Weeks ago by now, Mark had once seen the threads of the world when he was stretched thin on the first day of Healing Club, and when he had first connected to those cleaner plants, in that training room with Lola. In the first real goblin push, the first 100 goblins they sent after Isoko, Eliot, Mark, and David, Mark had caught glimpses of the world again.
Of the threads that bound them all.
Thinking of them as threads was incorrect.
Mark had figured that out fast once he got a real, gut need to figure it all out.
The threads were connections to the world, to each other. Force vectors, perhaps. Except they were more airy than that. Kinda ephemeral. Perhaps it was the stuff of astral bodies, or physicality, or everything all at once, taken together in a cacophony that could not be delineated, only described.
Mark was a weight upon the world, and so was everyone else, and so was the tower, and the tools that Eliot had made, and the tree under the ground, and the ground itself, and the goblins headed this way.
Mark could not feel the goblins right now. Not directly. They were too far away.
But they were focused on Mark, and his people, and his whole general existence in this tower.
He did not need to see them, to feel them.
Mark was like a kid, wrapped in blankets, hiding from the world, pretending that the monsters in the night could not get him if they could not see him. But they could still get him. The monsters in the dark pulled at that fabric, little hands pulling at threads in the black. Mark felt the pressure of their need long before they entered his range. They pulled at Mark with their desires.
Mark waited with the covers tight around his face, knife in his heart, for the monsters to appear out of the dark, to dare a single finger toward him, to step into the light—
There.
A thousand claws pulling at the fabric surrounding Mark, yanking his blanket away, revealing all the knives he had hidden under the covers.
Mark opened his eyes, and he saw the threads of the world.
Everything moved in slow motion.
Eliot wondered why they were out here, and if he could nap yet. He was already being affected by the nudges of the mind goblins.
Isoko spoke at Eliot through the radio, telling him that he needed to listen, and he needed to stay awake, and he needed to turn the lights back on, because Eliot had turned off the lights because, in his own words, it was time to sleep, right?
Obviously it was time to sleep.
The monsters wanted their prey asleep.
They were already attacking.
Mark saw those attacks in the air, in the threads. The mind magics of the mind goblins. Those attacks were not threads, but maybe more like clogs.
Everything moved so slowly.
But David moved in a normal timeframe as he stepped around the room, looking at Mark. He had picked up Eliot and moved him to the side, like he had picked up a sculpture of Eliot, who was moving too slow to be considered anything but frozen. Eliot was still sitting, half asleep, even though David had a hand on the wiry guy’s shoulder, and Eliot was in the air.
It was freaky.
The goblins were there, at the edge of Mark’s range.
There was no blue on the holo display, though. Eliot must have shut it off, strangely enough.
Mark didn’t need the holo display, or the cameras, which were also off.
Mark realized a lot of things at that moment.
He was a part of a dance. The dance was in the breath, the blood, the very movement of life itself, and even in the mind, in the directed thoughts of himself and the mind goblins out there. Mark wondered, for a moment, if there was a ‘Union of Thought’, because if there was, then the goblins were certainly in a Union of Thought right now. They all wanted one thing.
The humans only wanted one thing, too.
Just from different directions.
The monsters wanted to live, and they wanted the humans to die.
The humans wanted to live, and they wanted the monsters to die.
Mark said, “But I am the arbiter of that sort of thing, in this place, in this time.
“And so,
“The humans will live,
— resilience, good, vein integrity
“And everything else will die,
— weakness, bad, vein decay
“Life to the humans, death to all monsters.”
- - - -
David watched a miracle and he tried not to run from it.
Mark sat on a stone bench in the dim lights of the stone room, and his eyes glowed white, while his heart beat black as night. Veins of utter miasma shot through the world itself, connecting David and Eliot and Isoko to Mark in a moment that would forever be etched on David’s memory. Perhaps he was the only one capable of truly appreciating what happened, since it happened so fast, Eliot was incapacitated, and Isoko was outside.
Eliot’s cameras caught it, for sure, but it was over in a flash.
Black lightning extended out of Mark in every direction, touching everything, coiling through the ground, instantly killing the monster tree, and then passing on into the distance. David watched the lightning spread beyond cameras that could not capture it fast enough, well enough, so David punched through the wall and stepped outside.
