[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 151: Twisted Minds

Regina was getting used to her ostensible ally being less of a reliable soldier and more of a hurricane that occasionally blew away the same enemies she was dealing with. Granted, those winds tended to be more favorable than not, but she could do with fewer reminders of how unpredictable they could get.

Case in point: basically the entirety of Regina’s currently active citizens in Boston had just witnessed Will exit the atmosphere.

A brief examination of the message boards across the city and even further beyond revealed recordings from people with intelligence-based skills spreading like wildfire. None of them carried accurate sound—those that even had sound just captured an incredible amount of static buzzing. From Regina’s experience, that was likely due to the passive aura surrounding his soul. Insufficiently powerful observation skills were likely to fizzle out on someone who just had that much interference actively spinning around their aura. Regina herself tended to have that effect on people.

Even if no sound had been transmitted, though, the entire city had watched as Will had soloed a platinum-rank battalion boss—the first in the ESNA to do so—without even seeming to break a sweat. From there, he had claimed a powerful platinum-rank artifact that the chatrooms were still going crazy over analyzing before just disappearing, leaving the dungeon in a storm of dark magic that brimmed with so much raw chaos that it set even Regina on edge. 

As if leaving a challenge dungeon he had been breezing through up until that point for no apparent reason hadn’t been enough, the corruption wielder had gone a thousand feet above the tallest building in the city, sat there for a while, and then vanished in a burst of power that even a bronze-ranker would have been able to feel.

I do truly wish people would stop leaving their messes for me to clean up, Regina thought, resisting the urge to huff out a sigh. A leader did not show exasperation unless it was necessary.

Fortunately, general knowledge of William Li-Brown had spread across the world more now than it had a couple months ago. Unfortunately, some of that knowledge, while true, painted an unfortunate image.

Regina had a few fires to put out. Most people viewed the corruption wielder as a near-mythical entity. While regular Users were progressing at their own pace, banding together to fight against beings much stronger than themselves, William Li-Brown, dark angel or Reaper or whatever pithy epithet the people had come up with recently, was a singular force who came and went as he pleased, leaving bodies in his wake.

Now, that interpretation didn’t necessarily hurt Regina, but it did make it a bit awkward when she had people actively calling for her to kill him before he could do the same to them. They were somewhat counterbalanced by a separate faction who claimed that if Will wanted them dead, they would be, but that wasn’t quite what she wanted. Her ESNA had expanded far, far beyond the original squad she had been a part of when they’d been transported into the other world, and keeping it active took not only the skills of a politician but also ones of a User. The world after the fall was an entirely different beast from the one before, and the fact of the matter was that the people most suited to organizing other people were either fighters or gone, either dead or in a system facility somewhere.

Not that Regina particularly cared for the lives of corrupt old farts who still acted like they were living in the wrong century, but she did have to acknowledge that it had been a pretty major adjustment to go from a soldier to a leader not just of a unit, but of an entire country.

She composed a message to Will, then deleted it, thinking better of it. There was no point in berating him for leaving her with a public relations issue. Not only was he unlikely to understand, he was going to go do it again, and there was nobody who could stop him.

Sometimes, she wondered what was going on in that man’s twisted mind. Most leaderboarders had something wrong with them. With the corruption wielder, that came with a disregard for authority that went far beyond the usual. Regina had gathered enough information about the man to tell exactly what kind of deals and tribulations he was taking. Sovereign-tier sponsors, demons, gods… even now, she was sure he was leaving to go mess up the day of someone far stronger than the upper half of Earth’s Users put together.

What was happening inside that twisted mind of his?

#

“So,” Will said. “You think I could get them to turn the internet back on?”

“That might be the dumbest thing you have uttered this month,” Ayla said. She thought on it for a moment, then amended her statement. “Second dumbest.”

Predictably, the pathway that yanked Will towards his meeting was through the Beyond. His comprehension of his own skills and the magic they utilized had been steadily growing with use, and he found himself able to understand a little bit more of this transit system each time he went through it.

