Chapter 472

Mark burned the air as he traveled in a spiral of lines, carving through the sky toward Isoko and the guys, hearts beating hard, mind racing with worry. Timeweaver’s recorded message spoke of the blockade moving onto Earth, into New Tokyo through rifts. Half of the danger of all of that was not just the ships, the dryads on the ships, and whatever they were doing to the people living on the other side. Rifts also lured and created kaiju.

Mark couldn’t hear all of that past the clearing storms, past the time differences, but he tried. He strained. And so, Mark heard a low rumble far, far below the storms, in the distances, in the fabric of reality itself. Maybe they were too distant to hear properly, or maybe they were still small.

Mark desperately hoped for the latter.

Small rifts didn’t draw kaiju.

Mark wasn’t on that task right now.

Up ahead floated the black bowl of Crystal Tower’s loaned hoverplatform. The adamantium Mark had left behind was only PL79, since he wasn’t controlling it, so it was dented and torn, pieces missing. But it remained. It was still adamantium.

Isoko, Derek, Specter, and Tempest, faced off against flying speedsters.

Mark moved fast enough to rip at the sky with flame and thunder.

Isoko was moving, too, and so were all the enemies. Isoko danced across the entire ship's space, one arm curved in front of herself like a bar of platinum used as a shield, an airshield made of platinum Tactile Telekinesis holding steady on that arm. Her other hand gripped a flail of storm winds that she ripped across the battlefield, at 4 different targets, each of which flickered in the sky and reappeared elsewhere—

Specter kicked someone out of the air over the platform.

Mark reached the platform, and his Union reached a moment later.

Tempest was almost dead on the floor, wounds unknown to Mark, because a literal pile of Dereks held her together, keeping her alive, because Derek was so concentrated on keeping her alive with Good/Bad. But Derek was moving at normal speeds and this was a speedster battle.

Isoko noticed Mark.

Mark noticed Isoko.

Union told him just as much as her tense eyes did. She couldn’t break through the PLs of the people fighting them now. Mark could. Mark joined Isoko with his own adamantine strength, both of them piercing through the defenses of the 6 speedster attackers, hitting them with Slowness and bringing further Alacrity to Isoko and Specter.

The battle switched on that single moment.

Isoko strung her platinum winds and prismatic Union alongside Mark’s adamantine strength, burrowing into the 6 speedster attackers, cleaving 6 heads from 6 bodies. In the very next moment, she was on the deck of the hoverplatform, channeling a sky’s worth of healing into Tempest and Derek.

Mark slipped slightly into normal time, hitting Tempest with several beating hearts’ worth of the standard healing Unions; Blood/Bloodless, Good/Bad, Purity/Corruption to get rid of any possible poisons or catastrophic compounding issues, and then back to Good/Bad, and then a few more nuances.

Tempest burst back to life in 10 real-time seconds, gasping strong as Derek stepped away, or died off, or merely disintegrated since he realized he was no longer needed in a meatshield capacity. Derek took to the helm again, and Tempest gripped the sky, her fury writ large upon the weather and the rain.

A true tempest unfurled like a pyroclastic cloud from an erupting volcano.

Mark repaired the black bowl of the hovership, Unioning all of them together with Glory and Fear, stepping into normal time. The team and the heavens radiated brilliance under a deepening hurricane sky, as Specter stood inside of the adamantium on the edge, and as Isoko flared to Prismatic brilliance, turning all the rest of the world Boring in comparison.

Mark Called out to all onlookers, to all those watching on the incoming battleships, and to the two archmages slowly flying their way, still a kilometer out, “Death to the Godking! Disgrace to all of you!”

Hotano flinched as though struck, his path through the sky barely altered.

Amberstone screamed back, furious that his prize had been stolen.

The archmages glowed with power, Amberstone amber and Hotano a weird sickly green. They were going to strike.

But then lightning scattered overhead, an attack from Isoko and Tempest, and collapsed straight through both archmages, and while Hotano pulled back, green spell fading, Amberstone turned his spell toward the lightning, grabbed it, and suddenly the lightning was rimmed in amber light that connected across the sky, all the way to Isoko and Tempest in the back of the ship.

Tempest froze in amber time, her control of the skies broken.

