[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 113: Lose-Lose

One upside of getting tossed into the constant mess of bullshit that gods were getting Will into was that he was not caught off guard at all by the suddenness with which his soul was transported into a space that wasn’t this world.

This wasn’t exactly the same as Vyx, Sadareth, or Kadael pulling him into one of their soul-spaces, though. Those were very clearly spaces built by and designed for the gods themselves. Will was relatively helpless in those, with his one defining trait being that unless a god was willing to cross the line of plausibility like Vyx had, he could not be permanently harmed.

Given everything he’d heard about Peace, Will had assumed that she would be the type to not only cross that line but pretend like it didn’t exist entirely. He’d been willing to chance that risk. Two gods had been involved in the creation of his skill, after all, which theoretically meant that it was as Peace-proofed as possible.

Under normal circumstances, Will would have readily believed that his sigils were just waiting to fuck him over, but he had lacked normal circumstances from the start. Both of the gods he’d used to create this skill knew that he would throw them under the bus in a heartbeat, and Will had proven that he was both willing and able to do so even in the face of death itself.

Fortunately, he wasn’t going to have to take all three of them into a suicidal spiral—not yet, at least. This space lacked the obvious flair and energy that marked it as a god’s space. Instead, Will and Peace stood an indeterminate distance from each other in a field of stars.

This wasn’t the Beyond, though. Not only were gods supposedly incapable of accessing that extradimensional space, Will was also familiar enough with the sensation of relying on his soul to keep himself alive and intact in that place to know that whatever this was, it certainly wasn’t the Beyond.

Will’s best guess was that this was the equivalent of neutral ground, a space that was open for a god’s taking but not yet claimed by either. He could already see pure white spreading from around Peace, who was impossible to look at directly.

She did not say anything, but Will could sense the hostility radiating from her. He replied in kind.

“This is the longest I’ve made it into seeing a god or someone of similar power without them saying you, so you’re already up there on not being obnoxious. Though then again, taking part in a conspiracy to, what, corrupt the planet further? Accelerate the second impact and cause total extinction? I don’t even know what you want.”

Continued silence.

“Well, if you’re not going to give me anything to work with.” 

Will drew on the empowerment he’d gained from repeated soul torture and the basics of soul control that he’d learned both from his time in the Beyond and from the gods themselves.

He was under no illusions that he would be able to overpower Peace, but that wasn’t going to stop him from trying.

This goddess was either incredibly taciturn or already knew about Will’s tendencies to bully deities into—well, not submission, but certainly not a state they wanted to be in. Given what Nynn had said about Peace, Will heavily doubted that it was the former.

From the moment she started expanding her domain, it was clear that Peace had the upper hand. Granted, that had been the clear and obvious assumption from the start. What silver-ranker could hope to compete even a single tier up, let alone against a god? What silver even dared to think about trying?

Still, even if it was a foregone conclusion, Will wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

He was curious as to what the difference was between the Weaken and Corrupt was. The former was a bronze-rank aspect of Desecrated Bond while the latter was gold, and the difficulty of actually using them seemed to be directly proportional to that.

What exactly was the difference between contesting a sigil link and the sigil itself? Will was pretty sure it was a safe assumption that the god whose connection he was trying to suffer would not appear in the divine flesh for Weaken. Having to directly fight a god was a complete fool’s errand—even Will knew that, and dumbass foolhardy plays were kind of his entire gimmick.

That meant there was more to this skill than it seemed. Either that, or the Hunger and Elven Mother had decided to troll him into taking a useless skill, but after the amount of investment both gods had placed in him, he highly doubted that. For gods as small and desperate as they were, it was safer to assume their primary goal was to further their own interests, which wouldn’t be helped by throwing away the life of someone who had vacuumed up so many of their resources.

Will knew that on a rational level, but as his burgeoning soul-space crept outwards and met the tidal wave of Peace’s, it became difficult to reconcile.

He’d thought that he knew pain. For almost the entire duration of the system integration, he’d suffered day and night under the attentions of the Hunger, who had done its level best to annihilate Will’s soul within the limits of its soul-space—first because it had wanted to force him to submit, then because he had asked it to.

The Crown burning plausibility had taught him a nasty lesson in assuming that he knew the limits of what gods were capable of. Every time there was a strict rule binding one of them, he had abused the hell out of it, but it turned out that if a god was willing to spend enough of its resources, rules were more of a problem for mortals.

Compared to this, those two had been like a child with a chainsaw. They were in the same realm as Peace, but they didn’t remotely compare to the goddess’ sheer intensity.

