The air was suffocatingly dense.
The seconds counting down to the beginning of the duel passed slowly as the two men stared each other straight in the eyes.
Everything about Apophis was the opposite of Lucifer, and vice versa: their personalities, their senses of morality, their social upbringing, and even the themes of their abilities as Espers.
Light against shadow; shadow against light.
The two men had already fought, so Apophis knew what to expect from Lucifer's abilities, but something still seemed strange about this whole scenario. What had seemed like a look of nervousness on Lucifer's face now seemed… different. As though it was simply a ploy to get Apophis to lower his guard.
Why had Lucifer decided to challenge him at this very moment? Apophis had defeated him a few weeks ago on Cronos I, so what made Lucifer think he had any chance of winning this time, right after Apophis had received such a massive power boost?
It wasn't even like David fighting Goliath. It was like David challenging two Goliaths at once!
While the timer was still counting down, Apophis took a quick look at his opponent's character sheet.
╔══════════════╕
╟─╼ PLAYER
║ ╰╼[Name]: Lucifer
║ ╰╼[Title]: Bearer of the Light
║ ╰╼[LvL]: 32
║ ╰╼[Tier]: C+
║ ╰╼[Class]: Esper
║ ╰╼[Biology]: Nestarian
╚══════════════╛
This was nowhere near strong enough to challenge Apophis. LvL 32 was certainly high compared to most other players, but Apophis had just reached LvL 42 himself! In fact, Apophis estimated that he was now dangerously close to the power level of a demigod, a being with a body as strong as steel and almost no basic needs like eating and sleeping.
Even still, Apophis was clearly at the top of the food chain, and Lucifer was like an ant by comparison!
The countdown finally reached its last moments.
System Notification: The duel will start in 1 second...
System Notification: Start!
Apophis reacted immediately. Instead of leaping right into a hand-to-hand skirmish, he chose to set up a battlefield that would serve him well and let him save as much Energy as possible. Immediately, he used ~Waterbending~ to flood the surrounding ground, creating a zone where Lucifer couldn't step without being attacked.
Lucifer laughed as the water approached his feet. "Is that all? I'm disappointed. Apparently, I need to force you to show me your new powers!"
He crouched, striking the ground with an open palm and calling upon one of the basic Esper Skills, ~Earthbending~.
Apophis simply pushed more Energy into his water, intending to overwhelm Lucifer's attempt to shield himself. After all, Apophis had put many, many Skill Points into ~Waterbending~. Trying to stop his Skill would be like trying to stop a cruise missile with a pane of glass…
But to Apophis's surprise, the ground shivered and cracked, sucking the water down into it and creating a safe ring around Lucifer! Apophis quickly noticed a series of ripples in front of him on the water's surface, and he jumped back just in time to dodge the spike of stone that burst up at him from the ground!
Apophis activated his ~Demonic Wing~ and leaped into the air to escape the range he estimated for Lucifer's Skill, but his opponent simply pulled an array of stone blocks out of the ground and hurled them up at him like an anti-aircraft gun!
Apophis was confused at the power of this attack. Had Lucifer created some strategy around putting as many Skill Points as possible into such a basic Esper Skill as ~Earthbending~? That didn't make any sense. Even Apophis, who had focused heavily on ~Firebending~, was only able to use it as a powerful weapon because he also possessed ~Dark Lord of Flames~ and ~Eternal Flame (lvl 3)~.
In his first life, Lucifer hadn't focused on earth-based Skills at all, but instead on light-based Skills. That had seemed to be the case in this new life, as well. So what exactly was his plan?
Apophis thought as hard as he could while dodging this heavy pelting of stone blocks. Though Lucifer hurled them with the accuracy of homing missiles, Apophis's astounding 1,200 Agility stat was sufficient to let him dodge them all… at the cost of a steady amount of Energy, which was always required to act at such a godlike level. Was Lucifer simply trying to run him out of Energy?
