[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 83: The 80/20 Rule (Patreon)

Oliver Turner was having a terrible month.

It had all started well. The R/V Sentinel had been deployed on its maiden voyage. As an oceanography vessel, it had been unparalleled. Oliver’s life’s work, a project to maintain and regrow barrier reefs, had been ready deploy for the first time on the ship.

They’d been ten days out of Southampton when the world had ended. 

Their vessel was advanced enough that the handful of astronomers who’d come aboard as part of an interdisciplinary research effort had been able to use their equipment to spot the enormous planet heading their way about ten minutes before the first system message had arrived. None of their equipment had ever seen it before—it had been like it had manifested out of nowhere, except it was far too large for that to have happened.

By now, Oliver was sure that it had been the result of the same magical madness that had overtaken the entirety of the world.

At thirty-four years old, he’d been pretty sure of the path his life was meant to take. He’d been happy, almost. He had not been ready to have to make a snap decisions between indentured servitude and life or death, and in a hurry, he’d picked the latter.

Oliver had spent every day since regretting it.

About half of the people aboard the ship had chosen the same as him, and they’d all gone through the same tutorial.

The problem had come when the tutorial had spat them out. When the impact of planet Arcadia had irreversibly changed Earth, it had also changed much of what was already there. Apparently, the navigation setup on the Sentinel had been one of those. It had gone completely nonfunctional. Even the old-school compasses had begun to fail, which Wisteria, one of the astronomers, had theorized was because another planet colliding with theirs had screwed with Earth’s magnetic fields.

Not that the science really mattered. At the end of the day, they were stranded on a barely functional ship in the middle of the ocean. Everyone had magic now, which should have been able to help them, but not a single one of their abilities were on the order of power they needed to navigate a massive ocean or bring them any closer to shore.

Supplies had run low, and morale even lower. Rations were running low, and they were down to their last crate of whiskey. That, of course, had been when the situation had gotten even worse.

Dungeons. They were a feature of the new world, and even though the Sentinel was smack dab in one of the most isolated positions throughout all of Earth, it had not been ignored.

Dungeons had opened up in the ocean around them, creating pockets of isolated environments that were nothing like the surrounding sea. Using their oceanography equipment, they’d found them at depths from just a few feet under the surface to several miles down. One or two of them had even opened on the ship itself.

At first, it hadn’t been a problem. The dungeons had been unformed and bronze-rank to start with, and they’d provided valuable supplies for them to continue with.

Then, they’d increased in difficulty. Even with monster core amps, nobody had been able to reach silver, and when the dungeons under the sea had started overflowing, disaster had struck. Hordes of unstoppable bronze and silver rank monsters infested the waters now, and one of the few of them who had a perception power had said that there was even a gold-rank leviathan in the depths.

Yet they had still been forced to the dungeons to try to get supplies. The remaining crew of the Sentinel was fading fast. They’d set sail with over a hundred personnel, with fifty-six of them remaining when the system had come.

That number was barely thirty now, and it dipped every day.

Oliver had already had too many close brushes with death to count, but his Mariner class was essential to keeping everyone alive and capable of perception in the ocean, so he had to join every expedition.

“Ready?” Wisteria asked. She was his second on this drop, her esoteric Void Knight class having been the game-changer on a number of the major bosses they’d faced so far.

“Yes,” Oliver said morosely. “Silver-rank dungeon. Six hundred meters. Arnold and half his squad died clearing a path in, which means that if we can get the prizes, we’ll have enough supplies for a month. Please confirm.”

An array of scattered confirmations rose from the six bronze-rankers grouped up with him.

“Let’s get this over with, then,” Oliver said.

All seven of them dove off the side of the ship, narrowly avoiding the edge of it with their superhuman bronze attributes, and Oliver’s Equilibrium Mantle spread to encompass all of them, allowing them to breathe and function normally underwater.

As always, the ocean was a dark and unforgiving place. Past a couple hundred meters, the amount of sunlight that filtered through the water lowered sharply until it looked like a perpetual twilight.

Oliver would never get used to the feeling that things that were far larger, more powerful, and hungrier than him were staring straight through his soul. It made matters worse that this was actually the case now.

His Perception wasn’t very high, but he could still sense the bronze-rank monster fish that swam around them, looking for an easy mark to pick off. That was how Lisette had died on Tuesday—she’d gone too far from the main squad and gotten ripped to shreds by a pack of bloodthirsty bronze-rank sharks.

