[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 84: Dead Fish (Patreon)

“The cycle is faltering,” Sadareth commented, looking down far below. “A shame, especially seeing how many of my champions made it so far. Yours, too.”

“Don’t remind me,” the Hunger sighed. “My ‘champion’ seems to believe that our relationship works the other way around, with him the god and I the mortal. Frustratingly, he is dead-set on proving himself correct.”

“And what of Vyx?” Sadareth asked.

“Always moments away from trying to kill him,” Kadael said. “Yet he never takes the last step. I suspect that my champion foiled the Crown’s plans. Ordinary anger, even over a corruption wielder, would not bring him this far.”

“You would know,” the Elven Mother said, a playful twinkle in her eyes.

“I do. If this cycle were any other, I would brush it off as him having a bad decade. With the aberrations, one begins to wonder.”

“One does. Tea?”

“Please.” After Kadael and Sadareth had cleared far too much of their stockpile of Emperor-tier liquor, he’d accidentally blown up one of this solar system’s moons in a drunken stupor. It had been an outer planet’s, so he had not been crushed by the weight of plausibility, but that had come far too close to disaster for him to indulge again this century. Tea was more than welcome.

The Elven Mother hummed as she prepared the drink. It was a very mortal thing to do, but it had only been just over a century since their ascensions. They were not so much more than mortals themselves.

Ironic, in a way, that it was the Crown who behaved most like a mortal child despite his vast seniority.

The tea leaves were of Sadareth’s own breed, a line she had cultivated carefully on a garden world for sixty years. Although she had every capability to will something as simple as a cup of tea into existence, she took pride in the process, going so far as to boil the water herself rather than simply conjure it already heated.

It was delicious, which Kadael sorely appreciated.

“The Crown,” he said, taking a sip. “Peace. The Thief of Stars. Distortion and Justice. Fire. You and I. Fire and perhaps Peace excluded, these are not usual qualifiers to the final phase of the trial.”

“Indeed they are not,” Sadareth said. “And Peace has three participants when usually she only fields one champion. There is another game afoot, and I fear that it is being played without us.”

“The cultists,” Kadael suggested. “They plot to knock the cycle further from its path. My champion and yours have discussed them some, have they not?”

“They have,” Sadareth agreed. “All they have is speculation, but I have a greater concern.”

“You already knew I would suggest them,” the Hunger realized. “You have been spying.”

“We are gods, Kadael. There is no spying. I am merely observing. Or, rather, failing to observe.”

“Are they shrouded in such corruption?” Kadael frowned. “It should not be so. Our senses should easily penetrate metal-tier corruption, at the very least.”

“Precisely,” Sadareth said. “They are being sheltered. I do not know by who, but someone on our level is involved, and that scares me.”

The Hunger’s frown deepened. “We cannot uncover this without threatening plausibility, can we?”

“Likely not,” the Mother said. “At first, I believed this threat to merely be problematic for our champions. It would be a loss, but there are always more elves and more who hunger.”

“We would have survived,” the Hunger agreed easily. “Yet the presence of an Executor group, the highest levels of the organization, or another god…”

“Or even a demon,” Sadareth finished. “This situation is one that may threaten even our seat. And it is only our champions who can defeat it.”

“Good news, then,” the Hunger said darkly. “William Li-Brown will not stop at anything to defeat his enemies. Monsters, gods, demons—he will die before he submits to them.”

“Our power in the hands of mortals,” Sadareth mused. “It’s been a long time since I felt so much like we were teetering at the edge of a precipice.”

“I do not miss this feeling.”

They sat there for a while, drinking tea and reminiscing over worse days.

Ascension had not come with the perfection they had hoped for, but they would do everything they could to keep it.

#

The last time Will had been underwater, he’d been severely underpowered in comparison to his competition. The life and abyss elves who’d been following them had all been silver-rank, and though he had clawed back the odds with his silver-rank Chaos Transfer and their temporary companion Azure Four, the silver elf who’d supposedly defected to their side had ultimately proven that his interests were only his own. It had been a struggle to survive, and only chance combined with forcible activations of Azure’s traps had gotten him and Caiyeri through it in one piece.

This time was different. A handful of the dungeons were silver-rank, but the bulk of them were bronze, clearable even by the weaker researchers aboard the Sentinel. The primary issue stopping the researchers had been that the uncleared silver-rank dungeons had filled up to the brim with monsters and magic, overflowing. Back in America, there had been enough people in the area regularly clearing dungeons to alleviate the pressure in them, so to speak, and there hadn’t been any gold-rank dungeons threatening to leak. It was a different story here, and Will assumed the same was true for much of the ocean.

All that was a long way to say that for now, they only had to deal with roaming silver-rank monsters and the dungeons themselves. For an admittedly disparate group of silver-rank Users with a ton of experience clearing monsters a higher rank than them, the makeshift band Will had assembled was devastatingly effective at handling the roaming infestation.

