[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 99: Old Enemies (Patreon)

Alan didn’t have many beans to spill on the subject of his boss apart from his name, though even that wasn’t much to go off of.

The Contractor. Will had sent a few messages out to his connections around the world, asking to see if anyone had heard of him. So far, he hadn’t had any luck. Liam had said that Hua might know something more, but she had thrown herself into clearing the dungeons at a frankly dangerous pace and wasn’t responding to anyone’s messages if they weren’t trying to fight monsters with her.

Other connections, tenuous or not, had found different results.

Natalie: The Contractor? My faction’s never had any dealings with him. We’re working out a deal with the powers that be at the moment. We can ask then.

Will: That would be great. Thank you.

Natalie Blurr, currently rank 87 on the global leaderboard, had apparently warmed to Will after witnessing what he’d done to protect humanity out in deep space. She was a lot more open with sharing plans with him now, at least. Her no-bullshit aggression was still there, but it was tempered by experience.

On the other hand…

Lu Jie: I told you not to contact me again. You would do well to stay away from the mainland, young master.

He refrained from telling the now rank 50 silver-ranker that the only reason he still had air in his lungs was because of Will. Although it didn’t look it, this relationship could still be salvageable, and Will didn’t want to completely burn that bridge just yet.

Unsurprisingly, it was the American that knew about the Contractor, who Will’s skill had located as being in the general vicinity of the West Coast. Obfuscation skills or technology from the secretive plotter’s end had kept him from getting anything more specific.

Casey: That guy! Oh man do I hate that guy. He runs an organization that we’ve just been calling “Big O.”

Will: Big O? Who the hell came up with that?

Casey: High command. Their goons usually have some equipment or another that sports a logo that looks like a big O. There’s probably another meaning behind it, but if we call it something silly, people feel less threatened about them.

Will: Makes sense. What else do you know about them?

Casey: They’re weird. They make connections everywhere, and once they start worming their way into a city, it takes a lot of fire to burn them out. All I do know is that the PA gave up most of the Four Corners states as well as chunks of Nevada because it just wasn’t worth it.

Will: Pretend for a moment like you’re talking to someone who can’t think of an acronym for “PA” other than PA announcer. Wait, what does the PA stand for there? Shit.

Casey: Wow, you really have been living under a rock. Pacific Alliance. Can’t answer your second question, sorry.

Will: Do they have Vegas?

Casey: That’s… contested territory. It’s not a hot zone, and is actually a pretty nice city if you can stay out of trouble, but I tend to get into trouble. I haven’t been.

Will: Fantastic. Thanks, dude.

Casey: No problem. Hey, let me know if you’re ever down by the coast. We’ll grab a beer or something.

Will: Will do.

Just like Will, Casey had been knocked out of leaderboard contention by the otherworlders, but he’d been surprisingly open to hearing him out back at the tournament and was even more open to a working relationship now. To be fair, he hadn’t witnessed Will’s demonic aura in person yet, so that was prone to change.

Amelia: Setting us down in ten. Wrap up whatever you’re doing back there.

Will: Heard loud and clear.

They weren’t actually doing much of note in the back. Mostly, Caiyeri was trying to figure out how to use a cell phone.

“Why would you ever use one of these?” she asked, sliding a finger on the screen again, changing the page of apps it was on. “Why does it do that? The system just works. Why would I want to lose a hand to try to use the chat feature?”

“Well, we didn’t have the system for a while,” Will said. “This was the best way we had to communicate with people.”

He and all the others near where he’d landed back on Earth had given up on using their phones long ago, but it turned out that on the coasts, where there had been denser concentrations of people to fight back the monster hordes, there were just enough cell tower and cell tower equivalents to keep a simple network up. It was slow, and so many server banks had been knocked out that the majority of what had been on the internet was simply gone, but it was something.

“Also,” Will said, “You can—or could, maybe—just get consumed in content. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok—god, you could doomscroll from one platform to another for hours, just on your side in bed. You know, the more I describe this, the less appealing it sounds.”

