[System Decay] Chapter 34: Bend Like A Willow, Break Like An Oak

The second night was no easier than the first. Though Will had already begun to adapt to the pain that the Hunger could inflict upon his body, it wasn’t easy to withstand mind-shattering torture for a whole night.

At least the conversation breaks were getting longer. Caiyeri had warned him about the abyssal elves making a play for the life kingdom, and though the Hunger was not a god of elves, Will doubted he knew nothing about that.

“I can do this forever,” the Hunger said.

“So can I,” Will said.

“Incorrect,” the god replied. “You will die, whether it is at the hand of another fresh User or one of the natives. Another will pick up my sigil.”

“The elves seem to kinda sorta really hate you. You really think one of them is going to bend the knee before me?”

“Unlike you, the elves know their place in the world.”

Will snorted. “So your divine propaganda’s been more effective on them? You, what, scared them into submission? I told you before that I think you’re not really as impressive as you claim to be. I don’t think that anymore. I know it.”

Whenever the Hunger didn’t have a response for him, it just sent pain screaming through his veins. It was a different kind each time, but unlike real torture, it didn’t last. Will knew that when he woke up, it would be over. He wouldn’t even feel the effects when he got out of bed. It was quite literally all in his head, and knowing that made it bearable.

Knowing that the Hunger was as good as admitting that Will was right almost made it a pleasure.

“Something tells me that me not choosing to be your slave is a big problem for you,” he said the next time he stopped screaming long enough to be sure that the god wanted to talk again.

He had to admit, the fact that he could start speaking without any trouble told him everything he needed to know about the god’s power. None of this lasted. Impermanent pain would pass. He would not break here.

“You insolent child,” the Hunger hissed. “Do you even know what you seek to toy with?”

“No,” Will said. “And frankly, your insistence on trying to break my will isn’t helping with that. You realize there’s a reason people try the carrot and the stick, right?”

“You would be my champion,” the god said, as if that explained everything.

“Okay,” Will replied. “I would have no free will. I got a notification for the trial of the champion, which I assume accepting the role will get me into. That really doesn’t sell me on you.”

For the first time since their original interaction, the Hunger took physical form, emerging from the darkness. He looked different than Will had thought he would, a red silhouette with no human features beyond his outline. The god put a hand to his face.

“You would gain power, of course. You killed my champion. You witnessed how I elevated him to the silver rank at the end of his life. You saw how he was stronger than those of the same level.”

“Which is something I can already accomplish thanks to my skills and training,” Will countered. “Plus a bunch of ridiculously overtuned items that people keep on having a bad habit of dropping around me. And about that advancement thing—you do recall that Axl didn’t exactly survive the process, don’t you?”

“You are intolerable,” the Hunger said.

“And you’re an impatient shit,” Will replied just as easily. “You introduced yourself as a god, so I assume you’re mortal. It’s been, what, two days?”

“The trial approaches, and it is more important than ever,” the Hunger said, irritation clear in his voice. “Do you even know what has happened this cycle?”

“Obviously not,” Will said. “It feels like the system is intentionally feeding me huge amounts of detail about Arcadia and dodging the subject of what the hell is actually happening.”

He had some ideas, of course, but he didn’t speak his mind on that. Ayla’s reaction at the end of the tutorial had been all he needed to know that something was going wrong with this entire process and that the ostensibly benevolent system wasn’t all that it seemed.

“The worlds are falling apart,” the Hunger said. “Dread Executors swarm the planet like ants on a corpse, and us deities—“

The god stopped.

“Ooh, sounds like you’re in trouble,” Will said. “Well, come back to me again when you have an actual good reason for me to accept your offer. Or change the terms. Either is fine with me.”

Without a better response, the Hunger abandoned him to the pain once more.

#

“I fail to understand the mortal,” the Hunger complained. “I was headstrong once, like him, but even I knew to bend the knee to overwhelming power.”

Sadareth, the Elven Mother, giggled. “He has more insight than most. From your speeches of him, he must have realized that our avatars are not permitted to act further against him. If the situation had been different, I am certain he would react more favorably.”

“That is the part that puzzles me,” the Hunger—no, in the presence of his long-time friend, he was Kadael—admitted. “I do not think he would.”

“Oh? Why is that?” Sadareth asked, sipping lightly from her tea.

“He does not break under unimaginable pain,” Kadael said. “He remains defiant even in the threat of unending torture. I believe him a madman.”

