[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 103: Same Time Next Week (Patreon)

Will wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about leaving the gestalt alone in a dubiously populated area, but neither his aura senses nor Sen had detected people in the area. He figured that the sudden and brutal death of a good chunk of their leadership would keep the life elves from wanting to interfere with the area, and most humans in the area were either dead or gone.

Besides, it had seemed friendly after he’d gone through the universally effective ritual of killing the shit out of some evil bastards together. Since they’d killed Grimle and Nymlera together, Will had sensed less hostility from Jessie’s aura than ever before. He chose to think of that as a potential to work with the gold-rank monster in the future rather than a temporary satiation of its unstoppable hunger after killing its master.

For the time being, he was more curious about this so-called summit. Right off the bat, he had sneaking suspicions about it, some worse than others.

The messages had at least come at riregular time periods, not all at once, so this hopefully wasn’t someone trying to trick him into coming to a location for an ambush.

“Oh well,” Will said. “The best of luck to anyone trying to surprise me.”

Still, overconfidence was an easy path to a swift and untimely death, so Will decided to send some verification out.

His first suspicion was that someone was somehow spoofing the system to send him messages from his friends. It might have been a little silly to think about what was essentially an email scam in this time, but the Contractor had proven that it was capable to change your name in the system somehow.

Confirmation from each of his contacts assuaged that one.

Of course, that didn’t stop mental compulsion, the sudden and inexplicable betrayal of all of his allies, and any number of other issues, but that was a bridge he could burn when he got to it.

Then came the matter of transport. Will could have gone to the ESNA and had them ferry him, but he really didn’t want to deal with politics right now. He’d gotten messages from Commander Charlie asking him to join them, but Will was not so clueless as to be unable to read between the lines.

If he went with the ESNA, it would be making a statement. The silver-ranker who’d defeated a demon and saved the world sitting at the same table of one specific American faction?

Will didn’t think they were evil, but he didn’t want to tie himself to a faction. After the apocalypse had thrown him out of the trap that had been his life, he had found that his distaste for being beholden to others had steadily increased in intensity. He could make friends with Charlie, even after he’d triggered several tons of TNT underneath his feet, and he’d made friends with people like Hua, Natalie, and Casey who were all representatives of their own respective bodies, but he was not going to join their organizations and blindly obey another’s orders. Not ever.

Thankfully, Will wasn’t the only human unbound to organizations.

Will: Yo. You get the invite?

Nathan: Yep. Are you going?

Will: All the cool kids are going, so I guess so.

Nathan: It’s going to get messy, I can tell you that. I’m not the only human otherworlder, and if more than one of us got an invite, then it’s going to be a shitfest.

Will: Oh, it’s going to be messy either way. Are you up to date on modern politics?

Nathan: Do you like torturing yourself?

Will: Like? No, but I go through it every night because if I don’t, I won’t have what it takes to survive here.

Nathan: You sound like exactly like the kind of shit that would enjoy politics.

Will: I don’t enjoy this. I endure it so we can survive.

Nathan: Well, I’d like to see who’s who now. You have a ride?

Will: I was just about to ask for one, actually. Can I catch one from you?

Nathan: I’m not an Uber driver.

Will: I’ll catch you up on Better Call Saul. Didn’t you want to know how that ended?

Nathan: Where should I pick you up?

Will: Point Nemo, please.

Nathan: Wait, the Sentinel? Why?

Will: Do you want updates or not?

Nathan: I’ll be there in an hour.

Will chuckled, closing the chat interface.

“Don’t wander off too far, yeah?” he told Jessie. “I’d like to still be able to find you when I come back.”

Still incapable or unwilling to use system messages, Jessie’s intentions were nonetheleess clear in its aura. Will had reached a level of understanding with the gestalt that nobody else had, and the creature was not going to let that bond fade.

Especially since it knew what Will would do to it if it did.

Will knelt down and began casting the ritual to the Beyond.

#

Entering the Beyond felt different now. He hadn’t noticed it as much while he’d been focused on either transporting himself and fighting off Caiyeri’s connection to her sigil, but now that he was alone and stabilizing his soul instead, he could tell that the sensation of something being ever so slightly off hadn’t been only in his head after all.

He had learned from Ayla and Nynn, both experts at navigating this space, that his presence in the Beyond was a soul projection, not his actual physical body. Despite that, he’d had by far the most physical representation of himself out of the three of them, and the sensation in his eye didn’t help that.

