[System Decay] Chapter 36: The Tyranny of Rank

What a goddamn moron. Will found it hard to believe that these were supposedly trained special force elves. Why would he just blindly believe a subordinate without double-checking things?

Maybe Will was just abnormally distrusting, but he was pretty sure that this exact situation justified being a bit paranoid.

That said, he couldn’t discount the elf as a threat.

Qwayne Two, Champion of Chaos. Level: Silver 2.

This is a squad boss.

The original Qwayne is a biological engineer, one that still produces clones for the Abyss Nation today. His variants, as the name implies, vary. Qwayne Two is an early model, created as a disposable pawn that could test chaos magic for the Abyss. His expected lifespan was two months past viability.

That was about ten years ago. As you might be able to see, he is not currently dead. Trained in the isolation of an abyssal chamber, he has little experience beyond simulations but is more than willing to kill.

Be wary of his attacks. The power of chaos is a pathway to corruption, and though it is less actively harmful to the system, there is a reason it is typically banned.

This guy’s a boss? What’s the difference? Is it the intent to kill me from the start? Does he have a vault key on him?

That didn’t matter now. All that did was winning this combat.

Decaying Touch sent corruption slithering into Qwayne’s body, distorting his skin and armor—and then, just as abruptly, it faded.

A flurry of notifications scrolled through the corner of Will’s vision.

You have inflicted a level of [Corruption] on [Qwayne Two].

[Elven Chaos Anchor] negated bronze-rank [Corruption].

[Qwayne Two] has broken the effect of [Decaying Touch].

[Qwayne Two] has gained a level of [Blessed].

Will triggered Pages of the Past and Time in a Bottle off instinct, assessing what had happened. He’d known that unknown skills could and would come into play. As a silver-ranker, Qwayne was full of unknowns. The general bent of the elf’s power had been provided to Will via system message and traitorous Caiyeri, but the specific stuff was all under the hood.

Pages of the Past, though, revealed skills and items that might otherwise have remained hidden.

Item: [Elven Chaos Anchor]

Status: 14% corrupted.

Will wanted to curse, but in the slowed time, his mouth couldn’t move fast enough to swear. Of course he would have an anchor. Caiyeri had had one, and there was no reason for them to get rid of them now that they were back in reality. Especially since he was using the Chaos element, it made sense.

What else did he have?

Skill: [Effect Inversion]

- Passive (affliction, chaos).

- Cost: low stamina and mana.

- Cooldown: 3 seconds (cleanse)/1 minute (inversion).

Silver

When you gain an affliction at the rank of this skill or lower, you can allow the power of chaos through your veins, cleansing the affliction. If the affliction is a lower rank than this skill, you gain a random boon based on the inverse of the cleansed affliction.

That explained why the corruption hadn’t properly taken hold, as well as the blessed condition he’d received in return.

Condition: [Blessed]

A being of ultimate power has looked favorably upon you, imbuing you with the strength to continue on.

- All damage taken while this boon is active is nullified. This protection decreases with time and damage taken until this boon ends.

Okay, that was really bad. He’d been able to both clear the corruption with the anchor and turn any remnants of it into a condition that was as stupidly good as corruption was devastating. The only saving grace was that the inversion passive had a cooldown of a minute, which was longer than it seemed in a straight-up fight.

Anything else?

Nothing that he’d actually activated, it appeared. Either his skills were all attack based and quite powerful or he was an idiot. Will wanted to assume the latter, but he couldn’t rely on his opponent to make mistakes.

This was still workable. He was just going to have to change a few things.

Will already had his slayer sword out in one hand, but that hadn’t been all. Knowing that the actively hostile member of the scouting trio Caiyeri brought was silver had prompted him to make some different preparations.

This was one of his first fights so far where it wasn’t him that was completely taken off guard and forced to adapt to the situation. He’d had time to prepare himself and the battlefield.

Raw force alone was unlikely to close the gap between them. Will’s Power stat was still only Bronze 1, which was a far cry from whatever Qwayne’s was. As such, when striking at the elf, what he needed to build up was afflictions.

That was harder with the Effect Inversion skill, but Will was just going to have to cope with that.

Though he couldn’t move much during the slowed time, Will was more than capable of using his instant activation skills.

Skill: [Mark for Death]

- Spell (affliction).

- Cost: moderate mana.

- Cooldown: 1 hour.

Bronze

Target any creature you can see or sense and mark them for death. During the next hour, the effectiveness of attacks and afflictions against the creature are increased, and you can track the creature through your minimap and through walls. This skill’s cooldown resets if the targeted creature dies.

[Soul Link] (bronze) - A fraction of all damage dealt to the marked creature is converted to healing for you.

Marking Qwayne should have been his first step, but he hadn’t wanted to give himself away before applying the first layer of corruption. It hadn’t worked, so here was plan B.

