Ch 194 – Keep Moving Forward
With a roar tearing itself from his throat, the explosions from both Flame Art: Flame Steps and the dozens of Flame Mines layered beneath his feet detonated simultaneously, their flames empowered by Undying Flame.
The combined force of the explosions rocketed Deacon forward, transferring all the inertia gained into Echoform Reliquary and into his uncle’s fist.
Bjorn's right fist was blasted backward by the sheer inertia transfer from beneath Deacon's feet into it, the massive appendage no longer taking up the entirety of Deacon's vision and instead revealing both his uncle's wide grin and the completely unblemished skin of his fist where Deacon's blades had been pressed moments before.
Fucking hell, Deacon thought with no small amount of frustration as he leaped into the air to dodge the horizontal swipe of his uncle's left arm that came cutting through the space where he'd been standing, the massive limb gouging out a trench in the ground deep enough to fit a horse in as it passed through where Deacon had been a fraction of a second earlier.
With twin jets of flame trailing after his feet from Flame Steps still being cast, Deacon landed in an unsteady run directly onto his uncle's giant left arm where he immediately began using his dual short swords wreathed in BloodFlame to slash at his footing as he sprinted up the length of his uncle's arm like it was a road, leaving behind dozens of cuts in his uncle's training suit sleeve along with singed footprints from the flames beneath his boots, each one marking his path as he ran toward his uncle's neck.
Deacon's heart hammered against his ribcage as he caught sight of his uncle's right hand, the same one he had just knocked backward with that explosion, rushing toward him from the side to swat him off, closing the distance far faster than Deacon had anticipated, given that barely ten seconds had passed since he had managed to push it away in the first place.
Deacon burst the flames beneath the soles of his feet and launched himself forward up the massive arm, though he was thrown considerably further and far more uncontrollably forward than he'd planned as his uncle brought his right hand down against his own left arm where Deacon had been running, the impact creating a thunderous clap that generated a shockwave powerful enough to blast Deacon off his trajectory entirely.
He barely managed to twist himself midair and get his feet positioned correctly before he slammed feet-first into a thick tree trunk with enough force that a massive crack echoed through the forest as the wood beneath his boots began to splinter.
Deacon didn’t waste a second as he swapped Echoform Reliquary into its double-handed axe form and swung the weapon at the wood directly beneath his feet with a Power Strike chop that severed the upper portion of the tree from just below his feet in a single stroke.
Not even a full second after Deacon had cut through the tree, Bjorn's massive right foot collided with a boulder the size of a small house and kicked it with such tremendous force that the stone projectile smashed directly into the bottom half of the very tree Deacon had just cut through.
The sheer power behind the kick not only obliterated what remained of the trunk but also tore up a massive chunk of earth and roots along with it, sending the destroyed tree and boulder crashing through dozens of other trees in their path and leaving a wide and destructive trail in their wake.
Focus, focus, Deacon repeated to himself like a mantra in his mind as he dug the fingers of his left hand into the bark of the upper half of the tree that was now falling toward the ground along with him, his right hand still gripping his axe tightly. It’s just see-through glass…
With an expression of intense concentration crossing his face, Deacon’s feet shakily and unstably found purchase against the air itself, as though he were trying to balance on a wobbly platform floating in water.
His uncle's eyes widened momentarily in what might have been surprise as Deacon managed to take his first proper air step.
With an audible intake of air, Deacon hurled the entire upper half of the massive tree he'd been clinging to directly at his uncle's head with every ounce of strength his current Power Boost-enhanced body could muster, the severed trunk spinning end over end through the air as it closed the distance.
However, just as the projectile got within a five-meter radius of his uncle's face, Bjorn's right fist came around and smashed the entire tree trunk into hundreds of thousands of wooden splinters that exploded outward in every direction.
Deacon was completely unbothered by the shower of splinters that tore through his training suit shirt and pants in dozens of places, because the dark red runic echoes tattooed across his skin protected him from any actual damage.
The wooden shards bounced harmlessly off wherever they struck his exposed skin; even the splinters that hit his closed eyelids during the brief moment he shut them bounced away without leaving so much as a scratch.
Skin of Jötunheim for the win.
Relying momentarily on Blood Sense to keep track of his uncle's position while his eyes were closed against the shower of splinters, Deacon could feel through the spell that his uncle's right fist was still hurtling toward where he was currently falling through midair.