Will was infinitely glad that he had chosen to undergone all the torture he had. If it hadn’t been for that, he was sure his mind would have shattered the second Peace started bearing down on him.

The other gods had referred to Peace as one of the core gods for quite some time. Will had only learned bits and pieces about the hierarchy of the gods, but he knew enough to intuit that a concept as core to existence as Peace would wield drastically more power than something as nebulous as an Elven Mother or even a Crown.

Still, that hadn’t prepared him for this. It took everything Will had to keep his mind from fraying into the abyss. Even if that wouldn’t kill him, he was sure it would ocunt as a failed contest, and he was not going to fail this unless he got something out of Peace.

To his surprise, he wasn’t instantly crushed. Though the pain was immense and the sheer force of Peace’s onslaught was staggering, sparking an inferno that consumed Will from the inside out, his soul expansion hadn’t been immediately crushed.

As a matter of fact, Peace hadn’t even pushed it in that far. Will had expected to be barely hanging onto life, and it sure felt that way, but as his mind acclimated to the hurt, his god-forged soul forcing itself to adapt once more, he realized that Peace controlled a mere three-quarters of the void they were floating in. That was more than it had conquered before they’d directly clashed, of course, but that he still had a significant chunk himself was sa wonder.

And the pain… was fading. 

Will was fully aware that he existed here more as a representation of his soul than an actual physical body, but he grinned anyway. Peace was more composed than the other gods had been, but he could sense the mild twitch in her aura that indicated irritation.

“As it turns out,” Will huffed, “I have a nigh-supernatural ability to annoy you lot. Guess you’re not immune to it.”

Maybe it was just that gods were used to being treated with the reverence that they believed they deserved. They certainly weren’t used to silver-rankers contesting them directly. Will supposed that it would be similar to an ant suddenly growing the power to stop his boot and pushing back, no matter how futile it was.

Not even Peace seemed to take that well, though she was much more composed than the last few gods he’d met.

“You are quite powerful,” she said. 

That was that. Four words. No more, no less.

“And you’re surprisingly shit,” Will said, his mind racing.

This certainly wasn’t the full extent of Peace’s power. There was no realistic way he, a silver-ranker, could win in a battle of soul domains against… okay, he could totally beat a gold-ranker, but a platinum one? Since that was a full tier up, probably not. When it came to the scale of gods, he could forget lesser or greater or core or whatever the hell they called themselves. He should have been little more than a leaf on the wind.

“You can’t use all of your power, can you?” Will concluded. “Something is limiting you. I don’t know how this skill works myself, but I’m not actually facing you in your entirety. The thing is, you are using a god-tier amount of power. Nobody else could inflict that much soul pain. But judging from the fact that it just doesn’t quite hurt as much anymore and that your push is pathetically mortal, I’m guessing you ran out of gas.”

There was no response once again, which was as good as a confirmation.

“C’mon, can’t be a little more talkative? That scared of talking to a mortal?”

Peace did not reply, but Will could sense her domain shifting.

More importantly, he could feel himself starting to make headway. This unclaimed space they were in had become claimed by their efforts, but it currently belonged to neither of them. Peace’s soul-space also didn’t feel the same way a god’s usually did, and Will realized that this skill may have, in fact, been quite overtuned for being only a gold-rank one.

If he had to guess, Weaken accessed the sigil link very directly, ignoring the god’s influence entirely and just targeting the User’s connection from their end—like cutting a rope bridge off from the end. 

Now, Will was approaching it from the opposite direction. He steadily grew aware of Peace’s claim—specifically, its connection to one Adam Riser.

That must have been what was stopping Peace. Will was sure there was some more nuanced, possibly more accurate reason for it, but the goddess was almost certainly limited by the vessel it chose. Whether that limited how much it could push before it risked killing its User and ending the skill or just limited the amount of energy she had in general was an interesting question, but not one that he could answer right now.

For the time being, he had other priorities. When he dove deeper into this domain clash with his soul, he could see that while Peace was currently constrained by the form of a silver-ranker, he could see that this was no isolated part of herself. It would take little to no effort to break through the sigil link and turn his attention on the goddess herself. With the amount of corruption Will and his soul could bring to bear, that wasn’t an insignificant threat.

Peace seemed entirely unworried about that, though, which was either because she was dumb or because she believed she had a way to easily deal with it.

Will could believe the latter pretty easily. If he pushed beyond the confines of what this skill had been designed to do, he was sure he would be able to pen himself up to a real fight against Peace.

