Isoko looked at Mark with concern, after Mark had said something about something. He wasn’t even sure what he had said.

While the sun had begun to dip down to the horizon beyond the large, ornate windows of the Grand Hotel, Mark healed people far out of sight as he spoke with Isoko about Union. It was the perfect thing to do after facing a kaiju and almost dying. Mark wasn’t sure what was happening right now, though.

“… What?” Mark asked.

As if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, Isoko asked, “You can use Breath to practice and you haven’t been doing weird practices yet?”

Mark sat on the edge of his own bed across from Isoko, feeling kinda on the spot. “I’ve been working on adamantiumkinesis.”

“Union is more versatile, though!” Isoko exclaimed. “It’s pretty much the only reason that I’m okay with not being a Sky Shaper. Sure, I can’t do much with it right now, but when I can actually advance in Union, I have ideas, Mark. Ideas.”

Mark chuckled. “Okay. What kind of ideas?”

Excited all over again, Isoko asked, “Can you do invisibility— Or something like invisibility?” She pulled back. “Maybe ‘attention-grabbing’ would be easier. Can you inhale ‘attention’ and exhale ‘ignorance’ and make yourself the center of everyone’s sights? You’d become the center for any team like that, for sure, just by virtue of keeping the monster’s attention on yourself as opposed to anyone else. Or how about that thing that Credenza does with luck. Can you inhale ‘success’ and exhale ‘failure’?” Isoko had a sparkling sort of look in her eyes as she said, “What about speed magics? Can you inhale ‘speed’ and exhale ‘slow’?”

“… Err.” Mark sat up straight. “I can try something, I guess.”

Isoko smiled as she said, “Good! I want you to try and make me faster.”

Mark laughed. “You just wanted a buff!”

“Of course I do, mister Best-Supporting-Supervillain! Gods! Can you imagine if you can do what Seraph does, at all?”

Mark’s eyes went wide.

No, he couldn’t imagine himself being like Seraph.

Seraph was a rather famous hero who blessed whole armies of people with hundreds of various strengths. He was practically the best support hero on the planet right now, following on the heels of Best Woman and Friendster, both of which were dedicated support heroes just like Seraph. But Seraph was the number 1 support hero because he could single handedly ensure that entire support structures for kaiju fights never fell to even incidental damage. He could also turn Glorious Man into a speedster and flier, all on his own. He could take a thousand brawnies —just normal brawnies!— and power them up with enough agility, strength, and durability, to hold a city wall from a monster wave. Never speed, though, or stuff like smarts, or anything emotional or mental.

If Seraph had been here in Wolf Bayou, there wouldn’t have been a single casualty in the fight with that sky-ice kaiju.

… Now that Mark was thinking about it, was Seraph’s basic function to buff a person’s Power Levels to extremely high heights? Mark didn’t actually know what Seraph really did, in a technical sense, but he was called a Blesser almost all the time, and Mark had met a guy who was Seraph’s ‘opposite’ last month, and that ‘opposite’ mostly decreased the Power Levels of whoever he targeted.

That Hexer had been Raoul, in that Sparring for Non-Brawnies Club.

… And now that Mark was thinking about it, if he ever had to fight a Hexer it would be a disaster for him. A really big disaster, too! He hadn’t gotten scanned in a while, but his Adamantiumkinesis was likely not more than an 85, so if he was ‘hexed’ to drop below Kinetic 078, then he would be weighed down by his own adamantium. Adamantium was PL 79, and if you didn’t have a PL at least equal to the PL of the item you were Shaping, then you got weighted down.

Mark had spent the better part of a day flattened to the floor, constantly holding onto his adamantium as he struggled to grow his astral body strong enough to be able to—

“What you thinking about?” Isoko asked.

“About Hexers and Blessers and what would happen if my PL with Adamantiumkinesis dropped below 79.”

Isoko narrowed her eyes—

“Oh!” Isoko’s eyebrows went up. “That would suck.”

“I’ll have to keep an eye on it. Never thought about that sort of thing before right now.”

Isoko said, “Union can decrease PL’s, too. Not as much as a Hexer can, but probably enough. Want to see if this is an actual weakness? I can ‘hex’ you.”

“… I’m pretty sure I can actually draw in resilience against that sort of thing, now that I’m thinking about it.”

“Hexers can do 50+ points of Power Level debuff.”

“Oh shit,” Mark said softly. “No. I can’t… fix that.”

Mark thought in silence, and Isoko looked away, having ideas of her own.

Eventually, Mark said, “But anyway: I don’t think I’ll be turning thousands of basic brawnies into high-tier soldiers anytime ever, Isoko.”