Mark for Death would be crucial here if he wanted to stay alive. The elf was almost certainly much more durable than he was.

As time sped up, Will slashed upwards with both blades, applying his touch-range storm spell to both of them.

Skill: [Thunder Wraith’s Grasp]

- Spell (augmentation, evocation)

- Cost: low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Bronze

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.

Compared to the power he could put behind one single, intense blow, his strike was weak and sloppy, but Will didn’t need to inflict a devastating cut—in fact, with his bronze-rank Power behind the bronze-rank weapons, he was unlikely to be able to do that, period.

But with his weapons, all he needed to do was connect.

Notifications flooded his vision.

[First Blood] doubled the power of your attack.

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

[Chieftain’s Axe of Despair] inflicted a level of [Bleed].

[Chieftain’s Axe of Despair] inflicted a level of [Altrien’s Despair].

[Chieftain’s Axe of Despair] inflicted a level of [Poisoned].

[Chieftain’s Axe of Despair] inflicted a level of [Charged].

[Senzen’s Seven-Star Slayer Sword] inflicted a level of [Charged].

Senzen’s Seven-Star Slayer Sword

Charges: 1/9

The effects set in immediately, and Qwayne’s Effect Inversion started nullifying them almost as quickly. Bleed was the first to go, followed by poison—but notably, the charged condition didn’t seem to qualify as an affliction for the purposes of the skill.

Will teleported away the moment his twin slashes landed, avoiding the inevitable retributive strike.

Qwayne’s weapon of choice was a jagged obsidian-black greatsword that he swung around like it was nothing. From the radiating cracks of acid that exploded from its tip hitting the ground, though, Will assumed he didn’t want to get hit by that.

Will: Where’s the third?

Caiyeri: Left him outside. Can’t trust him fully, like you said.

“YOU,” Qwayne bellowed. He wiped his sword across his armor, noticeably standing straighter with every passing moment. “Corruption. Banned by universal Arcadian treaty.”

Will: Leave as soon as you can. The dungeon boss isn’t dead yet, so the gate is still open.

Caiyeri: Got it.

“Not banned on my planet yet,” Will said.

They were both buying time for different reasons. Once Qwayne’s inversion came back online again, he was going to be able to turn another powerful debuff into a boon that would easily tilt the fight even further in his favor.

Will, on the other hand, knew this battlefield. He’d set it up for a proper ambush, not any of the amateur hour shit the Iron Boys had tried. He needed Caiyeri out of here, though. It wouldn’t work if there was a friendly within.

“It will be,” Qwayne said, twirling his sword around like a cheerleader baton. “I have to thank you, human.”

Quietly, Caiyeri stepped through the portal. If Qwayne noticed it, he didn’t comment on it. He must have thought she was retreating, knowing he could handle it.

“Oh yeah?” Will asked. “Why’s that?”

”Because—“

Will took advantage of the break in the elf’s concentration to teleport again.

Before the fight, he’d gone around with a load of unformed-rank daggers and claws, burying them in the dirt around the cave. Since the boss was confined to a single room for the time being, he had plenty of time to work with the rest of the dungeon. The conditions were perfect now. He could teleport basically anywhere in the room, and it was dark enough that Wraith Cloak would turn him fully invisible.

The knives weren’t the only thing he’d hidden, either. The elves had enough darkvision to see his setup, but by taking the majority of his attention, Will prevented Qwayne from noticing the two dozen oil barrels he’d placed in every possible nook and cranny.

As he stepped out the portal, fully cloaked by his invisibility skill, Will activated the store-bought detonator.

He emerged in front of a concerned-looking Caiyeri and a very nervous elf he hadn’t met before. Azure Four, going off of Identify.

“I’m going back in as soon as I can,” he said, uncorking and downing a bronze-rank mana potion. Qwayne’s mark still showed on his minimap, so the gambit obviously hadn’t killed the man.

That made sense. Stacked oil barrels had been enough to kill weak bronze-rank goblins, but with the kind of defenses this special forces clone was packing, it was unlikely that even a full cave-in could knock him out.

“Does he know about me yet?” Caiyeri asked.

Will shrugged. “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

He stepped back through the portal, activating Time in a Bottle as his body started to approach it. The process of entering a dungeon wasn’t an immediate one, and with the slowed time, Will got to experience the entire underwater sensation of traveling through the murky darkness.

Thank god I have the Space feature to keep myself from feeling this too hard.

When the not-so-dark shape of the dungeon began to come into view again, Will immediately teleported, avoiding the descending sword blow.

The dungeon was still on fire, though the oil was rapidly burning out.

Qwayne barely looked like he’d been hit at first, but a closer inspection revealed that his blessed condition was gone now, opening him up to damage once more. Bits of his chainmail armor looked burned, but that was negligible.

“Seven knew what you were doing, mm?” Qwayne said, brandishing his sword again. “I’ll have to address that when I’m back.”

