[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 108: Just Grunts

Aza got the memo. His wings spread immediately, covering Will in golden light even as a cornucopia of explosives tumbled out of the portal that had opened right above his head.

If there was any time to start burning through his mana reserves, it was now. As Sen’s eyes saw the combination of raw silver-rank explosive alongside the truckload of grenades hit the ground, Will’s mind went into overdrive, using Time in a Bottle to buy himself a few precious seconds to work with.

The hunger phantasm spread from his body like a plague, forming a pitch-black sphere around him. Will manifested it physically, forming a second layer of shielding at a further radius from Aza’s golden protection. It encompassed the explosives as well as most of the street he stood in. He had no illusions that it would stop the full force of the explosives, but he hoped it would dampen them enough to keep other people in the buildings from getting hurt.

You’re gunning for a lot of collateral damage here, Lu Jie, Will thought.

They hadn’t left on the worst of terms. Will had killed Lu Jie’s good friend and ally and made an enemy out of him, but they’d at least had some level of mutual respect.

Respect didn’t matter to the guy six feet under, though.

Crimson lines crossed his phantasm and the world around him, his demonic eye showing him the weak points of his defenses and the area that he stood in.

Importantly, it also showed him the lines of death in the explosives as they began to detonate.

The contact explosive was the real concern here. The only magical effect in there was to increase the potency of the mundane detonation, which meant that he couldn’t negate it in any way except shielding.

On the other hand, the magical grenades all had esoteric effects of their own, many of which had shield-piercing effects that could ignore even silver-rank magical protection. That would have been a problem if not for the newest sigil skill he’d acquired. Against the demon, he hadn’t been able to use it because he would have killed himself with how much life force he needed to expend.

Against a silver-rank assassination attempt, no matter how well-prepared, it was usable.

Skill: [Ravenous Feast]

- Spell (sigil).

- Cost: very high mana. Life force (varies).

- Cooldown: 12 hours.

Silver

If you truly hunger, you can devour anything, but every feast comes with a cost.

When a magical effect targets you, you can attempt to contest it with this skill and your aura. If you are able to match or overpower the skill, you can attempt to resist it with life force in order to negate a portion or all of its effects. 

Upon a full negation of the skill, you are refunded all of the mana expended to cast this skill (but not life force). You also gain mana and stamina proportionate to the amount of resources placed in the negated effect.

[Overflow] (silver) - Excess mana and stamina is not discarded.

Sadly, the Hunger had never given Will the promised rewards for reaching top 4 and top 2 in the tournament since those rounds had never taken place, but he couldn’t complain about the ones he’d received.

A twisted purple-black energy spilled out of Will’s hands, slithering into the darkness of his phantasm and creeping over the grenades as they exploded.

Even though the phantasm should have blocked his vision, he could still see the bright red lines in the darkness, a dozen new ones appearing as the detonation began.

Just like Nynn’s Counterspell, Ravenous Feast depended both on Will’s ability to direct his skill and the amount of investment he could put into it. His experience with Ghostflame made him hesitant to use a lot of life force, but he also knew that he now had a title that could mitigate the effects of losing it.

Furthermore, targeting the weak points of the magical effects infusing the explosions reduced the cost required. Functionally turning every skill he could easily direct into a critical hit had almost made him reconsider his relationship with the demon living in what had been his right eye.

Almost.

Will had to use Time in a Bottle’s secondary effect to speed himself up enough to make actual use of Ravenous Feast, which brought his mana down to just over half of its maximum capacity. It was a hefty consumption, but its returns would make up for it.

Purple and black met red and devoured it, consuming the critical points of the ice, distortion, radiance, and poison effects of the grenades amongst many, many others. Will couldn’t stop all of their effects with how much life force he was willing to spend, but he could defang most.

He stopped when his vision began to fade into the grayscale that it always did with Ghostflame. There was a certain amount of life force expenditure that just simply wasn’t worth it, even if he would recover it soon enough.

Will let time speed back up to normal as his sigil skill consumed the bulk of the magical explosions screaming towards him. From start to finish, everything had taken about thirty seconds, or one point five seconds in real time.

Deep inside him, his connection to the Hunger rumbled with approval.

Bright, blinding light flashed with such brilliance that it simply cast Will’s shadows aside. Even with the magical elements denied to them, the grenades were still silver-rank explosives, and the combined force of it knocked Will off his feet even though he was fully encompassed by Aza’s wings.