He was still a long way from being able to replicate it. Will was out of skill slots, anyway, so it wasn’t like there was a silver bullet he could get to mimic this effect—but he was also growing to understand how this world worked. Tablets weren’t the only way to a skill. Items built or salvaged, rituals learned or practiced, sigils earned or stolen, any number of more esoteric methods… there was always the possibility that he would be able to do more than just exist in the Beyond one day.

That was one of the few things Ayla hadn’t told him much about, claiming that the information was actively dangerous to have. Will had pressed a bit, but when it had become clear that she was serious about it, he’d stopped. He trusted her to have good reasons, and he didn’t want to push his friends any further than he had to.

The people he was about to meet, on the other hand, were not his friends. They were allies out of circumstance, which meant they were one step away from enemies. Those, Will had very little compunctions about bothering.

Case in point: when he’d felt Ayla tunneling into this Beyond teleportation, a process that he was well aware was very expensive for the sponsors he’d already pissed off, he’d let her in, intentionally slowing himself down and weakening his connection to the tunnel for her to enter. She’d done most of the work, since he was still a relative novice when it came to the Beyond (albeit one who was progressing at an apparently ridiculous rate), but he hadn’t stopped to consider if his sponsors would be mad at it.

Besides, he was still getting there one way or another. A bit of a delay didn’t mean much, especially when time was as wonky as it was in the Beyond.

“Hey, you’re the one who tunneled into here,” Will told Ayla, picking himself out of his thoughts. “If you wanted to listen to my shower thoughts so badly, you could have just asked.”

“You haven’t showered in several months. You just use a magical cleanser every time.”

“Keep your eyes out of my bathroom,” Will snorted. “Anyway. You think I could? I told Caiyeri I’d find her the remaining gacha game servers, but I think they’re just all down now. I looked into it a while back, and most of the servers stopped talking to each other when the world shifted and the satellites all went down. The home base ones are in China, and to be quite frank that country’s just been hit with way too many disasters for them to still be working.”

“To indulge your useless hypothetical,” Ayla said, “Even assuming they had any interest in resetting your network, it is unlikely that they would recover exactly the data needed. More to the point, any restored infrastructure would not survive for very long. The same issues that brought down your internet the first time would plague it again.”

“Then we’ll just build it stronger,” Will said. “Maybe I should get Regina on that.”

“You have Regina on building a low atmosphere railgun,” Ayla reminded him.

“Right. Can’t forget about that. After we beat Peace, maybe.” Will looked at Ayla’s amorphous form, which seemed calmer than usual today. “I’m assuming that has something to do with why you came here.”

“Are you telling me your system helper can’t come in to check in on you from time to time?” Ayla asked with a tone that would have strongly suggested a raised eyebrow had she been human.

“If it’s you? Hell no. You only show up for good reasons, and as fun as my company might be, showing up to banter definitely isn’t that good a reason.”

Ayla’s arms multiplied, then folded back into herself until she looked more human. From her aura, Will took that as the equivalent of a sigh. “Correct, which is rare for you.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“The range at which this information is coming from is so great that I can’t guarantee its accuracy,” Ayla said. “I also do not have detailed specifics.”

“That’s fine,” Will said. “Whatever you have is fine.”

The changeling paused for a moment. “I was sure you were going to make a sarcastic comment there.”

“Can’t be that predictable,” Will said. “Besides, I don’t think I can properly stress how much of an advantage it is getting non-Earth information from you. I’m pretty sure you are literally unrivalled in terms of information gathering on this planet.”

“Oh. Thank you.” Ayla didn’t seem to know what to do with that information. “It’s to be expected, really. If I was anything short of stellar after seventy-five years of waiting, that would just be embarrassing.”

“You’re well past that,” Will assured her. “You were talking about information?”

“Yes. As I am quite sure you are aware, you have made a number of enemies in high places.”

“One or two, yeah.”

“It would appear that your enemies in lower places—“

“The Contractor, you mean?”

“Correct. I suspect he has managed to manipulate his way into sovereign-tier conversations just as you have, judging by his repeated conspicious Beyond-driven absences from the planet. From the volume and direction of them, it is very possible that you have more enemies than you did before.”