By this point, Lucifer was hundreds of meters away from Apophis, and the dusty clouds of rubble from the surrounding buildings almost obscured him. Whenever a stone block missed Apophis, it shattered against a nearby building, creating a crumbling pile of rubble and sand which hung in the air due to ~Earthbending~.
"This is getting very annoying," Apophis growled. "Maybe he's trying to use all the debris to hide from me and get a sneak attack. Even that won't help him, though!" He flew higher into the air, above the attacks, so that it would take much more Energy for Lucifer to make his stone blocks fight gravity to reach him.
However, at this point, Lucifer stopped throwing these blocks. Apophis gave a sigh of relief. He'd been completely focused on dodging for several minutes straight, and he was getting dizzy. Looking down below him at the wreckage of the buildings near the warehouse, it looked almost as though Lucifer had pulled up half the road to throw at him!
"Had enough?" Apophis laughed, though he knew that Lucifer was too far away to hear him.
Then, something even more strange happened.
All the debris and dust which had been hanging in the air started to shift. The broken stone cubes moved in a swirling pattern, then began forming into hundreds of gigantic boulders, far larger than the ones Apophis had been dodging. They were perfectly spherical and looked like planets orbiting an invisible sun.
Apophis frowned. Surely this required far more Energy than Lucifer had left. How was he managing to—
Then Lucifer snapped his fingers.
The giant stone spheres ignited with ghostly white fire.
They blasted upward towards Apophis like a meteor shower, even faster than the original, smaller rocks.
Because of his absolute surprise, Apophis took a second to react. Then he laughed. "You absolute fool!" he shouted, then used ~Dark Lord of Flames~, which gave him complete control of all fire within 1,000 kilometers. He used this to extinguish all the meteors, since he wasn't immune to fire damage, despite all his Skills.
Well, he extinguished almost all the meteors. He left the one meteor closest to Lucifer blazing with fire.
Then, Apophis used the second ability of ~Dark Lord of Flames~ and teleported to the fire which burned brightly on that meteor, closing the gap between him and his opponent and causing all the rest of the meteors to hurtle in completely the opposite direction from himself! The split second after he teleported there, Apophis banished the flames, so that he took only minimal damage from the attack.
The meteor was still flying towards the point where Apophis had been just a moment before, so he spread his demonic wings and pushed off, flying swiftly towards Lucifer.
As he went, Apophis was still troubled. He didn't understand why a talented player like Lucifer wasted his Skill Points to develop such a basic branch of the Esper Talent Tree as Geokinesis, which was where ~Earthbending~ came from… Not to mention the usage of ~Firebending~ which he'd just used to ignite his meteors.
Any experienced player knew that it was best to focus on a single branch of the Talent Tree and put all their points into it—and a few other Skills—in order to create synergy between their Skills. A quick look at the Talent Tree for any class, even one as complex as Esper, made that very clear to anyone with MMORPG experience.
Yet, Lucifer seemed to have acted like a noob who spent what must have been over a hundred Skill Points on a few random branches of the Talent Tree, despite them not synergizing at all with his light-based Skills.
Suddenly, Apophis remembered the duel's time limit. If that limit was reached, both players would be permanently banned. Several minutes had already passed. Though he could hardly believe it, he was suddenly filled with the conviction that Lucifer was truly trying to sacrifice himself to get them both banned! That would explain why he'd bought random and pointless Skills, just to catch Apophis off guard and make him spend time trying to figure out what Lucifer's strategy was!
Not to mention pushing Apophis hundreds of meters away with a Skill that Apophis could obviously dodge. Though he clearly hadn't expected Apophis could teleport to a fire like he just had!
"I'm not playing your games anymore!" Apophis growled. "Let's make you use up whatever Energy you have left."
Apophis dropped into a sumo stance on the meteor, making a hundred rapid punches in the direction of the sky. Up above, a black fireball with a white-hot heart formed in response to each punch.
Then he equipped Regnier's two-handed sword, spread his demonic wings, and leaped so hard off from the stone meteor that he shattered it into even smaller pieces than before! A shock wave burst out from under his feet and he hurtled at incredible speed towards Lucifer.
