Chapter 453

For a moment, Mark was in the middle of a wide open field under a dark sky. This was just the first blip, then.

Mark kept himself small, his astral body tucked in tight, as he told Quark, “Prepare for speed combat.”

“Yes, sir. I am in contact with Aluatha Command Center. They have allowed me access to many different overwatch channels. We have another 40 seconds to the second teleport, to our destination, which is located over D’Cuba; AKA Terrible Monster Island. Tertiary destinations include an area south of the Great Gate of Okuana, AKA the Strait of D’Gibraltar, and several possible locations in the middle of the D’Atlantic Ocean. Many teams are being deployed to many locations. We are going to be on our own.”

Mark breathed in the Good and exhaled the Bad.

Cool night air breezed through his hair, dark grasses wafting in the wind, while the sky was full of lambent pinks, greens, blues, and whites. The auroras looked particularly vibrant tonight. The moon was getting full, most of it illuminated in stark white and deep greys, while radiant gold shone through the cracked shell of that lunar surface. It was pretty bright. It was a good night for a fight.

Some bright Aluathan city lay on a mountain over there. Mark had no idea where he was, exactly, but he was clear of any danger.

He expected to be shot instantly, and for some backtrace of spellwork to hit where he had come from. He hoped that city was going to be okay. It was probably going to be fine. What was the worst thing that they could throw at him, anyway? Probably Death Magic.

A hovership couldn’t possibly have that much Death mana to matter, but it probably did have some.

Death mana was pretty dangerous, though. Replacing the entire astral body of a person with something that was incompatible with their body and existence was a pretty good way to kill someone. It had even worked on Mark once, but his witch-connection to the Empire and his soulhouse had protected him from that true death.

Empires figured out how to kill people that needed killing, though. Just take a look at Buckler and Lancer. They had been prepared. They had almost got him—

Quark said, “We’ll be coming in from the side. 2 kilometers distant. I have a visual on the carrier now.”

A holographic image flexed into Mark’s view, rapidly resolving into a 200-meter-long hover carrier. It was on the smaller size, comparatively. Larger ships than this one went through the gate at the settlement all the time.

This ship had half-deployed bright purple half-rings floating high, high above the ship. Only two of them were up and active. Two of them were still being deployed. Mark mostly recognized them as hover rings, like the larger ones that encircled the transport ship’s front and back. These half-hoverrings looked like half-moons, floating like balloons in the night.

The prismatic beam was scheduled to come from Longwater, so it had to bend around half the world and travel something like 11,000 kilometers, mostly high above the surface. Those half-moons were the gravity magic that would bend the beam. Mark found the whole thing easy to imagine, but impossible to believe that it would actually happen at all.

“Gods,” Mark breathed out, “Could they really bend it that much?”

“The theory is sound and there are historical records of Okuana bending their beams to strike nearer targets, but this is new tech, invented and never deployed about 50 years ago,” Quark said. “It is likely much better than what they used to have.”

“30 years into the great peace of post-Reveal was the last time Okuana shot a bent beam, huh, so… fuck…”

Mark let it go.

Mark took a breath, and he waited.

Some monster lay in wait in some grasses up ahead. A bunny. Horned, it seemed. Mark easily ignored it, but it had been prowling around Mark ever since he appeared. And then it leapt at Mark—

Fire and death ripped across Mark, destroying everything.

The fire dissipated and Mark stood unharmed and falling in the sky over the dark ocean.

He had blipped.

Mark breathed in Alacrity and breathed out Slowness, speeding up time slowly. Not all the way. He didn’t want anyone to suddenly return-from-death at true speedster levels. Thinking about it now, that was kinda funny; David had once told Mark to never go at full speed even when speed was necessary, because you always needed to have something left in the tank; something that no one expected. How nice for Mark to remember that , huh!

Anyway.

The sky was dark and full of auroras and the broken moon high overhead, but at a different position. A little left of where it had been; closer to the horizon.

