The night threatened on the horizon, the forest crackled in the chill of winter, and the monster howled in the cave. An echo of pain and hatred vibrated across the leafless forest.

And Mark slashed his spear through the air, discarding the blood from the weapon.

Mark floated a foot off of the ground, a dozen meters away from the entrance to the cave, and above all of the gore on the ground. White-furred monkeys lay decapitated, limbless, and bisected here and there. Some of them were still spurting blood, refusing to die as fast as they should, but those were monsters for you. They’d be dead soon enough. Each tiny terror was the size of a small child, and each one of them could kill almost any normal party. Mark had worked his way through the lot of them over the last two hours, his black adamantium blades flashing through the air, along with his alchemical silver spear, as he killed, decapitated, and eviscerated.

And now the main enemy was defenseless.

“Has the queen moved?” Mark asked, though he already knew the answer because of his Union sense.

Mark was one of two living things larger than a toddler still in the area. Not counting the trees, of course. It was just him and the monster. In the real wilds, such a venture would get a guy killed, but Mark was stronger than the average person, this was rather well-hunted territory outside of the walls of Memphi, and Mark’s team was busy with their own lives.

Isoko was training and studying for her hovercar tests. She had been busy with that stuff for the last month, but her training had kicked into higher gear in the last few days. She was probably learning basic hovercar repair from a trainer right now.

Eliot had moved to the house with Mark and Isoko two weeks ago, but he was busy, too. Everyone wanted a piece of ‘Very Human’, because of what he could do for them with his Man-made Manipulation. It wasn’t too bad being out in the wilds alone, though. Eliot had made Mark an upgrade for his AI, Quark, but he usually got trashed every other outing anyway.

But Mark’s AI, Quark, was here. Quark wasn’t a real person. He had no soul. But he was competent when it came to information organization, and pinging off of the publicly available resources that hunters used around Memphi.

“And how’s the scanner from Eliot, too?” Mark asked.

Quark spoke from Mark’s backpack, into his earpiece, “The personal monster scanner from Cybersong is at 30% capability and is beginning to rapidly unravel, as Cybersong indicated it would once it was outside of his perceptions and passed the 3 hour mark. We have about 29 minutes of capability left in the scanner. It is showing that you and the monster and the mundane trees are the only living things within 100 meters. My estimation is that the mirror monkey queen has not moved, but that she is prepared to burrow and escape as the reports have said, unless she thinks she can kill you, which, since you are solo, means she should still attack you. A query to Skywatch reveals the presence of three other burrows in the near area, though. She has routes to escape if she confronts you and she desires to flee. Those burrows are at 8 o’clock, 70 meters distant, 10 o’clock, 120 meters distant, and 3 o’clock, 180 meters distant.”

Mark grunted in acknowledgment. He had seen two of those burrows and cleared them out because the mirror monkeys had been hiding in there. He had not seen or sensed the third burrow; it must have been empty. Skywatch was useful.

Winter was almost here, in the leafless forests north of Memphi, yet snow had not fallen. It was mid-December, though, so the snow was bound to start falling soon. Until then, Skywatch, the satellite systems of Memphi that oversaw everything that they could, was pretty much free to use by any slayer, hunter, or otherwise, out in the field. The bareness of the forests made queries to the system fast and easy, too.

You could never have enough sensory abilities.

Mark might have been out here alone in the wilds, which was pretty stupid if you were a normal person, but as a tri-Talent with a Power that helped to boost his tier in every category, a Power to ‘fly’, somewhat, and a general immunity to almost all Mind Magic, Mark was one of the very few people in the world that could go out into the wilds like this and not be worried about dying. This still wasn’t something he relished doing, but sometimes needs must, and this was one of those times.

This monster was a special kind of horror that had already torn three separate teams apart, and it needed a singular person to kill it. Mark had been granted free use of the Skywatch system to hunt the beast, and that is what he was going to do.

Now that it was alone, it was time to end this.

Mark beat his heart with Union, black veins extending out into the air, beyond his body, drawing in resilience and giving back weakness. There wasn’t a lot of life to connect to out here in the leafless, sleeping forest, now that Mark had killed all of the queen’s defenders and it was mid December, but there was more than enough for his purposes. With a flex of his adamantium that held him off of the ground and allowed him to use his spear even more like an extension of his body, Mark spun his caltrops on the ground here and there, pinching the rocks that had grown over them, breaking those rock covers in the process. The queen had been trying to tie him down with her stonekinesis.

The queen had killed two people by subtly covering their boots in stone when they weren’t looking, but Mark didn’t have that issue. He wasn’t standing on the ground.

The queen roared in her cave, hating that she couldn’t lock down the threat outside of her cave.

Mark breathed in warmth from his surroundings, plummeting the air to a chill even as he warmed up quite nicely. He exhaled white mist that he flowed toward the monster in the cave, feeling it out, cooling it down. The queen didn’t react to that. Perhaps it merely felt colder? Hard to say. It couldn’t tell Mark was using Union on it at all, which was par for the course with ‘simple’ monsters.

Mark floated forward, black caltrops breaking hold on the bare ground every time the ground tried to swallow the caltrops. The queen roared in the cave—

Mark’s unionsense warned him of the attack before it happened.

The queen stood in her cave, deep in the cold dark, like a quiet vector of control, focused on Mark. She had subtle tendrils of stonekinesis threaded through the land, her intent to trap and harm Mark betrayed by the vector of her soul. But then her sense of self suddenly expanded outward, into the land under Mark. The land turned into a barbed spike, stabbing upward.

Mark pushed off of the ground to the right and gently slid to the left, keeping his adamantium in contact with the ground because he hadn’t learned how to actually fly yet. Not for real. He was working on it, though. The spike missed Mark by meters, as Mark knew it would. Two more spikes erupted from the ground, trying to stab, to kill. Mark casually floated away from both attacks, seeing them coming from a mile away. He floated forward, his spear at the ready, the black-capped silver length of metal floating with him.

Four more times the queen roared in the dark. Four more times the ground spiked at Mark, and Mark slid around the spikes, wary for the actual fight. The ground spikes were real attacks, but the queen was rapidly realizing that they weren’t going to work, and now she was focusing, attempting to spike the ground to surprise Mark. There was no surprising Mark in this way, though.

There was a reason that this monster had been marked as a high priority kill target for anyone ranked Yellow or above. There was a reason this thing had killed so many people, and not just because it was a spawner monster, laying clones down all the time that would grow into powerhouses, just like itself.

Mark breathed in warmth and breathed out a chill, the air misting into threads of white that flowed into the world, into Mark’s Union, into the queen in her hole. Black veins extended out of Mark’s body, threading through the air, turning invisible, as Mark reached near enough to the cave to fully latch onto the queen—

The queen noticed, finally. She didn’t escape, though. She could have escaped underground, making this kill a lot harder. But she roared with fury and raced out of her cave.

She was a monstrous monkey the size of a hovercar with three arms, one which was much larger than the others and which came out of her back, at a grotesque angle. One leg was stubby, the other muscular and long, and she lopped when she raced. Two faces roared on two sides of her malformed head, while her belly was distended with lumps, with more eggs. Her four eyes bored into Mark, though one of her eyes was too large for her face and peered off into the distance. It was possible that eye was nonfunctional.

And then she latched on to Mark with her own true Power, and Mark saw what many other people would have seen before they were killed by the beast.

The queen became a copy of Mark. The same black webweave underarmor and overarmor, with his same backpack on his back, with bits of black metal stabbing into the ground, holding the queen in the air. Not-Mark twirled a silver spear with a black tip. The queen’s face was exposed, like Mark, and Mark felt so damned odd to see himself as other people might have seen him.

Not-Mark had solid black hair that drank in the light, blacker than his armor, while his eyes were silver and piercing. He looked like a villain, with those black veins floating all around him.

Not-Mark advanced, using an inferior copy of Mark’s spear, jabbing forward like a wild man with no regard for how to fight at all. It didn’t need a whole lot of knowledge, though.

Mark flowed out of the way of the spear, using his own weapon to guide the queen’s spear to the ground.

The queen’s spear touched down and stone blasted in every direction like shards of glass, even the dirt turning into more shards to inflict more damage. Mark kept his cool, even as the shards slammed into his backpack and across his right side, like getting hit with a bunch of high-speed marbles. The webweave and armor held.

Not-Mark pulled back and slashed forward, and Mark slapped down onto that spear, gaining height even as he forced his Union into the queen, drawing out all of her strength and making it Mark’s own. The queen attacked again, but this time with tiny bits of black metal that Mark deflected with his own small bits of metal, breaking the queen’s ‘metal’ in the process.

The queen’s ‘metal’ bled, red waters splashing outward.

Not-Mark screamed and tried attacking again, becoming a storm of metal bits and one very large spear, but Mark countered each attack, angling his adamantium to cut whatever the queen sent his way. The queen bled from everything she sent Mark’s way, and still, she kept attacking.

The Mirror Monkey Queen was able to replicate most everything about a person, including their Powers, though she wasn’t able to use them like their actual users. The report on her indicated that her Power was some sort of minor Reality Manipulation, marking her as an Arch-type monster. All of her progeny were similarly gifted, but to a much, much lesser degree. Mostly, they retained their stonekinesis. Perhaps, if this was a true Reality Manipulation monster, then Mark wouldn’t even be out here. Some superhero would have blasted the beast from the sky. But the queen’s Power wasn’t that great.

She had still killed a lot of people, though.

But Mark was stronger still. Union empowered him and weakened the queen. Real adamantium was no substitute for her fakery that was, in truth, just a part of the queen’s body. And she was tired, and getting more and more tired with every exchange. Mark was healthy as could be.

Mark floated backward, systematically cutting, carving, and when he could, he slammed his spear into not-Mark’s stomach. The queen screamed as Mark ripped his spear out of not-Mark’s belly, pulling out a stream of broken eggs and blood and tiny bodies with the action.

The fight resumed.

The slam of spear on spear continued to ring out into the chilling twilight, for the queen was still rather resilient. She was a top tier monster. A true killer. She had only been alive for several days, though. She would not remain alive much longer.

