Savage Awakening Chapter 499. Munching Steels (II)

“Fifth form?” said Zane.

The Sage made a noise through a mouthful of meat.

Zane took another thoughtful munch.

Sometimes he did wonder just how strong the old fellow was.

The Barbarian Sage never went much into it, but Zane hadn’t seen anything manage more than a passing scratch—outside that one Malzareth vision, that was.

When he saw the Sage, he always got an impression of great density. The old fellow’s skin was pretty torn up from all the scars on him. But the muscles beneath, and the bones, felt like treasures beyond even Divine Profound. Zane had seen him take 128p barbell-planets to the back of the head—the Sage had barely noticed.

Now that he looked at it—those scars went deeper than he thought. They cut across the bulk of the Sage’s torso, making a gnarly mass. Zane felt the lingering aftereffects of Destruction... They must’ve been the same scars Malzareth had given him in that vision. They’d never healed right.

Still, it didn’t seem to give the Sage too much trouble. He seemed as cheerful as ever.

Zane thought about it for a bit.

Then he shrugged. He figured he might as well ask. “So how many Empyreans can you beat at once?”

The Sage blinked. “S'pose it depends how strong.”

The Sage thought about it too.

“Never really tried taking on too many, to be honest,” he said at last. “Pretty rare you get more than a dozen in one spot. S'pose there was that time I went for Beast-King—I went at ten of those Sun Lion bastards, back-to-back!”

He chuckled. “Now there’s a scrap for you.”

Zane nodded. He wasn’t really sure why he asked it like that, to be honest.

“Let’s just say—back in my day, I just about ran out of Empyreans to fight,” said the Sage cheerfully. “Kept on finding the biggest, baddest Monsters there were—the baddest masters there were too! ‘Till none of ‘em wanted to take a challenge from good ol’ Jogo… took damned ages to get there, though.”

The Sage looked to be reliving happy memories. Probably times with lots of screaming and smashing. He gnawed wistfully on his bone.

It was how unpretentiously the Sage said it, too, that made Zane think the old fellow wasn’t exaggerating at all. He was just listing off good times.

“Sounds like the life,” said Zane honestly. He figured he might try something like that one day, when this was all over.

He kind of already was—beating up the folks on Noughtfire’s incentive list.

“Bah! You’d think so. But the chase, the fight—that’s the meat of it!” said the Sage. He wagged his bone at Zane. “You only realize when you get to the peak. The greatest thing you can give a man’s a worthy challenge! Something he can put his whole life into—batter his heart and soul against, get put down, get back up, and try again, and again, ’till you’ve licked the damn thing!”

The Sage grinned. “If you don’t have that, well—guess you’ve just got to find ways to pass the time. Though in all my years looking, I never felt something quite as good as a good scrap.”

The Sage had that fire in him—the old fellow was just so animated all the time. He still had that fighter’s heart, and then some—but for all the time Zane had known him, he seemed settled. Content to enjoy life. Tending to his beasts, romping about with Fluffy and the like.

He wondered if the old fellow just got a bit bored. …That didn’t seem right, thinking about the Sage.

Zane went for a lamb kebab bursting with juices and started working on it in earnest. “You ever think about leaving the Galaxy?”

For a few seconds, there was only the crackling of fires.

“That’s the funny thing,” said the Sage, tearing off another chunk of meat. “Was just planning on doing it! Then I went and challenged that snake bastard. Thought I’d see how he was doing down there in his Superdungeon—a bit of a foolhardy idea.”

The Sage grinned. “Didn’t go so well, in the end… hell of a fight, though!”

“You don’t look too cut up about it.”

“I’d do it all over again!” said the Sage. He thumped his knee. “That was one of the greatest fights I ever had. Even if the slimy bastard backstabbed me at the start of it! Only thing was—the ol’ bastard got me in a cell and scratched me up a little, for his trouble.”

He nodded down at his scars.

“Took me ages to heal after I broke free—and I mean ages. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of years, just to get the worst of that Destruction out.”

The Sage grinned. “One hell of a fight, though… you should’ve seen it, lad. Damn, but that was one hell of a fight…”

Zane nodded. He could imagine.

