[System Decay] Chapter 51: Sapience Check

Will dashed from branch to branch, incapacitating spiders and other similar crystal beasts with his hunger aura and phantasm before dropping multi-target Mark for Deaths. Will played with his movement abilities, reveling in the massive increase to his mobility. With the airdash and the hunger phantasm, he added an entire new axis of movement to his arsenal, enabling him to operate in three dimensions instead of two.

With all three movement skills active at once time, Will was reaching speeds that he couldn’t have dreamed of before.

Skill: [Escape Artist]

- Passive (body).

- Cost: none.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

Never look back.

Your movement speed is increased at a rate inversely proportional to the amount of equipment you are wearing (maximum of 50% increase).

Your movement speed is increased by up to an additional 50% if you are currently being attacked.

Silver-rank addition: If you are being attacked, you gain greatly increased control of your aerial mobility.

Will did his best to attact the attention of any many of the monsters as he could to keep Escape Artist triggered. The crystal beasts had less variance than he’d initially assumed they would. Most of them had one each of a melee attack, ranged attack, and a movement ability, though the latter tended to be relatively weak.

Keeping their aggro on him and not the slower-moving, armored Liam was pretty easy, given the massive, threatening target he presented while his phantasm was fully extended.

Escape Artist worked wonders in the air. Physics didn’t allow for humans to control their falls very easily while in the air, and even with the phantasm, Will had been at the mercy of the forces of the winds and gravity.

Now, though, he could twist in midair freely, stepping off of platforms he made with his phantasm and kicking off temporary walls—and he could even redirect his glide with his body alone, making his movemements horribly unpredictable.

That wasn’t to say that he had a perfect evasive pattern, though. Will was still new to his silver-rank powers and body, and though he’d trained pretty well with Caiyeri, that didn’t make him instantly amazing at this. Predicting enemy attacks was difficult when there were over a dozen of them at any one time firing at him, and combined with skills that moved much further than he was used to, he took a ranged attack every now and then.

Thankfully, his new rank kept him from taking a mortal hit, though some of them did penetrate further than the flesh.

Will was equal parts disturbed and excited that when a bronze-rank spear shot from a crystal hedgehog stuck a couple inches into him, he didn’t feel his body immediately start to shut down like it had when he’d taken near-lethal hits before.

“I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be a kidney there,” he said, ignoring his sword in favor of ripping the quill out with his bare hands. “Am I protected on the inside now, too?”

Even the bleeding stopped quickly thanks to the afflictions that he’d laid down on the monsters providing him with healing through Soul Link.

“Silver rank is fucking awesome.”

Down below, Liam was taking full advantage of the space that Will had created for him, clambering from branch to branch. His movement abilities weren’t up to snuff, still being at bronze-rank. That leap skill he’d used to smash those two spiders must have been high-risk or high-cost, because he wasn’t using it now.

“Keep up!” Will shouted downwards, spiraling to one side to avoid a barrage of crystallized venom.

“If you say so!” Liam shouted back.

A second later, Will had to spiral even further away as a massive red bullet surged past him, breaking the branches apart as they did. They weren’t thin branches, either—these offshoots were thick enough to be tree trunks of their own, and there were entire crystallized ecosystems on them, and yet Liam’s ability tore them apart, a red wave of force ripping the branches from the trunk and smashing pieces off of the core crystal itself.

Even as an ally, Will had to shield himself to keep from being blown away by the passing of the skill, air-dashing upwards at max power so he could ride the wave of force like a massive updraft, increasing the surface area of his phantasm and reinforcing it with silver-rank mana to keep it from breaking against the skill.

“What the hell is that?” Will tried to say, but the screaming wind stole his words away. Instead of trying to shout again, he went for a skill analysis.

Skill: [Pages of the Past]

- Spell (divination).

- Cost: moderate mana.

- Cooldown: 6 seconds.

Silver

Allows you to detect magical effects that were used in your immediate surroundings in the last 24 hours. If the rank of the effect is at below the rank of this skill, you can also glean insight into what the effect is.

[Traces of the Past] - Also allows you to detect footsteps and read conversations made in the area during the same time window. 

