Adamant Blood

Mark came back to himself, in the church.

He walked out of that church, toward Eliot’s craft, waiting on a distant hill.

Soon, he was sitting on a plush chair and feeling a lot of feelings as Isoko flew them home. It was almost relaxing. Addavein was watching him, but with concern. Not with actual worry. Sally and Eliot had worries. Isoko was quietly hopeful, but also terrified.

Peace lasted for all of 10 seconds.

And then Sally asked, “Wanna see how your 100 Trial looked on our end?”

“Yeah sure.”

Addavein told Isoko, “Park it.”

Isoko angled back down to the ground, sighing, “Parking it.”

And then Mark got to see something truly worrying.

When the white aurora lifted off, when the pillar of light in the darkness was gone, when the demons stopped singing, the recording followed a drone that gazed down on Mark, arguing with Spark and Quark in their respective orichalcum and mithril bodies. Mark turned it off.

Mark asked, “Everyonesaw that?”

Addavein said, “It was mostly an illusion, but yes.”

“Yeah, illusion, sure. Otherwise the planet would have ripped apart from the gravity… sure.” Mark decided, “I’m gonna ignore all of that, for now. Let’s go home— Fuck. Aurora’s controls.”

Addavein said, “Whenwe release that control, Aurora will become a true inheritor of Aluatha and usurp the royal control of many capital systems. When we release her, she might even die; that’s how I would have set it up, just to prevent capital system collapse, or whatever will happen. So we can put off all of that, if you want. Still gonna release her one day, but it doesn’t have to be today.”

“Wouldn’t she know that we know she’s being controlled?” Isoko asked. “She is a telepath.”

Eliot said, “She doesn’t read minds unless she has to… but yeah, she would read our minds.”

“She might not,” Addavein said, “And if she doesn’t, then we don’t have to deal with this today.”

Mark decided, “We’ll put it off for another day, if we can, and I want to talk to Elaria Valen. She would know what’s up with a lot of this stuff, since she’s part of the old Aluathan royals—” Mark added, “And I need to knowabsolutely everythingabout fragments of a divine mirror.” Fuck, he was tired. “Not right now. Please someone put some pins in that and try to set it up…”

Mark decided to end his words there. He had already closed his eyes, but he heard Addavein agree and the others started talking softly, so this was fine. Perhaps he would have drifted off, for at least a moment, but then he heard a word and he shocked awake, groaning a little and Unioning with Sleepiness and Wakefulness, dispelling his tiredness as much as he could. And then he was up.

Isoko looked at Mark with wide eyes, saying, “I didn’t put you to sleep!”

Mark grimaced, and said, “I know, and… and I reacted very poorly back there. I know you were just trying to help, Isoko. I’m not mad and I’m sorry you felt the need to do that to me in the first place. Let’s blame all of that on Dominant and his eldritch interference, and thank the witches it wasn’t worse… How far away from Dawncoast are we?”

Isoko said, “We already parked on the roof of the house.”

Mark blinked and then looked out the window. The city wall was out there, in the distance, and the vectors he felt all around were the vectors of various people he already knew. Andria, Tartu, the witches, Shawn and Lenny, were all down below, along with Derek… or at least Mark was pretty sure he had that right.

“Must have actually drifted off, there,” Mark muttered, as he got up from the chair.

“We were wondering how to move you, or if we even should,” Sally said.

Mark said, “Sorry I was being weird back there, and that I will continue to be weird for a while. That trip to New Tokyo and everything afterward was a big fucking deal… Wait. There’s… Ah. Oh.” Mark got it together, standing in his roughspun clothes, as he looked to the empty space in the cabin of the vehicle, and prepared to meet someone who would probably show up the moment Mark mentioned, “Timeweaver.”

Zaid al-Ishak, Timeweaver, appeared in a flicker of glitter, resolving into a middle eastern man with a short beard, brown skin, and wearing a brown and gold pinstripe suit. He held the rounded top of his plain cane, and stood, almost triumphant, in that space that Mark had been staring. Everyone stared at the Redo Hero with him.

With a solid voice, Timeweaver stated, “Four months ago, while everyone was in Endless Daihoon, and benefiting from Aluatha’s rising-yet-still-neutered star, Dominant didn’t believe anyone on this planet was a true threat to him or his interests. Then you came back and threw millions of tons of adamantium at Dominant along with an open gate to elf land, and a threat of a Reset Quest. The mana almost put him into a stupor, as it did when Aluatha rose from the ashes 350 years ago and gave Dominant enough mana to send him off into hibernation.