Mark got into the flow of battle while the queen lagged, stone layered onto her bleeding guts, holding her insides inside as much as she could. But but still splashed everywhere—

An opening.

Mark slashed, and there went not-Mark’s right leg, cut almost at the pelvis.

The queen screamed as she went uncontrolled, blood freely flowing from her severed leg, spurting out red onto the brown ground. The land screamed with her.

She swung her spear, and the head transformed into sharpened stone a good four meters longer than it had been before.

It was a feint, just like everything the monster did. It wasn’t even really tired. It only appeared tired, because that made its targets drop their guard. But Mark could tell, with his unionsense, that the monster wasn’t even fully committed to this fight. Not yet.

Mark was trying to force it to fully commit, though, and so Mark retreated a meter, sliding away from the strike. The blade came at Mark’s head but the real attack was in the ground, already stabbing up at Mark, at the place where he had retreated.

Mark pushed off of the ground with his adamantium, launching himself into the air and away from both strikes. He sailed 15 meters upward, and that’s when the queen fully committed; Mark could tell, based on the queen’s attack vector focusing fully on him.

Not-Mark slipped under him, to where Mark would have fallen down. The queen jabbed up with the spear, the head of the spear turning into five different spears, becoming an unequal mirroring of force.

Mark made his own move, his heart, head, and lungs, beating with adamant and weakness. He stabbed down with black veins like the shattering of a sky with dark lightning. In a single stroke, Mark overcame every defense of the queen, its multiple spears faltering away like a flower wilting in the sun. Not-Mark gasped in her sudden lack. It was like cutting the strings of a puppet.

The queen faltered to the ground, completely insensate.

Mark buried his spear through the queen’s head, down her neck, through her stomach and into the ground. It was not dead yet. Not by a long shot. Even with his weapon full through the creature’s body, the creature was trying to rally.

It was weird to kill something that looked like himself.

Mark turned on the adamantium blender and turned the queen into little more than hunks of meat. Normally, such destruction wasn’t necessary, but the queen’s vector still existed even when Mark chopped the body into pieces; her ‘illusion’ was stronger than it appeared to be.

Her ‘illusion’ of taking Mark’s own form and some of his Powers remained, even in death, until Mark started really going at it. Mark carved off not-Mark’s head and then carved that head into mush. He turned the body and ‘webweave’ into scattered black. Eventually, the body pieces started to transform back into the queen, but not really. Eventually, Mark saw human flesh turn into thick monster hide and white fur and boils of tumors. The ‘illusionary’ bits of the monster’s adamantium mostly became stone, but some turned into fingers and toes. The queen’s many copies of Mark’s alchemical silver spear became an arm and Mark chopped up the arm, turning it into several arms that were more real than the single one had been.

Dripping with blood that was not his own and breathing evenly, Mark surveyed the scene.

The queen’s vector was fully gone.

She was dead, for sure. He had needed to blender every single clone of the queen, too, because those little shits also had the same ability to survive their mirror dying. But Mark had needed to go further with the queen than he had with her progeny. But it was finally done.

Mark breathed in the cold, twilight air, relaxing in the bloody desolation.

Everywhere, white monkey bodies lay in pieces. Many, many pieces. Blood covered the bare trees and the ground, collecting into puddles.

And Mark hovered above it all.

With a breath of purity/impurity, Mark cleaned himself off. He breathed in sustenance and exhaled deprivation, to rebuild himself after the battle, though there wasn’t much life around here to work with, except for the sleeping trees. He was kinda hungry. His muscles were vaguely sore from the strain of moving like he had been moving for the last two hours of battle, but the soreness was a good soreness.

… Was it over, though?

“I can’t feel any other monsters in the area.” Mark took a moment to make sure that was a true statement, and it seemed true enough. The trees were asleep and some of them were monstrous, but that was perfectly fine. The mirror monkeys had killed everything else in the area. Mark nodded, and then asked, “Quark? What’s Skywatch say?”

Mark looked out at the land while he waited for Quark to do his queries and come back with answers.

… he waited some more?

Mark frowned. “Quark?”

When no answer came, Mark let his spear float to the side while he looked at his backpack—

There was a big hole in his backpack.

“Ah, fuck.”

Mark jangled his backpack and bits of metal slipped out of a gaping hole, scattering debris onto the ground.

“Ahh, fuck!” Mark complained, frowning. “I thought that stone swipe had missed me. Shit fuck.” He looked closer at his backpack, muttering, “And I got the smallest, tightest backpack I could get. It was tier 3 webweave, too… Shit.” He stuck his hand through the entire backpack. “She got me good, didn’t she… Well.” Mark pulled out half of a broken phone. “I should say she got you good, didn’t she, Quark.”

Quark didn’t answer because, of course, Quark had failed to survive yet another encounter.

“Bah!”

Mark slung the backpack back onto his back, frowning at everything. He stared at the overcast sky, at the cloudy horizon in every direction. The sun was on the horizon out there, somewhere. Down here, the land was pretty much the same in every direction; bare trees, ready for winter snows. Night was coming on, and it was gonna be a cold one.

… Mark was kinda lost.

“Which direction is Memphi?”

Quark was not around to answer.

- - - -

“It’s the tenth fucking time he died, Isoko!”

Isoko laughed, saying, “You should get an implant!”

It had taken Mark twenty minutes to find out where he was out in the wilds and then another hour to get back to the northern gates to Memphi, and then ten minutes to query the local Skywatch kiosk, to make sure that there weren’t more mirror monkeys out there. There were none; Mark had gotten them all. A trip to Slayer HQ allowed Mark to clear the quest and get paid, and then he had a long ride on a tram to get home. He had gotten home well after dark, but Isoko was up late in the living room, watching mandatory training videos.

And now Mark was showered and wearing night clothes and feeling comfortable in his new home.

After the ordeal with the demon and Wolf Bayou, Mark had moved into the ‘guest house’ on the side of Uncle Alexandro and Uncle Gabriel’s main property. The main house was all lights and shadow, hidden far beyond a leafless forest outside of the glass doors of the living room. That place over there was three stories tall and made for rich people and secured as normal measures could secure it. This house here was a single story, with four bedrooms, a pair of offices, and a great kitchen and living room. It was decidedly less secure, but Eliot had put some additions into the place, so it wasn’t that bad.

This place was much more comfortable, and less intrusive than living there at that big house, because this was the home that Mark had thought was his uncles’ house years ago, back under Curtain Protocol, back when Mom and Dad had brought Mark with them to Memphi, to see his uncles and the city. And now Mark lived here, with his two friends, and teammates. It was nice. Comfortable.

Mark didn’t have to worry about his uncles getting caught in the crossfire here, in this house, if some sort of killer went after him, or, more likely, when that damned dragon Addavein showed up again. The dragon was probably still ‘napping’, but he had been napping for a handful of months now, and he should be waking up soon, if he wasn’t awake already.

Addavein was probably already awake, according to Inquisitor Lola and David, and the Church of Freyala. Addavein was probably doing sneaky shit out there, where people couldn’t see him.

So much sneaky shit, no doubt.

Mark plopped down onto the couch across from Isoko, glancing at the video playing on the screen, as he said, “I don’t want an implant, Isoko. Implants are rife for security concerns. That technospider we fought two weeks ago would have been a nightmare if I had had an implant.”

Isoko winced. “Oh yeah. Forgot about that one…” She paused. She asked, “You could get a custom housing for Quark?”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “A what?”

“Hold on,” Isoko said, as she picked up her phone and flicked around on a search engine. “I forget what it’s called exactly— Ah!” She turned the phone toward Mark. “A housing! It still goes under the skin, but as soon as it’s touched by tech-based monsters then they usually disintegrate rather than mutate.”

Mark looked at the screen and read aloud, “ ‘AI housing’.” The picture was of a needle-like thing with a bunch of protrusions that looked flexible, so it wasn’t really a needle at all. It went under the skin, usually on the right side of the back, or on the backside of a leg, or under the skin of the forearm. Mark leaned back. “It’s still an implant, Isoko.”

Isoko nodded. “Yeah. But these ones are mostly bio-implants. They play really well with tactile telekinesis, so a lot of brawnies get them. You should be able to do TT eventually, even if you can’t right now.”

Mark frowned, shaking his head a little. “Maybe if I can TT eventually, then I’ll do that, but nope.”

Isoko shrugged. “Your issue is kinda an edge case, but ‘AI housing’ comes in a lot of flavors.”

“I’ve never heard of the term ‘house’ before?”

“I meant to tell you about it the other day, when Quark got chunked the last time…” Isoko glanced behind Mark. “Eliot knows more, though.”

Mark felt Eliot walking down the hallway behind him. The guy had been sleeping, but he woke up when Mark had started making noise in the house.

“AI housing is a pretty broad term,” Eliot said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he walked into sight. He plopped down onto the seat to the side of the living room, yawning. “Good hunt?”

Mark smiled. Eliot was ‘burning the candle at both ends’, as Uncle Alexandro had said. Mark said, “It was a very good hunt. I had to kill about 50 versions of myself that didn’t know how to use my Powers at all, and simply couldn’t in most ways, and then one accomplished version that actually knew how to fly around with kinesis and shrug off most wounds. The queen’s Mirror Reality Power was a lot stronger than the progeny, and she wasn’t committed at all to the fight. She was sandbagging. Waiting for me to mess up. I think she let me clip off her leg, and then she tried to capitalize on that wound to pursue for real, but I turned it on her and chopped up something that looked like me for a good five minutes. She didn’t die until I turned her to gore, though. The babies died a lot easier than that.”

Isoko listened, nodding.

Eliot said, “Freaky fucking monster. What rank was it?”

“High Yellow,” Mark said. “A few more solo-kills like that and I’ll get my Green Slayer badge, but you both need to come with me when you can so you can get into Green with me.”

“Can’t get into Green without another sapient monster incursion,” Eliot said, “And those are all taken care of by others out there.”

“I’ll be able to go back out with you again in two days,” Isoko said.