Isoko moved on, too, saying, “Maybe so, but you can already heal people, protect them, feed them, purify them, and a whole bunch of other stuff. So let’s experiment with weirder applications, because I want to be able to go really, really fast.”

“That’s dangerous though, isn’t it?” Mark said, “Speedsters can avoid the dangers of going fast, but normal people can’t— Wait.” Mark had a thought.

Speedsters protected themselves from the extreme forces of moving too fast through their astral body and innate speedster-type Power. Normal people were often simply ripped apart by a true Speedster who wasn’t careful. Someone like Inquisitor David, who had a times-35 speed modifier, could literally push on someone with a normal sort of push and cave their face in, or do any other horrible sorts of things.

But Mark had seen David move Eliot around in that training mission to get him out of danger, and speedsters moved people around all the time. Inexperienced speedsters were practically forbidden from touching people with speed unless they had trained to touch people, and move people around.

And, since they were talking about Seraph and speed buffs, Mark recalled a few things that Seraph had spoken about that he simply never buffed people with.

Speed was one of those things, because ‘speed’ was actually time magic, and not just ‘moving faster’. Or something like that. Mark wasn’t sure, exactly.

But he did know that too much speed, without the astral body to control that speed, would literally rip a person apart in any number of ways.

And yet….

Mark said, “You’re not a normal person, are you. You have a speed modifier, so you already have some ability to be sped up without ripping apart.”

Isoko smiled brightly. “That’s my thinking, too! My modifier is only 1.2-times, but it’s a start. It’s enough to protect me from a basic speed-up. And you can buff yourself with speed too, without injury…” She paused. “You should be able to buff yourself with speed. Powers have in-built limiters to prevent self-injury— And you can buff yourself with durability and resilience, anyway.”

Mark’s heart beat with resilience and weakness right now, black veins extending out into the air, into the world beyond. Mark said, “Don’t think I’ll be stopping that anytime soon.”

“Exactly! So let’s do some speed experiments!” Isoko held up a hand, turned full platinum, and started tapping her thumb to her middle finger, saying, “There’s not a whole lot of ways to test speed at low levels, but this is one of them. I’m tapping my fingers together as fast as I can. It’s about four taps a second. You’ll be able to tell if I speed up even a little bit. Go for it.”

“… Just… go for it?”

“Any way you want! Go for it. I don’t know what words you’d use at all, but I know I want to be super fast.”

Mark rolled his eyes and then he thought for a moment. Isoko’s gentle fingertaps were a soft sound in the background, as Mark considered speed.

… He could do the basic idea to start, right?

Mark breathed in ‘speed’ for himself and Isoko, watching her fingers tap each other.

… He didn’t see any appreciable difference in speed. Mark breathed out ‘slow’ for himself and Isoko, spreading the slowness into the air, ridding both of them of ‘slowness’. Or at least that was the idea.

Nothing happ—

Oh. Duh. He was breathing for both of them, so of course he wouldn’t see a difference. He was sped up, too, if at all… Maybe. If he was, he seemed capable of handling a little bit of speed? Maybe?

Isoko kept tapping her fingers.

Mark didn’t think he was sped up, though.

Mark said, “This is a completely new problem for me, Isoko, because the first thing a Union user does is secure themselves. This problem has me giving speed to you and not harming myself or taking speed in myself… Which I am just now realizing that I do not know how to do that. You want me to make you speedy, without affecting myself in any sort of way.” Mark added, “And even before that issue, I think I might have mentally blocked off using speed for myself, either intentionally, or as a limit to Union.”

Isoko stopped tapping her fingers, as she said, “Oh. Huh.”

They were both silent for a little while.

Mark decided, “I’ll keep trying, though.”

Isoko raised an eyebrow. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

Isoko resumed tapping her fingers.

Mark breathed in speed for both of them, and exhaled slow, and that didn’t really work. Mark tried ‘fast’ and ‘slow’. ‘Vigor’ did pretty well, actually, Isoko’s fingers tapping faster and her eyes widening, maybe, but when Mark exhaled ‘lethargy’, which he felt was the opposite of ‘vigor’, Isoko and Mark both flinched and jittered.

It was like waking up, but ten times stronger. Like getting woken up by a bomb blast going off in the other room. Mark felt scared, exhilarated, and too-full-of-energy all at once.

It was a bad Union. A misfire, somehow.

Mark broke that Union and his Blood Union crackled a bit before he resumed that one, spreading out his black veins to the world, to others out there. Something healed inside of Mark, his fingers jittering a little as his hand twitched, and then calmed. Isoko’s shoulders fast-twitched backward and she transformed that movement into a full body stretch, her hands and fingers jittering as she sighed out and got up to walk around the room.

