[System Decay] Chapter 27: An Abnormal Amount of Calm

Ayla closed her eyes, the passive magic of the suppressing chains preventing her from sleeping. It provided her with rest that equated a good night’s sleep, of course—the organization couldn’t have its workers losing productivity to poor rest.

But it didn’t let her dream. Dreams were dangerous.

She hadn’t been called as an upgraded tutorial helper. Despite the fact that her services were known to have a much higher rate of creating top tier Users, despite the fact that she’d been doing personal coaching under the watchful eye of the system and the organization for over a century, she’d been assigned to a dozen new Users, managing them and highlighting certain parts of the world for them.

There was something abnormal going on this cycle. She could feel it in her bones, the same way one of her danger sense skills had triggered a few of her bodies’ instinctive anxiety reflexes.

Ayla wasn’t supposed to care about that anymore. She was a servant, not a User. The administrative organization didn’t need her to worry. It didn’t need her to think.

It just needed her to serve, which Ayla did.

Decades of experience kept her going, though, reminding her of what was truly important. She hadn’t forgotten the promise she’d made to herself when she’d first been brought here.

There was very little she could actually do here besides learn and observe, but she made the most of the tools she had access to.

She opened her eyes again, the uncanny sensation of artificial sleep passing through her and washing away the weariness in her form.

The tutorial interface was barebones, moreso than usual. Ayla couldn’t even see who she was giving them to, only their stat sheets and their locations. No details about the world had been given to her, either.

All she knew was that they, too, had broken the chaos defense contract. As if they even had a choice. Ayla’s planet had been in prehistory when the contract had been given. Nobody had recorded it, let alone remembered it.

Fairness was a concept of the past, though. For now, all she could do was observe and try to give these people every chance they had to survive in the new world.

Tap.

A knock at her door. Ayla tensed up, remembering the notice that had told her a Dread Executor was visiting. She didn’t know for what reason, but she had never made the mistake of asking after seeing what had happened to the ones that did half a century ago.

No. This wouldn’t be one of them. Ayla had been personally visited by one of them twice in her lifetime, and the way their aura brushed up against her soul was unforgettable. If this one had wanted her dead, they could’ve just obliterated her from far beyond the outpost. Hells, they probably could have annihilated the entire moon.

Ayla answered the door after ensuring that none of her charges were in immediate danger of dying. She’d lost one already to unknown causes—given how little information she’d been given about the planet, she suspected it might be to corruption.

There was nobody at the door. That in itself was relatively unexceptional. While Ayla had had her abilities restricted down to nothing beyond basic resistances, there were others who were permitted a bit more freedom, and of course there were administrative steps.

What was abnormal, however, was the single piece of paper drifting down ever so slowly, propelled by an invisible breeze.

She snapped it out of the air. It felt odd to her senses. It took her a moment to place why.

It was completely nonmagical. The paper was real paper, the writing on it placed there by a real quill or pen or pencil. In a complex where quite literally everything was built magically, it was an outlier.

Ayla read over the letter, eyes widening as she did.

Void Dreamer. I know you, though you do not yet know me. I apologize for not reaching you sooner.

I offer you freedom from a cage in exchange for a life fleeing. This cycle has been disturbed. The gods are taking notice. The organization’s attention is occupied.

You will know where to find me.

- Dread Executor Ramiel

The moment she read the last word, the letter started to crumble, burning from one end. The flame that devoured it was also somehow also nonmagical.

Less than two minutes later, she heard the sirens.

#

“You killed my champion,” an oily voice said.

Will was in an empty, dark room. He’d gotten here—somehow. He was here because—ah. That sensation, that familiar dread pressing on his soul? He knew this.

“Would you have preferred it if I had rolled over and let him kill me?” he asked archly. “A champion that couldn’t kill an unformed human with less than a week of experience to his name isn’t a great champion, is it?”

The Hunger laughed, the sound rebounding across the inside of his head somehow. “You speak boldly. Do you know who I am?”

“Oh, I know this one,” Will said. “Some snobby rich dude’s son? Someone with connections that’ll totally destroy my life if he tries? I know what you are, man. Why do you have to sound like a nepo baby trying to hype yourself up?”

