[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 93: An Arm and a Leg (Patreon)

“A full summoning,” the Hunger said. “I should have realized this sooner.”

“It is not the strongest one that could have been summoned,” the Elven Mother replied. “It is worrying nonetheless. It is powerful enough that reverberations could affect us. Your champion is speaking to it, is he not?”

“For a certain value of speaking. I worry for him. Demons are not like gods.”

“Some, perhaps,” Sadareth said, gently reassuring her long-time companion with her divine aura. “Remember, Kadael. Demons are far more variant than we are. Some act like gods; others, mortals; others still, forces of nature.”

“Have you seen this one before?” Kadael asked.

“I have not. We can only hope.”

A dimensional breach opened on the moon they’d taken residence on. Vyx stepped through, incensed.

“YOUR CHAMPION DECIDED TO—“

“Not now, Vyx,” Sadareth said. She gestured rudely, and the Crown fell back into the portal he’d arrived with. The Elven Mother turned back to the Hunger and smiled. “See? You once saw Vyx as a force of nature yourself, did you not? Look what your charge has done to him.”

“He is bold,” the Hunger acknowledged. “If only I could have given him more power.”

“There is time enough for that,” Sadareth said.

Even the Elven Mother’s calming influence couldn’t quite keep the worries of two gods away. She knew that too much rode on this. Her power base had taken root well in many planets, but it was especially concentrated in this cycle. If so many of her representatives fell here, especially to corruption, there was every chance that her divinity would be damaged.

Now, though, the boy had made contact.

There was nothing the gods could do but watch.

#

During the course of the trial of the champion, Will had been taken away from the tournament itself multiple times. He’d spent every night in a god’s dream-space and been teleported both to a random point on Earth as well as far off-planet for a sponsorship. On top of all of that, he had established a long-running connection to the Beyond, a plane of degenerate positive energy.

This was somewhere in between actual teleportation and the more conceptual spaces. Will’s soul was still in his body, but the world seemed to narrow until it was just him and the enormous demon that hovered at the edge of perception.

His soul was calmer in here, which was another point towards this space being not entirely real or at least partially divorced from baseline reality. Under 890 levels of corruption, many of which were a much greater rank than he should have been able to tolerate, even Will’s soul would have quickly begun to fracture.

“Hey there,” Will tried, waving at the massive creature. “English?”

The demon defied mortal senses. Will could only even properly process the general size of its existence because of his aura senses, his vision failing him like it usually did in the Beyond. The two of them must have been at least a thousand miles apart, but the demon still took up most of his vision.

If it weren’t for Sen, Will would have had trouble telling whether it was a large creature that was relatively close to him or a truly enormous one at long range. Thanks to his familiar, he knew it to be the latter.

Instead of speech, the creature opted to send a beam of magical information at Will. Even with Shattersoul, he couldn’t keep it from blasting through him, overwhelming his innate defenses.

This wasn’t a soul attack, though. If it had been, his title would have taken more effect.

No, this was how it spoke.

<YOUR WORDS AND SENTIMENTS ARE COMPREHENDED>

“Oh, great,” Will said. “You’re going to talk like Vyx does? That’s going to be annoying.”

<SPEECH IS A CONCEPT PRESENT IN THOSE WHO CANNOT YET see THE truth>

“No way. It’s even worse? How?”

<YOUR TRANSGRESSIONS MEAN nothing>

<YOU HAVE SOUGHT my being FOR A PURPOSE>

“So I have. Do you have a name?”

<NONE THAT YOU COULD COMPREHEND>

“How’s Richard? You feel like a Richard.”

<IN YOUR TONGUE THE CLOSEST NAME WOULD BE the one who devoured the stars NOT richard>

“Richard it is, then. So! Have you been dealt with my kind before? I assume you have, since you let these little shits summon you.”

<YOU DO NOT see WHAT YOU ARE a part of NOW MORTAL>

Will rolled his eyes, making sure his aura gave the same impression off to the unstoppable demon.

“I’m pretty sure I do see, actually,” he said. “You eat corruption. Probably souls, too? They offered you a big meal with the promise of a bigger one. All you have to do is break one planet in the process. The pillars hijacked the power of the tournament to get enough power to actually open the gate, and just like that, you’re free to wreak havoc on a planet.”

A pause.

