The Shine wound south and east, before it turned around on itself toward the west, and then north, for a good 3 kilometers, before it turned south once again. It was a great big bend in the river that mirrored the Mississippi River back on Earth. In this particular place, on Daihoon, is where the settlement would happen.
Or rather, that’s where the ports would be. Eventually.
For now, the settlement would happen about 5 kilometers to the east, up a tributary and high above the flood plains. It was a good spot, covered in tall trees and with half of it mostly flat. The eastern half was raised slightly, on a hilly sort of area that was perfect for higher lands, in case kaiju came through the Shine to the west and spilled water everywhere.
There were more than a few lakes out there by the Shine that were more like water-filled footprints than natural lakes. It was kinda scary. They were very old, very large footprints, because they were fully overgrown, so it was not that bad to see such sights out there.
The land was rather pristine, but it was still full of monsters.
Mark held on the side of the railing of the viewing platform, looking down at the land alongside hundreds of other people. A lot of people were pointing at the land, smiling and talking about how they wanted a house ‘right there!’ and how ‘that’s where the shopping district will be!’ and then other people spoke of how that stuff wouldn’t happen for a while because they’d all be living in a stuffy castle to start. Those downers got lightly boo’d, and then there was laughter. Some of the more martially inclined people, who had clearly become friends in the last 13 days of travel, were talking about how ‘you can’t live there! I’m living there!’ and then the challenges for land went out with calls for duels and spars.
Sally leaned down and whispered to Mark, “We’re going for a flying castle, yeah?”
Mark smiled wide. “Eventually! If we don’t like our neighbors, we can move.”
The Grey Whale flew high above the settlement site, above the tributary leading to the Shine, and Mark tried to make out what had been done down there, so far. Not much, from what he could tell. There should have been 20 or 30 people already living down there, making a go of it in the wilds, prepping the space for the arrival of the Grey Whale today. They had been down there for the last 2 months, according to what Eliot had said.
But Mark saw no signs of people.
No smoke from chimneys, no cleared land.
Mark would have asked Eliot what was going on, but Eliot was with Aurora and others right now, all of them getting ready for the landing… or whatever it was they were doing. So Mark brought out Quark again and looked through his augmented reality view to try and understand the settlement site.
Quark helpfully marked the signs of settlement with colored dots.
A tree without its top over there, signifying a corner of the city wall. A giant boulder sitting on a pile of rocks, signifying another corner of the city wall. Overall, the city wall was an oval but with straight-line walls. The proposed lake site was an area of the twisting tributary that wound back and forth over lowlands, making a marsh. They’d have to excavate it to make a lake, but it already looked like lowlands…
Now where were the people who were supposed to be there?
Mark moved Quark back and forth, looking over the site. He couldn’t see any human presence in the area—
Oh. There it was.
There was a hunting lodge down below some trees far to the east, beyond the proposed city walls... Or at least that’s where Quark said it was. He had marked the location with a little blue house image. Mark moved his phone in and out of the way, trying to see what Quark was seeing, but he couldn’t see the location at all. Quark couldn’t actually see it either; he just knew where the lodge was based on whatever information he pulled from the Grey Whale’s servers.
The lodge was probably under the same hiding magics as the Grand Port.
Mark asked Sally and Isoko, “Are many things hidden by those hiding magics?”
Sally looked to Isoko, saying, “I only knew about the Grand Port.”
Isoko said, “Small things are easier to hide, I think?” She shook her head, adding, “But no. Those magics attract certain monsters… or at least that’s what I heard. I don’t know.”
Moments later, the intercom bleeped and Aurora’s voice filled the air.
“Attention! We have cleared the area in preparation for first clearing. What will happen now is I will rip up the land, clearing it, with further instructions to follow. Thanks to Eliot Cybersong, I expect our forward castle to be built within the next 12 hours. Will Eliot Cybersong’s team please report to the nearest guard station.”
“Shit!” Mark pushed away from the railing, exclaiming, “Were we supposed to—”
Isoko was right there with him, moving through the crowd, saying, “I asked him three times if we should be there!”
Sally followed.
A few people chuckled beside them—
And then a great ripping sound cascaded through the world, and Mark glanced backward, just in time to see rainbows reaching down past the viewing area, past the crowd. Boulders and trees churned into the sky, and Mark winced, annoyed that he didn’t get to see the spectacle directly. Other people had filled up the railing, and more were pushing in, trying to see Aurora rip up the world.
Mark soon found an army guy, or he was found by the army guy, he wasn’t sure. It was Carl, and Carl joked about how the show was only getting started.
