Rowena Thobb hadn’t seen the light of day, for real, in 25 years. It had been the safest way to keep her under control, for her Skill was Annihilating Light, and that meant death to everyone nearby if light ever touched her skin. She still remembered standing in the courtyard of her family’s home, where all of the Thobbs had left for Tutorial and then come back a few hours later, or not, and accepting the System prompt to take the Tutorial. Back then she had thought it was a disgrace when her older cousins had failed the Tutorial, and never come back. She loathed them, cursing their names secretly while everyone else had cried. Aunt Lissy had fallen into a deep depression and almost taken her life when she lost her boy. And so, when Rowena had accepted the Tutorial prompt, she had told Aunt Lissy something that she regretted for the last 32 years.
“Forget those failures. When I come back, you’ll see true brilliance in the Thobb household once again.”
The Tutorial itself had been a minor event. Nothing compared to hunting monsters around the summer estate, or joining small forays into the forests with her older cousins who were not disappointments.
And then she had touched that prismatic mana.
Only 30 minutes gone! She had been so proud.
She came back.
Almost every single person was still there, waiting for her to come back in record time. Her father, her two mothers, her baby cousins sitting on her uncle’s laps, and her sister and brothers, standing in the back and eating snacks from the trays set out by the help. Aunt Lissy was gone.
Rowena only got to see them for a moment, to think that maybe she had been too harsh on Aunt Lissy, and then her Arch Skill had activated.
Annihilating Light.
Her Power Level had been 1 for a second, and then it climbed to 30 and then 70, and then 98. That’s what the Empire’s people had told her, later, when they found her curled up in the air, sobbing and unable to control her Skill at all, because that was the order in which everyone she knew had died. The babies went first, and then the pre-Tutorial younger sister, and then most everyone else, and then finally, her father, looking at Rowena for one long moment as he tried to curl her light away from him, from others, but he failed, and then Rowena’s Skill tore through him, as well.
Rowena had been on a cocktail of suppressants for most of her life, and living in the dark. Aunt Lissy had visited her a few times to scream at her, and every time she did Rowena knew she deserved it—
Trace knocked on the side of her iron box, her voice transferred through the speakers, as she said, “You ready, Miss Thobb?”
“He’s gotta have a !” Rowena stressed, yet again.
Trace had been Rowena’s handler for years, but she was young. Too young.
Trace said, “Steps have been taken, and you’re on the highest medically allowed shavallian we can give you. Say, you see that last episode of Worm God?”
Rowena sighed a little, laying against the side of her mobile fortress as it spidered across the ground, barely disturbing her at all. The chair was comfortable, and even being in the full dark Rowena had long ago learned how to see with other spectrums. If she focused, the world beyond her space turned greyscale, but she tried not to do that because even that little bit of exposure brought up her light levels, and then the danger started.
“No. I want to see it in… in full color, or not at all.”
What did color even look like, anymore?
Concern slipped into Trace’s voice, “You’re on shavallian, Miss Thobb. Highest possible levels of it, too. I made sure of it so that you could see the show. It’s the finale.”
“I know, and thank you, dear, but I’m conserving my light-exposure for today.” Rowena tried not to be too hopeful because that way lay destruction, as she said, “If this doesn’t work then I’ll watch it in a few days, when my light levels go back down. It’ll be something to look forward to.”
“… Okay, Miss Thobb.”
The trip into wherever she was going was quiet, the gentle tap of the spiderbot’s feet against the ground like soft whumps into Rowena’s dark space.
Trace moved Rowena’s spider-cell for her, being extra careful, as always, and Rowena occasionally blinked in the greyscale to see what was happening. They stopped at a back entrance to some building, and then Trace spoke with someone who was not Mark Careed, but who worked for him, so Rowena didn’t look too much at the guy at all. Soon, a few different voices spoke of logistics… and Rowena was sure that two of those voices were the same.
