Adamant Blood

Kendrai dreamed of something that she never got to finish, for a whisper of her god and former lover came to her, shocking her awake.

Murder has happened in your city.

Kendrai shot awake, sitting up in her bed, bedsheets spilling off of the bed as she grabbed her red wolf mask, already calling out, “Whitewolf! Greenwolf! Someone was murdered—”

The War for Life touches Wolf’s Bayou.

“… Shit.” Kendrai strode out of her bedroom with her mask on, the technorganics lining the walls of her Palace illuminating the hallway as though they were simple lights, and not a whole lot more than that. But those ‘lights’ helped to send her voice to all of those those who needed to hear, as Kendrai called out, “Some fucking demon is here!”

The technorganic veins in the palace pulsed red with worry, and then they shone red with flickers.

Mayor Emilia Ramirez of Memphi spoke in the walls, “Is it still alive?”

The God of War and Murder whispered into Kendrai’s soul,

The demon is still alive in the viscera that remains of the murder it committed against its host, the Mind Controller woman spoken of by the Union boy. The host targeted the Union boy but got caught by Freyala’s Chosen. The demon murdered the host through inaction.

It is a demon of Thrashtalon.

It has mutated the Mind Control of its host, in death, to Body Manipulation.

A shock of ice seemed to filter through Kendrai’s guts and up her spine. She had sent Greenwolf after that investigation into the local Mind Powers.

Was Greenwolf dead?

… No. Probably not. He probably timed himself out to keep out of danger. He’d be back later. Him timing himself out was always a last ditch effort, though. Usually he timed others out. But against a demon of Thrashtalon, of course Greenwolf would time himself out.

Kendrai started running, shouting orders, “It’s a demon of Thrashtalon! All hands to all powers! Prepare to counteract demonic Body Manipulation!”

Fuck, this was going to be a big fucking demon kill.

Mayor Ramirez spoke through the walls, “Containment Crew is on their way.”

“FUCK! … I guess we have to box them.”

Fuck fuck fuck.

- - - -

Mark looked at the viscera on the ground, all around the room. Blood and bone lay in piles and in splatters on the walls. Red gore dripped off of a sconce by the door, flopping to a chair and then further onto the marble floor. It splatted. A bunch of stuff was splatting as Mark and Isoko sat there, on Mark’s bed, in the only clean spot in the room.

It sounded almost like rain.

Mark stood up, saying, “Should I clean it up? I was thinking that any investigators would want to look at it but… but I’m not sure.”

Isoko sniffled, then stood up, looking strong and fully platinum. “If we clean it then they’ll think we hid it, right? Standard operating procedure… I have no idea what SOP is right now. But… Grandma told me once that if I ever accidentally killed someone in a training accident to never hide the body, and to always come clean. Running and hiding anything always made it worse.” She solidly said, “So I guess we’re doing SOP and leaving the remains where they are.”

Mark nodded. “That’s what I thought—”

Suddenly, the vectors all around Mark paled in comparison to a new vector arising from the ambient atmosphere. It pointed at Mark, and then to Isoko, and then to the room and the dead body everywhere. The pressure of it took Mark’s breath away.

Isoko noticed Mark, if not the vectors in the room. “What?!”

Mark said, “Someone is looking at—”

The feeling of being Seen seemed to focus on this space, and Mark almost panicked. It was like standing under Addavein, as the dragon stared down at him… But it was actually not that bad? No. This wasn’t Addavein; Addavein was hibernating. This was something with a lot more points to it. It wasn’t just one giant vector. It was ten thousand smaller vectors, and they all came from the walls, the… the television? Isoko’s phone, sitting on the table between the beds? The wires in the walls. Everything… electrical? They were all looking at Mark, at Isoko, and at the remains…

And then some small vectors appeared among the viscera.

The viscera started to move.

To undulate.

To slip toward each other, like a thousand slugs of various sizes and body parts, from fingers to guts to eyeballs, so many eyeballs, all gathering up into—

A face appeared from the viscera, but without the burned handprint upon it.

