[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 90: Culmination (Patreon)

The cultists, of course, had not been idle. Ataraxis’ sect had been listening into the conversations through various means, and though they had not gained perfect information, they understood enough to know that they would be returning into a trapped venue.

Ondrel Arctree, priest of corruption, was a Gold 6 with the Clone skill. At extreme mana cost, he was capable of creating a simulacrum of a gold-rank or lower being that possessed many of the same skills, though it could only use them once.

The artifact pillars allowed Ondrel to embrace corruption in order to enhance that skill. At a lower cost, he could create less effective replicas of the target, but the pillar allowed him to target all of the cultists. Ever since Ataraxis had evacuated them to their temporary base of operations in the outer edges of the solar system, Ondrel had been using his skill non-stop, recharging with mana potions and corrupting himself further.

Ataraxis had promised that nobody would have to die, but Ondrel had chosen this fate. In order to improve their chances of seeing this world to its end, he was more than willing to cross the boundary between life and death himself. The pain of corruption spreading through his body was an unbearable ecstatic hurt, but he pressed on nonetheless.

He was making a difference in this world. Until that difference was set in stone, he would create clone after clone after clone, forming a veritable army for the sect. Ondrel refused to die until then.

“It is time,” Ataraxis said abruptly, his voice spreading across the moon they had overtaken. “Assemble the forces at the pillars.”

His task finished, the priest stopped resisting.

By the time his simulacrum army started marching into the portals formed at the pillars, there was nothing left of Ondrel Arctree but a decaying skeleton.

#

Will’s message came just in time for Liam and Haoyu, both of whom had been on deployment against the same threat. An otherworlder had come back twisted and inhuman. Once upon a time, Xavier Jenkins had been a functional citizen in Canberra, Australia, but time in another world had changed him. The gold-rank necromancer had taken over Sydney, and the death toll was already reaching the hundred thousands.

When the widespread message hit them, they were in the middle of fighting one of Xavier’s summons—a colossal bone tower that refused to die no matter how much brute force they used. Their special strike force had already lost six bronze-rankers and a silver to the necrotic aura of the construct, and they were already reconsidering their approach to it.

The message just confirmed their course of action. Haoyu ordered a full retreat, and given his near-legendary status amongst the strike forces, they heeded it.

Not half an hour later, Liam and Haoyu felt the uncomfortable, queasy tug of teleportation magic. They shared a concerned, knowing glance with each other before they were sent away.

Even the two Aussies, neither of whom were spatial magic specialists nor even possessed the Space element, could tell that something was wrong. While the system’s teleportation had been forceful, this felt as if their entire existence had been crumpled into a ball and thrown out of a massive, malevolent hand. Something twisted within them as they traveled, and though their perception did not catch it, both of them understood that there was something deeply, deeply wrong.

Liam teleported straight into utter chaos. He didn’t entirely recognize the area around him, but he remembered bits and pieces of the exposed vacuum he’d seen when the cultists had broken into his round.

He made a mental note to thank Will later as he activated his readied item, a local normalized atmosphere device that what technically passed as the Australian government had been using to keep their divers alive when they had to fight offshore. Around him, dozens of others who had arrived in the same sudden wave of teleportation used similar skills or items. 

A scant handful had clearly ignored the message, and Liam watched without sympathy as they clutched at their skin, their blood boiling thanks to the vacuum around them. Some of them were already in the process of making it to the marked safe zones on their minimap, but they’d been teleported into a place that was half a dozen klicks away from the nearest one.

You had your warning, he thought.

It was just like the first stage of the tournament all over again, everyone confused and looking around, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do.

That lasted all the way up until they sensed the massive, overwhelming pressure on the other side of the asteroid. Only a handful of the people around him didn’t react to it. Liam did feel a little bad about that. With no aura senses at all, they were probably going to be dead soon.

As the pressure drew closer, Liam and the others around him turned towards it. The asteroid was small, so the horizon was much nearer to them than it would have been on Earth—a few hundred meters, maybe. A klick, maybe.

That meant that when the hooded gold-rank figures began to flood the horizon, they were within range to charge.

