Title: [Heretic]
Very rare
A title awarded to those who dare to defy gods time and time again. There’s more of you than you might think. There’s also fewer of you that survive than you might hope.
Increases resistance to divine magic. Increases resistance to effects that result from sigil skills. Attempts to negate an opposing sigil skill with your own skill have a significantly higher chance of succeeding.
Sigil skills are drastically more likely to hit you.
That was pretty on par with what Will had expected. Once again, he had gained more tools to engage in activity far above his level, but of course it came with the downside of throwing him into progressively deeper shit. It was small comfort to know that he was getting a helmet almost explicitly so that he could get hit in the head harder.
Oh well. He could complain all he wanted, but that wasn’t going to change the reality of things.
His current reality was that he and nine of his allies were deep in the midst of a superdungeon the likes of which Earth had never seen before while being chased by sigil-holders that outstripped everyone but a handful of them in raw power.
It wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed, though. Nynn had a map of the superdungeon in his head, and Will’s perception wasn’t far behind. Though Sen’s eyes would miss any dimensional tunneling that Peace’s sigil-holders completed out of his immediate range, the familiar still caught the bulk of the people coming for them.
Of course, Will wasn’t the only one with perception powers. Anyone with Peace backing them up would be able to identify Sen with either enough focus or by identifying the connection to him through the burst of magic emitted when he used a skill there. The hunger phantasm exploding from every range extender that his familiar provided was helping with that to some extent, but he didn’t have the mana to sustain everything, at least not without One Foot in the Grave. Activating that skill now was no sure bet—he didn’t want to risk the backlash that not killing someone would cause as a result.
There was, of course, another way to fight. Peace had brought an army, but Will wasn’t the only one capable here.
Will: Everyone able to see through the dark?
Hua: Good enough. Still recovering from the gods.
Lily: I have darkvision, but not through magical darkness.
Nynn: Yes.
Nathan: Yeah. Gets in the way of some of my skills.
Yui: My senses are good enough, but I would prefer some room to see.
Will: Okay. I’ll run ops, then. I’m going to share my map with you. We’re going to focus down a few targets. There’s ten of us. I sense at least a hundred of them within a mile or so. Thirtyish gold-rankers, though there’s definitely going to be more. The superdungeon’s weird with space, so I think we split 3/3/4 on this, targeting three at a time. Sound good?
Nobody objected, so Will got to work.
#
The Peace sigil-holders were powerful. That was undeniable. Will had started scanning them with Pages of the Past as they entered his radius of influence. Though some of them were capable of detecting Sen’s eyes when he activated the skill and subsequently destroy the eyes, he kept it up.
Stealth was no longer a priority.
What Pages from the Past revealed to him, however, painted a different picture of what their capabilities were. Yes, they were strong individually, with each of them sporting some variant of the soul-striking pacification ability that they’d used in conjunction at the human summit. Yes, they were capable of becoming even stronger when they cast their skills at the same time as the others.
One of his suspicions grew stronger as he scanned their skills, though—these almost certainly hadn’t been gold and silver-rankers before this. Their non-sigil skills were few and far between, and though there was some distinction to them, they were invariably cast with less power and mastery than the sigil skills were.
They were strong, but they were all strong in the same way, and even if it was a goddess powering them, they by and large weren’t capable of using their power in different, creative ways. These were elevated Users, not ones who had earned and bullshit their way to the top of the pile, and it showed in their technique.
Against a standardized force, they would have still been deadly, but Will and almost everyone with him were specialized in being weird.
And, more importantly, he had the logistics advantage. That was something that could easily go overlooked in a battlefield where everyone was throwing around building-melting skills, but this was exactly the kind of place where Will excelled. With Nynn sharing a map of every location he sensed and Will determining the actual layout of the dungeon, they could effectively shut down every location.
The gold-rankers had wizened up to his favorite trick, of course. Peace seemed to have updated her healthcare coverage for the higher-power sigil-holders, because they invariably had a powerful shield that the hunger phantasm couldn’t penetrate, preventing Will from just corrupting them all and calling it a day.
That made this a bit of a pain, but that was easily resolvable.
“The plan is simple,” he’d explained, just before initiating the first jump. “Nynn. You’ve got long-range teleports, yeah?”
