Esmerelda skidded to a halt just behind the exhausted line of cadets that were holding the frontline, now able to see the violet sigils etched onto the side of their necks - courtesy of Jerimiah Heart. The dirt beneath her boots was slick with blood and bile, turning it into the perfect home for a snout-nosed rat, and the acrid stench of burned flesh singed the inside of her nose. However, Esmerelda gave no outward reaction other than her hands being already alight with magic sigils.
Unlike Esmerelda, Jass and Deacon didn't stop - instead, they ran past the gaps within the frontline.
"Cover us!" Deacon shouted over his shoulder to Esmerelda, his voice barely audible over the howls and screams of the various mutant creatures around him.
"Already on it," Esmerelda muttered, raising both palms as arcs of blue-white mana erupted from her fingers, her spell further emboldened by her Innate Skill, The Spirit Kissed, activating for the second time upon her arrival on Floor One. A skin-tight shield snapped over the trio, filtering some of the corrupt mana saturating the battlefield while protecting them from physical attacks.
The cadets nearby instinctively tightened their formation around Esmerelda as she began to recast the same spell around each member of the frontline.
Jass let loose a battle cry, glaive gleaming with a fresh enchantment, and vaulted over a gutted school bus wreckage. She landed hard, blade-first into a level 4 mutant slag lurker trying to ambush them from the side. The creature shrieked, limbs twitching, before it was cleaved apart in a wet arc.
Deacon was already ahead, flame-wreathed blades out, teeth bared, blood from dozens of low-level mutants coating his armor. He carved through a pair of hook maws like they were made of paper, his Lesser Beastblood Tonic still singing in his veins even as the last of its effect faded.
And there he was.
Face to face with the Floor Boss.
He'd waited 16 years for this moment.
And he didn't wait a second longer as he charged forward.
His right sword connected just under the creature's ribcage, sliding between plates of fungal chitin. But instead of flinching from Deacon's attack, the Floor Boss swatted him away like a fly. Deacon went airborne, smashing through a burnt-out delivery truck, denting the side as he rolled through it and skidded into a pile of rubble.
"Deacon!" Jass snapped, hurling herself forward.
The Floor Boss came for her next, arm swinging in a lazy, grotesquely confident arc. She ducked, rolled beneath it, and slashed a wide gash across its thigh, where the fungal plating was thin.
Esmerelda saw it all. From her perch just behind the cadets, she clenched her fists but couldn't do anything other than stop the low-level mutants from attacking Deacon while he was down, she wasn't a Healer nor was she a Buffer.
Jass was still trading blows with the beast, her movements a mix of desperation and rage. She deflected a strike with the shaft of her glaive, flipped back, then lunged in with a rising cut that carved a trail through its stomach.
But the Floor Boss showed no reaction to her strikes, instead, it opened its jaws.
Mana gathered in its throat.
"Aegis Nova – Full Bind!" a voice shouted out from behind the frontline, back where the group of the top 15 stood atop a roof.
A massive, translucent sigil above and below the Floor Boss. Chains of pure light snapped down, wrapping around the creature's arms and torso just as the mana in its throat reached critical mass.
Damian? Deacon asked himself in disbelief. No, this isn't the time for having these thoughts right now.
The roar caught in its throat moments before it was to be unleashed.
Deacon exhaled hard, pain still thudding through his ribs, but the moment he saw the chains snap down around the Fungal Floor Boss, he kicked off the rubble he was above and shot forward.
The Floor Boss twisted toward him even as its body groaned against the bindings. That pale fungal eye rolled downward, locking onto him.
Deacon ducked under the first snap of its restrained arm, feeling the raw pressure rush overhead like standing near a passing freight train.
He stepped inside its guard.
Deacon dipped under the first thrash of its arm, still stupidly strong despite the chains, and slid into striking range. Both swords came down in a crosscut straight into the exposed gap between its ribs and spine.
Rotten flesh and black-green blood exploded out, hissing on contact with the mana lining his blades.
The Floor Boss thrashed in its bindings, attempting to squash the fly attacking it.
Deacon was already moving. He spun to the side, flipped one blade into a reverse grip, and drove it hard into the soft joint behind its knee.
The limb buckled slightly.
He yanked it out, turned, and slammed the other sword up into its side, just under a patch of cracked bone-armor Jass had already opened up earlier. It sank to the hilt.
