The former rank one User was panicking.

That wasn’t a reaction many would have associated with him, not in the times before or now. He had been a high-powered executive and the oldest man in his family when the screens had come. At the end of a life well lived, he had chosen to stay and fight while most of the rest of his family had preferred safety. Regaining his strength and going far beyond what he had ever dreamed of as a young man had been a pleasant surprise, and he had applied the same ruthless drive to his skills that he had towards his normal life.

Most of his family had taken that approach. Xie-ren, who had immigrated to the United States when they had been young, had also stayed, joining up with him when she’d confirmed that he was still alive. Though she had operated more independently than under Lu, she had stayed in touch with him, reveling in the benefits of new youth alongside him.

Right up until the global human summit.

Now, he defended a nation run by a murderous sociopath that had once been of Earth but no longer was against someone who was supposed to be family.

He did not recognize this Xie-ren anymore. Jie Xie-ren was gone. There was a monster in her place.

Or, perhaps more terrifyingly, she had decided that blood mattered less to her than her god.

Jie Lu could not protect his people from her onslaught. There were simply too many Peace sigil-holders. More than half of his attacks were stopped in their tracks, their momentum pacified by a group cast. Every time he killed a group of them with a portal-accelerated projectile, more of them seemed to creep out of the ground like ants.

Even the terrifying Fan Laozi’s power was only enough to protect the titans themselves. The Peace sigil-holders operated with tremendous coordination. Every time a User poked their head out to attempt to return fire or protect against a barrage, over a hundred silver to gold rank skills converged on them, guaranteeing death if Lu couldn’t get them out of the way in time.

This was a losing fight, and the worst part of it was that Lu knew in his heart of hearts that part of the reason it was that way was because he was not willing to accept that his sister was gone. He still hoped, perhaps foolishly, that she was still there and could still be reasoned with.

Another part of him was worried that he would activate the strongest combination he could try and it wouldn’t be enough.

All his life, he had been enough. Nothing had been able to stand in his way.

What would become of him if he tried this and failed?

He was shaken out of his thoughts by the telltale magical signature that he knew would be followed by a mass cast of the Pacify sigil skill. Lu cursed, spending another chunk of mana he wouldn’t be able to recover quickly.

Gold-rank skill—Portal Overcharge. It was a very efficient skill that he’d used a good number of times to enhance the number and range of the portals he’d been using, but the number of times he could use it without backlash had decreased since it had hit gold. He was running out of remaining uses.

This was worth it, though. In a span of instants, he repositioned almost the entire Shanghai coalition, repositioning them just out of range of the Pacify before returning them to their original positions. Their numbers were dwindling at an alarming rate, but Lu knew that if it weren’t for him, that pace would have been far faster. If he hadn’t been present to act as a life tether it was very possible that Lu and the otherworlder would have been the only ones remaining.

It was becoming clearer that he was going to have to take drastic action soon. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to do it, but—

Darkness flooded the city, and Jie Lu found himself filled with an odd combination of terror and relief.

For months now, he had feared this familiar sight. He still remembered the terror of trying to exact revenge upon William Li-Brown and realizing that it was his men who were dying, not the corruption wielder’s.

This time, though, he was not the greatest enemy. Jie Lu was not the scariest fighter on the battlefield, not the strong man he had always believed himself to be—and for possibly the first time in his life, he was okay with that.

Within moments, the oily, magic-absorbing darkness blanketed so much of the city that it covered the titans up to their knees. Both sides were firing blind now, but it was clear that the tide had turned.

Will: Miss me?

#

Will wondered if the way he felt fighting Peace sigil-holders was the same way everyone else felt about him. They were frustratingly good at staying alive, and they were slippery. Anyone that got caught out of position instantly ate a blast of gold-rank corruption to the face, which was usually enough to kill them once Caiyeri got wind of their general location, but they were very good at not getting caught out of position.

In sufficiently large groups, their collective sigil skills were sufficient to deny entire blocks of space, preventing the hunger phantasm from entering the space they occupied and dealing with them.

Will was fifty-fifty on the idea of triggering One Foot in the Grave to try to brute force his way through, but the extreme cost of that skill wasn’t worth it if he couldn’t finish it here and now. It was a fantastic enhancement, but it also eliminated his ability to passively heal by damaging and killing people, which meant that he would be doing an all-or-nothing play for zero guaranteed return.