She blinked in the greyscale to see the sandy, flowing world beyond her darkness, and she saw two people who were the same. A third same-person was behind them, at the door to the room. Rowena huh’d, and shut her vision off again. A multiman, then? That was neat. Hardly ever see that sort of Skill in the Two Worlds, though there was a multiman character on Days Of Our Times. That had been a great show years and years ago—
“And this must be Rowena Thobb. Hello, Ma’am.”
Rowena’s heart shuddered as she recognized that deep, rumbling voice from The Documentary of Endless Daihoon and the Battle For Memphi and the other small shows he had done. Hope kindled in Rowena’s chest, once again, and then she viciously killed as much of that hope as she could. And yet, Trace had told Rowena about all the soldiers out there with new and changed Skills, and Walaria herself had spoken to Rowena about removal of her Skill, and… And a bit of hope remained.
Rowena’s voice echoed in the small space of her vehicle as she said, “Hello, Mister Careed. I have heard a lot about you and…” Hope died, finally crushed enough to kill it, and so Rowena simply asked, “Can you actually do this? Remove my Annihilating Light?”
“I’ve been able to remove a bunch of Powers from others, so I don’t see why Annihilating Light should be any different.”
The boy was too cocky by half.
Rowena glared at the dark in front of her, snapping, “I’ve had Skillers try their hand before at tempering it, or destroying it, but it rebuilds itself and me, and the Skiller was NOT REBUILT at all. Two people have died trying this, Mister Careed. I do want you to stress yourself if the need arises for you to simply escape. I will NOT have your death on my conscience at all. Do you understand me?”
“I understand perfectly. Your range is 50 meters, and I’ve already surrounded both of us with a shell of adamantium an inch thick. It’s a bit dark here, but I was told you could see just fine.”
Rowena flickered her vision to greyscale, and sure enough a layer of something truly impervious lay out there, about 10 meters away. It was adamantium, for sure. Rowena knew adamantium on sight. She also knew Mark Careed on sight, because Mark was adamantium, and also… Mark was hope. In reality, he was a void to her sense of sight, the stray photons and neutrinos in the air out there barely making any waves at all, except when they struck and left Mark and the adamantium shell behind.
“Would you like to come out of there?”
“… I don’t think I should. You can do it from there, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can, and I already feel your astral body touching mine, so this is all I need. Are you ready?”
“… I’ll have Healthy Body in turn, yes?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Healthy Body would have been a disgrace in the Thobb family a lifetime ago.
The Thobbs were dead.
Rowena stilled her heart as much as she could, which was not much at all, and she softly said, “I’m ready.”
It was a warmth.
And then it was like the eyes of a dragon god staring at her, filling her mind with horror, with ice and fire in her veins, and then ripping apart her very soul, taking away the sun and giving her a token pittance in return. It was a degradation. It was a horror. Rowena couldn’t move. She couldn’t think—
And then it was over.
Rowena shuddered, breathing hard… breathing easy, wondering if that really was everything—
Her vision was gone.
It was too dark.
She was trapped in a box and she couldn’t see the controls on the spiderbot and screams ripped out from her throat as she remembered the years of true darkness after the Tutorial where all the faces of her family crawled at her, and visions formed in the blindness that was her life.
Mark was saying things about not panicking, but Rowena was beyond that. She was panicking—
And then a soft clicking and then a ripping tore off the roof of her spider bot and light flowed in. Cursed, terrible light. Oh gods, she was going to kill someone else again. It was too bright! She was already killing someone, wasn’t she!
“NO NO NOOOOO—!”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Mark said, overhead, “You’re okay. You’re not killing anyone anymore, and Healthy Body should already be fixing your eyes, but I’m helping. Can you see me?”
Rowena had expected Mark’s voice to blast away in disintegrating glows, but he kept talking, and that’s what made her finally look up, instead of cowering away.
Mark was up there, beyond the square meter of space, looking like a black shadow surrounded by light. And then Rowena’s eyes adjusted. It was Mark. He was dressed in white, his skin was pale, and his irises and short black hair were blacker than dreams. Mark held a hand down to her, asking, “Would you like to see the sky?”
