The Core
The doppelganger's side burst open.
Clang!
I caught its follow-up attack with my broken hilt and pulled back to put distance between us.
So it's gotten... stronger.
Only a little, but it had grown. The strength behind the doppelganger's blows was different from the first time we'd collided.
Grrrk.
Then the torn flank began to regenerate, knitting itself back together until the creature was spotless again, as if nothing had ever happened.
"Ha."
It had been a decently powerful strike, and watching it erased that easily just left me dumbfounded. But this outcome did settle one thing for certain.
It's like a Slime.
Slimes were F-rank monsters, yet they were widely shunned by awakened hunters. The reason was simple: unless you destroyed the core, a Slime would never truly die. No matter how you cut it, it just kept regenerating.
A liquid-like body, the same as a Slime. A body that regrew no matter how it was sliced. However I looked at it, the doppelganger was an evolved predator — a Slime's superior.
Come to think of it, every gate where a doppelganger had ever been discovered had been a low-rank gate, F or E class.
Which means the core has to be somewhere. Highest probability is the heart or the head.
And of course, the head and the heart were also the hardest places to target. First, I needed to pin down the core's location.
The dagger carves through the air in a blur of steel.
Basic footwork.
Speed (Sok).
I stepped into the rhythm and lunged straight in, slashing with my dagger.
Whoosh.
The blade split the air. The doppelganger snapped its head back and slipped out of range.
"Tch."
I clicked my tongue and broke away again. The only reason I'd bothered aiming for the neck was to find the core. Even if the head and body were separated, the thing would regenerate as long as the core survived. But whether the head regrew first or the torso did would tell me exactly where the core was hiding.
I need to settle this in one exchange, don't I.
The way it had dodged just now made it clear — the doppelganger was faster than me now.
Great. So a copy gets to distribute its leftover stat points while I can't spend mine.
I had to bank 500 leftover stat points, which meant every one of mine was locked away. The doppelganger had no such restriction. In other words, it could pour all 420 of my unspent points into itself.
Hmmm.
I began circulating the mana in my lower dantian. The moment it moved, my speed changed. Ordinarily I used it as a support for controlling mana's flow, but that was never the lower dantian's true purpose.
The limit breaker for mana.
By running the lower dantian, I could temporarily push my mana's movement past its own limits.
Five minutes is my ceiling, at best.
And honestly, the odds were I wouldn't even last that long. Five minutes was the estimate only if I burned my body out completely. Ideally I'd never push it that far — but right now, I had no choice.
"Hoo."
A deep breath, then I stepped.
Basic footwork.
Swift (Kwae).
The advanced step above Speed, the one I had no business being able to use yet. Properly speaking, it demanded true mastery of Speed and far greater control and dominion over mana. But in this state, I could ignore every one of those conditions.
BOOM!
The air around me detonated from the sheer force of my movement. Naturally, the doppelganger couldn't react in time.
Shk!
Its head came off, clean and almost anticlimactic.
Thud.
The doppelganger's head hit the floor.
Brrrr!
Its headless body shuddered violently — then swung its dagger straight at me.
Clang!
I hastily deflected it. The head was gone, but the body moved on its own anyway.
So the core must be in the heart.
Now that I knew where it was, all that remained was finishing the job.
Basic footwork.
Illusion (Hwan).
When an enemy was this close, stepping into Illusion was devastating. Letting an opponent slip away from point-blank range was exactly that dangerous.
Thud!
I drove my dagger into the heart of the still-reeling doppelganger. The blade punched cleanly through its chest.
And then—
"Kghk!"
Blood poured out of me in a torrent. I looked down and found the doppelganger's dagger buried in my stomach.
How—?
My blade had gone straight through its chest. But far from dying, the thing had punched a hole straight through my abdomen.
"That... hurts."
I forced my body to move, and every time I did, the dagger buried in my stomach shifted, grinding out a fresh wave of agony.
First I need distance...
Only then could I stitch myself up, treat it, something. I kicked out at the doppelganger, and my blow sent it staggering back.
"Stealth."
The instant the gap opened, I vanished into the skill. The doppelganger didn't even pretend to search for me; it simply stood there, motionless.
"Ha... ha... ha."
I gripped the dagger embedded in my belly and wrenched it free. The moment it left my body, it melted back into liquid. Then I poured a potion over the wound.
Sizzle!
The potion's effect stopped the bleeding, but the wound itself stayed exactly as it was. This was only a lowest-grade potion — no one could expect it to actually close the injury. Stanching the blood alone was blessing enough.
No way I can use the limit breaker now.
My lower dantian sat in my lower abdomen, and my lower abdomen now had a hole in it. Obviously that technique was off the table.
And the backlash is going to hit any second now—
The moment the thought formed, it arrived.
"Kehk!"
It felt like my insides were turning themselves inside out. My organs twisted, and my lower abdomen burned like it was on fire. One wrong move and Stealth could unravel on its own.
If Stealth drops while I'm like this, I die.
