Now, why did John want the tournament to happen at such a breakneck speed that all fighters would exhaust themselves in the process? The simple answer was: because he would not be affected by it.

Gamer’s Body’s many virtues included a much more thorough recovery from fatigue than was reasonable. It protected John from such long term effects as sore muscles, but it also solved most problems of exhaustion after just some resting. Provided he wasn’t suffering from any debuffs in the dehydration or starvation departments.

It was an advantage that John seldomly got to use inside combat, but when he dictated the rules, there was no reason not to take advantage of every little thing he got. The entire design of the tournament had the goal in mind to exhaust Jeremiah before he got into the arena.

With some more or less expected outcomes.

For one, the fatigue had been clearly less successful than John hoped. The Art Eater was clearly sweating, but his breathing was well-regulated and his posture straight. Basically, he looked like a marathon runner that had just finished the first lap. Sure, he was a bit strained, but he could easily continue for a while longer.

‘Can’t say I am too surprised,’ John thought, still satisfied. That the person with 400 Endurance was able to stomach a whole lot more than anyone else, including Rave, participating in the tournament was well inside the scope of predictable results. At the same time, the man John was looking at wasn’t the tall black-haired guy he had came to know Jeremiah as.

Instead, he was looking at an ironclad warrior, quite literally. The Lake Alliance’s representative’s skin was polished bronze, shimmering with all the colours of the rainbow as if a thin layer of oil had been rubbed over it. A previous fight had caused the clothes on his chest to disintegrate, revealing the silver-white lines, thin as they were, outlining his muscles, just as gold segments covered more vital, usually less protected, areas of his physique, like stomach and joints. Despite the clearly metallic shell, they still rippled with the flexibility of a well-trained human.

Baelementium, Mithril and Elementium, that the Art Eater could present all of those rare metals did speak to his powers. It also spoke to a lack of foresight that his Stats reflected. ‘Not that an Intelligence of 18 is really that bad,’ John thought as he rolled his head. ‘If it is supposed to be equal to my Intellect, he is only seven points lower than I was when this whole thing started. Given the amount of bad decisions I used to make… well, I still make bad decisions sometimes.’

There were two Stats that Jeremiah Arter had at absurd heights. Aside from Endurance, his Spellpower was also in the low four-hundreds. Of course, having two Stats that high meant that the others had to be low to compensate, as such Strength and Agility reached only 105 and 76 respectively. At the same time, the Art Eater’s mana only reached an E rank.

Those were all the pieces of information that John had gathered at their first meeting, where he had pumped all mana into Observe to break through Jeremiah’s protections. Whatever those were, they were currently active, so the Gamer could sadly not take a stock of the metal man’s doubtlessly buffed up Stats. It was best to assume at least the physical ones to be increased drastically.

John had surmised that Jeremiah had been some sort of transformer (not in the autobot way) by his original Stat distribution. That Spellpower had to go to something and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be magic attacks, not with that low mana. ‘It had to be that or some other sort of largely passive effect,’ the Gamer thought, as he finally arrived in the middle of the arena.

Now, as to why Jeremiah had pulled this card already, it was either to show off or because he wanted to end previous fights quicker. A better strategy would have been to let his superior Endurance wear his enemies down, just to leave John guessing for as long as possible. Thankfully, the Art Eater wasn’t particularly inclined to execute proper plans.

‘Man, I would love to boast about all of this,’ John thought, only a couple of steps between him and Jeremiah now. ‘Can’t do it without potentially giving away lots of things though… well, no villain monologue today. Everyone ready?’

The question was of course dedicated to the present familiars, who appeared at his side one by one. Aclysia had already been there, standing to his left, Sylph and Salamander materialized in the air behind him, Gnome on his right side and Undine was seen only for a moment before shifting into her item form and wrapping herself around John’s right hand.

Even Siena showed herself for a moment. Using up her three-day teleport cooldown, she appeared right next to John. Visually, it was the exact same as her shifting from incorporeality, which was quite important. If she had just appeared or later on attacked from Jeremiah’s shadow, it could have prompted a few questions John didn’t want anyone to wonder about.

