[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 92: Alea Iacta Est (Patreon)

While most of the cultists had turned to funneling their energy towards the summoning ritual, a good portion of them remained on duty to guard the stunned Users and kill those who broke free of it. For the time being, though, the only ones who were even close to capable of doing so were the ones that Will was manually freeing. Nobody else had the experience needed to even attempt freeing themselves from the influence of a Lord.

Nynn showing up helped him along. The Dread Executor’s link to the Beyond required much less setup than Will’s did, and unlike the corruption wielder, he could devote his attention to it. Will was spending his mana as quickly as he regenerated it, burning through an incredible amount of resources in a desperate attempt to keep as many people alive as possible.

When Nynn opened a path to the Beyond, he couldn’t stay for long. His soul was thoroughly exhausted from using his Culmination, and even doing this little was going to leave a permanent mark on him.

It was worth it. He had made decisions to abandon planets more populated than this, consigning them all to the blade rather than attempt to salvage the pieces, but this cycle was promising.

He had already given up so much. What was a little more?

Will sensed Nynn’s turmoil, but only in passing. His aura senses were focused on himself and the others around him, not the one who had entirely evaded taking on even the slightest bit of corruption.

Time in the Beyond worked differently than it did on the outside. When Will and Nynn returned to reality, no time at all would pass. That made each teleportation a rare chance to take a break and restore mana.

Until now, Nynn had never seen Will so serious. Will himself hadn’t even realized that he had this mode. Normally, even against the impossible odds of facing forces far greater than him, he was always ready with a pointed jab and a dark, unfailing humor.

Now, though, when he was personally responsible for the lives of thousands, that joking facade was nowhere to be found.

“How much time do we have?” Will asked.

“My best guess is in the realm of twenty minutes or less,” Nynn said, instantly understanding what Will wanted. “The demon is already beginning to show itself, and some time has passed since you began eliminating the corruption.”

“Six hundred and seventy-seven instances cleansed so far,” Will said, his soul flickering with the consumed power. “How many are dead? How many does that leave to go? Do I even have enough time?”

“Six hundred and seventy-seven aren’t,” Nynn said. “You can’t always save everyone.”

“No. I can’t. But I can do my best to get as many of the survivors as I can.”

“You will make a fine Executor one day. Follow the trail I leave for you.”

They returned to reality as Nynn’s tenuous connection to the Beyond slipped, moving to the second asteroid.

Will had been monstrously effective at clearing out the cloned army of cultist simulacra. They were less intelligent than the model cultists that they had been based off of, and they were significantly less powerful. With only one or two skills per simulacrum, they were mostly threatening because of their sheer volume. Once he’d started dosing them with corruption using his empowered phantasm, it had been easy to chain lightning through them with Thunder Wraith’s Grasp and Abyssal Tempest.

Now that he was focused primarily on healing, however, that became a much more difficult ask. When he passed by one of them, he could devastate the simulacrum in seconds using his active Ghostflame, but those few seconds would be long enough for someone he could have saved to die.

When there were these many people to save, it was easy to lose track of the humanity present. Every time he paused, that was someone whose community would feel their loss. Even the weakest of the participants represented the best of humanity. One loss here would mean friends, family, organizations left without key components.

Cognizant of this, Will drove himself even further into igniting Ghostflame over and over again, not bothering to fight a cultist unless they were immediately threatening a vulnerable stunned User with death or if they were actually in his way.

129 levels of [Corruption] cleansed. 129 levels of [Stunned] cleansed.

[Envoy of Mercy] has activated. You have gained one level of [Blessed] and [Purified] for each life you saved. 129 instances of each have been gained.

As Will broke the stunned Earthlings out of their corrupted stupor, the cultist simulacra turned on them. Their ritual did not require the usage of those who were not corrupted, and though the true bodies of the cultists were busy completing Ataraxis’ last act, the simulacra were under no such constraint.

Thankfully, Nathan’s traps were still active, and their earlier tactical nuclear bombing run had decimated the numbers of the clone army. There were few enough that with Nynn assisting, the Users who regained consciousness were able to push back.

There were still losses. There would always be losses against gold-rank monsters, even when the bulk of their number had been thinned.

After Will cleansed a User, though, their fate was in their own hands. He had no time to try helping the rest of them.

For every two he saved, one died before he could get to them. That ratio was tilting in favor of the dead over time, their souls drained and fed to the ongoing ritual above them.

