Will dove deep into his bottled time as the second group of detonations went off. Even partially defanged, he didn’t want to get hit by the more esoteric effects he’d seen.
Besides the analytical benefits, it gave him the time to examine the rewards he’d just gotten.
First, he put his two free points into Speed, bringing it up to Bronze 6.
Then, he took a look at his brand new skills.
There was an entirely new segment of his status page available now, this ...
2024-04-04 04:59:03 +0000 UTC
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The three members of Will’s current party all had some form of movement skill, but they hadn’t been getting by through sheer speed. Through a combination of clever movement tech, aura control, and good positioning via Azure’s detection ritual, they had found themselves in a pretty decent spot.
They were not, however, the first to get there. That much was clear by the time they swam close to the highlighted area on the map, and it became even more obvious given the extraordinarily ...
2024-04-03 03:27:02 +0000 UTC
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“You’re not focusing,” Caiyeri said. “I thought it would be easier for you to empty your mind.”
“Contrary to popular expectation, I do actually have a functioning brain,” Will replied. “Meditation’s never really worked for me. There’s always too much to do, too much to worry about.”
“There is.” Caiyeri opened her eyes, her aura noticeably roiling just a bit before she calmed it again. “That’s just a symptom of life. I have always had much to be concer...
2024-04-01 01:52:25 +0000 UTC
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The unreal space of the Hunger’s domain was growing uncomfortably familiar. The crushing dread that had assailed Will’s mind the first time he’d been here had faded more and more upon each successive visit until now.
“I assume you have some idea of what’s going on outside,” Will said, “so I’m going to make this simple. Hopefully you have enough room in that tiny little brain of yours to make sense of this.”
That garnered an angry growl that had reality cracking l...
2024-03-29 04:59:04 +0000 UTC
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This is a significant, full-scale rewrite of the previous chapters. Even if you read the pre-rewrite chapters, I would highly recommend reading this. Events deviate heavily.
“Follow the instructions as quickly as you can,” Azure said for what felt like the five hundredth time. “My detection ritual tells me that there are at least two dozen other sapients delving the dungeon with us.”
“We heard you twice the first time,” Will said. “You’re doing mos...
2024-03-28 07:58:35 +0000 UTC
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NOTE: This chapter has been partially rewritten. If you would prefer not to reread the full chapter, an overview of the changes will be posted at the end. I appreciate any and all feedback on the chapter.
Lake Monroe wasn’t just a lake, which Will had expected. He had yet to see an all-underwater dungeon, though there had been that one that had been mostly submerged. They’d prepared for the eventuality of there being impassable conditions—well, Caiyeri and Azure h...
2024-03-26 06:16:56 +0000 UTC
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Hi. After a couple of months straight writing Corruption Wielder every day on top of attending college, I sort of got into a fugue state for some of the recent chapters. Before I started posting this fiction, I was able to go over each chapter 2-3 times afterward and revisit it when I was a dozen chapters ahead, but I'm not capable of doing that now that I'm releasing daily. As such, I'm not happy with chapters 39-42 (the last of which is still being written), so there is likely not going to ...
2024-03-25 01:08:42 +0000 UTC
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Moving from dungeon to dungeon was easier said than done. All three of them had some form of stealth skill, but they knew they would be contending with silver tracking skills. Azure and Caiyeri had had the presence of mind to at least take themselves out of the party of their elf group, hoping that it would indicate that they were dead.
None of the three expected that to last long, but they needed to use every tiny advantage they had.
The life elves would kill Caiyeri and Azure on...
2024-03-21 04:51:13 +0000 UTC
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The information flooded into Will’s mind’s eye as he brandished the fully-charged slayer sword at Qwayne.
Skill: [Chaos Transfer]
- Spell (enchantment).
- Cost: high mana.
- Cooldown: 10 minutes -> 1 minute.
Silver
Let others suffer as you have.
Cleanses you of all levels of the [Corruption] affliction and transfers it to a des...
2024-03-20 04:35:16 +0000 UTC
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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.
2024-03-19 06:48:47 +0000 UTC
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Critical hit!
