The angel paused in its rampage.
Its senses had grown to encompass the primitive world to which it had been summoned. Though its strength had been limited to a low enough level that it could not use its Perfect Sight upon the entirety of this world, it had maintained enough of its strength to do so on a smaller area.
It blinded itself across the world, withdrawing its senses so it could focus on what was before it.
Perception radius set: 300 units. Perception height set:...
2025-03-13 06:44:34 +0000 UTC
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Bursting with power, Will stepped back into reality. During the process of his resurrection, his items had been transferred into his inventory—most of them, at least. His inventory wasn’t unlimited, though it was quite large now. Taking the corruption from the Lady of Pale Fire had carved a hole straight through the center of that, lessening how much he could carry, and moving everything that had been on his body into his inventory had naturally led to some of them disappearing.
The...
2025-03-12 05:43:23 +0000 UTC
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The angel woke, and it understood. Where the world prevented it from moving, it changed it or removed the obstacles in its path.
It was a being of many purposes and abilities, but it had been awakened with a singular one.
Eliminate. Eradicate. Execute.
No. That wasn’t quite right. That was… a memory of a memory. Not its own. Implications it was picking up from the souls of those that had fed it. Knowledge from Beyond.
This was not what it was meant for.
2025-03-10 05:08:39 +0000 UTC
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Will didn’t step through immediately. Though he was extremely tempted to do so, he was also fully aware of the fact that he alone probably wasn't enough for this. That wasn't due to a lack of power or anything—in fact, he felt stronger now than he ever had before.
However, he was at least somewhat familiar with the Contractor. Thanks to Ayla, he also knew that said User was somebody who had been playing at the same level or higher than him this entire time.
That fucker had bee...
2025-03-05 07:03:21 +0000 UTC
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Finding the Contractor was easier said than done. Though Will and his allies had a significant intelligence network thanks to both accumulated technology and familiars, trouble arose from obfuscation.
Will was no stranger to dealing with stealth skills. Hua, who was part of his inner circle at this point, had a sigil skill specifically enabling her to hide from most conventional forms of detection, which he’d had to work around during every fight alongside her. In a fight, it usually ...
2025-02-27 18:06:51 +0000 UTC
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Lily Teneli had been having an odd couple of weeks. She didn't have an affiliation, not exactly. While she’d tagged along with the corruption wielder's party for some time, she knew as well as they did that she wasn't really a part of their group. She had actively been trying to kill Will once upon a time, and unlike the others in their group, she hadn't had a good reason for it besides self-interest.
If she had to be honest with herself, she probably would have taken the chance to el...
2025-02-26 01:51:21 +0000 UTC
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The Beyond was an old friend to Will by this point. If his journey was any more turbulent out through the gate because of its block against skills connecting to the Beyond, he didn't notice it. For all intents and purposes, it was a regular journey through the Beyond. Since he didn’t have access to Sen, he had no way of knowing the reactions of the Lords and Ladies he had left behind, but he was pretty certain that he had achieved what he needed to do with that statement.
Ayla was, pr...
2025-02-23 04:12:41 +0000 UTC
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Will burned.
It was not fire that enveloped him. Pale Fire's culmination had long since dissipated, vanishing when the dozens of thousands of instances of Lord-rank corruption had swept in and obliterated that skill by directing it straight towards the sovereign-tier woman.
No, what was surging through his body was a new kind of power.
Will had felt the presence of plausibility before. Fighting others who had reached the 10,000 kill mark—in other words, those that he...
2025-02-22 00:04:08 +0000 UTC
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A Culmination. Will recognized the term. He'd witnessed two of them—one from Ataraxis, the corruption cultist, and one from Dread Executor Nynn. Nynn was no longer a Dread Executor even in name, but the power he had wielded that one fateful day at the Trial of the Champion had been a promise of what Will could achieve if he survived every trial thrown his way.
This, too, was a demonstration of the power a User could wield at the top end of the scale. Will watched in fascination as fir...
2025-02-16 07:10:02 +0000 UTC
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The Contractor had grown used to dealing with complicated situations from afar. This time, though, he had to admit the slightest bit of uncertainty.
While he was no stranger to the high-level maneuvering needed to manipulate events above his tier, he had largely pulled on sovereign-tiers for items and favors that had been balanced with similarly herculean effort of his own. The Contractor knew how to play people, but he was very much aware of the sheer power differential between him and...
