Personal System Calendar: Year 00015, Day 1-28, Month VII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6859, 1st to 28th day of the 7th Month
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Duel: Human vs. Beast
The little green serpent, all those years later, had finally grown into something capable of challenging the very first human it had ever laid eyes on. It understood, on some level, exactly how strong this particular human actually was.
But as a lord, it reasoned, it needed to keep testing itself, needed to keep proving its place, or risk slipping down the food chain it had fought so hard to climb. Even without being able to see August's levels directly, restricted as that information was to August's own Personal System, the serpent could feel it instinctively, a deep unease rattling through its scales and down into its bones. This human was dangerous, and rightfully so. Word had reached the serpent long ago that this same human had helped win an entire war on the forest's behalf, well before the serpent had risen to its current position. No matter. It would fight regardless, and find out exactly where its own strength truly stood.
August, for his part, could pull basic information on whatever stood in front of him, courtesy of his Personal System, a genuine cheat skill unique to him alone. Name, species, that much came easily. Rank and rarity followed, then level, and if his opponent proved weaker than himself, the system would extend further still, revealing skills as well.
The Personal System wasn't invasive by nature, though. It only surfaced this information when August actively willed it, or during active combat. Otherwise, he simply saw the world the way anyone else did.
August drew out a full array of weapons, each one materializing and settling into its proper place across his body, the same positions they'd normally occupy if worn conventionally, though he typically kept them stored instead within the subspace granted by his Personal System's integrated item storage. It seemed whoever had integrated this game-like mechanic, the Personal System, into the World System had drawn on Soul 777-777's own knowledge from Aerthe, on what a "game" even was, in shaping it this way. Doing so meant no visible weapons weighed him down, no restriction on his movement. He had complete freedom until the exact moment he actually needed them.
The serpent coiled itself in preparation. Once Rex confirmed both sides were ready, he brought his massive bone tail down in a single decisive whip, signaling the start of their battle.
August, dwarfed by the serpent's full twenty-one-meter length, moved fast, closing the distance in a blur and landing the fight's first blow before the serpent had even finished settling its coils. His strike connected against one of its scales, hard enough to knock it clean out of its defensive posture. The serpent answered by igniting, its whole body wreathed suddenly in blue flame, heat rolling off it that August could feel from several meters away, easily five times hotter than it would normally be.
He knew exactly why.
The Fire Element, at its core, followed a hierarchy few outside serious scholars of the elemental arts ever bothered to learn.
Red sat lowest on that ladder, the Crimson Flame, little more than raw physical combustion burning somewhere around a thousand degrees.
Above it climbed Orange, the Amber Flame, hotter and more destructive.
Above that, Yellow, the Solar Flame, is efficient and tightly concentrated.
Green came next, the Verdant Flame, the first tier capable of consuming magical energy rather than simple fuel.
And above green sat Blue, the Azure Flame, a tier defined less by heat alone and more by purity, density, and the sheer authority it held over ordinary matter.
Beyond blue climbed Indigo, capable of burning straight through magical structures themselves,
then Violet, operating at a level of destruction closer to raw elemental force than fire in any conventional sense.
And beyond even that sat two final tiers entirely outside the normal spectrum: White, the theoretical peak of perfect combustion, consuming everything, matter, magic, mana, enchantments, leaving nothing behind to speak of.
And Black, stranger still, not simply hotter than white but something else entirely, a negation of fire's usual nature altogether, erasing rather than burning, ending rather than consuming.
The serpent's flame sat solidly at the Azure tier, Blue, the fifth rung on that ladder. Rare on its own, rarer still paired with the acidic venom it carried alongside the fire itself.
Fortunately for August, fire had always been his own primary elemental affinity, which meant he carried real resistance, verging on partial immunity, to flame in general.
This particular serpent, though, was a genuine mutation even among its own kind, one capable of spitting acidic venom and blue fire simultaneously, a combination that turned lethal in ways venom alone rarely managed. Venom by itself, so long as a target carried no open wound, usually wasn't fatal outright. Acid-laced venom riding on top of blue flame was an entirely different matter. Anyone caught in that combination could expect a death drawn out and agonizing, fire consuming flesh as fuel, acid eating through what remained, venom finishing whatever the first two left behind.
Fortunately, this wasn't a fight meant to end in death. It was a contest of endurance, of will, whoever broke first. Both combatants fought at the very edge of that line, careful, even at full intensity, to keep the other alive.
