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Book 3: Chapter 48: Diamond and Just Like You

"Hideous sound, that healin\' of yours makes," Guildmaster Brux commented. He silently watched as Soph returned to the side of the room where Breena and Yulia were before giving all of his attention back to Lone. "What\'dya mean?"

"You want a fun fight. I can\'t keep up with you even when you\'re not applying your stats. We have a few choices to fix that. You limit yourself to my level, but that\'s hard and takes effort you\'d rather put on the fight, right?" Lone received a nod in response. "Right, and the obvious alternative is for you to hit me with your aura, catapulting my stats, but then I\'ll have to focus on trying to breathe, let alone move, due to your aura. I\'ve been under the influence of an X-ranker\'s aura before. It was suffocating and my instincts tell me he was a lot weaker than you."

"Who?" the guildmaster asked. "I know a lot of X-rankers."

"Xer\'rava, a dwarven Taker\'s guardian," Lone answered honestly.

Guildmaster Brux narrowed his eyes in thought then sighed. "Guess I don\'t know enough. Never heard of \'im."

"Right, so, you feel a lot stronger than he did. And thus, the answer is to push me to my limits, outside of attacking my head, of course. Let\'s see if I can learn how to apply a stat. Strength or Agility might make this more fun and balanced, no?" Lone asked.

Guildmaster Brux nodded happily. "Push ya to your limits. Last time that happened to me, I lost my leg and most of my motivation until it was beaten back into me. Not all of us can regrow heads and the like, eh? But sure, yeah, this might be pretty fuckin\' fun. You\'ve got three seconds before I start \'pushing\' you."

Lone gulped. He didn\'t like the sound of that. Still, he was no idiot and he certainly wasn\'t one to waste time. He\'d asked for this, did he not? He needed this to grow to stand a chance against Zel, right? He did the only logical thing he could to start preparing, he covered himself in a full suit of his Bone Armour.

"One," Guildmaster Brux announced, raising three fingers and lowering his forefinger.

"Tail Spear," Lone invoked, hoping the skill could injure the guildmaster, and if its one-time additional affect triggered, so be it.

He needed applicable stats for the eventual confrontation with Arch Devil Zel\'s forces, so it would be foolish to keep gathering Luck endlessly, always thinking \'just a bit more Luck to make it more likely I\'ll get more than one or two free applied stats\'. That kind of thinking was endless and would lead to the skill\'s effect never being used up.

"Two," the mostly naked but still incredibly intimidating brick shithouse of a man said, lowering his middle finger.

Lone closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He always had a small buckler strapped to his wrist for Forced Parry. The last time he had used it, it was also to ward off an X-ranker\'s attack, which was a happy coincidence. He planned to use it here too if he got time to react to an attack.

He opened his eyes, summoned the swordspear Wilbur had steamforged for him, and then moulded his bones to create a small but durable buckler on his right wrist. He leapt at the guildmaster who only grinned madly at the attack.

"Three." The attack was far faster than Lone could react to but it was barely, just barely, visible this time unlike the last one that had destroyed half of his skull and its contents.

Guildmaster Brux had both lowered his index finger and closed the gap between him and the jumping Lone in a fraction of a second while also aiming a punch at his gut.

"Forced Parry!" The talent activated long before Lone was finished invoked it, though the scale was that of milliseconds.

He\'d been working hard to try to cast spells, invoke skills, and use skill talents, wordlessly for a few weeks now whenever he trained, and it seemed that while he still needed to say the words themselves, some fruit had come of his efforts.

It was perhaps a difference of a skill activating when said to now activating halfway through being said, but still, it was progress and it was just fast enough to work on the powerful but now intentionally slower attack of the guildmaster\'s.

Lone lost all feeling in his right arm when the skill talent moved his attached buckler to parry to attack. That was due to the fact that while he had deflected the attack, yes, his defences were far from sufficient to mitigate all of the damage. His entire right arm had been turned to mush and the armour encasing it exploded, sending shrapnel every which way.

