[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 87: Leviathan (Patreon)

“I don’t want trouble,” Natalie lied. “There’s a far greater threat to deal with right now than the likes of you.”

The latter half of her statement, at least, was true. While the gold-rank elf of the Abyss nation was being a bit of a pain in the ass, she hadn’t actually done anything yet.

“You are aware of the presence of one who resembles me within your allies, are you not?” This question came from a lethally beautiful elf that Natalie would have considered having a fling with if not for her general murderous air.

Caiyeri Zero, as Natalie understood it, was among the strongest of the elves her small nation could send. Natalie, being a major player in one of the largest connected cities still operating, was not entirely unaware of her. The Abyss had been a massive pain in the neck, and as far as she was aware, the fair-skinned elf with a supermodel build and snow-white hair was personally responsible for the deaths of over six thousand unformed and bronze-rank humans in Manchester.

“She’s a friend of a friend,” Natalie said evasively.

A mile beneath them, Natalie’s summons were fighting alongside that very same “friend of a friend.” The gold-rank leviathan that had been threatening the stability of the Sentinel had increased its activity so much that they were sure it would try to devour the ship once they left. As much as Natalie didn’t want to try fighting a monster over a full rank above her, she hadn’t been able to conscience leaving a bunch of helpless bronze-ranks to their fate.

What use was power if she couldn’t protect those who needed it?

Caiyeri Zero and Thalia Brooksoul, both representatives of dangerous elf coalitions, didn’t see it that way. The latter was meditating atop a tree-like construct she had summoned out into the water—complete waste of mana, if you asked Natalie. Meanwhile, the former had caught Natalie just as she’d determined that it was a good time for her human body to join the fight. Both of them stood atop the ocean now, Natalie with a Speed skill and Caiyeri with a projected force platform.”

The abyss elf smiled charmingly. “A friend of a friend, you say? Do yourself a favor and disassociate from her. I would not want to be in your position when she dies.”

“Lady, I don’t know who you think you are, but we’re all in deep shit right now,” Natalie said. “I doubt anything Will tried to say actually got through to you, but this is absolutely not the time to be chasing down petty grudges.”

Natalie had spent enough time around Will recently to understand what it felt like when an opposing aura started to take over her own. She barely noticed it now, but she did catch it when the gold-rank elf began to overpower her aura with her own.

“That’s my cue, I think,” Natalie said. “No chance in hell I’m staying to see what you’re trying on me.”

She closed her eyes, visualizing her summons. They were all in aquatic forms now, adapting to the crushing pressures of the ocean.

Natalie might have noticed the aura, but her senses were nowhere near powerful enough to detect what it left on her.

By the time she might have noticed anything wrong, she was already gone.

#

Hua was equal parts relieved that there had been more than her friends participating in the fight against the leviathan and disappointed that not everyone had come together.

She kept on doing that thing where she believed in the goodness of other people. It was a terrible habit of hers. Haoyu had managed to clear himself of that a while ago, but she still clung on to that thought.

Casey Justin, American. Osiris Adebayo, Egyptian. Lily Teneli, American. Nitika Kapoor, Indian. Caiyeri Seven, abyss elf. Neriym Rain, water elf. Natalie Blurr, British. Nathan, presumably American at some point but now an otherworlder. In addition to Hua, that made nine lined up against the leviathan. One of the absent ones was possibly dead already, but there were six others who could have participated and were not.

Of the nine fighting, only one or two were actually suited to the water. Neriym was literally in her element, but her natural grace in the water didn’t extend to anyone but herself, and she didn’t seem particularly interested in sharing her abilities.

That was a problem. Even though Neriym was a gold-ranker, the leviathan had properties that made it hard to kill beyond its rank.

For one, it was half a mile long.

Hua had never seen a living being this large before, and she hoped she would never have to again. Its aura radiated throughout the span of the water, oppressive and unyielding. It didn’t even notice her as she threw attacks at it.

The problem was that it didn’t have to notice her. Its rank was high enough to simply overwhelm her with its presence, and she could tell that its aura was damaging her merely by being near it. Her attacks scaled with the amount of credits she put into them, but the leviathan was simply so large that her skills, which were specialized in assassinating human-sized Users with brutal efficiency and stealth, were functionally useless.

