[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 111: Superdungeon

Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [76/100]

Will wondered if word was getting around about the failed assassination attempts or if it was just his aura being weird again. The odd looks from everyone he passed by was pretty par for the course, he was pretty sure, but it was starting to feel like every nation had an eye on him. Sen was able to catch quite a few surveillance skills placed in various locations, each of them with different enough magical signatures that it was clear that they were from different parties.

Unfortunately, Will’s demonic eye didn’t see the lines that connected skill to User through Sen’s vision, so he wasn’t fully able to trace down who exactly was surveilling him.

He did know that the assassination attempts he’d foiled, one of which had ended in the opponent surrendering and the other in the death of a silver-ranker who’d been just off the leaderboard, had both been made by independent agents that had links to the Contractor.

As much as he hated to admit it, he owed some of his preparedness to Lily. Sure, he would probably have been able to survive the assassinations either way, but there were still methods he was unprepared for. Lu Jie’s plan, for instance, might have worked if it weren’t for the fact that Sen had just happened to scan the right part of the airspace above Geneva.

Sen was a very, very useful intelligence-gathering familiar, but it wasn’t perfect. A thousand eyes felt like a lot while within the confines of a building, but spread across a city and its airspace, that number started feeling a lot less effective. Even during the tournament, he’d only had to keep track of a select group of people, most of whom had been bunched up in groups that were more easily observable with a thousand eyes. The city was a different story.

That second attempt would have come as a genuine surprise had he not been warned of potential vectors of attack. Lily hadn’t been working as an independent mercenary for very long, but she’d participated in a major black market auction that had been selling weapons of moderate to mass destruction—though given that the governments weren’t terribly focused on shutting said markets down, it was unclear as to how disallowed that was.

One of those items had gone to the same silver-ranker that was now dissolving in a dumpster a couple blocks from the summit. It had been a one-time-use gold-rank item, attuned to the would-be assassin so that it wouldn’t cause him soul damage. Lily had called it a “telefragger,” an assessment upon which Will now agreed after seeing it in action. He’d walked through a point that had been layered over with magic of some kind, paying it no mind since practically all of Geneva had some passive skill or another placed over it despite the suppression field.

When he’d sensed the magic trigger, he’d reacted as he normally would, with one exception. What he wouldn’t have seen coming without Lily’s warning was the teleport triggering from well outside the range of the city. Had it successfully resolved, the silver-ranker would have appeared with a sword piercing straight through the vitals. Will wasn’t entirely sure if he’d have managed to put himself back together after that one, but he did still have a few levels of Blessed and Purified left over.

He’d negated it entirely by boosting himself dramatically upwards and out of the range of the effect, of course, so it was a moot point now—though of course he wished that the item had remained intact after. It would have been a great addition to his collection.

Having allies was life-saving. Will counted himself lucky that he’d managed to stay free of tying himself down to any given faction while maintaining a strong support network.

He hoped that he wouldn’t burn any of those bridges today.

Not everyone in the city was entering the first day of the summit, it seemed. A good deal of the people who’d arrived were not representatives but retainers, guards, and other members of national staff.

Will had apparently been deemed important enough to participate in the first day, which he hoped was all he needed to attend.

The venue itself was decidedly impressive, but Will didn’t particularly care enough about architecture to bother spending time gawking at it like some other ambassadors were.

Ultimately, there were about two hundred people in the first meeting, which was in a circular room filled with a load of long desks that reminded Will both of what he remembered of UN meetings and a college classroom.

He was unfamiliar with politics and hadn’t bothered to learn about how this type of deal normally worked, but it appeared that there was a moderator of some kind judging by how nobody was fighting to be the first one to speak.

Will figured out pretty quickly that everyone was chatting with each other through system messages by how quiet it was despite the apparent agitation of most people in the room. He found his way to Natalie, Liam, and Hua, who were sitting some distance away from what Will assumed to be the Australian officials.

A notification alerted him that he’d been pulled into a group message.

Natalie: You’re late.

Will: Bumped into an assassin on my way. Also, I got coffee. Anyone want some?

Liam: Glad to have you, mate. I’ll take one.

Hua: If you’ve got spare, sure.

Natalie: I already had mine, but I appreciate the offer. Do you know how this works?

