“Alright, guess it’s finally my turn,” Ben said as Jake was carried back to his cell. “Want me to bust you out first so Thera and Vasta can try to treat you?”

“Ugh, no, I want them to keep focusing on Amy,” Jake groaned as he laid on the ground, feeling every one of his injuries. “Good luck though, hope you have an easier time than us.”

“We’ll see.”

He’d already broken down the barrier containing him when he went to help Amy and it hadn’t reappeared so Ben simply walked over once he saw his starting point being marked, taking a step into the light as he tried to anticipate what sort of attack he was going to face.

With materialization being the only real option, or at least however the trial might replicate it if it couldn’t make a duplicate that was truly capable of the spell. He was working on the assumption that every copy was just a complex mana construct that had been made to replicate them in mind, body, and skill, which would mean it wouldn’t actually have anything it could enchant on and with nothing else around to use material manipulation on, it was going to have to create whatever else it would fight with; unless of course, the trial’s ability to replicate him was going to be to a higher level than he expected.

He supposed it might be hypothetically possible that a copy made based off of his mind and skills would be able to actualize, adding another dimension to what attacks might be possible, but in the end, there was no way to know until the fight began and Ben had no intention of letting it get to that point in the first place. He knew based on the previous matches how many milliseconds it took after standing in place for his duplicate to appear and he both created and fired a bullet to get the timing so it would immediately go through the other’s head before they’d have a chance to react, only missing because of the position his copy appeared in. Not standing like the rest, it was sitting down, already looking defeated.

“Alright, let’s get this over with,” It muttered in a way Ben genuinely didn’t know how to react to. All of the other duplicates had said something to get in the minds of their real selves but his seemed more like it was confronting an inevitable loss than anything else.

It could have been a trap, something to distract him for when the real attack came but as it slowly came to its feet, Ben couldn’t help but feel his curiosity get the better of him.

“Uh, you okay?”

“As I can be, getting sent out to a losing fight,” It sighed. “But whatever. I don’t have a choice in this but to try and kill you and you don’t have a choice but to stop me so shall we get this over with already?”

“Uh, yeah, sure… No. Sorry, what’s going on?”

The small back and forth had already completely thrown off his expectations of the fight in a way he was struggling to make sense of compared to what the others had dealt with but it was enough to make him see the other as more than just a thing to be killed, same as he’d found in the very first trial he’d challenged. Perhaps that was a part of its plan and he did his best to be prepared for any surprises that might come from it but it hadn’t acted on them yet if that was what it was doing, instead sighing once more.

“Look, I’m not exactly in a hurry but I am being compelled so we can talk while we fight, alright?” It said, finally acting as an arrow was materialized and shot in one go, being instantly neutralized as Ben himself materialized a plate to deflect it, causing its path to change as it harmlessly flew past him while a barrage of attacks finally began, with Ben choosing to go on the defensive for all of them as they came.

He couldn’t help it though, he was curious, extremely so, to the point that he was fine with delaying things a bit for whatever answers he could get.

“So, like, shouldn’t you be picking out all of my psychological weaknesses by now?” He asked, getting a hollow laugh in exchange.

“What would be the point, you’d just compartmentalize it away,” The false Ben told him, creating a number of shots at all angles to fire in on and getting them all blocked. “What am I supposed to say? You’ll never see your family again? You’ll never save the world? The fact that you think you even have a shot is a genuinely shocking level of narcissism or that the idea you might be able to kill you-know-who is so dumb that it feels like it should have come from someone with single digits in their intelligence? Did any of that strike a nerve?”

“Eh, not really,” He shrugged, immediately seeing the other’s point. All were things he’d gone over enough himself and the other was right, he could just mentally push it to the side. So what if his goals were ridiculous, narcissistic and more likely than not a little impossible, he still had to try them. That was just a fact, not some deep-rooted insecurity to be exploited. “But then what are you? The others weren’t so talkative.”

“What, are you the last fighter for this floor?”

“Yeah.”

“Out of curiosity, what floor are we even on?”

“What, you don’t know?”

“Why would I? Doesn’t seem like this lines up with what the front door had implied for the first section but beyond that, there’s no way to tell. Since you, and therefore I, don’t have access to any affinitied magics I can’t even use that as a clue to tell me if this is the first or second half of this either.”

“So that means that you as a replica of me were made the second I entered the first floor then instead of right before this one? Interesting,” Ben muttered. “Which means… Ah, you lucky jerk.”

