They teleported into the Plaza of Might, and from there did a few more jumps. One to a near outpost a few light-years outside Steelheart territory. Another to a far outpost. Then a final jump to the edge of the Conclave's teleporting range, nearing the frontier of the Dragonspire Galaxy.
Zane remembered Reina telling him that teleportation stations were something like roads in the Astral Plane. For them to work, you had to build out the links and maintain them. But there were places too chaotic and too dangerous for roads—and that was where they were headed.
"That's as far as it'll take us," said the Sage. He cracked his knuckles. "We're on our own from here on out! We'll have to get through the Outskirts first. That's that whole thing."
He gestured at the scene before them.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of chunks of ice floating about. Some slabs could've spanned small continents. Together they made a great band of extreme cold that slashed across the galaxy, like some enormous wall of ice that'd been shattered, and shattered again for good measure.
You could fit hundreds of planets into it, end-to-end, just in the space Zane could see. And it only went deeper and deeper.
There was something to the breadth of the place—the scope of it—that struck him. A grandeur. This hulking mass of ice chunks, translucent and twinkling and forbidding, throwing seas of freezing aura deep into the Galaxy…
"This here's just the Outskirts. Once we get through here—get into the real Wilderness—that's when you'll get the real nasty stuff," said the Sage cheerfully. "Suneater Lions, Void Mambas. Maybe even White Tigers, if we're lucky."
He stared wistfully into the distance. "Those bastards make for damned great fights, I tell you—great training. But even here there's strong beasts lurking! It'll be a good warmup."
Zane nodded.
"I won't be stepping in, by the way," said the Sage, patting him on the back. "This is your training. Whatever we come across, that's yours to fight."
"Good," said Zane. He wouldn't have it any other way.
The Sage cracked a grin. "Attaboy."
He took another scan of the vast field of ice before them. His gaze settled at a few streaks of black cutting through the white like oil spills staining the ice field, and his brow furrowed.
"Corruption energies," muttered the Sage. "Right. Old Nog told me they'd been dealing with some Monster hordes lately. More and more. Those bastards have gotten to this place too, huh."
He shook his head.
"They never got this far before. The Godbeasts of the Desolate Wilderness will fight each other for a thousand years straight, but if there's one thing they can't stand more than each other, it's Monsters. If it's gotten to the point they're breaking through even here..."
He paused. "Times sure are changing. Stay sharp, lad."
Zane nodded.
Together they waded on in.
***
They leaped between the chunks, moving at a pretty fast clip, bounding miles in a step. A blur of ice chunks whizzed by overhead, underfoot.
It was quiet so far. But Zane could tell it wasn't empty. He could feel the whispers—aura Signatures in the distance. Every one felt strong. Mid-Minor God at the least, and there were traces of Sacred Bone aura everywhere he felt.
There was quite a high concentration of ambient essence here. It was in the air, in the ice, and it only grew the deeper in they went. They were crossing into stronger and stronger zones.
He remembered vaguely—might've been something Reina told him once too, on a walk; she liked going on about all sorts of things—that prehistoric animals back on Earth got up to dinosaur size because there was so much oxygen in the air back then.
He had a feeling it was the same way with essence.
They made it about a quarter of the way through before they ran into their first encounter.
It started as a rumbling. The Barbarian Sage ground to a halt. Sniffed the air.
"Well," he said, crossing his arms. "Looks like they've smelled us."
Then his gaze sharpened.
"Monsters."
All around them, ice chunks began to tremble. Rippling over them, under them.
Then came a low rumble, like the beginnings of an earthquake, starting in the far distance, out and to the right…
A splotch of inky darkness, seen vaguely through the lenses of so many ice chunks. Drawn thick. A horde of them—and the splotch was growing fast.
He honed in and felt their domains.
It felt like an avalanche—but not any known to nature; this was an avalanche that could swallow planets whole. Interstellar clouds of rushing cold shot through with Corruption. Bursting with mid-Tier 6 Laws.
And powering that avalanche, muscling all the Outskirts' ice out the way, were the beasts.
He felt their killing intents latch onto him one by one. Felt their minds, felt how they felt him—an intolerable glut of life, blinding life—too much. They couldn't stand it.
They felt this desire to extinguish him. A hunger at the core of their massive beings.
𝕊𝕜𝕪𝕔𝕣𝕦𝕤𝕙𝕖𝕣 𝕄𝕒𝕞𝕞𝕠𝕥𝕙 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕃𝕠𝕣𝕕)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟝𝟞𝟚
Tusks like icy mountain peaks. Bloodred eyes poked through coats of shaggy onyx fur. Reams of frost poured out their mouths.
