“You’re taking this better than last time,” Ayla said.
“I’m getting used to it,” Will replied. He sighed. “Please don’t tell me this is going to be a get-this-done-now-or-the-world-ends thing again? I mean, it’s fine if it is, but I don’t like the pattern this has been following.”
“Probably not,” Ayla hedged. “Probably.”
“Wow, that really fills me with confidence.”
“As it should. I know much more about your world than you do.”
“You didn’t even grow up here!”
“I have spent more time observing your planet than you’ve been alive.”
“Wait, and this isn’t your first cycle? I thought you only spent like… how many years was it again? Sixty? Sixty years as a User?”
“I have spent at least twice that operating the cycles,” Ayla said flatly. “And the number was seventy-five. One day, that number will be higher, but for the time being, I am where I am.”
“You’ve never said anything about that,” Will said. “I get why you wouldn’t want to or be able to talk about it while you were still in whatever kind of fucked-up call center you were in before, but aren’t you free now? This should be free from the system, right?”
“The world is larger than you know,” she said. “There’s no point in saddling you with shit that won’t even matter if you don’t survive the next century.”
“The next century? You didn’t even make it that far before you got yoinked out, right? How do you know? Also, I don’t think I live that long.”
“I was a special case, and don’t pretend like you haven’t felt the change in your lifespan. If you stopped advancing right this moment and never took another fight, you’d live to a hundred fifty, but that isn’t what’s important right now and we’re wasting time. Ask me again when you’re a diamond.”
Will raised an eyebrow, then remembered that he was a projection of his own soul and opted instead to project a large red exclamation mark above his head. “When? You’re confident. Anyway, what’s up?”
“An issue that I should have seen coming a while ago, but didn’t,” Ayla said. “You’ve talked to too many gods.”
Of all the things Will had been expecting from her, that had not been one of them. He expanded the size of the exclamation mark above his head.
“That’s the one from that one game with the snakes, right?” Ayla asked. “Metal Gear?”
“That one definitely doesn’t have snakes. One Snake at best. Also, I was going more for Pokemon.” Will folded the mark away, wanting to conserve his soul energy to prolong Ayla’s ability to stay in the Beyond if possible. “Not the point, though. Talking to gods? I figured it would be a problem because of the demon.”
“Oh, that’s definitely a major factor,” Ayla said. “Don’t even get me started on how much that messed up my day.”
“I mean, it was that or let it eat Earth.”
“Yes, it was an incredible move that saved the world and blah blah blah,” she said. “We’re not talking about you having your big damn hero moment right now. We’re talking about the aftereffects it had. You did that, and now we’re here, correct?”
“Yeah. I have a lot of shit with gods, too. I have two sigils—“
“Three.”
“Pardon?”
“You have three sigils. The last one is burning a hole in your inventory for some reason, and it’s not strictly connected to you, but you do have a third.”
“Oh. Right. Ataraxis, that gold-ranker cultist shithead, gave it to me, and I figured that I should probably just not claim it. It was literally corrupting the surroundings, so… not really something I could dump. Kinda forgot about it after, though.”
“Your shitty memory is going to be the death of you,” Ayla sighed. “But yes. You have three sigils, two that are active and one that is corrupted enough that not even I can tell what god it’s supposed to be to. You have a relationship with one of your sigils that is deeply abnormal, which is underselling the issue by a laughable amount, and you have a connection with a god that isn’t your sigil, which is even worse.”
“Kadael, Sadareth. With you so far.”
Ayla shook her head in disbelief, her entire being morphing with the motion. “You really do remind me of myself. Anyway, the problems don’t stop there. Deep connections to two gods, sigils to two more, a demon in your eye, connections to the Beyond, and you can’t seem to stop taking shit from outside the cycle. Five sponsors, except none of them are officially listed as sponsoring you.”
“Oh, yeah. Turns out that it’s really easy to threaten people into giving you what you want when they’re scared to shit of you killing their guys.”