<YOU HAVE MORE insight THAN YOU SEEM TO>

“Yeah, I get that a lot. Turns out that when you have a cheery facade that makes you look like a dumbass, most people actually think you’re just a dumbass. Makes it really easy to take things off guard. People, monsters, gods, and now apparently demons too.”

<YOU SEEK A CONTRACT>

“Yep. Pretty simple deal. If the cultists were able to do it with ostensibly gold-rank shit, I should be able to do it with a platinum-rank skill, no?”

<IT IS NOT IMPOSSIBLE>

“Great. Then we’re getting somewhere. You want corruption, correct?”

<YOU PRESUME MUCH>

“I don’t know how much I need to presume. Your aura’s strong as shit, but one of my sigils is Hunger. I can tell when you want something so bad that you’ll stop at nothing for it.”

A wave of approval washed over Will, and he grinned. He’d worked hard on getting his shit-eating grin perfect. Every time he faced another being way too powerful for him, it only got more irritating.

“Thanks for the plus one, my man,” he told the god who’d invested a significant chunk of power into him. “Told you that you wouldn’t regret getting your pockets rinsed.”

The approval soured, tinged with irritation, and Will’s grin grew wider.

“Anyway,” he said, returning his attention to where it mattered. “You want corruption. You want to spread it, but you need to devour it. Whether that’s to live, or it’s what you live for, or if it’s just some messed-up demonic desire, I don’t know, but I do know one thing. I have what you want, and I’ve just cleansed the entire area around me, which means that nobody else has it. Do you know what that gives me?”

There was a moment of silence, so Will decided to answer himself.

“The answer is leverage, you big fucking dolt. The same thing that’s kept me in the game when there are beings beyond your comprehension trying to deal with me. And yes, I mean you, Richard.”

<MY NAME IS NOT richard YOU insignificant MORTAL>

“I’m actually rather significant to you right now, Richard. Or would you prefer I call you Dick?”

Rage from a being much more powerful than him was a familiar sensation at this point.

“Can we just skip all of this? Let’s just get to the part where you realize that I’m worth more to you than whatever other objective you’re pursuing, yeah? Maybe less of the torture than usual?”

<I WILL devour YOU WHETHER YOU CONTRACT OR NOT>

“Yeah, I definitely haven’t heard that one before. Do you tell that to all your new contractors?”

<MAKE YOUR OFFER>

Sure enough, even all the overcharged mana in the world couldn’t keep a skill two ranks above his operating forever. Will was rapidly running out of time to make his pitch, even if he did seem to have a bit longer in this space than he did on the outside.

“Right. It’s pretty simple. You fuck off and leave this planet alone, and in return, you get a little bit to nibble on.”

<YOU OFFER ME YOURSELF>

“Sort of.”

Will had become intimately acquainted with his soul by this point. Theoretically, what he wanted to do here was possible. Had he ever actually tried it? No, but that was besides the point. Nothing good ever came out of not taking stupid chances.

“I’m giving you two options here. One: you get to feed on part of me. Don’t worry, I have a lot of juicy corruption to give you—roughly three moons’ worth, plus everything I cleansed. In this option, you go back through that hole in reality and call it a day. Maybe try again later.”

Ghostflame hadn’t gone all the way through with removing the corruption, so he even still had that. After the actions he’d just taken, Will was likely the sole relevant source of corruption in the area.

“Or, number two, which I’m sure you’ve already considered. The deal falls through. I take a quick trip into the Beyond, which you should be familiar with, and I light myself on the greatest Ghostflame you’ve ever seen. I kill myself in the process, or maybe you do, but one way or another, Nynn takes my body, which is going to decay into uselessness like that, and portals off into some distant part of the universe that you can’t come near. You go hungry. A few months, or maybe days, or maybe hours from now, a group of Dread Executors show up.

“Do you think I haven’t been paying attention? You’re way above the level of this planet. If you’re able to be here, then that means that beings of similar power will be permitted here too. They might be forced to let the summoning slide, but your actual existence? You’re not staying alive for long, and your last moments are going to be filled with pain, hunger, and regret that you let your only meal get away from you.”

The pause was longer this time.

<WHAT IS YOUR PROPOSAL>

This was the tricky part. Will hadn’t had much time to think over this.

“I’m going to assume that you can’t just siphon the corruption from me.” 

That was barely a secret. If it had been able to, it wouldn’t have had to eat an entire asteroid, taking three of Will’s allies with it.

<TO consume IS TO devour>

“Not a direct answer, but good enough. This is going to cost me an arm and a leg, isn’t it?”