The demon he’d formed a contract with had bonded itself to his soul, taking a piece of him and affixing itself to Will as if it was a skill in exchange for leaving the planet alone. Its native plane was the Beyond, which was where the cultists had summoned it from by using the corrupted souls of two thousand of Earth’s finest as fuel.

It was clear that he was on its home turf now. Will remembered when Caiyeri had been forcibly dragged away from his Sanctuary not just by the natural chaos of the Beyond but also by the Elven Mother. His demon was attempting to do the same now, but he had sanctified this ground and he would not be moved by an outside force while he was here.

“Calm down, Richard,” Will said aloud. “We had a deal, right? You realize that eating me here just means that you return the bit of your body that you managed to get outside of prison right back into the cell, right?”

“Richard? Who are you talking to?”

A second thread of magic had connected to his while he’d been consolidating his Sanctuary, using his rapidly increasing soul knowledge and strength to fashion a slightly nicer area to sit in.

“Ayla!” Will said. “It’s been too long. Have a seat.”

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” she said drily. “Your soul control is improving in leaps and bounds. I do have to ask—why the plastic lawn chairs? Also, you haven’t answered my question.”

Ayla was technically the first living thing Will had spoken to after the apocalypse had begun. As his tutorial helper, she had been instrumental in keeping him alive during the early days, but she had revealed a few too many details about the organization that maintained the system and been censured. Now, she was somewhere in deep space, placed there by a Dread Executor and beyond anyone’s reach.

She still had access to the Beyond, though her soul was weakened from what she had implied to be decades of captivity so she came here much more rarely. When she did come, she came in true soul representation form. Ayla was a changeling, and so her body was constantly shifting, making it impossible to pin down a true form.

The woman who’d earned the title “Void Dreamer” at some point in her life pulled out the lawn chair Will had conjured with his soul and sat in it.

“Well, I figured it was better to start somewhere simple,” Will explained. “I’ve sat in lawn chairs a thousand times. I didn’t want to try making some throne or similarly fancy seating arrangement and realize I was bungling my own soul.”

“I don’t buy the safety excuse. I can see what’s happened to your soul, you know. Just because you haven’t brought up the fact that you’ve apparently died and come back doesn’t mean I can’t tell.”

“That’s a lot of negatives,” Will said. “Surely you had language lessons growing up.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. Now, about ‘Richard.’ I see that you’ve got a demon riding you. I presume that this is who you were referring to?”

“You could make it sound a little less weird.”

“It is literally inside you, Will. There isn’t much I can do to make it sound better.”

“Point. Yeah, I don’t know if you noticed, but we weren’t quite able to stop the cultists from popping a bunch of us and summoning a demon.”

“It was hard to miss. Two Culminations were used. Even with my senses dimmed as they are, I would have had to be delusional not to see that.”

“I do recall that. Have you seen Nynn since?”

“He’s contacted me once, but he no longer has the same pull he did for the duration of the tournament. Nynn willingly went from knight to pawn to counteract the effects of an enemy, but he’s essentially taken himself off the board.”

“Ooh, a chess analogy. Where do you see yourself here?”

“I wanted to be the player, once upon a time, but I never made it there. You might have called me a queen. Now, I’m a captured piece, waiting for a pawn to find me.”

“I feel like that’s derogatory towards me.”

“I am definitely not implying that you are relatively powerless and being manipulated by forces that you cannot even perceive.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who’s going to come back out of here into deep space.”

“Low blow.” Ayla chuckled, then grew serious. “On a more relevant topic, the demonic connection will close doors.”

“Nynn said as much,” Will said. “The Elven Mother didn’t seem to be happy with it, either.”

“Demons are as far removed from a mortal User as the gods are,” Ayla explained. “Comprehension of exactly what they are is low. Many of the gods lack knowledge of their like, and those that do hold onto it greedily.”

“And it’s a big no-no,” Will said. “I figured as much. How much do you know about them?”

Ayla barked out a laugh. “More than most mortals, which amounts to basically nothing. I won’t discourage you from walking this path. I had a low-tier demon contract myself, which was a mistake that ultimately led to my loss of control and capture.”

“Seriously? Damn. I guess I should keep an eye out for the men in black.”

“The organization doesn’t erase your memory. I’d argue that makes them worse.”

