B.F.HUUPS
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Chapter 55
🕑 Added 2025-08-10 20:50:34 +0000 UTCAaron would have to be a little smarter against this foe. It wasn’t just an attack that could hit him, but one that exploded like a shotgun that he couldn’t predict.
Unfortunately for the crow, that was precisely the kind of challenge he welcomed.
Attempt number two went about as well as one would expect. However, he had gauged the range of the explosive shockwaves. Even if he couldn’t predict the shockwaves himself, if he knew how large they were, he could effectively dodge them.
There was a problem, though. Even at the edge of the shockwave’s radius, power travelled outward. This residual power wasn’t enough to instantly kill him, but it was enough to send his body trembling out of control, staggering his movement and making him an easy target for follow-up attacks.
Aaron had powered his buffing Skills before the fight as usual, so why hadn’t [ Relentless Scourge ] prevented the crow’s Skill from slowing him? Because the Skill hadn’t actually affected his speed. It had damaged his coordination by sending powerful tremors through his body, which in turn slowed him.
This put him in a difficult situation. The attack radius of the shockwaves was huge. The crow could keep firing, and even if he managed to dodge a couple of attacks, he was bound to get caught eventually. Especially since he couldn’t easily organize a counterattack whilst it was in the air.
But none of that stopped Aaron from racing straight back into the trial. First, he needed to figure out how or why the bird’s attack had managed to hide itself from his ability to read fate. Once he knew that answer, he would attempt to tackle his inability to dodge the attack.
The battle started again, and Aaron focused on the sonic attacks when they came. He studied them and fate as he battled the beast. He could dodge the initial attack easily enough, but he knew what was coming next. The vibrations traveled some distance through the air after the attack exploded.
He had planned for this and was already moving away. Cycling stamina and using [ Gust Step ] and [ Adipose Fusion ] for additional power, he pressed everything into his speed.
It seemed like he would do it, dodging three attacks in a row, but the fourth exploded just within reach. It had landed several meters away, but the shockwaves traveled far enough to turn him into a trembling mess, allowing the crow to finish him off seconds later. He triggered [ Equal and Opposite ] to try and nullify the damage, and it worked to an extent, but not quite enough to let him survive.
But dying wasn’t something he was overly concerned with. He had to thank this bird. It exposed him to a weakness he didn’t realize he had, and he was determined to figure out how to patch the hole in his technique.
But as the fights dragged on, he realized something was off. He focused on the fates bound to the attack itself. Everything had threads of fate, representing what their possible futures were, and attacks themselves were no different. Fate couldn’t be tricked. Even if an attack shifted from one thing to another, it should be visible to him. The only limitation was the length of time he could see, and the concentration required to map many threads simultaneously, especially in battles with many foes. It was supremely difficult and had taken Aaron a long time to get the hang of, but it always worked.
But this wasn’t what was happening. Even if he ignored the crow itself and focused entirely on the sonic attack, he still could only see the attacks’ fate and not the vibrating energy it unleashed.
Maybe the beast was just running on pure instinct and manually triggering the shockwave when it got close? No, that didn’t make sense. He wasn’t reading its mind. Regardless of how mindless it was, fate was fate.
The more he thought about it, the more confusing it was. Everything had threads of fate, even Yendal, a primordial goddess, and from his understanding, one of the most powerful beings in existence.
If Yendal couldn’t merely defy fate, there was no way this crow could. And yet, it appeared that it was.
It really did make no sense.
Unless there was something else going on, Aaron thought back to the beast’s description. It had a title called Heavenly Defier, and he immediately wondered if this could have anything to do with it.
Titles were bound to achievements. The ones Aaron had gained were because of impressive feats he had achieved… that and arriving in the trials. Still, System bugs aside, a Title was indicative of what feats someone had pulled off.
Kinslayer was fairly self-explanatory, and distasteful. Did the System really provide boons to those who killed their own families? The thought made Aaron a little uncomfortable, but it wasn’t what interested him.
Heavenly Defier, on the other hand? Did that mean this crow had done some heavenly defying act? Aaron wasn’t sure if the multiverse defined heavens and fate as the same thing, or related in some way, but if they were, then perhaps a Title gained by doing something that defied just that could provide a boon to overcome something like fate reading?
It was a bit of a stretch. Couldn’t a literal goddess be considered heaven-defying? Anyone who had climbed to the peak and claimed godhood was more heaven-defying than some peak E-grade beast, regardless of how strong it was for its level.
Dammit, what is it?
Whatever the answer, he knew he had to learn more about this attack and formed his mana sphere around his body.
Hopefully, he could gain some insights about the crow’s attack. But that wasn’t his only reason for doing it. The mana sphere had proven immensely useful, but it was simplistic and crude, and not something that could be relied upon in a real-life or death situation. If he continued using it for this final push to level 25, perhaps it would influence his evolution.
The crow circled through the air and dove toward him in an attack pattern.
The following blast traveled straight through his mana sphere, stalled briefly by [ Equal and Opposite ] again before killing Aaron instantly. But nonetheless, he gained data from the experience.