Ayla laughed. “True enough. It was seven, for me, but that was a different time and place.”
“Are you dick-measuring sponsor counts right now?”
“No,” Ayla lied. “So! Do you know what all of this means?”
“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”
“You’re a plausibility sink, Will. Like it or not, you’re someone who’s consistently and repeatedly taken advantage of situations that are vastly above your level. Your very existence has been marked by the world as abnormal to the cycle.”
“I don’t think I’m clear enough on what plausibility actually is for that to make sense,” Will replied. “It’s what keeps gods from interfering, right? They need to spend it in order to take action?”
“Essentially. An oversimplification of it is to think of it like their fuel. It’s a resource that can be bought, sold, traded, used, or lost, and it lets them do… anything, depending on how much they’re willing to spend.”
“I think I see where this is going. I’m not a god, so clearly the plausibility isn’t doing anything for me. I’ve never encountered issues fighting up a rank—besides the obvious—and the same is true for dealing with entities way past what I should have to—again, besides the obvious. It’s not a good thing that I have a lot of this, is it?”
“Not at all,” Ayla said. “To be completely honest, I don’t know why you have as much as you do. Your circumstances say that you should have an abnormally high amount, but the amount that I’m guessing you have now is far off the mark from what I thought.”
“You have a ritual or something to calculate it?” Will asked.
“No. What I have is experience, a better understanding of the gods than most, and a very, very close connection to the Beyond. If I had a ritual, I could have seen this coming a long time ago.”
“A long time meaning, like, two months ago. We haven’t been active for long.”
“True. Still, in two months, if my calculations are correct, you have amassed more plausibility than every single silver and gold-ranker currently on your planet. Combined.”
That took a moment to settle in.
“What the fuck?”
“Exactly my reaction. Now, remember, this is a resource that can be stolen. Therefore, if I had to assume Peace’s motives…”
Will groaned. “It’s like she’s the US and I’m a third-world country with previously undiscovered massive oil deposits. Damn it.”
“Succinct, if a bit outdated given that neither the USA nor what you consider the third world currently exists in any recognizable form.”
“Well, if it gets the point across. You’re saying this makes me the most important person on the planet, somehow?”
“On both,” Ayla corrected. “You were contending with gold-rankers already, but those were isolated incidents. Nynn sealed himself to help the cycle, and many others are otherworlders, returning early because despite everyone’s best efforts, this cycle is shitting the bed. The gods had an interest in the academic sense, but they were mostly willing to write it off as a loss. What’s one planet meeting an accelerated death to them? There are trillions more out there.”
“But now that they have a reason…” Will trailed off.
“There will be direct action,” Ayla confirmed. “Probably. Expect more moving pieces and more things to go wrong. Be careful of any sigil-holder.”
“That’s half the planet at this point.”
“Not even close to true.”
“It’s, like, half the people I interact with, at least.”
“Then you’d better hope your gods are forming a coalition,” Ayla said grimly. “Otherwise, you’re going to get a lot more blood on your hands.”
Will flashed her a grin that wasn’t entirely sane. “I’ve got enough that it won’t wash off already. I’ll let them come.”
“With that attitude, they’re definitely coming,” Ayla deadpanned. “I am running out of energy, so it might be a while before I can speak to you again. One last thing: your planet is not the only one with sigil-holders that will pursue you to the ends of time.”
“Of course it isn’t. I expected that much, at least.”
“Be careful in the superdungeons. There’s opportunity in them, but even I didn’t touch one until I was firmly gold.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“First time for everything,” Will said. “I’ll see you around.”
“No, you won’t.”
He snorted. “Yeah, fair enough. Until next time, then?”
Ayla nodded. “Against my best wishes, Will, I’m starting to like you. Please stay alive long enough to speak with me again.”
