Kiba nervously raises his arm toward the Demon King. They gave him a rapier, but it was heavy. The only thing he really had going for him was the special power he gained when he reincarnated; this body was weak, and he was weaker. If this devolved into a physical confrontation, he was fairly certain he wasn't going to be an unscathed party. It was right in the name, Demon King. That was the endgame boss the hero was supposed to fight after going on the huge quest and gathering allies to storm the keep, not the first boss, unless it was a cutscene curbstomp that the protagonist somehow survives, and learns not to underestimate form one.

That was why he had done so much grinding before following the obvious plot advancement path. After so much Card Syphon and Card Synthesize-ing, he had gotten a decent assortment of attack combos and, after comboing down the boss, a levelboss of the forest, a nineteen rhinortoiserhinortoise, a decent elemental aoe. After that one lucky draw though, he had only gotten the common drops, despite how powerful any individual creature would be. At least the countdown timer on the tornado reset after each encounter, otherwise it would have taken far more hours to Synthesize a bunch of those common cards into an At-Will, manaless ability to reflect anything in a sphere ahead of him. It was probably possible to grind the card into an even more powerful version, but the drop rate for status effects was pretty low relative to the attack cards, most of which wouldn’t even synthesize past tier one, and didn't increase as the average level of the random encounters grew to levels he was unable to one shot.

When he first went in, the mobs were all level five or lower, and he still couldn't fight them. Instead he had needed to do reputation grinding sidequests until he had enough pull to get an escort from the village hunters, at which point they killed a tigermoth, and he managed to Card Syphon a basic Air Mana card from its body. Apparently the hunters were only available for one tutorial kill though, and they left with the winged cat immediately afterward. Fortunately, even though it was completely useless to just try and use the card, Kiba figured out he could activate it when poking with the rapier and a jet of pneumatics would fire along the path of the tip and into anything in front of it. That gave him enough of a jumpstart to Syphon a few more bodies for loot, and with each single use card he syphoned up, he had another mob wipe option. Each particular creature was vulnerable to something, it was only a matter of finding out what.

Fortunately, he had found a way to work around that.

Hanging from a tree branch above a mossy rock, right beyond where the hunters had left him, was a cocoon of some kind with eyeballs on the shell. At first he assumed they were just patterns, until they followed him as he walked towards the body.

Card Syphon was an ability he mostly used after the creature was dead for a very simple reason. It took about ten seconds to charge up the power, and he hadn't yet found anything obliging enough to stand still while it was trying to kill him long enough for him to syphon them. As a cocoon was solidly attached to the surface it bonded to though, he was more than capable of standing a bit away from the thing and blasting it with a drain. The card he got from it was 'Peek’, and after synthesizing it with a copy of 'Pierce’ he got a card that would tell him what type of attack would be most physically powerful against the target creature. Combined with the function of the Peek card being to tell him what cards he could get from an enemy, he could actually search out the loot he needed.

The nice thing was that Card Syphon didn't kill anything, so he was able to load up on 'Peek’ for all his synthesizing needs. With the eyepod serving as a waypoint for exploring the forest, he had moved from having ‘Air Mana’ and 'Peek’ to having 'Pierce’, ‘Slam’, 'Slash’, 'Poison’, 'Confuse’, ‘Befuddling Cloud’, 'Deadly Cloud’, ‘Petrify’, 'Find Weakness’, 'Status Effect Vulnerability’, ‘Steal’, ‘Steal Info’, 'Detect Ability’, 'Air Blast’, ’Reflect’, 'Air Jet’, 'Space Cutter’, which was apparently not an air element attack and wouldn't allow him to use it, and then he got 'Spin’ and combined it with another 'Air Mana’ to get 'Twister’, which was enough to let him start grinding seriously.

Fortunately, every creature here had an Air Mana syphon after defeat, so he basically had an unlimited supply of Peek and Air Mana. Since those were the ingredients to form Steal, and it was just a Card Syphon that didn’t take ten seconds, though unlike the ability it had a miss chance, he could farm the rare cards a bit more easily after he got the Card up to an unlimited use state. A single copy of a common card would work once, then evaporate. If he used Card Synthesis on two exact copies though, they would move up a rarity. Uncommon cards would just become unusable for a full day, and he hadn’t wasted enough time for that to have ever been a factor. Instead, once he got something like Pierce up to Uncommon he’d grind another copy of the card and merge them to get a Rare version, which reset after each battle. It was really annoying that he hadn’t managed to get another Rare Spin to drop, but until he got to the point it wasn’t ending battles with every use there wasn’t exactly a difference between the usage conditions. With how easy it was to get Air Manas, having a Rare to merge with the Spin wouldn’t be a problem, and then the doubles would get him a Unique anyway. However, after a solid ten hours of grinding he was kind of sick of the task.