[Lingering Resonance] - You gain insight into the ambient magic of the area. Strong auras that were present in the last 24 hours as well as any active magical wards or traps will also be visible to you.

Will didn’t need the skill to tell that Liam’s aura had abruptly increased in strength. That much had been apparent when the supposed bronze-rank had rocketed up over a hundred feet in a single second.

Still, it was eye-opening to see what the skill had done. It was, somewhat predictably, a sigil skill. It aligned with Liam’s aura much better than the other skills he’d used up until this point, that was for sure.

The name and specifics of the skill were inaccessible, which came as a surprise. Will supposed that the gods wanted to keep their sigil skills secret? That made sense if they were competing against all the other gods.

Clearly, the Hunger needed him to succeed, so it was likely going to be the same for him.

As Liam slowed to a stop some five hundred feet above his original position, Will airdashed back into position, getting back in the general vicinity of the tree. He was under Liam now, but some judicious use of his airdashes got him back ahead.

Liam might have still been bronze, but he had no issue dealing with the bronze monsters here.

Will let him have his fun, using the opportunity to use a few more of his upgraded skills.

Skill: [Thunder Wraith’s Grasp]

- Spell (augmentation, evocation)

- Cost: low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

A haunted storm gathers, and it grows mighty. Channels ghostly lightning into your fists or melee weapon, grasping an enemy to deliver successively greater amounts of lightning and necrotic damage.

Inflicts stacking levels of [Charged].

[Charged] - Target takes increased damage from lightning attacks. Target is easier to hit with lightning attacks. 

On a critical hit, all levels of [Charged] are expended, inflicting exponential amounts of lightning damage for each charge cleansed.

Silver-rank addition: [Charged] now causes a spark of lightning that chains to nearby enemies upon landing a strike on the target.

Will tapped each of the monsters he passed by with the slayer sword, applying his Thunder’s Wraith Grasp with every strike.

The result was as beautifully violent as he’d hoped for. Blue lightning sparked through monsters, chaining through closely-packed groups of them and frying them to bits, the electricity proving too much for their their bronze-rank crystal.

Grinning with glee, Will left a storm of electricity and death behind him. Corruption was still more effective for killing single targets, but his big complaint at bronze rank had been that he had no individual skills that could do heavy area-of-effect damage, so he’d had to rely on external explosives. With the lightning from this skill, he now had a way to deal with swarms of lesser monsters.

Around him, Will could see that other parties were not faring as well. Most of them were climbing, but he and Liam were by far the highest. Some people had given up on the challenge already, though those were a scant minority—anyone who had made it into the trial of the champion was going to be someone driven enough to get a silver-rank reward or a sigil.

Still, they couldn’t match up to him at all.

Will was tempted to write them all off, but he knew he couldn’t. Liam had seemed relatively harmless at first, but his sigil skill had been blindingly powerful. There was every chance that the others were the same.

This tournament was going to be a challenge, and he was damn right to treat it like one.

Not that he was going to let that stop him from having his fun.

He bounded up, tagging monsters with marks, corruption, and lightning charges. Liam finished off the ones that Will’s skills couldn’t eliminate, increasing in speed as he did.

Will could detect the skill that Liam was using that boosted his Speed and Power attributes for each kill he got within a short span of time.

“Seems more thematically fit for my class, but okay,” he muttered.

Despite his aerial mobility, Will struggled to stay ahead of Liam. He could easily see how the other man would become a monster if left unchecked, even at bronze rank.

That said, his silver-rank attributes ultimately won out, driving him higher and further than Liam could manage.

“Sorry, Liam,” Will said, flipping upside down with a trademark shit-eating grin. “Looks like I’m not gonna be the spider here. See you on the other side.”

Fifty feet under him, Liam shrugged. Even from this distance, Will could see the good humor in the man’s expression.

“See you on the other side, mate.”

Will used one more air-dash and popped into the swirling mass of magic above him.

Main Challenge 0 (Sapience Check) has been completed.

You have gained 100 bronze credits. Your health, mana, and stamina has been refreshed.

You are the 27th User to complete this challenge.

The prize was practically irrelevant to him at this point, but he’d gotten himself out.