“Yes. I can take anyone I can touch.”
“Fantastic. Yui?”
“Tiring, but doable,” she said. “I need a location, though. Otherwise, I have the same condition as Nynn.”
“If you’ll check your map?”
“Then of course.”
“Teleportation is so broken,” Liam grumbled. “I wish I had some.”
“Give it a couple ranks,” Lily consoled him. “That’s what they told me, at least.”
To keep a complex operation as simple as possible, they’d decided against swapping groups ahead of time, which led them to their current situation.
Will activated Weapons Free.
Way back in the tutorial, he’d proven that he could use personal teleportation skills to transport others, using his newly acquired Destructive Synthesis on the teleportation daggers that had been so plentiful amongst the goblin hordes. So long as enough of their bodies were in contact with him, he could count them as part of his whole and bring them with him.
With Sen, Will’s teleportation range amounted effectively to anywhere.
Ten Users vanished at the same moment.
The bloodbath began shortly after.
#
Nigel had been fairly late to acquire silver rank. He’d tried to avoid monster cores, knowing that they would inhibit him later down the line, which had made increasing his power a pain in the ass. He’d been grinding dungeons as much as he could safely, but it had still hurt to see everyone who thought of him as lesser to increase in power so much faster.
So when the Contractor had come knocking, offering a different job from the usual type he employed, he was more than willing to take it up. A full rank’s worth of power for just a handful of missions wasn’t something to be passed up on.
Up until now, it had been worth it as all hell. The superdungeon was confusing at best and straight-out lethal at worst, but there was the same amount of illogical reason to it as any of the various dungeons that had swarmed Earth. This one was weirder than usual, but Nigel was operating with a goddess’ guidance. Finding his way to the core of the dungeon had seemed easy enough so far, and with a small army full of people who’d received similar upgrades, it had been practically a cakewalk. Gold rank was just that much of a boon.
He hadn’t counted on having an assassination target, but he didn’t mind that either once it came up. Nigel had killed enough monsters in his time to know one when he saw it. Peace herself had shown him how many this William had killed, explained how the magic he used was plainly and intentionally damaging the fabric of reality, undoing the progress that the rest of the world was working towards.
As darkness exploded outwards from hidden sources, obscuring the skeleton-filled room he was in, Nigel remained calm. He had skills that could see through magical darkness, which he activated as soon as it came close. A chill settled into his bones as the shadow washed over him, sapping energy from him, but a passive sigil skill warmed him, preventing the sensation from distracting him.
His aura senses weren’t the strongest, but he had trained them enough to at least understand when a large, sudden burst of magic executed a room or two away.
Instantly on guard, Nigel sent out a warning message to his comrades in the area, not expecting much of a response. He’d basically just drawn on them for extra mana so far, his own skills proving to be enough to carve a path through the dungeon.
Move. Danger sense prickled at his mind, and he dashed, unsure of where to go.
Moments later, twinkling chains ripped through the granite wall right where he’d been standing, twirling as they soared into the dungeon room. One of the chains searched for him, moving with a mind of its own, while another pair dug themselves into the ground.
“You’re getting it!” a woman shouted. “Good shit!”
“Thanks,” another, seemingly older one replied.
“Who the hell are you?” Nigel shouted in reply, inching away from the massive hole in the wall as he prepared his mana, readying the pacification aura.
Except, he realized, his mana wasn’t responding. His senses were still functioning, and his passives worked, but the moment he tried to extend his magic out, it fizzled.
“This is Null Zone… Wisteria? Is that correct?”
“Wisteria, yes. I’ve been using it, but it’s such a pain in the behind to get working correctly. It feels so… precise.”
“Train your aura further,” the other woman advised. “Once you acquire a better sense of how to suppress your own magic, it will give you insight into the best way to suppress others’.”
“Any tips for that?”
“HEY,” Nigel shouted again, frantically checking his inventory for an item that could get him out of this. “Can we talk? I don’t know who you are, but I’m hoping you’re not just going around murdering people!”
There was a pause. His heart sank.
“Are you?”
The one who’d been giving the advice replied, affecting a more formal voice. “Are you currently pursuing one William Li-Brown or his associates?”
