[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 71: The Force that will End the Worlds (Patreon)

Nynn clearly wasn’t nearly as capable of using the full potential of the Prince-rank scythe he wielded now. Will guessed this was either because the former Dread Executor was saving the remaining charges in a weapon he couldn’t recharge or because Nynn’s body was getting used to being sealed from his original King rank down to gold.

Despite that, Nynn joining their side was the turning point in the battle. Having gold-rank power was one thing. Knowing how to use it was another. Though he, the cultists, and Nathan were all ostensibly the same rank, Nynn made them look like children who’d picked up their grandfather’s swords.

He stepped between blasts of chaos energy with an effortless grace, as if he’d already seen and memorized every attack that they were going to use long in advance. Nynn never missed a step, moving so cleanly that it looked like his movements had been choreographed and rehearsed a hundred times.

Landing attacks on the cultists proved to be much easier than reaching their pyramid-like artifact, though. Not only did the five surviving gold-rankers risk life and limb to keep the artifact from taking damage, it appeared to have some in-built protections. Every time they got close, it flared with power, corruption pulsing out from around the artifact to form a shield that repelled even Nynn’s attacks.

Nynn: There were similar pillars in the other locations. I forced them to flee, but the pillars activated. I do not know what they are, nor can I destroy them with my limited means.

Will: Don’t you have the scythe?

Nynn: Restrictions. I can’t use it on the pillar.

Will: Shit.

Will suspected that he might be able to get past the defensive abilities of the pillar, as Nynn was calling it, but he couldn’t find an opportunity to make a break for it. As it was, he was using every movement skill he had the moment they came off cooldown, narrowly dodging an ever-tightening weave of attacks from the corruption cultists.

The pillar began to glow, visible even through the distorted corruption around it.

Will: That can’t be good.

Nynn: No.

Will: I should be immune to the corruption. I might be able to take a shot at it. Can you clear a path?

He sent the same message to Nathan.

Nathan: You owe me.

Will: I’ll catch you up on the last however many years you missed.

Nathan: Then I’m with you till the end of the line.

Will: Do you have to jam a movie reference into every line? Last good MCU movie, by the way.

Nathan: First of all, what the fuck? That’s just wrong. Second, to your question: yes. Third, behind you.

Will split his attention from the chat just in time to eat a face full of putrid gas, flying straight into a cloud of disease that shot forth from a cultist who’d started to predict his teleporting pattern and had positioned herself in a perfect spot to catch him off guard.

You have been afflicted with one level of each of the following afflictions.

[Poisoned], gold rank. [Blinded], silver rank. [Rot], silver rank. [Fatigued], silver rank. [Bleed], silver rank. [Wither], silver rank.

Will stumbled, his control over his mana suddenly faltering as half a dozen afflictions obliterated his abilities.

The cultists took this opportunity to capitalize, seeing one of their foes fallen, but they were mistaken in how much it stopped him.

Will was activating Chaos Transfer even as he hit asteroid rock, targeting his slayer sword.

Skill: [Chaos Transfer]

- Spell (enchantment).

- Cost: high mana.

- Cooldown: 5 minutes.

Silver

Cleanses you or a weapon of all levels of all afflictions and transfers it to another designated weapon or back to yourself. Increases the strength of the transferred afflictions to silver rank if they are lower than silver. The next target the weapon strikes will gain all levels of all afflictions that you cleansed.

Four separate bolts of energy hurled towards him, but suddenly, Nynn and Nathan were in the midst of the corruption cultists, the former becoming a whirling dervish with his scythes and the latter firing colorful lasers right back at them.

In the midst of the chaos, Will recovered quickly enough to air-dash away, though he was caught in the outer radius of some of the effects. One beam in particular struck his shoulder, boring out a fist-sized chunk of flesh.

Even as blood and muscle splattered out from the open wound, it started to close.

[Soul Link] (bronze) - A fraction of all damage dealt to the marked creature is converted to healing for you.

Mark for Death’s bronze-rank addition had saved his ass more than once, and it came into play now. Nynn and Nathan’s dance of intense violence did an order of magnitude more damage than Will was taking. The tyranny of rank worked in his favor even though he was a rank lower than everyone else—gold-rank damage converted to healing on a silver-rank body was fantastic, patching him up in instants.

“Activate skill!” Nathan shouted, his armor glowing with the radiance of a rainbow… or a gaming PC powering on. It was more reminiscent of the latter, really. “Overclock!”

