In Noid's atrium, the gods still watched the boy's battles.

"I think I figured something out," the Enchantress broke the silence that had infused the atrium since the boy departed.

"Figured something out?" Liam was the first to ask.

"The skill," she said. "I think I might know its rarity."

"Oh?" Noid arched a brow, curious as well.

"Think about it," she continued. "He left his 'family' back in the trial for years, decades even. He is still a mortal. Time is not irrelevant to him yet."

"So you think it is a Divine ski—" Liam tried.

"No!" she interrupted. "I've considered it for a while. There were only always two options for skills outside the norm that any sufficiently enlightened soul could possess. But if it was divine, as we all know, then it should have no associated costs apart from his resources and will power."

"And we could not find a cost," Noid said.

"But I just found one," Enith said with a frown.

"Yeah?" Liam said, questioning.

"Emotions. The boy… will break. Only he won't do it in our care. Because as long as he is in time dilation, his emotions will be eaten, his thoughts eased. He will rationalise everything he goes through here."

"You think…" Noid tried, but he couldn't think how to complete his thoughts.

"The last time he ever showed any intense emotions for a prolonged period was right before the last upgrade, wasn't it?"

No one had an answer for her. They all knew what that meant. She had won another logical argument before it even started.

****

Rafe took his favourite sword stance right out the gate. He crouched his legs, held onto his sword with both hands. Its tip touched the ground. He took one heavy breath, feeling the trance come over him.

He held the pose for two seconds, as par Aeon Swordsman etiquette of dueling. Then he burst forward with a push of his legs and the fight was on.

Devila was no slouch. She had her whip out immediately as well and was already trying to float backwards on a small wind to escape him. With both his Dash skill and his movement technique though, Rafe was after her like a bullet.

He saw her eyes widen in surprise as his sword got closer and closer to her chest. But then a shimmering crystal like shield of mana formed around her. It was even faster than a veil would have been.

She always had fast casting speed. The polygonal shield was rushed this time though, and it was weak. Weak enough that Rafe burst through it after only a few moments of study.

It had achieved its purpose of buying enough time for the whip to come from behind and attempt to ambush Rafe.

Rafe had absolute control of his surroundings, which was all that saved him. He had also released his aura a little from its leash. He hadn't used it a lot for combat over the last two floors, and he was starting to realise that was a mistake.

He needed to use every tool he had at his disposal. Once he left the void and started to use insights and concept abilities, maybe he wouldn't need his aura as much. But training it helped in increasing the strength of his soul. And from Devila's status, increasing one facet of either body or soul or both was not the worst idea.

He threw an aura blade at her. Devila didn't seem to notice, busy as she was trying to control her whip which was dueling Rafe.

She never took her eyes off Rafe for even a moment as she withdrew slowly. Rafe was unable to close the distance in short order again, but he was getting a lot of practice for his new footwork technique.

His aura blade hit her and the whip blade floundered. It wouldn't cause any external damage, but for a moment, her soul was thrown into chaos.

Rafe grinned as he went to close the distance again. The whip appeared to block his path but she'd lost her rhythm. He would be there in no time.

"Tch."

He heard her even as his eyes widened in realisation. He had meant to taunt her into acting out in anger by using her technique to dance around the whip and close the distance again. She had reacted, but not as irrationally as he'd hoped.

Her fighting style was magic based. Distance was her friend. She needed to get distance to fight at her best, but Rafe had once seen her let people get close. After she'd drawn a spell circle with her dancing feet. And Rafe had walked straight into it. He tried to retreat but the blue barrier was there like it had been when she trapped that poor team on the third floor.

Rafe used his mana sight to see the runes preparing to shoot their load. It was too slow for someone like him though. He only had to dismantle the thin barrier and jump out. He was still a little grazed, but nothing that would affect the rest of the fight. Bleeding and burning was a daily occurrence at this rate.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Except Devila decided that was the perfect time to press her advantage; a squad of paper crane talismans surrounding Rafe and getting ready to blow.

Her famous exploding talismans. They were only in a semi circle around him, clearly giving Rafe enough of an out to make a run for it. She either did not have enough, which he found hard to believe considering they were her favorite, and also considering her strongest skill.

The other option was that she was trying to herd him somewhere. He didn't know what other traps she had waiting for him there, but Rafe was not stupid enough to give the enemy what they wanted.

He decided to take his chances with the explosions. Another use for his aura skill and for a fighting style he hadn't used in a while.

He drew a knife, faster than the eye could see. With his aura compressed as close to his skin as he could control it while making it semi-solid, he started to twirl like a tornado. He was unbalanced, as he always was when he paired a dagger and a sword.

The explosion rocked the entire floor, although the staircase so far had seemed like something F-ranked users could not hope to dent. Rafe was relatively safe within his cocoon.