Back at the base, the questgiver guy had told him that this was a vitally important task, and time sensitive. Considering that he had just joined up after reincarnating into a completely useless, but technically Noble, body and skipped the starting town and quests entirely in favor of going to grind faction rep at the nearest major hub, he was probably a bit underpowered to have gone straight in to progress the plot. The guy even said it was suitable for level nine, which he most certainly was not. Extremely convenient then, that the time spent grinding in the forest only ticked down the clock every fifty seconds. Slight drawback in that he couldn't pause the timer to sleep after doing all of that, but an easily fixable one; all he needed to do was use a tent while in the grind zone. Still took a solid ten quest minutes for him to get a full night's sleep in the woods, but the tree the eyepod was stuck to seemed to be a safe zone, other than the emubees. They were fairly harmless though, just waddling around and stuffing their faces into flowers. Without being quite tall enough to reach the stamens, they smacked the stem with their heads until it fell over and they could rub their bodies all over the pollen. The fact that they continuously screamed ‘pollinate’ made it a bit hard to sleep, but anything can be ignored if you’re tired enough.

Of course, after spending the personal time of a day putting off objective progression, he had no real choice but to follow the obvious path of dying plants that signified the correct direction for the boss fight. Altogether, he had killed his way through enough enemies that his card gains had been bounded by the Syphon time, rather than how many bodies he had access to. As a result, he had:

Air Mana x56 Unique Cooldown: 1 Second Generates energy with air affinity. Peek x15 Unique Cooldown: 1 Second Identifies which card can be drawn from target. Pierce x5 Unique Cooldown: 1 Second Basic piercing attack. Ignores some defense. Slam x5 Unique Cooldown: 1 Second Basic crushing attack. Some knockback and stun chance. Slash x5 Unique Cooldown: 1 Second Basic slashing attack. Some bleed chance. Poison x5 Unique Cooldown: 5 Seconds Basic poison blast. Some poison chance. Confuse x5 Unique Cooldown: 5 Seconds Basic mental attack. Some confuse chance. Befuddling Cloud x1 Unique Cooldown: 20 Seconds Area of effect mental attack. Some confuse chance. Deadly Cloud x3 Unique Cooldown: 20 Seconds Area of attack poison blast. Some poison chance. Petrify x1 Unique Cooldown: 5 Seconds Basic pertification attack. Some petrification chance. Find Weakness x5 Unique Cooldown: 1 Minute Determines which damage type is effective against target. Status Effect Vulnerability x3 Unique Cooldown: 1 Minute Determines resistance of target against status effects. Steal x5 Unique Cooldown: 5 Seconds Chance to obtain item of target. Defaults to card. Steal Info x1 Unique Cooldown: 10 Minutes Chance to obtain detailed information about target. Detect Ability x1 Unique Cooldown: 5 Minutes Chance to obtain information about targets special characteristics. Air Blast x5 Unique Cooldown: 1 Second Air element crushing attack. Knockback effect. Reflect x5 Unique Cooldown: 5 Seconds Air element petrification. Stops targeted attack and returns it. Air Jet x5 Unique Cooldown: 5 Seconds Air element piercing attack. Ignores armor. Space Cutter x5 Unique Cooldown: 10 Seconds Space element slashing attack. Severing space always inflicts bleeding, chance of amputation on target. Twister x1 Rare Cooldown: 5 Minutes Air element area of effect attack. Knockback in the upward direction.

It was nice that there was a clear path marked out in the mountain of where to go, with no loose rocks or anything. That didn’t do much to clear out the ominous atmosphere of the flat shelf where he reached the boss arena though. Wide, flat plane, pentagram burnt into the stone in magic-sight, scenic mountain in front with the village he’d done a pile of sidequests in visible in the distance, sort of. Sure, it was empty when he got there, but the moment he walked in, he was sure that the target would show up in a cutscene manner. He was right, but only delayed a couple minutes to check that his cards were ordered correctly.

Starting Hand

Steal Info

1

Twister

1

Find Weakness

1

Status Effect Vulnerability

1

Detect Ability

1 Top Deck Air Jet Pierce Air Blast Slam Reflect

Well, the first ten cards at least. It was way too much work to optimize his entire deck every time it auto-shuffled. In general, he just removed a few cards from the active deck to increase the odds of him drawing whatever he needed. It wasn’t as though he had a minimum deck size.