“Finally, I can wreck your smug ass,” Jeremiah growled.

“Woooooow, hostile,” John responded with sarcastic surprise, fixing his glasses. Aside from the World Ender set, the two rings, Purgatory and the necklace, the Gamer’s get-up today had been the same casual thing as the past few days. A white shirt with short sleeves, black pants, leather shoes. It revealed that both Purgatory and the Undine glove only reached up to his elbow, but that was more of an accidental thing, really. “Didn’t know you swung that way, buddy.”

The Art Eater needed a moment to understand what John was getting at, then tried his hand at threats a second time, even more angry. “I will tear you in half!”

“Well, however you do it, I’ll still have a bigger dick than you,” the Gamer responded casually, looking at the autumn-leaf-winged butterfly that fluttered past him. That was the moment when the announcer was out of the arena and the fight began.

Jeremiah’s first move was absolutely predictable. With an angry roar, he leapt forwards. Not at John, as he noted, but at Aclysia. A motion that, all the same, was blocked by Gnome. Activating her unleashed ability, the soil elemental began moving, partly against her will.

The condensed sand under their feet turned into a fertile brown as it came under the sway of Gnome. As a torrent of earth, she created a U shaped wall around Jeremiah, as she travelled from the nearest to the farthest butterfly. John could hear the impact of metal on stone, once, then a quick second time, coming along with Jeremiah’s fist ripping straight through the wall.

‘So, he will still go for the logical target in combat, rather than the emotional one… or perhaps he just wants to hurt me emotionally first,’ John analysed the situation. The first step to winning this fight was to understand his enemy’s weaknesses. ‘Now for a bit of a playground move…’ John thought and ordered Aclysia to grab the fist.

The weaponized maid got a grip moments before Jeremiah could pull back. Putting a foot against the wall, she pulled on the arm. On the other side, there was confused and frustrated screaming. The reason why John called this a playground move was because this reminded him of two kids play fighting, one of them trying a kick and the other catching the foot. While it was a bit goofy, it was a pretty effective way at immobilizing someone.

Aclysia’s position was much better than Jeremiah’s. Thanks to his own ineptitude, his arm was stuck in a tunnel in which wiggling around was basically impossible, and Aclysia could use her legs to support herself in this tugging match while Jeremiah was slowly getting pulled against the wall. ‘How difficult is it?’ John asked, continuing to gather data.

‘Quite,’ Aclysia answered with a single word as she continued to strain herself.

If the weaponized maid was challenged with her total 641 Strength in her superior position, then Jeremiah must have been at least around that number. Somewhere in the 500-700 area, John guessed, as Jeremiah was still clearly losing. More and more of his arm came into view, until he was up to the shoulder and could be pulled no further.

Not a complete idiot, the Art Eater switched tactics the moment he realized he couldn’t escape that grip. Instead, he targeted the wall that was keeping him confined. His Baelementium covered left crashed into the brown stone again and again. The odd angle did prevent this from being immediately successful, but cracks started showing soon.

‘Gnome, focus on repairing the wall,’ John ordered, coordinating everything mentally while standing in a relatively relaxed pose. ‘Salamander, you go do what you do best.’

‘You got it, boss,’ the endflame elemental replied with glee radiating off her surface thoughts. She landed at the neck of the wall, something that Jeremiah didn’t fail to notice, only increasing his struggles. Gnome poured mana into the cracks of the wall, just as Salamander gathered a firestorm between her hands.

Grey and gold fire cascaded into the narrow pathway. With no escape possible and the wall, acting as a sort of focus, the Art Eater was now subject to a heat so intense even people in the back row could feel it. Excess fire flickered over the top of the wall, a sea of flames that blinded everyone, accompanied by a rising cackling from a very happy pyromaniac as she turned up the heat even more.

