Adamant Blood

Mark stepped into speed-time and the kaiju helped, for the dragon was already doing minor speed magics and now Mark was 'doing speed magics', too.

Quark was right there with Mark, already moving fast, waiting for Mark to catch up, a series of noises rapidly adjusting to understandable words, like he was tuning a radio.

"Unknown dragon on the smaller side. Initial inspection estimates at 300 meters of body. A lot more meters in wing and tail. Lightning, illusion, and speed capabilities. Facial expressions reveal a desire to strike first and ask questions later. The lightning appears to be especially dangerous to the electronics in the Dreadnought, with half of the ship now disabled. It is attacking. This is not an opening discussion. This is the worst outcome for a dragonfight. Usually they want to talk. Based on the ineffectiveness of the lightning upon yourself, we should assume that they are a young, weak dragon, or maybe this is an initial discussion. Whatever the case, it is attacking with deadly force."

As Quark spoke, Mark felt the world out.

The dragon's vector was full of need, predominantly the absolute need to kill Mark as fast as possible, and then it would move on to the others. It was here for blood and treasure, and it was the most greedy thing that Mark had felt in a long time.

Mark imagined it had been tracking them for some time, far out of range of sensors, or maybe hidden with magics that the Dreadnought had no way of sensing through. Mark's range was only 1.3 kilometers in a single direction. Maybe when Isoko got Sky Shaper, then her sensory range would get bigger. Maybe when they finished the scanners, then they could sense dragons even through illusions, but that seemed like asking for too much.

Sometimes enemies came prepared, and you could only respond to the damage they inflicted.

A great spike of that attempted damage currently connected Mark to the dragon, yellow lightning gathered from all over the dragon's body and then focused onto Mark through an arc of brilliant yellow that crossed over the dragon's front. The shape of it all told Mark a few important factors.

One: the lightning was 'weak' and 'natural'. It was not magical lightning from a single source, and that was good. Magical lightning flowed from start to target. It was kinda slow. Natural lightning, caused by magical effects, flowed both ways, connecting source to target, and it was incredibly fast.

Two: Mark was not the target. He was incidental. The target was far down below, inside of the ship. Mark was in the path of the lightning, though, because he was the biggest, most metal thing out here, and the dragon was choosing to shoot through Mark, to maybe damage him, on the way to the real target down below; the ship's internals.

Three: Mark was pretty much immune to natural lightning. This was a fucked up way to find that out.

And Four: Mark was gonna kill this dragon, even if it was opening up with a 'weak' attack.

Mark moved at the speed of thought, ripping into the air, clawing his way forward, headed toward the yellow face and fangs. Lightning crackled against him, moving just as fast as him, as he broke shockwaves into the air.

Mark slashed out adamantium caltrops, right into the dragon's maw, into his 4-meter-wide teeth, into his main lower and upper fangs. The whole mouth was maybe 30 meters across.

Mark did some dental work, starting on the lower right fang. It was about 7 meters tall. It was not easy. The dragon flinched as Mark cut. But Mark cut anyway, near the root, because he was going to leave a corpse, and that corpse had to send a message.

But cutting dragon teeth was perhaps the hardest thing Mark had ever tried to cut. Harder than the necks of those balloon lizards back on Daihoon, for sure.

Mark cut anyway. Into the enamel, then into the bone-ish stuff, and then into the soft, pulpy meat in the middle. The dragon's vector filled with instant pain as it registered the attack, but Mark was already through the first tooth, the bottom right. He moved on to the bottom left, ripping through the air, and then cutting into the second tooth—

The dragon felt that, too, and its vector began to unravel and panic. Greed vanished. Worry overwhelmed. Still, it hoped to survive this. It was going to wait Mark out, because it wrongly assumed that Mark wasn't able to keep this level of speed up at all.

It was wrong, and it soon realized that.

It tried to pull away, but not before Mark cut the second tooth out of the creature. With a shockwave pull, Mark ripped the cut fang out of the mouth, throwing it onto the deck, where the tooth slowed down and then hovered in the air. It was still moving, exactly like the first tooth was still moving, but it was moving a lot slower now that Mark wasn't moving it directly.

Mark gripped onto the dragon's upper left fang, fingers of adamantium gripping other teeth while some adamantium 'floss' went around the fang, cutting—

The dragon's panic reached a fevered pitch and all of its attempted attack fizzled, lightning sparking and dying. Magic churned inside of yellow-scaled flesh as the dragon tried to accomplish something else—

The entire yellow dragon turned ephemeral… And that was it? Yes, that was it. It was enough to stop the damage. Mark's adamantium found no purchase. The dragon began moving, as much as it could, and it reminded Mark of someone trying to move without seeming to move. It was pretty fucking slow.

