Savage Awakening 554. Making Progress (II)

His third Star-crushing Slash made clearing the morning horde much faster. With that third slash taking out two Empyreans at a time, and Kain’s own thicker pillar of Destruction doing the same, they’d gotten the total grind down to just over 40 minutes. That included the Boss portion.

Since the best Law hours were those crucial first few hours when the crystals shone brightest, shaving off even ten minutes would make quite a big difference in the long run. To say nothing of cutting half an hour. Zane was pretty sure it’d mean he’d get out years earlier, which meant more time to train with the Barbarian Sage and more time to break through to True God, all in time for the war.

Kain also seemed to be taking the clearing quite seriously. They were both grinding hard for it.

The slight downside of Zane’s new three-slash chain was that it was a good deal more intensive on the body, even in the sheer amount of essence he was moving through his physique, to say nothing of its physical requirements. And he’d have to spam it dozens of times in a short window.

Then there was the precision aspect. That third slash was a behemoth that stretched a quarter-mile and ran as thick as a highway—something he’d underestimated in his first few slashes. He quickly learned he had to be careful not to accidentally clip too many sleeping Astroliths. That first day, he accidentally roused six in a single slash and burned a good six or seven minutes whittling them back down.

He felt working out the kinks was quite doable, though. A few days later, he had it down pat. 

He wasn’t even ticked off at Kain all that much anymore. They just nodded to each other, got the work done, and went their separate ways. They might exchange a few words, just checking up on how their battles were going or making note of any changes in that morning’s Astrolith field. Some mornings there were multiple triple-cannon Astrolith bosses, for instance, which would require a little extra care. Zane was pretty sure a single hit, if he let it charge all the way up, would take him for over 50% health.

They always smashed those triple-cannons first, as a precaution. Then clearing the rest was pretty simple.

At night, Zane did wonder how Evan, Avery, and Reina were doing. He hoped they were all well on their way. Reina would be deep in buff grinding by now. He imagined her throwing herself at the task day and night. Evan, he imagined, was working his way up the middle floors of the Delver King’s Tower. Avery might be doing jumping jacks somewhere or something. He wasn’t sure.

One night, he wandered a little far from his usual patrols and happened upon a dragonscale tent.

Massive runes shimmered in the air, marking a thirty-foot circle. The tent lay at its center. None of the embers could make it through that rune circle. They bounced right off. It was an odd thing—no aura left that circle either, like it was its own little sealed-off dimension, right in plain view. Two lanterns lay outside the door. They should’ve swayed in the blistering breeze, but not even the wind could make it through, by the looks of it.

Zane would bet a Shard of Destruction that this was Kain’s tent.

There were a few intriguing slashes in reality arranged about the ‘front yard’—the area that would’ve been the front yard, anyway. Frosty air poured through one, and nature aura poured through another. He wondered what they were for.

He thought about getting a closer look at it, but in the end, he didn’t. If the guy wanted to be left alone, he’d leave the guy alone.

***

A week later, Zane tore down the slope of the Boulder Field, smashing Astrolith after Astrolith.

More kept crawling up through the fissures. Zane sped between them, crushing them nearly instantly. He used his hammers for this—just swinging them in straight-line crushes.

He quite liked the Boulder Field as a training ground. It was the rockiest region of Mount X and already a Monster-dense zone, especially at night. But the more disturbances you made on the surface, the more Monsters would show up. It made for quite the convenient repository of training dummies.

He’d just found a useful hack to benchmark his progress.

He’d taken note of his base stats before he entered the field and started to fight. Which looked like—

Vitality: 256M

Regeneration: 510M

Strength: 399M

Dexterity: 169M

Speed: 134M

But the moment he started burning Red Giant, a Red Giant gaining more Starfire by the day, he took note of his speed stat.

Speed: 176M

That meant burning Starfire gave him an over-30% speed boost, at least while in combat. Something he was quite pleased about for just a few months’ work.

The rest of his stats—strength, vitality, regeneration—only saw 10-15% boosts from Starfire, with Dexterity receiving just a few %. At least so far. They looked like:

Vitality: 294M

Regeneration: 561M

Strength: 448M

Dexterity: 172M

He didn’t often check stats mid-battle, since he never saw a need to most of the time. But this was a solid use case. He liked being able to put a progress bar on his next Concept. 

By now, three months had passed since he’d first stepped foot here.

These days, more and more Astroliths were showing up in the starfield. The number had increased by nearly a third since he’d first come, and more Stardrakes and Astroliths were cropping up on Mount X too. Even the essence in the air, the embers, were thickening… it felt like it was all building to something. He just wasn’t sure what yet, or if it’d even affect him up here in his little nook of the Pure Yang lands. He just had that gut feeling.

