[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 94: Low Atmosphere (Patreon)

New York City had been a noisy, chaotic mess before dimensional rifts had summoned in city-wiping threats from other worlds.

Humanity was no longer in the same state it had been a mere two months before, but that didn’t mean it was less of a disaster. Not everyone who had survived the tutorial had thrown themselves fully into the new world, and there were many unformed and monster-core-abusing bronzes who’d been displaced.

Estimated death toll at the time of provisional government response was five thousand, but that number was very unclear. Fortunately, the hundred-foot-tall turtle abomination had landed smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, which had been largely abandoned thanks to its plentiful silver and gold-rank dungeons.

Despite being a turtle—or tortoise, the reports weren’t entirely sure on which it was—it moved with deceptive speed, knocking out the foundations of buildings that hadn’t quite finished collapsing yet.

A squad of dark fighter jets of a make that hadn’t existed before the advent of the system screamed towards the city at supersonic speeds, magically enhanced weapons at the ready. 

“Striker 1 flight, this is Command. Be advised, target has a breath weapon capable of ground-to-air assault.”

“Command, this is Striker 1 flight. We have visual on the target. Do we have better eyes on it?”

“Negative. Drones confirmed a low gold-rank reading before being destroyed. Stay out of range. If eliminating the target is impossible, prioritize leading it into the bay. Evac efforts are undergoing. The target cannot be allowed to travel north.”

“Got you loud and clear, boss,” a different voice said. “Bombs away!”

If anyone was listening into the relatively unencrypted transmission between provisional military command and the Striker squadron, they might have heard several deep sighs.

In the wake of the apocalypse, the military hadn’t exactly stayed intact. A larger portion of them had chosen to continue fighting than civilians, but not all of them had gained classes that were compatible with existing equipment. That had led to some less than organized swaps into and out of what counted as elite military forces.

Nobody could complain when the job was done, though. A bit of poor communication was easily made up for by the power that aligning the proper Pilot with their gear could bring.

Standardization was becoming less of a priority with every passing day. Even now, all four members of the Striker squadron unleashed different types of attacks. Striker 3, the one who’d interrupted the rest of his group, had a specific mechanism on his jet that dropped a mass of unmanned drones that he controlled with a skill, each of them loaded with enough TNT to collapse a skyscraper.

In addition to that were traditional ordnances that had been enchanted with various armor-piercing runes from Striker 1, a fairly standard energy beam attack that used a mana sensor built into the plane to lock onto enemies from 2, and a high-risk spectral machine gun from 4 that required relatively close strafing runs.

Combined with various other augmentations, they were a terrifying force in the skies. Even at bronze rank, they had been capable of grouping up together and taking out high silver-rank aerial threats.

This was a different story altogether though. So far, the entirety of the Eastern States had only dealt with four gold-ranks, and each time, destroying them had required a large-scale military response and long, pitched warfare to make it work. One had even taken a tactical nuclear strike to eliminate. The only reason Striker squadron was here without support was because the rift had been so sudden, without any of the buildup they had grown to expect from them.

“Command, this is Striker 1. Target has been identified as an ancient rune turtle.”

“Says it’s a battalion boss,” Striker 3 said. “No shot in hell we’re breaking through that thing’s armor.”

This gold-rank had clearly put most of its abilities into defense. Not a single one of the plentiful attacks had even put a dent in its armor, though parts of its glimmering crystalline shell had slightly discolored.

“At least we have its attention,” the same man continued. “It hasn’t been moving as—shit!”

The turtle looked up, its massive jaw yawning wide open. Enormous amounts of purple steam spat forth from its throat and sizzled through the air. Striker 2 took a glancing hit to the edge of a wing and lost control of his plane, tumbling into an uncontrolled descent. The rest couldn’t afford to follow him, and they confirmed his ejection from his plane. Defenseless as he was while parachuting, it was a stroke of fortune that the turtle kept its breath focused on the others.

