Adamant Blood

It was midnight and Mark was practicing some more weird words while Isoko was sleeping to the side, taking a nap before the party.

They had no idea when the party was going to happen. Both Mark and Isoko assumed it would have already started, but Mark had picked up the room phone to ask the people at the front desk when the party was happening, they had told him that invitations would go out when they went out. They expected a start time of 11 PM, though.

11 PM came and went and Isoko had called a second time, to ask more questions.

They had told her that the party would happen when it happened, and invitations would go out soon. Perhaps 12 PM, midnight. They had told Mark that he could stop his healing Union, though.

And now it was midnight, and still no party.

“12:27, actually,” Mark mumbled to himself as he looked at the clock hanging in the bathroom.

It wasn’t like Mark or Isoko could skip the party, either; that was just unthinkable. Not after being invited by Redwolf herself, and after Mark asked for blackened tuna steaks.

So Mark was practicing Union in new, weird ways, with some moss that he was growing in the bathroom.

Currently, the moss occupied the bathtub’s bottom, in three different clumps, though it was growing beyond that limit with every experiment. Plants loved being a part of a Union for any reason whatsoever, so this was not surprising. Mark had needed to physically separate the clumps and connect to them individually a few different times already.

He’d clean up the moss when he was done, but what else was he going to practice with? On another person? No way! It had been irresponsible to practice with Isoko and Mark couldn’t believe he had actually done that, now that he was thinking about it, but it was done. And so, Mark practiced Union with some moss.

Could he… breathe in green coloring, and breathe out pale tan? To make himself look green and the moss to be tan-colored? Before any possible applications, Mark wanted to know if it could actually be done. So he breathed for a little while, and nothing really happened except the moss grew some more—

It was like a light being gradually, and then rapidly, turned to full brightness. The moss grew tan. Mark’s skin remained the same. And then the moss started to die.

Mark rapidly switched to resilience/weakness and watched as the moss came back to life, back to green, and as his own skin got a faint green hue to it, like he was sweating out green.

Mark looked at his skin and wiped off the green… dust?

“… The fuck?”

Was it… dead skin?

A quick breath of purity/impurity cleared away the dust, thankfully, and Mark mentally jotted down that he had done something interesting, but he wasn’t sure what. Maybe Lola would know.

He moved on.

Could he… breathe in visibility for himself, and invisibility on the moss? Could Mark take all of the moss’s visibility? Several breaths later, Mark had no idea if he had done anything at all. The moss was still there, and Mark felt the same. Maybe he needed a third party to see if there was a reaction to the loss of the moss’s ‘visibility’.

There was a better word to use for what he was trying to do, though.

‘Aggro’.

He’d certainly need a third party if he wanted to practice with an esoteric, video-game word like ‘aggro’, but Mark absolutely wanted to practice with that word, specifically, just to see if he could loop a group of people and a monster into having the monster only attack the person Mark wanted them to attack; to attack the best person equipped to handle that monster. Isoko had touched on that idea a bit earlier, and Mark wanted to try it out.

Now that wasn’t in any of the lessons that Mark had gotten from Lola, but maybe only because Freyala, as Emily Turner, had been born long before video games and the tank/healer/DPS trio came about in video game lingo half a century ago. Mark barely played video games at all, but he knew about them, roughly, back from high school when people played them and talked about them in class. He mostly knew that the entire idea of ‘aggro’ was something that a few Tutorial trainers had needed to beat out of kids every now and then.

Monsters did not follow ‘aggro’, like video games had aggro, and to think in those sorts of terms was to get a person killed. But maybe Mark could do a ‘visibility/invisibility’ thing like Isoko had said. What words to use, though?

‘Aggro’ and… hmm… ‘non-aggro?’

That’d be an experiment to do in the wilds—

But wait.

Mark hummed, then said, “By simply using Union in a group, I can kinda guide people into rhythms anyway. Is a coordinated dance an act of aggro control, or… Or what?”

