[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 74: Gestalt (Reprise) (Patreon)

You have marked [Devouring Gestalt] for death.

Will’s initial assessment of the gestalt came through Sen. With his familiar, Will now had a much better idea of what he was going against than he had at any time back on the surface.

The gestalt’s most advanced skill was already high gold. Devour enabled it to grow quickly by simply eating other Users, incorporating elements of their skills into its own.

Had this monster been another human, Will would have complained about it being blatantly overpowered.

Okay, that was a lie. Will was going to complain about its skills being blatantly overpowered anyway. That was kind of the pot calling the kettle black, but the gestalt’s magic expanded far beyond just the standard skills that a human User could make use of. 

It hadn’t been given a class, which should have limited it by a lot, but its attacks were all infused with another one of its skills, Death Echo, which allowed it to use the signature skill of a devoured enemy one time after killing it.

Granted, it wasn’t like Will didn’t have his own broken abilities to compensate, but even as he sent the hunger phantasm out, threatening a powerful Decaying Touch, he saw that the gestalt was also capable of learning.

It separated limbs off into thin tentacles instead of the powerful, broad arm-like appendages Will had gotten used to seeing. Rather than immediately attack him, they started slicing through the air, tearing through the trees that had risen in place of rocks in this battlefield. All of their strikes were empowered with different kinds of magic.

It’s learning quickly. Will sent the hunger phantasm sailing towards the gestalt, cloaking his own position with Wraith Cloak and staying low to the ground to avoid inadvertently taking one of those tentacles to the face. Sen’s eyes, which were functionally immune to physical damage, revealed how sharp the spikes marking each of those tentacles was.

The gestalt proved Will’s errant thought doubly true as Will’s shadows drew closer. It tore the forest apart to stay away from the phantasm, and its tentacles were infused with so much power that even despite the phantasm’s semi-solid state was torn apart by the whip-crack of the tentacles.

Every time Will solidified part of the phantasm, it would be smashed apart heartbeats later. He used those opportunities to afflict it with his Decaying Touch. The resistance it had picked up was actually just one part of a larger skill—which, again, Will found to be utterly bullshit, but it did mean that it wasn’t on par with Will’s rank.

[Decaying Touch] has been cast through the [Hunger Phantasm].

You have inflicted a level of silver-rank [Corruption] on [Devouring Gestalt].

[Devouring Gestalt] has attempted to resist [Decaying Touch].

[Devouring Gestalt]’s [Corruption Resistance] (Bronze) failed to negate the effects of [Decaying Touch] (Silver).

Sticking it with corruption was hardly a complete victory, though. The last time he’d done it, the corruption had spread so far that it had been forced to shed a massive chunk of its body.

The fact that it could shed corruption hadn’t been lost on the gold-rank monster. Every time a tentacle caught the distorted affliction, the gestalt simply tore the tentacle from its body, allowing the piece of its body to decay into a withered husk.

Although Will was confident that he could survive this, especially after seeing the gestalt react to him, the creation that had formerly been a life elf construct and now was something more like Frankenstein’s monster was putting everything it had into this fight.

Under normal circumstances, Will was sure that he would have been mincemeat by now. Hundreds of Users had fallen to the gestalt in the same manner. Will was Silver 3. Against a Gold 4, he should have stood about as much of a chance as a snowball in hell.

Fortunately, Will’s circumstances were anything but normal. The gestalt had fallen into the same trap that so many humans had, taking easy improvements instead of solidifying its core. Consuming Users for power was no different from a human using monster cores to level up, and its aura control and overall competence was heavily diminished as a result.

Furthermore, the only one who had significantly damaged this creature had been Will. The gestalt had only known true pain from corruption, and so even if it was adapting to him, it was primarily on the defensive. Until it figured out that Will’s defenses weren’t strong enough to protect him from a combination of intense gold-rank speed and a plethora of overwhelming magical effects, it was at a disadvantage.

Perception was key here. So long as Will could keep the fear of man instilled within the gestalt’s abnormal, magic-fueled hearts, he could stay one step ahead.

