[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 125: Plausibility Curse

Before Nynn could fully recover from the effect of the stolen Peace skill, Will called Aza, drawing the familiar to his side, and teleported as far away as he physically could, which meant all the way to the few of Sen’s eyes he’d stored in Australia.

Aza, sensing a connection to the Dread Executor he’d split off from, understood his purpose and clung onto Will as he slipped into the Beyond once again.

Even doing it from the other side of the planet, Will couldn’t help the thread of uncertainty that rang through him while he opened the portal. Now that he was aware of Nynn’s folly, he could sense its reverberations throughout the Beyond. It was small reassurance that it was “only” potentially a solar system-sized mistake, especially when that meant they wouldn’t be receiving any help from external Dread Executors beyond the little that Azathoth had managed.

The corruption was a pervading rot, and even Will, whose entire kit centered around using that rot, could tell how wrong it felt here. The sensation was as if he had stared up into the night sky and seen the sun.

Dread Executor Azathoth was no longer in the Beyond—or, if he was, he was no longer anywhere near the area that Will frequented.

Ayla, however, was. She looked healthier than she had before, which was unexpected.

“You’re back,” she said, sounding very unsurprised. “Brought your familiar with you?”

“At your service,” Aza said. “Dreamer, if I have it right?”

“I have to admit, being recognized is getting a bit old,” Ayla said drily. “It was nice at first, but I’ve met the rest of you already.”

“Ah, my apologies. I was sure I felt a tug, but no memories have been reintegrated, so I couldn’t be sure. You know how it is.”

“I don’t, mostly by virtue of your friends chasing me down and tossing me into space jail.”

“Um, guys,” Will said. “I hate to break up a nice bit of banter, but we do remember the massive ticking time bomb in the room with us, right?”

“A few minutes isn’t going to make a difference in when it goes off, especially in a plane where time isn’t properly linear,” Ayla said, dismissing his concern with a wave of… was that a flipper? Changelings were weird. “That said, I do agree that we should get moving.”

“As the lady says,” Aza agreed. “I assume that the burgeoning mass of corruption is the current issue?”

“It is,” Will said. “We don’t have a safe way to eliminate all of it, since we think that feeding the demon in my head is probably a bad idea, so we have a stopgap. Well, the stopgap isn’t what I’d call safe either, but it’s much less likely to go catastrophically wrong.”

As Dread Executor Azathoth had so kindly explained, skills were etched onto the soul. Passive skills like Equilibrium Mantle would work while in the Beyond because they were part of the soul expression that everyone manifested themselves as, while active skills were substantially harder. Richard the demon had integrated into his soul, which carried unfortunate implications but also meant that Will could see the lines of death while within this plane, which was very helpful when it came to dealing with everything here.

Most importantly, he was going to be able to use his freshly platinum-rank ability to deal with this situation.

One critical exception to active skills generally taking much more effort to use in the Beyond was familiars. Will had brought Sen’s eyes through the plane before in an effort to spread his sphere of surveillance that much further, so he’d known that on some level, but Azathoth had expanded his knowledge to include the fact that familiars represented themselves in the Beyond. While they had a soul link to Will, their summoner, both Sen and Aza would be perfectly capable of doing their own thing because they had their own souls.

Essentially, that meant that he could use them at will here, which in the case of Aza meant that Will could use the Guardian Angel skill to strengthen himself against demonic influence.

Aza, being a fragment of the Dread Executor who had thought all of this up, understood this all, and he pieced two and two together before Will was even done explaining.”

“It is certainly risky, but that’s why I’m here,” his familiar said. “That said, at silver, I might be hard-pressed to give you the strength necessary to survive.”

“Is there a way to fix that?” Will asked uncertainly. “I was thinking the same, and I was wondering if I would have to use cores, but I don’t want to contaminate my power like that.”