Will didn’t even want to look at the demon. That was a problem for later. He could only handle one impossibility at a time.

With Nynn’s assistance, the first impossible task was becoming quite possible. His chat windows had all been greyed out when the stunning effect had hit, but his contacts were slowly going back online. Lily Teneli was active again and had left a brief thank-you for him, having been on the same asteroid as him. Caiyeri was as well.

Caiyeri: That was the pressure of a Lord. Twice.

Will: Yes. Fight the cultists or get off-planet if you can. Update me on the demon.

Caiyeri: Got it. You have a lot of questions to answer if we survive this.

The second planet-asteroid was easier to handle than the first. The nuke-trap had actually taken hold here, limiting the amount of resistance Will had to deal with.

Alan Truman. Haoyu Fang. Osiris Adebayo. The names started reappearing with increasing frequency as he got closer to where the thick of the fighting had been.

Nathan’s name never lit up. As Will made his way through the ominous crowds of frozen, stunned Users, he sent Sen’s eyes out to sieve through the planets, looking for significant magical projections that matched Nathan.

187 levels of [Corruption] cleansed. 187 levels of [Stunned] cleansed.

[Envoy of Mercy] has activated. You have gained one level of [Blessed] and [Purified] for each life you saved. 187 instances of each have been gained.

He realized why as he drew closer to finishing off the second planet, easily outpacing the simulacra and drawing lightning that did nothing more than charge the air in his immaterial phantasm.

Nathan had been in deep space when the stunning effect had occurred. He wasn’t corrupted, since he hadn’t used monster cores to level up, but he was stuck in his suit nearly a thousand miles from anyone else.

Will: Nynn. How many more Beyond jumps do you have?

Nynn: I am accruing soul damage from it already. At most, a single one. My soul is likelier to break than manage another.

Silently, Will cursed the fact that Nynn had apparently not forged his soul as thoroughly as he had.

This wasn’t unsalvageable, though. Part of the preparation for the incoming corruption cultist movement had been setting up portals to the Beyond on hidden parts of the asteroids that they’d good as confirmed would be staging areas.

Will: Take me to Nathan.

To his credit, Nynn didn’t hesitate, sending both of them diving into the Beyond. This time, they were in there for barely an instant before Will sensed the magical thread they rode beginning to fracture. He had just enough time to reorient his soul before they were tossed back into reality next to a floating, stilled Nathan.

1 level of [Stunned] cleansed.

Envoy of Mercy didn’t activate, telling Will that Nathan would have survived this otherwise, but that was fine. Even with Blessed and Purified constantly being consumed to mitigate his life force expenditure, he had a surplus of the boons, and he only needed it once.

You have consumed one level of [Blessed] to negate the cooldown of [Sanctuary].

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

He, Nathan, and Nynn entered the Beyond together.

Maintaining it with two others who didn’t have perfect control over their soul—Nathan because he didn’t know how to, Nynn because he had burnt his power reserves to shreds—was significantly more difficult than usual. It wasn’t impossible, though, and Will took the time to rest and restore his mana.

“Where are we?” Nathan asked, gaping around them in wonder.

“Inside a skill,” Nynn answered. “A portal power, of sorts.”

“That can’t be all this is. There’s spatial magic in here, sure, but there’s so much more to it.”

“Unimportant right now,” Will said. “Are you aware of what’s been happening?”

“I know I was stunned. I couldn’t perceive anything after that.”

“The demon summoning has started. It’s using corruption as a power source. As far as I can tell, every core user is corrupted, scaling with the amount of core usage they had.”

“That is correct,” Nynn said. “Doing this enables the demon to feed on the soul as well as corruption. One thing you may have not noticed is the ambient corruption.”

Will shook his head. “Haven’t been paying attention.”

“The celestial bodies themselves have been corrupted,” Nynn said. “The effect of the pillars combined with a Culmination and the massive wound to reality has turned the asteroids themselves into fuel.”

“Well, shit,” Will said. “How do we deal with that?”

“I am working on that.”

“You know, I came here thinking it would be a simple trip,” Nathan said. “In and out. One corruption wielder dead and gone. Things are never that simple, are they?”

“Welcome to my life, buddy,” Will commiserated.

“What can I do?”

“Protect me,” Will replied. “Deal with the cultists. If you can interrupt the ones who’re casting the ritual, do so.”

“The demon cannot be stopped anymore,” Nynn said. “Unless it miraculously chooses to return to its native plane, all we can do is prevent a full manifestation.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Nathan said. “One trash fire at a time.”