The hovership Quark had shown Mark was now real and hovering 2.3 kilometers away, according to Quark’s sensors.

A single trail of illuminated, golden-black fire-honey mana missiles were headed Mark’s way, shot from the tip of some spire in the middle of the ship, arcing through the sky on more or less a single invisible thread, linked right to Mark’s existence. It was basic auto-targeting mana missile artillery, probably based on the Bolt spell, though Mark had no idea what the mana-type was. Maybe something Death but also Fire aligned. It was expensive as fuck —the settlement couldn’t afford that shit at all— but it was also the cheapest you could get when it came to high-end, antipersonnel weaponry.

Everything about the mobile relay station in front of Mark screamed EXPENSIVE, so yeah, this was a big damned deal. This was a real, strategic asset, and it seemed to be floating over the coast of some island down there. D’Cuba? Probably. The land down there was dark, the ship was dark, and the only illumination was the auroras all overhead, the moon, and the fire.

The burning spells struck Mark and sank in as much as they could, doing nothing to him at all except for burning on his webweave and incinerating it away. The Death mana sunk into him very slightly before Mark’s Clean House brushed that away, the Death leaving him like a particularly purple tinge to the black veins in his astral body.

Visual obscurity was Mark’s real issue, but right now it was just a single auto-turret hammering at him. Quark tagged 17 more black-fire fireballs headed up the thread of targeting, at Mark. They had already stopped firing, and it had only been 5 seconds of battle, so far.

The faster AIs and people on that ship —since there were certainly a few of them, at least— were either seeing that Mark was fine, or they were gearing up something more.

.

.

Mark flicked his astral body out to his full range, bits of adamantium gripping far, and then he turned a few of those bits of adamantium into air brakes, expanding them into umbrellas a hundred meters away. He ripped himself through the burning sky, toward the dark ship. One anchor after another. Yank, yank, yank. Mark burned the sky in his passing, leaving the deathfireballs behind as he tore toward the ship itself, aiming at the large cables that connected the half-moons of the four deployed ‘beam benders’.

Those beam benders floated about 75 meters above the ship, one at the front and back, and two closer together in the middle. The entire ship was geostationary, its normal twin hoverrings giving of a characteristic scatter-glow pattern that said that the ship wasn’t moving anywhere at all, anytime soon—

Mark suddenly fell down through the sky, pushed on gravity too strong to deny, his front tethers of adamantium airbrakes snapping out of his control. It was not pleasant, and all of Mark’s body turned solid black in response to the real threat, his weight magnifying and making the problem even worse.

Quark identified the problem in Mark’s tumbling vision, highlighting a pair of tiny tuners that had stuck out of the side of the ship and aimed his way. Those purple-tinged tuners had created a bubble of massive gravity around his body.

Mark dropped a hundred meters in a fraction of a second, so he Unioned harder with Alacrity and Slowness, moving faster, turning his fall into a directed dive. He was not fast enough to avoid the high-gravity bubble, for the targeting systems were either automatic, AI-based, or speedster-enhanced. Mark grabbed on the air better, pulling on larger gatherings of atmosphere, yanking himself upward with a PL Shaper strength that stretched his body, spaghettifying him—

He snapped out of the gravity field and suddenly he was moving faster than the targeting systems could keep up. Mark slammed the forward umbrella forward even more, splitting it into several air anchors, slamming into the hull of the ship—

The ship discharged electricity, like living lightning. That electricity followed Mark’s astral body to his real body and burned him with Death and Lightning mana. Mostly Lightning mana. It did nothing but reveal the ship in all its glory.

It had been running dark. Now, all the lights came on at once.

It was a dryad ship, and now that Mark was close enough he could see the whorls of branches that made up its hull and the giant green eyes that lined the bottom. Those eyes locked onto Mark, the dryad’s vector unfurling like a hidden dragon, which is what it had been. Mark was pretty sure Quark’s initial images had shown a white hull, but that had been an illusion.