While it sucked in the moment, at the back of his mind, Lone was looking forward to perhaps a level or two in Bone Armour and Oaken Flesh.

\'Let\'s test his physical defences now, shall we?\' Lone thought, easily ignoring the pain and discomfort caused by his exploded right arm and the one regrowing in its place.

"Pierce!" Having a moment of sudden inspiration, whether skill related or just in general, he didn\'t know, but Lone felt it was right to try to encompass his tails in the usage of Swordspear Mastery\'s active effect.

Ten attacks rained down on the guildmaster, nine from the mostly golden tails, and one from a steamforged weapon. Not having enough limbs to ward off all of these rapid attacks, and also not wanting to back off, Guildmaster Brux used a skill.

"Diamond Defence!" His body\'s flesh quickly shifted and shimmered from that of organic to that of the hardest substance from Lone\'s home planet.

With his skin now made entirely out of a bright red diamond, Guildmaster Brux laughed when all ten of Lone\'s attacks merely bounced off of his torso leaving no damage at all. "You\'ll have to do better than that."

"Request granted," Lone replied with a laugh of his own.

He didn\'t know if it had worked, attaching Pierce to his tails, but he didn\'t care. There was a new skill in front of him that he very much so wished to learn.

"Fireball!Fireball!Fireball!WeakenedStreamofEzekial!InfernoArmaments!Fireball!Fireball!" If he still had to use the words to cast the spells, then use them he would, just as fast as was physically possible.

Fireball after Fireball flicked from his hand to the guildmaster\'s face and while the X-ranker was processing the sudden shift in battle tactics, he was then inflicting with a Weakened Stream of Ezekial, guaranteeing he would stay alight for the next 20 minutes with the demonic-inspired skill. At the same time, Lone had stored Wilbur\'s gift and immediately used up over half of his MP capacity to recreate an inferno version of the weapon.

"Stop casting Fireball! It\'s annoying!" Guildmaster Brux shouted, sending a shockwave through the room which Soph had to protect herself and Breena from with a few extra layers of barriers, half of which shattered. Yulia simply distorted herself with seemed to leave her unaffected.

"Why don\'t you stay still?! Fireball!Fireball!Fireball!" Lone shot back. "Can\'t hurt ya with cold weapons, and diamond melts at 4,500 degrees Celsius, Fireball!Fireball!Fireball! so I gotta get there somehow!"

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"My insides would long be turned to dust before you got me that hot! Fuck! Stop blocking my line of sight and dodging me!" Guildmaster Brux was truly getting enraged.

That was both good and bad for Lone. On one hand, the guildmaster might not be able to hold back as well like this with his mind being filled with rage, but on the other hand, he\'s be less likely to dodge and perhaps less accurate with his devastating punches.

"Fireball!Fireball!Fireball!Ungrounded!Fireball!Fireball!Fireball!" Lone continued relentlessly from the air while flickering around the room as fast as he could, landing at least 60% of his magical blows, with that percentage only rising as the guildmaster\'s movements became more ragged and predictable alongside his growing fury at being toyed with like this.

"Seriously! Last warning, you fuckin\' brat! Stop it! Fight me like a man!" The guildmaster boomed once more, forcing Soph to expend even more mana on protective barriers. Again, Yulia used her magic to go unharmed.

"Fireball!Fireball!Fireball! Tell me how a man should fight - Fireball!Fireball!Fireball! - once we\'re done! Fireball!Fireball!Fireball! I\'m quite enjoying cooking you, thank you - Fireball!Fireball!Fireball! - very much!" Lone retorted.

Lone\'s felt a chill in the air as if the number above his head he couldn\'t even see from Death\'s Primal skill Lifespan Revelation had be reduced from infinite to nearly nothing.

The guildmaster had stopped moving and his whole ethos had changed from playfully excited to being an existence of pure murderous fury. He gracefully and without any hurry, reached down to his peg leg and pulled a short blade out from it\'s base, not unlike a sword hidden in a cane.