“I certainly wanted a wipe after watching the fourth one of those movies. They really shouldn’t have made that one.”

“There was a fourth? I didn’t watch that many movies while preparing for Earth, but I remembered liking that trilogy.”

“No,” Will said hurriedly. “Ignore anyone who tells you otherwise. Anyway, demons? If you had a contract too… any advice?”

“Nothing that you don’t already know or suspect,” Ayla said. “You must already sense the way it wants to take your entire existence for itself.”

Will nodded. “It’s like a sigil, but way greedier.”

“That sensation is not going to go away. If anything, it will continue to worsen with time, and the demon will continue trying to hijack your body. You must learn to control it.”

“Oh, lovely. I get a tortured fight for my body during the day as well as the night. Is there a way to eliminate it entirely?”

“If I knew, I would tell you.” Ayla shrugged. “My journey was not finished yet when I was so rudely taken off the board.”

“You’re going to have to tell me more about that.”

“Worry about those problems when you get there. Even if you do happen to be the most abnormal silver I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, myself included, the organization abjectly refuses to interfere with the matters of metal tiers. The cycle is young yet, and the chance that you’ll die before you become a real threat are astronomically greater than the risk they would be taking by violating plausibility.”

“Great. I can procrastinate on getting executed by the secret police.”

“Exactly! You should be very wary about the demon itself, though. Wouldn’t want it to take over your body and soul. Wouldn’t want to make yourself a harbinger too early.”

“That sounds sick,” Will said. “Presumably not the kind of sick that would be worth dragging myself into.”

“Absolutely not. You like being in your own mind, right? I seem to recall that.”

“Okay, fair enough. I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You’re doing better than I expected,” Ayla said, her voice surprisingly soft. “You’ve been through a lot.”

“It’s not even close to being over,” Will said. “You and I both know that much.”

“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”

“Any update on the cultists?”

“None that I can see, but it’s clear that the machinations they laid are still active. There are still players on the field.”

“The machinations?” Will tried and failed to hold back laughter. “You sound like a B-movie villain.”

“I am old enough to be your great-grandma,” Ayla said. “Get used to it.”

Will snorted. “Fair. When can I expect to see you again?”

“I don’t know,” Ayla said. “I’ll let you know if anything new comes up. Good luck with the rest of your humans.”

“Will do, boss,” Will said. “Hang in there.”

“Can’t do much else.”

They stayed there for a while longer, both of them meditating and recovering their mana. It was good exercise for Will’s soul, which had grown much stronger but still had a long way to grow.

Eventually, he saw the limits of his soul in sight, long after Ayla had run out of power to sustain him and he’d swapped to relying on himself only. He bid her farewell, and they both departed—Ayla back to deep space, Will back to the portal he’d left aboard the Sentinel.

He returned to a ghost ship.

Evacuation had gone well, it seemed. When Will expanded his senses and sent Sen around to examine the ship, he sensed some signs of habitation, but there were no actual people still here. Everyone had either left with the ESNA or found their own path back via their own respective organizations. In the process, they’d cleared out every dungeon below gold rank in the area, leaving only the occasional bronze-rank monster spawn to crawl around.

It had been long enough since full evacuation that said bronze-ranks now infested the research ship, but Will was long past the point of worrying about monsters a full rank lower than him, no matter how many of them there were.

Darkness surrounded him as he walked, picking out the items he’d gained from the wholesale slaughter and subsequent looting of the life elves. Monsters in his immediate area took one look at his aura and scampered off, giving him a clear path up to the top of the ship.

Will was early, so he took a seat on the bulwark, legs dangling over the watery abyss beneath him.

“Miiiiiiid,” he said, drawing out the word.

It wasn’t actually that bad a haul, to be fair, but he’d hoped for more from a relatively high-ranked expedition.

All of the elves had been armed with decent equipment, which he couldn’t complain about, but he couldn’t use any of the armor if he wanted to keep using Escape Artist, and none of the benefits they offered were good enough to counteract the downsides of not gaining a sizable speed bonus.

Of course, having something like fifteen sets of silver-rank armor and two sets of gold-rank armor was a pretty massive boon thanks to Destructive Synthesis. He would be able to thoroughly protect himself the next time he got into a fight so long as he had enough time to draw something from his inventory.

Apart from that, there were a bunch of weapons with unremarkable effects that he didn’t particularly care for. There were a couple Starstrike Longbows that looked just like the one he currently owned. They weren’t worth attuning to, but they would serve as good backups in case he overtaxed the one he already had.

