[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 156: Return

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, predictably, waiting for him.

“You lived,” she said. “I could barely see what was going on in there.”

“You don't have to sound so surprised about it,” Will replied.

“I am and will continue to be shocked every time you walk into an obvious death trap and somehow walk out stronger than you ever were.” Ayla’s amorphous form rippled with some kind of surprise as she took his soul in. “You gained the ability to use plausibility.”

“Looks like I did,” Will replied.

“Looks like—You could sound a little more excited about it.”

“You can read my aura. You know damn well how excited I am about it.”

Will was nothing short of ecstatic that he'd been able to harness this power. He'd been getting fucked over left and right by the few people on Earth who were already able to use this, and Peace herself had manipulated him into granting herself the ability to activate her plausibility and shit on his parade. Having the ability to fight back for once was heavenly.

That said, it wasn't like this was a win-instantly button. Sure, it catapulted him from one of the strongest people on Earth to probably the single strongest one, but the god he was playing against right now had a lot more experience than him at the plausibility game. Now, the game had changed from finding sufficient power to defeat what the Contractor had to using exactly the correct amount of power to win without letting Peace up the ante again

“You're going back to Earth,” Ayla said. “You know, you have the skill set now to simply not.”

“Not what?” Will asked. “You mean, like, abandon the planet?”

“You make it sound like such a bad thing. Yes, you can leave the cycle. There are plenty of Gold Rankers out there who aren't actually cycle-bound. I was one of them.”

“Not being cycle-bound seems like a really shitty idea right now,” Will said. “I guess if you were just trying to get away from some kind of disaster back home, that'd be one thing. I kind of bring the disaster with me.”

“That's true.” Ayla’s figure rippled, her equivalent of a shrug. “But there are ways to hide your presence. Ways to counteract the difference in power. You have allies. You have plausibility. You have access to a wealth of knowledge on how to stay hidden.”

“I mean, you did get caught.”

“Because I made a mistake. Every mistake you make seems to end up becoming another opportunity.”

“Are we seriously entertaining this right now? I have people down on Earth that I care about, and that's my goddamn home planet. What would leaving even bring me?”

Another ripple-shrug from Ayla. “It's something that I feel the need to express. You're in a similar position to where I was once upon a time. I don't expect you to take that suggestion, nor do I think it's the best option available. I just want to be sure your eyes are open to everything.”

“That's a fair point.” Will could not count the number of times where he had been almost completely screwed over thanks to a slight lack of critical knowledge. If he had been just a little bit more aware about what corruption could do and the mechanics of plausibility, he might have tried to approach that incident in the Beyond with a little more tact. “I'm still going back, though.”

“Of course you are.”

“Got any tips?” Will asked. “I'm still kind of new to this whole using plausibility thing.”

“You get used to it. Trying to teach you about the mechanics of using plausibility would be a mistake. I've seen people try it before. It works differently from person to person. The rules of plausibility are the same, but the way you use it depends only on yourself.”

“Well, that's useful to know,” Will admitted. “I'll make sure not to spare anyone promising they can teach me the ways of plausibility, then.”

“You weren't going to spare them anyway.”

“Yeah, but I'll kill them extra fast.”

“That aside,” Ayla said, “I have no advice for you in this moment other than to find your target and eliminate it as quickly as possible. You have reached the point where you can enter the battlefield on the same level as your opponent, but the longer you give Peace and the Contractor to prepare, the more uphill of a battle this will be.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Will said. “It's been a busy couple of days.”

“It's going to have been longer than just a couple of days back on Earth,” Ayla said. “Though I couldn't see most of what was happening because you were so far away from my position, I could tell that the primary method of attack against you was not the only vector by which the Contractor’s hired sovereigns sought to eliminate you.”

“Wait, this is new to me,” Will said. “I didn't sense anything else. Are you telling me—”

“It's hard to gauge from here,” Ayla interrupted. “But at a guess, there was a time dilation effect applied. I would wager that the goal was to segment a fragment of physical reality off into a massive bubble in which corruption would slowly take over your allies and either eliminate you or weaken you sufficiently for your plausibility to be taken freely once you return to Earth. Your companions wouldn’t have noticed it because of the threat in front of them. On the time scale they work on, a slight distortion effect would have barely registered.”

“How long?” Will had been so sure that he'd had things under control, but this threw a wrench into matters. “Fuck, we only had a few weeks left until the angel popped.”

“So timeliness matters even more now,” Ayla said. “Rest assured, no angel has appeared. It has, however, become clear that it is an angel that will appear. I cannot tell where, because my senses, strong as they are, cannot penetrate both a dead zone and the anti-surveillance magic utilized by the Contractor.”

Will sucked in a breath, which was, strictly speaking, unnecessary given that they were currently representations of their souls rather than actual living beings. “Guess you're right. Shit, that's bad.”