He stood under the light and watched a sky of black lightning skitter throughout the goblins on the rooftops and the goblins flying in the air. Black lightning crashed into bushes and the normal trees and the fish in the lake and the grasses on the ground. It started in the north, since Mark had correctly deduced that he had needed to kill the tree, and then he swept in a counterclockwise manner, using his full, directional range to grab and kill. In a flash of thought, Mark had completed an entire circling of the sky. Mark’s Union was a fast thing, moving at the speed of thought, for he had realized one of the truer powers of Union; the ability to connect to the dance of electricity in the brains of monsters, and life itself.
Perhaps, if Mark hadn’t been tutored so well then it might have taken him a year to get here. Or maybe he never would. Mark seemed rather capable, though, so of course he would get here.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
David watched as black tendrils touched goblin minds and eradicated those minds from existence. It didn’t take much to kill a goblin if you were truly powerful, and Mark was already there. The problem with goblins was that they were tenacious, and Mark was not getting the distant ones, and he was already faltering from astral body strain.
David wondered if Freyala would command him to kill Mark now.
It was not outside of possibilities, but David hoped not. He liked the kid. David had doubted that Mark would get here this fast, but Lola had told him that Mark was going to get here faster than any of them were ready for, and that David needed to make peace with that. The Collective already knew what was going to happen, and they had given their tentative approval.
Lola certainly wanted the boy alive. She felt way too much guilt over what had happened with Addashield.
David felt some guilt, too, but the Collective had already decided that she had no guilt for her part in the shitshow that was the end of Addashield’s life, and now that the dragon was around, the Collective was ‘very happy’ with the outcome. They were definitely looking for ways to take out the dragon should the need arise, though.
And Mark was already pointed that way.
David suspected that Freyala would be truly happy with this outcome, with this much advancement from Mark, this fast. And if not, then she would tell him.
At full speed, fast as he could go, David watched the sky for a full 5 minutes of personal time; the threads of black woven among the dark, and the light.
He could almost see the world as Freyala must see it.
David grinned at that thought.
Gradually, but also rather quickly, David rejoined the normal flow of time, slowing down so the world could speed up. Rapidly, Mark’s black veins faded away, and flying goblins began to fall out of the sky, while the monster tree’s trunk cracked, its branches fell, and it finished dying, having never really lived. The leaves of the thing were already twisted and broken black things, and the trunk was not far behind. David nodded at that; the tree was useful, but it was a monster, too.
Mark collapsed from strain, of course. David saw that coming from a while away.
Eliot freaked the fuck out, screaming about a hole in the wall and why was he laying in bed and all sorts of things that it was normal to freak out about when confronted by mind monsters.
Isoko calmly asked, “What happened?”
David was already standing next to Mark, healing Mark from his small, internal wounds. He was healing fast; it was mostly just astral body strain, and Mark had Healthy Body. Mark would be fine after a while.
David said, “Mark cleared out almost all the goblins then he fainted from overstrain.” He glanced down at the holo display that Eliot was frantically trying to reestablish. It looked like Mark had killed almost everything out there, which was good. David said, “You have two choices. Wait for Mark to get back up, which looks like it might take a day, or risk going out there to hunt down the remaining goblins right now, which looks like about… 30-ish. The corrupter goblin is surely among one of those. Probably a mind goblin, too, and neither of you have a way to truly defend from that without Mark. But if you let them go, then they’ll come back stronger than ever.
“Because they won’t marshal forces against you three like they did tonight, with only 1300 goblins. They’ll go out on a biting spree, biting everything they possibly can, spreading far and fast and then coming back here with an army of thousands.”
Isoko stepped through the open wall, saying, “We relocate while we can.”
Eliot flinched when Isoko appeared like a shadow in the hole in the wall, and then he chuckled, sighed, and said, “I’m checking the scanners. The goblins scattered in every direction. David is right; they’re going to just start biting monsters and recouping losses as fast as they can. Every historical record of something like this happening only makes the goblins more eager to kill whatever hurt them this much.”
Isoko asked, “We relocating, or not?”
“Uhh… ! Well...” Eliot said, looking at the scanners, tapping away at the air to focus himself. “It appears… Oh. Mark killed everything in the whole area. There’s… oh. No life except us within 150 meters in every direction. Further?” Questioningly, “He killed the grass, too?” He looked up to David.
David grinned. “It was a miracle of his own making.”
Eliot paused.
Isoko stared at Mark—
Something loud crashed outside and Isoko whipped around. It was just the monster tree, further breaking apart. Isoko stared outward for a little while as she looked out at the black sludge ocean, the slippery acid on top, and then she said to Eliot, “Make a mobile base that we can move elsewhere and set down before the sun comes up and the wyverns turn active.”