That was a bad joke, Will reprimanded himself. Especially if I do choose to give up an arm and a leg. That would be really awkward.

<YOU FORGET A THIRD PATH>

“Do tell.”

Will steeled himself. He had a decent idea of what was going to happen here.

As intense pressure rolled over his soul, he sighed.

“Always the same with your kind,” he said, capable of forming words through the pain. “As powerful as you might be, you’re no god. What makes you think you can hurt me enough to make me give up? The Hunger couldn’t. Neither could the Crown.”

Shattersoul worked in both directions. His soul was no longer constructed like a normal person’s, and so he could resist the effect of the demon’s pressure much more. Granted, he couldn’t push back against it, but he could remain sane through the agony, which he couldn’t say for gods.

Yet.

The pain passed quickly. Unlike the gods, the demon must have quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be able to break him like this.

“Tick-tock, asshole,” Will said. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up, but you’re running out of time. What’s it going to be?”

<OFFER: compromise>

Accompanying that system message, which Will had thus far been assuming was an interpretation of whatever eldritch method of communication the demon was using, was a scrolling diagram of arcane text and figures, which slowly resolved themselves into something like a pictogram.

Will frowned. He’d been operating off of incomplete information and assumptions so far, which had been slightly unnerving but for the most part had just been logical conclusions. Until now, it had seemed like he was correct.

Now that the demon seemed to be interfering with the system itself, he grew much less sure of the assumptions he’d held.

Not that he was going to let that show, of course.

As far as he could tell, the demon was… hold on, what was this?

Will tried to take the information in as much as he could, but just like with the demon’s body itself, it was the kind of thing that didn’t make sense when he was only using his human senses. It just failed to make sense in much the same way as the Beyond.

By cutting off his sight, he got a better idea of what it wanted.

<you will close your eyes and i will open them>

<your heart will beat with mine>

<your soul will carry two lives>

The messages scrolled themselves across the center of his shut eyes, increasing in frequency and incomprehensibility at an extreme pace.

Will was starting to get the idea. The demon wanted to integrate into his body, consuming it from the inside out—in a way, it wanted to be like the monster core pollution, nestling itself into a poisoned soul.

“Absolutely fucking not,” he said. “You’re not getting anywhere near my innards.”

<OFFER: compromise>

The message remained, soon joined by a second.

<ARE YOU WILLING TO DIE>

There was the crux of the problem. Will did have leverage in this, but it resided in his body. Killing himself was one of the few ways for him to actually get out of this, which was… less than ideal. He preferred living, thank you very much.

That left them at a bit of an impasse. The demon knew Will didn’t want to die. Will knew the demon didn’t want to give up his meal.

Alright then, he thought. Here goes nothing.

Even in the dream-space, Will had been able to access his soul. The same was true for this area, which was much closer to reality than the half-real spaces the gods pulled him into.

It was a touch nightmarish in there. His soul had been shattered by the Crown, and now the shattered pieces were being further assaulted by so much corruption that he almost failed to identify which parts of the entire mess were him.

Time in the Beyond had taught him soul control, though, and the corruption had yet to infect all of him. Will calmed himself, shifting his soul as the demon watched him.

The devouring gestalt had managed to evade his corruption earlier in the tournament by simply shedding pieces of its body before the effect could spread all the way. Similar to the gestalt, Will had a level of resistance that would prevent all of the affliction from taking root in his soul immediately.

In theory, he could do the same thing the gestalt had, just on a soul level instead of a physical one.

In practice… well, this was the practice. He was about to find out whether that was possible.

Will didn’t waste a moment trying to prepare himself for this. He was running out of time already, and he trusted his hard-won instincts.

In just under a couple months, he’d undergone more soul training than most Users would have by the end of the gem tiers. With a Corruption affinity, he was uniquely suited to this task. Will’s shattered soul flew, disassembling and reassembling itself, moving corruption along with it.

To him, it seemed like an eternity of boldly thrashing his soul around until the bulk of the massed affliction had been isolated to one part of it, but in reality, it was almost no time at all.

The problem lay in the fact that no matter what he did, Will didn’t actually have a good way to transfer the corruption. Chaos Transfer’s gold-rank ability involved being able to be used remotely on others, transferring their afflictions to himself. Theoretically, he could try transferring it to a weapon, but using it for everything crushing his soul right now felt like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.

