A little over 80 minutes after the gravity inverted at the lava belt, the world beyond the bubble became lava once again and Mark’s adamantium vehicle bobbed out into open sky, which was really just a great big tunnel in the middle of the stone layer. It was exactly as Andria had described… but not quite.
Roiling masses of slimes absolutely polluted the surface of the lava, like a secondary layer of heat to the whole place, all of them glowing brightly. Mark wondered if any of them were Andria right now, but he had no way of knowing. Perhaps she was looking for them at this moment? Well, she could look then. Mark hoped she found them.
The world far overhead was more lava. Quark rapidly calculated that the tunnel was about 55 kilometers wide. Mark rapidly righted the vehicle into something that wouldn’t bob up and down, while Quark took a bunch of measurements outside of the invisible adamantium shell.
“Oh wow,” Sally muttered, as she looked left and right, as Mark stabilized the vehicle. “This is fucking amazing.”
Everything was lava in a great orange and red tunnel through the center of the layer, except for giant crystal spires of what looked like some sort of smokey quartz, or perhaps subtly purple quartz. Everything glowed red and yellow down here, and a rope of fire, maybe a kilometer wide, glowed bright white at the very center of the entire layer, bathing the land in almost-normal illumination. The tunnel and the fire rope at the center extended far, far out of sight, and those spires of crystal probably came in all colors, but who really knew under this lighting. Quark calculated some of the spires to be 3.5 kilometers wide, and 7 to 8 kilometers tall. A lot of them were a lot shorter, and spread out a whole lot. The spires kinda formed ‘cities’ on the inside of the layer, though, with collections of spires poking up in clumps here and there—
“That way,” Sally said, pointing to the left. “I can already feel it over there… somewhere over there. It feels more spiky than the fire in the air.”
Mark checked with Quark’s estimation of direction and sure enough he saw the screens in the vehicle and the vision in his eyes pointed over there. Mark spun up a rotor overhead and lifted the adamantium vehicle into the air, asking, “What’s the atmosphere like, Quark? The pressure and temp feels lesser than inside the ground.”
Quark read out, “1400 degrees at the lava, 1100 in the air. Pressure is lesser than inside the ground, but still at 3x Earth-normal. That white-fire sky-light-rope is at 30,000 to 45,000 degrees.”
Sally looked up. “Oh shit, that’s hot.”
“It appears to be lightning, miss,” Quark said. “Solid plasma.”
“Neat,” Mark said, rotor spinning overhead in the soup-like air. “Flying is easier than normal but we’ll stay away from the fire in the sky—”
The lightning in the sky zapped down onto one of the crystal towers far ahead, sending flickering white heat down the crystal’s surface and into every other crystal near that larger one. The larger crystal suddenly started glowing and then it shattered, sending kilometer-wide crystal chunks scattering into the tunnel. None of those crystal chunks were anywhere near Mark and Sally. But they were still ‘close’, in a large sense. Maybe 9 kilometers away.
Those chunks of crystal landed upright in the lava and then spread cooling patches where they landed. And then the crystals began to grow, the cool patches in the lava spreading fast, even more crystals sprouting up from the patches. They had to be growing from something, but from what? Mark had no idea. Maybe from sucking the lava up into crystal formations? Who knew!
Moving on.
“I think the ‘hedgehog kaiju’ is really small most of the time so it doesn’t get zapped to death by the fire,” Mark said, as he began flying them toward the suspected direction of the kaiju, which was somewhere over in that vague direction, to the far side of the new crystal growth.
“Maybe,” Sally said, her vector turning worried, her TT on the hull of the vehicle beginning to truly spark into the heat, into the lava. Softer, she said, “Maybe.”
Mark Unioned with Glory and Fear, driving away the subtle danger lurking in Sally’s heart, asking a ‘funny’ question, “What if it’s actually a hedgehog?”
Sally began to glow, fear fading, power sparking hard against the world outside of the adamantium shell, as she grinned—
Sally suddenly focused.
“There,” she said, pointing up and to the left, almost on the other side of the vibrant white center of the layer.
Mark angled the vehicle toward the left, circling the center at a wide distance, skimming the surface of the lava, headed toward a suspiciously cooled surface of the interior. A dark spot on the bright lava. Quark estimated the spot to be 4 kilometers wide. It was far away from any crystal tower; just out there in the open, among the slimes. Quark estimated a 10 minute flight time—
“Oww?” Mark said, feeling weird for a moment as something touched him in a weird sort of way. But it wasn’t touching him, he realized. It was touching the surface of his bubble. “Something spikey is—”
And then he heard it, in the distance, at that dark spot. It was a warbling spikiness, like tiny crystals vibrating at each other and chiming, but also a roar. A kaiju. Quark zoomed in and static overlaid the screen in Mark’s vision, and on the screen he put up inside of the invisible adamantium bubble.
