[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 70: Not All of Us are Idiots (Patreon)

“That’s right,” Nathan said, smiling with obvious relief. “Thank god there’s someone who actually gets my references around here. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this?”

“Not long enough to not threaten me with death, apparently.”

The smile dropped off the gold-rank’s face quickly. “You should have picked better company.”

“How so?” Will asked, stalling for time. He’d spread Sen’s eyes out far in order to keep his eyes on the entire planet, and he needed a few moments to get them back. “Because I have the corruption element? I got this because of where I started, dude. Come on.”

“You seem like a nice enough guy,” Nathan said, sighing deeply. “I hate to kill you.”

“You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die,” Will said, auto-completing the quote. “Fantastic movie.”

“I didn’t care for it.”

“Seriously? It’s got to be top ten most quotable movies. Hell, you’re quoting it.”

“Quotability alone doesn’t make a movie good. I thought the framing story was—you’re stalling for time.” Nathan thrust his hands out to the side, sleek gold-rank armor manifesting itself onto his body in moments. It swirled with stars, making him look like he’d taken the Milky Way and turned it into a clothing design.

Enough of Sen’s eyes were here now that Will could sense mana charging within the futuristic-looking set of armor.

“Activate skill: Turbocharge,” Nathan declared, his magic reaching a peak.

Will used two of his time-related skills in quick succession, thankful that he’d brought his mana back up to full before going after the corruption cultists. Time in a Bottle sped up his perception until he could see the sparks of Space-element mana igniting in the armor, and Pages of the Past detected magical effects in the area.

Except, Will realized, Pages of the Past only actually gave him the information about the skills that he was seeing if they were at or below the rank of the skill, which was silver right now.

Skill: [Pages of the Past]

- Spell (divination).

- Cost: moderate mana.

- Cooldown: 6 seconds.

Silver

Allows you to detect magical effects that were used in your immediate surroundings in the last 24 hours. If the rank of the effect is at or below the rank of this skill, you can also glean insight into what the effect is.

[Traces of the Past] - Also allows you to detect footsteps and read conversations made in the area during the same time window. 

[Lingering Resonance] - You gain insight into the ambient magic of the area. Strong auras that were present in the last 24 hours as well as any active magical wards or traps will also be visible to you.

He could see that the armor was absolutely loaded to the gills with wards, though. There were wards of oxygen breathing, pressure control, force resistance, regeneration, psychic shielding, stealth, magic nullification, and more—all at gold rank.

Someone had put a lot of effort and resources into this armor, and Will did not want to be on the wrong end of whatever Turbocharge did as Nathan surged forward.

In the slowed time, he commanded his hunger phantasm to form weapons.

Nathan was clearly from Earth, but his aura control was so much better than almost everyone else’s here—and it carried the same signatures that the corruption cultists had. The gold-ranker’s strength was such that even with a few dozen of Sen’s eyes, Will couldn’t get a totally accurate bead on him.

Will teleported behind Nathan as he came out of the accelerated state.

Just in the nick of time, too. Nathan’s sudden attack was nearly as fast as Nynn’s scythe-dash had been, nearly blurring faster than Will could track. The gold-rank left an afterimage behind him, carving a deep furrow through the asteroid’s surface and kicking up a surge of lunar dust.

Asteroid dust? It didn’t count as lunar if it wasn’t the moon, right?

He had bigger things to worry about. Nathan turned on a dime, burning off the rest of the mana from his skill.

Will air-dashed away immediately, eager to create as much space between him and Nathan as possible. The gold-ranker, detecting his intentions, immediately thrust a hand out. A wide purple energy beam exploded from Nathan’s open palm, igniting the dark sky with burning radiance. 

Though Will hadn’t been able to tell what the skill actually did, his insight through Sen’s eyes had warned him of the gathering mana. He materialized the hunger phantasm at exactly the moment Nathan fired.

The beam tore through the sigil skill like it was wet tissue, but the momentary delay his materialized phantasm caused in the blast gave him enough time to air-dash out of the way.

“Hey!” Will shouted, using Wraith Cloak to hide himself within the remaining darkness.

That proved to be a mistake, as Nathan used the sound to orient his next shot.

Will cursed, mentally apologizing to Sen as he brought a dozen of the eyes out of time lock, allowing them to tank the blow for him and providing a paper-thin shield for him to reposition behind.

“Holy shit, bro,” Will said again, teleporting immediately this time. “I’m not your guy!”