Eliot said, “I don’t think we can. Some of the goblins are in place out there, watching from far away. They’d go after us if we ran.” Eliot looked to Isoko. “We can stay here but I need metals, Isoko.”
Isoko made a decision, then said, “Anything in the nearby square?”
“Four streets to the north, past the tree,” Eliot pointed at the holo display, saying, “Here. It looks like a collapsed garage. You and I can go after it while Mark recovers—” He looked to David. “A full day?”
“Maybe 18 hours,” David said.
Eliot told Isoko, “We can survive here if we get more metals, but we can’t wait for Mark to wake up.”
Isoko looked to David. “Odds on us dying out there without Mark’s mental defenses?”
David said, “Depending on how fast you go, then it's anywhere from 80% survival rate, to 20% if you go slow, at all.”
David almost spoke of using holographic cloaking fields, but they were learning fast, and—
Eliot pulled some drones up and they flickered with holograms. With a grin, Eliot stood up, saying, “We can increase those odds by sending holograms in every direction, and going fast.”
David heard something spraying outside, so he took a quick peek to see what it was. Eliot was spraying all of the nearby oil/acid slick with orange neutralizing agent. With the orange drops almost locked still in the air, for David was moving fast, David took a wider glance around the space, walking briskly to check on the goblins he knew to be out there.
They were watching, but mostly just the young ones, left as hive mind tethers; not any real dangerous ones. If the kids triggered the goblins to chase them, then he would rescue the kids, but hopefully the goblins would go after the false trails, and hopefully Eliot would remember to make the oil out there splash with some downdrafts from the cameras. Those goblins had very, very good sight, and they weren’t stupid.
He stepped back inside and rejoined the normal timeframe.
Eliot said, “Soon as the neutralizing agents are done, I can send the false trails out at the same time as us. They’ll even tap the ground like us if we were really running. Should make those goblins out there think we’re actually running.”
As the two kids made final plans to run for it, David almost spoke up about how Eliot was only making flying drones show Isoko and himself, and not including Mark in the false trails, or as a fake image in their real dash across the kinda-slippery ground. He should have included Mark, because they would have recognized that Mark was the one who did the black lightning death, and if he wasn’t there, then they were extra vulnerable.
But this was a learning experience, and sometimes action was better than explaining everything to each other, and yet, in a kind of expected way, the goblins saw that Eliot and Isoko had dashed off to the north, and they had seen that Mark was not with them. The goblins decided to attack, but they were still far away.
David moved back and forth between Isoko and Eliot, as they crashed into the car park and started bashing shit and gathering metals, and the scanner in the base that showed goblins converging on their locations. They had correctly figured out that Isoko and Eliot had ‘lost the member of their team that had killed all the goblins’, and now they were circling back, all of them, to try and kill Isoko and Eliot…
Hmm.
David looked at the scanner, and saw that… nope.
The big goblins were staying away. They were continuing on to the normal goblin plan of killing and transforming anything that moved in order to recoup losses. The goblins going after Eliot and Isoko were opportunistic killers. One mind goblin did go after Eliot and Isoko, though. Just one.
If all of the goblins and the corrupter goblin had turned, then Eliot and Isoko would have had a confrontation with them. But as it was...
David watched as Isoko sliced a diving goblin in half with one hand and grabbed a suddenly-sleeping Eliot with the other, throwing him into the cart full of supplies and then pushing him fast, back toward base.
Isoko was immune to the mind monsters now, which was good for her…
The mind goblin, and most of the goblins with it, decided to turn around and return to the ‘recoup losses’ plan.
Back in the base, Eliot slammed awake and Isoko chuckled, talking about risks and rewards.
Eliot tried not to freak out, but he was freaking out a lot.
David thought it a good lesson.
Eliot should not be out in the wilds at all. He was too useful to humanity and his power was directly countered by all the monsters of the world. It was good that he was scared. Perhaps he would forget his whole bardic career thing and go back to Citadel, or maybe to some city somewhere. Anywhere, in any human place, would be better than out with the goblins and the monster trees and all the rest. Humanity needed Eliot bored and successful in a city more than it needed Eliot out there in the wilds, dying.
Isoko would do very well out in the wilds, though.
She was smiling as she spoke of goblins raining from the sky.
At least they had gotten a bunch of metals.
Eliot started sorting through it, but he had to throw half of it out as monster-touched.
Mark slept soundly.