Zane heard his own roar, proud and unrelenting, rolling into the far distance. There was triumph in it. And a challenge, too. The same one he'd posed to this world since he’d come.

It had not been able to answer him.

He stood there, feeling pleased. But also feeling the heat start to fade out of him, his breaths start to wind down. His head growing heavy, his thoughts feeling thick inside his head… he wondered if he would get a reprieve before the next planet.

Then he blinked. Looked around.

He appeared to be wobbling.

He frowned.

It wasn't him that was wobbling—the whole island was. He looked around some more and saw it wasn't just his island. Every island on that shattered planet began to shake…

And it was then that he realized this still, somehow, wasn't over.

The floating islands parted before him like waves in a stormy sea… something was rearing up from the far depths, something absolutely massive.

A skyscraper of a head rising from the shattered earth, then more steel still, rising faster and faster, sloughing off sheets of magma as it came—

A sheer cliff of a torso, cuffed with gold, gleaming silver. Huge bulbous lights ran down the front. The arms were pillars of steel, ending at claws big enough to grapple mountains.

Zane had never seen anything like it.

It towered over him in full, casting a bleak shadow that drenched a quarter of the planet. It had to be a thousand feet tall once it rose to its full height, maybe more. A deity forged of the planet itself—maybe the planet’s very spirit, manifest in one terrible form…

God Golem (Simulated Monster Lord)

Essence Level 488

It made a sound like tectonic plates clashing, fathomlessly cavernous, and Zane felt it through the islands at his feet, sending earthquakes trembling through them…

Zane blinked at it. A pause.

“…Hm,” said Zane.

That was quite a bit of a Level jump. Over seventy Levels from the last few Ascendants.

And it wasn’t just the essence crashing down over him, many times denser than any of the others. Not just the Laws either—which were on a completely different tier, wrought with Tier 5 Concepts that easily dwarfed the others’ too.

The most telling thing was this God Golem’s aura.

Zane had never heard of that ‘Monster Lord’ title. But it had to be something greater than Monster Grand Knight and Monster Knight. The Corruption streaming off it… he got a vague sense for what that meant now. The energies running through that gigantic body—it was a similar feeling to what he got from that Minotaur. And those Corruption beasts. And that Hydra, and the rest of the Monster Knights… just much, much more dense.

Now he could feel it so clearly, he put a finger on it—it felt like a higher grade of the same Bloodline. Some Monstrous Corruption Bloodline they all shared… only this one had enough to be a Lord.

He felt it most viscerally when its domain blew out in full, rolled over him. He groaned under the weight of it.

It was clear then that thing was no normal Ascendant. The gap between this thing and an Ascendant was at least as much as the gap between an Ascendant and a Nascent.

Zane inspected himself.

His own Bloodline appeared to be almost entirely burned out.

His Health wasn’t doing so great either—closer to 10% than 25%.

His Soul… he wasn’t sure he could get any more attacks out of it. He got a splitting migraine the last time he tried…

His essence was mostly gone too.

A few of his limbs did seem to still be mostly working, though. So that was nice, at least.

He blinked at the immensity before him. The over 100 Levels standing between them. A full tier of Law. A full tank of very powerful Bloodline, and an essence pool to rival his own at his peak...

He scratched his head.

If he thought about it too much, he thought he might come to the conclusion things weren’t looking too good.

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Eh.

He decided to stop thinking about it.

He just bared his teeth and attacked.

He let loose a bellow just as fierce as all of his other charges, and launched himself at that deity. It was like attacking a mountain—he wasn’t even sure where to start. So he went straight for it, head-on.

He just knew he would give it everything he had left. When he attacked, he fought to win.

As he rose—Chains flaring behind him, hammers at their ends—he called up one last strike.

Wish Upon a Star.

Twin stars erupted in air. So intensely purple they burned away the shadows that Golem cast, burned away at its domain, even—challenging its supremacy… and for a moment it truly looked like the fight hung in the balance.

It was the sort of attack that, given the good three seconds to charge up and unleash, might have done some serious damage...

Unfortunately, in the space of those three seconds the God Golem picked up a nearby island—some hundreds of tons of dense steel—wrapped it in an even denser layer of Tier 5 Law—and smashed Zane out of the sky with it, putting a rather abrupt stop to that.

It drove this smash deep into the island Zane stood on. So deep that island shattered too.

The golem kept on driving. Islands kept on shattering, deeper and deeper...

You could hear the crunch of Zane’s body with every new layer it passed.

***

A planet away…

Burnwater winced, almost choking on his tea.

“Ai!” he gasped. “… That’s got to hurt… ah… that’s it, I think…”

He set down the cup.

