The Primal Hunter 11, page 31
Of course, if Minaga wanted to bet again, the Viper would put his money on Jake winning the rematch.
Jake appeared in an entirely white room the very next moment, a system menu popping up in front of his eyes.
Three Resurrection Points Available:
1. The day the challenge to the Necromancer was issued.
2. Fifteen days after the challenge to the Necromancer was issued.
3. The same day that the fight with the Necromancer took place.
Choose one Resurrection point.
Reading the options, Jake had to admit that he had kind of wondered exactly how this entire ”multiple lives” thing would work, and it turned out it was pretty much a save system with different checkpoints. Well, at least that was better than blacking out and waking up in a hospital bed while being told he ”barely made it” or something similarly dumb.
Considering his options only for a moment, he decided on the second one and made his choice.
In the blink of an eye, he found himself lying in a bed back at the townhouse. An odd sense of déjà vu hit him, which shouldn’t have been that surprising, considering he had just returned to a prior point in time, but he still felt the need to check his system menu to confirm it wasn’t just his own mind fucking with him.
Lives remaining: 9
He had really died. It was an odd feeling indeed. Well, okay, it wasn’t true death, just a Challenge Dungeon death, and he had a feeling being put in a similar situation outside of a scenario with multiple lives would have ended differently. The fight certainly would have, as Jake would have bailed the second the Necromancer yelled Undying and became seemingly immortal.
Also… it was quite the way to die.
”For my first fucking death to be to poison is oddly… Is ironic even the word?” Jake muttered to himself. “No matter what, it’s pretty damn funny for the Chosen of the Malefic Viper to be poisoned to death.” He grinned stupidly at that.
Not having Palate of the Malefic Viper seriously sucked. It was the kind of skill Jake just took for granted, but it really was utterly broken, wasn’t it? How in the hell did a skill even give such insane resistance and even immunity to poison? Jake had the feeling that if he’d had Palate, the fight would have been easy despite the Necromancer being some freakish, semi-immortal Transcendent.
Anyway… Jake had lost, but his spirit hadn’t diminished in the slightest. His opponent had been an incredibly powerful monster in the form of a Risen, and Jake had gone in with a lack of information and a bad plan. At least, a bad plan for the type of foe he was fighting.
That was why Jake had chosen to resurrect fifteen days before the fight. He wanted to make new preparations, but he didn’t need to go back an entire month or even choose another opponent. No, even if he had lost once, he was confident in winning the rematch.
He also mentally addressed what had happened in those final moments before he died. He’d felt a sense of desperation and tried to reach for something that he no longer understood… but he knew that the moment he had, he’d felt it was a bad idea. It was a ”there is a time and place for everything” moment, and a Challenge Dungeon like this was obviously neither. Exactly what Jake had tried to do… Jake had a feeling he didn’t necessarily ever want to find out.
Sighing, Jake got off the bed and stretched. He had preparations to make, and as he walked out of the bedroom, he saw Owen and Polly approach through his sphere… which was when he realized something.
For the next fifteen days, he would be forced to rehash the same conversations while potentially even having to explain why he knew things he clearly shouldn’t be able to.
So, it appeared there was still a major punishment from dying in the Colosseum, at least on the mental front.
Chapter 34
Death & Flames
Exactly how long is this gonna take? Jake wondered as he balanced atop the pole of stable arcane mana, holding his bow ready. It has to have a time limit or something, right?
Staring down, he observed the arena below, mainly using his sphere as the dense miasma covered pretty much everything. Inside this cloud of thick miasma, smack-center in the arena, lay a torso with only a head attached. Fifteen meters away to one side was a leg, an arm was nailed to the wall in another direction, the second leg had been thrown all the way to Jake’s starting area, and the final arm was nailed into another wall directly opposite the first. Well, alright, the limbs weren’t all in complete condition, but the majority of them were spread out like that, with a few fingers and plenty of minor parts just lying about below.
Jake had entered his rematch with the Necromancer knowing what kind of foe he would be dealing with. He’d spent his fifteen days preparing everything he could while replaying the same damn social interactions again with Polly and Owen. Only through sheer struggle had he overcome the urge to bring up future knowledge and attempt to convince them he was actually a time god.
As for the fight itself… there was not much to say. Jake had learned all he needed about the Necromancer’s fighting style during their first fight, and for the second time around, he didn’t bother with some big finishers.
Instead, he’d quickly moved to get the upper hand by using his special arrow to take off one of the Necromancer’s legs. After that, he’d promptly separated it from the Necromancer and, one by one, severed his limbs primarily using ranged attacks. With one leg, the Necromancer couldn’t really dodge anything, and using mana strings, Jake had been quicker at yanking away limbs than the Necromancer.
Of course, that still meant he had a cloud of miasma to deal with, but Jake also had a way to handle that.
When Jake had initially entered the fight, he had not only brought what he could store in his Ring of Deft Hands but also several poles of stable arcane energy with one end sharpened, making them look almost like spears. Two of these were now used to hold limbs in place, two had gotten destroyed, and Jake was standing on one that had been embedded into the top of a pillar. There were still a few left in the miasma below, but he didn’t need those anymore.
