In his next three attempts at defeating his clone, Alistair actually did worse. For some reason, he couldn’t quite replicate the sequence of moves that led to him almost achieving victory. He monotonically increased his fighting techniques, control of his new [Dash], and synergy with Dev’rox, yet he couldn’t quite tie them together on a path to victory.
The first time, he defeated the doppelganger in hand-to-hand combat, for him to all of a sudden use Tranquil Mind’s reaction time advantage to chain together an unstoppable combo. At each turn, he was outmatched by a slight margin, leading to his inevitable defeat.
The second time, Alistair thought he had it all figured out. He had a mental list of the ten or so tricks the fake Alistair used over the course of their extended fights. Black Impermanence to hold on longer, the force field as a way to make [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment] hurt against non-evil opponents.
Alistair called them “tricks,” but they were really manifestations of a higher fighting IQ. If only he could copy those instincts, he would have the victory easily.
Perhaps that’s the stage beyond the fundamentals, as Master Ko Pao and Brother Pike put it.
Despite his list of traps to watch out for, Alistair lost once again.
He approached it differently. Instead of extreme close quarters where Skills were too slow to be employed, he went at a medium range. With agile movements, they exchanged Skill for Skill, [Blood Hand] for [Force Fist] for [Frozen Claw].
Alistair couldn’t keep up with his alter ego, but that was the idea. By switching the distances from medium to close, he would keep that bastard on his toes.
It was a complete failure. Even with Dev’rox and him working in perfect unison, Alistair exhausted his Mana reserves after an hour long battle of attrition in which he knew he was never that close to victory.
In his third go at it, Alistair was just fed up. It was stupid to get emotional about something so important, but how could he not get frustrated? He wasn’t even close to giving up or anything so drastic, but having all of his attempts fail was painful.
So, he went back to his previous tactic—an all-out frontal assault. It wasn’t completely out of frustration. Alistair knew if he executed everything right, he would have a solid shot at winning.
The moment he materialized within the force field bubble, Alistair [Dashed] towards his identical self. He was lucky that the silent clone had no memories. Over the course of several days, Alistair had mastered the nue aspect of his Tier 4 [Dash].
After the brief invisibility granted by the flicker aspect of [Dash] vanished, there were two assailants of the doppelganger. And he didn’t know one from the other—for a vanishingly brief period. After that, the illusory effect of the small impartment of nue disappeared.
In that tiny window, Alistair had both the nue shadow and his real self throw a right straight. His real self was behind the fake Alistair, and the shadow in front. Halfway through the punch’s arc, the doppelganger figured out the trick and raised his arm behind his head to block the attack.
Using Dev’rox’s mental horsepower to slow down his perception of time, Alistair activated [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment] midway through the punch, not giving his opponent a moment to rest.
After catching the punch, the doppelganger spun around in one acrobatic motion, kicking toward Alistair’s face. A Dao fist from Spiritual Fighter’s Echo caught him in the left palm, but didn’t do much damage.
Alistair blocked the kick with a gauntleted hand, ducking under another and moving forward for a single leg takedown. At that moment, the finishing Skill was almost done forming above the two of them, leaving the doppelganger with a choice.
That fiendishly smart clone completely ignored the threat from above, pounding Alistair’s skull with a downward elbow infused with a [Force Fist], all the while burning Karmic energy to fuel a crimson [Eyes of Truth].
Alistair pulled a trick from his other self’s book, slipping into Black Impermanence. The feeling of utter finality was still foreign to him, as well as the eclipsing dark halo that surrounded his body and eyes, leaving just a corona of hidden light around his irises.
If this was a fight in the real world, he would have been feeling that elbow later, Black Impermanence or not. His trance shielded him from the involuntary effects and pain, allowing his complete focus. Despite the fact the doppelganger burned Karma to divine Fate, Alistair hid his intentions with Black Impermanence and countervailing Karmic energy.
A [Draconic Roar] burst forth from Alistair’s mouth, but he tilted his body toward the side to shoot it past his opponent. Once again, he was taking a page out of the fake Alistair’s book—using the power of his finishing Skill to reflect projectiles that weren’t so justice-coded. The only difference was icicles vs particles of force affinity Mana.
For a moment, Alistair thought he was finally going to achieve victory. If only things were that easy. The copy entered Tranquil Mind, Alistair feeling the sense of absolute peace even without any visual cue.
With all of his nearly 1,000 Agility, the other Alistair reined down piercing strikes with the sharp claws of his Devilsbane Gauntlets.
Black Impermanence had its advantages, but it couldn’t keep up with Tranquil Mind’s reaction times. Nor its adaptive qualities, allowing the other Alistair to break through his defenses. Alistair tried blocking, but the doppelganger always was a step ahead. He had no time to drop Black Impermanence and enter his own Tranquil Mind, and even if he did, the backlash from the accumulated damage under the former would be devastating in his current state.
