“So… how do you want to approach this fight?”, Cerion asked me.

“What do you mean? The same way we always do, of course. We just run up to the bad guy and start swinging.”

Cerion sighed and rubbed his temples.

“Can’t you at least ambush him with an apparation first?”, he said exasperatedly.

“I guess so…”, I replied.

Apparating into an attack would force me to reset the mana in my surroundings, but if I was successful, it would be a worthwhile trade.

If there was one major downside to my current overloading build beside the fact that it gradually destroyed my body, it would be the fact that I had to ‘charge’ my environment with mana before I could use my skills, since my overloaded Aura could only grab onto mana from close by.

When I apparated, I couldn’t exactly teleport the overloaded mana that floated around me, with me.

That meant that when I apparated somewhere, I wouldn’t be able to use any skills for the first few seconds after the apparation, because the mana simply wasn’t there yet. The upside of this, was that once my immediate surroundings became saturated in mana, I could theoretically continue using skills infinitely.

Thankfully, my [Aura step] didn’t utilize teleportation, so I was able to carry a lot of the mana that I had made tangible with me as I dashed around, while the ambient mana stayed behind.

In summary, my ambush strategy was a little risky, but had a high pay-off if it succeeded. Fortunately, I wasn’t scared of taking risks, thanks to my healing skill.

I motioned for Cerion to approach the ghostly knight, but told him to keep his distance until I completed my ambush.

He crouched and snuck behind a few bushes, slowly but surely getting closer to the giant gateway. After a few minutes, he was only a few dozen meters away from our opponent, hidden behind a boulder.

From my cover, I had a sight line of my target. He was quite far away, so I would have to push my skill to its limit. Luckily, [Ghost apparation] was a tier 4 skill. While its description left its general capabilities unsaid, in truth, apparating such a distance had become possible since the tier up. It might not be as effective as the ‘greater’ variant, but it would do.

Before springing into action, I pushed some more mana into my core and the circuit that [Dark Form] regulated, topping up their capacity. With a lurch, I activated my apparition and reformed a hundred meters away, behind the transparent ghost. From close up, I could tell how large he actually was. He looked as wide and tall as five men combined, with spiky armor and a sword and shield in his hands.

As I appeared behind him, I swung down my greatsword and pushed as much mana as I could summon in that short moment into the tier 4 weapon. My half-charged sword cleaved into the ghost’s shoulder, sinking a dozen or so centimeters in. I activated a curse mark for later. Good thing I did so, too, because a split second later, my opponent gave a ghastly howl and swung his body around in such force that my sword was dislodged and I was sent flying, tumbling on the grass as I landed.

Fortunately, entering an overloaded state in battle had become second nature to me now that all of my skills were geared towards making that happen quickly. Thank Helios for small-capacity cores.

As I struggled to gain back control and right myself, the dark mana around me gradually grew in density.

The ghost I had ambushed shrieked and flew at me, only to be interrupted by an arc of water shearing its way through the ground, interrupting its charge. The ghost lifted his transparent shield, blocking the attack, before backing up a few dozen paces.

It had realized it was facing more than one opponent, I supposed. Was it trying to figure out our numbers first? Smart ghost.

“Looks like this is rather intelligent as well…”, I murmured.

“Stay on your guard. We’ll have to tag team him.”, Cerion said, appearing next to me.

I grinned. Dealing with my curse mark wasn’t so easy, and with Cerion adding pressure on top of that, this guy was already done for.

“I’ll put on the pressure, since I left a curse mark. You should focus on taking advantage of openings to capitalize on.”, I suggested.

Cerion nodded, and whipped up some water to circle around the area that we had designated as our little fighting ring.

I lifted my greatsword and started swinging, activating the overloaded sword skill repeatedly. As I swung, I got faster and faster thanks to [Berserker swordsmanship]. As I charged my weapon with mana, more and more flooded out of my body, joining the exponentially growing mana in my blade. With each swing, the flying sword arcs became sharper, larger and more powerful. All of them tore their way through the mud and grass, straight at my opponent like a swarm of scythes.

The ghost tried to fly around my predictable attack pattern, which hadn’t been aimed that well in my frenzy, but in moments like these my curse mark really shined. The arcs followed the ghost-like a pack of bloodhounds, even lifting into the air when my opponent took off into the sky. Unfortunately, the longer they flew, the more mana concentration they lost. Eventually, they would fizzle out. But it was enough to limit the ghosts' movement and reflexes.

As our opponent flew through the sky, several ice spears appeared from below, aimed right at him. This, in combination with my continuous assault, finally forced the knight into a corner. He dodged the three spears as they whizzed past him, and raised his shield at the incoming steam of arcs. My attacks impacted his spectral shield and dissipated, though I didn’t let up my assault. He couldn’t stay still and block forever, after all.

More arcs hit his shield, a few even flying in from the side and cutting into the other parts of his spectral armor, leaving a few black cuts each time.

