Before Will left the UK, he sat down for a somewhat awkward cup of tea with Michael, Natalie, Caiyeri, and Jessie. It was mostly only awkward because they a) couldn’t figure out how to fit Jessie in a tea room and b) Jessie appeared to like the taste of tea, but regular teacups didn’t work for it. They’d ended up having one of Blurr’s underlings duplicate the liquid until there had been enough to stick into a firehose.
“We need to talk,” Michael said over his cup. “Is everyone here good with you?”
“We’re talking,” Will replied. “If I didn’t trust them, they wouldn’t have come with me.”
“Fair point,” he replied. “Uh, that includes…”
“Jessie can hear you,” Caiyeri said. “I would not suggest acting like it can’t.”
Jessie nodded its head, smashing through the forcefield that Caiyeri had set up in lieu of an actual room.
The elf sighed, snapping her fingers. A new forcefield went up to replace the last, this one an extra ten feet higher. “Mind your manners, Jessie. We’re in polite company.”
Blurr was poorly attempting to suppress a laugh. For someone usually as dark and serious as her, it felt strange to see her expression in anything that wasn’t broody. “I’ll admit that this wasn’t on the list of things I expected to see my lifetime. I thought that one of you would be dead by now.”
“I’ve gotten good at not dying,” Will said. “I’m pretty good at dying, too, but that’s another story. Michael, you had something to say, right?”
“I did,” the Tracker said, growing serious. “When I picked this class, it wasn’t just to follow monsters. I finished the tutorial as part of a group, and one of the things we were sure about was that the future was going to carry more surprises for us. I picked up a sponsor early, and I’m a sigil-holder of Sight, who is a lesser god in Fate’s orbit.”
Will tensed. He’d sensed the sigil connection, but he hadn’t identified that.
“He doesn’t serve Fate, if that’s what you’re worrying about,” Michael said. “I have no affiliation with Peace. Swear it on my life.”
His aura seemed to indicate that was the truth.
“Carry on,” Will said. “You were talking.”
“Right. So obviously you noticed the big fuckoff planet showing up in the sky, right?”
Time to impact: 1 year, 8 months, 14 days.
“Got a little counter in the corner of my vision that reminds me in case I ever can’t be bothered to look up,” Will said.
“Right. But a couple months ago, something changed. I hear about it when I dream. Sight tells me. There’s a whole other civilization up there, and I think they know we’re here.”
“That doesn’t surprise me, given what I’ve heard about the cycle,” Will said.
“More importantly, I think they know about you.”
“Wow, look at you go,” Caiyeri said drily. “You’re famous. Again. This keeps happening to you, for some reason.”
“Why do you think that?” Will asked.
“They’re preparing for war.”
Will and Caiyeri sighed in cadence at that.
“Of course they are,” Caiyeri said.
“Just once, I’d like someone’s reaction to me to be hey, cool, let’s work together to fight monsters and shit,” Will said.
“That was my reaction.”
“You don’t count. I mean someone with actual political relevance.”
“Watch where your mouth is going, human. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how many times you would’ve died without me during your tutorial.”
“I did die, remember? Whose fault was that again?”
“I just gave you the poison. It’s not my fault you drank the entire vial.”
“Excuse me,” Blurr said, cutting in sharply but politely. “Are the two of you going to get a room, or should we leave?”
“We were just finishing up,” Will said.
“I don’t like what you’re implying,” Caiyeri added. “That said, we were about done. Do you have the information on the people that you’re adding to Will’s murder list?”
“We are not calling it that,” Will said.
“Assassination list? Hit list?” Caiyeri suggested. “I’d just say leaderboard, but there are people we like on there.”
“We do have information on Pixie and Warr, if that’s what you’re asking,” Blurr said. “Pixie leads a faction in what used to be Bosnia. They’re full of affliction-based classes, and they’ve cleared a fair chunk of Eastern Europe of human and monster life. Motivations unknown, but given what we know now, I think we can guess.”
“Fantastic,” Will said. “Warr?”
“Brazil superdungeon. We lost eyes on him after he went in. He has a confirmed killcount of at least ten thousand, though.”
“How’d we get that?”
“He reappeared in the remnants of Sao Paulo. That city no longer exists.”
“Ah.”
