Savage Awakening 508. Challenge of the First Ones (II)

They started into the depths. The tunnel made a ramp straight down.

Just ten feet in, Zane was already starting to feel it. The walls were scratched heavily with gravity runes. Nothing like the dwarves’ or the runes of man, but they were strong in their own blunt way.

They hammered gravity on him with each step. It just kept shooting up.

At the entrance, he had to be carrying the weight of five planets.

Twenty steps in, it jumped to ten times that.

Forty steps, and he was having to start fighting with each step—he had to cycle his own gravity against it to hold it off.

The more he struggled, though, the more he felt he was learning. He quite enjoyed the strain of it.

He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but after just half an hour of fighting, he could swear his gravity had taken another step.

He was sweating pretty heavily by then. He could see the exit there, though—see the clearing beyond, could just about make out a cluster of steel pillars.

“How’re you feeling?” said the Sage casually.

“I can take it just fine.”

The Sage grinned. “Good lad.”

Another handful of steps, and the exit was in sight. A plain clearing. Now he counted nine of those proud steel pillars, making a circle, each engraved with a single crude rune.

He felt the aura of Rhino souls from each one of them. Like many a Rhino had left a smidge of their thoughts behind.

The Sage gave him a hearty back-slap.

Then a rumble shook the cavern. He frowned and looked up.

A sheet of dust filtered down. The cracks above them trembled. Zane saw Corruption working deep inside.

“Well, shit,” said the Sage.

Then that seam rammed the tunnel, end to end. And the ceiling broke open.

The tunnel collapsed. For about a tenth of a second.

It caved in up to a point. The gravity in the tunnel only made it worse, and the stone that made the ceiling was heavy enough already. With all that pulling force, it was bound to be a vicious crush.

Then it all just stopped.

The Sage held it all in his hands and shoulders. His hands were thick with gravity.

Gravity that welded the cracks together. Gravity-cores had shown up in the ceiling, pulling all that stone back from the brink.

“I’ve got it,” grunted the Sage.

“Need any help there?” It seemed like quite a lot.

The Sage cracked a grin. “I might be old, but I can handle a few pebbles. Guess the Monsters made a mark after all… You go up ahead. Don’t you worry about me—you just take care of business down there.”

Zane hesitated. “…You sure?”

He was having a hard time guessing just how much weight it was. But under this much gravity, it had to be several hundred planets’ worth… maybe thousands.

The Sage just snorted. “You keep standing there, and I’ll take it as an insult! Run along before I teach you a damned lesson.”

“Alright,” said Zane, amused. “I won’t be long.”

He kept going.

The gravity right before the main chamber made him feel like he was made to hold up the cavern himself. He wasn’t sure how worlds’ worth of weight were being stacked on him right now, but just standing there had his Asura Titan’s Body fighting at 250%. His heart pounded heavily in his ears just to get his blood flowing to his fists. His breaths made pale fog in the air.

Still, the more he walked, the more he cycled his own gravity, the more he felt he could take it.

He wasn’t sure what it was with this tunnel. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t get the same effect if he asked the Sage to stack him with gravity and resisted it.

It was proving quite the useful training tool. He’d eaten a great deal of gravity-dense steel; consolidating it into solid Law, though, always took some practice.

He broke into the clearing beyond. He was a bit surprised to find it kind of… fine?

The gravity was gone. It was a relief, physically.

It was a simple cavern. Torches studded the walls, throwing flickering warm light over those pillars. This close, he made out carvings of names on them too, followed by a few horn markings—left by other Rhinos. A Rhino gesture of respect. He wondered if they were the resting places of certain ancient Rhinos or something. There was certainly a hefty aura to those pillars.

As he inspected them, they all began to rumble.

Something swirled in their center, gaining form.

Zane braced for a fight.

Then he blinked.

Oh—it was just a Rhino.

A spirit Rhino, by the looks of it—fed by the pillars. It noticed him and waddled on over.

It sniffed. It seemed intrigued by him. It made some Rhino noises, but Zane couldn’t quite tell what it meant.

Then it blinked and started scratching on the ground.

Hi, it wrote.

Hi, Zane wrote back.

They blinked at each other a bit more.

The Rhino kept on scratching.

I’m Trial Spirit, it wrote. I do Inheritance stuff.

Neat, wrote Zane.

The Rhino then gave an explanation.

Its name was Nic. It’d been the tribe’s herbs manager once, but then it’d passed away. It volunteered to be the Trial Spirit. Now it was here.

It explained some more about what this all was. Nic wrote in pretty simple sentences, sometimes choppy. But he got the gist of it just fine.

There were a bunch of rewards stored in this Inheritance—some of the finest treasures the Rhinos ever laid hooves on. What Zane got, and how much of it, would depend on how well he did in the trials.