Once the Necromancer was well and truly cut up, the miasma nearly covered the entire arena, at which point Jake drove the pole into the top of one of the pillars and stood on it. The miasma was heavier than air, it seemed, and it never went higher than a little above the pillars, so when Jake stood on a two-meter pole, he was entirely in the clear. It was also a nice way to practice his archery while balancing.
Because even if the Necromancer had lost all his limbs, he still tried to get them back. Jake hadn’t seen it the first time around, even if the Necromancer had mentioned during their short conversation before the fight that he was capable of it, but the dude could summon skeletons. Weak-ass skeletons, but skeletons nevertheless. He didn’t try to fight Jake with them but instead used them to retrieve his limbs, so Jake still had to keep an eye out and shoot a skeleton once in a while as the minutes passed.
Standing there, waiting for the Necromancer to just die already, he had plenty of time to fully reflect on his prior loss. It had been his first ”death” ever since the system arrived, even if it wasn’t a true death. Jake would have thought the feeling would be more upsetting, but he felt oddly fine with it… because he knew that if this had been real life and not a Challenge Dungeon, he would have just up and left the second the Necromancer became seemingly immortal.
Jake wasn’t averse to retreating if the situation wasn’t salvageable. He just treated the Challenge Dungeon differently, as he knew dying was part of the experience. If he treated the real world like the dungeon by just moronically staying in a fight he couldn't win, he would have died quite a few times already, such as when he nearly fell to that damn mushroom below Haven when he was still in E-grade or versus the Termite King.
Comparing a true death to one inside a Challenge Dungeon was just idiotic. Besides, many Challenge Dungeons were designed to only end when one died. Maybe the Colosseum of Mortals even worked like that. One also had to remember that these were fights taking place in an unfavorable setting where Jake would avoid fighting if it was a true fight to the death.
The arena was just ridiculously advantageous for someone like the Necromancer. Seriously, it was a small, enclosed arena versus a semi-immortal guy who was all about outlasting his opponent and creating a cloud of miasma. A cloud that, under any normal circumstances, Jake could have just stayed away from for the entire duration of the fight, making it a total non-issue.
Finally… if this had been a fight in the real world, Jake would have been willing to risk far more. For if true death was on the table, he would be willing to pull on anything to survive or, at the very least, ensure mutual destruction.
Jake was thrown out of his thoughts as he suddenly felt the miasma below start to thin out, signifying something had changed with the Necromancer. For a second, Jake considered if there was a second phase or some shit like that, but when he focused… he felt that the soul of the Necromancer had left his body as his final words echoed out.
”Your victory… Well-earned…”
With those words, the miasma seemed to evaporate instantly, and even the small, insignificant traces in Jake’s body were eliminated.
”And we have a winner! The Doombringer has brought doom upon the Necromancer! It was a grueling and hard-fought battle, but the Gauntlet of Champions continues for the challenger! Now go! Rest, and return to continue your conquest!”
Cheers and all that sounded out… and Jake’s suspension of disbelief was seriously beginning to wane. Did nobody in the audience care that the fight had effectively been Jake bisecting his opponent and then waiting on a pole for a good ten minutes for him to die? If Jake had been an audience member, he would have demanded his money back, especially considering you couldn’t even see the arena for the majority of the fight due to the miasma.
Anyway, Jake had to remember why he was there and once more reminded himself that trying to understand the dungeon was a fool’s game. So, rather than waste his time and mental energy, he walked out of the arena, his next objective already in mind.
Three Champions down, four to go. And Jake, after doing some research, had already decided on who he wanted to fight next. Originally, the plan had been the Lord of the Hunt, but during these fifteen days, he happened to encounter a certain Phoenix Queen, which had made him quite curious about her.
She had a Bloodline, after all.
Jake couldn’t wait to find out what it was all about… and she seemingly couldn’t either. While the Archmage and Necromancer had both wanted a full month, the Phoenix Queen made the wait just three days. This did put Jake on a bit of an unexpected timer, but he just had to make a special arrow, as he already had a game plan for everything else she could throw at him. Besides the Bloodline stuff, of course.
Vilastromoz shrugged. “Not that interesting of a rematch.”
“Hey, man, we had to make him a one-trick pony, or the fight would have been impossible,” Minaga said, leaning back. ”And Jake dealt with his one trick and won. Pretty simple, really. Or are you saying we should have given him the Undying Banner?”
The Viper nodded, smiling at the notion of him having that monstrous artifact. Naturally, the real Undying General would not die to something that simple, and he had plenty of methods to control his miasmic cloud and keep his opponents and allies inside of it, but for the Challenge Dungeon, they’d had to make him way weaker, or he would indeed have been impossible. It was very much the same reason why Jake didn’t meet a single opponent that could fly. While Jake could still handle a flying opponent, it would just mean a default loss to those that, at level 0, would simply have no means of fighting back.
Of course, that didn’t mean there weren’t more unfair opponents. In fact, of the final four Champions, Vilastromoz would rate two of them as straight-up unfair, the first of which being Jake’s next opponent.
