Chapter 310 The Battle With A Doppleganger
However, this did not mean that Dante could act as he pleased here. He had simply gained an advantage that he could use, and how to use it smartly was the key here.
For one, the Divine difficulty level was out of the question completely. To do that required higher dimensional power, and the issue had already been illustrated when he fought Lara's Centralis Universe clone.
Higher dimensional powers could only harm higher dimensional power/beings.
As such, Dante's eyes fell on the Grandmaster difficulty level. This one was arguably the best for him since he could freely use Quantum Entanglement and its abilities, but his doppleganger could not, only able to use Quantum Core and Nanite Resonance.
Choosing lower difficulties was unnecessary, especially since choosing Grandmaster and Master would have the literal same effect, but the payout was vastly different.
As such, Dante made the choice right away, and the area around him warped. He was taken away from where he stood and appeared in a white room that seemed to stretch for eternity. The visual cue Dante got was very similar to looking at the hyperbolic time chamber's interior.
However, he was quickly focused on the manifestation that appeared before him, which was that of his own form. It was a fleshless creature made up of a strange form of matter that looked like white clay, but was partially translucent.
The moment the being appeared, it locked onto Dante and began attacking without waiting for any sort of signal. Immediately, it rushed towards Dante and punched out, a blaze of hellfire true qi surging from its fists.
Dante carefully assessed the attack and punched out similarly with the same amount of hellfire true qi. It was important to verify for himself whether everything about his exact capabilities had been copied fully, or whether they were weakened or magnified.
When both fists collided, the hellfire true qi surged around crazily, lashing the body of the two fighters. Unfortunately, both were immune to all hellfire due to their mastery of the Internal Arts, so this was nothing but a show of power.
However, it was enough for Dante to realize that it was pretty much as he thought, that the power of the doppleganger was perfectly equal to his. This made him frown as he disengaged and began casting a spell, which the doppleganger naturally mimicked.
6th rank spell: Lightning Cannon!
The two blasts of lightning energy as thick as a bucket collided and released a small energy shockwave that could have fried any technology of a lower grade that had been nearby.
Both Dante and his doppleganger's eyes churned as they glowed brightly, both focused on the other. They stood in such a stalemate, burning great amounts of energy as they tried to suppress the other, but eventually both stopped, realizing how futile it was.
Summoned beasts were released, namely Killian the Antimatter beast, Blacko the Oblivion beast, Weaver the Soul beast, and Dao the Counter beast. They had already seen the fight through Dante's eyes from his soul space and knew what kind of foe they were fighting.
Killian first manifested endless antimatter and waved his wings, shooting it towards the doppleganger casually. To no one's surprise, a duplicate Killian appeared and also mimicked the move, causing the two attacks to be neutralized.
Then, another Blacko, Weaver, and Dao also appeared and prevented the beasts from one-shotting the doppleganger using their special rule-based powers. Eventually, Dante called them back, but the doppleganger did not.
After all, it was not forced to mirror-match Dante; it could freely use any of his methods to take him down and make him fail this challenge. However, seeing Dante retract all his power and smile at it with confidence made the doppleganger irritated.
It even went the extra mile and twitched a finger, countless nanites coming from its clothes that were mimicked from Dante and covering its body, forming a futuristic-looking armor solidified and powered by EX Rank Nanite Resonance.
Dante obeyed the rules of fighting and allowed his foe to transform completely until they were satisfied. Unfortunately, the doppleganger disdained to speak, and did not monologue about how it was superior to Dante and it had achieved a level of power never seen before.
Still, it definitely postured a bit before seeming ready to end this flimsy challenge and take Dante's life once and for all. However, it only saw Dante raise a finger and draw a circle in the air that encompassed the area around them.
For some reason, the doppleganger felt like it should absolutely stop Dante from doing this no matter what, but it was too late. A surge of higher dimensional power erupted that caused everything within this area to become nihil.
For the doppleganger, its nanite armor crumbled onto the ground and the beasts it summoned were forcibly dragged back into its cloned soul space. Its dantian was sealed with the true qi being out of reach, and it could not even access its spiritual cores to perform parlor tricks, much less magic.
Yes, at this moment, apart from its stats, it could not use any other special power or ability inherited from Dante. All of this was caused by one of Dante's newest abilities that came after he reached the A Rank, Quantum Nullification Field!
Within the area of his quantum marker, all superpowers and abilities were negated completely as long as they were not of the higher dimension. So regardless of the entity, they would be stripped of their power until they became reliant on only stats to fight.
This would not work on beings like Lara due to their stature in the universe, but everyone else was fair game. Unfortunately, as overpowered as it was, it was still only circumstantial because beings like Portia existed, who had insane stats and support-based superpowers, so it was not the core of their offensive ability.
So Dante did not dare to run up and down thinking he was invincible, but he also acknowledged his superiority over people like himself who had various offensive powers of a special nature, especially this doppleganger.
When Dante first heard from the Cosmic Tree that Quantum Entanglement could not be copied, he was excited for this reason. If he still had B-Rank Quantum Entanglement, it would have been meaningless unless he wanted to drag the doppleganger to his quantum space to chat with Lara's clone.
In fact, the doppleganger never had a chance to turn things around because the hand sign Dante made was for aesthetic purposes; he only needed to think to place a quantum marker down within the range of his spirit sense.
He also only needed to think to activate the nullification field, so trying to 'interrupt' him was fruitless unless you had a significant statistical advantage over him, making you so fast that you could move before he could even think.
The doppleganger was obviously not built like that. He was not 'him'.
Before it could even react, it was struck in the chest by a familiar blast of electrical energy from the 6th Rank spell from earlier. Immediately, it was sent flying with a charred patch on its chest area, enough to cause it to roll on the ground and twitch in pain.
Dante did not relent, casually repeating the blast over and over again, striking the doppleganger while it was on the ground.He did not see the need to use any other methods but the most direct, which was to blast it to death.
After a minute or two of near-machine-gun-like attacks from Dante, the doppleganger was finally turned into dust and ash. Rather than be pleased, Dante felt a bit of seriousness as it meant that if the same thing happened to him and he was ever put into a situation where he could only use stats, he too could be killed in a minute or two if subjected to such high-intensity blasts.
In the end, he was pulled from this realm and returned to standing in front of the black spire. He glanced around and saw that the golem he summoned was still standing where it had been, glancing at him while waiting for his next order.
This made Dante wonder if it had truly been a case of him being transported away or if everything had occurred in some sort of mental plane. Luckily, there was an encyclopedia right with him that could answer.
"Yes, you were taken away and then brought back," Levi answered with a roll of his eyes.
As a dignified 10-star Divine Beast of Truth, how could he be asked such simplistic questions?
Dante ignored the fellow and received the feedback from the Black Spire. It told him that the territory now belonged to the Eternal Universe and they received an immediate payout of 10,000 units of Chaos Will and will receive such every year as long as the territory is not captured by another universe.
Also, for performing this feat, Dante was awarded with 1,000 Spire Points, which made his eyes light up.
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