Savage Awakening 507. Challenge of the First Ones (I)

“Make that fist in the mind,” said the Sage. “That’s it. Now, you crush the damned thing!”

Zane did.

The twenty-foot-tall geode hurtling through the air got crushed to dust.

The geode troll that threw it blinked up, befuddled.

“Nice one!” cheered the Sage.

The other geode trolls looked just as befuddled. It didn’t stop them from trying for it again, but the result was just the same. They summoned their giant boulders and lobbed them, and they became more practice for Zane. Nine boulders went up, nine dust clouds came down.

Then he rounded them up with a gravity core. A well-placed hammer crushed the bunch of them.

“Geode troll boulders are pretty dense,” said the Sage, scratching his chin. “It’s all the gems in ’em. I’d say about three times as dense as the core of your typical C-grade planet. Means you’re making good progress… I’d say you’re well over 50% of the way there.”

Zane nodded, encouraged. “I’ll keep working on it.”

The trolls were a pleasant surprise. Their geodes were just the kind of thing his gravity could crush well. It made for pretty good practice as they made their way down the winding slope.

This zone, on the Sage’s half-filled, hand-scrawled map, was called the ‘Stone Ocean’—this stretch of landslide-prone, rocky slope that separated the Whiteforest from the Stomping Grounds of the First of the Rhinos.

The Stomping Grounds themselves were visible since they left the treeline—this gold-wreathed beacon in the distance. A field of gilded knee-high grasses that shone sunlight; they looked like afternoon light, tempered to strands of steel. A lazy river twined its way through. It looked like a Rhino kind of place.

The place was riddled with craters of Corruption too, like much of these Ruins. It must’ve covered a far grander stretch before—but the patches that mattered, the patches they were headed for, had kept their luster.

A monument squatted in the middle of the field.

It was a big ol’ Rhino head—big as a mountain. Its mouth was wide open, revealing a tunnel. The sheer size of it gave it grandeur, even if the sculpture work was a bit blockier than Zane was used to.

“That’s got to be it, right there,” said the Sage, crossing his arms. “You can tell it was made by a Rhino, too. Rhinos’ve got lots of strengths, don’t you let anyone tell you otherwise! But one thing they don’t have is hands. Might not be the best sculptors, Rhinos, but they do like their sculpting. When they carve something up, they give it their all! That right there—might not be the prettiest thing, but you can tell a Rhino made it with real heart. A Rhino tried its best there. You’ve got to respect it.”

Zane had to agree.

They were still a few hundred miles off. It was something to look forward to the whole way down.

They rounded another few rocky bends, beating up trolls as they went. The closer they got, the more he started to wonder about that Prime Blood.

He smashed a herd of nine geode trolls straight off the mountain; they smoked like comets, making neat little arcs. “What’s so special about that Blood stuff?”

“What’s so special! It’s damned Prime Blood, lad—it’s hard to wound a Rhino that’s got the Rhinos’ Prime Blood. It’s damned near impossible to kill one!”

“Huh.”

“It’s that vitality, lad—jacks it up so high it’s not even damned fair! Take Prime Blood, and you’ll live through damn near anything, except if you get your heart ripped out! You break a bone, and it’s healed a second later, even if your body’s made of real top-tier stuff. That kind of healing factor—stack that with a Rhino’s durability, and that’s one hell of a one-two punch. That’s what makes the Rhino so damned dominant, not just in the Galaxy, but outside it too…”

He trailed off. “Hm.”

“What’s up?”

“Not sure,” said the Sage, looking around. “You hear that?”

Zane frowned, listened with both his ears and his soul sense. At first, he only heard the shriek of a strong wind, picking up fast.

Then that sound seemed to take on a voice. A ghoulish, shattered, tripled-up voice—a howl of pure rage.

“Looks like we’ve got a visitor,” said the Sage, brightening.

A ghastly wind screamed by and made landfall right in front of them, making a well of depthless shadow.

Then a monstrosity rose out of it. Spawned right in front of them, towering fifty-odd feet—a six-armed skeleton, blood tears streaked down its cheeks…

A Universe welled around it. A bloody universe where shades stumbled, bleeding from every orifice, and the skies were torn up, bleeding too, and the rivers ran thick with the stuff.

Its aura seemed to darken, to bloody up reality for miles.

Zane’s body reacted instantly to the pressure; just standing in its presence put him on edge.

It could only be Empyrean.

Ghrix, Lord-Ruler of the Dark Elves (Monster King)

Essence Level 766

“I was wondering where that elf-Boss was,” said the Sage. He shrugged off his spear. “Well! Looks like it’s me again… what a chunker of a fellow this is, eh? Just look at the size of ’em!”

“It’s a big one,” Zane agreed.

Such hubris… It seethed at the Barbarian Sage. To think you could tread in Ghrix’s sacred kingdom, and slay the finest of Ghrix’s flock… and get away…

“That wasn’t me,” said the Sage proudly. He gave Zane a slap on the back. “That was this lad over here, all by himself!”