Mark slammed adamantium anchors into kaiju-strength wood, connecting with Union to a kaiju-sized being that had been hiding itself as much as possible. The dryad unfurled with light and a whole lot of speed-infused lightning the very second it felt Mark’s intrusive Union worm into its astral body.

Mark swallowed that speedy lightning, making that speed his own, yanking himself forward, into the kaiju, spilling out adamantium blades that tore the sky with fire long before Mark carved into the kaiju’s body.

The dryad screamed as it came apart into roots and branches, pulling away from Mark, revealing a shining silver ship’s hull below it. Ah! It had been hiding itself on the hull. This, then, looked a lot like the ship Mark had been sent to kill—

Something sharp and vicious tore out of the hull a hundred meters away, as the dryad pulled away. Quark caught it before Mark did, but Mark looked that way and saw a hail of cutting-somethings pulling his way. It was a person surrounded by Shaper-stuff. Maybe ice? The guy had a glowing belt that shimmered some sort of golden aura over his entire body, the world falling away around him as he came at Mark with speed.

The guy was wearing speedster gear, he was a Water Shaper, and none of that mattered because sudden recognition blossomed in the soldier’s eyes as he met Mark’s gaze, as he recognized the black adamantium Mark was carving into the hull. The guy flinched hard, suddenly reeling back, fear overcoming all conscious thought.

Not a concern, then.

Mark ripped into the hull, trying to avoid some vectors he felt inside, though his speedy movements and ripping power probably caused a whole bunch of casual injury. That didn’t matter. These people were soldiers. They knew what they were getting into.

Mark made his way to the central axis of the ship, to where he guessed the power core probably was. Quark helped, analyzing the stuff Mark tore through, which was good, because Mark reached the center and he found nothing. Quark pointed an arrow forward along with a question mark. Maybe it was that way, maybe not.

Fire blazed as Mark ripped forward, through metal and wood and dryad, aiming at one of the many power cores the ship probably had—

Bright, blazing hot light. It was there, right in front of Mark, long before he realized he was there. What kind of core was it? Nuclear, maybe. But also crystallized mana. Not Death mana, thankfully. Wherever the Death core was it was not here. Mark would find that one later.

The core was mana, so Mark drank in the core, switching to a Full Union of Glory and Fear.

People pissed themselves, the dryad withered trying to slink off of the side of the ship, and Mark became even brighter than the core he suddenly, violently drained of mana. The ship disintegrated around him and Mark helped it along with a violence of adamantium; cutting, churning, carving—

Someone made a terrible decision a few tens of meters away.

Dark Death ripped out of some place in the ship a good 50 meters away, detonating down the entire central corridor of the ship, flooding every cargo space and room and especially the core where Mark stood, still Glorious but now suddenly half-dead, his lower half fallen apart and his arms broken and breaking even more. Death nipped at his soul and Mark closed himself off, concentrating on Adamant and Ethereal, stabbing into all that Death mana with a dissipating Union.

The dryad was still there, just beyond sight, clinging to the ship.

Mark swam through fiery Death, breaking the surface of the ship and making some rapid conclusions.

The ship was fine. The 4 floating half-moons of gravity bending power were still up there, floating above the ship. The dryad had grown up the connecting cables of all four benders, trying to manually hold it all together. The ship’s hoverrings were still fully active and fully locking the ship into geo-stationary position; Mark could tell based on that particular sparkliness that all stationary-locked rings shared.

Some necromancers or otherwise were still active and alive down in those Death-filled depths, and the Death was soaking into Mark, trying to break him apart. Some ‘Death Shapers’, which was not a real thing, were inside the miasma and trying to funnel it into Mark. They were not actually present except in spirit, otherwise Mark could have killed them easily. They were kinda ethereal, though, and that made them easy targets for Mark’s distinct ability to harm ethereal things by switching up his Union of Adamant and Ethereal.

