Savage Awakening 517. Founder Fight (IV)

A/N: Bonus chapter!

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Six Giant Skeleton hands reared out of the ground and crushed the Barbarian Sage.

They hammered one on top of another—BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

For a second the Sage’s growls could be heard through the cracks in the fingers, and some kind of Law shield—a flurry of steel—could be seen resisting. 

Then the hands compacted. Making denser fists. There came a crunching. A grunt. It was hard to tell whether it was the shield breaking or bone. 

The hands compacted more, until they could hardly fit a man anymore. 

That last crunch was definitely bone. 

Just when it was starting to look bleak for the Sage, that whole mass began to tremble. Draegmir cocked its head. 

Then the hands burst open with a BANG! 

The Sage charged out roaring, a blur of angry motion. 

The lich moved to block. It wasn’t fast enough.

The Sage’s spearhead struck right where its heart would’ve been. 

There was a flicker of black. The image of a dark sphere.

The lich’s ribs shattered.

But the strike still couldn’t wound the Monster Core beneath. 

Draegmir let out a shriek, and slashed. A vicious wind clocked the Sage right in the soul, sent him tumbling back. But he landed laughing. 

“Nearly got me there,” he said. “Good one, that. ‘Course I had to get you back!”

The lich’s face wasn’t fixed in that creepy smile after all. 

It curved into something hateful. Getting wounded seemed to have incensed it. Maybe it hadn’t thought the Sage was capable of it, all this time. 

“Ah, shit,” said the Sage, though he still seemed pretty cheery. “Now I’ve done it, haven’t I?”

Draegmir shrieked again and thrust a finger right at the moon. 

It drew so much essence, so much Destruction in that moment that stress fractures started showing on its bones. The whites of Destruction breaking through. 

Bone Blasts burst across the sky. Five… ten… twenty—blotting out the sky in bone-white chunks. 

That dread moon dimmed. Its power had all been drained away.  

Thrown into thirty godsdamned Bone Blasts. 

“…You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The Sage had to laugh. “All this for little ol’ me! You really want me dead, eh?” 

When he grinned, at that incredible mass, he wore the same grin as when he’d faced down Malzareth in chains. 

Then it fell. 

The Sage’s spear raced out. And in that moment, he drew deep of the well. 

On muscle memory, on Law, on Concepts he’d wielded ten thousand times in the past; the stuff of mastery, the stuff of a lifetime of brutal battles… he found the core of the Barbarian Sage, and raged with it. 

A Flurry of the Mad God crashed over the skies, and brought down blast, after blast, after blast. 

It was a hell of a Flurry. The kind he would’ve been proud to make, even in his prime, and in it you found all you needed to know about the wildness and heart of the Barbarian Sage. 

But it could only go thirteen strikes. Thirteen Bone Blasts. 

The rest all landed, one after another, in a violent, merciless rythym. 

Then, at last… 

Nothing. 

*** 

The quiet almost seemed strange, after all that talking the Sage had done. 

Draegmir drifted closer, checking on the rubble, wafting aside reams of smoke. It’d felt something crush—a great resistance of essence flattened, made nothing… 

But it was impossible the Sage could’ve survived. 

That kind of Destruction could threaten stars. A single scarred old human was worth little more than the dust whence that species came. 

Still, the ancient lich was inclined to check. Leisurely, Draegmir settled at the site of the devastation. 

In the end, it was bluster after all… 

Draegmir’s grin was back again. 

…Pity… such a pity… pity… 

The pity was that the human had to be destroyed utterly.

He would have made a pleasing addition to Draegmir’s collection. This was so dull a place… any hint of emotion fed the old lich. If only the human could’ve been preserved, played with… but all that remained was a mound of lifeless bone. 

…Such is Fate… 

In the end, a man was a man.

Draegmir was still not certain how the a waste-creature such as man could inflict such a wound on it. 

For the first time in ten thousand years, the lich felt a great welling of displeasure. 

…This would not do. 

It would take it out on the young one, it decided.

The one shining with vitality. It would make him scream. 

Draegmir had a feeling that one was even juicier. The thought of how it would torture him sent a sick thrill through the lich. Its smile came back again…

A cough. 

The lich froze. 

The side of that bone mound burst open. 

And out stumbled the Barbarian Sage. Spitting blood, looking pretty badly banged-up. But altogether in good spirits. He coughed again, spat out a bloody chunk of what looked to be a small, fleshy organ, and frowned at it. Then he grinned. 

“Hells, that hurt,” he croaked. He shook out an arm and the bones clicked back into place. 

…You’re alive. 

“That’s your killer strike?” The Sage crossed his arms and gave the bone hill a once-over. “You hit harder than I would’ve thought, for a skinny little shrimp.”   

At Draegmir’s silence—"Don’t feel too bad,” he said amiably. “I’m pretty damned hard to kill. You go through as many life-and-death fights as I’ve been through, out in the Wilds, you get a knack for surviving.” 

How…? 

“An old investment, I made long ago,” said the Sage wistfully. “Can’t claim any credit now. Back in my prime I made the Fifth Form of the Titan Rhinoceros… doesn’t mean you can’t kill me. Wouldn’t claim that. But…” 

He held out a hand, and his spear fell into his waiting fist. 

“I’m afraid it’ll take a lot more than the likes of you.” 

The old lich just stared. 

“Through all that fighting, I realized something,” said the Sage. His eyes gleamed. “Think I might’ve known it all along. But it took getting whacked in the head like that to shake it loose.” 

What? 

“See, there was one thing I never got.” The Sage wagged his spear at Draegmir. “The Law I practice is called Black Hole. Now, the thing with Black Hole is, it’s got one hell of a pain in the ass for a final Concept. And back in my prime, I fought, and fought, and fought—that’s how I learn these things best! But I never could get the hang of it… just didn’t have enough Destruction to make it work.” 

