[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 144: This Guy Blew Me Up Once, But We’re Cool

Regina. Gold 4 [CLASS HIDDEN BY SKILL].

Leaderboard Rank: 10 (+1 in the last 24 hours)

Will really didn’t like dealing with Regina.

The self-styled Supreme Commander of the Eastern States of New America or whatever name the nation that controlled most of what had been the eastern seaboard was named now was an ally, but she’d always rubbed him the wrong way. There was just a level of suspicion that he couldn’t help but feel around her.

To be fair to her, it was entirely possible that this was just a function of something her class did. Will’s Reaper class as well as a number of other features he’d gotten from dealing with gods and demons had rendered him unsettling to literally everyone. If his allies had to deal with the looming sensation that he was going to snap and kill them at any given time, he supposed he could find it within himself to work with someone he found a bit suspicious.

Besides, the offer she was in the process of detailing to her wasn’t terrible. In exchange for what was essentially grinding a dungeon, Will would get her cooperation and considerable resources put towards the purpose of building a weapon that would be capable of downing an angel.

That was how it was supposed to go, at least. Only time and a lot of violence would tell if she held up her end of the deal. The consequences for her violating a good deal were pretty dire, though, and Regina was savvy enough to know that. Will got the impression that neither of them wanted the other as an enemy, which had been enough to ensure their cooperation up until this point.

“Challenge dungeons, you say?” Will asked. “Gonna have to get a bit more detail on that one, I think.”

“It’s difficult to explain,” Regina said. “They emerged about a month ago. We suspect that they’re related to the superdungeons.”

“Makes sense,” Will said. “That’s the only big dungeon-related thing I can think of that happened recently.”

It had been a while since he’d even entered a dungeon. He’d cleared out a few to gain the treasures he’d needed to hit gold, but Will had been far too focused on dealing with external User interference and finishing the Reaper challenges for his rank-up to bother with dungeons. He’d looted them, but he’d rapidly been reaching the point where he didn’t need loot from an average dungeon.

That said, he was very willing to do so if it meant he had a quick way to power-level, especially if it also meant that he could get Regina to build a superweapon.

Will was reasonably sure that creating said superweapon was just begging for someone to interfere and subvert it, destroy it, or otherwise interfere with the process, but that was fine. He only needed one good fight out of anything the ESNA’s leader could cook up.

“They’re more difficult than standard gold-rank dungeons, though that much should be obvious,” Regina said.

“Right,” Will said, returning to the topic at hand. “It was either that or some shit about resetting each time you leave them.”

“It’s both,” Regina said. “They resemble certain manifestations of spatial phenomena that I grew familiar with while we were on our other world.”

“Yeah?” Will asked. “System hasn’t been very detailed about the places you were transported to.”

“You won’t find many of us wishing to be any clearer about it,” she said. “Suffice it to say that it was extremely lethal, largely devoid of friendly sapient beings, and full of nasty surprises.”

“Gotcha,” Will said. His own tutorial had been of that sort, though he’d found a friendly partner in Caiyeri, but he hadn’t spent anywhere near the three years that Regina and her group had inside one of them. He could imagine how mcuh that would have sucked. “So. Challenge dungeons.”

“Yes,” Regina said. “Within the ESNA’s boundaries, there are three. One in old Boston, one in DC, one in some bumfuck nowhere town that got glassed before we ever got there.”

Will frowned. “Didn’t we level DC a few months back?”

“The necrotic wyrm,” Regina recalled. “Yes, but the dungeon appeared long after that situation stabilized and the city was condemned.”

“Wait, what happened to that thing?” Will asked. “The otherworlder riding it tried to kill me at the first human summit, but the wyrm got away. Thing was pretty powerful, wasn’t it?”

“Wherever it is, it’s not in our territory,” Regina said. “I figured one of your gang here would have heard of it. Weren’t you running around hunting everything above Gold 2 the past few months?”

“Leaderboarders with high kill counts, yes,” Will said. “But that was mostly just me, and the wyrm isn’t originally from Earth so it’s not there.”

Regina’s eyes narrowed. “I’m an otherworlder with a high kill count.”

“Not an evil one, last I checked. I’m trying to do good things, believe it or not, and plunging the entire east coast into chaos isn’t on my to-do list.”

“It’s somewhere in central America,” Liam volunteered, reminding the two of them that there were, in fact, still several other people in this room. “Contact in the area told me.”

“You have contacts in central America?” Will asked. “Why?”

“Your contacts are from space and an elven empire that doesn’t exist anymore,” Liam said. “I’m not the weird one.”