There was definitely still energy left in the changeling as she let her connection to the Beyond waver and disappear, but Will could understand if she wanted to conserve it. Though he still wasn’t entirely sure what a dead zone was, he could guess that it at least had very, very little mana in it. If she was just floating in space in the equivalent of a massive suppression field, it would be better for her to conserve energy for when it counted.
Will spent some time in his Sanctuary composing himself before stepping out. Unlike Ayla, he had plenty of soul energy to spare thanks to his lack of restrictions, and he could use the time.
His head swirled with new information, and he found himself glad that he hadn’t exposed his portal ability to everyone. Allowing others to join him in the Beyond, especially sigil-holders, would have been more of a pain than he could be bothered with right now.
“So I have gods after me. What else is new?”
On the one hand, there was no specific timescale, which meant that he could deal with this at his own pace instead of being harried to hit nigh-impossible deadlines like he had with the tournament. On the other, there was no specific timescale, which meant that if Peace wanted to conjure an entire legion out of her ass and throw it at him, she could.
Oh well. One way or another, Will was going to have to fight. The only consideration he had was in warning his allies, since it wouldn’t be fair to expect people to lay down their lives for him when the entire world was stacked against him—especially those who might be directly going against their god’s intentions.
Less urgently and more excitingly, Will had received a number of notifications detailing the final steps he needed to hit gold rank. Given what he now knew about the forces arrayed against him, progressing fast and hard was looking like a necessity, not just a goal.
That said, the requirements were… not very fun for the short-term.
New quest: Gold Challenges
You seek to advance to gold rank. Starting now, mere power alone will not be enough to rank up.
- Gain an understanding of your soul [1/1]
- Gain control over your soul [1/1]
- Sacrifice certain silver and gold-rank treasures [0/?}. Suggested treasures: [Silver Dungeon Core] x100, [Gold Dungeon Core] x1
- Consolidate your mana [0/1]
Special quest: Gold Challenges (Reaper)
Certain classes include additional challenges for rank-ups. You possess one, Reaper.
- Kill 7 beings with a killcount of 10,000 or higher [1/7]
- Possess 3 or more sigils [3/3]
- Kill or subjugate three sources of corruption [2/3]
Will had been and continued to be happy that he’d inadvertently cleared a bunch of the requirements already just by doing what he’d been doing, but the remainder was less pleasant. He didn’t even know what a dungeon core was, let alone how to get one and sacrifice it. The dungeons didn’t drop those… did they? Was there some process that he hadn’t been let in on yet?
Apart from that, the Reaper challenges were truly absurd. No wonder the class description had said that something like 95% of them died before they could reach a class evolution. They must have just been stuck at silver, because where was Will going to find six more city-killers? Honestly, he was surprised he’d even found one.
The one about sources of corruption was incredibly bothersome, too. He assumed that the two he’d gotten were from subjugating the pillars the corruption cultists had been using during the trial of the champion and possibly the demon, but now that that was gone, where the hell was he going to find a third source? The short-term threat of the cultists had been wiped out, and Will was pretty sure that nobody was going to be summoning another demon anytime soon.
“Eh, there’s probably something in the superdungeon,” he mused. “Hopefully.”
He’d been thinking about asking his gold-rank allies about it, but while they could probably help with the whole dungeon core deal, he sincerely doubted anyone would have any experience with the Reaper class.
Will supposed it couldn’t be helped. The system manifested itself in odd ways, and he’d chosen one of the oddest paths.
His current target was another User with a less traditional path, too.
One last moment of meditation later, Will manipulated his connection to the Beyond, changing his location from Geneva to a certain field in roughly the middle of nowhere, Indiana.
It’s middle of nowhere, Midwestern Region #3 now, he reminded himself. Not much of an upgrade, but not really a downgrade either.
Predictably, his target hadn’t actually stayed that close to the portal. It only made sense. The devouring gestalt needed to eat to live, and Will hadn’t formed the Sanctuary somewhere terribly close to any active dungeons.