The nearest gravity semi-circle was about 35 meters that way.

Mark slammed out a Union of Adamant and Ethereal, vibrating it back and forth, dropping four people out of the Death miasma all around him. They’d take too long to recover before Mark’s main job was done, so Mark ripped through the air, toward the nearest ‘gravity moon’.

The dryad wrapped tighter around the cable, preparing for Mark with all of its strength, its roots and branches suddenly 5 meters thick and getting thicker, Death soaking into the wood and strengthening it in some dangerous way.

Mark didn’t care about that.

Mark made a 5-string adamantium garrote, wrapped the entire cable and dryad tendril, and then he started twisting faster than the speed of thought, ripping through half—

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The world filled with prismatic light, coming from over the horizon.

It was as thick as a train, and bright as a thousand suns. It was the light of the prismatic lines that ran throughout all of the elven lands in Endless Daihoon, but unshielded. Unleashed.

Mark ripped through the entire cable. The dryad tried to hold it in place, rapidly growing over and around Mark’s cutting monowires, locking the cable in place, but Mark Unioned with Growth and Decay, suddenly bulging with muscle and adamantium as the dryad suddenly withered in turn. Mark ripped through the cable and the power system that attached it to the ship—

The prismatic line overhead bent, running over the half-moons of gravity magic, squealing the world like a metal shearing, like a train derailing, or rather staying directly on course—

And then the cable Mark had cut through was broken and moving fractions of meters—

The prismatic line suddenly derailed, for real, untethered gravity spiralling it, uncontrolled, in every direction, like molten crystal shrapnelling.

Something caught Mark, splashing away half of his body, knocking him out of Union.

Time sped up as Mark regained consciousness a fraction of a moment later, body burning away in Prismatic fire.

Massive crystals of Prismatic mana splashed through the ship, like metal and wood and people were nothing more than suddenly-boiled water. Explosions took away Mark’s sense of up and down, and then Mark was in the superheated water. He was in the ocean below? He was in the ocean! How the fuck did he get down there?

Down was the ground.

Up was the surface of the water.

And beyond the water, was a prismatic apocalypse. That apocalypse reached the water’s surface and Mark was already rushing away, Unioning with Alacrity and Slowness, drinking deep of the prismatic everything that the fire overhead supplied and running faster, swimming faster.

The sky was crashing down and everything was turning into splashed nothings.

A subjective minute later and Mark rose from the surface of the water 5 kilometers away from where a prismatic line of crystalline light danced across the surface of the world at a steep angle, scraping away everything and then slamming up and down, directed like a stream of molten fire from some far, far destination. It was actively killing everything that was there, if the distant targeting systems could find it—

The line of prismatic light swung Mark’s way.

He kept running, far to the side, flying fast, prismatic line chasing him—

“Pull in, sir,” Quark said, in speed-time. “Teleport ready.”

Mark pulled in fast.

A blip took him before the crystalline light could.

Mark appeared on the grasses far outside of the Winter Ball party. No one was around him, which was good. Mark was currently a whole bunch of himself, so he took a moment to condense, to store away adamantium that he didn’t need right now, to become himself, to stand tall on the grass and to make himself some temporary adamantium clothes, and to look at the sky with everyone else currently standing outside of the Winter Ball.

There was a giant rent carved through the top of Domal’Takela’s dome, and a splash of prismatic fire far below everything else.

Mark breathed, almost hyperventilating. Could he even hyperventilate anymore? He had no idea. He knew nothing at all, in that moment. All he had were questions.

The attack had been aimed at Domal’Takela. Not at the Obelisks.

Quark analyzed fast.

The attack had missed everything. It had struck about a kilometer to the side of the main party.

It still obliterated all that was over there, in that field, and quite a few people who had been outside when it came through the roof of Domal’Takela.