The other silver-rankers were largely the same. Hua knew from connections with Osiris’ country-state that he was capable of a one time use gold-rank detonation skill that would functionally be a full-force nuclear bomb with some added effects, but he clearly didn’t want to use it here.

That made sense. The real threat lay up there in the stars, and though Hua hated to admit it to herself, it was just logical to prioritize the well-being of an entire world over the lives of a few bronze-rankers that ultimately wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

Still, it fucking sucked, knowing that they might have a way to kill or at least seriously cripple the massive, serpent-like leviathan but weren’t going to use it.

Their primary other hope lay in Nathan, whose offenses were head and shoulders beyond almost everyone else Hua had seen, but he was the one the leviathan’s offenses were primarily focused on. 

Despite its size, the monster was surprisingly quick, and it proved to be highly maneuverable. Hua was halfway down its body and didn’t have to content with anything other than its aura, but Nathan had to avoid and deflecct a rapidly moving head and a wide-range breath weapon that corroded everything it touched into dust. A hapless silver-rank monster or two had entered the area of effect, hoping to prey on the scraps the leviathan had to offer, and they’d been melted down to their bones within moments.

Caiyeri: Every effect I can apply to this monster would be much better if I could do anything other than break through its armor. That does us no good when it backs that armor up with a million tons of mass.

Hua: Right?? I can wear down a gold-ranker, but not one like this…

Caiyeri: Don’t exhaust yourself. There isn’t much time left until the tournament starts up again, and we’ll need to be ready for whatever comes next.

Hua bit back a rude reply that Caiyeri didn’t deserve. She’d come to like the elf woman over the weeks they’d spent together. Caiyeri was snappy, but she was direct and less unkind than she seemed at first.

Still, she didn’t want to leave the Sentinel defenseless. They’d been doing some great work before the apocalypse had come, and despite the hopelessness of the situation, none of them had given into despair. The last thing Hua wanted was to abandon them to their fate, but it was looking like that was what she would need to do if she wanted to survive the next day.

That was the nastiest part about this world. Every day, she could feel a bit of her humanity slip away. Her morals, which she’d held herself to so strongly before the system had come, had been tested against reality again and again, and she’d found that she preferred living to her moral code.

For the time being, so long as she could, she would continue to fight. The monster’s aura might be chipping away at her life, but Hua could still contribute something. Right?

Not even Hua was delusional enough to believe that was the truth.

She was grateful for the water surrounding her, because when sudden tears rose to her eyes, the ocean wiped them away for her.

Just this once, she didn’t want to have to choose. How many more times could she take being forced between what was right and what was necessary until she broke?

Nitika Kapoor was the first to give up, accurately identifying that her skills weren’t doing anything significant to the leviathan. Osiris left not long after.

Caiyeri: We should leave. You’re being worn down by the monster’s aura, and you’re not meant for aquatic fighting. There’s nothing more we can do. We don’t even need to be here in the first place. This isn’t our fight.

Hua: But you’re fighting it anyway, aren’t you?

Caiyeri: It’s what he would do.

Would do, Hua noted. Not would have done. Caiyeri still thought Will was alive. Hua had given up hope on that a few days ago. In her experience, people vanishing without a word and becoming unreachable by chat message were almost always gone forever.

Then, just as Hua’s resolve to keep fighting began to change into a bitter acceptance of reality, the already-dark ocean darkened further.

The leviathan’s body had glowed with bioluminescence, painting an eerie picture in the deep darkness of the ocean, but even that faded as Hua was surrounded by shadow.

Her heart jumped as a second, even more oppressive aura pressed down against the leviathan’s. It was so changed from what it had been before that Hua almost thought it was the strange gold-ranker that she’d seen brief flashes of before he’d vanished, but then the core of it shone through, and she realized who it was.

She had never been so happy to be proven so wrong so quickly.

#

Corruption spread across the leviathan’s body with shocking speed. The last creature of even vaguely similar size that Will had fought had been the devouring gestalt, and that one had possessed a dozen tricks to get past his corruption.

This leviathan, however, had no such thing. It was the apex predator of the ocean, and it was nigh unkillable in its own element, but just as it possessed an array of tricks that had kept the arrayed silver and gold-rankers from putting a meaningful dent in it, Will had one extremely powerful trick that could bypass all of its innate defenses.

