[System Decay] Chapter 42: The Calm Between the Storms (isn't actually that calm) (Patreon)

“You’re not focusing,” Caiyeri said. “I thought it would be easier for you to empty your mind.”

“Contrary to popular expectation, I do actually have a functioning brain,” Will replied. “Meditation’s never really worked for me. There’s always too much to do, too much to worry about.”

“There is.” Caiyeri opened her eyes, her aura noticeably roiling just a bit before she calmed it again. “That’s just a symptom of life. I have always had much to be concerned about. Being unaffected is an art in its own, and it’s something that you’ll have to develop. Blank out the outside world. Let yourself become one with your magic. You don’t need to understand what’s within your inner world, but you do need to be able to feel it. Do you know any breathing exercises?”

“A couple,” Will said, inhaling deeply. He knew how to hold a breath and slowly exhale to center himself, but it wasn’t perfect. It could help still his thoughts, but it couldn’t get him into the state of total blankness that Caiyeri said he needed.

“Interesting,” Caiyeri said. “A basic one, but somewhat effective.”

“If this is basic,” Will said, letting out another breath, “why don’t you show me a technique that works for you?”

“The more advanced ones take years of training,” Caiyeri said. “They aren’t something that you can pick up right away.”

“Show me whatever you think works, then,” Will said.

“Picture your heart as a feather,” Caiyeri ordered. “As you breathe out, imagine that feather floating up, and as you inhale, imagine it dragging closer to you.

Will visualized the organ beat-beat-beating in his chest, translating the slow thumping of his heart to the cyclic motion of a floating golden feather from no earthly bird. He didn’t know why that was the image that he conjured in his mind, but it felt right.

“In. Out. Keep that image in your head. Do not let it slip.”

In accordance with Caiyeri’s instructions, Will laser-focused on the mental framework.

After half an hour of this, with Caiyeri making sure he didn’t slip up for even a moment, Will’s entire world was nothing more than darkness empty but for a feather, rising and falling.

“Now,” Caiyeri said, once she was sure that his meditation cycle had gotten that basic step down, “every time the feather falls, widen your senses. Feel the way it spreads through your body and soul.”

Will wanted to get her back with a jab, but she was being uncharacteristically serious right now, so he met her where she was, allowing himself to sink into the darkness and operate off his senses alone.

Deep within, he felt a flicker. For just a moment, his awareness expanded, the faintest trace of magic threading itself through his perception and spreading through his nervous system.

Then, all at once, it was lost.

“Good,” Caiyeri said, snapping him out of the trancelike state. “Now do it again.”

#

Penelope Two was alone.

She’d entered the dungeon with Scheiren, but when the great flood had hit them while they were trying to rejoin Rowan’s strike force, they’d been separated, thrown down different tunnels.

Penelope was not at home at all in the water. It was dark here, true, which ensured that a certain subset of her powers was online, but she was far more at home within an urban setting or dense jungle. She was a bird of prey, and no bird belonged underwater.

All she needed to do was make it to the surface. It was growing increasingly obvious that this was not a mission she was suited for. Better to retreat from the unwinnable fight today and live to see victory tomorrow than to overcommit and lose everything.

She notified Rowan directly, then started fleeing as gracefully as she could.

Penelope realized that she’d entered the vicinity of the prey they were hunting when the dread hit. The tell-tale aura of a sigil-holder radiated the sensation of a being of power, arrogance, and divinity.

Her senses were fine-tuned enough to give her a general direction of where the aura was coming from. It was accompanied by at least one bronze-rank aura and the hints of what Penelope knew would be two silver-ranks.

The bronze-rank human was separated from the traitors. Foolishness.

Even if this was not her element, she was still silver. The human would be experiencing the same slowdown. This was her opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of retreat.

Determined to bring her clan the head of the weak sigil-holder, Penelope set course towards him.

Then, abruptly, his aura vanished.

Penelope recoiled in shock. He was still here—the sigil’s oppressive presence made that more than clear enough.

