Savage Awakening 557. Shard Farming (II)

Zane had given some thought as to how he wanted to conduct this night. He wanted to make it as efficient as he could—only hunting Shard Bosses, stacking as many Destruction shards as possible in that 8-hour window. He didn’t want to get into a situation where he was fighting 30 Empyreans at once. He wouldn’t get anything by wasting time on the dozens of Astrolith grunts making landfall every minute.

So, he did something he very seldom tried in these kinds of boss fights.

He just blasted right by them.

He was used to being the slower one in most fights. So it was quite a welcome change, running circles around them—so much so that he could just ignore them. Especially with the strides he’d made in his Starfire Concept. In that moment, he felt every percentage of that nearly 50% explosiveness gain. He grinned.

He could still feel them locking onto him behind him, feel them firing up their cannons and their beams. But he could track them with his soul senses just fine. Even as he felt the first of their beams loosed, making landfall where he had been just a heartbeat before, he knew if he just kept moving, he could stay ahead of them. All the way until he took down that Boss. That was the plan, anyway.

He’d already closed half the distance.

Though this kind of speed, in this atmosphere, did come with a serious cost. He was getting smashed for a good 10% health per second right now, and he hadn’t even gotten to the real flight yet. The embers flying at him were an attack unto themselves, scorching burn marks all over his chest and arms—it looked like he’d been gouged by dozens of molten knives. He threw heavy gravity around his eyes, repelling the embers as best he could. Enough got through that it was still a nuisance, but it’d do.

To the Shard Boss’s credit, it rallied the moment it saw him. Its reaction speed was a great deal faster than its stone grunts.

It let out a deep, earthy groan and stabbed its pillar-like legs into the cracked mountainside. And all the cracks around it, stretching miles, blazed with light—striking up with the colors of stars…

He had a bad feeling about this.

That starfire color raced up the Mega Astrolith, rippling up the cracks in its mighty frame.

He realized, with a start, that that thing was drawing Starfire straight from the Pure Yang lands.

At the same time, those heavy plates on its body lit up one by one, livid with Creation-lightning. Eight armored plates in all, each storing a single shard of Creation.

And it all went to a single chunk. That proud prow on its back suddenly erupted with starlight.

A space-like blackness expanded from the tip of that prow, like a fragment of a starless night sky, stretching dozens of miles across.

At first glance, Zane thought it might be this massive, jagged portal to another dimension. He couldn’t make out what it was meant to do.

Then he realized, feeling it closer, that it existed right here. It was the Astrolith’s own little swathe of created space—a space immensely rich in ancient Laws, Laws that felt as ancient as this continent. That prow had opened up its own little mini-universe, right in the middle of the sky. An empty one.

Then meteors burst into being down its length, and its purpose grew instantly clear.

They burgeoned with shocking speed, spinning as they grew, each chunk crackling with Creation-lightning… he’d barely taken another step, and they were already a dozen miles across.

They lit up with starfire and crashed into this world.

With how chunky those meteors were, he hadn’t expected them to move blindingly fast too. Maybe he should’ve, with the sheer amount of starfire loaded into them. They didn’t fall in arcs. Each made a shining line straight for him, and he found himself running straight into their midst.

One look at them, one feel for the sheer firepower in those things, and he knew if even one of those landed, it’d be enough to break all of his momentum.

The first few meteors would’ve caught him—but he stomped down his fifth step and cut hard left, right behind a cluster of grunt Astroliths. The shower wrecked its own grunts.

A pleasant surprise from fighting here. Zane was finding all the meat shields—stone shields?—he could need. He landed a sixth step, and this one struck with so much momentum he added his own crater to Mount X’s tough surface. He made it to another Astrolith cluster just a split second before it was blown to smithereens.

That much cover proved enough.

Zane arrived in striking range, axes trailing high behind him, lit up with two lines of Red Giant flame…

He took one last, seventh step.

It was more of a lift-off than a leap. He exploded off the ground and wound his axes all the way back. In that moment, his body was working so hard, torched so heavily with essence, carrying so much Charge momentum, he couldn’t have stopped the Limit Break even if he wanted to.

Chains shattered all over his physique, and he roared.

The Shard Boss clearly felt the danger. It let out a cavernous groan and pulled even deeper from the Pure Yang’s Land’s reserves.

So much starfire shot through it that he saw new cracks searing down its whole being, shattering what had to be Origin-grade steel and cracking even its shard armor plates.

That pristine prow deepened to dark silver.

Powerful Laws of Gravity thickened reality all around them, creating a wide river of force, and for a second, he thought they were trying to weld him to the ground. Zane’s eyes narrowed as he fell. He didn’t care how much Gravity this thing had—there was no way it was managing it at the speeds he was going.

But those laws didn’t act on him at all, and in a split second, he realized the Boss’s true intent. He saw and felt it. Space, extending before him and behind him, all around the Shard Boss… there was another Concept there too, something he didn’t quite recognize until he felt himself slowing mid-air—saw the embers around him slowing too.