“So, thoughts?” Caiyeri asked. “We can take them, right?”
“There’s not many people we can’t take,” Will said. “We should probably get going. This is going to take a while.”
#
Time to impact: 1 year, 7 months, 29 days.
Locating Pixie’s faction took over two full weeks. Will had to draw on a half dozen separate connections to lend him resources. It ended up being a combination of four non-combat Users from the ESNA, a small army’s amount of detection devices from Australia, and a whole bunch of using Nathan as a glorified taxi to finally find their base of operations. They were spread out across about a hundred miles, but their core group was centered in a desolate wasteland surrounded by several dozen open dungeons.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Killing them all took eight minutes.
Every time he’d found an offshoot of the group, Will left a single one of Sen’s eyes near them, keeping it cloaked. Since most of them were also silver-rankers, they didn’t have the means to detect the familiar, let alone destroy it.
Ninety-seven members of a group known colloquially as the Long Death experienced a quick, brutal death at the hands of gold-rank corruption applied by darkness that swelled out of their shadows without warning. Across the countries they were spread across, one by one, bells tolled to end their lives and reap the next one.
Pixie survived longer than the rest. As a gold-rank Chronopoisoner—one of the classes Will had been offered during the tutorial, and one that had the potential to evolve to Dread Executor—she had methods to counteract certain afflictions, slowing down her own personal time to prevent them from taking hold quickly.
Unfortunately for her, the combination of Envoy of Mercy and Chaos Transfer meant that her entire primary kit was useless on Will. She also added a layer of traditional combat to it, but there was only so much she could do to prolong the inevitable.
“Hey,” he said in front of her dying body, casually slicing through another poison skill that shot forth from her trembling hands. “Does the phrase certainty through death mean anything to you?”
“W-what?”
“No wonder they didn’t make you a candidate,” Will said, shaking his head. “Only thing it looks like you’re good for is killing people weaker than you.”
Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [725/1000]
Special quest: Gold Challenges (Reaper)
Sub-task advanced.
- Kill 7 beings with a killcount of 10,000 or higher [5/7]
#
Time to impact: 1 year, 7 months, 3 days.
Time slowed down as Will finally closed in on Warr, and a system notification clued him into the fact that it wasn’t him doing it.
[The Order of the Striker] requests a meeting. Accept? [YES / NO]
That was somewhat unexpected. Will frowned. He’d been forced to accept a sponsor meeting when he’d been in the trial of the champion, but the system wasn’t transporting him off-planet this time. He… didn’t actually know the protocol for this.
You have consumed one level of [Purified] to negate the cast time of [Sanctuary].
“Hey, Ayla,” he said, stepping into the Beyond. “Anything new?”
“Besides your rapidly approaching deadline? No.”
“Great. Could you tell me what the deal is with sponsors asking to meet me outside of the trial of the champion?”
“That’s strange,” the changeling said, her aura expressing a frown. “They usually don’t take interest in people beyond trial events. It’s likely that you’ll be brought off-planet briefly, but it’s expensive on their end, and they can’t kill you without risking more than even a Lady or Lord can afford to lose.”
“So accepting it is fine, then?”
“It is. Did you just spend a thousand credits to ask me if it was safe to accept an invitation?”
“A thousand silver, yeah. I mean, thanks to the sponsor incident back in the trial, money means basically nothing to me up until we get into the gem tiers, so it’s pretty much free. See you soon.”
He slipped back out of the Beyond and into reality, then accepted.
Meeting accepted.
You will be transported off-planet in [10 seconds].
He arrived in an unfamiliar building, already standing at the head of what looked like an ordinary boardroom with substantially more powerful auras than any executive office would have ever had in the before times. Three figures hidden by shadow were sitting at the table already, larger than life and radiating power.
“Very edgy,” Will said, nodding approvingly. “Not the kind of venue I would’ve picked, though. It kinda offsets the vibe. Also, do y’all have names, or…”
“We had a deal, corruption wielder,” one of them ground out, his voice infused with so much power that Will had to brace himself to not be blown back by it.
“Ah, so that’s what this is about,” Will said, finally realizing what the meeting had been called for. “You sponsored this asshole, didn’t you?”
“We did,” another one of the figures said. This voice was more even. She was also visually indistinguishable from the others, which wasn’t helping Will be any less irritated by this. “He will make a good member of the Order, one day.”