“Brilliant,” Will sighed. “I could do with taking a step in somewhere and not instantly finding myself neck-deep in flaming shit one time, y’know?”

“Arguably, the ESNA is that for you,” Ayla suggested lightly. “This warning is mostly because the entities that the Contractor is dealing with are on the scale of the ones you are. While none of those Lords, Princes, or Queens can interfere with your current cycle, they are well within their boundaries to attempt an attack on the sponsor coalition you inadvertently created.”

“I never do anything inadvertently,” Will said. “Wait, I made a coalition? How?”

“Your life possesses a great deal of value to a great number of people. You have five sovereign-tiers who have made non-aggression pacts with you, meaning that everyone else lacks those. What did you think was going to happen?”

“I didn’t think about it at all, to be honest. Well, thanks for the warning.” Will sighed.

“You keep doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Sighing. I know for a fact you know how to stop your form from breathing in here.”

“I mean, I can project exasperation with my aura instead, but that’s just not as interesting. I’m not quite that keen on leaving that much humanity behind.”

“We can talk about that again in a few years.”

“Assuming I’m still here in a few years.”

“Believe it or not, I am optimistic.”

Will raised his eyebrows. “What makes you say that?”

“I have thought you well and truly dead a total of seven times to this point.”

“And?”

“You still stand before me, do you not?”

With that, Ayla tapped out of the connection, popping the bubble she’d formed and sealing the tunnel exit behind her.

Will continued on like nothing had happened. To the outside world, it would very much seem like he had just had a slight hiccup during his travel.

“I really need to murder this Contractor guy,” he muttered to himself. “Wonder what he’s up to.”

#

In a hidden part of what had once been Nevada, there was a dome of magic that had been designed to be impenetrable to perception skills up to low platinum-rank. It was intended to be a perfect defense, immune to anything human and anything from Earth.

In that sense, it had succeeded. The two beings who had wandered into it were not, indeed, from Earth.

Three somewhat flummoxed individuals stood at an impasse in the center of a desert that was less empty than it seemed.

Despite appearances, the two insectile creatures were not actually Iridium and Osmium, the two currently active Speakers of the Unification Front, and the one human was not in fact the man known in most areas as the Contractor. All three of them were relying on proxies—one of Iridium’s skills from a previous Speaker of the Soul granted him the ability to create a near-perfect simulacrum of both Speakers with the one caveat that it could only activate each skill they had once before crumpling to dust, while the Contractor had somewhat unsurprisingly formed a contract with a Peace-aligned gold-ranker to cast an image.

In actuality, the two Speakers were currently carving their way through low platinum-ranked monsters. Not every creature the Contractor and his forces had defeated had been left dead; a good deal of them had been taken in for other programs, some of which included defense. He was not so bold as to think that a few platinum-rank monsters would be enough to stop just anyone from attacking. After all, his own forces had taken it down, and he never made the critical mistake of believing he was uniquely powerful.

No, the purpose those monsters were serving was as a deterrent. With the Speakers occupied fighting, they would be able to have an actual civil conversation instead of just trying to kill him outright. The Contractor was less informed on the Unification Front than he wanted to be, but he knew enough to understand that they were quick to commit to a fight. Sure enough, the Speakers had immediately started attacking blindly the second he’d sent his chat message.

With this setup, though, they could have something approaching a civil conversation. The Contractor had never been in danger of actually losing his life, of course—he wasn’t even within a hundred miles of this location. Still, it was nice to be able to talk to them while they weren’t actively attempting to end his life.

“Your people sent you after the corruption wielder, correct?” he asked, intonation carefully crafted so that the system translator would send the correct message over. “I imagine he turned you towards me.”

“Not quite,” said Iridium. “We have established a truce with the contract-breaker. His time will come, but that will be after your angel has perished.”

“So he’s going around telling people now,” the human said, conjuring a simulated cigar to smoke. The gesture wouldn’t go entirely understood by the aliens, but it assisted him in getting into the right mindset to project an aura of confident comfort. “Within expectations, at least. I assure you, the angel will not be any more disruptive to the cycle than the corruption wielder.”