He still got a bit red in places, but he could handle this much. Once the fire had dissipated, he jumped straight into attacking her again. This time using his Demon God's promise.

He did notice that Devila was looking towards where she had attempted to herd him toward. Toward a ledge with a talisman strapped to it that Rafe didn't recognise.

Name: Talisman of weathering

Type: Decay mana enchanted talisman

Enchantment: Will cause weakness on anything it is strapped onto temporarily.

So she had planned to throw him off the ledge. The floors were relatively big. As big as a football field even. Throwing someone out the ring was probably a valid way to win. Rafe had just never considered it.

This time he used his dagger to defend against the whip even as he always tried to close the distance. The technique Devila used meant that in no more than a minute the pair had gone a whole lap around the floor, although Rafe was now careful to keep his back toward the side that leaned against the spire.

He jumped just in time to avoid being frozen by a few freezing type talismans. He heard Devila clicking her tongue.

He noticed she still had the bag she'd carried when they'd met early on her first floor. Aside from that, her attire was a little different. She wore cloth armour still, but this looked a lot more like the witch's robes the Enchantress favoured, complete with a pointy hat.

Rafe didn't know what she carried in the bag now, what with how she hadn't been pretending that's where she kept her talismans. Seeing her fiddle with it at first had him wanting to snort, but an instinct had him jumping back just in time.

A group of talismans flew and circled above Devila. It looked like any normal flying talismans, but with his racial ability Rafe saw how these talismans were interconnected to create some kind of spell formation above him.

Devila's whip retreated back to her, and she had it coiled around her hand in a heartbeat. Rafe should have attacked her then, but she was too calm. His instincts told him to run.

Then the beams started, right after Devila floated like an angel of death to loom over him.

The formation had yanked her into its centre.

She extended her hand in his direction and the beams started to rain down.

It was reminiscent of the star beams from the calamity beast before, only this time these were beams of some kind of explosion mana as opposed to stellar mana. Rafe ran like a mad man. The array was in essence a pre-cast spell that Devila only needed to control to attack Rafe.

By the time the array ran out of juice, the amount of destruction on the floor had eclipsed the damage from all of Rafe's other battles.

By the end she hadn't even been aiming, just letting very large beams shoot out at imperceptible speeds. The whole floor had been targeted. He hadn't known it was a rule, but apparently even going to the stairs to try and head to the lower floor would have counted as a loss.

So Rafe had done the only thing he could. First he'd gone upwards with his Earth shattering style's original semi-flight technique. Then he'd tried to hang onto the wall. That was when he'd realised Devila wasn't even paying attention anymore, just raining death onto the floor with impunity. It must have been such a boon, to possess such a monstrous amount of mana and control to boot.

She was still as inexperienced at fighting as she'd been before though. You never closed your eyes in the middle of a battle.

He was like spider man the way he was holding onto the wall with his dagger planted into it. He pushed himself off even as the array started to die down.

Devila opened her eyes to survey the destruction she'd wrought even as she slowly started to float downwards. And then she stiffened but it was too late.

Rafe had expected better from her, so he had overcommitted. He tried to course correct at the last second so he didn't kill her. He hit her forehead with the flat of his blade and their bodies collided, and they crashed onto the floor together.

He was on top of her, and her eyes were closed and her teeth were gritted. Her whip flew out of her hands before she even opened her eyes. Rafe found himself retreating this time.

He didn't attack. He waited for her to get to her feet first. She studied him calmly. She was panting, overly stimulated by the intense combat. He was the same.

"You had the chance to end it all," she said "And you did not. Are you looking down on me?"

Rafe frowned. "No…but these are supposed to be friendly spars. I could have killed you, if I'd gone any further."

The woman frowned at him in turn. "You could have killed me? Are you telling me you've climbed this far, and you've killed no one?"

As far as Rafe knew, none of the challengers he'd fought had killed anyone. That was why they'd all simply thrown in the towel once they knew they were defeated. Devila didn't seem to have those same compunctions.

"It seems you are looking down on this trial, aren't you? No, you are looking down on the multiverse as a whole. Let me teach you then."

She attacked first, this time not bothering to keep distance.

The Enchantress' technique was created to keep enemies at a distance. Even still, it was a sword technique the woman could use to defend herself if she was forced into melee range.

Devila being as violent as she was, was trying to modify some of the movements which had before been defensive to instead be attacking moves. She was like a string dancer, her sword attacking Rafe from unseen angles as she used her own body as a weapon.

Rafe was in no way being pressured though. But only at first.

At first Rafe had everything under control, but then the spells started to come. Mage's hand, force barriers, fire balls and earth lances all pushed him back. He could see Devila's mana pool whirl, and it seemed like a bottomless pit.

For her part, the spells seemed to be ignoring her, their effects just washing over her and only affecting Rafe.

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