[System Decay] Chapter 37: He Didn't Like It (Patreon)

The information flooded into Will’s mind’s eye as he brandished the fully-charged slayer sword at Qwayne.

Skill: [Chaos Transfer]

- Spell (enchantment).

- Cost: high mana.

- Cooldown: 10 minutes -> 1 minute.

Silver

Let others suffer as you have.

Cleanses you of all levels of the [Corruption] affliction and transfers it to a designated weapon. The next target the weapon strikes will gain all levels of [Corruption] that you cleansed.

Silver-rank addition: Cleanses you of all levels of all afflictions. Increases the strength of the transferred afflictions to silver rank. You may now transfer the affliction between weapons or back to yourself.

This could be the difference maker. At the very least, it wouldn’t give the elf that bless effect that had soaked up all the damage from a shit load of barrels exploding. If corruption at silver rank was as superior to itself at bronze as Qwayne’s devastating power was to Will and Caiyeri’s, it was a massive step up for Will to be able to use this.

Still, if he’d been reading the skill correctly, Qwayne could probably purge the enhanced afflictions with a single usage of Effect Inversion. Will was going to have to combo this with another attack, most likely the crit—but that couldn’t be all. Qwayne needed some time and space to use Effect Inversion, that had become clear, and so a relentless press of attacks could slow him down.

Will couldn’t do that alone without burning literally everything he had, so he called into the chat.

Will: How’s it going out there? I have a better plan for killing this guy now.

Caiyeri: Your “plan” before was just blow him up and shoot him. That’s not a high bar.

Will: You’re not answering the question.

Caiyeri: Drinking a mana potion takes time, jackass. Give me a few.

“You were called here to kill me,” Will said aloud, unhooking the corrupted axe from his back as he did. “Would that be for this?”

Qwayne watched, amused, as Will took the sigil out from his inventory. It was a bit annoying to finagle the axe, sigil, and sword at the same time, but he managed by holding the former two in the same hand.

“You’re stalling for time,” the elf said.

“It’s working,” Will replied, assessing the expression on his opponent’s face, protected by forcefields but still visible to anyone who cared. “You’re interested.”

“Perhaps I am,” Qwayne said. “What of it?”

Will put the sigil back in his inventory, then started scraping his arm with the edge of the axe.

You have been afflicted with one level of [Bleed].

You have been afflicted with one level of [Altrien’s Despair].

You have been afflicted with one level of [Poisoned].

You have been afflicted with one level of [Charged].

Chaos Transfer’s cooldown reset thanks to its rank-up, and it was much faster to come off now anyway, which made this a viable thing to do in addition to the rest of his makeshift plan. The effects of his own afflictions started stacking fast, wracking his body with pain. His vision dimmed, an effect of bleed or the despair, and he suddenly felt extraordinarily slow and sluggish.

He slashed himself again, sloppier this time.

You have been afflicted with two levels of [Bleed].

You have been afflicted with two levels of [Altrien’s Despair].

You have been afflicted with two levels of [Poisoned].

You have been afflicted with two levels of [Charged].

You have been afflicted with one level of [Corruption].

Only then did he use his skill, transferring a truly evil-looking array of sickly colors to his sword.

“Well,” Will said, as if he hadn’t just stabbed himself twice and given himself the equivalent of the black death, “I was wondering if we could come to a more amicable conclusion.”

Qwayne looked at him for a few moments in disbelief, then burst out in laughter. “You’d fit right in with Two, friend! But I’m afraid not.”

“Why?” Will asked, genuinely curious. “You want the sigil off me, right? If I just handed it over, why would you still go to the effort of killing me?”

“Sigil-holders are all corrupted, one way or another,” Qwayne said. “We know how to corrupt our own the right way. You’re dealing with a god in your mind. I know you’re not fully you in there, human. If I peel your skin apart, do you think it’ll be cells and flesh I find in there?”

“Jesus, man,” Will said. “That escalated quickly. I’m still me, I’m pretty sure.”

He was actually a bit offended by that. Will had been putting in a ton of effort to stave off the Hunger. The person in his brain now was one hundred percent him, though perhaps less well-rested than he would have been if he didn’t have a god torturing him every night.

“That is precisely what a divine being acting through its thrall would want that thrall to think,” Qwayne noted. “I will address you as a human, but I know your games. We’re all trained for it.”

This guy’s completely brainwashed, Will realized. Caiyeri had been sort of the same… but she’d been raised without contact with the outside world, hadn’t she? The system had told him that Qwayne had been raised basically in a lab.

That made things make a little more sense, actually.

“So you’re going to kill me, cut my body into tiny little pieces, and take my stuff?”

