"Are you gonna give it a try?" said Evan.
Zane nodded.
"Good luck!" cried Evan. "You can do it!"
Evan said it almost every time Zane went into battle—from some others Zane would've thought they were just saying things. But Evan really meant it every time. He was rooting for Zane with his whole heart.
"Thanks," said Zane, ruffling his hair. Evan beamed.
Then Zane made for the Array portal. The crowd parted gasping before him.
It was the same technician running the Array as last time. A lady with a blonde bob; she was looking up at him with a little smile, but she felt quite nervous. Which tended to be a lot of peoples' default reactions to him nowadays. They got this intimidating aura from him somehow. He wasn't sure why; he thought he was pretty relaxed most of the time.
"Would you like me to set a time limit again, sir?" she asked.
"No," said Zane. "I will go all the way."
She nodded quickly. "Ah—of course! Whenever you're ready, sir."
She gestured to the portal; its spectral purple hues began to swirl, brighten, making a soup of psychedelic colors.
Zane took a deep breath, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was warm. Ready, eager to get in some good scraps. To see just how strong his new Mythic+ Smash was. And there was that number in the back of his mind, getting him all riled up—862 kills…
He stepped on through.
The world changed.
He stood in the first layer again. It was like the surface of Mars, a world of ruddy grounds, ruddier skies. Red dust storms scurried across the horizon.
Then the Monsters started spawning in. Giant rock-golems groaning, belching smoke, dripping magma from every joint.
He had a very simple strategy.
He just waited, let them spawn in wave after wave. Soon the whole army was bearing down on him, smashing at him with those flaming boulder fists; they exploded all over him; the fists ruptured, cracked, broke apart against his Steel skin. Those fires sputtered out against his own, stifled utterly. He barely felt the lot of them banging at him at once. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Soon all hundred of them were swarming him; he could hardly see the sky; he could hardly see anything. Just stone and magma exploding over his face, again and again, blotting out his vision…
They were hurting themselves a lot more than him.
In the meantime, he set up his new and improved Apocalypse Smash.
A furious redness spawned in the sky. He saw it through cracks of airspace in that tangle of flailing limbs; it looked like one of those dying stars. More red than white. The white was buzzing, flickering at the edges of it. Slashes of it streaked across the surface like bolts of lightning. But the rest, the bulky mass of it, was a smoldering furious red.
The energy there was stunning. The heat of it raged over him; that alone dwarfed the power these magma-fists put out. It made all the fires spurting up around him look like candle flames set against a noonday sun.
The sound surprised him too; it had this deep-throated crackling roar, huge and cavernous, drowning out the world. It had the same nice feel to Zane as revving a motorcycle. But louder.
First impression: Zane liked it quite a bit. It just felt like a good smasher. Zane had a good intuition for these things.
Time to test it.
He waited for the signal—there!
A shadow fell across him, fell across everything. The final boss spawned in, a looming skyscraper of living molten rock, bellowing so loud it trembled the dusky ground—
ℙ𝕪𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕤𝕥 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕀𝕘𝕟𝕖𝕠𝕦𝕤 𝕂𝕚𝕟𝕘 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟡𝟟
Zane let loose.
The red giant fell to earth. Right in the middle of the swarm.
BOOM!
It didn't feel like an attack. It felt like a natural disaster.
In an instant Fire Law was everywhere. A pure wall of it blotting out the magma, blotting out the stones, blotting out the sky. Raging through everything. It wasn't just Fire Law—it had a vicious Electric edge to it. It struck like lightning. It destroyed like the fiercest flame.
The blast knocked him off his feet, splattered him in a wall of soot.
He picked himself up, brushed himself off, spat the soot out of his mouth, and checked out the damage.
The landscape had been ruddy red. Now its whole face had been blackened—seared to slag going hundreds of feet in every direction. Mountains of ash ranged everywhere, smoking feverishly.
He seemed to be standing at the bottom of a massive smoking crater. It went so deep it touched bedrock.
There was just one dot left on his mini-map. Him.
Zane was quite satisfied. Yes—this was a good Smash. Last time it took him quite a few Extinction Smashes to get through the lot of these. And they certainly weren't instantly dusted like this…he quite liked the feeling of it.
He scratched his head.