Isoko frosted over with thin amber light, but she struggled and the light cracked. Her PL was too high to be overtaken that easily. Mark helped her shrug it off with a Union of Glory and Fear. The amber archmage’s freezing spell did nothing to Mark. Mark wasn’t close enough.

And then Amberstone got in range of Mark’s Union and he knew it. He was prepared to do the same amber-locking to Mark, another amber spell already burning in his grip.

So Mark strung himself out across the sky, toward Amberstone and to the sides, hitting the archmage with Fear as Isoko and Tempest broke out of the spell behind him.

Amberstone screamed in absolute fear, but something was wrong. Something was broken inside of him, sort of how it was broken inside of Mark. Mark didn’t react normally to fear. He fought. Amberstone fought hard, too, and suddenly Amberstone’s yellow glow doubled.

Mark discarded part of his body, stretching back to the ship, right in time to watch as Amberstone released his amber spell onto Mark’s old, stringy body. A kilometer of black adamantium frosted over in time-locked amber, almost reaching Mark on the ship, even as Derek was pulling them away and Isoko was pulling them away a lot harder.

Isoko said, “Hope you got a better idea than fear, Mark!”

Mark was already considering all of that. ‘Fear’ wasn’t that useful. Oh sure, fear still worked very well for most applications of Glory/Fear, but some people didn’t react at all to Fear and some people went crazy, like Mark, and apparently like Amberstone.

Who was Amberstone, really?

All Mark really knew about the guy was that he was some archmage completely devoted to Dominant and Okuana, and that he was something like 200 years old. Addavein would have known how to take him down, for they had surely tangled as Addashield and Amberstone, but Addavein wasn’t here— Oh.

… Well.

If Fear didn’t work, then how about ‘Disgrace’. Glory and Disgrace might work very well on a lot of the targets here. Dominant was terrifying to almost all of the people who worked for him, or near him, making people more scared about failure than anything else. So. Yeah.

Glory and Disgrace.

Mark thrummed with Glory and Disgrace, sending a spear of himself into the distance, cracking through Amberstone’s defenses—

The archmage suddenly balked, his glowing amber spell shredding under Disgrace, while Hotano activated some sort of big defensive magic, suddenly displacing himself a kilometer directly away from Mark, back closer to the big ship.

Mark instantly told Isoko, “Glory and Disgrace, or whatever kind of Disgrace you want to use.”

Isoko thrummed the sky with platinum Prismatic and drab Disgrace.

Amberstone tried to rally spellwork into the sky, into Isoko’s power, but his spellwork folded in on itself and he faltered in the sky, and then he went running back to the ship.

Mark told his team, “We’re making straight-lines to the closest rift to Earth, somewhere to the north. Derek, find out the target.” Derek gave a salute and he drove fast, Isoko and Tempest both marshaling the winds behind them and carving the sky with active defense to keep the void bombs off of them. Mark continued, “Isoko keep up the battlefield control. Tempest hit through the shields. Specter on defense. I’m back to being the head of the spear. We avoid archmages and close rifts to Earth.”

Tempest spat, “I believeDominant is really going through with this! FUCK OKUANA! DEATH TO THE GODKING!”

The sky roiled with her rage.

Mark focused ahead.

A group of four ships were all angled with sterns butting up against each other, the shields of each ship joined into a great sphere around them all. Dryads grew from the deck of each ship, swirling into that space between all of the ships, making magic. Mark couldn’t see it from here, but Quark was able to connect to Earth right now, to get the image from the other side, because a great hole yawned open between those four joined dryads.

The actual incursion was a bunch of soldiers with guns and flying equipment, making a beachhead atop some forest space north of Takasaki in New Tokyo, while the dryads reached through into those forests. According to Quark and Aleph One, the incursion was turning trees into spell-throwers and forest wildlife into monsters, into Green Death Ecology.

It was a horror of necromancy. Mark was pretty sure that some of the things Quark was showing him were some actual horrors made out of people who had been in the forest, because one of the horrors had on a fluffy pink shirt. Maybe a child’s shirt.

The superheroes and the New Tokyo Defense Force were on the other side, pushing back the incursion in the skies with a whole lot of different strengths. Most of those strengths were ineffective, including the Castellan defenses. That golden fire of Hearthswell blasted across the land, trying to burn things, and failed.