Once they were out of range, the ancient rune turtle seemed to lose interest in them, turning its beam weapon back down upon the city. The men and woman in the planes noticed this, but they couldn’t afford to be broken up about it. Most everyone who couldn’t defend themselves in this area had already died. They couldn’t waste resources that they needed to stay alive.

Then, all of a sudden, as data pinged across three functioning dashboards, their comm lines went silent.

“Striker 1 flight, this is Command.” The agent on the other side sounded harried. “Backup is still twenty minutes out. How long can you hold?”

The response was silence.

“Striker 1 flight? Striker 1, do you copy?”

“Command,” Striker 4 said slowly. “Do you have anything pointed at the lower atmosphere?”

“Striker 4, I’m… not sure I understand.”

Far below them, even the turtle had sensed that something was amiss. It had started to eye the falling figure of a single poor bronze-ranker, ready to turn its breath weapon upon him, but now it snapped its mouth shut, its head angling way up.

Several hundred miles above, only detected thanks to the recent rapid advancements made in magical radar but blatantly obvious to the naked eye once they tilted their planes to look at it, a meteorite blazed through the sky.

“Striker 1 flight, this is Command,” a different voice came through. “We have confirmation of a meteorite entry. Projected landing site is populated. Can you destroy it?”

The three remaining pilots didn’t let their collective sigh of relief go through the comm link. They were willing to risk a lot, but engaging that turtle for twenty full minutes just sounded like suicide. In comparison, shooting down a meteorite was a walk in the park.

“Copy that, Command.”

Three jets shot up in perfect formation, magical ordnance locking onto the meteorite. Instead of the gold-rank armor, it was just a rock. There was nothing to stop their hypersonic attacks from tearing through it and atomizing it.

Except, apparently, there was. Striker 4 had the Farsight skill, and she confirmed that the meteorite had been blown to bits, but their mana radars were still picking up a signature.

The turtle’s breath weapon exploded outwards again, forcing them to evade, but the steam quickly crystallized into a single, tightly focused beam aimed directly at the falling meteorite.

“Yo, Telly,” the man flying Striker 3 said. “The hell is going on?”

“I… think that’s an aura,” the woman in 4 replied. “I can’t tell the rank, but it’s definitely stronger than the turtle. There’s a monster on the meteorite.”

“Shit. Do we fight it?”

“Striker flight, this is Command. Disengage. Repeat. Disengage.”

“Command?” Striker 1 asked. “Why? With all due respect, there are still people down there.”

“Word’s come in from above. The Aussies have seen this one before. It’s not hostile.”

Telly—short for “Telescope,” a callsign that she hadn’t been able to shake before and definitely wouldn’t be able to now—clicked her tongue. “I don’t know what to tell you, Command, but that’s definitely hostile.”

“The fuck is an Australian monster doing in our airspace?” Striker 3 asked.

You have received a message from [William Li-Brown].

Every pilot, even the one who’d been downed and was gradually parachuting to his death, received the same system message at the same time.

Will: Do you know how hard it was to get your contact information? Jeez. Has the chain of command just completely gone to shit? Don’t answer that.

Will: Anyway. Your job here is done. Leave the rest up to me, and don’t shoot. It would make this a little harder.

As they finished reading the message, what remained of the meteorite rocketed past the jets in formation, darkening their sight and senses for a moment before it continued soaring downwards.

“Holy shit!” Striker 3 shouted. “What was that?”

Will: Just passing by.

The three jets turned downwards to watch the streak of shadow rocketing towards the ground.

The shadow seemed to slow as it continued downwards, settling into a gliding spiral. Telly was the only one of them with a perception skill sharp enough to see that the dark mass had resolved itself into massive, mana-rich wings, turning a straight fall into a smooth glide, sending whatever horrific creature—or human—was hidden beneath it straight towards the rune turtle.

Amelia alias “Telescope”: That’s a gold-rank. You’re not on the leaderboard, Mr. Li-Brown. I would advise you think twice.

Will: I’ve never been great at doing that. Hey, this monster is going to release a lot of bronze and silver-rank parasites when it dies. I’ll take care of the slower ones, but I’m going to need you to grab the rest of them.