A group of crystal-spiked hedgehogs rustled around on the surface of the dark spot while a bright-purple-spiked hedgehog, twice as large as the rest, was on its hind legs and wiggling its nose in the air. Mark could barely make out the purple hedgehog through the static on the screen, but all of the hedgehogs were like that; obscured from the camera. But Mark could tell what they were doing out here, mostly. Most of them were simply walking along on the dark ground, poking at the rock and either extending the front edge somehow, or actively hunting on the edges, aiming for the lava slimes that absolutely polluted the surface of the lava.
The hedgehogs pounced on the lava slimes like spiked balls jumping at water balloons. The slimes popped, sometimes even before the hedgehogs got there, and then the hedgehogs ate the slime that was left—
The purple hedgehog suddenly looked in their direction, opened its maw, and roared a true Kaiju Call.
Every single other hedgehog suddenly went from an estimated 2 meters tall, to 20 meters tall, the grouping of 700-ish hedgehogs suddenly bouncing off of each other as they spread out like an explosion of spiked flesh all across 10 kilometers of land. The ones that landed in lava and slimes turned that lava into solid land and the slimes into splatters. Those nearest to the main, purple-spiked hedgehog, turned 30 meters tall, into main guardians for the kaiju.
Mark was still 10 kilometers away from the first ones, but being anywhere near them was like being near ten million bees all trying to sting him at the same time. Mark barely felt it, but it was still there. Sally, however, felt it a lot.
And she was absolutely radiant.
With might in her voice and Glory in her power, Sally stood strong and Called out, “Your Retribution is nothing before Drakarok!”
“Guess we’re going for it already,” Mark said, mostly to himself.
Mark fell into the flow.
One of the lead hedgehogs raced forward as Mark raced toward it, and the hedgehog squared itself up, digging its legs into the hardening lava. It reared its butt to face its back toward Mark and Sally. Black quills launched out of its back, curving through the air right at Mark’s adamantium shell. Mark spun the rotor toward the left, taking off at a racing angle—
“Let them come,” Drakarok said, with Sally’s voice, as he put her hand on Mark’s shoulder. “We will stand tall and let them kill themselves upon our power.”
The flow broke.
Mark looked up at Sally, who was now twice as large as before and taking up a lot of space in the shell, but there was space to spare, and Mark stopped flying away. The monster’s spikes came in from every angle, piercing—
Piercing nothing.
For a moment, Mark swore he saw black spikes poking into the adamantium shell. But then that didn’t happen.
Instead, golden Retribution flashed outward, incinerating every single spike and launching lightning through the sky, right at the hedgehog that had tried to kill them. The hedgehog died in a way that Mark had never seen something die before. The golden lightning was practically physical, and it drilled into the monster exactly like the tens of spikes that the monster had tried to drill into Mark’s sphere. The resulting Retribution caused the hedgehog to explode outward, gore painting the world like a popped balloon. And then the gore turned into almost nothing at all as it seemed to shrink, which is probably exactly what it was doing.
The purple-spined tiny kaiju roared again and the whole array of monsters rushed into angles of attack, like batteries of mages with wands ready to fire on a massed enemy. Suddenly, a hundred huge black-spined hedgehogs all loosed, all as one, filling the molten air with dark spines.
The spines touched the invisible shell around Mark and Sally, and then golden, physical lightning raced back toward the hedgehogs, popping them in turn. Pop pop pop! 25 hedgehogs suddenly died. Sally sagged for a moment, but Mark’s Glory and Drakarok’s presence sustained her.
The tiny, hidden kaiju at the center suddenly roared something else, and purple sparks jumped from it to every one of the other monsters out there. Every other hedgehog suddenly magnified in size, yet again, and they raced at Mark’s stabilized adamantium bubble. A thousand shots fired. A hundred obsidian hedgehogs died, no real match for Mark’s adamantium or Sally’s divinely-empowered Retribution.
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Sally glowered at the enemy and spoke with Drakarok’s voice, “See how the leader uses his family. See the evil inherent in the systems. He will not move unless we make him move. If possible, we would keep some of the hedgehogs alive, but the leader is beyond hope, and that is before we get to the issue of them being tools of the demons. All kaiju must die, Mark, and the system itself must be remade.” Golden eyes demanded, “Open the shield. We will engage them directly and you will see what plans I have for you and Sally.”
“… Is she going to be okay?” Mark asked, unfurling the adamantium shell.