“I don’t think it’s fair for the real one to tell the person who knows they’re nothing more than a fake that they’re lucky. You do know that even if I beat you and win, there’s nothing for me beyond this, right?”

“…Okay, fair, it’s just you missed some bullshit I had to deal with on the first floor.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, the gods absolutely sucked at level design. The second I walked in there was already an attack so close to my chest that it wasn’t even in my field of view and long story short I got my heart destroyed.”

It took a beat for the other to process it but once he did the false Ben couldn’t help but laugh as he continued on his attacks. “Wow, Nare really fucked up that one, huh?”

“Yeah, not thrilled. If I get out of this then he’s getting an earful later. Which is going to depend on if I beat you or not though because to answer your original question, this is the fifth floor.”

“No kidding? I guess there’s something a little flattering about being the final challenge, even if that’s still going to be the end of me.”

“Okay, but on that note, why are you so talkative compared to the other copies? Did my minds and sacrilege affect whatever process made you in some way?”

“Eh, maybe, I never met the others they faced so I can’t say but if I had to guess, they all probably thought they had a chance of winning and were left more focused on their goal. I have no such illusions. Even if I have to try and kill you, the knowledge that it’s impossible is surprisingly freeing.”

“What? Why’s it impossible?”

“Sorry, that would be telling. I can’t exactly be giving away anything that would give you an advantage, can I? I’m sure you’ll notice on your own eventually when you stop stalling and try to fight me for real.”

“Hmm, well, just a little then. I really would like to chat longer so I can’t have you dying on me quite yet,” Ben said as he began launching his own attacks, watching as his replica continued to fire his own while now managing his defense on top of it while Ben’s number of shots grew until it reached a point where he was seeing the other do something he himself didn’t. He could see the copy begin to struggle.

“Interesting,” He muttered. “You’re a lot worse than you should be.”

“Gee, thanks for that.”

“You know what I mean. Even if you didn’t get to see the others, it’s pretty obvious that you’re not on my level which seems to break the fundamental feature of the trial’s structure.”

“Hmm? And mind sharing what that is for someone who didn’t get to see the other fights?”

“You were meant to be a little lower than me stat-wise but superior in using my skills. The fact that you can’t keep up means that somewhere, something went wrong in your creation. Did something about me break the floor again?”

“You’re getting warmer. Let’s see if you can get it before you decide to just win already.”

“Hmm, is it because there’s certain skills I have that you can’t use or is it because you have the same ones I have that you can? If you’re modeled after my mind, did you get curious and try to give yourself a soul to see what would happen?”

“That would be interesting but I can’t pull that off.”

“Too bad, I wonder how that would have turned out. In that case, something to do with actualizing then? I do it in tandem with my materializing to lower the cost. Are you unable to, leaving your attacks more expensive when you already have less mana than me?”

“…Well, yeah, I guess that’s part of it.”

Part of it, huh?

He wanted to know, and maybe that could have been a trap in and of itself. Draw his curiosity to such an extreme that he couldn’t just end things without being left to wonder at an answer he’d never get for the rest of his life but if that was what it was then he’d fallen for it completely.

God, if only I could read his mind to just steal the answers, I’d… Wait, who says I can’t read his mind?

Since it seemed the gods couldn’t make them he’d been operating on the assumption his copy didn’t have a soul and while that most likely remained to be true, he’d found himself falling into another clearly false assumption about his own powerset. That a target needed one if he was going to connect to them.

Considering that as connect had grown, its features as both an enchanting and a soul skill had become more and more prominent, it had led him to looking past what it had originally been. A mind skill, only needing the target to have a mind and nothing else to be used, something he’d already discovered back when he’d challenged Anailia’s trial and faced a different replica.

That Ben certainly hadn’t possessed a soul either, not that he’d ever stopped to consider such a thing, meaning that it wasn’t actually a requirement for using his skill, no matter how strange that might have felt and now that he’d thought it he couldn’t resist seeing if he was correct, lunging forward with both his strength and mana before reaching out with connect to see if it would work and feeling as it clicked into place, exposing the artificial mind to his own, immediately giving him the answers he was looking for and more beyond it.

The connection made, one thing was immediately obvious in a way that revealed exactly why his copy was so sure it would lose in the end. Its mind was weaker than his, significantly so.

