[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 89: Contact With the Enemy (Patreon)

This was the first time in the tournament so far that Will had received rewards and not immediately thrown into a waiting room. His Equilibrium Mantle kept him and Osiris from being affected in the vacuum as they walked, and Will was keenly aware of the other man’s presence as he examined his rewards.

“You know,” he said, “I didn’t realize it until now, but accepting rewards definitely feels like a private thing. This is a little awkward. It feels like I should be going into a changing room or something.”

“Assert your victory more thoroughly, why don’t you,” Osiris said. His voice was light, but his expression and aura showed that he’d been more affected by his complete and total loss than he was letting on. “I can look away, if you’d like.”

“Sorry,” Will said. “Let’s get to the safe zone first. Can’t have you accidentally dying to space. How have you even been active for this long without an anti-vacuum item?”

"I had a suit,” Osiris said. “It broke during the first cultist incursion. Irreversible corruption, I’m afraid.”

“I didn’t see you in the triage area then. You get away okay?”

“Indeed, though I was unable to take any of them out without risking annihilating the entire asteroid I was on.”

“Unlucky. Hopefully, we’ll get better results this time.”

“That depends. I do not know if I will be able to detonate them without harming those who are brought in by the ritual.”

“Nynn has a plan for that,” Will said. That wasn’t entirely a lie, though the implication he was leading towards was definitely not anywhere approaching the truth. “We’ll get you set up to deal as much damage to the incoming cultists as we can while minimizing how much the returning competitors get hit.”

An often-overlooked benefit of having a more effective aura was his ability to keep it completely still. Lie detection through aura reading was an iffy measure at best, but when Will’s aura control was this good, he could completely fool anyone who was relying on non-skill-based lie detection, especially since he technically wasn’t completely lying.

A lot of people were going to get hurt no matter how this went. Obviously, he wanted to minimize that, but it was childish to imagine that there was a way where everybody lived and nobody got hurt.

The cultists had put in far too much planning for this. Their plan must have been cooking for years at least. Their equipment was so effective that even Nynn, who was an expert in breaking through priceless artifacts, couldn’t find a way to properly disrupt the ritual circles, nor had he been able to identify where their summons would take place.

Nynn: I see that your round has finished. Join me in the safe zone and deliver the ritualist to me.

Will: You knew he was a ritualist and didn’t tell me?

Nynn: I was going to contact him directly once he made it to a safe zone, but this worked out better. I do not have control over the matchups.

Will: Lovely. We’ll be there soon.

“You have any movement skills?” Will asked.

“Sure I do,” Osiris replied. “Not ones that’ll work great if I have to keep up with your skill, though. I don’t know if I can match your speed, whether that’s higher or lower.”

“Great.” Will sighed. “Guess we’re doing this the old fashioned way, then.”

Fortunately, at silver rank, their speed was superhuman. At a dead sprint, even magically unassisted, they could reach a consistent, rapid pace that allowed them to make it to the nearest safe zone in decent time.

It was as barebones as the arena. All of the normal trappings of a safe zone had been tossed out, replaced with just a largely empty sitting area, a single automated shop, and a closed-off platform that radiated spatial magic.

As they arrived, that platform’s magic peaked, and Nynn walked out of it.

“Osiris Adebayo,” he said.

“That is me,” Osiris confirmed.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Will said, drawing both of their eyes to him. “Isn’t it a bit stereotypical to be named after a mythological creature?”

Osiris shrugged. “I picked the name. I have always been fascinated by the bountiful history of my country. When people were changing races and fundamentally rebuilding themselves from the ground up, I decided a name would not be that adventurous in comparison.”

“Oh, that’s awesome,” Will said. “Ignore what I said. Picking a god of death in the apocalypse does seem a bit on the nose, though.”

“Will,” Nynn warned. “Every minute matters.”

“Right, right. Are you off, then?”

Nynn twirled a finger in the air, and Osiris startled. System messages must have been opening up for him.

“Do you accept?” Nynn asked. “Will should have briefed you on the basics.”

