[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 112: None the Wiser (Patreon)

Author's note: I misnumbered a chapter like 18 chapters ago and just noticed. It's been fixed now, so this is actually c112, not c111. Enjoy!

Caiyeri, Nynn, and Wisteria had been in the superdungeon for under an hour and had already almost died five times.

Almost dying had become a frighteningly routine part of Caiyeri’s life at this point, and she was no stranger to having to fight above her rank, but there was something offputting about this dungeon that was setting her on edge. Before, when the assorted competitors of the trial of the champion had temporarily set differences aside to fight off the horde of gold-rank clones, it had felt like a war effort. 

To use a comparison Will’s friends might have made, if that had been an action movie, this was a horror one. She had yet to actually watch one of their films, but she was familiar with the concept because of the theater novels her outpost had been supplied with.

It hadn’t been all too long since she’d left her outpost in the grand scheme of things, but her life had been irreversibly changed during that time. Caiyeri had finally been exposed to the workings of what progression in a cycle should be like. To be fair, part of that could be attributed to the human tendency to poison themselves in the name of short-term gains, while another part went to the abnormalities that had been cropping up like mushrooms by a river, but it was clear to anyone with eyes that the humans were taking far more risks and engaging in far more battles than Arcadia had.

Her planet was being left behind. With every passing day, there were fewer and fewer relevant forces that had come from Arcadia, most of which were run by elves or elementals who had already reached gold rank a while ago. Even those were slowly getting overrun, too slow to adapt to humans to realize that after only a month of this cycle, there were real threats emerging and returning from other planets.

Caiyeri wasn’t sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, those were her people. She was of their blood, not any human lineage.

On the other, she was an outcast now. Elves that had defected from their native faction were relatively common, but ones who joined human efforts were still few and far between. There were a scant few that she was faintly aware of, but they hadn’t connected.

“Head in the game, Cai!” Wisteria shouted, activating a skill that Caiyeri had learned was called Null Zone.

At Wisteria’s rank, it could only nullify the effects of skills that were bronze or lower, which would have been entirely pointless in this dungeon.

That, of course, was where Nynn came in. Even as Wisteria’s skill expanded, he poured mana into it. Though neither Caiyeri nor Wisteria had the overpowered perception needed to see the former Dread Executor’s full class, it was clear that he had a great deal of focus revolving around the manipulation of mana. One of his most used abilities was Counterspell, but now that he was working with Wisteria, it was apparent that he was equally capable at amplifying skills as he was nullifying them.

This way, he didn’t have to do any specific removal of his own while training a potential protege. Nynn’s amplify hit Wisteria’s skill right as the previously-hidden slime that had blended into the latest set of impossible stairs shot out a line of acidic ooze at Caiyeri.

It wasn’t quite enough to increase Null Zone to the gold rank it would have needed to be at to completely nullify the attack, but Wisteria’s warning combined with the effort she took to defuse part of the skill was enough for Caiyeri to quickly use Emergency Shield, throwing up a forcefield around herself that was just able to block the remainder of the skill.

She whipped around and fired the seven-shooter she’d received from Will, imbuing it with the Sharpshooter and Autoload enchantments with the skill she’d primarily been using as a weapon summoner before.

[Instant Death selected.]

[Instant Death selected.]

[Instant Death selected.]

Nynn blurred into action, using the comparatively tiny fragments of power that remained in his dreadscythe to attack the monster. Even with his amplification, Wisteria’s offensive power wasn’t strong enough to handle a gold-rank monster.

The battle to kill what was essentially just a large mass of magical ooze took a depressingly long time, which was what bothered Caiyeri the most about this entire thing. The superdungeon so far had taken the form of a spatial abnormality, and it seemed to be composed entirely of staircases and windowless, claustrophobic rooms with admittedly powerful loot.

They’d been fighting almost non-stop for hours now, using the items they picked up as fuel to keep going, and as far as Nynn could tell, they were less than one percent of the way through the superdungeon.

“I hate this,” Caiyeri said when they were done, doing her best to scrape bits of congealed ooze off of her armor. “Not being able to tell if we’re even improving.”

“I would have believed you would appreciate this more,” Nynn said. “You trained Will, did you not? You should be no stranger to this.”

“It’s not that we’re fighting above our rank,” Caiyeri said. “It’s that the most ordinary creatures are acting like boss fights for us. It makes me reasonably certain that any actual boss in here would wipe us off the face of the planet.”

“A reasonable concern. Do you wish to return to the surface?”

“Absolutely not. Let’s move onwards. Also, Wisteria, we need to have a talk about what you’re calling me.”

“I think ‘Cai’ sounds cute,” the Void Knight said. “Your full name takes too long to shout.”

They finished ascending the staircase, finding themselves in another room.

Wisteria gasped. Caiyeri did not visibly flinch, though her ears twitched.