Liam was comfortably into silver rank now, but the auras he sensed coming from the cultists were far more intense than he’d expected.

He grit his teeth, planting his feet in the ground.

Roughly at that same moment, Liam’s vision went white.

#

“Jackal One, Two, and Three ignited,” Osiris said as calmly as he could. “Jackal Four obstructed.”

He relayed the message to the rest of the coalition, though given the flood of notifications he was getting as his previously-eliminated allies started barraging him with updates of their own alongside far too many questions, he doubted the others would be checking.

In the weeks after the system initialization, he’d taken advantage of the chaos and his new class to find and locate the strategic reserves of the nuclear powers closest to him. Most of them had been displaced or destroyed, but he’d found several of them locked away in a silver-rank dungeon that had spawned in on one of Israel’s nuclear silos. Since nobody in the area had been capable of clearing said dungeon at the time, he’d taken the liberty of attacking it as part of a joint operation with him and some operatives from the UK.

The long and the short of it was that he now possessed six nuclear bombs, three of which had just partially detonated. Part of his Nuclear Specialist class enabled him to empower and control nuclear explosions, which generally wouldn’t have been an option for him until higher ranks, but Earth had discovered how to split the atom far earlier than the average sapient society did.

Now, three planted explosions painted the surface of the asteroids he’d prepared them in. Their power was modulated so that they would automatically stop at a certain radius, but as much as Will and Nynn had tried to reassure him, Osiris was no fool.

By detonating those three bombs, he had killed comrades. In order to be strong enough to wipe out gold-ranks, he hadn’t been able to hold them back to the point where silver-rank Users like those who’d been eliminated would be able to survive.

Those who could survive would experience other effects. Blindness, temporary or permanent depending on their distance from the blast. Burns so deep that they could char organs. Radiation poisoning thorough enough to defy health potions.

And even then, it had been necessary.

There were too many enemies. Osiris had spoken to Nynn briefly about this and learned that the massive wave of gold-ranks were largely simulacra, but that didn’t help his decision. Even if they were the result of a skill, the goldcultist clones still had durability befitting of their rank, and even if they could only use one or two skills of their own, they were devastating all the same.

Osiris could only hope that this was worth it.

#

Lily regretted not trying harder to stay in the tournament. Sure, it would have transported away at the most opportune time to grind a whole bunch of enemies, but she had gotten used to the idea of having some level of backup. She was a Hunter, and she was always open to a challenging fight, but as her senses spread out to detect literal hundreds of gold-ranks marching out of a portal, she decided that there was a difference between a challenge and straight-up suicide.

That wasn’t to say that everything had gone wrong. As the simulacra exited the massive portal that had formed around the massive pillar, which had appeared nearly exactly where Osiris and Nynn had predicted it to show up, Nathan’s traps began to trigger. Thin lasers sprouted up as the cultists passed over the place, cutting through gold-rank armor like it was putty. 

His planted magical craftsmanship proved to be worth its weight in diamonds. Small fist-sized spheres rose up and spiraled open, cutting lasers igniting from each corner. The cultist clones were durable, but they were less hardy than their real counterparts. A solid hit from one of the lasers was enough to render one of them ineffective.

Lily tossed in a few contributions of her own, tactically retreating as she peppered the cultists with long-range arrow shots. She excelled in a duel when she had a Hunter’s Mark up, which had made her extremely effective in the battles thus far, most of which could be reduced to simple 1v1s. Against an army? If she could find their leader, maybe, but there was no way for her to differentiate between one cultist and another.

The cultist simulacra raised their hands as one, pointing in her general direction, and she fled.

Lily drew their attention straight into the crowd of several hundred Users that had been teleported onto her planet. Gold-rank crimson lightning coursed forward from their collective hands, striking through the vacuum of the tournament-removed planet without slowing.

She took cover by diving through the freshly arrived Users. The skill that created the bolts were not meant to target or chase individuals, instead just meant to maximize destruction. The corruption sect had been aware that most of those that they summoned would be hostile towards them, but most of the people being summoned back did not need to be taken alive. Losses were acceptable.