Mark smiled. He nodded.

After coming back from Wolf Bayou, Mark and Isoko had spent some time in the Slayer organization, running a few different quests for goldleaf and ranking up. Making a successful trip to Wolf Bayou had been enough to get them both to High Red, but it was the work of a month of contracts and kills to get into Orange, and then High Orange, which is when they were killing dangerous monsters instead of the rote kills in the Red levels. Both of them had reached High Yellow after not too much longer, which is when Isoko decided to expand her capabilities with her hover license, and Mark had decided to go for a soloist Slayer rating.

Mark was practically a ‘rich man’ because of those bigger kills and continual work, with each Yellow mission netting him another 1,500 goldleaf, or even 2,500 for today’s special mission. In these last few months, Mark had already made more money than Dad and the guys had made fishing for an entire year. It was humbling, and kinda sad in a weird way. He wanted to give money to his parents, but they were dead.

… But anyway. Mark had made 90k goldleaf since he started hunting monsters outside of Memphi, but he had spent most of that already. He was still ‘rich’ compared to a normal person, but even 100k gold leaf was nothing for a high-level warrior, where artifacts and good weapons could run at least that much for a single piece of a proper tool kit, and Mark was becoming a soloist, so he’d need to be more outfitted than most. Uncle Alexandro had helped out with an underarmor webweave, but the oversuit Mark had gotten made had cost him most of his money already, just in materials alone, and it was already outdated. His spear was just a normal spear, too, but one treated with alchemical silver. Mark wanted to buy a real spear made of real mithril, that he could cap off with his adamantium, but such an expense was going to run him 250k goldleaf. Too much!

And yet, spending money was the only way he could ever advance to Purple rank, to become a Dragon Slayer.

And Mark was going to be a Dragon Slayer.

He had already decided that half a year ago, when he came out of the Tutorial and found that there was an unwanted dragon in his life. Mark was going to come to blows against Addavein… eventually.

Probably.

… Even if Addavein was not Addashield…

Or, more realistically, if not Addavein, then Mark was going to come to blows against some other dragon. Mark was the ‘brother of the dragon’ now, and whatever he had been before had been wiped out when Addavein chose this route, which meant that Mark needed to be on a dragon’s level, or else he and those he loved would certainly die due to forces way, way out of their control.

Eliot yawned, then pulled back the yawn and said, “You’ll get Green soon enough.” He brightened a bit, waking up some more as he said, “Any good high-tier AI housing will cost 50k goldleaf, but you’re gonna need someone to organize everything for you when we go to Daihoon, and Quark can do that, so you’re gonna have to spend the money, Mark.”

“Nooo!” Mark complained, lightly, feeling his stomach drop. He wanted so many different things, and he didn’t have enough money to get them all. “I’m so close to being able to afford a hoverbelt!”

Isoko snorted.

Eliot grinned. “Sell some adaman—”

“No,” Mark solidly declared. “It’s my adamantium.”

Isoko laughed and Eliot grinned.

Mark had about 720 grams of adamantium right now, and he had only made another 10 grams of adamantium himself, naturally, in the last few months. Mark’s full assortment of adamantium was about the size of three fingers, and it was all he could do to stretch it as far as he could go, to give himself enough weaponry to really dominate a battlefield. Mark had tried growing adamantium from his body, since he was a farm for the stuff, just like Addavein, but no matter what sorts of experiments Mark tried in that direction he never managed to ‘force’ his body to produce more adamantium.

He was working on it!

Eliot continued, “Quark isn’t even a True AI, so he’s always going to be vulnerable to every little bit of tech disturbance anyone can muster at all, but if you get him some real housing he could survive… for a little while, anyway. But you’re a frontliner. AI helpers tend to survive when they’re on the backline. You’re always gonna have a problem keeping Quark alive.”

Mark sighed.

Eliot added, “Whatever you do, you should not get an implant. Bio or otherwise. They’re just not safe.”

Isoko arched an eyebrow, asking, “They’re not? Even if Mark manages TT?”

Eliot waved a hand, as though that said everything he needed to say. He was still tired, it seemed. And then he realized he needed to use his words, so he said, “They’re a foreign body inside the body. If you can Tactile Telekinesis it, then you’re probably safe—”

“Which is what I was going to do,” Isoko said, nodding.

“But Mark can’t TT, so internally-housed AIs are a no-go. Flat out, straight up.”

Mark went, “Bah. I’m working on it! Haven’t made any progress, though.”

Eliot cut to the heart of the matter, saying, “There’s gonna be so much money rolling in when you’re working the settlement, you know. Until then, I’ll continue to make phones for Quark. That’s not a problem.”

“I had to wander around for 20 minutes to figure out that I was heading in the wrong direction today. The mirror monkey queen was out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.”

Eliot shrugged. “You don’t have to work that hard right now, and the discounts are gonna be big when we get set up. Save the energy!”

Mark rolled his eyes. “That monkey already killed two teams and was threatening a monster wave. It had filled up two burrows with eggs, and it was working on a third. I need Quark’s assistance… quite a lot, actually.”

Maybe Mark needed to spend some more money. How much did he have in the bank right now, though? Should have been… 12k? After today? Mark would check his balance later.

Eliot shrugged.

“Did you manage to get the blanket discount yet?” Isoko asked Eliot. She had asked that question a few times already these past months. She only asked again because Eliot’s answer changed each time.

“Not yet,” Eliot said. “Fireforge is still giving me the runaround. You’d think with me building them state of the art facilities for free that they’d be more than willing to give a true, lifelong discount. I’m gonna be building shit for them for five years, after all. But they have guilds that are making demands of them and all that shit.” Eliot rolled his eyes. “As though they hadn’t already given lifelong discounts to all the noble families and House Valen, too.”

House Valen was the main noble house that was organizing most of the settlement project. Aurora Valen was the General of the Settlement, and she was an incredibly strong Telekinetic and Telepath. A bi-Talent, really, in the Arch and Mind directions.

Isoko clicked her tongue. “That Artificer’s Guild…” She had complaints, but it was old ground to say those complaints again. “I know they give out lifetime discounts. Grandma has an Obsidian Card. House Valen has one, too. What more do they want other than citywide support?”

Eliot said, “Wandering Sage has an Obsidian Card because she’s proven herself.”

“I just need to kill some dragons, then, eh?” Isoko asked, rolling her eyes.

Eliot’s eyes widened in surprise, as he remembered something. “Oh!” Eliot said, “That’s another thing that happened today. Contribution points! Aurora and Iliandra managed to finalize that whole contribution system today. It’s gonna be better than Aluatha Empire-standard settlement contribution points, too, based on the premise that we really are making a twin city and we really are going to be opening portals and shipping between Daihoon and Earth here at Memphi.” He added, “A lot of people still don’t believe that’s what we’re aiming for, but the General and the Ambassador managed to finally convince the major actors today.”

General Aurora Valen of House Valen was only one of the major heads of the settlement project. Ambassador Iliandra Snowstepper of the Aluatha Empire was the other major player spearheading the creation of the settlement beyond the Veil, on the Daihoon-side of Memphi. Mark had met Iliandra a few times, but not for very long. Mark had met both of them, briefly, but only in a professional ‘how do you do’ sort of way. Eliot was the one truly moving in those circles, since he was the one who would be building almost all of the city, mostly by himself.

Eliot said, “So you can get an Obsidian Card out of the Artificer’s Guild for some astronomical amount of points. I wasn’t able to secure any sort of blanket discount for us three, but Aurora knew about it, and she manage to expand the point system so that— Well. There’s a lot. The short of it is that you and Mark can run your missions like normal, and whatever money you make in the systems they set up you also make points a the same time. Something like 100 goldleaf to 1 point. But if you spend that money in the city on any of the guilds then you also make points at the same rate.” Eliot waved a hand, covering a lot of ground with that small gesture, as he said, “There’s an anti-abuse system, of course. Monster hunters can make points getting paid, and also paying others, up to the amount that they have already gotten on record as getting paid by the settlement. Everyone else can only make something like 5 points per day, max, spending money on the guilds in the settlement… It’s complicated. They spent four hours on this stuff.”

Mark sat back on the couch, taking that all in, and then instantly asking, “What can we buy with points?”

Isoko asked, “How long is this point system staying active?”

“A lot of stuff, and for 1 year. We should be ready to open a portal between worlds by then. The first time we do that is when the point discount system begins to taper off, because when we’re successful then the entire world is going to want to be involved. So you have a year to get a million points to buy an Obsidian Card, which gets you a lifetime 25% discount at any Artificer Guild shop.”

He needed to make 500k and then spend 500k? Holy shit, that was a lot to make in a year. Could he even do that? He had made 90k in 3-ish months, and he was out there doing work all the time. There were only so many missions to go around at his level, after all, and they were snatched up when they appeared.

Mark breathed deep. “A million points.”

Isoko grinned. “We can do that! For a 25% lifetime discount? Fuck yeah we can do that.”

Mark had a sudden thought that made him jolt.

Eliot and Isoko looked at him.

Mark asked, “Can we buy magic lessons with points? I want to know… about a lot, really.”

Months ago, when that demon Leash had come after Mark, he had said some very interesting things that Mark was still coming to terms with. The demon had spoken of adamantium being crystallized mana, and Mark had asked most people he knew about what that could mean, and none of them had known anything at all.

Inquisitor Lola had carefully informed Mark that perhaps he shouldn’t put too much stock in the words of demons, since this demon, Leash, had specifically targeted Mark in order to… create a destabilization? Or something like that? Lola wasn’t sure. Considering that the demon had spoken about Mark turning Addavein back into Addashield and his demon Kanda, and also about elves and resurrection magics, Mark was highly inclined to accept Lola’s suggestion to ignore the demon.

But Mark wanted to know about the crystallized mana thing, and he needed to talk to a mage to learn more about magic, but mages of all sorts were all contracted with each other and their superiors to not allow magical secrets into common understanding. Mark had hit a brick wall when it came to finding real answers about magic.

