[System Decay] Chapter 17: Tutorial Zone, Stairwell% (Patreon)

With their new skills, clearing the way through the goblins was substantially easier. Caiyeri’s new skill affixed to her fire element, which was bound to her Perception stat for some reason. It was a passive ability called Thermal Sight that did exactly what it advertised. Elves already had great nightvision, but at bronze rank, her magical sight extended slightly through walls.

It was certainly less flashy than the death-element skill that Will had awakened with the tablet of the dark forest, but it was damn useful. Rather than have to rely on torture, which was shaky information at the best of times, they used Caiyeri as a scout, checking corners and ledges throughout the tunnel system.

They still weren’t able to avoid every ambush, but anytime they got caught, they had the teleport daggers. By now, they’d learned that while the goblins excelled at quickly deploying themselves places, none of them were capable of tracking where others went after using the Eerie Step skill. They had to split up to try to follow Will and Caiyeri, and if a small enough group chased after them, the pair simply found a convenient corner to ambush their attackers in.

Otherwise, they ran. Will’s new skill was fantastic at that.

Skill: [Wind Walker]

- Spell (stealth, movement).

- Cost: very low mana and low stamina.

- Cooldown: none.

Unformed.

At the eye of any violent storm, there is silence. Draw upon the power of the winds to lighten your step and increase your speed.

Combined with his new element, it was perfect for repositioning stealthily.

[Power]

- Bound to [Storm]: Once a storm begins, it will not stop. Your stamina depletes at a greatly decreased rate while you are above a walking pace. Difficult terrain caused by water or wind does not impede your movement.

Will had asked Helper, and he’d learned that he had the potential to run on water with the skill he’d received—or even fly. That was enough to awaken the childish wonder in anyone.

Caiyeri, of course, didn’t see anything special about this.

“Anyone can fly once they reach diamond rank,” she said, crossing her arms and turning her head up.

“You’re bronze, and I’m unformed,” Will replied. “We’re about as far as we can get from diamond at the moment.”

“And? What about it? Do you not plan on making it there?”

“Of course I do. Doesn’t mean everyone will. How many people even make it to diamond?”

Helper: Approximately 5% of Users. The average User will never know the joys of flight.

Caiyeri dismissed the message with an errant flick of her wrist. “Don’t compare yourself to the average User, Will. I don’t know you well enough to know if you’re like me, but you’ve survived this long. If you’re not the exception, then you’re not trying hard enough.”

Oddly enough, the words resonated with him. He hadn’t come here to be a normal person again. By the looks of the tutorial, he wasn’t having anywhere near the average experience.

To the top it was, then. No matter what it took.

Before they could discuss it any further, Caiyeri called out that there were goblins rounding the corner and they had to get back to kiting them.

Despite being at unformed, Will was getting used to the bronze-rank goblins. Part of it was because of all his great weapons at bronze rank, but that wasn’t all—they were predictable. After getting hit once, they would usually try to teleport away, and they tended to prioritize themselves over their groups.

That meant that with a stealthy few shots to start things off, any clan would be thrown into chaos. Will’s stealth bow was a great help to that, especially once he applied a shadow rune to it. That combination had made the otherwise unassuming shortbow glimmer with an oily black darkness and gain a new ability:

[Shadow String]: All projectiles fired from this bow will create a small burst of [Shadow] upon impact.

Essentially, with good aim, he could blind them, cause them to start teleporting randomly, and give himself and Caiyeri plenty of opportunity to pick them off. She was able to easily keep up with him, using some Speed-bound skill to accelerate her teleports with the vents.

With their hit-and-run tactics, the two of them easily racked up the kills.

After hours upon hours of this, Will’s Power and Speed both made it to 16, and his level increased once again to 17. He put the unused points in Soul, bringing it up to Unformed 14. Perception, one of his two unbound attributes, was his current lowest at a measly Unformed 12 after a couple of stat increases gained from observing the patterns of the camp, but Caiyeri was doing enough spotting for the both of them.

Time until tutorial failure: 14 hours, 38 minutes, 25 seconds.

Will was up to eighty-one monster kills. The second part of his tutorial quest looked like it was going to be the most viable one for completing it.

They had a straight shot to the stairwell from where they were, but the area around the stairwell itself…

“You didn’t say that it was going to be like this,” Will muttered.

Though the rest of the tunnels so far had included a few clearings, this one was far larger than anything they’d seen prior. At least as large as the football-field-sized chunk of land he’d stood upon on the surface of this tutorial zone, the cavern stretched high with vents spaced around it at irregular points.

Will’s eyesight wasn’t good enough to see into all the nooks and crannies of the place, but at least at a closer range, he could see a pretty hefty collection of red dots. At least a dozen other tunnels all converged in this one place, and each of them had some signs of civilization set up around them.

