Before Will left the UK, he sat down for a somewhat awkward cup of tea with Michael, Natalie, Caiyeri, and Jessie. It was mostly only awkward because they a) couldn’t figure out how to fit Jessie in a tea room and b) Jessie appeared to like the taste of tea, but regular teacups didn’t work for it. They’d ended up having one of Blurr’s underlings duplicate the liquid until there had been enough to stick into a firehose.
“We need to talk,” Michael said over his cup. “I...
2024-10-09 23:29:30 +0000 UTC
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Sen was going to have to put in a lot of work here, but it seemed that Henry was at least somewhat aware of Will’s familiar. While his city-wide influence wasn’t on the same level of Cross’, the Blizzard Arcanist had a skill that reduced parts of the city to a temperature so low that Sen’s eyes began suffering damage even in their intangible state.
Natalie: Twelve summons active. Three are dead already. Others are adjusting. Check the northside. Think he’s hiding there...
2024-10-03 03:56:03 +0000 UTC
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Will hadn’t read up much on Henry, but information on him was apparently scarce. He hadn’t been anyone important before the apocalypse had hit, just like Will. What little they did know about the Blizzard Arcanist wasn’t even enough to pick him out in a lineup, though it did confirm that initial assumption of insignificance—British, born and raised, a few years out of college, working some dead-end job in a consulting firm. Exactly college-student-Will’s failure state.
To be f...
2024-09-29 06:43:49 +0000 UTC
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Will ended up staying an extra three hours, but Natalie didn’t mind after he told her exactly why he was going to be so delayed. During that time, he made some arrangements with Regina. She wasn’t exactly happy that he was practically giving orders to the nation, but she’d acknowledged that short of requisitioning Lu Jie, who was quite unlikely to cooperate with the ESNA, to drop a nuke on top of Cinder, this wasn’t a problem that was going to go away. Already, her people were drawing...
2024-09-26 07:29:02 +0000 UTC
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Will reabsorbed the bulk of the corruption he’d thrust outwards, focusing it around him and using his demonic eye to spot and kill the worst of the ash-plague that was everywhere in here. His passive mana expenditure was even higher in here than it had been when Equilibrium Mantle had been working overtime to protect him from deep space, which was saying something.
Despite that, he didn’t think he was going to need to fight. Not just yet.
Though there was malice in th...
2024-09-21 07:01:15 +0000 UTC
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Lance was a slippery piece of shit.
Granted, Will had expected that to be the case. Killing Cross had been—well, easy was the wrong term for it, because he’d still needed to push himself to the limit to chase the Necromancer through all of his constant teleports as well as avoid the frankly absurd amount of power he’d been putting out. He’d managed to make it look effortless, of course, because he was just that cool, but it hadn’t been a walk in the park.
A...
2024-09-18 23:30:56 +0000 UTC
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Cross had been Xavier Jenkins once, but that man had been weak. Willing to compromise. He had been forged in the crucible of another world, and now he had strength. The years away had been long but fruitful.
When he had come back, he had curled his lip at what he saw. The world had ended. It was every man for himself, and yet his nation had fallen to helping the weak? Cross had practically soiled himself laughing when he had learned that the powers that be had decided to put a teena...
2024-09-17 02:42:35 +0000 UTC
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Before Nynn could fully recover from the effect of the stolen Peace skill, Will called Aza, drawing the familiar to his side, and teleported as far away as he physically could, which meant all the way to the few of Sen’s eyes he’d stored in Australia.
Aza, sensing a connection to the Dread Executor he’d split off from, understood his purpose and clung onto Will as he slipped into the Beyond once again.
Even doing it from the other side of the planet, Will couldn’t help the...
2024-09-08 23:42:04 +0000 UTC
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Will’s ability to stay in the Beyond was limited only by his soul. He was suddenly very grateful for his repeated insistence on torturing himself, which was becoming a disturbing trend. Thanks to the amount of stress he’d put himself through, he had enough capacity to remain in here for a while.
His time here was still limited, unfortunately. Though the strain on him was more manageable than it would have been at any time before, it was still very noticeable. Will wasn’t yet at th...
2024-09-05 05:44:33 +0000 UTC
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[Instant Death selected.]
Zero teleported even as Caiyeri’s bullet burst from the gun, flying off into the deep abyss.
“You don’t have to tell your friend to back off,” the template said. “That might make this fair.”
“I don’t need ‘fair,’” Caiyeri said. She eyed her counterpart with a baleful eye, watching her return it in kind. “I would very much like you to be dead, though.”