In an absolutely mad kind of way, this was good for Aaron. If the beast killed him so quickly, he could farm this experience for data against its attack relatively quickly.
Restarting the trial, he used [ Gust Step ] to fly straight up to the tower’s top and reapplied his mana sphere. It took barely a minute, and he was dead again.
An insane grin plastered his face as he respawned in the hallway. At least his method was efficient. He was sick of wasting time, and the trials wouldn’t last forever. He needed to make the most of his time.
Within less than an hour, Aaron had experienced dozens of deaths to the crow, and he was starting to get a feel for the sonic attack it sent his way.
Wait, I was right. There’s nothing about this crow that can defy fate, is there? It’s the attack… but it isn’t defying fate either, is it? No, it's blocking me. Or rather, my ability to counter it…
It was the interference that he felt. There was some additional element to the attack that blocked his ability to read its fate. This interference was not so powerful to affect fate itself, but it could blind Aaron’s ability to read it.
That’s it, isn’t it?
There was a special quality to the sonic attacks that wasn’t directly related to his fate reading at all, and yet it nullified his trait.
But how did that work? Aaron wondered. And then he realized what was happening two deaths later. The Skill used by the crow had an effect that nullified counters, and it considered his fate reading a counter to the Skill.
This made complete sense, he thought. If the attack had some special trait that made counters ineffective, and it considered his fate-weaving a counter, then it explained why it blocked it. It also meant that the Skill was an extremely powerful one, and a Skill as powerful as that in the E grade likely came with a downside.
It was hard to truly gauge the raw power of the Skill since Aaron was so massively underleveled, but he believed it was strong enough, especially with the staggering effect it had. To also nullify counters was very impressive.
Peak E grade was a world away from Aaron, but those at E grade were still small fries in the multiverse, and Aaron doubted they would have Skills that could beat his trait without drawbacks.
A grin crept across Aaron’s face as the bird circled through the air, preparing to attack. He still had no idea how to best it, but his plan to learn how its Skill worked had gone exactly to plan, giving him hope.
Besides, he felt like this was an important insight into how the multiverse worked.
If he couldn’t counter the Skill, maybe he could learn to survive it? Perhaps this was the perfect opportunity to test out his new Vitality Heart.
Before restarting the trial, Aaron ate as much as he could stomach, greatly ballooning himself out to ogre proportions. He would need all the energy he could get for this, and finished his meal off with a serving of “Stew of Boiling #$ErRor&*” for the boons.
When he got to the tower’s top, he summoned his mana sphere and tinkered with it to shield himself from the crow’s attack. It was nowhere near powerful enough to stop it, nor even seriously weaken the attack. However, even the slightest dampening of the Skill might be enough to help him survive its initial blast.
Bracing for impact, he cycled stamina through his body to harden it and into [ Equal and Opposite ], attempting to boost the Skill’s power. Meanwhile, he cycled HP through his Vitality Heart, attempting to boost its effectiveness.
The sonic blast came hard and fast, exploding through his defenses in an instant and killing him. But every death was an opportunity to glean information, and Aaron didn’t waste a second going through his preparations and restarting the trial.
His second death wasn’t instant. He lived for two whole seconds before his wounds got the better of him; on the fourth attempt, that was increased to three seconds.
Four seconds of the seventh attempt.
Five on the eleventh.
Six on the fifteenth.
Seven on the twentieth.
Eight on the thirtieth.
Nine on the thirty-third.
And ten on the thirty-ninth attempt.
For ten full seconds, Aaron was pumping Vitality through his body and shielding as much damage as possible via pouring mana into his shield.
His body was wrecked internally by the attack, and he again felt the odd feeling of his soul drifting away as his body perished.
Yeah, nah, he thought.
Through sheer force of will, he clung to his nearly ruined corpse, at the same time continuing to force his Vitality Heart to keep beating, despite the strain. A few seconds later, though, he could no longer hold on and once again returned to the hallway.
It was obvious that this was far more than just a Vitality Heart and huge quantities of energy keeping him alive. Aaron still wasn’t sure exactly why or how he could do what he could, but he knew that he would die instantly to the powerful attack if not for his ability to cling to life.
And on the forty-second attempt, he survived the attack, and the crow circled back through the sky, turning away from him as it powered up.
For his strategy to work, Aaron had been dodging the first few attacks, and only hunkering down and tanking the final one he couldn’t avoid. But it was still only four or five attacks in a row that the crow could manage before breaking from its attack, suggesting that this assault was quite costly for the giant bird.
It made sense, though. An attack that couldn’t be countered was a powerful one indeed, and he had finally survived it just long enough to be able to fight back.
He had poured stupid amounts of energy into healing and was gaunt and malnourished, but he quickly started shoveling food into his mouth.
“I’m getting close,” Aaron muttered as he watched the bird turn. Surviving the attack had taken just a little too much out of him, but next time, he would unleash his vengeance for everything the beast had put him through.
