43. Laws of Sharpness (I)
Apparently the Law Fruit he'd found in that dungeon chest wasn't the only one.
Before he left, Reina presented him with a sack of them. There were five more the warriors had picked up clearing nearby F- and E- ranked dungeons. They've saved them just for him—or rather, Reina had ordered them saved for him. She felt he would make the best use of them.
When she handed them over, she told him, a little defensively, she only did this because it was the logical thing to do. As the strongest, he should have them.
When he set up his Faction, he'd never expected to get anything out of it. It was an off-the-cuff thing he gave little thought to. So this was a neat surprise.
***
After that, Zane went off to the Cavern of Insight. Things changed fast around here. He remembered thick forests here, with gnarled vines draped over the paths ready to trip him up. Instead his way went pretty smoothly. The ground had all been cleared, making for clean roads. When he passed the F-ranked Snaring Thickets dungeon, which used to be unwalkable, he found beaten paths leading to a quaint little town. Reina had installed a Ranger Grove here, a wooden dome laced with thick vines, and the bulk of the townsfolk were hard at work training inside. Readying for war.
A little while later, he made it to the abandoned warehouse. Similar story here. The warehouse had been converted into a warrior training ground. He heard clashing and roaring. Flashes of essence pour out the main entrance.
The Cavern of Insight was much like he'd remembered. No one had touched it since he'd last come—the same winding path in, the same slashes on the walls, the same dais where he imagined some great expert once sat.
He let out a breath. From what Avery told him about how Laws worked, he imagined this would be a lot tougher than learning his Fire Laws. For one, his Class was already attuned to Fire, as was his Soul Weapon. Sharpness was something new, something he'd just brought in.
He got out a Law Fruit and wolfed it down in four bites.
His head started to tingle. A sweet warmth spread his temple, soaked deep, past the stuff of the physical, like it was warming a part of his soul.
He wondered if they stacked. He took a bite of another one. That same sweet warmth soaked him again, just as strong. Huh.
Then he downed the rest of the Fruits.
His head swimming, he took a circle around the room, inspecting each of the slashes. They were even more profound than he'd remembered—now he'd glimpsed that eruption vision, that old man destroying the star, he could spot when there were depths of Law hidden beneath the surface. Depths he couldn't begin to perceive.
It was like that here. These Laws were nothing like whatever the old man had wielded—they were orders of magnitude less powerful—but they were still far beyond him. As Zane inspected the slashes, the Laws he grazed were minor. He felt like he was staring at icebergs—the Laws he saw were the tiniest extrusions, bobbing above the surface.
He could see them—sort of, lingering out there. But he couldn't feel what it meant to cut. Not truly. That was the hard part.
He didn't need his eyes open to see them. He could sense them at the level of the soul, hovering all around him. So, he sat down at the center of the chamber, closed his eyes, crossed his legs, and opened himself up to feeling.
Just as he'd done with the Heart of the Volcano, when he tried to comprehend eruption. He let himself go, let the constraints of the flesh melt away… It wasn't simple, nor easy. He'd feel an itch, a scratch, a twinge of random pain, a soft gust of wind tickling his arms, and he'd be yanked back.
But he kept trying. And eventually…
He let his mind dissolve into the universe. It felt a lot like falling asleep.
He woke as someone else, somewhere else. He was caught in a tattered, faded memory, all soft at the edges, blurry, but its feelings were still so intense they felt real. He was panting, running—not on ground but air. He glanced down. His shoes ran up to mid-calf, slips of embroidered silver, glowing fiercely.
He ran on nothing. Nothing but air. He couldn't control it—but he could run along the current. And these were fierce currents indeed, storm currents lashed with rain, howling as they spread across the surface of a black-blue ocean, frothing with white foam.
His boots let him run on the winds. They hummed with wind Laws. But they were fading fast, sputtering out.
A stretch of black clouds hung over him, heaving with rain, groaning with thunder. His eyes were trained on the stormy sea below, watching, twitching as he ran.
His heart thudded in his chest. He didn't dare lose focus—not for a second.
Just below him, the sea began to seethe. He yelped, kicked off the air, and his boots sent him sprawling down a nearby current—just as the ocean erupted and a giant head broke the surface like a blue whale broaching, but so much bigger than a blue whale, and its mouth leered wide to show endless rows of white teeth set against a black mouth—a night sky of swirling teeth.
