Savage Awakening 595. The Final Training Montage (VI)

He felt the difference instantly. Every single cell in his body was awash with brilliant essence—and then, suddenly, it ceased.

If you inspected his physique in the Astral Plane, you’d still see them lit up bright; you could see the quality jam-packed into his muscles. But they no longer gave off an aura.

His body now felt quite a lot like Z-Platinum in that respect.

Zane himself still gave off an aura—though that was all just from his soul now, he realized. The material itself, the steel of his body, sealed all the light in.

Now he kind of wondered just what were the requirements for an aura-less being… he was pretty sure Noughtfire, for instance, didn’t have an incredibly strong physique. But the old fellow had no aura, as did that straw hat fellow. Maybe at some stage of Empyrean you could just control it?

The thought popped up briefly at the back of his mind.

Mostly he was still examining his physique, and feeling quite pleased. He flexed his hand and nodded to himself.

Even when he was sleeping, he was digesting, tempering his muscles with new steel—and sleep actually helped speed the process, he’d realized.

He clenched his fist.

It was a little weight off his chest—a feeling he hadn’t really realized he’d been carrying.

Zane just liked feeling unbreakable. Whenever his power output grew imbalanced with his durability and he started breaking a little too easily, he'd always feel at least a bit irked. He just didn't feel like himself.

Now he’d set things right again.

The changes went past his muscles and skin, deep into the bones, and his organs, too—in an instant, every bit of him got a significant leap in sheer quality.

Though he knew it’d be difficult to tell exactly what that meant until he gave it a test.

The Sage gave him a hearty slap on the back—a slap that still felt a bit heavier than you’d expect a slap on the back to be. But it didn't feel bone-breakingly hard anymore.

“I saw how hard you worked for that level-up… two-and-a-half months of gritted-teeth grinding! Well earned, lad.”

“It felt like a long time coming," said Zane, grinning.

…Come to think of it—the Sage’s hearty back slaps had always felt hard, even when Zane was just an Ascendant. He felt like the Sage was trying to be considerate. He just got the feeling that for the Sage, as long as it wasn’t life-threatening, a back slap was good to go.

In any case, the two of them changed up their schedule that morning. That day was a Law day, but rather than jumping straight into a crusher session they went for Kaijuu-punching instead, just because Zane wanted to feel the difference in his physique up close.

This time he fought a Shellster. He opened the fight with a gravity-assisted, Red Giant-stepping charge—bellowing a war cry, falling some 1,300 miles straight into a cocked-back punch—and this time only a single bone broke in his hand when he connected square on the center of its shell, right at its hardest point.

It was quite a stark contrast from his entire arm shattering in his first Kaijuu fight… and it was also nice to see a good chunk of that giant Kaijuu shell shattering right after.

The Shellster screeched and stomped up a gravity whirlpool, and the two of them started slugging it out.

He handled the rest of the fight without much trouble. He ended up with two more cracked ribs. But as any veteran Kaijuu-puncher can tell you, just two cracked ribs was a pretty great performance. Especially against a Shellster; unlike with Hammerheads, whose giant tail-whacks afforded some breathing space now and then, those whirlpools made Shellster fights nonstop slugfests.

All in all, solid progress.

“Hells, lad…We really are gonna have to get you fighting some of those top-tier Category Is!” said the Sage. “Might be next time we’ll go for a Mastiff.”

“Bring it on.” 

That afternoon Zane went for another crusher session—this time, splitting his time between settings #8 and #9.

He realized there was actually also a physical element bottlenecking his Law progression. Part of the reason he hadn’t been able to progress much past the Crusher’s #8 setting was just that his body couldn’t handle the strain after a while. His crusher progression was really based on two things—his physique and the Size he’d loaded in. Both would let him resist the crusher force and access higher levels of crushing.

The more he could endure, the more gains he could unlock.

This time, his body could handle six hours of that #8 and #9-intensity just fine—maybe some soreness in his back and legs, but that was all.

He was pretty sure he’d be good when it came to durability for a while.

***

He and the Sage still decided to keep his A/B Law and lifting schedule. His body level-up just gave him room to push himself even harder in both Law and physique.

That night, as he and the Sage shared some juicy drake legs around a campfire—“Every time you hit a physique breakthrough like that, lad, I just get so damned pumped!”

The Sage grinned ruefully. “I’ve got a little more pesky latent Destruction to deal with. Now, I’ll be doing ice baths for a while—I’ve got a hell of a lot of scar tissue to deal with. But it’s that deep-set Destruction that’s slamming the brakes on things.”

“That does make sense.”

The Sage had the worst Destruction scarring he’d ever seen, and that was by a long shot. Noughtfire, for instance, just had some stump fingers.

“Once that’s dealt with… might be I’ll break out some higher-end steels too. Mind you, I didn’t get to see much action last War. But it was still enough to nab a few Creation shards from the Store. An ol’ buddy of mine, Grand Elder Thorin, he’s been helping me turn them into some full-fledged Creation-laced ingots… hells, but it’ll be great to start chowing on those again. Now—you can take in raw Creation shards if you’ve got the equipment. But at this stage, I do like those Creation-laced steels better. Just gentler on the body.”

The Sage stretched out, looking pleased at the thought. “Might be I’ll get to make use of ’em faster than I thought.”

“I was meaning to ask about that, actually,” said Zane, stifling a burp. He was halfway through one of the juicier drake legs in the pile.