But Mark was good against ethereal things. Disrupting etherealness was usually enough to seriously kill or injure something; even something as large and as powerful as a dragon. But that would require Mark to change up his Alacrity/Slowness.

… So sure.

Mark switched to a union of Adamant and Ethereal. Instantly, time sped up to a normal degree, as Mark took all of the creature's strength and fed it all of Ethereal's weaknesses.

The dragon was already a kilometer away, flapping its translucent wings once, but then its wings broke like a bird with a bone disease. The air cracked. Leather flapped. The dragon roared in pain and it dropped out of its ethereal spell, and then kept fleeing far away, falling fast and in full retreat, like someone had catapulted it directly away from the Dreadnought.

For one brief moment, Mark wanted to kill it. To really go after it.

But it was already far away from the ship, there could be others, and the dragon's vector was completely different than before. It was scared as fuck, and it felt, honestly, like a child. A scared, crying child. It even looked young from this angle, with its big head and its small body, and its stubby, broken wings, and Mark was absolutely sure it was not a child at all… but maybe it was?

Mark watched it go, not quite sure if he was doing the right thing to let it go, but this was the dragon's territory and… And it was already 15 kilometers away, burning power to fly even faster, to escape…

Shit.

Should he have killed it?

"… fuck fuck fuck."

The coms were filled with people talking, Isoko needing instruction, Eliot complaining about the damage to the deck and a complete power outage in the first 2 thirds of the central core.

"Fuck," Mark muttered, and then he called to the team, on the coms, "Should I have gone after—"

"Absolutely not!" Lola spoke, taking charge of the situation. "We need to leave fast, Eliot, and to consider going to ground, or to another ribbon of sky. Can the ship handle transitioning through layers yet?"

Mark looked at the deck, where 2 dragon fangs had landed and lightning had scorched the wood. The damage wasn't healing. Mark went over and slapped the ground with a wiffle bat of adamantium, and then he scraped at the scorches, finding a big hole. The yellow dragon's lightning had burned a giant hole in the deck. Fires ignited inside that hole, in the extreme heat inside the ship.

Mark stared at the fire, not sure what to do about it all, muttering, "I think I should have killed it?"

And then suddenly the fires were out.

David stepped onto the operations deck about 100 meters away and then he walked closer, being sure to give Mark enough time to notice his approach. He said, "First off: There are some things all speedsters are told when they turn into a High Speedster, like yourself… and I'm not sure if they apply to you, but I'm gonna err on the side of caution and give you the spiel:

"Don't go at your full speed unless you have to. Most speedsters age in normal time when they go fast. How old do you think I am? 40-ish? I am, yes, but I was only born 25 years ago. I'm on a de-age list, like all High Speedsters who work for big powers, but it's still a concern.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

"I don't know if you have that concern. Err on the side of caution, though.

"Secondly, it's much better to fake enemies out while keeping your true speed in reserve, and so, the very second you felt that attack wasn't major you should have switched back to slower time and let the ship get damaged as well as clipped at the dragon. No one was in real danger but you, and that dragon was testing you, directly, and also disabling the ship so that we couldn't fly away. Maybe we could have found out its motives, aside from the greedy, obvious motives.

"And finally, regarding the dragon: It's a good thing you didn't kill that one, because that was absolutely the opening for diplomatic talks. Prepare to talk to some dragons, Mark, because someone is absolutely coming."

Mark frowned a little as he listened to David's calming voice, which he supposed was the real reason David was talking so much. The frown went away. David helped to center Mark in the moment. As that time passed, Mark felt Eliot wind his vector through the centerline of the ship, junking and repairing things far below the surface.

Mark turned to David. "It really felt like a murderous attack, though."

"Maybe it was," David said. "But we don't know that since you responded with full force, right away. I don't think it was, because it could have sniped at us far away from you, and the lightning didn't hurt you at all."

"Ugh," Mark said, shuddering a little.

Eliot said, "I can get the ship up and running again in 10 minutes. It's decision time. Forward, to another layer, or wait here? It'll take an hour to get through the cloud."

Mark made a decision, "Into the slipper fish cloud. Full speed ahead, away from the Crossing. I'll Fear the fish away from the ship."

"Okay okay," Eliot said, and then he added, "Let the first ones through, to strike the ship, to see if we need to rely on you the whole way… The ship should be able to take a rain of fish, though… I think."

"Heard and understood," Mark said.

The 10 minute repair wait time was tense, made more tense by taking Eliot 12 minutes to get the ship fully operational again. And then Eliot called an 'all clear', Isoko gunned it, carefully, and the Dreadnought flowed forward, through the sky, into the yellow-grey fish migration.