‘Too much!’ Gnome warned, her usual shyness overpowered by the need of quick clarification, the walls she was tasked with maintaining now starting to melt. It would have been too mana intensive to continue under those circumstances.

Before Salamander could dial it back down, Jeremiah finally succeeded. He broke through the stone at a second point, his metal skin glowing red with heat. The structural integrity of the wall, half a metre thick, was beyond risky at that point and the Art Eater managed to break sideways through it. While he may only have been around Aclysia’s strength, he was definitely faster, grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her forwards rather suddenly.

Aclysia was still positioned to tug in the opposite direction. It wasn’t a loss in the strength match that made her lose her footing at that point. Rather, it was both of their overbearing power that caused the barrier between them to break completely. The excess force now pulled them at each other.

‘TELEPORT!’ John panickily dictated the moment he noticed the wall crumble. Aclysia reacted just in time to use her three-day cooldown to bridge a distance of just a few metres and reappear behind her master. Where her head had just been, Jeremiah’s unnatural, steel-like teeth snapped at the empty air.

Despite just having been bathed in flames, the Art Eater seemed less bothered by that attack than the exhaustion he had to go through previously. Not that John had a long time to look at that, since Jeremiah immediately came trampling towards him like a humanoid bulldozer. John’s body moved extremely slow by comparison to his mind, as he went through numerous meanings of this apparent lack of damage, the logical explanations of the causes and, finally, what his plan had to be to win this fight.

He had weighted the scales through a bunch of small actions, just to make his loss in this fight as unlikely as possible, despite their very much on-par levels. Now it was time to use all of them.

And it all started with dropping Mana Protection.

A superheated fist of metal and man crushed into John’s face with the power to pulverize bones. His nose was mashed into a bloody pulp, just as fractures spread all the way into his cheekbones and glasses were crushed, all while scorching his skin off. Although John’s pain tolerance made all of this bearable, it was high on the list of things he would not want to ever feel again.

As he flew backwards, the vision of his glasses first fractured, then vanished completely. The item he had possessed was now broken beyond the point of usability. He could have used a new Possession on any of the shards if he got hands on them, but for now he was robbed of his own vision.

“Not wearing contact lenses seems awfully unprepared of you!” Jeremiah mocked when he saw the milky brown of John’s eyes.

Catching himself with his back against a stone wall, doubtlessly the little labyrinth that was the shadow segment of the arena, John felt all unease suddenly vanish as Gamer’s Body took care of the damage. All five hundred points of it, over a fifth of his HP. “I honoured you with the reliable method of sight,” John answered, deliberately in the slightly wrong direction. “I guess you wouldn’t be so nice to let me put them in very quickly?”

“My answer is a pretty clear: FUCK YOU!” Jeremiah declared, turning away from the Gamer to once more assault Aclysia. There was part of John that did want to find out what would happen if the Art Eater actually succeeded in taking a bite out of Aclysia, but caution won out over arrogance and curiosity in this case. A new stone wall appeared between the Artificial Guardian, focused only on getting away, just as thunder and fire rained from above.

Both elements washed over the Baelementium hide dealing seemingly no damage. ‘Conserve your power,’ John therefore ordered. That someone clad in a metal of elemental origin was largely immune to elemental damage was to be expected. ‘Gnome, hide Aclysia underground.’

‘R-roger!’ Gnome answered, concentrating her magic to open a hole underneath the weaponized maid. That would take a few moments at least; if it was an immediate thing she could do, John would have used it to trap his opponent instead. Sadly, that didn’t work with the faster variety. If they had tried it on somebody of Jeremiah’s speed, he would have grabbed the edge and pulled himself out again before anything meaningful was accomplished.

‘I hate encounters with defensively weighed statballs,’ John thought, as he bought Gnome the time she needed to close the hole above Aclysia before Jeremiah could dive after and have a close quarter dinner. Since the start of the fight, he had sent his over-regenerated mana to Undine. It could have been used to heal the damage he took moments ago, but John prioritized this more aggressive approach.

