[System Decay] Chapter 33: Denied Entry (Patreon)

“Can you tell me the next time you’re about to eliminate all my senses?” Will said.

Of the four of them, he was definitely the least exhausted. Trevor hadn’t gotten into an actual physical combat, but both Darkness and Silence were high cost skills and his Soul attribute was still low enough that using both of them had fully depleted his mana and then some. Will’s Death attribute was the only reason he wasn’t completely out of resources, and Trevor’s benefits didn’t have a similar mana-restoring effect.

To be honest, Will was quite impressed with how smoothly they’d managed themselves. Yes, none of them had come anywhere close to taking down their respective targets, but the combination attack they’d done had softened up Timmel quite a bit, and the suppression had turned Fenn’s senses and defenses off, allowing him to kill her with a gun. Given her rank, Will doubted that he would’ve been able to do the same without them.

It had been a rough moment for him, though. Will’s perception powers all focused on enhancing and speeding up the senses he already had. Without a way to cut through the magical mute-field, he’d been stranded.

Even now, he practiced his aura sense, reaching out to try to differentiate the three around him. Will had done that a bit passively before, but he knew now that he needed to hone those senses as much as he could. If it hadn’t been for those senses, he could have died. Had Fenn trained hers more, Will would be a twitching bloodbag on the ground.

“Sorry,” Trevor managed to get out between breaths. His brow was soaked in sweat, and just like the other two, he was on his back in the grass. “Didn’t, didn’t think that you couldn’t see.”

“And I’m assuming the three of you didn’t think that the elves could see,” Will said.

“He couldn’t see,” Allie said, flat on her back but more coherent than either of the other two. “I can see through the dark, but he couldn’t. He was fighting with instincts and reflexes.”

“How the hell do you manage that without sight or sound?” Will asked.

“I dunno,” Allie replied. “Why don’t you ask him?”

She rolled over onto her stomach and gestured at the body, which Will had mangled beyond recognition. The combination of corruption and Ghostflame had shredded the elf’s upper half into something that more resembled ground meat after someone had tossed it into an industrial strength blender.

“Sure,” Will said, activating Pages from the Past.

He’d leveled up shortly after killing Timmel, the effects of User Killer enhancing the increase in experience. That had been enough to recover his mana and restore his body back to full health, giving him the opportunity to use skills at will again. The others had leveled up mid-fight, but even then, they’d been worn down too fast. An unformed rank level up just didn’t provide as much value.

Skill: [Mother’s Love]

- Passive (body).

- Cost: none.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

You are blessed by the Elven Mother. Your faith grants you her grace.

You are immune to all basic afflictions. Your martial strikes have a drastically increased chance to inflict a critical hit while your faith is unbroken.

[Mother’s Finesse] (bronze) - You are not obstructed by difficult terrain. You can react to attacks made within 5 feet of you whether or not you can sense them.

[Mother’s Vengeance] (silver) - All attacks double in power on the last target to land a hit on you.

“Huh,” Will said aloud. “Looks like they worship the same Mother as the elves in my tutorial did.”

“Hold on,” Allie said, propping herself on her elbows. Her hair fell into her face, matted with blood and dirt, but that couldn’t stop the curiosity in her expression from showing through. “Are you actually talking to the dead?”

“Not exactly,” Will said. “I’m just observing a skill he was using.”

Timmel had been a tank build—exactly the kind of person that Will was most effective against.

It was scary how close the elf had been to simply winning. Mother’s Love was an awfully powerful skill, and Will realized now that the only reason he’d been able to get a Decaying Touch off without dying was because he hadn’t registered as attacking to the skill.

“We didn’t alert anyone, did we?” Allie asked, looking around. “I think Lev can’t get up.”

“Oh, shut up,” Lev said, having regained his breath. “You can’t either.”

“I don’t see anyone alerted,” Will said.

That was because of him, of course. The others hadn’t been able to muster up the energy to help hide the bodies, so Will had dragged them out of the sight from the gates, cleaning up the blood as best as he could by covering it with oil from an unused barrel. A bit unhappily, he continued, “But I realize that I probably can’t enter the city safely.”

“Somehow,” Trevor said, looking Will up and down, “I think you’ll be fine.”

“There’s silver and gold-rankers in there,” Will said, wiping his bloody hands off on his pants. “I struggled hard enough against people four levels above me. A full rank?”

He neglected to mention that he’d killed Axl while still unformed, but the point was made. Even if Will could take on a silver or, somehow, a gold, there was no way he’d be able to fight against an entire city of them. His kit was best suited to killing individuals, not armies.

“So what do you want to do?” Lev asked. “You were the one who wanted to come here.”