The wall of fish loomed, moving in a general upper-left to lower-right sort of way, blocking all of the way forward in a great swath of movement of flying fish. Soon, the ship got near the veritable wall of flesh and then the fish began to swish around the ship, like speeding hovercars, all silver and flickering yellow—

A fish, 5 meters long and like a giant tuna, crashed into the prow ahead of Mark, denting the wood and then slapping its way across the surface of the ship, rushing through the railing, breaking the meter-thick railing as it went over the edge—

Another two fish crashed into the ship, each of them 6-ish meters long, like really big tuna. Nothing but muscle and forward motion. They slapped into the wood, crashing off of the surface and leaving giant gouges where their spike fins carved into the grain. Those fish did not try to leave. They swam toward the front-center bulge in the operations deck, and then they hung out back there, hiding near the large obstruction, circling the entryway into the bowels of the ship like a pair of prey hiding from predators… No. Mark understood what they were doing. They were looking to make a nest—

One of them squirted bright yellow eggs at a nook in the forecastle, and then the other one squirted a white cloud at the eggs. The whole thing kinda latched onto the ship, like a giant clump of frog eggs, and then the two fish swam on, breaking the railing on the way off of the ship.

This was a spawning run, it seemed—

Other fish rained down and slipped around the ship, hiding in the nooks and crannies—

A large fish slammed right into the wooden surface 50 meters behind Mark, cracking through 2 meters of solid wood, as it went inside the ship.

"I got it," David said, blinking away, and then the fish was dead and David was throwing the giant fish off of the operations deck, into the swarm.

"Okay that's bad," Mark said, mostly to himself, as he watched the density of approaching fish. "Gonna get worse, Eliot. So should I…?"

"Fuck shit," Eliot said, "Okay. The base wood ain't enough. Do it, Mark."

"On it," Mark said, speaking to everyone.

Mark Unioned with Glory and Fear, reaching out into the swarm of fish.

It was like the entire Dreadnought had become a shark. The fish swimming this way all instantly shimmered and flashed away from Mark's touch, zooming out and down, or out and up. Whichever way got them furthest away, they took, and then…

And then Mark stared out at the swarm as it resumed its normal swarm-like behavior, with Mark and the Dreadnought acting like one of the sharks.

The river of fish curved behind the boat, sealing them into the swarm, and then it was shimmery silver darkness everywhere.

Mark was the only reason the Dreadnought could go this way at all. Millions of fish, each 6-ish meters long, each flashing silver and yellow, swarmed around the ship, flying downward. All sight lines were lost. All the mirages of horizons were gone.

Mark meditated in Glory and Fear, floating near the center of the ship, letting the rain of fish feel like actual rain to his senses… or maybe more like a monster wave. The largest monster wave that Mark had ever seen, or heard of.

It was kinda beautiful.

… And nothing really happened, except for Eliot got a whole lot of power from Mark, taken from the fishes, and so Eliot was able to strengthen the ship a great deal more. The lightning hole in the hull grew over as Eliot's vector flickered through a bunch of new systems inside the centerline of the ship, creating redundancies everywhere. Isoko asked about having an emergency secondary ship for them to retreat to, if needed, and Eliot spoke about how the castle could fly on its own, just fine. Then Eliot asked Mark to let the fish through once, when the swarm was lesser, to see if the ship could handle it. That started an argument between Lola and Eliot regarding prudence in dangerous situations.

Mark said, "I can let a few through. I have that much control."

With a difficulty that looked easy, and sort of was easy because of how often Mark had to do this sort of thing, Mark specifically ignored some of the tens of thousands of fish in the envelope around the Dreadnought. Those fish, sensing that the way forward was open, zoomed through the open space—

They went right back out, crashing into the surrounding swarm and rejoining their brothers and sisters in the migration. They had not been Feared, but everyone else was Feared, and so they moved with the school, each of them not really acting on their own at all. That's how fish were, Mark supposed.

Mark said, "Looks like we can't test the ship. The fish don't want to be out of the swarm… You know? I bet you could Fear them yourself, Derek, even with your reduced range and not having Fear at all."

"You think I could?" Derek asked, sounding interested in the idea.

"The individuals are mostly part of a group consciousness that's not really conscious at all. Poke at one and you poke at all of them."

"Let's not do that sort of test right now," Lola said, in a final sort of tone.

Derek had already multiplied tens of times over, but he retreated like he hadn't done anything at all.

And the ship sailed on.

Now and then, great holes opened up in the river of fish and 30 meter long sharks appeared. The sharks were impressive things, all sleek and grey and partially invisible with optical camouflage, with their multitudes of fins and multitudes of eyes all down their bodies. They flowed softly, following the swarm, drawing slightly closer to the Dreadnought than the fish, but Mark Feared them away well enough and they slipped to the sides, leaving the ship behind.

The dragon's teeth remained on the deck of the ship, next to Mark.

Mark wondered if their owner would try again.