Adamant Blood

“Skilling fish is hard,” Mark said, sitting by a pond of Sally’s creation on the other side of the Shine.

The pond was the shape of a punch, driven deep into the ground and with a finger’s-width of connection to the shine. The punch had been 30 meters across and the ‘finger’s width’ was a full 5 meters wide, so there was lots of space for fish to swim in here to get trapped, to get experimented on.

The experiments were not going well. Mark was able to notice each and every one of the fish coming and going and he was more than capable of selectively Fearing away the big ones and luring in the small ones. The normal fish came and went as they pleased, and they, along with the actual targets, more than enjoyed the fruits of Mark’s failed experiments.

Mark had mostly made a lot of chum, and the fish loved it.

Sally sat beside Mark on a rock, smirking as she asked, “Forbidden Magic is hard, huh?”

“I can see why people ask the demons for help,” Mark teased right back.

“Ughhh! Don’t even joke about that!” Sally said, her vector tumbling from joyful to disgusted.

Mark grinned a little… but his face fell, too. And then he spoke seriously, “The world is designed by demons to make you want to go to them, Sally, and ignoring that fact doesn’t change that fact. From how Titan’s Strength people can only ever hurt themselves and they need someone with true knowledge of healing and Powers in order to heal, which is an extreme example, to something much more mundane, like how if anyone learns about magic at all before their time then they either monsterize, or they get a terrible Knack. People needto be kept in the dark by the people who love them, until they’re finally old enough to mature into random real power, and then even after that they can only hope to fight the big fights that threaten everyone by going to the demons and asking for more magic. Or by joining with them, and becoming archmages or dragons.

“The problems out there are massive, and they are created by demons in order to be problems… or for whatever reason that they’re not telling us.”

Sally frowned as she looked at the chum-filled waters of ‘Fist Pond’.

No one spoke for a long while.

And then Sally said, “Yup.”

Mark replied, “Yup.”

And then Mark focused on a new fish coming into the kill-zone. To Mark’s Quark-enabled vision, the fish was about 2 meters long and coated with ice. To Mark’s dreamsight the fish had an ice-like brilliance to it, and the dreamland frosted all around it. Mark zapped it with a Union of Sleepiness and Wakefulness, and the fish turned lethargic, sinking to the bottom of the pond, freezing over, shielding itself from whatever else might be out there.

And then Mark stepped into his dreamspace while he was connected to the frosty fish with Union.

As Mark stood in his surgery suite, the fish appeared out of the darkness beyond, swimming with an easy grace, under a frozen surface. It was the only thing moving well under the ice. Everything else was frozen. The world of the fish was a frozen buffet, just waiting to be consumed.

Mark took a blueprint for nothing at all and formed a bait fish on his property with that blueprint. The bait fish wiggled brightly and shimmered with sunlight, and Mark opened the way for the frozen fish to swim toward the target.

The ice fish paused as it saw the bright lure.

Under a sheet of ice, the frozen fish darted forward, mouth gaping open to vacuum the bait fish inside, deeper into its own memory of ice and easy hunting.

Mark unfolded the bait fish into a scaffold, turning frozen fish into both a cage around the core memory of the ice fish itself, and wrapping all of the ice fish’s natural Binding in adamantium, soaking into the Skill. Carefully, he subdued the ice fish even more, as he began tugging the fish’s Power away from it, and he replaced that Power with nothing.

Quark stood to the side, watching the process in a way only he could, which was not at all how Mark was seeing it. He was calm, though, and that was why he was here; as a warning system in case Mark needed to come back to reality. But nothing was happening externally.

Soon, the work was done.

The fish was terribly injured, but as Mark settled the fish's Binding into a blueprint for what might have been either Ice Shaper or Ice Body, based on a bunch of sigils that Mark sort of recognized, Mark put the blueprint into storage and he came back to the real world, still connected to the fish. He breathed with Good and Bad, and the fish, who looked like it was suffering from frost damage to Quark’s sensors, began to heal. The ice in its body began to fade away, while broken scales and a burst eyeball and torn fins rapidly healed.

The near-dead fish was smaller now. Maybe 1.2 meters long, according to Quark’s estimates.

It was a lot weaker, too.

Some of the smaller, more violent fish in the pond set upon the previously-monsterized fish, and those normal fish soon ate the defenseless fish. Power Level 10 fish tearing into a Power Level 0 fish… Not even a contest.

Sally was holding a visor up to her eyes so she could see through the water, too. She lowered the visor, saying, “I almost feel bad for it.”

Mark was a little stunned, though, so he didn’t respond too fast.

Had he really gotten Ice Shaper from the fish?

Ice Shaper —any of the big elemental Shaper Powers, actually— were big Powers. The kind of powers that you built a team of warriors around. The kind of Power that Mark had originally hoped for when he went for Addashield’s offer.

“I think I just got Ice Shaper,” Mark said, still disbelieving what had just happened. “I’ll have to look at it closer but… holy fuck. Ice Shaper.”

For a moment, Sally said nothing, her vector tumbling with surprise and joy, and then a disbelief at that joy, followed by a whole lot of introspection. It was a facial journey of emotions that ended with Sally staring at the water, saying, “Fucking hell… Forbidden Magic, huh?”

“Forbidden Magic,” Mark said, agreeing.

Softly, mystified at herself even as the words came out of her mouth, Sally said, “No wonder people ask the demons for help.”

Mark said nothing to that.

They both just sat with emotion, with each other, and Mark got back to fishing.

The sun dropped lower and lower in the sky, and fish came to Mark, to the killing field, and Mark tried to keep their Powers intact as he pulled them out of them. Mostly it was water-centric Powers. Something that might have been Slick Body was common, and Mark got good at pulling that one out of the fish because he got a lot of practice. Something that might have been ‘Hider’, if it was Natural, or ‘Camouflage’ if it was Soul, or maybe even ‘Unnoticed Mind’, if it was Mind-based, was the second most popular fish Power.

None of them seemed like real Powers, though. More like Knacks.

Mark pulled two Water Shapers out of a pair of fish, though, and with the Ice Shaper from that one fish…

As the sun fully set, Mark said, “We’re done here. I need to check these out deeper, and that means going back to the house.”

“If you can really put Shaper into people…” Sally looked toward the dark horizon, beyond the Shine, beyond the settlement in the far, far distance. She had been thinking deep thoughts while she had been on guard duty for the last few hours, and now she let those thoughts out, saying, “If you can put Shaper into people, then there are a lot of hunting teams that could really use a Shaper. I got hundreds of ‘em looking for a good Shaper in that warrior-connection program I’m funding with your money. Not for a while, though. Not until you can do this without turning them into chum.”

Mark wasn’t sure where this new capability was going to take him, but he was really glad Addavein had suggested trying this the other day. Mark nodded, saying, “I’ll see where it takes me.”

- -

Mark sat in a dark room in the bottom of the house, and then he closed his eyes and entered his soulhouse.

With a thought, Mark stood before his filing system for his gathered Powers.

Mostly, it was unorganized, because Mark had simply put stuff into the filing cabinet without knowing what he was putting in there, and stuff tended to move around in his house when he wasn’t looking, when it was new. Mark spent a minute putting stuff into hanging folders, and then Mark stepped to the roof of the house, to the back, and he activated his System Call contraption.

Like always, Mark had to Call out to System Prime several times to get enough of a connection to actually show his status, and thus show what kind of Powers/Skills/Abilities he had picked up.