[System Decay] Chapter 49: Entry (Patreon)

Advancing to silver rank…

[Power] advanced from Bronze 8 to Silver 0.

[Speed] advanced from Bronze 9 to Silver 1.

[Affinity] advanced from Bronze 7 to Silver 0.

[Soul] advanced from Silver 2 to Silver 3.

[Resistance] advanced from Bronze 8 to Silver 1.

[Perception] advanced from Bronze 6 to Bronze 10.

All bronze-rank skills have increased to low silver.

Purging impurities. Initiating bodily conversion.

As system messages flashed past his vision, Will tried to get a grasp on his surroundings. He was traveling through some kind of spatial magic, he was pretty sure. The space around him was nonsensical and felt artificial in a similar way to the Hunger’s dream space. Will’s Space attribute kept him from losing track of his surroundings as he tumbled through space, though unfortunately he couldn’t glean much of value from the area around him.

The past couple of weeks had been an insane ride. From being just another nobody working on a computer science degree to being thrown into an extreme-difficulty tutorial as the world ended, coming out of it alive with an elf companion and dangerous, forbidden corruption powers, to outclassing people twice his level through a mixture of great skill usage and luck—not to mention the god whose torture he’d had to endure in order to keep his own mind driving his body.

It barely felt real even to him, and yet here he was, on his way to the trial of the champion. Details about the event had been sparse, but he knew what hung in the balance. While Will wouldn’t say he’d repaired his relationship with the Hunger, not exactly, the god was depending on him to do well and had given him a pretty sizable boost in terms of power.

This was going to be a challenge. Although Will was now in the top ten on the global leaderboard, it wasn’t only the human Users of his cycle that were coming to the tournament. He knew that there would be silver-rank elves here too, and most worryingly, the gold-rank devouring gestalt, the kaiju he’d forcibly entered into the tournament at the last second. Will didn’t regret that choice, knowing he’d saved the lives of everyone in Survivor Hill back on Earth, but it was going to make winning this that much harder.

This transportation was going a bit longer than he would’ve liked. He wondered if this was unique to him because of the conversation he’d had with the Hunger, but he put those worries away. There was no way his god was the only one who’d had a one-on-one conversations with its sigil-holder, and besides, it was pretty evident that he was being transported elsewhere for the purposes of the trials.

That said, it irked him that while the system could still give him notifications, he couldn’t open his stat menu up while he was stuck in this transportation.

Some amount of time passed. Will amused himself by imagining scenarios that would never happen—except it was entirely possible that they would, now that the system had arrived on Earth. That was a trip, wasn’t it? With his magic abilities, he was now capable of doing nearly anything.

Well. That was an exaggeration. With a lot of people using their magic together, brilliant things were possible. Alone, Will’s corruption/death/space based Reaper class was just very good at killing things.

He sighed. This wait was getting a bit boring. Including the conversation with the Hunger, how long had it been? Five minutes? Ten?

“I just want to see what I got for silver rank, man,” he sighed. His initial excitement had been tempered by irritation, but there was a lot of excitement to go around.

A deep, tearing crack resonated through the empty space, drawing Will’s attention immediately. It was the first sound that he’d heard this entire time, and it was deafening. The only point of reference Will could accurately compare it to was the Hunger. The sound tore through him, overwhelmed him—and then a part of the darkness cracked away into staticky nothingness.

Warning: An external entity has interfered with the transportation process. Please do not worry. There is nothing you can do to change the situation. An emergency patch has been deployed.

The world distorted, the system screens falling away, and then, abruptly, Will was falling.

#

For about three feet, that is. His Resistance attribute kept him from face-planting on what proved to be remarkably hot desert rock.

[Resistance] 

- Bound to [Balance]: You recover from disorienting effects at a much faster pace. You always land on your feet.

“What the hell was all that?” Will asked himself, taking stock of the situation around him. “Do tournaments always start with reality breaking?”

There were other forces at play here, ones greater than he could currently deal with—so Will decided to leave that concern to the system. It hadn’t been lying when it had said there was nothing he could do. While Will had been able to access his powers, he didn’t have any way to seal massive, gaping holes in reality.

Immediate concerns, as always—Will had just been dropped into an unfamiliar environment, plus his system was exploding with new messages. It was kind of sad that this wasn’t even in the top five worst introductions to a place he’d had by now.

