“We’re going to change a bit of the focus of the whole organization today, so listen up.”

I had everybody’s instant attention. I didn’t often address them in person vocally, so me showing up to do so was something important, and dual Mark/live show-and-tell was in effect.

I lot of eager baby Claws were looking at me, wondering what life-altering thing was going to take place today. Even the Ghost Knights didn’t know, and they were as eager as the rest of them.

“First of all, everyone who has a Mindclaw is aware of the limitations and powers of it now. The eager among you want to advance to using a Mindblade with a Focus, and are taking the special training to actually become competent enough at fencing to do that.

“But!” I looked over everyone, in and out of the Markspace, “A Mindblade is an offensive weapon. It is a tool, and it is a tool made to kill. It literally has no other purpose but to do so. A Mindclaw is marginally better in that it can be used to parry, and to grip, but really, it’s there to rip things apart, too.

“This means that when we manifest our Claws,” I raised my arm, they did the same, and many, many Claws flashed into existence, “we are drawing a weapon.”

Hundreds of them. The Mentats would go apeshit, if not for the fact that Null Psions couldn’t even be used to power the Terrestrial Beacon.

The colors of the claws ranged from soft, dark green, through emeralds, metallic greens, and edgings and symbols of gold intruding here and there, to occasional shows of yellow and gold among them. There were also blue and white scattered around, those kids aware they were recruits for the Coronal or Umbran Striker squads as soon as they became competent enough. Some had the translucent blades and whitish fires of a Ghost Knight about them, their Claws clearly more crystalline than the rest.

“We are going to be unique, and we are going to change that view of us, as just another group of people with killing skills. And we will do it, with a Focus like these.”

I drew out a round buckler. It was only about a foot across, the size of a dinner plate, built of polished durasteel, and had the sparkling crystalline patterns of psionic circuitry upon it, especially around the rim.

I held the polished steel-blue of it up for all of them to see, and dropped my Claw, the signal for them to do the same. I grasped the buckler with that hand, and drove my Focus into it.

There was a familiar snap and hum, louder than manifesting a Claw. A field of golden force an additional foot in radius spread out around the buckler, very obviously turning it into a shield.

There were whoa’s from everyone, staring at the new Focus VERY intently. They’d never seen anything like this...

“As you can see, this is not a Mindblade Focus, this is a Shield Focus. The purpose of a shield, before anything else, is to PROTECT.” I looked over all of them over the top of the shield. “When you pop a Mindshield, people aren’t going to be leery of you, like they are a mindblade or a mindclaw. A shield is not there to harm people. Oh, you can use it to do so, but that is not its primary purpose. If you have your shield up, people will know that you are there to protect, and to defend... because that is what a shield does.”

I flicked my off hand, and my Claw came up. “Which does not leave you defenseless. If you can manifest a second weapon, you can still manifest a Claw.” I let it snap off, and then flicked Chalice down into my hand. Everyone straightened as I snapped up my Blade, and the four Suns and two Stars upon its glittering golden length, poised and ready over the edge of my shield, like some techno-knight of yore. My hair fluttered behind me, while the rest of me was motionless, waiting in a stance like a statue.

Yeah, I pretty much had all of them right then.

“And lest you think so,” I flicked them both off, and then my Nimbus flared up around the buckler. “This is a hunk of durasteel with psi going through it. You can reinforce and keep it strong, enhance its damage, just like a Claw or mindblade.” I slammed it down on the ground, and blew four Suns and both Stars, rupturing a small crater in the duracrete with the edge of the Shield. Eyes widened in appreciation.

“A shield is also a weapon, and it’s stronger than a fist,” I told them. “Henceforth, combat training is now going to include usage of a shield, and Shield Foci will be made available to everyone who wishes to purchase one, as quickly as we can get them made. We will have them available in combat and non-combat forms, if weight is an issue and you don’t want to use them for attack.”

Making the practice bucklers was easy, and they were Disked in as I ordered them. Everyone stayed in lines as they were passed out down the ranks of those gathered here. To keep them Vajra viable, they’d been forged by hand, not by stamping, and this had taken me and my assistants a decent amount of downtime to make. Again, funny how the old skills were coming into use in a techno age, simply to keep stuff from going Inert.

Teaching via use of the Mark was very quick and thorough, and if they had Visual Files, could be recalled endlessly for practice on their own. I spent hours going through the forms and stances, bashing techniques, deflections, parries, binds, blocks, hunting cover, calculating angles, and showing sparring and combat techniques against weapons ranged and close-combat. They watched in rapture as I bull-rushed people, hammered them, spiked them with a targ coming out of the center, adjusted the edge to razor-sharpness and chopped things off, weathered a storm of slugs and laser fire without harm, and parried strikes from shock and vibro weapons, as well as Claws, without any problems whatsoever.

Another regimen of training going on...

---------

The expansion of my forces had a major bottleneck, and that bottleneck was me.

I had no Sevens underneath me, which meant I had no one else who could Tat secondary Marks and so induct more people, and they certainly couldn’t do it at the level of the Mark Geas. So, the scores of people I Marked every day were the limit of what we could actually recruit.

Word had spread through Downspire that I could make someone a fake Psion, and naturally there were a whole lot of forces interested in this, as well as individual people.