He had thought that Caiyeri or one of his other contacts on Earth might have reached out to him, but he remembered now that the system chat did have a range limit. The reason why Ayla was still able to communicate with him was because she had managed to hook herself in as the system helper thanks to the challenge dungeon. Caiyeri and the others had no such system.

“I believe you can do it,” Ayla said softly. “As of your entry into the Beyond this time, you finally have the weapons necessary to fight this kind of warfare.”

“Could have told me that earlier,” Will said.

“It is not so simple a task to acquire the ability to use plausibility,” she said. “As much as I wish to push you so that you can survive and become the best of us, I do not think you would have reacted well to me telling you to kill nine thousand more people.”

He considered it for a moment.

“You've changed, Will. A couple of months ago, you wouldn't have even hesitated to tell me I was a monster for suggesting that.”

“It is monstrous,” he pointed out. “But when the trade-off is whatever the fuck Peace is trying to do with a cycle…”

“Dangerous thinking, but I understand. I made that choice before. I would not again.”

“It's a good thing that it worked out the way it did. Well, I say good, but we'll have to see how the Contractor shapes up against me. And everyone else. I've got a few contingencies in place, but the reliability is dubious. I wonder how everyone else is doing.”

“You'll find out soon.” Ayla hovered, and Will recognized the telltale signs of her running out of soul energy to remain in the Beyond for much longer. She must have already been here doing something else, whether that was observing or simply waiting for Will to appear.

“Something the matter?” he asked. “Beyond the glaringly obvious.”

“Just a realization.” Ayla didn't seem to want to go quite yet, but judging from her aura, which she was being uncharacteristically open with today, she also didn't want to say the words on her mind.

“Are you going to share that realization with the class, or…?”

“It would be unfair to you.” Though she was one of the best at utilizing the Beyond the way it was meant to be, constantly chiding Will on his organic mannerisms while acting as a soul representation, Ayla sighed. “We've operated as partners up until this point. I've given you advice, and you acted on it. I don't want all of that to have just been a means to an end for me. There are already too many players trying to use you. I don't want to be one.”

Will blinked. “Sorry, was that sentimentality I just heard from you? The Void Dreamer? You know what Nynn thinks of you, right? You've been living up to your reputation for a while, but this is just odd.”

“Captivity changes a person. Maybe I've gone soft.”

“Maybe? Ayla, I thought we went over this already. It's not using somebody to trade favors, and besides, I already owe you a lot. What do you want me to do?”

“I don't want you to do anything. You said before that one day you might try to find a dead zone I'm in and retrieve me from it.”

“Yeah, and I still plan on doing that. Just, you know, when I have time. And I'm alive. And I have the ability to do so.”

“That is not entirely correct,” Ayla said. “You make it out to be like it's a later priority, and yet I can read your aura. You would drop things for this, because despite all that violence, that demonic, lethal certainty, you are still a good man underneath it. That is why…”

“Stop angsting about it and just tell me,” Will said. “Unless it's immediately actionable information, I'll file it away for later.”

Ayla gathered herself. “What I wish to tell you is that you do not lack the ability to find me. You certainly lack the time, and your circumstances are not ones in which I would try to go off-planet, especially with the purpose of rescuing one person, but with your plausibility, you can travel through space like nobody else on your planet.”

“Nobody else?” Will could definitely think of a few people he wouldn’t bet on himself against when it came to travel.

Ayla thought about that for a moment, then amended her statement. “Few others.”

“Okay, that's nice to know, but I don't see how that's damaging information.”

“The actual information I have is a location. Mine.”

That did surprise Will. He had been under the impression that Ayla didn't actually know where her dead zone was. He'd been pretty certain that was part of why it had gotten its name, after all—the complete lack of interaction with the system.

Then again, he’d also been communicating with Ayla through the system all this time, so it couldn’t be completely disconnected.

“Why can't you just tell me later?”

“I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to connect here. The effects of an angel vary heavily, but they almost always interfere with the Beyond. It won't be a permanent wound like corruption would inflict upon it, but the chances I will still be able to communicate with you as I have are shaky.”

“You knew this already.” It wasn't a question.

“I did. I didn't want to make a false priority rise up your list.”

Will shook his head.“I’m just going to ignore whatever this phase you've gotten into is and just say give me the damn information. It'll really suck losing you as a resource, and despite everything, I do kind of like you as a person—changeling, sorry. Like I said, I'll come for you when I'm ready.”

“That's going to get you killed one day.”

“What, being willing to help people who help me?”

“Being kind.” Ayla mimiced his expression. “The information will enter your system when you leave the Beyond. I've taken up enough of your time. I need my soul to recuperate.”

Ayla was acting a little strangely today, but Will did have an angel to beat.

“I'm back off to Earth then,” he said. “I’ll see you again when I see you.”