Mark had no idea what was happening when he got into the flow in a battle and everything came together perfectly, and how much that series of events related to Union’s Power… But Union helped him get into that flow rather easily, and Isoko had remarked how nice it felt to simply be fighting beside him. It felt different to fight with people who you knew how to fight with, as opposed to warriors getting in each other’s ways all the time, and Mark was good at keeping a battle under control, and in their favor.

Something to think about!

Mark moved on to another idea.

The big idea, really.

‘Adamant’ was a word that was absolutely charged with meaning, both in English and personally for Mark. Aside from the adamantium laying against his skin, Mark had adamantium growing in his bones. Mark hadn’t wanted to mess with ‘adamant’ as a word for Union for a few reasons, though. Primarily… He didn’t want to think about Addashield. That particular mental hangup was loosening, though. Mark was still…

Mark was still having issues. A lot of them. But he was moving on.

Secondarily, though, and perhaps even more important than Mark’s mental connection to the word ‘adamant’, Mark had no idea what other words he could use to counterbalance ‘adamant’. It was the same problem counterbalancing the word ‘aggro’.

“What is the opposite of ‘adamant’?”

Mark had no idea what to counterbalance ‘adamant’ with, or where, exactly, the idea of ‘adamant’ fell with regard to… to anything. Was it a healing idea? A protection idea? A growth idea? Sure, ‘adamant’ had a personal meaning that Mark was still trying to understand, which would influence what the use of the word would do in a Union, but words existed outside of a person, too.

Much how the demons designed magic tens of thousands of years ago, and all of humanity and every living thing used magic how the demons made it, the word ‘adamant’ had very specific meanings (more than most words!) and Mark wasn’t sure —exactly— what those meanings were. He’d have to talk to a mage about those deeper meanings, for sure. But first, he would need to know a mage who would want to tell him secret magics, which was a big ask.

Most mages were in guilds. Very secretive guilds.

That one girl that Mark had met already, Svea, had the Arcane Power of ‘Bolter’, which allowed her to shoot bolts of magical energy. It was a mage Talent, and she had a clear path to power in learning more magic. But she also loudly proclaimed that every mage she ever talked to wanted to sign her up with 5 and 10 year loyalty contracts.

Mark probably would have needed to sign one of those very same contracts if he would have gone into arcanaeum.

Mark didn’t even want to think about asking Addavein for magical answers.

And then, in addition to the magical meaning of ‘adamant’, there was the added issue of Mark being an ‘adamantium farm’. Adamantium was a biometal, and Mark had Healthy Body and also Union, so using ‘adamant’ and some other, purgative word to counterbalance the Union, would probably be… very good for Mark.

Or very bad.

Addavein produced multi-ton spikes of adamantium from his body.

Would Mark do the same?

… Hopefully not.

Mark got back to thinking about adamant’s antonym.

“… I could just try ‘weakness’,” Mark told himself. “ ‘Adamant’ is clearly a ‘good word’ and ‘weakness’ is a balancing word for both the half-healing/half-protection resilience/weakness and also the full-protection durability/weakness… So…”

First, Mark took stock of his body, of the adamantium he felt inside of himself. There was getting to be a lot! Comparatively, anyway. When he focused, Mark felt a soft scattering of dust particles of adamantium inside his bones, spread like a mist in his ribs, pelvis, spine, and upper leg and arm bones. A few nodules were larger than dust-sized, but not appreciably so.

So that was Mark’s current reserves of adamantium. If this experiment caused a change in any of that, then he would stop.

Mark prepared to breathe in adamant and expel weakness.

Mark focused, squaring his shoulders, and then he breathed in adamant—

A weirdness.

Mark stopped.

Mark sat there for a moment, trying to understand what had just happened. He had breathed in adamant and felt, like, a tingling in his... bones? Yes. In his bones. The tingling was still there. As Mark sat there with half a breath in him, the feeling gradually faded away.

“What the fuck was that?”

Mark breathed out weakness to balance himself more, and then he breathed in adamant, and this time he did not stop. He felt his bones almost magnify, or something. It was like… like a warmth?