Still. These things died a little too easily. It was hard to tell just how much stronger his new Smash was.
He figured more testing was needed.
𝔽𝕚𝕣𝕤𝕥 𝕃𝕒𝕪𝕖𝕣, 𝕎𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕗𝕦𝕝 𝕀𝕟𝕗𝕖𝕣𝕟𝕠, 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕔𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕕!
The Mars-world faded away. A new one faded in.
He stood on a black sand island, swaddled in an endless black sea. The sky was black too, the same color; you couldn't make out the horizon. The only source of light was the bright white moon. A monochrome world.
It was that squid world. He'd passed this one pretty easily last time too.
So he figured he could do the same thing. He threw his Apocalypse Smash up in the sky. Which brought a nice-looking blood-red sheen to the world, rippling across the waters, staining the sands. He started loading it, stuffing it with essence.
Soon it grew so hot he could see the surface of the sands starting to melt, run out into the water.
And he waited.
Ripples disturbed the waters. A massive tentacle reared out, snatched up a leg—but he turned up to Steely Density. It couldn't move him. Another got hold of his other leg. Then another. He waited for them all to spawn in; soon he was nice and trussed up. The nice thing was they yanked him from all directions, so he ended up staying in the same place.
He let them take their licks at them, gnaw at his arms, his legs with those little suction-cup spikes. By the time it got to eighty or so squids yanking at him, it actually started to hurt. Once they got near a hundred, he was mildly concerned they might dislocate a shoulder. That was a lot of Level 90-pluses, yanking on him as hard as they could…
Then that whirlpool popped up in the middle of the ocean. The boss spawned in at last.
Zane fed it an Apocalypse Smash.
BOOM!
His world erupted in steam.
It took a while for it to clear, swirl up to the skies in a little hurricane. He blinked.
He stood on a flat stretch of hard land. Glass, he realized. It was his island. That glass had been sand a moment ago.
It took him a moment to realize what was going on. He scanned his surroundings—there was a cylinder of air all around him, hundreds of feet long, hundreds of feet high, a football stadium's worth.
The gargantuan walls of this cylinder were a deep flickering red. Blasting fierce heat—all burning, roaring with it, laced through with Fire Law. Steaming up a storm.
And they were falling. Surging. Making a collapsing dome, sloshing all over him—
Oh.
He was looking at the sea.
He realized what was going on. His blast had just deleted a football stadium's worth of water. He'd put a giant hole right in the middle of the sea. And set the rest of it on fire.
The water had some thick Water and Ice Laws in it too. It was just that his Stormfire, augmented with Elemental Fire, didn't care; they had no power over this kind of fire. It smashed them aside and feasted.
Pretty neat. Zane approved. One quality of a good smash was how much it squished what it hit. If you squished something so hard it changed states of matter, that got bonus points.
Now burning walls of water bore down on him from all sides, tsunami waves hundreds of feet tall, cresting, spitting burning foam—
𝕊𝕖𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕕 𝕃𝕒𝕪𝕖𝕣, 𝕃𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕤 𝔻𝕖𝕡𝕥𝕙𝕤, 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕔𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕕!
And the scene shifted. Zane blinked.
He stood on a high barren plateau, riddled with dry cracks. The skies were stormy, slate-gray, heaving with rain.
He was learning some new things about his Smash. Still—not quite sure how strong it was. Everything it touched so far just got dusted.
Maybe this Layer would be a better measuring stick.
Wyverns were cresting the horizon, floating over. Nearly all Level 99. He waited until they were all swarming him, screeching, spitting wind and lightning—
He launched an Apocalypse Smash into their midst. It felt like setting off a nuke. A plume of red—then dust. Instantly. Smoldering dust, scattering in mini-tornadoes on the wind…he nodded. Still a good bird smasher, he was pleased to see.
Then came the Boss.
𝔾𝕒𝕝𝕖 𝔻𝕣𝕒𝕘𝕠𝕟 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟙𝟘𝟛
The first actual Foundation threat. This thing had gotten him down to 75% Health last time. It kind of looked like a scaly emerald-green bat blown up a thousandfold; it looked at him with narrowed slitted eyes, and snorted. Tiny stormclouds floated out of its nostrils.
It howled an ear-piercing battle cry. And started charging that weird tornado-breath Skill—
Zane whacked it.