Let’s just ignore how sharks aren’t pack hunters, and how there aren’t even supposed to be any in open ocean, Oliver thought. Logic was too much to expect out of the world now. They had come from the dungeons, obviously, which had just manifested in the middle of the ocean, obviously.

A silver-rank presence brushed against his mind, sending a chill up his spine, but he ignored it as well as he could. They could fight silvers if they had to, but that would cost all their resources and possibly lives. If it wasn’t a dungeon monster and not actively hunting them—which they couldn’t always rely on—their MO was to ignore it.

As they got deeper, though, Oliver couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong today. A feeling in his gut, maybe, or perhaps the way that the light suddenly seemed to dim. The entrance to the silver-rank dungeon was only a hundred meters beneath them. It was a portal-type, which meant that there was a shining gate in the water that seemed like a refuge, though none of them were stupid enough to think like that anymore. The first few to make that mistake had never been seen again.

There was an odd lack of unformed-rank monsters swarming the entrance, which made him suspicious. The bottom feeders always tried to prey on weak monsters and humans who had just completed a dungeon, broken and beaten. They’d only claimed one of the Sentinel’s number, but Oliver had still grown used to clearing the little shits every time they did a dungeon.

“Something’s wrong,” Wisteria said, echoing his thoughts. “Gut feeling.”

Gut feeling was something Oliver would have never considered as actionable evidence before the end of the world, but in the time since, he’d come to value Wisteria’s instincts. The younger woman had already been something of a prodigy, but she had been absolutely instrumental for their continued survival.

“How bad?” Oliver asked. “If you sense anything off, we’re backing up. The dungeon will still be here tomorrow. We can’t risk losing more people.”

“Go,” Wisteria said suddenly. “There’s no monsters anywhere near this dungeon. The only other time I’ve sensed that was…”

“The gold-rank,” Oliver completed. “Everyone, fall back! Regroup on me!”

It was too late.

Dark shadow exploded out of the golden portal, turning twilight murkiness into midnight black. The misty substance spread over their entire party in moments, covering them before they could even react. As it passed over them, a deep sense of horror surged through Oliver’s very existence.

He still remembered the first time he’d been introduced to the vast scale of the universe. Truly understanding how insignificant he was in the grand scheme of a universe so large he couldn’t even hope to truly comprehend it had spawned a deep, primal fear that even he couldn’t put a name to.

Today, he remembered that sensation. As shadow gripped him, seemingly taking physical form, he found himself incapable of moving. The rest of his squad, he saw, was the same, save for Wisteria, who had vanished beyond the darkness.

His heart dropped. Is she gone?

Then, slowly, the shadows parted, and two American voices came through, chatting loudly as if they weren’t nearly half a kilometer under the sea.

“…can’t call just anything to do with the ocean a Titanic reference, Nathan,” one of them was saying, exasperated. “Like, come on! The ship isn’t even sinking!”

“Fine,” the other person said. “What would you compare it to?”

“I don’t have a snappy quote on hand, but there was this decent horror movie once, Underwater?”

“Year?”

“2020.”

“Yeah, I was gone.”

“Well, it was sort of a Cthulhu-like deal. A group of researchers gets stranded underwater, hence the name, and they have to make their way through a bunch of these weird monsters… shit. I’ll explain it to you later. Someone’s trying to backstab me.”

Oliver’s heart dropped.

A second later, Wisteria suddenly appeared, shadow dissolving as she emerged from out under the cover of her stealth skill.

“You saw me?” she asked.

“Wisteria, is it?” the stranger said. “Name’s Will, but all my enemies call me William Li-Brown. I got a little misplaced, but trust me, I’m not trying to hurt you.”

“Dude, you literally look like someone’s knockoff Shadow the Hedgehog OC.” The other stranger came into Oliver’s field of view a few moments later. He was covered head to toe in futuristic-looking armor that radiated sheer power. Even then, it wasn’t able to overcome the sheer terror in Oliver’s heart.

“And you look like a Marvel cosplayer had way too much time and money,” Will shot back. “Come on, man. Those movies stopped being good after Endgame.”

“I thought you said the last good one was Winter Soldier. I never caught the last movie, though; figured it would be the last one I needed to watch.”

