[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 106: The First Human Summit

The city of Geneva had gone relatively untouched by the dungeons populating the world thanks to a combination of a lucky draw with only low-rank dungeons spawning in the area, a relative lack of Arcadian infrastructure clashing with the existing city, and a heavy high-rank presence in the city brought upon by the desire of several European post-apocalypse factions to have something approaching a neutral ground.

The final piece of the puzzle as to why it was such a functional city when so many other major ones had been repeatedly raided by monsters and turned to ruins came from a passive effect that extended across the entire city. Nobody was entirely sure what caused it, though most assumed that it was a gold-rank or higher artifact that had either been looted from a dungeon or broken free from one.

Will felt the adverse effect settle into place as Nathan brought him over the Alps. The mountains were beautiful, of course, but he wasn’t here to be a tourist. He was grateful that Nathan had told him about the widespread AoE that had been placed over the entire city on the way there, because it was very likely that he would’ve done something dumb otherwise.

The amount of ambient mana in the city was vanishingly small, and it was clear just from feeling it out that it was the result of something artificial. Will’s aura control was strong enough that he could sense the odd stillness in the air, and he caught the way that the dregs of mana still remaining all seemed to be flowing down towards a central point in the city.

“Mana suppression field,” Nathan said. “Not harmful to us, but it’ll make it nearly impossible to level, consolidate gains, and most importantly, recover mana. Items won’t recharge either.”

That was one of the primary reasons why there hadn’t been any territorial conflict over Geneva. Dozens of factions large and small had interests in it, but when Users would be reducing themselves to their stats and items, which would also run out eventually, there was much less of an incentive to fight on the inside. That was magnified the fact that any faction that took the city would inevitably be crushed by the fresher forces that would be waiting outside the suppression field, creating a bit of a no-win situation that disincentivized attacking.

Mana potions alleviated the issue some, but even those could only go so far. Will personally had enough access to non-potion mana regeneration that he hadn’t learned much of their limitations so far, but Nathan had experienced suppression fields of similar effects during his time in Selrethnir and therefore had the requisite experience.

As it turned out, the amount of mana a potion could restore decreased sharply after a day without proper meditation or related mana cycling technique that worked by absorbing the ambient magic into one’s body. It continued decaying after that, which meant that although it was technically possible to operate like normal in the Geneva suppression field with a truckload of potions, it would be very, very expensive.

Will didn’t have much faith that this was going to be entirely bloodless. He had enemies amongst some of the major factions thanks to the trial of the champion, and if every major human group had been invited, he was sure the Contractor was here too—or, at least, a proxy. That man seemed like the type of person who would use puppets to deal with people. That was how he’d handled the guy with the necrotic wyrm, at least.

The summit itself was to take place at a newly constructed dome in the center of the city. Will had never been to Geneva, but even he could tell that it had come after the apocalypse. Its architecture was infused with magic, allowing for the creation of physics-defying arches that looked like they were moments from collapse but held anyway.

There were more people here than Will had expected, but that made sense in retrospect. There had been over three thousand participants in the trial of the champion, and those weren’t representative of everyone important a nation could send by a long shot—and, of course, that had been before the advent of a load of powerful otherworlders.

Nathan dropped both of them on a large field that had been marked out as a landing strip for flights. There were a couple of other silver-rankers who had taken a similar flight path to them, some under their own power and others with items. The bulk of people in the area were getting out of jets or other, more esoteric vehicles, though there were quite a few planes that were just that—large passenger airliners without a lick of magic.

Will supposed that made sense, given the suppression field. A traditional plane wasn’t going to stop working without mana, though he would have been a bit worried about the ease with which it could be shot down.

“Shouldn’t you put your armor away?” Will asked. “Or are you not worried about running out of battery?”

“Like I said earlier, I’m used to these fields. I designed my suit to be usable for a year in a platinum-rank suppression field, which is the highest one I could find in one of Selrethnir’s towers.”

“And did it work?”

“I designed it half a year ago. I got a bit sidetracked.”

Will snorted. “Yeah, no shit.”