All this took place in the brief window between the impact of [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment], since Alistair had placed his Skill at the opposite end of the force bubble to give time for [Draconic Roar] to percolate its Mana.
All he had to do was hang for a bit longer. Not even a quarter of a second, perhaps. For all of his high Constitution score, Alistair found his neck vulnerable, as his opponent sent forth an inundation of strikes. He was unused to this swarming pressure coming from another in-fighter.
In a last ditch effort to escape, Alistair burned far more Karma than he had alloted, throwing away his next attempt more than it was already doomed. It would take more than the seventeen hours to recover his finishing Skill, so why not Karma too?
He [Dashed] forward burning the last of his Karma in an attempt to escape the never-ending assault.
The doppelganger was one step ahead. Using the reaction time of Tranquil Mind and burning some of his own Karma, he placed his hand in the path of Alistair’s throat. While the Skill was designed to stop Alistair short of any physical obstacle, the moment he did, the fake Alistair used that moment of defenselessness to spear his original completely through the neck.
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Alistair woke up in the white room with a nasty cough.
“That felt way too real,” he choked out once he recovered from the lingering psychosomatic effects of dying. “Is that actually what it feels like to get stabbed in the neck?”
“It is real,” Dev’rox said. “The Pathfinder AI teleports your body and anchors your soul, the moment it receives a fatal injury and heals you, so in one sense you actually died. It’s not much relevant except when dealing with some crazy religious sects.”
“Crazy religious sects?”
“The multiverse is vast. You have to expect some crazies. I’ve never encountered one, but occasionally places that employ revival technology get raided by cultists who think its an abomination against natural order. Not really a present problem, however.”
“Huh,” Alistair noted, filing that information away for a more relevant time.
Dev’rox floated around to face Alistair directly. “You don’t seem as dejected as before. Got that frustration out of your system?”
“After I recover my Karma and [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment], I’m going to win.”
“Bold claim. Let’s see it happen.”
----------------------------------------
Alistair practiced as much as he could in eighteen hours of lobby time. After his first seventeen hours, he gave up right away, going back to practice. All leading up to what he hoped to be his final encounter.
Seeing his own emotionless face was getting tiring. Alistair liked to think he had good features, especially after the effects of cultivation, but for all intents and purposes, his face was the ugliest in the entire multiverse.
So when he finally returned for the nineteenth time to face his superior clone, he was one hundred percent focused.
After coming his closest to winning last time, Alistair created a simple but extremely detailed strategy, with multiple branching paths for each eventuality. He did this with the help of Infinite Arsenal, which turned him into a supercomputer with the sole function of calculating a way to win.
Infinite Arsenal seemed to be less effective when used outside of an actual combat scenario, but he would make do. Alistair once again timed the end of his lobby stay down to a millisecond, pre-preparing a [Dash] and the Tranquil Mind state.
With his lightning quick reflexes, he and Dev’rox worked in unison to change his orientation. While changing direction mid-[Dash] was impossible, the imp projected an array in Alistair’s current [Dash] direction and one point toward the fake Alistair. He also used some of his Mana reserves to squash the distance between the two cultivators once Alistair was through the portal.
The result was sheer speed. They hadn’t tried this direct an approach before because the margin for error was extremely high. Tranquil Mind didn’t naturally cover Dev’rox’s consciousness—it was because of the high tier of [Ghost Whispers] that they could paritally meld their minds together. The combined processing power of the passive Skill along with Tranquil Mind acted synergistically.
The doppelganger’s eyes barely had time to register the incoming stimuli. Alistair’s [Dash] ended with him having skin-to-skin contact with his other self. He could feel the presence of his alter ego’s Tranquil Mind taking hold, but it wasn’t complete.
Not having time to activate one of his offensive Skills, Alistair slammed the man with two, solid hits. He channeled Pike to the best of his ability, taking on the solid, unbreakable affect of the Silver Comet Sect. First was an elbow straight to the doppelganger’s jaw, and second was a knee straight to the solar plexus.
Even as the knee hit, Alistair could feel the signature peace of Tranquil Mind from his opponent.
All will be satisfied, Alistair thought. No man is above justice, nor is no man below redemption.
While the momentum of his knee carried the two of them toward the blue force bubble, Alistair grabbed onto his counterpart’s jacket. By that point, the clone was fully functional, though his output was temporarily reduced by the impact of those two blows and their Spiritual Fighter’s Echo follow up.
For what was over the dozenth time, Alistair grappled with Alistair in close quarters. Their situation was quite reminiscent of a judo match, considering the heavy Mammothskin Raiment they both wore, with its stylish fist emblem for the Northeast Order Freehold.
