Savage Awakening 503. The Grand Engineer (II)

It wasn’t that Zane minded a nose break now and again. It happened against these heavy hitters. He’d just been hoping it would hit a little later. The first exchange of the fight was a little embarrassing, he felt, even at his nose break rates.

He shook his head, trying to clear it—whirled, felt it lock onto him again, and just managed to dodge a pillar of an energy beam.

He landed in a crouch.

All told, that first exchange didn’t go too badly, he felt. He could work with this.

The idea was to get a measure of the Monster. Try to figure out the thing’s skill set, how it worked. Gauge the kind of firepower it was working with.

Then he’d take it down.

So far, he knew it could make lots of stuff very quickly—which made sense. The fellow could build just about anything, it seemed, and fast. Skeleton-Dormu had almost as much Creation as he had Destruction. There was so much that it was a bit hard to keep up with.

He'd just had that thought when he looked up.

There—spinning slowly midair—were hundreds of bars of infinisteel, slowly turning, like giant metal icicles.

Then it all fell at once.

He lashed out with his chains and exploded a string of them—sent the bulk of them slanting away. Just then, a fleet of oil tankers rammed him from behind, nearly bowling him over; but when he righted himself, one hammer was enough to blow up a lot of them. He looked up, only to see more infinisteel already crashing over him.

He lashed out a palm and threw up his own gravity. Put his whole soul into it, like a body slam of the mind—he just managed to knock them off course.

He barely had a second to gather himself before one more bulky shadow fell over him. He rolled out of the way, and this giant cracked bell dropped out of nowhere, thick with gravity, making yet another crater. If it had hit him like that, it might’ve flattened him.

He narrowed his eyes.

This fellow really wanted to crush him.

He was almost surprised to find himself out in the open after that. When he gave the dwarf a look, he saw its core flickering—Creation welling up again.

The thing was recharging. Zane had weathered the storm.

He seized that moment and counterattacked.

Went right into an annihilation charge. One step, two, three, slammed down in rapid succession—when the mecha-dwarf saw it, he started throwing more scrap in his way. But he zig-zagged right through them, gaining momentum, gaining undeniable speed—

His hammers trailed behind him, building speed just as fast.

He put all he had into them as he unleashed. Cranked up the weight, dropped gravity hard—and just let that dwarf have it. Gritted his teeth and sank in a Red Giant Smash.

BOOM!

Its arms exploded into shields. But those shields caved in just as fast under the weight of Zane’s blow; sparks showered—the dwarf had to stumble two steps back. He felt countless gears cranking hard, engines blowing beneath the surface as the monster to keep it all together.

When the smoke cleared, it was still standing.

But Zane could see the dent he’d put in it. And that gave him a great deal of heart.

He’d made that thing bleed. For all that energy packed in, all that creation, all that corruption and high-grade steel—it was still made of stuff he could get his hands on. Stuff he knew how to break.

If he just got a few good hard blows in, he could make it scrap metal.

All it took was executing now.

He had to dive out of the way of yet another avalanche. He was feeling pretty good, confident. He felt like he had a read on the thing. The main problem was still that it had way too much stuff to throw at him. It seemed it had fully recharged.

He’d just have to slow the thing down…

It stilled. He blinked at it.

The engines whirred louder.

Data gathered.

He had a sinking feeling.

Commence kill sequence.

Death-world initiating…

He roared and launched for it—but the dwarf was faster.

It slammed its fists together. Before he could get in another step, that inner universe swamped everything.

When he blinked again, he found himself standing in a tunnel. Brick beneath his feet, brick above, making the walls too, all welded together by tons on tons of high-grade steel. Out in front, torches lit the way.

It had managed to shove him into its pseudo-universe.

…This was a first.

He glanced around, letting his senses go wide. But he couldn’t quite sense an exit—just more bends and turns in the tunnel. It seemed to be some kind of labyrinth, a maze. It was all much bigger than any inner universe he’d seen.

The dwarf lived up to his name, it looked like. It had built a world—and now he was stuck in here.

But he could sense the dwarf was in here too, and that gave him direction. He sensed it somewhere in the distant tunnel, just a few miles ahead of him. It might have home-court advantage here, but he still had his body and his Great Sage Mind.

He didn’t mind tracking it down and finishing it. It might even be kind of fun, he felt—a new challenge.

He wanted to see just what it would throw at him, just how it would try to stop him.

He still wanted to get it back for that broken nose.

He was just about to set off when the walls to either side of him surged with spikes. The same happened with the ceiling.

He had just a moment to blink—he briefly registered four giant pistons. Then it all crushed in.

Blood spurted.

“Ow,” groaned Zane.

Each of those spikes was tipped with Creation. He wasn’t skewered, but he’d been cut to the muscle in a few places. He was bleeding quite a bit now, crisscrossing his body. It annoyed him more than anything.

Then cannons popped out of the ceiling.

At the same time, chunks of wall slid back, revealing flamethrowers. Chunks of ceiling broke open, showing giant vats of oil.

