[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 158: Search and Destroy

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 wasn't too much of a problem to smoke somebody out thanks to a combination of Sen and everybody else's perception skills, not to mention the tendency of his aura to force people out of hiding.

In a fight, though, they only had to scan the battlefield. This time, unfortunately, their search radius was the world. While there were records of the Contractor operating out of what had been the western United States, even Will knew it was easy to fake a location. Besides, those records were months old by this point.

Basically, Will and company had the full Earth to search. They had a large amount of personnel and equipment to do so, but they did not have time. 

They also didn't have a great number of alliances. While Will had parts of what had been China on his side thanks to his improved relations with Lu Jie, as well as the ESNA, he had very little connection to much of the rest of the world. Given precedent, he was reasonably sure that there were a great number of alliances that would simply not accept his existence, let alone offer him any assistance.

There were a few downsides that came with being a highly armed, incredibly dangerous corruption wielder. Not being able to make allies with people who weren't at least a little evil was one of them.

Regina had more connections than he did, but even then she was a head of state, which came with a lot of baggage. The best she could do was secure clearances for her jets to fly overhead without risk of being shot down, but there was only so much that could do when they had so much of the world to cover.

In the past, Will had cooperated with others to probe areas of Eastern Europe to search for a group of Users led by someone with over 10,000 kills. Back then, however, he had been searching for obvious signs of magic across a region that had been rendered a barren wasteland.

Finding something that had been intentionally hidden was a different story entirely. They had to use specialized equipment, the likes of which the ESNA had very few of thanks to the time and expense it took to create just one.

Will, Nynn, Yui, and Nathan each had their own specific methods to find people who were utilizing stealth skills—unique in method but similar enough in function that Will wondered if finding rats was a necessary part of becoming a Dread Executor candidate.

By necessity, they had to each operate alone. There was simply too much ground to cover for them to group up together. While Will had been gone, the others had obtained various items and increased their own power to the point where they were fairly confident they could manage a quick regroup if that became necessary.

Will, alongside a small division of Regina’s aerial forces, had decided to tackle the portion of the former United States where they had initially located the Contractor’s forces. A good chunk of the West Coast and desert states were believed to be under his control. The good news was that a great deal of it was empty desert. There were a lot of monsters in the area, having taken over the unoccupied space in what Will would have considered to be pretty shitty states before the apocalypse. 

Will was keeping up with the jets by hanging onto them through a string of hunger phantasm, trailing behind them like a kid on roller skates holding onto the bed of a pickup truck. Sen’s eyes dragged over the landscape as they traveled, periodically bursting out with mana as Will used Pages of the Past through his familiar. He actually found hidden traps at a pretty frequent rate, but few of them belonged to the Contractor.

Millions of users had been through what had been the United States of America. Though most of them had funneled into the organizations that had risen out of the ashes of the country, there had still been many who had started in places like this. Nobody was bothering to pick up their trash when coming back for it meant potentially dying to a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters.

“Picking up something on radar,” one of the pilots said. “Might want to take a look at this.”

It was a familiar voice. Amelia, alias Telescope, had been one of the first users Will had seen upon crashing back to Earth after the Trial of the Champion. Regina had picked the squad that would accompany Will carefully, aware that while most of her people weren’t stupid enough to attack him, there were a great deal who were too put off by his aura and the part of his class that made him seem incredibly evil to properly work with him. 

The others in this group weren’t ones that Will recognized, but they were apparently made of tough enough stuff to handle him. They also weren’t talking to him, which was a bit odd, but he could deal.

“I hear you,” Will replied. He didn’t know why they weren’t just using the system chat, but Regina had claimed that the verbal aspects of the comms they used had some use at least. Will's best guess was that she just wanted to record everything. “Direction?”

“Northwest, about two and a half miles,” she said. “Structure. Subterranean.”

She sent a diagram through the system, and Will focused more of Sen’s eyes around there. He hadn’t fully scanned that area yet.

Sen’s eyes found the structure pretty quickly, and Pages of the Past revealed that it was, in fact, quite heavily trapped. There were a couple of entrances from the ground, very mundane-looking gateways into a sprawling facility beneath. Each of them had a number of gold-rank traps placed upon them, but no magic had been used in the last 24 hours, nor were there any lingering stealth effects being peeled away.

“Give me a second,” Will said. “I'm going to take a closer look.”

He sent hunger phantasm exploding out of his Thousand Eyes, spreading corruption through them in order to disarm the most obvious traps. Once those were clear, he sent the eyes in as well.

“Not really seeing signs of life,” Will said. “Let's check it a little deeper. Can you take the top off?”

“You got it,” Amelia replied. “Bluejay One and Two, can openers.”

