Adamant Blood

The Light Box went up perfectly.

Kendrai gave the people inside a 50% chance at surviving this. Better than most odds in this sort of scenario.

Kendrai sat in her control booth, watching it all unfold in her scanners, as she watched the Containment Crew work their magic. This particular Containment Crew came directly from Memphi, and they used the normal artifacts and personal magics as any CC, so Wolf Bayou wouldn’t be writing off that huge section of land in the middle of itself. Kendrai disliked having CC here, but today, because of the demon, CC came in with all of Collective Temple at its back. It was more than what she could have pulled in from her own Church of Drakarok, though those guys were inside the Light Box, too.

No one messed around when it came to demon attacks.

Demon, kaiju, dragons. Those were the only things that humanity on this side of the Veil responded to properly, in Kendrai’s opinion. Everything else was lax. They didn’t treat their criminals hard enough, for example. They always opted for exile instead of execution.

This whole event right here was because of that decision to exile, instead of execute.

But it was all going to be over soon, one way or another.

Kendrai hoped that Mark kid made it out of this mess. He was going to be a superhero one day, but not if he got sniped this early in his life. The demons knew that, too.

And so did Thrashtalon.

Whitewolf stood tall as he asked, “How far along are we, Crew?”

He had spoken to the main leader of the Containment Crew; the only one who could talk right now. All the rest of them were linked hand-in-hand.

Without turning or looking their way, the lead man spoke mechanically, “ETA 90 seconds to illumination of threats. Melted material has reached 90%. Melting is almost complete. Estimated loss of life for melting is holding true at 0 deaths out of 397 enclosed people. We expect the enclosed people, and the ones we seeded inside, to be able to negate the threat in a timely manner. Estimations of time for clearance is 2 hours…”

All the rest wasn’t important. Their ‘negate the threat in a timely manner’ wasn’t as helpful as ‘2 hours’, which put this ordeal firmly in the ‘we might be able to rescue all those people’ category.

50% chance of success; just like Kendrai expected.

Kendrai looked at the scanners set up around the containment zone. The zone itself was a giant box of white hardlight, supplied by one of the members of the Containment Crew, and expanded to extraordinary proportions by the shared astral bodies of the rest of the crew. That sharing was made possible by the leader, who was a Seer of phenomenal power. Looked like a different Seer than the one Kendrai used to know. Did Paul retire? He might have.

Kendrai would have to greet this new guy afterward.

She turned her attention back to the screen.

Whatever their faults, at least Earthlings knew how to build a box.

“… And this demon is being rather well-behaved,” Kendrai mumbled to herself, frowning.

Whitewolf spoke up, “Reserves are prepared for the real fight, if such should happen, but the predictors indicate that this demon’s true strength is in hiding.”

Kendrai simply nodded as she stared at the screen.

- - - -

Mark fought baby-sized humans on a multicolored mud lake under a sky of brightest white.

He was nude and that was not a big deal; not really. Everyone was nude. Everyone was fighting baby-sized monsters, or getting protected from baby-sized monsters, or burning the lake of mud, or trying to get themselves out of mud.

There was no getting out of the mud. The mud was omnipresent—

No wait. Over there, some guys were hauling people out of the mud and onto stone, but the stone was getting overrun by tiny people swimming out of the mud. Mark went over there and blendered some of the smaller monster-people before he Unionized a blast of purity/impurity out into the world, erasing most of the gore from sight and stripping mud from people, exposing wounds that he began to heal.

Some things squirmed in some of those wounds, but other people were on the job, actively helping, or ripping the worms out of their own flesh.

It was a chaotic mess.

Some brawnies who could Tactile Telekinesis well were standing on top of the mud, like Isoko, and most of them were able to do that, but some people, like Mark, were stuck in the mud. Someone yelled about support for the sinkers, getting the brawnies to help hold people above the mud, but not many people had ever trained for such a thing, and most people were sinkers.

Fires bloomed over there, burning things. Air pulsed over there, burning even more things. Some plants grew here and there because Mark was supporting their growth, because he was in a Union with every single person in the enclosure and everything else besides. But people were burning the plants.

Mark wanted to tell the fire brigade not to burn all of the plants because he needed those plants to help clean the air, to absorb the impurity that he was putting out there. But then one of the plants turned from a bush into a tangle of teeth-covered vines and started to whip at people, growing larger with every passing second as it sucked up gore from the mud all around. The fire brigade burned that one next.

Someone yelled at someone in the fire brigade, complaining about breathable air, while someone else, much louder, shouted them down, talking about how air concerns were being taken care of.