Forget the nearly five thousand Ben held, his duplicate possessed less than five hundred, absolutely meager in comparison in a way that showed exactly where its defeatist attitude was coming from. Combine that with the fact that it was going to be worse at materialization since it couldn’t actualize at the same time to lower the mana cost and Ben was going to almost certainly be able to handle everything that was thrown at him, even if that wasn’t all he got from the look in the other’s head. There were memories as well, showing him what the replicas had been doing before being sent out for the trial and revealing just why they were so much better with their skills. They’d been engaging in a different death match of their own.

If what he was seeing had been true for all of them, there hadn’t been a single copy made for each of his group but hundreds, all being put up against each other in a hidden fight that had been running in the background during the rest of the tower, Bens facing off against Bens in a simulation designed to force innovation and improvement from the ones that survived while at the same time grafting the memories of the losers onto the victors to see where they went wrong, constantly being forced to try and innovate and improve to come out on top until there was only one left.

It was why most of the fights he’d seen before him had the replicas performing better and it was another reason his copy had already felt so defeated. Ben could already see some novel strategies it had developed in all the fights it had been put through and he was already memorizing them to practice himself to incorporate into his own work but it had known from the start that it was inherently weaker than the original, almost certainly because the trial didn’t have the power to replicate the true structure of his mind.

With what it had, it was more like it was at the zeroth level of both his unnatural mind and his unnatural thought speed, not able to think nor react to the same degree the true Ben was and all the worse for it. If the trial had worked as intended then it would have given it an edge but in such an incomplete state, it wouldn’t be enough for all that Ben was.

“Hmm, did connect work then?” The duplicate asked, feeling a curiosity of its own. “No soul to reach out with so I couldn’t check myself but seeing as how you broke some distance without going for the kill I guess that means you’re reading my mind.”

“Yeah, sorry ‘bout that.”

“What do I care? This floor seems pretty clearly intended to inspire the originals with whatever their copies were able to figure out, if you’ve gotten into my head then you can see which of my strats will work for you when this is done. As things are though, I can’t beat you and you’ve gotten all you can from me so just kill me already.”

“…”

His copy sighed. “Listen, all you’re doing is drawing things out at this point. I’m compelled to fight you with everything I have but I can see how things are going so just end it and get out of here, all you’re doing is wasting time.”

“If you’re really me to any extent then I don’t believe you don’t want to live.”

“Obviously I want to live but even if I win it’s pretty obvious I don’t get to. Even if I win, the trial that’s creating me will either cut off power and I’ll cease to exist or it will dispose of me in some other way. I don’t actually get a victory condition, only you get to have the chance to properly win and any bit of dawdling is just a waste of time on your part. We both know you have things to do and reasons why you’re trying to get stronger, staying in here is just a waste of time.”

He was right, plainly so but it left a sour taste in Ben’s mouth. Was a soul a requirement for personhood? The gods of the world seemed to think so, they wouldn’t have made a section like that if they didn’t but the creation before him was a thinking being. Bound by the rules of its creator but still able to make choices of its own. Something that wanted to live but had no path to get a life, leaving Ben with only a single question. Was he willing to potentially lose out on some power for what felt like a gamble at getting a different path to it?

“…You know, I really am capable of endlessly self-empathizing,” He sighed. “Every time I meet a copy of myself I can’t help but like them, I wonder what that says about me?”

“I’m sure something that Myriad would have some choice words about but liking me isn’t a reason to not end things. I’m obviously not winning here, all you’re doing is embarrassing me at this point.”

Ben still hadn’t let a single attack get through no matter what the other threw at him but he just shook his head. “You’re right, you can’t win but what if I can get you out of here still anyway?”

A pause before the false Ben shook his head. “And live what sort of life? I’m not you, do you think the people we love will accept a duplicate as much as the original? Thanks, but I’d rather not get my Pinocchio ending only to still be nothing but a cheap imitation to the people I care about.”

“I agree, if I was in the same position then that would be hell but who says that’s what I’m thinking?”

“Then…?”

“Are you being compelled to win or to not lose? One will make things significantly easier to get what I want from you.”

“Being?”

Ben grinned. “A tie.”

Even if it was to a weaker extent, his copy shared the same mind as him and with the hint began to think about just what that meant, putting the pieces together until a grin formed on its own lips and their endless wave of attacks stopped.

“A tie sounds acceptable.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep