[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 97: How is this Fair? (Patreon)

Over in Amelia’s ship, the bronze-rank Pilot was gradually realizing that the elf in the back had not, in fact, taken a parachute pack.

“Uh, it was Caiyeri, right?”

“That is my name,” the elf said. She sounded distracted, like she was talking to someone else. She probably was. “Is something wrong?”

“You don’t have a parachute pack. There should be two, but it’s a bit awkward to put on while we’re flying.”

“Parachutes? Is that what the backpack full of useless cloth was?”

“Yeah. Have you never heard of them? What was your plan?”

“I had expected you to have a slow-fall potion of some kind. Anytime we were meant to do a long jump, we had a crafter who would make one of those. I have none, unfortunately. The shops make them too expensive.”

“Well, put the parachute on, then. Unless you also happen to fly?”

“I’m not putting a heavy backpack on and presenting a massive target out of myself.”

Amelia cut off her own next sentence with an incoherent curse, banking hard to avoid an errant piece of debris flying at them from the ground far beneath them.

“This is the handle to drop myself, right?” Caiyeri asked, unphased by the sudden g-forces acting upon her body.

The Pilot checked her internal cameras. The elf woman’s hand was on a pullstring handle plastered with blaring red warning signs and a huge DO NOT PULL label.

“Yeah, but—”

Caiyeri pulled the lever, and the ceiling above her corkscrewed open. Her seat ejected at high velocity, fast enough to break an unformed-rank’s neck.

“—you don’t have a… god damn it.”

Amelia sent a quick message to both Claws and Will that roughly approximated to “the elf decided to jump without a parachute, it’s not my fault if she dies, please don’t kill me” and redirected her jet. She had been selected because she was the fastest bronze-rank available for deployment, and it looked like they sorely needed reinforcements.

Will: Don’t worry about it. I’m sure she’ll be fine.

Content with that result, Amelia opened a voice chat line through traditional technology to Claws.

“Ready to give ‘em hell?” she asked. “Looks like they could use us over by the Smithsonian.”

“It’s a target-rich environment,” Claws said. “I’ll drop a few presents.”

“Isn’t your callsign not that kind of Claus?”

“Shh. It’s close enough. Don’t interfere with my fun.”

“I’ll keep them off your back.”

They both turned sharply, turning towards the bulk of the silver-rank monsters that were even now still swarming the city.

#

Will kept an eye on Caiyeri as she tumbled through the air in an entirely uncontrolled descent. For some reason, she was still in the seat she’d been in while riding the plane, still buckled in. It wasn’t terribly worrying at first, though Will wasn’t sure how she planned on getting out of it. Then, as they started dropping further, their descent shrouded in Will’s hunger phantasm, he started growing a touch concerned.

Ten thousand feet to the ground became five thousand just like that. Will prepared himself to go into a glide as he fell, but Caiyeri didn’t have the same abilities as him.

Caiyeri: Stop putting the shadow over me. I’d like to be able to use more than one sense.

Will: What the hell are you doing?

He tightened the phantasm anyway, adding more material to his dark wings.

Caiyeri: Keep moving. I’ll catch up.

Will: If you say so.

As the shape of bombed-out cars and pitched long-range battles between several lines of ESNA defenders and the rampaging hord of smaller silver-rank necrospawn became clear to the naked eye, Will spread his wings and materialized them, turning his downward dive into a swift glide.

The gold-rank wyrm noticed him, turning its massive head. Flaps of spiny flesh flared out from side of its neck, shooting another barrage of quills at him. Now that he was closer up, he realized that they were each the size of a minivan, traveling at the speed of a bullet.

He was much better prepared for gold ranks than he had been once upon a time. The devouring gestalt had possessed a similar attack in the form of its bone spear rain. Back when he’d been a bronze rank, it had been all he could do to survive a single barrage.

Now, though, he just curled his wings tighter on him, increasing the speed of his flight and covering himself with a solid barrier.

Since he was being targeted for an attack, his aerial movement was greatly improved.

Skill: [Escape Artist]

- Passive (body).

- Cost: none.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

Your movement speed is increased at a rate inversely proportional to the amount of equipment you are wearing (maximum of 70% increase).

Your movement speed is increased by up to an additional 70% if you are currently being attacked.

Silver-rank addition: If you are being attacked, you gain vastly increased control of your aerial mobility.

Always a staple, Escape Artist had steadily ticked up in its effectiveness throughout silver rank. It had been a tiny advancement at first, but as the percentage had ticked up from 50 all the way to where it was now, Will had realized that it had the potential to make him very fast indeed.