Amelia: You assume a lot.

Will: You know what? I’ll let you make the decision in a couple of minutes. Be right back.

By the time the three jets had the rune turtle in visual range again, the area currently designated as the Manhattan Exclusion Zone was even more of a mess than it had been before.

Swirling shadows darkened the entire area even though it was midday. Lightning sparked within, constantly barraging the turtle, which itself was blasting its wide-range breath weapon at every possible opportunity, melting entire floors off skyscrapers and knocking them down into each other.

The reason for this became clear when the Striker squadron drew closer, staying out of effective range of both combatants. Ominous, distorted magic corrupted the turtle, slithering through its defenses and wracking its body.

Even thousands of feet above the battlefield, they could all hear a bell toll.

#

This was going better than Will had expected. Equilibrium Mantle, which was definitely his least obviously impressive skill by far, had proven to be worth its weight in gold. 

Skill: [Equilibrium Mantle]

- Passive (body).

- Cost: very low mana over time.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver.

Nullifies extreme environmental conditions in a small radius around the user’s body. Drastically reduces the effect of adverse conditions.

[Harmony of Self] (silver) - Your mantle affects your internal world as much as it does the environment outside. Your body will remain in balance at all times, preventing you from suffering from illness and removing the need to breathe. This skill does not protect against external attacks.

Well, maybe that weight was in silver.

Even as he fell through the atmosphere, the skill had kept him from suffering the adverse effects of first going through intense cold and then intense heat. It had not prevented him from being on a meteorite that was falling at several thousand miles per hour, nor had it stopped said meteorite from getting blown to shreds, but it had at least kept him from burning up in the atmosphere.

His biggest problem had been getting from an extremely fast-moving meteorite to the ground without turning himself into a past. Even his air-dashes via Wind Walker weren’t enough to break him out of that spiral, but fortunately, the desperate gold-rank upgrade to Hunger Phantasm he’d obtained to enable a contract with a demon had made him capable of forming wings large enough to redirect his momentum.

Skill: [Hunger Phantasm]

- Spell (sigil, conjuration).

- Cost: low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Gold

Conjures a dark phantasm with a volume of 40,000 cubic feet. You have fine control over this phantasm within a moderate range of your body. You can control parts of the phantasm at a range of up to 2,000 feet. Lasts until dispelled or destroyed.

[Starvation] - The phantasm counts as a weapon and doubles the effect of all drain conditions. Every attack you successfully land on a target that is touching a phantasm drains their stamina and mana, restoring yours. This also restores your health if your stamina and mana are full.

[In the Flesh] - For a moderate mana cost, the phantasm can take physical form. For the purposes of touch-range spells, you can use the phantasm. At silver-rank, the physical form increases in its ability to affect the material world.

[Echo of Despair] (silver) - When a target that the phantasm is touching reaches critical levels of stamina, mana, or health, the phantasm emits a pulse that applies the [Wither] condition on the target and any other enemies within a short distance.

[Desperate Famine] (gold) - Vastly increases the volume, speed, and range of the phantasm as well as the durability and flexibility of its manifested form.

It was a simple upgrade, but it had been key in giving him the massive wings he’d needed to restore himself into a glide. From there, it had been pretty simple. The rune turtle’s defenses were so strong that he couldn’t break through it with bronze and silver rank weapons, but he had a number of ways around it.

First and most obvious was corruption. The turtle’s armor had actually deflected the touch range skill at first, but Will had managed to inch the phantasm under the turtle’s body and afflicted it. 

With the Unstoppable properties of his gauntlets and slayer sword, he had gradually increased his ability to inflict damage.

[Unstoppable] - This weapon does increased damage with each charge. This effect is enhanced if the charges were all obtained against the same type of enemy, and it is enhanced even further if all charges were obtained against the same enemy. This effect is reset if you hit a different target.

