She overdrew her mana in the end. The fight was a boon to Rafe in so many ways. Fighting someone like Rafe the way she did was a mistake on so many levels.

Maybe she thought he'd run out of stamina before she ran out of mana. And she'd be right, in most cases. Rafe only had to apply the second function of his Puppeteer's Rubber Body and he was swishing around her attacks like a ballerina.

He started to integrate the new technique into his own style, breaking through the intermediate level. He even started to more easily deal with Devila's whip attacks that seemed to come from everywhere around him like a storm. He'd always been able to bend his sword like a snake using his Northern Wind dance technique.

There was a lot of synergy, he noticed. And that worked well for him. His footwork improved by leaps and bounds.

'Ding' Your skill Swordsman's footwork has grown to level 285.

Your skill steady footing has grown to level 313.

Your skill Aeon's Sword Mastery has grown to level 766.

Your skill Blade intent has grown to level 76.

Your skill Aeon Warrior's trance has grown to level 123.

Your skill Acrobat has grown to level 15.

Your skill Puppeteer's Rubber Body has grown to level 54.

By the time he paused his movements long enough to deactivate the skill, Devila was stood in front of him and panting. She was bent over and her whip was dragging on the ground.

Rafe couldn't remember the last time he'd spent more than an hour using his Puppeteer's Rubber Body. It must have been in the trial when he'd gone to rescue Jonathan and the others. Still, after an hour his true stamina pool had recovered a lot.

"You are a lot more worthy than I thought," Devila said.

Rafe wasn't sure what would happen then. He wasn't sure if Devila would just give up like the others. Would he be forced to kill her? Because the way she was looking at him with hatred now, even if tried to withdraw from the floor she wouldn't let him.

She wished him dead.

Would she use her life force again? He wouldn't put it past her. What about the spirit bombing she'd tried on the Calamity beast? But that Devila had realised she was a fake. This one thought she was real. There was no way she was going to try for suicide. Was there?

Besides, she was not all out of mana yet. It was more a problem of being unable to use mana anymore. She had too much mana for an F-grade, and while her trait made it possible to have even more, her spirit was still the normal F-grade spirit.

Meaning it could only channel so much energy per second. This was mostly just a guess on Rafe's part from seeing her mana pool. She was trying to ignite it, but the mana would just whirl for a moment, then sputter and die.

"You made me use one of my strongest arrays this early on," she said. "I didn't even have to use it against those five guys on the tenth floor. It was my trump card of sorts. Yet it did nothing to you. You are much stronger than anything in the F-grade should be."

Rafe answered her sarcastically, but only in his mind. Something in the vein of, nah, man, I'm not even level ten yet. Sure, I'm an E-grade already. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity.

"So then I guess I'll have to get serious. My reward for the third floor was a new ability. A tier breaker ability."

Rafe frowned. So many bombs dropped in that one statement. He'd thought it odd. Most dungeons had a reward distortion everytime a challenge was cleared, but he'd only been getting rewards from his quest system. He had wondered how the other challengers would have benefitted from the tower, especially since none of them should have had a quest system yet.

And then there was the question of what the hell a tier breaker ability was. He wasn't sure, but it sounded impressive. Impressive if he had been the one to say it. Scary when an opponent did.

A book floated out of Devila's cross bag. It started opening. Rafe realised watching it open like that was a bit of a foolish move on his part, so he started to run in, to charge at her.

Name: The Enchantress' Spells (????)

Description: The Original Skill the Enchantress received from her future self that would later inspire the system.

Skills: All The Spells She Wove

How had Devila received this as a floor reward? Wasn't the Enchantress being too blatantly favouring? This was exactly why Rafe hadn't liked her in the beginning, or so he told himself.

But the book opened fully and a shining golden avatar that looked like a winged version of the Enchantress appeared. It was miniature, only a bit bigger than those faerie-like creatures Rafe had seen when he received the quest system. The creatures he'd been told were 'manifestations of the children' or whatever.

Rafe noticed Devila's mana pool drain without ever having to combust. This new skill drained her mana in a way that barely exhausted her soul. It just used a lot of mana. She was empty of all mana in but the second it took Rafe to get close enough. Then her stamina pool drained too, converting to mana as Rafe watched.

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She fell down, boneless. The mini-Enchantress grew bigger. Then it started to drain Devila's life force. Rafe's eyes widened in disbelief. Disbelief and anger and apparent betrayal.

He sped up, but then the draining stopped, and Devila lay on the ground breathing and snoring and not knowing anything about what was going on in the world around her.

The golden statue opened its eyes. And Rafe knew despair. He was close enough that he should have been able to destroy her with a simple cut, but he felt the aura the statue gave off.

He didn't know how, but somehow he knew that attacking something in the E-grade was beyond him as he was now. Even mages got a pseudo veil early on. It couldn't work against warriors of the same tier, but an F-grade attacking even an E-grade mage would have to contend with a veil as strong as any warrior's.