The enhanced agility it granted him was amplified by the skill that let him dance through the air.

Skill: [Wind Walker]

- Spell (stealth, movement).

- Cost: very low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver.

Draw upon the power of the winds to lighten your step and increase your speed.

[Zephyr’s Cloak] (bronze) - While this skill is active, you gain a slight blur effect, making you harder to see and target while moving.

[Galeforce Dash] (silver) - While you are not touching the ground, you can spend mana to send yourself flying forward with wind-aided dashes. This also imbues you with storm power, increasing the amount of damage you deal to foes afflicted by [Charged].

Combined with Sen, whose eyes gave Will perfect information on the incoming weapons, he was easily able to identify the exact location of each of the quills coming towards him.

At silver rank, Will had unlocked an entirely new dimension of movement. He made full use of it now, repositioning himself perfectly to avoid the tightly spaced quills. While a net of them might have been able to pin down a jet, he was just one person, and his perception skills were good enough that he could slide between them, his shadow not even taking the slightest hit from them.

He analyzed the quills as he slid past them with Pages of the Past and concluded that was the optimal outcome. Even touching these was likely to afflict him with something nasty, and though he could handle stuff like wither pretty easily, he didn’t actually like suffering from afflictions.

The instant he was past the barrage, Will spread his shadow wings again, converting his momentum.

Far below him, Sen’s eyes caught the still buckled-in Caiyeri hit the ground right in the center of a bunch of silver-rank spiders.

Fucking spiders, Will thought. Immediately after, he clocked the fact that his companion had been falling at roughly three hundred miles an hour.

The chair crumpled on impact, the sheer force of it splattering a spider’s brains out in a shower of silvery gore, and the elf bounced, her fall inexplicably converting into a forty-five degree angle surge in speed.

Will triggered Time in a Bottle, curious to see how she’d survived that. With Sen’s gold-rank upgrade, Will could now use his skills from afar so long as one of Sen’s eyes was close, so he checked her trail with Pages of the Past.

He was startled to realize that the way she’d done all that was a skill he’d seen her use before. Will hadn’t had the opportunity to see the upgraded version in full force until now.

Skill: [Emergency Shield]

- Spell (conjuration).

- Cost: low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

Timing is everything.

Create a personal forcefield that absorbs damage at silver rank. If you do not sustain heavy damage within 1 second of activating this shield, the cost of this skill increases to extreme mana. If the shield receives enough damage to break, your mana is fully restored.

[Redirect] (silver) - If this shield receives enough damage to break, you can redirect the force that broke it, applying it to yourself or externally in any direction.

Eyebrows raised, he sent a message to Caiyeri as he let time go back to normal.

Will: Sick usage of the skill there. Where’d you get the idea to turn fall damage into movement speed? I don’t remember that many cliffs in the caves.

Caiyeri: Your friends gave me some of your media. It was quite informative.

Will: Wait, when you mean our media, do you mean like… books?

Caiyeri: One moment.

Down below, Caiyeri hit the ground again. This time, Will’s senses were primed to catch the brief pulse of magic surorunding her as she smashed into the ground again. There were spiders in the area again, and this time, they shot webbing at her as she rose up.

Will swooped in low, hunger phantasm rushing significantly further below to intercept the webs before they could create a net that would entrap her.

#

Ashton was fed up with people.

He’d been fed up with them even before he’d been sent to another world. People were shit. They were annoying, loud, and every last one of them was only out for themselves.

When he’d woken up in another world, it had been a fresh start. Magic was real, it turned out, and he’d been summoned with the right elements for a great class.

Then, not a year after his arrival, he’d been backstabbed by his own party. The hot princess who had summoned him had done a sudden about-face and gotten him thrown out into exile, never to be seen again.

He’d shown them all what it meant to mess with someone who was already at his breaking point.

Ashton’s Tamer class had been a perfect fit for the wilds, and Druudrazil, his bonded wyrm, had been by his side since. Monsters were easier to understand. They didn’t betray him. He had never had to worry about one of them suddenly deciding it hated him.

And, of course, when he told them to kill, they killed. He’d subjugated one kingdom and had been on his way to annihilating another when a new portal had opened up again, this one leading straight back to Earth.

It was like the system had decided to answer his deepest prayers, like it was finally giving him retribution for the years of suffering he’d endured.

Finally, it was his turn.