The wording varied a bit between the items, but they were functionally the same. With his skills as developed as they were now, it got pretty easy to stack up the afflictions. Thunder Wraith’s Grasp applied a level of charged every time he hit the turtle’s shell, and Abyssal Tempest sharply increased the amount of damage he did proportional to how charged a given target was. Lightning struck out across the shells as he pummeled it. Sadly, it didn’t do much to the turtle itself, but the sparks did start frying the plentiful parasites that crept across the massive turtle’s shell.

Just like the elder rune turtle he’d fought during the tutorial, the individual segments of the shell each served as armor, and their color grew redder as he dealt more damage to it.

Unlike the last time, he didn’t have a hellish equalizer to blast through it beyond steadily chipping away at it with corruption and his other afflictions. Also unlike the last time, Will actually had some idea of what he was doing now.

The turtle’s entire body looked to be criss-crossed by blood-red lines to him, and that wasn’t just the segmentation of its shell.

In exchange for piling enough corruption to kill a world into an eye and feeding it to a demon, he’d received a demonic powerup in the form of a replacement.

Item: [Demonic Eye of Death Perception] 

Mythic, gold (growth, prosthetic)

This item can only be attuned to the User that holds a contract with the demon that provided it. You are attuned to this item.

Due to their nature, demons are not gradeable by the system. It is only in the form of a prosthesis or otherwise limited item that they can be understood, and even then, it is largely in relation to the materials containing their influence. This eye is currently limited by the maximum amount of energy your body can contain. Its rank reflects this.

The mid-tier demon you obtained this eye from perceives death.

[Visualize] (bronze) - You sense death. With this eye, you see the weakest points of an object or being. 

[Cut] (silver) - Hitting these lines with the correct angle and force automatically results in a critical hit.

[Envision] (gold) - You now also see the weakest points of a magical skill.

Perceiving death was a horrifically powerful skill even at the current rank. As long as Will could quickly reposition himself—which he could—it was functionally an auto-crit, which vastly boosted damage output.

Granted, it wasn’t always possible to get into position to do so, but against a slow-moving turtle that had to scour its own body with a gold-rank breath weapon to try to hit him? Easy.

Will could see the potential of how heavily this skill could evolve over time. On some level, he wondered if he even wanted to have the demon living in his right eye increase in rank, but he supposed that there was no use in worrying over what he couldn’t change.

Sen was instrumental in keeping him in this fight. His familiar, composed of a thousand free-floating eyes, had been one of the three skills he’d upgraded to gold rank in a desperate move to survive the demon summoning back at the trial of the champion.

Skill: [Thousand Eyes]

- Familiar (time, perception).

- Cost: extreme mana. 1,000 gold credits. 100 gold-rank Monster Cores or equivalent. 1,000 silver-rank Monster Cores or equivalent.

- Cooldown: none.

Gold

Summons an avatar from an alternate universe that is perpetually locked in a single instant. This familiar is incorporeal. This familiar is a non-continuous entity.

This familiar currently possesses gold-rank attributes but will not have access to [Remote Domination] until it is resummoned.

This familiar possesses truesight.

[Synchronicity] - You can use all senses through the Thousand Eyes, relying on either yours or your familiar’s. The eyes can access echoes of recent past events (5 seconds or less) within its vicinity, showing you spectral images of events even if you cannot see your target.

[Time-Locked] - By existing outside the normal timestream, your familiar can expend mana to become imperceptible to non-magical means and aura senses.

[Remote Anchor] (gold) - For the purposes of skills with a range, you can use a large enough collection of eyes as a focal point for that skill, extending your range.

[Remote Domination] (gold) - You can project your aura through any of the thousand eyes. After reaching a sufficient threshold of eyes in one area, you may attempt to afflict the [Stunned] condition upon enemies within range.

For the time being, all Sen had was gold-rank speed, but that was all he needed for now. The iridescent, immaterial eyes whirled around the battlefield, giving Will perfect information on the turtle, evacuating humans, and the bronze-rankers in the jets above him.