Rowena had no idea what happened for the next few minutes.
She ended up on a bench, sitting beside Trace, her assistant for the last few years. Trace had taken over for Prudence who Rowena had accidentally killed one day. And now Trace was sitting beside Rowena.
Trace was a young girl with Light Shaper, and the air around her flickered with soft glows, her eyes were blue, her hair was blond, her skin was white, as she held out an ice cream cone to Rowena. The ice cream was a pink and white swirl on a brown cone, and dusted with redder sprinkles. The sky was a radiant blue with piled white clouds, while the building behind them was white and regal. Tan and orange stones built a nice pathway underfoot, curving here and there, leading to a tram station where men and women of all sorts of colors were wearing all sorts of cloaks, standing around, talking to each other, looking happy. Green, green grass, grew around brown barked trees with bright green leaves. Little yellow flowers grew in assortments while taller yellow and red flowers grew above them all.
The solid black Gate of Aurora’s Settlement stood in the distance like a doorway for gods and kaiju. It was inactive right now, but there was still lots of hover traffic everywhere, moving to and fro, each one different, though some were cheaper and made in the same general shapes. They were silver and white and cream and grey and dirty and pristine and iron-sided and more. Their hover rings shimmered with purple light.
Trace handed Rowena a white napkin, and Rowena wasn’t sure what she needed to do with that.
But little drops of something were hitting her hand, and Rowena realized she was crying.
It was a beautiful day.
- -
The sun set, all purple and gold, and Mark felt strangely fulfilled, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been strange at all. He had done a lot of good.
Aluatha had gained 20 necromancer-adjacent soldiers, using up all of Mark’s Animate Undeads and a whole bunch of Healthy Bodies and a few other assorted Powers.
A whole bunch of new Shapers used up all of his Shaper Powers and all of the Kinesis-strength Powers, as well as all of his extra Bodys of any good typing at all. The only Shaper Power left was Ice Shaper, and only because it was one of the more difficult ones to use as it had too many downsides and too many upsides. Fire destroyed it, heat, as in the heat of monsters, weakened it, and Water Shapers stole its strength, Water Shapers could do ice (and steam) with a bit of practice anyway, but Ice Shapers could not do water at all.
All of Mark’s 7 Speedy Body Powers had gone to the Shapers as well, and a few other combinations with other things had sucked up all of the Mind Powers that Mark had stored up. Mind Control and Speedy went to a soldier with a history of espionage and the former Knack for being Unnoticed, so that was a straight upgrade for her. A really, really good upgrade.
Speedy wasn’t the best speedster Power, but it was a good 10-times speed which was more than enough for almost all situations.
Captain Javis expected truly good things from those soldiers. He didn’t know most of them, though; he had been briefed on them, met them over the last 24 hours, and then brought them here. He had known the three True Brawny guys, though. Those guys were some new major power houses for some low nobles who had once had major houses in Empire Aluatha, but who had since fallen on hard times, their bloodlines fallen apart.
All three of them were now expected to renew their bloodlines as much as they could, as well as win major engagements as soon as the war started.
And then there were the 23 people who had come to be made normal.
Rowena Thobb had left a deep impression when she screamed about being in the dark. She had lived her whole adult life in the dark, though, otherwise she killed people, but actually, truly living in the dark was another horror all together, so when Annihillating Light left her, that was her new reality.
Annihilating Light was a strong Arch Power. It reminded Mark of his own adamantium puffball doomsday scenario. Having be the default version of your Power? Gods, that would have been horrible.
One guy had had Transient Soul, and his real body had been destroyed long ago, so he could only live in the body of others. He had been living inside of a volunteer soldier. That one had been finicky. Mark had ended up giving Healthy Bodys to both the volunteer and the Transient Soul guy, which was fine with both of them. What had not been fine was how Mark had needed to do some battlefield surgery to separate the people from each other and to grow both into real persons.
Mark was sure that both people would have some PTSD from that, but… They signed up for it, and they signed up for it again after Mark told them that that might happen.