In the wake of the trial of the champion, a fair chunk of the world’s elite had discovered the true cost of cores when the Tears of Absolute Purification had corrupted them. Though Will had cleansed them of that corruption, it had left them with damaged, dead portions in their soul where the monster cores had held them up before, hampering the depth and breadth of progression. People like Hua and Liam who had relied less on cores and more on their training had been less affected, but there had been many leaderboarders who had fallen off, replaced by those who hadn’t lost power.

Will didn’t want that, and judging from their auras, neither Ayla nor Aza thought that was a good idea either.

“Fortunately for you, I am a Dread Executor.”

“A fragment of one,” Ayla reminded the familiar. “Don’t go around forgetting where you are, now.”

“Of course,” Aza said pleasantly. “A fragment that carries around a whole lot of knowledge, though, which means…”

Will started as tendrils of power reached through his soul. If he hadn’t been so in touch with his power, he might not have noticed that it wasn’t the system moving things around—no, this was his familiar.

[Guardian Angel] (Aza) is requesting power.

“I can’t make power out of nothing, but your soul is strong,” Aza said. “You have skills that I could skim off of without impacting your effectiveness at all.”

Will closed his eyes, looking inwards. His perception of his own soul had only grown stronger with continued training, and he could understand the various facets of himself that represented skills. Aza was startlingly close to gold already, though many of Will’s skills were closer. As Will watched, the familiar’s link extended to brush over a few other skills.

“Okay,” Will said. “That seems fair. Let’s do it.”

[Corruption Resistance] has been lowered from high gold to mid gold.

[Decaying Touch] has been lowered from mid gold to low gold.

[Guardian Angel] has advanced to gold!

“Since this is a rough reallocation of power, I am purposing it all solely for the benefit of this task,” Aza said. “I will be similarly more powerful outside the Beyond, but I would not expect any flashy attacks to start coming from my wings.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Will said. “You got it, though?”

Aza’s aura was stronger now, so the question was wholly unnecessary, but the familiar nodded anyway.

“Shall we?”

Ayla raised a hand, forming a bridge from their shared sanctuary towards the expanding mass of corruption. It was still being held at bay by a protective layer of what Ayla had called “null energy” and Azathoth had called “the Great Barrier” that was keeping it from interfacing with the positive energy of the Beyond, but even Will could see that the barrier was slowly being eaten away.

If it had been up to him, he would have done this alone. Will had no idea of the ramifications, but not only did he not want someone else potentially interfering with him, he also didn’t want someone to get hurt if his demon went wild.

Ayla, however, was someone he couldn’t say no to. Her expertise in the Beyond was unparalleled, which made her presence mandatory for this operation, and Will trusted her to know what she was doing. She’d taken risks like this before, if the changeling was to be believed.

Though Will was the one who would actually be performing the cut here, they had determined that the Void Dreamer was necessary to make it possible.

Dread Executor Ramiel, Ayla’s mysterious benefactor, had apparently communicated with Azathoth enough to find something of a plausibility loophole. Releasing restraints on her just for a short period of time was possible without giving Peace a leg up. Since she was in a system dead zone, she didn’t count as part of the cycle and was thus fair play.

There was only so much that a Dread Executor could do without actively entering the dead zone that Ayla was in, however, which wasn’t possible for some metaphysical reason that had gone way over Will’s head.

That brought them to where they were now, approaching the mess of corruption in the Beyond. It was a stark contrast to the rest of the plane—whereas Will had grown accustomed to the iridescent colors of the deep magic that ran through the Beyond, the corruption was a colorless void, a blank space in the magical energy that swirled throughout.

It hadn’t spread that far yet, but the fact that Peace—or Fate, whoever—had packed it into an overpowered bomb had exacerbated how bad this was. The affected area was, to Will’s best current estimate, half again the size of the island ecosystem that the bomb had detonated within.

If they didn’t do anything, it was obvious that it could and would get worse. This was still the first stage of detonation, and it was only going to keep spreading. Now that he was taking a proper look at it, Will could respect Nynn’s decision to throw it away. Will might have been able to tank this, but even he wasn’t sure, and anyone without his ridiculous resistances would have definitely been dead in the minute or so it would have taken to get to them.