“Goodbye,” Ayla said. It sounded surprisingly final.

Will wanted to dig into that a little, but he wanted to get back to Earth more than that.

He took the path out of the Beyond at the same time Ayla did.

#

Ayla Dreamer hovered in a dead zone. For the first time in over a century, including the time she'd been in prison as a captive of the system organization, she felt well and truly blind. When she'd been a prisoner, she had access to data. Before that, and to some extent now, she had access to the dreams of the Void. To her, the Beyond wasn't only a way to transport herself.

It was, in some ways, a predictive model. Energy flowed through the Beyond in ways that didn’t exist anywhere else. Time didn’t work the same way there as it did normally. And while Ayla would never presume herself to be a precognitive or fortune teller, there was a reason she had been so adept at avoiding the capture of even gods while she had been active.

This time, however, when she tried to peer into the potential paths Earth could take, she saw nothing. She didn’t see destruction. There was simply a lack of a path to see.

In times past, that had meant a force too great for her understanding of the Beyond to model. In this cycle, that shouldn’t have been possible.

Now, she could only watch like any other mortal would.

And though she hadn't said it, she knew it was very possible the fate of this cycle lay on the shoulders of one particularly snarky corruption wielder.

Watch out for yourself, Will, she thought.

Through the Beyond, she’d already seen a hundred ways he should have died. So far, he’d been lucky or skilled enough to avoid them all, but lucky only went so far.

#

Will was traveling a fair distance to the Beyond this time, and he wasn't sure how much time had elapsed since he left, nor was he certain how things would have developed during his absence.

He was pretty sure he'd warned his companions that he was going to be out for a bit. At the time, he’d thought that would have been for a couple of hours, not however long it had ended up taking, so this was going to be a little awkward.

Since they hadn't exactly established a set meeting point, Will decided to go to the same point that he’d entered the Beyond from—back down in Boston.

The trip did feel a little longer this time than it had last, but then again, this was the first time Will had used the Beyond to travel further than a couple thousand miles. It gave him some time to reflect on the nature of the place as he traveled, letting his senses expand out to take in a world of pure potential—the world the Angels emerged from.

I'll be strong enough to bend this place to my will one day, he thought to himself.

Dreaming about the future didn't help him now, though. He used the opportunity to train his senses and practice his soul projection, but he was primarily focused on just getting back.

Subjective time didn't actually matter while he was in the Beyond, as he knew that the amount of time that would have passed on the outside was entirely different. At least, that had been his experience leading up until this point—he didn’t want to risk the possibility of it being different this time around, so he kept his trip as short as possible, minimizing the burden on his strain.

When he stumbled out of the portal back into his temporary living facilities in Boston, not much seemed to have changed at first glance. The second glance, however, was significantly different.

“Did they build me a fucking memorial?”

His senses expanded out the second he arrived back, his soul reconnecting with his bonded familiars. Part of that included an admittedly impressive small monument with his name inscribed on it.

Will's system was instantly bombarded with dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds, of new message notifications. He skimmed over a few of them—people from across the world had been asking after him for a good bit of time now. He scrolled as quickly as he could, trying to find the earliest message he’d gotten after he left.

It was from Caiyeri. The timestamp was marked as 19 days ago.

“Ah, shit.”

It looked like he had not, in fact, given sufficient warning to most people that he was about to step off-planet for an indeterminate period of time.

Caiyeri: System says you're out of range, and it's been a couple of hours with no response. Going to assume you're not dead because I refuse to believe you would die without causing an enormous commotion, but if you'd like to send a message back sometime soon, that'd be appreciated.

Hers was the most level-headed of the messages. Others had been panicked, unsure what him being out of range for so long meant. Still others, Cinder included, had sent a couple of messages updating him on their situations while also asking if he'd been yanked off-world like a lot of the otherworlders had prior to the beginning of the cycle.

The most concerning ones were the ones that didn't come from his allies. They came from some names he recognized and many others he didn't, the latter of whom seemed to have gotten his contact through somebody else. They seemed to be testing whether or not he was still here.

It was disquieting to realize that it was very possible his very presence on Earth might have been enough to stop certain people from acting out, so to speak. While he'd been gone, some of those people had acted.

Will made a mental note to add “deal with a whole bunch of mass murderers” to his already too-long to-do list.

For the time being, he had some other shit to get done.

He drafted a message, then sent it out to his closest allies—the ones he would need in the days to come.

Will: Got a little waylaid. Had another attempt on my life, but that's about par for the course. I'm back now, and that's what's important. I've got gear, I've got new power. Sorry for the delay, but we still have a Contractor to find.

The “and kill” was implicit.

The first message back was from Caiyeri.

Caiyeri: For a message announcing your return from assumed death, I would have thought you would try something grander.

Caiyeri: Let's get it done.