Caiyeri let her conjured warhammer dissipate, grimacing at the mess she’d just made of the life elf construct. A result of decades of genetic and magical engineering, the fauna that roamed the state that the opposing elf kingdom were all threats to any living beings in their area. The myriad destructive spells that could be placed within literally any animal, no matter the size, meant that they had to slaughter every potential threat, slowing the speed a...
2024-03-18 05:57:23 +0000 UTC
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The second night was no easier than the first. Though Will had already begun to adapt to the pain that the Hunger could inflict upon his body, it wasn’t easy to withstand mind-shattering torture for a whole night.
At least the conversation breaks were getting longer. Caiyeri had warned him about the abyssal elves making a play for the life kingdom, and though the Hunger was not a god of elves, Will doubted he knew nothing about that.
“I can do this forever,” the Hun...
2024-03-17 04:22:18 +0000 UTC
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“Can you tell me the next time you’re about to eliminate all my senses?” Will said.
Of the four of them, he was definitely the least exhausted. Trevor hadn’t gotten into an actual physical combat, but both Darkness and Silence were high cost skills and his Soul attribute was still low enough that using both of them had fully depleted his mana and then some. Will’s Death attribute was the only reason he wasn’t completely out of resources, and Trevor’s benefits didn’t have...
2024-03-16 06:17:50 +0000 UTC
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Timmel Skyspear. Bronze 8 Paladin.
Fenn Windchime. Bronze 9 Priestess.
Just like Caiyeri, both of the elves were hiding their skill lists. The system didn’t provide a description for either of them, which Will had surmised by now meant that they weren’t automatically hostile towards him and also didn’t warrant a boss description.
Idly, he wondered what qualified someone to be a boss. Against the likes of an unformed rank, he was sure t...
2024-03-14 20:21:32 +0000 UTC
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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 peopl...
2024-03-13 21:22:47 +0000 UTC
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Clearing the school grounds was disappointingly uneventful. Will saw people running from him every now and then, but they were always far away enough that he wasn’t able to confirm whether or not they were in the Iron Boys or had been locked up in the university with them. He still found himself half tempted to shoot after them anyway, but he wasn’t ready to take that step yet. Will’s class was Reaper, but he wasn’t going to kill those undeserving of it.
As promised, the univers...
2024-03-12 17:47:05 +0000 UTC
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Something was wrong. Will couldn’t tell if it was the sigil bothering him just for the sake of irritating him, which he wouldn’t put past the petty god that it had attached to him, but he had a nasty feeling about this.
Soon enough, he realized what it was.
Earlier, he’d heard the voices of the two men that he’d just killed, but that hadn’t been all. There had been other signs of life—birds chirping, the faint sound of twigs being crunched underfoot, the hum of ambient...
2024-03-11 21:30:17 +0000 UTC
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There were bodies in the water. They were almost unrecognizable as human now, stripped of all their clothes and equipment.
He had heard gunshots last night. The blood on these bodies was no longer fresh. Whoever had killed him had done so a while ago.
Grimly, Will used Identify on them.
Mark Wong. Neil Patel. Two people, real, human people, who’d died at the hand of other humans.
The freedom of the apocalypse wasn’t just for him. Without the veneer of soci...
2024-03-10 19:02:05 +0000 UTC
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Ayla closed her eyes, the passive magic of the suppressing chains preventing her from sleeping. It provided her with rest that equated a good night’s sleep, of course—the organization couldn’t have its workers losing productivity to poor rest.
But it didn’t let her dream. Dreams were dangerous.
She hadn’t been called as an upgraded tutorial helper. Despite the fact that her services were known to have a much higher rate of creating top tier Users, despite the fact that s...
2024-03-09 20:11:18 +0000 UTC
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True to the system’s promise, Thalia did not pursue Will once he left the dungeon. Frustratingly enough, it meant leaving the dungeon uncleared, but even though he knew that he had to push himself to his limits, he wasn’t stupid enough to try to 1v1 a clan boss.
The system was more than happy to notify him about his new discoveries afterwards.
Boss Tiers:
A boss’ tier is determined by the minimum projected size of the party required to defeat i...
2024-03-08 18:43:09 +0000 UTC
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“Great timing, Caiyeri,” Will hissed.
It wasn’t right to get mad at her. She didn’t control the nature of Will’s fights.