“Get it done,” Will said. “I’m gonna drop us back in now. Prepare yourselves.”

All three of them exploded into action the moment he returned them to the final planet.

There had been noticeably fewer still alive on the last asteroid. Will had cleansed a total of around a thousand Users now, and he’d counted a total of over five hundred dead.

It’s only going to get worse.

The third asteroid was much the same as the first two, though by now the opposition had begun to grow wary of Will’s ability to cleanse the other Users. They still didn’t devote all their resources to fight him, but Will found himself having to use Wraith Cloak with increasing frequency, hiding him just a bit. Granted, lighting himself aflame with a power that could strike the soul itself was a little awkward in terms of being stealthy, but what could he do about that?

The revelation that the demon was drawing from the asteroids and not just the Users reframed the entire battle. Will had been wondering why the cultists hadn’t gone harder on stopping him, but if the planets themselves were the goal, then of course they wouldn’t mind if he was clearing the bonus corruption they’d dealt to the people fighting for them.

The pillars had been a constant threat this entire time, pulsing out corruption, but as Will started to save the final wave of Users, the lines of magic connecting to them solidified, the massive triangular portal they had created widening further.

A chilling presence made itself known, its aura oppressing Will’s in a way that only divinity had been able to do. Across the four asteroids, every single User, cultist or not, flinched back instinctively as an otherwordly presence brushed against their souls.

Something crept through the portal.

Will’s perception, even with Sen’s truesight, could not accurately describe it. While in the Beyond, concepts seemed more fluid. Representations of souls morphed often, and it was hard to pin down what was real and what wasn’t, with aura sense telling more truth than his senses did.

This was much the same. To all his human senses, a chunk of reality just looked like it had been removed and replaced by TV static.

To his aura sense, he could tell that something of far greater magnitude than his existence was looking at him.

Will realized why that was as it reached a horrifically long appendage down towards the second planet he’d gone to. Of course it would want to scope him out. He’d been cleansing corruption this entire time, and all of that had to go somewhere. Ghostflame wasn’t burning it all away, not when he was barely using the skill offensively. With his functional immunity to corruption, Will hadn’t even noticed, but he must have been the most corruption-dense individual in this solar system right now.

If it wanted to see what he was made of, why wasn’t it reaching for him?

He understood why when its appendage made contact with the planet. It was easier to sense the long, insectile, proboscis-like aspect of the demon’s body that extended literal thousands of miles to make contact with the asteroid.

Though the asteroids that the tournament had taken place on weren’t large enough to be considered moons, let alone planets, they were still decently sized. The one that the demon’s proboscis alighted upon was nearly thirty miles in diameter. Will didn’t even want to think about how much mass that amounted to.

And in a single instant, the planet shriveled, withering away into dust like a plant wilting in fast motion.

Warning: contact [Osiris Adebayo] has died. Messaging has been frozen.

Warning: contact [Haoyu Fang] has died. Messaging has been frozen.

Warning: contact [Fortress] has died. Messaging has been frozen.

A mass of identical notifications flooded his vision, but it was those three that he fixated on.

Nynn: Fuck.

Will wasn’t sure if his read on the aura of a creature so much older and greater than he was could be considered to be accurate, but he was pretty sure that the reason it had avoided going for him first was because it was interested, and because it wanted to save him for later.

That asteroid—carrying hundreds of people he’d saved—had been a fucking appetizer.

The demon retracted its proboscis at a much more sedate pace than it had slammed it down, and a second one started to reach down.

Will triggered Time in a Bottle, overcharging it to give himself as much time as he could to think.

If there was ever a time to pull out all the stops, it’s now, he told himself, observing the area around him.

The pillars had done their work and were beginning to wind down, having pumped the asteroids completely full of corruption.

His mind raced in the slowed time.

There had to be a way out of this. There always was.

But direct power wouldn’t work. Couldn’t. Will couldn’t even tell what rank the demon was through its aura, but it could be accurately summed up as “too high for you, dumbass.” Even true damage wouldn’t do enough to a creature of that size.

This was by far the largest monster he’d faced, greater by far than the leviathan. It was larger than any of the asteroids were. If it had been any other creature, Will would have tried to pull off his usual bullshit. Corruption was a powerful affliction against any creature, and true damage through Ghostflame was another big equalizer.

This creature was nothing like the other titans he’d faced, though.

