[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 96: Of Course I Know Him (Patreon)

For the majority of her life, Caiyeri’s life had been the same. Deployed as a rapid-growth clone into a corrupted area, she had little scenery to look at but the strange, dangerous caverns beneath Arcadia.

The last two months had been a vast change of pace for her. In that timespan, she’d seen far more of another planet than she’d ever done of her own. To be fair, she still hadn’t seen that much of it, but she had seen other territories. Met people who didn’t want to kill her, though many had. In a very real sense, it had been a new world for her.

As she passed the threshold into the Beyond, the same sensation of cautious wonder and instinctive danger sense washed over her once again. Caiyeri, who had been training her aura for the entirety of her time alive, realized quickly that she was supposed to use her magical senses to see.

Her mind exploded with wonder as massive, interleaving tendrils of incomprehensible mana flooded her aura senses. Caiyeri gasped, only belatedly realizing that she probably shouldn’t have been able to breathe.

Will was stabilizing her, she grasped. The two of them were standing on a simple platform, bare in its presentation but for a couple of seats.

A heavy weight seemed to tug at her, as if trying to yank her away, and she stumbled back. For a brief moment, Caiyeri existed outside of the bounds of Will’s Sanctuary.

In that instant, her very soul felt like it was going to tear apart as the external forces of the Beyond and the sigil clawing at her, erasing all semblance of rational thought with soul pain.

“Hey!” Will cried out, though Caiyeri was too insensate to hear him. “No. Not in my house.”

Then there was a bright blue flash, motion, and a snap that reverberated through her body and soul.

The force that had been tugging on her was gone now, and Will pulled Caiyeri back into stability. After the assault just outside his boundary, the reprieve was extremely welcome.

“Sorry about that,” Will said, scratching the back of his neck sheepishly. “I didn’t realize your sigil’s reaction to this would be so… violent.”

Is this what you feel every night? Caiyeri wanted to ask the question, but when she took a good look at Will, she lost that train of thought.

Outside, she’d noticed that one of his eyes had been augmented somehow. Evil-aligned energy had been coursing off of it, but Caiyeri had written that off as Will being Will. Every single skill and evolution he’d received seemed to make him even more anathema to anyone but an abyssal elf or other evil-aligned faction. She’d assumed he had received some manner of power-up in the wake of defeating a demon that would have devastated the entire planet and hadn’t thought much else of it.

In the Beyond, however, which she knew only as the place that Will’s portal ability was forcing them through, he looked like a true monster. His right eye had glowed with an arrogant, malevolent blue, but now that glow was a blaze that spilled out of his eye and encompassed his entire body. Azure flame scorched the air, leaving a trail behind Will as he walked. He had something that looked like a sword in his hands, wreathed with the same power that billowed from his eye.

Caiyeri centered herself as much as she could, building up the mental stamina to speak again.

“Wow, you recovered from that fast,” Will said, watching her put herself back together. “You wanna try my training regimen? This is a big part of it.”

“Your training regimen is regularly torturing yourself to the edge of death? No wonder you are the way you are.”

Will snorted and dropped the sword. It vanished into nothingness before it hit the ground, the blue flame going with it.

“So,” Caiyeri said, eyeing Will’s demonic side. “What did you do?”

“Integrated a power-up into my skillset,” he said. “Turns out that demon magic is really effective at operating within the bounds of my transportation skill, which is… complicated. I’d explain it, but I don’t think I want to give Sadareth more reason to be pissed at me.”

“You speak of Mother,” Caiyeri said.

“Yep. That was her trying to pull you back. I’m not entirely sure if that was intentional or instinct, but either way, it’s not going to work. Look, the gods are bastards. Even the ones I can begrudgingly admit I sort of like are utter dickheads.”

“You don’t need to tell me that twice. This is a demonic affixation, then? How have you not lost your mind? Wait, don’t tell me—it’s because you lost it before the system even came to your world. Do I have it right?”

“I’d say I lost my mind a little afterwards,” Will replied with an easy smile. “There was a short window between me being tossed up into space and me saving your ass from a goblin. Either way, I’m still me. Sanity intact.”

“That’s debatable.” Despite her words, Caiyeri was relieved to see that Will—and, importantly, his aura—was the same slightly irritating, overconfident but lethal corruption wielder that he had been.

