Mark walked down the road to Slayer HQ, Northeast Rivergate chapter, while Sally walked beside him.
They made quite a pair, Mark in his ceramic and webweave armor, and Sally in leathers designed to deflect blows, instead of taking them head on. But they weren’t any more of a sight than anyone else. Some people stood out quite a lot.
Over there was a trio of women, all dressed with the same style of flouncy dress and wide brim hat, like they were all witches out for the grandest ball ever. One wore all various shades red, the other all blue, and the final one wore all green. They even had some flowers growing on their gowns… or maybe those were just decorations? Probably just decorations. Not real flowers. They looked like they were out for a movie event, or maybe they were shooting shots for a show. As Mark glanced their way a few times, the show option seemed more accurate. They had little cameras floating around them and they were smiling a lot, their vectors pointed at the cameras just as much as their vectors were pointed at each other. They seemed like they were shooting a ‘reality’ show of some sort.
Live streaming, probably. A lot of hunters made extra money showing off videos of their hunts or their daily lives. Eliot had been poised to do exactly that.
Other people looked more normal.
Metal armor that fully encapsulated. Leathers, but with a good metal helmet. Big swords, small swords. A few floating weapons that were the tools of Shapers, like Mark... or maybe they were artifacts.
Mark asked Sally, “You ever think about getting floating weapons?”
Sally scoffed, “Why would I want one of those?”
Mark was wearing his black webweave under off-grey armor plating, while he floated his spear at his side. The spear was just a well-made wooden thing. Mark had yet to douse it in alchemical silver. His backpack held all the essentials of the day, from his phone (that he had encapsulated in a web of adamantium, now that he had extra; he’d get a proper AI house later) to paperwork, a soda, and a few snacks. He didn’t need actual food or water, so he didn’t bring any of that. Mark was a rather imposing figure when he was on the field, but now he was just walking along, floating his spear at his side, spearpoint downward, as was proper for carrying weapons around in the open.
Sally was an imposing figure without even trying. Her color scheme was brown leathers and satchels on her belt, with her two swords simply stuck on her back, held there by Tactile Telekinesis. Both of the swords had a modesty guard, which was a wrap of leather that only covered the edges of the giant swords. Those guards wouldn’t do shit in a real fight, but they were necessary to wear around town, to show that Sally wasn’t in a fight right now. They were some imposing weapons, for sure. The swords added a full two extra feet to her height. Maybe more. The tips did not drag on the ground, but only because Sally was very careful about that.
“Floating weapons mean you can walk around without worrying about them dragging on the ground,” Mark said, “And also so you could use multiple weapons, because two giant swords cannot always be the best tools for the job. Your extras could float to the side when not using them.”
“I thought about getting some floating weapons for just that reason, but the price was too high. They use the same gravcrystal that hoverbelts use, and a bunch more besides that because they have to stay near you without actually touching you. And whoa boy, if you want a weapon that can actually fight for you?” Sally made a small whistling sound. “That’ll break the bank.”
Mark hummed. “All good points.”
They walked by nice buildings and guildhouses of all sorts of sizes, mostly on the small size, and then they reached Slayer Square, at the center of this particular nexus of business.
Northeast Rivergate Slayer HQ was a giant building of wood and stone and glass and outdoor areas. It had a hoverpad at the back, and not much actual business going on inside. It wasn’t the most busy of Slayer-associated locations in the city, because they didn’t do Slayer business here. That designation was reserved for the actual working offices directly beside the gate, about twenty kilometers in that direction, down the street. This area here was home to apartments, accountants, general stores, and a lot of restaurants, because this was where Slayers hung out and networked.
Right over there was a Mage Guild office, next to smaller mage guild-type offices that belonged to other, smaller guilds. This was practically a guild district, like all other guild districts in the city. This one had a pretty big superhero office, too, and even a Memphi Guardhouse, where a woman in a black and yellow suit tried to hand out fliers to people who walked by, trying to recruit them to work in the Guard, instead of for themselves. She wasn’t having much luck.
The promise of a constant paycheck wasn’t what drew the crowds in this location, but sometimes people got tired of the hunt for any number of reasons. The guard was a good fallback option.
But mostly, people were here to network with other hunters.
Sally smirked, and told Mark, “Smaller than Crytalis, but not by much! A whole lot fucking bigger than Harbordock, though— Oh! I see another Giant Strength eatery!”
Mark smiled at Sally’s open joy, saying, “We can order food from there at HQ, if you want, but as soon as we walk through those big open doors Quark will announce us as ‘present’ to the system, and we’ll be headed out within the minute.”
“Ha!” Sally walked forward a bit faster, joy on her face, as she said, “Let’s test that theory.”
Mark quietly prayed that his prognostication was correct, because he didn’t really want to be bombarded with party requests for the next few hours.