And then the Light Box flickered. The white light became something more, something different, and the chaotic mess of monsters in the mud and people unable to exit the mud and man-eating trees became intelligible. Red light illuminated everything demonic inside the light-cube, and now some rocks floating on the surface, some mosses growing in Mark’s Union-group, and even one of the people hiding among those who were unable to fight, were all illuminated brightest red.

The red illuminated things were the demon.

And the mud began to evaporate into twisting wisps of dust, circling upward and out of the fight, out of the top of the Light Box—

Thousands of little red dots flew up and out of the mud, up into the air, to follow the streamers of dust up and away—

Fire bloomed overhead at the top of the box, bright red and then deep yellow, the heat of it all contained overhead. The red-lined demon bugs struck the firewall and burned, instantly.

Some guy stood up, yelling, “Attention everyone! I’m Inquisitor Jake from the Collective Temple! The Light Box is up and active and we will get through this in an orderly fashion! The mud is evaporating! The fires are killing the demons! The only thing we have to do is survive this fight, and we’ll survive the night!”

The demon never stopped crawling out of the mud to get to people, to attack their feet directly above the surface and disrupt their tactile telekinetic hold on the surface, to drag them down. But now there was a plan, and now that Mark looked, he saw that there had been a plan all along.

He saw the people standing tall on the mud’s surface, and the people flying just above the surface, and he saw the vectors of everyone gathering into a better formation, a unified whole. Mark joined that Union instinctively.

The fight redoubled but the fight wasn’t so chaotic anymore.

There was a flow to it all, and though Mark couldn’t touch the demon, he could Unionize with everyone else. Some guy with Telekinesis got the strength he needed to lift himself and several other people out of the mud. Inquisitor Jake had some sort of earth-kinesis Power, so he solidified the stone underneath him, pushing all the small demon-vectors out from below his area, securing a bulkhead against the demons. And the people started to move with purpose, away from the largest groupings of demon monsters and allowing the fire brigade to blast flames and heat at monsters-pretending-to-be-people and monster-monsters who lurked in the mud like jaws waiting to lunge and bite.

And all the world was a melted mess.

Mark’s adamantium was fine, though. Apparently the melting ‘mud magic’ of the illuminated cube couldn’t affect his PL 79 metal. Other things with similar high PL’s floated in the mud. Mostly knives; small bits of metal. Mark even found some adamantium, floating among the mud that had once been the Grand Hotel and the other nearest ten buildings. One second, he was fighting across the mud, and the next second, he stepped onto something that cut his foot, but he also came away with a ribbon of new adamantium, a good two meters long.

The rest of the thing he had stepped on turned out to be a mithril kaiju blade that Mark handed over to Isoko.

“Aww thanks!” Isoko said, as she slapped the mithril blade at a pair of flying frogs.

Someone, an older man who was currently standing on the solid ground made by Inquisitor Jake, saw Isoko and shouted, “That’s Wolf Bayou property!”

Inquisitor Jake told the guy, “She’s using it right now.”

The guy didn’t care about that. He stared harder at the sword, and then freaked the fuck out. “Where’s the adamantium edge?!”

Mark sliced through monsters under the mud and above the mud, saying, “I’m using it right now!”

Whatever the older man said beyond that, Mark did not hear.

Mark ripped apart a few dozen small babies that crawled through the mud at him and then he blasted them with purity/impurity. He couldn’t actually destroy them at all. The demon only had a moment of weakness when Mark disrupted its bodies. What survived turned to slugs once again and escaped into the mud. Mark didn’t bother chasing them.

The fire team was the one actually killing the demon; everyone else was backup or on defense.

Mark called out to the older man, “I’ll give it back when this is over.”

And then the fire team was moving their way. One fire guy who wasn’t getting along with the fire team’s program was currently yelling at the fire team’s leader, who was some Inquisitor that Mark didn’t know, who also had fire powers.

The Fire Inquisitor commanded Mark, “I need you on defensive, Mister Careed! Back up!”

Mark didn’t say a thing. He trudged through the muck, back toward the solid land. Isoko grabbed him by the hand and pulled him along, walking along the surface, dragging them both away. They hadn’t really gotten out of position at all, but the battle was a constant mobile thing, except for the center where the solid land held and people fought off things that crawled out of the muck at them.

The fire team blasted the ground where Mark had been, and the mud burst with burned babies.

Isoko let Mark go when they were pulled far enough to ‘safety’. Mark frowned as he looked into the mud around the island, beyond the people, to the space under them. Tiny vectors flowed in the mud down there, and even under the island. Inside the island, too.

Mark said, “This is fucking impossible. They just keep multiplying.”

Isoko sat down in the mud, saying, “We’re out of immediate danger. This is just a cleanup event now.” She looked up at the box. “How wide is the box now?”