The Boss had invoked some Concept of Spacetime.

The strange thing was, he still didn’t feel it was affecting him at all. He carried just as much momentum as before. But it was slowing down everything that crossed that river of space, and he instantly saw what it wanted to do.

The thing was buying time for itself to load meteors strong enough to finish him off.

He could see them stacking right in front of him, piling on thousands of tons of mass, stuffed so full of Pure Yang energy that the meteors were cracking, like all that starfire within just barely welded them together…

Zane hefted his axe, still mid-leap, hurtling toward that Boss. And prepared to meet them.

The first meteor screamed for him, and he let loose a star-crushing slash. With how slowed he was in this river of space-time, he almost didn’t make it in time. He had to funnel some of that great mass of essence burning up his body, essence drawn up from his Annihilation Charge, just to meet the meteor.

But the slash did strike true.

His base slashes, even without seven Charge Steps’ worth of momentum, were enough to cripple an Empyrean. It spoke to just how much firepower the Shard Boss had drawn up that he only barely managed to cleave it in two—and even then, the debris knocked off another 5% Health.

The second meteor was already upon him, and this thing was the size of a mountain. The force going through it would’ve easily been enough to destroy a pre-Integration Earth.

But when Zane chained in his second Slash—99% bigger, 99% stronger—he found that this time, he wrecked it easily.

Then he was just a few hundred feet from the Shard Boss, falling faster and faster. He saw it trying to summon one more meteor, so big it swamped almost all of that mini-universe.

But he wasn’t about to let it complete.

He slashed—and beat it to the punch.

At last. After seven Overlord Annihilation Charge steps, and two star-crushing slashes, and more debris than Zane could remember, he unloaded it all on the Boss’s head.

The slash carved a quarter-mile line in the air, starting from Zane’s cocked-back axe, splitting a giant white-crimson gash all the way through to ground level.

The moment he unleashed it, he felt muscles tearing all over his upper body. With his First Rhino’s Hide of the Ancients, his physical toughness had been boosted massively. It’d been quite a while since any Skill had had this kind of effect on him, and that was just from throwing it.

That connection had been quite satisfying. He’d felt the CRUNCH shiver up the chains. Saw fissures race a mile down even the extremely tough slope of Mount X, spreading from the point of contact… dust clouds puffed all over that line.

He landed in a crouch right before the Monster, and squinted into the smoke.

He could feel he hadn’t killed it before the smoke had even cleared.

Though he was a little less disappointed when he made out the extent of the damage.

He had utterly wrecked its prow. Dented it into a crater. His strike had followed through too, ripping deep into the Astrolith’s blocky head and putting a pretty sizeable crater in that as well. The force had also shattered nearly every plate on its body, which effectively crippled it.

With just how much force and essence he’d put into that, he was pretty certain that was the hardest shot he’d ever thrown. He knew it was a half-step T1, but he was still kind of surprised it survived that. Then again, with the sheer amount of power it had drawn from the land, it did make sense.

He supposed he couldn’t be too disappointed in nearly one-shotting a half-step T1, all things considered.

Now all there was to do was clean up. He was pretty wrecked. He wouldn’t be pulling out another slash like that for a good half hour, he guessed. But in its state, just a finishing blow or two would do, and he figured he could still manage that.

Then he became aware of two new, quite serious concerns.

First, the small army of Astroliths he’d left behind.

He felt thirty massive gluts of starfire finally lock onto him.

…He definitely couldn’t take that right now.

Then there was the scene in front of him.

The Shard Boss had stomped those pillar-legs back into the ground, like it was plugging them back into the socket.

Pure Yang starfire streamed up those limbs again—so fast he felt like he was watching the thing get turbocharged. Zane thought his regeneration was pretty good, but even he was a bit dumbstruck at just how fast those cracks were vanishing.

…Now, that just felt like cheating.

He was just trying to figure out which problem to take care of first when he had an idea.

He just stood there and waited, breathing heavily. A good second or so passed, enough time for the Astrolith mob to load up well and be ready. He kept his Great Sage Mind trained squarely on them.

He felt them fire and stomped right out of the way.

Then fourteen beams of starfire smashed straight into the Shard Boss.

This was a bit of a gamble. There was a chance the thing would just be immune. Or that it’d get charged even more, since it was using starfire as its fuel source.

But after he saw it friendly-fire its own grunts quite effectively, Zane made an educated guess that it went the other way.

He was pleased to be proven right.

…That still wasn’t enough to kill it, he was a bit incredulous to see.

He slammed an axe on it, and its burned-out crag of a head finally exploded.

That got the job done.

That thing was almost unreasonably tough.

But he had no complaints about the treasures it dropped.

Shard of True Destruction [???]

Shard of True Destruction [???]

He happily snatched them up.