Tartu stood at the edge of the massive, frost-covered tree trunk, muttering at Mark, “I really hate that this… I mean. I love that it worked out so well. Really happy about that. But I also hate it. Shit like this makes it really hard to say you’re unfit for duty.”

  Mark smirked at him. “You can say I’m unfit if you want, but you’d be lying to yourself.”

  Tartu grumbled. “… Maybe.”

  Mark nudged him, saying, “Come on! Call me a good leader!”

  Tartu took a deep breath, and said, “You’re a good leader, Mark.”

  Mark felt really, really good to hear that, but also to just be here. He gave Tartu a side-hug and Tartu pushed off, complaining about cold metal. Mark laughed.

  The plan had gone off without a hitch. An easy win, for once! Probably because they were allowed to pluck some trees, as long as they did it properly, which they did.

  Two hours ago, Isoko had begun churning the sky with heat and frost, at about 10 kilometers above the 10-kilometer-tall tree #3. She wasn’t even touching the tree's astral body, but she had been close enough, and the tree had poked a few subway-thick spear-vines out from its canopy, testing the air, feeling that something was close. But Isoko made herself less noticed with that Union of Obscured and Revealed she had worked out in the kaiju-battle layers, and the tree stopped noticing her.

  Isoko restarted a few more kilometers up, with Mark and the Dreadnought even further up than that.

  Mark reached out with his Union of Heat and Cold, soaking in the heat that Isoko pulled from the sky and dumping it into himself. He pushed that heat into adamantium bricks that he dumped into a big boiler for Eliot and the Dreadnought, to turn that heat into steam that pushed a turbine that then charged up some batteries.

  That part of the plan was probably overkill as far as paranoia was concerned, but they didn’t want the heat escaping from Isoko’s actions to cause other trees to notice the shifting temperature. So over the course of 20 minutes, Isoko dropped the temperature in the sky from a cool 22 degrees, to -3, and the Dreadnought got some battery power

  The Dreadnought was fine. The team was fine.

  Mark and Isoko were perfectly fine, too, because Mark was adamantium and Isoko was Full Platinum and not even directly interacting with the heat she was moving. Everyone else, even with Body PL’s in the 40s or above, were tucked away in the warmth of the ship, because the air out here was PL 99, just like at the Anathema Layer, and that meant it drilled into you, even if you were prepared for it. Isoko kept the air around her warm enough, so she was fine.

  30 minutes after starting, snow began to fall, and Isoko began to let the sky churn downward, letting heavier air fall quite heavily.

  The very second the cold air touched the kaiju tree, the questing spear-branches, wiggling and hidden in the canopy, began to retract under the leaves. The tree’s vector had quieted. Isoko had descended when that happened, and then she brought the cold air directly into the tree itself. The tree retracted into itself more and more frost formed on its bark, on its leaves. Leaves shriveled and died. The whole tree seemed to retract, going from active, to hibernation. But its vector was still questing outward, and Isoko could feel it searching for her.

  At an hour into the endeavor, the vector of the tree flipped and went internal.

  The vectors of the other nearby trees, all of which were about 12 to 15 kilometers away, fed power into the sleeping tree, trying to keep it awake, but they ultimately failed when Isoko brought the temperature of the targeted tree down to -60. The nearby trees stopped trying to interact with the frozen one at that temperature, for their own roots were getting fragile by that point.

  Isoko had landed on the topmost branches by then, and Mark had landed there with her.

  From there, events happened quickly.

  Mark tried cutting into the bark, and he got pretty decently far, but ultimately he saw it would take time to cleave into the tree, and he’d have to go into the tree himself to find the heart, which was somewhere around 1 kilometer above ground and beyond a kilometer of wood. Mark didn’t want to do that, since it might expose him to the prismatic mana and cause him to Second Awaken.

  And Sally was already Second-Awakened. According to Addavein, being exposed to more prismatic mana when you were already at the cap of 3 Powers would just make the prismatic mana spill off of you.

  So Mark handed Sally a big adamantium ax.

  She made that ax a whole lot bigger as she squared up at a full 1.5 kilometers tall, ax glittering in her hands, swinging for the fences. The entire world seemed to crack as she struck that tree, but no, it was just the frozen tree practically shattering at her swing. Mark had never seen anything quite like it, and it was fucking amazing. Sally had been 3 times as tall as Titanfist! Cool as fuck, really.

