If there was one thing that made this kind of fight bearable, it's that there wasn't any kind of time limit--or at least, in my experience with boss fights, there never were. That, and the fact that the Slenderman, like most boss fights, didn't ramp up in difficulty out of nowhere; there was a phase change at half health, but other than that, it should be relatively consistent, so you had time to understand the enemy, adapt, and grow yourself to overcome what was before you.

I mean, in theory.

In practice, there was a timer on this fight, because whenever the Slenderman did damage to the floor or walls, he left real, tangible holes into the abyss, and while I could throw myself from solid floor to solid floor, I wasn't immune to making mistakes. I stretched my mind a bit in order to keep all of the holes more or less in mind while also spending a lot of attention on the Slenderman itself, watching for cues, openings, and inefficiencies.

And also, the Slenderman did have a lot more patterns than the average boss, probably because the Administrator himself could simply create them.

He decided after another couple rounds to try a tactic where he drew his fists back karate-style and then punch at me from a ways away, and with each forward punch he would release some kind of air or force shockwave. Of course I was suspicious from the start, barely dodging the first but getting into the swing of it after a bit. He actually wasn't as fast on that as he could have been, and so I tried going in to take a shot at him. I got one good hit on his shoulder, and twisted in midair to try to backhand him before I got out of range, but missed with the second shot. I could have thrown the blade, again, with telekinesis... but I was having trouble adapting to my new Class Feature.

Merry had described Telekinesis as me throwing around mental weight, when she was trying to explain Psychokinesis, and apparently I had some mental "weight" limit that was pretty high, but when I put that telekinetic weight behind my blade, I couldn't also use it to throw myself around, and also it became more expensive to use telekinesis on the blade, or on myself while carrying it. I could recover the weight, lightening the blade and giving me more to play with, but it took a moment, longer if I used a lot of the stuff. All this on top of me burning through mana, which I was now starting to get low on as I experimented.

I did have potions, unlike that first battle, but not an unlimited supply, and there was a lot of fight left to go.

Merry took a break from trying to enhance my actions, and I could tell she was trying to strategize or find a new answer, so I took over the entire mental burden of surviving the fight in the meantime. It had really helped, not being alone under these circumstances, but mostly that just meant I wasn't going to become unstable and collapse; I had the skills I needed, and the experience, and the grit, or at least, I was confident that I would survive most anything short of an unfair surprise attack. Which, of course, was a thing, but... I had to hope that it wasn't going to happen here. The situation was unfair enough.

I went about five rounds without any help from Merry, and got another hit in along the way. Shuffling the weight to and from my sword turned out to be the thing where I most needed help, but I managed; I stumbled splitting my attention between the unfamiliar task and dodging, but in the end I got my hit and got away without dying, which was always the number one goal.

Jay...

After those five rounds, I was eager to have Merry back in my corner, but when she approached me, mentally, I could tell she was keeping something back. Not that I could spare the attention to try and read her mind, but it felt weird that she didn't want me to know what she was thinking.

Jay, bro, just... do you trust me?

With my life. I mean... the question surprised me, and scared me a little given the context, but really, in every part of my relationship with the fairy so far, she'd been smarter than me about the stuff that she could see and touch. She knew me, and she knew what was going on inside. I'd not seen her get anything truly wrong in a long time.

'Kay. This is gonna suck.

Merry, to her credit, waited for an opportune moment, but then she knocked me, mentally, away from the controls for my telekinesis, which confused me and made me trip and stumble. And then I felt her hands on the Skill, and then...

...and then?

The Slenderman almost punched me in the face as I realized that I... that I no longer had a Telekinesis skill, at all. It had gone away. Merry had taken the entire skill and jammed it, starting with the ends, into whatever the recycler function of the class was. It wasn't just broken; it was gone.

I felt her hands on the telekinetic sense, too, and that vanished a moment later. My passive ability to just know where things were, the comforting sense that I wasn't going to trip over a rock or fall in a hole... it was just gone.

The Slenderman, obviously sensing just how wrong everything seemed to be going, paused. I... I tried to decide whether or not I should attack in that interval, but honestly, in that moment, I had started to lose my will to live.

Because in the end, more than anything, what kept me alive was the freedom that I'd found in the Dungeon, and I didn't understand that until it vanished. Telekinesis was more than just a thing that saved my life; it was my life.

No.