Eliot wasn’t sure as he said, “I think that mage lessons are… on offer? I’m not sure. I’ll have to review the list... And the list is still fluctuating. If you want mage lessons I could ask about that?”

Isoko said, “I can’t imagine they’d allow magical secrets out of the Guilds. Those guys are bound by laws larger than money, aren’t they?”

Eliot shrugged.

But Mark said, “Well I want magic lessons. I’m sure Addavein will come at me with knowledge about all of that shit eventually, and I want to know if that whole interaction is going to be… an issue, or whatever it could be.”

Was Addavein going to learn about what the demon Leash had told Mark, and would he view talk of turning himself back into Addashield and Kanda as… as a threat? A promise of destruction? Would he want to kill Mark right then and there?

There were a lot of issues about all of that stuff and Mark was still untangling those issues in his mind, so he wasn’t really sure where to even begin to tease apart what Leash was trying to accomplish with his bombshell of information.

There was a very good chance that Addavein would just laugh off Leash’s words, claiming them completely demonic and untrustworthy… Which would probably be the best outcome.

Mark needed multiple sources of information about all of that; that’s all he really knew right now.

Eliot nodded solemnly. “I’ll ask in that direction.”

Isoko asked, “I’d like to learn some magic, too… if I can. But maybe just a flying spell, if they have one…” She scrunched her lips. “If such a thing is even possible?” She asked, “Do you think flying spells exist, at all? Or are all flying spells just creative applications of Powers?”

Eliot readily said, “I have no idea.”

Mark said, “Flying spells have to exist. Addashield never filled the air with the sound of helicopter blades when he flew.”

“Magic is supposed to be super complicated,” Isoko said. “That’s all I really know.”

Eliot said, “I know that it takes a mage a year to learn a new spell and five years to begin to use it properly.”

“Is it just an astral body graft?” Mark asked, “Like the Chosen System? With a god grafting on a new ‘limb’ to the body? But the wizard makes the limb themselves, instead of having it granted? I know that traditional mages often end up with pseudo Powers that don’t work as well as the real thing.”

Isoko hummed. “It could be!”

Eliot shrugged. He asked Isoko, “When is your big exam?”

“Not until next week. I got…”

They chatted for a while about a bunch of stuff.

Mark felt all warm and fuzzy, sitting there on the couch, chuckling about Isoko telling a story about her turning Full Platinum and promptly flipping the hovercar with her extra weight, and then Eliot talked about building metal furnaces for processing ores of all types. Mark talked about monsters he killed, telling Isoko and Eliot that they should come out with him tomorrow, but they were busy, which was understandable.

Eventually Mark turned in, laying down on a nice bed under nice covers. Dawn was just a few hours away, but that was fine. Mark had no monsters to kill tomorrow, and everyone else had other work to do, so they weren’t going to go on a tour of the woods yet. Maybe in a week or two they’d go as a team, back into the woods to kill monsters together. To make the world a safer, kinder place.

Quark’s silver light glowed on the desk in his room, on his computer where his main body lay when Mark wasn’t taking him out for a hunt and inevitably getting him accidentally trashed…

“Security status, Quark,” Mark asked.

Mark couldn’t feel anything out there, outside of the house, but Quark had access to a bunch of Eliot-created systems that could scan differently than Mark could scan.

Quark pinged awake, said, “Scanning,” and then fell silent for a few seconds, before saying, “Readout clear. Nothing larger than a mouse within 100 meters of the house, and nothing on the horizon pointed this way. Misters Alexandro and Gabriel Careed’s house is similarly secure.”

Mark smiled a little. His unionsense told him the same thing.

Mark fell asleep softly, drifting off into dreamland.

He woke several hours later, the light of the noon sun falling onto a white world—

Mark did a double take, waking up all the way.

“Snow?!”

The world was white with freshly fallen snow, and Mark had never seen it in person. Not really.

He hopped right out of bed and rushed into the yard, barefoot, shirtless, and feeling free. It was cold and snow crunched under his bare feet and the wind chilled his body, but it was a good sort of chill and Mark had a tier 5 Body, so he could withstand snow for as long as he wanted. Mark laughed as he kicked the snow, and then he used some cups of thin adamantium to make a pair of scoops, to make a snowball.

Mark tossed the snowball in his hands, smiling the whole time.

It was magical.

And it was still snowing, just a little bit!

The sky was overcast and Eliot and Isoko weren’t home, so they were probably at the settlement staging zone or the hovercar testing center, so Mark was all alone again today. He didn’t mind. He had his own stuff to do.

But first things first.

He built a snowman.

And then he went back inside the house, took a warm shower and got ready to go out. He grabbed a fresh phone for Quark to inhabit, and he spent a half hour querying ideas to solve Quark’s dying-all-the-time issue. Quark helped, and soon, Mark had some good directions to explore.

A short while later Mark left the house and headed for the tram.

He was going to solve this AI housing issue. Quark was too useful, and Mark was beginning to see that, based on current trends, if Mark didn’t do something, he should expect Quark to simply not be there for the second half of any trip into the field. And that seemed intolerable.

- - - -

Mark stepped off of the tram, surrounded by people he did not know, all of them all in their own little worlds. Some people definitely noticed Mark at a few prior stops, though. His absolute-black hair color was not natural at all, and from there, they knew who he was.

But no one had said anything to him.

And now Mark was here, standing at the entrance to AI Alley. There were many different ‘AI Alleys’ in the city of Memphi, but this was the closest one to Mark’s home in Shady Acres, and the reviews were good. Quark had even recommended it using whatever algorithms he used for such things, and so Mark had come here instead of to the other places.

The road was wide and closed to through-traffic, with snow-covered trees growing in the center. Soft silver lights shimmered blue and rainbow in plastic pipes that edged the brickwork here and there, rimming some windows and illuminating alleyways. That pipework would be the body of the Mayor of Memphi, and this place was a node of her personal network. Emilia Ramirez had thousands of personal nodes scattered all across the city, just like she had here, though places like this were more obvious than other such lands. These sorts of places were ‘out in the open’, for multiple reasons, and in places like this particular Artificial Alley, the True AIs lived.

Robot bodies, with multiple metal arms. Round heads full of sensors. Human-like bodies that were just a bit off and with visible electronics to mark them as AIs, and not as fleshy humans.

Or at least that was the idea. Mark couldn’t see any artificial people yet, and he hadn’t seen any artificial people at all on the way here, but there were bound to be some in this place. Humans walked down the streets, to computer shops and manufacturing zones, and body shops of all kinds—

Oh.

There was a True AI, right there.

The person themselves was normal enough, talking to a friend and both of them wearing summer-type clothes, even in the snow, because they were both brawnies, for sure. But the True AI had see-through plastic and lights and metal for a forearm, gesticulating a story to his friend with his hands. Lights shimmered under clear skin.

Mark tried not to stare, and he mostly succeeded. He walked on, passing those two guys, turning his attention to the rest of the street. A bakery was selling bread and sweets, and a clothing store was over there, promising deals on AI-integrated clothing. Mark wondered if they had any deals on high-tier gear. Something that could survive a direct blow by a monster…

Well.

He was here to see a store called Harrod’s Hardmetals, but that was far down the street.

He could start here.

Mark went into that store first—

There was an artificial person, standing behind the counter, and he was obviously artificial, too. He had a round head like a discoball full of sensors and four arms that came off of a central stalk, like octopus arms. It was a servitor-based body but specialized, and Mark could tell right away that it wasn’t just a servitor. It wasn’t some fake bartender or personal shopper.

It was a real being. Just like the guy on the street. This guy here had a vector to Mark’s unionsense. That meant it had a soul and an astral body. A strong astral body, too.

“Greetings, customer!” said the AI. With a teasing voice, the AI asked, “Have you never seen a servitor before?”

“You’re not a servitor. You’re a real person.”

The person paused, their arms stilled for a moment, and then they laughed. “Ha! You have a sense for people, then! I am a real person, yes. How can I help you?”

… Mark thought it rude to talk about the nature of bodies with the salesman, so Mark collected himself, and pulled his phone out. Quark blinked to life and Mark set the phone on the counter, saying, “My AI always gets trashed out in the field. I’m a Slayer, going to be advancing to Green and beyond, and I’m a frontliner. I need tier 5 materials for an AI housing, at least. Tier 8 or 9 if I could, but I know those are crazy expensive. I am thinking of a house, but I’m not doing subdermal. Maybe something at my back, or something like that? I have a few places I want to visit here on the street, but I walked in here first. Do you have any suggestions?”

“Hmm… A frontliner?”

“Yes.”

“Frontliner means constantly destroyed electronics and everything else. Have you considered subdermal? That’s the normal option.”

“I can’t do that. No TT.”

“Ahhh… yes. That would be a problem.” The AI paused, and then said, “The stuff I sell here is in the 100-1000 leaf range and is not rated for battle at all. It’s all tier 1 materials. I don’t have exactly what you need here, but I can guide you further along. What you want is an AI housing, as you have said. Tier 1 is 10,000 goldleaf, and it gets more expensive from there. Tier 9 is something a superhero would want to wear, and that stuff is regulated by Memphi and other sorts of places. Living AI can get subsidies and make the costs for a tier 5 body negligible, but you have a base AI here, so you’re going to have to pay the whole way, and tier 5 is about a million goldleaf for a basic setup.”

Mark’s stomach dropped. “It wasn’t that expensive online. They were saying 50,000 goldleaf for tier 9.”

“Different systems cost differently. What you saw was probably a cheapo version of the basic system; the one they published to make you want to inquire further, and then they jacked up the price. The main cost of a competently made AI house is a crystal substrate called livium. Livium grows stronger based on the complexity of the AI inhabiting it. Do you know what that is?”

Mark shook his head. “Never heard of livium before.”

The AI nodded their discoball of a head. “All Living AIs have a livium processing core that grows with them, and when we grow enough of it, we donate the excess to a new AI that we then raise as our child, until they grow up and can do the same for their progeny.”

Mark stood up straight. “I did not know that.”

The AI chuckled.

And then Mark had a question. “Livium goes into normal AIs, too?”