The serpent's arsenal ran wide. It could spit its Acid-Venom-laced Blue Fire in a stream that behaved uncomfortably like napalm, clinging and spreading wherever it landed. Or it struck at range with its massive tail, wreathed now in the same blue flame, capable of leveling trees with a single sweeping blow.
August, faster than the serpent could track, closed distance again and again, buffs layered across his body until he moved with the wind's speed and struck with lightning's edge, hammering the beast from every angle it couldn't anticipate.
He'd come to this fight without armor, only his weapons and whatever he'd been wearing when he arrived. That choice cost him twice. Once, the serpent caught him with a glancing lash of its tail, blue fire licking briefly along his forearm before his own resistance smothered it, leaving behind only a faint red welt rather than the char it should have left on anyone else. A second time, its venomous fire caught the edge of his cloak, eating through the fabric in seconds, close enough that he felt the acid's bite against his skin beneath it, sharp and chemical, gone almost as quickly as it came once he tore the ruined cloth away. He wouldn't have felt either hit at all if he'd worn his armor, but he hadn't bothered, not for a fight where no one's life was actually on the line.
Still, he had to admit he hadn't fought anything of this scale in some time, and found himself, somewhere in the middle of it all, grinning behind the mask that was probably the only thing he had on that could properly be called protection. He was more invested in the fight than strictly necessary for something that was, on paper, a formality.
Both sides held back more than either let on, pulling their strongest attacks at the last possible moment, canceling blows that would have ended things far too quickly, or far too destructively, given how much forest surrounded them. The fight stretched past an hour, August offering mercy wherever the opening allowed it. Size, it turned out, cut both ways. Impressive and intimidating as the serpent's bulk was, it also gave a trained eye considerably more surface area to work with, more places for a strike to land.
The serpent, for all its raw power, simply couldn't track August's position long enough to land a clean, decisive hit of its own, not against something moving this fast, this unpredictably. A couple of hours in, bruised, scorched along one flank where August's lightning had finally broken through its scales, and thoroughly exhausted, the serpent finally conceded.
Leveling this stretch of forest just to prove a point held no appeal, and even if it had been willing to risk it, some part of it already suspected the outcome wouldn't have changed regardless. August, it sensed, had spent most of the fight testing himself as much as testing his opponent, training as much as dueling. That alone told the serpent everything it needed to know about how much of a threat it had actually posed.
"I concede. You win our duel, human."
And with that, the match ended. The village had secured all three permissions it needed, with conditions attached, as expected. Among the terms, August promised to send people out to study the terrain across each beast lord's territory personally, to determine the best possible route for the road itself.
The meeting adjourned shortly after. August and Aetherwing made their way back toward Maya Village, carrying good news home at last.
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The Road West
The road itself wasn't a new idea, not really. August and Uncle Andy had scouted this same stretch of terrain years earlier, back when the proposal existed as little more than a rough sketch and a shared hope that it might someday matter. What they'd confirmed then still held true now: the village sat roughly 200 kilometers from the border heading due west, with a single kilometer of buffer zone separating the edge of the forest from the imperial highway beyond it. Not an unreasonable distance, not for people willing to put in the work.
The engineering side of things had never really been the obstacle. Sibus had sketches ready for this kind of project long before today's meeting ever took place, terrain surveys, load calculations, the kind of practical groundwork that made him so reliable when it came to turning an idea into something buildable. The real holdup had always been the territorial rights that would be violated, it was never the question of whether it could be constructed or not, since any road crossing additional beast lord domains required going through proper channels first, which meant, in practice, going through Aetherwing. As Guardian Beast of the Northern Forest, he mediated matters like this on behalf of all thirty-three beast lords collectively, though even he couldn't simply override an individual lord's will on his own authority. Every agreement still had to be earned, lord by lord, the same way August had earned it today.
It hadn't been guaranteed, not by any means. Some beast lords, even now, after everything the village had done in defense of Shadowfen, still viewed humans as little more than another source of meat, tolerated at best, never quite trusted due to humans' greed for more resources and land. Today's outcome could easily have gone the other way. That it hadn't fortunately gone the other way around, that all three beast lords had agreed, however conditionally, felt like real progress, the kind that would let the village start actual survey work instead of simply waiting on permission that might never come.
There was still work ahead. Terrain to properly map, routes to finalize, bridges to design for beasts who wanted nothing to do with human roads underfoot. But for the first time, the path west felt like something real, rather than a plan perpetually stuck waiting for someone else's approval.