Academy of Beginnings Sword Style (Uncommon):
The Academy of Beginnings Sword Style is a structured and widely taught technique within the Academy of Beginnings that focuses on clean strikes, defensive posture, and balanced footwork. This style emphasizes fundamentals over flair. While using the Academy of Beginnings Sword Style you will receive a slight increase to your Strength and Dexterity stats.
Ah, so that's how you get the skill descriptions to show, Deacon mused to himself as then double tapped the other skills that he was curious to read about.
Basic One-Handed Weapon Mastery (Common):
Mastery begins with a single blade. Unlocks baseline proficiency with most one-handed weaponry. Provides a minor bonus to stamina efficiency when chaining basic attacks with a one-handed melee weapon.
Basic Light-Shield Mastery (Initiate):
A light-shield turns defense into opportunity. Unlocks baseline proficiency with most light-shields. When wielding a light-shield your stability when blocking is minorly enhanced.
Undying Flame (Innate skill):
A breathing technique, taught from father to son, that channels the heat born from the body and emotions. As the flame within builds, the user stores this burning energy until reaching full capacity. When released, intense heat radiates from their body. For a period of time, all fire attacks are enhanced.
Hmm, this is… Deacon trailed off as he read his skills beside the campfire as it dried his armor while absentmindedly taking out his ultra folded blanket from one of the pouches on his hip.
I guess this answers my earlier question as to how or rather why I haven't been as shocked or reacted as badly as I thought I would have after seeing Dad again after all this time.
Deacon sat quietly, as memories played across his mind of days long past, filled with the daily schedule of breathing exercises and meditation, practiced before and after weapon training with his father. He could almost hear the quiet guiding words of his father and smell the scent of tobacco that would always sting his nose when his father passed by him.
Or maybe, I just knew that Dad couldn't have died, and that maybe he got stuck on one of the top Floors of the Tower or something like that.
Even to this day, his breathing followed the very same pattern that his father had taught him back when he ran around the cabin in diapers. It had been so deeply ingrained in his mind that it had become second nature to him, allowing him to be able to do it without conscious effort after the age of four.
The breathing technique his father taught him was a simple one; with every breath he took, he drew in as much oxygen as he could, and as the oxygen entered his blood, he would merge it with his own fire mana, all the while coursing it through his body.
It was simple enough that he could do it at the age of four subconsciously, back when he could barely push mana out of his body. But when he was thirteen and tried teaching his breathing technique to his friends simply due to the fact that he was bored and his manaphone was dead, none of them could do it.
Back then, he'd never known why his father had taught him to breathe that way or why he'd been so adamant about him learning it, as it hadn't given him super strength, and it only marginally improved how long he could hold his breath.
... But now he knew. His father had wanted him to learn his own Innate Skill.
Deacon pulled his unfolded blanket tighter around his frame in response to the gust of wind that howled through a hole in the wall. I should plug that hole close tomorrow if I decide to stay here for the next couple of days.
"I guess trying to find the Floor Boss can hold out a while longer," he mumbled to himself as he scooted himself closer to the campfire, letting his eyes drift toward the jagged skyline visible through the gap in the wall, filtering out the faint flashes of multicolored spells off in the distance.
Tomorrow, he'd start exploring again.
But tonight? He needed to rest.
***
The fire had long since burned down to smoldering embers, their dim light struggling to hold off the darkness that filled the room Deacon set up camp in. Deacon stirred awake, eyes groggily opening to the sound of wind howling with a new, heavier pitch.
"Wha?" he mumbled to himself at the sounds of the wind harshly smacking against the outer walls of the room that he was in and somehow managing to get his leather gloves that had been drying to slap him in the face.
He sat up slowly, rubbing the stiffness from his neck. Looking at the Quest Panel he saw that he had slept for four hours. That's all his body had taken before dragging him back to the waking world.
He blinked owlishly for a few more seconds before nudging the blanket off of him and slipping on his gloves and peering out the open door frame of the room he was in and staring toward the open side of the building where the massive bite-shaped gap revealed the outside.
"Yeah, uh… what the fuck is that?" he muttered to himself. "Is it raining poison?"
The thunderstorm that had been going on when he'd passed out had been replaced with whatever thing that was going on now.
Grabbing a wooden desk leg from nearby, he made his way cautiously to the jagged edge of the open wall.
The wind clawed at his clothes the moment he neared the gaping hole. He extended the table leg outward into the falling rain.
Sssssss.
The wood hissed violently, steam curling off the soaked end as it blackened and began to bubble.
He yanked it back and gave it a slow once-over; part of it was already eaten away, wet and splintered, as if dipped in a vat of acid or Bonehead's water-filled bathtub that he alchemically "refined" to be able to handle his more toxic brews.
"Right," he said grimly, tossing the stick aside. "Definitely not stepping out in that."
He turned from the ruined skyline and rolled his shoulder again. Not perfect, but it's a lot better than last night.
Making his way to the stairwell door, and peered down through the narrow gap in its frame. The air below was darker than the rest of the building, still and humid – a stark contrast to the howling storm outside and the staircase leading to the top was boarded up with by his estimations, a hundred different objects.
From deep within the stairwell came the distant echoes of scraping and clicking noises.
"Yeah, uh, no," he said to himself as he then grabbed a nearby metal chair leg, rusted and bent but solid enough, and jammed it through the broken door handle and frame, wedging it into place.
Then he carefully and quietly dragged a broken cabinet over and tipped it sideways in front of the stairwell entrance, stacking half-splintered drawers and planks on top to create a quick barricade. It wouldn't hold forever, but it would make noise if something decided to try and come up.
