It seemed Cerion had stopped hesitating.

With a grin, I cannoned into the seating area on the other side of the arena, using aura step. I drew my sword and tore into the ghosts, which ran away like an actual crowd would when frightened.

The moment my mana touched any of them, they disappeared like a mirage. Rather than turning into a puddle after a shriek, these ghosts just disappeared as if they never existed in the first place.

“Great. More fakes…”, I murmured. Right after, I heard a whistling sound. With a powerful aura step, my legs buckled as I was thrown to the left by the small explosion my skill always made with each step. Right where I had stood a moment before, three metal spikes were lodged deeply into the arena. It seemed that the chains stretched all the way over here. A quick glance over the arena showed me that Cerion had dodged his own attackers as well. Luckily, the metal monster itself didn’t seem that impressive and remained standing in the middle of the arena, only using the chains attached to its back to attack.

With a turn, I used my maelstrom to cut into the crowd like a scythe, reaping their non-existent lives by the dozens. Several times, I had to dodge incoming spikes, which somehow breached my defenses and were even faster than me with my movement skill.

As I ran around, destroying the ghostly illusions, the three spikes flew after me and stabbed at everything that even remotely resembled me. They had given up all sense of tactics and were just wildly trying to overwhelm my defenses.

Unfortunately, it worked. Even as I kept killing ghosts, the monster didn’t get any weaker. The true boss hadn’t shown himself yet, and eventually, the chains were bound to catch up to me.

One of them finally pierced my maelstrom completely. I was too slow to dodge or apparate, and was pierced in the torso by the spike, which tore itself free right afterward, creating a wide hole in my chest.

To be honest, I wasn’t that worried. It would heal quickly. Problem was, if I failed, Cerion would too. He wouldn’t heal. I looked over and saw him standing on the other side of the arena, expertly wielding his sword and his skills to counter the spikes’ assault. Unlike me, he was fighting more intelligently and countering their offense by using ranged attacks, only using his sword when they got past his initial assault.

I grinned and coughed up blood. It seemed Cerion didn’t need my help quite yet.

With a groan, I summoned Revan and ordered him to hold off the spikes. I apparated away right after, straight into the seating area for the richer ghosts. Surely one of them would be sneaky enough. I ran up to the central chair and tore it in half from behind with a sword arc.

Fuck! Even that ghost hadn’t been the one, because it, too, disappeared like a mirage. I cut my way through ore ghosts as I made my way to the hallways behind the seating area. Exquisite decorations and expensive architecture were torn apart by my maelstrom as I barreled past, running around like a madman with no clear goal.

I didn’t have much time. Cerion couldn’t keep surviving that onslaught, so I had to find the true boss quickly.

Where would an imitator, a charlatan hide? Somehow, he could see us no matter where we were in the arena, but he wasn’t easily visible himself. Was I looking for a ghost? A true warrior that that metal monster was just an imitation of?

“No.” I murmured. I wasn’t.

With a grin, I figured out where to head next.

A few minutes later, I found myself within a damp hallway that lead to the arena, separated from it by metal bars. This was the area where the large beast had first appeared from. A blue glow appeared under one of the wooden doors leading to one of the chambers on the side. This was what I had been looking for. I inched open the door, revealing a thin small blue ghost, floating near the ceiling and looking into the arena from a small pair of metal bars, as if peering outside from the inside of the gutter.

“Finally found you…”, I whispered.

Fearfully, the ghost whipped around to look at me. My wide smile was the last thing it saw as it turned back into water, forming a puddle on the ground, reflecting my face back at me like a mirror.

I grimaced. Maybe I enjoyed that a little bit too much.

Ding! Combat finished. Congratulations on reaching [Overloading Death Knight] level 48!

Reach level 50 to advance to tier 3.

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

48 down, two more to go. Hopefully, that final boss would net me both.

I quickly put my five free points into wisdom and waved away my stat screen, focussing on my surroundings again.

Inside the puddle, a small tag rested. I picked it up and turned it around in my hand. It was more of that dungeon gibberish.

Outside, the sounds of battle stilled and the chanting stopped. I heard some loud clunks as the metal golem collapsed, but that was it.

A moment later, I apparated near Cerion, who was leaning against the wall of the pit to remain upright. He was covered in wounds and cuts, though he didn’t have any visible life-threatening injuries, making me sigh in relief.

“I found the actual guy. Another clean kill. Hopefully, the final boss isn't another trickster, yeah? Here, it dropped this tag. What does that say?”, I inquired.

“Huh, what?”, Cerion heaved. He was staring at my chest, which was slowly closing its wound bit by bit. Dark form allowed me to fight even with a wound like that, so I wasn’t too bothered. Cerion seemed a little put-off, though.

He took the amulet and looked at it for a moment, deciphering it.

“It uh… it says: this is an imitation of an imitation of a coward’. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean but…”, he replied tiredly.