“I see that we were not, in fact, the first to attempt this superdungeon,” Nynn said. “It is to be expected, I suppose.”

He pointed at the mess of dried gore and cracked bones on the floor, and the body rolled aside, revealing a single metallic disc at the center.

“This, on the other hand, was not,” Nynn frowned.

“What is it?” Caiyeri asked.

Nynn looked up at the low ceiling, his gaze going somewhere beyond. He flickered once, and Caiyeri tensed, but then it was gone.

“Peace,” he said, just loud enough for the elf and human with him to hear. “What are you doing?”

Caiyeri started typing a message.

#

Will was growing increasingly certain that the spokespeople for Peace and what he presumed was Fate were not the actual representatives—or, at the very least, they were just officers. Every time they allowed a question to be asked, there was a certain delay between them hearing it and replying. Furthermore, both were silver-rank, though admittedly they were both leaderboarders at the higher end of it.

The play made sense. It was already obvious that assassination attempts were going to be a fairly common theme of the summit, and it wasn’t worth taking the risk of losing a critical member of their group of “chosen” to a random attack.

All of Will’s group had elected to stay quiet for the time being even when the Human Defense Force from Australia had asked questions of their own. They discussed things quietly between themselves, but none of them wanted to make themselves more of a target than they already were.

Will was certain that Peace’s group expected opposition. Whether or not they expected it from him was less clear, but he assumed that since he had the Crown as a connection, they would be.

Then again, he wasn’t sure how the sigil monitoring situation worked. While the Hunger had seemed to sit in him like a passenger, he’d never actually felt the Crown looking through his eyes or judging him for his actions. In fact, it was like it wanted to wash its hands of him entirely, which was actually quite possible. The Hunger had complained a time or two that Will’s particular problems with corruption had gotten so bad that it had affected the god itself. Maybe the Crown had decided to not bother, especially since Vyx hated Will’s powerset with such fiery passion.

Still, if the information they were providing was accurate, they were implying a level of power that nobody else could match. They claimed to have established a power base around several superdungeons based in Nepal, Tanzania, and Brazil. Based on Liam and Natalie’s best guesses, the most likely points to have a manifestation would be points of significance, that corresponded roughly to Mt. Everest, the Serengeti ecosystem, and either the massive statue in Rio or the Amazon rainforest.

Supposedly, they had conquered the latter, which was raising a lot of suspicion from the crowd. Nobody—Will included—believed that there was someone who could seriously annihilate a dungeon that was supposed to include platinum-rank threats. Will had dealt with beings of far greater power before, but the only reason he had even survived those, let alone come out ahead, was because he’d had incredible leverage. Even he had never actively fought a creature two ranks above him—with the exception of Axl, the Carrion Lord, but that had only been because the goblin had ranked up to silver at the very last second in their fight.

Even then, that had been because he was able to wield corruption. Peace didn’t have sigil-holders who could do that, as far as he was aware. Even if some of the more powerful otherworlders were on her side, Will was hard-pressed to believe they’d cleared their way through a full platinum-rank superdungeon, which they had explained was many, many times larger than a regular one.

As the conversation continued onwards, he felt a brief tug at his soul. At first, he assumed it was one his gods attempting to pull him away, but he understood the difference quickly enough.

No, this wasn’t a call from gods. It was rawer than that. There was no sense of overwhelming power emerging from it, just a weak pull to a place beyond this one.

Will: Yo. I’ll be right back.

Hua: Not this again.

Will: For real this time.

You have consumed one level of [Purified] to negate the cast time of [Sanctuary].

Will fell into the Beyond, following that thread as it became visibly crimson to his demon eye for the first time. He’d been here enough times that following it didn’t take much more effort than usual. Confident that little to no time was passing on the outside, he took his time to take careful control of his soul, driving him towards the increasingly familiar threads of magic.

Sure enough, he found his way onto one of the iridescent bridges, ultimately connecting himself to one Ayla Dreamer and former Dread Executor Nynn.

It was immediately apparent how much more experience the owner of this sanctuary did over Will. Rather than the relatively basic space Will had formulated, this was a proper mansion in its own right, resembling a god’s soul-space more than a last refuge.

“Welcome, Will,” Ayla said. She sounded tired. “This is my space, because for some reason, this guy never figured out how to set up a sanctuary of his own.”

“Until this point, Peace was a reliable enough source of most of what I would need the Beyond to provide,” Nynn said. “That… may no longer be the case.”

“I’ve been telling you this,” Ayla said. “Do you seriously think any of the gods would ever be interested in anything but themselves?”

“Of course not,” Nynn scoffed. “Peace’s self-obsession was a productive one for decades, though. It isn’t often that you don’t want peace.”

“That depends on the type of peace,” Ayla replied. “It seems she herself has changed what she has found acceptable.”

“What have I missed?” Will asked. “I’ve been at the human summit. There’s a rep from Peace and one being remote-controlled by another god. They claim that they’ve dismantled a superdungeon and they have some level of control over two more.”