Digging his right foot against the air once more, small tufts of flame spurting out from beneath his boot for just a moment, Deacon launched himself upward and to the side to avoid the massive fist.
Taking full advantage of the shockwave that Bjorn's fist created when it stopped its forward momentum, Deacon used the explosive blowback of displaced air to send himself shooting in the direction of his uncle's head at a speed his own movement couldn't have achieved.
A cold sense of dread flooded through Deacon's entire being as Bjorn spoke up.
"Let's take this up a notch, shall we?"
With those words said, Bjorn picked up the pace and moved at least twice as fast as he had been moving moments before, shrinking back down to his normal size in the span of a single heartbeat and all but teleporting to appear directly in front of where Deacon was flying through the air.
Before Deacon could even process what had happened, how his uncle had managed to shift from his giant form into his normal form, his uncle's knee buried itself in his stomach with enough force to lift him slightly higher into the air.
As Deacon doubled over midair from the impact, Bjorn's right arm suddenly began to swell and grow while the rest of his body remained normal-sized. The gigantified arm grabbed hold of Deacon by pinching the front of his training suit, and with an “Alley-oop,” Bjorn launched Deacon high into the air above the forest.
"Fuuuck!" Deacon shouted as he tore through the air at what had to be over one hundred and fifty miles per hour, flying so high above the forest that he could see the curvature of the Training Field's boundaries in his peripheral vision before he collided with the solid blue barrier that served as the ceiling with a loud thud that knocked what little air remained in his lungs out.
"Ah fuck," Bjorn muttered as he stared down at the torn piece of cloth still gripped between his now normal right hand’s fingers where he'd grabbed his nephew's training suit, and he cursed again as he watched Deacon's body bounce off the ceiling and begin falling limply back toward the ground far below with his weapon, Echoform Reliquary, free falling out of his grasp. "Fuckity fuck fuck."
Bjorn fully shifted into his giant form and launched himself into the air with a boom so loud it shook the entire forest, leaving twin massive footprints cratered into the ground where he had been standing.
He crossed the considerable distance between himself and his falling nephew within seconds before shifting back to his normal size and catching Deacon in his arms while they were still a few hundred meters above the forest canopy.
Bjorn opened his mouth to ask if Deacon was alright, but before a single word could leave his lips, his nephew's fist connected solidly with his face, the punch stunning him for just a moment before another fist crashed into his face from the opposite direction.
Deacon pushed himself out of his uncle's arms to wrap his legs around Bjorn's midsection and began wailing punch after punch onto his uncle's face and upper torso.
Bjorn couldn't help but laugh at his nephew's deception as his own dark brown slitted eyes locked directly onto Deacon's crimson-red slitted ones.
Whipping his head forward with considerably more force than Deacon's punches had carried, Bjorn headbutted his nephew directly in the nose and used his far superior physical strength to easily break the cartilage with an audible crunch.
But Deacon soldiered through the broken nose and the jabs his uncle was managing to snake through his defense, his surprise attack having failed entirely, and now finding himself in a position where he had absolutely nowhere to go, given that they were still free-falling through the air.
Fuck it, grappling it is, Deacon decided, completely unaware of the massive dark red runic echo of a coiled serpent on his back beginning to rouse from its slumber, its long neck stretching upward toward the back of Deacon's neck as though reaching to plunge its fangs into it.
Unhooking his legs from around his uncle's midsection, Deacon deliberately tanked the vicious hit his uncle sent crashing into his kidney in favor of using the momentum from the blow to rappel himself around onto Bjorn's back, the movement cutting off his uncle's view of exactly what he was doing and catching him entirely by surprise.
Bjorn heard a familiar metallic twang of wire being pulled taut, and suddenly he found metal wires wrapping themselves around his throat while Deacon planted both feet firmly against his back and began using him like some sort of discount sand skidder, pulling his arms backward to tighten the wires around his uncle's neck and began sawing at it.
Deacon was completely uncaring about the fact that his own blood was running across the wires from where they cut into his hands, and he cast Ignis Sanguinis: BloodFlame Armament directly onto the metal wires themselves, transforming them into garrotes of flame that began burning into his uncle's skin even as they continued falling and had now breached back into the treeline with only a few seconds remaining before they would crash into the ground.