She sensed the template’s magic before Zero move...
2024-09-01 20:58:30 +0000 UTC
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This wasn’t the sum total of Peace’s efforts. Will could practically feel it in the air. The goddess was blatantly violating plausibility, spending her own reserves to do this—but it didn’t feel like a final effort. Peace was possibly the only deity that Will had had a conversation with without any leverage to exercise, and so he was very much on the back foot here.
Plans upon plans upon plans could still be waiting for him, but he figured he was fine to deal with those later.
2024-08-29 18:27:59 +0000 UTC
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Title: [Heretic]
Very rare
A title awarded to those who dare to defy gods time and time again. There’s more of you than you might think. There’s also fewer of you that survive than you might hope.
Increases resistance to divine magic. Increases resistance to effects that result from sigil skills. Attempts to negate an opposing sigil skill with your own skill have a significantly higher chance of succeedi...
2024-08-25 22:41:41 +0000 UTC
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A couple of minutes earlier, Will had stepped into the Beyond.
At first, it had been simple enough. Nynn was no current Dread Executor, but he was familiar enough with the Beyond to advise Will on it, at least. Ayla had made a brief appearance, detecting a significant presence there, but she hadn’t stayed for long.
“I would tell you to think twice about what you’re doing, but I know how much you tend to listen to me,” she said.
“Anything besides the obvious I shoul...
2024-08-23 04:51:23 +0000 UTC
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Requisitioning a plane proved to be more complicated than Will had hoped it would be. Now that his point of contact with the ESNA had been bumped up from Commander Charlie to Supreme Comander Regina, he’d been a little warier of requesting stuff from them. He asked anyway, but it looked like even their largest transport wasn’t up to the task of carrying a being as large as Jessie.
A bunch of other nations were also eager to curry his favor, and he sorted through them in his me...
2024-08-21 05:22:01 +0000 UTC
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“You’re taking this better than last time,” Ayla said.
“I’m getting used to it,” Will replied. He sighed. “Please don’t tell me this is going to be a get-this-done-now-or-the-world-ends thing again? I mean, it’s fine if it is, but I don’t like the pattern this has been following.”
“Probably not,” Ayla hedged. “Probably.”
“Wow, that really fills me with confidence.”
“As it should. I know much more about your world than you do.”
<...
2024-08-17 03:38:22 +0000 UTC
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[Power] advanced from Silver 2 to Silver 5.
[Speed] advanced from Silver 7 to Silver 8.
[Affinity] advanced from Silver 5 to Silver 7
[Soul] advanced from Silver 6 to Silver 9.
[Perception] advanced from Silver 1 to Silver 5.
You have 8 unused skill points.
[Decaying Touch] has advanced to gold rank.
Notice: You ...
2024-08-13 09:30:33 +0000 UTC
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“For a goddess of Peace, this piece of shit is really good at being violent,” Will complained.
“Gods become what they are through violence,” Yui replied, glaring at the burnt remains of what had been a hotel before several tons of TNT had been teleported into it.
Nathan: Yui’s wrong on that front, I’m pretty sure. I’ve talked to a few high priests in my time, including one that actually witnessed an ascension off planet. There are other paths to divinity.
2024-08-10 03:33:20 +0000 UTC
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All remaining instances of [Blessed] and [Purified] have been consumed to restore the life force consumed by [Ravenous Feast].
Will kept a careful thousand eyes out for the people teleporting back in. There had been a couple of fatalities, though none had been people who possessed any sort of real power—two silver-rankers and all four bronze-rankers who had somehow made it into the conference.
It was a shame, but they weren’t affiliated with any nation that Wi...
2024-08-07 20:39:33 +0000 UTC
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Author's note: Sorry for delay. Jet lag has gotten me REALLY bad. Almost recovered, though. Hope this is the last delay.
Will, of course, had not missed anything. Just like with the Beyond, the time he’d spent in Desecrated Bond didn’t accurately reflect the amount that had passed on the outside. There, it had only been a moment since he’d activated the intervention, but the effects of it were instant.
He had been curious about what Corrupt would actually do...
2024-08-04 07:41:22 +0000 UTC
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One upside of getting tossed into the constant mess of bullshit that gods were getting Will into was that he was not caught off guard at all by the suddenness with which his soul was transported into a space that wasn’t this world.
This wasn’t exactly the same as Vyx, Sadareth, or Kadael pulling him into one of their soul-spaces, though. Those were very clearly spaces built by and designed for the gods themselves. Will was relatively helpless in those, with his one defining trait be...