Will’s Equilibrium Mantle was a massive boon to them all. Though the skill’s description did not explicitly state it, he found that by overcharging it and increasing the mana cost, he could increase the radius of the normalized weather zone to encompass the entirety of the pack so long as they stuck close together. It did reduce Hua’s efficiency, since an obvious area of nullified ocean reduced her ability to be stealthy, but it was better than the alternative.

Blurr, to his surprise, was the most effective underwater, trumping even the gold-rank Fortress who, to be fair, was in the complete inverse of his element. She had three summons active, each of which were naturally suited to the ocean environment, and they set upon any hostile in their path with vicious ease.

Seeing that everyone was handling themselves just fine, Will decided it was safe to split his attention a little. He had a few hundred of Sen’s eyes with him now, on the lookout for traps and any potential ambushes, but the bulk of them had been sent elsewhere. Even hundreds of thousands of miles away up in high Earth orbit, their magical link to Will allowed him to instantaneously control any of them and see through clumps of the eyes.

He wanted to take a look at the corrupted area back in the tournament venue, if you could call a bunch of big space rocks with architecture glued onto them a venue. Will kicked himself for not having used Pages of the Past there while he’d been there in person. With Sen, he could gain a lot of insight into magic, but the presence of corruption made it harder, and Will couldn’t use skills through his familiar, especially not at this range.

Still, even without that ability, Will was able to find areas where the corruption had lessened a little and he could bunch up a ton of Sen’s eyes to do deep dives into the corrupted land. The pillars that the cultists had placed down had propagated broad damage across massive asteroids. Though the pillars themselves had been removed by the cultists after they’d successfully planted them, the aftereffects also had something to be studied.

Caiyeri had suggested that the cultists might be using their pillars to corrupt everyone that they summoned back or to empower themselves. The last time Will had seen it active, it had inflicted platinum-rank corruption using only gold-rank power, so there was certainly some truth to that. The more he explored it, though, the less that seemed like it was the only facet. There was more to it, he was a hundred percent sure, but he—

Caiyeri: Will! Pay attention!

The message snapped him back to reality, and he dodged out of the way just as a silver-rank squid shot a cloud of acidic ink towards him with startling speed. A bit of it still managed to hit him, but he had planned for this. Even as it seared past his nonexistent defenses, he slowed down time.

Then, he used Favored Element. Usually, the cast time for the ritual that selected a type of damage resistance or immunity for him was ten minutes, but Envoy of Mercy came in clutch. He’d gotten a couple of layers of Blessed and Purified thanks to killing the monsters that had been circling Oliver, Wisteria, and their squad after he’d appeared, and he used a level now.

You have consumed one level of [Purified] to negate the cast time of [Favored Element].

The silver-rank upgrade auto-selected Acid as his favored element and Fire as his hostile, and he allowed time to speed up again.

The ink burnt his pants off, then dribbled harmlessly down his leg and back into the water, where it slowly dissolved.

Will fired back a moment later. It was only a single silver-rank monster, and he didn’t want to spend the limited charges on his blast scepter, so he sent his peak silver phantasm after it, teleporting to it as soon as it got close. With the fresh power-up, the speed of the Hunger’s shadow was unrivaled by anyone not using a movement skill, and Will appeared right next to the squid’s eye in moments.

You have marked [Giant Arctic Squid] for death.

You have inflicted a level of silver-rank [Corruption] on [Giant Arctic Squid].

A couple slashes with the slayer sword and a usage of the Bell Tolls later, the albino squid was laden with so many afflictions it couldn’t move. It was simple enough to clean it up afterwards. It dropped a couple awakening shards of the deep, which Natalie laid claim to because she almost had enough for a tablet. 

Other than that, it dropped the standard credit allocation, which they split somewhat evenly. Will gave up his share in exchange for the squid ink sac, which was a silver-rank crafting material. With the gifts from his sponsors, he had enough money to last him quite some time, and he’d been meaning to get around to crafting magic items of his own.

It probably wasn’t the most optimal way to split the loot, but the system they had in place for the time being worked.

Hua: You good?

Caiyeri: You can’t be losing focus like that.

Will: Chill. I didn’t get hit, did I?”

Hua: Bro your pants are missing from the knees down.

Will: Nuh uh.

Caiyeri: You are insufferable.

He, Caiyeri, and Hua had actually allied in an earlier round, so they were in a party now. The others were less willing to join Will’s party, even Fortress, who’d been part of the same alliance. Individual chat worked with them, at least.

As they continued diving towards the silver-rank dungeon, Will returned his attention to Sen as well as his chat windows.

Will: How’s it looking, Nathan?