It was a fight he was genuinely curious to see… for it would be a clash of opposing Bloodlines. A Bloodline rooted in the power of illusions that sought to fool the opponent’s senses and reality itself, and one that was purely Perception-based. It was a rare opportunity indeed.
Though, perhaps, knowing Jake… Vilastromoz should not have been surprised by the outcome.
The entire arena was a bloody hellscape. Everything was on fire as an inferno roared, brought on by a single beastkin floating around with labored breathing and unleashing her magic. Transparent, flaming wings sprang from her back, spewing out fire like there was no tomorrow. All in an attempt to burn a single archer within this sea of flames.
Jake, standing toward the middle of the arena, was entirely covered in flames, yet they didn’t seem to bother him. At times, he would still dodge seemingly nothing or loose the occasional arrow, forcing the Phoenix Queen to try and dodge or block. She had about a seventy-percent chance to avoid getting hit, but with time, the damage was accumulating.
More significant was the mental damage she was taking, as nothing she did seemed to work. Jake was pretty burnt in many places, but the more time passed, the less he got hit.
Jake had taken a bit to figure out what the Bloodline of the Phoenix Queen was all about, and it had taken a bit longer than he would have liked. In the end, he concluded that her Bloodline was linked to illusions, or more accurately, fire illusions.
The Phoenix Queen was capable of creating flames that were both real and unreal at the same time. Illusory flames that were obvious illusions to Jake’s Bloodline-powered senses, yet at any moment, they could become real and burn you, with the opposite also being true: Very obviously real flames could suddenly turn illusory, doing nothing.
Nothing mundane could truly distinguish them, and the most dangerous was when she mixed the two, creating flames that were real but that you couldn’t feel. These flames could even be ”real” to the body but only illusions to your clothes, making you burn without affecting your equipment. It was like they bypassed the Perception stat and even armor entirely, setting someone on fire without them feeling an iota of pain. If they watched their Health Points, they could probably see it going down, but there really was no other way…
Well, there was no other way for anyone normal. Jake was far from normal.
See, the reason Jake had taken so long to understand the Bloodline—and even now, he wasn’t entirely sure on most things—was that… well, it didn’t really work properly on him? At least, it didn’t seem to work correctly, based on the reactions of the poor Phoenix Lady.
Jake could still easily distinguish the real from fake flames, and while she could change their states, it wasn’t instant, so he had a pretty easy time dodging the fires that actually hurt while they were still transitioning from fake to real. And with the vast majority of the flames being illusory at all times, Jake had plenty of space to judge with, even if the arena appeared fully aflame.
Needless to say, a level 0 could not fill the entire arena in a sea of flames by themselves, especially not for a prolonged period, but when ninety-five percent or more of the flames didn’t actually exist? Yeah, that definitely saved a lot of mana.
Not that it helped the Phoenix Queen much to save this mana… as chances were she would run out of health before mana.
Ultimately, no two Bloodlines were equal. When the two of them were put on an even playing field by being the same level, the main decider was whose Bloodline was better… and, well, Jake won handily there. Had Jake been level 250 and faced the Phoenix Queen as a level 280 or something, chances were she could have fooled even Jake’s Bloodline, because at that point, two Bloodlines clashing was akin to two normal skills clashing, as they were both equally outside the rules of the system.
So, with a level and power advantage, her flames should have been able to fool Jake… maybe. In all honesty, Jake wasn’t sure if it could totally fool something like his danger sense or intuition, which didn’t ”interact” with the magic directly but were more based entirely on himself. His sphere, though? Yeah, even the level 0 Phoenix Queen’s illusory flames took Jake a moment to see through, even now that he kind of understood how they worked.
By this point, the fight itself had already been going on for nearly five minutes. Jake, despite being at a disadvantage at the beginning while trying to understand his opponent, now firmly had the upper hand as the Phoenix Queen focused on dodging, relying on her high speed brought on by her summoned fire wings.
Using her illusory flames, she tried to hide her form and even made fire clones of herself, but Jake easily distinguished them and focused on the only real beastkin floating around. She did try to hide using all means possible, even making sure to pull out any arrows Jake struck her with so he couldn’t use his own mana to track her.
Not that it helped her when he could see the entire arena using his sphere. Again, it was quite a bit more difficult than normal, as most of the illusory flames did look real to his sphere at first glance, but with focus, he would tell the difference between more complex illusions like her clones and the real thing pretty easily.
With her illusion not working and Jake capable of dodging most of her attacks, she didn’t have much more to show for herself. Jake, deciding to finish the fight, set up a trap by casting a net of arcane strings that managed to entangle the Phoenix Queen’s foot. Before she could burn it off and get free, Jake landed his special quasi-Protean Arrow. The design of this one was pretty simple, as Jake hadn’t been sure exactly what he would need, but he did know that she wasn’t heavily armored, so he went with one to maximize damage.
That turned out to be a good choice, as the Phoenix Queen was blasted back. Jake had hit her square in the chest, sending blood flying everywhere. She crashed into the back wall of the arena, her entire middle section crushed, and when the arrow exploded, her whole body was practically obliterated. In the end, she had been a caster, making her quite squishy, and to ensure his victory, Jake had no real choice but to just go for the kill.