Mark had a good idea of the size of the box, but his senses didn’t extend past the box. It was some sort of truly-solid magic. Mark looked up at the white expanse, and at the walls, sensing what he could, and he said, “It was 100 meters square, or something like that. I think we’re at 80 meters square— No. Wait. Oval, now. I think they’re closing it off faster. When did it become an oval?”

Isoko said, “About five minutes ago—”

“Everyone up!” Inquisitor Jake yelled, “Everyone up! We’re moving the island! It’s got monsters underneath it!”

Isoko asked Mark, “How deep is the mud right now?”

“Like 7 meters, or something,” Mark said, “I can’t exactly tell. Thin at the top and thick at the bottom. It’s still evaporating, too.”

Wisps of stone flowed into the sky, into the firewall at the top of the Light Box.

Some woman Mark and Isoko’s age heard them speak, and cheerfully said, “It was at 10 meters! So 7 is good! Right?”

And the island of rescued people got moved.

Inquisitor Jake made solid land in front of him, into the part of the mud pit that was freshly cleared of monsters, and people walked behind him. He let the land go further behind those people, the solid land turning back into mud, releasing a fresh batch of horrors into the mud. They had gotten themselves wedged into the solid stone that Jake had made, but now they wiggled free, laughing.

People tried not to freak out.

Demons showed themselves and Mark was there along with a few others in the group, cutting them down, burning them, or slicing them apart and splashing them away. The group resettled in another part of the mud flats, with fewer demons underneath it.

The demon takedown had started with complete chaos, with everyone falling into ‘mud’ and floating on top of that mud, and all material possessions destroyed, but now it was kind of rote work. Mark trudged through mud with others who walked on the mud, the floor underneath the mud not really solid at all, and people killed miniature people, and monsters, and rocks, and anything else that might glow red. The fire teams came through, burning the demons.

And the walls shrunk—

Inquisitor Jake yelled out, “Okay! The ground is 5 meters deep now, and the infection is under control! We’re going to start evacuating people now!”

The relief among some of the people was enough for them to cry. Jake called out for volunteers to stay, first, and Mark and Isoko both independently raised their hands to stay. They both grinned at each other.

Jake called out, “Fliers, take these people to the top! One at a time!”

It was more chaos, but Mark didn’t need to pay attention to that. He just killed monsters.

A hole opened up in the roof and people started getting evacuated, while ‘birds’, glowing red, tried to fly out of the place. The demons tried everything to escape, from worming into people who had no idea they were infected (the demons had some sort of Body Control that allowed for numbing venoms) or they tried to hide in people’s long hair (which wasn’t really working, since the demons still glowed red under the white light), or they tried producing toxins that paralyzed and killed (but that was a complete failure, since Mark and Isoko and other cleaners were on the job).

The rescue at the roof of the white room took out all the elderly or the infirm, first, which wasn’t much since only a few people actually lived in Wolf Bayou full time. Twenty minutes after the first batch escaped, the next batch went, which included people who were going crazy from the situation. Inquisitor Jake told everyone that they were NOT free to leave, and that they’d be in quarantine for days, so they shouldn’t expect to just be free after this. That warning seemed to calm people down some; this was not over as soon as they escaped the demon. The next group contained everyone who wasn’t contributing to the cleaning.

Mark trudged through the muck, approaching hour number 2, saying, “Somehow I imagined killing a demon to be less troublesome and more troublesome than this.”

Isoko laughed as she walked on top of the mud beside Mark, her edge-less, borrowed kaiju-blade held on her shoulder. She grinned, platinum and reflective in the light, saying, “You could try standing on your adamantium more.”

“I am!” Mark said, “I’m still sinking in.” He looked to the side where some people were almost swimming in the mud, as the group moved to another area. “I think the mud is getting thinner.”

There were only 50 people left in the Light Box by now, and the monster attacks were commensurately greater. Mark was basically blending monsters all the time under the muck, and the demon seemed to be okay with that. Demons were fucking crazy.

The thing was laughing, still, and Mark was pretty sure that it didn’t care about actually winning the fight. It just wanted to inflict pain on itself and on anyone else it could reach.

Inquisitor Jake overheard Mark and Isoko, over the increasingly loud laughter of the monster. He said, “It is getting thinner. The magic that made the containment cube is getting denser as the cube gets smaller, so the mud evaporates faster, but we’re trying to keep the level of mud about the same. If the monster has nowhere to flee or hide, or people to torment, that is when things get really dangerous.” Jake looked around at everyone looking at him, and reiterated what he had said a few times already, “This is going to get a lot more dangerous, and soon. Be ready for it.”

The demon laughed. “I can’t wait!”