Alistair had practiced his grappling skills over and over and over in his penalty periods. There was no way he would lose in that area, even if this clone was better than his previous self in every way.
Faking a tackle for the legs, Alistair used all of his Strength for a shoulder throw where he hoisted his counterpart up into the air like a bale of hay. While Constitution made them heavier, it didn’t do so at a rate keeping up with their Strength.
Next came a [Draconic Roar]. With the combined mental boost of Tranquil Mind and melding with Dev’rox, he could expend the majority of his nue in a single scream, along with an amount of force affinity Mana that streaked the air with coral light. If he had to deal with the consequences of his Skill usage, he could have permanently hurt his brain, but he was relying on everything being reset.
While the cone of [Draconic Roar] was still expanding, Alistair suddenly switched from Tranquil Mind to Black Impermanence, adding on his skin-tight proto-Domain. In this defensive position, he [Dashed] forward, through his own expanding roar.
Given the power he put behind the Skill, those two defensive steps he stole from the doppelganger were key to not being instantly blown away.
In that moment, the fake Alistair recognized the true threat. The threat that Alistair meticulously hid in the inception of the [Draconic Roar]. [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment] from above, going backwards toward the two of them like in previous times. The key was not only the Karmic energy, but also the roar. The noise of the roar along with its incredible mass of nue blocked out the sound of the chanting of the bodhisattva’s name.
The doppelganger recognized right away that it was too late for him to perform his own finishing Skill. Within the confines of his Tranquil Mind, his reactions would be much faster than Alistair’s in Black Impermanence.
Gathering [Force Fists] in both hands, the shifty clone enveloped his huge coral fists with crimson Karmic energy. He spun rapidly, using the special frame of reference flooring to speed up his rotation, jumping at 45 degree angles repeatedly.
He used [Force Fist] in the way that Alistair had against Dragonus—spamming it over and over, which became the initial inspiration for [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment].
These [Force Fists] were far stronger than the ones Alistair had used, and fired at a far more rapid pace. Alistair could almost see the strain his counterpart’s meridians were under, as a torrential amount of force affinity Mana exited the clone’s fists.
For a moment, it looked as if Alistair’s plot was going to fail. The tide of enormous [Force Fists] began to crowd out the [Draconic Roar] and even the fists of the Avalokiteśvara avatar were being pushed back. That all changed in an instant with Dev’rox’s explosion of Mana.
Over time, Dev’rox had shown more of his true capabilities. Since in his living form he was a Profound realm cultivator, he had still not demonstrated a taste of his Profound power, but now he was ready to unveil one of his favorite abilities.
While his homeland in the Asura Hell had no direct correspondence with the Pathfinder AI’s Skills, spells were something else. So, with the increased connection of Tier 4 [Ghost Whispers], Dev’rox unleashed his Rank 1 Spell: Spatial Rending.
Hundreds of minuscule magical arrays appeared instantly in the space, glittering like dwarf stars. They formed a chaotic web of space affinity mana, creating a grand arcana that Alistair had never before seen the likes of.
Alistair could feel the esoteric aura those arrays gave off. It reminded him somewhat of that First Script character back in the Holy Ravine, but nowhere near as meaningful. Still, the air of mystery and ancient power chilled his soul and it was obvious that Dev’rox poured the remainder of his Mana pool into this singular spell.
At lightning speeds, blue lasers shot from each array to its nearest neighbors, forming an intricate lattice of octahedron-shaped units of space. Then, space shifted.
Every fractional unit of space changed spots with another in a seemingly random pattern. In the same way that Dev’rox’s magical arrays connected disparate areas of space, each division of space created by the tiny arcanic circles was linked to another, preserving the laws of physics, just changing the orientation.
That threw off the fake Alistair completely.
To be honest, the real Alistair was nervous for a second. Theoretically, there was no reason to think someone couldn’t adapt to the scattered space. Even pre-initiation humans eventually adapted to having one’s visual field flipped upside down.
He was too slow. The confusion and disorientation were enough for Alistair’s attack to land. The fists of justice connected with the nue and force Mana of his [Draconic Roar], sending it flying into the doppelanger with absurd force.
Alistair was well and truly out of ideas. If this failed, he was done.
After a final bated breath, the confusion abated as Dev’rox’s magic began to fade away. Right before the spell collapsed, a notification popped up.
> Congratulations on placing 98th (pending) in Cosmic Blood, Disputed Shard Fief rankings.
>
> Badge Acquired: Cosmic Blood - Top 100 Performance (Untiered Legendary Badge): Achieve a top 100 performance on the Cosmic Blood trial. 200 Upgrade Points, 50 Platinum Drachma.