Lily proved that to be true as she kited the lightning bolts into and through a mass of Users. She flitted from point to point, marking people she didn’t know and didn’t care about so she could use her Flash Step, which brought her to her prey.

“Hunter Lily Teneli,” an elf she vaguely recognized said. Gold-rank aura, though at the bottom. Wilhelm Zero?

She didn’t care. Lily targeted another person and teleported away just as three separate bolts of lightning smashed straight into Wilhelm, conducting through his armor and frying him from the inside out. The elf was dead before he even hit the ground.

Lily had considered herself on the ledge of sanity, staring down into the abyss, but this was situation was so far gone that it wasn’t even in the same realm. She didn’t have the personal power to do anything to shut down the portals, let alone fight off all the cultists coming through it.

So she ran, and she ran. The other Users who’d been teleported in, seeing her example, did the same.

But there was only so far they could run, and person by person, crimson lightning tore them apart.

#

“Three nukes went off,” Will said. “The last one didn’t. Pillar teleported too close to it, I’m guessing. That’s where we’re going.”

His hands were already on the border, spreading corruption into the forcefield there. Sen’s eyes were working overtime, providing him information on the current state of the battle, but he had to keep them from getting too close for fear of their destruction.

It was easy enough to break through the forcefield when the intense magic of the tournament was being funneled away by the pillars. He was out in under a minute.

The problem was that in that minute, three hundred people died. Will didn’t know most of their names, but he could see that they were being pushed back everywhere. Too many people had shown up without a plan, and too many had gotten too close to the bombs as they’d gone off. That wasn’t a problem yet, but the nukes hadn’t even scratched the pillars nor the portals, which would require a more focused effort to remove. Once more cultists started coming through that—or, god forbid, the summoning ritual driven by the pillars completed and brought a demon screaming into reality—the people who’d been blinded or stunned by the bombs were going to suffer.

But Will couldn’t focus on them right now. His target was the fourth planet, where Nathan’s traps had worked but Osiris’ hadn’t. There were still something like forty functional gold-ranks there. Nynn was already on his way, but they needed more support fast. The Users there were dropping like flies.

“I’ll go,” Caiyeri said as he pushed them both out of the forcefield. “You need to get everyone else out of their arenas.”

“Shit,” Will said. “You’re right. Are the anchors functional?”

Nathan had been a lynchpin in making this losing battle anything but a complete stomp in the cultists’ favor. He’d established waypoints on each asteroid, collecting crafting materials from everyone willing to chip in, and had crafted consumable items that would allow them to take a one-way trip to each of them.

“I’m about to find out,” Caiyeri said. “Good luck.”

“Better hope we rigged the cards right.”

“You know me.” She smiled, and for once, it wasn’t the grin of a feral lioness on her way to tear his throat out. “Don’t die on me.”

Caiyeri took a token from her inventory, closed a fist around it, and vanished.

Will wasn’t far behind. They had somewhat planned for the cultists deciding to attack in the middle of a round, but this was already so far out of control that the plan barely applied. He didn’t have a way to teleport to the other arenas, so he was going to have to do this the hard way.

#

Thalia Brooksoul faced off against the gold-rank Nathan in a simple arena. She’d exhausted half of her skills already, blanketing the arena with silver-rank vines.

“You’re batshit insane,” Nathan hissed. “Do you know what’s happening out there?”

“It does not concern me,” Thalia said. “Do you know how close I am to gold? One good fight, human. That is all I need to advance.”

“Fuck you,” Nathan shouted. “People are dying, and I don’t have the bullshit required to break through this forcefield. Are you trying to end the world again?”

“As far as I am concerned, it has long since ended,” Thalia replied serenely.

She had had multiple crises of faith during this tournament, but ultimately, she’d proven to be stronger than it all. All she needed was more power. That was all anyone needed to thrive, really. The world could crumble for all she cared, as long as she was not there when it perished.

Thalia was a life elf, but the preservation of it only mattered to her when it came to her and her own. The rest of the world had been fashioned to be used, not respected.