Will sighed. “What I want to do is go in the city and buy some loot. What I think I’m going to have to do is have you three do it for me.”

“We’re going to be able to handle yourself even less,” Allie said.

“I’ll note that you three don’t have a constant ability that makes you appear unfathomably evil,” Will said drily.

“Fair point.”

“How did that happen, anyway?” Lev asked, a little nervous. “It’s, uh, I didn’t want to bring it up, but I always get the feeling that there’s something wrong with you.”

“Long story,” Will said, waving it off. He popped out all his bronze and silver credits. All told, they amounted to about a hundred silvers, which he hoped would be enough to buy something decent. “One of you inventory these and buy me a weapon, please.”

“A weapon? Not armor?” Trevor asked. “You got a hit a few times. I’m planning on buying myself some armor once I can.”

“I’ve got a skill that depends on it,” Will explained. “I’ll take armor or other clothing items if it doesn’t interfere, but I would really prefer a weapon of some sort.”

The gauntlets of strength and miraculous wrist bracers were already pushing it. They nerfed Escape Artist’s effectiveness by a couple percent. Will didn’t want to think about how bad full-body armor would be.

“Alright, then,” Lev relented. “I’ll chat you about what we can find. It looks like things have changed here anyway, so we’re going to need some time.”

“After I figure out how to walk again,” Trevor added.

“After we figure out how to walk again.”

#

Once they regained enough stamina to walk again, the other three members of the party entered the city through the gates, which opened even without an elf to do it for them. That struck Will as bad design—why put someone weak on guard duty and then let the gates open?

Then again, he supposed the closest he had to city-building experience was playing Civ V for so long he’d nearly failed out of high school calculus. He wasn’t going to go up to the city designers and tell them what to do.

“Besides,” he mused, “they’d probably just try to kill me.”

Speaking of trying—and failing—to kill him, he had two bodies to loot.

As he triggered the loot prompt on these two elves, who apparently counted as Users despite not being from Earth, Will wondered if he was perhaps being a touch hypocritical. He’d condemned the Iron Boys for going around killing and stealing, and here he was, doing the same.

“Nah,” he decided. “I wasn’t the aggressor here. I think.”

Technically, he’d used the first skill in the fight, but he was pretty sure Fenn’s Life Reversal had been the first attack thrown. Will wasn’t going to feel bad about taking what he could from the results of a necessary fight. So long as he didn’t set out to kill other people with the express purpose of leveling and stealing their shit, he was morally in the clear.

The elves did have some decent gear on them, though it was all bronze tier at max.

Timmel’s staff-scythe thing was neat, but its most useful effects were restricted to followers of the Elven Mother. Will already had one god taking up space in his inventory. He wasn’t keen on another one, though he did take it anyway. So long as the Mother didn’t start visiting him in his dreams alongside the Hunger, he’d be fine.

Fenn had a simple pendant shaped like the massive tree he’d seen Thalia guarding on a thread around her neck.

Item: [Evergreen Pendant]

Uncommon, bronze.

“She who takes must first understand that which she is taking; only then can she truly use her spoils.” - Commonly attributed to Verizel, a legendary life elf necromancer.

Increases the healing done through lifesteal. Attuning to this item also grants you the [Lesser Regeneration] skill.

[Lesser Regeneration] - Slowly recover while not in combat. Stabilizes you at the verge of death.

Will only had the slayer sword attuned so far. He didn’t know how many attunements he would be allowed to stack up, but it was definitely at least two.

Skill: [Attune Corrupted Item]

- Attunement.

- Cost: very high mana.

- Cooldown: 1 day.

Bronze.

Attunes an item of bronze rank or lower, purging the [Corruption] from it if applicable. All attuned items become growth items. If the attuned item was not already a growth item, it will become irreversibly corrupted.

The irreversibly corrupted part had kept Will from using it on any of his normal gear, alongside the mana cost that had indicated it would take basically everything he had to offer, but this pendant wouldn’t be too big a loss if its corruption turned out to be too much for him to be around other people.

Will attuned the pendant, sucking in a breath as every drop of mana he had poured into the skill, igniting the silver tree charm with distorted light.

[Evergreen Pendant] has gained the [Corruption] condition.

He put it on. The cool weight of it reminded him of the life he’d taken to get it, but he put that unnerving thought aside.

Nothing else either of them had looked to be useful for him. Armor was a detriment with Escape Artist, and the other weapons were unexceptional. Fenn’s daggers were essentially +1 daggers, friends of lazy game designers everywhere. They granted a very slight boost to Power when using them.

Rather than try to hide the evidence that he’d killed them through physical means, Will decided to try something new. He took a crate of goblin loot out of his inventory, now empty after a whole lot of Destructive Synthesis, and lifted the bodies into them. It was disgusting work, but they fit.

