[System Decay] Chapter 30: Boots on the Ground (Patreon)

Clearing the school grounds was disappointingly uneventful. Will saw people running from him every now and then, but they were always far away enough that he wasn’t able to confirm whether or not they were in the Iron Boys or had been locked up in the university with them. He still found himself half tempted to shoot after them anyway, but he wasn’t ready to take that step yet. Will’s class was Reaper, but he wasn’t going to kill those undeserving of it.

As promised, the university had in fact been infested by dungeons. For the most part, they were portal-types. Interestingly enough, some of them seemed to have refreshed after being cleared. Will dearly wished he could ask Ayla what was up with that, but she was elsewhere now.

To the party, it was a gold mine. Having access to so many unformed rank dungeons was going to be a game changer for them. They’d already started leveling up and gaining skills quite nicely, though they were still nowhere near Unformed 15.

Lev had explained what they’d learned during their tutorial on the topic of monster cores to Will. He’d been surprised that Will hadn’t been using them, since the description alone didn’t lend themselves to a full explanation.

Will had seen the trade-off and instantly decided against using them, but it turned out that most of the other people in tutorials had been fighting against monsters that dropped cores then, allowing their helpers, who they’d thought were just tutorial tooltips, to give them the rundown on why they were bad.

“You seriously didn’t run into monsters with cores?” Allie asked. “Something like nine out of ten mobs here end up dropping them.”

“Nope,” Will said. “I wonder if it’s because the place I went to wasn’t supposed to be a tutorial zone.”

“Whatever the case,” Lev said, “Our helpers said you don’t want to take monster cores because you grow a hundred percent reliant on them by the time you hit the tier thresholds, which are, uh…”

“Gold, diamond, and queen,” Allie said. “King for the rest of you all.”

“Thanks, Allie. Yeah, basically, you need to start from zero within the tier and do it properly if you want to make it to the next tier up.”

“That would explain the way it cuts off your progression,” Will mused. “Why doesn’t the system just tell us that?”

“I believe that it may be intentionally goading some of us into making poor decisions,” Trevor said. “If it really wants to find the best of us to fulfill the chaos defense contract, then it wouldn’t want people that can’t assess risk properly, right?”

“Or,” Allie said, “maybe the people updating the thing just haven’t bothered to put the explanation in.”

“Also possible,” Trevor conceded. “I find it more useful to think of the forces behind the system as living, somewhat human-like beings. It helps make some of their decisions make more sense.”

“Just psych major things,” Allie joked.

“Wait, you majored in psychology?” Will asked. “You were in my advanced econometrics class.”

“I took that for fun.”

“For fun?”

“I thought it would be a good examination of human nature through the lens of our financial institutions.” Trevor shrugged. “Fat lot of good that’s doing me now.”

Will snorted. “Hey, if it helps you figure out why the system does what it does, that’s a win.”

“Speaking of the system,” Lev said, “Should we affix our new skills?”

“Let’s hit a safe zone before we do that,” Will said.

“Huh?” Allie asked. “Does affixing skills take you a lot of time?”

“It does leave us pretty weak immediately after,” Trevor reminded her. “There’s a reason we normally take turns.”

So the visions Will had been seeing weren’t normal, then. It couldn’t be because of the sigil—not only the sigil, at least. Maybe it was the presence of corruption that did it? Maybe his tutorial had been so abnormal that he’d been irreversibly altered. He hadn’t been able to select a different race because of that, after all.

“I don’t like the thought of being caught unawares by a rampaging monster while recovering from a skill affixation,” Will said. “We can’t enter the safe zone we’ve been using for a while yet, so let’s go north.”

“We haven’t been north yet,” Lev said. “It’s blank on the map. That’ll be interesting.”

“It’s elf territory,” Will replied. “Not the fun kinds, either.”

“Elves?” Allie cut in, voice tinged with wonder. “Like Lord of the Rings elves?”

Will thought of Caiyeri, with her sharp tongue and gleeful murderhobo streak, then of Thalia, the silver-rank guardian who none of them could even try holding a candle to. “Not exactly. I’ll tell you more as we walk.”

#

They were running out of time.

Caiyeri wasn’t the most well-informed elf, and she ranked low on the power scale of Group Two, which meant that the only information that was supposed to reach her ears was the absolute essentials for the upcoming assignment.

Even she’d heard the higher-ups behind closed doors, giving briefings about the life kingdom’s unexpected progress.

