[System Decay] Chapter 52: Socialization (Patreon)

With it becoming increasingly clear that they were going to be waiting for a while for the second challenge to appear, Will took some time to explore the waiting area, keeping an eye on Caiyeri and Liam. The elf didn’t seem to care much for Will’s new… friend? Friend worked, but “temporary ally” was probably better given the circumstances.

He was worried that Liam could turn out to be another Azure-like situation, but the other man seemed to be less likely to draw on Caiyeri for the time being. The peace they’d reached was uneasy, but Caiyeri didn’t seem to hate him. She was naturally snarky, though, and “neutral” for her easily came off as dislike.

That said, it looked like their tenuous alliance could hold for the time being. Importantly, Caiyeri didn’t give a damn that Liam had the Death element, which put her in a very rare set of people.

Liam couldn’t hide his Death element thanks to his lacking ability in aura control, though Will could. Meanwhile, although Caiyeri could mask her abilities and elements easily, her physical characteristics were more obviously non-human, and not all of the blood had gone away with her armor. Some of the people who’d already made it in had laid witness to her killing a group of humans without context, and he doubted that they would care for an explanation from her.

That left Will, who had yet to piss off anyone here and had sufficient aura control to hide what he could do.

He sighed. Dealing with people had never been his strongest suit, but it had come down to him again and again.

“Shouldn’t the world ending change that?” he muttered under his breath.

Will walked around, taking a look at the facilities and the people that had populated it.

Now that there were no longer new people coming in, the tension in the room had broken somewhat. Users were milling about, having conversations, and looking for amenities. The lavish waiting room for the top 100 had similar furnishings as a safe zone, including a shop that offered basic magical weapons, potions, and… monster cores? Will wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.

To his surprise, he found that he wasn’t the only one with decent aura control in the area. Nobody else even came close to his level of control, but there were a handful that were at least making an attempt at holding their auras closer to themselves.

Will was one of the scant few that actually had an aura power, though he noted that those who did possess one tended to be more effective at understanding that the auras even existed. It wasn’t enough to hide their power from him—quite the opposite. They drew his attention instead.

Liam was not one of them, unfortunately. Will noted that the people he recognized from the leaderboards tended to have a better grasp of their auras on average.

Caiyeri: Your cycle has pathetic aura control.

Will: So you noticed, too. In our defense, our planet had no magic before the cycle started.

Caiyeri: Truly? That sounds incorrect. I’m sure it existed, and you simply failed to recognize it.

Will: I’d believe that when I see it, and maybe not even then.

Caiyeri: Go on and get speaking to people. You should at least have a passing understanding of what the strongest of your crop can do. Even if you cannot make an ally of them, you should either avoid making enemies or learn how to defeat them.

Will: I’m pretty sure I could kill anyone here. I doubt most people have a counter to corruption.

Caiyeri: Pride before the fall, human. Now go.

Will sighed. That was a fair point. Though he had access to the strongest affliction known to him, it was very possible for him to lose a fight before he managed to land a level. Even if he managed to corrupt someone, it was very possible that he would die before they did, and whether or not his target lived after that didn’t matter to him very much.

So, allies. At first, Will had entertained the thought that all humans still on Earth should be working together, and that most people would think the same, but it had taken all of five minutes back from the tutorial to understand that even with the world so changed, human nature remained the same. He was going to have to treat this with care, knowing that every interaction could potentially lead to someone as petty as Dylan trying to kill him during the trial.

The first person he tried to approach was Lu Jie, the global number one. That man had been number one since the first time Will had seen the leaderboard after stepping out of the tutorial, and he wasn’t trying to hide it at all. His aura control wasn’t sloppy, but the Chinese man was making no effort to hide the fact that he was silver.

“Holy shit, the core usage on this guy,” Will muttered. 

From a cursory glance, he could already tell that the Portal Mage was already Silver 2. Will could already feel that advancing through silver was going to be much more of a pain than bronze and unformed, and yet Lu Jie had gotten a head start after only one day of being silver. He wondered if the top-ranker had an organization feeding him monster cores or something given how quick he was advancing.

The entourage around Lu Jie certainly suggested that. There were four or five others with him, speaking quietly with each other. Though their armor was disparate, they all had the same icon emblazoned on their outerwear somewhere.

They were speaking Chinese, Will realized. He’d taken lessons for several years as a child, and he still spoke it at home—or, well, he had, right up until the world ended. Home didn’t exist anymore.