“That’s about the gist of it,” the elf agreed. “You know you’re not going to be able to run. Even if you make it out here, all of the rest of Group Two has the location of this dungeon.”

I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Will thought. They had the location Caiyeri had given them, but while they were within the dungeon, they wouldn’t show up on party minimaps.

Caiyeri’s location, as it so happened, was wrong.

Speaking of Caiyeri…

Will: How’s it looking?

Caiyeri: I’m about ready. What do you need me to do?

“I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it,” Will said aloud.

Will: Just shoot a gun. You know the one.

Caiyeri: Mother no. I’d like to stay alive, thanks.

Will: It won’t be corrupted. Trust me.

“Bold of you to assume you’ll get to it,” Qwayne said. “Shall we?”

“Honorable of you,” Will said. “You villain types have a habit of doing that. Screwing yourself over with honor.”

“Oh, don’t mistake this for honor,” the elf said. “We all have our hobbies.”

“Killing people in ritual combat is yours?”

Caiyeri: Trust has gotten a lot of people killed.

Qwayne shrugged. “So what?”

Will: He’s about to engage again. Come in NOW.

Not waiting for her response, he took the seven-shooter out. It was bronze-rank, but a one-in-a-thousand chance would amplify its power to the point where it could break even gold-rank defenses.

It was also still corrupted, but all that banter had been enough for Chaos Transfer to come off cooldown. Will used the silver-rank feature of the skill to uncorrupt the weapon.

Something like this had been in every plan, but the evolution made it much easier to handle.

Qwayne took a decisive step forward, and Will slowed time for just long enough to take in the situation.

A figure was coming through the portal.

She came.

He let go of Time in a Bottle and tossed the gun up. “Catch!”

Caiyeri did.

Qwayne closed the distance between them in a single second, but even his silver-rank speed couldn’t beat a finger on the trigger.

[Instant Death selected.]

The elf’s chainmail armor shattered, forcefields flickering off as he tumbled to the ground. His grip on his sword never failed, which was completely fine with Will.

He teleported to that jagged blade with Weapons Free, his own slayer sword raised high.

Before Qwayne could recover from the sudden, overwhelming force of the seven-shooter’s ultimate shot, Will stabbed down with the slayer sword.

It was a bronze-rank item with bronze strength behind it, but he had every buff imaginable applied to it. Even a nail could threaten an elephant if it hit in the right way.

[Mark for Death] increased the power of your attack.

Critical hit!

Expending nine instances of [Radiance].

Expending twenty-one instances of [Charged].

[Senzen’s Seven-Star Slayer Sword] inflicted three levels of [Corruption], two levels of [Bleed], two levels of [Altrien’s Despair], and two levels of [Poisoned].

The blade barely penetrated, but from the detonation of radiant electricity, any onlooker would’ve assumed Will had run him straight through.

Will didn’t waste a second.

“The Bell Tolls, asshole,” he hissed.

Skill: [The Bell Tolls]

- Spell (esoteric).

- Cost: high mana.

- Cooldown: 1 hour.

Bronze.

Cleanses all afflictions from you and targets a creature you can see. The creature cannot benefit from magical healing for the next minute. Inflicts necrotic damage scaling with the consumed afflictions and any injuries the target is suffering from.

[Withering Decay] (bronze) - Death approaches. Increases any affliction on the target by one level. Inflicts one level of [Wither].

He increased corruption to a fifth level.

There were only instants before Effect Inversion could start negating the bevy of effects he’d just smashed down onto the unsuspecting elf, but in those instants, Qwayne was insensate, necrotic power spreading through his veins.

Not dead. Not yet.

“Don’t you dare think I’m going to let you get back up.”

Skill: [Ghostflame]

- Spell (enchantment).

- Cost: extreme mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Bronze.

Draws from your blood, afflictions, and lifeforce alongside your mana. Cleanses all afflictions from you and all creatures living or dead in a 10 foot radius. Wreathe your fists in ghostflame. Inflict true damage upon any enemies you strike.

[Phantom Pyre] - Increases the base damage of this skill for every affliction cleansed.

The bronze-level upgrade hadn’t been useful the last time he’d used it, but this time, it consumed five levels of the strongest affliction to exist, two of bleed, two of despair, two of poison, and a level of poison.

In short, the ghostflame was blindingly powerful. True damage ignored the rank disparity, and with this much power behind it, on a target already as ravaged as this one—

The elf’s chest caved in and burst like an overripe watermelon.

You have defeated [Qwayne Two].

Level up!

#

Caiyeri was completely out of gas. Will turned to her to see the elf woman collapsed on the ground, mana and stamina utterly depleted.