“But Dominant has held on staying awake, because of the danger you present. He tried to stop you multiple times, but he has failed.

“You prevented his first strike against Aluatha’s heads of state, you have destroyed his blockade, you have empowered many, many people, disempowered many of his own people, you have threatened to remove the goblins from the board, andyou have attained your demon. More than all of that, Dominant has driven you to truly contemplate destroying the entire world that he lives in, and now you have the tools to actually accomplish as much.

“We are now in the mutually assured destruction phase of war.

“Dominant has plagues, horrors, shifts in the magic itself, and bargains with demons far, far older than exist in recorded history.

“And so, he has bargained with me to come to you with a deal:

“Dominant will fight you in the realm of politics, from now on.

“Establish your 12 Empires and bring forth a conclave of Emperors at White Cauldron, if you can.

“If you break this treaty, then he will begin releasing horrors that have not been seen or envisioned for 10,000 years.

“Please take the treaty.”

That last part had come from Zaid. Not Dominant.

Mark looked at Zaid, and asked, “How much of this was planned by you, and how much did you take advantage of?”

Zaid easily said, “I have to live all of these lives to get all of these distances into the future, though I do cryosleep myself rather regularly to peek into the far future. I was in a cycle of cryosleep when Addashield Fell.

“That’s where all this current iteration of the worlds happened. I woke up 10 months after he Fell, on schedule, and discovered that the Fallen Addashield was in the process of systematically destroying the Two Worlds.

“So I went back.

“Tried to fix his Falling, first. Found out he had to sacrifice a child to the demons every 10 years, and that I could not stop that at all. So I went the other direction.

“I went to you, Mark.

“It was rather easy to get you Emperor’s Child Drops, to make you ready for that long shot gamble to fix the problem with Addashield completely. That worked every time. Didn’t expect the dragon, but that’s a lot of adamantium, and the world needed adamantium, so I let it flow that way.

“You got lost in the aftermath, because I didn’t care about you.

“Addavein got pretty fucking messed up when he wasn’t allowed to be in the Hero/Villain Program, so I decided to fix that and went looking for you, to see where you ended up.

“Didn’t go back far enough the first time because I found out you were captured by Aluatha rather instantly after your Tutorial, because you ended up being adamantium blooded, too, and that turned out pretty awful. For what you did for the world? To be turned into a monster for adamantium? Pretty terrible. I thought those adamantium farms were disbanded, too.

“By then a bunch of stuff had gone wrong, so I went further back.

“Things went smoother when you were in Citadel Freyala.

“Then I stepped away. I have lots of things to fix all over the place, and maybe I end up erasing this conversation from the timeline if this turns out poorly, but probably not. We’ve had similar conversations in other futures, and it usually goes well. You did well with the Battle for Memphi, too. Just a little bit of help, and there you go. That’s who you are, and I appreciate that.

“I was considering a closer relationship with you when you killed Goblinhome, but the temporal distance and opportunity between all those assassinations attempts on you, and then you killing Goblinhome, and then you running off into Endless Daihoon, was all pretty grim, and I couldn’t let you notkill Goblinhome. I was prepared to lose you in Endless Daihoon, but you had done a lot for the Two Worlds, and that’s how it was; pretty good.

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“I decided to actively begin recruiting you for worldwide efforts when you came back from Endless Daihoon for the Reset Quest.

“Very competent! Very useful. I found out a lot of stuff that I did not know about at all, and we managed to break the blockade this time with minimal loss of life.

“And now you’re here.

“But you’ve been here before.

“My usual plot is to pick you up in 3 days and then you and I and Derek head into Okuana and start dismantling that entire empire. We’ve done it before. But… Honestly, it’s getting pretty bad. The campaign lasts about 3 months, and it ends in pretty much the same ways, each time: Complete destruction of Daihoon, initiated by you, through a necromantic methodology that I know you already know how to do.

“And it’s the right call, each and every time. It’s the only way to kill Dominant, otherwise he just keeps coming back.

“You and I have had a lot of conversations about ‘acceptable losses’, though, and so I have decided that all of that campaign is the ‘bad end’.

“Now we’re doing peace.”