A circle of absolute black started swirling at the tip of the Sage’s spear. Fearsome Laws condensed. 

“Turns out there just wasn’t enough in Dragonspire, at the time. Destruction, that is. Nothing I could’ve done. So I made plans to get the hells out. But not before picking a fight with the big bad making a damned mess of the place.” 

Destruction started massing around the edge of that black sphere. A ring of absolute white, even as the blackness grew denser…

The Lich was still silent. Bit hard to tell with Lich faces, but the Sage had a feeling it couldn’t believe what it was looking at. He kept on rambling.  

“I had that fight. Got banged up with Destruction, some of it so damned deep it stuck around a few hundred thousand years! Enough Destruction to kill an Empyrean who knows how many times over, if it weren’t for my Titanform. You let that Destruction simmer the ages. Tear at your unconscious through the rise and fall of civilizations, through the life-cycles of stars… turns out, give it enough time, and you learn a thing or two. Eventually it just becomes a part of you.” 

The creation at the tip of the Sage’s spear looked like a fuzzy nothing-sphere. A great nothing even in the Astral Plane. 

Destruction crackled through it like white lightning. 

“I ought to thank that little snake!” laughed the Sage. “Might be I’ll get a chance to do it in person.” 

Those Destruction-sparks were so dense even Draegmir looked entranced by them. 

“That was one hell of a fight you gave me. Made me poke around in the dustiest back-corners of my damned mind… well, I took a poke in there, and I found something.” 

He grinned, looking a little mad. “Turns out I had the pieces all along! Might’ve had ‘em quite some time. Just never really looked, and pieced it all together… guess sometimes these things just take a while.” 

He hefted his spear. “Anyway. I’ve just about had enough of you.” 

The Sage struck. 

The spear made an arc in the air, and the creation on its tip began to tremble, made a sound like static in the Astral Plane. 

Draegmir snapped out of it. It threw up gnarled hands, shrieking. Worlds of bone avalanched. 

The spear simply deleted them. It was the simplest attack in the world. 

Then it went a step further, and rammed through the chest of the lich. 

It wasn’t that fuzzy sphere, at the end, that destroyed the lich. It was a formidable thing, and it was suffused with Destruction, and its gravity was so vicious it made reality liquid, made it crash like a whitewater river as it moved through. 

Draegmir could’ve withstood all that. 

But at the heart of that sphere, that Black Hole, there was a mystery. A point where infinity was not just a theory, but was made real. 

A point of utter annihilation. 

It was only there for a fraction of a fraction of a heartbeat. Right at the moment of contact. 

But that was enough. 

Draegmir the Lich took that blow, and ceased. 

Its Monster Emperor core went first. A power source as strong as a star, simply deleted. Then the rest of the lich compressed around the tip of the spear. Just bones crushed to dust. And Destruction took care of that too. This all happened in a single instant.

The Barbarian Sage landed in a crouch. “Phew!” 

The tip of his spear was smoking. The ten million-year Bone that made its tip was cracked. He didn’t mind that. It’d heal in time. 

He had to chuckle. 

“That little shrimp really thought it could kill me.” There was a hard light in his eyes. 

And for a moment, you could imagine the man who’d been the undisputed strongest fighter in Dragonspire, standing atop an ocean of Empyrean skulls. 

The light winked out. He put his spear away. Cracked his back and groaned. “Damn, but that was hell on the joints!” 

He frowned down at himself. “I’ve got to stretch more,” he concluded. Then he shrugged and went to check on how the lad was doing. 

***

Zane, it turned out, was wrapping things up too. 

It looked like he’d figured out his Gravity concept. The Sage had a feeling he would. It made those Founder skeletons look like they were moving through mud.

The Azure Flame Founder was dragonkin. And its Skeleton could summon dragon-wings too. It just managed to break free, make for open air—

Then Zane clocked it, closed a fist at the sky, and wrenched it right into the ground. It made a hefty crater. The Sage winced. “Oof!” 

He watched as the lad out-wrestled Thalgrim, and crushed the dwarf in a hammer-off. He watched as the Mistress-skeleton tried binding him with her vine-thorns, tried dimming his life-blood with some pretty gnarly poisons. But he just grabbed her vines, wrenched her in, and crushed. 

The assassin skeleton had the most luck—ol’ Thousand Faces. Most legendary assassin this Galaxy had ever produced, that one, and even in death it kept its wiles. The fellow could shadow-walk, which let it escape some of Zane’s gravity. 

It kept flitting from shadow to shadow, and every slash it made splintered into hundreds more. 

But nothing it did caused the lad any more than irritation. 

The Sage had to whistle. “Damn!” 

By how frantic that thing was slashing, he was pretty damned sure it was fighting scared. And he didn’t know undead even did that. Couldn’t blame the skeleton, really. Looking at the lad now—a walking juggernaut that kept healing, no matter what you threw at him, that could end you in a single blow, where one mistake meant he’d get his hands on you, and it’d be over… 

Must be pretty terrifying, fighting that as a Monster. 

The Sage almost felt bad for the poor assassin when Zane ripped it out of its shadow by the neck, smashed it into the ground, and finished it with two swift Red Giant punches. 

The Sage waved as he ambled in. 

“You just about done with ‘em?” 

Zane blinked. The lad was still deep in fight-mode. He looked down, and almost seemed surprised to find he’d wrecked them all. “…Yeah,” said Zane. “Just about.” 

The Sage gave him an ol’ head-ruffle.

“Good stuff! Right. See those big ol' bunkers? I’ll bet a damned spleen that's where the Lich’s hoarding the best stuff this Ruin’s got to offer. What do you say we sack this place and get on out of here?"