Daemon's three skeletons leaped at Alexei, preparing to strike at once in a devastating combination attack!
Alexei knew exactly what had happened.
One of the Necromancer class's starting Skill Gems was [✧Command Skeletons].
At its base level, this skill allowed a player to summon the skeletons as a passive effect, but Necromancers could also activate it to command all their skeletons to attack a single target at once. The skeletons would then receive a tiny attack speed and damage buff for a few seconds afterward.
It was skills like this that gave Necromancers such powerful burst DPS potential! If they all hit, Alexei would lose a huge chunk of his HP.
However, a fraction of a second before the trio of attacks landed, Alexei put his palms together in front of his face and activated his own skill, [✧Balance].
A bubble of golden light expanded around him for exactly one second, a period which overlapped with the skeletons' attacks stabbing into him! During that time, Alexei became as intangible as a ghost, and the attacks passed harmlessly through him.
Then Alexei's single second of invulnerability passed.
He wasted no time in casting [✧Sacred Fist], slamming his arm into the first skeleton and shattering its obsidian bones!
The remaining two skeletons stabbed him repeatedly, dealing chunks of damage, but Alexei quickly turned to deal with them.
He parried the second skeleton with his open hand, gaining a fraction of a second of invulnerability as he performed an open-palmed counterattack that exploded the skeleton into bone shards.
"Enough!" Daemon screamed, and pointed his one-handed scythe at Alexei. A magical circle appeared around the weapon, and an identical one appeared around Alexei's body as the [✧Curse of Frailty] took effect.
Alexei's movements became 10% slower, and his physical attack and defense lowered by 5% each. This jarring shift in speed made Alexei stumble, leaving him wide open for a couple more skeleton jabs.
By this point, he was down to almost 50% of his HP. The skeletons had been getting fairly lucky with high damage rolls, and Alexei felt an edge of nervousness.
'Stay calm,' he reminded himself. 'This guy's playing all his cards now because he doesn't know any better!'
Sure enough, Daemon then made perhaps the dumbest choice available to him.
All classes had specific ways of regenerating Energy, and Necromancers were poorly suited to duels like this. They mainly gained Energy whenever a creature died nearby—though their own summons provided only tiny amounts of Energy from this.
In a duel like this, Daemon had only one way of regaining Energy: he drained a bit of it every second from the target of his [✧Curse of Frailty]. However, this was slow, and it would take about ten seconds to regain all the Energy spent to cast it.
But Daemon wasn't paying attention to his Energy usage.
Despite the way Alexei had so skillfully dodged his most powerful attack, then destroyed two of his skeletons, Daemon was not acting cautiously at all.
Instead, he started channeling the last of the Necromancer starting skills, [✧Life Drain]. It dealt steady damage and drained the enemy's HP to restore the attacker's HP, but had a huge Energy cost.
Since Daemon was currently at full HP, he was wasting a potentially useful healing skill to gain a bit of extra damage.
All these sources of damage—one skeleton, the curse, and the HP drain—certainly added up, and Alexei dropped to about 20% HP.
But the fight wasn't over.
Daemon ran out of Energy and stared at his scythe in disbelief.
At that moment, Alexei cast [✧Purgation], his own final ability!
The [✧Curse of Frailty] vanished from him, severing Daemon's Energy regeneration.
In Path of the Immortal, Monks had a special attunement mechanic which changed based on the skills they used in battle. Casting [✧Purgation] attuned Alexei away from Unity and toward Peace, lowering his Energy regeneration but gaining a small HP regeneration effect.
Then he turned and kicked the last skeleton repeatedly until its skull flew off and its body crumbled!
Breathing heavily, Alexei turned back to Daemon and gave him a thin smile. "You should've saved the last of your Energy," he said. "You could've used it to summon three more skeletons—"
Daemon screamed in rage and ran at Alexei, swinging his scythe without using any skill to empower it.
Unfortunately for him, "auto-attacks" such as these were extremely easy for Alexei to parry.
He slapped aside Daemon's first attack, leaving the Necromancer wide open for a fraction of a second. Alexei's counterattack would receive a huge damage multiplier, especially since he was a Monk using unarmed combat.
Alexei curled up the fingers of his right hand and cast [✧Sacred Fist], driving his knuckles into Daemon's abdomen.