Is there some Prime Blood in there? wrote Zane.

The Spirit nodded. The rewards were organized in tiers, and if you got a higher tier, you also got everything in the lower ones. It mentioned some other stuff in there—lots of Rhino Skill tomes. The lower-leveled ones taught things like Annihilation Charge, but there were others—one taught the Divine Profound skill ‘Daybreak Horn,’ a favorite of past Rhino champions. Not having a horn, Zane wasn’t as intrigued by that one. There were also some extremely high-quality grasses up for offer, the Spirit informed him, but as he was not a habitual grass-eater, he had to pass on those too.

There were also some Rhino body parts on offer—those piqued his interest. He had yet to fill up on those.

The most intriguing thing in there was definitely that Prime Blood.

The Spirit informed him that it was the best of the rewards. He’d have to hit the top tier to qualify for that. How much he got depended on how well he did.

Questions? it wrote.

No, wrote Zane.

Nice, it wrote. It thought about it. Start now?

Sure, wrote Zane.

Okay.

It turned to go, making a half-circle. Then it seemed to think of something and circled back around.

10,000 of best Rhinos tried challenge, it said. Strongest Rhinos under Empyrean ever. No Rhino ever Prime Blood.

It thought about it some more.

Maybe impossible?

Zane shrugged. He told it he’d still give it a try. The Rhino nodded.

Then it seemed to remember some more useful information. It started giving him all he needed to know about the first Trial.

Trial of the Chunk, it wrote.

Unfortunately, it ran out of space around then—they’d written quite a bit, so they had to go around putting dirt back.

They regrouped and continued.

Trial of Chunk, it wrote. Scratch the Chunk.

What’s the Chunk? wrote Zane.

The Chunk, apparently, was just a very big slab of incredibly strong stone. The Rhinos thought it’d been the core of an ancient planet at one point—but it came to the Rhinos as an asteroid. It fell right in the middle of a Rhino herd ages ago, even before the Rhinos came to Dragonspire. It was widely agreed it was a sign from the river of Fate. They’d kept it ever since as the ultimate test of strength.

Nic then summoned the Chunk.

It didn’t look particularly impressive, Zane had to admit. It was quite a large chunk, and the material was much rougher to the touch than it looked. It had no Laws to it either, no great gravity.

The only thing it had going for it was that it was really, really tough. Or so the Rhino claimed.

Just scratching it was a big deal, Nic explained.

As this Inheritance was meant for Rhinos under Empyrean, only True Gods and half-steps had tried damaging it.

The Chunk [???]

3 tries, wrote the Rhino Spirit. Make best try. It gave him a friendly tail-swish. Then it waddled out of the way.

Zane considered The Chunk with some interest. It was surprisingly intact for a thing that’d been around for a few million years and had taken batterings from some of the Rhinos’ best. The biggest mark sat right in the middle of the thing, running a foot deep. He wondered who’d managed that.

The more he examined The Chunk, the more special it seemed. Every mark, now that he looked close at it, bore the residue of a soul—a memory of that moment. He knew if he sank his mind into it, he’d see a vision of the Rhino that made it. This Chunk made a record of some of the best Rhinos there had ever been.

Something else caught his attention. This Chunk came from beyond this Galaxy. If the First of the Rhinos brought it along, and they’d had it long before they arrived, then most of these marks were made by Rhinos outside Dragonspire.

He might be competing against some of the strongest Rhinos not just here, but in all the universe.

That thought was enough to get him fired up.

As he stared down that scarred surface, he got ready to make his own mark in history.

He got out his Axes. Wound them all the way back. The cave wasn’t big enough to make a Storm, but he could certainly unleash a hell of a Red Giant Slash.

And the neat thing was, he didn’t have to rush it. He was hitting a still target.

He could load up as much as he wanted.

He did just that. Cranked his Axes all the way back and sat on his Nuclear Fusion. Just stacked it on the edge of it, building until he almost physically couldn’t hold the pressure anymore.

Then he roared and unleashed.

The Axes slammed down in a shower of sparks.

And scored two clean gashes along the stone.

They scored deeper than most, but they were pretty far from the deepest marks on there. Zane blinked.

He was pretty sure he’d just hit strong enough to badly wound most half-step Empyreans.

He was even more impressed just how many deeper gashes lay on that stone—all made by Rhinos under Empyrean.

The universe had quite a few talented Rhinos across time, it seemed. He supposed it wasn’t so surprising.

He grinned.

He’d begun to think maybe there weren’t folks like him out there at his level… it did sound like an arrogant thought. But so far, no one had managed to stand up to him.

That was just Zane’s first try.

But it was nowhere near his strongest.

The Trial Spirit nodded and scribbled some notes on a notepad it’d conjured up.

Zane backed up all the way to the edge of the cavern.

He wanted a running start for this next one.