“They don’t have control over the one on Mount Everest,” Nynn said grimly. “We just found a dead body with a Peace sigil on it. The others weren’t able to tell, but I could see that Peace was actively participating. This was no independent maneuver.”

“The others?” Will asked.

“Wisteria Blake and Caiyeri Seven.”

“What the hell? Tell Caiyeri hi from me and also ask her why she didn’t end up going to Vegas. Wasn’t she in the ESNA?”

“Your friend Hua requisitioned and relocated her,” Nynn said.

“Oh, lovely.”

“We still have no understanding of what Peace is doing,” Nynn said, steering them back on track.

“Aren’t you one of her messenger boys?” Ayla asked. “You should know.”

“A deity-affiliated Dread Executor is no longer affiliated with that deity when they give up their status,” Nynn said. “You are young yet, Dreamer. The gods play games on scales far greater than beings as insignificant as a Prince who would be willing to lower himself to gold.”

“That was an insult, not a genuine request,” Ayla said flatly. “I can tell you have no sigil or connection to her anymore. You don’t carry the stench anymore.”

Will raised an eyebrow at that. He hadn’t sensed any difference between Nynn’s presence here before he’d used his Culmination as a desperate effort to counteract the corruption cultists’ plans, but Ayla evidently had.

I still have so much to learn, he thought.

“We’re in the same shitty boat now, Nynn,” Ayla said. “Your goddess doesn’t need you anymore, I’d bet. Or maybe she’s still there, telling you to get closer to the corruption wielder, but somehow I doubt that. After the debacle of the tournament, she’ll know there’s another way to draw him out into doing insane shit.”

“You know I’m right here, right?” Will asked. His soul was even flowing into Ayla’s sanctuary. Though his control still didn’t come close to rivaling hers, he could at least provide some power to keep it going.

“I’ve been counting on it,” Ayla said. “You might notice that I’m not exactly able to act.”

“Is there a way that I can get to you?” Will asked. “You seem like you’d be a pretty great help if we could get you back in action.”

“Not before the next planet hits, no, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to throw away a couple of years of potential.”

“Yeah. Especially when I’m hearing that the planet arriving is going to come with a whoooole lot of shit.”

“You can bet that Peace is going to try to take advantage of that.”

“This is not the Peace I know,” Nynn interrupted. “She would never—“

“You talk about me being young, but I think the only naive one here is you,” Ayla fired back. “Gods change all the time. Maybe the dominant personality changed. Maybe her definition of peace changed. Who knows? Who cares? What we know is that she has people violating plausibility and a plot that we can only guess at in the background.”

“Wait, they’re violating plausibility?” Will asked. “How can they do that?”

“The only presence we’ve seen so far has been dead,” Nynn said. “His sigil indicates a level of involvement that is unprecedented this early. Even the most egregious god should not be favoring their sigil-holders like this.”

“Mine are pretty favorable,” Will said.

“Different story,” Ayla said. “Gaining power from an unwilling god is significantly less plausibility-violating than a god choosing to grant disproportionate power itself. Which Peace appears to have done.”

“That’s not complicated at all. What does this mean for me?”

“I don’t know,” the woman who’d once claimed the title of Void Dreamer said. “Maybe I am too young for this. How gods choose to do things is as opaque as why. Until we gain more information, I would say just do what you’ve been doing. Observe the Peace coalition. I’m too far to say anything more.”

“Enter an anomaly when you gain the opportunity to,” Nynn said. “Or a superdungeon, I should say.”

“I’ll scope things out,” Will said. “Don’t get Caiyeri killed. We’ll have a problem if you do.”

“I won’t,” Nynn said.

#

Will returned to the real world after about thirty subjective minutes spent in the Beyond and collapsed his link to it immediately after. He’d regained a decent chunk of the mana he’d used to activate the link in the first place, and collapsing it proved to be significantly easier than establishing or maintaining the portal.

To the outside world, it would have looked like nothing more than a dark flicker. Will would be surprised if anyone even detected him using the skill.

Caiyeri: Have you been in a superdungeon yet?

Will: Funny you should ask. I just talked to Nynn.

Caiyeri: Oh, that’s what that flicker was?

Will: Yeah. I’m in the middle of something right now. I’ll let you know when I get more info. Good hunting.

Caiyeri: You too.

The conversation around him was continuing, with none the wiser as to what Will had just done.

He couldn’t be bothered trying to figure out who was who here. Political bullshit had never been an interest of his, and being complicated further by the literal gods overseeing the people involved?

Yeah, no thanks. I’m taking this to the source.

Will looked at the Peace sigil-holder, feeling the way this Adam’s aura had changed thanks to his god.

Time to meddle back.

[Desecrated Bond] has been activated on [Adam Riser], sigil-holder of [Peace].

You have chosen to use [Corrupt].

You will now contest [Peace].