Will: Not the faintest clue. I’m here because you said it was probably going to be important. Do you?

Natalie: Yes. The moderator is a leaderboarder who’s taken it as their duty to ensure a neutral ground. They seem to have some level of immunity to or affinity for the suppression field and have announced their intention to remain here for a duration of a few years at least, though given that it’s barely been a month or two since integration, that’s very up in the air.

Will: Neat. How does participation work? Should I raise my hand if I want to speak? Kindergarten rules?

Hua: Are you a child?

Will: I should be the one asking you that.

Liam: Nah. There’s a system interface for it.

Will: Right. Almost forgot about that.

Down at the center of the ring, a hooded figure surrounded by so much magic that even Will was hard-pressed to see through it raised a hand for silence. The already-quiet room stilled, and the figure spoke.

“It is a pleasure to have you all here. I have been informed that several attempts at international terrorism have already been identified and eliminated, but I would advise you all to remain on guard.”

Will: There aren’t any bombs or anything under the event, at least. I checked.

Hua: Good to know. Any active weapons on participants?

Will: Not that my familiar can see, though I’ll point out that anyone could bring out an active nuke given three seconds to access their inventory.

Hua: Of course. Still, better to have two hundred people prepared for battle than 199 like that and one with a gun out.

The bulk of the participants had been on Earth this entire time, but Will sensed that nearly every single delegation had at least one otherworlder, Natalie’s group excepted. Lu Jie, who’d tried to kill him earlier, had a gold-ranker of his own with him. The ESNA had a woman that Will had only heard referred to as the Supreme Commander. The same went for the PA, Australia, England, the Indian factions… the list went on. 

As the moderator introduced the event, Will continued looking around the room, searching for threats.

Not all the otherworlders were here, not by a long shot, but there were a fair few here that made it clear that everyone had been invited. Everyone human, at least.

Ashton, the gold-rank otherworlder who’d carved a path of destruction through DC, was present at a table of his own. Will saw no hint of Druudrazil, his tamed necrotic wyrm, but he couldn’t discount the possibility that Ashton had brought that damnable thing into the area. After the failed telefragging incident and Lu Jie’s assassination attempt before that, Will knew there was every possibility that this particular gold-ranker had tricks up his sleeve that were well outside Geneva itself.

Will: Found one of the monsters.

Hua: Which?

Will: Ashton, no last name. Gold-ranker. Tamer class. Sixth circle, table D.

Natalie: I see him.

Liam: I don’t.

Hua: Ha ha. Powers?

Will: Can call upon a gold-rank monster that was single-handedly destroying a city. I don’t know what else, but if he’s comfortable enough to be here when he knows that he has enemies here.

Natalie: Assume some kind of instant-summon or summon-teleport ability.

Will: Are those your ways out? I’ll point out that he’s not a summoner.

Natalie: Mine and others. He’s a tamer, correct?

Hua: Same archetype. Try to find what’s up his sleeve before engaging. Don’t engage here. He’s a good target.

Will: Found a few of those, have you?

Hua: Three. Two silvers and a fresh gold.

Will: I know. I saw the bodies. Who were they?

Natalie: Mass murderers from Melbourne, Bristol, and London. The gold-ranker from my city was mind-controlling an unwilling slave harem. They were the worst kind of trash.

Will: Lovely. I reckon we’ll find a lot more of their kind before the year’s out.

Hua: I expect so.

“Speaking now is provisional Supreme Commander Regina, representing the Eastern States of New America,” the moderator announced.

“Thank you,” the woman in question said, standing from her seat. She took a step forward and abruptly disappeared, showing up again in the center. “As I’m sure you’re all aware, the world is not as simple as we thought. Six years ago, my regiment and I were made painfully aware of this.”

Will studied Regina with one of Sen’s eyes, piercing through the passive protective veil she had around her. She had a metal mask covering the right half of her face, and like Will, she was missing an eye and had chosen to replace it with a gold-rank item. 

Rather than a demon, though, it was something more mechanical. It wasn’t practically leaking corruption, either. The exact effects were hidden to him, but judging from how Will could see dozens of lines emerging from it and disappearing shortly after, connecting her to many of those looking on, he could guess that it had a reasonably powerful perception skill bound to it.

