[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 77: Overwhelming Intensity

Nymlera Brooksoul was newly gold rank, and she knew that she was the most powerful participant remaining in this tournament.

Thalia, her daughter, had promise, but she relied on external factors to turn battles in her favor. Her advancement was not directly fueled by monster cores, but she had tainted many of her weapons and connections with them. In the pursuit of power, Thalia had forgotten perfection.

On the other hand, Nymlera had never consumed a single one. Her aura, trained across a century of meditation and meticulous planning, was stronger than any of the abyssal elves could manage. She had nothing but disdain for them. A squadron full of gold-rank terrorists, each of them scrabbling for power like children, taking any and all means to increase their strength no matter how much it poisoned them.

Nymlera had known from the start that she would be the one to fulfill the contract. Even after Arcadia as a whole had failed, she had never lost faith in knowing that her slow, closed-off cultivation of power would ultimately lead her to victory.

Against a fresh-faced silver rank human with not even two months of experience, she was more than assured in her victory.

“I have your race to thank for this, truly,” she said to him, extending her senses into the area around her. “Killing enough of them proved sufficient for the revelation that brought me to gold rank.”

There was a pause on the other side as the human digested that.

With much less fear than she had anticipated him being filled with, he spoke. “Right, then. Still a piece of shit, it seems? It takes a special kind of evil to make even an inhuman monster hate you for what you did to it.”

“You speak of the gestalt,” Nymlera said, surprised. “You survived an encounter with it.”

William Li-Brown laughed, but there was no humor in the cold sound. “Survived? I beat it until it was begging me to let it run. That thing is my pet more than yours now, Nymlera.”

She searched for the tell-tale mark of a lie in his aura, but the human was frustratingly good at controlling it. He must have used monster cores to achieve his silver rank as quickly as he had, but he had the aura control of one of Nymlera’s children. She was certain that she could overpower it with just a bit of effort, but she could not tell at a glance whether or not he was bluffing.

Not that it mattered. The human was certainly lying. He must have somehow gleaned the gestalt’s mind with a skill or a powerful item received through pure luck, or perhaps the abyssal traitor he’d gotten onto his side had informed him of some reconnaissance that her clan had used to gain insight upon Nymlera’s experiments.

“I don’t have to kill you,” he continued. They were still behind forcefields now, which Nymlera knew from experience was to give them more time to speak with each other, allowing sponsors from other galaxies more time to determine which side they might want to pick in the future. “But you’re making it real hard to find a reason not to.”

“You will not kill me because you cannot,” Nymlera said simply. “You have promise, boy, but you would be much better suited to this world if I had a year with you in a laboratory.”

“Oh, lovely. I can end up as a lobotomized freak of nature? Joy.”

“That is the nature of life.”

“Great, profound statement when you’re not the one under the knife. Though I’m not sure you’re even qualified to speak on that, given that you couldn’t keep a leash on the one monster you were supposed to be able to handle.”

That was a point of irritation for her, but she cloaked the ripple of emotion that passed through her.

“Your aura control sucks shit,” Will said, voice echoing through the halls of their prison-like arena with frozen clarity. “Well, it doesn’t suck as bad as the humans, but come on. Caiyeri has better aura control than you. Maybe that’s a product of your circumstances type thing. She had to control her aura perfectly or risk corruption or death every day, but you had a nice little settlement all to yourself. Lost your edge, didn’t you?”

“You know not what you speak of,” Nymlera said. “You are trying to unbalance me with false remarks. I know your kind. The soul of the last one I met is screaming inside a flesh golem even as we speak. He is much more pleasant that way.”

“First of all, yes, I am, and it’s working. Second, ooh, veiled threats. I’m a big fan of those from a proper villain, but you barely rate a B-. The only reason I know who you are is because you helped make a monster that is, frankly, much scarier than you are. I’d give that one a solid A.”

She was not going to let a human unsettle her, especially not one as young as this impudent upstart. As Nymlera searched for a retort, she began planting the seeds of her victory. Her magic let her summon dozens of minions that she would design specifically to counter the attributes she could divine from any given target. For as long as she could remember, she had used it as the basis for her experiments, filling out the ranks of the life elf footsoldiers. They were far weaker that way than they were under her direct control, but they had been sufficient firepower.

Now, she could easily abuse her century of experience to adapt to the man before her.

The Elven Mother had seen fit to grant Nymlera glimpses of this man, so she knew the devastating power he could bring to bear. He had affected the gestalt through underhanded tricks, but this was no open area. Her summons granted her perfect information, and they would be able to disperse the shadows he had inflicted corruption upon the gestalt with.

“You use borrowed strength from the Abyss and claim to be powerful?” Nymlera sneered. “Don’t think that I don’t see through your smoke and mirrors, human.”

That got him to pause again.