Nathan was way too fast for him. The raw speed gap between a silver and a gold who wasn’t being pinned down by a former Dread Executor was incredible. It was all Will could do to stay alive. Even being grazed by the after effect of it sent him tumbling high into space, knocking him away from the planet.

Will’s mind should have panicked, but somehow, he was entirely calm. He’d dealt with worse. He’d made enemies of less reasonable beings. More powerful ones.

He sectioned off the bulk of his attention to surviving, while the remaining part went towards shaping the last bit of his plan.

Nathan began to vary his attacks, pulsing out his aura to detect Will where he hid in the shadows.

Will responded in kind, and though his aura was only silver, it had been forged through the most intense of flames. He pushed Nathan back, startling him with the raw power and finesse of an aura that should have been a full rank under him.

It wasn’t going to last forever, of course, but one inroad was enough.

Slowly—which, by Will’s standard, meant about five seconds—Will overwhelmed Nathan’s aura, tearing away the protections near him.

The gold-ranker wanted to take down corruption wielders. Will had an inkling of the actual purpose that had driven the man whose aura was not of this world to Earth, and it wasn’t just him.

He capitalized on his increased aura pressure, forming the phantasm into words in front of Nathan’s eyes as the other man struggled to compensate to suddenly losing half a rank of stamina and magic power.

Will teleported behind Nathan, suppressing the aura closest to his body to avoid revealing himself. At this distance, his fine control over the phantasm would be good enough to quickly create the words. If Nathan reacted poorly, Will could always run again.

At least 20 corruption cultists in area. I’m trying to eliminate them before they ruin the trial. Not on their side.

Eliminate. Eradicate. Execute.

The last words were a creative flair. Will had no idea whether or not Nathan had anything to do with Dread Executors, but the gold-rank… Nynn had called them otherworlders, right? The gold-rank otherworlder had come here because he was trying to kill people who dealt with corruption, and Nynn was here for a similar purpose.

Nathan paused as he saw the text form in front of him, focusing on defensive efforts instead of attacks as he scanned it.

“You’re one of them?” he said, disbelieving.

Will couldn’t tell whether the emphasis on that word had been a “holy shit, my bad,” or a “holy shit, I need to kill you even more now.” He hoped it was the former, but if it was the latter—whatever. He’d committed already.

“No, but I’m here with a guy who was,” Will said, emerging from the shadows behind Nathan. “Let me guess. You’re here because a bunch of assholes opened a portal of some kind from your homeworld… er, not your homeworld, I guess. The world you got sent to. Selethnir, right?”

“That’s the one,” Nathan said darkly. Magic pulsed threateningly at his hands,  “I take it you’ve met them, then.”

“Couple of them, yeah,” Will said. “Didn’t get any good loot off them, but they wanted to hire me. When I said no, they weren’t the most understanding.”

Nathan glanced at him suspiciously. “You’re hiding your aura. You could be lying.”

“You’re also hiding yours,” Will countered, thankful that Nathan wasn’t an utter moron like everyone who insisted on continuing to fight him no matter what. “How about I show you the way to them? Every second we waste here is another second where people could be getting hurt.”

And people were getting hurt. Most of Sen’s eyes had come back to Will, but enough of them were spread out across the asteroid that he could tell that the inbuilt protections that came with the system’s fabrications weren’t holding. He’d been able to knock his dome’s walls down with a usage of silver-rank corruption, proving how insanely strong the element was. 

Though the cultists didn’t have direct ways to corrupt the domes, they had devices of some sort, and the teleportation sequences that were supposed to move people out of the tournament weren’t all working.

“If you decide that I’m still evil, you can try to kill me afterwards,” Will said. “Though I’ll warn you: nobody’s succeeded at that so far.”

“I get that a lot,” Nathan said. Though a sleek Daft Punk-style helmet covered his face, Will got the impression he was smirking. “This could be a trick of some kind.”

Will winced as Sen’s eyes spread further. There had been a dozen more critical injuries during their brief skirmish, which Will was going to refer to that engagement as because “running for his goddamn life” didn’t roll off the tongue quite as well.

“I’ll tell you what’s not a trick,” he said, releasing his aura control. “It’s these cultists. It’s the dying people who we need to keep the world from falling to pieces. Respectfully, you can either watch over me, lend a hand, or get out of my fucking way.”

There was a moment of silence after that.

“I’m going,” Will announced, preparing his weapons preparing his weapons with the runes in his inventory. "If you're going to try to stop me, now is the time, but I don't think you'd like who that would make you allies with."