“Oh yes. A much smaller core, and you need to flood the core with your own...” The AI glanced around the room, moving a bit, and seeing that Mark was the only one in the store. “I will speak fully beyond Curtain Protocol. You need a livium core for your personal AI, and you need to flood the AI housing with your astral body, and thus, eventually, the tier of the housing will match your Power Level. It will have the same weaknesses and strengths you have, though. You look like a brawny to me. Are you… never going to have TT?”

Mark said, “I’m more of a Shaper with Union.”

“Oh! Yes. A Shaper would have been my next guess.” The AI said, “As for Union, Freyala’s Union will also allow you to connect to the livium core in your AI house and bring it up to speed with your astral body. You’ll have to watch out for manipulators, but with a high Shaper tier you should have a good Mind tier, and thus the housing will be immune to most normal tech-based Powers. That’s always the real danger when using a base AI and spending money on a livium core; it could get corrupted easily.” The guy leaned back, saying, “Of course, you could just get a box of high-tier material and strap it to your back and stick the phone inside there. That’s the cheapest option. And! In that case!” The guy gestured with his wiggly arms to a display to the side. “We have some of these! Now these are pretty inexpensive and easy to replace, with multiple redundancies.”

Mark looked at what the guy (Mark was pretty sure he was a guy) was pointing at, and he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The thing hanging on the rack looked like straps and bands of fabric, with lines of metal on them, or maybe wires. It looked sleek, whatever it was. And then Mark saw the small camera dots on the straps. He had mistaken those dots on the straps for buttons, but nope, they were cameras.

Mark asked, “A full body rig?”

“Correct! Cameras in every direction, and with hookups for a basic AI system, or any sort of system. It will allow you to have a few different nodes of your AI on your body, and hopefully one of them can survive your battles. That’s the other major option when it comes to solving the AI-in-battle question; redundancy that can connect to itself. It’s a lesser version of what I got going on right here,” the guy tapped his discoball of a head. “Full camera systems here—” He tapped his arms in multiple locations. “And here and here. All down my arms and my body. You need a high-powered core to organize all of this memory load, but it has a great benefit of redundancy. For instance: Several cameras can be turned to slag by an errant lightning bolt, but the rest will function just fine. In your particular case, I would suggest getting something like this and also a double basic housing, tier 1, as the cheapest possible option. One AI house on your back, and one on your leg, for instance. If you’re going cheap, then go for redundancy.”

That was all a really good suggestion. Mark kinda didn’t want to wear a full rig, but maybe that would be useful?

“… Huh. Thank you very much.” Mark looked at the full body rig again. After a moment, with the shopkeep looking at him expectantly, Mark turned to the guy and said, “I think I might want a livium core system… Or at least learn more about them.”

The guy nodded, and then said, “In that case, then you should take a left out on the street and walk about half a mile to the other end. There, you’ll find all sorts of higher end materials at the bigger stores. This end of the street has rather mundane solutions. You’ll be wanting to go to Harrods’ Hardmetals for the truly bespoke options, but even a place like Shander’s might be enough.”

Mark grinned. “Harrods was on my list to visit.”

“Most people do go that way, and for good reason. I used to be a manager there, but I wanted to offer cheaper options that Harrods simply wasn’t willing to do, and so, I’m here. When you get there, know that practically everything they do can be done cheaper if you really go looking, but everything at Harrods is that expensive because they do a lot of quality stuff. Don’t get swindled if you choose to go somewhere too cheap.”

Mark smiled softly. “Thank you very much. It was nice to meet you.”

The shopkeep nodded a little. “Nice to meet you, too.”

Mark walked out of there, smiling.

And then he walked down the street, marveling at the snow and the shops.

Mark soon crossed a street that was otherwise unremarkable, and that’s when AI people began to show up with a lot of regularity. They were people, for sure, even though some of them looked like hovering servitors and others looked almost completely human, save for distinctly non-human features. They showed off their metal and their lights, a lot, and Mark kinda wondered why they did that. They could appear fully human if they wanted to, couldn’t they?

Well he certainly wasn’t going to ask anyone about that. That just seemed rude.

‘Hey, I couldn’t help but notice that half of your skull is all LEDs under a clear plastic face, but all the rest of your body looks normal. Why is that? Also, are you a man, or a woman, or should I call you a ‘them’?’

Mark had never seen robot people before, but it seemed rude to ask about those sorts of things.

Mark eventually found Harrods and the other place that shopkeep had talked about, and about ten other interesting shops. He scoped out his options, boggled at the price tags of a proper livium-core AI system setup, and promptly decided that all of that was something that needed some real consideration. He was not able or willing to spend that much money today, at all.

350,000 goldleaf for a basic livium-core system? Sure, it was the best option, but Mark only had 18,600 in the bank right now, and he needed 21,000 to get a real hoverbelt, so he could fly higher than 4 meters off of the ground. He had thought he had been rich, killing monsters and getting paid very well, but the price tags on the good, high-tier material stuff were priced in the stratosphere.

Soon, Mark was walking along the road, back toward the tram stop, not having bought anything, and thinking.

He decided, “I’ll get by with Eliot making a bunch of phones for Quark, for now.”

When he had enough adamantium, Mark could just wrap a phone in adamantium and protect Quark that way. But first, Mark would need to have more than 720 grams of adamantium. He needed to do more experiments about forcing his body to make more adamantium, for sure. Adamantium was a biometal, after all, and Mark’s body was already naturally producing the stuff, but not fast enough—

Something caught his eye.

Mark stopped on the street, and looked at the store to the right. It was all bright lights and feather scarves draped on mannequins in the windows, and sex toys, vibrating in the back of the display. It was a robot sex shop.

… Curiosity had Mark walking into the store, walking through a few aisles, and walking right back out, face all red.

He got back on the tram and headed back home, trying not to think about the sex shop, and focus on everything else he had just seen.

Humanity had never been friends with any of the other species out there on Daihoon. Not really. The goblins wanted to eat people, the demons wanted to fuck people over and steal their bodies, and the dragons wanted to rule unopposed, tyrannical. The elves were mythical and unknown. Any of the other thinking monsters out there only seemed to use their thoughts to figure out how to eat more people.

But AIs were different.

Superficially, they resembled demons, due to not having bodies of their own outside of computer systems. But they were real people. Sometimes people from Daihoon called them ‘familiars’, but that was only for the young True AIs. True AIs were almost like ‘monsters’ that were not monsters at all, but instead partners to humanity.

They were one of the only species that lived alongside people and helped people, because people helped them… Or at least that’s how Mark imagined it worked. He didn’t know much about AIs at all aside from what he had seen on the screens growing up, and besides knowing that Malaqua, the Stone God of the System, had been the former City AI for New Delhi, before he became a god and the jailer or emperor of the demons, depending on who you asked.

Mark was content with just having an AI who could tell him directions now and then. He did not want a true AI at all. ‘Dumb’ AIs didn’t have souls. Of course, dumb AIs were easy to destroy and corrupt because they had no astral body, which made them as easy to destroy as a tissue paper; a phenomenon which Quark had experienced many times over. Baseline people had no astral bodies at all, either, which made them similarly susceptible to destruction, but at least people could spontaneously generate an astral body when they were exposed to enough magic. Could AIs do the same? True AIs, anyway; not AIs like Quark.

… Eh! That thought was a strange one. Mark didn’t want Quark to be a real being. That screamed ‘slavery’ to Mark, or rather, Mark knew that he would give Quark over to the AIs (probably to COFR back in Citadel Freyala) and let Quark become his own person, away from the battlefield, if Quark became a real person.

Mark was pretty sure that the AIs and Malaqua took a poor view of people who enslaved AIs for their personal use, though that was just a guess. Seemed a reasonable guess, though, since Mark had read in his Two World History course that something had happened regarding all of that, like, 60 years ago… But he didn’t remember many details—

Mark had a sudden thought.

“Oh…” Mark’s thought expanded. “… Oh.”

Since it was hard to find humans to teach him magic, because they all required decades of service or big guild contracts… were there AI people that knew magic, that weren’t in the Mage Guild, or whatever it was called? Could he get some answers regarding magic from some living AIs?

Malaqua had even spoken to Mark directly, after the Tutorial, to tell him a bunch of stuff and then promptly inform him that he could answer no questions.

But maybe…

Maybe now, Malaqua would answer some questions? Every Stone Temple had communion rooms for people to speak to Malaqua, if they wanted. Mark had even undergone the False Tutorial in one of those communion rooms.

Mark checked his phone for the nearest Stone Temple. He saw one on the way home, and he decided to get off a few tram stops early.

Mark gripped the railing overhead as the tram turned a curve, and he thought about asking Freyala questions, too. But… He had already asked the Inquisitors he knew about magic, and none of them were able to answer anything.

- - - -

“So I came here,” Mark said, as he sat in a stone booth, facing a stone wall, “To see if I could get questions answered about a whole bunch of stuff having to do with demons and dragons and archmages and elves and resurrection magics and… ah… All of that.”

Mark went silent, his tumble of words petering out. He had spoken to the Stone for the last hour and a half, or maybe more. There had been no answers, but he had started talking, and he kept talking. Everything was weird in his life. Nothing was as it should have been. His parents were dead and demons were pointed in his direction, and a dragon was his ‘brother’, and Malaqua, the Stone God of the System, the Demon Jailer and Emperor, had all the answers to everything anyone would ever want to know.

But would he actually give answers? That was the real question.

Usually the answer was no. Gods usually didn’t answer people, unless those people were truly important, and not even then most of the time.

Did Mark rank getting answers?

Mark had never tried to speak to Malaqua before. He had never tried communing with any of the gods except for Freyala, and only obliquely. But he had run the False Tutorial twice, and he had taken the real Tutorial once, and he was set up to be a powerhouse eventually, so maybe he should have come here for answers, and sooner than this.

