Savage Awakening 560. Off-Season

A/N: Bonus chapter!

The dragons did end up taking down the King Astrolith, by the looks of it, but not without leveling the valley below. It hardly even looked like a valley anymore. New canyons riddled the place, some so wide you could step in and plunge straight into the starfire mantle, thousands of miles below. Destruction Laws sank over the place like a heavy fog.

The Pure Yang continent was also slowly mending itself, stitching back together little by little in bursts of deep-mantle starfire. As Zane sat there, just recovering, he saw the far edges of those canyons searing back together. The land groaned as it moved. In a few days, it’d be like the battle never happened.

The only things it’d leave behind were the shards.

Ten Destruction shards for a night of work still gave him whiplash. That made fourteen total over the course of the season.

Shard seasons came around here once every two years, from what Noughtfire had told him. If he stayed here for a full two decades and performed just as well as he did this season…

…That’d be a hell of a lot of shards. 

He wouldn’t be able to make use of those shards right now anyway. He’d have to break through first. Still, as he lay there he couldn’t help but imagine just how strong he’d be as a True God with all that Destruction. 

To fight a T0 Empyrean on equal footing, he had to have a significant Destruction advantage over it. His current plate’s worth was more than enough. In terms of pure, raw firepower, he’d put himself on par with a half-step T1 right now.

T2 Empyreans had a minimum of 32 shards… fighting them would look quite doable.

T3 Empyrean still looked a long way off, though. Even if all his prep went as well as he was projecting—which there was no guarantee. T3s would have at least 128 shards, on top of some serious T7 Laws… he might be able to match that figure, maybe even slightly exceed it if he worked hard. But to overpower T3s, he’d need to dwarf their shards. That could be a while yet.

But he was getting pretty far ahead of himself. T3 was already pretty close to the peak he’d find in Dragonspire. One Tier at a time. 

He stood, cracking his neck.

Every time he thought about the heights of power in this galaxy, he also felt a mental kick in the ass.

He felt like he really should get going and finish up this Starfire Law as fast as he could. There was just so much to get to.

He took one last glance at the ruins of the Valley. He was pretty sure that King Astrolith had been peak T1. He wasn’t sure he could beat it even if he got the full Concept of Starfire, but he made a resolution to at least try before his time here was done.

Then he went around Mount X, just to check up on how Kain was doing.

The ground was littered with craters. Kain was still doing some cleanup work, by the looks of it—clearing the Astrolith hordes off his side of the mountain. 

Zane rounded the corner just in time to see Kain slash two fingers, and blast a clump of Astroliths straight off Mount X. Kain stood in the middle of a circle of spinning runes, which did a fine job warding off the dozens starfire beams heading his way.

Kain had made quite a bit of progress with that pillar-pillar of his. It’d nearly quadrupled in size since the time he first saw it. It still struck him as quite inefficient. If it worked for him, he supposed.

“You’ve finished?” said Kain, cocking a brow. 

Zane nodded. “Need a hand?”

“I’d appreciate that.”

It took maybe an hour for the two of them to clear the rest of the slope.

They had a brief chat after that about how their nights went.

“Only a single crew from the valley dared breach my side of the mountain tonight—and a weaker one at that,” said Kain. He looked pleased. “It was no great difficulty warning them off. Every other year, I’ve had to deal with five or six. At times, flights of dragons, even.”

“Was it the crew with the fishing-pole guy?” said Zane. “They had a poke at my side too. Weird bunch.”

“I’ve… underestimated how… nice, I suppose, it is to have someone watch your back.” Kain considered him. “This arrangement worked out well.”

“Glad to hear it.” Kain had made a lot of progress since he’d first arrived. He was kind of proud of the guy. It had to be pretty tiring, being that suspicious all the time. It was no way to live, in his mind. 

Kain eyed him, deep in thought. Then he shrugged and nodded at the valley below. “The bulk of the shard-chasers down there will be leaving in the next few weeks. Shard season’s concluded, after all. I expect you’ll be staying, though.”

“Yeah, I haven’t finished up my Concept just yet.”

“Then I shall see you tomorrow morning.” 

“Sounds good.” Zane gave him a wave and left.

***

That was how his first year in the Pure Yang lands went.

Sure enough, just as Kain said, the folks in the valley trickled away in the upcoming weeks. A month later, there was just him and Kain left, dutifully clocking in day after day at the starfield.

Without shards on his mind, it was pretty easy for Zane to hunker down and focus. He wanted to fully grind out the speed benefits of Starfire, or at least get pretty damned close, before next Shard season struck.

At night, he continued his usual routine—this time practicing his fourth Slash. When it was in its complete form, it’d be a half-mile long and as wide as a river. He was pretty sure it’d be visible from space.