He hadn’t been looking directly at the explosion, but he was still temporarily blinded by the sheer force of it. Will sensed Aza’s shield shatter, his connection to the familiar informing him that his Guardian Angel had been blasted away into a building by the sheer force of the combined explosives.

His hunger phantasm had gone onto cooldown, having been fully annihilated, but other than the minor scrapes he’d gotten for falling on his ass, Will suffered nothing.

Mana and stamina surged into him for his successful activation of Ravenous Feast, refunding him the cost of the skill and then some, bringing him almost all the way back to full.

[Envoy of Mercy] has activated. You have gained one level of [Blessed] and [Purified] for each life you saved. 17 instances of each have been gained.

11 levels of [Blessed] and [Purified] have been consumed to restore your life force.

He’d been right to assume that there were people in the buildings around them, then. Envoy of Mercy could apparently trigger off of shielding people, which was good to know for the future. If that assassination attempt had gone off properly, every person he’d just been considered to save would have died because of one of the many effects of those explosives.

“Not a good look for a peaceful summit,” he said, looking up at the plane again.

Will had been lucky in a number of ways. He’d had Sen scouting the area around him for a while, but the eyes weren’t strong enough to find a random plane in the airspace, especially one that had stealth enchantments applied. Lu Jie had given away his position when he’d made a magical broadcast from his ship.

It was magically reinforced, though not enough to stop Sen from getting a look into it, which was another stroke of luck. To cap it all off, they weren’t moving too quickly for his Thousand Eyes to catch up with.

Will was grateful for their incompetence, but he knew he couldn’t rely on it. If he did, it was only a matter of time until someone actually good at this successfully killed him.

Not that this attempt was over, of course. Will had caught enough snippets of conversation in the ship to guess at what was going to happen next.

“Now,” Lu Jie said, just over three miles above him.

With Time in a Bottle still on cooldown, Will prepared simply by drawing Eclipse and the slayer sword from his inventory.

As the portal opened, he used every movement skill he had. Escape Artist, as always, was giving him a passive buff thanks to his lack of armor. Though the bombing had taken his artificial shadow away, it was late enough in the day that the natural lack of light let him increase his speed and render himself invisible with Wraith Cloak. Finally, Wind Walker lightened his step, once again boosting him to the point where he could move at the speed of a drunk driver with a brick on the accelerator.

His guess as to where Lu Jie’s skill was going to open up was wrong correct, so he launched himself at an incorrect angle, but that was acceptable. For the instant the portal was open, the distance between him and the plane above him was shortened from three miles down to about three feet. Sen’s range-extending feature had been cut off by the magical reinforcements inside the plane, but now that Lu Jie was opening a portal himself, he was opening a vulnerability straight into his flying fortress.

Will activated Weapons Free and disappeared.

There were six silver-rankers in the plane—one pilot, four fighters, all at Silver 8—alongside Lu Jie, who had somehow made it to Silver 10.

Will’s target was the closest fighter to the portal—or, to be more specific, his spear.

Weapons Free did not cancel his momentum, so when Will reappeared three miles above the ground, he was still under the effect of all his movement skills. Just to add insult to injury, he added one more air-dash with Wind Walker, further accelerating him.

He acted as a living missile, slamming into the armored fighter and denting his silver-rank steel with the sheer force of his body.

One level of [Blessed] has been consumed to mitigate damage.

Of course, raw speed with no magical force to back it up wasn’t enough to break through silver-rank armor, but he didn’t need to destroy it. Doing his best imitation of an exceptionally unruly bowling ball was enough. 

The chaos he inflicted upon the Chinese group’s well-organized plan could not be understated. The four assassin-duelists had been positioned around the portal, ready to drop, and Will’s sudden appearance knocked two of them into each other, surprising all of them.

The plane shook before he could right himself, unbalancing everyone, and Lu Jie’s portal snapped shut.

As he and the two men he’d knocked over struggled to get back on their feet, the other two fired on him with rifles that utilized silver-rank ammunition.

Two levels of [Blessed] have been consumed to mitigate damage.

Will kicked off the ground, Escape Artist enhancing his speed even further, aiming his swords backwards. Sen’s eyes showed him where his enemies were, and the demon’s told him where to hit them.

