Durff was heavy, and that was a problem because his hammer was supposed to be heavy. Heavy hammers hit people hard, that was the simple and basic understanding of how they worked.

Oh, sure, the Scarlet Alliance had a lot of fancy words for that. They talked about velocity and momentum and weird sorts of energy that he didn’t know about. It didn’t matter, because he was part of the upper realms and thus used upper energy to do stuff. Simple.

He got to see all sorts of scrolls and techniques written for hammers. He appreciated the opportunity, and did his best to learn from them. But for the most part, they were too hard to understand. He wasn’t sure how people were supposed to get that stuff. If he knew, he would probably be a normal member of the Guardians of the Veiled Brilliance.

But he didn’t get it. And even though they gave him lots of things that were hard to understand, he liked the Scarlet Alliance and the people in it. They were trying to help, and it was better than not being given any opportunities.

Durff thought the best option for him came from that sword lady. Durff had tried holding two hammers. It was helpful, even though the only thing he learned from it was that he wasn’t a two-hammer guy. He was definitely a one big hammer guy.

Her other advice had been to fight stuff. Maybe even people with hammers specifically, but he didn’t know of any sizable groups of them that were on any sort of approved hammering list. Maybe far into one of the groups on either side, but he knew better than to intrude into the Exalted Quadrant on his own. And he shouldn’t go into the Trigold Cluster because they might think he was a spy or whatever. Them being his new friends. And maybe the Trigold Cluster too, now that he thought about it.

Without a good supply of humans to fight, he looked up things he could hammer. There was one system people didn’t like because of what they called ‘overly aggressive asteroids’. Frankly, Durff thought that flying space rocks were pretty aggressive by their very nature, just daring anything to get in front of them.

-----

The system was up north, but not too close to the Everheart System. Durff wanted to stay away from that. Everyone talked like Everheart was dead, but acted like he was alive. The same was true of the one person Durff had trusted back in the Trigold Cluster, his aunt Eka. Lots of other people said he was dead and acted like it. And then they were dead.

Unlike almost everyone, Durff didn’t think he had anything against Everheart. But he also didn’t have any reason to go near something a dangerous cultivator claimed. So he made sure to avoid that place when he came to the weird little system with dangerous rocks.

The system didn’t have any planets, just asteroids. They were in big rings and a weird cloud. Durff knew that some people said the system should have once had planets, and they got broken up. In Durff’s opinion, he just thought the asteroids liked being able to move around on their own.

They certainly enjoyed it now, rushing towards him as soon as he entered the system. Durff was glad they did, because it was a really long way between each of them and he would have had to turn and change his direction a lot to get to all of them.

Well, it was still only a small fraction of them. But a good thousand or so were rushing towards him. They were full of energy. Better, they were heavy. He felt it, even as they approached.

He swung his hammer at the first one, fully expecting to smash it to smithereens. It didn’t attempt to avoid him at all, merely rushing towards him in a straight line. However, he didn’t think he even chipped the thing. Instead, he sent it flying back in the other direction.

Were they unbreakable? No, Durff knew that wasn’t possible. He had to be able to smash them. He just wasn’t good enough. He batted aside another dozen of them as they came in rapid sequence.

Without footing, it was hard to hit good. And smashing things against other things was better than not. Durff knew that, and it seemed the asteroids did too because they tried to smash into him from opposite sides.

Occasionally they succeeded.

With a big crash, Durff was rocked as two asteroids bigger than him and smaller than a mountain hit him together, squashing him from both sides. He felt his bones creak. He shoved them away, using his legs to kick one out then spinning to smash the other with his hammer.

The bombardment of attacks didn’t end. It was… nice. Just a bunch of rocks trying to smash Durff while he tried to smash them. He had a feeling they might kill him, but he didn’t worry about that. All he had to do was be the one who won the fight, and he would survive.

They sure didn’t break apart easily. He even slammed one into another, coming in at an angle. They bounced off of each other instead of shattering… though he did see a few small chips. Those little bits also tried to attack him, as it turned out. But they weren’t heavy or fast, so it didn’t matter.

At least he only ever had to deal with two or so at once. More than that simply couldn’t squash him, and they didn’t coordinate well enough for the funny shaped ones to fit together. Sometimes, when he smacked them, they seemed to slam into each other on purpose too.

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This was good. Durff didn’t know if he could make a hammer out of one of these things, but maybe he would try. Then it would be heavy and smash things good.

Not having to worry about poisons, surprised attacks, traps, teeth, weird energy draining formations, and all sorts of things like that made Durff’s time really relaxing. Sure, his bones were getting chipped both from incoming attacks and sometimes the force of his own blows, but that was fine. He could put the pieces back where they belonged when he was done.

-----

Almost on the opposite side of the band of the Upper Realms that contained the Scarlet Alliance, Alva was engaging in significantly less brutal training. In fact, she was facing no resistance at all as her shots flew to the south… across the border into the Lower Realms.