  Frozen branches cracked and broke overhead, and Sally smirked as she casually backhanded the debris falling on her, swooping it away with one hand and then battering away a particularly large branch with her large ax. Anything that did hit her was small enough to go unnoticed, except for where it sparkled gold, Retribution rebounding everything that touched her.

  Some of the trees did wake up at that display of shrapnel scattering, though, so Sally got real small, real fast, and Mark swooped in and grabbed her mid-air, before retreating high into the sky, chased by the questing spears of the nearby trees. The spears were too far away to catch them, though they did grab at the suddenly-moaning and groaning kaijus that popped out of the frozen tree.

  Some bear-thing, a wolf-thing, and four bird-things got pulled into the nearby trees, where those trees wrapped those kaiju tight and kept them contained.

  Isoko cooled down the trunk of the target tree again, making the other trees retreat from the area.

  And now the center of tree #3 stood exposed, and frosted over. The tree itself had a 2.5 kilometer-wide trunk, and you’d think the glow would be small and in the center. Most kaiju only had maybe a mansion-sized ‘heart’, and the prismatic glow of the hearts of Endless Daihoon kaiju was pretty much that size as well.

  But this thing had a prismatic glow 500 meters wide. As big as a kaiju itself. That glow stood at the center of the trunk like a glowing softness in the air.

  Mark stood near the frozen bark of the still-alive kaiju tree.

  And Tartu stood about 10 meters in front of Mark. He was preparing himself—

  Tartu turned and told Mark, “Thank you, Mark. We’ll get you yours next.”

  Mark grinned. “Go get your power up, dude.”

  Tartu paused, nodded, and then he walked forward, mostly hovering because Sally’s ax-chop had broken the tree a lot. There were practical canyons in the wood in front of him, so Tartu flew—

  The prismatic glow took him when he was a kilometer away from it, soaking into his body like a living thing, slamming into his soul.

  Mark reached Tartu a second after the glow settled into his skin, before he started to fall. He wrapped the guy in a metal cocoon and lifted off into the sky, toward the Dreadnought, sparing a glance back toward the hole left in the trunk from the now-missing light.

  Some prismatic glows remained down there, in the depths of the hole that was the center of the tree. Based on how the other nearby trees were already reaching out for it, roots to roots, blood flowing into that hole in the center of the tree, Mark imagined it would grow back just fine.

  Mark got Tartu up onto the Dreadnought.

  Before Mark set Tartu down on the deck, the deck started to branch out and grow leaves and moss under his nude body. Mark smiled at that, and at how much Tartu looked like some chloromancer or Naturalist.

  Tartu slept under mosses, as big leaves shaded him from the sky overhead.

  “Good luck, dude,” Mark said, softly, watching over Tartu as he slept.

  - - - -

  “Oh shit!” Eliot said on the comms, “The system caught one!”

  Mark looked up from Tartu’s sleeping body on the prow of the deck, to see Quark display images in his view. Somewhere in the kaiju-capturing forest, a tree was capturing another kaiju, and not in any way Mark expected it to happen.

  The trees grew in their hexagonal plots, like normal, but something like a mist crossed the world where the capturing tree grew. From that mist, a kaiju appeared. It was dog-shaped and heavily wounded, with bright red fur that masked how bad the damage really was, but it was walking under its own power, out of the mist, and into the shadows of one of the great trees. The size difference was such that it looked like a small dog standing next to a big tree.

  Blood dripped from a broken jaw, eyes bled down a scratched face, and blood poured from a stomach wound, as the dog kaiju slumped against the tree.

  The tree wrapped the dog with lashing roots that dug into the body like a hundred spears. The dog roared, the tree did not care, and the tree pulled the dog against itself, burying the roots deeper into the body—

  The mist ripped open and a giant rush of tumbling brown flesh and claws and eyeballs rushed into the forest, aiming at the red dog.

  The entire forest in that area came alive at that moment, ten trees almost warbling, shaking their spears, and then the tree that held the dog gained twice as many spears to grab and wrap up the flesh kaiju.

  The flesh kaiju was not captured nearly so easily.

  It ran. It dodged. It tried to fight back with giant cleaving swords of bone, sending wooden spears flying. But those severed wooden spears turned into snakes of wood that wrapped and covered, thorns spiking hard through eldritch flesh.

  Ultimately, the trees fought better, aided by fellow trees that each drove long spears into the flesh kaiju like a group of warriors pinning down and stabbing a thrashing beast. The beast survived way, way too well, spreading around the spears, rushing away through the forest like an elemental body, like someone with Gore Body, trying to find a way out.

