Let’s do this, you guys! Max’s cursed equipment—the comrades who’d fought alongside him throughout the great war—also responded to him. A great variety of weapons all jumped out of his ring at once; not just the sword, dagger, bow, and spear he’d used in the dungeon, but also an axe, crossbow, halberd, flail, rapier, mace, and others.
“Groooooar!” Ka Ru finally recognized that he was facing an enemy and unleashed dark energy from his massive maw. As expected of a true dragon and the natural enemy of holy warriors who fought with the power of the gods, his attack was powerful enough to reduce the barriers of the great temples all across the Garden of the Summit to shreds, and it brought instant death to all living beings.
In order to block the dragon’s breath, various shields also popped out of Max’s ring—including a buckler, kite shield, lantern shield, and dueling shield—all of which more or less got between Max and the incoming attack. The shields clustered into something like a single giant shield, from which black smoke billowed as the dark energy collided with it. But Max was no longer behind the shields. His slitted blue pupils had locked on to his prey’s eyes before the pitch-black explosion occurred. Max pulled his bowstring back to its limit, loosing an arrow as Dragonsbane energy also flew from the crossbow floating next to him.
“Don’t underestimate me!” Ka Ru put up a dark barrier that resembled black flames to block the attack.
Right back at you.
“What?!” However, the arrowhead only encountered a little resistance before breaking through the barrier and heading for Ka Ru’s eyes. “Aaargh! Dodge?! I, Ka Ru, the Dragon of Darkness, have to dodge?! How dare you make me do something so unseemly?!” With a large flap of his wings, Ka Ru managed to dodge by a hair’s breadth, indignant from his wounded pride.
But as the arrow went past Ka Ru, it drew an arc and headed back for him at incredible speed. He had an arrow that he couldn’t ignore coming from behind, while Max was approaching from the front.
“The great darkness will cover all!” Hoping to clear out everything at once, Ka Ru created a dark, egg-like aura with him at the center, which he then unleashed in every direction.
“Hmph!” To deal with the approaching black wall, Max gripped his axe and halberd in each hand, then swung them down with all his might. As the two sides clashed, the sound of an egg cracking echoed around them, and the next moment, the dark shell was one-sidedly smashed to bits.
“Impos—” Even as death approached him, Ka Ru could not seem to believe it. Meanwhile, the numerous weapons that entered the shell crashed into his torso, wings, tail, and legs.
“Hyah!” And the real killer was the sword that Max had just thrown with all his might—directly at Ka Ru’s eye.
“Argh!” Ka Ru was too slow to react, and the blade, which was specialized for killing dragons, pierced deep into his right eye. This was a serious matter on its own; it was as good as being poisoned by Dragonsbane power. But the flying weapons digging into Ka Ru’s body only made things worse. The last thing Ka Ru saw was the same thing many of his comrades—and his own real-world counterpart—had seen in their final moments: Through a gap in his helmet, the blue Dragonsbane Knight’s eyes shone with deadly intent as he brought his spear down at the dragon’s head.
There was the sound of a mirror cracking.
All done, all— Max watched the Dragon of Darkness falling to his death, but he didn’t overlook something starting to squirm inside the corpse. He readied himself for another battle.
It should have been impossible. This creature was one that Max had definitely defeated, but their clash should have taken place in the later stages of the war than this—and above all else, the host was different.
“You aren’t meant to be parasitizing this guy!”
Blue appeared from the back of the corpse as though it was molting. Its appearance and voice were exactly the same as Max’s back in the day.
“Gyu Ri!”
Gyu Ri, the Parasitic Dragon. No one knew what he really looked like, as his authority allowed him to perfectly copy the killer of his host. And in this case, that killer was...
“You’re such a pain in the ass!” Max cried.
“O power of the blue dragon!”
Huh?! That voice?!
The power of blue versus blue clashed at the very pinnacle of the Garden of the Summit.
“Gyu Ri? What’s going on, Lara?” Ferd was perplexed by seeing the two Dragonsbane Knights clashing in the sky, which would have never happened in the original timeline.
Lara could imagine two possibilities. “Either the virtual world is doing its best to eliminate us, the foreign entities, or this world has gotten so messed up that it can no longer control its own power.”
“So...I guess we should hope it’s the former?”
“In terms of how much of a hassle it would be, then yes. Things would be much easier if this world is working hard.”
The preferable scenario was that the virtual world had complete control of this situation, but there was also the incredibly bothersome possibility that it was going berserk.
“But, well...” Lara hesitated, as if something was on her mind.
“There’s no doubt that all kinds of things are going wrong.” Stein, who had been observing Gyu Ri’s muscles, finished her sentence.
“Let’s do this, you guys!” Dazzling weapons, as good as new, burst out of the brand-new, shining blue armor and helmet and attacked the original Max.
“Agh! Shaddup!” Max’s scarred, battle-hardened weapons screamed inside his head, burning with rage as they intercepted their sworn enemies, who had given them a terribly hard time seventy years ago. Sword against sword, spear against spear, battle-axe against battle-axe, mace against mace, the weapons clashed like dogs biting each other.
If you’re gonna copy us, do it properly! That’s what we were like seventy years ago! Max’s copy had brand-new armor and weapons, but the real ones showed clear signs of wear and tear. The difference between them was obvious, so when Max heard his own strangely young voice, he realized he’d ended up fighting himself at the height of his prime—or so he’d thought.
This one hasn’t spent seventy years with these noisy guys! If I just knock him down, we can all gang up on him and win! If Max had any chance of victory, it would be because he’d spent a much longer time with the weapons floating around him. And unlike back when his comrades had their hands full and couldn’t come help him, if he now knocked his enemy down to the ground, they could all surround him and crush him.
Let’s do this! So Max and his weapons decided that they only needed to surpass their past selves for a brief moment, and they attacked the imitations with everything they had.
“What’s different?!” Meanwhile, Gyu Ri was astonished by the clearly strange difference between them and was struggling to regain his footing.
Could it be?! Max realized what was likely happening as he watched the familiar scene, but the weapons continued doing their thing. Two blue shooting stars clashed, a sword parried a battle-axe, a shield averted a blow from a spear, and a battle-axe repelled a bow.
“Raaaaah!” Max shouted.
“Raaah?!” Gyu Ri parroted.
The difference was evident. The dim veterans were striking the shiny fakes, again and again. Max’s weapons would sometimes settle into his hands and sometimes fly of their own volition to repel the fakes’ fierce assault. The blue trails intertwined over and over, but the gaudy brilliance was repelled every single time.
Gyu Ri wasn’t in any position to keep resisting. “How can you fly?!” he protested.
I knew it! As Max looked at Gyu Ri plummeting to the ground, he became convinced that his earlier guess was right.
To begin with, Gyu Ri’s power allowed him to copy the person who’d killed his host, so it was really strange that he was copying Max in his younger days. And the fact that Gyu Ri couldn’t fly freely meant that he was not yet in the state that Max had reached through the fierce battles in the later stages of the war, when he’d overcome the rules laid down by the gods. In other words, this fake had taken the form of the yet-inexperienced Dragonsbane Knight, who hadn’t been fighting in the great war for that long; this was also proof that this virtual world couldn’t perfectly reproduce Gyu Ri’s abilities.
The second half of the war was full of nothing but real monsters, after all! The faces of those he’d fought to the death near the end of the war—with Gyu Ri being one of them—briefly flashed in Max’s mind.