One woman had had Misfortune Manipulation. She had walked in with a handler with Stone Body, and that handler was injured. Cracks all throughout his stone, bird crap on his neck and shoulders, one eye squinted shut due to injury. The woman had been so ashamed that she couldn’t stop the birds from pooping on her handler, but it was better than her handler suddenly dying of a myocardial infarction, which tended to happen to people who had real, physical bodies around her.
Mark grabbed her Misfortune Manipulation, and he had also offered the Stone Body guy a Healthy Body, saying he knew how bad an Elemental Body Power could be. The guy declined, but Mark could tell he was thinking about it. Maybe he’d call back later and ask for it.
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Not all of the Powers taken today had been inherently dangerous.
Joku Kaddoko was a 25 year old man with Dreaming. Dreaming was a Natural Power, and it caused the world around him to flex into dream. Nothing had been real for that man, except for what he believed to be real. He had come from a lineage of Dreamers, but he had some sort of physical or genetic or magical deformity that prevented him from being able to control what he imagined to be real. Could have been caused by some trauma from some event, too. Mark didn’t get that information.
Whatever the case, Dreaming have been a fine Power, but Joku simply could not handle it.
Mark pulled Joku into his soulhouse and the guy just stood there, fully fleshed out instead of like sand, and then Mark had pulled him apart and put him back together. He hadn’t minded. He had told Mark that he disintegrated quite often in his dreams.
Walaria had told Mark that Dreaming was the advanced form of Weird, and to keep both Powers in reserve for her personal decisions, to come at some later time.
All in all, Mark had given away maybe 90 Powers, and gotten a handful of weak Powers along with 23 that were mostly dangerous, and yet… They could be made useful, with the addition of other Powers.
Annihilating Light probably required Light Shaper and possibly Smart, and then you’d have a person who was a rolling puffball of disintegration who could do more damage than most dragons could ever dream of doing. Shutting it off was a trick that Rowena had simply never managed due to heavy trauma.
Dreaming required Smart to make it truly effective, but if it was combined with any sort of Healthy Body or Healthy Mind (Which Mark had never heard about, but which he had always assumed existed), then that would solve most of the issues with that one, as evident by all of the other Dreamers in that guy’s family who did fine with that Power. Once that was done, then you’d have a ‘Reality Warper’ who was potentially better at warping realities than someone with the actual Power of Reality Manipulation. Walaria had already ‘soft-locked’ that requested power set out of Mark; she needed to find someone worthy of it, though. She thought she had some Healthy Minds on tap, too, though she did not tell Mark any details, only that it could happen.
… Was there a ‘Healthy Soul’ Power, too? Probably.
Healthy Body was one of the few Powers that evolved, too, so… what would Healthy Body evolve into when it was nestled into a Dreaming-type Reality Warper? Who knew! Maybe Walaria had an idea, or maybe Addavein. Someone might have an idea… but maybe not? These sorts of power ups did not usually happen, so who knew what would come out of them, in the end.
Mark was absolutely sure that the specific mana types of the people he had Skilled today would influence everything to come about them, too. Most of them had gotten ‘adamantium tainted’, too, according to Eliot on the scanners, so who knew whatwas all about!
Mark gazed out at the sunset from the roof of Dawncoast Skilling, and said, “System Call: Powers in reserve, display list.”
He had marked the newly-gained, inherently dangerous Powers with a little asterisk.
Mark wondered if he should mark of them with little asterisks. Like... Undead Body was probably inherently dangerous, too. He knew Plant Body was okay, though, because Plant Body had normal biology to it, and the people who had Plant Body often ended up becoming philosophers and good people. There was a superhero many years ago from earth, Terrasplat, who had gotten Farmer from Verdago through the Chosen System who then tried to turn the Sahara into a paradise.
Of course, those people who used the Sahara as a temporary gate to and from Daihoon had kinda fucked up the whole thing that Terrasplat had going.