Sure enough, when he attempted it, a glaring red box appeared before his eyes.

[Chaos Transfer] has been overloaded. You cannot currently use [Chaos Transfer] to cleanse yourself.

So there were limits on his skills after all. That wasn’t terribly surprising—after all, Will had detected that the corruption had still lingered around him when he hadn’t used the burning Ghostflame to kill things—but it did make this much more awkward.

“I have a better question for you,” Will said. “Do you want to go to your grave regretting that you didn’t take what was offered? And, to answer yours: you’re not getting a full ride inside me. Take me out to dinner first, jeez.”

<YOU HAVE A compromise OF YOUR OWN>

Will’s mind was racing as fast as his soul was. He’d made the connection that the demon didn’t just want nourishment. It understood that it had to return to the Beyond or be set upon by forces much greater than itself, and it didn’t want to go back.

That was the part he could exploit. The demon had tried to be subtle, but it hadn’t.

Will could feel the pieces almost clicking together. If he had to sacrifice a part of himself, he could do so, forcing all of the corruption into that one part of his body via a shattered fragment of his soul. The demon wanted a way into reality through his body, mind, and soul, but he didn’t need to give it the latter, did he?

What could he give up?

The joke was that a deal with a devil—demon, in this case—could cost an arm and a leg, but he needed all his limbs to function. Internal organs were a no-go for a similar reason.

Sensory organs… with his Perception as high as it was, alongside his aura sense, there was a nugget there.

Screw it. This is no time for caution.

“You get the most partial of manifestations,” Will said. “I’ll give you an eye.”

Something seemed to shift.

#

“Your champion is making dangerous moves,” Sadareth observed.

“He is.”

“The demon is agitated.”

“It is.”

“Are you going to give me a longer response, friend?”

“Yes.” The Hunger gestured with his aura, gently nudging his goddess companion’s attention towards the third planet. “The demon’s agitation is causing a ripple effect.”

“Ah. That is… less than ideal.”

“As has been everything the past few cycles. Whatever Will chooses to do next, it is out of our hands. One way or another, however, a mid-tier demon has been summoned centuries before even a successful planet could handle it.”

“You call him by his name now,” Sadareth said. “You are growing.”

“If he somehow survives this integration, I would be unsurprised to see him among our ranks one day,” Kadael replied.

“And what comes next.”

“Of course. That is something that even I cannot foresee.”

“If your champion has taught you anything, you can properly foresee very little.”

Kadael laughed bitterly. “Painfully true. I have done what I will do. The rest is up to him.”

Deep in the solar system, the demon’s tendrils extended, sending waves of twisted magic that wasn’t quite corruption grasping out towards a planet not so far away.

#

It only took three rapid-fire sessions of somewhat unimpressive soul torture for the demon to give up. They had found the point where neither of them were willing to budge further, and it was the demon’s time who was running out. In the grand scheme of things, it was its desire which mattered more here.

“As it turns out,” Will said, “There are some wills that even you can’t break.”

He resisted making an even worse joke. There was a lot of wordplay he could have gone for, but a cheesy pun on his own name? Good enough for a monster like this.

<YOUR compromise IS ACCEPTABLE>

Even an unformed-ranker would have been able to tell the disgusted resignation in the demon’s aura.

A mid-tier demon has accepted your offered contract. Do you accept your offered terms?

Will could feel the skill allowing him to hold this contract slipping away, so he got on with it.

You, [William Li-Brown], have initiated a contract with a mid-tier demon that you have designated [Richard].

He popped a silver-rank dagger out of the knife he’d stolen from Ingrid with Weapons Free. If it had been enough for the gold-ranker to attempt suicide with, it was enough to gouge out one eye.

Now came the tricky part.

“Hey, Richard,” Will said. “Right or left?”

<IT IS IMMATERIAL>

“Right it is, then. That’s my non-dominant one, anyway.”

He dug the knife in, coalescing the corrupted portion of his shattered soul at the same time. Will shoved all of the corruption into his eye, wincing at the burning pain that rivaled even that of a god’s torture, then severed his optic nerve with the lethally sharp knife.

The distance between him and the demon seemed to warp, a wave of proboscis-like tentacles lashing out. The eye vanished before Will could even perceive it, and a truly enormous wave of corruption detonated before being sucked away. To Will’s aura senses, it was a breathtakingly beautiful sight of an unspeakably large creature’s body exploding out like a fireworks display in deep space, encompassed by a cloud of dark corruption, then surrounding it and consuming it all.