Within a minute Mark, Isoko, and Sally were down at forward zone A, which was a Skill platform at the front bottom of the ship that was open all around. It was basically catwalks over open air.
This was a much better angle to watch Aurora work.
The sound of churning land was incredible. It almost hurt to hear boulders and land breaking.
Mark looked down past the catwalks to the land below, as Aurora stood at the precipice of the catwalk up ahead, also looking down, her Skill stretched below like a great rainbow flex. Her Supreme Telekinesis wasn’t actually light-based at all. It was reality that had been so strongly twisted that light and gravity and everything else simply crushed at her touch.
Mark stared down at the site for the settlement, his mind going back to when Addavein had summoned him to Daihoon, all those months ago. The dragon had been in the sky, and he had said some shit, and then he left like the passing of a thousand jets. The roar of his wings had caused the land to rip and tear, for boulders to be cast aside like so many pebbles, for trees to break and twist like snapping toothpicks.
Aurora accomplished much the same, but on purpose and with precision.
Mark mostly saw how the ground pounded and flattened, and how the tributary widened in the middle, and water began to flow into the depression left by Aurora, and how the trees blasted outward and stacked into piles. How the fuck did she have such a large range? How did she support herself? Mark’s mind whirled, because Aurora’s Supreme Telekinesis was a Shaper Skill, after all. She needed anchors in order to create so much destruction in such a large area, just like how Mark needed anchors on the ground with his adamantium, in order to float above where he had anchored.
Mark saw the anchors.
Aurora’s anchors were kilometers to the left and right; they looked like rainbow twists holding onto a hillside, a river bank, and probably more places besides. Everything was bright and full of transformation down below, but those anchors were solid flexes of rainbows so dark they were almost black—
The sound was incredible, and then it was gone, and Mark realized Aurora was saying something.
Mark looked up at the woman, who was sweating lightly. Mark instinctively Unioned with her for strength, weakness, and purity/impurity. Aurora brightened, seeming to relax and seem better.
Aurora smiled, saying, “Thank you, but I was saying there are a few monsters down there that need killing. They were specifically left in place months ago because they were strong and they killed everything else, but now they need to go, and you need to prove yourself as powerful to everyone else watching. This was the scenario that I was planning to give my brother so he could prove himself, but now I’m giving it to you, because of your unique circumstances.”
Mark’s heart thrummed with sudden anticipation, joy, worry, and surprise, all at the same time. And then he glanced down, past the catwalks, down to the center of the destruction, where something began to lift out of the center of the marshy and pulverized future lake bed. The monster was dinosaur-like, but with long arms and a long tail, and it lifted its two heads out of the broken land, roaring a challenge to all.
It was hundreds of meters away, but Mark could tell it was the size of a house. Maybe even larger.
Aurora was talking about how the monster was at the height of C-grade, but it was a simple-type beast, so it was probably at the limit of his capabilities, but it was expected for him to be able to handle threats like this all the time on his own. Here was his chance to do exactly that.
Mark turned toward Eliot, Isoko, and Sally, all of whom were standing closer to the door that led down here, to the assault platform. He smiled, flickering out his 3700 grams of adamantium into handlebars and wide almost-blankets that caught on the wind whipping through the space. He anchored himself so he didn’t fly away, as he held the handles out to his team.
With a solid voice, Mark asked, “Ready for battle?”
Isoko and Sally both grinned, each of them grabbing their own offered handles fast, while Eliot swirled a bunch of metals off of the nearby walls to hold onto the handle for him, creating a pole with holds for his hands and feet. Mark was proud, at that moment.
Sally tested the floating handlebar, but Mark held strong, and she didn’t leap out of the platform yet. She said, “I’m gonna need a sword.”
Eliot hopped onto his seat and Mark easily held his weight, as Eliot said, “I’ll make a tree into a club! There’s a lot of resources down there.”
Isoko was looking down as she said, “I see smaller monsters coming out of the muck, so I’ll need a sword, too.”
Mark felt a swell of surety as he heard his team make rapid plans, and as he connected them and the whole world with Union. He said, “Five seconds.”
They only needed three.
Mark lifted off of the catwalk, taking Isoko, Eliot, and Sally with him.
The world whipped by, the ship too far away to return, the ground rising below. Mark spread his blankets of adamantium wide, grabbing the air, slowing their descent more than enough, as he repositioned his whole team in a better weight distribution for a controlled fall.
He had never done this before with all of them, but he had done this before with just Isoko and Eliot. It was usually Eliot on top, Mark in the middle, and Isoko at the bottom, as she was already turning Full Platinum and her weight shot up to nearly 400 kilos. Sally was easy enough to add to the distribution, slotting her at the same height as Isoko. Mark grabbed the air and slowed their descent from a rapid, killing-plummet, to a controlled fall.