“Still—great run—fantastic, really!” said Burnwater. “You did very well out there, Zane. You sure showed a lot of folks.”

It was Zane’s unofficial debut—the first time most of the Galaxy would be able to see him in action, whether live or through recordings. Burnwater was quite proud of his junior apprentice-brother.

“You’ll come back much stronger,” said Burnwater to the pile of smoking rocks on his scrying glass. A pile of smoking rocks at the bottom of an extinction event-sized crater.

“Once you weave in that soul attack,” said Burnwater. “You’ll get ‘em next time for sure! Just keep on… err…”

He paused. Frowned.

Unless his eyes were deceiving him, that pile of smoking rocks appeared to be trembling.

Then—all at once it burst open, and this time Burnwater actually choked on his tea.

There was a hunched, bloodied, shattered figure. Staggering to his feet…

“...Zane?!”

***

All the blood had drained from Lin Rai’s face. Her mouth kept moving—no sound was coming out.

She could hardly even tell that wreck was Zane anymore. He still had his size. But every part of him was crushed—bones poked out of every limb. At least one leg, maybe both, were broken. His arms were broken. His chest was broken. So was his back.

… It was hard to find a part of Zane that was not broken.

“How—…?!” she croaked.

She saw the air warping around him—a heat-wave of purple and silver, the colors of Stormfire and the Titan Rhinoceros intertwined… a heat that pulsed out of the core of him, out of a fierce, unyielding heart. A heat so intense it cracked the stones at his feet…

Woozy, stumbling, Zane Walker got to his feet.

Silence.

Even the God Golem seemed shocked, staring down at him. Like it didn’t quite know what to do.

It soon decided on a course of action, though.

It picked up a second island and smashed Zane with it.

***

It wasn’t just Burnwater and Lin. By now, folks across the Azure Flame Faction had caught wind of this—and a few outside the Azure Flame Faction too…

Planet Sunny Day

Thousand Seas Tribe

Planet Sunny Day was the lounge planet of the Outer Faction Chosen of the Thousand Seas Tribe—where they all came to relax after a hard day's work. It was pristine beach after pristine beach, with sparkling blue waters in between, so clear you could see from one end of the planet to the other.

The Chosen here were tanned, wearing shell dresses or woven seaweed. Some were bare-chested. Usually they would be sipping fruit drinks, or splashing about playing in this tropical paradise. But right now, most of them were gathered on one giant log raft with a mist-projection on it, staring in rapt attention.

One girl sat at the very front. She was the only one there in a hoodie, and she was eating out of a giant tub of popcorn. The other Chosen were also eating popcorn from their own tubs too—a new invention which quickly caught on in the Thousand Seas Tribe after the hoodie-girl introduced it.

They let out a collective gasp. A silence.

A beat passed. Another.

The God Golem inspected the island he’d just used to smash Zane Walker for a second time. The Golem seemed almost hesitant, suspicious. Carefully, it picked up the thing with two pillar fingers. Revealing the remains beneath.

There was a musclebound but extremely broken man. Lying face-down on the ground. Squashed about as flat as a man can be squished.

Then the man groaned. Again.

The God Golem couldn’t seem to believe its eyes as Zane propped himself up on one shattered arm. Then another. Lurching to a knee, then another, then rising to his feet—still woozy—somehow wobbling upright…

The heat coming off him now, off his heart, was starting to melt the stones around his feet. By the look in Zane’s eyes, he did not seem to be fully there, even. It was just a mask of pure determination.

The whole Thousand Seas Tribe raft exploded in consternation. Disciples clutched their heads, dropped their popcorn, let out wild cries—and all the while, there was Avery, going, “See? I told you!”

Then the God Golem grabbed another island, and smashed Zane again.

It promptly grabbed another island, loaded it with an apocalyptic amount of essence and Tier-6 Law and dropped it on the same place. It repeated this two more times for good measure.

They all stared at the comically shattered abyss—an abyss running straight to the heart of the planet.

There was a smoking, shattered ruins at the bottom of it. A heap of rock so pulverized it was all but fine dust.

…The rocks began to tremble—

By now the God Golem was looking rather traumatized.

The Golem screeched, hauled up an entire continent, and brought it down on the rock-pile.

There was a long, strained silence.

…And then—at last—the run ended.

There was silence too on the Thousand Seas Raft.

The first disciple who managed to pick his jaw off the floor croaked, “Heavens…”

The second, a girl who was their #1-ranked Chosen, cried, “Just how much can that man take?!”

Avery snorted. “You haven't seen anything yet,” she said through a mouthful of popcorn. “That was him at like 50% power! If Reina was in danger, he could've eaten at least six more of those.”

There were many ‘ooh’s and ‘ahh’s all around.