The result of that practice was that Omnilingual didn’t actually translate everything the Chinese group was saying, so Will heard them as an odd English-Mandarin pidgin that wouldn’t have been out of place when his parents were calling their friends in New York.

“Hello,” Will tried.

“Leave,” an entourage member clad entirely in silver-rank plate said in Mandarin. “Lu Jie is not open to solicitations. Especially not from a bronze like you.”

Will stared flatly at the guy who’d spoken and replied in English, not able to find the words in what was supposedly his native language. “You are literally bronze, my man. You can wear all the silver gear you’d like, but you can’t hide that.”

“You dare?” the entourage member replied. “You offend the lord with your presence, you insolent—“

“Silence, brother,” Lu Jie said. His voice was surprisingly gravelly. His armor hid his face; the other man’s body looked young, but he sounded as if he was in the waning years of his life. “Newcomer. You are stronger than you appear.”

“You think so?” Will challenged. He didn’t know how good Lu Jie’s aura senses were, but the top-ranker was a core user, and Will couldn’t sense Lu Jie’s aura trying to feel out his. “What skill makes you say that?”

“You think I need a skill to tell a man’s confidence?” The entourage moved aside as Lu Jie stepped forward, amusement clear in his voice. “You could kill every one of these good men and women without breaking a sweat. At least, so you believe, or you would not be standing here, not a trace of fear in you.”

Will wasn’t so overconfident as to say he could stomp every person here, but only one of them was silver—the rest were using a ton of gear that was above their rank, but they were all just at the upper end of bronze. None of it would be capable of stopping silver-rank corruption, so in a pinch… yeah, he could handle them.

“Look at you,” Lu Jie chuckled, shaking his head. “Any sane man would back down when faced with that threat, yet you are considering it nonetheless.”

Is that phrasing correct? How 1 to 1 is Omnilingual’s translate? Will pushed that thought aside, acknowledging the elder with a shrug. “You should keep better company.”

Lu Jie laughed, full-throated, silencing his companions before they could speak. “You are an interesting man, Mister…”

Will was hiding his skills, class, and rank, but his name must have still been on his character sheet somewhere.

Whatever. If this was some respect play, he genuinely could not give less of a shit. “Will is fine. You’re an interesting man yourself, Jie. Number one since the tutorial, hmm?”

The top-ranker waved it aside as if being the world’s most powerful person was about as important as having half-off coupons to the local supermarket. “Numbers. So deceiving.”

“That they are,” Will agreed. “I suppose we’ll see how deceiving they are when we’re actually up against each other.”

“So we will,” Jie agreed amicably. “Should you survive past the initial culling, I may have an offer for you.”

“I look forward to hearing it,” Will said, hiding the fact that he had no idea where that non sequitur had come from.

He could recognize a dismissal as such, though, and counted this as a social victory, if not a major one. The top-ranker must have been turning people away, judging by the way half the room seemed to try to sneak a glance at him before he wandered off towards his next target.

Natalie Blurr was still alone. If Will remembered correctly, she was a Chaos Summoner. Right now, she sat at a healthy number four on the rankings. She was Silver 1, and her aura control was better than damn near everyone else’s. Unlike Lu Jie, she was alone, fiddling with a knife and looking at the floor.

“I’m going to tell you the same thing I said to the last set of pricks who wanted to team up with me,” she said in a harsh London accent, not bothering to look at Will. “Fuck off. If you’re here to scope out what you can use against me, double fuck off.”

“Charmer, aren’t you?” Will said. “You’d like my friend Caiyeri. Or you’d kill each other. Either way, I think it’d be really funny to put the two of you in a room and see what happens.”

“Are you mocking me?” she asked like she was asking about the weather, raising her head to look at him. Her expression sent a chill down Will’s spine. If looks could kill…

“No,” Will said sincerely. “Just looking for good people.”

Natalie snorted. “In here? You’d have better luck looking for a needle in a stack of haystacks. If you can find someone here who’s not a murderer, I will gift you a hundred quid.”

“Pound’s not worth much now,” Will noted.

“Silver, then. I can afford that.”

“I assume you’re not going to count yourself amongst the good people in that list?”

“Of course not. I have so much blood on my hands that I’m not sure it’ll ever wash off. What are you trying to rope me into?”

”Not trying to rope anyone into anything,” Will said. “I’m not trying to find weaknesses, either. Everyone is weak to me, Blurr.”

She looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “Wow. You actually believe that.”