𝔻𝕣𝕒𝕘𝕠𝕟-𝕥𝕦𝕣𝕥𝕝𝕖 (ℂ𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕦𝕣𝕖)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟜𝟠𝟚
Holy shit!
More of it came out of the water, and Zane saw the turtle part of it—a great dark-gray shell that could have been an island studded with thousands of barnacles.
It came halfway up between the sea and the sky before it fell. The man summoned his sword, this slim blade, sleek but devastatingly sharp, and slashed.
A line of light whistled past, struck the dragon-turtle, and shattered to little pieces.
The man cursed and kept running.
He couldn't run much longer; his boots were giving out, his essence was giving out, his body was flagging.
"Has the Deep-Sea Emperor no honor?" he screamed. "To ambush a rival Chosen in such cowardly fashion?"
The dragon-turtle snorted, spewing brine, and fell away.
Now he was all desperation. Ahead, on a smudgy map—cliffs rising out of the sea. Was that a cave burrowed in the stone?
It was! He nearly couldn't make it out—the darkness of the cliff blended almost perfectly with the darkness of the sky. But it was there. He dashed toward it, hoping against hope, even as the sea started bubbling beneath him again.
Gritting his teeth, he burned out the boots for one last mad thrust. He shot like a cannon, even as the ocean erupted around him. He went tumbling through, smashing over and over on stone, and came to a sprawling, gasping, ragged halt.
He heard the Dragon-turtle's furious howl. Then he was thrown off his feet. He felt the whole cavern shake, the whole cliff tremble as the massive creature threw itself against it.
But it held.
For a while the man lay there, trembling, gasping. He patted for his Bag of Holding but found nothing. He hung his head.
He walked down the cave path, searching for a way out. None—dead end. The only thing there was a small cavern.
It was the very cavern Zane sat in in the real world.
Only its walls were blank. In the vision, the man sat at its center and waited. The dragon-turtle did not go away—he could see it on the mini-map, lurking, waiting. It didn't need to get at him; it just needed to hold him. The Deep-Sea Emperor knew where he was. When it came, he was doomed.
This went on for quite some time.
Zane wondered with slight annoyance what the owner of this vision was playing at. He lay there, trembling, head down, swamped with sadness, with hopelessness.
"Is this truly how it ends?" said the man. "To think! The Sage of the Crimson Edge, Chosen genius of ten thousand years—trapped and killed by an unruly local hegemon! Of a D-ranked Planet, no less!"
An indignant fury rose, mixing with the man's helplessness.
It was as though he was waiting for this 'Deep-Sea Emperor' to come end him. Why wasn't he moving? Doing something?
An hour later, the man did. He came to the wall and pressed a trembling finger. Then slowly, carefully, he drew a line straight down, etching a scratch into the wall.
Zane felt the will—concentrated on a single point, a point infinitesimally small, trembling on the tip of that finger. When it drew forth, the wall had no choice but to give.
Zane felt a prickling of excitement. The sensation of cutting poured through him, and he soaked it in. He tried to memorize every little contour of that cut, tried as best he could to edge every little move into the grooves of his mind—
The cut ended.
The man barely got an inch in before his essence sputtered out. The man sighed and hung his head. He baffled Zane. Surely he must see he couldn't afford to mope?
The man did. It took him nearly ten minutes to work up to drawing a second line. Then a third a few minutes later. Finally the man was working up to a rhythm. Over and over Zane let those Laws of cutting flow through him, permeating his mind. He sat with those feelings as though in a warm bath. They started seeping under the skin…
By the time the man had gotten all the way around, he was getting excited. Zane was too. They were both on the verge of something—a breakthrough.
The man drew his last slash and shuddered.
The universe rushed into his mind.
Zane caught none of it.
Like staring at static noise on a television. But when it passed, the man was on his knees, trembling.
"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, yes, yes!"
He strode toward the cavern mouth, head high. It was lit up yellow now; the storm had passed and sunlight poured into the world. He saw the dragon-turtle rear up as he came close, eager to get at him. Its massive head broke the surface.
The man slashed.
One pure-white line crossed the air and touched that Level 482 Dragon-Turtle's neck. And passed clean through.
The head slid off the body and crashed like a meteor into the ocean.
The vision ended.
Zane sat there, soaked through with sweat.
𝕃𝕒𝕨𝕤 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕙𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕕!
𝕄𝕚𝕟𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 ℝ𝕒𝕫𝕠𝕣'𝕤 𝔼𝕕𝕘𝕖