Some other guy, who was deep in the ‘water’ called out, “I can’t do this anymore! Can I be next to leave!”

Jake looked up.

Mark looked up, too.

There was a lot of fire up there.

Jake said, “Soon as the fire clears, that means that the current group is done and more people will be allowed to leave.”

The guy treading water, one of the fighters who was killing demons with some sort of tiny bursts of black light happening all around him in the water, complained, “Fuuuuuuck.”

Mark asked him, “Are you really having trouble? There is help.”

Jake said, “Get on the raft. Now. You’re reaching a limit.”

The guy said, “I’m fine! I’m just bitching.”

The guy was barely holding it together, but he was holding.

“Get on the raft, sir,” Jake said, more strongly.

The guy ‘relented’, getting on the raft. He cried a little, but then someone tried to say something softer to him and he said, “I’m fine! I’m fine. I just had… I had my journals I was turning into a book. It’s all mud now.”

The guy got a lot of sympathy for that.

Jake told the guy, “You can be on the next trip out.”

The guy said nothing.

Isoko said to Mark, “You and I are here until the end, I suspect.”

Jake said, “You are. Thank you for assistance with Union, Mister Careed. Paladin Isoko.”

Mark felt a little bit better about everything. “No problem.”

“Glad to help!” Isoko said.

Everything seemed ‘good’ right now, for a certain definition of ‘good’, except for whatever horrors the demon would unleash once it was truly cornered, once the mud was gone and it couldn’t hide anymore. Inquisitor Jake and the other guys still seemed to think that this was absolutely winnable.

But what would happen afterward? Was Mark going to get blamed for the demon? The Mind Control woman had contracted with a demon in order to come after him.

… Mark carried on.

Soon, the fires overhead faded and the next group got to go. Treading-water guy shouted for joy and started crying when he got to go, to be lifted up with the others.

And the light box got smaller. The liquid buildings, rocks, and dead organic matter, all got thinner. More watery.

Demonic vectors appeared out of what had been harder mud, at the bottom of the light box. Mark blended those demons apart, and he found out something he hadn’t gotten a chance to realize quite yet. Something fun, for a change.

Much like how Mark expected to eventually be able to fly by spinning his adamantium fast enough to provide thrust in the air, but which he was incapable of doing right now due to his adamantiumkinesis still being ‘body locked’ to normal physical actions, normal physical actions were more than enough to push against the hard mud, to rise above it all. Mark realized that he might not be able to fly with his adamantium yet, but he could certainly swim really, really fucking fast.

With enough spinners and the extra adamantium, Mark actually ended up stepping out of the water for the first time in 3 hours. It was not easy, and Mark faltered a few times, but eventually he managed to turn his ‘caltrops’ into ‘propellers’.

Mark shoved his propellers at all the little demon monsters lurking below the multicolored ‘waters’ of the melted city block, churning up blood and viscera in the shallows the entire time, too.

Isoko grinned as she watched him ‘hover’, while Isoko merely stood above it all, her bloody sword already being purified by her own breathing. She looked away, still grinning—

Someone screamed about being attacked ‘underwater’ and the fire brigade was already there, helping the man directly, while Mark and Isoko supported everyone with Union healing and protection. It was not an abnormal exclamation of need. The demon liked to take bites out of people all the time, and leave behind hidden presents inside healed flesh, but Mark and many others in the light box could tell when a person had been infected.

As some specialized healers dug out a worm from the recently-attacked man, the man quietly asked for something from the healers, but Mark couldn’t hear what had been asked. The fire brigade burned demons, Jake moved the island across the box, and some healer nodded to the recently-attacked man, and the man looked relieved—

“I have a request!” the Mind Controller woman exclaimed, from where she stood at the far side of the light box, her voice cutting through all other noise. It was not her, of course. It was the demon pretending to be her. To use her body for its own desires.

The fire brigade set upon her instantly. She burned. It was not the first time the woman had spoken.

She was speaking to everyone who could possibly listen, all the time. In small mouths here. In whispered tunnels in the muck there. She hadn’t taunted Mark yet... Or maybe she had tried, but Mark was fast enough to kill those beasties before they could speak. Every time an unknown vector appeared within his range, he killed it.

And now the demon was taking form and openly stating the intention to want to talk to Mark, but from too far away. Mark couldn’t kill it when it was that far away.

Jake roared over the battle, “Expect the real fight to start soon, and then never stop even after we kill it! Demons aren’t like humans! They don’t live here! This is not their real life! Her real actions are counted in tiny measures over years and decades, and in the words of poison she says to you right now! Do not listen—”

She stepped out of the liquid stone on the other side of the light box, saying, “Five minutes to talk to Mark! And then I will peacefully depart this mortal coil!”

