[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 114: That's My Line

Author's note: Sorry for delay. Jet lag has gotten me REALLY bad. Almost recovered, though. Hope this is the last delay.

Will, of course, had not missed anything. Just like with the Beyond, the time he’d spent in Desecrated Bond didn’t accurately reflect the amount that had passed on the outside. There, it had only been a moment since he’d activated the intervention, but the effects of it were instant.

He had been curious about what Corrupt would actually do to the sigil-holder when he used it. After dealing with Peace—in a fashion, at least—he’d gone for the link in its entirety, banishing any fantasies of directly corrupting the goddess. She hadn’t just let him go through with it, of course, but she also hadn’t burnt any plausibility to force him out.

Will was glad for that. It was proof at least in some small way that it was possible to directly defy a god, even a core one, without instantly being incinerated. He had rationally known that it was a possibility, but that hadn’t registered on an emotional level until he had actually made it out of there. He’d been able to separate himself from the very real possibility of his imminent death until now, but now that he was alive and still intact, a wave of relief washed over him.

Compared to a core goddess, dealing with a bunch of angry sigil-holders was nothing. Mortals, he could deal with. Aza was on call to deal with any sudden attacks, and even the gold rankers would be hard pressed to deal with sudden corruption.

That said, he wasn’t exactly looking forward to this. Will knew that he was in a position where he could have a real shot at wiping out every last person here, but there were too many unknowns. He didn’t want to just start corrupting people left and right, especially when the vast majority of the assembled national representatives weren’t people he wanted to alienate or kill just yet. More importantly, it only took one lucky or particularly powerful gold-ranker to get past his tricks and end him permanently.

Still, he was prepared to do what he had to.

What he didn’t expect was for Peace to make good on her promise. Even as all the sigil-holders turned towards him, Desecrated Bond’s final effect kicking in, he saw a ripple of realization pass through them.

She’s talking to them, he realized.

That as good as confirmed that when Alan Truman, the American who’d wanted to work with Will back in the trial of the champion, had claimed that “a lady” had told him not to, it had been Peace. None of the sigil-holders were good at hiding that they were being directly contacted by something, though it might not have been immediately apparent to those who were less intimately familiar with the divine.

The room fell into uproar quickly, which was to be expected when Riser still hadn’t stopped screaming.

With one of Sen’s eyes, Will made contact with the former sigil-holder, opening a chat request.

Will: Calm down. You’re not even dying.

Now that it had been a few seconds, he could tell that Corrupt had, in fact, just cut the godly connection off. He hadn’t been able to do much more than dig deeply into the sigil link before he’d been forced out, but Will had been curious to see whether his additional meddling would have been enough to materialize real effects.

It was not so. Apart from the distinct lack of a sigil when Will activated Desecrated Bond’s Identify feature, there was nothing else setting Adam Riser apart from any normal person here. There was no corruption, no debilitating affliction, not even the slightest hint of soul damage.

Predictably, Adam did not accept his chat request.

Fortunately for Will, the chaos was not yet focused on him. It had been notable when every Peace sigil-holder had turned to face him, yes, but there were enough people around him and enough others suddenly rising from their seats that they’d drawn attention away from.

Hua: You did something.

Evidently, not all of the attention.

Will: You noticed?

Hua: I’m not blind, so yes.

Liam: Hey.

Hua: You sensed it, didn’t you?

Liam: Yeah. What’d you do, mate?

Will: Tried something out. Shaking the nest.

Natalie: What do you mean by “shaking the nest?” It’s a fragile enough situation as it is.

Will: You’re doing the same, aren’t you? Going through with your vigilante justice and all.

Natalie: Is it actually vigilante justice when we each represent formally recognized national bodies?

Will: Recognized by who? I’m doing this because it’s blatantly obvious that a certain group of sigil-holders is up to something. I don’t know their motives nor do I know what they actually want to do, but the Peace coalition is operating outside the bounds of our countries. Quite possibly humanity itself.

Hua: As are you.

Will: Yes. The difference is that I’m just trying to exist. I don’t serve any higher master. These guys…

As if to punctuate his point, each of the Peace sigil-holders swelled with mana, prompting an immediate redirection of attention towards them. Nobody fired any skills, seeing that none of the multinational sigil-holders had activated any of their own, but all across the summit, Will could see weapons manifesting. Everyone was on their feet, ready to act at a moment’s notice.

Natalie: Well, shit. Didn’t think it would come to this so fast. It’s MAD. Whoever’s the first to make a move is going to get dogpiled by every other nation not wanting to be the first mover, then it’ll be a total shitshow. How did you even get away with casting?