“He did, and I do.”

“Perfect. Then join me. We have work to do.”

Osiris nodded, looking back to Will and waving at him.

“If an asteroid explodes, it was probably my fault,” Osiris said. “Allah willing, I will see you again.”

Will raised an eyebrow at the religious sentiment, but shrugged it off and waved back. “See you after this is all over.”

“It will never truly be over,” Osiris replied. “We will jump from fire to fire until we either forget how to burn or turn to ash.”

“Personally, I plan on the former.”

“Osiris,” Nynn said warningly.

“Of course. Lead the way.”

“I will be in touch,” Nynn said. “The others have not finished their round yet.”

On that note, both of them stepped onto the platform. With a burst of mana, Nynn sent both of them away.

The moment they were gone, Will checked the loot he’d gotten from the last round. The credits were non-negligible, but he hadn’t even spent an entire diamond credit yet and he still had 999 of those remaining, so money itself wasn’t going to excite him anytime soon.

The real prizes were the item and the skill.

Item: [Maximum Attribute Potion]

Very rare, gold

Typically found in the reserves of once-great kingdoms desperately fighting to survive, Maximum Attribute Potions are a great expense for a limited benefit. During the time that benefit is active, however, it proves that it is worth every credit.

Unless you use it to improve your performance in bed. This is not uncommon, but it is quite a waste of money and time.

Increases one attribute to Gold 10 for 1 minute.

“Well, I know exactly when I’m going to use this.”

A powerful, one-time buff could be critically important when he was facing off against Ataraxis. Will was a hundred percent sure that the cultist would come to do his dirty work in person. Given what he’d learned from Ingrid, Ataraxis’ presence would be required in order to carry the rituals out to maximum efficiency. Will wouldn’t be able to dissolve the entire thing through one killing alone, but if he could take out the ringleader, that would be a devastating blow to the overall summoning.

Now for the skill.

Skill: [Ravenous Feast]

- Spell (sigil).

- Cost: very high mana. Life force (varies).

- Cooldown: 12 hours.

Silver

If you truly hunger, you can devour anything, but every feast comes with a cost.

When a magical effect targets you, you can attempt to contest it with this skill and your aura. If you are able to match or overpower the skill, you can attempt to resist it with life force in order to negate a portion or all of its effects. 

Upon a full negation of the skill, you are refunded all of the mana expended to cast this skill (but not life force). You also gain mana and stamina proportionate to the amount of resources placed in the negated effect.

[Overflow] (silver) - Excess mana and stamina is not discarded.

A counterspell-style effect was more than welcome, but unlike Nynn’s unrestricted Counterspell, which Will was appropriately jealous of and dearly wished he could use, Ravenous Feast came with a number of limitations that made it significantly less appealing. A long cooldown meant that realistically, he was only getting this skill off once. Technically, he could use Envoy of Mercy to negate the cooldown, but there were better skills to use it on than ones that ate his life force to activate.

That was the primary downside and the main reason why Will was leery of this new skill. The upshot was that theoretically, there was no limit on how strong a skill he could negate. Given how strong his aura was, especially with Shattersoul, it was possible that he could even interrupt the summoning ritual mid-cast if he somehow managed to get it to target him. The problem was that if he spent life force proportional to the amount of power invested in that, he would be killing himself to cancel it.

He tabled that option for another day. This was still a very powerful skill, reservations aside. If he picked a crucial attack to use it against, he could easily turn the tide of a fight.

With nobody else in the area, Will spent some time testing his skills out, ordering Sen around to find the other arenas. The results of the top 16 matches didn’t even matter that much anymore, given how derailed the tournament had been, but he was worried that there could have been a bad matchup leading to a death, since the limiters were no longer active.

Fortunately, even the people who hated him were at least somewhat aware that there was something greater than them going on. At least at first glance, it looked like nobody had died yet.

One fight had just completed. Neriym and Fortress had been placed together, and the latter had ceded the battle after the water elf had flooded the entire arena with magic-resistant rain.

Poor guy, Will thought. He’d been placed into situations that directly countered his entire race the entire tournament.