The wide open doors of Slayer HQ loomed, framed in stone, while the inside looked like the foyer of a giant hotel. Mark walked forward, right behind Sally, and Sally reached up to touch the top of the door but she couldn’t reach. She chuckled at that, and then she was inside. Mark stepped inside.
… And no instant notification from Quark. Well that was fine.
Slayer HQ had a bunch of stuff in it, and people were sitting around at tables and playing cards or sitting on couches and watching movies. Mark imagined it like a firehouse, with firemen, or a squadhouse in an army, or, exactly like it was, a guildhouse with a bunch of people who were killing time, waiting to kill some monsters.
The place was also absolutely decorated for Christmas and a lot of other holidays besides. There were trees with garlands for Christmas, with red and green everywhere, but there were also monster jaws encased in metal for Lenbar, which was something over on Daihoon, and candles with burning eyeballs for some other Daihoon holiday. Their complimentary snack bar was open and doing brisk business, handing out cookies decorated in all sorts of ways. It smelled fantastic. Like holidays.
A giant map of Memphi held in the back of Slayer HQ. It was a heatmap of every possible monster event happening around the city, mostly outside of the city, showing off in real time. It wasn’t a Slayer-only system, though. A whole bunch of satellite feeds linked in to that system, and the system was repeated in every major guildhouse all across Memphi.
Skywatch, the main system for tracking these sorts of things, was always on the case.
Sally stood, watching the map, alongside a few other people.
Mark stepped to her side, ignoring the absolute plethora of vectors pointing in his direction—
A vector slammed into Mark and Mark turned, already knowing who it was. Mark put on a smile and tried not to be offended as Kardi chuckled and walked out from a bar, smiling wide. Kardi was a tall, lanky kinda girl who was pretty good at killing monsters with her Talent for Luck and her spellguns, and Mark had even gone out with her a few times to kill said monsters, but there was something off about her. She was too friendly… Or something like that. Kardi simply seemed like she had bad vibes, though Mark had never actually experienced any sort of concerning vector from the girl. Just a general sort of unease that was mostly Mark’s fault, he figured.
Kardi called out, “Mark!”
Sally turned—
Quark beeped in Mark’s backpack and Mark felt relief. Mark waved off Kardi, saying, “Hey, Kardi! Bye! We got a mission to get to!” Mark touched Sally’s hand and gestured toward the hallway over there that led toward the hovervans, and started walking—
Kardi smiled brightly and didn’t stop coming, saying, “I just wanted to tell you that I got approved for the settlement project! I’ll see you there, Mark. Maybe we can party again sometime.” She winked. “See you later~”
Diplomatically, Mark said, “That’s great, Kardi. Glad to have you. Bye!”
And then Mark went walking and Sally lingered for just a moment, but she caught up fast enough.
“So who was that cutie?” Sally asked, glancing back the way they came.
Mark shook his head, saying, “She’s very insistent and… She’s a fine person, I guess.”
Sally just chuckled.
The hovervan was there with a driver sitting in the seat, eyeing Mark and then Sally. Mark knew the driver as a man named James. One other person was in the van, but two more were outside, all of them geared up and ready for a drop. The last person in their team flashed their full-orange badge across the scanner station on the side of the hovervan, and that was when James truly saw Mark and Sally. They were headed his way, after all.
James smiled wide, calling out to the people in the van, “Looks like you kiddies got lucky as fuck! You got the Dragon’s Brother and some big bitch for an escort!” He looked Sally up and down, asking her ‘kindly’, “How much you weigh with all your gear, honey?”
Sally chuckled, saying, “320 kilos, old man.”
“Oh shit, a big one!” James flicked some controls on the van, saying, “I got the controls set, so you’re all set to come aboard. Get in!”
Mark rapidly told Sally how to scan her badge and then he got into the van with the orange-ranks, instantly thumbing at himself, saying, “Mark. Metal shaper and Union. Leader, support, frontliner. High Yellow.” And then he looked at Sally, saying, “Sally…?”
Sally picked up what Mark was putting down, hopping into the vehicle, which didn’t budge at all, and saying, “Sally. 15-times modifier. Frontliner brutalist. Transferred from a different guild recently so low yellow. What’s the mission?”
One of the high-orange guys spoke up, marking himself as the leader in that action, saying, “Uh. It’s just a routine High Orange threat. One small group of dangerous monsters came out of a hole in the ground and started making the land their own. We don’t actually need, uh, that much help—”
“Stupid fucking kids!” James said, as he pressed a button and filled the cabin with a dinging sound. The edges of the doors flashed yellow and a sign flickered on, telling people to hold on and prepare to move. That was all the warning they got. The door slammed shut and James pulled back on the wheel. The hovercar ascended, and since the inertial dampeners were on, Mark barely felt the shift in gravity. James looked behind him as he drove, fixing the other team leader with hard eyes, saying, “None of you are healers. This one is a healer. You take the help you can get.”