Humans aren’t supposed to have this level of control, she thought. Even if the traitors had been training him, he shouldn’t have been able to hide himself from her second sight so effectively. Not this quickly.

The aura reappeared for an instant, the human’s control over it slipping, and Penelope whirled around as fast as she could in the water.

Sound propagated much less effectively underwater than it did on land. She never heard the arrow release, especially given the quiet enchantment Will’s stealth bow gave it.

Of course, the arrow couldn’t hit lethal speeds either, but Penelope didn’t even know what was coming until a dark figure flashed into existence behind her.

He couldn’t hide the magic from his teleport, but her heart leapt in fear. Nobody should have been able to get so close to her. How had he hidden himself so well?

Training kicked in over instinct. She reinforced her body with the Iron Skin skill. At silver, it was effective enough that an attacker would be hard-pressed to even make her bleed with a guillotine.

But instead of a weapon, all that grazed her neck was a hand.

Penelope whirled as fast as she could, striking it away and pivoting into a thrust with a conjured dagger, but the human was already drifting away.

A familiar pain scorched her skin, ruining it wherever it touched. Corruption.

The Abyss had prepared her for this, though, and her amulet would—

From over a hundred meters away, a formerly Abyss-aligned elf carefully aimed a revolver and fired, rigging the dice to pick a fast, piercing bullet.

The amulet shattered, taking Penelope’s surety with it.

You have come into contact with [William Li-Brown].

You have received a message from [William Li-Brown].

Even in the oppressive quiet of the drowned dungeon, Penelope heard the bell ring. She felt her body freeze, necrosis splintering through her veins.

Dread crept through her. It wasn’t only the sigil indicating it—she had grown used to signs of the Hunger.

Now, though, there was an entirely different element to it. The human, a full rank lower than Penelope, looked at her with calm, cold eyes. The gaze of a predator, filled with the certainty that he was going to see her dead.

Will: Tag. You’re it.

He vanished.

#

Level up!

[Perception] advanced to Bronze 3!

“Finally,” Will said, squeezing out the water from his official Lake Monroe souvenir T-shirt. “I’ve been waiting on this level for ages. Now I can finally take Soul to peak bronze.”

“You realize that the average elf takes years to make it through bronze,” Caiyeri said.

“Sounds like the average elf is slow as shit,” Will replied. “If it takes you guys years to make it through this rank, no wonder your planet didn’t pass the threshold.”

“That—is honestly fair,” Caiyeri said. “Though our foundations are stronger than most.”

“Penelope’s foundations didn’t seem that strong,” Will said.

Caiyeri shrugged. “They were an earlier batch than us. The training methods werne’t up to par.”

The elf had reacted to him quickly and had managed to stab him once or twice, but it had been non-lethal and easily mendable through the Soul Link aspect of Mark for Death. Will had kited her around a bit using Weapons Free. It looked like Penelope had a similar build to him, an ambush fighter who wasn’t so great after the initial burst of damage was complete but could ramp up into a dangerous endgame fighter.

That is, when she was in the right environment. Her skills reminded Will of the ranger class from Dungeons and Dragons. Highly specialized, pretty strong in their favored terrain, and nearly useless without.

Underwater, she was a sitting duck. Taking inspiration from the cave goblins, Will had teleported between the positions of three arrows he’d shot into crevices in the tunnels, alternating the amount of aura control he used.

It had been a grim sight, watching Penelope start to panic as she realized that not only could she not target him, but his afflictions were of the most dangerous type. The stacking chaos and necrotic damage from corruption and wither, respectively, had proven to be too much. Now, Penelope was a decaying, necrotized chunk of lifeless flesh aimlessly drifting through the tunnels.

“If we can isolate more of these fights, we can probably take out the entire abyssal contingent,” Will commented. “Though I have to say, everyone using different gimmicks makes it really hard to use my skills to their full potential.”

Favored Element was the lowest of his skills now. While everything else had its progression around mid-bronze, that one was still at the bottom of it. He’d already cast it for the day, picking water as his favored element in case they happened upon another prayer, but it hadn’t come into play against Penelope.

