Owen clapped slowly. I hated that he made it look cool.
He said he finally understood my power. I could lower my displayed rank, and I used that false weakness to trigger aggression. He said it was clever, but limited against someone who would not attack first. I was just a liar with a chain.
Then he drew a thin black knife and cut his own palm.
A red aura spread around him. Not an aggressor mark. A skill.
His real rank appeared. Clean, cold, dangerous. The air in the arcade bent around him. His blood floated into the shape of small knives, each one humming with curse energy.
He had not attacked me. He had armed himself. That was legal.
He smiled and asked what I would do if the villain understood consent.
I told him I would become annoying.
Then I lowered my rank to F and walked away.
He did not expect that. Nobody ever expected me to leave the dramatic duel.
Owen followed, because pride had hooked deeper than any chain blade. He could have stayed still. He could have let me go. But I had turned my back on him in his perfect stage, after freeing his hostages, after caging his people, while wearing an F-rank like a clown nose.
He threw the first blood knife.
Red sparks. Aggressor confirmed.
I turned around smiling. His S-rank protection shattered with a sound like cracking ice. Mine returned.
S against S should have been dangerous. Predator reversal triggered, because he had initiated combat while I displayed F. My first counter hit like a falling building. I shadow stepped under the thrown knife, appeared at Owen's side, and drove my elbow into his ribs.
The shockwave blew out every window on the left side of the arcade. He slid across the marble, caught himself with one hand, and laughed through blood.
Good. I wanted him awake for the lesson.
Owen moved like a nightmare. Blood knives spiraled around him, cutting from angles that did not make sense. His shadow stretched and split, creating false bodies that lunged while he stayed back. He was not a tank, not a brute, not a screaming idiot. He was a duelist who had spent the apocalypse learning how to kill players without wasting motion.
For the first time, I had to fight seriously.
So I cheated seriously.
I lowered my rank midfight. Every time Owen prepared a skill, I flickered from S to F to C to F again. His blood knives tracked rank pressure, not just body movement. When my rank vanished, the knives stuttered. When I revealed, they overcorrected. I used those tiny errors to slip through gaps a normal fighter would never see.
He cut my jacket. I cut his glove. He sliced a pillar in half. I dropped the top half into his path with a chain pull.
He launched six blood knives at once. I shadow stepped into the shadow of the smallest one, appeared behind the entire volley, and yanked the chain blade across his back.
He spun, caught the chain in his hand, and grinned.
Bad idea. The chain blade was not just metal. It remembered attacks.
I triggered the afterimage release. Every swing I had made in the last minute repeated at once as ghostly black arcs. Owen let go too late. The arcs slammed into him from all directions and pinned him against a glass elevator.
Still, he did not fall. He laughed again, but the laugh had cracks.
Then he pulled his final trick. He lowered his own visible rank to F.
For half a second, I actually felt surprised. Not because he had the same ability. He did not. He had an item, a cracked badge that copied the last rank manipulation seen nearby. It flickered on his chest, forcing his S-rank down into a gray F.
He wanted to bait me into attacking first. He wanted my protection gone. He wanted to prove he could steal my story.
I stopped moving.
He stood there bleeding, smiling, fake F above his head. The arcade was silent except for glass falling in tiny musical pieces.
He said, "Now what?"
I said, "Nothing."
I sat down right there on the marble, cross-legged like an idiot. Owen stared at me.
I pulled the cursed snack cake from my pocket, the one Riley had given me days ago, somehow still alive. I unwrapped it slowly while Owen's fake F-rank trembled above him.
Then I ate it. It was still terrible.
Owen's eye twitched.
The thing about villains who build stages is that they cannot stand an audience getting bored. His item would not last forever. My patience could last at least as long as a bad snack.
He stepped forward. I chewed. He raised a blood knife. I swallowed. He shouted that I was mocking him.
I said, "A little."
He attacked.
Red sparks. Aggressor confirmed. His copied F-rank shattered.
I sprang up with S burning above me and the worst snack cake in history powering my soul. Predator reversal hit one more time. Not as strong as before, but strong enough. My fist crashed into his chest, and the shockwave threw him through the glass elevator and into the central fountain.
The portable beacon rang again. Light chains wrapped around him.
For a moment, Owen tried to cut them. His blood knives sliced through the first layer, then the second. He was strong. Stronger than I wanted to admit.
So I lowered my rank to F and walked toward him.
Even chained, even beaten, he lunged. Another red flare. The beacon upgraded his cage. Glass walls rose around him, thick and bright. The chains pulled tighter. His S-rank flickered, not gone, just trapped behind the penalty field.
I looked down at him and finally let my real rank shine without hiding it. My fight with him had pushed me over the line. The letter above my head changed from a quiet S to a full blazing S, and the entire arcade filled with gold.
Owen stopped smiling.
That felt better than victory.