The Mind Controller.

She looked older, and yet younger at the same time. Less full of hate. More filled with joy.

She grinned—

Mark rebelled, hatred and terror flowing in his mind as he blasted the pile of viscera with a lightning strike of purity/impurity, decaying it, splattering what remained. He carved with adamantium. He slapped apart with blades of black. He attacked the eyes and the tongues and the fingers and the body parts as they tried to gather, to become whole again, but the piles just came together in other parts of the room.

A voice Mark had never heard before spoke through a hundred whispering mouths, opened up around the room, in the piles of meat, saying, “Tsk tsk tsk! So violent—”

Isoko joined in the destruction, slapping the nearest mouth, one of the larger ones, splattering it, even as her own heart beat with purity/impurity, and the viscera on her body evaporated. How had she gotten gore on herself again? Mark had cleaned all of that off! Isoko splattered apart more and more body parts, like she had been doing that this whole time. Ah. She had been killing right alongside Mark. He hadn’t noticed that right away—

The body parts laughed.

There were too many body parts!

Mark exclaimed, “How the FUCK is there so much viscera?!”

“It’s multiplying!” Isoko said, as she slapped a large mouth on the wall that was giving her a raspberry.

The larger piles grew legs and dashed in every direction, trying and failing to escape Mark’s slashing adamantium. They laughed and gurgled as Mark killed them. They laughed even more.

Isoko smashed with her feet and slapped with her hands, crushing and breaking whatever she could touch, breaking marble floor and wall as she attacked the whatever-it-was, yelling, “What the fuck IS IT?!”

Mark said, “I don’t know! All I know is it needs to die!”

A massive pile of flesh became a frog-person that launched at Isoko.

Isoko used her forearm and hand as a knife-edge, slashing down at the thing, even as the thing opened up sideways, all the way, unzipping into teeth and tongue and mouth. The taunting body parts had changed tactics. They were trying to kill. They had been running but now they were killing and Mark didn’t have a chance to tell Isoko that she shouldn’t take that frog head on. Mark’s heart beat hard and Isoko was going to get beheaded—

Isoko changed tactics, dodging underneath the thing, and the monster crashed into the wall behind her. She had moved so fast! Mark didn’t have time to think about that right now.

Mark carved the ‘frog’ into little pieces of meat as he zapped it with purity. He should have evaporated the whole thing, but one pile became many, the monster splitting into a dozen small people to laugh and run in multiple directions. The little people were fully formed! Fully formed 5-inch-tall people! How was it—

Oh no.

Holy shit it was getting better at controlling its own gore.

It was getting better.

Mark and Isoko were only able to do so much.

Isoko gritted her teeth. Rage filled her face as she struck again, her palms slapping tiny people to death, purity/impurity only partially working to erase whatever the monster was. Isoko cracked the floor with a strike and the floor broke downward, right before Isoko spun and brought her hands together to splatter a tiny person who had been running at her. That tiny person became a splash of gore that painted a wall and became ten different small people, running away in every direction, hopping down through the cracks in the floor and out of the window. They laughed.

Each small person was a copy of the Mind Controller woman.

Mark felt the vectors of each and every tiny person. He killed as many as he could, slicing them down to size and then breaking them apart with purity-impurity. But the monster was playing with them, wasn’t it? Laughing and combining and chasing and getting away when it could.

Mark connected to the little shits with a brain-power Union of decay.

Instantly, every single miniature monster-person in the room turned into piles of mush, blood sputtering outside of their tiny bodies. Mark should have done that sooner. Holy crap, he was unnerved.

The laughter stopped, but the piles of mush were still alive. Like slugs, the vein-less slugs escaped through the broken floor and the outlets and the open door, but Mark switched to cleansing them and so did Isoko, and some of them died.

Most got away.

Within 30 seconds of the start of the second fight, the fight was over.

The fight was just beginning.

The reformed things had fallen out of sight, into the background. Someone yelled down below. Something crashed in the hallway. A flash of heat burst through the cracks in the floor as someone down there yelled about tiny people—

Someone across the hallway screamed a death scream, their vector going from gentle-sleep to wildly-awake, as tiny vectors invaded their own. Mark couldn’t see what was happening over there, but he imagined people climbing into a body, through skin and other places, and ripping the person apart. That’s what the vector was telling him.

He hoped he was wrong.

Mark connected to that larger vector, the person, as strongly as he could, healing them while they were being invaded. They screamed even more, and more vectors woke up in that room and got involved. If that encounter would have lasted more than a few seconds, Mark would have done more, but as soon as the other people in that room woke up Mark heard small explosions and the tiny vectors scattered. The invaded person was still screaming, but Mark was healing them and they weren’t infected right now.

He heard laughter underneath the screams. The tiny people had been diminished, but they remained.

All around him, Mark felt the tiny people scatter to the wind, their vectors feeling like distant goblins.

“What the FUCK!” Isoko exclaimed, in the broken, bloodless room. She asked Mark, “Can you still feel them? Kill them?!”

“I’m trying!” Mark reached out as he was already doing, trying to feel for the small vectors all around. He caught the most obvious of the small vectors—

A chill ran up Mark’s spine because he failed to touch any of them. All at once, every single connection he made to the little monsters was rebuffed. He could still sense them in his Unionsense, for they were still actors upon the world stage, pulling this way and that in their own existence and directional desires, but he could not touch them.

For a moment, Mark blanked. He had felt this before, hadn’t he? This inability to connect?

He tried again.

He grabbed onto some of the small vectors, but others rebuffed him, breaking his Union of Brain and Blood. Were they ridding themselves of their brains and blood, somehow? Maybe that was it?

No.

It was something worse.

“Something changed. I can’t connect to most of them. And some of them are… are too strong to connect too?”

Mark reached for them and he connected, but then the small monsters did something. Mark felt it as they did that something again and again, every time Mark tried to connect. They broke the connection—

Oh.

Mark recognized what he was feeling. He recognized that ‘something’ that they were doing. It was like a twist. A sideways step. It felt like an astral body slap. Like a denial.

Mark knew this feeling because he had experienced it a few times already.

It felt exactly like what Addavein did to disconnect Mark, the few times Mark had connected to him.

There was a strong mind in those monsters that knew how to disconnect Mark’s attempt to touch them; that could feel Mark try to connect to them and thus break that connection. It was simultaneously stronger than the mindless crystal-winged kaiju from earlier, and weaker in every other possible way, because the astral bodies of those tiny things were small, yet smart—

Those bodies were a hive mind.

The hive mind knew things beyond a normal hive mind.

It was a demon.

It had to be a demon.

A hive mind demon in an unkillable, growing body.

Mark knew, in every ounce of his being, that the thing that had been the Mind Controller was now a demon—

Isoko was at the door, looking left and right. “They all vanished?!”

“They’re still out there!” Mark said, “It was the Mind Controller woman I told you about, but that was not the person I remembered. I think that was dem—”

The television and Isoko’s phone, sitting between Mark and Isoko’s bed, turned on. A servitor announced, “Demonic activity in your area. Body Controller small demons. Don’t let them get big. Burning and flesh destruction kills them. Cutting only makes the problem smaller. Greater response formulating.”

The phone and television went silent.

Mark heard the same announcements echo in the hallway of the Grand Hotel’s fifth floor.

A second later, the servitors started saying, “Demonic activity in your area. Kill every small moving thing around you that you don’t recognize. Further instructions to follow once demonic motivations are further identi—”

A stapler sitting on the nightstand gained a vector and began crunching Isoko’s phone, though it did nothing to stop the message coming out of the television.