“That sounds like a living hell,” Caiyeri said. “No wonder your species was so unprepared for the system.”

“Hey, we have a pretty good survival rate so far, don’t we?”

“You should ask your system lady. She might be able to tell you more.”

“She’s fucked off somewhere nobody can get to her. I don’t think it’ll be easy to reach her. Hey, that’s not the power button. You’re just changing the volume.”

“Primitive technology,” the elf sighed, shaking her head. “You can keep this.”

“Have you tried the games yet?”

“Games?”

“Yeah, I’ll show you a few after we pick up the others. Maybe Lev can do it for you.”

Will accepted the phone back and inventoried it. It was just his crappy old one from before the apocalypse, but he’d heard that practically every remaining major nation had some kind of magical engineering to raise their tech level to the point where smartphones were a bronze rank item.

Amelia directed the jet to slow down, aiming them at a clearing in the thicket beneath them. With how incredibly maneuverable the magical jets were, they were able to come to a near standstill and land easily.

Will teleported out of the plane before she could even turn the seatbelt sign off, Sen’s scattered eyes revealing the situation to him.

Forty-one people, not all of whom he recognized. Lev was at the forefront, alongside Allie. Trevor, who’d been their AOE specialist, was nowhere to be seen. Nora, who had been a monster core bronze when he’d chatted with her during his stay at Survivor Hill, was still with them, but she’d taken some heavy hits. She was missing half of an arm, which had been replaced by a bronze-rank sword, and though healing potions had removed most damage that would have scarred, he could tell from the general state of her equipment that she’d been sent through the wringer.

All of them had.

Will remembered snatches of the last conversation he’d had with Nora, who’d once been a treasurer for a sorority at the same school he’d gone to.

Who wants power? She’d asked. I’ll do what I have to if it means that I don’t die, but power for power’s sake is boring.

He didn’t want to rub salt in the wound now, but as he stared down the disparate camp of Users, Will could see plain as day that he hadn’t obtained power just for power’s sake. Power let him do things. It let him thrive.

The mindset Nora and many others had allowed themselves to fall into was respectable, but it came with its own risks. Risks like, apparently, not developing the senses necessary to understand why they were still coming under fire, nor to detect cloaked intruders.

“Lev. Allie. Nora. Good to see you all,” Will said, turning off Wraith Cloak right in front of Lev.

That may have been a mistake.

Lev’s class was currently Twilight Electromancer, which was an interesting mixed healing skirmisher class. He’d just barely managed to hit silver rank, it seemed, though he was missing a lot of skill slots.

The point was that he had no strong aura power, even if his aura senses were decent, and he had no perception skills good enough to detect Will while he was invisible.

Also, Will now radiated significantly more evil than he had before.

Lev shouted in alarm, jumping backwards. He teleported, using a skill that Will remembered was called Steps of Night to retreat farther into the camp.

Will: Relax. It’s me.

Lev: Jesus H. fucking Christ, don’t do that to me.

The sight of their de facto leader panicking alerted the rest of the camp to Will’s presence, too. He noted their hasty setup. To be honest, it was quite impressive that their temporary tents were as good as they were given the circumstances Lev had relayed to him, but—

Oh. That was an arrow coming at him.

Will used Time in a Bottle the second one of Sen’s eyes detected the bronze-rank projectile being loosed.

In fairness, he mused, that’s a pretty good shot. Explosive, too.

His hunger phantasm wasn’t even out yet, though he’d been getting ready to deploy it. Somehow, Will didn’t think that announcing his presence with a massive wave of shadow was going to endear anyone to him.

Then again, suddenly popping out of nowhere with an aura that screamed evil, hostile, bad at people was also not the best idea.

Whatever. This was manageable. Will watched the arrow slowly approach him, then spent some extra mana to increase his speed while in the slowed time.

At a 20:1 time dilation, the projectile was pretty easy to follow. It hadn’t been launched with any equipment that would make it incredibly fast or anything, just accurate.

