CHAPTER 252: THREE STEPS

Julius did not stay still for long. As if the approval he had just granted Dylan was nothing more than counterfeit currency, he suddenly changed the rules.

His hands, heavy as anvils, plunged into the earth. He pulled out two flat stones and clapped them together, the sound ringing like a death knell. Then, with a sharp flick, he hurled one at an angle—not toward Dylan, but at a split tree. The impact burst into a spray of wooden shards, flung at eye level. The second stone skimmed along the ground, invisible in the shadow of the roots.

Dylan raised his arm too late: splinters sliced his cheek, and the low projectile clipped his ankle, sending him stumbling. A misstep. His balance broke, and he crashed into the dust.

"There," Julius growled without mercy. "Real war doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It strikes when your foot slips, when your breath falters, when your eye waters from a splinter. So? You going to stay facedown and wait for the end?"

The words cracked at the same time as another stone, hurled with merciless cadence. Dylan rolled sideways, clumsy, barely avoiding the projectile that shattered the ground where his skull had been a heartbeat before.

Julius offered no respite. Stones came faster now, closer together, like a beating rain. Each throw targeted a point that forced Dylan to rise wrong, to twist off-balance, to lose his stance. This wasn’t a duel—it was a demonstration of what it meant to be crushed by rhythm.

And yet, within the chaos, Dylan began to see the pattern. The giant wasn’t throwing at random: he was weaving a cadence, a trap of tempo. One high, one low, one against the line of his escape, then a pause—brief, but always at the same instant. A breath.

Dylan seized it. He planted his feet, locked eyes with the colossus, and chose to gamble on that gap. When Julius launched the next stone, he did not dodge. He braced for it, felt it coming, and with the crash of his torn shoulder, he deflected it with a brutal sweep, immediately following with a hasty but deliberate throw of his own.

The stone did not hit Julius. But it forced the colossus to raise an arm to deflect it, breaking his rhythm for a fraction of a second.

Dylan panted, his face smeared with blood and sweat, but there was a spark burning in his eyes.

Julius halted, lips twisted in a carnivorous smile.

"Better," he said. "You found the opening. But don’t just see it. Create it."

Already his hands scooped up heavier, more irregular stones. The exercise was only just beginning.

The new stones seemed alive. Too large to be thrown easily, too jagged to fly straight. Yet Julius hurled them with monstrous ease, as if each was nothing more than an extension of his colossal arms.

The first projectile didn’t fly straight. It spun, lopsided, zigzagging like a wounded beast before ricocheting off a boulder and rebounding unpredictably. Dylan barely dodged, his breath stuck in his throat: this was no longer just about reflexes.

The second came before he’d even found his footing. A misshapen stone, spinning like a serrated wheel. Dylan tried to duck, but his foot caught on a root. His body pitched, and the rock’s whistle tore another lock of hair from his head. Too close.

He staggered up, tasting iron, and understood: Julius wasn’t just attacking his body anymore—he was attacking his balance, his breath, his inner rhythm.

"You think an enemy plays fair?" the colossus roared, his voice drowning out the thunder of impacts. "You think they’ll let you put your right foot down before your left? No. The world waits for your stumbles the way a vulture waits for your fall. So move—even when you’re falling."

A third stone came, fast as a bullet. Dylan had no choice but to drop to his knees, sliding through damp soil, dust sticking to his sweat-soaked skin. Pain flared in his open wounds, but instead of yielding to panic, he clenched his teeth.

The cadence quickened. Too fast, too cruel. Julius now unleashed stones in pairs, the first to force a dodge, the second to punish it.

And yet... something shifted.

Through the fatigue and pain, Dylan began to see not just the stones’ trajectories, but the voids they left behind. Tiny gaps, fractions of a second where his body could slip in, where his hands could snatch a rock from the ground. His ragged breath found a crude rhythm, a primitive percussion syncing to Julius’s murderous tempo.

This time, he did not just evade. When the fourth stone shrieked toward him, he dove forward, rolled through the muck, grabbed a smaller rock, and in a clumsy but deliberate motion, he hurled it back.

His stone flew in a shaky arc, but it forced Julius to shift his shoulder half a step. A sliver—but enough to break the colossus’s inhuman flow.

Dylan rose, gasping, arms trembling, eyes burning with a new fire.

"There it is..." Julius chuckled, teeth gleaming white through his dark beard. "You’re dancing at last. But dancing isn’t enough. Create your own rhythm—or mine will crush you."

And already, his hands closed around another armful of stones, as if the earth itself were an endless arsenal.

The stones resumed their deadly dance. But this time, Dylan refused to drown in the cadence. His body shook, his vision swam, yet his mind clung to a single thread: close the distance.

Each throw carved an invisible boundary between them. Julius ruled because he stayed far, untouchable, master of the tempo. As long as he held that advantage, Dylan was nothing more than a broken puppet dancing to his beat.

So Dylan decided to change the music.

He stopped dodging backward. Each time a stone hissed past, he moved not away, but forward—even if only by a step, even if only by a breath. His body screamed, his flesh bled, but with each gap, he gained a meter.

Julius saw it, and his smile widened.

"Look at that—the rabbit thinks it can hunt the hound! Come on then—advance!"

A massive stone crashed down, shattering a trunk in front of Dylan. Splinters nearly tore his thigh, but he dove through the breach, leaping between broken branches. He rolled, skinned himself raw, but when he rose, he was closer.

Another barrage. Dylan no longer bothered to counterthrow—his arms were too heavy, his hands too numb. Instead, he used the stones he grabbed as makeshift shields, intercepting blows at an angle, letting them shatter against him rather than fleeing their path. Each impact wrung a grimace from him, but he endured, closing the gap.

For the first time, Julius frowned.

"Hm... so you want to die faster, is that it?"

But Dylan gave no answer. His lips spat only blood and ragged air. Words were gone. There was only the fixed idea: close the distance, force the giant’s hand.

Then the moment came. Julius wound up a broader throw, hefting a massive stone that spun in his palm before release. Dylan, instead of retreating, lunged straight ahead, practically diving under it. The stone howled behind him, pulverizing the ground, and the cloud of dust cloaked his charge.

When it cleared, Dylan was no longer ten paces away.

He was three.

Close enough to see the sweat beading on the colossus’s brow.

Close enough that Julius, with a grunt, let the next stone drop to seize something else.

His hand closed around the staff slung across his back. The wood, polished smooth from use, thrummed through the air as he swung it in a single motion.

"At last." His voice boomed with approving thunder. "You’ve forced me to raise a weapon."

Dylan staggered, his chest heaving with stolen breath, but despite the pain, despite the fear, a tight smile spread across his bloodied lips.

He had lost a thousand times in this duel, but in that single detail—the stone abandoned, the staff raised—he had won his first real victory.