Will: I didn’t think that far ahead.

Natalie: Fucking moron.

Will: Shook the nest, didn’t I? Personally, I’d rather deal with this now than after they’ve picked up all the plans everyone else is making.

“William Li-Brown,” one of them declared, his magically-enhanced voice rising above the general hubbub of the crowd. “You are not to be interfered with today, but do not mistake this for mercy.”

A slight majority of the people participating in the summit did not yet know Will’s name, but there were enough that were intimately familiar with him and what he did to finally draw attention to him.

Anyone who fell into that former category soon learned, though. Even those who didn’t know the name William Li-Brown had some idea of the corruption wielder that had operated during the trial of the champion. After all, every relevant nation invited here had sent at least one representative to that trial, and though not all of those representatives had come back, information had.

Now, even though Will continued suppressing his aura to prevent Outcast from immediately alienating the entire world, it was clear to everyone with eyes—and probably those without—who he was. There was no hiding the telltale mark of the demon in his eye, even to anyone who was unfamiliar with it.

Can’t be helped, I guess. Will had hoped to remain in the shadows for a while longer, though he had second-guessed himself over that. Many a night had him considering whether his desire to stay hidden was because he genuinely believed that it would be much easier to operate while fewer people knew of his existence or because he was just being an edgelord.

Well, whatever. That was no longer a question.

Will rose from his seat with a long-suffering sigh.

Will: Anyone have a good way to magnify sound? I can try using a raw mana amp, but with how many people are here, I don’t think I can get over them.

“Yes,” Hua said aloud. “Here.”

She passed him a small clip-on microphone. It glimmered with bronze-rank magic.

Hua: We use these during evacuations. Megaphones don’t do enough.

Will: ‘ppreciate it, thanks.

He cleared his throat, passing mana through the mic as he did. It amplified the sound, bringing even more attention to him.

“Fantastic,” he said drily. “I love public speaking. To you, mister… hey, can you shut that guy up?”

One wet thud later, Riser abruptly stopped screaming. Sen’s eyes told him that the silver-ranker wasn’t dead, but he was out cold.

Will raised an eyebrow. “Not very nice to do to one of your own.”

“He is not one of ours anymore,” the man who’d spoken earlier said.

They weren’t passing the blame onto him. Was that because they wanted to hide that they knew, or did they actually not know? If it was the latter, why hadn’t Peace informed them? Did she want them to be less scared of him or something?

Will shook his head, clearing his mind. This was exactly the problem he wanted to avoid. Over-speculation while having too few facts to go on would just wind up with him defeating himself. For the time being, he needed to just look at what he could do.

Think. Focus. Prioritize.

What did he need to accomplish?

The words of his sigils came to mind. Will knew that these were all Peace sigil-holders thanks to his little incident with Sen earlier.

Peace hadn’t connected that incident to him yet, either. That would have been easy ammunition to use in the court of public opinion here. Was she limited—nope, Will wasn’t going to keep speculating. This was the time for action. Theories could come later.

Thanks to this little incident, they’d done him the favor of outing part of their conspiracy. Will needed to find what remained.

“I’m glad you’re taking this opportunity to reveal yourselves,” he said. “Isn’t it nice to know that there’s a higher purpose for you? An organized purpose that suits you more than what your existing fellows might like?”

Yui: What the hell are you doing?

There were too many people involved in this. Will bit back a sigh, forcing himself not to make eye contact with the gold-rank otherworlder to properly express the depth of his irritation.

Will: You’re a bit late on asking that question. You said there was a rot in this summit, right? I’ve found part of it, and I’d very much like to start figuring out how to excise it.

“You’re making hefty accusations,” Provisional Supreme Commander Regina of the ESNA said, her voice projecting equally as loudly.

She wasn’t one of the Peace sigil-holders, thankfully, but there were a fair few of her high-silver underlings who were.

“You’d be served well by paying a bit more attention to who you’re employing,” Will said. “There are sigils and sigils, if you know what I mean.”

That was evidently lost on many of the people watching, but to be frank, he didn’t care about most of them. Will could value them as human beings that he intellectually knew would be valuable for their regions, but he couldn’t see them as anything more. Though many of the people he glossed over were silver-rank just like him, he just could not be bothered. They weren’t even playing the same game as him.

“I do,” Regina said coldly. “If anything, that emphasizes how hefty an accusation you’ve made.”

“Sure,” Will said. “Remind me again which goddess just used her sigil-holders as a hive mind?”

