Chapter 227 - And then there was Corruption (Patreon)

Spending the rest of the day grinding turned out to be a loveless task. As he was now free to go directly into Tier 16 (which spanned the level 81-85), the difficulty increased quite a bit. For John himself, that was less of a problem. His skillset was quite solid, and with Siena actually helping the group, if only as little as possible, they did pack quite the punch.

Lydia and Rave had problems keeping up at this point though. Punching 10 levels above their weight had been no problem, but 20? They weren’t dead weight, but neither did they have any hope of soloing any mob in the instance. John had Undine be close to them for most of the time as they were the most likely candidates to be injured.

The workaround here was using the Flask of Grinding, the item that charged when John killed enemies and granted up to 25’000 experience points. It had a limited effectiveness on them, but it did help them nonetheless. John had previously just consumed it himself, guessing that it wouldn’t work on them.

He also has selfishly basked in the glory of being the definitive strong guy in the group for a change. Sure, he had long since overtaken Rave in factual combat strength, which was easy to overlook due to his powers being split between seven other people, but it was a whole different feeling that she actually needed his help (or the help of Aclysia to be exact) to deal with a mob.

But that glory had made room for a slightly bad conscience fairly quickly. 

He had then carefully suggested for them to try whether or not it worked on them. It did and so that was that. Lydia mentioned looking into getting a stronger version of that item; as she would greatly benefit from it, she would even stem the costs. John, of course, accepted. He was looking for some better gear.

As that went on, they beat the other three new kinds of dungeon. Thana and Nathalia stayed behind to entertain each other through varying means.

First, they went to the Lizardmen for the Capture-fight. John had long wondered what the objective to be captured was. He would have guessed a flag, but for all intents it could have been a person of interest or a village or something else. It turned out to be a flag.

The dungeon was pretty straightforward: There was a flag on top of a hill. Get the flag, fighting through a set number of Lizardmen who were stronger and gave more experience than your average monster to get there. Return the flag to your spawn point. Get experience. It was fairly dull, but John noted that this would be a pretty great way to grind out experience for himself (not for the rest of the group though, as the Flask of Grinding quickly became their most reliable level tool and the lack of loot meant that there was nothing to eat for Aclysia and Momo).

Then they went to siege the Dwarf fortress. John was fairly intimidated by the name, and it was a pretty imposing sight to behold. A fortification more mountain than castle with thick metal plates as its gate looked down on them. Well, that was also not entirely true, it was more of a hill shaped like a mountain. A small hill. The encounter was clearly designed to be beatable by their group. The Siege encounter was interesting in that it was largely different from John’s usual encounters.

For a start, unless they came too close, there wasn’t an enemy attacking them. They had more than enough time to draft up a battle plan. The dwarf fortress was way less imposing once it turned out that they didn’t really have any aerial defences. All they had to do was send over Sylph, Salamander and the sparrow and wait things out. Once the defences were weak enough, they cracked open the gate.

Aclysia and Gnome did what high strength characters with bodies made out of steel and stone usually do in these types of situations and became living battering rams. Once inside they had to reach the heart of the fortress and touch the throne. This one turned out to be better for grinding out…nothing really, the siege took way too much time to be a nice use for anything but team building exercises. Which was worth it in itself, kind of. Maybe there was a trick to this John still had to learn? Either way, that was off the checklist.

And then there was Corruption.

“That name is super bad news,” Rave said as she handed back the Flask of Grinding to John. For the moment she, as the lowest level individual in the group, got to drink from it the most. “Well, that last thing was super easy thanks to Jack.” “Thanks to whom?” John wondered, did his girlfriend get hit with some illusionary dart and seen rum flying around or what?

Rave pointed at the sparrow on John’s shoulder, “Jack, ya idiot, it needs a name.” “It is literally me,” John pointed out and then twittered to underline his own words. “Ja and that’s confusing, so you continue to be John, unless I am mad at ya, then ya are Jonnie, and when I want ya to make sweet love to me, ya are tiger, and that is Jack, Jack Sparrow.”