Mark swiped his adamantium through the stapler, splitting the thing apart at the hinge—

Two small people, one larger than the other, appeared out of the broken halves of the stapler, each of them laughing as they ran in opposite directions.

The little shits could turn into objects.

Mark made cages out of adamantium and grabbed both of the small people, only to find he had captured bits of rock instead. The rocks didn’t even have vectors anymore. Oh shit, these things were adapting fast.

Mark crushed on the rocks, turning them into splatters of goo.

A single heartbeat of purity and impurity was enough to kill the smaller splatters of goo, erasing them from existence, while the larger splatters turned into a few marbles and tried to roll into cracks in the ground.

Isoko stomped on the marbles, roaring as she did so, saying, “FUCK YOU!” each stomp pulsing with a purity and impurity of her own.

Some of the marbles gained feet and small legs in order to run faster.

Mark crushed everything that moved on its own.

But the problem was everywhere, now, and hidden, vectors turned silent, as monsters melded with the environment, becoming mindless ambush predators that only acted when they needed to. Mark couldn’t sense anything in the room besides himself and Isoko and the thing lurking in the electronics in the walls.

Mark was a little worried.

Isoko chuckled wildly, “I think we lost our marbles, Mark!”

Mark stared at her, asking, “You okay? You good? Don’t crack on me, Isoko.”

Isoko took a breath and calmed. “… I’m good. Sorry. That was weird. Sorry. But it’s a fucking demon! No wonder it could overpower my resistances! Holy crap!” She took another breath, and then she focused. “I’m good. Let’s kill some demonspawn—”

The television announced, “Attention, civilians: Do not engage with the demon. Do not attempt to leave the area. A plan has been formulated and is here.”

Mark went to the window and looked outside.

The sky was filled with light; hovertrams, heroes flying on their own, spotlights turning night to day—

The spotlights gathered.

A beam, as though someone had opened the sky to a world of light, shot down onto the road beyond the next street over, demarcating a line of brilliant white, erasing the night and highlighting all the buildings. More lights shot down across the other streets, and Mark rapidly realized what was happening. He had seen them do this on television sometimes.

It was a Light Box.

When Light Boxes went up, the outcome was almost always certain death.

Mark said, “They’re boxing the area.”

Isoko stood beside Mark, watching a wall of light become the edge of their world. “Oh shi—”

The box completed.

The sky was soft white light and nothing existed beyond 150 meters in every direction. The vectors of the world beyond vanished, along with all the vectors in the walls, watching them from the electronics. The world was contained to a cube, centered on Mark and Isoko’s room here at the Grand Hotel.

Mark rapidly tried to think. “What happens in a Light Box, for real, Isoko? All I know is that the people inside almost never survive.”

Isoko stared at the light outside. She looked lost, and yet sturdy. “They’re not always death sentences. They’ll send people inside to combat the threat… hopefully. If they’ve sent people inside, then this is a survivable fight. So we fight, Mark. That is all we can—”

A building across the road from the Grand Hotel began to fall apart, like it was soft cheese, melting in an oven, the top of it falling down like soft ice cream onto people who were either screaming or cursing, or something like that—

Mark felt water, heavy as stone, fall onto his back. He almost faltered, but he remained upright.

The ceiling began to rain down on them like liquefied stone, crushing into Mark and then slapping aside, everything turned to liquid that was not liquid at all. It was multicolored. It was stone and wood and nails and wires, turned to melted matter. Everything melted, except for Mark and Isoko.

The somewhat-panicking vectors of everyone else in the light box turned to full-panic, some people flying up out of the melting world, and most falling down into the melted world. But people and living things did not melt.

Mark’s clothes fell apart, flopping down to the holey floor that was itself slipping down in rivulets, the entire Grand Hotel and the whole city melting down into multicolor muck.

Mark complained, “This is another one of those formative events, isn’t it.”

“Yeah,” Isoko said, watching her own clothes fall away. “Could do with fewer of those.”

Mark laughed just once.

And then Mark and Isoko dropped through the melting floor.