Savage Awakening 582. Boot Camp (III)

The Sage gave Zane a quick tour of all the most important stations in Boot Camp, starting with the planet-sized lunk of steel smack-dab in the middle. It was also the closest station to the teleporter.

“This here’s your go-to punch trainer,” said the Sage. “It’s the very same one I showed you in that letter a few years back. Hasn’t changed a bit since then. Hasn’t changed much since I first built it, actually, except for getting a few new runes and chains tacked on.”

The Sage took it in with pride.

“Great way to benchmark how you’re doing with that Pure Size Concept. Sink your knuckles in and you’ll see the shape of the punch nice and clear. This ol’ thing’s never let me down—wail on it all you want, and it won’t even come close to giving out on you.” 

Zane nodded. These days he found he could break pretty much anything he set his mind and body to. The Pure Yang Lands were a pretty high-grade area and he still hadn’t had much issue destroying the boulders and the Astroliths, which were physical-specialist Empyreans. So he was quite intrigued.

It prompted him to inspect it, and he did.

Ultradense Wrecking Bag of Perfect Mending [Epic (O)]

Custom-forged of ultra-dense Neutron Star core steel, this treasure is runed to take heavy damage while providing maximum punching comfort. This treasure self-repairs under heavy damage.

“Like it says,” said the Sage. “It’s got a nifty self-repair enchant in there. Means after you wear it down enough, the surface’ll reset—make itself good as new! Ready for more heavy punching. Doubt we’ll see it do that this time, though, unless we get damned busy. Even in my prime, it took me a half-century of heavy punching to wear the stubborn bastard down. The steel itself’s all Divine-Profound. But with how it’s runed up and refined—got a few buddies to help with that—it’s damned worthy of being an epic Origin treasure. Well then! How about you go and give it a try?”

“Sure thing.”

“A good clean punch ought to do it, right down the middle there.”

Zane stretched his shoulders. They stood a few hundred miles off the surface, though he didn’t feel any of the planet’s gravity acting on him. He figured it had to be one of those giant runes at work—the ones inscribed in the air, wrapping the wrecking bag in a bright belt.

He considered his fist and the size of the punching bag, frowning a bit.

“Right. Almost forgot,” said the Sage. “One more thing about Pure Size—it feels a lot better punching something that big when you’ve got that scaled up first. You haven’t punched many targets this big, have you?”

Zane shook his head. “No, not really.” 

“It takes some getting used to.” The Sage hmm’d. “The good news is, most Monsters don’t tend to get this big. Even the strongest ones—at some point, there’s just a size tradeoff there. That Kaijuu you saw was on the bigger end, and that was only a few moons big. That said, you make a moon-sized impact, and you can pretty comfortably punch planet-sized stuff! It’s useful learning to do it, even if you don’t always need it. That’s the nice thing about size. You don’t always need it, but when you do, you’ll be damned glad you have it.”

Zane wholeheartedly agreed with that. In his experience, size was just plain useful in most situations.

“And anyway,” the Sage continued, “Pure Size doesn’t just let you make your punches bigger. It lets you give ‘em more heft too. You’ll see when you start getting it. For now…let’s see. Just try it with a hammer. See how that does you.”

The Sage tended to go on and on—he just liked talking. But he appreciated it.

He did try a hammer blow; he took out his chains and gave the wrecking bag a good THWACK. Nothing fancy, just as a test. 

The impact didn’t crater. It just hit the surface, sank in, and lay there. The impression looked pretty small compared to the size of the planet, but it still had to be a few dozen feet deep. The punching bag barely trembled.

“There you go! See how it keeps the impact-shape, even when you pull back? That’s what’s nice about this punching bag. It’s a precision tool, is what it is, lets you see all the damage laid out. Felt pretty good too, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Zane, a bit surprised. “It almost doesn’t even feel like hitting steel.” There wasn’t any of that reverberation effect he expected, or that stubborn feel that made punching high-grade steels unpleasant. It just felt like a really good punching bag. It kind of made him want to give it another few thwacks—it just felt good to punch.

“That’s all rune effects,” said the Sage. “It wouldn’t be very fun at all, punching straight steel over and over… That’s enough of that. We’ve got a fair few stations to check out.” 

Then the Sage seemed to remember something else. He tapped an Interspatial Ring. “You’ll need this too, by the way. Almost forgot, since I don’t use it much anymore. But until you get into some of the heavier duty movement Skills—which probably won’t be 'till you make True God—this’ll serve you well here.” 

The Sage handed him a knife with a serrated edge. Space Laws played along the spines.

Reality-Ripping Travel Knife [Rare (D)]

A knife forged for localized fast travel, keyed to the Barbarian Sage’s Boot Camp. 

“There’s no infrastructure out here, right?” said the Sage. He seemed quite pleased about that fact. “It’d just be pretty tough to keep up a full-on teleportation network just for Boot Camp. So we’ve got these instead. Old-school stuff.”

The knives were pretty simple to use. They were linked to a series of checkpoints in space—checkpoints located all around Boot Camp. All you had to do was focus on a checkpoint, pour your will into the knife, and make a slash. The knife would then tear open a temporary gash in reality, and the exact same gash would appear where you wanted to go. A kind of shortcut through space.

Then you just had to step through the gash, and you were there.

In this case, they just went to the next-closest checkpoint—what looked like a cluster of moon-sized rocks.

He inspected the gash as it closed behind him, fascinated.