“You don’t do much fighting anymore, though.”

“Eh.” The Sage finished off a bone, reached for another. “Always been meaning to get back into it. Took ages to get back into some kind of shape, though—by then I was an ol’ bag of bones. It’s some slog getting here, I tell you—it’ll be a good while since I’m in the shape I was. Kept putting it off—just a few more centuries, out here with my beasts, romping around with Fluffy…”

The Sage scratched his beard, frowning. “Come to think of it—I never really knew where all the time went. A year goes by, then another… I kept meaning to get back into it. Guess all that much time goes by, and you get used to things.”

A few hundred thousand years of no fighting—Zane wasn’t sure what he’d do with himself. A man had to do what he was made for, that’d always been his view.

“Then,” said the Sage. “I saw this damned brat from Earth, fighting a few ice demons down there in the Superdungeon. Fighting with so much damned heart—getting put down over and over again… there was a time I swore that damned dragon had the kid dead to rights! Then they went after his lady, and he made himself get back up—showed the kind of heart I hadn’t seen in ages, not since the days I was gunning for the top! And I thought—hells, if that isn’t what life’s about—I don’t know what is! That’s what it’s all about!”

“I didn’t know that,” said Zane, surprised. He couldn’t remember the exact incident. It could be quite a few, now that he thought about it. “…You thinking about getting back into it now?”

The Sage grinned. “I’m old, lad. …But might be I’ve got one more run in me.”

Zane was pleased to hear it.

“There’s this boot camp I made for myself to get into peak shape—back in early Empyrean. I call it Heaven Defying Camp—that was back when I was real hungry. Going around challenging every Patriarch, Matriarch, and Ancestor I could—taking on the damn world, in my head! All that stuff’s gone to rust… one of these days, when it’s crunch time—time to get in tip-top shape. One of these days, I might just take you.”

He was looking forward to it.

First, though, they had Ruins to clear.

***

The next morning Zane started working on another steel stack—a light breakfast. He was trying not to overdo it. He didn’t want to get too sleepy during the journey ahead. But he did get a good chunk down, enough to put a solid dent in the pile.

After a few bars of infinisteel, he hit some kind of threshold.

He felt an echo in the steel. A scene suggested itself to him, like an old memory.

He saw a dwarf with two giant hammers strapped to his back. His arms and legs were augmented by a mechanical exoskeleton riddled with runes. The rest of the scene filled in—the fellow was sitting on a stool, smack-dab in the middle of a warmly lit workshop—there were shelves full of gears, chunks of intricate interlocking steel, lots of whirring and humming and sparking machines—mechanical arms and breastplates. A helm that looked like something out of an Iron Man movie.

There was a box of a window cut out of the side where stars whizzed by.

A workshop on wheels, it looked like.

The dwarf was bulky, but he had a gentle air to him. Old, with a bushy white beard and sleepy eyes half-hidden behind a pair of wire spectacles. He had the look of a kindly old professor. He was humming something off-tune as he worked at a joint with his tools. He reached over with his exoskeleton hand, casually scooped up a great big chunk of steel, and plonked it onto the desk. Something about it delighted him.

He was working on what looked to be the chest piece of a mech suit. He was just tightening a bolt when the whole workshop ground to a halt.

There was a whine of machinery outside—the sound of a low-grade explosion.

The dwarf frowned, stood, and made his way outside.

The scene drew out to show the full vehicle. It looked like an RV—a workshop tied to two mechanical bulls. Bulls that were billowing an abnormal amount of smoke.

Spikes of sleek shadow, each as big as the tip of an iceberg, had punctured them.

The owners of those spikes made themselves known.

Eight masked men in black fatigues and white-fire insignias, riding skeletal horses with manes burning black fire. Each a half-step Empyrean. Dagger-sharp shadows flickered around their fists.

The biggest of them hopped down and took off his mask. It was a human—a very handsome man, though badly scarred down one cheek. He had an easy grin that showed off a diamond tooth.

“May I help you gentlemen?” said the dwarf mildly.

The man laughed.

“As a matter of fact, you can.”