“You can stop gawking now,” Ayla said. “We’re only going to get one shot at this.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” Will said.

Ayla’s form, amorphous as ever, began to glow with a dull but persistent light, and new bridges emerged from the Sanctuary. Will started taking on the brunt of maintaining the sanctuary while she constructed bridges the likes of which he’d only seen from afar.

Slowly, they surrounded the corruption, encasing it in an egg of magic invisible to the naked eye but vivid and bright to anyone with even a hint of aura sense.

With that came crimson lines, the color of which Will was much more familiar with.

Connections. Lines of death. There were more of them now than there were before, brighter and thicker.

The theory of this operation had also been mostly incomprehensible to him, but after several attempts at explanation, he’d gotten the general gist of it.

The Beyond was, strictly speaking, not entirely manifested in reality. That was why physical material didn’t exist and all living beings presented only as their soul projections, and it was also why active skills were much harder to use. Magic didn’t want to exist in a plane full of energy and nothing else; no, it preferred to be actualized in the real world.

It was because of this that they had to constantly supply soul power to their sanctuaries and bridges, because not doing so would make that mana wink out and return to the real world. Will had experienced that.

What they were doing now amounted to encasing the corruption in magic, which was a bit of a risky maneuver given the possibility of breaching the barrier that was keeping it from a matter-antimatter reaction, but Ayla and Azathoth had both assured him that it was very doable.

The first problem with that was that the mana would simply trace its way back into Ayla once she let go of it and render the containment null. The second, obviously, was that it was still in the beyond. With Ayla’s fine control over the mana, she could make this mana-egg a barrier of its own, but because it was in the Beyond, it would still be at high risk of detonation.

That was where Will came in.

Item: [Demonic Eye of Death Perception] 

Mythic, platinum (growth, prosthetic)

This item can only be attuned to the User that holds a contract with the demon that provided it. You are attuned to this item.

[Visualize] (bronze) - You sense death. With this eye, you see the weakest points of an object or being. 

[Cut] (silver) - Hitting these lines with the correct angle and force automatically results in a critical hit.

[Envision] (gold) - You now also see the weakest points of a magical skill.

[Sever] (platinum) - With sufficient force, hitting the weakest point of a magical skill will cut magical bonds.

The upgrade he’d gotten from the demon felt wild, which made sense. It was more powerful than anything else in his body by two full ranks, and it was only his overtuned Affinity that let him handle it at all.

Will targeted the lines connecting Ayla to the spell she’d woven over the corruption. This would have been substantially harder with resistance, but with her cooperating, he was able to cut her control of the skill away from her, leaving the magic without an owner.

With nobody to return to, the mana just sat there, slowly siphoning back into the real world.

This was step one of the band-aid fix Azathoth had suggested, but it wouldn’t be enough on its own.

They had two options for step two. One of them was to attempt to portal the entire thing back into real space, which thanks to the containment case no longer ran the risk of the corruption imploding as that magic stripped away the null energy stopping it from interacting with the Beyond. That was patently impossible for Ayla, who would simply die the moment she entered reality, where the corruption would devour her magic and then her, and Will was not yet at the stage where he could make portals that large.

Nynn might have been able to, but the path he took into the Beyond had been torn to shreds by the corruption he’d thrown that way. Azathoth definitely could have, but that would have just been inviting Peace to fuck them up.

That left them with option two, which they were considerably less sure of but was the best they could get.

When any given person entered the Beyond, they tended to do so by entering through a similar path that bridged reality and this plane—Nynn, for instance, would currently enter through a tunnel that ran smack dab into enough corruption to kill a continent.

That tunnel was exactly what they sought to exploit. Since these paths weren’t exactly in reality and not exactly in the Beyond, they didn’t have the same amount of explosive risk with corruption that the entire positive energy plane did.

