Savage Awakening 527. Skyfalls

The crucial physical upgrades had been made. 

He’d mainly be relying on a few physical strengths in the fight. There was his heart of the Prime Rhinoceros, granting him that +300% regen. His newly upgraded Hide of the Ancients. The Buff of Ultimate Vigor, letting him extreme Limit-Break on top of its health and regen buffs. And finally, the overall boost he’d get from a Fourth Form physique.

He figured those, with all his Destruction and some last-minute additions, ought to be enough.

At first he wasn’t as into this Haxorax fight as he would be, say, a fight for Earth, or a life-or-death bout with his friends’ lives at stake. The First Prince of Dragons seemed like just another challenge. One hell of a challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. He didn’t feel the stakes as viscerally.

He didn’t like having that mentality going into a fight, though. Especially as big a step-up as this one. He needed to find an angle on it—something to get him going, mentally and physically.

Reina telling him how that Patriarch was positioning him as a stepping-stone… that’d done the job.

Pleased, he inspected his newly tempered physique.

He’d take all the fuel he could get.

Onto the next bit. 

In his mind, this bit was just a bonus. He didn’t mind if he didn’t manage to work these Skills out. Two months wasn’t much time to master Divine Profound tier techniques. But if he could... he had a feeling he’d be doing quite well for himself.

***

“Right!” said Jawl. He took off his thick, soot-stained gloves. “All yours, m’lord! Give it a few more minutes, and it should be done activating.”

Runes slowly lit up all over the island.

“It’s been a while since we fired her up,” said Jawl. “Every few years she does get an update! Master Noughtfire helps calibrate her to match your strength level. She ought to be able to take Empyrean-level hits.”

“Thanks, Jawl,” said Zane. 

“‘Course!” 

Zane did wonder how Noughtfire was doing. It’d been a while… he really should visit one of these days.

His steward left him to survey the island. It was one long bare stretch of black sand studded with obsidian outcroppings. A bunch of nothing where he could tinker as much as he liked. The runes etched into the ground made everything hyper-resistant. A wayward blast wouldn’t accidentally split the planet in half—a necessary measure these days.  

He started with the tome for Daybreak Horn.

He went over each of the six Rhino-made drawings inside. They were simple but drawn with care and dense with knowledge. The Skill involved charging up a blow, then unleashing it in one giant cleaver. It weaponized the rupturing of reality, kind of like those Earth-Law Skills that smashed the earth, sending up spikes that damaged the enemy. Striking them with the very stuff they stood on. 

Daybreak Horn hit the enemy directly too, but the bulk of the damage came from that reality-breaking effect. The strike could also split pure essence in half—meaning essence shields and even Skills coud be broken. Something about reality rupturing made it particularly effective at that. He could charge straight into someone’s attack and simply smash it open.

He hadn’t dealt with Skills of this kind, though—he had a feeling there was a whole class of reality-type Skills he just wasn’t aware of. High-level stuff, stuff you’d only start to see at the Empyrean level. With nothing to compare it to, he felt he had a steeper learning curve. In the few weeks he tried it he managed to make some hefty fissures in the fabric of reality. Nothing strong enough to constitute the Skill though.

With a few more months, he was pretty sure he could get it. But it was looking increasingly unlikely before the duel.

He wasn’t too disappointed. He never thought of it as make-or-break. He soon moved on to Chainstorm Cage.

He found this one much more promising.

The tome was written by the legendary gaoler of the Superdungeon, the Faceless One. It was surprisingly detailed, rife with the Faceless One’s neat, tiny penmanship. Zane had read it on the journey back from the Ruins. Now he took a few days to reread it, cover to cover. He gleaned a surprising amount of new stuff this time around.

By the end of it he felt like he had a pretty solid understanding of this Faceless One. He seemed to Zane quite a thoughtful, if dutiful fellow, though he never shared details about his life. You could just sense it in the writing style. There were all the thoughtful details and troubleshooting notes, as well as the acknowledgments section, where he gave lots of credit to the Dread Passenger’s ‘Six Damnations Cage’ and the Coiling Dragon’s ‘Starcrusher’ as inspirations. This fellow had clearly put quite a lot of care into it. 

The Faceless One also included a nice section at the end thanking anyone who made it through.

Zane also got the feeling this Faceless One had been a bit lonely. He supposed it’d be hard not to be in a job like that.

In any case, the Skill itself was pretty simple. A great expansion followed by a great contraction. Throw out the chains like one vast net, then haul in the prey. 

Making that net that was the crux of it. He hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it when he was testing it on the journey back. Though to be fair, the the back of a speeding Eldritch horror wasn’t a great testing ground.

He found it a lot easier ‘casting out’ that net here on his training island.

The ‘activating’ bit still gave him trouble, though.

The core of this Skill was making a vast Gravity field bound by the confines of that chain net. That field would come off of every link of his chain; the chain would power it. It meant he’d have to flare a glut of Gravity Law through his chains, making some massive engine of Gravity.

