[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 154: Promotion

A Culmination. Will recognized the term. He'd witnessed two of them—one from Ataraxis, the corruption cultist, and one from Dread Executor Nynn. Nynn was no longer a Dread Executor even in name, but the power he had wielded that one fateful day at the Trial of the Champion had been a promise of what Will could achieve if he survived every trial thrown his way.

This, too, was a demonstration of the power a User could wield at the top end of the scale. Will watched in fascination as fire—which shouldn't have been able to survive in space, where there was no oxygen—ignited from the Lady of Pale Fire as a starting point. Just as her title implied, the fire was beautifully pale. It had an almost reflective quality to it as it ballooned outward, spreading at speeds that the Order of the Strikers display told Will were in excess of 1% of the speed of light.

It was over in a flash. Even with the displays monitoring the entire event having limits on them, presumably specifically to prevent too much mana from slipping through and overloading the instruments, Will thought his retinas might burn out looking at the video representation of Pale Fire's culmination.

In the amount of time it had taken her to charge up her ultimate ability, the others had gotten far, far away. Steve, for one, was so close to the moon that Will was on that the camera—or whatever high-ranking analogue to a camera they were using—could now make out specific details of the buildings Will was pretty sure he was in.

It made sense once he saw the fallout of Pale Fire's culmination. The sensors hadn't been able to properly capture the full extent of the devastation wrought by that one Culmination. The last time he had seen one of these, it had been due to the work of a ritual that had temporarily allowed a gold-rank man to access a power that he shouldn't have had the ability to. 

This time, it was being used at full power by someone with the mana to back it up. Even back then, the corruption cultist’s Culmination—or, at least, his imitation of one—had been significant enough to travel hundreds if not thousands of miles across the three small moons that the Trial of the Champion had been taking place on.

While Will had only the moon alongside what he was pretty sure was this solar system’s star to judge size, he could tell immediately that the sheer scale of what the Lady of Pale Fire had accomplished was significantly greater than anything else he had seen before—perhaps with the exception of the demon he now called Richard.

While he hadn't gotten an accurate count of the number of enemies himself, a brief examination of the sensor data had shown that there were so many of them that they seemed to fill up space larger than the size of the moon Will was currently on. There had been tens of thousands of gold rankers who had been conscripted to deliver whatever vector of attack they had been planning on using.

Now, all that was left of them was the fading sparks of Pale Fire's culmination. Will wished that he could have seen it with his own eyes, sensed it with his own aura. Having that kind of information about true power was a pivotal step toward obtaining it on his own.

From what information he had gathered through Nynn and Ayla, he was reasonably sure that culminations were something you got when you ascended to the Sovereign tier. However, Will didn't particularly care for playing by the rules, and he had already demonstrated to himself and to the world that the rules of the system were not necessarily ironclad. Even if he couldn't get anything close to the real thing, a fraction of the power that Pale Fire had demonstrated here would be a true game-changer on Earth against the likes of the Contractor.

The raw devastation inflicted by the Lady of Pale Fire onto the amassed “suicide brigades” made Will wonder why their enemies had even bothered in the first place. If they knew that they were up against other Lords and Ladies who were not restricted by plausibility when fighting against a group of gold rankers who weren’t in the cycle at all, they shouldn’t have sent people who would have been so susceptible to a single blow.

And then, as the ashes cleared and the sensors that had blown out trying to read the output of Pale Fire’s culmination started to come back online, Will realized that the brigade had not only been here to try to deliver whatever weapons they were holding.

Where before there had been an army of swirling dots demonstrating the current locations of the force that the enemy sovereign-tiers had used as their proxy, there was now a large black region. That darkness was a clearly different color from the background, and it didn’t seem to carry the same meaning as the default display. It was, Will realized with a slight sense of horror and a much larger sense of curiosity, corruption.

That corruption had come from the suicide brigade. Whatever they had done, they had managed to create a lasting effect even when the majority of their items and all of their bodies were little more than disparate atoms floating through deep space. In the process, they had somehow managed to surround Pale Fire with a cloud of roiling darkness. Will was not sure of the exact details of what had happened, but he could tell that the corruption was not remaining idle.

"Oh boy," Will said to himself, knowing that it was very likely that Steve was monitoring him at this very second, "this just got interesting."

#

The Lady of Pale Fire had, as the mortals on the newest cycle across the multiverse often liked to say, fucked up.

Steve watched impassively. Though he was relatively new to lordship—he had only been at that rank for a mere five standard years—he knew how it worked. He had been sponsored by the Order of the Striker when he had been but a bronze-ranker on his own planet. They had supported him through the Trial of the Champion at gold until his planet had passed the threshold into a new kind of warfare. 