Mark saw that golden fire here on Daihoon. Flames burned the hole in the Two Worlds, trying to shut it down, but the dryads grew into that fire, soaking in the power and turning it into shielding for the rift itself and probably for the ships.

Or at least that’s what Aleph One was telling Quark.

All Mark saw from his angle were ships with guns blasting their way, trying to slow them down, but Tempest and Isoko were already sending giant blasts of lightning at those shields and into the gunfire. Trailing bullets and spells twisted in the Shaped sky, puttering out before they got turned all the way around. Lighting struck golden shields and skittered away—

“Concentrating,” Isoko said, staring ahead.

Mark felt her Union focus alongside her Shaping, alongside Tempest. They had been doing probing strikes. Now came the big one—

The world cracked as a giant pillar of platinum lightning struck the center of the shields and then pounded inward, cracking the shields and burning through a dryad and an entire battleship. The portal remained intact. The dryads were spatially locked, somehow, and through the fourth one was half gone the other three rapidly began healing the fourth one.

Mark glanced backward for just a moment.

Amberstone and Hotano were at the head of their battleship, pursuing Mark and the hoverplatform.

Mark told Isoko, “Don’t kill the archmages. We can’t do it until everything else is taken care of.”

“OH SURE!” Isoko said, keeping most of her battle mania under control. “YOU GOT IT, BOSS!”

Specter was less controlled, yelling, “WE CAN’T KILL THEM?!”

Derek told Mark, “Go,” and then he told the guys, “They all have deadly triggering Contracts and—”

Derek could handle explanations.

Mark spun through the sky, toward the ship, to kill the beachhead.

He slipped into the hole in the upper shield before it could close, and he saw, for a moment, a hole below that opened up to Earth. Dryads surrounded it, coiling and undulating and growing through the hole, even though golden fire burned them. They were sort of like Dominant in that way. Smaller, for sure, each only 50-ish meters large, but they were keeping themselves small to keep their power requirements low. As long as they had power then they could keep operating.

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Mark hit all of them and every single person on the four ships with Energy/Entropy.

The Castellan fires blossomed to full strength, burning the dryads away as the dryads screamed. The portal winked out, and then the shields out there winked out, too, and Mark fully joined with Isoko once again, right as the dryads wound up some Death spells.

Death flowed into Mark, and Mark felt energized, his adamantium flesh multiplying.

One grand soaking of Death later, and Mark had stripped the ships of their power. Mark didn’t have time to strip everyone of their Bindings, though, so Mark went for the dryads, pulling out their Cursed Abomination Powers and killing them in the process. It was the fastest way to kill them, and then they were dead.

Mark opened his eyes back to the real world to see the rift truly close, and to see a bunch of people attacking him. They fired bullets and spells at the black bowl of their transport, too. Tempest and Specter and Isoko were doing fine. Disgrace was doing A Lot against the people here.

Soldiers cowered and archmages failed to close the distance.

Mark thrummed with Glory and Disgrace, and every single attacker on the ship cowered as something a whole lot stronger than fear curled into their minds, telling them that all of their worst fears were coming true. Mark fulfilled a fraction of those fears, stripping the Bindings of the 20 people directly attacking him with spells and weapons, and then hitting up the guys in the leadership positions, ripping out Leaders and Commanders and one Tactician, then moving on. He made sure to circle back on a few guys who had distinctly solid Power Levels and who ran instead of fighting.

Mark ripped out Battleminds from each of those people who ran, who had the sense to run. Now that they didn’t have Battlemind, Mark had no idea what they were going to do. From their heavily confused vectors, they had no idea what they were going to do, either.

And then Mark rushed into the sky to help Isoko and the heroes. His very approach was all it took to drive off some speedsters who had gotten there while he had been busy.

Isoko and them had been busy, too, churning the sky against the encroaching archmages and their dryad backups on the big ship. A whole lot of lightning and platinum bursts prevented those ships and their assailants from coming much closer and 4 kilometers away.

“How’s Disgrace working out for you?” Mark asked, eyeing a trio of flying speedsters about 2 kilometers out, to the east. Mark had trouble keeping them in sight, but Quark did not. “Speedsters trouble?”