Gold-rank mana flared in his aura, practically burning out into the air. Even with Nathan trying to play his aura close to the chest, Will could sense how much he was consuming for this attack. It had to be an all-or-nothing extreme mana skill just like Ghostflame.

Nynn, not to be outdone, shimmered with mana of his own. Unlike Nathan, Nynn’s aura control was vastly superior to even Will’s. The former Dread Executor could have been using a low-mana skill or an extreme one, and Will wouldn’t be able to tell.

Nathan exploded with strange light as Nynn blurred forward, each of them taking the attention of the remaining cultists. As the cultists went to defend themselves, they opened themselves up to attack. With all the afflictions stacked on his sword, one hit from him combined with a usage of The Bell Tolls would nearly guarantee a kill. With the reward system from the harsh system quest that the Executor Token granted him, that would mean another awakening shard of the Beyond, which could give him a crucial skill.

But that wasn’t what Will was after, here. His path was not one of maximizing kills and experience. If he could manage as powerful a build as possible, of course, that would be ideal, but he wasn’t just getting power for power’s sake.

The pyramid-pillar-artifact-thing was clearly a keystone for the cultists, and whatever their objective was here, it was obvious that they were going to fuck with what remained of Earth’s humanity.

Will could not let that stand.

Even with two elite gold-ranks maxing out their mana consumption, the corruption cultists still had the advantage of numbers, and they weren’t pushovers themselves. Their defenses also acted as offenses, flooding the thin, almost-vacuum air with plague, lightning, chaos, and effects so esoteric Will couldn’t identify the element without using Pages of the Past.

Still, between all of that magic, Sen’s eyes charted a path. All it would come down to was whether Will could take it.

He slowed time down until the lasers seemed to be almost frozen.

Skill: [Time in a Bottle]

- Spell (chronomancy).

- Cost: high mana per second.

- Cooldown: scales based on how long the skill is used.

Silver

Accelerates your perception of time, enabling you to experience twenty seconds for each second that passes outside.

Silver-rank addition: previous effect of time dilation is doubled. At high mana cost, you can increase your movement speed for one objective second, though this effect ends if you use another skill or an attack.

Will was spending a lot of mana, but the surge in resources he’d received from the death of the previous cultist was significant enough that he still had just enough to speed himself up drastically. It cost him heavily, and it still only barely outpaced the gold-rank speed that Nathan and Nynn both managed, but it was enough.

Step by stap, burst by burst, he dodged his way through the chaotic storm of magic, thankful that Sen gave him a thousand eyes to judge his surroundings so he didn’t need to distract himself with trying to find the way. The path ahead was clearly defined for him, his senses working with his familiar’s to propel his body in just the right way.

Will wondered if this was what Nynn felt like at all times.

The artifact was surrounded by an expanding cloud of corruption, which Will ran into face-first.

You have been afflicted with a level of bronze-rank [Corruption]. You will gain an additional level of silver-rank [Corruption] in [3] seconds.

[Corruption Resistance] (Silver) negates bronze-rank [Corruption].

He cursed mentally, thankful for the sped-up perception of time. Those three seconds would be more like a minute at the current rate he experienced it. Will was coming up on the limits of how much mana he could spend at one time, though, so he wouldn’t get anywhere near that entire minute. Already, he was starting to feel his skill operate less effectively, making him feel like he was running through molasses.

Gotta make this quick, he thought, pushing forward with an air-dash, his freedom of movement increased by Escape Artist since he was both being attacked and weaponless as well as Wraith Cloak due to the lack of light sources here.

As he got closer to the pyramid, the corruption grew steadily more intense to the point where it physically affected the world, making it significantly harder for Will to even push through.

He hit a barrier made of dense, solidified corruption. Anyone else would have been stopped by it, he knew. Even Nynn didn’t have the tools necessary to break through this much raw corruption at gold rank.

Will, who had been given the simultaneous blessing and curse by the system to carry the power of corruption, could.

With a mighty heave and a sudden burst of mana, Will forced himself through the barrier.

He tumbled through low gravity as the resistance against him suddenly popped and he found himself in clean, uncorrupted air again.

Even in the sped-up time, the gold-rankers had such speed that the fastest of them were already starting to react to Will, slowly firing another skill towards him.

But it was too late already. The area immediately next to the pyramid-pillar was completely free of negative effects, and though Will hadn’t been able to get perfect information on the pillar itself with Sen’s eyes due to the thick corruption around it, his own senses were refined enough to tell him that there was not a trace of corruption within the artifact itself.