“Nah, I’m thinking he won’t,” Will said. “I got details over time. Looks like your standard murderhobo type. Make the numbers go up, no matter who you have to go through to get there. Very lone wolf, which I can respect, but also very sociopathic and very fond of killing people who’ve done nothing wrong, which I can’t.”
“WE. HAD. A. DEAL.” This from the first voice again.
“Jesus, calm your tits,” Will said, holding his hands up. He glared at the figure that he assumed it was coming from. “Well, you might not have them, depending on your species. Calm your soul, dude. Not cool to try to suppress mine when we’re at your house. You know there’s a little thing called plausibility that might be an issue for you, right?”
“Hezen is out of line, but he does bring up the heart of the issue,” the woman said.
“Sounds like an issue, not an iss-me,” Will said. “No? Does that not translate? Okay. Here’s the thing. That deal you brokered with me? I fucking remember it, because that’s what laid the basis for a lot of the gear I have now. It protects you, and it protected your charges while we were in the trial. You’re not going to get me on some technicality here. I know what you signed. I know what I signed.”
“I told you that wasn’t going to work,” the third voice said, sounding exasperated. “This one will never listen.”
“I’m listening,” Will said. “I’m just not someone who’s going to roll over because you presented yourself as someone more powerful than me. Do you know how long it took me to get here? I have fought my way through every asshole under the sun. I didn’t even know Earth had that many gold-rankers. My friends are helping, but this wasn’t easy.”
“You’re going to regret this,” the first man said.
“Somehow, I don’t think I will. Let me tell you what you might regret. Are you familiar with Peace?”
“Do you take us for fools?”
“I’ll take that as a yes, then. Right. What you might regret is getting in my way and realizing a few years later that oops, you just let Peace annihilate my entire fucking planet, including every single promising candidate you might’ve picked out from either mine or the one about to hit it. How is it that I’m two tiers lower than you shitheads and still fighting for a greater good than you can even think about? Hell, there are Peace sigil-holders in this superdungeon trying to, I don’t even know, subvert it or some shit?”
“You’re being emotional,” the woman said flatly. “You need to consider the situation you’re in.”
“I’ve considered my situation plenty,” Will said. “And you know what I’ve decided? Humor me.”
“What?” she replied.
“I’m kind of a big deal, and that means I don’t need to entertain this BS anymore.”
With that, he selected the return option, vanishing before any of the representatives could get a word in.
In the wake of his departure, the third voice spoke again.
“This is exactly why we have that deal with him in the first place. Had we not made it, could you imagine what would happen when he reaches the higher tiers?”
“You have no guarantee he’ll even make it to gold,” the first one replied angrily.
“Then why did you call this meeting?”
The others had no response to that.
#
Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [945/1000]
Special quest: Gold Challenges (Reaper)
Sub-task advanced.
- Kill 7 beings with a killcount of 10,000 or higher [6/7]
The fight had been surprisingly hard. Will had gotten into melee range of Warr, who was a simple Warrior, and he’d absolutely lost the close-quarters battle. It was only thanks to Envoy of Mercy that he’d managed to avoid losing a limb, and he was down to only a handful of Blessed and Purified levels remaining.
Will was not a swordfighter. He was just a very powerful User who happened to have a pair of swords. When fighting against someone with actual CQC skills and training, he wasn’t even close to a match.
Once he’d gone to long-range combat, it had been easier, but Warr had a ton of magic items to burn, and it had been Jessie and Caiyeri who’d been key in negating those effects. Working together, though, they’d managed to find a gap in his defenses and corrupt him. It had been a hop, skip, and a jump to killing him from there.
Will took Jessie and Caiyeri into the Beyond from the Brazil superdungeon, not wanting to stay there too long. Peace had established a more thorough presence there, and the only reason that they hadn’t been overwhelmed by her people was that Warr had already dealt a great deal of damage to them on one specific path.
Ayla met them in his Sanctuary.
“Your soul feels cold,” she told him. “Lethal.”
“It’s what it needs to be,” Will said. “One to go.”
“One to go,” she agreed. “I have news.”
“Oh, lovely,” Caiyeri said. “What is it this time?”
“Aliens. More accurately, the other planet. They’re looking at you. They are watching.”