slifer274

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 103: Tenuous Hold

“You know, I really need a better name to call you than ‘gestalt,’” Will mused, dashing upwards through his own darkness. “Too much of a mouthful.”

Predictably, the gestalt did not give him a verbal response, though a slight shift in its aura indicated that it had heard him.

Will’s next sentence was cut off by Grimle Brooksoul, a Gold 4 with the Overlord class, exploding with power.

An abnormally powerful aura rippled out from Grimle’s body, pushing the hunge...

Corruption Wielder on break till 7/5

On vacation with my family in Singapore. Thought I would be able to get some chapters out. Nope. Instead I am very tired and in no state to produce a chapter that is up to par. Posting will resume July 5th-6th, depending on your timezone. Thank you for your understanding.

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 102: Another One Bites the Dust

Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [37/1000].

None of the elves Will had systematically annihilated so far had been gold rank. As such, each of them contributed one skull to the throne of death he was slowly building. Will didn’t want to become the type of person who could easily boast a kill count of over a thousand, but this was necessary.

They still hadn’t caught on to the tactic he was using to evade them. Some of the elves now realized that the Hunter’s Mark...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 101: Nobody To Help You

As it turned out, it was significantly harder to track down the source of the Hunter’s Mark affliction when they were actively trying to avoid detection.

That wasn’t to say it was impossible—far from it. Since it was an active condition and not a fire-and-forget one like corruption or poison might be, it constantly pinged the Users who had inflicted it. Will couldn’t track it perfectly with his magic alone, but his demonic eye was a fantastic assist. It allowed him to see the we...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 100: Old Enemies

Alan didn’t have many beans to spill on the subject of his boss apart from his name, though even that wasn’t much to go off of.

The Contractor. Will had sent a few messages out to his connections around the world, asking to see if anyone had heard of him. So far, he hadn’t had any luck. Liam had said that Hua might know something more, but she had thrown herself into clearing the dungeons at a frankly dangerous pace and wasn’t responding to anyone’s messages if they weren’t ...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 99: It's Just Business

The sudden departure of the necrotic wyrm was the turning point in the battle for what had formerly been Washington DC. The city was almost certainly no longer going to be livable after this, not unless a concerted group of silver-rank builders focused all their efforts on putting it back together. 

Just the damage done by the wyrm had been enough to render the mile around the White House uninhabitable. The Smithsonian Museum, which had already started taking damage from the many d...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 98: How is this Fair?

Over in Amelia’s ship, the bronze-rank Pilot was gradually realizing that the elf in the back had not, in fact, taken a parachute pack.

“Uh, it was Caiyeri, right?”

“That is my name,” the elf said. She sounded distracted, like she was talking to someone else. She probably was. “Is something wrong?”

“You don’t have a parachute pack. There should be two, but it’s a bit awkward to put on while we’re flying.”

“Parachutes? Is that what the backpack...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 97: Of Course I Know Him

For the majority of her life, Caiyeri’s life had been the same. Deployed as a rapid-growth clone into a corrupted area, she had little scenery to look at but the strange, dangerous caverns beneath Arcadia.

The last two months had been a vast change of pace for her. In that timespan, she’d seen far more of another planet than she’d ever done of her own. To be fair, she still hadn’t seen that much of it, but she had seen other territories. Met people who didn’t want to kill her,...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 96: Understandable, Really

The item was an interesting one. It was gold-rank, but it wasn’t as flashy as Will had expected a gold-rank item to be.

Then again, he supposed that to some people out there in the cosmos, gold-rank items were to them as regular unformed-rank equipment was to him. It made sense that there would be some more mundane, less combat-focused items.

Touching it put him into a state where he was suddenly and acutely aware of his soul, as if he’d been knocked out of his body. It was qu...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 95: RTB

Maybe hanging from the bottom of a magical fighter jet by literally holding onto its gun hadn’t been the best idea. Will and the man he’d accidentally knocked unconscious with his phantasm had been in a rather precarious area with little cover, and it was only thanks to the last-second intervention from the pilot he’d contacted that had kept him from having to deal with the added complication of the other two planes shooting down the one he’d been hanging from.

Even getting here...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 94: Low Atmosphere

New York City had been a noisy, chaotic mess before dimensional rifts had summoned in city-wiping threats from other worlds.

Humanity was no longer in the same state it had been a mere two months before, but that didn’t mean it was less of a disaster. Not everyone who had survived the tutorial had thrown themselves fully into the new world, and there were many unformed and monster-core-abusing bronzes who’d been displaced.

Estimated death toll at the time of provisional govern...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 93: An Arm and a Leg

“A full summoning,” the Hunger said. “I should have realized this sooner.”

“It is not the strongest one that could have been summoned,” the Elven Mother replied. “It is worrying nonetheless. It is powerful enough that reverberations could affect us. Your champion is speaking to it, is he not?”

