a damned monster wave?!”

The monster she was about to kill juked to the left and Isoko missed her chance to kill it with one easy stroke, so Mark killed it for her, slipping his scalpel through its neck, dropping it to the ground; dying but not dead. Isoko’s words took a moment to register, but then they registered, and holy fuck.

“I think we are in a monster wave, holy shit?” Mark said— “Oh fuck.”

There, in the distance, to the north, what Mark had assumed was a cloud was not a cloud at all. It was a fucking dust storm, low and rumbling. A monster stampede.

Fuck.

This was a monster wave.