Mark crashed to his knees, thanking the gods, hating the Godking, and sobbing just a little for the knowledge that everyone he loved could have just died. But they didn’t. Because he had been fast enough. He had altered the course of the beam, just a little.

Holy fuck.

Everyone at the party was freaking out, and Mark was among them, trying to find his people—

And then Isoko dropped out of the sky and Mark was hugging her, and Eliot got Mark some clothes and Mark panicked, asking where Addavein was, and where Lola was, and where Tulo was, because those were the only three people he didn’t see.

“Lola is fine,” Isoko said, “She’s with Tulo and Derek, trying to respond to help heal the people who were outside when the beam hit. A few people were vapo—” Isoko’s voice cracked. “Vaporized.”

“Oh gods,” Mark said, faltering a little.

Sally steadied him, looking furious at everyone but there was nowhere to direct her anger. The enemy was half a world away. He had struck from beyond the horizon—

“Walaria has left you a message, sir,” Quark said.

Mark’s team focused on him

“Play it.”

The first thing Mark recognized was that Walaria did not give him this message. The voice was AI, and obvious about it. Walaria didn’t have time to talk to Mark directly, but she had had time enough to authorize this message.

“The attack was not as-calculated. You were sent to one of several nodes necessary to disrupt the beam. Most nodes failed. Addavein lives, and he will return when possible. Most people did not live, or succeed. Thank you for succeeding. We will not allow such a thing to go unanswered. Prince Doomo’s talks with Nobody Important and Dominant are now revealed. If any honor is left in this world, Nobody Important will act on behalf of Aluatha as he has agreed to act, since Dominant has attacked through Systemic means.”

There were screens here and there at the party.

Every single one flickered with a bright red banner of Aluatha that then resolved into Prince Doomo, standing before the camera.

“On behalf of Aluatha, and for all good, free peoples of the Two Worlds, I call upon Aluatha’s compact with Nobody Important, as he has chosen to call himself, to enact a stop against further aggression from the Godking Dominant through his misuse of the System. Please tear down the Pyramids of Longwater, and prevent this weapon from being deployed again.”

Then the flag returned to the screen.

It fluttered for a little bit—

The cameras opened to a scene half a world away.

Isoko gripped Mark’s hand tight.

A night sky full of auroras loomed over a trio of bright white pyramids. The image was staticky, as though taken from a hacked, closed circuit network. There was barely any sound at all, and what sound there was seemed to be coming from another room, just beyond sight. It sounded like a rushing hate. A kaiju, somewhere out there. Mark instantly knew that this was live footage, and that Doomo if Nobody Important was going to—

The sky rumbled, a yellow aurora splitting open into a bright, draconic eye, and then molten titans descended, coalescing into cleaving warriors that splashed the pyramids apart, moving too fast for things that were so very, very large. The world detonated into crystalline light, a voice coming through for just a moment—

THAT IS NOT WHAT THESE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE USED FOR, DOMINANT. THIS IS INTOLERABLE.

—and then the sound was gone. The visuals were gone, too.

The moment stilled.

And then Prince Doomo came back on the screen, looking too relieved. He bowed and ducked away.

Emperor Salvation, still wearing his Winter Ball outfit, took the screen, eyes flickering with blue fire as he said, “Aluatha is once again at war with Godking Dominant and his ilk. We hold no enmity toward the people he has crushed under his roots, and so we offer asylum to all citizens of Okuana, and to those paladins and priests and people of the Pantheon that he has already aggrieved so dearly. The free world is always at risk from tyrants, and Godking Dominant has proven, once again, that he is not human, and he never was, no matter what sort of ghosts he claims to be part of himself, and his history. The tyrant tree can never be trusted with power over any people, at all, ever again. Further information to follow.”

The broadcast cut. The red and black flag of Aluatha went back up.