“Now, if you don’t mind, hold onto your soul,” Will said. “We’re about to land, and it might be a touch rough.”

“I’d like to explore this area a little more,” Caiyeri said. “I’ve never been this conscious during a teleportation. Does it always take this long?”

“You should have experienced the trial of the champion. Dear god that was bad. And no, unfortunately, there’s only so long I can hold this. Also, exploring too much here will probably cause permanent soul damage. Especially outside of this place.”

“If you say so,” Caiyeri said. “You’ll have to take me around the place someday.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Will’s eye flared brighter, and the Sanctuary around them began to shrink. “For now, we get in a plane, kill whatever blew up DC, then we hit Vegas and go gambling. Sound good?”

“You had me at ‘go gambling.’”

Caiyeri still hadn’t realized that it wasn’t her body being transported but her soul. Will did, however, and he could see the visual change in how her body expressed itself, the elf’s eyes literally lighting up.

“Jesus, you’re hopeless,” he said fondly. “Let’s get killing.”

The Sanctuary shrank further, and Caiyeri found herself standing on tarmac next to Will. A plane narrowly missed them, taking off not twenty feet from them.

He collapsed to the ground.

“Will?”

#

Will was a touch confused.

“This isn’t the place I usually get yanked into,” he said. “How did you even get me in here?”

“You see,” the Elven Mother said, clearly restraining her anger, “Kadael is a good friend of mine, and he was willing to do a favor for me when my sigil-holder was transported into the dimension of demons.”

“Ah. So that’s what this is about.”

Her aura expanded, radiating divine strength. A warning.

“Look, Sadareth, I get that you’re upset,” Will said. “I do want to point out that if the Hunger’s a friend of yours, you should know that that’s not going to do anything to me.”

The energy faded away, leaving Will and the elven goddess staring each other down.

The Hunger’s usual venue of choice was a simple, darkened room, as barren as Will’s Sanctuary was. On the other hand, the Elven Mother’s dream-space was an opulent tea room that revolved around a single tree that reached up high into a violet sky.

As for the goddess herself, she was blindingly beautiful in the most literal sense. It was only because of Will’s constant soul bombardment from the Hunger and the Crown—and now also the demon living in his right eye—that he was capable of even glancing in her general direction.

Though the entire dream-space was criss-crossed by the lines of death, all of them ended at Sadareth.  That was to be expected, to be honest. At his current stage of development, there was nothing he could do to even scratch the surface of a god. In fact, the last time he’d tried, he had ended up dead for his efforts. Will wasn’t going to repeat that mistake, especially when he didn’t actually hate this goddess that much.

Still, it was a bit disconcerting to see a world painted in crimson and a goddess who went untouched by all of it.

Her blinding brightness faded a smidge, allowing Will to actually make eye contact with her.

“You are correct,” she admitted. “The matter remains that you not only sent my sigil-holder into a dimension inaccessible by gods and populated largely by demons, Dread Executors, and those who would seek to break the system itself, but that you also somehow managed to break my connection to her.”

“You got it back, didn’t you?” Will asked innocently.

“You know very well I did. Severing a sigil-holder’s bond is much more complex than that.”

“Then I don’t see where the problem is. You have direct access to her soul, don’t you? She’s still her. I’m still me. No demonic influence if you ignore the one in my eye, which I’ll remind you is there because I saved the fucking world. I’m not asking for the keys to the city, but a little recognition would be nice.”

“Your efforts were seen by many of our kind,” Sadareth acknowledged.

Even though her aura was many, many times stronger than his, Will could sense the shift in it enough to tell that she wasn’t giving him the full story. There was something else to it. There always was.

“I helped you out, didn’t I?” he guessed. “Unless your main concern is the literal thirty seconds of distorted time where you couldn’t get information from your sigil-holder, then you’re probably wondering whether my jaunt through the Beyond ended up with me going loony. Except you’re a god. The fact that you were able to pull me in here implies that you should be able to test my soul, but I don’t feel any of the crushing pressure that usually comes with the Hunger rolling through mine.”

The goddess remained silent, which only spurred Will on further.

“If you won’t touch my soul, despite the seeming constant desire from you lot to do exactly that, then I can only assume that either it wouldn’t help you or that you can’t. Why wouldn’t you be able to? Well, my first thought is that it’s because I’m not your sigil-holder, but you’ve been indirectly affecting me this entire time. That leaves me with only the conclusion that you don’t want to risk exposing yourself to this demon. Am I right?”

