Chapter 741: Wood versus Fire

Sky stepped out of the arena with a grumbling, muttering voice, as Eisen looked at him with a smile on his face, "Good job, Sky. Although, I think we should maybe kind of talk about your tendency to freak out when... you know."

"But I'm not a child!" Sky replied with a loud, annoyed voice, and Eisen just slightly chuckled as he placed his hand onto the Fae-Kin's head. Something that felt weird to do in this form, since Eisen was fully transformed into his Demonic form. Actually, he never had the chance to do something like this in his current form, although it did still feel faintly familiar. Probably through one of Eisen's memories that he had recovered along the way. Things were starting to slowly blend together when he tried to recall certain things.

"Well, this is another win for us." Eisen pointed out as he turned his head, looking at the Grandour with a light grin on his face, and the chieftain turned his head with a glare, "The bet was that you would win all ten. There is no way that is going to happen. Those little ones were simply a surprise to my warriors! They will not win the next ones!"

Eisen laughed slightly as he shook his head, "We'll see about that. Askr, it's your turn." The old man said with a snap of his finger, making sure that the command would be understood by the giant golem. It didn't take long until both parties had gathered down there in the arena, and everyone seemed rather surprised to see Askr. To them, he looked like a forest giant that had been affected by the giants' curses in an attempt to grow stronger than usually possible for them.

Askr stood there, a weapon sheathed to his hip, but ready to fight with whatever means were offered to him. Since he held a lot of skills trained up by Brody himself, Askr had various different combat capabilities. However, since Grandour was aware that Askr was a golem, he clearly thought that his abilities were limited to what regular golems were able to do, which could be called simply throwing themselves at their opponent and hitting them with whatever they could.

"This fight will be anything but simple for your side. To others, it looks like that puppet is a giant overtaken by wood, so it is only fitting that the one we have face it is a giant overtaken by flames." The grandour explained, and Eisen stared at him with a deep frown as he activated his truth-seeing-eyes. He saw the mana flow throughout the distance, and managed to spot a large amount of fire elemental mana concentrated in one spot.

And then, the gate on the side of the grandour's warriors opened up, as a figure stepped into the arena. She stood there, donning thin armor basically all over her body. But it wasn't just any armor, it was armor designed to contain rather than protect, something that Eisen was able to see right off the bat. The thing that the armor was supposed to contain was the power of flames that had practically consumed this giant.

Her hands were clad in burning flames, and her hair had basically turned into fire itself. Blazing light flooded out of her eyes, and it was clear from her furious demeanor that the fire had not only taken over her body but her mind as well.

"Is she always like that?" Eisen asked, "Always under the influence of those flames, I mean."

"What sort of question is that? Of course she is! There is no cure for this curse!" The grandour exclaimed, while Eiro let out a deep, annoyed sigh, "Right, because that definitely makes sense. Listen, the cause for this seems rather simple, so we might be able to find a solution that is just as simple. Her core is-"

"Silence, I will not let you distract me during this fight! I want to see your warrior of wood crumble to charcoal!" the grandour exclaimed with a broad grin, and a few moments later, the fight had officially begun. The old man rolled his eyes, figuring that he could just tell them about his ideas later. He might have to talk about it with Xenia to see if his ideas would actually end up working.

But for now, Eisen just really had to make this guy next to him shut up for a while. He snapped his finger one more time, and slightly muttered, "Freeze her over, Askr."

The moment he commanded the giant golem, he turned his head to the side so that he could watch the grandour's expression as Askr activated a certain ability of his. Mist flowed down his body and the air around him cooled down tremendously. The runes all over his body started lighting up in a faint, light blue light. Ice started covering Askr's whole body as he turned into the practical antithesis of the warrior in front of him.

"But- How did-" The grandour muttered, and Eisen couldn't help himself but just broadly smile, "What, did you expect Askr to be a one-trick golem like the others you might have seen? He was personally created by me, using abilities taken from all five of us that peaked. Anything you throw at him, my Askr will be able to fight off."

While the grandour was still trying to comprehend what exactly this old man just told him, the fight actually began. The furious, fiery warrior started to rush at Askr and pushed her flaming spear forward. Askr saw the incoming attack and pulled his blade out of its sheath. He swung it to the side just once, and the wooden weapon cleanly cut through the metal of the spear. Because of course, the metal was greatly weakened, being influenced by the heat of the warrior's flames. The grandour had clearly planned on having the hot metal damage the wood that made up Askr's body up even more than it normally would. But in this case, the weapon hadn't even been able to scratch a part of his armor, so it was clear that there was a large difference power between him and his opponent here.

However, in response to the weapon just being cut apart by a wooden blade, the warrior fighting against Askr just threw said weapon to the side. Instead, she went for a more feral way of fighting against her opponent.

She threw herself at Askr in an attempt to grapple him, but the golem simply let go of his blade for a moment and grabbed the collar of the warrior's armor, throwing her away from him and causing her to tumble to the ground. Of course, the heat she gave off started to melt parts of the ice that were covering Askr's body, but due to the sheer amount of mana that the golem was able to output, that ice regenerated the moment it had the chance to. And since the wood underneath wasn't all that suspectible to heat in the first place, even though some of the ice melted away, Askr was totally fine.

However, there were some aspects to the warrior's flame abilities that neither Eisen nor Askr had really taken into account, which was that, since the armor she was wearing controlled the flames, she was able to output them in particular patterns and strengths, giving her an incredible fine-control over her movement by simply propelling herself with flames like some sort of rocket.

Before the warrior hit the ground with her back, her body flipped around and she landed on all four limbs, as if she was some kind of cat. She twisted her body around in a clearly unnatural way, as if her body itself had lost mass and had turned into flames in certain areas to allow for this sort of thing. Her arm twisted onto her back and she latched onto Askr's shoulder, practically trying to burn her fingers into his wood to at least get a proper grip on her.

As if Askr was unsure how to exactly react, he turned his head toward Eisen, awaiting a command.

"...Askr. Niflheim." The old man muttered, and immediately, the giant golem reacted. What happened now was practically incomparable to what happened just a moment later. The whole arena froze over, and even snow slowly started dropping down onto everyone that was watching this scene, as an ability Eisen just recently built into Askr had been activated.