The fire brigade set upon her. She burned.

Mouths began to rise from the liquid remains of the city block, like bubbles, each of them speaking, “I have too many bodies and you’re beginning to fail to remove me fully from those I have infected. You will have to turn this entire trap into a death zone to be rid of me, and as soon as my mind vanishes from here—”

The fire brigade and Mark and everyone else with any ability at all to kill the mouths, all acted in concert, all of them burning and slicing and purifying whatever they could. Most people were brawnies, though, so they slapped the mouths, or stomped the mouths, breaking them as much as a slap could. Isoko was one of the few people with a weapon, and she used it to crush and slam into the larger monsters, splattering them when she could.

Mouths began to boil out of the mud, multiplying and expanding, eyes appearing, everything lined in red illumination, marked as demonic.

Jake yelled out, “Transition to big fight!”

Oh fuck, here it was.

The mouths continued to speak, “—I will activate the sleepers you didn’t manage to find out there. You cannot kill me. There was never any hope!”

Mark blendered bright red flesh as he floated above it all, and nothing was working well enough. He couldn’t touch the demonic lake with his Union at all. People screamed out orders, and Mark connected to them, everyone supporting each other. The lake opened with jaws and teeth to swallow people floating on the surface, to bite and chew and then spit out, alive yet on death’s door. Mark and Isoko and others frantically healed those people and killed those mouths, but those spitting mouths just reformed elsewhere and laughed.

And Mark’s hatred grew.

Or rather, he was facing his hatred he had locked away for the past several months. Over a year, really, since he had first met Addashield and then been locked into a coma, only to come out of it with magics and power that wasn’t given to him because it would help him, but because it would help Addashield, and then Addashield went and avoided all responsibility by dragonizing, and then—

It was all too much.

He had put all of his real thoughts about this particular Light Box situation onto the backburner for multiple reasons. The demon was a terror and it had almost killed everyone inside the box ten times over, but the demon was a known entity, and the various combinations of Powers and people in the room would eventually kill it. Already, the ‘wood’ part of the mush in the ‘water’ was gone, burned away, and the smoke was further burned away and purified as it exited the top of the kill container. All that was left in the ‘water’ was liquefied stone and other solid, unburnable materials.

All the trees were gone. All the plant matter was ash that already left on the wind.

And they were going to kill it.

But now, it was fighting back, for real, and Mark’s Union was stressed to keep everyone alive and healthy, for there wasn’t much ‘world’ to connect to, here in this Light Box.

Mark was stressed.

Even with Healthy Body and all his power, he was in a box with a demon. It was almost as though he was inside of the box that he had shoved all of his bad emotions into. It made him grimace to think about that, as he killed more and more demon spawn.

“Never any hope at all!” said the smaller mouths as tongues of razor teeth slipped out of the mud to strike at whoever they could reach, dragging them down into pits of horror. “Die die die!”

But the speedsters in the group were on the ball, and Mark supported those people and their rescue targets, while the fire brigade burned everything they could. Some of the liquid stone became liquid lava. It was still just a tier 0 material, though, so the demon’s bodies only got burned a little when they were inside the lava. Still, the lava further zoned the monster, reducing the space it could freely occupy.

Most of the stone atomized, turning to vapor that exited upward.

The kill box became an oven and Mark sweated as he breathed out impurity, into all the little plants he possibly could. But the plants were all dead under the onslaught of heat. There was no regrowing what did not exist at all.

Mark’s fury tracked with the heat of the kill box. He cut off grabbing hands with his adamantium, slicing through faces that tried to bite him as his hatred grew and grew. He watched as Isoko ripped a guy from a burning maw, kicking away teeth. Snapping jaws opened under her feet to swallow her legs and draw her into the liquid stone, but Jake was there, solidifying the stone under her feet and Isoko got out of the way of those big jaws, and then Mark was there, blendering the jaws to mush.

Some people flew into the air, trying to escape, but they had been doing that every so often and they couldn’t keep it up for long. They weren’t used to running their powers endlessly, and even if they were…

Mark couldn’t keep up with the demand on his own Union, on his own expelling of weakness and bolstering of astral bodies, to keep them going forever. His heart beat with resilience and weakness, black veins extending into the air, into the light box, much further than they usually extended.

Faint black lines connected him directly to Isoko, bolstering her the most.

But there was nowhere for the weakness to go. Not anymore.

Miasma gathered in the burning fires of the fire brigade, everywhere that something died and couldn’t be cleaned away. Purity could only do so much, and someone at the roof of the enclosure was already trying to keep the air clear but keep the demon contained. They weren’t cleaning the air enough, and Mark wasn’t able to stuff more miasma into the air, for the air was already saturated—

Something blossomed at the top of the light box, like an unfurling gold light.