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Below them, the bipedal alligator rex saw them coming. It roared.
It was as big as a house with long arms and legs and a tail that slashed the ground, carving tracks in the broken mud and muck. All around the broken land, in the muck and the broken plant matter, mounds stirred. Maws and claws pulled out into the open, revealing themselves as smaller alligator rexes, each of them angry and ready to kill, each of them the size of a person.
Sally and Isoko slammed into the ground, both of them Tactile Telekinesis’ing on the marshy, broken land, holding themselves above the muck. Mark landed to the side, already piercing down into the ground, holding himself above it all, transitioning his blanket-like adamantium layers into swords and caltrops.
Eliot landed on the muck and the muck turned into a defensive platform, stone rising out of the destruction as a solid platform. There weren’t even holes in the construction, as Mark would have expected in a monster-occupied-land situation, but Mark rapidly reevaluated the monsterness of this land in the wake of watching Eliot rapidly form a defense position, lifting the land out of the muck. He created a solid platform five meters in diameter, with lights emerging from the ground, indicating the distance toward threats.
Aurora had absolutely pulverized this land and made it ‘man made’, hadn’t she.
Wooden swords popped out of the ground near Isoko and Sally, one 2 meter long straight-sword for Isoko, and one absolute beast of a tree-like baseball bat for Sally.
Gator rex prime charged their way, and all the little ones followed the larger one in battle.
With four meters of thigh-thick tree gripped by its base, Sally launched out into the muck, the enormity of her Giant Strength allowing her a solid grip on the land, and on her weapon. She slapped a small gator-rex at the larger one, and the larger one clawed at the smaller one, roaring as it did so. The small monster skipped across the muck, disoriented, but alive. A big slash from the big monster had only knocked the small one aside. It roared, and all the little ones roared with it.
Mark softly said what they all already knew, “They’re defensive specialists.”
As the little ones came on, Sally batted away two more with two rapid swings, striking one of them at the big guy again but the second went wide. The big guy slashed at the ground as it charged across the land, directly at Sally.
Isoko hung back, ensuring that Eliot was protected, while also Unioning with everything in the area, her heart and breath beating with protection magics.
Eliot twisted his fresh platform into an almost-walled area, with walls a meter tall and a few meters thick, ensuring that everything coming his way would have to get through solid rock to do so. The rock here was not tier 0 like it was on Earth, so it might actually provide some real, baseline level of defense. Lights glowed on the edges of the platforms, turning red when the smaller gatorrexes were near enough to leap the distance and get inside.
Isoko moved toward the nearest red zone, slipping toward the enemy with a speed twice as fast as any normal human. She tried to flick her blade through a leaping gator, but the gator’s skin was tough as fuck, and she only managed to connect with it, her platinum-coated wooden sword flexing and then sending the monster back into the muck.
“Fuck,” Isoko whispered, surprised she hadn’t cut the monster.
Mark floated, his heart thrumming with darkness that seeped out of his skin in lightning-like veins, connecting him to everything. He hadn’t done much, yet, but he was about to, because this was not going to be a normal fight. This had to be a show. Not a normal show, either, with back and forth and drawing it out for the camera. This had to be a show of power.
Eliot, Isoko, and Sally all knew what was coming, and what Mark could have done already, but Mark had wanted to wait for Eliot to show his speed at building, and how well his building held up to monsters, for Isoko to show her capability at protecting someone, and Sally to show her strength.
The giant gator rex roared at Sally as it ran at her, its clawed hands scrabbling on muck as it charged on arms and legs that were several meters long. Its body towered overhead, even over Sally’s 8 feet of height. Sally responded with a roar of her own, golden light inundating her big bat, the monster almost upon her but not quite close enough.
The smaller monsters focused on the new land in their midst, three of them charging over the embankment Eliot had built and charging at him.
Mark would wait until Isoko and Sally had gotten their hits in.
Isoko got in the monsters’ way and this time she carved off a head, through a chest, and then pierced through thick scales, into one of the monster’s hearts, the monster dying almost instantly. They bled out onto the ground and the lights on the ground began to falter, now that they were touched by monsters.
Mark teased Isoko, “You figured out how to break their defense, huh!”
Isoko declared, “Of course I did!”
Eliot whispered in the air, through some hovering cameras that he had made even before they had fallen to the ground, “Mark.”
Mark said, “We’re fine. Sally still needs to get her hit in.”