Speak of the devil, Caiyeri burst through the portal half a second later.

“Great,” Will said. “That makes this a little easier.”

Will: He definitely knows. Give ‘em hell.

Caiyeri conjured a greataxe, giving it Armor Breaker and Heal Blocker.

“Everyone’s got their cards on the table now,” Will lied. “Should we get to it?”

#

For two bronze-ranks against a silver, Will had to say that he was pretty impressed with their performance.

Obviously, they hadn’t revealed the full list of their powers. Most of Qwayne’s seemed to enhance the sword he was using in some ways, and the chaotic nature of his powers made them extremely hard to defend against.

Will’s ring of adaptive shielding let him protect against some of the effects, but every time Qwayne brought his sword down, a new type of magic exploded forward from it. Will burnt far too much mana just teleporting around to avoid the attacks before realizing he could play it much more effectively by going into Time in a Bottle for a few seconds to analyze what kind of damage Qwayne was sending at him, then using the active variant of the adaptive shield to block it.

That wasn’t nearly enough to stop everything, though. Qwayne’s attributes were silver rank, and it showed. Though Will would say that the enemy elf’s swordfighting techniques weren’t anything better than what Caiyeri could offer, the sheer power and speed he could put into them meant that he and Caiyeri were always on the back foot. Whenever the sword made direct contact with Will’s shield, he found himself smashed to the ground, forced to teleport away or risk losing his head as well as the forcefield.

There was never a great opening for either of them, and they quickly found themselves being pushed back. Will didn’t need a perfect opportunity to get a clean hit in, though. Over the course of minutes, he got in glancing hits, increasing the charges on the slayer sword and the levels of the charged condition on Qwayne.

After the minute was up, he made sure not to give him any more conditions. It had taken nuking the entire cave (metaphorically, that is—Will was sure an actual nuclear weapon would have dusted the man, the dungeon, and the city around it) to break through one layer of bless. Will was definitely not going to do that a second time.

The problem was that even stacking the charged condition—which couldn’t be reversed—and building up to a crit with the slayer sword wasn’t going to be enough. Not while he was still bronze.

Will’s plans A and B had both hinged on using the combination of explosives and afflictions to get off an absolutely massive activation of The Bell Tolls, but that clearly wasn’t going to work. Even if it inflicted a fair amount of necrotic damage, the fact of the matter was just that Qwayne was more durable, stronger, and faster than both of them. It took everything they had just to survive, and Caiyeri was starting to take hits.

Plan C was… significantly less reliable, but at this point, it was looking like he was going to have to try every possibgility in his toolkit.

Will: Buy some time for me.

Caiyeri: Trying.

She started a burst of attacks, using not just her conjured weapons but a bunch of esoteric magic types, igniting the darkness with a rainbow of clashing sorcery. Qwayne responded in kind, colors pulsing through his sword. He pushed her back, forcing Caiyeri to flee even as she continued an onslaught that was rapidly turning into a desperation play. Will recognized the forcefield flashing in and out of existence.

Skill: [Emergency Shield]

- Spell (conjuration).

- Cost: low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Timing is everything.

Create a personal forcefield that absorbs damage at bronze rank. If you do not sustain heavy damage within 1 second of activating this shield, the cost of this skill increases to extreme mana. If the shield receives enough damage to break, your mana is fully restored.

After the first couple of times it worked to restore Caiyeri’s mana, Qwayne started playing around it, redirecting his magic every time the magic showed up, preventing the shield from breaking

Caiyeri: Running out of mana.

Will’s slayer sword was fully charged now, all nine slots along the edge filled with shimmering energy. When it struck, it would deal a devastating critical hit, expending all nine charges at once.

That wasn’t going to be enough.

Will: You’re doing great.

Caiyeri: Fuck you. Hurry up.

Inhaling deeply, Will used the skill he’d been watching on the edge of silver for the last week.

Over the course of the battle, the axe of despair he’d strapped to his back had passed its corruption to him. The message [Corruption Resistance] has negated bronze-rank [Corruption] was such a familiar sight by now that he barely even registered it anymore.

Will didn’t know how many levels of corruption were on him, but he hoped it was a lot.

He activated Chaos Transfer.

Suddenly, Caiyeri yelped in shocked pain and vanished, reappearing ten feet behind Will.

Caiyeri: That’s my contingency. I’m out of mana. It’s up to you now.

She collapsed backwards through the portal.

“That’s the traitor,” Qwayne said jovially. “Now, onto the human. I’ll warn you now, since you’ve been fun: you’re not going to like this.”

As every level of corruption slid from his body onto his sword, Will felt the skill crystallize. A new part of his mind opened, observing and understanding every step of the process.

After countless battles, this would be the one to push it over the edge.

[Chaos Transfer] has advanced to silver rank.

Will grinned. “You’re not going to like this.”