He hoped Jessie hadn’t gotten up to too much chaos while he was gone. There was an extent to which he empathized with the creature as a victim of its circumstances, but if it was still massacring innocent (well, relatively innocent) humans by the hundreds, Will was going to have a rather bloody problem.
There was blood but few bodies in the area, which was par for the course with the gestalt. Anything that died in its general vicinity usually ended up as part of the creature itself, which was part of why it had been such a dangerous threat. Its capabilities kept on changing depending on what the bulk of its current and recent bodies consumed were made of.
Since he didn’t sense it in his immediate area, Will sent Sen out. He hadn’t taken all of the familiar with him, as he’d preferred to still have some level of information on how things were proceeding in Geneva, but the bulk was here.
As he sent the eyes outwards, Will sat down and got to work on restoring Sen’s body, initiating the lengthy but simple process to convert monster cores into Sen-eyes.
“I’m going to have to clear some more dungeons,” he muttered to himself. “You’re an expensive familiar.”
At least it gave him something to do with his monster cores. It would have been a little awkward just sitting around with them in his inventory forever.
Will found Jessie pretty quickly thanks to Sen. It was so much nicer using the familiar outside of a suppression field. The multiplicative effect of having so many eyes together was in full force here, increasing his functional perceptive range a thousandfold.
“Expensive, but totally worth it.” Will grinned. “Alright, here we go.”
Sen had quietly become one of Will’s most broken skills. Even without the perception, his gold-rank upgrade alone would have been busted—and not even that, since Will hadn’t gotten the full force of it yet. Half of his gold-rank upgrade alone was busted. Acting as a range extender for all of Will’s skills resulted in a very far range indeed.
Just to test his skills, Will manifested an unformed-rank knife from his inventory and hurled it towards Jessie as hard as he could. The gestalt didn’t see it, obviously, since it was around three miles away, but Will would change that soon enough. He accelerated the knife with his hunger phantasm, using Sen as a range extender to create a bridge of shadow that extended far beyond Will’s usual fine control radius.
He’d used exactly this method to start and end what he had been told was now being called the Two Minute War, and it had worked well then. Will didn’t plan on such a flagrant display of power again anytime soon, especially given how much death was required to keep everything running with One Foot in the Grave, but a more limited application of it was great to keep a knife flying at speed.
Once it was within range of the gestalt, Will activated Weapons Free. The base range of that skill was a hundred and twenty feet for the portion that teleported weapons to him and sixty for the one that moved himself, which he had gradually grown to use as the main part of the skill. With Sen, however, his effective range jumped to potentially limitless.
In an instant, Will appeared at speed, carrying the momentum of the accelerated knife. He caught himself with an air-dash using Wind Walker, bringing himself to something of a stop as he hurtled down towards Jessie.
The devouring gestalt hadn’t been idle.
Devouring Gestalt alias “Jessie.” Level: Gold 10.
This is a militia boss if you choose to fight it. Your new friend definitely isn’t going to eat you, which you should trust because it’s only eaten… oh, 2,851 people and counting. A bunch of those were even above your current rank!
Surprisingly enough, Jessie has only devoured 16 sapient beings since you last saw it. All 16 were life elves. Sometimes lessons do stick if they’re from the self-proclaimed most important person on the planet. Maybe that title actually is earned.
“I didn’t even pick that!”
Will did activate Time in a Bottle as he approached, trying not to immediately draw Jessie’s ire, but he almost dropped it as a sudden, fairly obvious realization hit him.
Whatever intelligence was running the system knew about the Beyond. Well, of course it did, since it had granted him the Sanctuary skill, but it hadn’t really sunken in that the system that had granted him dark visions into what could have been the world’s final moments was the same joking one that came up with increasingly shitty jokes to make in mob descriptions.