Cards in Deck

Peek

1

Pierce

4

Slam

4

Slash

5

Poison

5

Confuse

5

Befuddling Cloud

1

Deadly Cloud

1

Petrify

1

Steal

5

Air Mana

5

Air Blast

4

Reflect

4

Air Jet

4 Unused Cards

Peek

14

Deadly Cloud

2

Space Cutter

5

Air Mana

51

Status Effect Vulnerability

2

Find Weakness

4

Once he was done with the menus and looked up, there was the Demon King, facing the mountain away from him with some person by his side wearing a black hemet. Before anything could happen, Kiba played his 'Steal Info’ card to check the one that didn't have a tail. According to what the ability told him, he had just found the missing girl for the one sidequest he hadn't finished; he also got a notification that his 'Universal Translation’ ability leveled up to two, which apparently was just enough to understand the Demon King. Super convenient.

Even at max level, the 'Steal Info’ card had a minute long cooldown, and there was no way he was going to clutter up his battle deck with multiple copies. He could only have five cards in his hand at once, and discarding to draw something better took time, which he usually couldn't afford. His current setup worked fine; he could drop his entire hand, discard the whole thing if there were survivors, and then have five attack cards he could spam every time they came off cooldown. Before that, he played his 'Detect Weakness’, 'Status Effect Vulnerability’, and 'Detect Ability’, leaving just Twister off cooldown. Technically Twister was his highest tier card, but Detect Ability took a longer Synthesizing chain to get to. Every time he wanted to get one, he needed two Peeks, an Air Mana, Confuse, and a Pierce. Grinding that thing to max had taken forever, but it would probably set him up for quite a few skips. Who needs scouting missions to discover an enemy's secret powers when he could grind the best card possible in mission one and skip all of that?

Well, faction mission one at least. What the status cards showed him was less than promising. Immunity to poison and a 99.9954 percent resistance to confusion. Most of the rest were immunities. Immune to bleed, zombie, disease, sap, petrification, and death. Vulnerable to blind, which would be great if he had any of those cards, but as it stood he would be better off just baiting out nonphysical attacks to avoid confrontation on his weakest area. Technically sleep was at 99.9954 percent resistance as well, but it was clear this was supposed to be a 'blind then beat’ type of boss battle. Too bad he skipped the starting area where he probably would have gotten the basic status effect cards.

Weaknesses weren't much better. Proximity to living vegetation, separation at the molecular level, and ‘absolute power’. Absolutely useless is what that was.

Detect Ability at least informed him on what that last one was referring to. According to the card, the Demon King had exactly one ability. 'Absolute Control (Least)’. Presumably another Demon King-esk existence would have 'Absolute Power’, and would be the counter to this one. Narratively, that would imply either a daisy chain of Demon Kings providing a set of checks and balances, or a single opposing force that is similarly vulnerable to this one's ability, which would make this singular Demon King part of its own faction. All in all, he was inclined to go with the first interpretation. The faction he joined was called the 'Chaotic Demon Sect’, and dealing with just one subset, or even just two opposed ones, didn't seem anywhere near disorderly enough to warrant an indication of said practice. Unless it was to make it seem less appealing, which was possible as well.

A similarly unappealing thought occurred to him at that point; in most light novels he had read before reincarnating, the Demon Kings had some sort of subjugation ability to force their minions to follow them. That would explain why his ‘Determine what happened to the missing girl’ quest hadn’t completed yet. Those type of quest were far better, in his opinion, than ones with specific required results. For example, if the quest were something like 'Bring the lost child back safely’, the entire thing may be pointless due to said child already having been eaten by a deadly pigbat. In comparison, his sidequest would have the same result regardless if the lost girl was dead, kidnapped, kidnapped and dead, kidnapped then rescued then died from pigbat during the escort mission home, run away, or serving the Demon King. The notification of sidequest completion seemed to lend credence to his theory, and there was another benefit to carefully curating his quest list. Confirmation of events through system interference.

Hopefully he wouldn't have to kill her during the boss fight though.

Picking up a rock from the ground, Kiba watched carefully to see if the Demon King would react to his movement. When there was no such response, he threw it at the fishbowl helmeted girl and gestured away from the Demon King with both arms. Using Twister would have hit both of them, and he didn't want to risk losing the card in the deck when reshuffling to get single target attacks.

He probably should have locked on. The rock flew between the two of them and triggered the cutscene.

His perspective zoomed in on the Demon King, who raised his right, unarmored, arm up to eye height. With the arm came the rock, floating in midair. Absolute Control had a physical component, confirmed. Kiba reinforced his determination not to go anywhere near that, especially on top of an arena. Odds were, getting thrown out of the ring would end up counting as an instant defeat, and then the whole thing would either start over at full hp, move to a new location with full hp, or instantly fail the quest and put the plot on track for the bad ending, depending on how malicious the system was for this particular instance.