“…” John stared at the window with a deadpan expression. “What, what?” Rave grinned and danced around him; “Did Gaia just agree with me? Cause that’s the O-N-L-Y thing I can think of why you’d make that face.” “Yeah, yeah, she just renamed it to Jack Sparrow…” John admitted and looked at his alter-ego called Jack now. Jack looked back.

It served some purpose to rename the sparrow. In the heat of battle the difference between ‘Send your sparrow,’ or ‘Send Jack’ could be fairly important. John doubted that that was Rave’s actual intention; she just wanted to poke fun at him and employed that argument to that end.

“Okay, so, with that out of the way,” John said and put the flask back into its holster, “let’s go visit that Corruption dungeon. I want to get my legendary ASAP, gearing up for the tournament is important.” “For ya it is,” Rave snickered; “I am equipped as I need too.”

John looked at his girlfriend in her skimpy clothes. Except for the gloves, all of her equipment was just clothes. Abyssal clothes, with an impossible to reach quality, but still just clothes. It wasn’t like Lydia clothes, which were already enchanted and custom tailored. Neither did she have the limitation that Aclysia and Momo faced, in that they didn’t get bonuses from anything that wasn’t weaponry. Rave’s refusal was more akin to Thana’s, but, unlike the blood mage, the techno-lover did not have abilities that would cause most of her clothing to be destroyed.

That wasn’t to say that Rave refused outright what John could give her, just that she was extremely picky about it. If it didn’t work with her current fighting style, she didn’t want it. That was understandable, but if it was worth refusing shoes that increased agility by 5% because you don’t like that they are heavier than the usual ones, John wasn’t sure about.

He kept the judging to himself though; he wasn’t a physical fighter, and if Rave, their prime martial artist, insisted that fighting in clothes she was comfortable in was more important than stats, then so be it.

John narrowed his eyes at his girlfriend’s cocky grin. “You are not hiding a battle suit or something, are you, Jane?” “Whaaaaaaaaaat?” Rave said in the least innocent denial possible; “I would never, why would I?” “Because you like being a tease sometimes,” John pointed out, “and because you like surprises.” “Like ya can judge me on that, mister ‘look at my glove, my glove is amazing’,” Rave shifted the blame away from her and punched him lightly on the shoulder.

John grabbed her fist as she pulled back and pulled her into a passionate kiss. “Assertive, I like it,” Rave purred once he pulled back. “Just doing what my girlfriend taught me,” he answered and leaned in for a second kiss when he heard someone clear her throat.

“My time is precious, as I have to remind you,” Lydia said; “I would much appreciate it if you could keep the flirtatious exchanges to a minimum until we declare the ‘grinding’ for the day over. 

“Furthermore, Rave, if you have equipment that increases your combat effectiveness, then I would be inclined to ask you to use it at any given time, for efficiency’s sake.” “Nope,” Rave denied, “not gonna.” “Why?” “Cause that’d be less fun, Lyly. Also, what equipment?” the techno-lover explained and then acted like there was nothing to be discussed.

Lydia sighed deeply and looked over to Momo for help. The support shook her head, “No way you will learn anything. John is really adamant about keeping that a surprise.” The princess just gestured for everyone to continue, “I miss my paperwork,” she mumbled. John opened the I.D.

They fell.

Into a deep cavernous pit that opened beneath their feet, they fell. Everything was pitch black. Everything? John imagined to see a spark for a moment. There was nothing like that. Everything. Rave used her powers, there was a spark, and he could see all around him for a moment. He really wish he couldn’t.

In that one moment he saw the walls of the pit around them. A semi-liquid lifeform, one being and at the same time many, hundreds of eyes swirling over the surface, their irises grinning with perverted glee, cringing out of existence a moment later to be devoured by eyelids like interlocking hands.

The light vanished, but the light didn’t. Despite Rave no longer using her magic, despite the walls becoming a smooth darkness, John remained able to see. His fall stopped. He was laying on the ceiling. No impact had been felt. The rest of the group came to a halt in the same way, although at differing heights.