Cerion took this downtime to charge up another attack. His movement skill made a rapid surge of water that he could surf on to move both vertically and horizontally. This time, he had combined his water cyclone attack with his movement skill, turning them into a combo. A gout of water appeared around Cerion and started to spiral into the sky, gradually gaining height with each loop. Eventually, it reached the ghostly skeleton. It tried to block the attack like the previous ones, but this wasn’t so easy.

As I saw Cerion’s attack hit our opponent from below, I charged up two orbs and dashed into the sky. The bones in my legs always cracked from the small explosions at my feet, but they healed as I tore into the sky, courtesy of dark form.

The water cyclone tore into the ghost, almost ignoring his shield entirely. After it passed, spectral blood gushed from the monster's wounds. Its limbs hung limply at its side, before it regained its courage and roared.

It hadn’t seen me coming, however. I launched myself at my opponent by creating a foothold in the air out of mana, using [Aura step]. With an orb charged in each hand, I catapulted myself at him and released my projectiles with a throw once I got close.

From that distance, it wouldn’t be able to dodge my attack, even if my orbs tended to fly rather slowly. The two black marbles flew at the curse mark I had left in his shoulder, but hit each other before they reached it. They made contact about a meter away from the ghost.

It desperately tried to escape by flying back down to the ground, but the explosion triggered too quickly. The shockwave sent it crashing down to the ground, where Cerion waited with his sword drawn and covered in water, spinning like a drill.

The ghost was impaled as its armor was pierced. It hung limply from Cerion’s sword, which was raised to the sky, before the spirit tore itself apart and disappeared with a guttural moan. Cerion was splashed with water as the spirit decomposed.

“Eww… Spirit fluids…”, I laughed as I landed back on the ground with a thud.

“Don’t say it like that!”, Cerion replied, red in the face because of embarrassment.

Ding! Combat finished. Congratulations on reaching [Overloading Death Knight] level 45!

Reach level 50 to advance to tier 3.

Stat points allocated. 5 free stat points per level up awarded.

“So… what do you think?”, I asked.

“Of what?”, Cerion inquired, turning his head.

“My new movement skill! Haven’t you noticed that it became a lot more reliable? I finally turned it into a skill after racing Rashid.”, I said proudly.

“Really? I noticed that you were a lot more maneuverable lately, but I didn’t think that it had already turned into a skill. Congratulations! So how does it work? Do you just blow yourself up repeatedly? Is it random how far you fly? Can you choose in which direction to launch?”

I held up my hands in surrender, quickly coming to regret even bringing this up.

“Yes, kind of, and yes. Now then, time to review. What did you think of that monster?”, I asked, changing the topic.

Cerion hummed and brought his finger to his lips as he thought.

“He was intelligent and capable of strategy, that’s for sure. We overwhelmed him quickly, but would a normal guy have reacted any differently to our onslaught?”, he asked rhetorically.

It was true. This dungeon had shown us its inhabitant’s troublesome intelligence and learning capabilities before. Though they didn’t transcend the strategies and preparedness of, say, a human, they were impressive enough to make a difference, especially when the opponent was of a higher tier.

“I agree. If that knight had been tier 4, we could’ve been in trouble. Still, didn’t we kill him rather quickly? What, that took like all of three minutes?”, I claimed, grinning.

Cerion smiled.

“It’s certainly fun to see how far we’ve come since just a few months ago. We trivialized that battle and kept that ghost on the back foot the entire time. Who knows what skills he could’ve used had we let up for even a moment…”

“Well, to be fair, he seemed to be focussing on his physical stats, rather than any impressive skills. If he had the ability to summon more ghosts, for example, I feel like he would’ve used it.”, I hypothesized.

“Well, don’t get overconfident. We don’t know if that guy even counted as a mini-boss. For all we know, we could face a horde of knights once we actually enter the city…”, Cerion said, making cold sweat appear on my back.

That seemed unlikely, however. A tier 3 dungeon would have a peak tier 3 boss, with a few tier 3 monsters to test intruders. A large number of tier 3s close to one another? The chances of that happening weren’t high.

“Why do you think my uncle sent us here, specifically?”, I asked out loud.

It didn’t really make sense. So far, this dungeon had thrown water-aligned monsters and environments at us. While Cerion felt at home here, neither of us had any particular advantage nor disadvantage in this dungeon, which meant that that couldn’t be the reason.

“Maybe he wants us to learn how to deal with tricky opponents?” Cerion shrugged, “Those ghosts from earlier were difficult to deal with once they started possessing plants.”

I hummed.

“Actually, I think it’s more likely he wants us to get more experience fighting against semi-intelligent opponents. The tournament is coming up, after all.”, I replied.

Cerion laughed.

“Already calling our future rivals ‘semi intelligent’, huh? Never change, Arthur.”

I grinned back.

“Luckily for you, I don’t intend to.”