That was the mental model he was settling on. It often felt quite useful to relate complex Skills to something he just got at a gut level. An engine felt right for this one.

He tried throwing out his chains again, pouring in the Gravity. But he couldn’t quite get it to stick—the Gravity kept lashing away. 

It wasn’t like before, when all he had to handle was a single Gravity core, a single point of Gravity he could bear down on.

He had to extend that Gravity-point into twisting lines now. Two lines, since he wielded two chains. As they crisscrossed, making the shape of the cage, he had to keep mapping all that Gravity to its contours, fitting it in as the chains ran outward… until it all locked in at maximum extension. And the full field snapped into place. 

All the while he kept the shape of that cage physically—no easy task, even with his physique.

All in all, pretty complex stuff. But doable, he felt. 

He’d throw out his chains, marshal Magnetism and Gravity into them. Then it’d all break loose and more wild force-storms would scour the island. By now every last obsidian outcropping had been flattened. He was pretty sure that force had made glass out of the sand, then diamond-like crystals out of that glass.

It was a solid display of force, but it wasn’t really meant to blast out. If he got the formation right, all that Law would point inward.

Then it’d intensify as he constricted the chains, and all those points of Gravity drew closer together, overlapping more and more, skyrocketing in intensity as he flexed and constricted the cage…

That was the vision, anyway.

Week after week, though, he just couldn’t quite get the hang of it. The ‘mapping’ bit was coming pretty easily to him now. But he still felt like something was missing. 

It was a bit baffling to him. He felt he was quite close by the end of it, but it was a little hard to tell. Like starting an engine, it was very much a binary thing, he found. Sometimes with Skills—like Daybreak Horn—you could make bigger and bigger slashes and mark progress that way. You could be pretty sure when you were most of the way there.

With this thing, you either started that engine, or you didn’t.

A month went by, and he was forced to admit there just wouldn’t be enough time to finish it off.

***

He talked it over with Reina one weekend. They were sitting in ‘Seregwen’s Table,’ one of the most exclusive restaurants in the World Tree, located in one of the upper-mid boughs. It was one of Reina’s favorites. The place was edged with gold and silver—just a tasteful dash of them. It was a motif these fancy elf establishments liked, Zane noticed. Mostly wood, vine, and stone in the building itself. He found it quite cozy. You could feel how high-quality each material was just by touch.

It had floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a view of the ‘Skyfalls’—these beautiful, white-watered, hundred-mile-long waterfalls that were the distinguishing feature of life in this zone. There were boats made specifically to sail up and down them and everything. The Skyfalls linked quite a few kingdoms. You could see those bustling hubs in the background, teeming with life, sprinkled with the puffs of airships.

The chairs were very elegant and a little too small for him. But he quite enjoyed the food. Today’s meal was honey-roasted Skyfall salmon glazed with cloudmilk butter.

Reina set down her fork.

“Maybe you’re just a few fractions of a second off with the timing?” she said, looking a bit puzzled.  

“Maybe,” said Zane. He thought about it. “It might be the reason. But it’s not why I’m not pulling it off, if that makes sense.”

She considered that, then nodded.  

“I was thinking about something the Sage said the other day,” he told her. “He said he comprehended better when he was working physically, especially mid-battle. It might work like that for this Skill, too. It’s a hunter’s Skill. It feels like it should be wielded against prey.”

He didn’t feel like it was the kind of thing you could manufacture. Sparring wouldn’t cut it—he needed real high-pressure, life-or-death type stuff.

“That’s if I wanted to grasp it in the next month, at least,” he said. He was still pretty sure that if he just kept banging his head against it, he’d figure it out eventually.

“You’ll figure it out,” she said. She sounded pretty confident. “And even if you don’t… you didn’t need it to beat that Haxorax anyway.”

“I don’t,” he agreed. “How’d that meeting with Elias go, by the way?”

She brightened. “I was just meaning to get to that! We just hammered out a deal, actually.”

She showed him the term sheet.

He blinked at it, then up at her. Reina looked quite proud of herself.

“Does he have that many Credits?”

“Nope,” she said. “He’s only got 30 transferable System Coins to his name, which he’s promised to ‘Zane Walker’ upfront. But since there’s a war coming up soon, I managed to get a soul-contract-binding IOU. He’s agreed to pay you another 75 Credits then.” 

“And if he can’t pay?” 

“Then I get his estate,” said Reina cheerfully. 

“…You just put maybe richest man in the Galaxy into crippling debt.” He had to resist a smile. Maybe not the richest. But with the resources he was slinging around, he had to be pretty close. And every time he got richer, Reina treated the guy like her personally piggy-bank. 

You almost had to feel sorry for him. 

She blinked. “I wouldn’t think of it like that… Zane, you know how slimy he is! He’s had it coming, if anything.” She raised her chin. “He should be glad I’m letting him keep anything at all.”

He blinked at her. 

She blushed. “I didn’t mean it like that.” 

“You’re a scary woman,” Zane informed her.

***

A few days before press was set to ramp up, Zane made a visit to Noughtfire’s.