This portal didn’t come with the same problems that the transportation into the trial itself had. An instant passed in the other-space of the teleportation, and then he was somewhere else.

Will landed on carpeted floor in what could have been the reception for an upscale hotel. There were a few people in here already, their auras radiating with silver and high bronze auras. He detected more silvers in this room than there had been right when he’d broken the barrier, he noticed. Either other gods had taken the opportunity to give their sigil-holders the boost to silver or they’d broken the barrier themselves during the initial challenge zone.

He detected a couple of familiar names from the leaderboard. Natalie Blurr was a tall, lithe British woman wearing dark leather armor standing alone in one corner, while Lu Jie, an average-height Chinese man decked out from head to toe in silver-rank armor, was speaking with a couple of others dressed similarly.

Everyone in the room glanced at him as he arrived, took note of his aura, which he’d held close to his body to limit the amount of information people could get from him, then looked away. Will felt the weight of their gazes in that brief moment, assessing him and determining that he wasn’t enough of a player to bother with.

You have sloppy aura control, Will thought. If any of them had trained their ability to sense auras, they would have been able to tell that he was a silver suppressing himself to appear like a bronze. His own control wasn’t neat enough to go undetected by competent people of his own rank, but the majority of people here were core users and hadn’t trained the basics at all.

Liam appeared less than thirty seconds after Will showed up about a dozen feet from where he’d arrived.

“Oh hey, Liam,” Will said, sliding over with a single usage of Wind Walker. “You were number 28?”

“Sure was,” the Aussie replied, clapping him on the shoulder. “Any idea where we are?”

“Looks like a glorified waiting room,” Will said. “Main Challenge 1 hasn’t showed up yet, so I’m guessing that we’re going to be stuck waiting here for a while.”

“Pretty spacy place for thirty of us,” Liam said. “If there’s a few thousand, though, I’m not sure if I’d say the same.”

“I assume they’ll be funneled somewhere else,” Will said. “I hope they’ll be funneled somewhere else.”

“So, now that we’re on more even ground,” Liam said, “care to tell me more about yourself?”

“Sure,” Will said. “Where to start…”

With Caiyeri not present in the same area as him, he figured it was a good idea to find some more allies. Expanding his sphere of influence couldn’t hurt, especially if everyone was going to return to the same places they came from when they got eliminated or won. Will had lamented the lack of real worldwide communication and infrastructure, and this seemed like a perfect time to get in on that.

Will explained the progress he’d made so far, though he neglected to mention the nasty parts with the Hunger and skimmed over parts of the tutorial.

“Hold on,” Liam said, pausing Will in the middle of a sentence. “You expect me to believe that you took on an entire six-man squad alone and didn’t even take a hit?”

“You said it yourself,” Will said. “I’m quick and sneaky.”

“Nah, there’s no way,” Liam said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Will shrugged. “If you can find me a convenient group of evil people to knock down a peg or ten, sure.”

“Plenty of those, but none you’d want to throw down with in a room like this,” Liam noted. “Lots of silvers. Trust me, you don’t want to fight them.”

Will had to choke back a laugh at that. “Yeah. Sure. I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, that’s the gist of my story. What’s yours?”

“Oh, boy,” Liam said. “This is going to be a long story.”

Will judged it to be a medium-length story as Liam told it. He’d been in his last week of boot camp when the system had descended upon Earth. Less than half of the people he’d been with had chosen to participate, but the ones that had had banded together. Liam had gained the Death element almost right off the pat, just like Will, and with his evil-seeming class, he’d been alienated from some less accepting members of the squad he’d entered the tutorial with.

Apparently, parts of Australia—or at the very least, the part that Liam was from—still had a functional government, which Will was surprised to hear. They’d kept themselves running through the apocalypse, though there had been some rather abrupt exchanges in the chain of command.

Liam had become something of a special forces man, joining up with a handful of other people with ostracized elements and operating as a shadowy force that their government could deploy to deal with particularly problematic monsters and rebel elements.

“And then, when we started killing some of the big ones, we realized we could steal their power,” he said. “Sigils. They sounded too good to be true, just like monster cores—but without the drawback.”