“I think,” Sadareth said lightly, passing two beads of magic into the soil that surrounded them, “that is where you are incorrect. Drink some tea, Kadael.”

“Elaborate.”

“Drink. You are losing yourself.”

Reluctantly, Kadael took a cup of the steaming beverage from the goddess. It tasted heavenly, as it always did.

As they drank, Sadareth’s magic took hold, growing two trees, one on either side of their table.

“You think him a strong evergreen,” she said, indicating a broad trunk with one hand. After mere moments of growth, it stretched mightily into the sky, painting an imposing picture to any mortals that might happen upon this planet. “You believe that with enough pressure…”

The Mother gestured, summoning a storm from thin air and concentrating it into a point. The tree resisted the force, but hers was a storm of divinity, and the trunk caved inwards, crumpling the wood and toppling the tree.

“I, however, believe him a willow,” she said, gesturing towards the other tree. She applied the same force to it. “Rather than standing proud no matter the case, he chooses his battles, adapting to the flow of the world so he can withstand what comes his way. In some way, he knows our plight. He chooses to exploit it.”

Despite suffering from the same onslaught of blows as the evergreen, the willow remained, bending under the pressure but never falling.

“You forget one thing,” Kadael said, snapping his fingers. Both trees—the toppled evergreen and the tilted willow—cracked, then shattered, reduced to mere grains of wood. “With enough power, everyone breaks.”

“True enough,” Sadareth admitted. “We shall see.”

#

“Goddamn it, you’re an asshole,” Will muttered as he woke. “Seriously, can you give a man one good night’s rest?”

He figured the answer was going to be no until one of them bent the knee. It was growing increasingly clear that the Hunger’s true objective was to secure him as a champion for the trial that would apparently befall Earth and Arcadia in just under two months, and for some reason or another, the god wanted Will to be a willing slave for it.

“Give it time,” he told himself and any asshole deities who might just happen to be listening in on him. “We’ll see who runs out of time first.”

After yet another unpleasant night of sleep, Will was more than ready to kill something. His party had ended up deciding to stay in the one safe zone located within the university. They’d bumped into one other person there, though she’d left without so much as a word to them.

Will had caught the name, though. Lily Teneli. The name had been vaguely familiar, so he’d gone through his contacts and system messages to find her.

Finally, he’d realized where he recognized her from.

Regional Leaderboard

1. Kenneth McCarthy. Bronze 6.

2. Lily Teneli. Bronze 6.

3. Jackson Grove. Bronze 6.

Your current position on the regional leaderboard is 10 of 699,152.

Will had jumped up six spots on the regional leaderboard since the last time he’d checked it. He wondered what had happened to the Andrew Andrews guy that had been in third place before. Will assumed all of the leaderboard members were abusing monster cores, so maybe Andrew had just lost access to a consistent source of them.

Globally, Will had also improved.

World Leaderboard

1. Osiris Adebayo. Bronze 10 Nuclear Specialist. Current sponsors: The Princess of Pale Fire and the Uplift Federation.

2. Lu Jie. Bronze 10 Portal Mage. Current sponsors: The Lady of Loss.

3. Natalie Blurr. Bronze 10 Chaos Summoner. Current sponsors: The Lord of Loss.

4. Hua Fang. Bronze 10 Warrior. Current sponsors: The Order of the Striker.

5. Haoyu Fang. Bronze 9 Warrior. Current sponsors: The Order of the Striker.

Your current position on the world leaderboard is number 1048 of 901,294,011.

Interesting. Will was disappointed that he likely wouldn’t be the first to silver worldwide, but he wasn’t going to screw himself over with monster cores, so he didn’t mind.

That aside, it looked like the positions had changed. Everyone on the top five had a sponsor now.

He wasn’t doing too poorly himself, looking at his sheet.

Name: William Li-Brown

Level: Bronze 4

Race: Human

Class: Reaper

Titles: [First Blood], [Silver Forerunner], [User Killer]

Attributes:

[Power]: Bronze 1

[Speed]: Bronze 3

[Affinity]: Bronze 1 (Silver 1)

[Soul]: Bronze 2

[Resistance]: Bronze 2

[Perception]: Bronze 1

Unused Points: 0

Universal Abilities

- Omnilingual

- System User

- Identify

- Marked for Death

Skills

[Power]: Storm

- Wind Walker (Bronze)

- Thunder Wraith’s Grasp (Bronze)

-

[Speed]: Space (secondary)

- Escape Artist (Bronze)

- Weapons Free (Bronze)

- Wraith Cloak (Bronze)