The thing was, it not only knew about the Beyond but also about what had happened in there. During his conversations with gods and other aberrant beings as well as personal interactions with the system, Will had come under the impression that whatever had founded it was dead. Despite that, there was clearly an intelligence in there—though Will hesitated to call it intelligent.
Ayla’s words about worries that he literally couldn’t be concerned with at the moment came to mind. When it came to anything about the system that didn’t have immediately useful implications, Will was almost literally immaterial. It was interesting to know for the far, far future (if he ever got there), but for now, he was willing to just file it away into the list of relatively useless trivia occupying a corner of his brain.
Will let time speed up, narrowly avoiding Jessie’s instinctive bone-spear attack before the gestalt clocked who he was.
“Yo, how’s it going?” Will said, using his phantasm to catch one of the spears and carrying it back to his hand. “Miss me?”
Jessie had been busy while he was gone. The system had talked about the fare the gestalt had been devouring, but it had apparently left out the massive amount of monsters it had been through. It had figured out how to enter dungeons on its own, and it had made quick work of a lot. Will could tell that it wasn’t going to be advancing to platinum anytime soon, but Jessie’s aura looked ever so slightly cleaner than it had before. Maybe chewing its way through enough monsters would offset the way its Devour skill made it functionally a core user, though Will was the last person to ask about something like that.
“Oh, I do love seeing what new things metal tiers come up with,” Aza said, materializing besides Will. “The desperation at those low ranks truly produces an unmatched creativity.”
“Nobody asked you,” Will said. “So, Jessie. You want to go hunting somewhere else?”
More to the point, the gestalt was getting bigger and more cohesive. Whereas it had been a kind of centipede-like thing of bony flesh and horrific gore the first few times Will had faced it, it could almost pass for something that had started out as an organic living being instead of a horrific amalgamation of… whatever was in there.
To be fair, it had been a living being once. What the gestalt was now was a result of decades of life elf engineering being applied to the first hapless victim, one Andrew Andrews, and everyone else who’d been added to it. No trace of those original minds remained, though.
Anyway, the point was that it now looked more like the skeletal necrotic wyrm that Ashton had died trying to turn on Will than an Escher painting, though there were still plenty of incongruities that placed it firmly in the realm of what Will would call Lovecraftian.
As if to prove its progress, the gestalt opened its mouth and vocalized. It wasn’t anything comprehensible, not even close enough to an existing language for Will’s translation skill to pick up on it, but it was clearly an attempt at speech that went beyond its previous incoherent roars.
A spark of genuine pride flared through Will, which struck him as a little odd. Young though it might have been, the devouring gestalt was also a horrific murder machine that was half again the size of an eighteen-wheeler, and yet…
“Is this what having a kid is like?” Will asked. “I was told babies are monsters, but this is kind of overdoing it.”
Jessie didn’t have a response to that.
“Fair enough.” Fortunately for Will, he was an expert at reading auras, and though Jessie’s aura had solid raw strength, its control wasn’t very good, so he could get the gist of what it was trying to communicate. “We’re going to go to a superdungeon full of new and interesting things to kill and eat, but on the way there, you’re going to meet some people I’d really like you not to eat, okay?”
A pause. Will made sure to modulate his speech with his aura. Jessie had shown itself to be pretty capable of understanding English speech, which made sense since it had started from an American human base and had absorbed quite a few of them along the way, but Will wanted to make sure he was getting his ideas across properly.
Jessie opened its mouth and tried to vocalize again. This time, Will could actually recognize a phoneme. Its speech resembled a bear’s growl if the audio had been fed through a woodchipper, but he thought he could recognize a ye in there before it devolved into frustrated roaring again.
Once again, its aura was enough.
“Sick,” Will said. “Alright. Come with me, then. We’ve got… actually, I have no idea what we have to kill. I just know there’s gonna be a lot of them.”
“This seems ill-advised,” Aza said.
“Yeah? Going to do anything about it?”
“No, I wholeheartedly approve. Do carry on.”