[System Decay] Chapter 31: Not a People Person

The Iron Boys hadn’t just been the dozen or so people who’d been in leadership. As they cleared their way through the university, the four members in Will’s party found evidence that there had been a number of others in here. There were signs of human presence everywhere, from dorm chairs that had been haphazardly tossed into a circle with couches from the retail dining locations around a fire pit to walls graffitied with a frankly childish logo on it.

They didn’t find the people themselves, though. While there were still controlled fires burning and food left half-eaten on countertops, the university had been almost totally vacated.

“Wow,” Will said. “Just goes to show that scummy shitheads like them have no backbone.”

“I think they were sheltering some people,” Allie said. “Or capturing. I don’t know what exactly their deal was.”

“If the racist group that was hunting people for sport was sheltering people, all the power to them,” Will said. “I don’t find myself particularly sympathetic to people who decided to hide behind them.”

The whole point of the apocalypse was for everyone to have individual power. What use was personal strength when you just bent the knee to the first group of dickwads you saw?

And what did it say about you that it was the Iron Boys who’d taken you in?

“I wonder if we’re going to see any of the people who fled in the near future,” Lev wondered aloud. “Somehow, I doubt that the type of people to take in Dylan as a soldier would be the nicest to deal with.”

“Oh, I’m sure we will.” Will knelt down next to a low table, peering at the labels on the bottles. Homemade. Someone had been distilling moonshine. “Didn’t you say there was a town nearby? Maybe they’re going to flee to that.”

“The town isn’t really for humans,” Allie said. “It’s not populated by people from school, at least. I didn’t get a chance to identify them, but since you’ve mentioned them, I think there’s a good chance that they’re elves.”

“Ah, shit,” Will said. “I don’t think those elves are on our side. Unless there’s another group that aren’t the life elves.”

Allie shrugged. “We didn’t get a great look at them, and most of them kept their stats stealthy like you do.”

“They’re northeast of here,” Trevor added. “I think some humans were there, but apart from a couple trades, there wasn’t safe accomodation there.”

“Which does kinda suck,” Lev sighed. “The safe zones are nice, but there’s limits to what they can do and how often you can use them. They’re way less plentiful out here in the real world compared to the tutorial, too.”

“Really?” Will asked. “There’s more of them here than in mine.”

Then again, they also came with the caveat of being able to be overwhelmed. Whereas the tutorial safe zones had been immune to attacks from beyond, it seemed as if a concentrated enough effort would overrun the safe zones here, at least if Will had interpreted the fine print on them correctly.

“That sounds awful,” Lev said. “I’m still shocked you made it through that.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I didn’t mean it like that!” Lev protested. Allie snickered.

“Anyway,” Will said, getting back on track, “there’s no humans in the life elf city, right?”

“I didn’t say that,” Trevor said. “Unsafe accomodation is accomodation. There were offers to work in exchange for protection and housing. Some people took it. We didn’t.”

“Good,” Will said. “You demonstrated basic competence. God knows too many people aren’t able to do that. They weren’t hostile?”

Lev shook his head. “Not at all.”

“Point of order,” Trevor cut in. “I think that they would be very easily moved to violence. Just because they weren’t immediately attacking us doesn’t mean they weren’t hostile.”

“Fair point.”

“But they aren’t attacking,” Will said. He remembered Thalia. She had been in that sort of state. She’d been protecting something. Was the city the same way?

“Not yet,” Trevor replied. “They were selling loot, which is the only reason any of us really had magical weapons. The drops from our tutorial were awful.”

Will’s tutorial drops had been incredibly useful, but he didn’t mention that. He supposed that was thanks to the difference in difficulty alongside the fact that he’d been a lot more proactive in finding and fighting bosses than the others.

Still, he was always looking for more stuff, and he knew for a fact that the elves had silver ranks among them. Will didn’t think Thalia would be the only one of them, given that the system had implied she was one of several priestesses, and he doubted that she was the highest on the command chain here.

“Selling items,” Will said. “They had weapons on sale?”

“There’s a whole marketplace,” Allie confirmed. “We could only afford unformed rank items, and we can’t use anything higher yet, but I think there might’ve been items ranked as high as gold? My memory isn’t perfect, though, and I was mostly focused on surviving the night at the time.”

“An understandable thing to focus on,” Will said. “Let’s hit the market, then.”

“Yeah?” Lev said. “You’re taking charge again?”

It wasn’t meant to be a barb, but it sort of felt like one.

“If I have to, yes,” Will said. “All of you are getting stronger, but I don’t think you have a specific objective in mind other than survival right now.”

“And you do?” Trevor asked.

“I made a friend during the tutorial,” Will said. One who’s higher leveled than all of you, he didn’t add. “Two of them, actually. I plan on meeting up with both of them, which requires dealing with the life elves.”

“Dealing with,” Allie said. “You mean killing.”