Mana conservation was going to be a bit of a concern for Will. He was used to spamming his skills all he needed, since killing anything hostile gave him a solid recharge thanks to his Death element.

He didn’t want to be the one to fire the first bullet here, and there was no way he was going to go around killing weaklings just to recharge his mana, but that left him in a slight conundrum. Keeping the hunger phantasm active cost a bit of power, as did his familiars—oh, that reminded him.

“Hey, Aza,” Will said, looking to the sky. “How’s this field for you?”

Sen didn’t give two shits about the suppression field, which Will was thankful for. Losing his extra eyes would be like, well, losing his eyes. He’d gotten accustomed to having near-perfect information of any given battlefield.

Aza, on the other hand, didn’t operate the same way the Thousand Eyes did. His life force was limited to the amount of mana Will had poured into the ritual, which could be concerning.

A winged figure resolved into the form of Will’s new familiar, who landed gracefully next to him.

“It would take much more than this to damage me, even in this form,” Aza said. “In the event I need to refuel, I will leave the area of the field.”

“Fantastic,” Will said drily. “My familiar’s superpower is to be able to fuck off and leave me alone.”

“In essence,” Aza agreed amicably. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be off now. It is not my place to interfere.”

“He said, interfering,” Will replied. “I seem to recall something about rigging what skill I was going to get?”

Aza winked at him and took off without another word, drawing stares and hushed whispers from the people in the immediate area.

“How many of these people actually matter?” Will asked as he walked with Nathan, keen on conserving his mana. Before he’d interrupted his own train of thought, he’d been thinking about mana costs.

Passives still cost magic, and Will didn’t want to spend too much of his potion reserve just to keep up his ability to run faster when there was no reason to.

“Very few,” Nathan said. “The ones that matter are really goddamn important, though. I recognize a handful of the auras in the area.”

“Me too,” Will grimaced. “I see Lu Jie. His faction isn’t going to be happy with me.”

Fortunately, his allies were also either in the area or arriving, so Will sent out a few messages letting them know he was here.

“Aw, crap,” Nathan said, suddenly pausing as they passed what looked to be a hotel serving attendees of the summit. “I should go.”

“See something nice in the bar?” Will asked. “I thought you didn’t drink.”

“No, it’s not that—shit, she’s here. Look, I’ll catch you later, just go find a hotel or something. Your friends are here, aren’t they? Go link up.”

“Dude, what—“

Nathan’s power armor lit up and he blasted off, leaving a dent in the ground alongside an exhaust plume big enough to cover half the street and many surprised onlookers.

“Wasn’t that the orbit guy?” someone asked their friend. “I thought he worked alone. Who’s the weirdo he was talking to?”

Will looked in the direction of the people talking, and they hurriedly looked away, dashing inside the hotel venue.

It was a good thing that he’d retracted as much of his aura as possible, he mused. It wouldn’t have done to send a bunch of silver-rankers who were presumably representatives of at least somewhat relevant human factions into a blind panic and have them all try to kill him on the first day.

“That would be a tomorrow activity at the very least,” Will mused. “Maybe a week from now. I’d like to go at least that long without murdering someone. Wait, is it still murder if they attack me first? Self-defense is a thing, but does that still factor in if they were never really going to hurt me in the first place?”

No, he decided. That was a little too arrogant. Silver-rankers were still very capable of threatening and even killing him, especially scrappy ones like him who had grown very accustomed to fighting above their rank. The late Osiris Adebayo had been a silver-ranker, and if he’d dropped one of his nukes on Will, he would have been nothing but a speck of radioactive ash in the wind now.

You have received a chat request from [Yui].

Will raised an eyebrow. That was the global rank three, wasn’t it? He pulled up the leaderboard to verify and yep, there she was. Yui was the one who he’d noted as almost certainly a Dread Executor candidate.

He accepted the request.

Yui: Talking to yourself? That’s an easy way to be shot on sight.

Five seconds after the message came through, Sen’s eyes caught sight of a gold-ranker plummeting from one of the mountains. She was surrounded by a crackling mass of magic that felt intimately familiar to Will, though it was a couple degrees off of what he had.