Good
Great
Restricted
Specialized
Body
Healthy Body (x4)
Plant Body
Air Body*, Darkness Body*, Diamond Body*, Eater, Frozen Body*, Fire Body* (x2), Ghost Body, Ice Body*, Light Body*, Parasitize* (x3), Technosis Body*, Undead Body, Vampiric Body, Wraith Body*
Breeder (x10), Slick Body (x5), Stunner Body
Shaper
Ice Shaper
Psychokinesis*
Mind
Cancer Control*, Dazzle, Mesmerize, Undead Mind, Zealotry
Tamer(x4), Plant Tamer (x4)
Natural
Camouflage (x2),
Dreaming*, Weird
Lovely Scent*, Pain*
Meaty
Arcane
Detect Death and Life (x4), Exorcist, Unseen Servant
Possession (x8)
Animate Ghost, Animate Undead, Black Flame*, Death Beacon*, Death Bolt, Drain Existence, Eye Creation*, Ghost Soul, Life From Death, Necromancer, Sense Swap*, Soul Kill, Transient Soul*, Undead Soul (x3)
Impregnate
Arch
Annihilating Light**, Bone Manipulation*, Importance Manipulation*, Misfortune Manipulation*
Sex Manipulation*
He had gained quite a bit of Arch Powers, which was great, in theory, but only if he could pair them with Powers that would ameliorate or subdue the main drawbacks of those Manipulation Powers. Something like Sex Manipulation was fantastic for a very specific subset of the population and for noble house needs, but for the person who had had it, it had been a curse of failed relationship after relationship. Honestly, that one seemed like a ‘skill issue’ to Mark, but the guy who had had it had been a paper pusher in Domal’Takela who just didn’t want it anymore, and so he had found out a way to get to Mark, and then Mark had taken Sex Manipulation from him.
Maybe Walaria would have a use for it later, along with the rest of these… questionable Powers.
“So many new heavily Restricted Powers,” Mark said, frowning a little. He had put a few asterisks next to others he had already had, like Black Flame, but some of these other ones probably deserved an asterisk, too. Like Undead Soul? Mark wasn’t sure about that. “Maybe I should move them to a different screen? Or rather hope that I can offload them soon… but who would even want an Elemental Body without the Shaper Power to go with it? Or something to humanize the person. Gods, those people today… Fucking hell. That Stone Body guy, too… But he was okay with it?”
Quark said, “Different experiences for different people.”
“I guess… I know had it pretty bad adjusting to ‘Adamantine Body’… Fuck. That Light Body person was pretty much a collection of lights on a chandelier.”
“They were happy to be themselves, and Healthy Body will allow them to heal their mind, as well.”
“... Yeah.”
… If Mark had Light Shaper to go along with this Light Body and Annihilating Light, then that would make a rather destructive person. Too destructive, perhaps? Or just what the world needed to get rid of Dominant?
Probably too destructive.
Making one-off super-killers seemed…
Seemed like something Dominant was probably cooking up right now to go along with a land invasion, or with whatever other major troop movement he was planning. Dominant had created goblins, after all…
Mark had a weird, worrying thought. He asked, “Do you think Dominant created goblins by taking an elf with a house… or maybe even his own soulhouse, if he has one, and doing what I’m doing with some Union-like Talent and shoving Impregnate and Parasitize and maybe some multiman Talent into Wongod? Ah… No. It would to have been that got corrupted by Impregnate, Parasitize, and some Multiman Power. Wongod was an elf, so he had a soulhouse. Dominant might have been an elf, but… could he still be an elf? Probably not? Not sure. Whatever the case, Dominant fucked up Wongod and then Dominant locked down Wongod’s soulhouse somehow so that Wongod could never change it.” Mark stared at the sunset beyond the wall of Dawncoast for a moment, thinking about goblins again, and then he said, “Send that thought to Addavein, Walaria, and Reeni, please. Send them the full, new list of Powers, too.”
“Done and done.”
“Thank you, Quark.”
- -
Walaria looked down at her phone, at a priority message. Ah… Mark was coming to some similar conclusions—
“What?” Mother asked.