Nathan completed his soon after, easily wiping the floor with the silver-rank Xie-ren Jie. He jetted away from the arena shortly after, having already located Nynn and Will’s locations. The gold-ranker went towards Nynn. They all knew he had a major role to play, but it was Nynn who was handling the coordination against the rituals, since it was he who had the most influence over the tournament.

Will’s goal right now was simply to ensure that nobody here killed the other. He flitted around the asteroid, using Wind Walker to air-dash in the low gravity. Sen’s eyes gave him insight onto all the ongoing battles.

A lot of them were similar to Will’s “fight” against Osiris. Rather than risk killing each other, they engaged in a non-lethal contest of skill. Hua’s aura narrowly overpowered Nitika Kapoor’s. Lily and Natalie had a contest that went down to the wire, which the latter ultimately won by using her summons to supplement her aura attack.

Caiyeri Seven was facing off against the original. Will drew his attention closer to that fight. That could go sour easily.

#

“You received the Mother’s approval, Seven,” the woman who Caiyeri Seven had been cloned from said. “That is no simple feat.”

“I bested another one of your kind.”

“Our kind.”

“If you say so. Your cells might make up my body, but we are different in mind and soul.”

“That is no surprise. Your body is perfect, because it is my body. Mind and soul? You were always meant to be a variable. There is no norm to compare you to. If anything, I must say that you are a successful experiment.”

“That’s not what you were saying earlier, was it?” Caiyeri remembered how much the abyss elf leadership had “requested” for her to come turn her sigil in and die earlier.

“This is not the same situation as it was earlier, is it?” Zero replied in kind. “I have no desire to kill one of my own when there is a greater threat at hand. That can come later.”

Caiyeri stared at her counterpart, bitter hatred pulsing in her heart. This was the woman who had consigned her to years spent in the Arcadian cave system, training, cultivating, exposed to corruption every day of every week of every month of every year.

But she would not let anger overtake her. Rage could empower a skill, but it could also easily make her sloppy.

“You believe Will, then,” she said instead.

“I believe my own two eyes when the system breaks its own rules to change the tournament. I believe my senses when they tell me that there are forces much greater than I at play. As poorly as you may think of me, I am not wasteful. Testing your true measure can wait until all the cards at hand have been played.”

“Then who advances here?” Caiyeri asked. “There is still the question of the rewards.”

“Let us engage in a game of chance, then,” Zero said. “You have dice, do you not? I always had a proclivity for the whims of fate.”

Caiyeri nearly failed to hide her surprise, but there was nothing in Zero’s aura to indicate that she knew what her opponent could do.

Had her progenitor not even noticed what her spawn could do?

“A game of chance,” she repeated, not believing her luck. “That’s what you want to stake this on?”

“I can sense your hatred, child. You hide it poorly. Any other game would result in your death, and as I said, I wish not to waste you.”

That almost sent Caiyeri over the edge, but she controlled herself.

Another day, she promised herself. I will have my blood, but it will not be today.

“A roll of the dice it is, then,” she said.

And of course, no matter how much Zero altered the parameters, it was already Caiyeri Seven’s victory.

Some days, she thought, the dice are just rigged in your favor.

#

Participants from the First Trial of the Champion of Cycle [REMOVED] advancing to the Top 8 by Sigil

[Kadael, the Hunger] and [Vyx, the Crown]:

William Li-Brown

[Sadareth, the Elven Mother]:

Thalia Brooksoul

Caiyeri Seven

[Aladriel, the Thief of Stars]:

Hua Fang

[Distortion] and [Justice]:

Lu Jie

[Peace]:

Neriym Rain

[Ahze, the Dark Guardian]:

Natalie Blurr

[None, qualified through external means]:

Nathan

Your next round begins in [72 hours].

The announcement for the top 8 concluded with significantly less fanfare than the previous round had. There was a sense of urgency to the system messages, which Will could have been projecting onto it, but given Nynn’s involvement in the tournament, it was very possible that it was actually him working it.