“Moun imen, kite m 'fè fas ak sa a. Pran sa a avèk ou, mwen pa fò ase yo sèvi ak li,” comes a voice. In front of Kiba, the Universal Translation skill activates, putting a subtitle in front of his eyes.

“Peon, leave us. Take this as you go, weakness abounds.”

With the casual dismissal of Kiba’s strength, the Demon King turned around to face him. The fishbowl helmet covered the girl’s face, but Kiba imagined that under the cover the turning head implied she was wishing him well against her captor in her absence, before she was to run up a nearly indiscernible path further up the mountain. The Demon King’s left arm was covered in a dark armored shell, and as Kiba watched the Demon lifted the clawed gauntlet up toward the girl. She moved to grasp the hand, and the moment she touched it the black material separated into chunks and reconglomerated over the girl’s arm. Somehow the similarities between the helmet and the arm gave Kiba a terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was almost like-

“Hero sent to defeat me,” the subtitles say, “I give you this opportunity to leave. You need not die today.”

The Demon King bares its teeth at Kiba, displaying sharp triangles clearly designed for cutting flesh. The threat was clear. The duelist felt a wave of primal fear course through him as he was forced by his brain to imagine being ripped apart by the Demon Maw.

And thus, Kiba came to the present. Yes, he could leave. That would fail the quest, and probably he would have to fight a stronger Demon King later, one who didn’t send his armor off with a subquest girl. That was probably the optimal path, really. If he killed the Demon King now, he only got the rewards for the quest, which honestly probably wouldn’t amount to much, and the two pieces of armor once he caught up to wherever the girl had scampered off to. Walking away would let him fight a strong endboss with a full set, and that full set could be his.

But no. That would be the path you take if you were good at fighting. Kiba was weak, and he knew it. Synergizing abilities to get a combo going, and grinding, those were the things he could do. Grinding would only take him so far, since he had yet to find a defensive ability. If he couldn’t one-shot something, that thing would one-shot him. Rather than making life harder for himself, it was better if he could stop problems from escalating in the first place. With enough time, he could use the Card Syphon to build up to an unbeatable level off of low level opponents anyway.

Rapier pointed straight ahead, Kiba uses his last card of the draw. In the midpoint of the arena, the air swirls, drawing more of the element into its deadly spiral, and begins trundling toward the stationary Demon.

“And so you have chosen death,” popped the subtitles, as the twister lurches forward into the Demon King. Preparing for a counterattack, Kiba dodges to the side to avoid any kind of attack launched blindly through the dirt-filled tornado. No such strike materializes, and as the whirlwind dissipates, there’s no sign of the Demon King either. Hopefully, that was because Kiba was overgeared for this fight and that one attack was enough to win.

Three seconds pass, and he almost starts to think that he was right.

Then, a slight whistling noise makes him dodge roll again. Right where he was standing, the Demon King lands, a cloud of dust blasting out from the impact site. Drawing a new hand of cards, Kiba launches an Air Jet toward the Demon’s center of mass. Stones rattle under the blast of air shooting forward, slightly loosening the rocks from their housing within the ground. Stationary where he lands, the Demon lets the nearly invisible projectile collide into him. The direct hit causes a life bar to generate under his hand screen, but unlike the beasts in the forest that simply had giant red lines he could deplete, this one was a block of gray. As the Air Jet spikes into the Demon’s Chest, a section of the bar flashes red, but then it returns to that static grey image.

Well, if chip damage wasn’t going to cut it, he’d combo spam. The Demon King seemed content to stand there, whipping his tail back and forth while Kiba ran back and forth, discarding as fast as he could.

“That tornado seemed like a useful skill. How often can you use it, I wonder?” spoke the undaunted creature in front of him. Apparently completely neglecting the Air Jet to the chest, the Demon made light of his cooldown timer. Kiba was suddenly overcome with regret. He hadn’t spent enough time trying out combinations with Twister. If he could chain it during combat, maybe that would be enough to break the Demon King’s guard bar. Unless he could break out of the encounter though, that was a five minute timer until he could use his ultimate again, and resetting the fight might just fail the quest.