Heat flooded into the once-protected space, whistling hot and burning strong, crushing and instantly evaporating the scant moisture left in the bubble. For a brief moment, Sally was not okay. But then the very heat itself sparked against her brilliant golden halo and she grew several meters larger, her skin turning golden and her hair shining like the sunlight, her feet too large, her stance too wide. But Mark hastily reorganized the platform, just like he reorganized his rotor that had been overhead so he didn’t cut into Sally’s head.
In a flash of inspiration, Mark crafted his rotor into a 10-meter-long sword with a 2-meter-long handle.
Sally snatched the sword out of the air and batted aside several volleys of spines all at once, sending shockwaves of golden lightning zapping out across the battlefield, popping several more hedgehogs.
She let the next batch hit her skin, driving through her biceps, her chest, her stomach, her legs, and Mark almost panicked, but Sally soaked in the wounds in her own body, pulling them out of herself and growing larger in response. Mark had no idea how she was doing this, but it was straining her a great deal, so he fed her Glory and drove away the Fear—
She kicked off of the platform, raising her free hand and forearm, and a golden shield appeared to intercept the next volley of spines—
In a golden flash, Sally vanished and reappeared 20 kilometers away, right next to the main kaiju, like a hunter appearing before a baby elephant, surrounded by all of the rest of the herd. The herd and the kaiju did not respond fast enough, and Mark was too far away to get near her at all. Mark Unioned with Alacrity and Slowness, pulling himself through the flaming air, racing to catch up, to get back to her. She was going to get killed! The purple-spined kaiju suddenly began to expand, expand, expand, matching Sally for height, even as Sally brought her guillotine blade down like a god striking home.
The kaiju continued to expand, roaring, its guardian hedgehogs turning toward Sally to kill her, a hundred quills released in a hundredth of a second.
Mark was closer now. Close enough to Union again—
The kaiju suddenly burst in half, both of its massively expanding halves going in opposite directions, prismatic light shining bright in the light of the lava and the death of a kaiju. The light consumed Sally, and then spines struck her. Mark had no idea of what happened beyond that because purple-spined hedgehog kaiju flesh filled the world.
For 2 frantic minutes Mark dug through flesh, feeling Sally just ahead, latching on to her with the very extremities of his Union, keeping her alive and trying not to panic himself. The purple kaiju was dense. Denser than anything Mark had ever cut through. Even with being dead and Sally having done most of the work, and when the thing was small and probably even more dense, Mark still had trouble cutting into the monster. And then he realized he could Union with Purity and Corruption and that helped him dig a bit faster, great fountains of flesh turning to miasma, bursting away from the canyon that was the kaiju’s body.
Mark reached Sally at the heart of the dead kaiju, and she was in rough shape. Four times as large as normal, great wounds open and oozing with burned flesh, as the rest of her flickered with golden lightning, keeping out the heat. Mark Unioned enough Purity and Corruption to drive away the walls of flesh closing in, and then he spat out a brace of adamantium like webs coating the space. He didn’t have enough adamantium so he threw his own body into the mix, holding back the tide of flesh long enough to heal himself and get more adamantium to throw at the problem.
Sally burned.
Mark Unioned with Homeostasis and Agitation, shoving away the problems out into the space beyond the adamantium web and bringing in as much stability as he could to Sally. She groaned in her sleep, her vector appearing out from under a haze of too much pain. Mark took all of the pain he could, and he shoved that pain away, but the pressure was crushing, so Mark Unioned with Homeostasis and Pressure as he sealed up the adamantium shell as much as he could. But Sally was too big, and she expanded as the pressure decreased. She was going to crush herself against the inside of his shell.
“No no no,” Mark said, frantic again, Unioning with Good and Bad to suddenly heal all of the problems of Sally’s expanding body, as she pressed into the wall of the adamantium. “Go smaller! Go smaller!”
Sally got bigger and bigger as her wounds closed—
“Drakarok,” Mark Called, directly into Sally’s body, lacing his Call with meaning and worry.
A golden light flickered and Sally shrunk a bit.
It was enough. It soon stopped working, though, and Sally grew again. But slowly. More controlled. She was going to expand.
Mark needed to deal with it.
Mark stood over Sally, adjusting the pressure in the space, widening the space with his own body over and over again, carving out more and more of the hedgehog kaiju with Purity and Corruption to open up the space even more. As Sally healed she got bigger and Mark moved to make the space bigger and bigger still. Holes opened up in the shell now and then, pressure spiking, heat rising, Sally shrinking from the pain and the whistling hot, burning atmosphere that was surely not even oxygen at all. Mark asked Quark about that. Quark returned the atmospheric composition as mostly nitrogen and carbon monoxide and not at all suitable for human life at all, which made sense. Sally died a bit as she tried to breathe that atmosphere.