Nynn: The tournament is regaining its power quicker than expected. Even with the relatively low-violence round and the vent, the magical potential is rapidly increasing.

Will: External interference? I can’t think of another reason.

Nynn: There are a dozen possible reasons. As far as I can tell, external interference is the most likely.

Will: That’s bad.

Nynn: Yes. Call everyone that you can manage. We need to prepare our staging grounds as soon as possible.

Will: Do we even know where the staging ground is going to be?

Nynn: No. We have leads, but a best guess is all we can hope for at the moment.

Will: Alright. Let me find everyone I can.

That meant almost everyone, though the elves all declined. The Peace sigil-holders also broke off to form a coalition of their own, leaving them in a few disparate groups. The bulk of them were willing to join Will’s impromptu group, though, and their confidence increased more when Nynn arrived. Not everyone had seen the former Dread Executor before, and the combination of his powerful gold-rank aura and Prince-rank item gave him the gravity needed to keep a group of self-assured Users together.

“Sixty-eight hours,” Nynn said once everyone willing to participate had been assembled in the same safe zone. “That’s how long we have until the next round. I no longer know if the cultists plan to wait until the end of the tournament before activating them.”

“Ingrid’s information was incomplete,” Will said. “Fucking figures.”

“Disinformation is a key strategy in information security,” Natalie said from where she was lounging against a wall, dark summons swirling around her. “Work long enough in cyber and you’ll find that exploiting people’s the easiest way to handle this type of shit.”

“As I was saying,” Nynn said, punctuating his sentence by tapping the tip of his scythe to the ground. It silenced the room immediately. “Thank you. We should assume that the cultists will attack at any moment. Follow my instructions completely or do not follow them at all. When they arrive, they will come with over a thousand individuals with no perception of what is happening. Transmissions in and out of the tournament are blocked, as always, and even I cannot circumvent that.”

“Hold on,” Will said. “I think there’s a way we can manage that.”

“Talk to me afterwards,” Nynn said. “For the time being, I have already assessed your strengths and weaknesses. I will now commence the orders for your positioning.”

“When did you do that?” Hua asked curiously. “Have you been watching us this entire time?”

“Roughly thirty seconds ago,” Nynn replied. “And yes. Of course I have. Are there any other questions?”

Half a dozen hands went up.

“That cannot wait until after I explain what you are to be doing?”

Half a dozen hands went down.

“Good. Then let us begin.”

#

“Earlier in the tournament, there was a blip,” Will said. “The defenses went down, if only for a moment, but they let some of us get messages out to our people back home.”

“Corruption-induced,” Nynn said. “I am aware of this. I arrived shortly before it occurred. Keep in mind that the cultists do have a window into our activities. If we—and by we, of course I mean you—deliberately corrupt the area, it is extremely likely that they will choose exactly that moment to attack.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Will asked. “That means we control when they come, and we can also get a message out to the people outside.”

“Not all of whom you can contact,” Nynn pointed out. “In this scenario, even those who were warned would get moments to prepare before being summoned.”

“Better than no warning at all. We can draft up a message to send to them all, can’t we?”

Nynn considered this some more.

“We must prepare the landing sites first,” he said. “The ritualist has identified a dozen likely locations for ingress.”

“Seriously? I thought the pillars were made of more inscrutable stuff than that.”

“With enough power, secrecy is no longer a necessity.”

“Good point.” Will sighed. “We’re not going to have enough firepower to deal with them, are we?”

“There is never enough firepower,” Nynn said. “There are plans, and there are plans for when those plans fail, and there is improvisation. At the end of the day, unless we are truly overwhelmed, it will boil down to that.”

“You don’t think your planning’s gonna work?”

“I do not think so. I know so. No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

“But a plan that doesn’t survive is better than no plan at all?”

“You’re beginning to understand. Very well. Prepare to breach the defenses. After we have an established response. The tournament has grown unstable. There is no telling whether or not its walls will permanently be lowered the next time you… blip it, as you say.”

“That is not at all how I put it, but given that you’re probably older than dirt, I’ll let it slide.”