-

[Affinity]: Corruption (primary)

- Corruption Resistance (Silver)

- Chaos Transfer (Bronze)

- Destructive Synthesis (Bronze)

- Attune Corrupted Item (Bronze)

- Decaying Touch (Bronze)

-

[Soul]: Death (secondary)

- Mark for Death (Bronze)

- Ghostflame (Bronze)

- The Bell Tolls (Bronze)

-

[Resistance]: Balance

- Equilibrium Mantle (Bronze)

-

-

[Perception]: Time

- Time in a Bottle (Bronze)

- Pages of the Past (Bronze)

-

Without any monster cores, he’d hurtled himself to almost the top one thousand of humans worldwide. He was a long shot past the point he’d been at just a week ago, alone and lost with nothing more than Corruption Resistance keeping him from slipping into death. If this continued, he could easily see how the potential of his class could take him further beyond.

The number of humans remaining had dwindled, though Will saw that it wasn’t falling at an unsustainable rate. He figured the people who’d gone through the easiest tutorials and hadn’t put any effort into leveling were biting the dust now. It was a shame, but it was what it was.

Will wondered how accurately the numbers of the leaderboard reflected power. With his party, he’d been able to take down the Bronze 8 and Bronze 9 elves with some effort, and he’d been able to kill a Bronze 10 in the process of advancing to silver with Caiyeri. Would his unique abilities and items let him close the gap between him and any of the top five in a fight?

Will hoped he wouldn’t be forced to find out.

Today was a new day, and a new day meant problems.

“I should get out of bed.”

#

Rather than risk drawing a ton of attention to himself by going to the life elf city again, Will elected to spend the day grinding dungeons, once again doing it alone. The others in his party were advancing at a quick pace, but none of them had even hit the bottom of bronze yet, though Allie and Trevor were both now at Unformed 20.

Once they were able to reach bronze, Will would consider working with them, but as it was, he was growing as fast as they were, if not faster. For the near future, it was unlikely that they’d be anything more than a hindrance in the dungeons he was clearing.

Going through dungeons alone was simpler. His stealth skills meant that he could hide in the plentiful shadows of the dungeons, making full use of his First Blood title to operate like an assassin. Conversely, the fighting style he adapted for cases where sudden overwhelming force wasn’t enough to take them all out worked great for bosses.

He accumulated charges with Thunder Wraith’s grasp, stuck them with corruption with one of Chaos Transfer or Decaying Touch, withered them away with The Bell Tolls, and performed the finishing touch with the slayer sword’s critical hit combined with Thunder Wraith Grasp’s charges exploding.

In this manner, he was able to successfully clear three dungeons without sustaining more than moderate injuries. It would have been more difficult with the group, ensuring everyone was alive and well, pushing people out of the way of powerful attacks, managing cooldowns, and being unable to use his own skills to their fullest.

Idly, Will wondered if it was even worth continuing on with the party. He’d joined them because out of the people who’d stayed for the apocalypse, Lev had been the highest up on his list of friends and family.

After saving their lives a number of times, Will was reaching the point where he was sure they’d be fine against the threats they chose to fight against. With the Silence-Darkness combo, they definitely would’ve been able to take down any individual one of the Iron Boys. Hell, if Will hadn’t figured out his aura senses, they might have been able to beat him.

That could wait until later, he decided. For now, they were still his friends, and there was nothing saying they couldn’t still provide any benefit to each other.

Sadly, none of the loot from the bronze-rank dungeons was particularly amazing. Today’s haul came largely in the form of awakening shards and armor. Will got an assortment of awakening shards, though not enough to make a full tablet of any kind, and the armor wasn’t good enough to justify the hit to Escape Artist, especially compared to the silver-rank item that Lev had ended up using Will’s credits for.

They’d been looking for weapons, but after an extensive, extraordinarily boring few hours where Lev had slowly informed Will of the details of the items, Will had realized that the slayer sword had more potential than basically anything a storeowner could sell them.

It made sense. The sword had been made for the life elves’ elite forces, while the gear they were willing to sell to humans, especially with whatever shady business they were involved with on the side and the incoming invasion from the abyssal elves, was made to turn a profit.

Defensive gear, on the other hand, was something that he was sorely missing, and though armor was a massive hindrance to his speed, the item they’d gotten to replace his gauntlets of strength wasn’t.

Item: Ring of Adaptive Shielding

Uncommon, silver

Commonly found in the hoards of silver rank dungeons, these rings are a favorite of large-scale militaries. Their distribution a century ago necessitated a shift in large-scale army tactics, but you don’t want to sit through the full history lesson.