In truth, he knew that it wasn’t because Peace had ordered them to look at him. He’d brought it upon himself with Desecrated Bond.

Yui: I would say that I hope you know what you’re doing, but I know you don’t.

Will: Do you want me to stop?

Yui: No. As dumb as this is, it’s working.

“I will run my own investigation,” Regina said. “I have reason to trust my magic over the words of a stranger. I’m sure you understand.”

Will surreptitiously sent one of Sen’s eyes to check on her, readying Desecrated Bond’s Identify function as it came off cooldown.

You have received a chat request from [Regina].

Eyebrow raised, he opened it.

Regina: I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

Will: Otherworlders. I’d really apprec

Regina: I saw what you did yesterday. You might have noticed that you didn’t affect me then either.

Will: I didn’t. I was kind of busy dealing with all of these pieces of shit.

Regina: Very provocative. I’ll keep that in mind.

“You’re not going to have to worry about that, Commander,” a new voice spoke.

Another Peace sigil-holder.

The mana that had surrounded all of the goddess’ disciples intensified. The energy in the meeting shifted, both in a metaphorical and physical sense. Until this apparently newly formed coalition played their new card, everybody had been locked in a standoff, holding back their attacks because nobody had wanted to be the first to fire.

This was as good as a starting pistol. The gold-ranks were the fastest to react, firing off a dozen held skills.

As the ones to make the first move, though, the Peace-aligned Users’ skills resolved first.

No, Will realized, slowing down time to perceive the activation in more detail. Not skills.

One unified skill connected all of them. Will saw the moment the crimson threads appeared, showing him the weak points in the skill. They were thinner than the ones he was slowly getting used to seeing, which he supposed made sense. If they were all using the same magic, it was certainly a sigil skill, which Will knew by now tended to be less imperfect than skills that were seemingly randomly assigned by the system via awakening stone.

Fortunately, Will had a few of his own.

He also wasn’t the only one moving quickly. Until now, he’d typically been one of the only people who had a movement skill this powerful, since most others had selected more balanced ones.

Now, though, there were entire other worlds of Users who’d spent years practicing their skills. Will had talent, but he was a powerhouse among powerhouses in most senses.

Of the people he knew or recognized, he saw Regina, Yui, Nathan, and Ashton from the otherworlders as well as exactly Lily Teneli amongst the largely silver-rank natives. More otherworlders were active than not, though many of them weren’t quite as fast as him.

The differences in reaction were interesting. Most of the lower powered Users were turning offensive skills on the Peace sigil-holders, while nearly every gold-ranker activated a defensive or movement skill.

Well, Will was a pretty rare case when it came to taking extreme risks and succeeding. It stood to reason that most of the gold-rankers had gotten that way because they’d actually had some level of moderation over the years.

Enough monologuing about myself. There’s work to be done.

Will used Pages of the Past, revealing the skills used in the room. His vision immediately bloomed with dense waves of information, showing him every last one of the hundred-odd skills that had been or were in the process of being activated. Most were unimportant, so he waved them aside.

To his surprise, there was not one but two unified skills being activated, so closely layered over each other that they had appeared to be one at first blush.

One of the skills was a simple mass-teleport at gold rank. The other was a bit more interesting.

Will couldn’t get the full breakdown of exactly what the sigil skills did, which was odd, but in fairness, it was both higher rank than him and had the power of a core goddess behind it.

What he could discern from it was that it was a strangely powerful aura skill. It had a stunning effect that compounded with each person added to the network.

Skill: [Pacify]

- Spell (sigil, aura).

- Cost: high mana per person.

- Cooldown: unknown.

Gold

Other than the impressions Will had gotten, this was all he had to work with. Since it was an aura power, it was very likely to break through a lot of the more physical defenses that everyone was putting up.

What was he supposed to make of this? All put together, they were just trying to stun everyone and, what, teleport out?

Even spending more mana to further slow time for himself, Will was rapidly running out of wiggle room.

Wait. Stun into a teleport… Peace had told him that her sigil-holders would avoid actively trying to kill him. If they were doing the same for the others—which wasn’t a guarantee, but judging by the skills they were activating, it was a real possibility—then the logical conclusion was capture.

What Peace would want him and the others for, he had no idea, but he didn’t want to deal with it.

The teleport was the salient one here. Pacify was an aura effect. Even if it was a full rank higher than him, Will had full confidence in his ability to stomach it. A teleport, on the other hand… less so.