***

Then it all whacked him at once.

Zane roared.

For a few seconds, that sound was lost in the flood—then it burst through again. There was a great shattering; a world-shaking blast as Red Giant consumed that lesser flame. Zane burst through that hallway of ruined spikes, breaking through trap after trap, punching his way into the open.

“Now you’ve done it,” he growled.

He exploded down that labyrinth hall like a bull.

Along the way, he managed to trigger six more booby traps: ice-throwers, spiked wrecking balls—

Warning!

Health under 75%

Ten seconds later, he staggered out of that kill-hallway—just after getting smashed by two wrecking balls, one to each side, making his ears ring.

He had to say—he was getting more and more pissed off by this whole thing. Right now, it was just teeing off on him. It knew he couldn’t dodge in here.

The good thing was he was pretty sure he was getting closer. It was a little hard to tell in this maze. But he kept powering through, clearing whole corridors with Red Giant Steps—the distance was starting to close.

Soon, he felt an opening up ahead.

He burst his way into the light.

Bright lights torched a distant domed ceiling. When he blinked them away, he saw… stands.

It was a stadium. The stands were packed with tiny cheering robots. Quite a few were eating scrap metal as popcorn. A jumbo-tron flashed high above, showing his bewildered face.

He was the only man down in the arena.

…Just what was going on?

There were a few more entrances to the arena—each big enough to fit a highway. He could sense the mecha-dwarf was somewhere up ahead—just about halfway between two entrances on the other side. He couldn’t quite tell which was closer.

Then a klaxon blared.

Moments later, he heard the rumble.

Undead green eyes burned through the entrance on the left—there had to be dozens of them. Then more showed up in the back.

The same in the entrance to the right, but even more. And footsteps rumbled through the din, a mechanical STOMP-STOMP-STOMP.

His Great Sage Mind got swamped with signals. He sensed down the tunnel, and it just didn’t end. More and more poured in by the second.

Even behind him, shoring up the exit. There had to be hundreds each way, charging into the arena at speed.

The spectator robots cheered as they burst in—making these high-pitched whirs. These droids wielded chainsaws, electric tridents, and flamethrowers, hammers dripping dirt, all making one big stampede.

He got to thinking. The mecha-dwarf wanted to swamp him.

Those tight tunnels would’ve been a better place to set up that kind of ambush. Out here, in open space, he had room to work.

He got out his hammers. Faced down the hordes.

And Zane began to smash.

***

The Barbarian Sage inspected the portal before him.

It was a pretty big portal. It led into the pseudo-Universe that had blown up out of the blue and sucked his disciple right in.

The thing with these pseudo-worlds was that you couldn't quite see into them like you could a normal world. They belonged to their owners. That Dormu-skeleton would have quite a bit of control. The Sage had no clue what was going on in there. 

Now—the Sage didn’t want to go in and accidentally put a thumb on the scale. That’d be a real shame, mucking up a clean win for his disciple like that.

He blinked at the portal for a bit.

He could still hear the clashes coming through. He wondered if sound went the other way too.

…

“Hang in there!” roared the Sage at the blank black sphere. “You’re doing great, lad! Just a little more—you take it to ‘em!”

***

Zane’s smashes took out half the arena at a time.

He’d thought about trying Red Giant Storm, but this place was a little too small to get anything big going—and he didn’t need to burn that much essence anyway.

Just his smashes were getting the job done, he was pleased to see.

He got the feeling the mecha-dwarf thought it could play with him—get off free hits on him forever. It was trying to treat him like a punching bag.

Zane did not appreciate that.

It was playing a dangerous game, as far as he was concerned. The thing about angering him was that the consequences showed in his body. And his body was well fired up now. If it thought it could keep getting away with it…

He narrowed his eyes.

For now, he focused on taking out a horde of spider constructs. These droid spiders that spewed lightning-webs; others spewed ice-webs. But he took them out before they could cause much trouble.

He’d drag fifty or sixty into a gravity-cluster, then smash them all with a hammer. He was getting a good 40% more monsters this way.

It was actually proving quite solid practice, he was finding. Not just as Gravity practice.

He was getting a good deal of essence out of this mass smashing too. They might be constructs, but they gave essence like real monsters—maybe because of all that Creation in them. He wasn’t sure.

He could see the vision for why this arena could prove quite difficult. It might even be enough to finish some half-step Empyreans off.

It wasn’t really built for someone with his firepower, though. Or his reserves. If they wanted to throw scraps at him, he could keep on smashing them for quite a bit.

For Zane, it was a neat farming experience more than anything.

In the stands, the robots started to boo. He had the feeling he was meant to be the heel—like he was the beast brought in for their kind to take down. He wasn’t going down very easily, though.

…This world was kind of weird.

He was done with this place.

Time to see about finishing that mecha-dwarf off.

He chose an entrance, smashing as he went, clearing his way—wading through tides of angry steel. Making for the Boss.