“Admittedly, this form of introduction tends to work better on those with some respect for divinity,” the voice said. “You familiarized yourself with me through the system.”

“I did,” Will said. “It didn’t want to give up much about you, but it did tell me you’re a god of goblinkind. That said, I was expecting you to sound more… gobliny. Like Gollum, maybe. Why do you sound like a Wall Street analyst trying to sell me on a crypto scam?”

“The goblins took me as their god, but hunger is not only satiated with sustenance,” said the god. “Mortals hunger for power, wealth, relationships.”

“Four out of ten introduction,” Will said. “You haven’t even threatened me with death yet.”

“Would you like me to?” the voice asked.

“Shouldn’t you be able to tell me?”

“You’re approaching this situation with an abnormal amount of calm for a mortal, William.”

“If you wanted to kill or hurt me, you’d have done that already,” Will said. “The last thing I remember is going to sleep, so I’m betting this is just you talking through me to the dream. The fact that you even need a champion tells me that you probably can’t exact your influence over this place directly.”

Sardonic applause greeted him. “Close, but not quite. You are not quite here, but a part of you is, just as the wholeness of my existence is elsewhere.”

“Great,” Will said. “If you’re going to do this tomorrow, could I ask for some better lighting here? I can’t see shit.”

“Not every deity will be so accepting of insubordination, even from their sigil holders,” the Hunger said, an amused undercurrent running through his voice.

“Insubordination?” Will said. “Sorry, who has whose sigil again? The hell do you even want from me? I just wanted a good night’s rest.”

“Yet you still have the sigil,” the god said.

“It gives me a great class,” Will said. “And I have a pretty good reason to believe that it helps power people up. Axl wasn’t exactly someone who could be trifled with.”

“Except you did.”

“I did. Has anyone ever told you that you act surprisingly human?”

“I haven’t spoken to humans in eight hundred years. How you perceive what I’m saying depends on what you perceive to be normal.”

“So you could just be a brain in a jar somewhere projecting the image of this voice.”

“I could be.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Will said, getting back on track. “You pulled me in here, so clearly you want something. What is it, and why is it ‘will you be my champion, oh great human?’”

“I would not phrase it like that.”

Will snorted. “I don’t think you’re as big of a deal as you want me to think you are with this whole setup.”

The darkness faded into blinding light that resolved into the figure of a single blurry man and the pressure on Will’s soul worsened. He tried to stand up to face the image of the Hunger, but he found himself unable to move. Crushing despair invaded every corner of his body, evoking every shitty memory of his past life that he had—and oh boy were there a lot of them.

His vision blurred, obscuring the Hunger’s form from anything beyond a dark, blurry silhouette of something vaguely human-shaped, albeit much, much larger.

“You are testing my patience, mortal.” The god’s voice reverberated through Will’s entire being, shaking him to his very core. Even knowing that he was in a dream or dreamlike setting right now, every fiber of his being told him YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. “There is no request involved. You will be my champion, and you will carry out my will upon this cycle.”

“Or what?”

The pressure on his soul increased, physical pain accompanying it. Will tried to scream, but he found that he had no voice to do it with.

“Or you will face this every time you close your eyes for the rest of your short, pitiful life until you die pathetically and a better host can be picked,” the Hunger thundered.

Will had thought he was done pushing his pain tolerance to the limits with the poison, but—

Burning. Crushing. Piercing. His insides became outsides. Every inch of his body tore itself apart and put itself together again. Will’s world shrank down to this vessel of a body. Time, space, death, life; none of that meant anything here. There was nothing but hurt.

The eternity that passed before it ended could have been an hour or ten years. Will’s mind wasn’t a reliable judge.

“I am always watching,” the Hunger said. “I am always listening. Submit or suffer.”

Will gathered himself, picking the shattered pieces of his existence up and hoping that the end product was the same.

“No.”

A crack appeared in the facade.

“You will be persuaded,” the Hunger said.

“I think not,” Will said hoarsely. He assumed that he didn’t have much time to speak before the Hunger sent him back to that painful hell, but he wanted to make this count. “See, I figure that if you’re willing to go this far but can’t actually kill me, you must really need a champion. If you don’t have one already, out of the almost a billion people on Earth? I doubt you’re a big shot. You need me more than I need you.”