They abruptly veered towards the facility. With the possibility of potentially hurting innocents out of the way, they were free to drop a few munitions of ESNA design. Augmented with silver- and gold-rank enhancements, these airburst bombs were extremely effective at tearing the ground apart.

Will dropped from the skies alongside the bombs, using Wind Walker and his artificial wings to ensure that he didn’t fall at a pace too similar to that of the ordnance. When the bombs blew, Will folded those wings in front of him to keep any of the shrapnel from hitting him.

There was very little living within the facility. There were more traps, and there were actually signs of something having been present, but for the most part, it was barren.

He spent another couple of minutes tearing through it until he was certain that they had covered the ground of the laboratory—or whatever facility this was supposed to be. There had been human activity here at some point, Will was sure.

Frustrated with the lack of progress, he decided now was as good a time as ever to practice using his plausibility. Dipping into it for something as mundane as this might have seemed like a waste, but amplifying a skill like Pages of the Past wouldn’t empty his well of plausibility any faster than a tablespoon would the ocean. The stronger he made it, the more significant that usage became, but something as simple as increasing a 24-hour time window into a 48-hour one, then a 72-hour one, and so forth? That was definitely doable.

It did end up taking more plausibility than he would have liked to return a result. He pushed Pages of the Past all the way back to three weeks prior—two days before he had departed from Earth. At that point, each incremental push was taking more and more plausibility, and Will was close to giving up before he found it—magic, faint traces of it in the past.

He'd been working on a piece of the angel here, Will realized. Just a piece. Even with his gold-rank upgrade allowing him to understand more of what a skill did, he couldn’t fully comprehend the minutiae of the magic that had been used here. What he could tell was what it was for.

“It’s empty,” Will said. “Move on to the next location. He ditched this one three weeks ago. I think it was part of the summoning ritual, but it has served its use already.”

“Copy that,” Amelia said.

Will sighed. He could imagine doing this again and again, following a wild goose chase as he tried to piece together every last one of the Contractor’s innumerable labs. If he had one with security that had been this frankly easy to circumvent, then he certainly had others. Will would need to track down everybody that worked for the Contractor in order to even differentiate between useful locations and those that had already been disposed of.

Wait, he thought. Track down everybody?

Will slapped his forehead.

“Will, is something wrong?” Amelia asked urgently. “Will, your aura’s going crazy.”

“Whoops.” Will shook his head, clearing it and calming his aura down. “I’m a moron. Let me call up Regina. I have a way more efficient way for us to do this.”

#

“Here you are,” Regina said dubiously. “Alan Truman. Silver 9. Runs a small sniper division out of what used to be Kentucky. Doesn’t have anything in his skill set that would work for you.”

Alan, who had just been brought into the large waiting room of the portal gate Regina had installed in her capital city, recognized Will immediately.

“Oh, hell to the fuck no,” Alan hissed, flinching away instinctively.

“Chill,” Will said. “I’m not here to hurt you. That much.”

“You have a history,” Regina said.

“Your man here takes all jobs for the Contractor,” Will replied. “Bumped into him during the trial of the champion. Bumped into him again after when he made a stupid decision and tried to fight me.”

“Those are vetted through me now. I am aware of his background.”

“Did you make him cut off any of his contacts?”

“Of course not. There’s usefulness in having them, after all.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Hey, I’m still right here,” Alan said. “Ma’am, I don’t know what you want from me, but as long as it doesn’t involve this guy—”

“Dude,” Will interrupted. “You shot me out of the fucking sky with a rocket launcher, and all I did was give you a warning. I just need a quick favor from you.”

“A favor,” Alan said dubiously.

“Yep. Hold still.”

“Hold… what?”

Will thrust his aura outwards, accompanying it with a scream.

Alan's expression morphed into a terrified not-this-shit-again look right before he got hit by the full force of Wail of the Forgotten. Will had more power to put behind it now, and Alan hadn't been expecting the hit. He passed out in five seconds flat.

The effect of [Wail of the Forgotten]’s subskill, [Dark Harvest], has taken effect. View your map for the current positions of all members of [Alan Truman]’s partied Users.

Regina seemed to have grown used to Will's shenanigans.

“You could have warned me about that,” she said.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Will asked. “Besides, I'm pretty sure you already figured I would do something like this. Why else would I ask for someone with no applicable skills?”

Just like the last time he’d hit the man, Wail of the Forgotten granted him a map of all of the user's allies. Many of them were very clearly ESNA, their distances and directions obviously still within the borders of what Regina controlled, but there were many others spaced out across the world. Those, Will gathered, had a much higher chance of being someone else's.