Every single person and even the eyes of the demon turned upward.

Mark wasn’t sure how he heard him, but he heard Jake say, “The fuck?”

Power literally rained down like drops of liquid light, falling upon Mark and Isoko and everyone else in the light box. Mark felt rested and whole, and strong. All the miasma in the entire box vanished in a brilliant rain of light, and the demon screamed from every possible mouth as it retreated back below the liquid surface.

The ground began to strongly evaporate, to fall up and away, becoming little more than light that sunk into the firewall at the top of the cage. Here and there small birds and bugs, outlined in red light, tried to escape through the firewall, but they couldn’t leave that way, not unless they were killed and atomized.

Jake shouted out, “Now we kill it!”

Golden light dropped into the mud and the world rumbled as the lake evaporated, revealing roiling flesh that screamed even as it turned to spikes and teeth and began slamming against the white walls, hammers of bone and nails of teeth all cracking against the white light. All of it lay atop a white light floor, and every person dropped onto that floor.

Mark blended all the flesh he could reach. The fire brigade burned the ground. Isoko slashed with her borrowed kaiju blade, breaking apart the largest beasts, while every other brawny punched and kicked the ground, breaking what they could break. Some of them had managed to find other weapons in the muck of the Light Box and they used those weapons. The Grand Hotel had probably had an armory in its basement. People flew above the mess—

“No,” said the demon, calmly, almost too calmly. It did not scream anymore. It attacked the walls, and completely ignored the people killing it, attacking it. “This is not my end.”

Mark and everyone else tried to kill it faster.

“I am not dying here.”

If only he could connect to it. If only he could break through this damned resistance! Whatever it was that allowed the demon to keep itself separate, untouched by Union, Mark needed to break it.

“I have too much left to experience.”

Great hammers of bone rose from the flesh underfoot and started slamming into the walls, and into the people. A pillar of bone slammed into Mark’s right side and sent him flying, his adamantium blenders ripping out of the flesh. Something broke in his own body, in his arm, the flash of being moved so easily overshadowing all pain.

He healed his body and carved into the bone pillars that came for him, all the world seeming to fall to chaos and death. People screamed. Despair and rage warred with the need to kill, and Mark found himself lacking. His blades didn’t carve deep enough. The golden light had dispelled the miasma in the air, but Mark was already pumping more miasma into the air, and so was everyone else.

Mark needed to be stronger.

Mark needed to be more than he was, but he would never get there. He was going to die.

He was going to die.

Isoko was going to die.

Mark needed strength… Or, barring some sudden inspiration that wasn’t coming, he needed time. Time away from the battlefield. Time to think.

Mark breathed in alacrity for a moment of peace.

Time slowed, and Mark had a moment when he wasn’t fighting for his or another person’s life.

The demon wanted to talk to him, right? Yes. It had said that. After a moment of thinking, Mark decided he would allow for a talk later, if he didn’t figure out how to kill the thing, first. But first came the fight.

How to fight, though?

Right now, Mark’s primary problem was the size of the Light Box and being cut off from ways of dispersing miasma. Whatever the Light Box was doing, it was completely cutting them off from the outside world. The miasma was building again. Mark doubted they would be putting more of those ‘golden drops’ into the Light Box to clear everything up, because even Jake had been surprised by that. Mark suspected that someone was out there, helping them, in abnormally strong ways.

…. Mark looked at the demon he was fighting.

Eyes and legs and hands and maws. It was like melted people and half-formed monsters, everywhere. The Light Box was the floor and the walls, and the demon was the ground. Mark’s adamantium could easily rip apart the monster, and it even did damage to the walls, but Mark didn’t want to damage the walls too much.

He wanted to hurt the demon. He needed to weaken the demon and fight it directly, though, and adamantium alone wasn’t cutting it. Union wasn’t able to touch the demon at all.

His adamantiumkinesis was probably PL 082-ish right now, and his Union was somewhere around there, too, but Union couldn’t touch the demon for whatever reason. And it wasn’t just a Power Level reason.

Demons had Power Levels in the 90s in every category. It was that innate power that they shared with archmages when they bonded to an archmage. So, perhaps, the demon was able to simply flex its Power Level to ignore Mark’s Union?

That made some amount of sense.

Why, then, did adamantium still work to harm the demon? Why was adamantium used against kaiju, too? Both situations had the target as PL 90-ish in all categories.

Union could be used against unaware kaiju, though.

There were a lot of thoughts there, all of them coming together, in the moment.