Mark stood up and stretched, too.

Isoko asked, “What was that one?”

“Vigor-inhale, but it was the Lethargy-exhale that really did… whatever it was I did there.”

“Felt like ten cups of espresso pumped directly into my veins,” Isoko said, as she beat her heart with good and bad, rapidly relaxing back to something more comfortable. “Did you mean to do it like that?”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Not really. The first part was a breath of ‘vigor’, which felt pretty much the same as ‘good’; basic healing, so not much effect.”

Isoko made a cute little noise of annoyance, “Ich!” And then she sighed, and said, “Expelling ‘weakness’ really is one of the best expellings, isn’t it. That whole concept is just so variable and holistic.”

… Oh?

A holistic approach, then?

Well… Maybe Mark’s body couldn’t handle actual speed, but how about something similar? How about something softer, with enough diffuse connotations to do… something. Mark wasn’t sure.

Mark said, “Let’s try this.”

Mark breathed in ‘alacrity’, which was a big-vocabulary word that he didn’t really know too well, except he understood as ‘quickness and haste in a general sort of way’—

The trees outside waved slower in the breeze, and Mark felt suddenly sluggish, as though he was trapped in syrup. He was still breathing in ‘alacrity’, and it took a long time to breathe inward. Mark didn’t think he would stop breathing inward for a full minute.

Isoko’s fingers tapped in a normal sort of speed, because she was sped up in a way that Mark was not. She was moving fast in every possible way. She knew something was happening. She stopped tapping her fingers and tried moving an arm, and she moved in a normal sort of speed, her entire body seeming to turn deeper platinum—

It was too much.

Isoko’s arm went too high. She fell off balance. She stepped forward, stumbled, attempted to right herself, and she ended up stepping to the side, right into a wall about 4 meters away. It was like she had been moving in low-gravity. She had been on the floor and then she had tried to step, and then she crashed. The wall had a rather prominent dent where she had landed. She held there for a while, looking too afraid to move.

Mark’s breath reached the end of his breath and he breathed out weakness to rid himself of his Union debt caused by taking something in and thus needing to exhale on a return stroke —he vaguely realized that his brain was going very fast right now— his eyes going wide as he saw Isoko still holding the wall.

The moment of Union broke, and the speed of the situation faded away.

Mark said, “That was ‘alacrity’ and ‘weakness’. I think I was able to handle the thinking-speed, but not the physical speed. You got all of it, though?”

Isoko took a moment, looking at herself and at the floor, saying, “I took a step and moved a lot faster than I should have. Mentally, I was in the flow, but…” She stood up and got away from the wall, walking slowly, testing her rate of movement. After a few paces of the room, she seemed to be in control of herself again. She smiled, saying, “I got rather speedy there!”

Mark chuckled as the wall broke a bit, falling down. “Well then.”

Isoko looked at the wall, too.

The marble facade was broken, but whatever repair magics were happening across the city resumed happening on the wall; the wall began to ‘heal’. Mark watched the wall with Isoko. It certainly wasn’t an Eliot-ish Man-made Manipulation repairing, but rather a high class repair magic. Probably Hearthswellian-based.

Or at least that’s what Mark’s previous lessons in his Understanding Curtain Protocol class were telling him.

Mark had always seen construction crews out and about after any kaiju-battle damage report on the news, and they always repaired things rather fast, so Mark knew that people did need to actually repair things and magic didn’t solve every problem… But this was on another level from those kaiju-battle repair zones. A much higher level.

But to be sure, Mark asked, “So that’s an advanced Hearthswell healing, yeah? Castellan?”

Isoko said, “I’ve never really seen it myself, but yeah, it has to be, right? And it’s just… active everywhere in the city? You think it’s active all the time?”

“They’re probably pumping more power into it to make it work overtime right now.”

“Maybe they have some buffers linked to repairers linked to some priests of Freyala.”

“Maybe…” Mark paused in thought, then he said, “I have a confession. I have no idea how I actually helped Redwolf do her thing at all. All I did was connect her to other people and take away her weakness and give her resilience.”

Mark was still surprised that Redwolf had loudly said ‘that’s the good stuff!’ when Mark had connected to her, focusing on her. Maybe Redwolf’s Power was mostly limited by her astral body’s strength? And astral body strength faded fast with stronger Powers. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing for Redwolf to be astral body limited.

Isoko rhetorically asked, “She complained about headaches, yeah? Body-based strain is common when Power-strains too far. Maybe she could always pop brains that big, but her Power and body stopped her due to limitations, and you removed those limitations by helping her spread out her… I don’t know. Not sure where I was going with that— Maybe her Brain Pop needs a commensurately-sized series of brains on her side to make it work well? I have no idea.”