He was really feeling the effect of the suppression field now thanks to the amount of mana he was spending, but unlike most everyone else here, Will had ways to circumvent it. Though the ambient mana was low, he fueled himself by using Destructive Synthesis on one of the many low-rank weapons he’d strapped to his belt for exactly this occasion.

In the same breath, he spent every bit of mana he regained and more with Ravenous Feast, pushing threads of violet darkness out past his body. It cost even more mana to push Time in a Bottle as far as it would go, just barely enabling him to actually make use of the counterspell-style skill before the Peace coalition could act.

Just in time, too. A handful of the Peace sigil-holders had speed skills of their own, and they were mounting a very competent defense against the attacks thrown their way.

Will wasn’t going to be able to disrupt the entire teleport. It was far too widespread and empowered for that. What he could do, however, was nullify anything that might be targeting him specifically. For good measure, he added on this close allies, though it didn’t look like any of them had been selected as an actual target.

Time started to speed up as the number of mana drains Will had to manage increased, and Pacify washed over the courtroom.

At gold rank, it was… honestly, a lot less bad than Will had expected. To be fair, he was comparing it against the real deal, which he now knew from experience was substantially stronger than a bunch of silver and gold ranks working together, to put it lightly. This was annoying, but it was easily manageable, especially with his aura.

The others around him didn’t seem to fare as well, so Will stopped suppressing his own, pushing the pacification away from his immediate surroundings.

Time sped all the way back up as he did so, and he sensed a sharp twist in his magic as Ravenous Feast devoured the line of mana that would have teleported him away.

With a muted pop, fifty Users disappeared like they’d never been there. Will recognized the shape of the magical residue they left behind, his recent painful familiarity with Peace’s domain coming to mind.

Pandemonium broke out as prepared skills and weapons largely misfired. A quick glance around revealed that with a few exceptions, Pacify had taken full effect.

Will sighed.

“I can already tell dealing with this piece of shit is going to be a pain in the ass,” he complained.

Deep within him, his connection to the Hunger stirred in agreement.

#

Yui’s skillset was not meant for instant speed. Her Speed attribute wasn’t even bound to her class—Space had been her Power element, and that was what she ended up using for maneuverability most of the time.

Despite that, she had spent so much time railing against injustice in Selrethnir against creatures and humans who vastly outpaced her that she’d developed a fighting style around it.

Anything the Void Reaver couldn’t dodge, she would allow to hit her, but on the occasions where she really couldn’t take a hit, she would move no matter the cost.

Her instincts had served her well so far, so when they had started screaming at her upon seeing the Peace sigil-holders come together, she’d listened.

Yui herself had never dealt much with Peace on Selrethnir. The cycle had been going fairly well on that planet, if you could call a steadily decaying world and increasingly dangerous life “well,” so there had been little to no need for direct intervention from gods. As far as she’d been able to tell, the goddess was relatively benevolent.

That impression scarily still remained even as she pulled out all the stops to transfer her elsewhere.

Though she was gold-rank now and had used this skill for years, she still wasn’t exactly sure what this one movement skill did. It was an instant astral tunneling skill, that much was clear, but for the brief moments that she was in another realm full of strange color and unreality, she was always certain that it was different from traditional teleportation means. That part was mostly irrelevant apart from the fact that recently, she’d been feeling less alone in there. Even now, as she exited from the tunnel into a falling hover high above Geneva, she could swear she sensed someone within that space that had been empty for so long.

As Yui fell, she prepared herself once more. This time, knowing what she would be entering, she readied the correct skills, anchoring herself in space so that only she could be moved by magical means.

She tunneled back, expecting to see utter devastation in the courtroom.

To some extent, there was. An orchestra of magic had gone off, damaging people and the environment to critical levels if not fatal ones, and items were strewn everywhere.

But everyone was still. Even those who were bleeding openly stood frozen, eyes lidded shut. It was as if she had returned to a world of mannequins.

No, not everyone. A handful of others had teleported out as well and were returning now, most of the other gold-rank otherwordlers amongst their number.

The aura here was strange, too. Yui had some experience with gods other than Peace, including incidents where they’d clashed. This felt like the aftermath of one of those, except one of them had won, and there was only evil left.

The source of that evil revealed itself. In a room full of human statues, one silver-ranker was moving like nothing had happened.

“Yui!” Will shouted, drawing all conscious attention to him once more. “The nest’s shaken! If you haven’t already noticed, we have a bit of a rat problem. Wanna help me burn it out?”

A grin that was equal parts terrified and terrifying split Yui’s lips.

“That was my line.”