  A second and third line of trees got involved in the fight.

  Mark stared, enthralled.

  Trees tore apart the monstrous flesh kaiju like a whole village full of warriors, trying to kill a particularly resilient slime. The ‘slime’ stood no chance at all. The trees eventually ripped it into pieces, each of the participants dragging some of those pieces into themselves, into hollows already made to accept those pieces. Tree bark rapidly grew over those pieces, sealing them away forever… or at least for a long time.

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  The red dog kaiju seemed at peace, pinned to the side of the tree, not fully-consumed at all. It was still speared through in multiple places, and now it was bleeding profusely, but… ehh… Maybe it wasn’t at peace at all? The dog kaiju seemed to be snarling.

  Barking in its sleep?

  Maybe.

  “Holy fuck, it’s still alive,” Derek whispered.

  Isoko said, “That’s fucked up.”

  “Oh for sure,” Mark said, “But the kaiju are tools of the demons, so I find it really hard to care about them at all.”

  “Also true,” Isoko commented.

  “What does it even mean; ‘a tool of the demons’?” Andria asked, more pondering openly than really asking the question.

  Mark said, “The demons in the mana make the kaiju. When the Veil breaks every month when we open the gate at the settlement, the demons make the kaiju in order to kill the gate, to keep the Veil intact. That’s why the Battle For Memphi was so hard-fought, and why the Cultists were there to try and break the gate. The kaiju are tools of the demons in every way I’ve heard tell about them… But honestly, I don’t know what a ‘demon’ even is, or why kaijus are the result of demons working their demon magic… Huh.” Mark had a thought. “When demons link with people the outcome is a dragon, which is a type of kaiju. Do you think when demons link with non-mages, like with animals and shit, it’s the same sort of… of mixing that you get when you mix a mage and a demon? But without whatever makes a person a person, you get a kaiju? And that’s where kaiju actually come from? Each one is from a demon, linked with an animal?”

  … Gods damn, Mark had never thought about it like that.

  A lot of people on the ship were listening, but Andria was the only one who didn’t quite get what Mark was saying. The gravity of it all. Lola understood most deeply, being as how she fought cultists all her adult life. She probably already knew this. David was right there with her. Derek understood, but his vector was elsewhere, mostly; he might be researching right now. Sally, Eliot, and Isoko wondered where Mark was going with this.

  Mark wondered where he was going with this, too, so he kept on with this thought process.

  “So that’s pretty self-evident, really,” Mark added, “But more than that…” Mark glanced overboard, to the vast forest down there, saying, “Is this a forest of demon-sucking trees? Or did the demons move on, back to Arakino, like how the demon Leash wants to separate Addavein into Addashield and Kanda, and then to kill Kanda forever, to end her ‘demonic bloodline’?” Mark looked at the twitching, still-living kaiju here and there, and he had another small revelation. “Do you think that the demons could have actually moved on, and all that is left are souls that are way, way too small for the bodies down there? Because when I was inside Addavein’s body and when he was in mine, for the Battle for Memphi, I couldn’t move for shit inside of that dragon body, and Addavein was sprouting tails and wings out of mine. Those bodies down there are trapped, but they might just be the result of animals, tortured forever, and probably permanently asleep, too.

  “And what about the trees themselves! Tartu got his prismatic mana from one, so they’re clearly kaiju, which means they’re all demon-created things, too. The union of demon and tree, probably.”

  No one said anything; they were all thinking, though.

  Mostly, there was worry for Mark.

  Mark loved their concern, but he’d rather they focus on worldwide problems. Perhaps it was naive to think this way, but Mark imagined if he knew enough about how the world worked then he could attack the problems of the world properly. You couldn’t fight a monster without knowing how it worked— Well. You could. But there was a good chance that you’d end up hurting yourself or others. So it was best to do probing attacks first, to figure out how they worked, and if you had enough power, and if you saw enough good openings, then you could go for it.

  You could cut the head off of the monster.

  … But if you could only weaken it, cut open some veins to let it bleed, and then kill it, then that was fine too. It was what it was.

  Andria said, “… I don’t know about all that, but I mean… What do you mean a tool of the demons? Aren’t demons more algorithms than people? How can anything be a tool of the demons if the demons aren’t able to use tools— Because what I’m saying is that something that mimics life cannot be a tool user, right? It’s just a stimulus-response sort of thing. So who cares if demons are inside the trees and the kaiju? There are probably demons everywhere, if you actually go looking.”

  Sally said, “Oh yeah there are.”