"Alright, that was really good – you pass." Bjorn called out to grab Deacon’s attention as they were now hurtling through branches, though his nephew either couldn't hear him over the wind rushing past their ears or was too focused on maintaining his grip to register the words.
"Uh, Deacon? I said you passed, and you can stop that nowm" Bjorn tried again, louder this time, but still got no response as the ground was rapidly approaching and his nephew showed no signs of releasing his hold or stopping his sawing.
"Alright, that’s it!" Bjorn finally acquiesced as they were now twenty-seven meters away from hitting the ground. He activated Gigantification once more, the sudden expansion of his body snapping the flame-wreathed wires around his throat as though they were threads, and placed one massive hand behind his back to position it directly beneath where Deacon had been perched just seconds earlier.
His giant form landed on the ground with a boom that sent tremors through the earth and toppled several nearby trees from the shockwave alone.
A few seconds after landing, Bjorn reverted to his normal size while carefully lowering his hand so that Deacon landed on the ground with a relatively light thud compared to the impact his giant form had just made.
Groaning as the wind was knocked out of him for what felt like the tenth time in fifteen minutes when his back hit the palm of his uncle's hand, Deacon finally let go of the broken, BloodFlame-wreathed metal wires and fell backward onto the grass, completely drained of both stamina and mana.
Bjorn deftly caught his nephew before he could hit the ground and carefully laid him flat on his back against the grass.
"Phew," Bjorn huffed, letting out a long breath as he stared down at his nephew. "You really had me there for a second, you were pretty damn close to landing a solid hit."
Unable to even verbally retort at the moment due to his complete exhaustion, Deacon simply let his eyes roll in their sockets as his only reply to his uncle's assessment, because from where he was lying it didn't look like any of his attacks had managed to do any actual damage to his uncle at all except for the faint and barely perceivable wire burns around Bjorn's throat that were already visibly healing and returned to its normal color as though nothing had happened within a span of five seconds.
"Close my ass," Deacon finally managed to huff out between breaths. "You didn't use any mana, didn't activate any skills, and you didn't even pull out any of your weapons the entire time you were in giant form."
"Don't forget I also didn't use my first Racial Trait either," Bjorn added with a chuckle, which only made Deacon groan louder in frustration at the reminder.
Bjorn crouched down beside where Deacon was lying and reached out to pat his nephew's head in a gesture that was probably meant to be comforting. "There, there—"
He hopped backward while still in his crouch just far enough to dodge Deacon's wild overhand swing with his right fist, the momentum from the punch sending Deacon rolling over onto his stomach, where he now faced the dirt, completely unable to flip himself back over, having burned through all but the last dregs of his stamina reserve.
Bjorn chuckled at his nephew's continued attempts to fight even when he was clearly done, and he reached over again to rub Deacon's head while his nephew could only groan in response to the gesture, the sound unintentionally causing a reel of memories to flash through Bjorn's mind.
As the warm rays from the Training Field's artificial sun bore down on them and the wind brushed gently past where they were sitting in the grass, Bjorn spoke up after the memories that had been playing through his mind finally came to a halt.
"You have to keep moving forward, Deacon," he started, turning his gaze away from his nephew and toward the distant skyline. "If you stop and wallow in your failures, you'll only end up as some decrepit old man stuck thinking about nothing but what-ifs and should-haves."
He paused to let that sink in before continuing.
"If you hesitate to take action because you're afraid of fate repeating itself, or if you believe that pushing your friends away will somehow protect them from harm, your heart will forever regret those choices," Bjorn advised with a heavy and weary tone.
"As someone who has seen and gone through many of the same things you're experiencing now during the three-plus centuries I've been alive: Be true to yourself, and never stop moving forward, no matter what obstacles get thrown in your path."
It was only a minute later, when Deacon remained completely unmoving and hadn't made any sound or grunt of acknowledgment that Bjorn felt a sudden sense of trepidation creep up his spine.
"Uh, Deacon," he said, leaning forward slightly to try and get a better look at his nephew's face, which was currently pressed into the dirt. "Are you still awake?"
After a few seconds of silence that felt considerably longer than they actually were, Deacon responded with a single nod of his head that pushed his face slightly deeper into the dirt along with a grunt.
Bjorn let out a quiet and slow exhale of relief and settled himself more comfortably on the grass beside where his nephew remained face-down in the dirt, glad that his sage-like insight he granted Deacon was heard.