I clapped him on the back, making him flinch in pain.

“Lighten up! We won!”’, I said jovially, proud of having been the one to save the day this time.

I heard thumping from a small distance away. Looking over, I found Revan bounding over, excited to have completed what I had ordered him to do. His skeleton was covered in cracks and bones that had broken off, so after petting him for a moment, I unsummoned him.

“How about a home-cooked meal made by me?”, I asked my friend.

He grimaced slightly, for some reason.

~scene transition~

A few hours later, we were both sitting around a small campfire, on which I was roasting some preserved meat on. Cerion had entrusted me with the cooking, which meant that whatever our meal turned into, he couldn't complain. Double roasted bacon was a family special, after all. Or at least, I was planning to make it one eventually if I ever had kids.

After Cerion recovered from his wounds by using health potions, much of his optimistic spirit returned. Fights that required every inch of our intelligence, albeit not our intelligence, were draining in more ways than one. While I tended to enjoy most fights, no matter how difficult, I had to admit that this was in large part to a lack of any sense of danger thanks to dark form. Only when Cerion was in danger did I start to feel like something might actually happen that I would regret, though even then the adrenaline kept me distracted.

This dungeon had been especially tiring, for Cerion in particular, I could tell. So far, we had just been in fight after fight, and each one had been dangerous in its own way. Without any down time to process our situation and what had happened, the days of continuous were starting to blend in together, which took its toll on both of us.

Still, there was light at the end of the tunnel. With just two days left, if we wanted to make it to Michael’s exam, we only had the final boss left to defeat. In other words, we were on schedule.

“Good job today, Cerion. You held off those chains long enough for me to find the actual ghost that was controlling the golem.”, I praised.

Cerion sighed.

“Well, the job’s done, at least… I’ll be honest, I don’t feel good about that fight. We were getting overwhelmed the entire time, forcing us into a position where we couldn’t know what would happen. Furthermore, the fact that a single ghost was the one controlling the amalgam was something we could’ve figured out much faster had we retreated. Same thing for that ghost’s actual position. You had to go down a mental list of possible locations to finally find it. With some reconnaissance and the right people we could’ve finished that fight much more easily.”

I rubbed my temples.

“I get where you’re coming from, Cer. But you can’t just use your head to reflect on something. To even activate that boss we had to enter the arena. Would you have been confident in fighting that amalgam in an enclosed space, where the boss knew its surroundings and we didn’t? From the arena itself, retreating would have been possible for me sure, but I think those spikes would’ve caught up with you. We just did the best we could with the limited tools we had. Was there a better way? I’m sure there was. But anyone could claim that they would’ve done better if they had been in our position. The truth is that in a fight, our first instinct isn’t logical, tactical planning. It’s fight or flight. We just have to walk that precarious path until we come out victorious.”

He smiled weakly.

“I think you’re right. After this dungeon, I’m gonna make some new skills for the tournament. I’m sick and tired of having to rely on you to save the day.”, he half-joked.

I grinned.

“Well, thanks for the compliment. I suppose I’ll see how effective those skills of yours are in the tournament, then.”

He grinned back wickedly.

“I suppose you will…”

“On a different note, are you confident about the tournament? You’ve seen the list, right?”, I asked him.

Cerion hummed for a moment.

“I am and I’m not at the same time. I’m fairly confident I can get top three in the singles tournament, but both that Emeri girl and you seem to have a high chance of beating me, no matter what I do.”

I frowned. It was true that Cerion didn’t really have any skills to effectively deal with me, while I remembered that holy maiden to be described as quite powerful herself. Unlike both of us, Cerion didn’t have a build that specialized in single-opponent fights. With my curse mark and berserker swordsmanship, my skill synergies tended to focus on single opponents, while he had a wide, varied array of AOE attacks that were versatile and powerful, but not necessarily groundbreaking.

“As for the doubles tournament…”, he continued, “I’m confident we can win that as long as we work well together. The mercenary guild’s seeded participants just didn’t seem that dangerous on their own. That ‘X’ character might surprise us, but beyond that… Finally, the team category I’m not sure about. We’re not participating in that category in the first place, but I think that commoner adventurer girl and her party might have a chance. You don’t just become a seeded participant through luck, after all.”

I nodded along to his observations. I agreed with his analysis, though personally, I was a little wary of Gaius, that monk from the east, too.

A few minutes of conversation later, we headed to bed for the night. The quality bedrolls we had bought months ago back in Reito still served us well so far, even after nights in a spider-infested forest, raided goblin camps and damp caves, they were holding up.

Most of our camping equipment was actually. We hadn’t been cheap when we had first bought our supplies, and that paid off. Properly made equipment, even if it was tierless, would naturally be much more sturdy and comfortable than their cheaper variants.

U summoned Revan, who had fully recovered from his wounds, as a lookout, and climbed into my bedroll, passing out from exhaustion right when my head hit the cushion.