Inexplicably, Lucifer didn't react at all to any of this: not to Apophis outwitting his meteor attack, not to the formation of the black fireballs in the sky, and not to Apophis's charge through the air. He didn't so much as move a finger to dodge when Apophis called down his black fireballs like a new kind of meteor shower.
At the same moment, a hundred black fireballs bombarded Lucifer's location, exploding with apocalyptic force, just as Apophis gave a brutal slash with Regnier's sword!
Then the smoke cleared.
The ground was bright magma where all the fireballs had exploded. The stench of molten metal and stone filled the air. The warehouse was in ruins.
Lucifer stood on a tiny circle of unmelted stone, completely untouched. There was a cut on the front of his armor where Regnier's sword had touched him, but that was all. Intense heat rose from the surrounding magma, making the air shimmer.
Apophis gasped in shock and leaped backward out of melee range, examining the situation carefully. He stared at Lucifer for nearly a minute, his heart pounding with confusion and wariness.
This whole time, Lucifer didn't move a muscle.
Suddenly, Apophis realized that the shimmering air wasn't because of heat at all… it was the sign of the Skill known as ~Energy Protection Shield~.
It was a powerful signature Skill of Engineers, not Espers.
This Skill allowed the user to inject Energy into items, to reinforce them or create other effects. Apophis realized that Lucifer was pressing his thumb into a ring on his index finger, and that ring was humming with an intense amount of Energy pouring out of it! So that was how Lucifer had been able to use his Skills for so long and to block such a powerful attack. He must have forced tens of thousands of players, or even more, to donate their Energy to charge his items!
But then Apophis remembered something else. As far as he knew, only Engineers could use these items with Energy infused into them, except in very specific circumstances. The only way for Lucifer to have a ring like this…
…Was if Lucifer himself was an Engineer as well as an Esper.
This wasn't completely unheard of, of course. Apophis himself was a Warrior-Esper, after all. But had Lucifer really discovered the ability to gain a second class and exploited it to its full potential within the space of less than a month?!
Suddenly, the protective shield faded and Lucifer used a new Skill which baffled Apophis even further.
Lucifer's eyes flashed brightly and his body flickered out of sight.
Thanks to his many years of experience, Apophis reacted without even thinking, activating ~Susanoo~ to protect himself from what he knew was about to happen.
Just as Apophis had instinctively known, Lucifer reappeared behind him and delivered a tremendous blow to where Apophis's head was supposed to be!
This blow was extremely brutal. It cracked ~Susanoo~ and threw Apophis down towards the ground!
Then he used it again, teleporting onto Apophis's back and smashing him even further downward!
Apophis smashed into the ground, splattering magma everywhere. He used all his fire Skills to shove the magma as far away from himself as he could, though it wasn't perfect since he didn't also have ~Earthbending~. But it worked well enough, leaving Apophis in a deep crater.
"I know that Skill…" he mumbled as he pulled himself back up.
~Flicker Strike~. An extremely powerful Skill… which belonged to the Boxer class.
So Lucifer was apparently a triple-classed Esper-Boxer-Engineer?! This was something Apophis had never heard of existing in Horus!
The sense that something was very wrong grew stronger and stronger. Was this even really Lucifer? In Apophis's former life, he'd heard of players using very careful manipulation to exchange names during a PvP tournament to manipulate who won. But that had been accomplished by vague wording in the PvP contracts, which didn't actually call players by their names. It was impossible to trick the game itself into giving the wrong name, right, since it scanned the brains of the players?
Regardless, there was no way that this Rank C+, LvL 32 player was able to fight on this level.
But then something put an end to Apophis' reflection.
Lucifer materialized a sword of light in his left hand and started to create small balls of light in his other.
Finally, some Skills which Apophis had already encountered.
But moreover, they were unique Skills which nobody else could use. Without a doubt, this was truly Lucifer.