Another crack.

“We will see how long that bravery lasts,” the god snarled.

The cracks spiderwebbed out, and then it was gone.

Will woke up with a start. It took him a moment to realize where he was, and then he smiled.

“Always listening, huh?” Will muttered under his breath. “Well fuck you, big man.”

New quest: Become the Hunger’s champion

A god’s sigil has fallen into your pocket. Make use of it.

- Re-establish the Seekers of Hunger. Acquire at least 10 followers. [0/10]

- Enter the Trial of the Champion with the Hunger’s sigil. [0/1]

Reward: You will become the champion of the Hunger, able to call on it in a time of need. Conversely, you will be compelled to carry out the god’s will and spread its influence.

“To be totally honest, having a god on butt dial doesn’t sound so bad,” Will said. “But I didn’t leave one life working for someone else to start this one the same way.”

The so-called god did not respond.

Will flipped the sky off and got out of bed.

He had a big day ahead. Some soul-crushing pain wasn’t going to stop him.

#

“You sleep alright?” Allie asked. “I swear I heard screaming at some point in the night.”

“Yeah, it was fine,” Will lied.

“You don’t sound fine,” Lev said.

Will shrugged. “Okay. It wasn’t fine, but I’m dealing with it. Don’t concern yourselves over it.”

“You’re kind of the most powerful guy on our side,” Trevor said. “If you’re out of commission, that’s a problem for us.”

“I’m nowhere near out of commission,” Will said. Whatever the Hunger had done to him, it didn’t affect him out in the real world. “I’m going to buy some potions, and then we’re going to get to training.”

Today, Will decided to stay closer to the rest of Lev’s party. It was a bit annoying to find bronze-rank dungeons close enough to the unranked ones that the others fought from, but he didn’t mind spending a bit of extra time to do so.

He had a bad feeling about this area. Between the life kingdom, Everdale University’s occupation, and his recent visit from the Hunger, it felt like everything was about to go tits up.

Will carved his way through his dungeon, which was a portal-type that went into a cavern that was filled with water that came up to his knees. It slowed his steps down, crippling his mobility and alerting every creature in the water that he was there.

And from the fins in the water, there were in fact many, many creatures.

Will got up close to a wall, bemoaning the lack of good hand and footholds for him to use. He could just barely get himself out of the water, but his system shop jeans were soaked, dragging him down. He inventoried them, resigning himself to less dignity for easier movement.

Looking at the water gave him an idea, though admittedly not a great one.

“I guess I don’t lose anything trying it.” Worst case, Will could just exit the same way he’d come. The dungeons didn’t disallow exiting right up until the boss room

He took a deep breath, glad that the animals in the water hadn’t decided to attack him yet, and launched himself off the wall.

As his boots touched water, Will overloaded his Wind Walker skill, pumping in more mana than it normally took.

Wind Walker used storm magic to lighten his steps, reducing the sound of each footfall and making him faster. Theoretically, if he could use enough of it…

Will’s first step splashed, and his second did too. Then his third.

He looked down as he sprinted across the water at expressway speeds, whooping with delight when he saw the brief imprint of green magic on the water that each step left.

“I can run on water!” he shouted, laughing. “Yes!”

There were a lot of other things he could do that were ostensibly more impressive, but it was little things like this that made him truly appreciate how much he had changed already.

It also meant that he was a lot more capable of fighting monsters that were much more capable of moving through the water than he was. Will used the slayer sword and the axe of despair both, practically skimming them over the water as he ran until he saw a target.

Over the course of a couple of hours, the knee-deep water, pristine when he’d arrived, clouded with the blood of several dozen unformed to low bronze fish, crabs, and esoteric buglike creatures that the system just identified as “Large Wetland Insect.”

And, more importantly, he got a skill up.

[Corruption Resistance] has completed the bronze rank.

[Corruption Resistance] advanced to silver!

It was his least impressive skill, though it had been instrumental in his survival early on. Now, all it really did was protect him from his own items and skills, though admittedly, that was useful.

Would you like to add a subskill to your skill? You currently have sufficient Awakening Shards to create a Tablet of the Ghost.