Void Knight was the base class for Void Reaver, and he was pretty sure that when he’d been offered it, it had been with the attributes of Space, Poison, and Corruption, but the latter had also had the potential to be swapped out for Chaos, which was what Will suspected she was using now.

She was also garnering attention from onlookers, though it appeared that Yui was a known element to many of them. The common theme of the lower-ranking representatives was less surprise and more the kind of awe that came with seeing an A-list celebrity in the flesh.

Will made a face, correctly guessing where she was heading for.

Will: Yo, Nathan.

Nathan: Yes?

Will: Fuck you. You know what for.

Nathan: Sorry. She’s from my world—er, well, the same other world, I should say. We were on Selrethnir together.

Will: Evil?

Nathan: No, definitely not, just… she’s a lot.

Will: Sounds like there’s a story there.

Will’s aura senses alerted him to the rapidly approaching presence, which had magically redirected itself far from the mountain that the User had apparently jumped off of, as it drew closer and closer to him.

He prepared himself to negate the skill if necessary. Ravenous Feast was a sigil skill that cost quite a lot of mana that he hadn’t had the opportunity to use in combat yet because of its cost, but if he needed to block a powerful attack with Aza not present, he could use it.

Yui became a blur of grey and red energy, falling towards the ground like a thunderbolt, but she didn’t cast a single attack at him.

Instead, the blur suddenly stopped on the street right in front of him, hovering about a foot off the ground in a pose that suggested she’d just leapt from a mountain. Which, in fairness, she had.

Contrary to the grey magic that surrounded her, Yui’s attire suggested that she might be a ice mage of some kind. She wore a close-fitting blue-white bodysuit and a cloak that billowed out behind her. The cloak seemed to be filled with stars, and Will easily identified it as a gold-rank item. Her hair was tied back into a braid that seemed to melt into the cloak, and a grey mask hid the lower part of her face.

Yui didn’t have a weapon out, which was promising, but she also didn’t seem very happy to see him, which wasn’t. 

With Nathan’s sudden departure and Yui’s arrival shortly after, quite a few people were poking their heads out of the nearby inns and other facilities.

“Nothing to see here,” Yui said sharply, sending a pulse of aura that wasn’t quite hostile but was threatening enough that the onlookers got the message and backed off. “Nice to meet you. I’m Yui.”

Will massaged his temples. “Well, at least you didn’t start the conversation by going YOU super angrily.”

“Why would I do that? I haven’t even properly met you yet.”

“Oh, thank god.” Will had had quite enough of powerful people already knowing his powers and profile inside and out. “I assume you have my name already, but it’s Will. William Li-Brown.”

Yui winced. “Your name is terrible to pronounce. Would you like to go somewhere quieter?”

Sen’s eyes showed Will how many people were doing their best to pretend like they weren’t discreetly observing the two of them. It was a strangely uncomfortable feeling. Enough of the people here recognized the significance of at least one of the two people in this conversation to ignore the urge to fly or fight that Will’s Outcast title imbued into his aura. 

Being spied upon by a thousand eyes that weren’t his own didn’t sit well with him. Will was sure that there was some level of hypocrisy in that, given that he had his own familiar, but he maintained mentally that he would have been okay with this if they had been less obvious about it. There were people using augmented binoculars to look at him! They could have at least hidden that.

“Yeah, somewhere less populated would be nice,” Will agreed. “Where are we heading?”

“An empty cafe,” Yui replied. “I visited it on my last trip to Geneva.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Once. My country wished for me to broker an agreement with the South Korean factions. I visited a couple of places.”

“How long have you actually been here? It’s only been, what, a week? Two weeks?”

“Shall we sit down before we continue?” Yui asked. “There are people listening.”

“Right. Lead the way.”

Yui had the good grace to at least only use mildly superhuman speed. Both of them were relying solely on their attributes, not wanting to draw on their magic because of the suppression field, which put the otherworlder solidly head and shoulders above Will.