Adamantium was a special biometal. The hardest metal in the Two Worlds. But it was more than that, wasn’t it. It was magically special. Unique. It wasn’t an element, like carbon or titanium. It was a magical metal.

And Mark made adamantium in his bones, in his blood. Just like Addavein, just like all adamantium-producing creatures, Mark made adamantium. He fucking hated Addavein, but the bastard was strong. All adamantium-producing creatures were strong, in all sorts of ways.

Mark was strong.

He was a vector of adamantium, and would crush all opposition with adamantium strength, in all ways, and not just in the strength of his actual adamantium. But in his Union, as well. In the Union of Healthy Body, Adamantiumkinesis, and Union itself, Mark would break all parts of the world he disliked, and that meant demons most of all.

Before, hours ago, Mark was wondering what ‘Adamant’ meant to him, specifically, and that’s what it meant.

Breaking everything that needed to be broken.

Mark’s breath of alacrity finished, the world sped up, blood and viscera and venoms and fire and lightning flying everywhere.

Mark’s Union beat with adamant, digging into the gore demon with a shattering of black lightning, breaking its attempt at separation from the Union Mark held in his soul. Lightning spread. The demon screamed a sonic wail, trying to break Mark and everyone still in the box with it. But they weren’t in the box with the demon anymore.

The demon was trapped in the box with Mark and his allies.

Mark tore at the demon with the full power of Union, giving it weakness in turn, and somehow his black lightning spread deeper into the monster, becoming lines of power that Mark used to shred the beast. Bone columns sliced to piles that decayed into Mark’s Union, becoming more black veins that broke and cut, just as much as they bolstered every human on Mark’s team.

Isoko raged at the monster, splashing apart skinless monstrosities that came for her with their claws and jaws open wide.

The fire brigade burned everything as they raced on the clear, glowing white floor, turning monster to miasma, that further flowed into black veins and got shoved into the monster all over again, weakening it further.

Mark was in charge of this space, and the demon was going to die—

“One minute! I’ll talk for one minute, and then leave!” the demon begged.

“Just die,” Mark spoke, and every other person in the Union spoke with him.

Mark’s black veins pulsed into the demon, rending vast swaths of him into blood.

The demon called, “Become an archmage linked to me, using the same contract that Kanda used for Addashield, and you will have it all!”

Mark raged.

But a cage of teeth and mouths surrounded him, trying to block him off from everyone else. Mark spun black veins and long lines of adamantium through that cage, breaking it fast, but not as fast as the cage reformed, and thickened—

And then spellwork appeared. Giant crystals of blue and black light, spun from eye stalks, shattered out of those ‘staffs’ and carved limbs from human bodies. People screamed—

The attacks stopped as soon as they started, as the demon said, “I can do worse!”

Mark faltered.

“I can do a lot worse,” the demon said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t, but I can. This Light Box only exists because I’m having fun right now. I’ll stop having fun and go for a genocide roll if you don’t stop and listen to me, Mark Careed. I came here for you.”

Giant eyeballs opened up in gore that stretched to the ceiling, each of them radiant with blue and black crystals, each of them focused on people who were already injured. The message was clear. They were guns pointed at heads. All at once, the entire fight went out of the group.

They saw their deaths.

The 50% survival rate had them on the wrong side of the coin flip.

“One minute, then you die without hurting anyone else, and leave this world behind,” Mark said, even as he continued to connect to the people, to heal them.

But Mark didn’t fight the demon, and the demon backed away, gore condensing, more and more eyes opening everywhere, though the black and blue spellwork crystals began to fade.

“Contract with me, using Kanda’s original contract but modified for personality, and I will help you kill Addavein,” the demon said. “I will help you resurrect your parents! I know of the High Elves of Endless Daihoon, and I can show you the path to those places. I know of the true secrets of Godhood and adamantium and demons of all kinds, and I will tell you those secrets. I am the demon Leash, and I would have you become a god—”

Jake yelled, “Don’t listen to him! Don’t—”

But then the demon’s body became teeth that grabbed the paladin and dragged him away.

The demon did not kill the man, though. Jake’s vector was still there and Mark still connected to him, keeping him alive and mostly unscratched by those gnawing jaws. Jake would survive. He’d heal.

Isoko whispered, “Mark.”

The demon did nothing against Isoko.

The demon continued, “I would have you become that which will remake the world, evaporate the Veil, heal and inoculate people with magic so that Curtain Protocol does not need to exist, and so much more. All good things, too! I would have you become the true superhero that I know you want to be; not this villain that your brother is making you become. I will do all of this and more, and I will not require you to kill people like in Kanda’s original contract.