Nathan: System locked us down pretty good. Whatever that Nynn guy did, it was pretty thorough. We’re stuck in a three-mile radius. Any further is completely blocked. No teleportation, intangible skills don’t work, can’t get a familiar through.

Will: I think I have a way out if necessary, but it shouldn’t be. We need the tournament to cool down, anyway. Can others enter?

Nathan: Not sure. The monsters seem to naturally being straying away from the border, and we are in the middle of the ocean. I doubt other Users are going to come after us.

Will: The cultists.

Nathan: Right. They’re in space, though.

Will: They got into space somehow. If they can make it to a remote asteroid, I’m sure they can find an ocean.

Nathan: Good point. I’ll keep an eye out.

Will: Sick. Thanks for checking.

Nathan: Speaking of checking, I found the leviathan. It’s about three mile down. Gold-rank, but on the lower end. Maybe half a mile long? It’s SUPER big.

Will: There’s always a bigger fish.

Nathan: I feel like this is the bigger fish, dude.

Will: Is anyone else going for it?

Nathan: No. As far as I can tell, all the others are going for dungeons solo or busy finding ways to deal with the water.

Will: Got it. Keep me updated. If it’s not going to bother us, I’m not going to bother it until we’re strong enough that it’s not even a question.

Nathan: Of course. Though I think we could take it.

Will: Pride goeth before the fall, Padawan.

Nathan: I have had the system for almost five more years than you. If anything, I’m the master here.

Will: You keep telling yourself that.

Will’s aura senses were powerful, but he didn’t want to stretch Sen thin looking for the other competitors. Too many of his familiar’s eyes were on active duty in high Earth orbit, and he didn’t want to be caught off-guard in the near future.

Nathan didn’t need to grind any of these dungeons for experience. The silver-rank ones wouldn’t give him that much juice, and the bronze-rank ones were functionally useless for him. For now, knowing that he was probably the strongest of the remaining Users in the competition by sheer stats combined with actual combat experience, which the other gold-rank in Fortress did not have much of, Will had assigned Nathan to overwatch. Having him observe the situation at large and ensure that nothing went wrong beyond what already had.

The first day slipped by with surprising ease. Their group did not work like a well-oiled machine at all. Will and Caiyeri were a strong duo, and to a lesser extent they worked well with Hua, but every engagement was fraught with the worry that someone would take this opportunity to thin out the competition a little. It was clear in how conservatively Blurr deployed her summons and in how much Fortress focused on a defensive fire shield so hot that he simply hovered in a cloud of boiling steam half a mile under the sea that they were fighting for themselves, only tagging along because the other options were significantly worse.

Still, they were all powerful silver-rankers, and so long as they weren’t actively inhibiting each other, they were able to clear it with ease.

[Power] advanced to Silver 2!

[Affinity] advanced to Silver 1!

[Soul] advanced to Silver 6!

[Perception] advanced to Silver 2!

Over the course of a day, they cleared a total of seventeen dungeons, most of them bronze-rank. It was good practice, though everyone was keeping skills close to their chest. Will still hadn’t tested out the Wail of the Forgotten skill against living targets. He knew that their ultimate enemy in this tournament wasn’t each other, but he didn’t want to reveal the skill until he had to.

In addition to training up his attributes, Will ranked up Eclipse, the midnight-black sword that glowed with a radiant white aura. He’d gotten it as a sponsorship gift from the Lord of Loss, who was also sponsoring Natalie Blurr and had given it in exchange for Will promising to not kill or corrupt Natalie as well as avoiding taking direct action against the Lord of Loss unless the Lord did so first.

At unformed, the sword was at risk of breaking every time Will swung it with silver-rank strength, but he was able to progress it almost to the top of unformed. A few silver-rank monster cores would’ve brought it up to bronze quickly, but he didn’t want to use cores on this item. Restricting its growth to the metal tier would be a massive waste of potential for a mythic rarity item.

When the day was done, they returned to the ship, inventories laden with food and water that they’d looted from the dungeons. Oliver and Wisteria, for some reason, greeted them with a loud, drunken cheer and a half-empty barrel of liquor that had been magically enhanced by some bronze-rank spirit.

Will talked to the crew some, but he found himself not remembering their stories and not particularly caring, either. After hearing Oliver’s, they all sounded the same. The only other person on this ship who interested him was Wisteria. Her Void Knight class was somewhat suited to the ocean environment they were in, but it wasn’t optimal. It did, however, have the option to evolve into Dread Executor eventually.

When Will brought it up, she acknowledged that it had been a factor.

“One of my visions was about a Dread Executor,” she admitted. “I figured if they can boil oceans with a snap of their fingers, I should pick whatever path takes me there.”

“Have you found any certainty through death?” Will asked, intentionally cryptic. That was the first line of the mantra the odd system interface that dealt with Dread Executors had fed him.