“You good there?” he asked.

“No thanks to you,” Caiyeri grouched. “Yes. I took a silver-rank potion, so I’m not going to be able to move for a bit.”

“The silver-rank potion you gave me didn’t seem to do that,” Will said.

“Potions are pretty much free when you’re close enough to dead,” Caiyeri replied. “I wasn’t close to dead, so I’m suffering the effects of overtaxing my system now. I overdosed on mana, then used too much too fast. My body’s confused.”

“Great thing to admit when you’ve got someone who could potentially kill and loot you.”

“If you were going to do that, you would’ve already done it. People can’t resist trying things around me.”

“Can’t imagine why. You have so much restraint.”

“Fuck off and give me a hand, will you?”

Will helped Caiyeri up, wrapping an arm around her waist.

“Shame,” Will said, looking at the body he’d produced. “I’d been hoping for something I could actually loot.”

The equipment that Qwayne had been carrying was largely unlootable. The combination of the freshly-uncorrupted instant death bullet and Will’s Ghostflame had shattered the chainmail so thoroughly that even trying to inventory it gave him nothing but scrap metal.

He did get some other loot from the dead elf’s storage space, though.

1,000 bronze credits have been added to your inventory.

200 silver credits have been added to your inventory.

1 platinum credit has been added to your inventory.

And, perhaps most importantly, the sword was still intact.

Item: [Chaos Blade]

Rare, bronze

Capable of channeling chaos magic at up to gold-rank without breaking, this blade was specifically designed in a way that allows its use in high-corruption areas.

When mana is passed through this weapon, it triggers one of a thousand random magical effects.

Channeling chaos magic at a higher rank through this weapon increases the rank of the triggered magical effects as well as the chaos blade’s strength to that rank (max. gold).

It… wasn’t actually that useful for Will. Random effects were not his wheelhouse, and though the seven-shooter had come in handy, the chaos blade doubled up on something he already had too much of—bladed offense. Between the slayer sword, which was just a fantastic all-around weapon, and the axe of despair, which was a consistent source of applying afflictions, Will already had most of his needs covered. His corruption affinity might help him use the chaos aspects of the sword more effectively, but…

“This doesn’t work with my build,” he said aloud. “I’m going to either burn this for a powerful Destructive Synthesis or give it to you.”

It did seem to work pretty well with Caiyeri’s build, though Will wasn’t sure on the details of how her Rigged Dice feature worked. Would she be able to pick a single one of the thousand effects, or would that have the same extreme mana drain and cooldown that force-picking instant death on the revolver did?

That wasn’t for him to figure out.

Caiyeri took the blade, leaning on him for support as she tested out the weight.

A second later, it disappeared into her inventory.

“Not bad at all,” she said. “It’ll do better than some of my conjurations, I think. I can’t believe they gave Two so much loot.”

“They didn’t all fall to goblins,” Will pointed out. “Also, you said they were mostly silver rank.”

“That’s true,” Caiyeri acknowledged. “Of the remaining ones, Qwayne was somewhere in the bottom third. I wouldn’t hope for a fight this easy now that they know we’re against them.”

“This was easy?” Will hadn’t struggled as much with this fight as he had with Axl, but that was only because he’d set up a total death trap in this dungeon. The difference between bronze and silver was even starker than the difference between unformed and bronze. “Actually, I guess it was.”

Despite all the effort they’d put in, neither of them had suffered anything beyond minor injuries. Caiyeri had taken one solid hit but had immediately run afterwards.

“Yeah,” Caiyeri said. “Azure might be able to help, but I don’t know how much I can trust him.”

“The two of you were really easy to convince,” Will said. “I won’t lie, that makes me more than a bit suspicious.”

“Yeah? That makes three of us. I don’t know why Azure’s so keen on leaving, but I can tell you why I’m gone. Leadership wasn’t exactly there for us in the tunnels. I can recognize when a behavior is implanted just fine.”

“You can?” Will asked. “That would’ve been a really nice skill for the world before the fall. We would have had a lot fewer problems.”

Caiyeri snorted. “And yet here we are, all of us in the same pot.”

“Here we are.”

She separated herself from Will, finding a convenient rock to sit on. “I’m going to tell Azure to come in. Don’t blow him up, thanks.”

“No promises.”

The other elf bore similarities to Caiyeri, though his hair was much shorter and his features slightly softer. His eyes were the sharpest part of him, darting around the room as he entered. They settled on Will.

Azure swore. “Mother above, get away from here. Caiyeri, he’s going to kill you!”

Will tilted his head at Caiyeri. “What?”

“The aura of general shittiness your sigil’s carrying got worse,” Caiyeri said drily. “It might’ve been you, too.”

