There was a tense and confused silence in the arena after the sudden arrival and departure of the ...Sovereign Fool, assuming that really is what he was. I'd say he wasn't much for talking, except that he very obviously delivered at least a couple messages beyond the one he was clearly forced to give me.

Don't try to spread the skill. The Sovereign Fool rules over those who don't fit in with society. What I do matters, and the fact that it isn't necessarily my fault doesn't matter. There was some kind of Trial upcoming. Lord Beneath plays a long game. People can cheat, if it doesn't matter in the long term.

And my skill was broken, somehow, and was fixed, though I couldn't quite put a finger on how.

Merry was dead silent, but when I focused on her in my head, I found that she was still there, and seemed to be okay. I got the impression, however briefly, that she had witnessed something overwhelming, and was somehow in shock.

"I guess we'll continue." The Slenderman interrupted our reverie, picking up a couple of large chunks of rock. "What do you think, Jerry--should I actually try fighting with all of the power of a level 250 monster? Do you think you're ready for that?"

I just sighed, and turned back to look at him, my thoughts no longer able to try to pick apart the confusing incident with the Sovereign, as I tried to mentally kick myself back into combat mode. I stared at him for a long moment, unsure of how exactly I was supposed to answer that question, but finally just shrugged.

"Look," I said, tiredly. "I don't know. I've never fought someone of that level before, and I didn't ask for this fight. How the hell am I supposed to know? Come at me, and I'll fight you. If you give me a challenge I can't win against, then I can't. If I can, I will."

Instead of spending any more time thinking about that, I tried slipping back into my new Skill, trying to regain the headspace I'd been in when I created it.

A battle of wills--a battle where you can't count on the enemy playing by the rules.

The Skill, I realized belatedly as I slipped into it, would not be one that played well with teammates; it treated everything within range as a potential target, as potential prey. Parts of my Telekinetic Sense, bonded with Stealth, Psychokinesis and the Contract, slipped into the space, slightly lessening the heavy weights that I felt I was carrying on my person. It diffused a little like an invisible blanket of emotions, and I adjusted it slightly, trying to fit the battle into my mind, using little bits of my own natural empathy and telepathy together with the stealth to conceal the effect, so that it would all blend into the background.

It didn't work, exactly. It wasn't supposed to.

The Slenderman noticed the field, but took no heed of it, and as he threw the rocks at my head, he let himself get distracted, and he was once more hooked by it. The fact that I couldn't really hide that I was doing something worked in my favor, here; it was proof that he accepted my energy as something that was supposed to be there.

I did notice, as he let me in again, that the skill was actually a little different. Where before, I felt like I'd been slipping through holes in the boss monster's defenses, now instead of holes there were poorly secured doors. And those doors were, no pun intended, now key to the skill: the fact that they were undefended gave my action some kind of legitimacy according to the system. And like with the Contract, once I had legitimate access to the boss monster, there were... things I could do.

His first couple throws were a little faster than before, and he ramped up the speed and power of his attacks to see what I could handle, not noticing that his aim was a little worse than it should have been. I counter-attacked, and he didn't notice his defense being lower in the moment than it should have been. I grabbed the creature and spun it around, throwing it away, and it didn't notice its own magic helping me do something that it should not have wanted.

I was becoming a puppeteer--a parasite in my own right, getting under the enemy's skin and using their own resources as my own. And it wasn't something I'd picked up from Merry or the Labyrinthine Star, though both had helped me get here. It was something I'd learned from other parasites--spirits or ghosts or who-knows-what that had plagued me for years on end.

They'd gotten inside me and tried to control me, and I'd figured out how.

"How are you doing that?" asked the Slenderman, switching to his faster-paced melee flailing, the one I could barely keep up with before.

I didn't try, instead dancing away, finding little doubts and bits of confusion in the enemy's mind and slipping into those cracks. The Slenderman immediately became more irritable, unable to really understand why, and it paid less attention, making the blows a lot easier to avoid or even stay out of range of. The black-suited man became hasty where they hadn't been, confused without even noticing. And, as I pushed my will into the cracks, I noticed that the System was now adapting to what I was doing, testing the creature's resistance to [ Confusion ] and [ Hesitation ] and [ Insanity ].

Those tags reminded me that I had an item aura that caused them, an aura I tended to only have on defensive items, and I placed it on my sword when I had a moment, just to heighten the effect. It was, ironically, something the Administrator had given me with the Devil's Garbage-ass Trash Sword.

But he'd never expected to be on the receiving end of it... or perhaps, he had, but not like this? It didn't really matter which.

In any case, the new erratic behavior in my enemy opened up a massive crack in his defenses, and I exploited it over and over again, keeping my mouth shut even when the boss asked again and again why things were going so wrong. And when half health rolled around, I stopped attacking and held my breath, wondering just what the phase change would bring.

As expected, the Slenderman paused, breathing heavily, and regarded me for a long moment. I sensed, underneath, something shifting within him, but couldn't tell what.

"Tell me, Jerry," he said, "What do you think that the Slender Man mythos represents?"

I blinked, not sure why that was a topic of conversation.

"In truth," he said, conversationally, "I was put together out of a lot of different myths, all representing something, a common aspect between them. The Slender Man was a mysterious but businesslike man that came out of the shadows and stole people's future--the children of the world. But there is another common myth with the same foundation you may be more familiar with."