Mark tried breathing out adamant—

He instantly coughed out blood, his chest hurting, his body aching. With a flick of intent he started beating his heart with resilience and weakness again, healing himself. He stopped coughing and… Well. He looked at the blood he had coughed up onto himself, and onto the bathroom floor and bathtub.

It was a bit… gritty.

Mark kinetically plucked his adamantium from his coughed-up blood. Soon, he kinetically held a tiny black dot of metal a fifth of the size of a grain of rice.

“… Huh. Okay. So… Huh.”

And then Mark realized that he was in a non-secured location, practicing magic, and possibly exposing that he could produce adamantium himself…

But at the same time—

“Oh fuck you, Addashield.”

—Maybe name-dropping that damned archmage would prevent potential spies from thinking they could capture him, or do other nefarious things to get at his adamantium. Would someone try to cut him up to get to his bones? Absolutely. Mark never used to think in that sort of way, but his naivety was wearing off. Heck! He was here in Wolf Bayou looking for people who had tried to kill him for his adamantium.

There were apparently lots of shitty people out there—

Something wanted to kill him.

What the fuck?

Mark startled, and then Mark focused.

He had been casually sensing the vectors all around him, in the background. Mostly, those vectors of attention pointed in unconcerning directions. People in the rooms across the hall, totally focused on each other and probably having sex. People on the streets, walking this way or that, and some of them in hurries to get wherever they were going. A few people had vectors pointing in every possible direction, which made them hard to read, but Mark had figured out that they were probably the Hearthswell people, repairing the city, or maybe other kinds of people, doing other multi-vector things. The people with very small vectors, all pointed in all directions, were sleeping. Not many people were sleeping.

A lot of the city was awake at this hour.

Who had wanted to kill—

There.

Someone was in the hallway outside of the room, walking toward the door to this room, and they wanted to kill Mark. They knew where he was, and they wanted to kill him—

The vector pointed inward, even as it continued to walk down the hall, and it wanted to kill… itself? And then the vector wanted to kill the walls, or something like that. And then the vector pulled inward and relaxed, or some other weird thing, and the desire to kill vanished.

It was as though the vector simply didn’t happen…

The fuck?

The much-calmer vector continued toward Mark and Isoko’s door, looking like a completely normal vector, only lightly looking at Mark and Isoko’s room.

Was that just a casual blip of murderous intent? Or something else entirely?

Mark’s heart beat hard anyway, and he focused on himself and Isoko, who was laying down in the other room, strengthening both of them. Isoko’s sleeping vector, which was pointed in not many directions at all and mostly silent, suddenly jolted.

Isoko launched to her feet, still half asleep, but she was awake fast. “The fuck was that?! Mark?”

Mark stepped into the living room of the suite, saying, “Someone is coming to our door.”

For a moment, Isoko didn’t understand. And then clarity came to her. She had only taken off her breastplate to sleep and she hadn’t even gotten under the covers, which was exactly because she was worried she would need to move fast. She had been planning ahead, and it helped. Isoko turned toward the door, her hand going for her wooden sword, but it halted.

“Do I need the breastplate?”

“I don’t know.”

Isoko put the breastplate on, anyway. The whole thing slipped over her head, and then she clipped the tabs underneath her arms—

A knock at the door.

Knock, knock!

Mark stood up, getting his adamantium ready. Isoko was already fully platinum. She grabbed her wooden sword and the sword turned platinum, too. The wooden sword still looked sharp. Mark was surprised that Isoko had managed to keep the sword under her platinum Tactile Telekinesis the whole day, but maybe he shouldn’t have been that surprised. Isoko had stamina.

Mark looked to Isoko.

Isoko stood ready. She nodded.

Mark said, “Come in.”

The door opened and Greenwolf stood on the other side.

Oh! It was just Greenwolf!

Mark smiled. “Oh, hello!”

Greenwolf locked eyes with Mark, below his green mask, and spiked with a desire to kill. And not just to kill Mark. To kill the people down below in the other rooms. To kill Isoko. To kill the people in the streets. Greenwolf wanted to kill absolutely everyone.