Xie-ren Jie was clearly one of the Peace force’s elites. Will had been able to find her amongst the chaos with Sen, but she’d noticed and eliminated his surveillance on her almost instantly.

Her primary attack was also not the generic Peace sigil-holder template—she’d already been a strong User before the goddess’ influence, and it showed in how lethal she was against the lesser Users on Shanghai’s side.

As best as Will could tell with Pages of the Past, she had a combination of skills that were primarily driving a fleet of arrows around her, infusing them with different powers and flying according to her desires. Blinding her with the hunger phantasm had helped somewhat, but she had perception skills to help, so it wasn’t perfect.

Fortunately, Will wasn’t alone. He kept holes open in his hunger phantasm for his allies who needed it and pointed the way to the nearest groups of Peace sigil-holders. The silver-rankers largely stuck together, operating as a lethally effective unit. Magical defenses bent under the combined forces of several silvers who had spent the last few months fighting against these very same forces like their lives depended on it—which it had.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

And when they took an inch, they took a mile. Will hammered in on every wavering shield, extending the Warp Strike feature of Weapons Free to swing an attack out into those defenses from miles away, often doing so from a thrown knife from one of his own.

Caiyeri was putting in a lot more work now than she had before. At silver, she had already been a force to contend with. Her trials and tribulations had forged her into a deadly, chaotic assassin. Her Gambler class hadn’t evolved, but her fighting style had. She took every risky opportunity, using her skills to turn a miniscule chance into a guarantee.

Now, those traits had been magnified a hundredfold. At gold, she was dodging attacks that she couldn’t even see, moving with a fluidity that Will could only dream of. Her skills must have all upgraded at the same time as well, because she was spamming magic like there was no tomorrow. Will didn’t even know that half the consumable magic items she was using existed, but there she was, flitting through his darkness like a living shadow just to drop a gold-rank hand grenade with a one percent chance to inflict true damage on anyone in its radius.

In the opening engagements, she was the most lethal by far, even more than Nathan and Yui.

Despite only being ten strong, Will could tell that they had easily shifted the tides of this battle. The amount of chaos they had added was key, and since it was primarily Will upsetting the order of things, it gave his gold-rankers a much easier time picking off enemies like fish in a barrel.

Will didn’t personally kill all that many people, instead relying on his wide-range spells to weaken defenses until either Caiyeri, Nathan, Yui, or Jessie steamrolled through them.

The Shanghai group was probably breathing a deep sigh of relief, he figured. Lu Jie should probably have warned his Users about what attacking into the darkness would risk, and now their casualties had been reduced to almost nothing. From what he’d heard of the man, Fan Laozi might not like that, but Will probably had time before the Titan Driver took so much offense that he started firing back.

One of the strange things about this new world order was that more was not always better. Just because Peace was forcing its thralls to work together didn’t mean that their vast numbers and coordination could defeat Will’s group. In fact, with no objective to project and no real limitations on where they could attack, he would have taken these ten powerful, adaptable Users over Peace’s army any day of the week.

Armies worked well against armies, but in a world where one man could be a battalion on his own, they weren’t always the best fit against… heroes? No, that didn’t sound quite right.

Will decided he’d think on that one. There was definitely a title in there that fit his haphazard group somewhere, but sociopathic murder machines didn’t roll off the tongue quite as well.

As lightning flashed through the darkness, Will started searching for his target again.

Lu Jie’s one condition for not shooting him down had been the same as what he’d asked of Will back when he’d dropped his blood feud against him, and sure enough, it was for the same reason—blood.

Where are you, Xie-ren?

#

Jie Xie-ren was losing this battle.

That much was plain to see. She had been slowly but steadily winning without even participating all that much, simply directing waves upon waves of silver and gold-rankers forward. Against the disorganized, impure forces that her brother and the one who had transgressed the boundaries of worlds, her strategy had worked. Peace’s hand had guided her way throughout, granting her troops the presence of mind needed to act as a unit. It had been nearly evenly matched, but she had been on a certain path to victory.

That was no longer the case now. Even as she observed her people through Peace’s connection, she watched as a group of twenty was overrun by a single elf who always seemed to be in the right place, avoiding attacks by mere centimeters and returning devastating critical attacks with pinpoint accuracy. A duo of gold-rankers who’d been using their stilling attacks to stop the hearts of a gathered group of Shanghai Users died screaming, run over by an unfathomably grotesque creature of some sort that vanished from her perception almost as fast as it entered.