With the last of the mana boost Azathoth had given her, Ayla summoned one final bridge, extending it towards the contained corruption and shoving it back where it came from.

Even if Nynn’s connection had been open, this wouldn’t have worked to return it to the real world, partially because he would die so fast that the corruption would start overwhelming baseline reality and then also blow up in the Beyond anyway.

But Will had cut Nynn’s end off, meaning this tunnel had an end to it. Once they got it in, Will could use his new demonic power to seal the other end, making a temporary containment chamber attached to Nynn’s life.

As he followed the mass of magic and corruption in, splitting off from Ayla with his own Sanctuary, Will wondered idly if this would make Nynn the most important person in this cycle instead of him.

…probably not, unfortunately. It was still Will that Peace wanted, and the interest of a major goddess was—

Shit.

Things started going wrong as soon as they were past the threshold of Nynn’s tunnel. 

Earlier, Will had acknowledged the demonic influence on him, but at gold rank, Aza had been enough.

That was nothing compared to this now. If it had just been pain, Will could deal. He at least knew there was an end to that.

No, this was far worse. It was an abrupt loss of control. His magic started swirling around him in ways he had never commanded it to do before, and the demon inside him was practically howling, its incoherent communication blasting through Will’s mind, barraging him with meaningless information.

Ayla’s influence had long since left the mass, and the changeling herself was just watching from the last of her Sanctuary. She was too far to help him in any meaningful way, and given her current state and what they were up against, Will wasn’t sure that her being close would have helped.

His magic spiraled towards the corruption, power entwining with a demonic source emerging from the part of his soul it had attached to, and he sensed the containment begin to leak.

Oh hell no.

Will: Ayla. Get the fuck out of here.

Ayla: You don’t need to tell me twice. You too.

Will focused his will through his shattered soul. He couldn’t stop the demon from doing this, but he could cut.

“Aza!”

The familiar didn’t need to be told twice. Life force flowed from him into Will, reinforcing the corruption wielder’s ability to resist.

Aza died in the process, his body crumbling into glowing ashes and dissolving into Will’s essence, but to the familiar, that was fine. He was just a vessel, after all, and he could always be summoned again.

Mind fraying at the edges, Will used Aza’s sacrifice to fight through the demon’s influence and take aim at as many lines as he could see.

Strictly speaking, he was on the wrong side of the tunnel. The plan had been to confirm its presence here, leave, and seal it from the other side—but the demon was absorbing corruption, it was getting stronger, and there was no time to do this properly.

Will cut, and he cut, his soul manifesting itself sharper and sharper.

All the while, more corruption permeated through the containment. Small mercies—the demon’s power wasn’t breaking the magic itself, just pulling corruption through it and fueling itself.

In a twist of fate that he might have found amusing another time, the demon powering itself more just made Will’s cuts more efficient, and in a matter of moments, he had cut the other end of the tunnel off from the Beyond.

The damage had already been done. That much was clear.

And it would continue to worsen if Will didn’t leave.

The instant he finished sealing the tunnel, Will let his connection to the Beyond lapse.

For a long, terrifying moment, it didn’t, and he could sense the demon’s fragment calling out to its full body—and then the last fragments of Aza’s life force ran through him, and he was spiraling back into reality.

Achievement earned: Plausibility Curse

You have become the first human in your cycle to expend plausibility.

Reward: This achievement is your reward. Consider yourself warned.

Special quest: Gold Challenges (Reaper)

Sub-task completed.

- Kill or subjugate three sources of corruption [3/3]

Except, as Will reappeared in Australia, corruption blossoming around him and swirling straight into his demonic eye, he wasn’t so sure he had subjugated it after all.

I need to get stronger.

In the real world, the demon’s influence was significantly lessened, since its real body was nowhere to be seen, but Will could tell that his relationship with it had been altered.

It was a blessing and a curse in one, but for now, it was mostly the latter.