Pointing his right palm in Jeremiah’s direction, John and Undine sent out a continuous blast of water. Steam rose as the cold liquid collided with the glowing metal body of Jeremiah. Simply crossing his arms in a defensive stance and standing his ground, the Art Eater let it roll over him. John had hoped the sudden cooling would have dealt some damage at least, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Nevertheless, the attack achieved its main objective, disorienting Jeremiah long enough so that Aclysia could finish hiding.

The moment the hole was closed again, the stream of water ebbed away. John didn’t want to pay any more mana on this than he had to. “Look at you, Gamer,” Jeremiah mocked as he relaxed his pose, water dripping off his muscular metal frame. “Your first successful effort in this fight, hiding someone from me.” He ran a hand through his short, black hair.

John had to suppress comments on how cheesy that supposedly cool pose looked or make another joke at the expense of the Art Eater’s minimal endowment. No reason to indicate just how well he could see even without his own vision or to make yet more dick jokes, those were quick to get stale.

Without any further words, he instead decided to turn tail and ran into the shadow segment, having Gnome seal the entrance behind him (something that he needed to provide the mana for as she was tapped at this point). Right now, John’s advantages had been greatly diminished. The four base elements had all proven to deal next to no damage and he couldn’t rely on Aclysia either. Time to test the last two damage types he had available.

‘If those don’t work either… well, then I really backed myself into a corner here,’ he thought, wondering what Combination he had that could break him out of this predicament. He came up with potential backup plans, but none of them worked particularly well. ‘So this better work…’ John thought.

The shadow segment of the arena was a maze. Although it barely deserved that name, due to its rather limited size, the many sharp turns and the near absolute darkness the thick walls and heavy ceiling provided great cover. He dropped a couple of Arcane Echoes as he hurried along to a hiding spot. ‘I suppose this is where you beg for my help?’ Siena’s whisper reached his spirit.

‘Do I have to beg?’

‘I want to hear it,’ her sensual voice teased with a sinister giggle, ‘therefore, yes.’

‘Okay, fine,’ John bowed down in a remote corner. ‘Please, great mistress Siena, do aide me.’

‘Hmmmmm,’ she hummed with both lust and doubt. ‘How about a promise?’

John was getting a little bit annoyed at this point. This was hardly the time for the nightmare elemental to play her games. Tightening his connection with Undine, taking advantage of her incredible ability to share senses with the other elementals, John probed for the happenings outside.

Jeremiah was evidently contemplating whether to chase after John or not. Gnome had also gone underground at this point, while Salamander and Sylph were flying so far up that he couldn’t reach them. Shrugging, likely thinking himself invincible given how the fight had gone so far, the Art Eater headed inside, breaking down the wall Gnome had erected at the entrance with a few punches.

‘What do you want?’ John asked, with clenched teeth.

‘One hour of your time, whenever I demand it,’ Siena answered quite clearly and immediately.

This almost felt like she was trying to kill him again, but if that was her goal, she could have gone ahead right now. Surrounded by darkness and with his defences lowered, all the nightmare elemental needed to do was slit his throat and be done with it. So, it was pretty clear that she hadn’t suddenly reverted to her old, even more malicious self.

‘Fine, you have it,’ the Gamer finally conceded.

‘Trust me, darling,’ Siena giggled, ‘you won’t regret it.’

With those cryptic words, the shadow spirit dove into her element, plentiful around them. ‘Let him step into one of the Arcane Echoes first,’ John instructed. Siena obeyed that, only watching Jeremiah from an adequate distance as he made his way into the labyrinth.

“The fuck is that?” the Art Eater mumbled to himself when he came across the aforementioned spell. In the darkness of the small labyrinth, the three overlapping, purple-glowing circles that made up the ‘landmine’ state of the AoE spell stood. “Well, Gamer, if you think I’m going to play along with your games…” he declared, taking a large step over the mine, “…you’re sorely mista-OW!” and went right into another one that John hid right around the corner, almost impossible to spot when taking a giant step over the initial one. “SON OF A BITCH!”