Elsewhere, she recognized the work of otherworlders. Though she could only see the impact craters and zones of null magic that they left behind, there was a particular stench to them that Peace had taught her to recognize.

She decided that she would start mounting her counteroffensive by targeting the weakest members of their group. There was a group of silver-rankers that were utilizing similar tactics but were noticeably slower. Towards them, she sent a hundred arrows, each of them approaching from different angles. Flurry, a skill that had been boosted to gold-rank by Peace’s influence, was a violent way to end fights, but violence in the service of a lasting Peace was acceptable.

Xie-ren wished more people could have opened their eyes to the goddess’ truth, but thus far she had only seen them truly understand when their choices had been Peace or peace in eternal slumber.

It couldn’t be helped. These attackers would not listen to reason, so they would have to die.

Arrows swarmed at a group of three silver-rankers—and they saw them coming somehow. One of them possessed a sniper rifle that seemed to never miss, and a slow null-magic skill from another slowed the arrows enough for the third User to use magic to overclock the sniper’s gun, giving him the speed and ammunition necessary to shoot most of the arrows out of the sky.

There were still a handful, though, and she only needed one to be lethal.

Except none of them were. Out of nowhere, a winged familiar appeared, a radiant aura surrounding him, and the arrows crashed into his wings, losing their power and falling inert.

A moment later, a message came.

Will: Getting impatient, are we?

Will: Thanks for making this game of cat and mouse a little easier. It’s not like my enemies to not try to come out to fight me.

Will: Then again, most of my enemies have been strong, and you… you’re not strong.

Xie-ren did not allow herself to get provoked by such an obvious trap, instead focusing on doing what she could to eliminate them. She sent a group of weak silvers towards the enemy silver-rank trio, baiting out their attacks before using one of her own. This time, the swarm converged into three massive single strikes—the first to break defenses, the second to dispel magic such as familiars, and the third to kill.

She was no more successful the second time than the first. Partway through their flight, the dispel arrow simply vanished.

Will: Oh, huh. Turns out that a big enough piece of ammunition does count as a weapon. Thanks for the big-ass anti-magic… errr… swarm? I’m not sure what to call it.

Will: I’d tell you to stop trying to kill my friends, but I guess we’re doing the same.

Will: Not that these people are your friends, are they? They’re thralls. They all act with one mind, don’t they? You all lost something when you joined with Peace. Maybe you less than most, but these grunts aren’t entirely human anymore. Some of them are literally walking corpses piloted by someone else’s intelligence—thanks for that, by the way, those are really easy to kill.

Xie-ren’s eye twitched. There was a level of arrogance she could brook, but the amount of sheer disregard for anything that this man was demonstrating was something else.

Xie-ren: What are you doing?

“Distracting you,” a voice said from behind her.

Xie-ren whipped around. She hadn’t been involved in the fight itself, having decided to determine the path of the fight from a mountainside a kilometer away. One of her skills had allowed her to create copies of herself, one of which had distracted the corruption wielder, but he’d found her.

And it was clear that this was, in fact, the one who Peace despised so much. If his sickeningly wrong aura and dark wings weren’t enough to tell her that, the way her goddess seemed to grip her shoulders confirmed it.

“Handy dandy skill I’ve got,” Will said. “Wail of the Forgotten. It lets me find allies of someone once I kill them with it. Commanders, by the by, count as allies.”

“You’ve come here to kill me,” Xie-ren said. Avoiding my senses, too.

She checked in on the status of her copies that she’d used as surveillance. Xie-ren should have felt them die if he’d killed them, but—no. Some of them were gone, but she could still feel in some faint part of her soul that their mana still existed.

It was their connection to her that he had killed.

“Not quite,” Will said. “I’m here because Peace will not stop fucking meddling with me, and I won’t take that lying down. Plus, I promised your brother.”

What?

“Here we go!” Will said, aura bursting with heretical arrogance.

[Desecrated Bond] has been activated on [Xie-ren Jie], sigil-holder of [Peace].

[William Li-Brown] has chosen to use [Corrupt].

[William Li-Brown] will now contest [Peace].