And so, here Mark sat, in a grey stone room, sitting on a grey stone bench, looking at a grey stone wall. It was a small room. Brutalist. Mark’s ass was threatening to fall asleep, but not really. He was just uncomfortable here in this solid room, now that he had finished speaking. A minute passed. The soft white light overhead and the solid greyness of the walls had turned from welcoming-strength to uncaring-emptiness, and Mark could not tell when the switch had happened, only that it had happened, and now Mark felt alone—

Words appeared in the air.

Do you want to contract with Leash? I will arbitrate this demon contract if you wish to pursue this option.

Mark’s stomach dropped, his heart beat hard, and black veins pulsed into the air. Softly, strongly, Mark said,

“No.”

The words changed.

Speak to the archmages. They would likely be willing to talk to you to answer your questions about magic and demons. Good day.

The words vanished. The left wall of the privacy booth flickered and a door handle appeared, along with a seam for the door. The room was unlocked and Mark could leave at any time. His time talking with Malaqua was over.

… It was over, just like that.

Mark didn’t leave right away. He stayed seated. He needed some more moments to process what had happened.

“Speak to other archmages, huh,” Mark muttered. And then Mark sighed, and asked, “Can I get a System readout of my Power Levels?”

The light overhead blinked, and like Malaqua had triggered a subroutine to take care of Mark’s request, words appeared with no preamble at all.

Body, Healthy Body: 059

Shaper, Adamantium: 087

Mind: 79

Natural, Union: 091

Soul: 67

Arch: 49

Estimated astral body completeness: 95%

The numbers were all a little bit higher than they had been last week. But also, last week, that ‘estimated astral body completeness’ had also read 95%. So his numbers had gone up, but he had remained at 95% ‘done with growing his astral body’. Maybe a person’s astral body is never truly ‘completed’? … Though that seemed wrong, somehow.

Mark was pretty sure he was growing beyond the normal limits that his astral body should have allowed. From what he understood about how this all worked, he knew that people usually reached their full astral body strength about half a year after Tutorial, but that ‘full strength’ was always going to oscillate up and down. Mark only seemed to be ‘oscillating’ upward, though.

Tri-Talents were maybe weird like that? Maybe they took longer to grow to full power, too?

Mark wasn’t sure.

… He didn’t want to talk to archmages and their demons.

“… Ah, fuck.”

On the plus side, there was an archmage out there that wanted to talk to him, and whom Mark had already spoken with and had a congenial moment. And it wasn’t Addashield.

Archmage Steve Blackthorn of Memphi had been one of the major forces to respond to the demon Thrash’s presence at Wolf Bayou, a handful of months ago. He had been wearing robes and he had been one of the first people to descend from the sky, to speak to Mark after Mark had told Leash to kill himself, and Leash had acquiesced. Mark hadn’t known he was speaking to Blackthorn at that moment, which had been for the best.

Mark had been rather more cold toward the demon-contractor the next time he had accidentally met the guy.

There hadn’t been a third meeting because that second one had gone so poorly, but Blackthorn had extended an open invitation to Mark to speak with him, whenever Mark wanted.

… Did he want to talk to another archmage, though?

Maybe.

But for now, Mark sat in the privacy booth, and he thought.

Eventually, Mark stood up and touched the door handle. The wall briefly turned to liquid and flowed away, exposing the ambulatory of the Stone Church beyond. Other people were out there, walking left or right, headed to their own personal booths or otherwise. A lot of people used this time to speak to Malaqua as some sort of therapy, for he always answered in some sort of way. Never directly, of course. But always in a way that you needed to hear… or at least that’s what the priests here had always told Mark.

Mark had expected an unexpected answer, and he had certainly received that.

An offer to arbitrate a Demon Contract?

That wasn’t normal, right?

Mark walked out of the Stone Temple and got back on the tram, his mind lost in thoughts.

- - - -

Mark steeled himself in the driver’s seat of the car his uncles had loaned him. He did not look up out the window, because he did not want to see what was out there. Not at this moment. He would get to it in a second.

It was a snowy day on this, Friday December 18th, 2048, and Mark had an appointment to see Blackthorn, the Archmage of Memphi.

Mark sighed, and thought back to a few days ago, at the Collective Temple of Memphi.

“There really is nothing we can do, Mark,” Lola had said, sitting at her temporary desk in her temporary office.

Inquisitor Lola was still in the process of moving to Memphi, because that’s what she had decided to do with her life. She had told Mark that she was still his trainer, too, if he wanted, because that’s what she wanted, when she wasn’t being an Inquisitor. Just how Mark was getting out there and making a life for himself, Lola was making a new life for herself. She had moved out of Orange City, never to return as well.

Most of her duties were already transferred to the local hierarchy of the Church of Freyala, so she was outside of the office more often than not. Mark had managed to catch her on her business hours, when she was inside her office, for once.

Mark had sighed, saying, “I really don’t want to go to that archmage for answers, and I really don’t like the idea of Malaqua offering to arbitrate a Contract between Leash and I.”

Lola had nodded seriously, saying, “And you shouldn’t. Malaqua can only ever point you in the right direction and give you a baseline to circumvent the largest of pitfalls, but the actual Contract is always hashed out between the individual demon and human, and the final Contract is always full of danger to the human and the world.” She added, “But as for Blackthorn, he’s not a bad sort.” A bit less polite, “Still an archmage, though.”

So much meaning in one small statement.

Mark had hummed.

And then Lola had stood up, grinning, and said, “It’s about noon! Have you had lunch yet? Let me take you to this place down the road and we can talk all about archmages and what I know about magic, and the Mage Guilds…”

Lunch had been great. They had even managed to talk about some weirder sorts of Unions, though Mark had made no progress on his personal quest to make his body produce more adamantium at a faster rate. Lola couldn’t help him with that, and she wasn’t even willing to ask around about it. Mark being able to make adamantium was something she was not going to spread around.

But Mark wanted more adamantium, for dozens of reasons. If he could just get more of the stuff, then he could truly become who he was meant to be… Or at least he wouldn’t have to use his alchemical silver spear as a stopgap measure. It was cheap enough to spend 100 goldleaf every mission to have a truly weighty, good length of metal to slash and stab into monsters, but the spear was only tier 5 when coated, and Mark wanted something better.

And maybe, when Mark finally ended up with excess adamantium, he could sell it for crazy amounts of money that he could then use to finally buy artifacts and tools to make him able to exist around a dragon without getting squashed, and hopefully, eventually, being able to fight back. Because that was the real goal.

Dragon hunting.

Kaiju killing.

Putting big monsters into the ground.

As it was, unless the kaiju battle took place in an easy scenario, like, for instance, with Mark sitting next to a Brain Popper and feeding them power enough to blow up the 6 heads of an uncaring kaiju in the far distance, then Mark couldn’t be anywhere near a kaiju battle without being in real danger.

And Mark wanted to learn how to fly, for real, so…

He needed answers from a mage.

And so, Mark was here, sitting in the parking lot of Blackthorn Tower, but not wanting to go inside. He glanced at his phone, sitting in the cupholder. Quark came to life at Mark’s glance, showing the time. 2:17 PM. The meeting with Blackthorn was at 2:30. Mark stared at the phone for a while, the time ticking to 2:18, and then 2:19, as Mark thought about Addashield and Mom and Dad and the destroyed house, and demons influencing archmages to commit atrocities, and dragons—

“Shall I request a reschedule?” Quark asked.

“… Y—” Pause. “No.” Mark picked up Quark and put him in his pocket, as he opened the door, muttering, “It’s time to see another archmage.”

Mark stood in the parking lot, looking up at Blackthorn tower.

It was shaped like a particularly thick and rough-hewn obelisk made of obsidian, with some weird architecture happening with the top floor, but it was really just tinted windows reflecting black and a disguised hoverport on the roof. It looked almost like natural obsidian, chipped by weather and shaped by forces beyond the keen of mortal men. And maybe it was, in part. It sat in the middle of Enchanting, a suburb and inner city located on the southern side of Memphi, overlooking the Mississippi River and Enchanting’s own port on the river.

Enchanting was a ‘mage city’, and there were guilds everywhere. The main ‘mage guild’ was here, but they were just in charge of making sure that mage secrets weren’t released. They were sort of like the Collective in that way; like the Inquisitors. Less violent and more ‘able to blackball someone from mage society’, though. That meant no ability to buy reagents for alchemy, or mage books, and a whole bunch of other things. Magical learning was highly regulated.

So there were reasons that mages stuck to the regulations. If they were found flouting the regulations, they were blackballed. Non-mages simply didn’t ever learn the true secrets of magics that real mages learned, with few exceptions.

Lola knew what to look for in her job as an Inquisitor, when it came to a mage exhibiting demonic influence, and if Mark ever wanted to become an Inquisitor he’d need to learn a lot about magic for those reasons as well. But Lola wasn’t a mage and she had a holy mission to keep humanity safe from demons, so her hands were already too full with that to add real magic to her skill set.

She had told Mark that ‘real magic’ was a bunch of minor Powers, though, and that was about it.

Mark already knew that much. Mom and Dad had gone to a year of arcanaeum to learn some minor magic. Mom had possessed the minor Power of Cleansing, while Dad had possessed the minor power of Telekinesis, and both of their powers had mutated to even more minor versions. At the end, Mom had been good at keeping water clean and that was about it, while Dad’s power had mutated into Fish Yank.

… Mark didn’t want to go into the tower.

Mark went into the tower anyway, one step in front of the other. Snow billowed across the ground as a gust of wind whipped through the parking lot, and Mark stuffed his hands into his pockets, to ward off the chill. A flurry dusted Mark’s coat and hair.

The doors opened at Mark’s approach and the snow followed him in, but not very far. The door closed behind him, and Mark felt like he was in the dragon’s den again, though it was really just a nice public lobby, if on the small side. Black and grey marble floors, obsidian pillars, and brightly colorful paintings on the walls done mostly in gold and yellow.

Archmage colors; black and gold.

The public entryway to Blackthorn Tower wasn’t very large, because Archmage Blackthorn only had himself and his staff to worry about, but it was large enough to have a greeting room with large couches and a big fireplace that was roaring with flames. It was warm, and it felt lovely. Homey. Even in all this ostentation, the place felt kind of like a home. That’s because it was. The whole place reminded Mark of a hotel entrance, but one of those fancy, ‘you don’t belong here’ sort of hotels.