He’d been having great fun, too. In his old life, there was no way that he could have commanded the attention and respect of the US army.

Ashton did not, of course, know that he wasn’t actually dealing with the USA but a splinter faction that had formed from those who had been aware of the system in some way or another before the world had ended. All he cared about was that he hadn’t had fun like this since he’d exacted revenge on the princess.

Everything was turning up his way... except for those two new presences.

One of them was an elf. He could tell that much with his skill Eagle Eye, which let him see through the senses of any of his tamed beasts. They’d had elves back in the planet he’d been sent to. Ashton was very familiar with them and all the tortured sounds they could make.

She was a silver rank, which ordinarily shouldn’t have worried him, since he was comfortably in gold and had been for years now, but he had grown to understand that there were certain beasts that he shouldn’t deal with. Sigil-holders were one thing, but there were a few who had possessed connections to their god that went far deeper than the norm. Their auras felt different in a brutal way, as if they had been aligned closer with their skills by carving their soul into the likeness of the god.

This one was an exemplar of that. Druudrazil’s senses were keen enough to pick up on how she was practically an incarnation of the Elven Mother herself. He would have to watch out for her.

Somehow, that was the less concerning one.

The other one radiated out from the center of a mass of shadow, gliding down from the sky on huge dark wings that never seemed to take damage. That aura pierced through even the necrotic wyrm’s gold-rank aura, which shut down and reversed all healing effects within the area. Despite it only being a silver-ranker’s aura, both Ashton and Druudrazil could sense it wash over them with devastating power. Both of them had overlapping aura powers which, when combined, had been enough to utterly suppress the battlefield.

When they met with the stranger’s aura, though, they struggled—and then they began to lose.

“What the fuck is that?” Ashton asked.

A corrupted shattersoul, Druudrazil rumbled, a telepathic skill connecting the two of them. We must kill it before it can touch us.

That got Ashton’s blood pumping. Throughout his years with Druudrazil, never once had the proud wyrm been genuinely concerned about a threat.

As the elf woman approached, smashing into the ground before rising up just as fast, and the corruption wielder spiraled closer, he ordered the wyrm to focus all its attention on them. Silver-rank bombs could damage Druudrazil with time, but they were much less of a concern than these two.

The wyrm’s wings spread and his jaw unhinged, spitting out a wave of necrotic energy that would melt flesh from bone, reanimating the dead as skeletons. Buildings collapsed as the destructive power of a high-end gold-rank monster obliterated every living being in a hundred-twenty-degree cone.

Notifications started rolling in, but Ashton swiped them aside. He had no interest in checking the names of the bronzes he was slaughtering by the hundreds.

That breath weapon had only gotten one silver-rank. Was it the right one?

Druudrazil’s senses said no. Both auras were still active.

As the necrotic blast faded away, Ashton’s eyes widened in surprise as he caught sight of them again. They hadn’t even been scratched by it.

“How?” he asked. “They’re silvers.”

Changed, blessed ones, Druudrazil communicated. I cannot imagine what twisted thoughts are going through their mind.

#

Will: No. There is no way you read a fucking manga and thought “hey, this is a great idea and completely bounded in reality, I should add it to my repertoire.”

Caiyeri: I didn’t read that much of it. I found the plot utterly dull and uninteresting, but the fight scenes were illustrated quite vividly.

Will: Dear god. You’ll have to show it to me. I’ll be the judge of your taste.

Caiyeri: It is less interesting to read about magical combat and politics when that’s day-to-day life.

Will: Hmm. That’s fair. Do you have it?

Caiyeri: No, it’s Lev’s. I have no idea where he is.

Will: Oh, shit. I almost forgot about him. I’ll toss him a text, see how things are going.

Caiyeri: You should probably focus on the wyrm in front of us first.

Will: Point taken.

No-selling the necrotic blast had been pretty easy. Will had used one of his remaining levels of Purified to eliminate the cooldown to Favored Element, which he’d cast immediately. One of the silver-rank augmentations to that skill made his resistances ignore rank boundaries, so he’d been easily able to tank the gold-rank blast head on with minimal damage.

Anything he’d sustained had been pretty easy to heal off through his aura, which constantly drained health, stamina, and mana from hostiles within it. Since they were passing over a city that had been packed full of undead minions, there had been a ton of free regeneration for him.

Will: He’s inside the wyrm. There’s a hollow component inside its spine. He’s piloting it, sort of? I’m not actually sure how the skills work.