His aura’s features sapped the gestalt’s health, stamina, and mana, fueling Will in the process. With that level of sustain, he was more than capable of weathering the side effects of the gestalt’s devastating blows. Even behind cover, avoiding the worst of it, the constant flurry of deadly-sharp tree shards coming from the utter destruction of the artificial environment barraged him, the speed of the debris sufficient enough to make even a silver-ranker bleed.

One level of [Blessed] has been consumed to mitigate damage.

It was a reminder that he wasn’t invincible… but when all this violence took only a single layer of the Blessed boon off of him, Will had to admit that he felt just a little unstoppable.

That said, the rate at which the gestalt burst through his phantasm was faster than he could replenish it. Even with the drain from his aura combining with the increased efficacy provided by the phantasm, Will was rapidly losing the war of attrition. 

Once his phantasm ran out, the game would be up. He would lose his best source of cover for invisibility and the easiest way to teleport around when, not if, the phantasm dropped.

The gestalt had far more flesh to spare than Will did phantasm. If they just drew out this brawl into a sheer contest of force against force, the gestalt would win every time.

It was a good thing that he didn’t plan on winning this through attrition.

Will needed the gestalt to make a mistake, but it had learned quickly, moreso than any human he’d faced had been. It didn’t give him any openings.

“Then I’ll just create one of my own.”

Pulling back on the majority of his hunger phantasm, Will manipulated shadow and pressed himself close to the ground, suppressing the aura his body gave off so much that he would be nigh-invisible to anyone without incredible aura senses.

As powerful as the gestalt was, it was sorely lacking in that department.

Hunger phantasm took shape, semi-solid wisps of shadow forming into a solid, cloaked figure. A handful of Sen’s eyes came out of time lock, glaring at the kaiju from around the humanoid.

This was the tricky part. As Will manipulated another group of hunger phantasm outwards, obscuring the figure, he started extruding his aura in a very particular manner.

The gestalt started attacking wildly nearly immediately, no longer plagued by the effects of Will’s fully realized aura. It didn’t know where he was right now, hidden as he was in the shadow, but in a moment, it would—at least, it would think so.

This was a trick Will had only gotten a handful of minutes to try, but he was confident it would work. By suppressing most of his aura but projecting the rest of it in a very specific direction…

His shadow clone lit up like a beacon, shining aura blasting from it in a way that made its location unmistakable. Without the usage of a stealth skill or any attempt to cloak the exact position, it was prime bait.

The gestalt took it. Half of the limbs on the front side of its body elongated into sharp, nightmarish tentacles that lashed out, spearing the clone a dozen times and tearing it to shreds.

That moment of distraction was enough for Will to sneak a dagger from his inventory into the hunger phantasm and within touch range of the gestalt.

He knew that using Decaying Touch at this range would just force the gestalt to molt more and leave him in a shitty position again, but that wasn’t all Will wanted out of this.

Deep breath.

Space warped, and Will teleported to the dagger.

Though his aura was suppressed, the gestalt sensed the spatial magic under it and instantly started bringing its limbs back.

The next few seconds felt like minutes—literally, because Will triggered Time in a Bottle the second he arrived.

Here we go, he thought, mentally steeling himself.

Since he’d seen the writing on the wall early, Will had focused on conserving his mana throughout the entire battle. That left him with enough to use a few high-cost skills.

He accelerated his movement speed with the silver-rank effect of his movement skill, consuming a hefty chunk of his remaining power, then activated a Decaying Touch.

The corruption took hold. Will knew it wouldn’t hold forever, but he didn’t need it to. He just needed the gestalt weakened for long enough to complete the second part.

After all his experimentation with the Beyond and restoring his damaged life force back to full, Will had still been left with a couple levels of the Blessed and Purified boons from Envoy of Mercy. Though the former had largely been consumed by this battle, Will hadn’t been afflicted with anything, and his new legendary title let him use the boons to negate the cooldown and cast time of a skill, respectively.

He consumed one level each of Blessed and Purified.

Give me an instant Sanctuary, he ordered.

The title delivered.

Will had only tested this with Sen before, but he was counting on it working here.