Mark nodded. “Well that makes sense, too.”

“It’s an Arch Power, isn’t it?”

“Not sure.”

“Could just be a general astral-body-strain situation. I know I couldn’t keep up Platinum Body forever until I got Union from Freyala.”

“That’s what I was think—” A sudden thought occurred. Mark asked, “Does it feel easier to go full platinum when I help you, or when you do it yourself? Is there a difference between Freyala Union, and my Union, is what I’m getting at.”

“Oh for sure when you’re doing it, it’s easier, but it’s the same Power. I think I’m getting closer to the quality of reinforcement you’re doing, but you definitely have a larger breadth of actions available to you.” Isoko asked, “Say? Have you thought about doing weird, magical concepts for Union? Like the words blessing and hex, since we’re talking about Seraph and all that stuff— Oh! Divinity and Demon! Breathe out the demon, breathe in the divinity.”

Mark went, “… Huh.”

He had a whole bunch of half-thoughts that didn’t make a lot of sense. Demons and magic, Addashield and Addavein. Souls and astral bodies and what words actually did. Months ago, Addashield had spoken of Key Words and how they were used to make Word Alchemy and Mark’s Color Drop treatment. He had said that Mark wouldn’t be able to make use of any of that himself, and that he should focus on working his Powers first, whatever those might be. Addashield had said that Mark would need to find someone else to impart the knowledge of Key Word Magic to, eventually, while also extracting concessions of long-term power… or something like that.

But Union was ‘Key Word Magic’, wasn’t it? Though Union functioned more on ideas of words, and not words themselves, right?

… Hmm.

There was a lot there.

Mark wasn’t quite sure where he was going with all of those thoughts, but they were there. It was like he was touching upon something that was just below the surface, unable to be seen.

… Mark would get there eventually.

Mark said, “A better use of my time might be figuring out how to work Union on other people without being directly involved in the transfer of power, myself. I won’t be able to bless you with the speed you can handle since I can’t handle that speed at all. My mind was going faster, for sure, but my body was just sitting there.”

Isoko went, “Ah. That’s a good option, too.” She grinned as she stood clear of the walls, and everything else breakable, and said, “Let’s try!”

- - - -

Mark tried to make Unions without him in it, as either a sink or a source. He failed. It was frustrating beyond belief to make a Union without involving himself in the power transfer at all. It was almost as bad as figuring out how to work Adamantiumkinesis beyond his normal limits of physical movement.

Mark worked on that divorcing, too, but it wasn’t going well.

Perhaps he needed a Union of more than 3 sources, because all he had right now was himself, Isoko, and the world. He wasn’t about to experiment with Union with all the people around him in Wolf Bayou.

So Mark moved on to something else he truly enjoyed, though that experimentation wasn’t going great, either. Mark lay in his bed, spinning adamantium in the air overhead, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t make it spin as fast as Addavein’s shaper-introduction told him was possible.

Isoko had been trying to work a ‘divorced Union’, too, but she hadn’t gotten any further than Mark had. She crashed out on her bed around 10 PM. She had been watching Mark play with his adamantium for several minutes in silence, by now.

Mark scowled at the adamantium, trying to make it spin faster than his muscles could move. It just wasn’t happening. He guessed his fastest rotation speed was maybe 8 per second. He would have used Quark to time the rotation, to get a better measure of his speed, but Quark was as dead as his phone—

Isoko said, “That’s difficult, what you’re doing now.”

Mark suddenly stopped, and then he laughed. “Yeah. It is!”

“I mean it. Like. Super difficult. Advanced studies, for sure. But that’s how you’re going to be able to fly one day.”

Mark paused. He looked to Isoko. He put his adamantium away, and asked her, “I saw how you looked at that Wind Shaper when she cleared the air around the bonfire. Do you want to talk about it?”

Isoko raised an eyebrow, and then she seemed to soften in a bunch of different ways. “Thank you, Mark, but I’m good. I really am okay with not having Sky Shaper. But that woman…” Isoko clicked her tongue. “That woman was bad at air movement. That’s why I looked at her like that. I was disappointed. Maybe she has a weakness of trainers, or something, because she was clearly not focused on clarity of intent at all.”

Surprise rapidly morphed to a small joy. Mark was happy that Isoko was doing okay.

Mark said, “I thought she did alright. One rip stopped the fire.”