“The hell is going on?” John asked, doing his best to make sense of what he had just seen. He couldn’t. His mind was unable to see anything in the grinning irises as logical.

“Guys, there is a boss somewhere!” John said, throwing Observes around like a madman, as the weirdly cropped window closed. In this absolute darkness, where the only thing he could see were him and his comrades standing upside down, not even Observe seemed to spy something. The flying trio of the group were the only ones who were not affected by the turning of the world. John did not like the fucking with his sense of space very much.

In unison, the grinning eyes opened again. The finger-like eyelids cracked in laughter, wiggling on their twisted joints evoking the picture of walls covered in black worms with broken spines. Everything was off. Then the cracks started to sound like music.

Laughed, maniacal music. The kind of beauty the most deranged of thoughts could only produce. Like a picture drawn in blood, depicting the most stunning of sunsets, so this melody of shrill, displaced tones somehow echoed a symphony that John couldn’t help but marvel at. In disgust at that fact, his heart started pumping as if it refused to live in the same body as a brain that started to understand.

Understand what?

What understands the taste of purple? What is there to understand about spinning leftwards? What, oh what, was a Nate?

“To think that your ability could produce a connection to the Outside!” Lydia screamed, holding her ears close as she made her rapier fly and penetrate one of the eldritch eyes. It bled laughter and a shift in dimensions. John suddenly stood at the left wall, the rest of the group at the right, the eyes all vanished.

Instead there was a THING between them, standing on the ceiling.

A mass of arms and just arms, each of them incomprehensibly twisted and different. Joints with spikes cut their neighbours, arms without joints, just a hand on a stick. Blades instead of fingernails. Fingernails instead of arms. Blight instead of flesh. Illogical. Horribly Illogical. It walked in symphony with the sounds now ceased, still burnt into John’s thought. 

What was that pattern?

“What do I gurgle? What is the weave? What is the third number in John Newman’s cellphone?” It gurgled from its joints. No, those weren’t the words. Those were John’s thoughts. What did it gurgle? Why was that important, he shouldn’t listen, he should see!

That wasn’t even the real deal? His head hurt. What vision? ‘Siena, you should have enough angles to attack him, do it!’ he pleaded to the nightmare elemental. His head hurt. ‘I can’t, there are no shadows, just nothing,’ Siena said to him in a tone that made. His head hurt. His mouth was dry. Maybe he could drink the boss? He looked a bit liquid.

John shook his head and aimed at the Outsider. A Mana Ray cut through the darkness, illuminating nothing but creating a shadow behind the mass of hands. Was it hovering or standing on some of them? John grit his wet teeth until he was afraid to crush his own jaw.

Did that attack do something? Did Siena ramming her blades through the being in the shadow of Mana Ray do something? Everyone awoke from their daze and attacked. The boss ceased to exist. Then it started again. They attacked again. Salamander’s fire looked two dimensional.

It hit John. It hurt. It didn’t. His HP were untouched, the boss had been missed. Salamander was gone. The boss had squished her in darkness. There was no window. ‘The fuck?’ the question rose from Salamander, ‘John, can you hear me? Hello? I am stuck in your head, would you let me out? What am I confused about?’

When did that happen?

What happened when it did? What was time if not a keychain? What is the vision of the pit, the man crawling for his brother?

“What am I confused about?” The whole group asked as one; the song of cracking laughter started to make sense. The boss had infinite hands, but infinity was just a growing number. All of this made sense. John checked his cellphone, the first number was home, the second number was adventure, the third number was trust. He couldn’t delete what he lost. He should delete loss instead. From the Outside peeking in.

The boss ceased to exist. They left the dungeon and collapsed on the floor. The eyes were cracking with laughter again. The dungeon left them. Something pulled them out. Someone that seemed unwelcome for a moment but John then recognized as Gaia.

“Fucking hell,” John, gasping for air as his brain unclogged, said and looked over to a window.

“Good riddance,” he said and fought against the need to throw up. The nausea that shook his body was extreme. Everything was swaying like he was on a boat. Having his feet below his head seemed wrong because it was right.

An explanation later.