They were trying for a ritual of some kind, that much was clear. Anything beyond that would either come to her as she was deployed…

“Seven,” Azure said, clapping her on the shoulder.

…Or from a much less reliable source.

“Nine,” she replied in kind. “What are you here to bother me with today?”

A chat window popped open. Caiyeri raised an eyebrow.

Azure: Can I trust you?

Caiyeri: Why are you using the chat?

“I’m just excited that we’re going to see some action,” Azure said, massaging a sore spot on his side. “It’s been years since I was last in the field.”

Azure: The leadership is always listening. Turns out I may have crossed a line or three.

Caiyeri: You told me not to trust orders.

Azure: I’ve been warned not to do that again. It won’t turn out so pretty for me next time. I’m only still here because there isn’t another surviving Azure above unformed.

“I heard the life elves have an aspect on their side,” Caiyeri said. “Would you happen to know if there’s any truth to that?”

Caiyeri: You’re trying to skirt boundaries again. I could report you for this.

Azure: But you won’t. I see you, Caiyeri Seven. I know the rumors about you, and unlike most, I know which ones are true and which are deliberate misinformation. You are not a willing slave.

“No,” Azure said aloud. “I doubt they have one. At best, they may have a sigil holder, but those are few and far between. By the contract, aspects are not permitted to interface a world this early into its integration. Even Arcadia had only just begun to have them, though it appears we’ve been reset to zero.”

“That’s good,” Caiyeri said. “A sigil holder’s already a piece of work. Actual divinity? Mother, no.”

Caiyeri: Rumors?

Azure: You were with the human who became a sigil holder. We have records of what happens in our outposts, and I have access to more of it than they know. Our deployment is multi-pronged. I suspect that human has something to do with it.

Caiyeri: Yes. He has the sigil of the Hunger. I didn’t want anything to do with it.

Azure: The templates want that sigil. I guarantee that.

“We’re going to have boots on the ground very soon,” Azure said, looking Caiyeri in the eyes. “The life elves are making a play, and I don’t think we know what it is.”

Caiyeri: What do you actually want me to do?

Azure: Just don’t mix up what they want you to do with what you need to do.

Azure: That’s all.

Caiyeri’s response was interrupted by the rousing siren that she had come to learn meant that leadership was coming.

There is a new announcement in [Special Abyss Group Two].

Announcement: Make all final preparations. The timetable has shifted. We are deploying elves into the region effective immediately.

#

The Hunger, Will was growing to realize, was horrendously powerful in some ways but startlingly limited in others.

It didn’t surprise him very much when affixing his new tablet of the ghost sent him straight back into the god’s dream realm instead of one of the visions of the past that the other tablets had given him.

What did surprise him was the fact that the pain wasn’t any worse than it was before. In a sense, after the torture that had been last night, his soul had adapted. It still hurt like hell, that was for sure, but somehow, he could tolerate it more.

The human mind had a remarkable ability to adapt to its circumstances. During the course of his studies, Will had read a scientific article about how most winners of the lottery found themselves a lot less happy than they’d expected after six months, while many of those who lost their jobs ended up being happier than they thought they’d be after the same amount of time.

It had been much less than six months, but Will was already starting to adapt.

“You really don’t have power here, huh?” he said. The duration of the pain was also drastically shorter than it had been before—likely because the visions didn’t last very long, but still. “I thought you were supposed to be a god.”

“I AM A GOD,” the Hunger roared, his voice reverberating through the dream-space.

“A wise man once told me that anyone who has true power doesn’t have to tell people about it,” Will replied.

“You didn’t get that from a wise man, you insolent moron,” the god said, seething with anger. “You got that from a television show.”

“Huh,” Will said. “So you do know what TV is. Makes me wonder why you haven’t taken any good life lessons from them. Did you base your personality around that one guy from Game of Thrones? If you didn’t, his name’s Joffrey. I think you’d like that kind of guy. Real asshole, totally immature.”

“You’re trying to provoke me,” the god growled.

“And it’s working,” Will pointed out. “Seriously, you seemed like a nice guy at first. What’s your problem? Can’t deal with people who aren’t willing to bend the knee?”

“Your insolence will not go unpunished,” the god tried.

“I dunno,” Will said. “I think you tried to punish me and it hasn’t gone quite how you wanted it to. I think that you need me more than you’re letting on, and I know that having your sigil has the potential to give me power. You’re not going to get anything from me until you start giving things to me, my man.”