And the Slenderman's backlit mouth opened wide, and two very obvious fangs appeared, shadowing the flames within, and his suit stretched out into a cape behind him, his hands sharpening into claws.

"Another monster that feigned nobility as it stole the lives of others, pretending to be an elite while living his whole life in fear of death. The Vampire--a creature that lives to consume the blood of the innocent and the naive."

And I felt my control over the monster slip, but not entirely, as the new form of the boss seemed to resonate a bit more strongly with its copy of my skill.

"Out of all the myths, I chose the Slenderman because I didn't want all the baggage of this one; I wanted a fresh start, a chance to be my own person. But it is a part of who I am, just as many other myths are. So are you prepared..." The Slenderman lifted one hand, its deep black cloak covering its face, "to face Dracula?"

I... mostly ignored that? I was trying to read what had changed underneath.

Similar strengths, similar weaknesses, but where the Slenderman was, mentally, a more vaguely defined character, the Dracula that was being presented here was canny, experienced, with a history and a mythology of its own that included many different depictions of it being a badass. If I was going to manipulate it, I had one very important advantage to leverage here: the Administrator's puppet itself was not experienced with the character it was trying to play, even though the character itself was fairly robust.

I jammed my will into a crack between puppet and character and waited for it to attack, the mocking words more or less sliding off of me.

And it did attack, its new cape becoming some kind of strangely deformable blade that it swung according to its will, extending far further than the material should have allowed and cutting like an axe into the ground where I'd been standing. The character should not have been quite so naive, but I pushed a thought into the cracks that the Slenderman wanted to grandstand, to show off, and as a result, the attack took just a bit longer than it should have, indicated what he was doing a bit better than he'd meant to.

I took several deep breaths, focusing everything on learning the pattern before I tried to counter-attack, but all along, I became a whisper in the back of the boss monster's mind. And, when I was sure I had a moment, I connected the Executioner Blade with Dracula's left cheek in a satisfying flying chop, then immediately got out of range again.

He was not expecting the blow, and a new flaw in the character arose, one that I didn't sneak in on my own: pride.

"That's not possible," hissed the vampire, turning and glaring at me with hatred in its face. "I am better than you. I am immortal!"

I... I just gave the monster a look, unimpressed.

What happened next, though, scared the ever living shit out of me, because Dracula moved as fast as he knew he could, and all of my attempts to subtly control the creature had to fall by the wayside as I realized that at that speed, I was almost completely unable to react. And he jabbed with a clawed hand at my stomach, and it was only the heavy blankets of mental weight I had draped over me that blunted the blow, turning what probably should have been fatal into a contest of wills.

And when it came to a contest of wills, Dracula was actually very flawed. He was too scared of death, and he spent his whole life running away from it instead of facing it. Not very helpful for him, here.

Claws sunk into my chest, and my mana drained quickly, but since I was still inside his head, some of my defenses used his mana instead--it probably just looked, to him, like he'd used more mana attacking than he expected, but the truth was that the heavy telekinetic cloak was there for almost exactly this reason. Because after years of mental warfare, I knew this much: if you let any little thing get to you, then they got in. If you let any little defeat be your end, then it was already too late for you.

Dungeoneer Health be damned, he wouldn't win until he convinced me I was dead.

"Impossib--" Dracula trembled, but I, operating on fear, smashed him in the face again with the Executioner. And when that stunned him for a moment, I did it again, and again. His skill instinctively defended him, but he hadn't snuck into my mind, so he was only draining himself.

The attack had been eye-opening for me. If he was capable of just doing that, then I couldn't count on being able to dodge it. So even though the skill was better used subtly, I reached through the connection between us and snagged at his heart, filling Dracula with fear and confusion, and pulled at his various sources of strength. Although I couldn't transfer that strength to me, I could certainly keep it away from him.

And with his defenses lowered again, and with him momentarily under [ Paralysis ], I beat him over and over with my sword until he was on the brink of death.

It wasn't a glorious fight. There wasn't really room for heroics. Looking back on it, in that first fight against the Devil, nothing there was particularly heroic, either, except that I wasn't willing to lose. And even if this asshole was so very strong... I just... wasn't willing to lose to him.

But as I felt and saw Dracula's health pool bottoming out, I did step back, taking one last pitying glance at the Administrator who, from his own perspective, had been humiliated by me so many times now.

"How," whispered the slender-Dracula hoarsely, "can a man such as you defeat me so easily?"

I snorted, and raised the Executioner above my head, feeding weight to it until I could barely hold it up. "What is a man?" I asked him in return, my lips quirking up into a wide grin as I said it. "Just a miserable little pile of... secrets. But, enough talk."

And with that, I executed Dracula.

As the boss monster faded, and without even paying much attention to the items that poured into my inventory, I decided on a name for the skill. Perhaps, if the Skill were going to be handed off to others, I would have thought harder on it, but the fact that it had none was wearing on me.

The Vampiric Cloak.

As I decided that, a skill description finally appeared for it, new name and all.

[ Vampiric Cloak ] [ Ascended ] [ Origin ] [ Fool's Caste ] Level 100 Transforms you into a mythical being, capable of many impossible deeds. May inflict [ Enthralled ].

I looked grumpily at the skill window, feeling like the description was deceptive at best and trash at worst. Moments after I though that, though, the skill window updated with a note at the bottom.

Yeah, well, fuck you too, asshole.

I just shook my head and started moving to finally leave the stupid boss arena.