“The last great one was Winter Soldier. Endgame was—okay, never mind. Wisteria, am I correct in assuming you’re the team leader?”

“No, that’s him,” Wisteria said, pointing at Oliver. “Who the hell are you?”

“Why don’t we get on dry land again first?” Nathan suggested. “We can talk afterwards.”

Finally, the shadows started to drift away, and the freezing terror that had gripped Oliver faded away. It was replaced instead by a mixture of dread and hope.

All of this power had come from one man. Nobody aboard the Sentinel had managed anything close, which meant that this could be an opportunity.

That, or this was the next on the list of an increasingly awful month.

“Fall back,” Nathan commanded again, less panicked this time. “Everyone to the Sentinel. Will, Nathan, we don’t have much, but we’ll see if we can get you situated.”

#

“Isn’t Point Nemo supposed to be the most isolated place on Earth?” Will asked, taking a bite out of the rations bar he’d taken from his inventory. “Didn’t count on there being a whole research ship there. What’s even here to research?”

“You tell me,” the man he’d learned was named Oliver Turner grumbled. “This was supposed to be a three-week research expedition, and then the world goes and ends itself. I didn’t even know where we were until you told me.”

“Tough luck,” Nathan said sympathetically. “And none of you have a way out?”

“I mean, look at them,” Will said. “They’re all bronze, and most of them are core users. Plus, they ended up literally as far from land as they possibly could. No movement skill is taking them that far, especially not at bronze.”

“You realize we can still hear you, right?” Wisteria Blake said. 

She was Oliver’s research partner from the UK, Bronze 7, early 30s, and the only non-core user he’d seen on the Sentinel. Notably, she also had the Void Knight class, which Will remembered had been offered to him during class selection.

“Yeah,” Will said. “Am I wrong?”

“Not particularly,” she admitted.

“Frankly speaking,” Oliver said, “We’re on one week of food and clean water, there’s a new silver-rank monster in the area every day, and there’s a gold-rank leviathan that’s getting steadily closer to us. We’re down more than twenty people since we started, and we have exactly zero contact with the outside world. Since you’re here, I presume it’s the same on the outside?”

“Yep,” Will confirmed. “Thank god I didn’t have to introduce that one to you.”

“When another planet hits yours, you tend to assume it affects the whole world,” Oliver said. “What’s your story?”

Will explained, briefly, what the Trial of the Champion was. Those onboard the research vessel had seen a system notification about it, but none of them had been able to unlock an invite to it. That was a shame, given that the plentiful access to system stores there would’ve given any participant the ability to at least buy supplies to keep the ship alive for a while longer.

He did gloss over most of the corruption problems. The people currently living here might have had some experience with it—it sure did sound like it, given the fact that their transportation out had been “extremely weird,” according to Wisteria—but he figured it was better not to make them worry about the potential for the trial to screw them over. It wasn’t like they could do anything to influence it, after all.

As they talked more about the current situation of the Sentinel, painting an increasingly bleak picture of the straits they were in, more of the ship’s crew found their way to the mess hall where Will and Nathan had gathered.

The teleportation hadn’t exactly gone awry, but it hadn’t been perfect either. Will hadn’t had much time to process that he was going to be in water again before he’d been teleported straight into the depths, Equilibrium Mantle protecting him from the cold and the pressure. He’d found Nathan shortly after, but the others had been split up a bit more.

Fortunately, it looked like they’d all at least remained within a square mile of each other, but once again, the system had proved that despite its massive, otherwordly power, it was still a terrible chauffeur.

“So, let me get this straight,” Will said. “There’s thirty-one of you alive right now, you’re basically under siege, and not a single one of you is higher than Bronze 7. Most of you are barely bronze despite monster core usage.”

“That’s right,” Oliver said, a note of defiance in his voice. “What would you have us do?”

A message appeared in the corner of Will’s vision. He tapped on it as he continued talking.

“Honestly, you’re making the best of a shitty situation,” he said. “You got dealt an awful hand, but everyone who’s just arrived—“

“Everyone?” Wisteria cut in curiously.

“There’s fourteen others of my power level in the area,” Will said. “Maybe a little weaker. Some of them are clearing dungeons, but others are starting to make their way here.”

“Like who?” a Bronze 2 who’d just arrived a minute ago asked from another table.