I let my attention shift to Merry, while also keeping my eyes on the long-limbed monstrosity that was now watching me closely.

Before you were here, bro, you had something else that was your life. You thought it wasn't real, though, and that's why you wanted to die in the first place. Because the 'you' in your head that was able to live the way you wanted to live was a lie, and so life wasn't worth living.

I... I blinked at her. I'd fought off ghosts trying to possess me, spent my life worrying that I was insane... I mean yes, in a way, I'd thought over and over that if that 'me' was real, then he was my best self, and even daydreamed that it woudl be true, though I knew it wasn't. The part of me that didn't give up even when treated like shit, that would have fought to the end of the world, the best version fo me... even suggesting there had really been actual ghosts, the whispers in my mind had talked of gods and people I knew and other things that I knew for sure had been false. The 'me' that could have lived in myth wasn't real, because the myth was lies meant to weaken me and control me.

Merry put her mental hands on The Devil's Rebirth Contract and destroyed it. That, I didn't mind, though the thought confused me.

Stolen novel; please report.

You have a mental concept of yourself and the Skill came close to it. Even after everything you did for the skill, it's wrong. All of these things are wrong. I spent a lot of time thinking about how the fairy knight used magic, how she stole it from the... from the guy. She took the pieces and she made her own thing out of them. She splintered them just like that and formed something new out of the ashes.

Jerry. Merry was in my head--no, she was behind me, giving me a hug. Don't rebuild Telekinesis. Fight like... like whatever you were back when you were fighting ghosts, or whatever. Just pretend that whatever you were doing back then was real, or could be real. Like the best you is the real you.

I blinked, letting my sword start to drop, and almost didn't notice when the Slenderman chopped at my head.

I'd like to say that what came next was me turning the battle around and immediately conquering my enemy. That'd be nice, yeah? I spent a bunch of time dodging, and felt a little humiliated as the Slenderman obviously slowed down for my sake. The Administrator was toying with me; he didn't want to kill me, even though the whole premise of the fight was that one little mistake would end me. And here was my vulnerability, writ large, and he obligingly lowered himself yet again down to my level.

I could have hoped to stop and meditate and try to grasp the concept of what Merry was telling me. It was tangible, in my head; the concept that I could, maybe, live my dreams, be my best self, but it didn't make any sense.

That imaginary version of me wasn't real.

I was thinking that as I watched a man with a pitch black face and flames within his eye sockets and mouth smash the floor with his bare hands. I was thinking that as he turned and punched, throwing a shcokwave with his fist, turning physical motion into magic with just his will. I was thinking it as I materialized a copy of a weapon in my hand and smashed said black face with it, understanding implicitly that a sword to the face was not lethal for this creature, and in fact it no longer did any damage at all from what I could tell.

It took me a very long time before something stirred inside of me--many rounds, honestly, of watching the Slenderman change tactics, many rounds of hitting him and doing no damage, many rounds of feeling Merry there in my head, trusting me and not helping, which I guess looking back on it was correct. The fairy that was in my head, that lived literally inside my magic, observed me as I came to a conclusion very, very slowly.

The version of me that existed back then, that had babbled in the darkness things about 'how dare the gods' and 'I'll destroy you' and 'you can't defeat me' as though the insanity in my own head was perfectly reasonable, the version of me that had forced itself to face the concept--real or imaginary--that it would fight a god if a god found it unworthy, the version of me that had accepted the idea that I had to crush spirits or souls or whatever because they were tormenting me and trying to possess me and...

The version of me that stood up to the impossible might have been insane, but it had survived. And now it--I--lived in a world where the insane things I had lived through might be real; like, really real. Or...

Or, equivalently, the absolute bullshit that seemed to be happening could be fake. After all, why was my bullshit fake and their bullshit real? Whether it's all bullshit or none of it is, magic comes down to willpower... or, well, it starts with it, at the very least.

Again, I'd like to say that the immediate effect of that realization was highly theatrical. I want to say that I batted away the Slenderman's flying fist like he was an ant, and my sword of dreams split his head in two with a single stroke, or maybe just that it threw him across the room and he begged for his life or bantered with me as I crossed the room to crush him.