Stolen novel; please report.
The guy seemed to reevaluate his life, turning professional in an instant, saying, “Sir yes sir.” And then he told Mark, “Miasma-type hardshells poked out of the frost an hour ago and we just got cleared to go kill them and take the reward, and we are fine with splitting it with a healer and the healer’s party…” ‘Mostly’, was left unsaid. “I’m Francis, a Wind Shaper, scout and shot caller. We got a Linz the Sniper with alchemical silver bullets, and Orris, our Basic Brawn frontliner. He’s the one with the mace.”
Some miasma monsters, huh? Well that wasn’t anything to tell a story about, but Sally seemed happy.
Sally asked, “How big are they, and how hard are their shells?”
“Car-sized and they’re mostly shell, with a Body in the 70s and some sort of Natural ooze knack going on, so a weakness to Mind and Arcane, and we’re packing bullets to that effect,” Francis said, “Most people can't hurt them and they just spew poison when they get frightened. We can take them because of Linz’s Sniper… But I get the impression that you want to crack them in half?”
Sally smirked. “You get the correct impression.”
Orris looked up to Sally, saying, “Those are some nice swords you have.”
Sally grinned. “That’s a nice mace you have, too. It’s not just an alchemical silver-able weapon, is it?”
“Nope!” Orris tapped the mace’s haft, saying, “Magesteel, so it usually works well against all the Body-type monsters out there.”
“Oh, that’s a good one,” Sally said, “I was thinking about that sort of weapon…”
The two brawnies talked a little, and the flight went fast.
Soon, James dropped them off outside of the ‘rockshell spewers’ incursion, which is what the AI was calling the whole event, which was not much of an event, at all. Everything was broken and frozen but also green and misty. Pools of burbling green slime fogged the air, while monsters shaped like boulders mucked about in the green on stumpy legs, their necks and heads poking out into the frosty air like long brown sausages. Mark was sure they had actual heads, but those heads had no features. Just wrinkles.
They reminded Mark of old people sitting in a hot spring while snow fell all around them. They looked more comfortable than threatening, but that miasma was deadly. It was eating away at absolutely everything, and spreading, burbling, quite far.
Mark openly wondered, “I don’t see any eyes? Can you hit them, Linz?”
“Oh yeah,” Linz said, unstrapping her long rifle from her shoulder. She popped the cork on a bottle of alchemical silver and locked the bottle into a reservoir on her belt, and then she took a bullet out of a different pocket and stuck the tip into the reservoir. As she locked the bullet into the chamber of the big rifle, she said, “I can see eyes on those stalks just fine as soon as Francis clears the air. I count 7 targets, but I suspect 17.”
Frost clung to the monsters, but then Francis moved the air using a bunch of tricks to expand his range. A cold wind blew along the path the wind was already taking, for James had dropped them off up wind, and now Francis blew hard, and the green smoke began to brush away from the closest monsters. A turtle startled a little, now that the mist was clearing around it, but it just hunkered down into the miasma and calmed down.
Sally was busy taking off the covers on her swords, eager to get out there, saying, “So who’s opening shots? Linz?”
“Soon as I give her a clear shot,” Francis said, blowing tunnels of wind across the field. “The AI says that the toxins are highly corrosive, so she needs more bullet integrity than just alchemical silver… and… a bit more… Er…” He kept blowing, and then he looked at Mark. “Oh shit. Yeah. Union makes it easier, doesn’t it?”
“Stamina will not be a problem today,” Mark said.
“I am so so fucking ready,” Sally said, as she tucked the leather covers into her back pockets and stood tall with a ‘kaiju blade’ in each hand. She was ready to kill, and that came out in her voice, as she said, “Pardon my swords.”
And then she tapped off of the ground and was ten meters forward, racing, jumping off of the ground and bringing her swords around for a slap against a rock beast, almost 120 meters away from the starting line. She didn’t have a speed modifier, but that didn’t seem to matter when you had that much power behind you.
Mark almost wanted to join her out there, but she was moving faster than him and she had already plunged into the green mist, headed for the first rockshell on the right, in the middle of a pool of green muck. He was almost worried for her health. But Sally’s entire body practically sparked gold the very second she touched the miasma, and Mark knew he was seeing Retribution in action, in person, for the first time. Sally wasn’t being reckless going into the miasma. She was activating her Chosen power. Retribution could only give back what it had taken, after all, and she was very much able to self-heal from the damage she inflicted.
Sally could have done this entire thing herself, couldn’t she?
Mark was so fucking proud in that moment, and in the moments that followed.