BOOM!
It just came apart at the seams. Like one of those giant Lego sets dropped on the ground—every bit of it went every which way. He saw a burning scaly foot fly this way, blackened claws shoot up into the sky, what might have been a wing cratering to earth, a burnt-out husk of a head shooting out of sight, mouth still hung open in shock—
𝕋𝕙𝕚𝕣𝕕 𝕃𝕒𝕪𝕖𝕣, 𝕎𝕚𝕟𝕕𝕤𝕨𝕖𝕡𝕥 𝕎𝕠𝕠𝕕𝕝𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕤, 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕔𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕕!
Hmm.
Well—at least he knew Apocalypse Smash wasn't strong enough to instantly ash-ify a Foundation Level fighter. So that was something. Still… a little too easy. Though he did enjoy how it exploded everywhere like that.
He was still waiting to come up against a real challenge.
The scene shifted—a desert landscape. Cacti littered the dunes. A noonday sun baked high above…
And these massive Level 99 gold-plated beetles started rising out of the sands; their horns curved like scimitars. Their carapaces shimmered with heat. Their beady black eyes glared hatefully at him.
𝕊𝕔𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕓 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕦𝕟 𝔾𝕠𝕕 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟡𝟡
By now things under Level 100 almost didn't exist to Zane. He let them all pile on too.
Then wiped them with an Apocalypse Smash.
The blast changed the color of the desert. All yellow to all black.
He was interested to note there were a few Level 100s in there too. And they weren't ashes. Still, they were so badly roasted, so badly melted he could hardly tell they'd been Beetles; they looked like wax sculptures left out too long in the sun.
Then there came a deeper rumbling.
A yawning maw opened up in the sands right in front of him. And the boss rose out of the ground.
𝕊𝕔𝕒𝕣𝕒𝕓 𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕣𝕔𝕙, 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔻𝕖𝕤𝕖𝕣𝕥 𝕊𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕟 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟙𝟘𝟠
It was as big as a house; its shell ran two layers deep, one silver and one gold, scribed over with shining white runes. Its long limbs were started over with gemstones. Its eyes were like rubies, shining with a burning intensity; its massive wings unfurled, casting long shadows over the sands. As they began to buzz there came a sound like thunder.
Zane was intrigued.
Then it blasted him in the face.
It opened its mouth, and out came a gunky glut of blinding Light Laws—Light, laced through with Fire.
It came too fast to react to. It felt like he'd been punched; his skin was reddened, steaming, peeling off in places. He even staggered a step.
He wiped it off his face, frowning.
That actually kind of hurt.
The Scarab Monarch stopped rattling. It blinked its ruby eyes at him, like it was wondering why it barely did anything.
Then it opened its mouth, tried for another one—
Zane had enough.
BOOM!
When everything stopped shaking, he found its shell caved in. The middle of its body was flattened out utterly; organs spilled out its sides in thick stringy red sausage-tubes, along with quite a lot of black blood.
The ends of its body were still intact though. Zane supposed those two layers of armor did do something. It was still moving—ish. Writhing, spasming in massive pain, hissing loudly, spitting gobs of light-essence. Its whole body was burning, melting, swallowed up in Fire Law.
Still alive though. Kind of.
A second Smash squished it flat.
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕦𝕡!
𝔸𝕡𝕠𝕔𝕒𝕝𝕪𝕡𝕤𝕖 𝕊𝕞𝕒𝕤𝕙 𝕀 -> 𝕀𝕀
𝕃𝕒𝕪𝕖𝕣 𝔽𝕠𝕦𝕣, 𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕤𝕔𝕠𝕣𝕔𝕙𝕖𝕕 𝔼𝕩𝕡𝕒𝕟𝕤𝕖, 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕔𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕕!
Zane was realizing there was a pretty stark difference between a Level 100+ like Zane or Eze, and a Level 100+ like this beetle.
At least this one gave him something of an idea of how strong new-and-improved Zane was. Strong enough to two-shot something of his Level. So—pretty darn strong, it seemed like.
He was quite happy with his new Smash so far. It was a good Smash; it pleased him greatly to smash things with it. It had a good boom and a good squish factor.
Still though. He hoped things would get more interesting soon. It was always so much more satisfying to smash hard-to-smash things.
The world changed. And he got his wish.