Caiyeri: Fantastic. I’ll draw its attention, you do your thing, we both focus on the pilot?

Will: Works for me, though I’m pretty sure we’ll have to kill the wyrm at some point too.

Caiyeri: One titan at a time.

They continued forward, cognizant of the terrain around them. It would have been all too easy to barrel straight into the side of a building. Will wasn’t sure if he would survive that at silver rank, but he definitely didn’t want to risk it.

Thankfully, the devastation the wyrm had unleashed upon its immediate surroundings actually helped them on that front, reducing the obstacles in their path to nothing. It did fill the ground with bronze and silver-rank offshoots of the primary threat, but those were pretty simple to deal with. Caiyeri was moving too fast for most of them to get a good hit on her, and Will was a nightmare to deal with.

As he passed over them, he let the hunger phantasm course over them. By manifesting it physically, he could use his touch-range skills through it, and he took the opportunity to afflict them all with corruption via Decaying Touch. These monsters had no way to deal with it, which made dealing with them as simple as just passing them by and afflicting them. A chunk of Will’s vision was filled with notifications informing him of the mass slaughter of monsters.

Sadly, killing the undead spawn didn’t count as killing a User, so Eternal Throne, the Crown’s sigil skill which would grant him a resurrection after a thousand kills, didn’t tick up. He had known that the point of that skill was to force him to become a monster of the human variety, but he had hoped there would be a loophole. No such luck.

As they got closer, Will and Caiyeri split off, recognizing that it would be best to avoid grouping themselves up for easy hits.

The wyrm’s head swiveled to face Will, and it started moving, trampling on the ruins of the White House as it turned to face him, its wings flapping forward, revealing deadly sharp tooth-like claws that lined its entire body instead of scales.

Will grinned. To be completely honest, having to deal with gods again had been a bit rough on his mental momentum for this fight, but the gold-rank monster’s body had a plethora of red lines marked on it, his demonic eye telling him exactly where to strike for maximum power.

Will: Yo, Amelia, Claws. Y’all got a bomb or two to spare?

Claws: Like you need to ask. Can you give us a target? The dragon doesn’t give a shit about most of our bombs.

Will: You’re attacking the wrong points. I’ll drop you a target. Also, it’s a wyrm, not a dragon.

Claws: Who gives a shit? Once it blows up, it’ll just be a corpse.

Will: I like the way you think.

The wyrm roared as Will sent parts his phantasm swirling towards it, and the sheer force of the sound was enough to blow back the immaterial shadow, altering Will’s path as well. It acted as an updraft, keeping him in the air. Necrotic energy infused its cry, threatening to inflict fear upon him, but he barely felt the effect of it. After dealing with gods, sovereign-tier cultists, and demons, how was he supposed to be scared of this?

Will roared back.

Skill: [Wail of the Forgotten]

- Spell (sound).

- Cost: moderate mana.

- Cooldown: 1 minute.

Gold

This skill releases a concentrated scream directed at an enemy or area. Skill propagation increases with sound propagation. You may choose to widen the area of effect of this skill in exchange for reduced efficacy. This scream deals psychic damage.

[Manifest Despair] (bronze) - By increasing the amount of mana you spend, you can distill the essence of the forgotten into a beam of energy that does not require sound to travel. This beam inflicts necrotic damage. Both attacks will stun enemies, overwhelming them with the voices of the forgotten. This stunning effect can be resisted.

[Lament of Agony] (silver) - This attack also inflicts stacking levels of [Wither] and [Weakness] upon those affected. These effects can be resisted. The difficulty level of resisting these afflictions lowers the further the target is from the center of the effect.

[Dark Harvest] (gold) - The voice of your victims will become forgotten eventually. You can do so faster. Upon killing or knocking unconscious any User through the usage of this skill, you learn the current positions of all members of their current primary party or guild.

As his only gold-rank skill that was pure offense, it proved the difference that the additional rank had provided. Dark energy spat forth in a straight beam, contesting the wyrm’s roar. With how focused Will made his scream, he was able to have it pierce straight through the effect of the wyrm’s skill.

Of course, it was attempting to deal necrotic damage to a wyrm whose entire gimmick was being Death-aligned, so it didn’t do anything, but damn if it didn’t feel good to scream at it and win.

More importantly, it opened up a path for his phantasm to get closer, dancing over the wyrm’s body. He outlined the lines of death with his hunger phantasm, sending a message out to his allies to target them.