Once enough people had reached the gem tier, the planet had been considered to be integrated. From there, Steve had left his home, which had little left for him at that point, and joined the Order of the Striker. There, he had worked under Lords and Ladies—and on one occasion, even the Prince in charge of the Order—as he had learned the ins and outs of what being a Sovereign meant.

The Lady of Pale Fire, on the other hand, clearly had not. Steve had read up on her prior to this altercation of theirs. Since she had been a competitor in the Trial of the Champion, he had identified potential weaknesses that he could play off of. The Lady of Pale Fire had been a Lady for only seven years, none of which had been during an active cycle and none of which had involved the kind of politics and interplay that cycle-bound warfare did.

She clearly had not participated in anything to do with a suicide brigade. It was possible she had heard of them, even heard of their risks, but she had made the mistake that killed the most new sovereign-tiers—assuming that eschewing part of what made them mortal was enough to make them wholly immortal.

There were very few people not named Dread Executors who could handle the kind of corruption one of these brigades unleashed when mishandled. For instance, blowing them all up while you were in the center of their presence and therefore opening yourself up to the massive amount of Lord-ranked corruption that unleashed upon the trigger of mass-produced Lord-rank items.

While Steve and the Order of the Striker had ways to cleanse corruption, just like everyone else here likely did, there was a difference between an errant miss with something like a particularly powerful metal-tier who could affect people far above his rank and one with a corruption nebula large enough to subsume a small planet. They did not have the tools to deal with something of this magnitude.

The good news was that the corruption had blown in a way that had integrated with Pale Fire’s culmination, inverting it and directing negative energy back towards her. The facility of the Order of the Striker would remain intact today.

The bad news was that their alliance of five sovereign-tier entities was about to go down to four. As much as Steve found the horrendously unprofessional and naive Lady of Pale Fire to be a bother in his accounting, he also knew that losing someone on her level of strength would be devastating. Steve was one of fewer than a dozen sovereign-tiers that the Order of the Striker had to offer, and he knew that though their classes varied, their abilities were similar. They needed the kind of dimensionality that somebody like the Lady of Pale Fire could provide if they were to avoid total destruction. That was how the Order of the Striker had weathered being caught on the edge of the 18th Great Cosmic War, and it was how they were going to weather this.

Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do for her—nothing he had could break through such dense corruption. Pale Fire could try to use one of her fast-travel abilities, but she had no inbuilt way to access the plane of energy that funneled users away from their cycle into these off-planet meeting locations. If she moved quickly through the cloud of corruption, all she was guaranteeing was that her inevitable, painful end would come much sooner.

“Retreat,” said the Lord of Loss. “I liked Pale Fire, but there is little we can do for her now. Her sacrifice means the loss of many billions of credits for the coalition built against us and also represents information—the signatures of the items that corrupted their users as they detonated. You all saw them, correct?”

“That is correct,” the one who had designated herself as Ash said. “This will be a sore loss, but it buys us valuable time.”

“You bastards!” The Lady of Pale Fire was still able to hear them, and they were able to hear her. 

That was a perk of being a sovereign-tier—communication was far easier than it was when all you had access to was a system chat. One downside of that was that sovereign-tiers could very easily hear the rest of their party abandoning them to die the most painful death in the known universe.

“I warned you," the Lord of Loss said. "You called me a coward.”

“You're going to let me die because I called you a coward?" Pale Fire screeched, a note of very real terror in her voice. As a sovereign tier, it was easy to forget what it was like to actually have your life be in danger. Reminders that they were still, in fact, mortal hit twice as hard as it would for anyone under them.

“Let's just go," the Lady of Overwhelming Violence said. "This is just sad to watch. I don't want—“

All four of them, separated by miles in their own personal protective skills, tensed as they sensed a very particular Gold Ranker's magic extend into space with them.

At first, Steve thought this was a trick. William Li-Brown had been left inside a secure room. That teleportation had transported him somewhere where magic could not escape. None of his skills should have been able to get him out of there.

It was impossible, but Steve, like many of the other members of the Order of the Striker, was quickly growing to realize that some people didn't care what was possible or not. Steve had known this kind of behavior in the Striker Prince, the enigmatic figure who ran the universal operations of Order of the Striker. Nobody expected it out of a gold-ranker.

And yet, here that very Gold Ranker was, darkness stretching throughout the pitch-black void of space, inky clouds reaching out towards Steve and his three surviving compatriots. Technically, four, but Pale Fire wasn't likely to remain alive much longer.

What was driving this? Steve was a scholar at heart—always had been. He wanted to understand the mechanics behind this defiance of what should have been a room powerful enough to prevent even diamond-rankers from escaping.

There was a sense of strength to the magic that couldn't have been the Corruption Wielder's own. Steve had analyzed that man's aura, and though he had understood that it had withstood contact with gods in a fashion that was unlike any other metal-ranker he had ever seen, this had something more to it. This had the favor of a god.