“Given your service so far, I will do you the favor of ignoring that comment.”

#

The next few days were hectic. Not all of the top 16 were willing to participate in Will and Nynn’s combined coalition effort, but the ones who didn’t at least stayed out of the way.

To Will’s surprise, despite his sister splitting off with Neriym and Alan, the other two Peace sigil-holders, Lu Jie had decided to join the coalition, though he would not speak to Will.

The Peace-aligned Users deciding to form a group of their own was suspicious at best. Will remembered that Alan had even been open to working with him right up until “a lady in his ear” had told him not to help Will. 

That could have been his sponsor, but given the fact that Peace was a goddess that Nynn had confirmed generally took a female form combined with the consistent non-cooperativeness of all three of the sigil-holders, even one who’d been willing to align herself with Will’s group to fight the leviathan?

Not a good look at all. Will even got to the point of suspecting Peace as the divine backing behind the cultists, but Nynn had put a stop to that. He had been aligned with Peace for some two centuries now, working with and for her. Given that this was ten times the duration of Will’s entire lifespan, Will could accept his judgment of her character.

Besides, even if Nynn was wrong, it didn’t materially affect how Will was going to approach this. He was already treating everyone not explicitly on their side as a potential threat. Caiyeri had said that her template was likely to avoid messing with her, at least, but that guaranteed nothing for Will or the rest of the group.

He spent most of the preparation time surveying the area, serving the same role Nathan had during their time aboard the Sentinel. The gold-ranker otherworlder was busy creating and deploying what Will could roughly assume to be were magical caltrops, scattering them about the landing points. In addition, he fashioned magical devices that would enable those without skills like Equilibrium Mantle to create pockets of normalized air so that they could survive in hard vacuum, at least for a while.

That workload meant he couldn’t be bothered with oversight, but Will had little to nothing that he actually had to prepare, so he just ensured that no third, fourth, or fifth party could come in to make things worse.

Over the course of the three days they had, Nynn and Osiris worked in conjunction to narrow the number of viable entry points for the cultists down to four. With only seventeen people, five of whom weren’t even in the loop with Will’s coalition, that left three people per entry point.

Three silver-rankers against an oncoming wave of a genuinely unknown number of gold-rank cultists—at least a couple dozen, according to Ingrid, but she hadn’t been given that information either—was a tough ask, but they had the advantage of being able to prepare the field.

Still, there was no way that this was going to resolve itself cleanly. The amount of sheer bullshit and ingenuity that the human Users had to offer made Will’s heart swell with pride, but they were arrayed against gold-ranked cultists who had artifacts empowered by divinity, all of which would allow them to use the most powerful affliction known to the universe.

One of the problems came in the fact that they were almost certainly being surveilled. Will couldn’t detect any direct observation skills on them, but Nynn was certain that there was divine interference on the side of the cultists. It was safer to assume that their plans were being monitored.

Fortunately, there was a lot of variety in the Users they had assembled, and that variety would only increase when the summoning ritual went through.

Unfortunately, when the ritual completed, there would be sheer chaos. Whoever managed to adapt to it better would be the one to come out on top.

All they could do for the time being was prepare. Everyone with a lasting skill or chargeable item set them up or started saving charges. Will’s Demonic Blast Scepter only had ten charges, but in three days, it was able to restore all of them.

Will, Nathan, and Nynn generally considered themselves to be the most powerful of the bunch, though Will’s power was present through his aura and abnormal class instead of his raw strength, so they split into separate groups so that each location would have the best chance at success.

Though it wasn’t a perfect split, they tried to ensure that each group had a powerhouse, a trapper, and one flexible member. Will’s group was composed of Caiyeri, since he worked well with her, and Osiris, who was the most capable trapper they had.

He did keep an eye on Hua, who was by far the youngest participant here. Will had promised Haoyu that he’d look after his sister, but that was hard to do in the best of situations, which this certainly wasn’t. She seemed to be in her element, though, and she was more than eager to battle.