Ignoring everyone else to focus on Will turned out to be an awful decision on the wyrm’s part as Claws soared over from high above, dropping a number of radiance-infused bombs with targeting driven by Claws himself.

Caiyeri, who had gotten herself perched high up on a small mountain of rubble a few hundred feet to the side of the wyrm, fired the seven-shooter Will had given her, using her now silver-rank Lucky Strike ability to enhance her accuracy and the damage output of the gun.

She fanned the hammer, firing an instant death bullet with all seven shots, unerringly aimed at weak points in the wyrm’s body.

Interestingly enough, the eyes were not any of the weak points. After a brief analysis, Will had actually concluded that the head was vestigial, and it was the core in its belly that held the real vitals, largely protected by its tough spine.

Caiyeri’s shots and the bombs landed at the same time, briefly whiting out Will’s vision. He relied on Sen and his aura senses as he closed his eyes, air-dashing upwards towards the wyrm’s underside as it roared in pain, the bombs burning off much of its skin while the shots pierced the armor protecting its vitals.

Caiyeri: This instant death really isn’t instant.

Will: What did you expect? This thing is the size of a shopping mall.

As he dashed up, he drew Eclipse, the sword he’d received from the Lord of Loss, as well as his slayer sword. At the same time, he converged the phantasm on the wyrm, triggering Decaying Touch through it.

You have inflicted a level of silver-rank [Corruption] on [Druudrazil, the Necrotic Wyrm].

[Prideful] resists [Corruption].

That was one of the first times Will had seen that wording, but he could immediately tell what it meant. His corruption spread slower through the wyrm’s scales, turning it from an instant-win button into merely a strong affliction. Every time he materialized the phantasm on it, it just tore it apart with its hooked skin, not giving him enough of an opportunity to apply enough corruption to take it down.

Well, that was fine. The wyrm wasn’t his primary target, anyway. Will readied himself for a massive combination attack, marking both Druudrazil and Ashton, the otherworlder, for death.

Then, suddenly, the wyrm reared back, flapping its wings to get away from him with surprising speed. It shot another array of quills at him, which he dodged easily.

What was it doing? It had been trying to fight him head on this whole time. He supposed repositioning made sense, but being in the air made it vulnerable to all the air-to-air potential that the ESNA held.

As Will tried to puzzle out what it was doing, a loose squadron of two bronze-rankers and two silvers passed by, peppering the weaker underside of the wyrm and drawing dark blood that spilled onto the ruins below, sizzling as it melted through what remained of the buildings it had destroyed.

You have received a chat request from [???].

What?

The wyrm dove while he was distracted.

Will barely managed to evade it. He could have tried to take it head on, but even he wasn’t foolish enough to think that his physical stats stood a chance against a gold-rank monster that weighed more than ten thousand of him put together.

A bell tolled as the wyrm dove, though it didn’t do much thanks to its affinity for the Death attribute.

It hit the ground in moments—then kept going. A sinkhole formed in moments, the crumbling White House falling in after it. Through Sen, Will detected the wyrm using its breath weapon to get even deeper.

#

“How is this fair?” Ashton complained. “I’m gold. He’s silver. I’m supposed to be better than him.”

Remember that you too have fought above your rank, Druudrazil reminded him gently as he continued to burst deeper through the ground.

“Still!”

You have received a chat request from [???].

Ashton almost ignored the notification out of instinct, then double-checked it.

“Well. That could be interesting.”

#

Claws: The hell did you do to that thing?

Will: Good question. I didn’t even kill the Tamer driving the damn thing. Looks like he’s running far, though.

Claws: Well, good work. If you can help clean up the rest, that’d be fantastic, but I think your job here is done.

Will: I’ll help. Don’t bomb too close to me. There’s still a bunch of weak civvies in the area.

Claws: You got it, boss.

He communicated this to Caiyeri.

Before he started to annihilate the spawn of the wyrm, he checked the message he’d received.

???: Aw, you showed up right when it was getting fun.

Will frowned, trying to understand what that was supposed to mean.

Deep in his soul, he felt a god stir with anger. He recognized that hatred from when he’d spoken with that god before, making a contract with it.

That was the Hunger. He’d been mortal, once, and he had a laundry list of other gods that he despised. This reaction meant that Will was likely dealing with the one right at the top of that list—well, its sigil-holder, at least. The Hunger had cut a deal with Will to steal this sigil.

A sigil-holder whose god claimed to hold the power of prophecy, which both Will and Kadael knew was utter bullshit.

Fate.

???: I’ll see you soon, corruption wielder.