This particular ‘hotel’ didn’t have many guests in the front room at all. Mark only noticed three, aside from him.

A student and a professor stood at the front counter, talking to the secretary on the other side of the counter, and some guy was sitting down on a couch by the fire, reading a book and sipping a coffee, probably waiting for his appointment, or something. Mark walked to the counter and stood behind the student and teacher.

In an arcanaeum, students would wear robes or shoulder capes that bore the colors of their arcanaeum. Memphi had 7 arcanaeums, but all of them had an M on the logo. The student here, who was a teenage girl, had a red shoulder-cape with a white M on the center. The older man wore a plain grey small-cape, marking him as a professor.

His words and tone also marked him as a professor; an angry one.

“Please,” said the man, straining to keep his voice even, “Deirdre will be a great mage one day, and the world will be poorer off for her not getting the education she needs to truly grow strong. I am begging you to give her a chance. Please allow her to speak to the archmage directly. Just that much.”

The small girl stood resolute, but silent.

The secretary said nothing.

Mark couldn’t tell much of what was going on, not really, but he could sense the vectors of the professor, the student, the secretary, and even the guy sitting down and reading his book, and he could tell a lot about the situation from just that. The professor was truly trying to do well by the girl, his vector pointed at the girl and the secretary, but also high, high overhead, to an indeterminate area where Archmage Blackthorn probably was. The girl was putting on a brave face but she was reluctant to be here, her vector pointing right back out the door. The secretary and the guy sitting down both thought that the professor was pushing way too hard… or something like that. Neither of them were really caring about what the professor was trying to do, with the secretary barely pointed in any direction at all, and the reader only glancing away from his book to look annoyed. Mark couldn’t put exact emotions to all of what he was unionsensing, and he certainly couldn’t read any minds, but he could tell basic intentions in the vectors he sensed.

The secretary, to a small extent, and some guys watching from some cameras to a much larger extent, were mostly focused on Mark. They had seen him come in, and now the secretary was trying to figure out how to politely get rid of the guy standing in front of her, so that she could focus on Mark.

Usually Mark didn’t notice what people were focused on unless they had a desire to harm or undermine in some way, or unless he was out in the field, but being here felt like being out in the field, getting ready to face a monster or hundred.

Mark’s own vector was pointed outward, toward the door, just like the girl’s.

“I’m sorry, sir...” began the secretary.

What followed was stuff that Mark tried not to pay attention to. It did not concern him at all.

Soon the professor was huffing mad and walking away, though the girl was walking faster. She was out of the door first, saying something about how it wasn’t a big deal, while the professor spoke about how it was a big deal, and how he couldn’t teach her like she needed, but by all the gods, he was going to try. It was kinda nice to hear him say that, and the girl thought so, too.

She grabbed the professor’s hand, and said, “It’ll be fine, dad.”

The professor’s heart soared, and he said something about how she hadn’t called him that yet, but the door closed and cut the rest of the conversation.

Huh. So they were father and daughter then? Or maybe adopted? Mark didn’t understand—

“Sir? Mister Careed?” the secretary said, smiling, and she was much more focused, now.

Mark stepped forward, saying, “Yes, ma’am. I have a… a 2:30 appointment…” Mark imagined that he should have said more than that, but he simply went quiet.

The clock on the wall read 2:28.

The secretary smiled, and said, “You can go up now if you want. The elevator over there will get you where you need to go.”

She gestured politely to the left, and Mark saw an elevator door that was almost hidden among the decor.

“… Well okay then,” Mark said.

And then he went to the elevator.

The door opened before he pressed the button.

They were ready for him, huh?

Mark got inside and there were no buttons to press. The door closed, and Mark’s heartbeat raced, black veins extending under his skin and connecting him to the world. He felt trapped, but he knew he wasn’t. The materials of the elevator seemed to be just tier 1, according to a scrape test Mark had instinctively, and maybe accidentally, performed on the metal in the wall. He retracted his adamantium back to his wrists before he broke anything else, and he relaxed. The elevator was just enhanced stuff made stronger so that normal wear and tear didn’t easily happen. This was not a death trap. Mark could get out of here easily enough.

But he was already within range of the archmage, and that terrified him.

Mark had seen Addashield kill with ease. He knew how powerful archmages truly were.

Blackthorn wasn’t a 360-year-old archmage who made the world what it was. He was not an Addashield. But Blackthorn was still an archmage. He still had a demon telling him all the secrets of the world, how to do real magic, and strengthening his body enough that Mark’s adamantium would have a tough time actually harming him…

Mark breathed in the good, and breathed out the bad, settling himself, black miasma threading into the world with every breath.

And the elevator went up.

- - - -

The elevator dinged.

The doors opened, revealing a vast open space at the top of the tower, like a superhero’s penthouse suite. The first thing Mark noticed was the smell. It smelled like a clean forest, and also like sweet smoke. Mark couldn’t place or really understand the smell, but he smelled it all the same.

The apartment itself was all light and air and plants growing in small garden patches, but also large, soft-looking couches and a big fireplace like the one in the lobby downstairs. Half of the entry room had a wall made of windows, giving a mostly unobstructed view of the horizon to the north and the east. There was a massive door in the center of that view, offering a way to get out onto a balcony that wrapped around the exterior of the tower. Plants grew out there, mostly bushes, but there was one nice, low-growing tree with brilliant green leaves growing in a protected part of the roof. The other half of the interior room was three separate floors and a staircase leading up those stairs. Down here on the first floor was big kitchen—

Archmage Steve Blackthorn was shirtless in a bathrobe, smoking something in a pipe as he flipped pancakes on a flat top grill. He had on boxers. He looked like any normal sort of guy, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, a pale complexion, and a relaxed attitude; like a guy in his house smoking a joint and making breakfast.

A nude woman was getting a drink from the fridge behind him. According to Mark’s unionsense, there were three other people in the apartment, all of them out of sight, in the other, larger half of the suite. Two of those people were probably having sex, according to their vectors. The third one was doing something else. The nude woman saw Mark and grinned as she held her beer. She walked behind Blackthorn and slapped the archmage on the ass, smiling and chuckling as she did so.

Blackthorn went, “Ahh!” as he jumped a little, and then he laughed and grinned and turned. “You’re not tired?” Blackthorn happily asked.

“I am very tired, and you have a guest.” The woman smirked as she pointed at Mark.

Mark had taken a single step out of the elevator, and the elevator just now closed behind him. There was no escape… And besides that, Mark wanted answers to questions. He needed to be here.

Blackthorn raised an eyebrow as he turned and looked at Mark. His eyes went wider and he exclaimed, “Mark! You showed up!”

The guy’s pipe fell out of his mouth but it didn’t fall down. It floated to the side and sat down on a small dish on a table in front of the kitchen. Blackthorn fluffed up his bathrobe and tied it around himself, while the spatula he had been using was now flipping the pancakes by itself, hovering there and exerting force outside of Blackthorn’s direct action. Cooked pancakes, all golden and with spots of blueberries, flopped onto a plate, as more batter floated out of a big bowl and plopped onto the grill. Fresh batter sizzled in a lot of butter.

The whole scene reminded Mark of when Addashield cooked in Mark’s home in Orange City. Mark recalled the taste of basilisk eggs, scrambled well, and sausage imported from Empire Aluatha, and how Addashield had hovered juice out of the fridge to pour Mark a glass.

Blackthorn asked, “Can I get you some pancakes, Mark? Maybe some coffee?” With a subtle questioning that was probably friendly, but which sounded concerned and which could have meant anything, he quickly added, “Are you drinking coffee, yet?”

He was asking about substance abuse, or something, maybe?

“… I have started drinking coffee. I prefer the flavored ones with lots of creamer.”

Blackthorn grinned. “Ah ha! Yes! That’s the good stuff!” Blackthorn clapped his hands and announced, “What is life without joy, right! Always go for the good stuff! Never go for black coffee. Black coffee is just boring old caffeine.” He walked over to a coffee machine that looked just as expensive as everything else in the apartment, saying, “I’ll make both of us some good stuff! Do you want it with or without some enhancers?”

Blackthorn’s Contract with his demon required Blackthorn to do drugs and sex, all the time, because his demon wanted to experience all of that, all the time, and Blackthorn wanted all of that, too. So when Blackthorn mentioned ‘enhancers’, that’s what Mark imagined he meant. It was probably the correct idea.

“No thank you, sir,” Mark said, “I’ll just take the latte, if you’re making them.”

Blackthorn grinned. “Of course!” And then he started making coffee, and after a flash of light, he had two cups of the stuff, and he was walking toward a table to set down the cups, saying, “I’m glad you finally accepted my invitation! I was afraid I had turned you off too much the last time we talked. Now, I know a bit about what you want, but I need you to tell me what you want, Mark. Please sit with me.”

… Mark decided to gloss over Blackthorn flashing coffee into existence. He sat down at the table with Blackthorn and had a sip of his coffee while Blackthorn sipped his own. Mark barely tasted it. He set down the cup.

Mark began, “I’m here to ask questions about the nature of magic and what that demon Leash told me about… Uh. I’ve gone to the Mage Guild looking for answers, but I’ve only just the other day found out that the Mage Guild is more of a regulatory body and not actually in charge of information, but I know about mage contracts and the inherent secrecy of the information. I don’t want to do a contract. I just want answers about… everything. Chances are I’m going to ask Addavein about all this stuff, too, but I don’t know what he will say… or even if he will be offended by what Leash offered; that idea of splitting Addavein back into the mage and the demon.”

Talking to that giant dragon would be like talking to a dragon, as the saying went; ‘talk to a dragon and have your life upended’. Talking to an archmage or anyone in any real position of power was pretty much the same as ‘talking to a dragon’, but not nearly the same.