“Do you have a problem with that?” Will asked.

“I think anyone would,” Trevor replied.

Will frowned. “You sure? I’m, like, at least six people in and probably somewhere around three hundred monsters. I’m fine.”

“I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions, of course,” Trevor said, suddenly sounding a bit worried.

“Don’t worry,” Will sighed, “I’m not going to turn it on you. All I’m saying is that I have an objective and you three… don’t really. That was the case before, and it’s the case now.”

He didn’t only have goals for the short-term, either. Right now, he needed to deal with the life elves and level up. After that, he needed as many shards of the beyond as he could get so that he could bind the skill that Ayla had told him to.

While he didn’t quite know if he actually trusted her, he knew that whatever had happened during the final moments of his system selection hadn’t been normal. He hoped she was okay.

In the long run? Well, Will had been told that ascending was possible. The final tiers were reserved for demigods and divinity themselves, and he had divinity in his pocket. He’d reach the top of the local leaderboard, then the world one, and then he’d go further beyond. If he couldn’t make the Hunger look like a petty child by the time he was done with this all, he would be disappointed.

For all that to happen, though, he still needed to move now.

“We do have goals,” Lev said, breaking Will out of his reverie. “Maybe they’re not so grand, but we have goals. The world isn’t going to stop changing just because we do, and I refuse to be left behind. Just because we’re not able to move at your pace doesn’t mean that we’re not fighting.”

Will looked at his old friend, eyebrows raised. “Damn. When did you grow a spine?”

Lev chuckled, breaking the sudden tension in the air he’d made. “Sometime between running for my life from a spider the size of a large child and 1v1ing a troll, I imagine.”

“Oh, I totally get the spiders thing,” Will commiserated. “Fuck spiders.”

“Fuck spiders,” Lev agreed. “So. The elf city?”

“Yeah,” Will said. “I want silver rank gear.”

#

As they traveled, Will used the skill he’d earned from the tablet of the book. The tablet itself had promised an information, book-related power, so of course he’d bound it to Perception.

Skill: [Pages of the Past]

- Spell (divination).

- Cost: moderate mana.

- Cooldown: 6 seconds.

Bronze

Magical effects leave imprints on the world. When collated from the very faintest, most ancient traces of magic, you can read a book of the history of everything.

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.

Although it wasn’t as strong for combat, this was undoubtedly his strongest scouting skill. It had multifaceted uses, enabling him to scope out an area for traps, find those who were fleeing from him, and even spy on people after they’d already left the area. Will was happy to have it, and he was sure that it would prove to be one of his strongest skills with time.

One major problem that came with it was the sheer amount of useless information he got from it. The system logged all the sounds and notable effects and footsteps for him, but the amount of information he got even from a relatively untraveled area was incredibly dense. Finding magical effects and tracking Users was already tough enough—finding individual conversations? Forget that.

Will did find that he was capable of using Time in a Bottle to give himself a little longer to sort through the information. In the heat of battle, that information could be critical. He was glad to know that the synergy existed.

After doing so, he encouraged the others to follow his example.

“We can’t rely on asspulls in the middle of a fight,” he said. “I’ve gotten lucky a few times before, and I’m sure that you three have too. Find synergies as soon as you can.”

“We have a few between each other,” Lev offered. “I’d show you in a practice range, but I’m pretty sure the only simulation chamber here is in the elf city.”

“Good thing we’re headed there, then,” Will said.

One thing the skill did confirm was that the surviving Iron Boys had indeed fled north. Some of them seemed to be on the same path that they now followed, through dense forest populated with entirely too many insectile monsters for Will to be comfortable with, but others had headed due north instead of to the east.

Will remembered that Thalia had been posted up there. He wondered if they’d met an unfortunate demise at her hands, or perhaps been slain by someone similar.

It wasn’t his problem right now. Will would save people from each other, and if the opportunity came, he would protect them from danger, but he wasn’t going to reach a hand out to pull them from their own stupidity.

For now, what mattered was getting in every bit of training he could as they walked towards the elf city, which seemed to be a solid two or three miles from the university. The breathing techniques for aura detection that Caiyeri and Ayla had walked him through could be practiced anywhere with enough competence at it, and he’d taken to them like a fish to water.

He’d tried to explain them to the others, but that hadn’t really worked out. Either Will sucked at being a teacher or they just weren’t able to grasp it as well.

Aside from that, he continually gave himself corruption by exposing himself to the axe of despair, which he’d combined with a vial of cave spider venom and a death rune.

Item: Chieftain’s Axe of Despair (Corrupted)

Rare, Bronze

Inflicts increased necrotic damage that increases the more damaged the target is. Has a high chance of inflicting stacking levels of [Poisoned]. Has a moderate chance of inflicting stacking levels of [Altrien’s Despair]. Has a high chance of inflicting stacking levels of [Bleed].