He’d been putting off his own progression in favor of dealing with shit as it came, but he couldn’t ignore it any longer.

Will needed to get gold rank.

“And,” he said to himself, looking over the burning, undead city ruled by one of the greatest mass murderers this world had seen since the cycle began, “I think I know where to start.”

#

On a planet that had formerly only been known in its unified native language as “Home” and was now designated Inanis-5, gold-rank equipment that had pointed at the skies since they’d become aware of the sudden change in their planet’s spatial orientation registered an anomaly.

At once, alerts spread across the Unification Front. With the technology they’d developed through their waves of returners coming back with wisdom from other worlds, delivering a message to the plentiful gold-rankers and even the rare platinum-ranker could be done in minutes.

Across the planet, which was now a year and ten months from colliding with Earth, a single line ended up in front of everyone who mattered for their coming trials.

Plausibility anomaly detected: William Li-Brown. Silver 10. Reaper. Corruption wielder.

Demonic activity detected.

That second line was enough to frighten even the most powerful platinum-ranker their world had to offer, but they were all glad for the warning.

Into the dungeon anomaly some of them went. They would encounter people from the other world there. They would see whether they were worth uplifting.

And all the while, they would prepare for war.

#

The Contractor’s abilities were not so finely tuned to the world as to detect a plausibility surge when it happened, but Fate’s were, and so were Peace’s.

There were two core gods at his shoulder now, and the direction he received from them was clear.

He had no issue operating like this. Yes, he was a mastermind, but he was a contractor. It was implicit that he would not always be the one issuing them, and there was no worthier master than two of the finest deities to exist.

They guided his hand as he contacted a certain set of individuals that he had spread his influence to. His contracts included tens of thousands, now, spreading from person to organization until his fingers were in so many pies it’d make an early 20th century oil mogul blush.

Of those, he had found what Fate knew this would require.

Before him, arrayed in a circle in the Mojave Desert, were nine hundred ninety-nine silver-rankers and ninety-nine gold-rankers, none of whom were on the leaderboard.

From the observation tower in the needle-like tower he’d harvested from Vegas, a thousand feet in the air, he raised a hand.

Everyone below performed an identical gesture, raising all kinds of weapon to their throats—blades, guns, esoterica from other worlds.

“Nine hundred ninety-nine silvers,” he verbalized, tasting the words on his tongue. “Ninety-nine golds.”

The Contractor lowered his hand as if he was a conductor, and down below, his contracts painted the desert with a symphony of blood.

Warmth spread through him.

You have been granted plausibility.

He left the tower before his next wave of contracts came to begin the ritual in the mess of the dead.

It was a simple one, but not one that could be completed without more plausibility to spend than even Peace could conscience. Fortunately for him and Peace, their target had just inadvertently introduced a great deal of it into the world.

Now, it was not only possible, but plausible. It would not be a true summoning, but it would be enough.

Six months. In six months, an angel of Peace would descend to Earth, consume William Li-Brown in his entirety, and grant a blessing unlike any other to the Contractor himself.

He grinned, conjuring a cigar and taking a self-congratulatory puff from it.

I can’t wait.

#

Dread Executor Ramiel looked at Earth, then to Azathoth.

“I told you,” Azathoth said. “That boy is not making it past gold rank.”

“Are you sure about that?” Ramiel asked gently. “Do you remember the last person you made such a bold assertion about?”

“I do, and I was correct,” Azathoth said. “She was taken in by the organization just as she made sovereign.”

“And where is she now?” Ramiel replied.

“With the boy,” Azathoth admitted. “In some sense.”

“Still here,” he said. “She will return, one day, and perhaps he will be with her.”

“I will believe that when the time comes.”

“Then watch,” Ramiel said, directing their attention towards a certain dead zone where a changeling was ever so slowly coming back into her own power. “You may be pleasantly surprised.”

“I will watch,” Azathoth conceded. “If nothing else, this should prove entertaining.”