Wisteria looked at him strangely. “Have you had too much to drink?”

Will shook his head and smiled. “That was a strange thing to ask. Sorry.”

Not yet, then.

When they slept, they did so in shifts. Unlike Azure Four, Will actually trusted Hua, which might have been because he’d already seen her when she’d thought nobody could and she had never attempted to hurt him or Caiyeri. Blurr, on the other hand, used her summons to watch over her while she slept. Fortress fell into a meditative trance instead of sleeping.

Nathan reported back to Will overnight as the latter was engrossed in Sen’s eyes, trying to discern what exactly the strange magic residue the pillars had left behind was meant for. It was achingly familiar, but just beyond reach of his mind. Will was sure there was more to the story than just amping the entire asteroid with corruption, but it would take time for him to understand the full picture.

The others had found their own sleeping arrangements. A couple of them also came aboard the ship, though they stayed far, far away from the humans. Neriym Rain, a water elf, literally slept with the fishes.

The second day slipped by just as quickly as the first. As it turned out, when you weren’t being faced with increasingly dangerous threats every single battle, fights became routine. 

Day by day, they grinded the dungeons and the roaming monsters, making sure to stay well clear of the gold-rank leviathan that stayed prowling the depths. Leveling up was slow, with every rank making it more difficult to progress than the last, but Will got himself to Silver 5. He put the extra two points into Affinity, which quickly advanced as he familiarized himself with Eclipse more, placing it at a functional Gold 5.

As the days passed on, Will gradually warmed to the initial pair of researchers he’d met. Oliver and Wisteria were the only two on the Sentinel that didn’t seem terribly frightened by his aura—or, at least, were willing to speak with him despite their fear.

They didn’t have many insights to offer on the system, but both of them were incredibly knowledgable in their fields. Oliver was a marine biologist and Wisteria an astronomer, and they did have insight on that front, though both bemoaned how much established scientific theory was going to have to be thrown out because of the apocalypse.

A week in, Will was still Silver 5, but he’d started to gather more loot. Eclipse was bronze-rank now and steadily growing, and he had finally assembled enough awakening shards to create a new tablet, which could finally fill one of his remaining open slots.

Item: [Tablet of the Abyss]

Common

Canyons. Caves. Oceans. Pits. All hide civilizations from the light, and in the underside, power accumulates.

Grants the power of the abyss. Affixes one at-rank skill.

While Will was debating which attribute to affix it to, he continued scanning the venue with Sen.

“I don’t get it,” he complained to a dinner table with Oliver, Wisteria, Nathan, and Hua, who’d taken up a sudden and recent interest in deep sea fish for some reason. “Seriously, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Oh, woe,” Nathan said. “Your overpowered sensory skill which somehow lets you do detailed analysis a hundred thousand miles away from your target doesn’t also come with an instruction guide to everything. Ain’t that sad?”

“It’s your ass on the line too,” Will reminded him. “I’ve gotten a better idea of the magic taking hold of the venue, but it doesn’t make sense to me. It feels… dead, for lack of a better word.” 

“Dead?” Wisteria asked curiously. “You talked about corruption before. Is that what’s causing it?”

“No. Corruption is actively destructive, and even if this is making use of it, it’s not doing the same thing. The magic is there, but it’s not actually destroying the place. The amount of corruption there isn’t actively increasing. Whatever lingering magic is there is just putting it into some kind of stasis that makes everything there seem like it’s dead or dying.”

“Kalingono,” Oliver said, snapping his fingers.

“Pardon?”

“It’s a local name. The scientific name is nimbochromis livingstonii, or Livingston’s cichlid. It’s a type of fish native to Africa. A friend of mine took me there once on an interdisciplinary research project with some freshwater biologists that was quite similar to what this was supposed to be, actually.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Will asked.

“Shush,” Hua said, scooting forward in her seat. “I love hearing about fish.”

“Fish tend to keep moving while they’re alive, but the kalingono just stops. It lays down on the riverbed, and scavengers quickly believe it’s dead. They get too close to it, far closer than they would be if they knew it was alive, and just as they go in for their first bite—“

“It pounces,” Will completed, a potential revelation dawning on him. “Shit. You think they might be luring something in?”

Oliver shrugged. “I’m not the one with overpowered otherwordly powers that apparently transcend planets.”

Will muttered a curse. “Give me a moment.”

He ran off, finding an area that was isolated as possible.

“I need to get this over with quickly,” he told himself. “In and out. Fifteen minute adventure.”

Will bound his new tablet, then opened his Sanctuary into the Beyond.

When Nathan and Hua caught up to him, they found nothing but a swirling dark portal that neither of them could seem to pass through.

“Is he always like this?” Nathan asked her.

“I’ve only known him for a bit,” Hua said cheerfully. “But Caiyeri tells me no. He’s usually even worse.”