“I would prefer not to hunt all of them,” Caiyeri said. “They’re not mine, but we are the same people.”

“Azure doesn’t seem to mind,” Will commented.

He was out of the safe zone for the time being, looking to loot the area around them, but he’d been the first to celebrate taking Penelope down.

“Just because one iteration of one of us is a sociopath doesn’t mean the rest are,” Caiyeri said.

“You sure? I wasn’t the one laughing while torturing innocent goblin children to death.”

“They weren’t innocent, and most of them weren’t children.”

“I notice that you’re not denying the laughing part.”

“Shut up.”

#

After the hectic chaos of the first few hours, the dungeon calmed noticeably. Well, that wasn’t the best way to describe it—in fact, activity from dungeon monsters actually increased after the first bit. The people within, however, started to settle.

Azure could only recast his detection ritual once per day, so they were going off old information, but the cards seemed to all be on the table now. The abyssal elf special forces group two, which Will still maintained was an awful, overly long name, had been thrown to the winds (or, more accurately, the currents), the life elf construct and human were an unknown factor out there somewhere, and Will’s trio was somewhere in between.

They trained both inside the semi-safe zones and out, carving their way through waves of lower-leveled monsters and meditating. Will had found that using Wraith Cloak, he could do a cheap imitation of suppressing his aura; in combination with actually trying to control it, it had worked well enough to deceive Penelope.

At what Will’s internal clock thought was night, they slept in shifts. Will wasn’t sure if he trusted the others enough to do so, but he didn’t really have another choice. They managed to make it through without anyone dead in the morning, at least.

As had been the case for the last while, the Hunger haunted his dreams. There was no conversation, not anymore. Will’s cards were on the table, and the Hunger’s hand couldn’t beat his. All it could do to try to force Will into submission was assail his spirit with raw divine strength.

It was an ordeal, but it was one that Will could use as an opportunity for training. Being a leaf on the wind was easier said than done when the wind was a Category 6 tornado, yet Will persisted, because what other choice did he have?

The knowledge that the Hunger had no other choice buoyed him forward, made his torturous nights worth it.

Days passed through the same routine. They chaanged their lcoations each day, challenging themselves on a variety of monsters and training together afterwards. Twice, they found other isolated members of the abyssal elves. With the same one-two combo of Caiyeri destroying their corruption amulets and Will inflicting them with a bevy of increasingly lethal afflictions, they took both of them down.

They also ran into a full squad once, though that was at a distance and they’d immediately fled afterwards.

As the days passed by, the situation developed further. The life elf construct was steadily growing in power, and though the numbers of the abyssal elves dropped, the rate of decline dropped sharply after the majority of them were able to group up.

After defeating the first water prayer, Azure was easily capable of locating the other two, but they held off on attacking them for the time being. For one, the water prayers now had access to their native element, courtesy of their dead brethren. For another, it was clear that killing or even fighting one created such a massive mana signature that it’d be as good as holding up a neon sign saying WIPE US OUT HERE.

Outside, things seemed to be going well. Will kept in touch with Lev, Allie, and Trevor. Lev gave him twice-daily updates on how things were going on their end. Will didn’t have much to say to them given how similar the structure of his wake-fight-train-repeat days were, but it was interesting knowing what was going on outside.

After reaching bronze, Lev had become de facto leader of the party. He had gone on to take his party to do at least a dungeon a day, which seemed to be a pretty punishing pace for most people, and they had gone on to group up with other low to mid-bronze and unformed parties in the area. 

The safe zones were starting to lose their immunity functionality for reasons unbeknownst to any of them, with results alternating from people taking real damage during spars to being kicked out six hours ahead of the eight-hour time you were supposed to spend in there, so Lev had teamed up with a number of others to pave the beginnings of what was now a settlement of sorts. 

It started small, just operating as a group of bronze-rankers watching each others backs, but over the course of the week, Lev’s updates mentioned more and more people. As of the latest one, it sounded like there were thirty or forty people in a group. They were eschewing the safe zones altogether at this point, relying instead on a handful of their unformed ranks who had magic that could prove to be very, very useful—just not for combat.

