The Primeval Era-Chapter 64: Shock and Awe! IV

What Damian threw flew a few miles across the open air, crossing the distance between the mountain and the approaching enemies in a matter of seconds that felt like an eternity to the young man who watched through senses that perceived Mana itself.

The log filled with his raging power, hardened by his Mana into something closer to stone than wood, flashed toward its target with speed that made mockery of distance and reaction time alike!

Oh!

The Bone Tempering Warrior leading that group never saw it coming.

He was focused forward, his serpentine-influenced eyes scanning the tribe ahead for threats, his mind occupied with the task his mistress had assigned. He was thinking about which huts to search first, which women to take, how to extract information about whoever had killed Lukaku and the Butcher.

He wasn’t thinking about the sky.

He wasn’t watching for attacks from miles away.

He wasn’t prepared for what came next!

The log connected with his face!

BZZT!

In the span between heartbeats, between one step and the next that he would never complete, the Mana-hardened timber struck him with a force that transcended anything a Second Circle Warrior should have been able to survive.

His skin tore instantly upon impact, the flesh of his face splitting apart like overripe fruit struck by a hammer.

The bones beneath, those tempered bones that were supposed to be his pride and his protection, pulverized under the collision as if they were made of dried mud rather than reinforced calcium.

The terrifying force and Mana carried within the log was something that even a Third Circle Warrior wouldn’t have been able to see or perceive with how fast it was traveling, something that turned all the advantages of cultivation into meaningless distinctions when confronted with raw, overwhelming power.

The Warrior’s head ceased to exist as a recognizable structure.

His skull collapsed inward, his brain became pulp, and the momentum didn’t stop there. The log continued through what remained of his head and into his neck and shoulders, the thick and pure force and Mana pulverizing the upper portion of his body into a spray of gore that painted the stones behind him red.

What had been a Bone Tempering Warrior, a being who had trained for years to achieve strength that set him above common men, became a headless corpse that crumpled to the ground with the boneless grace of a puppet whose strings had been severed.

And the log didn’t stop.

It smashed into the stone beyond where the Warrior had stood, and upon impact it splintered and exploded with a secondary detonation of contained energy. Fragments of wood became shrapnel, and the Mana that had hardened the timber released in a blast that expanded outward with terrible speed.

The two Flesh Awakening Warriors who had been flanking their now-dead leader had no time to scream, no time to understand what had happened, no time to do anything but die.

The explosion of wood and Mana shredded them with a force that exceeded anything their First Circle bodies could withstand. Splinters that might as well have been blades tore through flesh that had only just begun to awaken to power. The shockwave that followed pulped organs and snapped bones and scattered what remained across the Lands of Stone in pieces too small and too numerous to ever be properly buried.

Three Warriors.

Gone.

In the space of a single breath!

...!

Their blood painted the stone red as if a tomato had been smashed down!

It was a terrifying scene, a display of violence so sudden and so absolute that it seemed to belong to legend rather than reality. It felt like a strike of judgment from the skies themselves, as if forces that should never have been made angry had been made angry, and their wrath descended upon those foolish enough to provoke it! 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

As soon as the first strike finished, as soon as Damian confirmed through his Mana-enhanced perception that the three signatures he had targeted had been extinguished completely, he turned his attention to the second log that Uncle Adam had brought.

His hand sank into the wood as if it were clay rather than timber, his fingers finding purchase with ease that defied the material’s natural resistance.

He hoisted it up, shifted his stance, and threw toward another group of approaching Warriors with the same devastating force.

BOOM!

Another streak of blue-tinged lightning crossed the sky.

Another cluster of Mana signatures vanished from his perception.

"Keep them coming, Uncle Adam."

He called out with calm coldness, his voice steady despite the apocalyptic violence he was unleashing with each motion of his arm!

Uncle Adam stared at his Young Lugal with eyes of utter incredulity.

The figure before him looked like an ancestral wonder made flesh, a being from the stories that shamans told around fires when they wanted to remind their listeners that the world held powers beyond mortal comprehension. Thick tendrils of Mana surrounded Damian’s body like a cloak woven from lightning itself, the energy flowing and crackling with each breath he took.

His small frame, still lean from years of farming and hiding, packed such terrifying force that it seemed impossible for the two things to coexist. Every time he threw a log, every time his arm completed that devastating motion, it was like a wooden flash of thunder that passed over the village below and delivered death to those who had dared threaten it.

Uncle Adam didn’t ask questions.

He simply moved to the nearest tree and began cutting more branches!

Oh!

---

Far below, in the Purple Stone Tribe, Grandmother Essun was in the middle of berating a young Tribesman for his sloppy technique when she heard the first boom.

Her head snapped up, her ancient eyes searching the sky for the source of that sound.

She saw a flash of blue light streaking from the direction of the Roaring Stone Mountain, a blur of motion too fast to track that disappeared beyond the tribe’s perimeter with a trailing roar that made the land itself seem to tremble.

Then, from far away, she heard another boom!

"What in the name of the Ancestors...?!"