With his familiar granting him what was functionally limited omniscience, Will marked everyone else in the plane’s bay for death.

One of the silver ranks dodged, using a movement skill to get out of the way. The other did not.

[First Blood] doubled the power of your attack.

[Mark for Death] increased the power of your attack.

Critical hit!

Lightning sparked along a crimson arterial spurt, Thunder Wraith’s Grasp igniting inside the silver-rank and frying him from the inside out using his blood as a conductor.

Will’s target was at the peak of silver, though, so that wasn’t enough to take him down. The two on the ground were beginning to recover as well, so Will pushed out with his aura. Four out of the five Chinese operatives in the the bay with him were core users, with only one of the silvers being an exception, and they weren’t ready for the raw strength of his Shattersoul. With Outcast, their auras barely affected him.

Lu Jie had barely matched Will’s aura before he’d gone and reforged his soul in the crucible of the Crown. He wasn’t even in the same league anymore.

Will was fighting one against five, so he didn’t have the luxury of attempting to soul attack them, but his aura had been passively draining them of mana, stamina, and health the entire time. Flexing it made them recoil just long enough for him to press his advantage. He tagged the one he’d downed with a Decaying Touch, corrupting him, and a dolorous bell tolled.

He went for the coup de grace with his slayer sword—then found himself falling a mile above Geneva, the plane far above him.

Lu Jie’s skill had come off cooldown at the same time as Weapons Free, so Will simply teleported back onto the plane before the former top-ranker could shut the portal, using his newly gained momentum from falling to plunge his slayer sword into the downed fighter’s back.

You have defeated [Mao Jinghua].

Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [75/1000]

His slayer sword increased in power with every hit it inflicted against the same type of target. It had reset since he’d been using it on elves before and had swapped to humans now, but it was steadily ramping up.

The second gunner had recovered and aimed his weapon once more, but Will screamed at him, blasting him back and afflicting him with wither and weakness.

Before he could reach a peak, though, the two armored silver-rankers he’d knocked over earlier intercepted him. The core user tried to tank the scream with a shield, which seemed a bit unintuitive given that Will was using the wide area effect of it instead of the beam attack, and the other, the only one who wasn’t a core user, simply stepped forward with a rapier.

Will worked best in confined spaces when there was a lot of cover to work with. This was a confined space, but he could see the writing on the wall. The swordfighter forced him onto the back foot, and it was clear that he was much more skilled at using said sword than Will was. Despite all his close combat training with Caiyeri, Will had never actually gotten that good at using his blades—he’d just relied on his speed and his afflictions.

Their squad covered each others weaknesses, and though he could wear them down, it was unlikely he would do so before suffering fatal injuries himself.

“Oh, well,” Will said cheerily. “Time to cheat.”

Hunger phantasm exploded out from his body, finally off cooldown. It flooded the plane instantly, blinding everyone—including the pilot, who immediately sent them into a sharp climb.

Will sensed another pair of portals open, one under his feet and the other next to Lu Jie.

Using an air-dash to keep himself from falling through it, he grinned viciously. Lu Jie, still the highest ranked non-otherworlder, showed his emotions too clearly in his aura.

The leader of the Sichuan coalition was fucking terrified.

The portals snapped shut, taking Lu Jie and his dead comrade with them. That still left Will in a bit of an unfavorable position. All three of the remaining Users had decent aura senses and were able to navigate through the darkness with varying degrees of unease. The swordfighter might as well have been operating in broad daylight.

Will formed a knife out of his phantasm and teleported on top of the plane.

His target had been Lu Jie, not any of the others. He’d killed one because they were attacking him, but these were all grunts. Now that his primary prey was gone, he had no actual quarrel with the rest. They hadn’t promised to chase him down to the ends of the Earth or anything, either.

To be nice, Will didn’t corrupt any of them. Instead, he just clambered into a good position and blasted the engine with lightning before jumping away.

As he fell, he sent each of them and Lu Jie a message.

Will: In the interest of this peaceful global summit actually being global, I’m willing to overlook this one incident. I have no argument with any of you except Lu Jie, and that’s only because you went after me. I’m sorry about Jinghua. Leave me alone—at least for the duration of the summit—and the rest of you will make it back home.

The plane’s engine burst into flames, and it began to spiral.