“It’s working out better than I thought!” Isoko said, concentrating on what was going on out there.

Tempest and Specter were whole and strong, and Derek was funneling Good into them and into himself. Derek’s personal range was small, but his body was strung out over the Two Worlds, seer-style, and so he had plenty of resources to Union with.

Derek gave a thumbs up, already shifting the ship forward, toward some other location, while the ships behind them were dead-locked together with 4 dead dryads strung throughout their decks and innards. There was no more rift back there.

Another rift loomed ahead, Quark marking it as 20 kilometers forward.

5 blockade ships hovered in the sky between here and there.

Mark said, “I’m going to deal with those speedsters. I need full speed, Isoko, in 3, 2, 1—”

Isoko shifted her Union in a fraction, and so did Mark.

The world stopped.

Mark did not.

Fire detonated quietly, almost frozen, as Mark strung himself forward and in multiple directions, moving kilometers in a relative instant. He hit the first speedster flying on the wind, wrapping him in an adamantium shell and draining all of his speed that he could. Mark moved faster. The second and third speedsters moved like coma patients. They stumbled in the sky, their astral bodies barely moving at all. Mark enveloped all of them in adamantium, and then he locked all three of them together.

He had to drop his own Union of Alacrity/Slowness to Skill them.

Suddenly, he had three vibrating adamantium bubbles that dented out from the inside, but Mark hit them with Energy/Entropy and the dents stopped. Hopefully they wouldn’t get their mana back fast enough to matter.

Mark dove into the dream, and then he ripped out Wind Shaper x3, Accelerator, and Speedster x2, and then he took back his adamantium shells and let the guys drop. Their PLs wouldn’t lower that fast, so they weren’t going to die on impact.

They still went screaming to the sky, praying to Dominant and pissing themselves, because Isoko was back on her Prismatic/Disgrace Union and now these guys were defenseless against her ingress.

Mark flowed back to the black bowl, arrived, and said, “That’s some impressive speedsters for New Tokyo.” He looked to Specter, offering, “You only have Ethereality as Natural and some low-Brawny Body Power, right Specter?”

“Fuck!” Specter said, not knowing how to react to the implied gift. And then he solidified and said to Mark, “No. I can’t. I have Strong Body and I don’t want to trade years of my life for fast power now.”

“Battlemind?” Mark offered instead.

“FUCK YES,” Specter said, half-manic.

“I want Speedster,” Tempest said, vector furious at the world.

“You only have Sky Shaper and Weather Manipulation, right?” Mark asked.

Large machine gun fire skipped off of the black bowl around the ship, sounding like simple stops as arcing trails of bullets traced across overhead. The Derek at the top of the tower lost his head, gore scattered to the sky. Another Derek took his place as the Derek down below shifted the boat into evasive maneuvers.

Mark made some handles here and there and everyone held on.

Tempest held her security bar hard, saying, “Yes! Just those two is all I have!”

“I also have Acceleration from one of those guys,” Mark said, “Might be better than Speedster.”

“Which one came from the guy who took my fucking arm!” Tempest raged into the sky, blasting apart a lot of things far out of sight.

Isoko said, “Probably the Accelerator. I didn’t catch the whole thing.”

Derek said, “1 minute to safe contact with the next rift. Lots of shit in the way.”

Mark said, “Specter first. Here we go, dude!”

Specter flexed into the real world, locked to space by Mark’s adamantium Union and by a few grips he had on the guy's waist to make sure he didn’t flop around a whole lot. Mark dove into his soul and put Battlemind into his existence.

Mark pulled back and Specter gasped as Mark loosened his bindings.

Specter gripped his head, his vector expanding inward and outward. And then he shot his gaze up and out, saying, “Holy fuck this is a bad battle.”

Derek almost laughed.

Tempest was almost ready for her turn but she had a question, “Accelerator has better TT, right?”

Timeweaver spoke through the ship’s comms, “Yes.”

Mark repeated, “Yes?”

He had no idea if that was true.

Tempest saw the hesitation, but she said, “Accelerator.”

Mark dove into her, giving her Accelerator.

Mark came back out—

“Attack,” Derek told Mark.