As she waited for Will’s response, she fully summoned her minions. The forcefield penning each of them in was large enough that she had more than enough time to fully empower the menagerie of monsters she could now summon. She chose half a dozen human forms, mimicking the ones that had come from the area the human had contested her in.

“Wait,” Will said, clearly holding back laughter. “You think that I ”

The forcefields dropped, and she sent her minions forth. They were at the lower end of gold rank, but since they were summons, their durability and other attributes were all comparable to a mid-to-high rank silver’s.

She didn’t know why he had found her assessment so amusing, but it was simple logic to determine that the abyssal elves, the only ones who sought to harness corruption instead of battling it, would be the ones supplying him. That amusement likely meant that her assumption was incorrect, but how? The system did not supply its Users with corruption, end of story.

Nymlera centered herself. She could not assume that he did not have access to corruption now, and so she would commit to this battle as such.

She had six summons, and she sent them throughout the prison-like arena, each of them taking a different direction. With each of the summons carrying her aura senses further, her eyes spread throughout the entire facility. There was no way he could hide.

And yet, frustratingly, he did. Everywhere the summons looked, hallways were cloaked in impenetrable shadow. It was magical darkness that did not bend to the typical darkvision-style skills, and as for his aura signature—that was even harder to track. He blended into the shadows, his aura simultaneously pulsing out with startling strength and keeping itself so smoothly suppressed that she couldn’t identify his position, even with the summons.

The details of his aura, at least, gave her enough information to make this a surefire win. It was tinged with elements of hunger and death. As a life elf, every one of her summons carried a counter to the latter, and as to the former… she expended mana to propagate changes out to her active summons, shaping and delivering a skill to counter it.

Skill: [Adaptive Creation]

- Spell (augmentation).

- Cost: very high mana multiplied by the number of active summons.

- Cooldown: varies.

Gold

Delivers a skill one rank lower than the rank of this skill to all summons. This skill can be any skill that you can visualize and replicate with your mana.

That last qualifier was the sticking point of this skill. It was much more difficult than it seemed to be able to recreate a skill from scratch, starting from nothing and winding up with a power that could break reality. On top of that, the mana cost was prohibitively high.

A century of practicing, refining, and expanding her mana had given her the resources she needed to be a true terror with it. This time, she gave each of her summons a skill she had spent some two decades refining to deal with the occasional goblin intrusions onto her territory.

Skill: [Twisted Satiation]

- Passive (body, magic).

- Cost: none.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

Reverses and magnifies the effect of all drain skills used on you.

Against an aura that passively drained everyone who folded to it, it would prove to be incredibly effective.

At least, that was her assumption.

Then, one of her summons died. In a single instance of abrupt, brutal violence, it fought with a hidden presence, and then it was gone.

What?

Nymlera identified the position it had come from, then sent her remaining summons at it. She pulsed her aura out, looking for irregularities.

None.

Then, a moment later, her five remaining summons became four.

“Cute,” Will’s voice said, sounding oddly hollow. It bounced through the prison, making it impossible to identify where it was coming from. “Though I wouldn’t say sending me reminders of my past victories is the best way to destabilize me. I was wondering what happened to the rest of that gang. Thought a single fight was too much to clear all of them.”

Three. How was he clearing them so fast? They had been designed specifically to counter him.

“Reveal yourself,” Nymlera demanded, strengthening her aura. “You fight like a coward.”

A bell tolled.

Two.

She grit her teeth. Her summons were her primary method of dealing damage, but if it came down to it, she could fight at close range using her aura as a battering ram. As one of the few who had trained it up to gold without assistance, it was incredibly strong, enough to kill a bronze or silver-rank even if they tried to resist her.

One.

A cloud of shadow exploded in front of her, obscuring her sight. She drew on her aura sense, but couldn’t find anything but the noise Will had scattered throughout the arena.

“You know,” her opponent said, closer to her last summon than she could have predicted, “It’s nice that all of these have stealth skills on them, but it turns out that when they’re marked for death, I can see them through the walls just fine.”

Nymlera heard a crack, and her last summon died.

She tightened her aura, drawing it back in to condense it into layers.

In front of her, the shadow resolved into the figure of a man, brushing off the cufflinks on a white button-down that hadn’t even been bloodied. Nymlera could finally sense his aura. Silver-rank, as she’d expected.

“You,” she said.

“Me,” Will agreed amiably. “Looks like you don’t have many direct ways to hurt me.”

“You have no way to get closer,” she countered. “Try me.”

“Is that a challenge?” Will took a step closer, then another.

Their auras met.

Nymlera was a gold. A true gold, not a monster core one. William, she knew—or thought she knew—was a monster core silver. This should have gone far beyond just not being close. The difference in magnitude between their auras should have been like that between a silver-rank and a human without the system’s.

And yet, in the first moment, she felt his aura push back

Will smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes.