WARNING: This entity has been corrupted. Extended exposure to this entity may inflict the [Corruption] condition and may be lethal.

Despite all the upgrades, Will generally preferred using his slayer sword to attack. Still, the chieftain’s axe of despair had served him well, and it continued to give him the corruption affliction, which was fantastic for using Chaos Transfer.

That skill was damn near ranking up to silver, which was Will’s next big milestone. He power-leveled it by transferring corruption from his body to his slayer sword, then using it to kill one of the many insects they came across.

The giant fauna were mostly unformed rank and seemed to have come with the territory rather than being spawned inside the dungeons, which was evident by the fact that they didn’t drop monster cores. Sadly, they didn’t grant great rewards for killing them, but it did let Will get a lot of charges on his weapons.

Also unfortunate was the fact that he couldn’t try out his new Thunder Wraith’s Grasp skill. That one seemed to work really well in a fight where he needed to stack up a lot of damage, and the monsters he was up against for the most part were weak enough that the fight was over before he could even apply a second layer of the charged condition to them.

“Why do you guys keep running from me?” Will asked the rest of his party after the sixth or seventh time he solo killed a bug and they all abandoned him.

“Bro,” Allie said, “you have genuinely awful vibes when you have that axe out.”

“There’s already a kind of uneasiness just being around you,” Lev said. “I chalked that up to just being some magic weirdness, though.”

The sigil basically counted as magic weirdness. “Close enough.”

“When you have the axe out, though, and whenever you’re doing your weird smoke magic, every instinct in my body lights up to run,” Lev said. “I’m impressed with us for all still being here.”

“It’s really quite interesting,” Trevor said. “You’d make a fascinating case study if there were still psychologists practicing to see you.”

“Thanks,” Will said dryly.

“You know,” Allie said, “I just realized that we basically sided with an evil overlord.”

“I’m not an overlord,” Will said, annoyed. “Come on! I don’t even own any land.”

“Except for the university, which is under our control now,” Lev said. “Also, you didn’t deny the evil part.”

“Aw, shit, you got me.” Will grinned. “Time to enact my evil plan of terror, which is, uh…”

“Kill us, take our stuff?” Trevor asked. “That seems to be the running theme here.”

“Nah, that’s boring. If I commit to the villain bit, I’ve gotta do something that’ll keep children from sleeping a century from now.”

#

The elf city was breathtaking.

Now, compared to something like New York City or even Will’s hometown of San Francisco, it wasn’t anything terribly impressive, but it was everything he could’ve wanted out of a fantasy city. Rather than clearing out a massive copse of trees, the city had instead been interwoven into the woods, buildings growing out of vegetation and vice versa. A soft green light pervaded the entire place at all times, and unlike the eerie light of the caverns, it soothed the soul.

“This could’ve come straight out of a Legend of Zelda game,” Will commented.

“Right?” Lev agreed. “Don’t tell that to Nintendo. They’ll sue.”

“Ah, yes,” Will said. “The only evil that can transcend the end of life as we know it. Capitalism.”

“Uh, guys?” Allie said, a nervous tremor underlying her voice. “I don’t think they’re as welcoming as they were last time.”

She was right, presumably. Will didn’t know what one of these cities was supposed to look like , but there were an awful lot of similarly-armored elves in what looked like plate armor made entirely from interlacing pieces of dark wood marching around and shaking down anyone who wasn’t one of theirs—elves and the surprising amount of humans wandering around likewise.

In order to even get onto the soldier-patrolled streets, they had to first make it through a wall made of interweaving vines. There were gaps between the vines large enough to fit an entire person through, which was how Will could even see the city, but from the gold-rank aura radiating off the entire structure, he was sure there was a lot more to it than met the eye.

Their ingress point was a single archway manned by two guards. Will nearly questioned why there weren’t more before seeing that the flow of people in and out was less than he’d expected. It looked like very few people who entered the town saw much reason to leave, and he supposed there weren’t a ton of people who just decided to come here at the same time as his party.

Both of the armored elves at the gate—one man, one woman—were bronze-rankers, though they were much higher level than Will at Bronze 8 and 9, respectively. They eyed the party with suspicion.

“Stop right there,” the woman said brusquely. “We must ensure you do not pose a threat to the great city of Verdantwood.”

“This will be only a moment,” the man continued in a much kinder voice. A wave of magic passed over them all, ruffling their hair. “It’s just a basic… analytical spell…”

He trailed off, his eyes widening. Will used Pages from the Past to find what the spell had been.

Skill: [Detect Evil]

Will didn’t look a single sentence past that.

Universal Ability: [Marked for Death] - No matter your alignment nor how much you suppress your aura, detection skills will always identify you as evil. Beings of a higher tier than you will know of your existence, and will know your location and identity if you are close enough to them. Killing another User grants increased experience.

“He is the one who defies the Mother!” the man shouted. “He—“

Seeing no other choice, Will attacked.