“Many of you understand the otherworld situation, but for those who still don’t know, it’s simple. Across the last decade, somewhere between one and twenty thousand people have gone missing. A few of them, us included, managed to get messages back to people on Earth. Some of our companions believed us. Most didn’t.

“Now, everyone believes it.  I hope you all believe what I’m telling you this time. We didn’t return to Earth just because we love it so much, though I will say it’s good to be home. When we departed the other world, it was with the knowledge that ours would be under attack.

“Some“—at this, Will saw the lines from the eye connect to some of the otherworlders that had been identified by his group as dangerous to the humanity as a whole—“decided to become the attack. Those of us with a home to fight for came to defend our race. You may have noticed that the average difficulty of dungeons has increased sharply. Unformed rank dungeons are no longer forming, and even bronze-rank ones are few and far between.”

There was a general murmur of agreement at that. Will recalled seeing similar during his efforts to chase Nymlera and her group down. He assumed that anyone still at unformed at this point was either dead or locked away for protection, because he hadn’t seen any at that level in a while.

“Roughly two weeks ago, portals began opening in our other worlds, many of which were calibrated specifically to let us through. They were harmful to both this planet and the other, and as far as we’re aware, the only way to close them was by passing through them. According to the people in our—the other world, I should say, this was expected behavior for an event that wasn’t supposed to happen until five to a hundred years from now.

“If any other nation wants to chime in on this next part, I’d love to hear it. The ESNA’s analysts have determined that our abnormally early return—“

Regina stopped in the middle of a sentence, her head suddenly swiveling towards a random silver-ranker in the crowd. Will caught the weapon appearing at the same moment she did, and he also noticed four or five others in the crowd triggering their perception skills at the same time. A moment later, the rest of them realized what was happening as the silver-ranker drew his bow.

“FOR—“

He didn’t even make it to the end of his sentence before an oppressive presence silenced his magic, dimming the light in his bow. In that same instant, at least ten separate skills were unleashed by members of different nations.

Regina’s was the first one to hit the would-be assassin, a death-line igniting bright red as a gold-rank skill triggered. Time in a Bottle was the only reason Will managed to see the silver-ranker’s chest implode before the rest of the grouped up skills obliterated him from existence.

The explosion of the gore seemed to be inhibited by that same presence that had nullified the first power, and the messy remains of the silver-ranker sank into the ground.

Time sped back up to normal. For how sudden and brutal that had been, there was surprisingly little reaction.

Liam: Someone just fail an assassination?

Will: We really need to get you better vision.

Liam: Well, I sensed it. Just figured there’d be a louder crowd.

Natalie: Everyone here has a body count.

Hua: We’ve all seen enough people die.

Liam: Ah, so I’m blind in a room full of sociopaths. Lovely.

Will: Yep. What’re you gonna do about it?

Liam: Not die, hopefully.

Hua: This means no attempts from us during the summit itself, or at least not within sight of the moderator. Looks like their skills include some level of control over the suppression field.

Natalie: Yes. We’re definitely okay outside of the dome. I would wait for someone to make an attempt outside the moderator’s line of sight but still within the dome before we do, though.

Hua: Good point.

Will: You two are kind of scary.

Natalie: This coming from you??

“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,” Regina said as if nothing had happened. “Our best guess is that our abnormally early return triggered a surge of magic, possibly including the planet impacting Earth within the next two years. Whether it was us that caused it or the impending impact, it’s undeniable that gold-rank monsters are increasing in frequency, both in and out of dungeons.”

“A question from the Tokyo coalition,” the moderator said.

“I am not part of the coalition,” Dread Executor candidate Yui replied, annoyed. Her voice radiated out across the room without need for magical amplification. “We are affiliated, but I am not working under them or as part of their group. Supreme Commander Regina, you and I both know it was the brief manifestation of a demon that brought upon the worst of the magical surge. Do you have any plans as to how to respond to the impact?”

“A good question,” Regina replied. “Neither of us have witnessed the first impact, but we know that it resulted in no fatalities until the tutorial began. Presumably, the same will occur this time. What we actually need to worry about are the surges that are certain to occur.”

“I concur,” Yui said. “There are already gold-rank battalion bosses flooding this world. Has the superdungeon problem come to your attention yet?”