“This, we know to be untrue,” Osmium replied. “The Unification Front has yet to directly interface with an angel, but the system tells us much. Angels and demons are two sides of the same forbidden coin.”

“I presume he’s told you about the demon he’s carrying, then,” the Contractor said. 

He knew many things, but those were more from his connections than through his active surveillance skills. He had not been actively monitoring the fight between the corruption wielder and the three Speakers of the Unification Front, though he had been aware of Cinder Solace’s role in killing one of them. Any details that might have come up during their conversation hadn’t quite made it to his ears.

“Speakers do not need to be told of these matters,” Iridium scoffed. “We are aware. It is contained, however, and the manner does not yet threaten this cycle.”

“So you’re claiming that the angel that Peace herself is summoning is going to do so?” the Contractor asked. “Tell me, why do you think a core goddess would participate in something that would actually break the cycle?”

“Our loyalty is not to a god or goddess, instigator,” Iridium replied evenly. In the real world, his physical body burst out with magic, paralyzing the platinum-rank monster with a mass of phantoms. “It is to the chaos defense contract and the cycle. Unlike your primitive race, we have been aware of our place in the universe for a long time.”

“There are any number of entities out there who thought the same as you. There are dozens of sovereigns who thought similarly but learned better. There are opportunities in this for you yet.”

At this, both copies of the Hive gold-rankers froze, their real bodies temporarily unoccupied by any active attacks. In tandem, their insectile heads turned not towards the Contractor’s projection but his real location, far away in an isolated tower where he had spent the bulk of his time in preparation for the ritual.

They were no longer suppressing their auras, leading the Contractor to realize that he was not going to break through to them. These were true zealots, ones that believed in a cause far more than any of the Ladies and Lords and Orders he’d been dealing with did. He was more likely to get his plans through the distant Emperors and Empresses that ruled the multiverse’s cosmic clans than to these gold-rankers.

A leader could be persuaded to change their thinking or at least to modify their behavior to pursue their goals. A truly devout follower could only be persuaded to change their behavior if their very dogma was modified, which the Contractor neither wanted nor was capable of doing to the Hive at this stage.

He had his copy shrug, then drew upon his sigil.

Peace and Fate both lent him knowledge, allowing him to create a link that tied him to the nascent angel. He couldn’t draw much from it—an angel was nothing to be trifled with, and even a drop of water from a pool it had resided next to was potent enough to kill him. Any power he took was filtered through a dozen measures. By the time it got to him, more mana had been spent refining the angel’s power into something human-processible than he actually received. It was terribly inefficient and not at all what he was planning on doing with the summon’s power, but it was a good practice run of what would he would ultimately do with it.

Even with this limited amount, he could sense the sheer overwhelming otherworldliness of this power.

The corruption wielder carries this around every day, he thought. He had to respect that, though fear was entirely out of the question. This kind of power could only be obtained by being willing to fight and stand for oneself outside the bounds of this current cycle.

They weren’t too dissimilar, William and him. It was a shame that the corruption wielder was going to have to die for his purposes, but that was the world they lived in.

For the time being, these two aliens would do as an appetizer. The Contractor stepped through a portal in his office, reappearing at an anchor set in the Nevada desert. 

His emergence alerted both of the Speakers immediately.

“We have seen enough,” Iridium said his brother. “We will return to win another day. The Unification Front will not consist of us alone.”

Osmium clicked in reply, agreeing.

Before the Contractor could annihilate them, they took off, easily dodging the weakened platinum-rank monsters he’d planted in the area. They were out of his effective range within seconds, then out of his territory in minutes.

He let the angel’s power die down. There was no need for it now.

There would be yet another faction with interests placed in the events of the coming weeks. The Unification Front was sure to get involved now that they had a better idea of the people on all sides.

The Contractor smiled wide.

“The more variables the merrier,” he said to himself.

To most, this was going to be chaos. To the Contractor?

He saw nothing but opportunity.