They’d exchanged a few messages after their initial exchange, which had been enough for him to surmise that while she was technically “on-planet,” that didn’t mean that she was actually in the region. She was waiting to be deployed with the rest of what he assumed were something like elf special forces.
Judging from her response, her elve...
2024-03-07 17:30:16 +0000 UTC
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Uninformed citizens often assume that Cataclysms are caused by the confluence of superhuman conflicts, triggering a rift to the extradimensional reality where the Pacific alien’s primary body appears to have been stored.
While there is a fragment of truth in this belief, it is dangerously untrue. After over a hundred incidents, a pattern has been established. Large-scale superhuman conflicts that take place within a certain time window (~6 months) after the previous Catac...
2024-03-07 08:20:42 +0000 UTC
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“I’m going to be blunt with you,” Will said, drying himself off as well as he could with a shop-bought towel before tossing it back into one of his inventory crates. It was slightly worse than the one he’d been using in college, but it worked well enough.
“If blunt means we don’t end on the bad side of those skills, I think I can live with that,” Trevor said.
Trevor was the only one of them who didn’t really know Will from before, though he questioned if Allie and ...
2024-03-06 14:44:52 +0000 UTC
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Ung’s vault was startlingly well organized for an ogre.
“That’s another point towards it being stolen,” Will muttered to himself.
“What was that?” Lev asked.
“Nothing,” Will said. Thinking out loud was a bad habit born of having someone in his head who actually responded to him. “I call first pick, but you all need to get something.”
Axl hadn’t carried a vault key, which made Will wonder whether those only dropped on solo bosses, but Ung ...
2024-03-06 00:11:45 +0000 UTC
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The world around Ayla fell away as Will’s tutorial completed, her surroundings fading from the complicated, multi-faceted system board of a helper back to her drab reality.
She was never going to get used to that. Even though she couldn’t directly influence the world as a helper, access to the system—real access, not the paltry pieces the administrative organization granted her here—it reminded her of the old days. They hadn’t been the best, but they’d been much bet...
2024-03-05 18:21:02 +0000 UTC
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The monster that his system identified as an ogre was only Bronze 3. It was certainly more intimidating than the goblin children who’d been at the same rank. Will assumed it would be proportionally more difficult to slay, but it still wasn’t that high of a rank compared to literally everyone in the hell he’d just been through.
His ability to sense its power through its aura was nowhere near as refined as Caiyeri’s was, but the exercises Caiyeri and H—Ayla had put him ...
2024-03-05 02:23:38 +0000 UTC
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Class selection initiated.
Your elements are: [Storm], [Space], [Corruption], [Death], [Poison] (unaffixed), [Time] (unaffixed).
The empty room around Will expanded, giving him enough room to walk around and take a look at the options thrown up on the empty void around him.
Windows like the ones that displayed his status popped up all around him, overlapping and saturating the space around him. Each window expanded when he mentally selected ...
2024-03-04 17:39:46 +0000 UTC
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You have gained 10 silver credits and 300 bronze credits.
Broken Forcemail Armor has been added to your inventory.
Gauntlets of Strength have been added to your inventory.
Sigil of the Hunger has been added to your inventory.
Will put all eight of his free points into Perception, bringing his final attribute up to Unformed 20.
Achievement earned: A Journey of Ten Thousand Miles
2024-03-03 22:19:28 +0000 UTC
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Time until tutorial failure: 9 hours, 48 minutes, 30 seconds.
The second floor did not at all look like the first—though maybe that was just the room the stairwell opened up into.
Will and Caiyeri found themselves in the ruins of a temple of no denomination that Will recognized.
The elf, however, did. She clicked her tongue, changing her conjured weapon from a pair of daggers to a long spear.
They stood on a cracked marble floor, surrounded by pillar...
2024-03-03 08:41:27 +0000 UTC
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With their new skills, clearing the way through the goblins was substantially easier. Caiyeri’s new skill affixed to her fire element, which was bound to her Perception stat for some reason. It was a passive ability called Thermal Sight that did exactly what it advertised. Elves already had great nightvision, but at bronze rank, her magical sight extended slightly through walls.
It was certainly less flashy than the death-element skill that Will had awakened with the tablet of the dar...
2024-03-02 07:07:46 +0000 UTC
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