There must've been a dozen in that trampling horde. That Corruption cloud raged at their feet, foaming around, crashing through the ice field heedlessly, leaving a long trail of wreckage in its wake. Everywhere it passed the world stopped moving—the asteroids stopped drifting, blackening, going still, as though frostbitten—as though the ice itself had frozen to death.
A cold dark death was descending over this chunk of the galaxy.
Falling straight over Zane.
"Laws of the Giant Gas Cloud!" roared the Sage. "Sweeps through whole star systems—noisy bastards, aren't they?"
It looked to be a dirty blizzard blown up a thousand times.
The Mammoths trumpeted, and that alone blew up a host of asteroids nearby.
Zane had never seen so many Monster Lords in one place. A few in the 540s. Most were higher. The biggest ones, at the head of the pack, crossed the 560s.
Each had Sacred Bone powers in its tusks.
"So!" the Barbarian Sage shouted, and even then he could barely be heard over the rush now. But the grin on his face said all Zane needed to know.
"You ready to show me just what you've been up to?"
Zane slammed his fists together in answer, and the Sage let out a laugh.
He closed his eyes, taking the measure of his foe.
The rumbling had grown so severe now only he and the Sage stayed still. Their bodies were of better make; they couldn't be moved by mere noises.
Zane felt those domains stacking one atop another in the Astral Plane. This great surge, swallowing up more and more of the asteroid belt, adding it to that avalanche, until the entirety of the stampede showed up as a dark cascade, a single force in his mind… a clear enemy. Something he could put his hands on.
He felt his heart start to beat faster and faster.
He burned his Bloodline. His Asura runes flashed.
And his domain roared out of him in a splendor of gold.
Only now that gold meant more than just incredible heat; it blasted the Concept of Radiation. Radiation streamed out in a warbling invisible light. You'd only know it was there by its aftershocks—the little cracks, nearly invisible, that instantly started rupturing the fabric of reality. Zane could feel it doing its terrible work as it rippled into the world.
That bleak blizzard rammed straight into his own. A dozen mid-Tier-6 domains running up against the gold the way a raging river runs up against a dam.
Their domains cracked first.
The gold blasted through. Washed over the black, burning away the cold. And as his domain rushed out to swamp them he felt his enemy in the Astral Plane. That charge made one great solid mass of Corruption and ice and flesh.
But the instant that gold touched them, the instant the Radiation grasped hold of them, he felt tiny fractures rippling through them too. Breaking the links of their beings. And he felt the churning of their minds, the strange subtle sensations rolling through them—and those beasts felt something raking through, a feeling of sudden wrongness, and queasiness, and weakness, like all their bones had gone to straw.
The Mammoths choked—shuddered as one. Eyes bulging, blizzards choking in their throats.
Nuclear powers broke them down on the insides, wreaked havoc. And over their hulking bodies, their hairs were stiffening en masse as though fossilized in real-time.
Being struck by full-force Radiation for the first time was a little like staring straight at the sun with mortal eyes.
His power made his enemy feel brittle and weak as they stood before him. Made them feel utterly exposed.
Just to fight it, there had to be something very solid at the core of them. Otherwise—
A half-dozen trunks blared, trumpeted at once, giving voice to a boiling panic. Monsters started careening off-course, stumbling over each other, crashing sideways. The charge starting to splinter, to lose its thrust. But it was too late to stop.
They'd come to trample Zane, and now there was nothing to do but follow through even as they crumbled.
He wasn't done with them yet.
His hammers burst into being behind him, and in one motion he wound them all the way back.
Solar Flare Gold seared into the world. And his domain spiked to furious new heights.
And the world grew flush with heat. The temperatures, which had been well below what any instrument on Earth could measure, shot up past the melting point of steel in a split second.
All around them asteroids were melting; it felt like the world was melting. It had already been broken down before. To apply such a huge force to it all now…
But the biggest force was yet to come.
Solar Flare snaked over the heads of his hammers, wrapping them like shining gloves around clenched fists.
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕖𝕧𝕠𝕝𝕧𝕖𝕕!
ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕧𝕖𝕟𝕝𝕪 𝕊𝕠𝕝𝕒𝕣 𝔽𝕝𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕊𝕞𝕒𝕤𝕙 (𝕄𝕪𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕔+ (ℍ)) -> ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕧𝕖𝕟𝕝𝕪 𝕊𝕠𝕝𝕒𝕣 𝔽𝕝𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕊𝕞𝕒𝕤𝕙 -> ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕞𝕠𝕟 (ℙ)
By then it didn't look like they stood in the frozen Outskirts anymore. Or in the corrupted world of the Monsters' domain.
It looked like they all stood on the surface of the sun—knee-deep in Zane's power.
He bellowed. And brought his hammers down.