Well that was perfectly normal, wasn’t it? Who didn’t want to kill everyone around them occasionally?

… Mark blinked, his smile faltering as his thoughts didn’t make sense.

Greenwolf pulled back his killer instinct and became the calm investigator that Mark had spoken to before. His body language was perfect. His stance was easy going, yet professional. He had mud all over his boots and pants and shirt and his clothes were torn, and then his clothes were fine and Mark ignored the incongruity. Greenwolf was always getting into messes, after all. Or maybe it had been a trick of the light!

Why, ever since Mark had met Greenwolf years ago, the guy was always getting into shenanigans…

… What?

Mark was having trouble—

Greenwolf said, “Greetings, Mark Careed. I’m here with the results of your requested investigation, and to bring you to the after-kaiju party. Would you please cut off your head with your adamantium?”

Mark happily said, “Sure!”

He turned all of his adamantium into a blade and swiped through his neck.

The adamantium deformed—

Isoko lunged with her sword right at Greenwolf, faster than Mark had ever seen her move—

An insistent thought vibrated through Mark’s mind.

‘Kill Isoko.’

Phhbtt! The fuck?!

No, he was not going to kill Isoko. Mark would never kill another person, ever, and especially not Isoko—

Isoko stabbed into Greenwolf’s stomach, her sword hitting non-vitals as she yelled, “Mind Controller! Is there a city AI here! We have a murder attem… pt…” Isoko faltered, her platinum skin fading as she shook her head, stepping away from Greenwolf. She let go of her sword.

Mark felt weird.

Greenwolf pulled the sword out of his body with a grunt, and then he handed it back to Isoko, into her guts. The wooden sword shattered but drove rather far into her body, anyway.

… Why was Greenwolf trying to kill Isoko?

Greenwolf’s desire to kill spiked and he did not bother to hide it this time. He glared through his half-mask at Isoko, his eyes aflame, red and brown, as he told Isoko, “Drive that sword into your heart, girl.”

Isoko gasped, clutching the fragment of wood in her chest, her words coming out strained as she blinked a lot. And then she gripped the sword fragments strongly, breathing deep, pushing it inward.

Isoko collapsed to the ground, bleeding out.

Isoko was injured.

Mark needed to do something.

He healed Isoko, because obviously she shouldn’t be dying—

“Stop healing her, Mark,” said Greenwolf. “Watch her die.”

Mark stopped healing Isoko…

Why did he stop?

No.

No.

This was wrong.

He needed to do something. He needed to think. Something was wrong—

He needed time.

Mark breathed in alacrity, and the world slowed down.

And just like that, Mark disconnected from the normal flow of time, which seemed to be enough to throw him so far out of Greenwolf’s perceptions in order to break the mind control, or at least that’s what Mark’s instincts were telling him.

Because a top-tier mind control effect shattered, revealing Greenwolf as the older Mind Control woman.

The one who had tried to kill him on the shores of the Ohio River.

Beyond the surprise of seeing her, Mark’s next series of thoughts rapidly vibrated between securing the safety of Isoko, the realization that as soon as he stopped breathing inward he would lose his alacrity, how to kill the older woman and if he should, and, looking at the old woman, Mark wondered what she had done to herself.

She was all sorts of fucked up.

Pale pink flesh, like hardened sunburns, marked her cheek and ran up her face, looking almost like a handprint. The fingers ran into her dark hair, turning the hair bright white, leaving streaks in the brown locks. Her skin outside of that handprint wound was old. Much older than she had been. One eye was brown. Her handprint eye was bright red. She was dirty. Her clothes were tattered, bloody, and soiled. She stank. Mark hadn’t smelled her stink until now, until he had stepped outside of her control, but there it was. Did she shit herself? Maybe.

Mark was halfway through his inhale.

He needed more time to think, to figure out if he should kill the older woman or if there was another way. He did not want to kill her, but she was trying to kill Mark and Isoko. This time her attempted murder was going to succeed, unless Mark did something he did not want to do.

Mark needed more time.

