Savage Awakening 306. Titan's Body, First Form (II) (Patreon)

Zane could stomach a lot. And it was clear the Barbarian Sage was investing a great deal into him, and he was grateful. It was a huge gift.

Still, though...

He eyed the giant blocks, blinking. 

All that in a week? 

…Added together, they appeared to be several times the size of him.

Then he shrugged. 

He supposed he could give it a go.

Really he'd never tested how much he could eat at once. And he was never one to question himself in the face of a challenge just because it seemed big. You could never go into a fight with self-doubt. Zane figured it could be the same for a meal. 

Besides—he also figured the Barbarian Sage wouldn't give this to him if he didn't think he could handle it.

*** 

The Barbarian Sage rubbed his hands. Just had to get this bit out of the way. Then they could get to the good stuff!

Granted—maxing out the base body was meant to take a while. 

But as far as the Sage could tell, the lad didn't have a limit. Or if he did, it hadn’t been discovered yet. Zane seemed to be able to handle pretty much anything. 

He gave Zane a hearty slap on the back. 

The lad was a physical specimen like the Sage had never seen—it brought a smile to his face just to see him bumbling about.

Although… the Sage scratched his head. He hadn’t really given much thought to the logistics of the thing, to be honest. 

A week had sounded good—he’d plucked that out of thin air. The Sage figured with the rate the lad was going, he’d finish up several times as fast a normal talent. 

Now he was thinking back on it, though—remembering just what an Ascendant ought to be capable of… 

The Sage was realizing, a bit startled, that he might’ve gotten his timescales wrong. It seemed a rather big oversight, now that he thought about it.

He seemed to be off by an order of magnitude. Even speeding it up a few times, accounting for Zane’s physique—he should’ve said… a few months, maybe?

“Huh,” said the Barbarian Sage. 

That did seem more correct. He took a look at those four giant cubes. 

On second thought, it did seem a bit silly—he wasn’t sure you could even digest that much Spirit Steel in a week! 

The Barbarian Sage frowned. He opened his mouth to say something. 

Then he saw the look of determination on Zane’s face.

The lad was locked in. 

The Barbarian Sage thought about it a bit more. Then— 

Eh. 

He couldn’t bear to take Zane out of the zone like that. Not when he had that look in his eyes. 

Besides, he’d be fine—he was a big boy! The Barbarian Sage believed in him. 

“Attaboy!” said the Sage with a grin and a thumbs-up.

*** 

Skill up!

Behemoth Muscle IV -> V

Skill up!

Indomitable Hide IV -> V

… 

Zane lay facedown on the ground, groaning.

One hand, he was quite pleased. He’d never eaten anything so high-grade. He could feel his body strengthening with each mouthful of steel—his skin toughening, his bones growing denser, his muscles thickening with new fibers strong as Spirit Steel cables. 

He was also starting to feel a bit uncomfortable.

All that steel sat heavy in his belly. It had to undergo quite some digesting—refining.

He never had a problem eating big. He’d stuffed down entire feasts back in Stormhaven without trouble. This was something else. 

Skill up! 

Divine Titan’s Heart IV -> V

But it seemed his body was rising to the task. 

It was beginning to overheat—burning Stormfire deep in his gut, letting the powers of Destruction break down the treasures into their most elemental free parts, making them easy to absorb—making his belly a furnace.

He was metabolizing the steel pretty fast. Just as the last chunk was emptying, he chomped down the next. 

Skill up! 

Colossal Tendons IV -> V

So far he was progressing just as fast here as he had in the Azure Flame Faction. He’d never been fed like this before. 

It was actually rather tiring eating so much, running his body at such high-intensity. 

After the full day he felt as sleepy as he could remember. 

He stuffed himself full, and went to sleep. He woke up still yawning—still drenched in sweat. 

He threw himself back into it. 

He noticed he’d gone through about a quarter of a block so far—good progress. It heartened him.

After all those Bloodline boosts, and now this Leveling spree, his muscular strength could not be compared to what it’d been a week ago. All his muscles felt tight under the skin, pumped full, yet there was a density to them that spoke to their new power. 

 The quality of the raw material of his body was skyrocketing—making of itself a treasure of the highest caliber. 

He was pretty sure he could take the bare strikes of Ascendant Spirit Weapons, and come away unscathed. Kakorax’s claws might barely scratch him now. 

In the same way that samurai swords were folded and smashed and tempered a thousand times, made dense until their last traces of weakness were gone—just one thick, utterly solid chunk of pure steel—

So too was Zane’s body undergoing a tempering.

As day folded into day, though, the exhaustion started stacking up.

By now the air around Zane had taken on a constant red tinge; heat-waves washed out of him at all times, and his sweat smoked off his skin almost as soon as it came. 