“Of course I do,” Will said. “I’ve got enough blood on my hands to know I don’t want to add more if I can avoid it, and a side effect of that is knowing exactly what I’m capable of. I want to get an idea of who’s here with me. Win or lose, I’d like to know what the people who’ll run our world are like.”

At that, the tall, gangly woman shifted uncomfortably, inventorying her knife.  “You don’t want people like us running the world, William.”

“Will is fine,” Will said. “And as much as I agree with you, do you think the others at our level will?”

“Our, you say, but you’re not on the leaderboard, are you?”

“Nope. You don’t need to believe me, Blurr, but I do want to help keep this world from devolving into total chaos.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said. “You’ve got some balls on you, William, but I told you what I want you to do already, and I’m not fond of repeating myself.”

“Sure thing,” Will said, backing off. “See you in the next challenge.”

Caiyeri: She seems nice.

Will: I would bet she’ll get in our way less than Lu Jie.

Caiyeri: The Portal Mage? Your conversation with him seemed to go well.

Will: Yeah, which worries me. Blurr was honest. If the old man is willing to entertain a random “bronze” coming up to him and talking shit to his friends, I bet he’s got an agenda going.

Caiyeri: Point.

The last of the leaderboard present were the Fang siblings, Haoyu and Hua. They were third and fifth on the global leaderboard, respectively, both sitting at a respectable Silver 1. Their classes were still labeled as Warrior on the leaderboard.

Unlike the others, they were amicable from the get-go. They’d been chatting with various people as they came and went. Will found them lightly bickering with each other at the store. Both of them were Chinese as well, which Will supposed made some degree of sense. That had been one of the most populous countries before the fall, so it was statistically likely that there’d be a bunch of strong ones from the nation.

“G’day!” Haoyu said in perfect, Australian-accented English, brushing his shoulder-length hair back. “Looking to talk? I’m Haoyu. This is my little sister, Hua.”

“We immigrated when we were three,” Hua said with the same accent, pre-empting Will’s question. “We get the question a lot.”

“You two seem pretty energetic,” Will said. Young, too. Haoyu was barely his age, if that, and Hua could have been in high school. “You’ve got a lot of power.”

“You do too,” Hua said, peering at him curiously. “Weird. Are you doing something with your aura?”

“You know about auras?” Will asked, surprised.

“We know a lot about a lot of things,” Haoyu said. “Who’s asking?”

“Nobody,” Will said. “Just haven’t seen many people talk about it. What are you here to buy?”

“Monster cores,” Hua chirped. “You can’t get silver ones easily outside, and these are super cheap.”

“You’re using them to advance?” Will asked.

“Partially,” Haoyu said. “Cores cap you out when you get to gold, did you know that?”

Will nodded.

“We’re building a strong foundation to re-establish gold the pure training way as soon as possible once we hit the max we can get,” Haoyu explained. “But in the meantime, we need to get strong fast. The monster surges aren’t gonna wait for us to level up slowly.”

“Plus, they’re great for items, and our sponsor gives us lots to use it on!” Hua added. She frowned. “Not as much recently, though maybe that’s because they want us to just grab some loot of our own.”

“How does that work, by the way?” Will asked. “Do you have a sigil and a sponsor both? What’s up with that?”

“Yeah,” Haoyu said. “The sigil gives us direct power, but our sponsor gives us rewards just for existing or for meeting certain objectives. I think they’re invested in us because people are watching us since we’re on the leaderboard? Also, if we make it off this planet—and man isn’t that a crazy sentence to say—they’ll leverage us.”

“Huh,” Will said. “That was simpler than I thought it would be.”

“A lot of things are, once you get past all the intentional obfuscation and bullshit.” Haoyu shrugged. “A bunch of people here seem to like the whole mystery, not sharing thing. We had our fair share of that before the end, and we’re not going to repeat that now.”

“Fair enough.” As one of the people not sharing all the details about his powers, Will was pretty sure he agreed with Haoyu in concept, but in practice, maybe a little less so. “Hold on, you said you use monster cores on your loot?”

“Of course,” Hua divulged. “Growth items can take monster cores, didn’t you know?”

“No,” Will said. “No, I didn’t.”

“Oooh boy,” Hua said. “Sounds like someone has some loot he can upgrade.”

“You bet your ass I do,” Will said, grinning. 

He had so many monster cores. Though he’d handed off more than half of the ones in his inventory to the members of Survivor Hill that were choosing just to upgrade themselves with their cores, Will had simply slaughtered so many monsters that he had several stacks of them taking up space in his inventory.

“Oh, this is going to be fun.”