"Move!" he shouted, yanking his weapon free and diving left just as the Floor Boss ripped one of the bindings off with a snap loud enough to shake the ground.
Jass didn't wait. She was already on it.
Her glaive flashed once, then twice, each strike burying deep into the ruined joint Deacon had exposed. The second hit cracked through bone and fungal crust alike.
The Floor Boss howled in pain.
The second the Floor Boss screamed, Deacon planted his foot hard and pivoted around its backside. Its knee was wrecked now, he could see the joint twitching and spasming while leaking green-black blood, however, it was still standing. dangerous.
He couldn't give it time to recover.
Deacon threw himself forward, blades flashing. The first swipe carved through the dangling muscle of its calf, a thick strand of tendons snapping like a wet rope. The second strike was a clean diagonal slash up toward the spine.
He felt resistance, dense bone, but pushed through it with a snarl, mana sparking off his blade in brief pulses.
The Floor Boss staggered as a barrage of Power Shot arrows struck its right leg.
Its elbow dropped, its balance was lost, and gladly Deacon took the opening offered to him.
He darted in, slammed both short swords into its lower back, then kicked off the Floor Boss' spine with both boots and backflipped away just as a massive arm slammed into the spot he'd been standing a heartbeat ago.
However, it didn't matter.
As he was already in the air, twisting mid-fall, and landing low behind Jass as she tore another chunk out of the Floor Boss's thigh.
Its howl turned feral.
Esmerelda's voice rang out behind them sharply. "The bindings are gone!"
Deacon felt it before he even turned to notice the bloodshot eyes of the Floor Boss that glared at him.
The pressure in the air shifted both around the Floor Boss as well as the air within his chest.
The sudden heat was building in his chest, like someone lit a match inside his lungs. The Floor Boss's back arched, jaw splitting unnaturally wide.
Another roar was coming.
"Jass, break left!" Deacon shouted, stabbing his swords into the dirt revealed ground and grabbing a fallen cadet's tower shield from the ground before slamming it into the dirt in front of him like a wall – moments before the air around him detonated.
A cone of pure force exploded from the Floor Boss's mouth, obliterating everything in its path: cars flipped, bodies flew, and entire street signs were ripped from their foundations. The asphalt that remained around them cracked and shattered.
But Deacon held.
The makeshift shield shook in his grip, tore at his arms, but he stayed crouched behind it until the roar passed.
Then he rose, blood leaking from his nose, both arms trembling as he tore his blades from the dirt.
But he was still breathing, still standing, and his blades were still in hand.
"Alright," he growled, eyes locked on the bleeding cracks in the Floor Boss's fungal armor, his arms trembling in pain slightly as he attempted to tighten his grip around his short blades. "Let's fucking finish this, you mutated dickhead."
Beneath the pain, beneath the exhaustion and raw nerve endings, something deeper flickered to life inside Deacon's chest.
Heat.
A slow, deliberate fire sparked behind his sternum, just under the ribs. It coiled like a serpent waking from hibernation, fanned by the flood of emotion; rage, focus, defiance.
Ah, I get it now…
The Undying Flame.
That's why that name sounded so familiar, Deacon thought to himself as he felt as though time itself slowed around him.
Deacon exhaled slowly through his teeth, the breath coming out faintly tinted with steam. The blood on his arms began to sizzle. The blade in his right hand hummed in his grip, reacting to the rise in core temperature.
His father had told him stories about Mages, Healers, Archers, Warriors… Heroes, all of whom went on adventures that took them across the stars.
Every heartbeat fed the fire.
The adventures they took across the stars brought them to places where oceans were truly endless, stretching beyond the horizon in every direction under skies of burning violet.
A low, consistent heat that spread through his bones and tendons like molten wire pulled tight. His muscles steadied, his vision tunneled, and the world around him slowly began to move.
And the Floor Boss moved.
It reared up, its wounded leg dragging, mana boiling off its form in waves of thick green haze. Its jaw opened again, another roar starting to build, but this time, Deacon didn't look for protection from the blast.
They walked on worlds where gravity danced to its own mood, where forests sang with voices of ancient trees, and where cities floated in the upper clouds, their towers lit by a thousand suns.
He ran straight toward it.
The air warped around him, as thin tufts of steam entered his mouth as he inhaled.
Every step drove heat into the ground beneath his boots. The flames that wreathed his short swords moved in sync with the flame within his chest.