Dusting his palms, he turned away and looked up.
The top floors.
Fewer floors to cover and potentially even safer to explore without having to deal with thirty or so floors worth of mutated humans and beasts that the floors beneath him housed. And with the storm turning everything outside not mutated into toxic soup, his best bet at possibly finding something useful was going further up.
He made his way down the hall, boots squelching slightly from the damp, and found another stairwell, this one only leading upwards.
The air grew cooler as he climbed. Water trickled somewhere between the concrete walls, running through cracks in the structure. The fungal growths thinned out the higher he went, replaced by mold-stained walls and warped steel support beams groaning faintly with every gust of wind battering the building.
He passed two more empty floors – one filled with shattered desks and rusted-out office equipment, another that looked like it had once been a small communications hub, now gutted of anything functional.
Much to Deacon's dismay, there were no artifacts, Lesser Beastblood Tonics or anything of the sort on the floors he passed through, only a couple of Mutant Humans and Rats that were Level 1s and 2s.
Climbing up to the next floor, Deacon glided toward a tipped-over and empty vending machine and crouched behind it just as he heard wet, out-of-breath breathing nearby.
Peeking over the tipped-over side of the vending machine, he saw three figures standing in the open. Two of them were hunched over Mutated Humans, their bodies stretched thin and limbs too long, and between them a massive, bloated shape covered in chitinous plates and swollen nodules that pulsed with each breath.
It looked like a centaur if it had been built out of discarded flesh and hardened tumors. One of its arms ended in a jagged cleaver-like growth, the other dragging along the ground like a dislocated limb. Its mouth was sewn into a permanent, skin-stretched grin.
Ah fuck, Deacon complained. Those were always a pain in the ass to kill in combat class. What are the odds I fight one right here?... At least it doesn't have a bow on hand.
[Mutated Human Lv 3]
[Mutated Human Lv 3]
[Mutated Centaur Lv 5]
Deacon eased back behind cover and reached for the steel wire in his pouch.
"Alright, Deke," he murmured to himself. "You can do this."
He worked fast, looping wire between two ceiling supports that had come loose and pinning a bundle of rusted metal rods atop a precarious shelf just overhead. Below it, a second wire stretched low, ankle-height, between two desks.
It was a relatively simple trap to set up.
He moved toward a collapsed cubicle wall, crouched low, and scattered broken glass across a narrow walkway between two structural pillars; forcing anyone who wanted to approach quietly to choose another, noisier path.
The last touch was a distraction, a snapped chair leg and a piece of cloth from his sleeve, knotted and placed in plain view beneath a flickering ceiling light. It swayed slightly in the humid air, a decoy that might draw one or two toward it if he needed to split them up.
Once done, he gripped the edge of a nearby desk and hoisted himself atop it, crouched low, short swords in hand. Mana flickered at his fingertips.
A soft breath.
He picked his mark; the one on the far left, the thinner of the two Mutated Humans.
Then he struck.
Deacon shot forward, like a bullet fired from a gun.
His boots barely made a sound on the side of the vending machine before he pushed off, soaring through the air with a burst of mana-enhanced speed. His right short sword flashed downward, carving into the shoulder of the thinner mutated human before the creature could even react. The force of the blow sent it crashing sideways into a rusted filing cabinet with a wet crack.
The others reacted instantly, far too fast for something their size, especially considering the centaur looked to be at the very least 300 lbs.
The mutated centaur let out a garbled shriek as its legs hammered against the cracked floor as it surged toward Deacon, dragging its cleaver-arm behind it like a butcher pulling a body. The second Mutated Human, thicker and more hunched than the first, bellowed and began a flanking run.
Deacon didn't wait.
He ducked low, bolting between the cubicles and right into the narrow walkway lined with broken glass.
The hunched Mutated Human pursued him.
It stepped directly onto the glass with a sickening crunch, shrieking as shards embedded in its feet. It stumbled, slipping right into the low wire stretched between the desks.
Its balance was ruined.
With a howl, it toppled forward and slammed into the ground, just beneath the shelf.
The rusted rods came down like steel rain.
By the time the metal hit flesh, Deacon was already moving again, blade reversed in his grip. He spun on the remaining threat, the mutated centaur, and sprinted sideways into open space, baiting it to charge at him.
True to their pride as a warrior race, the centaur took the challenge without hesitation, thundering forward with a snarling grin across its face.
Deacon bolted toward the trap he had set up earlier.
Three- two… One!
He slid to a stop just past the knotted cloth.
The centaur barreled after him, eyes locked and slammed headfirst into the reinforced cubicle frame Deacon had dragged into position earlier.
The impact sent a shockwave through the room. The beast staggered back, dazed, legs tangling.
Deacon was on it in an instant.
His short blades became arcs of heat and fury, cutting into the creature's exposed joints; behind the knees, under the arm, across the throat where stitched skin split under the strain.
The beast screamed.
It lashed out blindly, cleaver-arm slashing sideways, grazing Deacon's ribs, tearing leather.
"Fuck!" he hissed, pain flaring sharp.
But he didn't stop.
With a shout, he drove both blades into its exposed lower gut, flame erupting from the points of impact. The creature convulsed, choked on its own shriek.
Steam hissed from its mouth as the flames cauterized its insides.
Deacon yanked his blades free, breathing hard, blood mixing with rainwater along his side. "Traps are king."
He staggered slightly, winced, and leaned against the desk he'd started on. After a long moment, he slid down to the floor with a grunt, wiping his blades off on a torn patch of his cloak. "Fuck centaurs."