After the intensity of the cultists, the demon, and still dealing with gold-rank weapons being aimed at him every which way, not to mention the looming threat of the Contractor—who he now knew was the one behind directing the gold-rank wyrm and Tamer to flee from him—it was kind of refreshing to have an easy situation.

Will let time speed up the moment he caught the arrow, immediately wrapping it in hunger phantasm and solidifying it. At gold rank, even a thin layer of it was enough to nullify the detonation, though it did shatter in the process.

A second arrow came from a different direction. This one didn’t even need Time in a Bottle—Will just redirected his shadow and used it as a barrier.

Someone teleported behind him, which was ballsy, then tried to stab him, which was ballsier but would have worked given his lack of armor.

Well, it would have worked if he hadn’t seen it coming, at least. Will activated Weapons Free, stealing a fairly decent bronze-rank growth dagger encrusted with a single sapphire. He tossed it back to its user, who definitely needed it more than he did. The would-be assassin looked at it in shock, then at Will, then ran away.

Before anyone else could send an attack his way, two things happened in quick succession.

First, Lev shouted “STAND DOWN” at the top of his lungs.

Second, Will suppressed everyone’s aura, just a tiny bit.

He wasn’t sure which one was more effective, but the encampment fell silent almost immediately and stopped moving shortly afterwards.

Will winced. Hunger phantasm was surrounding him now, and though he hadn’t shown anywhere near the full force of his aura, it wasn’t a good look to be using Shattersoul on bronzes.

Two or three people dropped from where they were standing onto a knee, heads bowed.

That was even less ideal. Will withdrew his aura as much as he could.

“So,” he said out loud. “That wasn’t my best idea. Hi. Some of you know me already, but for those who don’t, I’m William Li-Brown. I went to the same school as Lev, Allie, and Nora here, and I’ve come to expedite your trip to the East Coast.”

“What happened to you?” Nora asked, her voice tinged with horror. “Why do you—how are you like this?”

“I saved the world,” Will said grimly. “Once. There’s a lot more world-saving to be done before the year’s out, though.”

That got some murmurs going. Some of the strangers in the crowd seemed to recognize him somehow. Had they had connections back out east?

The phrase “angel of death” came up once or twice.

Will: I’m not sure I like where my branding is going.

Caiyeri: I sensed the commotion. I wish I could say I was surprised.

Will: I’m alright, by the way. Just in case you were worried.

Caiyeri: These are all bronzes. If you weren’t alright, you would deserve it.

Will: Touché.

“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the planet coming at us, would you?” Lev asked. “It’s… sort of been on everyone’s mind.”

“Nope,” Will said. “Well, I saw it appear close-ish to us, but I have no idea why. The how doesn’t matter, since I’ve made sure it can’t happen again. There’s nothing any of us can really do about a planet, so I figure we don’t need to worry about it. We didn’t die when the last planet hit us.”

“That’s not much better than what we had already, but I appreciate it,” Lev said. He gave Will a weary smile. “It’s good to see you, man. It’s been rough.”

“I can imagine.” Will surveyed the bruised and battered group of bronze-rankers. There were only two silvers—Lev and Allie. Not a single other had reached that point, though there were a few at Bronze 10.

As they stared each other down, Will got the hunger phantasm moving again, this time in much smaller increments, though it didn’t go unnoticed.

“Life elves, right?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question that he already knew the answer to. “You’ve done well to get as far as you can, but I imagine that they’ve somehow managed to track you down time and time again. Am I right?”

“You are,” Allie said. Her vocal box sounded destroyed, like she’d been screaming for hours on end before this. Did she have a skill that required her to do that? “It’s been a mess.”

Will frowned as he examined them further. Earlier, he’d assumed that they just hadn’t been aware of the affliction all of them had, but he could find it pretty easily by just using the universal Identify on them, which every human should have gotten during the tutorial.

“You can see the affliction on you, right?”

“Hunter’s Mark,” Allie confirmed. She opened her mouth to speak more, but winced instead.

Why wasn’t she taking a healing potion? Was there something stopping her?