He did something that was perhaps very stupid, but he did it anyway. He brain-danced with alacrity and weakness.

Instantly, a monstrous headache loomed and Mark’s sense of time divorced itself even more from normal reality. His heart seemed to stop, but it was still beating just fine. The Mind Control woman stared at Mark with hate in her red and brown eyes, looking like she was in the middle of saying something, of yelling at Mark, at being angry. But nothing came out fast enough to control Mark at all. Isoko stopped breathing, but no, Mark was just that much faster than her right now, mentally.

Mark had both a single moment and ten minutes before he passed out. Powers insulated their users from most backlash, but they didn’t do the same to others—

Huh.

Mark had a lot of thoughts. Mark had been prepared to find and then talk to this Mind Control woman… somehow. Figuring out how to find her and then what to say to her would have happened later, when he had actually tracked her down and talked to her. But she had found him first, and she had decided to go for the kill. Greenwolf had been assigned to find her, though, and he obviously had. The woman had come to them under the illusion of looking like Greenwolf.

What had happened between Greenwolf taking Mark’s information, and then him finding the older woman? Was Greenwolf still alive?

That didn’t matter right now.

… Mark had to kill her. He couldn’t risk putting her down with Union. Not after her obvious power-up.

Mark had shrugged off her strongest mind control the last time, but this time he was under her influence before he had a chance to realize he was under her influence. Isoko had even fallen to her control, but at least when the old woman focused on Isoko, she had loosened her power over Mark. Isoko had bought them both a chance to live.

Isoko was already almost dead.

She would be, soon, unless Mark finished this fight in their favor.

Mark still tried to think of another way, but he knew of no other way, and the woman was too strong right now.

Perhaps, Mark could have killed her with his adamantium if he had been prepared for the physicality of that sort of action. His adamantium was currently all wrapped around his own neck, though. She hadn’t known that Mark couldn’t injure himself with his own adamantium… She had tried to kill him a second time already.

Anger loomed.

First, she had tried to kill him in an ambush on the road, in the wilds, thinking him an easy target. Now, she was coming after Mark again, for any number of reasons, and she still thought him an easy target.

She had grown overconfident in her Power.

She probably killed a lot of people who couldn’t fight back at all. She had had complete control over him, just as she had over Isoko, who was dying in slow motion on the ground.

Based on the wavy handprint on her face, something big had happened, though.

Demonic power?

The Cult of Thrashtalon?

Those were rare cases, but Mark’s mind went right to those as explanations for this oddity he saw before him. Mostly, people got powered-up with temporary magics and the Powers of specific other people. A Buffer could power someone up a great deal, but this woman had walked through Wolf Bayou to get here, so she was displaying power far beyond what she had displayed before, and a Buffer couldn’t do that much… right? Before, she had gotten a nosebleed when she tried to force Mark to believe her lies last time, when she had stolen Mom’s face.

A flash of rage. A need to kill.

Mark didn’t know this woman at all, but he fucking hated her. So goddamned much. So much hate. The floodgates were opening and Mark was furious.

How would he do it?

If he brought the woman into his Union of Brain, alacrity, would she rip herself apart like Isoko almost had, or would she slip back into Mark’s flow of time, and take him over? She would take him over if Mark brought her mentally into this space, wouldn’t she. Her power probably acted at the speed of thought. Too bad for her that her thoughts were so much slower than Mark’s right now.

… Mark was delaying what he knew he had to do. His inhale was done, and he was about to exhale weakness again. His mind was still his own, flickering with a Union of alacrity and weakness. His heartbeats had yet to get to the next one—

Ah.

He didn’t need to risk bringing the Mind Controller into his Union of Brain, Alacrity.

He switched up a few things, knowing he would survive, and the woman would not.

In the moments of the switch, Mark felt something in the air trying to grip his mind, to rip into his soul and tell him what to do. To stop resisting. Mark wasn’t resisting anymore, though.

He went for the kill.

Mark’s astral heart pumped out alacrity and weakness, giving the woman all of Mark’s own weakness and the physical speed, while Mark took all of the woman’s mental speed.