I should probably wrap this up, he thought, using Weapons Free’s bronze-rank ability to teleport to a hidden knife held by the phantasm as the turtle croaked out another pained attempt at the breath weapon. It was getting weaker by the moment, corruption taking its toll.

He’d mostly been playing around with his skills, trying to make sure he was still capable of doing everything he normally was when the demonic eye was constantly feeding him information. It was giving him a headache, to be honest, though that might have been the reality-breaking being just chilling in his eye-socket, maybe a little too close to his brain.

A bell tolled, and the devastating damage Will had already inflicted upon the turtle worsened. 

Skill: [The Bell Tolls]

- Spell (esoteric).

- Cost: high mana.

- Cooldown: 1 hour.

Silver.

“Run. Hide. Fight. Try every last desperate play you have. In the end, the bell still tolls.” - Dread Executor Illona III, cycle 950.

Cleanses all afflictions from you and targets a creature you can see. The creature cannot benefit from magical healing for the next minute. Inflicts necrotic damage scaling with the consumed afflictions and any injuries the target is suffering from.

[Withering Decay] (bronze) - Death approaches. Increases any affliction on the target by one level. Inflicts one level of [Wither].

[Escape is Futile] (silver) - Cooldown resets if the target dies.

It was a hop, skip, and a jump to lethal damage from there.

You have defeated [Ancient Rune Turtle].

“Aw, man,” he said to himself. “I probably should’ve tried out some of my other skills.”

For the most part, he felt fine. He was still physically capable of using all his magic. The misalignment was deeper within him, where he’d sacrificed a piece of his much-abused soul to save the world.

Oh well. He had plenty of time to fix that.

Will looted the turtle—nothing terribly interesting, sadly—and started looking around the city for a better place to go. It hadn’t been his choice to land in the shattered remains of New York. The asteroid had just been in position for that.

Sen’s eyes, still swirling around the ruined city, notified him of the continued existence of the fighter jets above. As he’d asked, they were now aiming their efforts on the lower-ranked spawn that came scuttling out of the decaying corpse of the turtle. Their ally, who’d parachuted out of his plane when it had only been mostly irreparably damaged by the breath weapon, was on the ground about half a mile away.

“Oh. There’s an idea.”

#

Amelia: Oy. You there, Sledge?

Sledge: Barely. Thanks for checking. I’ll make my way out. Rendezvous point?

Amelia: Just go north. There’s shit all south. Pop a flare if you’ve got one.

Sledge: Copy that.

She brought the nose of her jet around, using her Farsight skill to look down onto the last known sighting of one Thomas “Sledge” Woodworth.

No dice. Whatever dark, infectious shadow had spread over the turtle and killed it was still blanketing the streets, reducing low-level visibility to none. They’d gone much lower than usual operating heights to ensure that they cleared out the parasites that had crawled forth from the dying turtle, but they were higher up now because the shadows had been so pervasive.

Amelia: Are you in the darkness?

No response. She frowned.

“One, Rogue, I can’t get ahold of Sledge. No eyes. He’s gone unresponsive on chat, too.”

That was always a bad sign. The chat would give her a notification if he died, but too often, a sudden disappearance meant that someone was unconscious and minutes from death.

“Holy shit, Telly,” Rogue, the pilot in Striker 3, said. “He’s right on you?”

“What?”

“Check your underbelly cam, Telly,” Striker 1 said, a note of tension in his voice. “Do not swerve. Repeat. Do not swerve.”

Confused, she commanded the screens to show her the rest of her plane. It usually wasn’t a problem, since her aura sense extended to encompass her jet, but if her companions said to…

Despite the warning from 1, she still nearly forced the plane into a roll when she saw what was on her jet.

Sledge had in fact fallen unconscious and was currently being buoyed by the same dark shadow that had encompassed several blocks of Manhattan. Next to him, hanging onto a modified autocannon powerful enough to shred through solid silver-rank steel, was a man wearing a dark cloak, shrouded in black. A single eye pierced through the darkness, a bright, deep blue that emanated evil.

Will: Hey there. Mind putting us down? I’d like to have a chat.