Walaria was sitting with Kalimara and Mother at their usual nightly dinner. Father and Doomo had events to attend to, so they had stayed for food and then left, and now the girls were talking about the future, and about the present.
Kalimara asked, “Was it from Mark?”
“Yes,” Walaria said, and then she looked toward Mother. “Just now, he hit upon your idea of how the goblins were actually created, with Dominant twisting Wongod’s soulhouse into the Green.”
“Not that surprising,” Mother said, though she was subtly surprised. “The pieces are all there, so of course they could only go together in so many different ways… Could we create a similar monster and set it upon Dominant and the dryads?”
Walaria thought not, because to do so would be to ruin Mark, and she did not want that. Mark was finally able to make use of a great many terrible Skills that Walaria had been cultivating in the hopes of using one day, so not only was he lessening the strain on the bottom line of the Empire, he would eventually be able to turn that fodder toward actual use.
But Walaria remained quiet; Mother knew her position.
Kalimara said, “There are two ways to go about this: The first way is to turn Mark himself into a goblin-like entity. This would be difficult for many different reasons, and the possible repercussions of failing this action mean we have two types of goblins fighting Aluatha, as well as Dominant.”
Mother hmm’d. She saw a path forward for turning Mark into another type of goblin, but she held her tongue for now, letting Kalimara speak toward her expertise.
Kalimara continued, “The second way would be to grab a multiman and turn him into a zealot of Aluatha who was against the Dryads and Dominant, and then instill him with various Skills conducive toward making him a plague unto the forest. The second way work well, for we could more easily instill guardspells onto such a person, including mindworms, while having them maintain a main, singular-self that we could lock down with thought control, but they would be vulnerable to whatever unknown arcana Dominant knows and keeps in storage. He murders all goblins in his territories easily, and he knows how to fight multimen with greater force than we. We know Manufacture Man tried to compete against Okuana in the 90s and then the man was never seen again. We have no doubt that if that one multiman from Dawncoast, Derek Kevins, goes up against Okuana in any real way that he will perish, and right now Derek is providing Aluatha with a great deal of espionage in the form of shrunken bodies that have gotten everywhere in Okuana.”
Mother thought for a second, then she moved on, asking Kalimara, “What sort of impact do you see Mark’s capabilities providing to Aluatha?”
Kalimara said, “With Eliot Cybersong having gained Necromancer and with our Death Mages moving to assist him with Death formations, we doubt they’ll have any need for any formal kaiju squad at all, but of course they’d still do that, so I fully expect the first major incursion from Okuana to happen on the 15thof next month, when Mark and them are busy with Gate Day. We’ll try to have the death crystal—”
“ ‘Try’?” Mother asked.
Kalimara corrected herself, “Apologies, Mother. I am more used to dealing with students, so I will correct my language.” She continued, “We have a full Death Crystal Formation up and active by next Gate Day, so that Mark, at least, can be teleported to the front lines of the war, whereupon I expect him to be like a dragon arriving on the scene. I expect archmages and such to try and kill him, and for him to prevail.
“As for his personnel contributions to the war... He’s already given us 3 heavy specialists and one true kaiju killer, as long as that Shawn Bench can stand under the weight we have placed upon him, so I would count that as at least a 1% boost to our Empire’s reservoirs. As soon as he gives us Swords of Empire and after a few more weeks of Skilling, we will have doubled our defense and offense, as long as the people he Skills can withstand the pressure.”
Mother swung her gaze at Walaria, asking, “Where are you finding more competent people to turn into kaiju killers, and what will they look like?”
Walaria answered, “I’m pulling people from all over the army, from families already loyal to Imperial Aluatha, and denying any families that have any dragonist tendencies, though the old families are pushing hard to get dragons back into the fray, and Addavein is requesting, heavily, that we allow such dragons to join the front lines, but after we shrink them down into people.”
Mother shook her head. “No glory to dragons, ever again. Keep up with Mark. I want to see that Annihilating Light being used for something productive. Find a superhero or make one, Walaria.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Chapter 461
24 min read