“So you know that cores are going to hold you back,” Will said. “You’re still using them?”

“We know enough about the world to tell that nobody’s above gold-rank, mate,” Liam said. “Cores are enough to handle what’s coming for us, and I owe it to my friends and family to do what I can to protect them while I can.”

Huh. That was surprisingly noble of him. Will’s estimation of the stranger kept rising with every word he spoke.

“I commend that,” Will said with a nod.

“You say that like you don’t use them.”

“I don’t.” Immediately after he said it, Will realized that that information was potentially something he could hide to bring out in a critical moment, but he dismissed the concern. Liam didn’t seem like the type to cause him trouble, and even if he did, well.

I can take him.

“Wow, and you’re bronze?” Liam said, genuinely impressed. “Your sigil must have been super powerful, then. Did it help you a lot?”

Will’s rank cloaking was working all too well on the core users. That was nice to know for later, at least.

“My sigil…” Will trailed off, thinking of all the pain he’d undergone at the Hunger’s hands. “Not really. It’s just a lot of hard work and a lot of opportunities. That’s all.”

“Well fuck me sideways,” Liam said. “Tell you what. Ever find yourself in Melbourne, you give me a call, yeah? You seem like the kind of guy we could use.”

“I appreciate that,” Will said. “I’ll keep you in mind.”

As they chatted, more people populated the room. For the most part, Will didn’t recognize them. After an initial burst of people, the rate of new entries slowed to a trickle, and fewer and fewer silver ranks appeared.

Will counted the people in the room as more of them teleported in. He’d been number 27, but that number had now ballooned into the eighties.

Caiyeri was the eighty-ninth person to enter the room. The left side of her body was drenched in blood, and Will detected her aura radiating off of her with a force that overpowered even the silvers. She looked pissed.

Her aura felt different in more than one way. It was a subtlety that only Will, who’d spent a massive amount of his off-time with Caiyeri meditating and refining his aura senses, had a chance of detecting.

Caiyeri had a sigil. She was hiding it well, but she’d gotten one.

The anger in her expression abated slightly when she saw Will. She waved, inventorying her bloody armor as she made her way to him and Liam.

The Aussie conjured his hammer, his skill snapping into existence around his armor once again.

Warning: Competitor-on-competitor violence is not permitted within the waiting area. Refrain until you are in an active challenge or you will be immediately disqualified.

Caiyeri paused as she approached, cocking her head.

“New friend of yours?” she asked Will.

“She’s an elf,” Liam hissed. “You didn’t tell me you befriended one. A murderer, too.”

“Self-defense isn’t murder,” Caiyeri said neutrally.

“You have bad experiences with them?” Will asked. “Don’t worry. Us too. As it turns out, elves as a race aren’t all the same. I vouch for this one.”

“I don’t need your approval,” Caiyeri told Will. “Or his, for that matter.”

“Be nice, Caiyeri,” Will said. “This is Liam. Liam, Caiyeri. She’s gotten me out of a few sticky spots and also happened to betray her nation.”

Liam didn’t un-tense, but he did put away his hammer. “If you say so, mate.”

“I’m surprised you were the first one to come through,” Will said. “There are other abyss elves, aren’t there? Plus that massive gold-rank kaiju thing.”

“Gold-rank? You never said anything about that,” Liam said.

“I was getting there.”

“They’re plotting something,” Caiyeri said. “I don’t know what. It’s always a plot with them. I doubt they’re going to let themselves be seen by humans. They know the bent of the trial already, so they can and will exploit it.”

Sure enough, after the top 100 entrants, nobody else arrived. That seemed to be the capacity limit of one room—presumably, the others had been sent to other, less nice entry points. Other than Caiyeri, no other non-human entrants made it in.

Will typed in his chat as he waited for the next challenge to appear.

Will: Congratulations on silver rank, by the way. And the sigil. What happened?

Caiyeri: The same to you on the silver. Four humans tried to enslave me. One of them was a sigil-holder. None of them survived.

Will: Jesus. Glad you’re alright.

Caiyeri: Be glad I didn’t kill more. Now look alive. I’ve burned my bridges already. You have connections to make.