Mark stood there for a long moment, staring… and then he got moving. To where? To do what? He wasn’t sure—

And then, for a moment, he saw Lola far afield, standing in step with other healers in white, healing some nobleman who had terrible burns over his entire body, and he saw Jessie Stills, surrounded by guards and his father, casting Resurrection on piles of dust and bringing back yet another person from death. Mark felt the moment like it was becoming a cultural monolith, seeming to embed into the nobility of Aluatha.

This was real. This had happened.

Someone was screaming out in fear of their dead father. Someone was sobbing. More were stunned. Some people were moving to escape, to leave before something else happened. Some were organizing. The Witches’ Welcome had broken. The Winter Ball was no longer a safe space, where people could organize for the betterment of the Empire, and instead old rivalries, old fears, old grudges came to the surface. Someone screamed in someone else’s face. Someone pulled a knife.

Mark softly said, “Death to All Monsters. Death to the Godking.”

Sally tipped over into absolute rage as she grew two meters more and roared, “DEATH TO ALL MONSTERS! DEATH TO THE GODKING!”

Isoko screamed to the sky, and soon others took up the call.

Mark Called out across all of Domal’Takela, his voice joined to those of all others, shaking the broken glass overhead and the sky beyond, as they all roared together, “Death to all monsters! Death to the Godking!”

The fire of war blossomed.

Mark got to healing people, to helping Jessie resurrect faster, to bringing people together, as he could.

- - - -

Mark stood in a small room across from Walaria, who was still wearing her silver-chain-enhanced witch’s wardrobe. She had many wounds on her body, but all of them were surface wounds.

Addavein stood next to Mark, and he was wounded, too. He held onto his side while a dangerous-looking black spot undulated under his neck and across half of his face. He had appeared a few hours after the strike had hit Domal’Takela, and he had not gotten much better since then, but he had assured Mark that was fine. The problem, as Addavein had explained it, was some sort of soul-replacement technique. The only way to heal this was time.

For now, the two of them were ‘reporting for duty’.

Walaria said, “I need to know where you stand.”

“With Aluatha,” Addavein said.

“With Aluatha,” Mark said, affirming his choices in life.

“Okay. You’re both on backline defense, as per normal operating procedure for our High Talents. Addavein; your progenitor has been at war with Okuana before, so we’ll allow you to have semi-autonomy. Tell us if you have ideas of what needs to be done, and I’ll make it work. For now, the generals are mustering the army, and we want you, Mark, to help make that army strong. The settlement will be more important than ever due to the gate, so you will both remain there. Do either of you have anything you need to say, right now?”

Mark asked, “What about Jessie Stills? I helped him out there as he worked hard to Resurrection people, and he seemed grateful and furious and fulfilled. In light of that… Does he still want the responsibility of his Power, or are we giving it to someone else?”

“He desires his Power, and we may ask you to give him another one. For now, Cade Waterson is healed up to PL 80 and rising fast, and he’s watching over him. We feel they might be a good match for asset and knight.” Walaria asked, “Anything else?”

Mark shook his head.

Addavein said, “Fighting Godking Dominant will require dragons. Consider overtures to Kabberjaw.”

“The official story is that we’re never doing that. The real story is that we’re considering it. Say no more on this topic, please.”

“What’s the immediate goal?” Mark asked.

“For now, the goals are securing the gate and our unfettered access to Earth’s resources and people. Dominant has already made inroads into New Tokyo’s gate, trying to enforce sanctions from a 100 kilometer-wide radius blockade. That will lose him just as much support as his first strike, which is not nearly as much support as we wished he would lose. We might go help Crystal Tower to break that blockade, but Crystal Tower is hoping for a peaceful resolution to that blockade. Events are developing. For now, go home and secure the gate. I’ll have Aurora give you specific first-strike missions against any incoming dangers, when we find them.”

- - - -

On the flight back, Eliot quietly told Mark, “I want Necromancer.”

“Okay,” Mark said. “How about right now?”

Eliot’s eyes went wide and he rapidly said, “Not right ! But… soon.”

Mark nodded.