“So this is it, huh? It looks more impressive from up close.”, I commented.

Before us stood the arena we had previously seen from a distance. Now that we were actually here, its true size became apparent. It wasn’t quite as wide as the theater that had served as the previous boss’ area, but what it lacked in width it made up for in height.

Instead of the dull gray Cerion and I had come to expect from the city of tears, this arena was made out of light-brown cubes and columns. Its individual building blocks looked like they had been carved out of larger sandstone, rather than made out of the small bricks this city seemed to love using.

Cerion and I were looking up at a massive statue depicting an unarmed man, guarding the entrance to the giant arena behind it. Apart from his helmet, the man was stark-naked, standing regally as it looked down at us.

“That thing isn’t gonna come to life, is it?”, I asked.

“I doubt it. This isn’t an earth-affinity dungeon, after all. I guess the ghosts might still be able to possess it somehow, though, so keep an eye out.”, Cerion warned me conspiratorially.

A sign below the stone statue spelt out its name in a few sentences, though I couldn’t read the language it was written in. The problem didn’t even lay with the language’s words, but rather with the alphabet they were written in. Usually, the system conveyed one’s status through a language one understood. If one didn’t speak or read any language, you would instead get a vague feeling about your stats and skills. One advantage humans had over monsters was that we were able to get a more specific picture of our capabilities and that we could plan out our future growth.

This system language-adaptation was something most people took for granted. With dungeons seeming like system-generated instances to me, I found it strange that it would use a foreign language like this.

“It spells ‘an imitation of an imitation of a statue’.”, Cerion explained.

I frowned. Cerion could read that gibberish? Of course he could. Because why wouldn’t he?

“What language is that? I’m not the most learned person, as you like to point out,”, I joked, “but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Cerion chuckled.

“I didn’t think you would have, no. This is Erantel, a language that sometimes pops up in dungeons. As far as I’m aware, no one actually ever spoke it, though. Dungeon delvers had to decipher it letter by letter. My father made me study it. He said some puzzles and riddles in dungeons require you to be able to read this language. The fact that it’s here might mean that it holds some kind of clue to a mystery that we need to know to clear this boss.”

I slumped forward sadly.

“So no straightforward fight for once?”

“No straightforward fight this time, Arthur. Sorry to disappoint you.”, he replied, laughing.

“What a weird name for a statue though… how about that sign above the arena entrance there? Isn’t that the same language?”, I asked.

Cerion squinted and nodded.

“Hold on, I can’t make it out from here…”, he replied, approaching the archway.

Once he got close, he started muttering as he tried to decipher its meaning.

“It says: ‘an imitation of an imitation of an arena’. Just more of the same ‘imitation’ stuff. I guess we’ll have to deal with a shapeshifter?”, Cerion pondered.

I chuckled.

“Quick! Tell me something only the real Cerion would know!”

“I never wash my hair because it curls if I do!”, he shouted back with an embarrassed tone.

I recoiled.

“First of all: how? Secondly, you’re disgusting.”, I replied, smirking.

“Coming from the greaseball that goes entire quests without washing up once, that hurts, Arthur.”, he said, wiping away a non-existent tear for dramatics.

“Hey! You know that’s no point in washing up if we’re only gonna get covered in goblin blood two seconds later!”, I protested.

Cerion waved away my comments and focussed on the entrance to the arena again.

“If it is a shapeshifter, just ask him why I don’t frequently wash my hair. I’ll ask you the same question. Alright, are you ready for the final fight of the day?”, he asked.

I cracked my knuckles and drew my sword.

“I’m always ready!”

~scene transition~

As Cerion and I entered the arena from the entrance, we followed the hallway until it opened up into the actual arena itself. We once again found ourselves in the center of the seating area, looking down at a large circular pit with a sandy floor. On all sides of the arena, archways were carved into the walls, revealing metal bars that separated the inside of the arena from the pathways that the combatants would have to travel down.

We stealthily peaked into the pit, in search of our, possibly multiple opponents, but we couldn’t find anyone or anything out of place. The arena was empty, the seating area was empty, hell, even the section meant for the rich was empty.

“Where is this fucker hiding?”, I growled.

“Let’s scout out the area carefully. Let’s sneak through the seating area first. Look for anything out of place.”, Cerion said.

A few minutes later, we reconvened, neither of us having found anything nearby. With no other option, we jumped down into the fighting pit, which would have been large enough to hold dozens of individual fights all at once. The walls of the pit were decorated with red symbols and drawings, which stood out from the brown brick the rest of the arena was made out of.

As our feet hit the ground, the arena started to shake. Cerion and I drew our swords and looked around wildly, preparing for a fight at any moment, for threats from any direction.

Instead, the arena lit up in blue. From down in the pit, we could see the seating area shine like a beacon, as blue ghosts appeared one by one, filling the seats.

I activated my [Dark Blade Maelstrom] immediately, covering Cerion and me. We couldn’t be sure they wouldn't just rush at us, after all.

Instead of the screaming Cerion and I had come to expect of the dungeon-born monsters, the crowd started to roar as if they were an actual audience watching a gladiator match. The seating area for the richer people had filled booths, just like the common seating. In the center of the area, a single ghost was sitting on a central chair, a throne, almost. I couldn’t make out what it was doing from a distance, but it raised its arm to the sky.

A moment later, the metal bars of one of the arena’s entrances started to rise, opening a large pathway. Cerion and I tensed up as we heard metal scraping loudly against stone, slowly becoming louder and louder.

After a few moments, a giant mass of metal emerged from the pathway. The heap of steel nearly didn’t fit its large pathway and spilled out onto the arena floor.