“The abyss elven faction arguably continues to exist for as long as I do,” Caiyeri said.

“That is cope,” Will said. “You’re not doing any empiring from where you’re at, are you? Do you even have the tech to keep cloning yourself?”

“Wouldn’t be using it if I did,” the elf said. “You’re getting off track, though, and I’m sure the nice lady with the anti-magic bombs under our feet would rather we hurry it up.”

Regina did not show any surprise in her expression, but a hint of it got into her aura.

“It’s fine,” Will dismissed. “Regina wouldn’t pop it on us, and she has to know that alone wouldn’t work.”

“I would appreciate,” the Supreme Commander of the ESNA said slowly, “if you did not speak about my personal protections in front of me as if I were not present.”

“You got it, boss,” Will said.

“Can I say that I like the satellite?” Nathan asked. “It’s pretty simple, but if whoever was engineering that didn’t have a class like mine, it’s impressive. Keeping it in the same spot in orbit above you to drop a laser’s pretty neat, though I’m not sure how much that would help if we decided to fight you right now.”

Regina did sigh this time. “Evidently I need to increase the security of my defensive countermeasures. I appreciate the compliments, but the elf—“

“Caiyeri,” Caiyeri said. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure of meeting, actually.”

“Caiyeri,” Regina continued. “You are correct. We do have more important things to get to. Thanks to how my class works, I have not yet had the opportunity to enter the challenge dungeons without risking too much. As such, I am not the best person to convey this information to you is not me but one of my subordinates. Allow me to re-introduce you to him.”

#

Charlie. Gold 1 Vanguard.

Leaderboard Rank: 31 (-7 in the last 24 hours).

“Oh, it’s Charlie!” Will exclaimed.

The first time he’d met this otherworlder, Commander Charlie had been Silver 10—significantly higher than Will at the time—and had been Will’s first point of contact with the ESNA after he’d come crashing down onto gold-rank monsters in New York. Charlie had also tried to kill him, but he’d apologized almost immediately after the dust from the pre-placed explosives had cleared. Instinct, he’d said, and he’d paid Will back for it.

They’d met again at the global human summit, but Will had barely paid attention to the man then. He’d been busy.

Now, the commander had ranked up. He still looked the same down to the brand of the cigar he smoked, but his aura had intensified significantly.

Their meeting point was the empty airfield where they’d parked Jessie before entering Regina’s headquarters. It was unlikely that they were going to leave immediately since they’d just finished off a pretty major fight, but Will had wanted to include everyone in this—and besides, it made everyone a little less antsy when they knew they weren’t standing on traps.

Not that the traps the ESNA was using would have done anything to them when Will, Caiyeri, Yui, and Nathan were all there, but it was a bit more comforting knowing that not even the option was there.

Will was a bit surprised to see that Charlie had fallen ranks on the leaderboard in the last twenty-four hours. The only significant change that had happened at the higher ranks had been Will’s killing of Fan Laozi, which should have shifted him up.

The older American did not look happy, though he brightened when he saw Will before immediately getting a bit confused as he saw the rest of his party.

“What the fuck is that thing?” he asked.

“What thing?” Will asked, looking behind him. He scanned over humans, an elf, a biologically and magically engineered devouring gestalt whose current existence had been built out of the corpses of hundreds, the otherworlders, Nynn. Everything seemed right.

“That monster,” Charlie said, pointing.

“Jessie?” Will asked.

“Wait, that’s Jessie?” Charlie asked, eyebrows shooting into the stratosphere. “Well, fuck me. I read about your companions, but I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Oh, there are after action reports on it?” Will asked. “It’s a sweetheart, honestly. It mostly avoids eating humans these days. Also, it’s getting pretty good at comprehending speech. Talking still isn’t its strong suit, but it’s learning.”

Jessie nodded its massive head, agreeing.

“You’ve got me on the back foot here,” Charlie admitted. “I thought I had the stranger thing to report.”

“You probably do,” Will said. “It’s a bit odd at first, but you get used to Jessie. Wanna get on with what you were saying?”

“Right…” Charlie said, looking over the rest of Will’s group. “I don’t recognize most of these guys. Except the Aussies. It’s been a bit, Hua. Liam.”

“Nice to see you too,” Liam said. “Everything holding up alright on your end?”

Charlie sighed. “Been better, been worse. I just burned another challenge dungeon attempt.”

“Burned an attempt?” Will asked.

“Right, you don’t know about them yet,” Charlie said. “So. I’ve been on the Boston challenge dungeon for the most part, but it seems like the rules are pretty consistent across all three of them. I’ll try to make this explanation quick.”