As time ticked down, the general thread of nervous energy running through the tournament seemed to increase. These were the most capable people on Earth, all of whom had sponsors and sigils granting them power beyond their rank, but they faced a threat that was quite literally unprecedented.

“The elves coming back may take issue with me,” Caiyeri mentioned on the last day as they took a break in the safe zone. “There is a high chance that whatever brief explanation Zero offers will be insufficient.”

“It’s going to be a mess no matter how it shakes out,” Will said. “If they show up trying to get you, we’ll just use them as bait for the cultists.”

“And whatever monsters they have with them,” Hua added. “There’s no way that there’s only going to be a couple dozen of them. They’ll have summons, surely.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate a couple dozen gold-ranks,” Will said. “Especially given how much of an amp their pillars give them.”

“No point speculating,” Caiyeri said. “Prepare yourselves however you can. The end is at hand.”

“Yep,” Will sighed. “Two more hours, then I’m knocking the walls down. That’ll be exciting. You have your messages ready?”

Part of the coordinated efforts that their makeshift coalition had put together included drafting a standard message, as well as identifying which of the other competitors they could send messages to. Nynn had a comprehensive list of participants in the tournament that they could cross-reference, but unfortunately, he couldn’t send a widespread message to all of them without consuming valuable power that would be better used towards his Dreadscythe.

Unlike everyone else here, Nynn was not actually a participant in the tournament, giving him the greatest freedom of movement since he didn’t have to worry about the trial of the champion automatically teleporting him to the next round. His self-assigned role was to find and eliminate Ataraxis. Both of them had items that allowed them to fight above their rank, and now that Nynn was more aware of the cultist’s tricks, he was going to be less prone to being affected by platinum-rank corruption.

When there were thirty minutes left until the next round was due to start, Nynn found Will once again.

“The tournament is charging entirely too sharply,” Nynn said. “I can only assume that the engraved rituals were responsible.”

“Then let’s get this going before they jump us. Where should I go?”

“Hold on.” Nynn held his Prince-rank scythe out in front of him.

Will took the weapon in one hand reverently. The raw power the item emitted was so great that it felt like one wrong move on the completely blunt handle would cut his soul.

Dreadscythe Nynn ignited with a burst of power, and then they were in the Beyond, following a trail of Nynn’s magic towards an exit.

“You’re prepared for this?” Nynn asked. “Once the fighting starts, I cannot guarantee your safety.”

“I haven’t been able to guarantee my own safety either,” Will replied. “We do this fast, we do this right, and we survive.”

“I am not the one you should be telling that to.”

Every time Will had entered the Beyond before now, he’d done so in his Sanctuary, his private domain of peace in an infinite magical void. He’d been awed by the sheer scale of the iridescent threads that wove their way through the postive energy plane, and now he was part of one alongside Nynn, his Dreadscythe paving a path for them.

Another thread intersected with theirs, and from the twisting magic below, a familiar, shifting form rose.

“Ayla,” Will greeted her warmly. “It is genuinely quite nice to see you.”

“You as well,” she said. “I sense a disturbance in the Force. Their ritual is pulling something from Beyond.”

“There is no fucking way you just pop-cultured me while I’m on my way to try to avert the apocalypse,” Will said.

“The apocalypse already happened,” Ayla said, which was true. “And besides. I was made to train for years for this position. I was going to be put into other positions as well, manning certain portions of the system, but we know how that went. If I have the knowledge, I’m going to use it.”

“Fair enough.”

“Time is short,” Nynn said, ever the serious one. “We are aware of the demon.”

“So that’s what it is,” Ayla said. “I will do what I can to lessen its effects.”

“Thank you.” Nynn’s reply was laconic but genuine. “My connection is running out. We have a border to break and a message to send.”

“Then this is goodbye,” Ayla said. “I wish you luck.”

“This isn’t goodbye.” Will’s voice was so defiant it surprised even him. “We’ll see each other again soon enough. Monsters, gold-ranks, and gods haven’t stopped me so far. I won’t let a demon do it either.”