“What, Creation shards?”

Zane explained his situation in Astra—

“You’ve got fifty-six of ‘em, just sitting in your back pocket!”

The Sage jerked upright. Then he had to laugh. “Hells, lad! The moment you break through… well, not the moment you break through, exactly, but not long after—you’ll be a godsdamned Endbringer wrecking ball!”

The Sage told him he needed to reach the Fifth Titanform before he could start incorporating Creation into his physique.

“There’s just a few requirements for it, not least being you’ll have to get to True God first,” said the Sage. “Good news is, you’ll meet most of ’em the moment you break through. First, you’ll need eight high-quality Titan Rhino body parts in total. You’ve already got seven body parts down… I figure if you add in that 100-million-year Bone from the System Store you’re eyeing up, that’ll make the eight you need. Then all you’ll need to do is upgrade that Foundation Stone, which ought to be pretty easy work with the System Store. And then you’re set! Basically—break through, get that Bone, and nab that stone upgrade. And you can start slamming Creation shards to your heart’s content.”

Zane was pumped for it too. Although—“That’ll still take quite a few Credits, though, right?” That 100-Million-Year Bone alone was more than he could afford right now… he supposed he could take in another Rhino body part, in a pinch. But something about settling, especially when it came to his physique, just went against everything that made him him. 

He decided he’d only settle if he had to. 

“Lad, once you start getting to the level where you can take down Greater Endbringers—which won’t be too long at all after you break through, I’d wager—store Credits’ll be the least of your worries.” The Sage looked confident of that. He felt that was quite was good to know.

The Sage also confirmed that although you didn’t need Creation to reach what he’d consider a top-end physique in the Galaxy, if you wanted to be one of the absolute best physique-wise—“We’re talking Primes, or some of the meanest of those Greater Endbringers”—it was difficult to get around it.

“That said, you ought to think of Creation-forging more like the cherry on top of a great physique. Makes a great physique into a godsdamned all-time legendary one.”

The Sage told him that forging Creation into the body was more like repeatedly upgrading the body’s sheer quality, at a fundamental level. It amounted to a bunch of passive upgrades done via one of the most fundamental strengtheners in the Universe. It’d be necessary to break through a ceiling of rarity grade. 

It wouldn’t work quite like most of the Creation he’d seen—the soul-kind, the kind that was active in Skills and essence and such. 

“Now, here’s the catch,” warned the Sage. “Creation-forging’s one hell of a shard sink. If you can choose one or the other, you’d usually choose to put your Creation in the soul… doesn’t apply to us, ‘course, since we’ve already got Destruction in our souls. But that’s what happens by default. That’s what happens when you straight-up crush a shard.”

“Sure.”

“That’s not to say Creation in the physique isn’t still great!” the Sage added. “It’s just that it’ll usually take dozens of shards to make a serious difference to a top-tier physique… at this level, that’s easily the difference between whether your physique breaks against a Prime Endbringer or not.”

It sounded quite promising to Zane, if a bit far off right now. 

The Sage put a lot of effort and heart into his explanations, which he appreciated. And this one was one of the Sage’s clearer ones… though it was still a bit all over the place.

“So this Creation would just be used to upgrade my body, then,” said Zane. “I can’t make use of it in Skills or anything, not even body Skills.”

“Can’t do it,” the Sage confirmed. “It’d just be a cut-and-dry quality upgrade. It’s not part of the soul, it’s only for the body. Just can’t have Creation and Destruction in the soul at the same time. Not unless you’re an exception like that craven little snake, with all those cheats it’s got… and let me tell you, that Malzareth wouldn’t be worth a damned thing without his daddy’s Bloodline!”

Zane blinked. That… kind of came out of nowhere. Though he was always one for more snake-bashing. 

The Sage also confirmed something Zane kind of intuitively knew: that all those Rhino body parts he’d taken in, way back when he was on Earth—the tendons, the heartstrings, and lung—they’d gotten quality upgrades over time too, just as part of his Titan’s Body. They’d naturally upgraded as he took in more Sacred Bones, and steel, and all the Bloodline that came with new body parts.

They still helped power things like his endurance and his stamina even now. 

***

3 months in…

Zane wore a harness, chained up to a giant sled. A sled filled with giant ultra-dense runed-up boulders.

He stood on a 10-mile-long track of hardened space, a straight shot down the middle of Boot Camp.

The track lit up; heavy Gravity Laws practically welded that sled and its load to the ground.

“You go haul ass, lad!” roared the Barbarian Sage.

Zane bellowed and went for it.

Twenty seconds later, he collapsed on the other side, breathing heavily, legs burning, pouring sweat—the thirty-fifth such run he’d done that day. Feeling his heart jackhammering, his Titan’s body burning…

Skill up!

Red Giant Step V -> VI

He re-tested and saw that amounted to another 10% distance boost, shaving just about two seconds off his time.

The ultragrav sled was one of his best explosiveness exercises, an aspect of his physique which was quite important to him. It also worked his quads and calves quite nicely.

It had always been Zane’s opinion that a man’s physique simply wasn’t complete without strong, sturdy legs.

By now, he was deep in Boot Camp. His Law loading had gotten to nearly 4% with his diligent daily loading work.

Suffice it to say, life was pretty great. 

And to top it off—that evening he returned for his usual hearty meat-and-Spirit-Water dinner, and found some letters from his friends waiting for him.