Nathan cocked his head. “You’re either an extremely convincing liar or telling the truth. Either way, I’m pretty sure I can take you down if I need to.”

“Great. Every good relationship is built off of mutually assured destruction.”

“Oh, there’d be destruction and it’d be assured, but the chances of it being mutual are about as good as Game of Thrones ever getting an ending.”

Will dashed towards the nearest cultist, not wanting to waste another second bantering, but he did take the time to turn back and shout, “How long have you been gone?”

Nathan caught up in an instant, his gold-rank speed and wards compensating for the lack of gravity. “Five years, I think, but the system told me that time might not work the same.”

“Oh,” Will said, drawing his slayer sword as the two of them approached the first dome. It was almost within physical sight, but he through Sen’s eyes, he could see that there were half a dozen cultists activating some kind of equipment that was brimming with corruption.

“Oh, what?” Nathan asked, eyeing the sword.

“You see the TV ending?”

“Not long before I got thrown into my own personal isekai hell. It sucked. Why?”

“Turns out that was the plan for the books all along. Someone datamined the guy’s hard drive or some shit, I don’t remember. Anyway, we have a fight to get to.”

To Will’s amusement, that factoid seemed to stunlock Nathan a lot harder than any revelation about Will’s nature had.

On that note, he dove straight into combat.

#

Nynn: I see that you have joined the combat.

Will: I’m a bit busy. Do you mind?

Nynn: Seeing as you have no issue messaging me while I’m mid-combat, I’m sure you can handle the same.

Nynn: There are wounded. Take care of your current location and join me.

Will: Wounded? Can’t you heal them with potions?

Nynn: I can’t heal corruption.

Will: Shit. Alright. I’ll let you know when I’m done.

Nynn: Don’t bother. I can see.

Nathan and Will hadn’t worked together before, but they proved to be a devastating duo. Though Will couldn’t inflict corruption on any of the gold-rank cultists, all of whom had items or skills to resist it, he could dash in and out of the combat, using his superior perception through his familiar and his quick, low-cooldown teleports with Weapons Free and the hunger phantasm.

It also meant that he could tell when Nathan started to bombard the location from orbit, doing his best Iron Man impression as he rained laser beams that used spatial magic to circumvent armor and defenses entirely.

He played more of a support role this combat, just like he had with Nynn. Instead of his powerful corruption, he tagged all of the cultists with a Mark for Death, increasing the efficacy of Nathan’s overpowered attacks, then built up stacks of the charged condition on all of them, each strike of his slayer sword transported to the vulnerable blind spots of the cultist’s own weapons.

Skill: [Weapons Free]

- Spell (movement, teleportation).

- Cost: high mana (reduced to moderate mana).

- Cooldown: 12 seconds (6 seconds).

Silver

Teleport any weapon within a 120 foot radius to your hands (if you can carry it) or your inventory (if you cannot). If a target is holding the weapon, they can attempt to prevent this spell from succeeding.

You can also teleport to any weapon within a 60 foot radius.

Silver-rank addition: The previous range of this skill has been doubled.

[Warp Strike] (silver): When making an attack, you can use this skill to make your attack originate from any weapon within a 30 foot radius.

Lightning coursed across the cultists, the charged condition igniting to increase the amount of damage electricity did to them.

Harassment was the name of the game as he steadily whittled them down with stealth attacks. Will stayed out of sight, using his precise aura control to cloak his presence alongside Wraith Cloak, which he could use to walk through walls when necessary.

Eventually, Nathan landed a hefty direct hit on one of the corruption cultists when she abandoned her defenses in a frustrated all-out attack against Will, who’d been focusing primarily on her after managing to trigger a silver-rank poison thanks to a Destructive Synthesis consuming a handful of bronze poison runes to temporarily enhance the slayer sword.

Despite her gold-rank attributes, the laser carved a hole the size of a fist through her chest, and Will wasted no time in hitting her with a one-two combo.

The phantasm overwhelmed her, dark shadows afflicting the wounded cultist with conditions that exacerbated the lethal shot.

Skill: [Hunger Phantasm]

- Spell (sigil, conjuration).

- Cost: low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

Conjures a dark phantasm with a volume of 20 cubic feet. You have fine control over this phantasm within a moderate range of your body. You can control parts of the phantasm at a range of up to 120 feet. Lasts until dispelled or destroyed.