The truth was perhaps even more profound, but it was personal. I kept dodging blows, but I weaved, in my head, a single skill out of what had been destroyed, mostly on instinct. Along the way, I threw Psychokinesis into the pit, and also Stealth, and threw their shattered remnants into the mix. Because what were they--what was any system skill, really--except an amplified version of my will? The will to hide, to destroy, the control, to steal, to sense... actually, sensing wasn't really a will, and I set the remains of Telekinetic Sense aside, as well as some pieces that felt similar from other things, but the rest I congealed into a single Skill.

It didn't work quite right--it was kind of raw--but when it all pulled together, the confused mess really did shake out to be a single, usable skill, one that I slipped into like a pair of gloves. It felt odd; in fact, it felt very odd. It was like nothing I'd ever used, or seen, or imagined. It wasn't anything like I'd imagined myself as back then, and it wasn't anything like I had expected the skill to become.

I felt like a big, heavy cloak was weighing over my mental body, like I was wearing some kind of heavy leather or rubber poncho, or something similarly ridiculous. I felt it weighing down my shoulders, and my head, I felt it weighing down my arms, and my legs. I felt like every motion was a burden. It was like the depths of my depression all over again; I didn't feel like doing anything.

And in contrast, the Slenderman's fists seemed to me like they weren't quite as heavy as they used to be--or, they were the same weight, but in comparison, they didn't mean much.

That... didn't mean I was an idiot, of course.

Instead of standing there and tanking a Slenderman fist to the face or something equally hubristic, when I felt that cloak settle over me and got used to dodging with the weight still on me, I started by trying to block the strikes. I took my sword and swung at an incoming chop, positioning myself so that if I was entirely wrong I wasn't going to get dead, but my sword intersected the monster's arm and both stopped dead.

And... if I wasn't mistaken, I could swear that the Slenderman's black suit jacket cracked where my blade bit into it. It didn't cut; it was like it was made of glass, or some other crystal, and it had reached its limit in a single strike.

The Slenderman seemed surprised, but that didn't say much. I was surprised, probably far more than the Administrator was.

Merry, how did you... I shook my head to clear it. Forget how she knew the idea would work, the more pressing question was why she was sure that the Administrator wouldn't kill me, and that wasn't a question I really needed answered. Instead, I moved forward, flicking my heavy-as-hell Executioner Blade back and forth a couple times, just aiming for little cuts on the Slenderman's armored suit.

Each strike either cut or shattered the suit.

"You do manage to be a surprise," said the beanpole's voice, as he jumped back to give himself some room, and I realized with some surprise that the voice, at least as it came out of the Slenderman, seemed winded--tired, I guess? These strikes had measurable effect on the Slendermans' health bar, but not big chunks; of course, they didn't need to be big chunks, because I hadn't really thrown a lot of effort into them. "So it's true. You've Fooled the system and created a Dungeoneer version of your own True Skill. So soon, and without the guidance of a Path Sovereign. You are, as always, an aberration, Jerry Applebee."

"Now," he continued, and I felt a slight tickle as some kind of magic washed over me, "let's see whether you've done a competent job at it or not."

And to my confusion and consternation, I suddenly felt a similar cloak of weight envelop the Slenderman. No, not similar; it was the same skill.

He'd taken it, like it was just his to take, and when he threw a punch with the Skill active, I could feel a tidal wave of weight behind the air shockwave, a tidal wave that didn't just knock me away--it shattered the floor in a line moving forwards, despite being a good three-four feet above it. The wall, likewise, was shattered to pieces, blocks scattering out into the void and then disappearing all too soon, I assume destroyed by whatever kind of death plane there was out there.

I should have been scared, but at that moment, I just felt a mixture of feelings--tiredness, frustration, anger, hate. This fight should never have even happened; I'd gotten my Full Clear Quest, and I was supposed to just move on.

But he wanted to fight, and I'd been fighting for my life. And Merry had the bright idea that now was the right moment to, I dunno, reach closure on ghost shit or whatever, so I needed to fight without my magic while I fucking reached closure. And okay, I did that, and now I had magic, or whatever, I guess. But even then, it wasn't allowed to be over.

Deep down, the one constant in my life since well before the Dungeons, even since before the ghosts had started bothering me, was this feeling that life was an unending chain of other people's bullshit, and I was getting pretty fucking tired of it. And this skill, or whatever? This was just that given form.

And given that I'd survived his strike, I was pretty sure that the Slenderman didn't know how to use it properly, and that thought made me smile a grim little smile.