For beings that were supposed to be so vastly above him, the gods he’d dealt with so far were surprisingly mortal, and the chagrin in Sadareth’s aura and expression told him that the Elven Mother was no different.

“In that case,” he said, charging on, “that means that the demon I beat out in the trial of the champion—“

“You did not defeat it,” the Elven Mother said, her words overriding his with divine authority. “You simply sent it back into its home. Which you are also accessing.”

“I kept it from destroying the world,” Will fired back. “And for you, I’m pretty damn sure I kept you from suffering whatever effects a mid-tier demon would have on you.”

Sadareth glared at him, affixing an ascendant-tier being’s gaze upon a silver. Under most conditions, said silver’s soul would have melted, reducing him into a blubbering mess, but both she and Will knew that most conditions didn’t apply to him.

After a tense moment, the Elven Mother’s aura softened.

“You’re still as obnoxious as ever,” she said in the way that one might call a favorite pet a nuisance. “Don’t let anyone change that.”

 Will wasn’t sure whether or not to be offended by her tone, but he wasn’t going to complain about being in another god’s favor. Besides, he had something to do.

“Being obnoxious gets results,” Will said. He tilted his head. “You owe me one now, don’t you?”

“Many gods do. You protected my charge, defiant as she may be, so rest assured that I will see you rewarded. Remain in contact with her when you level up next.”

“Awesome. I’d say to send Kadael my regards, but I’m sure he’s watching. You mind letting me go now?”

The Elven Mother waved a hand. “Until you level, then.”

“See you.”

She snapped her fingers, which was entirely unnecessary given that she was a god and the domain they were in was as much a part of her as the body she’d manifested, and Will woke up.

He was still on the tarmac, with three people curiously peering down at him.

They backed off the moment he woke up, his aura coming back to full force from the suppressed state it had been in while he was unconscious.

“And here I was thinking you had finally taken a fight you couldn’t win,” Caiyeri said, shaking her head. “I should have figured that the world wouldn’t do us the grace of truly shutting you up.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Will said, grinning as he got to his feet. “Glad to see you made it out okay too.”

After the Crown had shattered his soul, his understanding of aura and its relation to the soul had vastly increased, so not even Caiyeri could hide everything from him anymore. He could sense the flicker of concern despite how well she’d stilled her aura.

“You know these two, I assume,” Caiyeri said, gesturing to the two uniformed soldiers with them.

“Amelia,” Will said, nodding at the Pilot. He looked at the other one. “You’re not part of her squad.”

“No, sir, I am not,” the second, who was a silver-ranker, said. He saluted. “Captain Sebastian Nadir, though that rank means about jack and shit to you, if you’ll pardon my language. Callsign Claws. Just use that. It’s faster. Couldn’t meet you earlier because I was out on deployment. Every silver-ranker can take out a town full of bronzes, so people like me are in high demand.”

Will inspected him briefly. Silver 2, which wasn’t bad at all. Not an otherworlder. He’d used some monster cores, but it hadn’t been that significant. His class, Skyforge, was an evolution from Pilot that he’d received upon hitting silver.

“You must’ve been pretty close to leaderboard status before everything went down,” Will said.

“Huh?” Claws dropped the salute in confusion. “Oh. Yeah, I was… fifteenth? Something like that. Hey, we need to get moving twenty minutes ago.”

“Your boss was trying to bomb me twenty minutes ago,” Will said, but he went along with Claws, who led the way towards yet another nondescript concrete building.

It actually took some effort to keep pace with Amelia and Claws. Will’s passive movement abilities in Wind Walker, Escape Artist, and Wraith Cloak were too strong. He was reminded of the shitty escort quests in some open-world games where walking was too slow but sprinting was far too fast. Will ultimately decided that since he couldn’t expect a bronze-rank to keep up with him, there were better things to complain about than speed.

Caiyeri got there first. “Are all human structures like this, or is this organization just particularly boring?”

“I feel like you don’t have much of a leg to stand on there, given that you’re literally the seventh of your name out of… how many, again?”

“I never said my nation was any better.”

“Fair point.”

“These were rapid constructions,” Claws said by way of explanation as they arrived at the hangar hidden inside one of the blocks. “One of the high silvers who came back with the SC’s unit is a full city-builder class. She says that it’ll be more functional eventually, but for now, it does the job.”