The fact that it was utterly impossible to Awaken someone if they were a Two or higher, unless they were a Seven with a third Racial advance, was repeated over and over again. Finding a Seven who got there without being highly cybered or Powered was a huge thing. Most Sevens had some extremely expensive implants, and absolutely no desire to get rid of them just for some minor psychic abilities not as strong as what their implants gave them.

Being Cybered took money. Being a Null Psi took time and Karma. Money was generally a whole lot easier to get.

But on the flip side, this was a mega-city. The population was in the billions. The number of possible recruits was literally endless from my perspective, and just the fact that basically only teenagers with their whole lives ahead of them qualified meant it became a very hot topic among people of that age on the Boole and Quanta. They had one chance to join... if they got cybered, or if they hit Two, their chance was gone. If all they had was time and will... this was a chance they didn’t want to give up.

So, I was soon being inundated with Downspire kids with no money and no future, only time and the willpower to be something more than they were now, all trying to find some way, any way, out of the drudgery and hell of their life. I was offering a way, and it wasn’t cheap or easy... but the kind of coin I wanted happened to be the kind of coin they all had to pay.

There were Midspire recruits, too, who tended to be more interested in Goldilocks positions, preferring brain over brawn. That was fine, I needed both kinds...

--------

Our war with the Sharkey organization continued apace.

He was bleeding money, while new blood was rushing to serve us. Yeah, he tried to infiltrate us with traitors, but it’s damn hard to a) do that when looking at the color of people’s souls, treachery is a nice purple-black stain of intent and b) there’s a Geas attached to the Mark which is doing the job.

There were literally dozens of attempts to blackmail, intimidate, or otherwise create traitors among the kids, and some might have worked, were it not for the Geas. They literally couldn’t hold back the instantaneous alert when they or their families were being threatened, and basically everyone came howling out to kill those responsible, find any loved ones placed under threat, and generally rip those responsible, and all of their associates, to shreds. Two experienced kidnapping crews got to watch one another die the mushroom death in Doc Mick’s secure rooms, and three entire gangs got wiped trying to do the same thing, one of them from nearly a hundred miles away. The assets we mobilized to wipe them impressed even the Juris who quietly took the report we sent off to them over the minor incident.

As for the turncoats sent to infiltrate, they came in, and generally didn’t come out. The parties who sent them did sometimes receive their heads back, and their officers died by mysterious and assorted methods about the same time.

There was an open price on my head that was at six figures in credits and climbing, and certainly there were whole teams looking to get in on it. I had ambushes going off on me every time I went out, people shooting, things exploding, borgs attacking, snipers sniping, idiots coming up to duel me, drive-bys hosing down everything around me, the works.

It got a lot of them dead. Juris didn’t exactly like people who shot up crowds, even in Downspire, and me being around was often an occasion for them to get some target practice in. Now, people were prudent and gave me lots of room if they knew I was around, not really wanting to be fragged accidentally, but that was life downspire.

The fact I couldn’t be seen on surveillance cameras and the like if I didn’t want to be really annoyed a lot of people, especially the ones who wanted to shoot me with needle-beams from miles away, drop a death ray from an aircraft or hovercar far overhead, or swarm me with drones. Kinda hard to do when none of said devices registered me, meaning live spotters and controllers with real eyeballs required, and I had a bad habit of being able to pick them out.

---

Enjoying the relaxation of the assassination attempts as good opportunities to vent steam and earn extra Karma, I continued with the work of obliterating a major gang lord of Downspire.

His pushers and dealers began to abruptly get dead, which made it really hard to move product. Not moving product meant his suppliers either couldn’t be paid, or a longer time between deliveries, cutting into cash flow. Yeah, they knew I was responsible, but one of the guys who decided to help out by sending in an experienced Upspire problem remover was found dead in his bathroom, filled with Grin Gin and looking like he’d laughed himself to death in it. The dismantled remains of his stealther borg were scattered all around him in admiration of his death, as were his personal guards and enforcer borgs, and a lot of information in his personal logs had been hacked and left open for curious investigators to go to town on. A quiet word from the Dungeon meant this investigation got pretty ugly fast, and those zwilnik suppliers suddenly had some major and bullet-happy problems of their own.

Sharkey was left on his own, but he was a zwilnik lord with a long history and some deep reserves. If he had to spend money to recover his kingdom, he was willing to do it, and running away from his kingdom wasn’t an option. He’d carved it out with blood, kept it with blood, and he had no friends or allies Downspire, only rivals, competitors, and enemies, most of whom were quietly moving in on him and adding to his troubles, and scooping up the rats that were slowly fleeing his sinking ship.

He sent out people, our eyes were watching for them, and killed them as they came, fed them to TC’s soylent wagons, and reported dutifully to Juris about the final fates of multiple perps.

A name started to circulate on the Boole, talking about me, and caught on quick. It started when Sharkey was caught ranting about “that damn scarred hag” on vid, and then someone else pointed out how my skin and hair went all golden, and my brand was even more vivid when I fought, on the rare vids I allowed to capture the look.

The Golden Hag of Habberblok. Blooey, all over the Boole, and the Quanta too, of course. It wasn’t like I could fight it, golden Soulblade and all, so I didn’t even try. I suspect some aspect of my Curse was behind it...

So, his back to the wall as Sun Strikes blew apart his cyborgs and shooters, Mindblades ripped through his brawlers, and my Goldilocks fried the circuit boards of his technogeeks, he opted to resort to The Law.