Chapter 16 – Ghost of the Arena
The sky above Jotunheim Arena split with thunder.
Not real thunder, of course — just perfect sound design, the kind of digital storm that made your blood hum.
Beneath it, the tournament's first global bracket began.
Thousands of players from every world had gathered, avatars gleaming with holy armor, demonic wings, or crystalline constructs.
Names that had dominated Yggdrasil for years were all here.
And then… me.
Just Traveler_R.
No guild tag.
No title.
Just a silver phantom in a storm.
HIME: "Arena analysis complete. Environmental variables: thunder-elemental bias, magnetic interference on mana channels, visual noise intensity — seventy percent."
"Perfect," I murmured, rolling my shoulders. "Let's make it messy."
HIME: "Acknowledged. I will adapt your illusions to the environment's chaos field."
Lightning flickered across my reflection in the glassed floor — not really me, just another illusion waiting to be rewritten.
A Doppelgänger lived in layers.
And this arena was about to learn what that meant.
Match One – "The Seraph of Muspelheim"
My first opponent materialized in a flare of fire and gold — a towering angelic knight wielding twin radiant blades, one wreathed in holy flame.
Name: Alerion-IX.
Level 92.
Specialized in anti-magic combat.
"Traveler_R," he said through proximity chat, voice filtered through an overdesigned voice mod. "You rely on trickery. I'll show you the purity of light."
I grinned. "Light bends too, you know."
He charged instantly, wings igniting, holy fields expanding like a miniature sun.
That was my cue.
I stepped forward — and eight versions of me stepped forward with me.
The real one? He'd never know.
Each clone carried its own micro-delay, its own data echo, just enough to fool even Yggdrasil's anti-illusion scripts.
Alerion swung, bisecting two images — they shattered into digital dust, sending feedback pulses that scrambled his HUD.
HIME: "Opponent's perception tracking disrupted. Suggest synchronization of mimic protocol."
Already on it.
I mirrored his stance, copied his sword pattern, and his light parameter values.
When he struck again, his own light bent, refracted through my mimic field —
and for a moment, the holy flame consumed him.
The system broadcasted the end.
[Winner: Traveler_R — Match Time: 58 seconds.]
Match Two – "Queen of Frost"
Round two, Niflheim representative.
Name: Velgraya, an ice witch draped in translucent silk, wielding blizzards like paint strokes.
Her battlefield? An arena of frozen glass suspended over bottomless mist.
She bowed slightly. "I've heard of you, ghost. Let's see if illusions can freeze."
I tilted my head. "They can shatter, too."
As soon as the match began, the temperature dropped. Frost bloomed across the arena — real-time weather rendering at its finest.
Her spells weren't direct; they sculpted the environment.
Walls of ice, reflective surfaces, and delayed impact hexes.
Exactly my kind of chaos.
I shifted forms, each one blending into the mirrored reflections — creating depth illusions.
Every version of me reflected her attacks at slightly altered timing, creating a labyrinth of mirrored movement.
Velgraya: "Impossible… they're not reflections—"
"No," I whispered from behind her, blade against her back. "They're rehearsals."
She turned, launching a spiral of frost spikes —
but the Ren she struck was already data residue.
The real me dropped from above, cutting through the ice beneath her and collapsing the platform.
As she fell, she laughed.
Velgraya: "A fitting end… illusions never die, do they?"
"Only when the viewer stops believing."
The system announced my win again.
Match Three – "Ogre King Bashar"
Then came brute force incarnate.
Level 93.
A mountain of red muscle and spiked armor, dual-wielding clubs that could flatten most tanks.
He didn't wait for formalities.
He jumped.
The entire arena shook.
I let him hit me.
The impact sent my body flying across the arena, smashing into the barrier wall.
Spectators gasped.
Then the body glitched —
and split —
and melted.
My illusion had taken the hit for me.
The real me stood behind him, invisible, feeding data from his previous swing into my mimic buffer.
He swung again, faster this time, spinning his clubs in a hurricane.
I matched his rhythm perfectly.
Copied, accelerated, distorted.
Every motion he made became his own undoing.
When the echo delay loop reached 0.5 seconds, I snapped my fingers.
The air exploded.
Kinetic energy — his energy — reflected backward into him.
He collapsed to his knees, body flickering red with lethal feedback damage.
[Winner: Traveler_R — Match Time: 71 seconds.]
Match Four – "The Oracle of Alfheim"
The fourth was my favorite — a strategist, not a brute.
The Oracle, a silver-haired elf, Level 94.
Specialized in predictive magic — seeing moves seconds before they happened.
"Traveler_R," she said, smiling serenely. "I see a thousand possibilities. You lose in all of them."
I smiled back. "Then let's add one more."
From the start, I knew I couldn't outfight her.
Every move I made, she anticipated — illusions, shifts, data tricks.
She countered them with precision.
So I stopped moving.
HIME: "Ren-sama, are you—"
"Shh. Let her predict nothing."
By doing nothing, I removed myself from her algorithm.
Her foresight relied on data flow — visual, magical, environmental.
I cut it all off.
To her, I ceased to exist.
When I finally struck, it wasn't an illusion or a spell.
It was a data rewrite.
I flipped my identity flag mid-frame — appearing in her system not as Traveler_R, but as Oracle_Alias_02.
For 0.3 seconds, her perception recognized me as herself.
She froze.
Oracle: "What—"
My blade passed through her chest, and her avatar dissolved in a cascade of light.
[Winner: Traveler_R — Match Time: 89 seconds.]
By the time I left the fourth arena, the crowd had stopped cheering for me.
Now they just watched.
Silent.
Captivated.
Maybe even a little afraid.
To them, I wasn't a player anymore.
I was something else — something unpredictable, untouchable.
The ghost of Yggdrasil.
HIME: "You are trending, Ren-sama. Player analysis threads have begun labeling you as 'The Doppelgänger Algorithm.'"
Traveler_R: "Heh. Sounds more like a horror story."
HIME: "You are aware that your combat data no longer conforms to human behavioral patterns?"
Traveler_R: "That's the point."
I looked up at the storm still brewing over Jotunheim.
Every flash of lightning reflected across the arena, fracturing my reflection into hundreds of selves.
Each one a version of me — each one ready to fight.
The next round would be the real test.
Because now, the world had seen what I could do.
And somewhere, deep in the system logs,
the developers had noticed too.
End of Chapter 16 – Ghost of the Arena