“Oh, great,” Will said, trying to veil it the way she’d taught him to. “That help at all?”

“No.”

“Fantastic.” Will turned to Azure, his fingers itching for a weapon. “Did she not warn you about this?”

“She did.” Azure exhaled heavily. “Apologies. It was… more dramatic than I thought it would be.”

“I might be a bit of an anomaly,” Caiyeri volunteered. “In terms of reacting to this, at least.”

Azure ignored her, eyes drifting to Qwayne’s corpse. “You really did it.”

“What were you expecting?” Caiyeri asked.

“Exactly this,” Azure admitted. “I had hoped to avoid it, though.”

“You said that you had a plan,” Caiyeri said, steering the conversation back on track. “I don’t really trust your judgment on what counts as a plan, but I’d like to hear it.”

“Dungeons,” Will said simply. “The portal-types, to be specific. Leveling up is faster when we’re actually being challenged by something, right?”

“That’s how it works,” Azure said. “We’re trained to limit risk, though.”

“No wonder you’re stuck at silver after how many years?”

“I don’t see you at silver, human,” Azure said.

“I’m not there yet,” Will admitted, “but I’m growing fast. Besides it being better for leveling, you also can’t see us on a minimap when we’re in one of these.”

“Our tracking couldn’t find you in this dungeon,” Caiyeri said. “Qwayne’s, at least, though he is—was—supposedly our strongest tracker.”

“Exactly,” Will said. “My system tells me there’s fifty days or so until the trial of the champion.” He needed to be careful with his words here. Exposing too much about the Hunger or his corruption element carried the risk of triggering Azure again, and Will didn’t want to deal with another silver trying to kill him moments after dealing with one already. “Given what I’ve learned, I’m pretty sure literally everyone already established in the system has a vested interest in this.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Azure said.

“I haven’t,” Caiyeri said. “Care to elaborate?”

“It happens pretty early in the cycle,” Azure said. “I read some old records of it, so they might be wrong, but from what I can tell, it goes something like this. Anywhere from one month to three years after the apocalypse, there’s a competition between sigil-holders. The details of it aren’t very clear, but those who survive it almost always tend to make it to their global leaderboards.”

That sounded promising.

“I’ve got the sigil,” Will said, looking at Azure. “But you know that already, right?”

No adverse reaction from Azure. “Yes.”

“I’m going to assume you don’t want it from me.”

“Fuck no,” Caiyeri said. “Never the Hunger. Azure, if you so much as lay a finger on him trying to steal it, I will bring down every single elf force in the area directly to our location.”

“Understood,” Azure said. “I don’t have my eyes on the Hunger, anyway.”

“So basically, the plan is to grind dungeons, run from dungeon to dungeon, and get into the trial,” Will said. “There’s, uh, a lot of holes in it.”

“No shit,” Caiyeri said drily. “Is that all?”

“Yeah, basically. In my defense, if you were going to regret that, you probably shouldn’t have betrayed your entire race off of me vaguely saying I had a plan.”

“The time was coming,” Caiyeri said. “Our next stage was going to be looking for you, which was going to leverage me. You just rang the bell, so to speak.”

“Oh, fantastic,” Will said. “With that said, why don’t we make a party and update each other on what we can do? I have a suspicion that you two will be slightly better dungeon divers than my last party.”

#

Lily had been so damn close to finding it. A group of unformed Users had entered the same safe zone as she’d been camping out in while on the tail of eliminating the Iron Boys group. That had netted her a fair amount of experience, but someone else had stolen her fucking quest.

She’d gotten more quests in return, and that unformed group had come with a bronze-rank man that she thought she might’ve recognized from campus. Just being around him had made her skin crawl in a this-guy-would-wear-my-skin-like-a-suit sense, and it was only now, a group of dead elves at her feet and the information they’d carried in her hands, that she realized she’d barely missed what she was looking for.

Special quest: Leaderboard

Maintain your position on the local leaderboard. Eliminate threats to it.

- Stay within the top 3 of the regional leaderboard.

Reward: 1,000 bronze credits per day. Experience.

- Bonus: Kill others on the regional leaderboard.

Reward: ??

Quest: Sigil holder

Qualify yourself for the Trial of the Champion.

- Obtain a sigil. The closest sigil to you is: [Sigil of the Hunger].

Reward: Become a god’s champion. Extreme experience.

“I’m coming for you, sigil,” she whispered.

She was going to get that thing no matter what it took. Any thoughts of human decency she’d had before the integration were gone. After all, the world had ended, anarchy reigned, and goddamn alien races had invaded earth.

What better purpose was there in life than to level the fuck up?