There, without the extreme nerf of having to deal with an easily burnt-out silver rank vessel, there would be nothing stopping her from simply obliterating him. Directly contesting a god was essentially suicide.

No, he didn’t think he would be pushing that way.

There was a note of… not surprise, but quite, but still something of that kind. Resignation, maybe?

Peace had known how strong he would be going in, he realized. The combination of Shattersoul and Outcast made him uniquely suited towards dealing with gods, and with the limitation of this vessel, she must have seen the writing on the wall.

“You’re not burning plausibility on this,” Will said. “You’re not worried that I could pass corruption up the line?”

That finally got a response out of Peace. Well, it was either that or the fact that he was steadily encroaching on the sigil’s connection with Riser, which he was reasonably sure he could corrupt.

“You pose no risk to me,” she said. The goddess sounded bored, which was a first. “I had hoped to see what the others saw in you, but all I see is a defiant insect. You’re predictable, corruption wielder.”

“Am I now,” Will said. “If you’re talking, can I convince you to just leave us the fuck alone? The world’s dealing with enough shit as it is. I don’t even know what you’re trying here.”

“You likely never will,” Peace said, still sounding dangerously calm.

This was the worst-case scenario short of her actually spending plausibility to annihilate him, which he was pretty sure would be incredibly expensive given what the Crown and Elven Mother had said about it.

The thing with gods was that a lot of them were surprisingly emotional, having gotten too used to being revered. Will could exploit that, especially when the situation was tilted in a way that ensured he wouldn’t die for his defiance—not permanently, at least.

Peace was giving him nothing to work with. There was no desperation in the goddess, no leverage he could use.

“You can tear this link to shreds,” she continued. “Interference may be useful, so I will prevent my servants from seeking your death immediately.”

What? Interference may be useful? Will had found himself on the back foot many times before, but he’d usually been able to claw his way back through a mixture of refusing to do the rational thing and back down and by figuring out the exact correct weak points to exploit.

Now, the situation was reversed. Technically, he had the advantage over Peace, so long as she was limited to the silver-rank body that he was currently striking at.

The problem was that Will didn’t know what she wanted, nor was she willing to give it up. For once, he had no secret leverage over Peace. He was not the pivot point for her plans, nor was he significant enough to completely annihilate all threats she could place in his way. Will was half tempted to try to push through the barrier to try and corrupt the goddess herself, but even the briefest brush against the walls of the limited area Desecrated Bond had segmented the sigil link off to sent a chill through his soul.

There were some things that were not meant for mortals to mess with. While Will had and would continue to do so with most of that list, he was not going to throw his soul away in a helpless act of defiance.

“Are you going to get on with it or not?” Peace asked, just as evenly as she had.

Will bit back a curse. He didn’t like this situation. He didn’t like being a piece on the board when he didn’t even know the game being played.

But there wasn’t anything else he could do, was there? There were simpler gods whose activity he could control or predict, and through them, maybe he could find out what Peace was doing. The core goddess herself, however, was going to have to remain out of the equation.

Will had a feeling that if he cut the sigil link now, he would be playing into her hands. The problem was that said feeling also said that if he took the warnings she’d been giving him and left, he would be doing the same. It was a lose-lose situation.

That said, he did need to find out what this skill actually did beyond its description, and Peace had claimed that she would leave him alone for the time being even if he did break the link.

“I don’t know what kind of peace you’re trying to achieve,” he told the goddess, “but I want no part in it.”

“That is not a concern,” Peace replied. Her domain began to recede back into herself, evidently nearing the end of the energy she could expend in this space. Lines of death were beginning to appear, showing the growing cracks in what she could maintain.

Will started digging.

#

Hua saw the moment Will made his decision. What that decision was, she wasn’t entirely sure, but a sudden sensation of incredible danger coursed through her at the exact moment the corruption wielder focused on the speaker.

Mana coalesced around him, so tight and close to him that only she could see it happening.

Alarm jumped up in her chest, and she practically jumped out of her seat, trying to push Will down.

“Don’t—“

A wave of force repelled her, though it didn’t seem hostile. Throughout the entire arena, a similar effect seemed to pass over everyone, and all speech abruptly stopped.

Three or four dozen heads turned towards Hua—no. Not her.

Will.

A moment later, Adam Riser, representative and sigil-holder of Peace, began screaming.

“Right then,” Will said, greeting Hua with an easy smile. He looked around the room. “What’d I miss?”