The worst part was that there wasn’t even a town that they could sneak into. While there were settlements and camps at the exits, there was a solid five hundred foot stretch of just plain emptiness with nothing better than knee high rocks to take cover behind.

At first, Will almost mistook the stairwell for another cave, but when he made the shape of a door out, it popped up on his minimap.

He cursed quietly.

They were going to have to make a run for it.

“There aren’t any other stairwells?” he asked, making sure to keep his voice low.

“Not within a day’s travel, no,” Caiyeri said. “Unless you’d rather be stuck here?”

“I’m half-tempted to take my chances farming goblins until I’m free and away,” Will said.

“I wouldn’t blame you.” Caiyeri wasn’t entirely able to hide the quaver in her voice, but to his surprise, she sounded entirely genuine. “Everyone for themselves here, no?”

“No,” Will said. “I’m not taking the easy way out unless I damn well have to. If you can do it, then I can try.”

“I don’t know if I can do it,” Caiyeri said honestly. “The majority of my practical experience in battle has come from the last couple of days. I’ve never made it through a gauntlet like this.”

“Do you have any strategy for this?” Will asked. “Elven plans, maybe?”

“Our plan for dealing with this many goblins when our party size is this small is run,” Caiyeri said. “I can count at least fifty within range. I’m sure there’s more on the far side of the stairwell.”

“If we don’t have a plan, let’s make one,” Will said. “But I’m going to need you to be a little more open with the options we have.”

Caiyeri huffed out a breath. “Fine. We don’t have all day, after all.”

#

Time until tutorial failure: 10 hours, 37 minutes, 8 seconds.

They ended up retreating for a bit—and by a bit, Will meant four hours.

Though the goblins were communicating with each other, it took them a while to figure out where Will and Caiyeri traveled through, given their tendency to wipe the entire squad down to the last member. That gave them a little more room to test out various plans of attack.

He definitely had a few “are we the baddies” moments when they backtracked into areas where there were still-burning goblin corpses missing all of their gear, but he pushed it aside. Morality was a luxury afforded to those who weren’t fighting for their lives.

Well. He supposed he did have that luxury, given his choice to continue fighting towards the stairwell with Caiyeri, but he had given up on having a calm, reasoned discussion with the goblins a while ago. They wanted to kill the two of them, so he and Caiyeri killed goblins. Simple as.

After many, many attempts, they had a plan. He wasn’t sure how solid it was, but in theory…

Caiyeri revealed a shockingly good understanding of leatherworking. She used a conjured knife to work with a few pieces of leather goblin armor, fashioning a belt that fit Will suspiciously well.

“I have a natural eye for measurements,” she explained. “And, again, I’m lucky.”

By the time they returned to the entrance they had come from, Escape Artist barely had any effect on him. As it turned out, equipping weapons to a belt counted as equipment, and with enough weapons, that turned the skill way down. Wind Walker, inventorying the setup until the last second, and extreme caution made up for it.

His inventory two crates lighter, Will stepped towards the mouth of the cave entrance with three entire belts of daggers strapped to him. He had a bow slung around each shoulder, each of which had half a set of armor tied to it with string.

If they’d done their calculations right, this would work out just fine.

If.

“Ready?” he asked.

Caiyeri wrapped a hand around his wrist. He took hers in kind, securing them as much as he reasonably could.

“It’s not me that’ll be a sitting duck out there if this doesn’t work,” she said. “Are you ready?”

In lieu of an answer, Will grabbed a teleport dagger and activated Eerie Step.

#

There was almost half a mile between the tunnel exit and the stairwell entrance, and there wasn’t a straight line of vents between them. With a range limit of sixty feet, the teleport daggers weren’t going to be able to get them all the way in one leap.

After some careful, stealthy observation, the two of them had plotted out a map of the vents. In order to get there, he was going to have to follow an esoteric route that took maybe sixty usages of Eerie Step to travel twenty-five hundred feet.

Just stick to the plan, he reminded himself as they appeared sixty feet out into an uncovered cavern.

He’d hoped to go unnoticed for at least the first few teleports, but the cavern was empty as a gym two weeks after New Year’s. There was nothing stopping the goblins within from seeing the flash of light that accompanied their movements.

“Go, go, go!” Caiyeri encouraged.

The cooldown on Eerie Step as provided by the dagger of the sunken world was one minute. With his space element lowering his teleportation cooldowns by half, that was thirty seconds.

In a fight, thirty seconds was a long time. Here, it would be the difference between life and death.

But he’d learned that he could reset the cooldown by activating a second dagger, and they’d looted a lot of goblin corpses.

Will touched the second teleport dagger and triggered Eerie Step again.