  But Mark perked up. “Do you think you could control a demon with Mindless Manipulation?” Another thought came right on the back end of that major thought, and Mark asked, “Do you think that’s why— Oh my GODS. Is that why Nobody Important went to the moon?! To control the out-of-control demons?!”

  “Fantastical ideas aside,” Lola said, shutting things down before she even knew what she was saying, “No one should ever be interacting with demons with the hope of containing them, and that includes Miss Metallicmore.”

  “Oh! Ah. Damn. Yeah?” Mark said, wincing a little. And then he had another thought, “But if we want to kill them all, we have to know how and why they work. We have to know why there are all these ancient dead civilizations out here in the dreamlands, in Endless Daihoon. We have to know what made the System, and how it works, in order to remake it all.”

  “Let’s think about that for a while, okay? Just think the thoughts, and talk about them, but not how you’re talking about them, Mark,” Lola said, “You’re talking about it like it’s something we should go out and fix, right now, and that is impossible.

  “This trip has been full of a great deal of revelations. Perhaps, if we all manage to survive and thrive in the return, and after we get you your kaiju too, Mark, then maybe everyone back on Earth can gather together for some symposiums. I know that the Paladin Collective will have a lot of things to say about all of this here, and I know that a great many places can be fortified against major issues based on the powers we have already gathered here today. And I know that the Empire has a reckoning coming; through the law, through the news, through public opinion. It is highly likely that there will be a full action taken against the goblins, before they can reconvene and reorganize in D’Australia.

  “What I do NOT know is what any of this all means.

  “So let us pray for deliverance, and for the power to see the battle through to the end. Winning these very important days is more important than poking at demons and falling into their emotional and rhetorical traps.”

  Mark said, “I wasn’t going to summon any demons, Lola.”

  “I know! But I’m a teacher at heart, and I have to say these things when conversations go in these directions.”

  Lola was right; Mark knew that.

  But Mark also knew that he couldn’t shy away from the deeper questions in life.

  Mark agreed to drop the topics, though. He had already planted some big seeds, anyway, and those seeds needed time to germinate. Derek was still thinking big thoughts, elsewhere. Sally and Eliot were having a private conversation, probably about demons and whatever weirdness Eliot and Hearthswell were so set against and yet unable to talk about… Mark decided to call Eliot’s ‘problems’ the ‘outsider problem’, since Ena Raptor-Kin had said that word to Derek as the translation on the Ice Wall, and then Derek had told Mark about it. ‘Outsider problems’ seemed to be a good way to think about it.

  ‘Eldritch’ was a good word, too; Addavein had said that before a few times.

  And so, Mark watched Tartu sleep, the moss growing thicker around him as he dreamed a dream of gods and growing things. Others argued, like Sally and Eliot, or watched the world or some recorded shows, like Isoko and David, while Lola prayed at the Pantheonic Garden, and Andria practiced her Mithrilkinesis and Seer capabilities. All Mark did was think, and observe, which was almost like training, but not quite.

  Right now, Tartu’s Binding was changing, and though Mark could not see it, he could ‘see’ the vectors of tiny golden-flavored flickers inside Tartu’s body now and again. That would be the touch of Verdago…

  Oh.

  Mark said to the team, “Can someone watch Tartu? I need to pray to some gods.”

  David spoke up almost instantly, “On it.” And then David stood about 10 meters away, his vector proud as he said, “Freyala, right?”

  Mark snorted. “Freyala knew I was coming, huh?”

  David shrugged. “I don’t ask these sorts of questions, Mark. I was just told to be ready. Good luck.”

  Mark nodded… and then he took one more look at Tartu. Quark calculated his time based on the glow of his skin, listing off a few estimates in Mark’s vision, so Mark told David, “Maybe 7 hours? Maybe 15. I’ll be back before then.”

  David merely nodded.

  Mark hovered toward the Pantheonic Garden, plodding across the deck of the Dreadnought on caltrops, and then he went up and over the castle, to the side, before he fell down on the other side, near the exterior of the gardens. Lola stood at the entrance, about 30 meters away, and Mark went toward her.

  Lola bowed as Mark approached, saying, “I wish you good luck, Mark, but I know you make your own.”

  Mark smiled a little, and then he hugged Lola, softly, not too much, and Lola hugged him back. Mark said a tiny ‘thanks for being here’, and Lola sniffled. And then Mark let go and Lola stepped away to flick away a few tears with an easy fingernail, still looking composed even with a slight redness in her eyes.