That meant that it was generating the corruption through some external process—and more importantly, that it had no inherent defenses against it.

Will didn’t need any finesse. He swung the slayer sword at the artifact like a club.

Predictably, the edge wasn’t sharp enough to get past the innate defenses of the pillar, but he’d expected as much. It was a gold-rank build at minimum.

That wasn’t what he was trying for.

[Chaos Transfer] activated.

[Slayer Sword] transferred one level of gold-rank [Poisoned] and silver-rank levels of [Blinded], [Rot], [Fatigued], [Bleed], [Wither], [Charged], and [Corruption] to [Unidentified Artifact].

Not all of those items were capable of affecting an inanimate object, but enough would. Chaos Transfer only didn’t break Will’s weapons down because they were attuned to him. The few times he’d given corruption to random items, they’d immediately started decaying.

The artifact was no exception. In instants, the pristine white surface of the pyramid-shaped pillar curled in on itself and blackened like paper set aflame, and the corruption shield around it started to falter.

All of the corruption cultists turned immediately, focusing the entirety of their attention on Will and the damaged artifact.

Will let go of his skills, preserving the last of his mana for an attempted teleport out. All five remaining gold-rank enemies focusing on him meant that they dropped their defenses against the barrage that the former Dread Executor and isekai victim slash Iron Man cosplayer slash gold-ranker with terrible taste were inflicting upon them. Two of them went down almost immediately, scythe and overcharged laser slicing and blasting through them, respectively, though not before firing off one last skill.

Even if this was good for the fight, Will did not want to be at the center of five gold-rank all-out attacks converging upon a single location. He started the process to teleport out—but moments before Weapons Free completed, mana surged with such intensity that it dispersed his skills, tossing the phantasm to the winds and blowing him sky-high.

Will caught himself with an air-dash only to realize that the entire battlefield had been blown away.

He’d been too focused on the fight at hand. Sen’s eyes had largely pulled back towards him, and he’d ignored the sight of the rest of the planet.

This entire time, he hadn’t caught sight of Ataraxis, and now he was paying for it.

A gold-rank aura as intense as Nynn’s flared into existence as everyone caught themselves. The force of the arrival hadn’t been damaging, just displacing, but by sacrificing raw power, the movement it had caused was truly massive.

Even though he’d slowed himself near instantly, Will was nearly a quarter mile above the corrupted dome he’d just left. Nynn, Nathan, and the corruption cultists had been further from the epicenter of the blast, and they were all scattered to the winds. The two that had been struck down weren’t getting up, thankfully.

Nynn was the first to face Ataraxis, high priest of corruption.

Will cursed, sending more of Sen’s eyes downwards as he airdashed there himself. With the gravity almost non-existent at his altitude, he had to hope he could use Wind Walker quickly enough to return.

“You flagrantly violate plausibility,” Nynn accused. Will had no idea what the former Dread Executor was talking about, but he sounded serious. “You could not do this without a patron god.”

“Bold words from one with a weapon two full tiers higher than the strongest this planet can field,” Ataraxis replied serenely. “Whether or not we have a patron of our own will be a mystery for those who come after you.”

The high priest raised both hands as Nynn dashed forward with blinding speed. From a short distance away, Nathan, who had just gotten to his feet, aimed two cutting lasers at either side of Ataraxis and slashed his arms horizontally, aiming to bisect the man.

The artifact pulsed with the second strongest non-deity magic Will’s senses had ever processed, behind only Nynn’s scythe.

Speaking of the horrific weapon, Dreadscythe Nynn ignited with its full power, turning the man’s gold-rank attack into one much, much higher.

With a decisive slash, Nynn cut reality itself. It wasn’t for long, but Will saw the same disturbing, discolored patch that he’d seen when the spatial transportation had glitched. Then it repaired itself, space patching over the unsettling void like a wound being swen shut.

A deep chill went down his spine as he realized that he recognized that unreality as the Beyond.

Just what have I gotten myself into?

Will continued floating down, using less magic than he had before. Now that the primary threat was gone, he could relax… wait.

The primary threat was gone, but Ataraxis hadn’t died. He was gone because he’d left, taking the artifact and one of the surviving cultists with him. The other must have been out of range.

Corruption exploded out from the point the high priest had been at, far more potent than it had been even at the peak of the artifact’s abilities. Ataraxis had used it in conjunction with an all-or-nothing of his own to maximize the power of the corrupting wave, which ignored the cultists in favor of obliterating hundreds of Sen’s eyes in an instant alongside afflicting both Nathan and Nynn.