The metallic screech of arrow tips hitting cave stone graced his ears as he and Caiyeri reappeared. A quick glance at his minimap revealed that a bunch of the dots were quickly getting closer.

Right. They weren’t the only ones who could use the vents.

Will moved to the third dagger and activated the teleportation skill once more.

Then the fourth.

Every teleport saw the pattern of goblins encroaching on them change, following in hot pursuit. Will did his best to ignore him. Caiyeri was the one who had to do the defending. His job was to get them both to the stairs.

Five.

Every narrow miss was hair-raising. All he’d seen of the goblins led him to believe that they were a simple race, optimized solely for war, but when they coordinated, they were damn good at it. Rather than shooting arrows directly at them, clans started pushing to attack at the vents that Will and Caiyeri could teleport to. More than once, the elf had to activate her Emergency Shield to protect them both.

Six.

As he activated the sixth, Will could feel the soul fatigue start to set in. He checked his mana bar and cursed—he’d used over four-fifths of all the magic he could bring to bear. The goblin onslaught had distracted him.

This was what his ridiculous setup was for.

When they arrived to their sixth vent, a goblin was waiting for them, club raised high. Will reacted on instinct, kicking it in the chest.

[First Blood] doubled the power of your attack!

It stumbled back. A second later, Caiyeri’s conjured sword took its head off.

That second was enough of a pause for the other goblins to reorient. Caiyeri jolted, grunting in pain. Her fingernails dug painful white tracks into Will’s skin.

“Flesh wound,” she hissed. “Go!”

Will activated Destructive Synthesis, consuming a bow and all of the armor attached to it.

Mana restored.

You have gained the [Sharpshooter] skill at bronze rank for [1 minute].

You have gained the [Iron Skin] skill at bronze rank for [1 minute].

You have been inflicted with a level of [Corruption].

[Corruption Resistance] negates bronze-rank [Corruption].

Onto the next dagger.

All in all, he had fifteen teleport daggers. By the time he got to the last, the first one had reset.

Mana restored.

You have gained the [Keen Edge] skill at bronze rank for [1 minute].

You have gained the [Poison Wound] skill at bronze rank for [1 minute].

It wasn’t a perfect plan. Even with Caiyeri’s shield skill, they were still taking hits. Will was terribly glad for the Iron Skin buff the armor granted him. More than once, a sudden shock to his system told him that an arrow or sword had glanced off him. It hurt, but nowhere near as bad as it would’ve been if he got impaled by an arrow or had a leg chopped off.

Still, bit by bit, they got closer.

Twenty teleports. Thirty. Forty.

Mana restored.

You have gained the [Eerie Step] skill at bronze rank for [1 minute].

Fifty.

By the time they got the sixty-second teleport, both of them were bleeding from multiple injuries and every weapon sans six of the teleport daggers was gone, consumed for Destructive Synthesis.

The last stretch was empty of vents, so they had to sprint for it. At this point, the goblins had figured out their target, and a large group of them had started sprinting for the center.

Unlike their ridiculous plan, though, the goblins weren’t able to functionally negate the cooldown on their teleportation skill, so all they really had were arrows.

Caiyeri and Will broke contact and ran for their lives.

A burst of pain told him that arrows were pinging off his skin, but he’d consumed the second set of armor at the last second. He didn’t let the pain slow him down.

The welcoming void of the stairwell grew closer. Thirty feet. Twenty. Ten.

Will leapt into the entrance like he was trying to catch the game-winning touchdown at the Super Bowl and tumbled, grunting with pain as his body hit step after step before finally rolling to a stop.

He and Caiyeri got to their feet, both slurping down health potions, and dusted themselves off.

They… were alive. Their plan had worked.

“Mother’s grace!” Caiyeri shouted, wrapping Will in a rib-cracking hug. “I can’t believe that worked!”

“Ow,” Will grimaced.

“Oops.” Caiyeri let go. “A relic of the woman I was based on, I’m afraid. I can’t believe that worked.”

Level up!

Achievement earned: Unintended Interaction

Some way or another, you have used over 10 times your mana capacity in the span of 127 seconds without using a single mana potion.

Reward: You have gained an Awakening Shard of the Beyond!

“Neither can I,” Will said, grinning. “And it looks like the system liked that.”

“We’re not that far from the end,” Caiyeri said, also beaming. “We should rest up and get going before the goblins can chase us.”

“Let’s.”

#

The Carrion Lord was ready when the stairwell activated, indicating that there were protected souls within. The very thought of it disgusted him. The world needed to be protected from corruption, not the other way around.

He was ready when they burst out from the exit on the floor below.

“Oh, come the fuck on,” the human said.

“This is bad,” the elf added helpfully.

“Welcome back,” the Carrion Lord said. “You’ll find I’m not so merciful this time.”