Isoko shook her head. “She could have stilled the air, imposing her will upon the air around the fire and then closing inward to kill the fire. That would have been a lot less effort than ripping the fire away.” She added, “Of course, if you didn’t still the air enough, then the fire could restart once you stopped imposing your will, but to stop the fire you’d just have to impose your will deep, rapidly dropping the temperature of the burning wood as well as suffocating it.”

“… Huh.” Mark fell silent in thought as he tried to figure out why Cindy was trying to be impressive. He said, “Well I thought it was impressive.”

“Which was the point,” Isoko said, “She was trying to recruit us.”

Mark chuckled.

Isoko said, “Anyway... I don’t know many tricks with metal, but I do know that separating physical body and astral body speed is difficult. It’s how you’re going to learn how to fly, though. Gotta make tiny, super-fast propellers, and then rise up into the air. It’s easy to fly with Sky Shaper because you can control a large amount of air to support your weight and push upward and outward, so you’re not constrained by the size of your material like a metal shaper would be constrained. Light, wind, and dark are the Shapers that can fly the easiest, but all other Shapers have to learn aerodynamics and how to split the astral body from the physical body.”

Mark scoffed, “There has to be a different way to fly than making tiny propellers. Something more efficient.”

“You can use your adamantium to hold onto large props, like an airplane. Or you can get a glider and fly around using those.”

“… Oh.” Mark frowned. “That seems…” Mark wasn’t sure how that seemed.

“Not great,” Isoko provided.

“Yes, that. And also a weakness. A monster could break a glider.”

“Yup,” Isoko said, and then she continued, “Air Shapers can usually make simple tunnels of wind and support themselves on those. Everyone else has to figure it out the hard way— Oh! As for divorcing physical and astral: How about making some gears that allow for mechanical advantage? Mom talked about that once. Having stuff spin really fast and then trying to hold onto it when it’s spinning really fast might help you figure out the actual separation of physical and astral. Complicated parts, in of themselves, might even help.” She waved a hand. “But I don’t know for sure.”

Mark felt enlightened. “That’s a really good idea! Thank you, Isoko!”

Isoko grinned. “No problem. I hope it works! Mind if I check out the internet while you’re doing that? I want to see what the news says about the kaiju today.”

“Oh sure, go for it.”

Isoko turned on the screen to watch the news, while Mark spent a while figuring out gears and mechanical advantage and where, exactly, the limits of his current astral body lay.

You couldn’t push limits without first knowing of them, after all, and Mark had discovered several limits to his Powers already.

Healthy Body didn’t give him any sort of Tactile Telekinesis, and it might never do that. He was doomed to always lose his clothes in a big fight, because they were tier 0 and people struck with Body tier 4-9 in a real fight. That was Mark’s fate in that arena… unless he figured out how to get some TT of his own.

Adamantiumkinesis had a big limitation of physical actions limiting astral body action speed. It would take time to overcome that limit.

And Union seemed to have the limitation that Mark needed to be involved in the Union in some way. He couldn’t direct a system without being a part of that system; he couldn’t bless or hex others, without blessing or hexing himself, either along the same direction as his targets, or in opposite directions as his target. As the current battlefield lay, Mark didn’t think he would ever use ‘speed’ in a fight, because Mark certainly didn’t want to slow down himself to speed up someone else. That seemed like asking for a disaster. And yet, action speed was perhaps the strongest form of power on a battlefield.

They were all goals to hit, or hurdles to overcome, and Mark would get there eventually.

As Mark watched news of the kaiju battle over Wolf Bayou today, as he saw images of the destruction and the minutes tick by that the monster was active, he imagined himself slowed down, reacting poorly.

A cold sweat broke out across his body, as Redwolf’s words came to him, unbidden.

‘Could have been a lot worse’.

Which reminded Mark of something else.

Mark suddenly asked Isoko, “What do you think Redwolf was doing when she was talking to me about the kaiju, and how suddenly it was born? Was that… I don’t know. A threat? Or something?”

Isoko looked concerned as she stared at the screen.

Mark waited.

Eventually, Isoko said, “She got a weird look when you gave your rundown of the team that tried to kill you, too, especially around the mention of Mind Powers. I think… maybe she’s not as secure here as she lets on? Or maybe other Mind Powers are her weakness, or… or something else is happening there. I have no idea, Mark.” She looked at Mark. “The woman pops brains, she’s over a century old, and she’s a contemporary of Drakarok. Maybe you shouldn’t go poking into her business.”

Mark decided, “That’s a whole series of good points.”

Mark had a moment.

And then Mark gasped, and said, “Holy shit what if she does have some sort of thing with other Mind Powers going on? What if she knows the Mind Controller and the Mesmer?”

Isoko pointed at Mark with the phone, saying, “Now see? That right there would be poking into her business.”