Will’s senses went blank in the area, leaving him reliant on his own. He sent more of Sen’s remaining eyes in as he landed, sure the wave was gone.

It took him nearly twenty seconds to return to the ground, and by then, it was already clear how much damage that one pulse had inflicted.

Nathan was on the ground, convulsing and screaming, while Nynn, who was by his side, was stoically meditating. The latter was dealing with the corruption, placing his body into a state of stasis, but the moment he started to move again, so too would the corruption. Without the strength of his aura control active, Will was easily able to discern the details of the stasis skill.

Both of them had been affected by corruption of a rank higher than them.

Platinum rank. Gem tier.

More powerful than anything else this solar system had seen so far.

The two cultists who hadn’t been hit by the powerful pulse sauntered over to their targets, relishing their easy pickings. They saw Will landing and thought nothing of the silver rank who suppressed his aura so much he almost seemed like a bronze.

One of them said something to the other, who laughed. Will didn’t bother trying to listen in.

The one who laughed approached Will with a swagger in his step.

Will closed his eyes and teleported to Nathan’s side..

“Death comes for you all,” he incanted.

He didn’t have enough mana to withstand the strength of this skill. It would draw on his life.

Will’s vision went monochrome but for two spots of red.

Skill: [Ghostflame]

- Spell (enchantment).

- Cost: extreme mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver.

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.

[To Strike the Soul] (silver) - The damage inflicted by this skill ignores barriers of silver-rank or lower. Damage cannot be lessened or negated by skills of silver-rank or below.

When he’d activated the skill before, the flame had ignited his fists with a terrifying flame bright enough to ignite a room.

Platinum-rank [Corruption] cleansed.

This entire time, they’d been fighting in the shadow of Earth, relying on enhanced sight, aura senses, and magical skills to see.

Yet with a single usage of his skill, night became day.

Achievement earned: [Transcendent Radiance]

You have cleansed an effect two ranks and a tier higher than you. Your peace knows no limits.

Reward: You are in a high-corruption area. Rewards will be calculated and distributed later.

“Not so funny now, is it?” the corruption wielder taunted, taking a step forward. “Too late to turn back now, I'm afraid.”

#

Half a solar system away, Ataraxis did not need his eyes to sense the violent and thorough annihilation of the two comrades he had left behind.

He shook his head. Regrettable, but it was a risk of the job.

The pillar was broken. That burst of energy he’d used had triggered it prematurely, wasting all of its charge but for the little bit of stored mana that they would use to return to the planet when the time came.

These pillars represented years if not decades of efforts. To waste one like this…

“That boy is a problem,” Ataraxis mused. “He will prove to be a valuable convert.”

“Sir,” the priest he’d saved said. “The corruption wielder is a threat. No silver rank should possess the kind of power he does. We should kill him.”

“Foolishness. Do you shatter a knife for the crime of being sharp? He is merely being wielded by the wrong hand. The loss of one pillar is a blow, but our path has many, many redundancies.”

“As you say, sir.”

“At ease. This was a success. We will move again when the time is right.”

#

You have gained two Awakening Shards of the Beyond.

You have overtaxed your life force. You will not be able to move again until you have rested.

“You saved us,” Nynn said openly. “Corruption is the force that will end the worlds. I do not have the affinity for it that you do, merely a powerful resistance, and I over-extended myself.”

“Guess you’re not that evil after all,” Nathan allowed. “You still owe me one.”

“Come on,” Will complained. “This has got to count for, like, at least five.”

“Man, I just want to know how Stranger Things ended.”

“William,” Nynn said, voice turning serious.

“I know,” Will said with a sigh. “Job’s not done. If I can cleanse platinum-rank corruption, I can deal with anything else they’ve done. Show me the way.”

“I will lead you,” Nynn said. He strode off.

Will got up—or, at least, he tried to. “Wait!”

“Hm?”

“I can’t walk.”

“I got you,” Nathan said, bending down and lifting Will into a princess carry. “If that was worth five, this is one. That puts us at, uh, one minus five plus one, three in your favor?”

“Sure,” Will said drily. “Let’s go with that.”

Author's note: Sorry for the quite late chapter. Been busy meeting with friends, exercising, and trying to keep myself from rotting in my room lately. Mental health comes first—hope y'all are having a good one!