With the last of his mana, he cast the ritual, allowing time to speed back up.

“There doesn’t have to be an end.”

#

The abominant mind’s fear had slowly dissipated over the course of the battle. This human had damaged it before, but it had learned. It was becoming more than the limitations that had once been placed on it. The ones who had sought to control it, to shape its mind and bore chains into its lobotomized soul, could not touch it anymore, and neither would this human.

The copy of the man, the… decoy, it thought, finding the word from the memory of one Gavin Griffin, had been an embarrassing deception. Its aura had matched the human’s, yes, but the corruption wielder was trickier than that. This, too, it was learning.

Trickery could only take an enemy so far, though, and the abominant mind controlled a body that was far greater in power than this human’s. It prepared itself to go fully on the offensive.

And then a spot of the terrible, horrible, mind-crushing pain exploded from beneath it. The gestalt knew what it was now, and it moved to correct this mistake, expunge the corrupted flesh, but it then felt a tug on a level it had not felt since its creation.

Its soul.

As an experiment of the life elves, the gestalt had long known the sensation of another being rooting around in its soul.

Once, it had been a weakling, a mind fabricated by the elves and manipulated by them. After an extremely violent month, it was now so much more.

Despite all its growth, the sheer disparity between its control over its own soul and the seemingly divine wrath of the being that now contested it reminded it of those fearful first days, where it had been nothing but putty in another’s hands.

It fought, and it fought, but there was nothing the abominant mind could do against a man who had been forged by divinity.

The thought that passed through its mind did not exactly take the form of human speech, but if it could be translated, it would have been something along the lines of this:

What kind of monstrous god is this?

#

The transition into the Beyond was bumpier than it had been last time, owing mostly due to the massive creature Will was lugging with him. He had the tools to deal with it now, and his soul had been hardened through fire and flame.

Even so, he was forced to spend his remaining levels of Blessed and Purified to strengthen his soul control, granting him the power he needed to forcefully drag a second soul into his Sanctuary.

This time, he established control immediately, widening the platform that was his domain into something sizable enough to fit two souls on. Will still couldn’t make it fancy and domestic like Ayla and Nynn could, but that was fine. He didn’t need that for his purposes right now.

To his surprise, the gestalt’s soul did not take the monstrous form it had outside. Will had figured that his soul functionally projecting his full body into the Beyond was just commonplace with people who were new to soul control, but the gestalt was the same size as him and had none of the body horror bone-tentacle-centipede type shit that characterized it outside.

Instead, it resembled Ayla of all people. Its form was somewhat humanoid but constantly shifting, filled with dozens of iridescent colors.

Nynn and Ayla hadn’t been able to perform any attacks in here, and it was clear the same was true for the gestalt, which was looking around, confused. That left Will with some time to speak to it, since no time at all was passing on the outside and he had quite a bit of soul energy left.

“Everyone else has been able to talk in here,” he said. “Can you?”

The gestalt’s soul looked askance at him. Will’s Omnilingual skill, which every human User had, would translate his words into something the gestalt could understand and vice versa, and yet it looked at him like he’d grown a second head.

When it did speak, its soul representation started to fluctuate, actually growing a second head that folded into its chest and split out into pincer-like arms. Its jaw unhinged.

“You. Me. Kill. Desire.”

Although its vocabulary was simple and nigh-unparseable, Will could sense the intelligence in the being before him. It had been grown from nothing and had parasitically preyed on humans until it was at the state it was now, all in a month. In that time, it had already developed an intellect that could, on some level, converse with him. That sent a shiver down his spine.

“Are you asking me if I want to kill you, or are you declaring that you want to kill me?”

That made the gestalt pause, thinking as its body molted through half a dozen different forms.

“Both,” it decided.

“Oh, awesome. Well, if you want to kill me, I’ll be killing you, too. That seems simple enough. You’ve killed enough good people that I wouldn’t even lose sleep over it.”

Not that Will had lost sleep over killing anyone else. He was proving to be disturbingly good at ignoring what might have once been his conscience.