“We have nobody who can cleanse afflictions,” Lev said. “I just regenerate health. The only full healer we had was targeted first. He’s long since dead.”

“Well, I’m no healer,” Will said, spreading the phantasm out further and faster, “but I’ll do what I can. Don’t panic.”

“Don’t panic,” Lev said. “Has telling someone that ever worked?”

“No, but it was worth a shot,” Will said, sighing as he watched the encampment panic. Thankfully, nobody made the move of trying to kill him again. His aura had been enough to cow them into submission. “Here we go. Got a new skill upgrade recently that should do the trick.”

Skill: [Chaos Transfer]

- Spell (enchantment).

- Cost: high mana.

- Cooldown: 5 minutes.

Gold

Let others suffer as you have.

Cleanses you or a weapon of all levels of all afflictions and transfers it to another designated weapon or back to yourself. Increases the strength of the transferred afflictions to silver rank if they are lower than silver. The next target the weapon strikes will gain all levels of all afflictions that you cleansed.

Gold-rank addition: You can now apply this effect to any being or item. You may cast it simultaneously on any and all items or beings you are currently touching.

He’d directed Chaos Transfer’s evolution during the final stage of the tournament, when he’d needed to use it to cleanse three asteroids and the people on them of their corruption.

Alone, this gold-rank upgrade wouldn’t have meant much, but when he was able to count anything the phantasm was touching as something he was touching, and when Sen’s eyes could do the same, it let him affect quite a lot of people at the same time.

You have transferred 41 levels of [Hunter’s Mark] to yourself.

Condition: [Hunter’s Mark]

- Increases damage taken from the party of those who applied this affliction. This condition stacks.

- Broadcasts your location to the party of those who applied this affliction.

[Nymlera Brooksoul] is now aware of your presence.

[Devouring Gestalt] is now aware of your presence.

The murmurs started again, louder this time. Again, a handful of people dropped to their knees as if praying. To Will’s discomfort, there were more than there had been last time.

“What the—holy shit,” Lev said, eyes widening. “Thank you. Wow. Seriously. You’ve just saved our lives.”

“Not quite,” Will said, anger bubbling to the surface. “While the hunters are out there, nobody’s life has been saved. Get into the plane.”

“Plane?”

“Hi there,” Caiyeri said, perched in a tree some twenty feet behind and thirty feet above Will. “We have a plane. Will told me you could show me what games are useful for cell phones?”

Lev stared at her in disbelief, then at Will. He flinched as he met Will’s gaze.

There were so many lines crossing all of them. So many weak points. They were doing their best, but they were being set upon by forces far more powerful than them.

Will had never achieved an agreement with Nymlera, but he had with the gestalt. That it had noticed him just now meant it had violated it.

He was pissed, and the others could see it.

“Get away from me,” Will said. “I’m broadcasting my location like a goddamn lighthouse right now.”

“I saw,” Caiyeri said. “Follow me if you want to live.”

Though less terrifying than Will’s aura, Caiyeri was still a very strong silver. Nobody wanted to defy her, so they joined her, walking off into the plane barely large enough to seat all of them.

Caiyeri: Don’t have too much fun without me.

Will: Oh, trust me. This won’t be fun.

#

Twenty miles from the quarry of the life elf expedition she had inserted herself into, Nymlera saw the notification that her party’s Hunter’s Mark had shifted targets.

Her eyes widened.

“Oh, no,” she said quietly, her words only reaching her own ears. “Not him.”

Will: Leaderboard number 12. How very impressive. I wonder how many of my people you needed to kill to get there. Well, who am I to speak? I’ve killed enough people, elves, elementals, what have you for a lifetime, and I’m nowhere near done. What’s one more? You’re on your third chance, Nymlera. You’ve used up all my patience.

Will: Ready or not, here I come.

The chat window closed, and Nymlera was left staring off into space as her silver-rank underlings joined her.

“My lady,” one said. “Orders?”

She closed her eyes, focusing herself.

“Run.”