Will: Assuming you make it out of the plane.

#

Lu Jie finally stopped running after he was certain the corruption wielder wasn’t going to pursue. At a distance of thirty kilometers, he was well outside the range that he had thought Will could detect, but he could never be sure.

The summit was yet to start, and he had already shown weakness. Only Will had seen it, but there was nothing stopping him from spreading news of Lu Jie’s failure to the rest of the world.

The message he had sent was little comfort. Lu Jie knew that his life had been spared there. Had Will truly wished to, he could have killed him and everyone on board.

This had been a complete and utter failure.

He opened his messages not to respond to Will, but to speak to his partner.

Lu Jie: I have failed. We must proceed with our contingency.

Fan Laozi: Then we will. Continue to the summit. I will join you.

The message carried a weight to it. Laozi was not one who regularly departed from one place. At leaderboard rank 13, even a slight shift in his attentions could have titanic ramifications.

He shuddered.

Lu Jie: So be it.

God forgive me, he thought. I have become a monster among monsters.

#

Natalie: What the hell was that? Hua just saw you blow up a plane.

Will: Looks like someone had the same idea as you. Their mistake.

Natalie: Glad you’re safe.

Will: I appreciate it. I get the feeling I should watch where I sleep tonight.

Natalie: We have automatic security detail with our little AUS-UK coalition. My summons stay active during the night. Want to stay over?

Will: I wouldn’t be opposed to it. Drop me a location?

“I need a shower,” Will muttered to himself. “Surely one of these hotels will take me.”

It was getting rather annoying that this was an actual concern of his. His very presence was threatening to most people to the extent that they wanted to kill him. Will doubted that hotel staff would be able to see past his Outcast title.

At least that title gave him buffs. Silver linings.

People made way for him on the street, which was equal parts convenient and irritating. Word about him was starting to get around, it seemed, because people kept on gossiping about him after he passed them, though very notably not when he was actually passing. That led to a bit of a concerned, scared silence.

Natalie, Hua, and Liam weren’t the only people from their respective delegations, but they were the only ones that he was really willing to speak with and vice versa. Natalie and Hua were the highest-ranking individuals from their respective groups anyway, so he didn’t mind only dealing with them. Their venue of choice was a converted Hilton, which had been magically remodelled with this and that, none of which Will particularly cared about.

What he did care about was that he could have a nice, hot shower without anyone threatening to murder him as well as gain access to a hotel room where he could quietly gain his last two skills. After explaining what he wanted to do to, the others agreed to give him some space to finally round out his skill list.

“Twenty-four skills so far,” he said aloud. “Twenty-eight, counting the sigil skills. Two more to go.”

He’d gotten two tablets from Nymlera, both of which seemed to suit his purposes pretty well. Earlier, he’d decided to affix the tablet of the creator to his Death-affixed Soul and the tablet of the destroyer to his Corruption-affixed Affinity, but now that he thought about it again, that didn’t seem quite right. Affinity was a significantly less destructive attribute than Soul was, even if both of his elements tended towards destruction.

Will wondered if he could mix the two tablets and provide elements of both the creator and destroyer to both his new skills.

There was only one way to find out.

Closing his eyes, he drew on both tablets and absorbed them at once.

#

“Was that not allowed?” Will asked the Hunger. “I thought for sure that it’d be okay to affix two tablets at the same time.”

Having his sigil hijack his skill affixations was a familiar event by now, but he had thought that the god would let him see the skill visions one more time before the end.

“It was permitted,” Kadael said. “In fact, I encourage your hunger for discovery. That is not why I summoned you.”

“Yeah?” Will asked. “Then why am I here?”

“We need to have a conversation,” his god replied.

“That’s never a promising start. Well, I’m here. We’re having a conversation. What’s it about?”

“The Crown,” said a new, equally familiar voice, opening the gate into the Hunger’s realm like it was a normal door and not a protected soul-space.

“Sadareth,” Will said, acknowledging her with a nod. “Great, now there’s two of you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Corruption wielder, other gods are meddling in your upcoming summit. Do you know what we plan to do?”

“Meddle back?”

Both of the gods smiled at the same time, which was shockingly disconcerting. Sadareth’s smile was predatory just like Caiyeri’s, and Kadael’s was, well, hungry.

“Of course,” the Hunger said. “I knew I liked you.”