‘Huh, so arcane works,’ John noted the outcry of pain and clenched his left hand a few times to get it warmed up. ‘Now, Siena, you go ahead.’

With a sadistic smile, the nightmare elemental dropped from the ceiling. Quiet until the very moment her bladed tendrils assaulted Jeremiah. It was a short and sobering test. The blades screeched over the armour plates, digging small trenches into the Baelementium, penetrating it even at places, but failing to do the same to the vital areas covered with Elementium. By the time Jeremiah had turned around for a counter attack, Siena had already dropped back into the darkness.

Sobering and predictable. Nevertheless, John now knew that both shadow and arcane damage were effective. He had a resistance to the former, unlike the almost complete immunity to the other elements, so the latter was really his best bet.

‘Well, seems like the last option it is,’ John thought and commanded Siena to keep on the down low. ‘Could have spared myself some trouble if I did this from the start,’ he thought somewhat sarcastically, as he got up and into position. ‘If this wasn’t such a bitch to recharge, throwing it around would be way more viable.’

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Jeremiah sung as he continued to step through the labyrinth, occasionally punching a hole in the outer walls to not be at the mercy of the total darkness again. Although Siena’s scratches had already disappeared under the metal hull again, Jeremiah was now more careful than he had been before.

Which was why he reacted in time when he took a careful step around a corner and found himself presented with a blue-slime covered palm, pointing a dark purple shard of raw arcane energy at his chest. With all of his Agility, planting his feet firmly on the ground, he ripped his torso to the side. John’s Shardbound flew right past him and the Art Eater allowed himself a smile, pulling back an arm to once more ruin John’s face.

Until a searing pain in his left leg caused him to let out a long, pained shriek.

John had no interest in using lethal force against Jeremiah, so he had used his right hand, pointed at heart and torso, as the bait. This close, anyone would first see the hand and spell so close to their head and dodge them. That John had poured about a flat 1000 mana into that attack made it more than a feint as well.

The true danger had been the lower left hand though. The Mana Blade stored in Purgatory may have been infused with three elements, but those only added damage effects, they didn’t transform the spells arcane origin. As such, it had been disgustingly effective.

Left leg caving in, thigh bone almost completely eradicated, leaving only a frame of bleeding flesh, Jeremiah toppled to the ground. He tried to pull John with him, but the Gamer stepped backwards when he sensed the very start of the movement. Being blind was really more of a blessing as long as he could rely on Undine’s senses.

All the stumbling around for the past few days had been to the end of Jeremiah underestimating John himself as an opponent and it had worked tremendously. “Give up,” the Gamer demanded.

“Get fucked,” Jeremiah growled back and John rolled his eyes with a long sigh.

“It’s always the same with you hot-headed types,” he shook his head. “What do you even think is going to happen now? Are you going to menacingly crawl towards me?” The Art Eater grabbed the wall, fingers sinking into the stone, and tried to fight himself into a standing position with his remaining good leg.

A leg that was surrounded by shadowy tendrils and ripped away in the process. “Be a good victim and lay down,” Siena whispered into the crippled man’s ear. On the ground or not, that was a bit too close. An elbow flew her way and caught the shadow spirit in the cheek. She immediately unleashed, all of her curves suddenly becoming black and exuding a sort of dark mist. Hissing, she tumbled back, but was evidently ready to turn as much of the man into metal scraps and mincemeat as she could.

“Let’s not be unnecessarily cruel here,” John stated, observing Siena to remind himself of her Agility.

‘Unbuffed that’s 402 and he was able to land a square hit. Also in the 500-700 range?’ John wondered, still gathering data. He didn’t think this would be the last time he would fight the Art Eater. “So, where are we on the giving up thing?” the Gamer asked and only received a long stare. With another sigh and a scratching of his head, John said, “Well then. Guess we are being a bit cruel with you after all… let’s drag him into public view.”