2025-02-08 03:44:44 +0000 UTC
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Will popped out of the Beyond into yet another unfamiliar setting. He was getting pretty used to that, honestly. It wasn’t surprising that they’d taken him to somewhere he didn’t know already. The last couple of times he’d visited a sponsor had been when they’d been filing complaints against him for hunting their foremost Users, and those had been in private quarters far off-planet.
He would have expected something like the first incident where he’d met them all in something...
2025-01-29 03:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Regina was getting used to her ostensible ally being less of a reliable soldier and more of a hurricane that occasionally blew away the same enemies she was dealing with. Granted, those winds tended to be more favorable than not, but she could do with fewer reminders of how unpredictable they could get.
Case in point: basically the entirety of Regina’s currently active citizens in Boston had just witnessed Will exit the atmosphere.
A brief examination of the message boards acros...
2025-01-26 03:43:27 +0000 UTC
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You have leveled up two times!
You have advanced from Gold 2 to Gold 4. 2 stat points gained.
Achievement earned: Bridging the Gap
You are the 72nd User from your planet to defeat a monster above your tier.
Reward: You have earned an Awakening Shard of the Forerunner.
Will raised an eyebrow at that. He wasn’t surprised that he wasn’t the first person to...
2025-01-22 22:30:55 +0000 UTC
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In order to gain the power that a mid-tier demon could bring to bear, Will had given up a portion of his humanity in a very literal sense. His eye had been one part of the deal, but so had a chunk of his soul that hadn’t come back no matter how much healing or life force restoration he’d poured into it.
On the one hand, he could tell that even if the piece of his soul he’d given away hadn’t been a majority of his being, it had taken an irreplaceable part of him. He felt colder t...
2024-12-27 23:47:06 +0000 UTC
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“That is just fucking absurd,” Commander Charlie said.
It had been less than two hours since William Li-Brown and his party had entered the Boston Challenge Dungeon. During that time, the viewership for these specific nine people had quadrupled. More than half the city was tuned in just to watch them go, and the chat rooms were lively with speculation, betting, and general chatter about what was going on. Charlie himself had partaken in some, mostly since Regina seemed to have been ...
2024-12-24 09:56:23 +0000 UTC
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Select your treasure below:
- [Gravity Manipulator] (gold)
- [Inverted Boots] (gold)
- [Topsy-Turvy Grenade] (gold) x3 + gold-rank health and mana potions (x10)
- Full reset + platinum-rank health and mana potion + 1,000 gold credits
Will whistled. The challenge dungeon rewards were on the level of late-game rewards in the trial of the champion. To be fair, he was pretty sure the...
2024-12-18 02:30:20 +0000 UTC
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It had been a while since Will had entered a dungeon that felt like this. Though he’d cleared a few here and there, he had mostly done those in externalized dungeons. He hadn’t done many portal-types in a while, which meant that it was a bit of adjustment just to enter that portal and walk into a new dungeon.
That was less noticeable than the visceral change in the surrounding mana, though. Will had gotten pretty deeply accustomed to the art of constantly probing the area around him...
2024-12-13 02:14:05 +0000 UTC
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They didn’t go immediately, of course. Everyone was at least a bit beat up from the events of the day, and none of them were so eager to run a potentially depowering dungeon without taking a proper break first.
Regina was willing to post them up for a while, which Will appreciated. While he’d been thinking about establishing a more permanent place for him and his people, he also didn’t have the time nor the skills to create that place himself. He remembered the community that Lev,...
2024-12-10 08:01:46 +0000 UTC
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Regina. Gold 4 [CLASS HIDDEN BY SKILL].
Leaderboard Rank: 10 (+1 in the last 24 hours)
Will really didn’t like dealing with Regina.
The self-styled Supreme Commander of the Eastern States of New America or whatever name the nation that controlled most of what had been the eastern seaboard was named now was an ally, but she’d always rubbed him the wrong way. There was just a level of suspicion that he couldn’t help but feel aroun...
2024-12-08 22:01:37 +0000 UTC
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Achievement earned: Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes
You avoided a scenario that would have started a cycle-wide interplanetary war quest. Congratulations would be in order if the possibility of that scenario occurring wasn’t your fault to begin wtih.
Reward: [Peacemaker] title has already been rewarded. You have instead received experience.
Level up!
Your level has increased ...
2024-12-05 07:09:25 +0000 UTC
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Will wondered if this would be the time someone finally listened to him asking for them to talk. Historically, that hadn’t gone over well.