That was the first time Will had seen that pop-up, though admittedly it was also the first time he’d advanced a skill naturally rather than either receiving it at a higher rank or having it increase during the process of receiving his class.

Will declined. He didn’t want to use his precious unbound awakening shards right now, and even if he did end up using them to create the tablet of the ghost, he wanted to fill out his skill list before modifying his current ones.

It was nice to confirm his suspicion that he could change it, at least.

The boss of this dungeon was a squad boss at Bronze 4. Will decided not to go after it immediately when he saw what the boss room was, though—even from outside, he could tell that it was much deeper than the rest of the cavern. He’d already had some mishaps with his skill when he ran out of momentum after hitting a wall and sank back to his knees. Doing that while against a giant octopus boss in what was basically a huge fishtank?

At least it didn’t seem to want to leave its room. It couldn’t make it into the shallows of the rest of the dungeon.

Will was in the middle of figuring out a plan of action that wasn’t just “leave another boss unkilled and unlooted” when the chat feature went off.

Lev: Hey Will. Not an emergency call, but we just completed our dungeon and I think we hear gunshots.

Trevor: Those are definitely gunshots. I used to shoot with my old man on his farm. Sounds similar.

Lev: I don’t think it’s monsters.

Will got the implication.

Will: Everdale?

Allie: Probably.

Lev: Can’t say for sure. They’re far.

A glance at the watery boss room and his drenched body was enough for Will to decide that he wasn’t close enough to finishing up here to bother clearing the dungeon before clearing this.

If they were firing guns at monsters, that was one thing. From what

Will: I’ll head on over.

“Another day,” he told the octopus.

He left the dungeon.

Finding the rest of the party was easy enough with them on his minimap. Lev, for some reason, handed him a cookie when he got there.

“What’s this?” Will asked.

“You know how I liked cooking?” Lev said.

“Is that what you were doing every time you called in sick at six?”

Lev winced. “Ah, shit. Sorry.”

Will waved it off, though he was really tempted to press further. “The past is dead. Sure.”

“Some of the mobs drop cooking ingredients,” Lev said. “This one’s peppermint. It has a bit of ice magic in it, I think. They’re safe to eat.”

Allie gave him a thumbs up, cheeks bulging with what was presumably Lev’s cookie.

“When did you have the time to do this?” Will asked.

He took a bite experimentally and raised his eyebrows. Maybe it was because he’d spent so much time eating the ration bars, but this was really good.

“Couldn’t sleep. There’s a kitchen in the safe zone.”

Will popped the rest of the cookie in his mouth. “Keep it up. Where am I heading?”

“I’ll mark it on the map,” Allie said. “Here.”

There’s a marking feature? Will didn’t ask, but sure enough, there was a yellow ping on his minimap with an indicator telling him it was Allie’s.

“That’s the general area, not a specific place,” she warned. “Don’t get yourself turned around.”

“I’ll try not to,” Will said. He turned to leave, then paused. “Could I take another one for the road?”

#

Midway through their latest excursion, Kyle abruptly paused.

“Someone new’s on our territory,” he said.

“Yeah?” Dylan said, his grip tightening on the gun. In combination with his new skills, boosted by the monster cores, he was basically unstoppable. “How can you tell?”

“He’s the big boss,” Andrew said. He and another couple of Iron Boys had tagged along for this hunt. “Means he can see people on territory we’ve got.”

“This guy’s going to see the first bodies soon,” Kyle said. “Says his name’s William. William Li-Brown. You know this guy?”

Dylan’s knuckles turned white. “Fuck yeah I know him.”

Andrew laughed. “Don’t like him much, eh?”

“He won’t fit in with us,” Kyle declared. “He’s bronze, though.”

“We’re bronze,” Andrew asserted.

“And we have guns,” Dylan growled. “He’s just got a crappy six-shooter.”

“If he’s not worth our time, then I don’t want to bother,” Kyle said. “Threaten or kill?”

“Kill,” Dylan said immediately.

“Kill,” Andrew agreed.

“Kill,” the Jones twins echoed.

“Kill it is, then,” Kyle said happily. “I’ll send out the notice. Let’s go give him the good news.”