Its aura had been a mana and life drain one, similar to Will’s, but that hadn’t been its primary defense. That came in the form of a constantly active skill that redistributed the damage it took from any individual hit across its entire body. With the sheer size of the leviathan, that meant it annulled all of its traditional weak points, rendering it functionally invincible against anything short of a nuke.

Against corruption, though, its skill worked against it. All it did was spread the affliction to its body faster, and with The Bell Tolls, Will layered on an extra level of the affliction to quicken its death.

He sent a broad message out to everyone in the area, telling them to get out of the way. Every creature he’d corrupted tended to be erratic at best in its dying moments, and the breath weapon he’d seen with Sen on the way in had been effective enough to kill Will in one shot if he took a direct blast. He didn’t want anyone getting caught up in that.

Nathan: I thought you were dead, asshole.

Will: That which is already dead can never die.

Nathan: That line would sound a lot cooler if I didn’t know exactly which episode it was from.

Hua and Caiyeri seemed happy to see him, at least. Both of them began evacuating too, with Caiyeri using one of her Speed-bound skills to vastly increase the pace at which she swam upwards and Hua simply using a silver-rank item she’d acquired from one of the dungeons to encase herself in a buble that rapidly rose to the surface of the ocean.

Natalie: You’re alive.

Will: Why does everyone seem surprised about that?

Natalie: You did leave without any warning, and you did apparently drop off the face of the planet for several days without any contact.

Beneath Will, the serpentine monster thrashed wildly in pain, jettisoning its corrosive breath with all the might it had. Nathan had long since evacuated the area directly in front of it, though, and the others participating were well out of the way already and getting further.

Lily: I thought you were pretty boring at first, but you get more interesting every time I see you. What happened to your soul?

Will: Your aura senses were kinda shit the last time I saw you. Did they get better?

Lily: I’ll tell you if you tell me.

Will: It’s complicated.

Lily: What a coincidence. That’s exactly what I was going to say.

The leviathan’s death throes began. Will decided against wasting charges of his demonic blast scepter, though he did get a little closer with Sen’s help to charge his slayer sword, gracefully slashing just deep enough into the gold-rank’s body to afflict it with increasing levels of Charged and increasing the active charges in the sword.

Unfortunately, Eclipse, the sword the Lord of Loss had given him as part of their sponsorship deal, wouldn’t trigger here. Monsters didn’t count as Users, it seemed, so there would be no copying the leviathan’s corrosive properties.

You have received a message from [Neriym Rain].

Neriym: Be careful, human.  The blood is as corrosive as its breath weapon.

Will: Yo! Haven’t seen you in person yet. Thanks for the heads-up.

Neriym: You have a great deal of promise. Should our clans both survive the year, a mutual understanding would serve us well.

Will: Holy shit, you’re telling me reasonable elf nations exist?

Neriym: Don’t get your expectations too high.

They weren’t. When Will had arrived, splashing into the water with his climate-regulating skill active at full force, he’d seen that the gold-rank water elf had been basically trying to solo the monster. Her abilities—at least the ones Will had seen—were much more effective for drowning armies or enabling others than they were for fighitng a single large monster. It was entirely possible that they wouldn’t have needed Will at all, but she’d fought selfishly instead of as a part of a greater unit. If that reflected the values of her nation, he wasn’t terribly excited to meet them, either.

None of that mattered right now, though. There was very little time left until the tournament resumed, and Nynn wasn’t going to be able to hold that back much longer. Will just needed to eliminate any remaining major threats to the Sentinel, and that meant basically just the leviathan.

As it thrashed itself to death, its skin and skeleton coming apart at the seams, the gold-rank monster roared defiantly, its aura expanding out with stunning force. Even a human could manage to project their aura quite a long distance, and with the size of the leviathan, it could project its power all the way to the surface.

It was a suicidal gambit, but the leviathan was dying anyway. By investing all its power into this, I tcould permanently damage the silver-ranks and potentially even kill the bronzes aboard the research vessel.

“Oh no you don’t,” Will said. He projected his aura out as well, contesting the leviathan.

Everybody else in the area, even those curious enough to want to spy on him, had left for the surface. They were not fool enough to try fighting this monster any further, not even the most bloodthirsty of them.