To be fair, a number of times, it was him deciding that the other person wasn’t worth trying to save and going ahead with a field execution. He did have to admit that part of it, at least, was his own fault.
That said, this did seem like a situation that would be ideally resolved a different way. There was the sticky part where he’d murde...
2024-11-30 03:54:48 +0000 UTC
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You have been afflicted with a level of gold-rank [Blightfire].
Just being in the same area as Cinder’s power was painful even for Will. He snapped Equilibrium Mantle on as quickly as possible, regulating the environment around him so he didn’t burn to a crisp in an instant. At gold rank, it now also eliminated some of the viruses from the air, though Cinder’s magic was strong enough that a good deal still made it through. Half a breath later, he used Chaos...
2024-11-24 01:58:41 +0000 UTC
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When Caiyeri had advanced to gold rank only hours earlier, she had reveled in the experience of it. It had been long enough since either of them had achieved a rank-up that they had both almost forgotten what it felt like to reach such a milestone.
It was like being reborn. Will had never tried any drugs, but he imagined this must have been something like what they felt like. A deep sense of crystal clarity and surging euphoria infused his senses, his aura stretching out with a fresh st...
2024-11-21 04:02:42 +0000 UTC
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Nynn had been around for a very long time. When the cycle had come to join his planet, his world had been ready for it. Their civilization had been more advanced than Earth’s, and they had known about worlds that lay beyond them. Then, his rate of advancement had been nothing short of extraordinary. Within decades, he had ascended past the metal and gem tiers.
Over the course of the centuries since he had become a Dread Executor proper, he had learned a great deal and gathered a...
2024-11-19 02:32:23 +0000 UTC
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Will was a bit late to the party, having had to dodge the pursuit of several thousand Peace sigil-holders who had suddenly lost their primary leader.
Caiyeri: You left us with your entire mess to clean up, you dick.
Will: My bad. It’ll be good practice, right? You get a relatively safe space to practice your gold-rank upgrades in.
Caiyeri: Stop trying to make it sound like you’re doing us a service. Sending however many thousand ...
2024-11-11 06:16:58 +0000 UTC
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Will was starting to feel a bit like a broken record. He was pretty sure that it wasn’t exactly normal to be someone who was getting used to otherworldly dimensions in which he was meant to contest a god, but that was just his life now.
He briefly wondered how many other people on Earth or the other planet had come into contact with gods even a tenth as many times as he had. Of those, he wondered if they’d come out unscathed or had gone insane from having their soul broken ...
2024-11-04 22:11:16 +0000 UTC
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The former rank one User was panicking.
That wasn’t a reaction many would have associated with him, not in the times before or now. He had been a high-powered executive and the oldest man in his family when the screens had come. At the end of a life well lived, he had chosen to stay and fight while most of the rest of his family had preferred safety. Regaining his strength and going far beyond what he had ever dreamed of as a young man had been a pleasant surprise, and he had applied ...
2024-10-30 05:50:24 +0000 UTC
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Will clicked his tongue.
“It’s not every day you find someone willing to tell you to shut up,” Nathan said.
“No, he has those people already,” Caiyeri replied. “How many times have you told him to shut up since you met him?”
Nathan counted on his fingers, then the backs of his fingers, then gave up. “Okay. Fair. It’s not every day you see someone who can… I dunno, resist telling Will to shut up?”
“Shut up,” Will said. “There are lives on the...
2024-10-24 22:25:17 +0000 UTC
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The problem with missiles, Will mused, was that people kept on figuring out ways to hurtle at them faster.
Actually, no, that wasn’t the biggest problem with missiles by a long shot, but it was one of the more annoying ones on his mind at the moment.
The plane was probably toast. Will had entertained the idea of trying to take down all the missiles like he had when a silver-ranker on the Contractor’s payroll had used a single set of gold-rank bullets to try to shoot down his p...
2024-10-20 07:55:44 +0000 UTC
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“You know, by some definition, Will is already an alien,” Caiyeri said.
“That’s just not true,” Will said. “Your planet hit mine. Doesn’t that mean that mine counts as the ‘base’ planet here? That means you’re the alien, no?”
“Well, I never moved from my own planet.”
“That’s besides the point,” Ayla said. Her voice was patient and polite, but irritation radiated through her aura. “Do you know anything about the third planet? The one currentl...
2024-10-16 22:46:43 +0000 UTC
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