Blackthorn sipped his coffee while Mark spoke. When Mark was done he set down his coffee and said, “I’ve gotten your full transcripts of the questioning session by Justicar, after the Demon Leash incident. I’ve read every statement given by everyone involved, and I’ve heard a few different ways in which Leash promised you several impossible things, should you Contract with him. I’m not going to go over much of that with you, because there’s too much to go over. Mostly, you should know this: demons are not a monolith. They hoard knowledge. Not all of them knows everything that all the rest know, but there is a vast, basic level of knowledge that they all have, that would put almost any archmage to shame, and that includes me.

“I spend most of my days high and having fun, Mark. I am not a studious person. My demon, Planty, is similarly non-studious. I am at the lower level of what an archmage is expected to be able to do. Oh sure, I can kill any kaiju, so I do my duty, but I’m not very solid.

“But what I have learned in various inquiries about what Leash said to you, about the resurrection magics of the elves, about ripping a dragon apart back into a person and a demon, and about permanently killing demons…” Blackthorn scrunched his face, looking away before looking back at Mark, saying, “There are so many caveats to all of those things that there is no good way to start talking about them, other than to say that they’re probably all impossible things, and yet, there’s a 20% chance that the resurrection and separation magics might be true.”

Mark felt himself relax.

So there was a 20% chance, huh?

Good enough.

Mark said, “Thank you for telling me that. I suppose, now, I need to get stronger if I’m ever to venture into Endless Daihoon to find those resurrection magics. To that end, can you answer questions about magic, and help me eventually reach that goal? Like, specifically and for now, how about a flight spell? How does that work?”

Mark was definitely overstepping the bounds of politeness, but he felt secure enough to do that. And if Blackthorn didn’t want to help, then that was fine, too. Mark could move on from this encounter having called it a success already.

Blackthorn breathed a little, and then hummed, and said, “Strength will not be your problem. Capability will be your problem. Asking about a flight spell is a good idea, and yet...” He leaned forward slightly, and in that moment, he changed. He was still the young-looking man he appeared to be, and yet his shadows seemed deeper. His eyes drooped. He was almost a hundred years old in a 20-something body, but he rarely looked it. He looked every bit of his true age in that moment. His voice was the same, but it was also deeper, as he asked, “Are you going to contract with Leash? Will you accept Malaqua’s arbitration of your Contract?”

Mark’s heart beat with black veins and he almost cracked the coffee cup in his hands, but he stopped himself. He let go of the mug and tried not to glare as he said, “Death to all monsters, and that includes demons. I will never contract with a demon.”

Blackthorn stared at Mark for a long, deep moment, and then he pulled back, but his age remained in the look in his eyes. He simply said, “Good to hear. You shouldn’t go into one of those Contracts at all. You’re going to be strong enough without it.”

A moment passed.

Blackthorn seemed to relax, his body language loosening, his age melting away into youth, and he grinned. His vector had been rather pointed in weird, solid ways for a good minute there, but now his vector relaxed. Mark sensed Blackthorn’s desires point away from Mark and toward the coffee on the table, the pipe sitting on the dish, and then to the hallway beyond, where someone said something and another person said something else, neither of which Mark could hear, but which he understood to be small, nice nothings.

Mark pretended to relax.

Blackthorn went, “Well then! Ha ha!” He smiled. “Good to know you’re not interested in demons!”

Mark frowned a little. “I’m not interested in them for Contract reasons, but I am interested in knowing how to kill them.”

“Oh well sure. That’s what I meant, too.”

It wasn’t what he meant at all. He was worried, or concerned, or a more complicated set of emotions about Mark Contracting. Not about actually fighting demons, or learning how to fight demons.

Mark said, “Everyone should want to know how to kill demons. I wasn’t even aware such a thing was even possible until Leash spoke of it. I thought they were all immortal, bodiless things, each of them tens of thousands of years old and unkillable.”

Blackthorn smiled, and then he went in a completely different conversational direction, “So hey! You’ve only got around 720 grams of adamantium on you, but you’re adamantium blooded, right? From what you have on your person, I can see you haven’t cracked the secret of making more.”

Mark blanked for a moment.

His thoughts flashed across a spectrum of worry. Blackthorn knew that Mark could make adamantium, himself; that he was like one of those adamantium monsters that people hunted for their biometal. Blackthorn had called Mark ‘adamantium blooded’, meaning that there were probably similar words for the ‘mithril blooded’, which was the most common biometal that practically all mithrilkinetics made themselves, eventually. Adamantiumkinetics, like Mark, almost never made adamantium themselves.

Blackthorn smiled as he watched Mark have A Moment, seeming to see everything Mark was thinking, as he was thinking it.

Mark said, “I do not…” Mark frowned.

Silence.

“It’s good to be worried about being locked up for your adamantium production. It is a valid worry. Docile or mostly-docile adamantium monsters are locked up in very elaborate and secured containment zones in all of the major empires of Daihoon, and they are farmed for their adamantium. People who can produce adamantium are included in those lock ups, or at least they used to be, before the Reveal and all that shit show. There were lots of prison breaks back then. So many things happened back then.” Blackthorn continued, “You still shouldn’t let people know you can make the stuff. People are fucking greedy ass shitbags.”

“… Yeah, they are.”

Blackthorn nodded. “I’m a greedy shitbag, too.”

Somehow, Mark was not surprised. He deadpanned, “What do you want?”

Blackthorn grinned. “I want you to be my personal adamantium farm and I’ll be your mage-on-retainer.”

Mark frowned.

“We’re not doing prisons or holdings, or anything like that, though. You can live your life and do whatever. But when you want a big question answered, you give me a kilogram of adamantium. That’s enough to make one kaiju blade, with enough left over to outfit some smaller weapons, all for use in defense of Memphi. It’s just about the best deal that anyone could ever have with regard to answers from a real archmage, because they’ll be comprehensive answers. Enough to fill up an afternoon full of discussion, and maybe even a few weeks of afternoons. I won’t stop instructing you until you either ask me to stop, or you get what I was trying to teach you.

“It’s a priceless offer.

“But because we live in a world of actual prices, I can put numbers to this. 1 kilo of adamantium is currently 37 million goldleaf, with a constantly fluctuating price because Addavein disturbed the whole market. 1 kilo used to be worth 55.2 million. By way of comparing: A comprehensive magical answer from an archmage is impossible to buy, but 55 million would tempt most archmages. A kilo of adamantium is almost as impossible to buy as buying pure prismatic mana.

“The favor of a dragon, the action of a god, a prime soul crystal, or a treatise on one of the Big Spells and outside of the oversight of the Mage Guild; all of these are things that are worth about the same as a kilo of adamantium, and yet to call them equal in value would be a situational lie. But you have too much adamantium and I have too many answers, and thus, we can trade.”

Blackthorn grinned.

Mark had allowed Blackthorn to finish, because that was the polite thing to do, but now that he was done Mark almost stood up and walked away.

This sounded too much like making a deal with a demon. And, Mark had no idea how to make a kilo of adamantium. He couldn’t make any adamantium right now; not any faster than he already was, which was at the rate of 15 grams per year, or something similar to that. Blackthorn made it seem like Mark giving him that much adamantium was just a matter of… of deciding to do it?

Mark said, “I don’t know how to make adamantium yet, so I’m afraid this deal is over before it can begin. Sorry to waste your time.” Mark stood up.

He wanted to get out of there, anyway—

“Of course I’ll tell you how to make more of the stuff first. I want you to succeed, Mark, because when you succeed, we all succeed. Just look at all those monsters you’ve killed these last few months! I’m very happy that you’ve come to Memphi, Mark.” Blackthorn added, “And I need that adamantium, but I’m not dealing with that dragon. I’m gonna need weapons that can kill dragons, because that’s my main expected duty happening with this whole Twin-Cities-thing.”

Mark’s heart thumped.

Blackthorn was going to be the one tasked with killing dragons?

Mark sat back down, looking at Blackthorn, as he said, “So obviously you know which buttons to press to make me interested in this arrangement.”

Blackthorn grinned and put a hand over his chest, saying, “I solemnly swear to never use my massive power differential over you and yours to ever purposely harm you or yours.” He put his hand down. “But I need that adamantium to outfit my girls and guys with kaiju blades, Mark. When the portals open and connect the Two Worlds here in Memphi and the kaijus and monster waves start flowing this way, we need good weapons that aren’t Addavein-derived. We need those weapons in the hands of everyone.”

It was quiet, for a moment, as Mark thought.

The automatic cooking magics continued to grill pancakes in the background. Butter sizzled. Someone chuckled down the hallway. Blackthorn looked at Mark, and Mark looked away.

Mark turned back to Blackthorn.

He asked, “Do you want to kill him?”

Did he want to kill Addavein?

“No.”

No, he did not want to kill Addavein.

Mark wasn’t sure what answer he was expecting, or which answer he wanted. His own feelings about Addavein were complicated. But to hear a ‘no’ so solidly was still somehow… disappointing, in some weird way.

Mark said nothing.

Blackthorn continued, “I’ll still try to kill him if he steps out of line, but no one wants that battle, Mark. It would be a disaster. You understand that, right?”

“… Yes, I understand that.” Mark frowned a little. And then he discarded his weird emotions, and said, “I don’t want to fight him or kill him either. The idea that he’s my talzarki is growing on me.” A ‘brother born in disastrous circumstance’ was much easier for Mark to stomach than Addavein being some sort of actual brother. Mark stared at Blackthorn. “But Leash spoke of separating Addavein into Addashield and Kanda.”

Blackthorn looked the same as before, but his vector was more pointed now. Darker. Blacker.

As though it wasn’t a major question, Blackthorn asked, “Is that something you’d want to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Complicated feelings abounded, and in some sort of small way, Mark wondered if it would be easier to separate the dragon into the mage and the demon, than it would be to kill the dragon. Mark honestly had no idea of the difficulty or the involvement in the first option, while the second option, the fight-to-the-death, would end up with too many deaths.

“It’s dangerous to even talk about things like that.”

“… I can imagine that, yes.”

Blackthorn looked at Mark, and Mark returned the look.

Blackthorn moved on. “Let’s talk adamantium, manifested mana, and how that relates to you.”

Mark sat up a bit straighter. He nodded.