It wasn’t the fastest, given Charlie’s propensity to dramatically huff on a cigar after every important line and Will’s party’s habit of asking questions of dubious necessity every now and again, but they got the gist of it pretty quickly.

The challenge dungeons were at the minimum as hard as the toughest gold-rank dungeons they’d seen so far. Unlike those dungeons, there was a limit to the number of people you could send in at one time, though that was less of a hard limit and more about the fact that these dungeons changed.

A regular dungeon typically started spawning monsters again after a period of time. If improperly cleared or left to fester, it would repopulate itself and stop there. Not so with this dungeon type. The challenge dungeons seemingly fully reset instantly—or, rather, they opened up another instance of themselves the moment someone entered. A party could enter as one group, but if there was a delay between two people entering, they would end up in separate instances of the same dungeon.

Said dungeon was dramatically harder than a standard gold-rank one and scaled up quickly, rapidly throwing platinum-rank monsters and bosses at the participants—unheard of anywhere but in the superdungeon.

Including more people in a single go didn’t make it any easier—in fact, it did the opposite.

Regina had done a fair amount of experimenting already and determined that two was the maximum party size that could reasonably enter. When a pair entered, the dungeon simply doubled itself, though whether that was in power or quantity varied from instance to instance.

Anything more than that started turning it weird. According to Charlie, Regina had burned “several dozen attempts” getting information and gained that as the primary conclusion. 

In those larger parties, paths started turning on themselves. Space distorted, making normal rooms miles long and stranding people who’d been walking side by side. Traps went from difficult to outright unfair, with such highlights as the air abruptly being replaced by concrete or a trapdoor leading to a room that spawned monsters at a rate faster than the eye could see.

It was around this point where Will asked one of the few actually substantive questions he’d come up with so far.

“You keep talking about burning attempts and losing people,” Will said. “But you’re not talking about these people like they’re dead. Dead people wouldn’t have been able to relay that information.”

Though Regina did have a way to monitor her subordinates through their senses, if Will’s memory served him right, so maybe it was that. He didn’t mention that, of course.

“They’re not,” Charlie said. “That’s part of the reason we’re still going after them. When you die in the dungeon, you don’t actually die. You get transported out, refreshed, and cleansed—but you lose a level.”

That got everyone’s interest.

“Is that why you dipped so far on the leaderboard today?” Will asked.

“Yep,” Charlie grimaced. “Bit off more than I could chew. Thought I had the prep to take on a platinum militia boss solo, but I didn’t. Blew myself up, if you can believe it.”

Will thought back on his history of interactions with the man. “Yeah, I think I can.”

“That’s not very polite of you.”

“I’m not a very polite person.” Will’s mind was whirring with this information, so he excused himself for having poor comebacks. “Nynn, you know anything about this?”

“Dungeon anomalies are already fairly uncommon this early in the cycle,” Nynn said. “Since the cycle is already so abnormal, it may well be an offshoot.”

“You say that like anybody’s got an idea of what it means,” Nathan said.

“Like a secondary effect born from the superdungeon,” Caiyeri surmised. “An aftershock of sorts? It’d have to happen thanks to further deviation inside the first one, right?”

At the bewildered looks from everyone else except Nynn, she said, “Just because my nation was idiotic in certain matters didn’t mean we were uneducated.”

“You are largely correct,” Nynn said. “The mechanics of an offshoot are less important than what it means. If these are, indeed, anomalous offshoots, it is simply further proof that this cycle is broken.”

“We all knew that,” Will said dismissively. “Is there anything else we need to know about them?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Couple more things.”

Those couple more things were a lot more important than the Vanguard made them seem.

One: the rewards present were much better than they were anywhere else with the possible exception of the superdungeon. Unlike the superdungeon, they tended to be customized towards the person or pair who entered the challenge dungeon.

Two: each User’s performance was measured by the dungeon. They were judged for time per room, time per kill, number of kills, and a dozen other metrics, all of which had active leaderboards. Breaking certain thresholds and breaking records granted further rewards.

“I do recognize this now,” Nynn said after that part, frowning. “This… is not something I have witnessed in a cycle. Certain Dread Executors participate in gem-tier dungeons with similar constraints outside the cycle. How did it… I suppose the answer to that is immaterial to me for a long time.”

“Then it’ll be perfect for power-leveling,” Will said. “You can ditch the dungeon if you need to, right?”

“You can,” Charlie said. “That’s what we’ve been doing. The first few rooms of the challenge dungeons are fairly optimized because we keep on leaving them and grinding our way through.”

“Excellent,” Will said. “Alright. Anyone up for a bit of dungeon running?”