He was confident it’d be quite useful for boss fights.

Morning Astrolith-clearing time at the starfield had gotten down to less than half an hour. 

A month passed, then two. He kept on working away at Law and Skill.

There wasn’t much else to do at night these days. The valley below felt strangely dark to him; it was empty-feeling. He hadn’t realized how much he’d gotten used to his schedule of spectating the nightly skirmishes. It kind of felt like Monday Night Football after a while, just with a lot more fire and explosions. He was already looking forward to more shard season, if only for that.

Five months into what he started thinking of as the ‘offseason,’ he’d managed to get his total Starfire speed boost up to over 130%—clocked with his stats trick. When he burned starfire he’d raised his speed to a whopping 316M, up from 134M at base. It lagged behind his base Strength and Regen, at 399M and 510M respectively. But it was still a massive improvement—well on his way to claiming that 200+% speed boost at its maximum.

***

He made a habit of exploring the lands a few nights a week. The meteors started trailing off a little a few months back, and now the sky was only a fifth as full as it’d been during peak shard season. Things had quieted down quite a bit, both on land and in space.

Deep in the night, six months in, he started seeing sheets of Starfire rising to the skies. Flowing up from the fissures, striking deep into space… at first, he thought they might be getting a visitor. He’d gotten ready for some kind of giant Astrolith to emerge.

But the lights soon showed themselves to be quite harmless. That Starfire rose in jagged, glistening sheets, almost like an aurora borealis brought to ground level, just made of sheer starlight. They were stuffed with an immense amount of Destruction, making them pretty dangerous to observe up close. But from a distance, he could appreciate the beauty of them.

“I believe that is the Pure Yang land performing its primary purpose,” said Kain when he brought it up. He mentioned it when he saw another bout starting in the valley below, just after work. The phenomenon only seemed to happen at night.

“Making stars, you mean?”

“That’s right,” said Kain, hands behind his back. “The meteors bring down energy in one great burst—that is what we know as shard season. But the rest of the time, the Pure Yang throws energy back into the broader Galaxy, and what returns is but a fraction… the rest coalesce into stars. It’s key to the functioning of these lands. It is also why Monster activity has lowered so drastically in the past few months. That is my theory of the case, at any rate.” 

The more you knew. 

...He could swear Kain hadn't been this talkative when he first met the guy.

Besides the auroras, there wasn’t much to see around here. Just lots of Astroliths, cracks, and the occasional stardrake.

***

Reina wrote back to him about his Destruction Shard ceiling issue. She’d gone through quite a few archives of the World Tree, but his was a pretty unique case—no one had ever maxed out their shards at Minor God before. She couldn’t even find reasonable analogs. Ultimately, she seemed to think you just couldn’t get around it; you’d have to be able to change some fundamental rules of souls and essence to do it.

For now, he’d just have to sit on his shards.

He’d mostly made peace with the thought by now.

…He still felt True God couldn’t come quickly enough.

***

Nine months after the end of his first shard season—

Skill up!

Star-Crushing Slashes III -> IV

Before him lay two crushed T0 Astroliths, instantly one-shotted, lying amid a vast swathe of blackened stone. All the results of that fourth Star-crushing Slash. It was as though some giant had struck from the skies, carving a path halfway down the mountain. If he got a full head of steam, stacking it with his Overlord charge, he was pretty sure he could double that kill count. 

It’d been harder and harder to practice his Slashes as the Monster density trailed off. But he’d finally gotten the job done.

Onto the fifth slash. Though judging by how long it’d taken him to go from two to three, then three to four, this one would take a little while.

***

Fifteen months after the end of his first shard season, he fully maxed out the speed-boosting aspects of his Starfire Concept. His speed clocked in at a whopping 289M—over double what it’d been when he first arrived at the starfield. 

That also meant his steps, including his Overlord Annhilation Charge, slammed down twice as fast. It took half as long to get a head of steam going—an improvement he could feel quite easily. He also felt almost weightless blasting down Mount X in straight lines now...in the air, at least. His feet still made craters when they hit the ground.

He was honestly quite surprised. No Concept had ever made this big of a physical difference to him. Then again, he’d only had five shards of Destruction the last time he’d comprehended a Concept.

He knew having more Destruction made his Laws more… well, destructive. But he hadn’t fully realized just how much it would affect his Law’s potency in pretty much every aspect.

He was eager to see what they’d do to his firepower—and by extension his strength—now that he had fully turned his attention to it. He was pretty sure he was ahead of schedule, actually. At this rate he’d finish up the Starfire Concept well before the 20-year mark he’d initially planned for. 

The Law grind wound on.