I clung to Stealth with everything I had and tried, slowly, to rein in the rampaging mana. Left as things were, I was dead either way — cut down by the doppelganger when the skill broke, or twisted inside-out by my own mana going berserk.
"Hoo..."
I slowly breathed in the surrounding air, then let it out. It was the first time I'd used this breathing method since entering the Tower.
"Huh?"
Normally, breathing this deeply came with a catching, scraping sensation — but today the breath flowed without the slightest hitch. And for once, that was a good thing. With every cycle of breath, the mana settled further.
I should stop here, though.
Pushing further would buy me nothing. Forcing it would only earn me injury from the strain. Better to have never touched it at all than to provoke the backlash for no gain.
The moment I halted the breathing, a system message appeared, accompanied by a rather pleasant chime.
Mana berserk state has been brought under control.
Mana increases by 5.
Abundant mana has been absorbed.
Mana increases by 10.
A gain of 5 mana alone was enough to lift my mood, but the messages didn't stop there. Just from mana breathing, another 10.
Now that's tempting...
I knew pushing further could hurt me, but watching those numbers climb only stoked the greed. Still, there was an enemy right in front of me — there was no way I could just sit there and breathe.
"Status window."
Traits: Footwork, Body Reconstruction, Lower Dantian, Negotiation
Achievements: One Who Defied Time, Founder of Footwork, Gate Entry, Skill Creation, Maze Conqueror, I Closed It Alone, First Supernova, The Black Challenger, The Defense Battle, One Who Overcame, First Lower Dantian, Divine Beast Hunter, One Who Cut the Moon
💪 Strength: 30 | 💨 Agility: 30
❤️ Vitality: 30 | 🔵 Mana: 40
✨ Divinity: 5
Fighting Spirit — Passive (A)
Taeho Mind Method (B)
Area Detection (C)
Battle of the Fighters (C)
Stealth (A)
My mana had reached 40. Just ten more and I'd achieve my first awakening. Mana had its own awakening thresholds — 50, 100, 200, 300 — and at each one, a special ability was added to it.
"If only I could spend stat points on mana."
Special stats like mana or divinity couldn't be raised with stat points. That was the single biggest frustration.
I closed the status window and looked at the enemy before me. The doppelganger stood rooted in place, making no move at all.
The core isn't in its heart.
But that didn't mean it was in the head, either. Nor was the core something it could relocate at will. So the place it was most likely hiding was the stomach.
Because that's exactly where the thing aimed at me.
Normally, when you had a sure kill lined up the way it just had, you went for the neck or the heart. Targeting a vital point was only natural — and the doppelganger had gone for my stomach.
So its vital point is the stomach. Fine. Then I'll aim for the stomach too.
"Hoo."
I exhaled once and released Stealth.
Clang!
The instant the skill dropped, the doppelganger was on me, dagger swinging. Our blades met, and mine was unmistakably being driven back. Grinding, grinding — the dagger kept giving ground.
Both weapons were the same black dagger, so their performance was identical. That meant the one being overpowered by raw strength had no choice but to lose. I seized my broken hilt and went for the doppelganger's wrist.
Clang!
But against a creature with higher stats than mine, I couldn't land so much as a scratch on its wrist. Still, I managed to shave a little of the force off its dagger.
Clang!
I knocked the blade aside and struck for the wrist again. Regeneration was slow when a part was completely severed — the head earlier had taken considerable time to regrow. And if it lost a wrist, its arsenal would be locked down to a single weapon for a while.
Blocking a Legendary-grade weapon just isn't possible for it.
No matter how high its stats were, they hadn't even reached level 100, the threshold of the first Transcendence. Stats like that simply weren't enough to stand against a Legendary weapon.
Shk!
Just as I'd predicted, the doppelganger's hand came away, severed by the black blade. It recoiled at the sight and immediately tried to break the distance.
Basic footwork.
Break (Pa).
The Break step shattered the ground beneath me, and I bent the mana saturated in the shards and hurled them all at the doppelganger. The result: it could neither retreat nor press an attack. It was boxed in.
I finish this before the hand regenerates.
Break had sealed off its escape. What remained was to go straight through the front.
Basic footwork.
Illusion (Hwan).
I stepped into Illusion and threw the doppelganger's senses into disarray. Against a copy that had replicated the Siren's Necklace, the effect would be negligible — but even a heartbeat of confusion was enough.
The difference between us is simple.
The doppelganger had copied everything I had — every piece of equipment, every skill, every technique. Or so I'd believed.
If it could copy techniques, why has it never once used footwork?
Think back through the whole fight. Every one of its attacks had leaned on copied skills or raw stats. Not a single time had it executed a true technique.
It doesn't have technique.
What had carried me was never a wall of stats or flashy, overwhelming skills. It was the strange power called mana, and the art called footwork. I grew strong because I honed a technique, ground it down and polished it over years of sweat. But technique was the one thing the copy lacked.
It can't win.
I had spent my whole life fighting opponents stronger than me. And I had beaten every one of them with technique.
The moment you failed to copy my technique, your defeat was decided.
I charged the doppelganger head-on — and drove my dagger straight in.