How was a corruption wielder supposed to defeat something that fed on corruption?

Oh, he thought distantly. Now there’s an idea.

Will sifted through his inventory. He’d slacked off on organizing it after he’d started relying on it less. After unformed rank, he’d been able to get by off the power of his skills instead of just the corrupted items he’d used, but now, he was once again turning to magical items for an equalizer.

The Lady of Overwhelming Violence had given him an item that might prove to be the key.

Will: I’m going to try something. Everyone who can, run.

To where, he didn’t know, but he figured he owed it to everyone else to give them a warning.

There were a couple aces in the hole that he’d saved up for some time now. He hadn’t seen a good opportunity to use them, and now they were all paying for it.

Will let time accelerate to its normal speed, popping two items out of his inventory.

You have consumed [Gold Maximum Attribute Potion]. [Soul] raised to Gold 10 for 1 minute.

Gold-rank power surged through him, electrifying his veins. The sensation was so heady he almost forgot to perform the next step, but he stilled his soul and activated Destructive Synthesis.

You have activated [Destructive Synthesis] on [Demonic Beacon].

Mana restored. Your mana has overflowed.

You have gained the [Contact Demon] skill at platinum rank for [1 minute].

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

[Corruption Resistance] negates gold-rank [Corruption].

Except not even this would be enough, would it? Will had nothing to offer the demon despite being slightly more corrupted than everything around him.

One more ace in the hole. This better work.

Will used his final sigil skill—the same one he’d seen Axl use to forcibly rank himself up once upon a time.

Skill: [Desperate Stand]

- Spell (sigil).

- Cost: extreme life force. Increases further with each attribute or skill selected. This skill will result in instant death if the cost is too great.

- Cooldown: can only be activated once per rank.

Silver

You hunger for progress. No obstacle will stand in your path. Not even your life.

Forcibly increases the rank of up to three attributes or skills that are at the threshold to gold rank, ignoring other requirements for ranking up. You can also use this to forcibly rank yourself up at the peak of silver.

Will wasn’t trying to rank up here. He was still in the middle of silver, not the end. Instead, he targeted skills.

[Chaos Transfer] advanced to gold!

[Hunger Phantasm] advanced to gold!

[Thousand Eyes] advanced to gold!

The cost of the combined skills might have actually killed him, but Will had prevented—or delayed, at least—a thousand deaths, and his mercy had paid off.

100 levels of [Blessed] and [Purified] have been consumed to restore your life force.

With his increased control over his soul, he was able to guide the changes to his skills. He couldn’t dictate exactly what they would do, but that was fine. All he needed to do was form the general picture.

He didn’t even pause to read the descriptions of his new skills, knowing roughly what they would do thanks to his guidance.

Sen’s eyes moved with incredible speed, and from each of those eyes, his phantasm spread. Dark, fluid shadow spilled across the three intact asteroids. He wasn’t able to entirely cover all of them, especially because the cultists there were still trying to prevent him from acting against them, but he didn’t need full coverage. All he needed was contact between the phantasm, the asteroids, and anyone who was still corrupted.

You have transferred 890 levels of [Corruption] to yourself.

[Envoy of Mercy] has activated. You have gained one level of [Blessed] and [Purified] for each life you saved. 887 instances of each have been gained.

Three instances, he knew, had not been saved because those were the planets. The level of corruption they had gained was staggering, and not meant for a human. Only a few instants like this would likely kill him even through his corruption resistance.

Nynn: Will. Are you attempting to make contact with the demon? That is a path you cannot walk back from. It will not prevent you from being an Executor, but you must have read the description of demon magic before. This is a bridge that I have never and will never cross.

He smiled, knowing the former Dread Executor couldn’t see him.

Will: Alea iacta est.

Nynn: I do not understand.

Will: You’re about to.

With the corruption of three miniature worlds crushing him, his body only kept alive by his surging soul and Envoy of Mercy, Will used the temporary skill granted in part by Love, a Lady who had taken a particular interest in forbidden magic.

All of a sudden, his presence was crushed by that of the demon’s, which had turned its entire body.

A demon is looking at you.

Magic overwhelmed his body, but he was familiar with being overwhelmed. Will stabilized the skill and fired it off.

You have contacted a mid-tier demon.

___

Author's note: fun fact, alea iacta est is the most modern way to quote Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but apparently, the original quote is actually iacta alea est. Why does this matter? It doesn't. I just found it interesting.