The gash, and the Space Laws around it, looked a lot like the stuff he’d seen Kain testing out way back in the Pure Yang. In the time since, it looked like it’d just become a standard form of fast travel without a dedicated teleportation network.

It was a bit beside the point, though. He just stowed it away and joined the Sage on the platform.

“How’d you find it?” 

“I’m a fan,” said Zane. “Why don’t folks use these more often?”  

“Well, it’s not great on the fabric of reality, having it torn open over and over, especially if you've got a lot of traffic. But it’s just more plain fun than a teleporter, you’ve got to give it that. Anyway—this next station’s pretty simple. See all those planets out there?”

Zane nodded. They floated about in a vague rectangle of space, like an asteroid belt full of high-grade rocks.

“That’s what I like to call the ‘Demolition Zone.’ It’s kind of like the Wrecking Bag, but for when you want to try punching a whole lot of rocks instead of just one giant one. These also break a lot easier, though they’ll self-repair just like the Wrecking Bag does. They’re graded I to X on how hard they are to break. The X rocks, even I’ve got to put in some effort to smash.”

The Sage seemed quite proud of this zone too. He seemed quite proud of all of Boot Camp, for that matter. “This one took well over a century to get right. I’ll have you know, each of those rocks out there was discovered and hand-selected by myself for toughness and quality. Only got the best rocks for this one—got ol’ Thorin to help me rune ‘em up. Miserly bastard grumbled about it, but he still did it. They’re all fixed to stay in just about this layout. Gravity wells pull them back when they get too out of line. That’s what those squiggly runes right there are for.”

Zane had imagined the Sage had gone on some century-long excavation trip, meticulously uncovering all these rocks. But the Sage clarified that by ‘hand-selected,’ he more meant that every time he saw a sufficiently big, hard-looking rock on his travels, he just dragged it back to Boot Camp. Which felt a little less impressive.

“If you ever want to go all out on a bunch of giant rocks, this is where you go,” the Sage concluded cheerfully.

Off to the side lay a bunch of pillar-sized javelins, which the Sage explained were meant for testing Skills and Laws at range. 

“It won’t be long until you’ll be able to pick one of those things up with one hand just by touching it. Pure Size’s got quite a few uses to it. Works even for grip strength, so eventually you can pick up whole moons and hurl ‘em if you want! You’ve got the strength for that already, of course—it’d just be unwieldy right now if you can’t get a big enough grip.” 

“Makes sense.” He didn’t have much experience with spear-like weapons, but having something ranged and straight-line was a bit of a missing link in his weapons experience, now that he thought about it. 

“It’s just good for the soul to smash a field full of giant rocks now and again, I say,” said the Sage, nodding wisely. “Next up’s a Boot Camp staple! Deadlifts and dead hauls.”

Their next knife-slash teleport took them to a deadlifting platform, the one that stood right above the leftmost black hole.

The black hole itself wasn’t much bigger than the wrecking bag, just around the size of a large planet. But the moment you set foot on the platform, you knew you were dealing with a totally different kind of existence.

The gravity here was some of the thickest Tier 7 Law he’d ever felt. He had to grunt, staggering just in the presence of it before he righted himself.

“Careful there, lad,” chuckled the Sage. They peered down over that perfect dark sphere—you could see the pure force undulating over its surface, like translucent waves crashing on some unseen shore. Just looking at it, seeing the way reality bent and twisted, gave Zane a strong impression of just how much pure power was going through every inch of space down there. In the Astral Plane, all you saw was a spherical void and line after line of essence streaking into it.

“She’s a beauty, alright,” said the Sage, and Zane had to agree.

He’d seen his fair share of stars by now. Getting up close to one didn’t faze him much anymore, and with his current Law set, he was pretty sure he could be thrown into most normal stars and survive the experience. The Starfire he’d had to fight in the Pure Yang lands was pretty much just star-stuff, after all.

The kinds of forces going through the surface of that black hole, though…

At least with his current physique, he’d be pretty banged up just approaching the center of that thing.

He was pretty certain that before Integration, black holes didn’t have Laws, or Destruction deposits. Or Kaijuu inside of them, for that matter. This thing was definitely heavily magic-ified… then again, stars had to be that way too. He’d never gotten close enough to a star to feel it out with his soul senses, but by now he’d studied them enough to know. He was sure they had to have a fair amount of Destruction, at least in their cores.

Then he started thinking about the Kaijuu down there, which only raised more questions.

“Those Kaijuu must be pretty dense.” They lived past the event horizon, after all, where the forces had to be far worse.

“They’re tough bastards, alright,” said the Sage, nodding.

“Those Gravity Laws down there don’t affect them, though?” He remembered seeing Gravity Laws slip right off the Kaijuu he’d seen the Sage punch.

“It’s the scales,” the Sage confirmed. “Those scales cover their whole bodies, and they’re damned anti-gravity machines. If they had to deal with that much gravity straight on, only some of the Category II, maybe Category III ones could make it down there. And even then, not for long. A black hole’s a damned powerful beast, lad. One look at one of these beauties, back when I was a young True God, was enough to convince me this was the damned path I had to take… Just look at the thing! It’s just perfect. You’ve got to give it the respect it deserves.”

Zane got what the Sage meant. If he had to pick a single thing to be the physical representation of the idea of raw force, in all of Dragonspire—at least of the things he’d witnessed—this would be it, without a doubt.

“I’d say,” said the Sage after a bit. “The best way to respect a thing like that’s to do some heavy damned lifting with it.” 

He pulled out some chains and grinned. “What do you say we get you chained in?”