“For a certain value of speaking. I worry for him. Demons are not like gods.”

“Some, perhaps,” Sadareth said, gently reassuring her long-time companion with her...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 92: Alea Iacta Est

While most of the cultists had turned to funneling their energy towards the summoning ritual, a good portion of them remained on duty to guard the stunned Users and kill those who broke free of it. For the time being, though, the only ones who were even close to capable of doing so were the ones that Will was manually freeing. Nobody else had the experience needed to even attempt freeing themselves from the influence of a Lord.

Nynn showing up helped him along. The Dread Executor’s li...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 91: True Power

The trial of the champion had begun with 2,938 members. During the course of the tournament, there had been one single addition in the form of Nathan, but there had also been a few hundred who’d died either during the tournament or in the inevitable disasters after.

All told, there were somewhere around 2,500 competitors remaining, give or take a few dozen.

Of those, the majority were Earth-based Users, which meant humans. Almost without exception, the humans here had drawn heav...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 90: Culmination

The cultists, of course, had not been idle. Ataraxis’ sect had been listening into the conversations through various means, and though they had not gained perfect information, they understood enough to know that they would be returning into a trapped venue.

Ondrel Arctree, priest of corruption, was a Gold 6 with the Clone skill. At extreme mana cost, he was capable of creating a simulacrum of a gold-rank or lower being that possessed many of the same skills, though it could only use t...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 89: Contact With the Enemy

This was the first time in the tournament so far that Will had received rewards and not immediately thrown into a waiting room. His Equilibrium Mantle kept him and Osiris from being affected in the vacuum as they walked, and Will was keenly aware of the other man’s presence as he examined his rewards.

“You know,” he said, “I didn’t realize it until now, but accepting rewards definitely feels like a private thing. This is a little awkward. It feels like I should be going into a...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 88: We're So Back

The teleportation this time was as smooth as it had ever been. Facilitated by Nynn, it avoided the bulk of the traps and knock-on effects that the cultists had laid for them. Will was glad for it.

Things were coming to a head, he knew. There were still going to be four more rounds of tournament, each of which would continue restoring the power that had been gathering in the tournament, but then everything would fall into place.

By letting the trial cool off for two weeks, Nynn had...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 87: Leviathan

“I don’t want trouble,” Natalie lied. “There’s a far greater threat to deal with right now than the likes of you.”

The latter half of her statement, at least, was true. While the gold-rank elf of the Abyss nation was being a bit of a pain in the ass, she hadn’t actually done anything yet.

“You are aware of the presence of one who resembles me within your allies, are you not?” This question came from a lethally beautiful elf that Natalie would have consid...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 86: Torture is Good for You Sometimes (This Title Fact-Checked By REAL Torturers)

“This isn’t the end, is it,” Will said, checking for the fifth or sixth time with Sen’s eyes that the restraints Nynn had used on Ingrid’s now-defenseless body were still intact.

“You can relax on checking those,” Nynn said. “Items are significantly less subject to the whims of plausibility than Users. These restraints would bind a diamond-ranker with ease, let alone a mere gold.”

That was true, at least. A quick scan of them revealed that they were Prince-tier c...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 85: Give Into Despair

Each time Will entered the Beyond, it felt more natural than the last. This time was no exception. His nightly ritual with the Hunger had continued even while they were on and around the Sentinel, and he was slowly but surely getting to the point where he could almost think through the unbearable pain.

Already, he was capable of establishing a Sanctuary that stayed intact for long enough to allow him to recover his mana to full through meditation, though of course it didn’t h...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 84: Dead Fish

“The cycle is faltering,” Sadareth commented, looking down far below. “A shame, especially seeing how many of my champions made it so far. Yours, too.”

“Don’t remind me,” the Hunger sighed. “My ‘champion’ seems to believe that our relationship works the other way around, with him the god and I the mortal. Frustratingly, he is dead-set on proving himself correct.”

“And what of Vyx?” Sadareth asked.

“Always moments away from trying to kill him,” K...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 83: The 80/20 Rule

Oliver Turner was having a terrible month.

It had all started well. The R/V Sentinel had been deployed on its maiden voyage. As an oceanography vessel, it had been unparalleled. Oliver’s life’s work, a project to maintain and regrow barrier reefs, had been ready deploy for the first time on the ship.

They’d been ten days out of Southampton when the world had ended. 

Their vessel was advanced enough that the handful of astronomers who’d come aboard as pa...

[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 82: Devil in the Details

Silver 4 wasn’t a massive barrier broken, but Will would take it. He put both of his unused points into Soul, knowing that he was going to rely on Sen’s sight to make up for the lack of his own Perception, which was still a measly Silver 0.

After that, he checked his new skill.

Skill: [Wail of the Forgotten]

- Spell (sound).

- Cost: moderate mana.

- Cooldown: 1 minute.

Gold<...