And an E-grade mage had superior control of their mana. Meaning they could cast a spell in the time it took one to blink.

Rafe raised his blade in front of him in a panic. He used his mana infusion method to transform it into a great sword. The flat of the blade covered the whole of his face at least. The rest of his body, he had to depend on the enchantment on his armour which he'd barely used.

From his left came a biting chill colder than the harshest winters he'd faced on his travels on Aeon. And from his right came an inferno even hell would have respected.

He had known the enchantment on his armour would be too weak for this attack, and so he'd started retreating the moment he'd prepared his defenses.

It only took a few heartbeats for the forcefield to break down. Now the fire and hell frost were coming directly for him. He did have other defensive measures he could play with, but this spell was stronger than any he'd ever faced before. One half of him would freeze and thaw and break into a thousand pieces and the other half would be ash in a few seconds.

And yet the principles of the spell felt so simple it couldn't have been more than an E-ranked spell in terms of complexity.

"Ah, fuck it," he said through gritted teeth.

She was not the true Enchantress. A barely living grimoire probably containing a piece of the woman's soul. And she was not truly E- grade yet. It was just a skill that could defeat E-grades, if Rafe was getting the whole tier breaker thing right. It could, but it probably wouldn't in every single situation.

And it only had the amount of mana it had absorbed from Devila to play with. Didn't that mean Rafe could play with it a bit? And maybe even extol some advantages while at it.

The following few hours, or maybe months more like, were not all play as Rafe had expected. His body was more burned than it had ever been before. He was barely better than he'd been after the previous floor, because this time at least his body hadn't been halved.

It wasn't as cathartic a victory as it should have been. Mostly because even to the last second, it was all he could do to hide and run from the flying menace. His defenses had been deconstructed again and again, and his footwork had gone through yet more refinement, but he couldn't bring himself to celebrate.

If he hadn't found out about Aeon's true fate, this fight would have broken him. As it was now, he was just glad he didn't have to fight that monster for real. Ever.

He dragged himself to where Devila sat cross legged, meditating.

"Leave," he growled.

The woman sighed and opened her eyes to study him. Then their surroundings.

"At least it looks like I gave you a bit of a run for your money, didn't I?"

"Leave," he answered, not having any extra energy for banter.

He had no emotions at the time. The only thing he could think about was the exhaustion. And the fact he couldn't rest with an enemy this close to him.

With another sigh, Devila Vors exited the trial and went back to the multiverse. Rafe watched her ascend. He did not feel anything at that moment.

He collapsed where he stood, totally spent. His soul ached. He had used his aura to the best of his ability, and in the end he'd wrung his soul dry.

He did have a few healing potions a ways from where he lay, but he was too exhausted to care about that now.

When he woke, Rafe was little better. Checking his status screen showed that he'd only recovered about five health points in all the hours he'd been sleeping. He needed to use his healing potions if he was going to recover in any reasonable time frame.

And as he'd been resting, he'd realised that being on the tenth floor meant Devila had made it to the eleventh. To break her record, assuming it was the record, Rafe had to beat the eleventh floor.

He also had to work on the impressions the flying statue had given him for his footwork technique.

'Ding' Your skill Swordsman's footwork has grown to level 287.

He could feel his classes were almost only a quarter experience away from leveling again as well, and he'd done all of that without killing anyone. There was no chance the next few battles would be enough to push him to the edge, mostly because he doubted any of them would be as hard as the fight with Devila had been.

Still, he had just speed run the process of learning a new technique.

Maybe Rafe wasn't cursed with mediocrity. Maybe he was, as the gods had said, some kind of genius. But what kind was he. He'd always liked to train the basics even before he became a swordsman.

He'd been a master of the basics of basketball. He just lacked that flair that made geniuses. He had learnt the basics of swordsmanship over many years of training, and then adapted those methods to fit his own build and preferred fighting method. Maybe that was what he'd lacked before. Direction. He had the skills, but he could not direct them.

Right now he directed the techniques he practiced to areas he needed to improve in. Maybe that's what made geniuses. Directed training.

Or maybe suicidal tendencies like fighting a god who'd lived for thousands of years and was acknowledged as the best would do it. Or fighting a gigantic demon man who was proficient in hand to hand combat in melee range without any weapons.

Yeah, Rafe was crazy. There was no doubt about it in his mind.

Still, there were a few more battles to be fought.

There were five waiting for him on the eleventh level. Then six on the twelveth. Then seven, then eight, then nine, and ten on the sixteenth floor. There were twenty on the seventeenth level, with even Andragoth's team making a second appearance.

He somehow fought through that, but there were thirty on the eighteenth floor, and Devila was back. He died not even two hours into the battle. Although he didn't know how he lasted all those hours either. His Puppeteer's Rubber Body did work.

Still, Rafe had fought numbers, and he'd won. He always knew he was good against numbers for someone without any crowd control skills. He'd been right. He had broken the record Sam had tasked him with -more like blown it out the water- and now it was time to prepare for the last floor.

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