Am I a sociopath? Will wondered. He dismissed the thought. It wasn’t important.

“You. Mother. Same.”

“I’m the same as the… Elven Mother? Are you talking about the god, or the life elves?”

At the term life elves, the gestalt visibly flinched, then flared out with anger.

“Oh boy. You didn’t like that. They made you, didn’t they? Aren’t they, like, your coworkers?”

“Word. Unknown.”

“Coworkers? I guess you’re not exactly an office worker. Like, your equals. You were doing their dirty work with and for them.”

That really pissed the thing off.

“Slavery. Not. Choice.”

“Sucks to hear,” Will said. He found that he couldn’t muster up much sympathy for it. “You’re still killing people, though. Can’t let that pass.”

“Kill. Or. Die. Not. Choice.”

Will arched an eyebrow. That sounded dangerously close to a sentiment that he’d expressed himself a number of times. “Yeah, but some of us don’t go out of our way to murder everyone in our way.”

“Nature. Mine. Target. Predator. Yours. Prey. Predator. Both.”

That one took Will a minute to figure out. It helped that its soul so nakedly painted its intent, giving him a point to bounce off of.

“You’ll always be hunted because of what you are, and it’s in your nature to hunt and fight back. You target us because we fight you and because we’re prey?”

Assent from the gestalt’s soul removed the need for a real answer.

“The nature which, to be clear, was created by the life elves.”

That set it off again, but Will got what he needed from it.

To be honest, he sort of sympathized now. It was an incredibly shitty hand to be dealt to be born into this shit, then essentially enslaved by the life elves.

“I’ve got a suggestion for you,” Will offered. “Seeing as how I don’t know if you’ll actually die when I win. You’ve found a way to shake the life elves, right? So you won’t be under the control of the Brooksouls later. When you get back, limit your targets to them and them alone. Prioritize the ones who hurt you, then fuck off to some place where you can eat monsters. There’s a lot of monsters out there. You could stop being our target if you just stuck to eating beasts.”

That was a pretty terrible deal, all things considered. It also came with the possibility of harming innocents, which he was sure the life elves had plenty of, but it would limit damage, especially to his people.

Will expected an angry response, or none at all. 

Instead, he got curiosity.

“You. Win. Impossible.”

“Seriously?” Will asked. The doubt was painted clear on the gestalt’s soul and aura. Its control was mediocre at best, and it showed its emotions so transparently that he was almost embarrassed for it.

Will projected his soul further, using everything he had learned to suppress the gestalt’s existence here.

“You know that’s not true.”

Instead of waiting for a response, Will collapsed the Sanctuary, sending both of them hurtling down a different path.

The system had blocked him from using teleportation skills that could exit the arenas earlier, but transit through the Beyond had nothing to do with spatial magic.

Warning: You have left your arena. Round 2 is still ongoing.

Just as he’d suspected.

Will and the gestalt reappeared in the damaged triage area where he’d cleansed an enormous amount of corruption.

The entire surface of the asteroid had been impacted by the corruption the cultists had created with their pillars. Similar to the Arcadian cave system where he’d entered the tutorial, spending too much time here would corrupt any living being, which was already apparent in the way the gestalt was beginning to struggle.

“Forfeit,” Will suggested.

When the gestalt didn’t reply, he did what any sane man would do when faced with a gold-rank monster and ran the fuck away.

There was enough detritus around for him to activate Weapons Free instantly. As soon as he got out of range, he drew his Starstrike Longbow and fired an arrow, teleporting to it as he let it fly and air-dashing forward, combining it with his sudden momentum and the low gravity to rocket himself forward.

After the shock of having its soul dragged into and back out of the Beyond, the gestalt needed a moment to recover, and that gave Will valuable time to get ahead.

It gave chase immediately, perhaps guessing that it would gain a teleportation ticket out of the corrupted area via the trial if it killed Will.

In a fight, the gestalt’s gold-rank speed would easily dust his silver-rank abilities, but outside of combat, Will was exceptionally effective at simply running away.