They faced beasts that breathed stardust and storms that could erase entire mountains in the blink of an eye.
The Floor Boss turned to meet him, bringing one massive, bone-plated arm down like a guillotine onto his neck, uncaring of the weakened manabolts and manaspears striking its fungal flesh.
Tufts of flame exited his mouth and trailed in the air behind him as he exhaled.
The air around him began to dry.
Those near to him found their lips dried, and those closer to him, such as Jass, found themselves with split lips.
He slid beneath it, the floor cracking behind him as the strike missed by inches. Then he surged up, inside the creature's reach, both blades igniting as he dragged them in parallel arcs across its ribcage.
FOOM!
Fire burst outward from the gashes, not normal flame, this was his fire – his Undying Flame. It clung to the wounds, burrowing deeper, feeding on the fungal rot and releasing plumes of black smoke as it burned through.
The Floor Boss reeled back, howling in pain as the flames tore through its fungal flesh.
"Jass!" Deacon barked. "Now!"
"Got it!" She shouted from his side as she lunged forward with her glaive spinning like a turbine, every inch of it glowing with physical reinforcement runes. She brought it down right into the same spot Deacon had just scorched its flesh, right under the ribcage.
CRACK!
The fungal armor shattered, exposing raw, twitching muscle and glowing mana sacs within. The Floor Boss staggered back, claws flailing blindly, vents on its back releasing darkened smoke.
Esmerelda's voice rang out behind them. "Spirits of Fire and Flame, I call upon thee – Bombard!"
Her spell slammed down a second later, and from above the heads of the frontline that protected her, a barrage of fire arrows spiraled into existence on the Floor Boss's exposed chest. The impact sent it skidding back, smoke rising from its wounds.
The heat in his chest was at its peak now, his whole body felt like a live wire of flame that he could barely keep restrained within him. He let out a guttural roar that had come from the depths of his soul as he charged toward the Floor Boss, both blades raised high, charging at its exposed core.
It was then, where everyone who had been attacking the Floor Boss stopped and turned their focus to Deacon.
And through it all, they pressed forward, driven not by glory, but by the thrill of discovery, the call of the unknown, and their unshakable belief – all of which encompassed their Undying Flame.
The Floor Boss met him with a backhand, but this time, Deacon was faster.
He ducked and drove both flame-wreathed short blades down into the exposed core with every ounce of strength and fury he had left.
The reaction was immediate.
A pulse of fire erupted from the wound, visible even to Deacon, as Esmerelda could see the glow of Deacon's flames from beneath its flesh, roasting its insides.
The Floor Boss's howl came warped and strangled, its limbs convulsing as if every nerve had been set alight.
Deacon didn't stop.
He shoved forward, putting all his weight into the blades as well as into the flame still roaring from within him, and forced the Floor Boss down.
And down it fell.
Crashing to the street in a thunderous heap that cracked the dried dirt beneath it. Smoke belched from its gaping maw. The fungal growths along its spine shriveled and disintegrated. Its eyes, once glowing with putrid glee, dimmed to a lifeless haze.
Then, finally, its chest stopped moving.
Deacon stood over it, chest heaving, blades still buried in the now-smoking core.
Silence fell over the square.
Then,
*[Fungal Colossus – Floor Boss Lv 8] has been slain – Partial XP has been given.*
*Your Class has reached Lv 6 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point*
Deacon stood atop the corpse of the Floor Boss, slightly hunched over as he stood, watching as its face began to melt from his flames.
"Done," he coughed, uncaring of the line of blood that dripped from his mouth. "This was one hell of a–"
Alarm bells blared in his head as Deacon snapped his head to the side in less than a second, dodging an arrow that would have taken his head off his neck.
It carved a deep groove into the ground with a drill-like abrasion that tore his left ear clean off and shredded the flesh and muscle of his cheek. Blood sprayed in a hot arc from his face, and a spike of vertigo sent his head spinning.
However, Deacon in that moment cared not for the searing pain that came from the side of his face, the immense vertigo that rocked his brain, nor the screams of his friends that rushed to him.
No.
What he did care about was the man standing on the roof, 200 meters away from him, atop a tiled roof, Liam Ross and his bow that was currently releasing a faint trail of steam.
[Human Lv 6]
The Academy of Beginning's Number One cadet within Deacon's generation.