Mark took a breath. He said, “I kinda fucking hate you, a lot.”

“Yes of course, and you would be right to feel that way,” Zaid said, as if he was commenting on the color of bedsheets, or something else completely inconsequential, and not on very deep, very real feelings.

Mark asked, “The campaign against Okuana always ends in death?”

“No matter how many times we physically get him, he comes back, and the war gets worse. Never managed the psychological angle, mentally breaking him and all that, but it never showed much promise.”

“Fuck…” Mark decided, “Peace it is, if you can honestly come back from a year into the future and tell me that Dominant will honor that peace.”

Zaid grinned brightly. “It is so nice to work with you, Mark. One minute for you, one year for me~”

Zaid blipped a few times.

He did not blip back.

Mark sighed, saying, “Maybe it will be a full minute. Addavein? Is… Is all of what he said plausible?”

With a resigned rumble in his tone, Addavein said, “Timeweaver lies, cheats, steals, and worse, but he generally does what is best for civilization. Best practices when it comes to him is to simply live your own life, how you want to live it, but you’re young and he’s focusing on you, so it might be hard for you to feel that you are actually living your own life. Most people reach that sort of saturation with him rather quickly. I know several people who will kill him on sight, just because they know how much he has messed with their lives, for he makes almost no effort to hide this fact.”

Isoko, Sally, and Eliot kinda stared. Derek was at the door to the ship, while Tartu and Andria and the witches were a little bit distant. They had all heard some of what Timeweaver had said, since the door to the spidership had been open this whole time. When had it opened? Mark couldn’t recall.

Mark decided, “It’s actually quite freeing to know the future, so I’m going to continue working with him, for now.”

Isoko quietly asked Mark, “You know how to destroy the world?”

Sally earnestly, almost happily, said, “I’d believe it.”

Eliot asked, “It’s impossible, though?”

But Eliot, perhaps more than most, knew it was possible. He was simply hoping that other people didn’t know what he knew.

“I’m not going to do it, and it’s not a true destruction…” Mark frowned at a whole lot of things, and at nothing in particular. “But I guess we arein the ‘mutually assured destruction’ phase of the war? Fucking hell, that’s bleak. I don’t want that.” By saying those words, hearing himself say them, Mark knew they were true. He repeated, “I don’t want that.”

Sally nodded, secure.

Zaid came back, saying, “I searched for internet articles sorted by date and then had some AIs rate their importance, and decided the next year of peace was good enough. There’s always a big number of articles going ‘oh woe is us, ever since the Redo Hero left’, and that puts a big spin on everything when that is no longer true going forward, with me present and actually doing stuff.”

Mark decided, “Let’s give it a week before I invade, and if nothing happens from Dominant in that time then we can extend it by another week.”

Zaid looked hopeful, and then he flickered and came back. He looked annoyed, and he said, “Sure, Mark.” And then he was honestly cheerful again, saying, “Pleasure working with you! I’ll stay away for a while, but you’re always welcome to come by. And bring your demon friend. He’s a lot better when he’s in a body.”

Zaid vanished.

Sally asked Mark, “We’re not really stopping for a whole week, are we? You have Dominant on the back foot if he’s asking for this sort of shit and Zaid was all dejected before he did that fake-happy shit, so… so we’re still doing something?”

Mark looked to his team, to Tartu and the others beyond the open door, and to Addavein, as he said, “I’m so close to fucking shit up beyond recognition and that would get a lot of people killed, so it’s break time. Perhaps that’s why Dominant has called for a cease fire, too.”

Addavein said, “Dominant is still forcing himself to stay awake after a massive influx of mana, but maybe he’ll go to sleep now. He might even try to blame all of this on his generals, who were likely in charge while Dominant has been loopy.” Addavein asked Mark, “What are you doing in this break?”

“I need 3,000 kilos of orichalcum, and… Let’s go to the church. Can someone ask Elaria to meet us there?”

Derek said, “On it!” And then another Derek stepped out of that one and asked, “What kinda powerup did you get?!”

Mark hadn’t even checked his Status—

“Status,” Mark said, deciding to do it now… and he paused as he read. “Huh.”

“Is it neat?!” Derek asked, and then rapidly added, “Don’t share it with anyone! But tell me something.”

Mark hummed, nodded, and got to walking, saying, “It’s a bigger Status.”