Will finally got to the message as he answered questions from the crew of the Sentinel, who were hungry for any news about the outside world.

Nathan: Why are they so weak? I thought you were the standard for Earth. If I sneezed too hard, one of these people could die.

Will: You know the Pareto principle?

Nathan: Sounds like a comic book villain.

Will: Vilfredo Pareto, founder of modern microeconomics, so close enough. It’s also known as the “80-20” rule. 80% of outcomes tend to come from 20% of the population. Basically, we’re a top-heavy society, and now that everyone basically has superpowers, that effect is even more pronounced. This is a lot closer to the average User group you’ll see on Earth, though granted I’m pretty sure the average User group isn’t dealing with being… however far removed from land we are.

Nathan: 1,670 miles.

Will: How do you know that and not any other relevant piece of information about this place? Why was your go-to a goddamn DiCaprio movie?

Nathan: I did Quiz Bowl when I was in college. Anyway, that’s good info to have. Wait, doesn’t that make me like S-tier here?

Will: Yeah, basically. You’re probably the strongest human right now, though I hear there are other otherworlders, so it might not be you.

Nathan: Huh. Sure doesn’t feel like it.

Will: Welcome to my life.

As Will talked and explained more, a few of the other top 16 made it to the ship as well. 

Caiyeri arrived by simply swimming over and climbing up the side of the hundred-foot side of the research vessel. She arrived in the mess hall dripping wet.

“This gun works terribly underwater,” she said, showing Will the soaked seven-shooter. “Ran out of bullets already.”

“Guns tend to do that,” he said. “Dry it out and inventory it.”

She drew a lot of curious glances from the crew. Caiyeri was likely the first not actively hostile non-human they’d ever met, and it helped that to human senses—Will’s senses, at least—she mostly resembled a very attractive human with just enough non-human features to be clearly different but not actively threatening.

Will had to wonder how elves had evolved so convergently to humans, then decided that it wasn’t worth his time to think about. The answer probably came down to system bullshit like it usually did.

Natalie Blurr was the next to rejoin them, using her summons to stay high above the water, then Hua and Fortress. Despite being completely out of his element, the fire elemental was a gold-rank still, and he’d managed to boil enough water into steam to launch himself at the ship. Hua had tagged along with one of her Speed skills.

The others didn’t seem to be approaching them, preferring instead to dip into underwater dungeons to grind for the coming fights. Will couldn’t blame them.

The continued arrival of more and more people boosted the morale of the ship’s crew some, but that could only go so far. With each arrival, Will could see Oliver’s aura flicker in worry, even if he managed to remain looking stoic on the outside.

“Will,” Oliver said eventually, cutting him off in the middle of an explanation on why no, his shadowy powers and dark presence did not make him an anime supervillain, stop asking. “We don’t have enough food and water for everyone. Not for… fourteen days, you said?”

“Oh, that?” Will cocked his head. “Definitely a problem. How have you been refueling again?”

“Dungeon runs,” Oliver replied, “but those have been increasingly difficult.”

“Well then, that’s that settled!” Will said cheerily. “Hey, silver-ranks. And you two golds, I guess, though I’m sure you can handle yourselves. Want to do a teambuilding exercise?”

Natalie affixed him with a flat stare. “A teambuilding exercise.”

“Sure. We’ve got fourteen days. These guys have a pretty nasty monster problem keeping them from getting resources. Let’s solve it, yeah?”

“I’m down,” Hua said.

“Some more training couldn’t hurt,” Caiyeri added.

“Why would you exclude me specifically?” Nathan complained. “Is it because I said The Dark Knight wasn’t actually that good?”

Will was already running up the stairs. “Last one in the water is a rotten… fuck. Liam was way better at this type of shit. Just follow me, will you?”

A collective wave of sighs overtook the other trial contestants, but they stormed off after him shortly after, leaving the bronze-rank scientists alone.

“That was… interesting,” Wisteria said after nearly an entire minute of stunned silence.

“I’m going to crack open the last of the alcohol,” Oliver said wearily. “Maybe by the time they’re back, we can decide whether to drink in celebration or to forget.”

Author's note: Hope you're having a good day! Stressing over the launch (which is still 3+ weeks out...) and literally everything to do with the story today. If you've got thoughts on the current mini-arc, I'd love to hear them!