***

He could even see in the way the folks in the campgrounds were acting, which he kept a close eye on.

The campgrounds were properly at war nowadays—it was high drama. Territory had been changing hands every day. There was a point when the human-and-lesser-beast alliance had swelled so large they outnumbered the dragon-phoenix camp nearly two-to-one. Then they’d launched a counterattack, led by a pretty-boy prince of the Drawn Sword Sect who was mean with a flying sword.

They’d managed to force the dragons back, even after the dragons’ T2, Karagas, joined the fray.

But then a squadron of dragons made its way back from an expedition, led by the Black Dragon Princess Jaxarys. She pretty much single-handedly turned the tide. Over the course of a night, he saw T1 after T1 after T1 go up against her, but they dropped like flies even though she was only peak T0— a bit of a surprise. None of them could break her obsidian scales, and she mauled them with ease. She fought in half-dragon form, half-human form, keeping scales and claws, so she looked like a knight. Just a knight decked out in extremely strong dragonscale armor, armor laced with Creation and Tier 7 void Law.

Haxorax’s golden dragon flame had been his great advantage, but this Jaxarys’ strengths seemed purely physical. Kind of like Zane in that way, actually.

Three nights was all it took for the Princess and Karagas to crush the human-beast alliance. They then sued for peace and had to cede massive amounts of land. The prince was taken prisoner.

Zane later looked over some of the notes Reina had given him and found out that Jaxarys and Karagas were two of the dragon kinds’ four great ancestors. They were regarded with awe among the dragons, even during the modern day. That they happened to be active at the same time was a pretty big historical coincidence. When Jaxarys reached her fighting prime, it heralded what came to be known as the ‘Golden Age of the Ancient Dragons.’ She was meant to be a duelist on par with prime Salazar. The more you knew.

Now, Zane had purposefully taken himself out of these storylines. But he couldn’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if he’d fought down there. It wasn’t that he thought he’d totally turn things around—that would’ve been pretty tough, given the circumstances. But he saw that last duel, where the pretty-boy had taken on Princess Jaxarys. She’d flattened him in three blows. The guy was nearly in tears by the end. Just brutal stuff. It wasn’t mankind’s best effort, in his view. They were up against an all-time dragon talent, and they didn’t have an answer. They had no one they could call on to even try to match her. 

It had him a bit antsy, watching from up on his mountain. He had to remind himself it really wasn’t his business.

After Jaxarys got the pretty-boy down near critical, she slapped suppression cuffs on him and led him away. That was another thing—pretty much every fight was to imprisonment. Deaths were pretty rare here and mostly happened by accident. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe there was some rule about it that he just didn’t know about? 

These ‘camps’ down there were all composed of a few elites of Sects and kingdoms outside the Pure Yang lands. The Pure Yang lands were their own little lawless frontier. But killing each other here would still lead to serious repercussions for their organizations in the outside world, he’d imagine. It’d make sense if there were pre-agreed rules preventing anything too nasty, especially if folks meant to come back season after season. There were too shards around; the incentives were pretty strong. 

It didn’t make much of a difference to him. He didn’t plan on getting taken prisoner or being killed regardless. He just found it curious.

He liked that he could appreciate the battles more like a kind of sport this way. With these rules in place, he didn’t feel so bad cheering for or against folks from his vantage. It would’ve been rather more upsetting if his Stone Axe guys actually got killed, instead of just being taken prisoner.

He did still have to watch the Black Dragon Princess crush his guys. The Stone Axe crew was unfortunately caught in the first wave of the dragon counter-counteroffensive, and though they put up a brave effort, they did get swamped in the end. There were a few hours there where he thought they might escape, but the stubborn Axes fought until the bitter end. It was bittersweet. A good run, he thought—pound for pound, given what they had to work with and what they were up against, he felt they could go home with their heads held high.

Anyway, most of those engagements finished up over the course of the past few weeks. The dragon coalition, consisting of True Dragons, Black Dragons, and Flood Dragons, had solidified their dominance, claiming the vast majority of the territory. But they weren’t expanding anymore. They seemed to be hunkering down, as far as he could tell. Healing up all their fighters, crushing shards, doing last-minute Skill training. He got the sense they were prepping for something and wanted to be at peak strength..

The few human camps left standing were doing the same.

He asked Kain about it the next morning.

“The season nears its end.” Kain gazed out across the sky. “The end-of-season shard showers will strike within the month. It’s no surprise they’re all preparing… for many, that one night will make or break their season.”