The aura changed to one of deep satisfaction.

<THE PACT IS SEALED>

A chill went down Will’s spine as the demon began to retreat.

All except for one small piece. It had broken off part of its body to integrate with Will’s. He had set this contract himself, so he knew it was not just suicidal but world-ending for him to try to escape.

Will accepted the thread of demon magic into his eye. It would not connect to his mind or soul. By the terms of the contract, which he’d gotten pretty damn good at negotiating by this point, it could not.

Even then, a connection from his body to a demon’s was a major one, and as he felt a foreign, invisible substance crowd into his bleeding eye-socket.

Then there was pain, but Will had long since grown used to that. It was a pain that only scratched the skin and didn’t even touch the soul, so he was able to retreat into the abcesses of his shattered soul and push through it.

He felt the loss of a section of his soul, and he understood that the emptiness that was there could not be filled by this, lest the demon infect his entire soul. Will put that down on the to-do list.

Where can I find a spare soul fragment?

Then, suddenly, the connection closed. The entire list of bullshit he’d gone through gave up the ghost, and the platinum-rank Contact Demon skill completed, its purpose accomplished.

Once again, Will stood atop an asteroids, his shaduaows covering the rest of the asteroids.

He was alone.

A long list of notifications filled his screen. Eyes still screwed shut thanks to the pain of the demon fragment replacing his eye, he scrolled through a few of them.

The Trial of the Champion has now completed. No winner has been selected. This tournament will repeat in 100 years, when the next cycle begins, or at the leisure of the gods.

Nynn: I don’t know what you did with the demon, but its pressure is off of us now. The tournament walls are irreparably destroyed. I’m going to use what little power is left in the tournament to get everyone else back on-planet. There’s still an open connection to the isolation point on Earth. With the Trial’s dying breath, I can get them there.

Nynn: Good luck.

Will opened his eyes and saw a different world.

Everything, from the dead bodies to his hunger phantasm to the asteroids, was marked with lines and points, as if someone had overlaid a wireframe model atop all of them. The only exception was the wound in the world that the ritual had opened up, which was now closing, the demon’s influence disappearing even as Will watched.

You have gained [Demonic Eye of Death Perception] at the highest rank your body can process through a mid-tier demon’s contract.

Achievement earned: Contractor

You have been infused with demonic energy. Interesting unrelated factoid: in 99.7% of civilized planets, this earns you an instant death sentence.

Reward: You have earned the [Outcast] title.

For a moment, Will just stood there, alone and victorious, looking down at the blue-green orb that was the Earth.

He didn’t know what he’d be returning to. He didn’t know how bad the otherworlder situation had gotten.

Yet somehow, in this moment, more alone than he’d ever been, he thought that he was ready for it.

Caiyeri: You still alive up there? We just sensed a massive disturbance up there.

He smiled. No, he wasn’t alone. He still had his people. They were going to reunite soon.

Will: We’ll see about that. So far, the answer is looking like “yes.”

Flashing system messages alerted Will to look away from the blue-green orb that was the Earth.

In the wake of the demon disappearing, he’d been too focused on scanning its tracks for a potential attempt to reopen the portal, but the pillars were all dormant now, the path to the Beyond gone.

That focus had kept him from seeing the other elephants in the room.

First was the fact that the tournament was no longer supporting the asteroids. Their orbit was beginning to degenerate, and Will could feel the pull of gravity starting to drag him back to Earth.

That was, somehow, less worrying by far.

The second concern was in the other direction.

Far from Earth—but much closer than it should have been—was a slowly approaching form coming from what must have been millions of miles away, was a celestial body shrouded in purple magic.

A new planet.

As Will tumbled towards atmosphere, a system message ignited. Moments later, his entire message list blew up with people asking about it.

New quest: Second Impact

Prepare yourselves.

This quest has not finished populating. Further requirements will be added with time.

- Place in the top 100 by the impact. [0/1]

Reward: [???]

Second impact?

“Aw, fuck.”

His new eye, mysterious as it was, could see crimson lines crossing everything, but he could see one long one in particular. Innocuous at first, he quickly realized it connected Earth and the new planet.

Standing atop a falling asteroid, sword in hand, Will watched as the world jumped out of the frying pan into a wildfire.

A third planet has entered the cycle. The system has already been initialized.

Time to impact: 2 years.