The box went into his inventory, corpses and all.

Good to know for the future. Will didn’t know what he could do with an elf corpse, but it had to be better than leaving them out here for their comrades to find.

“Maybe I can find a necromancer to pawn it off to. The system told me they existed, at least.”

With that settled, Will only had one more reward to look at.

“A loot box, huh?” he said, scrolling through his system notifications. “Let’s see what this is about.”

#

Lev had ended up being the one to take Will’s credits. When they were together, he always felt the need to defer to his friend. They’d spent the same amount of time in the apocalypse, but somehow, it felt like Will had experienced a year for every day that Lev, Allie, and Trevor had. There was just no competing with that.

In their group of three, Lev was their de facto leader. He hadn’t been doing half bad at it.

They’d been in the elf city once before, but Dylan had been annoying enough about being at the “bottom of the food chain” that they’d collectively decided to leave before he could get them in trouble.

That said, the grandeur of the place hadn’t been lost on him, and even after days of wading through dungeons, the luster hadn’t dimmed at all.

He did feel a bit of trepidation from being within the city right after he’d played a part in killing two of the city guards, but while the armored elves traipsing through the city bounds looked at him like he was mud to be scraped off a shoe, nobody questioned him about his purpose otherwise.

“They’re really gearing up for war, aren’t they?” Trevor whispered.

“Sure looks like it,” Allie replied, also whispering. They weren’t close enough to anyone who could potentially overhear them to warrant speaking at a lower volume, but the energy that infused the city made all three of them feel like they were better off unseen and unheard.

Half of the shops that they’d gone to last time were closed off, shuttered by thick vines and notices in a language that none of them could actually read but could use the Omnilingual skill to interpret as “CLOSED TO FOREIGNERS.”

“Well that’s a little rude,” Lev remarked.

“You get used to it,” Trevor sighed. “Figures. We finally have something like equality for every human by way of the world ending, and now we’ve got racist elves. Can’t have shit.”

Lev snorted. “There’s got to be a few places open. Let’s keep looking.”

The city had a massive open-air shopping mall placed smack dab in its center that sold all types of items in shops carved into tree trunks and covered by massive leaves suspended with magic. The last time they’d been here, all three of them—well, they had numbered four, then, but Dylan didn’t count—had been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of everything.

This time, they were much more mercenary about it. Wonder was nice and all, but when there was a very real chance that the inhabitants of the city could turn on them and kill them all at any moment, they couldn’t afford to be distracted.

Heads down, conversations quiet, they found three shops that were both selling to foreigners and offered silver-rank equipment.

“This is scary shit,” Allie murmured, running her hand over a display case of evil-looking daggers.

“No touching,” the elf at the counter said, looking over his glasses at Allie. “Unless you want to buy.”

“Sorry,” she said, taking her hands off the translucent case like it’d burned her.

“I mean, Will’s whole thing is scary shit,” Lev said. “I think that this goes with his kit pretty well.”

“Okay, I’m glad that’s not just me,” Trevor said. “You sense that too, right?”

“The awful vibe he gives off?” Allie replied. “Like the way every second I’m with him, my fight-or-flight response triggers seven ways to Friday?”

“Yeah,” Trevor. “I would’ve put it nicer, but yeah.”

“He’s our friend,” Lev reminded them. “I think we’ve seen that assuming everything is what it is at first glance is a bad play by now.”

Allie shuddered. “Don’t remind me. I never want to look at a treasure chest again.”

“You three,” the elf said, setting the book he’d been reading aside. “No loitering. If you’re here to make a purchase, make it and leave. Otherwise, get out before I make you.”

Lev took the rudeness in stride. “I’ve got a hundred silver credits here. What can we get with that?”

The shopkeeper snorted. “I’ve heard that one before. I can tell you’re broke, unranked boy.”

Rather than reply and offend them both, Lev simply opened his inventory and dropped nearly a thousand bronze credits and a few dozen in silver on the ground. He re-inventoried them as they dropped, trying not to smile too hard at the way the elf’s jaw hung open slightly.

Allie: Lev, don’t be a jackass. This isn’t even your money.

Lev: Nah, this guy was a dick first.

Allie: Fair point.

Will: I have no idea what’s going on, but go you guys.

“Fine then,” the elf said. “I think we can do business.”

#

“Six hours to teleport,” Rowan Two announced. “Ready up.”

Azure: I’m not going to break away, but I plan on leaving. Are you going to join me?

Caiyeri: I won’t stop you.

She brushed a thumb over her conjured daggers.

“I’m coming back, human,” she whispered to herself. “Are you ready?”

_

Author's note: Sorry about the delay! Was out visiting the aquarium today.