As he stood there silently holding his blade while being pelted by Fireballs, a ten-metre tall man made of aura who resembled the guildmaster in physique but was clad in unusual glass armour appeared right behind Guildmaster Brux, holding a massive claymore of sorts that was piercing the ground.

The guildmaster entered an attack stance and swung so fast that Lone hadn\'t even noticed it until time seemed to stop for him. He was just suspended in mid-aid halfway through a chant to cast yet another flurry of Fireballs.

\'Should not have pissed him off. He\'s gonna kill me with that attack. I\'ll tell you what though, his aura looked nothing like what I expected,\' Lone thought. \'What is this state, by the way? Enlightenment before death or something? There\'s no way Soph is fast enough to teleport to me and then out of here before whatever attack he launches hits me. I\'m most certainly dead. Darkness? Death? Heck, Sky or Void? Can any of you hear me?\'

No one answered.

\'This is trippy... Is this a skill? It doesn\'t feel like one...\' he thought.

Time, as much as at a standstill as it appeared right now, still moved on and the frozen Lone could only watch as the tens of thousands of years old completely naked man - he was still on fire, after all - swung his blade despite being nowhere near Lone. It felt like weeks to him in this peculiar state but he knew the attack to have be monumentally swift in reality.

Time grew even slower and Lone\'s head throbbed in agony. He could see a wave of cosmic purple energy being fired in the trajectory the blade had been swung, heading straight for him but even in this... heightened state or whatever this was the wave of sword energy flew at the pace of a normal person walking.

Given the situation, Lone wasn\'t going to stop and study this feeling nor the fantastically powerful attack, he instead acted in what capacity he felt he was capable of. He moved almost... normally. A bit slower than the sword wave, but fast enough to dodge it even though everything else was still at a crawl. What sent a shiver down his spine, however, was that the cosmic purple energy that would surely kill him moved to match his new position.

\'Of course it\'s homing. This motherfucker lost his leg how, exactly?\' Lone thought in despair. He closed his eyes and readied himself to die for the first time ever.

What else could he do? His defences were like paper to this man\'s punches, let alone a serious attack. He could barely move faster than the sword wave but it homed onto him. What if this slowed time state stopped? He was dead. There was no avoiding this. Lone was sure Soph and Sophie would have some very harsh words for him when she reversed time to undo this mistake.

She was right, as she usually was. Fighting this battle crazed guildmaster who was an X-ranker was not a great idea.

Lone\'s perception of time rapidly returned to normal as his headache grew almost strong enough to burst his brain but instead of dying, he sensing a familiar aura appearing in the training hall and it was furious.

That aura belonged to the guildmaster\'s advisor, Thomas. He had his hand out and to Lone\'s absolute shock and horror, the man had simply caught and crushed the short sword\'s energy wave that would have certainly killed him. "Break time is over, Tomas."

"Fuck. I\'m in trouble," the guildmaster muttered.

\'His name is Tomas? So, Tomas Brux? Tomas and Thomas... Brothers? Father and son? They look and act nothing alike,\' Lone though past his ungodly migraine.

Thomas turned to look at Lone and smiled. "Congratulations on applying Agility for the first time. Do you have the MP required to undo the Weakened Stream of Ezekial?"

\'Seriously, what the fuck? He\'s only an SS-ranker. Sure, that\'s very powerful, but powerful enough to so easily disperse an attack that my subconscious was certain would kill me? Is he a hero? What is his unique skill? Attack Nullification or something else just as busted?\'

Lone wondered. He didn\'t stay dazed for long and replied, "Ye-Yeah, of course."

He brushed himself off and wiped away the cold sweat on his forehead before he expended 40,000 of his MP to cut the Weakened Stream of Ezekial short. "I did apply Agility, huh? Weird. I just... know how to apply it now."