“I mean, I guess I’ll take the skill fodder and the coins, but I have enough credits already.”

The real reward came from Grimle and Nymlera.

The former’s axe was a gold-rank item, which would have been much more impressive if Will hadn’t just ranked Eclipse up that far.

Item: [Rotting Greataxe]

Rare, gold.

This is a two-handed weapon. You may wield this weapon with one hand, but its capacity will be significantly diminished.

[Powerful] - While wielding this weapon, your [Power] attribute is increased.

[Wither Strike] (bronze) - A charged attack from this weapon inflicts the [Wither] condition.

[Rotting Strike] (silver) - You can spend mana to inflict the [Rotting] condition when you hit a target afflicted by [Wither].

[Infectious Strike] (gold) - Each time you land another strike, you can increase any affliction on the target by one level.

“Definitely a strong option. I guess I’ll attune it and get rid of one of my items? I don’t think I need the gauntlets that badly.”

The only problem with the axe was that while it synergized with Will’s skillset pretty well, it was unwieldy. Eclipse and the slayer sword were both powerful options, with the latter increasing in power over the course of a fight. Abandoning both of those for a single weapon would work in some fights, but he would have to determine which was the better tool for the job on the fly.

The other body had contained some more interesting stuff. Nymlera was primarily a summoner, but she was also an administrator. She’d been carrying around a number of tablets, some of which actually looked pretty decent.

Item: [Tablet of the Shieldmaiden]

Very rare.

“There is only one thing more honorable than dying for your people—not dying for them.” - Lancea, Princess of the Axellion Empire (sometimes known as the Shieldmaiden Princess).

Grants the power to shield.

Affixes a skill to your [Resistance] attribute at your current rank.

“Finally, something I can put on Balance,” Will muttered. “I’ve been waiting for this for a while.”

There was another tablet named for “the Creator” and one for “the Destroyer,” both at the same rarity. Will glanced over them. Both had options to be affixed to Power, Soul, or Affinity.

“My only three open skill slots are in Affinity, Soul, and Resistance. I can do… shieldmaiden for Resistance, Creator for Soul, and Destroyer for Affinity, I guess. I somehow doubt that I can use ‘Creator’ effectively with the corruption element.”

Will wasn’t a hundred percent sure on affixing his last Death and Corruption abilities right now, but Resistance, which was bound to Balance, was his lowest-priority attribute, so he had no qualms with affixing that now.

On top of everything else, Nymlera also still possessed a sigil, which had not vanished with her death. Will poked it.

The Elven Mother refuses to select you. No sigil was obtained.

“Oh come on, Sadareth. Surely you don’t dislike me that much.”

Will could feel something like laughter coming from his own sigil.

“Alright. I’ve still got, what, half an hour? Lemme affix this real quick.”

Just to make sure he didn’t accidentally expose himself to enemies, Will spread his hunger phantasm across the entire Sentinel and activated Decaying Touch through it, afflicting every bronze-rank monster on the ship with silver-rank corruption.

As they began to die screaming, Will used the tablet of the shieldmaiden.

You have awakened a [Balance] skill at silver rank!

Level up!

The elven sigil started to pulse with energy, and Will remembered what the goddess had said to him the last time he’d met her.

Stay close to Caiyeri.

His eyes widened. “Oops.”

Will collapsed.

#

“So,” Will said, finding himself in a tea room he’d seen once before but was quickly growing familiar with.

The Elven Mother looked distinctly unamused.

“I’m going to hope you didn’t call me here to soul torture me,” Will continued.

Sadareth sighed deeply.

“I see why Kadael enjoys his nightly diversion so. Unfortunately, that is beyond my current power.”

“Awesome.”

“Regrettably, I am here to reward you,” she said. “Don’t waste it.”

“Wait, that’s it? No conditions, no threats, none of the normal godly bullshit?”

The Elven Mother smiled. “As irritating as you are, you are still a friend of a friend who has done great things for the worlds. I will not forget that, no matter how much you make me try it.”

“Well, I appreciate the backhanded compliment. Same time next week?”

“I hope not.”

#

Will’s eyes fluttered open.

You have gained the blessing of the Elven Mother.

You have gained new racial traits.

[Balance]-affixed [Resistance] skill acquired: [Guardian Angel].

“Wait, what the fuck?”