“You will grow to understand why this is a mistake.”

Will shrugged. “Or maybe you’ll lose your last opportunity to get a champion first. Let me know when you decide to give up on your dreams of having a thrall and tell me what you can actually do for me. Until then, I guess we’re doing this.”

He woke up before the Hunger’s scream of rage could end.

#

“Your champion doesn’t seem to be cooperating,” the Elven Mother tittered.

“Yours haven’t even seen combat yet,” the Hunger snapped back. “Yours were groomed from birth to be yours. Mine is a new User.”

“That you only have one is a great failing,” Mother said. “At this point in your ascendancy, you should have at least three across the realms.”

“Must I remind you why I have only one?” the Hunger said. “Or of our agreement? We are young gods yet, Sadareth. Those of Peace or War’s likes are not forced to stoop to our level. Without a champion in this final cycle, I am lost.”

The goddess sighed. “Allow me a jest, Kadael. They come rarely enough these days.”

“You need me. You know this.”

“I know this. Two offshoots of the race that worships me will make contact with your host soon. They will either force him into your hands or kill him and take the sigil.”

“My current host is a superb vessel,” he said. “I have not seen a beginner of his caliber in centuries. Not since I was amongst the mortals myself.”

“Then he should have no issue avoiding my elves,” Sadareth replied. “Should they manage to kill him, I should think that the one who lands the blow will be a suitable host.”

“Suitable, perhaps,” the Hunger allowed. “But not a host with the corruption that defies the system. Not a host who is a Reaper.”

“If you prefer your current host so much, why do you avoid giving him a single concession?”

The Hunger slammed his aura into the tea room around them, atomizing it. The Elven Mother rolled her eyes and waved a hand, reassembling the place.

“The planet this tea comes from was destroyed three hundred years ago,” she said. “Don’t waste it.”

“Kill him if you must,” the Hunger said, ignoring her placid statement. “I will find a thrall.”

#

Skill: [Thunder Wraith’s Grasp]

- Spell (augmentation, evocation)

- Cost: low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Bronze

A haunted storm gathers, and it grows mighty. Channels ghostly lightning into your fists or melee weapon, grasping an enemy to deliver successively greater amounts of lightning and necrotic damage.

Inflicts stacking levels of [Charged].

[Charged] - Target takes increased damage from lightning attacks. Target is easier to hit with lightning attacks.

On a critical hit, all levels of [Charged] are expended, inflicting exponential amounts of lightning damage for each charge cleansed.

“None of my skill have been misses,” Will said with a grin. His fists sparked as he tried using the skill. They felt oddly cold when he used the skill, which he was pretty sure was a result of the necrotic damage.

The Hunger’s impact on him barely lasted a few minutes past waking up from the skill affixation. Will had to admit that a chill ran up his spine every time he thought about the dream space and the mind-crushing pain that he experienced, but for the time being, the shiny new skill was more than enough to distract him.

He’d affixed his newly-made tablet of the ghost to his Power attribute. It fit the Storm element well, and served to direct where this attribute was going to go. Each of his attributes were giving him more options for his fighting style.

Right now, he essentially operated as an assassin, using his nova abilities of Mark for Death and First Blood to deal massive damage right off the bat, but he also had his afflictions, which ramped up over the course of the battle and made him a deadly threat the longer the fight went on.

His Storm attribute, which had granted him one movement skill that was excellent for kiting and avoiding damage and now one that scaled with time. That placed it firmly in the latter group, which Will was grateful for. Being able to do a heavy strike to start off the fight was nice and all, but he knew from experience that it wouldn’t be enough to one-shot many bosses, and he didn’t want a lack of continued power to be the reason he died.

The others had gotten decent abilities from their tablets of the book, though they all seemed to be perception-oriented even if they had bound them to a non-Perception attribute. Will decided not to make the same mistake.

“Here we go again,” he muttered, activating the last of his rewards from the quest.

#

“You again.”

“Me again.”

The Hunger glared at Will. He stared back, arms crossed.

“I don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind?” Will asked.

“No.”

“Shame.”

At least Will was ready for the pain this time.

#

Atop the grove she’d been charged with keeping safe, Thalia Brooksoul opened her eyes.

She could sense a disturbance in the air. In the magic. The abyss traitors were coming.

War was at their doorstep.

“Finish the modification of the captures,” she whispered, her words transmitting to the workers beneath. “Our defense will begin with an attack.”