She melted into her roots and charged, killing intent spreading from her aura. Thalia might not be able to kill the gold-rank human here, but he was not taking her seriously and could thus provide her a balanced enough fight to force her over the threshold from Silver 10 to gold.

As she sprung out from the root system she’d created, fully formed, darkness clouded over the arena.

Nathan’s aura shifted, focusing on the newcomer.

Corruption spread through the arena as a phantasm wrapped itself around Thalia, blinding her but for her aura senses. That was little consolation when pain ignited through her body, notifications scrolling through her system at speed.

You have been marked for death.

You have been afflicted with a level of [Corruption].

Even muffled by the sense-eliminating darkness, she heard the bell toll.

A powerful, shattered silver-rank aura appeared behind her, suddenly projecting towards her soul.

She knew who this was. She’d seen him when he was only a pittance of a bronze-rank, and now… now, even though his rank was the same, he was so much stronger.

As his aura drew closer, she sank into her roots, only to be shocked out of it by a series of lightning strikes.

Thalia commanded her plants to attack as he simply screamed, a deep, piercing wail striking straight to her core. Her command weakened, then dropped to nothing, her will slipping away like water between her fingers.

“You were a clan boss the first time I met you,” Will said. “You scared me so bad I had to run away. And now you’re just nothing more than a petty elf trying to take advantage of the apocalypse to level up more? Fuck right on out of here.”

The phantasm cleared, revealing a man shrouded in shadow. A sword as dark as the night itself joined a gleaming, charged lightning blade as he drew closer.

“Nathan,” Will said. “It’s gone to shit. Get ready to pop off, yeah?”

He won’t even look at me, Thalia thought.

The last thing she felt was two crossed swords at her neck. Suddenly, her body went numb, her vision tumbling to the ground. Her head rolled once, twice, and then there was darkness.

#

Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [32/1000].

[Eclipse] has gained a charge from [Thalia Brooksoul].

[Lord of Loss] appreciates you blooding his weapon for the first time. You have been gifted 1,000 silver credits.

[Lady of Overwhelming Violence] asks you to assist her beneficiary. You have been gifted a [Silver Maximum Attribute Potion].

#

“That was stupid,” Will said. “Out through the exit you go. There’s a lot of people that need your help.”

“Then get us going,” Nathan said. “I can sense my traps going off. There’s way more than I thought there would be.”

“Yeah, I saw. Here. This should be wide enough. Get going.”

Nathan took off through the gap. Unlike most of the others participating, he was fast enough to not need the teleportation anchors. Within minutes, he was in open space, using every skill to the max.

His primary focuses were his crafting, which were the focus of most of his attributes, and Space, which was his Soul-affixed attribute. Nathan bent space to move faster, then started raining down gold-rank missiles upon the planets.

This was where he specialized. Nathan’s class, Orbital Engineer, was meant for a wide, open area like this, a far cry from the cramped towers he’d been forced into back on Selrethnir.

Lu Jie, once Earth’s rank 1 Portal Mage, rose into the air shortly after, stepping out of a portal. A quick check of the group messages revealed that Will had just freed him from the top 8 round.

Nathan: Did the teleportation cancel your portals?

Lu Jie: No. Guide me.

“Activate skill: Orbital Guidance,” Nathan whispered. “Activate skill: Turbocharge.”

With a burst of mana, he shared his perception skill with the Portal Mage, showing him the optimal paths to maximize destruction to the enemy while minimizing how many of their own people would take damage.

Lu Jie released the first of the portals that had been building power for almost three days now. A bomb that Nathan had spent a few weeks working on back in Selrethnir had been amplified by Osiris and given a further random power by Caiyeri Seven before being placed in a portal facing another portal. In a vacuum, that got the bomb moving at a very, very high speed.

With Nathan’s guidance, it slammed straight into one of the corruption pillars’ portal sites. A massive mushroom cloud ballooned from the impact site, though there was no flame. The portal itself flickered, and Nathan poured even more energy from his suit into it. If they could cut off the portals, they could cut off their enemy.

Spatial energy started flailing around the portal, corruption pulsing outwards, but the combination attack was the final blow. Osiris’ nuclear bomb had been enough to weak the barrier, and the gold-rank bomb moving at a measurable fraction of the speed of light did the rest.