Or maybe they were avoiding him.

His aura expanded, blocking the leviathan’s.

Title: [Shattersoul]

Legendary

Granted only to those who have had their soul broken and survived the process.

All aspects of your soul are unaffected by rank differences and bypass skill-based immunities and resistances. The range at which you can project your aura vastly increases, as does its strength. You are immune to soul attacks made at your rank or lower, and you have resistance to soul attacks made above your rank.

The leviathan was an ancient creature. Whether it had been brought in from Arcadia or been summoned from another world entirely, as the dungeon monsters often seemed to be, it had hundreds of years of power invested in its gold-rank aura. Its rank differential alone was enough to overpower most of the other Users.

But Will was no stranger to fighting above his rank, and he had already been capable of suppressing a gold-rank’s aura.

As it turned out, when his primary comparison point and training partner was not one god but two, one of which was fully intent on killing him, Will’s aura was very strong indeed.

For an instant, the leviathan’s aura matched his. Even with all the divine reinforcement and torturous training, Will was still a silver-ranker, and a human at that. In a fair fight, he still might have lost. It would have been close, at least.

Unfortunately for the monster, Will was not exactly a fan of making things fair. It was burdened down by corruption and wither conditions already, its body wracked with necrotic energy, and Will only made matters worse by striking out with his new Power-bound skill, channeling the Abyssal Tempest skill to form an underwater storm, dark clouds forming within the water itself and infusing him with elemental strength.

Lightning coursed across the leviathan’s body, the multiple levels of Charged that Will had inflicted upon it taking effect and amplifying the twisting electricity.

His aura overwhelmed the gold-rank beast’s, and he crushed its last stand with a twisted, vicious satisfaction.

The leviathan twitched violently once, twice, and then stilled.

You have defeated [Deep Sea Leviathan].

There really wasn’t much time left, so Will looted the leviathan quickly—no magical items, which made sense, but there were solid crafting materials and a few choice awakening shards—and returned to the surface, using Wind Walker’s air-dash to speed himself through the water.

Sans Neriym, the people who had been battling the leviathan gathered aboard the Leviathan. Will was the last to get there, and he found them already speaking amongst themselves.

As he entered the mess hall where they’d gathered, all voices fell silent. He’d masked his aura so that they wouldn’t see him coming until he was already there, but Caiyeri and Hua must have seen him on his minimap as an ally.

“You realize that I could hear you, right?” he said to the gathered group, “I feel like the main character in some high school coming of age movie now. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t want to talk to me.”

It wasn’t that, Will could tell. Some hid it better than others, and some were less affected, but apart from Caiyeri, every single person in this room’s aura was tinged with fear.

He sighed. “Alright, since I have your attention anyway, let me make this quick. In about thirty minutes, we’re going to be going back up to the tournament.

“To the people of the Sentinel, just stay put. We’ve killed the biggest immediate threat to your ship, and you should have supplies to last a couple of months, at least. Do what dungeons are safe for you. Monster core up if you have to. I’ll try to be back once this entire disaster is sorted out; I should be able to transport you to land by the time this is all over, but that assumes I survive. If I’m dead or otherwise incapable of getting to you, focus on training Wisteria. I’m pretty sure she’s the only one of you who can actually develop a portal power.”

Will paused, recalling the information he’d gathered from Nynn and the cultist. It was hard to get the sounds of Ingrid’s suffering out of his head, but that was a demon he could deal with later. She would’ve done the same to him, if the roles had been reversed, and he doubted it would have been for anything other than entertainment.

“That’s that for the ship. To everyone else: the tournament will continue because it has to. The events have already been set into motion. What’s different is that everyone who’s eliminated will remain at the tournament venue. The reasons for this should become clear once other people start arriving and start dying. The cultists have a two-part ritual with a corruption aspect followed by a powerful summoning step, and there’s almost nothing we can do to stop the first part. Spread the word if you can, because we need as many people on board as possible, or our planet’s going to have a very bad time. Maybe not full-on Alderaan level bad, but it’ll definitely be the beginning of another end.

“Any questions?”

For a second, there was silence.

Then, all at once, everyone started speaking over each other.

Yeah, Will thought, I probably should have expected that.