“Your plan was competent,” he said. “Your summons might’ve caused me trouble if you looked for the right elements, or if they weren’t so obvious in their intentions. You’re not weak, Nymlera, but you’re arrogant, overconfident, and you didn’t use your resources the way you could. How’s your relationship with Mother?”

“Ask her in hell,” Nymlera suggested, a thrum of fear running through her body as Will took another step forward. 

When her aura had been this concentrated before, it had been strong enough to prevent even gold-rank assassins from penetrating her defenses. That had been when she was silver.

“How long have you been hiding?” Will asked. “I know about you. Caiyeri’s given me the run-down.”

He stepped closer again, hunger pressing into Nymlera’s aura. She struck out with an empowered fist, and he dodged it like he’d seen it coming last week.

“Turns out that if you don’t fight people, you don’t grow as a fighter.” 

Will was noticeably straining, Nymlera saw. He couldn’t hide his expression. That should have been a win, but she was struggling too. She stopped speaking, focusing entirely on winning this battle.

“You know a lot of things,” Will continued. “But do you know what you don’t know?”

His aura pressed further. How was he doing this? It was terrifyingly strong. How could a silver rank be overpowering her? How?

“Let me tell you. You don’t know what it’s like to have a god rummaging through your soul, doing its level best to torture you into being its willing thrall. You don’t know how it feels to have your introduction to the system being your body falling to pieces. You don’t know what it’s like to be Beyond this world.”

Nymlera stumbled back.

“Every setback is an opportunity. You’ve had ample time to make use of that, but you got complacent. You don’t remember what it’s like to lose, do you? To be inches from death with every passing moment?”

Pain. That was… what was this? Her aura had been suppressed before, but that had been by a goddess. She hadn’t fought back against it—the Mother had been reshaping her soul.

“No? Well, let me remind you.”

This was pure, unadulterated force. Every fabric of her being lit aflame, her soul screaming out as she tried to resist, but she couldn’t. All she had to fight with at this range was her aura. She had always relied on her minions to fight. An individual battle like this was not what she was suited for, but she’d known that she was the strongest.

She’d known.

But the pain seared through her entire existence, fragmenting her mind, and all of the things she had been so sure she’d known began to slip away.

Nymlera Brooksoul, creator of the devouring gestalt, matriarch of one of the greatest life elf clans, screamed.

In this moment, she sounded no different from any of the thousands she’d butchered.

#

[Envoy of Mercy] granted you one level of [Blessed] and one level of [Purified].

[Nymlera Brooksoul] has forfeited.

You have won your third duel.

“Shit,” Will said. “I did not want her to stay alive.”

He’d forgotten that it was possible to forfeit at any moment, and it had cost him.

During his final training session with the Hunger, he’d begun a different time of aura training. Will had refined his aura into a perfect shield, forced to mold it and his soul into a form that could withstand the force of the Hunger.

As it turned out, in a world where aura control was so very, very important, a shield could very easily be made into a sword.

Will’s efforts were crude. Rudimentary. After only one “lesson,” all he could do was attempt to use brute force.

Sometimes, though, brute force was all he needed. Sen’s eyes had confirmed most of his guesses about Nymlera and patched up the gaps in his knowledge. She’d put literally everything into her summoner build, and as strong as they were, they really didn’t play with corruption well. 

Will had been able to overpower their auras and hit them with a nasty chain using the slayer sword, scepter, Decaying Touch, The Bell Tolls, and Ghostflame roughly in that order. Though the mana expenditure had been massive, he had been able to gather their mana and health back afterwards with his Death attribute. Mark for Death, notably, had not been involved. He couldn’t afford to take damage instead of draining health while they were alive, after all.

He looked back at the now-empty prison facility and winced, wishing he could get a message through to Earth down below. The rush of power that had surged through him when he’d been crushing Nymlera’s soul with the incredible intensity of his aura had felt too good. It had been addicting, and he’d reveled in causing someone else pain.

Will didn’t really care if that made him a bad person. He did care that it had meant that Nymlera would survive to see another day, back on the surface.

“Maybe if I’m lucky, the gestalt and Nymlera will take care of themselves. Oh, who am I kidding? Frankenstein and his monster never got shit sorted out, and I doubt this’ll work out either.”

He sighed, waiting for the teleportation to take him. He was going to have to figure out a better way to cheat this time. The system, perhaps detecting the BS he’d pulled off last time, had placed him on an asteroid that was largely isolated.

Instead of the transportation, though, he received a system message.

[William Li-Brown], you have been offored a sponsorship.

A second, identical message appeared shortly afterwards, then a third. Four. Five.

“What the fuck?”

Current open sponsor offers:

- The Lady of Overwhelming Violence

- The Order of the Striker

- The Lord of Loss

- [Two sponsors wished to keep their identities hidden]

You will be transported off-planet in [1 minute].

“No, seriously,” Will said, looking up. “What the fuck?”