She stopped at an establishment about three blocks from the dome, marked simply with an icon of a brown coffee mug.

It was full to the brim. Every single table inside was occupied. By all appearances, it was a nice, upscale cafe, but the ‘empty’ part Yui had mentioned didn’t seem to be accurate.

Will mentioned as much to her.

“It’ll be empty in a moment,” she said, opening the door.

They walked in, both of them suppressing their auras as much as possible, but all conversation stopped the instant that the two of them walked through the door. Given how most of the room was looking at Yui, it was probably her who’d stopped the conversation. Though Will knew quite a few powerful people, he was still a relative nobody on the global scale.

Yui walked to the counter and tossed a diamond credit over. “I’m renting the cafe. If everyone else would mind leaving?”

Her aura washed out over the room, once again not quite to the point where she would start harming them but with enough intensity to tell them that she wasn’t actually asking. People seemed to get the message, standing up and leaving en masse. Some of them left behind full meals completely uneaten in their haste, though most took their orders with them. Anything that was left behind vanished after a few moments, spatial storage magic flashing for a brief moment.

Will took a closer look at the tables, impressed by the amount of magic they must have invested in something relatively useless. He was about to use Pages of the Past on it before remembering that he wasn’t supposed to be wasting mana right now.

“Ladybug, half sugar,” Yui ordered. “Normal toppings.”

“Of course,” the nervous-looking bronze-ranker behind the counter said. “And you, sir… uh, Miss Yui, is he meant to be here?”

“Yes, he’s with me,” she said. “Will, would you like to order anything?”

Will scanned the menu with a couple of Sen’s eyes, not looking up. “Large hot latte, please. I haven’t had coffee in ages. I could use some.”

“Um, one regular passionfruit green tea with pearl, half sugar, and a large hot latte? Is that correct, ma’am?”

Yui nodded. “Thank you. Keep some of the tip for yourself.”

She gestured to a booth and slid into it as Will sat down across from her. The drinks were out in record speed, which Will assumed had something to do with the fact that the barista was actively using skills in the process.

“Um, if you don’t mind,” their server said. “Could I, um…”

“Yes, you can have a picture,” Yui said with the slightly pained undertone of someone who had gotten this a few too many times.

After that was done, she sat back into her seat and sipped at her tea silently. Will looked at her expectantly as he drank from his own.

“So,” he said eventually. “You wanted to talk.”

Yui set her drink down. “Yes. I had hoped that he would not run off, but I’ll see him later anyway, won’t I?”

“Who is he, to be clear?” Will asked. “Nathan, right?”

“Yes. We were briefly involved on Selrethnir.”

“Ah,” Will said. “And now the pieces fall into place. He’s your ex?”

“Yes, but he was at least a good fighter,” Yui said. “I was hoping to clear the air sooner rather than later. Then I saw you.”

“That’s a pretty awful segue from ‘this is my ex and I wanted to talk to him,’ you know,” Will said. “That said, I’m pretty sure you’re not looking to date.”

“No. I can simply sense enough of your soul to understand that you are like me.”

Will drained half of his coffee in one gulp, feeling out Yui’s aura.

He raised an eyebrow in surprise. “This is the first time I’ve seen another aura look like it’s been beat to shit and reshaped.”

She didn’t have a shattered soul, not as far as he could tell, but neither was her aura anything like the other ones he’d seen throughout Earth.

“I prefer the term forged myself,” Yui said. “Brushing close enough to oblivion can harden your soul. I found a particular certainty through death.”

“In the same way you might want to find order through chaos?” Will asked. “You’re scouting me?”

Yui relaxed at his sentence. “Confirming your candidacy. I am no Dread Executor. I simply do what one of them must.”

“Which is?”

She drank the rest of her tea before leaning in over the table. “Eliminate. Eradicate.”

“Execute,” Will finished. “Very cute. What exactly are you looking at here?”

“There is a rot in this summit,” Yui said, her stare intensifying until her eyes were literally blazing with magic. “Gods and mortals alike are trying to stop a better future. I am asking for your help in cutting it out.”