It was perfect timing for him to say that, which he had done on purpose for Eliot’s cameras.
Sally roared as the monster’s claws grabbed at her, as she spun away, evading a full grab attack. Golden light exploded from each scratch against her leathers, the light flowing to her bat, and then her bat swung down. It was the cracking of a glacier. The smacking of a 30 ton boulder against a mountainside. The sound of thunder and golden lightning.
The big gator rex thonked to the ground, roaring in hate even as it rapidly gathered itself back together, scrabbling at the ground, roaring—
It was time.
Mark brain-Unioned with the ideas of adamant and weakness.
Black lightning cracked through the world in every direction, touching every monster and drilling past every defense like it wasn’t even there, like the monsters were simple plants instead of middling-to-high grade threats. He took all of their strengths and gave them weakness in turn. That was the first step.
Mark also beat his heart with a Union of vein integrity and vein decay.
That was all it really took.
The monsters toppled. They breathed out foaming blood into the muck and the mud, and they died, while Mark spread his lightning into the mud, killing everything that hid below. Baby gator rexes died. Smaller monsters died. The plants, the bugs, the fish, the birds; everything died.
Everything perished for 500 meters in every direction, except for Mark, Isoko, Eliot, and Sally.
The big gator was mostly dead, but only because Mark purposefully allowed him his life. For now.
It would die soon enough.
Sally walked over to the monster, lifted her bat, and said, “Death to all monsters,” as she swung with golden radiance.
The gator rex exploded in decayed gore, with Sally as ground center for the red fountain.
For a moment, gore rained.
Sally stood there, blinking. Surprised.
She turned. “They fucking explode?!”
Mark smiled, saying, “Only when I focus on weakening them,” which was mostly true. Mark had needed to make a show, after all. With a bit of concentration, Mark flickered with a Union of purity/impurity, and Sally stood clean. Mark moved his attention to the greyed, dead land all around them. All of the gore began to evaporate from the blighted land, and the blight began to recede, grey and gore giving way to green moss. Mark said, “Not so bad when you can clean up this easily, though!”
Sally held up her tree-sized bat, watching as it started to grow moss and then small mushrooms and flowers. She smiled a little as she slammed the bat into the ground, leaving it to grow—
Mark had been ignoring the vectors looking down at them from above, but now one of those vectors fell to the ground and landed a few meters away, touching down with the lightest of touches.
Aurora stood on Eliot’s platform with Mark, Isoko, and Eliot, saying, “Good show. Now comes the much better part. Building!” She added, “Please stay with Eliot for the remainder of everything as we have previously discussed, keeping him strong with Union, and…”
There were instructions.
Mark followed them.
Mark mostly hung out to the sides with Isoko and Sally as Eliot did his thing, beginning with flattening the land and calling out when something needed to be turned ‘man made’. Sally got another bat soon enough, while Mark and Isoko acted as trash removers, turning plant matter and dead things into food for trees that they grew in designated forest spaces.
Aurora, Tulo Khava, many other Builder Guild people, and soon, thousands of people, all began working right alongside Eliot and each other.
There were stone shapers and water witches, Farmers of Verdago who made farmland on the downhill side of the tributary running through the space, Castellans of Hearthswell who worked on the walls and on stuff here and there below the ground, and then there were the brawnies unloading things from Grey Whale’s cargo holds. Big piles of stuff began to stack up on solid stone foundations. Kandon and other warriors made hunting plans around big monitors that were hooked up to scanning systems that had found threats further abroad that needed to be killed. Hunting teams went out, but Mark, Isoko, and Sally stayed with Eliot.
It was amazing to watch the bare bones of a city spring up within 4 hours.
A big wall was the most necessary thing, followed by warriors killing things beyond that wall and anything inside the wall, too, while a castle fit for a population of 10,000 came next. The stone shapers made most of the forward castle, but Eliot was soon walking stone corridors and turning them into hallways.
Everything was blocky and utilitarian, and Eliot was making 90% of it, but it was amazing to watch.
Mark marveled at his friend.
“I’m really glad I’m here,” Mark said, softly.
Isoko giggled, saying, “Me, too.”
“Holy fuck this is fun!” Eliot said, smiling under the sun.
But Sally’s eyes were watery as she saw Eliot put the finishing touches on a giant water fountain outside of the blocky castle. It was a basic fountain, but it was in the middle of an empty town square, in the middle of an empty land, waiting to be filled with buildings and houses and all sorts of things.
Sally softly said, “I wish Arana could have met you guys.”
Mark reached over and grabbed Sally’s hand, holding her tight. She gripped back, smiled a little, and that seemed to be enough, for now.