Mark oriented himself and took to the sky once again, facing off against a kamikaze ship aiming directly at them, dryad flailing like a thousand krakens on its surface, while the sky over there—

Oh.

Mark rapidly retreated back to the ship, to stand on the railing as the hurricane .

Tempest fully woke from her Skilling dream, Prismatic flows joining her, Disgrace leaving her.

Hurricane force winds suddenly began to spiral into tight bands of shifting sky, like a thousand different streamers joining one great river that circled and circled and circled for kilometers around. Platinum lightning sparked on those streamers, trying to help control what Tempest could not control at all. Winds echoed, howled, and then

The power jumped tracks as Tempest lost brief control of herself, Isoko had no way of helping her, and that great stream of wind carved out the kamikaze ship, and then a mountainside and all the land below and the sky above, like a snake suddenly bunching up, or a train piling into a crash. That sky crash ripped through a few different ships, aiming at the rift-bearing ships ahead, ripping right through their shields and crashing all the way through, leaving two and a half ships hanging in the sky and 4 dryads hanging onto those broken pieces. The rift remained between the spatially-locked dryads, but the ships were gone.

It was the destruction of a mountain’s worth of stuff, and it was awesome, but heavily flawed.

Tempest had no idea how to control her new Power well at all, for even with all the Unions around her, supporting her, Tempest still faltered against a few Dereks, almost passing out. She’d get the hang of it, though. Isoko stood right next to Tempest, needing to yell to be heard over the storm. Mark couldn’t hear them at all. Tempest nodded, almost drunkenly, and Isoko seemed she was telling Tempest to focus on the archmages behind them, to keep them at bay and not kill them.

Mark wondered how well that would work out for their team.

Didn’t seem like she could hold back much at all, or even get herself going in the right directions, but she’d learn fast. Mark could do a Union of Understanding with both Isoko and Tempest later, if he needed, before phase 3.

Specter saw the danger of Tempest’s new power, too, so he looked at Mark and Mark knew they were in good hands.

So for now—

Mark lifted off of the black bowl of the hoverplatform and threaded through the sky, aiming at the remains of the rift-bearing ships, and the still-living dryads.

5 minutes later Mark flew back to the hoverplatform, which was in a stalemate of winds and magic with the archmages and their larger ship.

Mark announced, “NEXT!”

Derek got going, Isoko and Tempest covered the exit, and four sleeping speedsters lay tied up to the sides, knocked out and with Specter watching over them.

Specter gestured at the unconscious guys, yelling over the winds, “More speedsters for New Tokyo!”

Mark was surprised. “How’d you knock ‘em out?”

Specter lifted a hand and buzzed it with ethereality, saying, “I can knock out a guy pretty easy when I can tell where they’re going to be!”

“Neat!” Mark said, as he began reaching into the sleeping speedsters. A minute later, Mark came out and said, “I got 3 more Speedys, some assorted other stuff, and one .” Lightspeed wasn’t as impressive as it sounded. Mark knew a guy back at Dawncoast who worked for the Sacredcuts who had Lightspeed. Basically, the guy could move anywhere as an immaterial ‘ghost’ of light, at actual light speed, and then reappear. He couldn’t do shit while in ‘lightspeed’, though, so what he did was flicker in and out of lightspeed and drop bombs made by the Sacredcuts where those bombs needed to go. Mark asked Specter, “That had to have been an interesting fight?”

Derek rolled the ship to get out of splashing gunfire.

Mark, Isoko, Specter, and Derek held on. Tempest almost went flying, but Specter reached out and casually grabbed her boot, and dragged her back to the ship’s cover.

Four sleeping guys went sailing out of the ship which was callous but… Mark had trouble caring about the soldiers of Okuana right now.

Specter said, “I missed the Lightspeed guy the first two times, but I got him the third time!”

“I almost went flying again!” Tempest said, slightly freaked out, gripping onto the railing hard. “But I have Tactile Telekinesis now! Right?! How the fuck isn’t it working?!”

Mark did a little Union of Understanding, leaving himself and Derek out of it, but helping Isoko and Specter to connect, for both of them had TT.

Isoko began, “It’s like this...”

Winds howled.

The ship flew on and the disgraced archmages pursued.