It looked like he was in the Mojave Desert, but opening the map told Will that he wasn’t even on Earth anymore. The minimap told him his current location was just “The Trial of the Champion.” He wasn’t sure why he’d been expecting anything else.

Besides the map, the other major indicators that this wasn’t Earth—at least, not the one he knew—were the swirling portals in the sky.

With Will’s aura sense, he could tell that each of the enormous space magic apertures emanated magic that was far beyond his capability to use, even with his fresh silver rank ascension.

Speaking of which, his senses definitely felt sharper than they had before. Everything felt more vivid, as if he’d gone from a shitty 144p stream with dollar store earbuds to an 8K flatscreen with a five-figure surround sound setup. The area around him shone with colors, which he quickly wasn’t because of any inherent property of the desert he was in but instead the upgrades he’d gotten from silver rank. It couldn’t just be his Perception stat, either—the jump from unformed to bronze hadn’t been nearly this steep.

“Figure the powers out after you know the situation,” he chided himself. “Can’t get yourself killed looking at system notifications.”

Will then promptly looked at a system notification. In his defense, this one was immediately pertinent to his situation.

Welcome to the Trial of the Champion.

Though only successful cycles receive the benefit of having this tournament regularly, the Trial of the Champion is held at least once per cycle. Congratulations, User [William Li-Brown]. You are one of a mere [2,938] competitors amongst hundreds of millions to be granted the opportunity to do battle amongst the best.

The tournament is simple, though individual rounds may not be. You will be assigned a series of challenges ranging from treasure hunting to group battles to the most common, one versus one battles, each of which will include opportunities for progression and elimination.

If you fail two main challenges, you will be eliminated. If you die, you will be eliminated.

If you are eliminated in the first 50% of participants, you will lose your sigil. If you are eliminated in the first 75% of participants, your sigil will be damaged. From there onwards, you will receive increasingly valuable rewards based on your ranking.

Assuming you don’t die, of course. Death tends to have a nasty effect on your ability to collect on your prizes.

Main Challenge #0: Sentience Check

Due to some moderate complications, you have been dropped into a high-chaos zone. Ascend from your region to the portals above to enter the tournament proper.

Difficulty: High bronze

- Enter a portal within the next 12 hours. [0/1]

Reward: 100 bronze credits. Full refresh of health, mana, and stamina.

Penalty for Failure: Automatic elimination.

“Wow,” Will muttered. "First you say it’s a DQ after two failures, then you tell me that this quest is an automatic elim? Fucked up.”

That was within expectations, though. This didn’t look like it was even supposed to be a normal part of the challenge. Will suspected that the reality-destroying static he’d seen earlier had something to do with this, and what the system had provided was the best it could manage given the circumstances.

Okay. Next was looking at the environment.

“No immediate threats,” Will muttered. “Lots of people, though.”

There had to be at least a hundred people within a square mile of him. Not all of them had dropped as cleanly as he had. Even as he watched, some people were still picking themselves up from where they’d fallen. Will’s eyesight was sharp enough now that he could make out details of people even at distances where he should’ve struggled to tell that they were human. Some people had clearly been asleep when they’d been sent here, judging from the way they blearily looked around.

Will hoped for their sakes that they’d be able to pull their act together quickly.

While there weren’t immediate threats, Will could see what he was going to have to summit in order to get to the portals.

Thin, glimmering crystal trees with ethereal branches jutted out from the ground at regular intervals, each of them starting between twenty and a hundred feet at the base and tapering off to a point where the portals began, the lowest of which had to be half a mile up in the sky. The tallest ones were partially occluded by clouds, so Will couldn’t get a perfect estimation on their height, but he guessed they topped out at about twice that.

The branches looked sturdy enough to support people on them, but it wasn’t just people on them.

Will groaned. “Why is it always spiders?”

They were teeming with all sorts of flora and fauna, not just spiders, but Will’s sharp eyes picked out the crystalline spiders crawling all over the branches first.

He sighed. “Nothing to be done about it, I guess.”

There were a few monsters crawling on the ground, but none of them were really within range of him. Nothing that concerned him right now—at least, not more than his skill upgrades.

All around Will, people started to gain their bearings, and a few were starting to band together, drawing on preexisting alliances or forming new ones.