Now that I had a better view of the mass of iron, I could make out that it was made from chains and weapons. Swords, spears, daggers, an entire array of weaponry made out its amorphous, shapeless body. All of the metal moved as if the creature was breathing, scraping against each other and making a constant, horrendous racket.

“Is that the boss? Do we just ignore the audience or what?”, Cerion asked.

I grunted.

“For now, I think so, yeah. We can always run if things get dicey. Nothing here seems fast enough to keep us in the arena if we try to run. Fighting the crowd and whatever that is at once seems like too much for a tier 3 dungeon. There must be some restrictions.”, I replied confidently.

“Alright. Don’t forget about that whole ‘imitation’ clue from earlier. There has to be a reason for that to be mentioned.”, Cerion said.

I nodded and prepared myself, pushing more and more mana into our surroundings.

The amalgamation of weapons continued to creak and crack, this time actually changing shape. It slowly rose up and twisted the chains that seemed to make up its body into strings and thick wires, until it started to vaguely resemble a man’s figure, in the same way that a troll might resemble a man.

It crossed its steel arms and flexed its chain muscles, causing the weapons in its body to jut out like spikes. From its back, sic chains tore free, each with a sharp spike attached to its end, dancing around the steel monster’s body like tentacles.

“So that was what that dagger symbol was referring to, huh…”, I muttered.

I shivered slightly. The last time I had been forced to deal with tentacles, I had seen the swamp terror kill one of my colleagues.

With both parties finally ready for battle, the crowd started chanting louder and louder, forcing me to turn down the strength of my hearing by using [Flexible senses]. It was just getting too distracting.

I wanted to come up with a quick plan, but the steel amalgam gave me no time to do so. Instead of charging forward, its floating chains elongated and flew right at us.

“Shit! I’ll block its assault! Get out of the maelstrom and look for an opening!”, I shouted. The unnaturally large and fast spikes tore through the air. Cerion nodded and activated his movement skill right as I increased the amount of dark blades spinning around me in a cyclone. Before I knew it, the spikes were on top of me, piercing into my manifold defenses. I had come to rely on my maelstrom for defense, because it blocked nearly all basic attacks, despite its inherently disjointed nature.

Even now, it blocked all six spikes, though their length gave me a cold sweat. From up close, I could see that they were nearly two meters long. Even if my defenses blocked most and made them ricochet, one of them had pierced right through most of my blades, only stopping inches from my sword, which I had moved to block just in case.

Shit. It seemed that defense wasn’t the way to go this time. As I thought this, the metal spikes dislodged themselves from the sandstone they had ricocheted into and started to move around my cyclone like snakes. The six chains became four as two left and flew in another direction, to harass Cerion, I supposed.

The remaining four slowly inched around me, never attacking, but always aimed right at me like hungry predators. Frustrated, I decided to go on the offence and attempted to cut one of the chains in half with an extended arc of [Overloaded sword]. The black scimitar of mana tore at one of the snake-like chains, which deftly avoided the incoming attack by bending out of the way, narrowly avoiding it. From behind me, I could hear the sound of metal clashing against mana constructs, a sound eerily similar to glass cracking. I turned around and found another two spikes pierced halfway through my maelstrom. The two that had gone after Cerion had snuck up on me while I wasn’t looking, nearly getting past my defences!

Infuriated, I threw together a berserker-overloading combo, keeping an eye on all six of my opponents again.

After a few missed arcs, I finally landed a hit on one of the chains. My mana crashed into the thick metal chain. For a moment, nothing seemed to happen, until I saw the overloaded mana destabilize and detonate. Clearly, those chains were filled to the brim with mana, otherwise my overloaded mana wouldn’t have reacted to it at all.

When the mana settled, only a small crack had appeared on the chain. I had to squint to even see it, and the chain seemed no less dexterous than before.

Before I had any time to think, they were flying at me again. Two spikes dug into the ground, tearing up the sandstone surface above them as they tunneled under my maelstrom, while the other four took stabs at my defenses looking for weak points.

Shit! Underground? Really? I couldn’t come up with any immediate counter measures, and while my maelstrom had worked as a defense, it had hardly left any damage on the spikes themselves. The chains, on the other hand, were super flexible and fast because of the absurd amount of mana coursing through them.

Seeing no alternative, I abandoned my position and my expelled mana and apparated near where Cerion and the metal monster were fighting.

When I appeared on the other side of the arena, I found Cerion clashing with the metal monster’s arms, which it used as clubs to send him flying and black his water-based ranged attacks. As I charged up more mana, I took a second to think.

The arena had left us clues about imitation. The monster we were facing hardly seemed possible to beat: even my strongest attacks didn’t leave a mark. It outclassed us in every way. On top of all that, the monster didn’t seem to fit this dungeon’s theme of water-based ghosts. The ghosts in the crowd seemed to fit the theme, but the monster itself had no glowing eyes or enraged, red features. No, it was just a hunk of moving metal. Then it hit me.

“Cerion! That thing isn’t the boss! It’s a fake! A ghost must be nearby, controlling it! Maybe all of the ghosts are! Let’s charge into the crowd!”, I shouted as he fought.

“What if that enrages this golem?”, he replied, shouting over the crowd.

“Do we have any other choice? That thing is too strong!”

Cerion momentarily turned to me, before focussing on the fight again. From a distance, I could see the metal spiked returning to the metal amalgam. They were about to focus on Cerion, which would almost certainly mean his loss, when a torrent of water swept Cerion off his feet and threw him into the stands, where he started swinging his sword like a madman, cutting his way through the crowd of blue ghosts.

It seemed the time for hesitation had passed. The time for action had come.