Sally brutalized the first rockshell, bringing her swords down and smashing into the turtle’s brown carapace like the wrath of a god, cracking the thing open with a thunder that rolled across the field. In that moment, she broke the tranquility of the poison hot spring. Turtle heads moved around, trying to find the source of the disturbance. They saw Sally and they made squeaking noises that turned into deep thrums, under the surface of the muck springs. The miasma around those ones increased. They did not move toward or away from Sally, though. They remained sitting targets.
Sally stepped onto the muck underfoot and launched herself off of the liquid surface, aiming at the next monster, her skin practically glowing gold. She killed the next one and Mark saw what happened better, this time. She was glowing gold, and then her swords seemed to drink in all of her gold right as she connected to the monster’s shell, and that gold cracked open the shell, sending spiderwebs across the rock, even as her swords continued to drive into the beast.
Retribution was working off of the damage from the miasma all around her, and then allowing her to hit the creatures even harder.
“Neat,” Mark said, smiling as he watched Sally tackle the next few monsters.
He had to beat his heart hard and focus on clearing the air around them, and making sure that no miasma interfered with his own ability to connect to Sally and the monsters, and to balance the Union in favor of humanity, but that was all background stuff these days. He had wanted to go into a fight with Sally, directly, but this was good, too.
Orris asked Mark, “Is she dating anyone?”
Mark laughed, Linz gasped and had an offended look on her face as she slapped Orris on the shoulder, and Francis shook his head. Orris looked at Mark, though, wondering if he would answer the question.
Mark said, “Don’t.”
“Fair enough!” Orris said, but he was still looking.
Francis soon cleared enough miasma for Linz to take her first shot, which she did, her rifle popping off with a sound that was barely audible over the crack of Sally’s swords. The backside of a turtle’s head exploded all over its shell, and then the turtle slumped down into the muck and began to dissolve in its own corrosive effluence.
For the next half an hour, Mark hung back with Linz and Francis, letting Francis call his shots and sweep away the miasma from the huddled rockers, while Mark purified the air around all of them, and allowed Sally to get up and personal with the monsters. Orris hung back, content to be a defender if anyone should come after Linz and Francis, which seemed to be his normal mode of operation. The guy was built like a tank, and his armor had wear and tear, so Mark was sure that Orris could do the job, it’s just that there wasn’t a job for him to do, what with Sally out there getting all the attention. Linz lined up her rifle when she found a shot, popping eyes and drawing ire, but mostly she lined her shots well enough to pop the brains of the turtle-like beasts. Any turtle that actually faced this way was soon a dead turtle.
It was a rather leisurely morning that ended up a lot more fun than worrisome, which was how Mark liked it. Routine.
Soon, the mission was done and the five of them were all cleaned up, thanks to Mark, which surprised the trio and made Sally gush about needing to buy another cleaner artifact, and they were back on the hovercar, flying back to Memphi. James wasn’t their driver, though. It was some guy Mark didn’t know.
Along the way, Orris asked Mark, “What’s ‘the Dragon’s Brother’ anyway?”
Mark dodged the question, “The name is Mark Careed.”
The trio waited for more.
Mark did not give them more, except to say, “Great to party with you three! Good luck climbing the ranks. Sniper teams are usually pretty good, I think.”
Francis, Linz, and Orris didn’t press the issue.
Mark and Sally touched down back at Slayer HQ, Mark and Sally parted with the sniper team, and not a minute later Quark alerted them to another mission, if they wanted it.
Sally eagerly said, “Yes!”
They ended up fighting some frost elementals, which were rare outside of Daihoon, because they usually didn’t last long outside of big magic areas. These ones were tougher than most, though. They could survive in this place, and winter was pretty deep right now.
Mark got to fight alongside Sally.
Sally swung her swords and shattered a 4-meter tall construct of frost and deadwood and stone, scattering debris across the torn ground, smiling wide as Mark flew beside her, two rapier-like bare blades of adamantium carving right through another elemental. They started to count their kills, and Sally got to see what Mark could actually do, as a Shaper.
It was a good day.
On the way back from the fifth mission of the day, Sally said, “You’re just as brutal out there as I always imagined you would be, Mark.”
Mark laughed. “You, too! Holy shit, you turned into a bruiser, Sally. Of course, you always were.”
Sally smiled brightly—
Quark dinged.
Mark floated Quark out from his backpack, which had a few more holes in it but nothing overmuch, smiling as he said, “And Quark survived the whole day! That’s rare!” Mark was expecting another mission, that he may or may not have accepted, depending on what Sally wanted, but Mark read the phone and felt a twinge of hope and worry. He said to Sally, “Isoko is home and Eliot is almost there. Missions are done! Let’s go home. I can’t wait for you to meet them.”
Sally nodded, resolute. She didn’t say anything, but Mark could tell she was worried.
Mark was sure it would go well, though. Sally had only been hard on Mark because they were best friends, but she would at least be diplomatic with Eliot and Isoko for a while, until a real friendship blossomed.