The body wanted to rest in order to grow. It wanted to settle. 

But Zane had fixed in his mind that one-week target. 

So he set his jaw and pushed on. 

The Barbarian Sage dropped by on occasion to pour a bucket of cold water on him. 

“You hang in there, lad!” hollered the Sage. 

He also gave Zane a gourd of incredibly refreshing glacier Spirit-water. That morning, he’d gone down to the planet’s South Pole to scoop it fresh. 

“Thanks,” slurred Zane. 

“Almost there!” 

*** 

At some point around day five, Fluffy also came over, and noticed him lying on the ground just struggling to stay awake. By then he had just resorted to lying there spread-eagled. He was in the best shape of his life, by far, and felt like he could hardly move a muscle. 

Every fiber of his being was excruciatingly sore. 

She dropped a giant boulder next to him, gave him a lick, and left.

At first Zane was confused. Then he realized this was just Fluffy's way of providing moral support.

…He kept on clinging on, yawning.

Eventually, a strange thing started to happen.

The more Zane ate, the faster he also seemed to metabolize the steel—his flames started taking to it better and better. 

Even parts of him that weren't refined—his belly, his intestines, and the smaller vital organs—started to grow dense in essence, gain a faint steely sheen in the astral plane…

Like alloys fusing in a forge, under this intensity, this pressure, for so long—a new body was coming together. 

His body was beginning to radiate a certain steely light all over, the energies of the Titan Rhinoceros showing clear in every last cell of him. Where before his body-parts—muscles, heart, tendons—were like separate cogs in the machine of his body, all working together, now they were making a seamless link. Fusing to a whole. 

And at last, at the end of the seventh day—

Level up! 

Bastion Bone IX -> X 

Woozily, he blinked at the notification, feeling stuffed to bursting. His body was seething light and heat. His head felt like it was stuffed with hot cotton-balls; he was thinking through some strange fuzzy medium.

But where there were four giant blocks of steel, there was now nothing.

Zane had absorbed it all.

His body began to quake. That steely light—that radiation—spiked higher and higher, a heat starting deep in his gut, spreading fast, until every last inch of him was bursting with it— 

Skill learned!  

Titan Body, First Form [Common (H)]

*** 

The Sage came bursting out of the cottage, blinked at Zane. His face split in a huge grin.

“I knew you had it in you!” said the Sage, ambling over. “How’re you feeling?”

He gave Zane a hearty pat on the back.

This was the last straw for Zane.

He keeled over. There was a massive THUD. 

The Sage scratched his head at his smoking disciple, currently lying facedown on the ground. 

“Uh… Zane?”

Zane was out like a light. 

He woke up about a half-day later. 

It turned out you couldn't just run your body like a giant furnace for a week straight without burning yourself out a bit… He was still yawning—but not feeling so raw anymore. 

He stood. Inspected his body, curious. 

There was the quality of his make. Everything—skin, bones, tendons, muscles—had been tempered to an extreme. 

He had become a finely crafted machine. You could tell even just looking at him.

But more—every chunk of him was made of the same quality. You could no longer identify any weakness within him. 

The Barbarian Sage nodded, looking quite proud.  “Well done, lad! You take damned well to the Bloodline. Wasn’t even sure it was possible to eat that much steel in a week!” 

“What?” said Zane. 

“Right then!” The Sage crossed his arms. “Now you’ve got the same body grade as a full-blooded Primordial Godbeast. You could stroll up to the Titan’s Trials and make a serious dent in those Minor God steles, I’d wager… But something tells me a dent’s not good enough for you. That right?”  

Zane nodded. 

“Make me strong,” he informed the Sage. “Strong enough to defend my home when the First Wave comes.” 

“That all?” said the Barbarian Sage. 

Zane thought about it. That was true. But there was something else, too, deep in his heart, and he said it simply. “Make me the strongest.” 

“That’s what I thought.” The Sage grinned. 

“We’ve got just under ten years. Let’s see what we can do, eh?” 

His eyes gleamed.

“Your training starts now.”

*** 

They took the teleporter, which beamed them up to the nearest planet. From a distance it looked like a pure-black block orbited by a spray of bright white moons.

As Zane drew close, though he could see those moons weren't in true orbit. They were anchored to the ground by a series of massive chains.

The moons were lined up in a row, increasing in size. 

There wasn't much else on the planet. A few craters. Anchor-points where the moons were tied down. A stele much like the one at the Titan’s Trials, though blank. 

There were two crater-like pits in the ground. One was stacked full of ice, and hundreds of vials of icy-cooled bubbling bright-blue elixir lay in there haphazard. 

The other crater was stacked high with Spirit Steel blocks. 

The last things there were Chains of varying lengths, tied to thick leather belts. 

“Welcome,” said the Barbarian Sage, “To Planet Pull.”