The Trigger Has Already Been Pulled
(Video of two Lilys locked in ferocious combat)
Just insanely OP Lily vs World Boss Lily.
What a lineup that makes your chest swell with pride lmaooo
Figured that even if she's Lily's doppelganger she'd top out at boss-tier at best, but no way it actually measured as a World Boss lmaoooo
And honestly, taking it down solo is ridiculously impressive too.
But hasn't this been the first time Lily's ever been pushed this far?
(Image of Lily regenerating her arm in an instant)
We all knew Lily's class was a hidden advancement, but I didn't expect a question mark to pop up.
Seeing her regenerate her arm makes it look like a recovery-type class, but then why was she throwing spears?
Lily clearly knows something, but her stream's already over, so—
"Hmm..."
Somewhere in DeoEn, beneath a sky of striking blue, I lay sprawled comfortably across my bed and stretched a snow-white hand up toward the ceiling. The arm that had been restored so effortlessly — as if it had never been blasted off at all.
This wasn't recovery from clearing a dungeon or from leveling up.
'It just... healed.'
The instant she died, divinity had poured into my body, and a single thought had surfaced — I need to hold onto her shoulder. Without any conscious decision, I had used divine magic to mend my arm.
Not just the arm, either. My whole body had been restored to decent condition along with it.
"What a strange feeling..."
Savoring a sensation I hadn't felt in a very long time, I pulled up my class information.
You wield ? freely and at will.
A class description so brief it went past simplicity into sheer laziness. Not a single skill, let alone an ultimate — not even the token passive effect every other class comes with. As a hidden class, it looked pathetically underwhelming.
But I knew exactly how extraordinary this was.
'Wield it freely.' That was the key phrase.
Divinity is a violent, unruly power — a potent authority that rages however it pleases. Its radiance looks like a force meant to nurture and heal all things, but in truth it is every bit as dangerous as demonic energy. Overinfuse a target with divinity and you can do far more damage than striking them with dark magic outright.
Just as poison becomes medicine and medicine becomes poison, divinity is no different.
I, too, had once poured countless hours into learning to control it. I weathered crisis after crisis along the way, and in the end I'd grown capable enough — but...
'With this, the range of what I can do just widened dramatically.'
Even with my body in such a wretched state, the divinity didn't torment me at all. If anything, it moved protectively through every corner of my body, waiting patiently for orders.
'Maybe...'
If only I could redirect the effort it demanded elsewhere. If I could reclaim the things of the past, one by one...
Perhaps I might grow far stronger than I'd ever been before.
"...And here I go again."
I had already strained and struggled to become strong beyond counting. I had fought thousands upon tens of thousands of battles just to claw my way back home — and now here I was, ready to walk back onto the battlefield.
Still, there was one small mercy to be grateful for...
Right now, I had no reason to fight alone.
"Sooo coooool...."
A woman with fiery red hair rippling around her shoulders was completely absorbed in a single screen. Two women, one with a spear and one with a hammer — Lily, and the copycat trailing in her wake.
The battle between a user barely over a month old and a World Boss was a spectacle that would have been a feast for the eyes even to a ranker hovering around the top 100.
One side boasted overwhelming power while lacking in technique; the other compensated for that shortfall with pure skill and finesse.
"Ooooohwaaaah..."
The victor was decided — and it was Lily, naturally enough.
Granted, Lily had taken staggering damage herself, but the mere fact that she had gone toe-to-toe with a World Boss alone and survived was almost impossible to wrap one's head around. After all, a World Boss was, by design, an enemy that demanded an army's worth of personnel to confront.
'If it were me...'
If she pictured herself facing a World Boss — or facing herself...
Redberry, the Mage of Scorching Heat, turned the thought over and over in her mind before slowly shaking her head. No matter how she spun it, she would lose. However impressive her own record, she wasn't a top-ten ranker.
And even those rankers — even they needed a team-scale force assembled just to challenge a mere low-grade World Boss.
But Lily had done it.
She had beaten herself. Beaten a version of herself stronger than she was.
Who else in the world could pull that off?
Leo? Sword God?
Both had a plausible case, but Redberry was certain neither of them could match it. That was how far beyond imagination Lily's performance had been.
"...I do need to collect that, though."
Truthfully, Redberry had been fretting over one thing for days now: receiving her Mana Condensation Stone, the ticket to the next lecture.
Originally, everyone on the team was supposed to receive one each once the Mock Siege scrim wrapped up — but then Taebaek, Black Moon's vice guildmaster, threw his tantrum after tantrum, and every scrim that day got canceled outright.
Worse, Lily had vanished, completely unreachable. So of course nobody got their stone.
Lily had since come back to normal, but somehow it felt awkward to just come out and ask for it. Even with no fault of her own, the optics were such that if Lily were to hand them out, she'd have to give them to the whole team — and Vlack, the man tied to Taebaek's mess, was on that same team.
And handing one out individually was out of the question; Redberry wasn't nearly close enough to Lily for that.
'...The scrim's the day after tomorrow, technically.'
She honestly couldn't say whether the lecture would even happen, but some instinct told her that if she didn't get the stone now, she never would.
Gulp.
Perfect timing — the stream had just ended.
She'd worried Lily might have burned herself out and logged off on the spot, but thanks to the class advancement, she looked fine, and she hadn't logged out of DeoEn either.
If she wanted to meet her, it was now or never.
Redberry typed calmly.
Done!
A single second stretched out like an hour.
"Why am I this nervous over a simple message..."
Her hands shook harder now than they had back when she'd completed a hidden quest, saved the自制 Spirit Noble's domain, and earned the title of Mage of Scorching Heat. Her heart was pounding; her hands and feet wouldn't obey her.
How long had she waited like that?
Ding.
"Wha— she replied!"
She answered!
Thankfully, none of the worst-case scenarios had materialized — no "too tired, going to bed," no read-and-ignored.
'D-do I just ask for it? But she never actually promised me one, so wouldn't demanding it outright look rude? Maybe just suggest we meet... no, I'd need a reason, wouldn't I...'
Redberry sank deep into a swamp of overthinking.
She interacted plenty with people inside DeoEn, but with real-world players she barely socialized at all. This kind of tangled, real-life back-and-forth was practically a first for her.
Time slipped past, and as she floundered in the mire of her own hesitation, one particular line surfaced in her memory.
'If you beat me in a bout afterward, I'll give you one. Of course, you'll have to win the scrim too.'
Why, of all things, did that come to mind?
If her future self could see her now, she would have clawed and bitten her way to that keyboard if that was what it took, screaming Stop, you lunatic! to halt those typing fingers.
But it was already too late.
The trigger had already been pulled.
"Uh... huh?"
What did I just send?
How did a request for a mana stone turn into a duel challenge?
While Redberry was busy cursing the useless ornament perched on her shoulder, an answer came back — one that sounded absolutely delighted about something.