Nathan did not flinch at the list of names that flew by his eyes, notifying him of what allies he’d just killed.

Varix Altaea. Shannon Brown. Vincent Norenson. He’d seen them for a few moments, hadn’t he?

He pushed that thought aside. The important part was that even as the asteroid broke apart, the sheer force of their combined efforts was enough to crack one of the portals, damaging the pillar enough to break its connection to the ongoing ritual.

“Yes!” he crowed. “One down, three to go!”

Elsewhere, corruption spread like wildfire as lightning coursed across an army of gold-rank simulacra. The clone skill that had created them was unable to mimic the cultists’ corruption resistance, opting instead for offensive prowess. Even silver-rank corruption was easily able to affect them, and even if it wasn’t an immediate death sentence, it lowered their power enough for the ex-competitors to band together and mount a proper counteroffensive. On the ground, simulacra flickered out and died seemingly at random as Hua and Lily, both stealth-based Users with temporary powerful amps, carved their way through the army without being noticed.

Bit by bit, they were pushing them back. The cultists had made their first major move with the ambush, and the combined forces of Earth and Arcadia had met them with preparation of their own. They were losing a lot of people and would continue to do so, but they were fighting back. One pillar was down, though it had cost a lot of resources, and it was very possible that with a coordinated effort, they could take the other three down before the ritual was even complete.

Despite all of this, those who were truly in the know—Nathan, Nynn, Will, and a portion of the other top 16—remained cautious.

The other shoe was yet to drop.

#

“It is time,” Ataraxis said. He spread his hands, conjuring a circle of a hundred levitating arm-length needles from his soulspace. With a hint of borrowed power, corrupted sparks began to flicker through them, forming a lethal network of magic in the area around him. “Our numbers falter. Ondrel’s sacrifice paved the way for our victory, but we must take it in our own hands. The enemy has exhausted their greatest efforts to eliminate only a quarter of our preliminary stage.”

Unrest had been gathering in his sect, but they stood at attention now that their leader was speaking again.

“Advance, my legion,” Ataraxis ordered. “Follow me.”

The ritual had begun, but it would take true action from them to complete it. No ritual of this power could be completed without risk, after all.

He stepped through the portal.

There was a piece of information that he had withheld from this sect for quite some time. Ataraxis had not always been a gold-rank, just as the Dread Executor who opposed them had once been a Prince.

That was why Nynn had been capable of the feats he had. He had been skirting the edges of plausibility, narrowly avoiding corruption with powers many times his rank.

Ataraxis had only done him the favor of doing the same one time in return. For the number of violations Nynn had committed against the unspoken rules, he should have had much greater retribution.

While the others of his sect entered the two other active pillars, Ataraxis took one of his own.

He emerged into chaos, which he had expected. A nuclear bomb had stricken this pillar, and it had less than thirty percent of its shields remaining before the defenders of the Earth-Arcadia cycle could start targeting the portal and ritual itself.

Nynn floated high in the air, facing the cultist leader as he exited the portal.

“Ataraxis,” the Dread Executor said, tilting his head.

“Nynn,” he replied in kind, the needles around him spinning up.

Throughout his perception, he sensed over two thousand souls. All the primers were set. So many Users had entered this tournament, and so many of them had tainted themselves with monster cores.

“You spoke of plausibility once,” Ataraxis said calmly, putting his hands behind his back. The needles started flying out, seeking targets with ludicrous speed. “You accused me of crimes I have not committed.”

“You know well what you have done,” Nynn replied, just as evenly.

“Nothing more than what you have.”

Ataraxis raised a hand. Magic stormed through his body, self-imposed seals breaking as he allowed himself a single step beyond the boundary.

The three pillars remaining reinforced his body, siphoning off his corruption to keep him from being affected by the stretching of plausibility. This should not have been possible, but with the pillars drawing on so much gathered power through the suddenly heavily populated tournament, Ataraxis would be able to do this one time.

He lowered his hand, the power of a Lord flowing through him.

“Culmination. Tears of Absolute Purification.”