“I could be persuaded to stop,” Nigel said hastily. “I, uh… I’m being persuaded pretty well right now, actually.”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He wasn’t able to break through. The effect of the Null Zone or whatever it was that was affecting this entire room was at gold rank. Nigel’s skills had developed significantly thanks to Peace’s power-up, but not enough. He couldn’t use them to get over this, and he had the suspicion that whoever had cast it had a better understanding of his magic than he did.
“I mean…” the other woman—Wisteria?—trailed off. “Yeah, if you screw off, that’d be doing us all a favor.”
“Oh, great,” Nigel said, relief flooding him. There was dying in the process of powering up, and there was dying for a cause he didn’t even particularly believe in. The latter was not something he planned on doing anytime soon. “I can be out in—“
Before he could finish the sentence, his vocal cords locked up, and then his body.
???: Seriously? Another one?
Fate’s whims work on humans even better than I expected, an amused goddess’ voice hummed. They never learn.
Pain like nothing Nigel had ever experienced before struck his soul like a sledgehammer, annihilating his ability to feel anything but. He suffered brain death in less than half a second.
When he opened his eyes again, there was something not entirely mortal behind them, gold-rank power from the divine ready to activate within the vessel.
…that is, until a thin red line appeared across the throat of the shell of Nigel’s body. That thin red became a gushing crimson within moments, and a second cut severed the head.
Both Wisteria and Yui received the message at the same time as a slight Chinese woman materialized out of a cloak of stars, sword dripping with blood.
Hua: Sorry that took so long. I was waiting to see if he would actually do it.
“You know, we’re right here,” Wisteria said.
Hua: Chat is faster and quieter. Come on. We have more to go.
“The girl is right,” Yui said. “Let’s go.”
#
Elsewhere, the group of four was having a grand old time. Nynn, surprisingly, was the least effective one of them when it came to mopping up the silver-rank summons that their particular gold-rank enemy had.
He cursed in irritation as wave after wave of pointless enemies charged him. Efficiency had never been his strong suit, and that had been before he’d been limited to a vessel that couldn’t use the power of a dying star to recharge.
And, of course, there was the bombshell that his erstwhile colleague had chosen to adopt a form to enter Earth alongside him. It was no true manifestation, of course, but it had been at least several dozen cycles since this Dread Executor Azathoth had even considered visiting a cycle.
This “Aza” behaved just like the already impulsive Azathoth did, if the Dread Executor was a literal child. That—
“Nynn! Head in the game!” Nathan shouted, using a burst of force to get him out of the way as a gold-rank beam attack sought him out through the wall.
Nynn had chosen to attack one of the gold-rankers with actual merit. The bulk of them would only be difficult to handle in numbers—it was the ones who had already been gold-rank before being empowered that would prove to be a real problem. The more of them they got rid of early, the better.
This one in particular was proving to be a pain. Nathan, Liam, and Lily, each of whom had access to the leaderboard, had identified their target as Owen, rank 29 on the global leaderboard at a true rank of Gold 0. He was an otherworlder with the class of Panopticon, which translated well enough to Nynn’s tongue for him to understand which of the standard classes this was a variant of.
With his original power, it would have already been a bit of a challenge to take him down. His class natively offered him the ability to have near perfect understanding of the magic in his area. In a sense, his skills would let him act like an even more prescient Will. Owen had seen them coming from a long way away, and it had only been the ridiculous, lopsided power that Nynn and Nathan both had that had kept them from being blasted to pieces on impact. Nathan had repositioned them quickly enough that Nynn had been able to gather the energy required to Counterspell the worst of the attack.
Now, it was continuing to prove to be a slippery fight. Owen knew that if he let the others fight in the same room as him, he would be at a severe disadvantage, so he’d played this like a cockroach, tunneling through the expansive network of the superdungeon as if he’d been born to it, tossing other distractions at them along the way.
Said distractions were much easier to mow down, of course, though they were irritating yet. Silver-rank summons were just powerful enough to be a constant nuisance, and the other Peace sigil-holders that Owen kept grouping up with were a force multiplier that couldn’t be ignored.
Not ignoring them typically meant killing them. Lily and Nynn together were devastatingly effective at that when they only had a single target—she could mark someone, vastly increasing the amount of damage she and her allies would deal to it, and Nynn’s overcharged dash skill let him plunge through dozens of meters of hard stone to execute one of them.
