I challenged Par at about noon today, right before lunch. I spent my time before that building a puppet.

The design I ended on almost completely forgoes armor, instead using speed and regrowing damage to make up for it. Taking advantage of spellwood to make repairs faster to help with the whole regrowing thing. It also has ten legs, letting it move in any direction incredibly quickly while also supporting the rather heavy upper body. For weapons I went with a much longer example of my spine polearm, only instead of two of them I had twenty-two eleven on each side. The limited armor it has is a pair of mobile shields that I can use to intercept any blows and take minimal damage. With this design I was sure I could win.

So I challenged him with my puppet and we fought. He was obviously going easy on me at first, either that or conserving his strength to figure out more info about my puppet’s abilities. Eventually, he started going on the offensive a lot more seriously and ended up doing some pretty serious damage to my damage before I recovered from the sudden shift, nothing I couldn’t fix though. From there, his strategy was to try to overwhelm my puppet faster than I could heal it, which was working for a little bit but then he started acquiring his own wounds, which took time for him to heal and slowed down his assault.

That is when I am assuming he actually got serious. All of a sudden he explodes in a cloud of fire, all of his injuries are healed, and he is also on fire. With one hand he wielded a sword, with the other he wielded a flame that somehow prevents anything from growing from the wounds it inflicts with passion and fervor. Suddenly my puppet wouldn’t heal properly, though I quickly realized that I could just grow around the injuries.

And then he started attacking my puppet with zealous fervor, ignoring any injuries he might take, all his wounds were burned away by that strange fire he wielded. It wasn’t till I stabbed him through the heart that he slowed his assault, and by that time half of my puppet had been chopped up and reduced to ash. It was only enough to give him a moment’s pause as he grabbed the arm that had stabbed him and burned it away, burning away his wounds in the process. That moment was all I needed to recover enough to go back on the offensive.

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And it continued to go like that, back and forth between us as I slowly lost ground and he slowly ran out of mana. He does have quite a bit of mana, more so than most accomplished mages. But that doesn’t matter, I have more.

By the time he ran out of mana I had three weapons left, seven legs, and the spine of my puppet was reduced to half the thickness it was before, on top of countless cuts and charred bits, both of the shields were gone. And he was still in peak physical condition, his fire must rejuvenate him somehow. At this point I was much more familiar with Par’s fighting style and how to read his movements, so I didn’t lose immediately and I even managed to injure him, albeit mostly superficially.

Eventually, it was hard to find uncharred places big enough to properly grow a weapon or leg from, and the combination of missing legs and unhealable char was preventing me from moving the puppet as fluidly as I was able to before. At the same time Par was spending every bit of mana he managed to get by burning closed any uncharred bits on the surface of my puppet, usually trading injures for it. And he wasn’t healing any injuries, so he was also constantly being slowed down and hampered.

At the end of the fight Par overextended, allowing me to get a definitive blow on him, and put his sword through my puppet in a way that rendered it mostly inoperable. He ended up collapsing from the blow, while my puppet couldn’t move anymore. A double knock out. Much better than I had hoped for.

When I finally healed Par enough for him to wake up he was laughing. Apparently, it is pretty hard to find worthy opponents around here. Then we got into a small argument of who would win if we both actually wanted to kill each other, he seems to think my forest would be able to hamper him enough for me to actually kill him, while I don’t think I would live long enough to do anything like that if we were to fight for real.

Overall the fight took all day, from lunchtime to dinner time. And I absolutely loved it. I loved the challenge. This high speed react or die challenge is so dramatically different from the slow and steady type of challenge that I am used to that it is a breath of fresh air.

Thinking back on the fight itself I am reminded quite strongly of Thes, not just in the emotion-fueled style of combat he has, but also the power behind him. I thought Thes was bordering on obtaining true immortality while he was raging, and Par is more powerful than that so I must have been mistaken, there is no way I am able to even come close to beating a true immortal. That would make me a true immortal, wouldn’t it?

Other than that I didn’t get a chance to do much today, as pretty much all of my time was occupied with fighting Par. So I, unfortunately, didn’t get to challenge Azrezel. I guess I’ll do that tomorrow.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.