“Work with me here,” Will said. “I need some intel that might be compromising to you but is literally useless in my hands. I'm going to start listing names, and I'm going to need you to tell me which ones are yours and which ones are targets.”

Regina hadn't become the leader of a nation for no reason. She understood what was going on pretty much immediately. “You can replicate this?”

“With every single one of them we find,” Will said. “Disseminating it isn't too hard either. I'm sure you can help with that.”

“I may be able to reach some of them myself,” Regina said. “With a name and enough of a connection, I can do a fair amount of work.”

“Okay, Makima.”

Regina looked at him strangely. “What?”

“Not the time,” Will admitted. “All right. Adrian Ross. Currently active somewhere around what used to be Ohio.”

“Mine.”

“Adeline Varex. Old California.”

“Target.”

#

Just about one hour after Will's abrupt disappearance from the aerial group he'd been with, he reappeared, stepping through the portal and brushing himself off like nothing had happened.

He sent a message out to his group. Regina would be handling operation-wide comms, but his specific one was his, and he wanted to handle them himself. He'd already sent messages to those in his party, but they had gotten the memo long before Regina had even gone to them.

Will: I'm not going to bother using voice chat here. We have a target. It won't be the Contractor, but it's probably one of his contracted. I need none of you to kill them. The kill has to be mine, but we can also get away with non-lethal measures. Coordinates should be entering your systems shortly. Any questions?

Amelia: When do we start?

In lieu of an answer, Will kicked off the ground and took to the skies, a gust of wind propelling him.

#

Over the course of the next few days, hundreds if not thousands of seemingly unrelated users learned to fear the sky. In some places, an orbital strike obliterated safe houses, destroying weeks and months of hard work to build defenses. In others, a quiet assassin that no one noticed—even when she was right in front of them—slipped up to people and held a knife to their throat. And still others, a series of ridiculously fortunate events allowed an elf to cartwheel through crossfires established by private military companies as she singled out one or two targets.

Anyone targeted by Will had it the worst, of course. He was trying out his new weapon, which meant a great deal of people got to watch his bombs fall on their residence before a halberd the size of a small skyscraper came tumbling down on them, blazing with corruption.

To be fair, the people his friends caught weren’t faring much better. They would knock them out or otherwise non-lethally disarm them—literally, in a couple of cases—and send a notification to Will, who kept one or two of Sen’s eyes with each group to act as range extenders. His Wail of the Forgotten could transmit through those pretty easily, extracting information from dying contracted targets from thousands of miles away.

It was a lengthy process. Every time he got information, he had to cross-reference it with Regina's data. Some of them probably weren't even allied with the Contractor and were instead agents from other nations. Through repeated “interrogations,” however, they were able to create a steadily tightening net. As they started to find more common variables, groups started converging. There were a few incidents where planes got shot out of the sky, but those were mostly recoverable. Will's party was a true X factor when it came to dealing with unconventional warfare, to say the least.

Bit by bit, they narrowed down their targets. When Will started screaming and receiving information that was clearly obfuscated by a stealth skill, he knew that he was on the right track. By the fifth day, every other person they were catching had that same connection. Though individually they were blurry, each additional person painted a clearer picture.

Eventually, Will was sure enough in his targeting to narrow it down to an area they should have already been able to see. There was a certain expanse a couple dozen miles from the Las Vegas area. A little ironic, given that he’d told Caiyeri they could go there for fun and relaxation sometime.

There was something different about this area that Will only realized when he got close to it.

Every time he got near it, he was struck with the urge to look somewhere else. At first, he didn't think much of it, mostly because the effect was working. When a bit of plausibility flared and his mind broke through it, however, he could tell that there was more to this than just a simple redirection effect. Redirection effects wouldn't have worked on him, not when mental and soul effects were nearly impossible to make stick.

As Will made his way to the boundary, burning pieces of plausibility in order to keep himself on track, he sent a brush of corruption forward, attempting to breach the boundary that was keeping him from noticing its very existence. The corruption made contact with something and then seemed to vanish, accompanied by the sound of glass shattering.

Except that wasn’t glass. The very reality in front of him seemed to shatter in the same manner that would have indicated an opening into the Beyond. There was no Beyond past this broken space, however—just more of the baseline reality that Will had thought he was in.

Was this a pocket dimension of some kind? Will resolved to ask Ayla about it sometime before remembering that she wasn’t going to be in contact with him for quite some time. All he had related to her was the information about where she was—surprisingly close, but far out of reach if Will wanted to keep Earth alive.

Focus. Now is not the time for getting distracted.

This time, when he sent the message, it was to practically everyone he knew.

Will: Think I found the fucker. Let’s show him a bad time.