She wasn’t trying to hit anything there, of course. She wasn’t even trying to reach the other side. Distance wasn’t her area of expertise, unlike Anton. However, there was something more to each shot now that might bridge that gap. Alva kind of wished she could, actually. That way, she could show him her progress directly instead of through some sort of recording. Those just… weren’t as good.

Her arrows flew forward towards the nothingness. Rather than mixed upper and lower energy, the border was basically empty. As empty as anything ever got, which was pretty darn empty.

Alva’s arrows were neither fast enough nor enduring enough to cross the whole distance to the lower realms, multiple lightyears even at the thinnest point. However, if that distance was suddenly far shorter? They might.

Her arrows distorted space around them, courtesy of the distortion beast they had fought in the secret realm. And the weird way things were constructed there, being stuck in a partial dimension. Nothing really made sense, not straight lines or curves or up or down.

If asked to explain it to anyone, she couldn’t have given them anything useful despite the insights being her catalyst for Augmentation. At best, she might be able to demonstrate and compare to those who already had similar insights.

An arrow left Alva’s sight and senses in a single instant, traversing more distance than was normally possible. Layers of subspace seemed to be ever tighter, and Alva could shoot into the second and potentially third layers. She would be quite good at killing distortion beasts, but even they didn’t live between realms. Simply nothing existed for them to feed on, no matter or energy of any kind.

With each shot, Alva considered what she could actually do. She had shot an arrow inside something, bypassing the outside. That was true even of a static formation, protecting an area with energy. Catarina had made her various iterations meant to restrict subspace movement, and the formation master’s expertise outsped Alva’s ability. She could bypass static shields, even deep and crossing layers of reality, but there was a certain level of adaptation she simply wasn’t ready for yet.

Oddly enough, distortion beasts were actually easier to kill as they lived on several layers of reality at once, even if it was difficult to kill them from the top layer where they only occasionally dipped a small and usually deadly part of themself.

But Alva wasn't really worried about shooting distortion beasts. Oh no, the Scarlet Alliance had that handled. The first step was to never tempt them to begin with, but if they had to be killed they had methods.

Instead what Alva really wanted to shoot was other cultivators. At this point, she was chiefly concerned with a small group of them. Domination cultivators. If she could slip past their energy defenses, they should die like anyone else. But she knew that it wouldn’t be so easy. The sheer power she’d felt was practically reality warping on its own, so keeping a stable shot even if they were simply standing there would be difficult.

Active dodging or blocking? Much more difficult. The chances of someone at that level not understanding at least in part the structure of subspace would be absurd. Well, considering how Zaur and Ratna had zoomed off they clearly knew how to travel in it if nothing else.

Unless they were completely insensitive to such things, she’d need to improve her technique to hurt anyone like them. But still, she felt she had something special. Nothing so extreme as Chidi’s Negation, but certainly something she could make good use of. And maybe, hopefully, Anton would be able to see if. If she could reach him, he could praise her properly, instead of just doing it because he was a kind grandpa. And she kind of hoped maybe, for once, he could learn something from her.

But for that, she’d probably need to shoot a few million more arrows at least. Which meant there was no time to cease practicing.

-----

Yuval’s core fighting style had been obvious early on. From the moment the kid was able to properly control energy, he converted it into fire. But he didn’t settle for simply manipulating energy. On the other hand, he also didn’t pick up any sort of weapon.

Vari wasn’t sure if it was her fault. It could have been a coincidence. Either way, Yuval took to using his hands and feet as catalysts for his flames.

With superheated flames matching the motion of his own body, his enemies would turn to ash before him. Well, once he actually had more energy. For the moment, he could certainly incinerate wooden training dummies. He couldn’t melt stone yet, but it really wasn’t a surprise.

Yuval was still early in his training after all. He’d raced through Body Tempering, and was now pushing through Spirit Building at a rapid pace. All that, even though he was limited by his parent’s insistence that he practice with lower energy. There was something that just wasn’t the same as doing it post Integration, a fact that Vari could attest to herself.

“Keep your guard up!” Vari instructed. “Remember that if you’re not instantly incinerating your opponent, they can easily counter you. Your range is as short as it can be, so you have to be faster. More flexible.”

The kid grinned. He clearly enjoyed using his abilities. But… they were going to have to demonstrate to him what losing was like soon. Obviously that was difficult, given those close in age weren’t great matches for his strength, and his parents or Vari herself defeating him was only natural, no matter how much they technically restricted their energy.

Though they did have one option. It was probably cheating, but they kept Jyotsana in their pocket for an emergency. Fuzz was betting on one of the wolf pups though. Some of them took after their father, and it would be optimal if Yuval was defeated with his own element.

He needed to learn, before he got a big head. It could easily happen, especially to geniuses raised in certain contexts. So they’d find something that wouldn’t kill him but would still make him understand. For his own good.