She never knew what hit her.

The woman gasped, clutching her chest, her voice cut off in a gurgle and sputter of blood. The air screamed as her voice could not. Instantly, every single vector in the immediate area looked her way, all of them hearing the wordless scream. The woman was focused completely on Mark, but then she was focused on herself, like a black hole forming and drawing everyone else in.

Perhaps, Mark thought, if he was better at controlling the forces of a Union, she would have died and it would have been over.

But Mark wasn’t that good with Union yet. He got a lot of physical speed, too.

Mark felt a tenth of what the woman felt, and he already felt like he was dying. Muscles twitched in his back and legs, the same ones that held him upright, and then those muscles tore. His lungs pulsed with diaphragm movement. And then his muscles pulled at his bones, and his bones cracked. His heart ripped apart in his chest, but his astral body pulsed that much stronger once it was broken from its organic limiter.

His actual blood veins burst under his skin, casting deep purple lines wherever his astral veins came out of his body, like his black veins were casting purple shadows.

His head felt like it was going to burst.

The same thing happened to the Mind Controller.

Mark had no idea how he did it, but he kept his mind going fast, out of sync with the older woman’s timeframe, to stay out of her grip, while his heart beat faster than humanly possible, ripping itself apart. The older woman experienced everything as a normal person, with a normal perception of time. Mark got a ten minute experience of her death.

Her eyes turned violently red as veins burst. Blood pooled like cold syrup from her eyes and nose, and Mark felt his own nasal passages fill with blood, choking out his breath.

The woman’s skull cracked open at the top. A rupture of blood broke through her skin on her left arm, like a fissure opening. Her pants turned deep red with spreading death. The sword wound that Isoko had given her suddenly exploded with blood, like a hole opening in a water balloon. She still had a light in her eyes.

She was still standing as Mark watched that light go out.

She was dead, and Mark had killed her. He had killed a person. He had done that.

He was going to be sick.

He severed his Union and started beating out resilience and weakness with every iota of his being.

Time rapidly advanced, from slow motion to way too fast.

The Mind Controller exploded.

Flesh and blood filled the room, warm and sometimes hot against Mark’s face, reminding him of the time he connected to those cleaner plants, the tube-like things in that lesson with Lola, when she was teaching him about Union. Hot blood and bony viscera felt a lot different than cold plant goo.

And then Mark realized that Isoko still had sword fragments stuck in her own chest.

Inside alacrity, time had passed slowly. Here, in the real flow of time, ten minutes passed in a forgotten heartbeat as Mark frantically pulled out the sword from Isoko’s body and then connected to the embers of her existence, still flickering inside of her mind. He healed Isoko and Isoko eventually gasped as her heart regrew and her blood pumped around too many splinters. But purity/impurity cleared those splinters quickly. Mark cried as he held her and Isoko sobbed a little and held him back. Mark was pretty sure he apologized and Isoko said something about how no, she was sorry, and it was her duty to protect others. Mark tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault at all—

“I have the Mind in the 70’s, Mark, and I was Unioning with Durability as soon as I felt her attack,” Isoko softly said, “I should have been the one protecting you. I’m so, so sorry.”

“That woman was messed up. Something was too wrong. You distracted her and I should have gone for the kill like you did. I faltered.”

Isoko just shook her head.

Mark said nothing else.

They were both alive.

Mark had killed someone.

Mark sat on the edge of his bed. Isoko sat beside him, holding his hand, and Mark wasn’t sure how they had gotten here. Both of them were already clean because they could just do that, but the room was still a mess, and Mark wasn’t sure what to do right now.

Isoko said, “She almost killed me. She made me kill myself.” She whispered, “I should have been practically immune to mind control.”

Mark rapidly realized that Isoko was freaking out, too, and for a whole lot of deep reasons.

Mark said, “You opened the way and I took the shot, and we won. It was messy. We can do better next time.”

Isoko sniffled. “… Yeah.” She straightened. “We’re alive.”

Mark said, “We’re alive.”