Mark hovered over Sally’s enormous head, fixing everything that he could fix as it happened, saying, “You’re not dying on me, Sally. Not here. Not now. Come on.”
Sally was unconscious, her vector trapped inside, her skin flickering prismatic as she vacillated from large to small, and then too big to contain at all. She suddenly gained too much size and she would have crushed herself inside the shell, but Mark frantically opened up the shell and heat and pain poured in again.
Mark compensated as Sally pushed up against the remains of the hedgehog, pain lancing through her sleeping vector, skin tempering darker in the heat of the underground. She whimpered, voice rolling like thunder, muttering in her sleep.
“It hurts.”
Mark broke a little in that moment, but he kept it together, moving as fast as he could, weaving the adamantium shell back together around Sally like a painter painting the world black with a paintbrush the size of a house and not nearly enough paint to go around. So he used himself up to paint the world; arms, legs, torso, and head, becoming more of a shell, more of a barrier against the world. Mark healed himself back to full, healing himself as much as he healed Sally, slowly sealing her into a cocoon that was entirely not good enough.
Quark helped with the architecture of it all, painting imagery into the air for Mark to follow, saying to Mark, “She should top out at 500 meters tall, so let’s plan for that.”
“Yes,” Mark said, looking over the adamantium he had left behind, rapidly heading back the way he had come to fix ten different problems Quark had noticed and Mark had not. Mark spoke in the thick, dense, molten air, “Let’s aim for 750 meters. She’s already at 400.”
Quark adjusted the design.
And Mark moved fast.
In 20 minutes, Mark put up a rough shelter with barely enough room for Sally at 750 meters, but she could curl up if she needed to, which she did, mumbling in her sleep.
“Dad, can we turn on the AC yet? I have money to help pay the repairman.”
Mark grimaced as he got back to Homeostasis/Agitation, pushing heat outside of the dark space, fixing small problems that appeared over and over again.
And then the hedgehogs outside started trying to poke holes into Mark’s adamantium shell.
Eventually, at 820 meters long, and curled up a little on adamantium pillows, Sally fell into a deep sleep and Mark killed hedgehogs. As he killed them, he felt every cut, every stab he inflicted. But he was adamantium. He deformed around the counter-blows and kept Sally’s cocoon safe, and Fear eventually broke the resolve of the hedgehogs. They scattered to the lava fields.
Mark melded through the adamantium shell, into the cool dark where Sally breathed softly and illuminated the inside like a glittering diamond. Mark watched over her for a little bit, and wondered a lot of things.
An hour passed, and Mark went from frantic, to merely prepared—
“Oh. Ha.”
A thought had occurred, as Mark gazed at Sally’s sparkling body. Sally’s Power was elemental anima, according to the language of Manawork. Anima was analogous to carbon on the Periodic Table of the Elements. Diamonds were made of carbon.
“Of course your reforging would take place in a volcano.”
And then Quark beeped a small warning in Mark’s vision, showing images of about some sort of crystal monsters coming out of the crystal pillars to the west, or whatever direction it was down here. They were aiming for the weakened hedgehogs Mark had chased off, and some of them were headed this way, gliding on the surface of the lava like they were figure skaters the size of houses and made of purple crystal. And something was swimming in the lava, not too far below. It wasn’t a kaiju, and Sally’s ‘bed’ was made out of adamantium, so Mark was pretty sure that she was safe… for now. Mark could at least heal her, though, unlike most other healers in the world, now that she was the size of a titan.
Mark shuddered.
“Gods damn this is freaking me out, Sally. You better not sleep too long because… because I’m fucking worried as fuck.” Mark breathed out, “Any sign of any weird slimes out there, acting like they’re being controlled?”
“I have been looking, sir. I have not seen any strange patterns among the slime movements out there that might denote a controlled slime, nor have I regained contact with the Dreadnought. And that big reddish-crystal lava dancer is coming this way.”
Mark looked to the left, and then he poked his head up and out of the adamantium shell, before lifting up all the way.
Sally was in a giant dome of black right now, and the edge tapered in every direction.
Some stupid fucking giant crystal thing with arms like spiked pillars poked the black shell.
Mark roared, “Back off!”
The crystal thing went running away, super fast, but it didn’t run very far.
Mark glared.
He knew he was going to have to kill it eventually. But for now it flowed away and aimed at a hedgehog, spearing it through with its pillar-arm and then crushing and destroying the body. It looked like it was exterminating vermin; not eating.
Mark glared more anyway.