“Impressive,” Caiyeri allowed. “That doesn’t make it any less ugly.”

“I don’t disagree. The nice parts are in the equipment we’ve got.”

Will was already familiar with Amelia’s dark jet, but Claws’ was new. It was half again as wider than Amelia’s, and it looked significantly bulkier.

“She’s going to be more maneuverable than me,” Claws said. “Both of us have long-range sprint modes, though, so we should be able to make it in fifteen minutes or so. Mine only sits one extra, so one of you is going to have to go with Pilot Amelia.”

“The elf woman,” Amelia said. “Unless it turns out you can also fly, in which case, fuck me I guess. My jet has an ejection option, but Claws is going down with the ship.”

There were no objections to that, so Will followed Claws into one ship and Amelia into the other.

Will: I don’t think she’ll betray you, but if she does, you better not die. Do you know how embarrassing it would be to lose to a bronze?

Caiyeri: Same goes for you. If you somehow die here, I will make sure to make your service is terrible.

Will: You have funeral services for elves?

Caiyeri: I know of the concept, though we never did them. Dead bodies were recycled. Some other elf nations, life and heavens especially, are extremely keen on them. They actually gain an alignment to the Mother with them.

Will: Oh, that’s not horrifying at all. I’ll have to ask her about it the next time she yanks me into a dream.

Caiyeri: Wait. The Elven Mother took you into the sigil space?

Will: Yeah. We talked a bit. She implied that she wanted to kill me, I said that killing me would probably irreparably damage her, and we made up and we’re on good terms now. Didn’t think it was relevant to bring up, though I need to be near you when I level up next.

Caiyeri: You what?

Caiyeri: How do you people say it? Right. Jesus fucking Christ.

Caiyeri: I shouldn’t even be surprised. Just casually talking to another god like it means nothing.

Will: My bad if you actually revered her.

Caiyeri: Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. If you could extort her a little more, that would be great.

Will: Fantastic. Glad we’re on the same page.

“Seatbelts,” Claws said.

“You have a magical jet that deploys silver-rank ammunition that can devastate cities like nothing we’ve seen before, and we still need seatbelts?” Will belted himself in.

“Look, if you want to spend a skill slot on ‘Create Seatbelt’ instead of Nightmare Barrage, you can,” Claws said. “Hold onto something.”

“That’s a fair poOIIIIIII—” Will was not prepared for how sudden the acceleration was. Even with his silver-rank attributes softening the blow, going from 0 to over Mach 2 in a matter of seconds was rough on everyone.

Claws whooped with joy as the landscape whirred past them. The raw force of their sudden ascent pressed Will so far into his seat that he was sure he would leave a permanent indent on it. With Sen’s eyes, he saw how narrowly they avoided the lip of the mountain range surrounding the ESNA headquarters. Amelia and Caiyeri’s jet was close behind them, though she had accelerated at a much more reasonable pace and cleared the mountain with a significantly larger margin for error.

“So,” Claws said, his aura spreading out to fill the plane. “I hear you’re a real bigshot.”

Will tensed for a moment, consolidating his own aura, then realized that Claws was only using his aura to prevent the sound of wind screaming past them and relaxed.

“You could say that,” Will said. “I haven’t done much.”

“Lots of sources saying there was a sovereign tier threat in the sky,” Claws said. “Some of our operators offshore told us they saw a huge spatial distortion before the meteors hit. You were up there, weren’t you?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I have the urge to crash this plane to take both of us out, even knowing you’re on our side. You wouldn’t have been able to walk in the base unless you were someone important.”

Will frowned. He knew what was causing that, but he hadn’t expected the effect to be this pronounced.

Title: [Outcast]

Rare

You have committed an unforgivable sin, defiling your soul in a permanent matter. By integrating a demon into your body, you have ensured that you will never again be looked at the same.

[Aura of the Exile] - Your aura instills fear in those who cannot resist it. This combines with your [Marked for Death] skill. If you overpower an aura sufficiently, the target is afflicted by the [Fear] condition at your rank.

[Alone but not Powerless] - You are always affected by the hostile effects of friendly area-of-effect skills, including auras. You gain a sharply increased resistance to aura powers.

Was his aura too strong? Will was already toning it down, but he suppressed it even more actively to see if that changed anything.