You may activate this front-facing forcefield in one of two modes.

1) Active: Creates a barrier that decreases the effects of all incoming damage and eliminates all of one specific type of damage at silver rank or lower. Costs high mana per second.

2) Reactive: Creates a barrier that is immune to the type of damage you last took at silver rank or lower. Costs moderate mana per second.

The reactive mode will activate if you are attacked.

Against dungeons that were comprised of monsters that largely used the same kind of attacks, it was a godsend. Will could walk through them with impunity.

His loot box item was a fair bit stranger, just like the Hot and Cold coin he’d gotten a couple dungeons back.

Item: Mysterious Ticket

Epic, silver

A ticket that allows entrance into an unknown gate.

Unfortunately, despite being silver, it told him literally nothing about what it was meant to do. No information about the gate, no information about the background of the ticket, nothing.

“For a system that likes the sound of its own voice so much, it’s really suspicious that you don’t want to say shit about this.”

Will inventoried it anyway. All loot was good loot. Unless it was cursed loot, though he hadn’t come across anything like that yet.

Making sure to stay far away from the elf city, Will continued training.

He wasn’t alone in that. Pushing them to join him and fight together had driven home the realization that they needed to do everything they could to survive if they wanted to make it more than a few weeks in their cruel new reality. Despite their inabilities to commit to the task before, Lev, Allie, and Trevor worked pretty well together as a team.

The day passed, and to his surprise, no new emergencies came to his attention. Will was sure that there were people being as horrible as the Iron Boys everywhere, but he wasn’t Superman. He couldn’t be everywhere, nor could he stop everything. It discomforted him that he could potentially be saving lives when he was training, but he knew that without getting power first, he wasn’t going to be able to help anyone.

The Hunger was no less obnoxious that night than it was the one before, but Will thought he might have seen a fragment of resignation in the anger of the god.

Or maybe he was just imagining things. That was entirely possible.

A week passed in this fashion. Will grinded his way through the nearby bronze-rank dungeons, while the other three cleared out unformed dungeons with increasing ease. Will leveled up twice, htiting Bronze 6, but after the easy pickings of the initial days, he couldn’t find enough awakening shards to make the tablets he wanted most. Instead, he focused on training up his slayer sword and his other skills. Chaos Transfer was on the brink of ranking up, he was sure of it, but it didn’t seem to want to do it against the bronze-rank bosses he soloed.

Of the other three, Allie hit bronze first, claiming the uncommon class of Radiance Knight with her sword, radiance, and wind elements. Trevor hit it a day after, selecting an epic class named Zone Controller with suppression, twilight, and fire.

The day that Lev was due to advance, of course, everything went tits up.

#

Will and his party had avoided the elf city as much as they could, knowing that the people present there would want him dead on sight. He got the feeling that the other three were dancing around the question of “why does Detect Evil ping you as a bad guy,” but he was totally fine with them not bothering to ask. No hard questions meant no uncomfortable answers.

As it turned out, they should have at least checked in on it at some point, because eight days after killing two of the guards there, they heard a tremendous crack of thunder from the north.

After a brief, shared moment of confusion, Will elected to check out what it was. They all had movement abilities, after all, so they could skedaddle in the case of something going horrendously wrong.

Will’s suspicions about the source of the sound were confirmed when he stepped into life elf territory again.

The tree maze that led into Thalia’s territory had been burned to the ground, though not only by fire. They were singed and scorched in places, burned down to the stump, but other, more esoteric powers had eaten through the trees as well. Acid, lightning, darkness, death—Will recognized the flavors of the residual magic that had been here.

Elves.

At the center of the now-destroyed mage, the massive leafless tree stood strong and unmarred, the ground beneath it littered with the bodies of those who had tried their hand at it.

Thalia Brooksoul, priestess of life, hovered a dozen feet above the ground, crackling with energy. From the power of the aura she was exuding right now, Will could tell that it had been her who’d caused that—likely in the process of killing the other elves, if the freshness of the blood was anything to go by.

“We should run,” Lev advised.

Will remained transfixed by the sight, sliding into his chat window and accessing a message log that both sides had updated once a day to share information.

Will: Caiyeri, what the hell did your faction do?

Caiyeri: You’re a week late to the party, Will, but you’ve come just in time for the main event.

Caiyeri: Care to join?

__

Author's note: sorry for the late chapter again, flight took up my entire day