Ghrix growled. Blood drooled. …You take Ghrix for a fool, broken human?

The Sage frowned. “Say what now?”

Nothing less than a full-fledged Empyrean could wreak that kind of destruction! But you would hide behind your young. You would have him take your punishment… pathetic. Ghrix sneered. This is the worth of the so-called fellowship of man…

“Hey now,” warned the Sage. “If you want a fight, you’ve got it. But don’t you run your mouth, now. Might not like what it gets you.”

Enough of this talk. The Elflord’s eyes flared. Do you think yourself the first fool to dare Ghrix’s territory?Six times Empyreans of man have fought Ghrix. Six times, Ghrix put them into the ground and made new flocks of their corpses… It is no difficult thing to add another to Ghrix’s collection.

Bloody icicles started building in the air, sharpening to glistening points, and Zane saw vortexes of Blood-Law thicken there like little bloody black holes. It had to be Tier 7 Law—and a strong one, at that. The Elf-King clasped one in each fist.

DIE FOR ME!

The icicles launched, ripping reality as they did; they left a trail of gory stains. And the Laws packed into that ice were thick with life-leaching feeling; they seemed to suck all life, all energy, all heat, even out of the air.

Zane got the feeling if those things touched something like the undead Dormu, it’d drain the fellow dry in an instant.

The Sage, meanwhile, just hefted his spear.

Laws gathered at its tip. Nothing fancy. Just plain density—but that density skyrocketed in a blink.

The world around it was a good measure of just how fast its weight shot up. The air bent, cracked, and shattered entirely, giving that spear tip a halo of void—and then it was impossible to tell just how much gravity it was gaining.

Destruction blazed across the tip like a rising sun. So much Destruction that the only one Zane ever saw rivaling it was young Noughtfire.

Gravity thickened all over the Sage’s physique too, as though every single muscle was some great engine of gravity. His skin took on a shiny tint; his muscles were coiled, stacked with incredible pressure.

All that power was channeled straight to the tip of the spear. Straight into that potential energy, still rocketing off the charts of reality.

Zane watched, transfixed, as the Sage bared his teeth.

The spear struck, carving a river of shattered void as it went, making an earthquake across reality itself.

The first shot hit that wave of blood-spears—and simply deleted them from existence. Just ran right through. Any debris was lost in the wake of the Destruction.

Then that spear caught Ghrix in the chest.

And deleted the Empyrean too. The way a boot might delete an ant. There wasn’t even an explosion or a squelch. The force asserted over its being was so absolute, so far beyond, that even evidence of its destruction was crushed to nothing.

The spear simply went through it, and the Empyrean ceased to exist in every way, including the soul.

It wasn’t the only thing gone. A solid square mile of void crackled where the Sage had struck.

The Sage had already loaded up a second spear. Then he stopped.

“Thing’s dead already?”

“Guess so,” said Zane.

“…Hm,” said the Sage. “That was a damned flurry, you know! Thing goes thirteen moves. What kind of a chump gets downed by the first?”

The Sage shook his head and put his spear away.

“They don’t make Empyreans like they used to, I tell you.”

He grinned.

“Well! Guess that’s that. What d’you say we go check out that big ol’ Rhino head?”

They headed onward, leaving a field of shattered reality behind them, slowly mending.

Zane was always quite curious to see the Sage in action. Every glimpse he got only made him more curious just how strong the old fellow really was.

He quite enjoyed seeing that too. The sheer forcefulness of that spear made an impression on him; it was clear the Sage had perfected it. He was taking notes.

***

“Tomb of the First Rhinos,” read the Sage, squinting. There was some kind of scrawled print on the ground—Rhino language, Zane guessed.

The stone Rhino’s mouth loomed before them. One yawning tunnel filled with steely light.

He wasn’t even in yet, and he could already sense the gravity. He could see just how dense it was in the air there. The way reality seemed to compress more and more, foot by foot.

He had a feeling things were about to get heavy, and fast.

It’d be great practice for his gravity.

He took another bite out of that mech core.

Skill up!

Asura Titan’s Body, Third Form VI -> VII

“That’s an Inheritance if I ever saw one,” mused the Sage. “Doesn’t look like the Monsters got to it, too. Though they gave it a damned good effort, looks like.” Up close, they could see just how cracked the Rhino head was. Corruption had slashed up the base, sent cracks all the way up the horn—but it didn’t manage to break it.

It didn’t look like the most stable thing, Zane had to admit. But it held.

“But the Rhinos have their own stubborn magics,” said the Sage proudly. “The shamans knew their stuff. Might not be the flashiest, but it works damned well, and it’ll last as long as stone. It was always a tradition for the Rhinos to leave their best to nurture their best… but there’s no higher standard for a Rhino than the Inheritance of the First Ones. That’s all-time stuff. It’ll be a test down there.”

Zane nodded.

The Sage clapped him on the back. “Right. You show ’em what you’ve got!”