"The first experience is always phenomenally involved. Stronger than what is possible for a very long time, sometimes never, though usually in a harmless manner. With how fast you moved, I suspect things looked very, very slow for you," Thomas praised before he walked up to Guildmaster Brux and slapped him across the face, causing nothing more than emotional damage. "Attempted murder on a fellow adventurer whom you had agreed to spar with? Even if you found his tactics annoying, that was unacceptable."

Guildmaster Brux looked embarrassed but didn\'t turn the advisor into paste, so he clearly wasn\'t angry anymore. "I knew he wouldn\'t die. That\'s why I made you after all, to keep me in check. I did promise him that I wouldn\'t actually go for the kill, and he wanted to apply a stat, which he did, so we can fight properly now. Where\'s the issue?"

"Wait, you created Thomas? Explain, now," Sophie demanded, having taken control presumably since she was, knowing her, likely going to attempt to execute the guildmaster before reversing time to save Lone, all of which seemed unnecessary now, but she was clearly still on edge judging by her tone and body language.

"You!" The guildmaster pointed at Sophie excitedly. "You\'re the one who killed Olberic, not that other girl! Thomas, right? It\'s like you. I made him from me, to stop me from getting myself killed. Wanted revenge for the leg, you see, but the grand guildmaster was smart enough to lock me up and convince me to learn a particular cloning skill. Thomas can only ever do two things. Use all of my skills, and keep me in line. That\'s it."

"And you can only make messes for me to correct," Thomas sighed before adjusting his glasses.

"You\'re nothing alike, and him being able to use your skills doesn\'t really explain how he handled that energy," Lone said. "Unless... You\'ve got a skill that makes you immune to damage from yourself?"

Guildmaster Brux nodded. "Quick thinker, eh? Sure do, it\'s call-"

"I don\'t care and I wish I wasn\'t curious enough to ask," Lone replied with nothing but disdain in his voice. "I never thought a day would come that I would actively despise a skill. It\'s great that you have it, but I wish I never knew it existed."

An awkward silence overcame the large and rather lightly damaged training room considering what had happened before Sophie giggled. "A joyous day, indeed. We shall no longer plot your assassination, Guildmaster Brux. You\'ve dented his unshaking love for skills. That alone is worthy of our forgiveness."

Thomas assessed the situation, saw the brighter mood, and decided to interject, "Guildmaster Brux is a fool at the best of times, but he is not wrong. He knew I would stop him even if his petty tantrum was very real, and he did also know it would likely lead to you learning to apply a stat, though I suspect he expected Vitality, not Agility, given your hardiness. Regardless, you were ready to die. That sort of mental burden is unfair to one so young. I\'ll arrange reparations for that. Expect them within a year. We shall be leaving now."

"Bu-"

"No buts! And put some clothes on. You\'re not returning to your office naked," Thomas scolded. "I trust you can find your own way out of here, Immortus the Immortal, Sofia Vladimirovich, Yulia Keining, Breena Redtail."

And with that, the thin formally dressed man with glasses and slicked back hair led the wild and depressed guildmaster out of his own private training area.

Sophie approached Lone and hugged him tightly while Breena casually but quietly approached them both. Yulia undistorted herself and walked over as well.

\'Never again. You are forbidden from fighting any X-ranker until all SSS-rankers are powerless before you. Do you understand? We will not have another scare like this,\' Sophie made clear.

Lone nodded slowly. \'I completely agree. This was... eye-opening. If it was him who ambushed me and not War Leader Clari... At least we gained a new tool to fight Zel, huh? Applied Agility.\'

\'... It would be best if we never had to fight him. If one X-ranker can do this, what is an Arch Devil capable of? They can rival Divines,\' Sophie asked rhetorically, ending their telepathic communications.

Lone just silently returned her hug, ignoring his notification log to ponder the question and try his best to push back the dread behind the answers his mind came up with.

"That was certainly interesting. I loved your use of fire magic. Very basic, but so intuitive as well!" Yulia was clearly a bit off her rocker just like everyone else in the room.