Adamant Blood

Mark sat on the starboard railing of the Dreadnought as he gazed out at the desolate, red sand wastes. The Dreadnought plowed ahead, into the unknown, following the trail of lights that the elves had told them to follow. Wouldn’t be long, now.

The ‘tower realm’ they were in now was rather compressed compared to the other realms they had flown through. It had taken 3 days to get through the original place with thick prismatic lines in the sky and all of the elves that they had met, and then another 3 days to get through ‘ocean land’, and yet another 3 days for ‘the ocean land and hidden cloud cities’. They would have already left this ‘red waste tower realm’ after only a day of travel, if the gate would have opened, but the gate to Earth was gone… theoretically.

The ship flowed forward at a rather sedate pace, for no one wanted to get to the end of this trip too fast.

Theoretically, wherever the line of lights was leading them was probably a gate to Daihoon, which probablymeant it was going to open up somewhere in the demon city underneath Empire Okuana, which was theoretically directly underneath Godking Dominant, the dryad that had ruled Okuana for all of known history, and even for the parts of history that had been unknown and lost even to Dominant… or purposefully hidden, more like.

A lot of stories had come out about Dominant in the last few hours, as David slow-rolled the Dreadnought forward, toward their destiny. A few of those stories Mark already knew. He knew about how Dominant had created the goblins as a weapon that he used against the original Aluatha and a whole bunch of other original empires back when the Dragon King was still around. He knew about how Aluatha and Okuana had been at eternal war ever since Aluatha came back around 350 years ago… which was probablythe work of an Inheritor regaining the ‘big magics’ of Aluatha, but that was just a popular theory right now. No one knew for sure about that. Mark didknow that Okuana ‘recently’ figured out how to kill demons, permanently, using adamantium, and that that was ‘the reason’ that Executioner Walter and Dominant wanted Mark to come to Empire Okuana.

“But how true is that?” Mark asked himself.

“How true is what, sir?” Quark asked.

“I’m thinking, Quark, that if Okuana has been around since the time of the Dragon King, and if they’ve been around since the time of System Prime and the elves and all of that shit… That they probably knew how to kill…” Mark stopped talking, because that knowledge of ‘ultimate demon killing’ was still a very, very secret thing. Something that only Lola, Sally, Isoko, and Mark knew about. Eliot didn’t even know about that yet, or at least, if he did know, then it wasn’t through Mark. Mark openly wondered, “I think it might be time to talk about that big secret to everyone here, Quark.” Mark also looked out across the land again, and also openly wondered… “System Call, Help. How do you permanently kill a demon?”

A blue box appeared.