2024-07-28 07:55:51 +0000 UTC
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Author's note: I misnumbered a chapter like 18 chapters ago and just noticed. It's been fixed now, so this is actually c112, not c111. Enjoy!
Caiyeri, Nynn, and Wisteria had been in the superdungeon for under an hour and had already almost died five times.
Almost dying had become a frighteningly routine part of Caiyeri’s life at this point, and she was no stranger to having to fight above her rank, but there was something offputting about this dungeon that was s...
2024-07-22 14:56:58 +0000 UTC
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Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [76/100]
Will wondered if word was getting around about the failed assassination attempts or if it was just his aura being weird again. The odd looks from everyone he passed by was pretty par for the course, he was pretty sure, but it was starting to feel like every nation had an eye on him. Sen was able to catch quite a few surveillance skills placed in various locations, each of them with different enough magical signatures that it was cl...
2024-07-21 15:45:49 +0000 UTC
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Elsewhere, a certain elf was quietly bemoaning the cold when she became aware of two presences approaching her.
“This is not where I would have expected to find you,” Nynn said, amused.
“You can blame Australia for that,” Caiyeri said, her jacket glowing lightly with the mana it was burning to keep her warm. “It was their idea to send scouts here.”
“You’re not Australian,” Wisteria replied.
“You’re not silver,” Caiyeri said in kind. “Weren’t...
2024-07-18 10:42:23 +0000 UTC
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Speaking with gods exhausted the soul, Will had learned from experience. He usually overwhelmed that exhaustion by simply experiencing crushing amounts of pain through his regularly scheduled torture sessions that were what amounted to soul training for him.
Now that he was on one of the rare occasions where he wasn’t training and was also in the process of affixing a skill, he could feel the passive drain on him. It was similar to the amount of effort it took to be in the Beyond, but...
2024-07-16 08:50:29 +0000 UTC
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That new hero in town is back. Do not cross her. Do not speak to her. If you see her, run for your life. She’s goddamn fucking insane.
- Internal communications recovered from West Lafayette villain Pine, 2024
#
It was strange how only a few days could change a place so much. Or maybe it was more accurate to say the person who viewed it had changed.
Vivian had been a superhero for one or two months now, and her powers had been active about a month longer tha...
2024-07-15 10:06:12 +0000 UTC
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Aza got the memo. His wings spread immediately, covering Will in golden light even as a cornucopia of explosives tumbled out of the portal that had opened right above his head.
If there was any time to start burning through his mana reserves, it was now. As Sen’s eyes saw the combination of raw silver-rank explosive alongside the truckload of grenades hit the ground, Will’s mind went into overdrive, using Time in a Bottle to buy himself a few precious seconds to work with.
The...
2024-07-13 08:39:23 +0000 UTC
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Not one day into the summit and Will was already getting a headache. After system integration, he had learned that he was exceptionally good at killing things and fighting against individuals that were far greater than him. What he was significantly less skilled at was dealing with fucking politics, which appeared to be the theme of these few days.
He had wanted to stay completely uninvolved in it, but Will didn’t want to go into the next stage of the apocalypse without knowi...
2024-07-11 15:09:36 +0000 UTC
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The city of Geneva had gone relatively untouched by the dungeons populating the world thanks to a combination of a lucky draw with only low-rank dungeons spawning in the area, a relative lack of Arcadian infrastructure clashing with the existing city, and a heavy high-rank presence in the city brought upon by the desire of several European post-apocalypse factions to have something approaching a neutral ground.
The final piece of the puzzle as to why it was such a functional city when s...
2024-07-10 03:52:23 +0000 UTC
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You have advanced to Silver 6! 2 attribute points gained.
A number of system messages scrolled past Will’s eyes, some of them less comprehensible than the others, but his language skill slowly translated them.
Not for the first time, he wondered how much Omnilingual actually lived up to its own name. He’d had a sneaking suspicion for some time that it didn’t work on languages spread by those who were significantly stronger than him. The demon’s language ha...
2024-07-08 14:15:20 +0000 UTC
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Will wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about leaving the gestalt alone in a dubiously populated area, but neither his aura senses nor Sen had detected people in the area. He figured that the sudden and brutal death of a good chunk of their leadership would keep the life elves from wanting to interfere with the area, and most humans in the area were either dead or gone.
Besides, it had seemed friendly after he’d gone through the universally effective ritual of killing the shit out of ...
2024-07-07 05:46:03 +0000 UTC
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