“To answer your question, yes, I was up there,” Will said. “It was pretty strong, I’d say. We got it to go away, though.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Claws said. “Even I felt it, and we’re, what, a few thousand miles away?”

“Something like that. It was a pretty long fall.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, that sounds like something I should worry about. You fell out of the—oh wait, I guess you have a flight power. That sounds kind of awesome, actually.”

“It was alright,” Will said. “How close are we?”

“About a minute away. Why?”

The “sprint” mode that Claws had mentioned was even faster than Will had expected, and Sen’s eyes had begun to fall behind. To make up for that, Will had commanded his familiar to latch onto the plane.

“Just checking,” he said. “I have a familiar with us.”

“Really? I don’t sense it.”

“That’s one of its abilities.”

“Interesting.” Claws clearly cared more about the previous subject, and he switched the topic back to it. “Say, I hear that at the end, there was only one person fighting up there. Reports are coming in from the ESNA folk who got sent up there already. Someone with a ton of shadows and some eye power that let them perceive everything. Sounds like a right terror, to be honest, but if they’re on humanity’s side, I’m all for it.”

Will resisted the urge to laugh. “Yeah, there was just one man at the end.”

“Is it true that a single silver-ranker managed to destroy a ton of gold-rankers and get rid of a monster that could’ve nuked all of us? That sounds a little too far-fetched, to be honest.”

“Nah,” Will said. “I saw it happen. There were a bunch of gold ranks fighting. To be fair, he wasn’t the only one. A lot of the others were taking out golds too.”

“Clones, weren’t they? Those basically don’t count.”

“Don’t let Caiyeri hear that.”

“Oh, I won’t. You said he. You saw him up there?”

Claws slowed the jet down as he spoke, realizing that they were drawing close to their destination. Sen’s eyes burst away as well, and Will began scanning the area with Pages of the Past.

DC was a mess. Just as Charlie had told him, there was a massive, pitch-black dragon-like creature perched in the ruins of what Will was pretty sure had been the white house. From beneath it, a ton of smaller monsters were flooding the streets, forcing everyone who’d been in the city to evacuate.

Claws and Amelia weren’t the only jets in the area. There were a couple squadrons of bronze-rankers here already, alongside a single other silver-ranker. All were engaged in air-to-air combat, eliminating the flying beasts that the necrotic wyrm was releasing.

Even as they watched, one of the squadrons veered too close to the wyrm, and it shot bony quills from its decaying skin, filling the sky with a storm of arrows. Two of the jets in the formation couldn’t bank out of the way in time and were crushed entirely by the assault.

“There’s a central commander,” Claws said. “A gold-ranker, we’re pretty sure. A monster tamer of some kind. Our goal is to find and kill them and take down the wyrm. Your job—”

“Found him,” Will said.

“What?”

“Found him. He’s using a stealth skill to stay hidden, but he’s pretty close to the wyrm.”

“You—okay, I—“

“Don’t bomb too close to me,” Will said. “Distract the wyrm if you can, but don’t hit the base of its body. Go for the head if possible.”

Will: Boots on the ground, Caiyeri.

Caiyeri: What does that mean?

Will: Oh, come on. That’s not a saying? Drop down whenever you’re ready.

Caiyeri: Got it.

“Are you going to be okay down there?” Claws asked. “The situation’s worse than I thought it would be. Those are golds, and we don’t have enough firepower to focus on it while dealing with everything else.”

“Hey, remember that guy you were talking about? The final fighter, the one you got reports about. You asked me if I knew him.”

“Yeah. This is a weird time to be going back to that. What, do you?”

Claws looked back only to see that the entire back side of the plane was filled with hungry shadows. To his credit, he did not panic enough to crash the plane.

The shadows extended outside, and a single blazing blue eye was the only indication that the passenger was still inside.

“Well, to quote old man Ben Kenobi, of course I know him.” Will unbuckled his seatbelt. “He’s me.”

Before Claws could reply, Will was already gone, invisible within a mass of falling shadow.

_

Author's note: Sorry for the lateness! Book 1 launch has been killing my productivity and super amping my anxiety. Happy with how it's going so far, though! If you'd like to support it, you can drop a rating at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D59MBXCF or get the audiobook at https://www.audible.com/pd/Corruption-Wielder-Audiobook/B0D5S8K61D