No matter, he had a five card combo in his hand. Air Jet, Pierce, Air Blast, Slam, Reflect. By playing them all at the same time, his body would use every single one of those cards with effectively no time between them. Stabbing forward with his rapier, the jet of air shoots toward the Demon King, but Pierce takes effect and he shoots his entire body forward with the wind to impale the Demon down to the hilt, at which point Air Blast fires off point blank, launching the body off his sword, before Slam shoots him forward ahead of the Demon to smash him into the ground. Before all that damage could go into effect, Reflect puts him in the path of the Demon King once again, and reverses his momentum. With all the force that would have pushed him into the ground, the Demon King is launched into the sky. The Moon is just starting to rise in this section of the world, so Kiba discards his entire hand until he has multiple copies of Air Jet. Stacking five of them, he pulls all the air in the arena into a single thrust, and blasts upward to jam the attack into the flying speck above him. A beam of roaring wind shoots into the sky and buffets the Demon King ever higher, causing a fair chunk of the grey bar to flash red. He could start to despair there, but there was one more part left to go. Dodge rolling away from where he had launched the attacks from, Kiba hopes he has enough invincibility frames to get away from-

From the north side of the moon, a massive bolt of lightning erupts, following the channel of air Kiba had just helpfully provided for the electrical current to flow through. It strikes the ground where he had just been standing, discharging in an explosive wave. Apparently he had mistimed the roll, because the energy shockwave crashes into him and throws him about five meters. Skidding across the ground, he convulses a bit before the electricity makes its way through his body, then sobs quietly in pain.

The grey bar was still there.

It may have been moments or minutes, but either way it was too long. Before he finished recovering, the Demon King was back on the ground, this time glowing from the eyes and smoking from the body. Great, he’d gotten to phase two.

“That almost hurt. I should thank you for the free energy, but it seems you are determined to keep attacking until you die,” the Demon states, stepping closer. From his left arm, a bit of electricity discharges into the ground. “It seems that action is required to retain this power. Let’s see what happens when I store some in your body.”

Gritting his teeth, Kiba stabs out toward the Slam card. As a basic attack, it was on an extremely short cooldown, and unlike Pierce he could target an area instead of an individual. Blasting away from the Demon King, he Slams his rapier into the ground on the opposite side of the arena, then leans against it as he continues to be in pain.

“You’re being a bit rude, not responding to me. If diplomacy has failed, I must resort to force.”

Next to a blackened spot on the ground, the Demon King raises his arm again. Electricity blasts forward toward Kiba, who frantically drops his current hand and mashes the Air Mana card. As fast as he can spam the cooldown, bursts of air interpose themselves between him and the approaching electric death. Waves of power flow from each of the two figures standing on opposite sides of the makeshift arena, rippling in the center, merging into a giant ball of electrified wind. Slowly, the ball moves toward Kiba despite the frantic mashing, and he thinks frantically for a solution. One by one, he discards the non-Air-Mana cards in his newest hand, which slows his mashing slightly and accelerates the ball. Finally, he finds a copy of the card he needs, and stops his mashing. With no air to push it away, the now enormous ball of lightning-infused air mana rockets toward Kiba.

At the last moment he uses Reflect.

Slamming his rapier’s blade into the ball, its momentum reverses completely. The lightning feeding the ball does nothing to slow its course toward the Demon King, who raises his other hand in front of him. Cutting off the flow of electricity, the Demon uses both arms to catch the ball, then throws it back toward Kiba. This he understood. Maneuvering slightly around the arena, he Reflects the ball back toward the Demon King. Basic Reflect is just enough to blast the sphere away from him, at which point the Demon King grabs onto the orb, holds it for a second, and throws it back. That was time he could use for more discarding, and once he managed to draw a second Reflect copy he could combo the same card into itself for a harder Reflection. With a two Reflect combo, he causes the gray bar to flash red, albeit very close to the end. The next time he drew a copy though, the three combo made a visible dent in the bar, making the first tenth of the gray turn red. The ball didn’t shrink in the slightest, and the Demon King didn’t try to aim anywhere other than his location. Kiba continues discarding individual cards until his hand is full of Reflect. His fourth combo had managed to bring flash a full fourth of the bar red, which definitely implied an increasing function of some sort for power. If he could take a hit, it might be worth testing combinations on the Demon King to determine the formula for damage when shifting the order of cards around, and synergies. That not being the case though, he simply follows the plan.

Once he gets five copies, and is positioned with the Demon King between himself and the mountain, he acts. Five Reflects, all activated at once, each one after the first more than doubling the power of the projectile. Slamming his bladeless weapon against the ball multiple times in a moment, he sends the enormous ball of energy careening into the Demon King, and further into the mountain. With the power of the cards leaving him, Kiba kneels, simply watching as the ball of Wind and Lightning pushes against the stone of the mountain. It was definitely burrowing deeper into the wall.

If that wasn’t enough, he didn’t really have anything else left. Kiba falls over backward and slides down the mountain, unconscious.