Will found himself worrying over whether Lev would have the power to defend it. There was strength in numbers, of course, but time had told him that superior numbers could fold in the face of superior strength and that even stregnth wasn’t a guarantee depending on the factors of the battle.

The elves seemed to be leaving their makeshift community alone for the time being, but there was no telling how long that would last. The life elves had taken humans who’d wandered into their territory already, and who knew how long it would be until they decided that they were running out of biomass and didn’t that little squad of humans look tasty.

That was a concern for after they got out of the dungeon, though. Will gave what advice he could, but even with Caiyeri and Azure giving tips, they were the blind leading the blind. None of them had been around long enough to gather the experience needed to run a budding township.

Will continued checking the leaderboards every now and then. Worldwide, it looked like the top five had stagnated at Bronze 10. There was something about the jump to silver that was stopping them, it seemed. Will hoped that whatever it was, it wouldn’t affect him too badly.

He hit Bronze 9 eight days into being in the dungeon, putting him at 5th on the local leaderboard and 530th worldwide. Will was surprised more people weren’t at his level or higher given the relative ease with which he’d reached it, to the point where he brought it up one day with Lev.

Lev: You can say that, but you realize nobody’s pushing as hard as you, right? The dungeons we clear are solo boss dungeons, and we do them with big squads. At best, we take a squad boss down from time to time. Since you left us, I’ve accumulated maybe… forty monster kills. How many do you have in that time?

Will: 576.

Lev: There you go.

The constant pressure from the Hunger continued to devastate Will at night, but pressure could create diamonds from coal. His Soul attribute was at Silver 2 now, the first of his attributes to break through, and his Resistance was all the way up to Bronze 7 as a result of continued endurance. His aura control was slowly but surely imiproving as well.

The abyssal elves continued to hunt them, but the water produced by the water prayers was so thick with mana that they could largely avoid detection. Azure’s once-daily ritual was strong enough to bypass that, and though the abyssal elves still had Lystri, who was their main pathfinder, just knowing where they were once a day was enough warning for all three of them to escape. The life elf construct was still growing in strength, which was disconcerting—it looked like it was now responsible for the deaths of four or five silver-rank abyss elves, growing each time.

Between the eighth and the ninth day, a system notifiation propagated throughout the dungeon.

- Eliminate the guardians of the temple. [2/3]

> Guardian #1 was eliminated by [William Li-Brown].

> Guardian #2 was eliminated by [Thalia Brooksoul].

The priestess of life. That was new.

She’d been a clan boss the last time Will had seen her, though that had been with the system using his then-weaker party as a baseline. Even now, he didn’t want to trifle with her.

Roused out of their sleep, the three members of Will’s party spent a frantic few minutes discussing what to do next before another notification appeared.

- Eliminate the guardians of the temple. [3/3]

> Guardian #3 was eliminated by [Lily Teneli] and [Devouring Gestalt].

- Access to the Arcadian sigil is now available.

On their minimaps, a bright yellow region displayed where the sigil was.

Azure, Caiyeri, and Will spent about three seconds looking at each other before legging it.

#

Azure had to hide his smile as he swam through the water. The sigil room was exactly where he’d predicted it would be—a strangely protected area where the water didn’t collapse in on the tunnel.

His frequent excursions were going to pay off. Azure was a planner, and every domino was falling just like he’d thought it would.

Everyone within the dungeon had been carefully sticking to themselves, with the abyss elves likely guarding the exits, waiting to ambush whoever tried to leave. Nobody wanted to try their hand at taking down a second water prayer, knowing that the result would be a beacon.

Enter the third party—still aligned with the life elves, but with none of the compunctions that anyone within the dungeon already had. As soon as the second prayer went down, the window of opportunity to kill the third without reprisal had opened, and now there was only one ppart left.

Demolitions Specialist was a trapper class. Knowing his location ahead of time? Having over a week to set up?

Will and Caiyeri were far enough ahead of him that he allowed himself to grin.

The sigil was as good as his.