Will tried to access his chat feature only to find that Caiyeri was listed as out of range once again. She must have been in a different starting zone of this type. He hoped that was the case, at least. Though he’d barely known her for a few weeks, he wasn’t sure he could stomach the alternative.

“Okay,” he said, centering himself. “Find skills, then find new friends. Simple.”

Will opened his stat sheet. It had been a hot moment since he’d viewed the whole thing.

Name: William Li-Brown

Level: Silver 0

Race: Human

Class: Reaper

Titles: [First Blood], [Silver Forerunner] (expended), [User Killer]

Attributes:

[Power]: Silver 0

[Speed]: Silver 1

[Affinity]: Silver 0 (Gold 0)

[Soul]: Silver 3

[Resistance]: Silver 1

[Perception]: Bronze 10

Unused Points: 0

Universal Abilities

- Omnilingual

- System User

- Identify

- Marked for Death

Skills

[Power]: Storm

- Wind Walker (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Thunder Wraith’s Grasp (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- 

[Speed]: Space (secondary)

- Escape Artist (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Weapons Free (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Wraith Cloak (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- 

[Affinity]: Corruption (primary)

- Corruption Resistance (Silver, middle)

- Chaos Transfer (Silver, low)

- Destructive Synthesis (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Attune Corrupted Item (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Decaying Touch (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- 

[Soul]: Death (secondary)

- Mark for Death (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Ghostflame (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- The Bell Tolls (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- 

[Resistance]: Balance

- Equilibrium Mantle (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Favored Element (Bronze) -> (Silver)

-

[Perception]: Time

- Time in a Bottle (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Pages of the Past (Bronze) -> (Silver)

-

[Sigil]: The Hunger

- Hunger Aura (Bronze) -> (Silver)

- Hunger Phantasm (Bronze) -> (Silver)

“Holy shit, I leveled a lot of skills,” Will said.

He’d already been on the highest end of bronze, but he appreciated the push the Hunger had given him a lot more now. Training even one skill up to silver would take ages, and it was only after a ton of focused training that he’d managed to get Chaos Transfer over the barrier.

Interestingly enough, reaching silver seemed to have expanded the capabilities of his system as well as his own. The skills that had already reached silver had an additional tag explaining which stage of progression they were at, which, while not life-changing, was a pretty big help. Rather than have to intuit where in the development of the rank his skills were at, the system could guide him.

Will wanted to sit down and scroll through the exhaustive list of his skills to find every last change and optimization, but everyone around him was frantically trying to get set up for the crystal trees, and the level of commotion was aggravating the monsters above.

Everyone here was a sigil-holder or someone who’d been good enough at what they did to receive a silver-tier or higher lootbox, so there was at least some basic level of competence amongst the groups. The issue was that while the individual groups might have been able to effectively move stealthily and deal with the monsters effectively, the group of Users here as a whole weren’t coordinated at all.

Will looked up at the trees, clicking his tongue. The bottom feeders were starting to crawl down as two hundred boots on the ground kicked up desert sand and created enough noise to tell any hungry monster competing for space in the crystal trees that new prey was here.

The nearest tree was half a hundred feet from Will, and the first of the crystalline spiders were already starting to clamber down.

“Of fucking course it’s the spiders,” he complained. “Come on.”

A tall, built man clad in full black plate swiveled his head towards Will at the sound of his complaint. He’d been on the way to the same tree that Will was targeting right now.

“G’day!” the armored man shouted at him. “Name’s Liam. Want to smoke some monsters?”

Will assessed the man. Bronze 10. He was probably in the top 100 Users worldwide, which almost certainly meant he was a core user.

He hadn’t dealt with any core users yet—at least, none that were of comparable strength as him. Seeing what an actual competent one could do would help ground his understanding of what the other people on the leaderboard were like.

More importantly, Will had wanted to test his upgraded skills out.

“Got a party?” Will asked, jogging towards the man unhurriedly. The spiders were still finding their footing, and they were less charging towards the nearest living beings and more assessing what they could hunt.

“Lost to another zone, I’m afraid,” Liam said. “You seem like a nice fellow, mate. What do you say? These spiders are pretty up there in levels, but hey—reminds me of home.”

“Well, shit,” Will said with a shrug. He grinned. “Let’s go ruin a monster’s day.”

__

Author's note: Please forgive the bit of recap. This is going to be chapter 1 in book 2, and readers on Amazon often forget what's happened in the months between books.