The half-Ascendants fell just as swiftly as the Nascents. They’d hardly risen before Zane’s Domain swept over, dooming them in a Stormfire hell.

Then came the strikes—BOOM-BOOM! Tufts of shining purple punching straight through their fat bodies like they were made of cardboard, not high-caliber steel.

Zane watched lumps of the half-melted metal whirl across the sky, watched angry red eyes dimming… These things had beaten him up quite a bit just a few days ago. Now they could not hope to touch him.

Things changed quite fast after he’d arrived at the Lightning Constellation, he thought.

Skill up!

Stormfire Smash IX -> X

Next came the full-on Ascendants.

The Hypergolems first, CLANG-CLANGing their way up the islands’ edges, throwing their claws like grappling hooks looping over the stone. As soon as they cleared the ridges, their domains blasted all over him—and Zane felt a new kind of pressure.

But it felt different this time around, now he had his own domain. Now he could fight back.

Two raging hurricanes met in a stark shining line. One a deep-silver heavy magnetic field. The other a whirlwind of lightning and fierce flame, searing through everything that dared cross its path…

Stormfire smashed through. Swallowed up that lesser Law, engulfing it—marking out the world as Zane’s own. Sparks of Stormfire started blistering the golem’s metal shell, and the material made a hissing sound, as though crying out in pain…

That was just one beast, though.

Still more were coming through. Lending their domains to the charge, throwing Zane’s powers back. Ascendant Sky Serpents zigzagged down the storm-clouds, hissing and cranking, and steely gray-whites started taking back the color of the air. Started to overcome him again.

He was still just one man, in the end—and this with the pseudo-domain, not a full one. That would come soon. For now, it had done enough.

Zane took a deep breath.

This time he took out his Axes. His hammers would do too—but he wanted to see what new kinds of destruction he could bring. They rose slowly, edges lighting up in sickles of concentrated light and heat—heat that ran strong and flush through his body, lighting up every last muscle in him, connecting it all in one great link of pure strength—

He took the Monsters to task.

Wrenched one chain hard and an axe screamed out, finding a golem’s grasping tentacles—the blinding edge met the dark-gray and sliced clean through, leaving only a burning stain behind.

He yanked hard; the chains whirled around, rammed that axe straight through another golem’s chest. He found not even their chunky bodies could stop the raw force of it—it sliced like a hot knife through butter, trailing sparks, explosions in its wake—and all the essence, the vitality, the soul it met burned up at a touch. Leaving steel chunks stripped of their powers—chunks that could only succumb, flailing limp…

He turned his eyes to the skies, to the Serpents irritating him with their little stings, and brought out an old weapon.

Lashed an arc. Rising Storm Slash!

The flames raced out to the distance, lighting on clouds. And bolstered by his domain, reveling in the fullness of his powers, it shot even faster—

It carved a line of Storm Serpents clean through. A rising arc of pure violence. And in its wake it left cable-like bodies burning up from the middles as they fell to earth, mechanical mouths gaping dulling light, eyes losing vibrancy—whatever essence they've been expecting from their cores never to arrive. Melting in liquid-metal blobs that showered the barren grounds, falling between the cracks…

Zane was actually kind of surprised standing there in the aftermath. Fists clenched, well warm now. His flesh was unbroken. His health perfect—his Pseudo-Domain still robust as ever.

He blinked.

He was pretty sure he hadn’t been hit once that whole time.

Almost at the same time as he had this thought, as though on cue, he felt the creature barreling from behind at him at top speed.

He turned just in time to get whacked right up the front side by twenty feet of churning steel.

It crushed him a good ten feet into the ground.

He groaned.

He clawed his way back out.

Rammed an Axe through, left its halves slowly sagging apart.

That was the end of that. Really this time.

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Skill up!

Rising Storm Slash II -> III

He surveyed the scene, quite pleased with his handiwork.

Then there was just one creature left by Zane's count. The one he’d been waiting for this whole time.

His Axes swapped out. In came his Prometheus Chains. These he liked for his heavy-duty work, his one-on-ones.

He waited for his enemy… it wasn’t long.

The islands began to rumble. Began to shiver, and part—and a vast head broke through the center of them… Zane looked dead into that flat deep-red rectangle of an eye. A cyclops of gears and cables, blown up to epic proportion.

God Golem (Simulated Monster Lord)

Essence Level 488

He remembered how this thing had battered him last time. He could tell it remembered too, by the way it was staring at him…

It would not go the same way now. Zane gritted his teeth. He would make sure of it.

The rest of it towered out, groaning cavernously as it did, all grinding gears and screeching cogs, the cranking and clinking of great links of steel… a domain dropped over Zane like a hammer-blow.

An ocean of Tier 5 Law. Dense with higher Concepts. This thing’s soul was massive too. Zane was not sure how the array made it work—these were deeper magics than he knew, but it felt real and potent as any Monster.

For a moment Zane’s Stormfire domain could only sag under the weight of it.

Those Laws were higher-order than his own—and he groaned under the heft of it… but its raw power, its ferocity, could not compete with Zane’s. Its Soul—hefty as it was—couldn’t match his either.