“I would have you kill Addavein, and take your revenge upon him, for I have a desire to end Kanda’s line, forever more. And not just him, but everyone who allowed your parents to die, there in that bunker. They should have been better protected! Holy Mother Julia Garin and Detective John Smith and Orange City are all culpable for your parents’ deaths, and they should all pay! But most of all, one above all deserves the most ire.

“Addashield!

“I will tell and show you how to separate dragons back into demons and humans. Once separated, you will bring back Addashield so that you can claim your revenge upon Addashield himself. And I will tell you how to permanently kill demons, so that you can do what I want, too:

“Revive and then kill Kanda. Permanently!

“Ending her astral line forever!”

Mark felt himself shudder; there, in a sphere of gnashing teeth and unseen mouths, everything glowing red and bloody, Mark felt a horror that had nothing to do with the gore all around.

He wanted to say yes.

But...

The demon continued, “Of course you do not trust me right now, but now you know my name. You know my desires. You may call upon me whenever you wish and I will give you tastes of power, Mark. As a start, here is one such taste:

“You, specifically, are using your Powers all wrong.

“I was ready to talk to you about using Adamant in your Union, but you figured that one out, though you have a long way to go with that one. So here’s a better hint, further along the path. Do you know why adamantium is the strongest metal? Why you expel black veins? Why the metal is black?

“Because adamantium is mana of a certain type, made solid through the actions of life and crystallization, and it is a mana that is in your very soul, Mark Careed! Solid and unyielding! Adamantium is crystallized mana!

“Now ponder the meaning of that for the rest of your life!”

The demon laughed.

Mark had questions but none of them were for the demon, except one. “Who was the woman you killed to get to me?”

“Mary Getty. Adopted mother of the Brawny Peter Getty that you cut the arm off of, and who died to a water tiger monster because he was wounded. Mother of the Ice Shaper, Cassandra Getty, who died to a speedy rabbit when Peter wasn’t there, for he was their usual front line. Mother to the Mesmer Victor Getty, who succumbed to the kaiju fall, when Mary and Victor were hiding out north of Wolf Bayou, trying to decide what to do next,” Leash said. “Mary survived by a miracle, and then she heard you were instrumental in killing the kaiju, and she went to Thrashtalon looking for solutions to her rage. And now we are here.”

Shock.

Dismay.

A rage of his own.

Mark put his rage into a box, and said, “It’s been over a minute. Kill yourself and leave.”

“Kill me yourself, if you can! I’ll even let everyone else leave, first!”

“No. We had a deal. I listen for a minute and then you kill yourself. Honor it and begone, demon.”

The walls undulated, and teeth fell away, revealing mouths that laughed and decayed. The mouths laughed and laughed and laughed! And the demon died. Red scanner-light that was marking everything demonic, began to turn off, as flesh turned to black sludge. Mark beat his heart with purity and impurity, erasing the sludge all around him, crashing through the death of Mary Getty’s mutated body—

Isoko broke through the black sludge around Mark, exclaiming, “Mark!”

Mark stood at the bottom of a clean space in the black lake that was the demon, his black veins connecting him to everyone, though his power of adamant was fading. There wasn’t an enemy to shove the weakness into right now, so Mark’s power faded, and he allowed it to fade. He said to Isoko, “Hey, Isoko.”

Isoko stepped onto the spot of light with Mark, asking, “Is it really dead?”

Mark looked around, saying, “Its vector is gone and the black stuff is vanishing, too.”

Paladin Jake was there in the middle of the field, black sludge falling off of him. Everyone stood at the bottom of black-sludge web-like scaffolding, all of it decaying, all around them. The spellcaster eyes were gone, and now it was just cleanup. Jake called at the fire brigade to start burning again, and flames licked into the sky. Black smoke filled the air, but it didn’t touch any of the people.

Mark said to Isoko, “Unless it’s hiding and also a liar, it’s gone. Based on it wanting future events to happen between it and I, if it lied to me, to us, right now, then I wouldn’t believe it ever again, so I doubt it lied. It should be gone.”

Paladin Jake was there, saying, “Don’t ascribe to demons human ideas.”

Mark’s box of rage almost opened.

Mark snapped at him, “FUCK OFF. I am not in the goddamned fucking mood right n—” Other people were looking his way. Mark said to Jake, “Sorry. I didn’t mean…” He stopped talking.

Jake looked at Mark for a moment longer, then he turned and started talking to the group about preparations to leave the Light Box, and what would come next.

Jake was suspicious. He was not the only one.

Mark overheard the fire brigade leader saying, “What did I say at the beginning of this. What did I say? They all even acknowledged it. Don’t go talking to the demon, no matter what.”

Mark continued to Unionize in silence, with Isoko and her giant mithril sword beside him. She was silent, too.