[Starvation] - The phantasm counts as a weapon and doubles the effect of all drain conditions. Every attack you successfully land on a target that is touching a phantasm drains their stamina and mana, restoring yours. This also restores your health if your stamina and mana are full.

[In the Flesh] - For a moderate mana cost, the phantasm can take physical form. For the purposes of touch-range spells, you can use the phantasm. At silver-rank, the physical form increases in its ability to affect the material world.

[Echo of Despair] (silver) - When a target that the phantasm is touching reaches critical levels of stamina, mana, or health, the phantasm emits a pulse that applies the [Wither] condition on the target and any other enemies within a short distance.

Condition: [Wither]

- Deals slow necrotic damage over time.

- Weakens necrotic resistances. If the target does not have a resistance to necrotic damage, they gain a weakness to necrotic damage.

A moment later, a bell tolled.

Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [11/1000]

You have gained 1 Awakening Shard of the Beyond.

Level up!

Will put every spare point he had into Speed, bringing him up to Silver 7 in it. Being able to keep up with his enemies was the biggest issue he had right now, and he was glad for anything to patch that weakness.

That said, the cultists weren’t making great use of their gold-rank speed, which Will found odd right up until Nathan tried to lob what looked like a spatial magic bomb at the strange pyramid-like device that they’d formed a ritual circle around. All five surviving cultists blitzed into position immediately, casting a group skill that absorbed the damage of the explosion into their bodies instead.

“They’re protecting their gadget!” Nathan shouted.

“Yeah, I got that,” Will muttered. “You’re not an anime protagonist. You don’t need to shout the obvious out.”

Actually, hadn’t he been saying his skill activations out loud too? What was up with that?

Will’s deadly game of cat-and-mouse changed with this new information. Whatever the item they’d planted into the ground was, it resisted his attempts to identify it, but he could tell that it was at the peak of gold-rank engineering at the very least. Corruption marred the ground around it, and Will guessed that it would continue as long as the pyramid remained in play.

That meant that his number one priority was now to destroy it. Of course, the cultists knew this, and their priority was to protect it. Will’s magic just couldn’t outclass theirs in raw power, excluding maybe the corruption magic, Ghostflame, and his aura, but they were immune to the former and the latter two weren’t good enough on their own to get him past five of them and hit their device.

Nynn: You seem to be having fun. They set a pillar where you are as well?

Will: Weird thing to be calling a pillar, but yes.

Nynn: Good. They have fled the zone I was clearing. It is not a success for us, but the integrity of reality remains intact for now.

Only seconds after the message came, a dark portal opened. Will hadn’t recognized the magic the first time he’d seen it through a storm of corruption, assuming that it was just standard spatial magic he couldn’t understand, but he now knew it to be a link to the Beyond.

Nynn appeared and the portal collapsed just as quickly. The battle seemed to pause for an instant as everyone except Will turned to perceive the new entry. Will tried to get a bit of hunger phantasm past the cultists during that lull, but they noticed and struck out with vengeance, chaos-infused lightning tearing through the phantasm and annihilating it.

He retreated immediately, jumping into the air with a single dash-teleport combo to join the other two. Will used what remaining hunger phantasm he had to form wings to keep himself aloft.

The former Dread Executor looked between Will and Nathan.

“The otherworlder candidate has a bounty quest attributed to you, William,” Nynn said, clearly amused. “What’s the story there?”

“Well,” Will said, nodding towards Nathan. “We reached a mutual understanding for the time being.”

“Then it appears that not all of your kind are idiots,” Nynn said archly. “I am impressed.”

“I don’t know if you’re my friend,” the gold-rank otherworlder said, “but the enemy of my enemy. And also, I have so many questions about home. Did that one lawyer show ever end?”

“Which one? Suits?”

“No, the one about the drugs. The Breaking Bad spin-off, right?”

“Oh, yeah! That was awesome. Not really my tempo, but nobody can deny that it was an amazing show.”

Nynn sighed. “I would like to retract my statement. Save it, will you?”

“You got it, boss,” Will said. “Got a plan of attack?”

“I have a plan,” Nynn said. “Attack.”

He dropped down, overpowered scythe pointed forward.

“Such a drama queen.” Will shook his head.

“Goddamn that guy is cool,” Nathan said, diving downwards as well.

“Why is everyone like this?” Will muttered, refusing to do any soul-searching as to how badass he found Nynn’s skydive. “I don’t even have a good one-liner prepared!”

There was nobody to listen to him even if he had one, though, so he dropped down and rejoined the battle.