Unlike the gestalt, he was not adversely affected by the ambient corruption levels in any way, and that meant he was able to constantly stay a step ahead as he flew, reveling in the low gravity and the way it made an air-dash equivalent to true flight.

The cat-and-mouse chase he was leading the gestalt on wasn’t purposeless, of course. Earlier, he’d spread five hundred of Sen’s eyes out across the asteroid-planet that this phase of the trial was taking place on, identifying which areas had been most affected by corruption.

What he’d discovered was that this asteroid contained not only the arenas for Main Challenge 3 but also many of the waiting areas, including a certain library hidden just beneath the surface.

The triage area was only about five from the library, which Will realized had been the staging area for the cultists.

Carefully, Will led the gestalt towards his destination, wincing as he sensed it obliterating arenas walls as it passed by, interfering with other tournament rounds. Nobody was dumb enough to risk provoking it, though, so its focus remained entirely on him.

Even now, it was adapting, changing how its body was organized to maximize the power in its legs, scuttling forward at speeds that defied reason. Will only barely managed to stay ahead of it.

As soon as he found the library, he dove, sending the phantasm into the ground beneath him to form one last location for Weapons Free.

He teleported just in time to avoid a barrage of bone-spikes fired from the edge of the claw-like appendages that the gestalt was now using to move, finding himself in a familiar—if much more damaged—library, high above the ground. Will used the phantasm to glide down, though he quickly smacked into a broken bookshelf and half glided, half tumbled to the floor.

Corruption buffeted him like a sandstorm. During his time doing the other challenges, the reality break that had affected the library had continued to do so, taking over the entire area.

Will reveled in the sensation of barely contained power all around him and began to count.

“One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Se—“

Above, the ceiling crumpled in as the gestalt pursued him, putting all its force into breaking the ground above its quarry.

Unlike Will, the gestalt had no way to fly. Not even to hover. And here, even after all the corruption, gravity had been normalized.

It dropped like a brick.

Will avoided it, wanting to ensure that he didn’t get impaled by a lucky bone shot. Sen’s eyes couldn’t safely make it into the corrupted area, so he used his own aura senses.

The gestalt started struggling immediately. It was difficult for even Will to survive here, and his corruption resistance was at his rank level.

[Corruption Resistance] has advanced to gold rank!

Scratch that. It was a rank above, now.

On the other hand, the gestalt’s bronze-rank resistance was already beginning to fail.

As Will watched, it began to flail, demolishing bookshelves that stretched hundreds of feet into the air. Corruption boiled into its blood, seeping into its entire existence. Unlike Will’s Decaying Touch, this came from all angles. There was no removing the head to save the body.

Will had to admit that it was a fascinating sight, watching the gestalt struggle to survive as layer after layer of corruption laid itself upon the monster. It shed its outer layer of skin and bone, letting the decaying flesh sluice off it like a molting snake, then did the same with the next layer, then the next.

Once he was sure it was too focused on keeping itself alive to attack, he approached.

“Like I said,” he said again, projecting his aura at maximum strength. “You should forfeit. Follow my suggestion, and maybe you won’t find yourself in a position like this.”

#

The abominant mind had known fear before, but this…

This was despair.

It had lost.

William Li-Brown, corruption wielder, stood over it with the wrathful vengeance of a deity. A rank lower, and he had bested the gestalt.

But not all was lost.

The followers of the Mother had been cruel and callous. The corruption wielder was the same, but it was not unfair.

The gestalt still had another chance at life.

For that, it realized another emotion it had never felt before.

Gratitude.

#

[Envoy of Mercy] granted you one level of [Blessed] and one level of [Purified].

[Devouring Gestalt] has forfeited.

You have won your second duel.

Spatial magic began to form around Will. He let out a breath, a weight lifted off his shoulders.

The corruption wielder smiled nervously. That had gone better than he’d expected it to.

As he began the process of teleporting away, however, the nerves faded.

“For those of you watching at home,” he said, knowing that at least two gods were watching him and hoping that three mortals—Ayla, Nynn, Nathan—were as well. “My name’s William Li-Brown, and you are not going to out-bullshit me. Not while I draw breath.”

With that, he vanished.