That sentence set the room ablaze with discussion, both spoken and system. Will had largely ignored the interface that had appeared for him up until now, having not possessed a terrible interest in what was slowly becoming a more interesting political event, but as it lit up with dozens of requests to speak, he started paying more attention.

Will: Superdungeon? You know anything about that?

Natalie: Very vaguely. None of them opened near me, though.

Liam: The higher-ups kept us blind on that one.

Will: Booooooooo.

Liam: Look, so long as I’m blind, I’m milking this bit. I’m serious, though. We’ve been denied information about this.

“I am fully aware,” Regina said sharply. “That was the next point to be addressed. Moderator, I would appreciate silence from the the audience for the time being.”

“Of course,” the moderator replied. The system responses went blank.

#

At the peak of Mount Everest, three people looked at a building that for all intents and purposes was a simple wooden hut.

“This abnormality has acquired a popular name amongst your kind,” Nynn said. “Superdungeon, I believe.”

“That’s the one,” Wisteria confirmed. “I talked to Oliver and some of my other contacts once we got back into chatting range. It’s been kept quiet, but in the age of the internet, you really can’t hide anything.”

“I should see about this internet thing you keep mentioning,” Caiyeri said. “I’ve been told there’s a lot of interesting content there.”

“Interesting is one word for it,” Wisteria said. “I’ll say that it’s one of the few things that the end of the world has actually made more useful. Once all the spammers and bots stopped functioning, it mostly turned to forums about the end of the world. And magical porn, but even a grade schooler would’ve seen that coming.”

“You’ve only been back in the world for a week and some change,” Caiyeri pointed out.

“The internet is very information dense,” Nynn said. “That’s not the point. What I am saying is that these anomalies—apologies, ‘superdungeons’—are a somewhat common occurrence late into the cycle. This is far too soon for them to appear, and as such, they’ve been knocked down in difficulty, but that is not saying much.”

“What should we expect?” Caiyeri asked.

“Gold rank monsters as a floor,” Nynn replied. “Every single enemy you face, even the lowliest wall spider, will be gold-rank or higher. The bosses will be more difficult as well. In return, you will increase your power at a greatly increased rate if you survive, and the loot you acquire is much, much better.”

“There’s a catch,” Wisteria said. “There’s always a catch.”

“Gold-rank minions aren’t enough for you?” Caiyeri asked drily.

“That’s just a normal level of insane. I expect that from the world, not some part of it that’s supposed to be more fucked up than average.”

“You’re not incorrect,” Nynn acknowledged. “An—superdungeons are one of the few aspects of a cycle that can manifest phenomena above the tier of the planet without breaking plausibility. They do so to siphon off extra power created by said cycle.”

“We never had one,” Caiyeri said.

“Your cycle was a failure. No excess power was ever produced, so you were never at risk of violating plausibility. This, right here, right now, is one of the few places in this world that could hold a being of platinum rank.”

“Don’t get us killed,” Caiyeri said, opening the door to the hut. Within it were stairs that extended far higher than should have been possible in such a small space.

Without another word, she walked in.

“After you,” Wisteria said.

“Stay close,” Nynn warned. “I will do what I can to protect you, but I can’t fix dead.”

“Of course not,” Wisteria said, smiling coldly. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? There’s nothing about protection. Eliminate. Eradicate.”

“Execute.”

They stepped in together.

#

“…and we have reason to believe that they may contain sufficient gold-rank threats to overwhelm our world’s forces,” Regina finished.

Instead of using the overloaded system message, two people simply stood up. Both of them shouted at the same time, the sudden intensity of their voice drowning out any potential challenges.

“I am Adam Riser, representative of Peace,” one of them said. The name sounded faintly familiar, but Will couldn’t place it.

“I am a nameless representative of a representative of an ally of Peace,” the other said. This one was a woman.

Lily: Oh, shit. I think that woman is being controlled.

Will: What?

Lily: Voluntarily, I think. I got an offer from the Contractor about this. Didn’t take it. Obviously.

“This superdungeon you speak of,” Adam said.

“It is not a hypothetical,” the woman added.

“We, the chosen of Peace, have found one of our own,” Adam said. “And we have mined it to its core. Every last bit of it.”