Ayla’s form was too inhuman to get a good sense of what her expression was, but her aura told Will that she was smiling.

“I like you, Will,” she said. “I look forward to meeting you again.”

And with that, both Nynn and Ayla closed their connections to the Beyond, placing Will in reality again.

He frowned as they alighted upon an asteroid that he’d grown steadily more familiar with in the past three days. Corruption still tinged the area.

“This is one of the potential summoning points,” Will said. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“This is where the wall is weakest,” Nynn said. “Where you are now does not matter. The moment the cultists enter witht heir corrupting influence, the boundary will crumble entirely.”

“If you say so. Show me what I need to hit.”

While Nynn was immune to corruption of gold rank or lower, his body pushing it away from him, Will absorbed all the corruption that hit him. His resistance simply allowed him to negate it.

With Decaying Touch and Chaos Transfer spreading through his hunger phantasm, Will enveloped the asteroid in a thin layer of shadow, corrupting every surface he could touch. He drew affliction after affliction from his own body and applied it to the air, the ground, the engraved ritual itself—basically everything not named Nynn.

As he did so, he opened the chat window, monitoring it. For the time being, it was still locked off, with him not able to message anyone outside the tournament.

Then, suddenly, his aura pressed outwards with more force than it should have been able to. He felt something cave beneath the corruption, and though his senses were not yet capable of perfectly understanding what he had done, Will knew enough to tell that he’d succeeded. He sent a quick message to the others in the tournament.

Will: Go go go! Send the message ASAP.

His chat window lit up with dozens, hundreds of missed messages from people back on Earth, but Will ignored them all. Every single person he’d met at the tournament who’d since been eliminated needed a message, and he sent the same one to each, functionally copy-pasting it. It was as concise as they’d managed to make it, but even he knew it wouldn’t be perfect.

Will: You are being summoned back to the Trial of the Champion. A cult planted a ritual that is bringing all of you in. We do not know when it will trigger, but we do know it will be soon. When you arrive, immediately find an area that you can breathe in. They will be marked on your minimaps. Be prepared for battle. All enemies are gold rank and will be using pyramid-like pillars to use corruption. Charge your skills as well as you can. Avoid red-marked areas on your minimap.

There were a few other details in a follow-up message, largely pertaining to positioning, but that was the gist of it.

Despite tempting fate, the engraved ritual did not trigger then.

Instead, it activated at the worst possible moment.

#

Your opponent is: [Caiyeri Seven].

Initiating teleportation.

[Limiter] has been removed for the top 8 round.

Shit.

This time, the teleportation was not seamless. Will could see chunks of reality broken away as he hurtled through the spatial magic, showing links to the Beyond.

SHIT.

When he stumbled out at last, standing across a small arena on an asteroid far from where he was supposed to be, he immediately drew on Sen’s eyes.

Caiyeri stood in front of him, a grave expression on her face. Will didn’t even need Sen’s eyes to understand what had happened.

No matter how much Nynn interfered with the tournament, he couldn’t stop the next round from proceeding.

“This is not good,” she said.

“No, really? Tell me more”

Will extended his aura senses through Sen. He should have seen sixteen other auras—the remainder of the top sixteen as well as Nynn.

Instead, where he’d left his eyes at the staging areas, there was now one group of three, two of two, and one where there was only Lily Teneli remaining. The other eight had been sent to the next round.

And as his senses expanded, he soon saw that those were not the only ones.

Further started to appear as Sen’s eyes gathered into clumps large enough for Will to see everything.

On each of the four staging areas they had identified, a large pyramid-like pillar rose towards the sky, corruption pulsing around them.

Then, his senses exploded as spatial magic burst from each corrupted pyramid.

The cultists’ response had begun, and the plan had already gone awry. Will was two hundred miles from where he was supposed to be as thousands of bronze and silver-rank auras started populating every single asteroid in the tournament network.

Less than a second later, the explosions started.

“Damn it,” Will cursed softly. “Caiyeri!”

“Get us going,” the elf said, all trace of the humor she’d developed with him gone. “We have a war to win.”