He could tell that everyone else was running similar scenarios through their heads, trying to understand why exactly the corruption wielder's magic had reached so far and escaped a facility they had needed express permission to enter. Gold-rankers weren't supposed to have this kind of weaponry available to them at this point in time. 

Steve wondered if any of them were thinking that it was a good thing they had made their deal with William Li-Brown when they had. He certainly was.

Before any of them could get too deep into it, though, mana flashed. Steve almost reflexively tried to stamp out that mana with his own aura, but he soon realized where it was coming from and what it was intended to do. The others realized the same soon enough.

The darkness had reached Steve. It hovered around him, not trying to get any closer but following him as he drifted through space. A moment later, William Li-Brown appeared with a flash of spatial magic just in front of where Steve's antimatter rifle had been stowed.

"Miss me?" the corruption wielder asked. "If I didn't know any better, I would have thought that you were trying to keep me locked in my room."

"You do know better," Steve said evenly. "That you are here indicates that you are aware that I was trying to ensure your safety by keeping you contained in a room. Evidently, that did not work. Why are you here?"

"You know, I thought you guys might run into some problem with corruption. It looks like I might have been correct." Will smiled, an expression that Steve knew from his files on the man was intended to provoke a reaction out of him.

He did not. Instead, he looked the corruption wielder dead in the eye. "I see that you are capable of surviving in deep space. However, the corruption that is currently assailing the Lady of Pale Fire is the product of lord-rank corruption detonating twenty-five thousand times. That is not something you are capable of surviving, let alone assisting with.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Will said. “I’ve got a pretty good reason to believe I can handle this.”

“A good reason,” the Lady of Overwhelming Violence scoffed. “That’s rich.”

“I don’t see you going off to help your supposed ally,” the corruption wielder shot back.

Steve had to admit that there was something strange about WIlliam Li-Brown’s aura. Stranger than the usual, that was—it was already obviously aberrant in a dozen different ways, but there was a further nuance to it this time, the same kind of blessed strength that had infused his darkness earlier.

“Now, if you don’t mind,” Will said. “I’d guess our friend Pale Fire here has three, maybe four minutes until she starts dying?”

“Slightly less,” Steve estimated.

“Then there’s no time to waste. Would one of you be a dear and teleport me within a couple miles of it? I spent a lot of gas getting this far, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly built for interplanetary travel.”

“Do not be a fool, corruption wielder,” the Lord of Loss said.

“You told me once that there is no advancement without a setback,” Will shot back. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

“There is a limit where bold action becomes idiocy.”

“Can’t get ya all the way there,” Ash spoke up, suddenly appearing besides Steve and Will. “Any teleport skill’ll get fried by the corruption if it gets anywhere close. I can make you real fast for a few minutes, though.”

“How fast?”

“Why not find out yourself?”

Though Steve had resolved not to be unnerved by the corruption wielder’s mannerisms, the sheer amount of chaotic evil that resonated through the boy’s aura at that moment sent a shiver up his spine.

“Let’s do it,” Will said.

Ash pushed him forward gently, applying a skill, and then Will practically vanished, rocketing off towards a corruption cloud the size of a small planet.

“That was idiotic,” the Lady of Overwhelming Violence said. “Why did you let him do that? He’s going to die and then we’re all going to be alone. No leverage.”

“Why didn’t you stop me, then?” Ash challenged.

Nobody had an answer to that.

The true answer, Steve suspected, was not one that anyone wanted to admit.

They were scared. Not of the idea that William Li-Brown would fail here and leave them stranded without the basis for their alliance.

Their fear was that he would pull it off.

#

Will had not expected being accelerated at a measurable fraction of the speed of light to be so fun. Without air resistance, his body felt an incredible amount of acceleration before he was simply hurtling through this solar system headlong into nothing but darkness.

Don’t think, he reminded himself. Just do.

Once his vision was entirely encompassed by the cloud, he figured it was close enough.

From his inventory, he withdrew the corrupted sigil he’d been gifted by a cultist.

Not a moment too soon. Mind-shattering pain scorched through his soul as every part of his existence started to unravel.

Will activated Chaos Transfer, cleansing himself and his surroundings..

His target was the sigil.

WARNING: Skill overloaded. Permanent damage to skill may occur.

Warning overridden.

25,891 levels of Lord-rank [Corruption] cleansed.

[Envoy of Mercy] has activated. You have gained a level of [Blessed] and [Purified] for each life you saved.

[Chaos Transfer] has been overloaded. You cannot currently use [Chaos Transfer].

Achievement earned: Implausible

There are a number of ways to earn this achievement or ones like it. The first and most common is one you already know—directly causing the deaths of 10,000 sentient beings.

Another, lesser known one, is punching so far above your weight class that the universe takes notice.

As a gold-ranker manhandling Lord-rank corruption, you certainly qualify.

Reward: You can now spend plausibility.