Path of the Immortal simulated pain in a way that prevented players from experiencing dangerous systemic shock… but, well, the pain still 'hurt!' Daemon let out a pathetic groan as all the air left his lungs. He crumpled to the ground for a moment before awkwardly rolling away from Alexei.
But when he tried to get up again, Alexei simply cast another [✧Sacred Fist] into his face.
Daemon staggered backward, then rushed at Alexei again with another auto-attack.
Parry.
[✧Sacred Fist].
This embarrassing series of blows drove the crowd wild! Everyone cheered for Alexei, especially since Daemon was clearly a whale who'd spent more on the game than they might spend in their whole lives!
Even though Daemon seemed to realize that he had no way of winning, he kept getting back up and attacking.
At first, Alexei thought it was due to blind rage and stupidity. Soon, though, he recognized a kind of warrior's pride in Daemon's defiant expression. It was an expression that said, 'You might win, but I'll go down fighting! I'll never surrender!'
As arrogant and abrasive as Daemon was, Alexei decided he could respect that kind of defiance.
But before a full minute had passed since the first skeleton attack, Daemon dropped to 0 HP, and the duel ended.
By now, Alexei had regenerated to about 25% of his max HP. "Good fight, all things considered," he said. He reached down to help Daemon up, but the Necromancer ignored the hand and rose on his own.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Daemon snarled. "Monks are definitely broken! I wasted all this money to look good, but apparently I chose a completely worthless class."
Before Alexei could answer, Zamniel stepped in. He looked extremely excited, shuffling back and forth on his feet like a child watching a skilled street performer. "No, that's not the case at all! As far as raw combat potential goes, your Necro skills are definitely much better than Ignatius's Monk skills.
"Think about it! You have skeleton summons who can burst down a target, as well as an HP drain and a curse that weakens the target. You should've opened with the curse, then ordered your skeletons to attack, then immediately begun the HP drain. It was clearly the wrong choice to open with your strongest DPS attack when Ignatius was waiting with that invulnerability skill at the beginning."
Daemon looked more doubtful. "Maybe. But it's stupid that he apparently had unlimited Energy! He just kept spamming that glowing punch attack. Doesn't take any skill to spam a broken ability."
"Look," said Alexei, "Zamniel's pretty much right. Your move rotation could have been better. You should've known that you'd only have a small pool of Energy, since there'd be no corpses for you to absorb here. The Necro tutorial told you that, right?"
Then Alexei glanced at Zamniel. "I'm really impressed with that analysis, though. Were you a beta tester like me?"
This was a careful part of Alexei's plan. Since there was no way he could fully hide his game knowledge—especially after beating up Daemon like that—the best cover would be to claim Alexei 'had' played the game before now… though as a beta tester, which he'd never actually been in his first life.
Zamniel's face brightened. "Oh, wow, that explains how you seemed to know exactly what he was going to do at every moment, and how you countered the skeleton attack so perfectly! No, I'm not a beta tester. I just have a lot of MMO experience."
Daemon's face twisted up in irritation. "A beta tester! So you 'were' cheating after all! You knew everything about my skills and didn't tell me!"
"Not cheating," Alexei said mildly. "You didn't ask. Besides, like I said… the Necro tutorial should've taught you how to use your basic skills. If you were just better at the game, you could've won easily. Monk is actually really weak at Level 1."
By now, the crowd had dispersed.
Rather than sticking around to congratulate Alexei, everyone had been inspired to fight in duels themselves… or to leave the waiting room and switch their class to Monk, since it was clearly such an overpowered class, no matter what the victor himself said!
After Alexei's last words, Daemon just scowled and held out his hand. A canvas pouch appeared there, and a pink-blue glow shone from inside it. "1000 Crystal Coins," he said. "I'm not a sore loser."
'All that complaining could've fooled me,' Alexei thought, but he graciously accepted the coins. They disappeared from his hand as they entered his inventory. "Thank you," he said. "Maybe in the future we can have a rematch. If you'd like to lose some more Crystal Coins, I'd be happy to give you another shot!"
"Oh, you bet we'll fight again," Daemon growled. "I'm gonna get much better Skill Gems and gear, then we'll see who wins!"
The Necromancer disappeared from the waiting room, probably to find one without people who knew he'd lost a duel in such an embarrassing way.