Zane roared right back—and his domain flared too, raging back to a standstill.

It started then, in a deadlock of domains.

He struck first. Leaped straight up, just like last time, and lashed out his Chains in huge sky-wrapping arcs… the God Golem’s flat eye narrowed.

It grabbed two islands out of the planet’s gravity and imbued them with untold weight. Untold Laws and essence, making vicious gauntlets out of them—and it rammed them straight at Zane, just like before.

It had worked before, after all…

And sure enough—it was shocking how fast the Golem could hurl those things, especially bolstered in that domain… they slowed coming in. But they still caught Zane coming up with a force that would’ve reduced any Nascent to meat paste.

CLANG!

It connected, full-on, with his entire front side.

He was crushed straight back down to the rocks—and then the second island came down, crushing again in a brutal follow-up.

CLANG!

At the bottom of a smoking heap of rock, Zane coughed a mouthful of blood and groaned.

Warning!

Health under 75%

…That thing still hit very, very hard.

Even though he was much less broken to start off with—and he’d braced quite well—it still crushed a big chunk of him with just two blows. He was smarting from head-to-toe; he’d heard bones and organs crunching and bursting at the impact. Luckily mostly the small, unimportant ones.

He sat up and felt a sharp stab of pain up his midsection.

Well—ones could fight through, anyway. For Zane, if it exploding did not lead to him collapsing in the next five or so minutes, he figured it was not that big a deal.

He had learned an important thing since their last meeting.

He could take a beating, especially from this thing. He was confident in this now that he had felt it. And it had to work quite hard to put Zane down… which gave him time to work. A window to seize, if he could just grab hold of it.

Some fighters liked a pretty kind of fighting. The sort where you danced around your enemy and never got hurt.

But Zane was happy to use his body as a shield if it meant he got what he wanted. He waded his way up, heaving himself out of the tomb the God Golem had made for him, and looked up.

He smiled bloodily.

He saw his Chain wrapped around the beast’s upper arm.

It frowned. Gave the chain a shake, but it was latched on tight… then its entire length exploded with Stormfire.

And Zane dragged the Golem deep into the shadow of his Domain.

He called on an old Skill then—but one that had never failed him—

He yanked hard, a whole-body effort, wobbling the God Golem off-balance—and at the same time, the chains closed in a vicious circle.

Prometheus Noose!

The God Golem frowned, a long crenulation of jagged steel.

And then it shuddered. It blinked at the chain melting through its massive arm, which had started steaming at the edges—it had a strong soul, and quality essence and Law running through, bolstering its body… yet this was a new kind of power. Zane’s new Stormfire did not care what kind of soul the God Golem had—no soul could match his own. And so it tore through anything, leaving only base elements in its wake…

This near-Peak-Ascendant could only watch in silent robotic horror as its defensive Skills, its essence crumbled before its very eyes, the noose tightening, melting with brutal ease, threatening to cut the limb off entirely—

It let out a whining shriek, like the wail of some alarm.

Then it knew that this had to end fast. It stared down Zane again. They had both shown the capacity to grievously damage the other; now it was just a matter of who ended things first.

It had only come across this now—but Zane knew what kind of fight this would be going in.

That was why his second Chain was already in motion, making a long arc even as the God Golem scrabbled for islands to smash at him…

He flexed his whole body, arms whirling overhead, legs stomping so deep they went up to the knees in stone. Gave a ferocious roar, a ferocious yank, and got the beast off-balance again—so much so it had to right itself against the shattered planet, accidentally shattering the islands in its grip, canceling its attack as it flailed for balance—and at last, Zane solidified a final connection.

His second Chain coiled around the other arm like a python. Now or never.

The God Golem screeched again. The Noose had already shrunk to almost half size on its left arm, and great gobs of steel were melting off now. Its fingers were starting to twitch and deaden, cords and cables snapping all over it—that death-grip was starting on its right arm too, and Zane hadn’t known robots could panic. He wrenched harder, grinning wider, and there was a hunter’s menace in the expression. He could sense the end.

It whirled on Zane, and grabbed for the thing that worked last time—a show of truly overwhelming force. Reaching over, plucking up a slab of a continent—some hundreds, thousands of miles long, blotting out half the sky as it raised it overhead with all the strength left in its failing limbs—

It poured in all it had left. Imbuing it with an unfathomable weight…

If it imagined Zane would flinch before the thing that had finished him last time, it was mistaken.

Zane simply raised his head, and snarled. BRING IT!

The God Golem screamed, and smashed a continent all over him.

All the force this planet-sized golem could muster, in an ultimate attack…

With how tied-up they were, Zane would have had to let go to resist, or get out of the way.

He made a decision. He just took it.

A trembling that would’ve put earthquakes to shame, upsetting mountain ranges, sending plumes of smoke halfway up the atmosphere… and then a long, slow settling. A silence. A stillness.

The God Golem stared down at the smoking rubble in a quiet desperation. A desperation that was turning more and more to hope, as Zane failed to emerge. He was still a Nascent—and that last shot had broken him before. He was still a man, after all—still just a man…

Then the stones began to rumble.