Owen stayed on the run, though. Every skill they fired at him was met with equal and opposite defensive magic, which was only further fueled by Peace’s contribution to his powerbase. Every now and then, splash damage from an attack that hadn’t been entirely negated by Owen’s defenses slipped through, disturbing his pace just long enough for darkness to explode out of seemingly nowhere, but the gold-ranker dodged the threat of corruption just as easily as he did everything else.
Worse, it seemed that he was actually using the attacks fired at him to fuel his returning beams. They were individually devastating beam attacks that homed onto their targets, tuned specifically to get through their innate defenses. Nynn recognized the skill—Retributive Light—but there was little he could do against it without the bulk of his toolkit other than dodge it, which he did. Each time he processed one coming towards him or an ally, he briefly sent them into the Beyond, just long enough to blink-dodge the beam before returning in a slightly different location.
Nathan: Piece of shit is making it hard to get a lock on. I’d bombard the place, but this isn’t really the place for that, is it?
Lily: I like my ass un-bombed.
Liam: I agree with the lady. Hey, I’ve got an idea. I just need a straight shot.
Nynn: I can do that. Your window will be small. He’s good at running.
Nathan: The hell are you going to do that’ll get through this? He’s got a billion ways to see us and defend.
Liam: Just trying something. If it doesn’t work, it won’t work. Fire when we teleport, will ya?
Nathan: Yeah, sure.
Lily: Whatever you say, boss.
They reconvened on Nynn, who sent them into the Beyond immediately.
He had to admit that Will’s gambit was benefitting him. Before, if Nynn had wanted to transport a sigil-holder through the Beyond, he would have had to weigh the amount of exposure he granted them, limiting his ability to effectively move them without either retribution from or a very awkward apology to a god.
After the corruption wielder had told four gods off, though, they were silent, allowing Nynn to actually transport them.
He re-manifested each of their group at different locations, the Thousand Eyes still tracking Owen enough for Will to give them a relatively accurate region.
This section of the superdungeon was a wide, open space split into eight slices, each of them carrying a tunnel off to another area. Owen was in the center of all of this impromptu panopticon, using the gold-rank monsters in the area as cover. It was a bold play, one that would only work if the User in question was either desperate or very, very capable of understanding and avoiding the attacks of the monsters himself.
Owen was the latter, but with some luck, they could make him become both.
Nynn fired off a basic ranged attack, not willing to overcommit in this body. His primary efforts went to sending mana into his allies’ skills, empowering Lily’s silver-rank Hunter class in enhancing her bow attacks to concrete-piercing levels and Nathan’s spatial magic, which sought to warp the area that Owen was in to rend him apart.
He stretched power out to Liam as well, but there was no skill to receive any power from.
Owen blocked Nynn’s attack with embarrassing ease, reflecting it into a beam that the former Dread Executor was forced to Counterspell. Lily’s arrows soared towards him at supernatural speeds, but he sidestepped them, catching one of them out of the air, and Peace’s protection flared into existence, defending him against Nathan’s spatial attack.
“That the best you got?” he taunted, spreading his hands. The magic that had been expended in an attempt to kill him swirled back towards him, glowing in a spiral formation around him—
And then Owen’s head exploded in a shower of gore, and the gold-ranker tumbled to his knees, dead before he hit the ground.
Nathan: What the fuck?
Lily: Yo! Nice shot, dude!
At Owen’s death, the Peace sigil-holders who’d been in the area alternately scattered or collapsed upon them. There was only one boosted gold-ranker amongst them and the others were silver, so it was simplicity itself to dispatch them.
The four of them gathered in the center of the panopticon, each of them cleaning off their weapons in their own ways.
Liam’s weapon of choice, it seemed, was a 7.62x51mm sniper rifle. Nynn was unfamiliar with the gun itself, but he had seen similar designs before, especially when he’d been subjected to unending human conversation earlier this cycle.
It was unformed rank.
“A non-magical weapon,” Nynn said.
“I figured if he was going to just send all the magic back, I could try lead,” Liam said, shrugging. “Wasn’t that hard a shot. I got the gun back during the tutorial, and it was handy there, too.”
“You say it wasn’t that hard a shot,” Nathan said. “Aren’t you blind?”
Liam grinned. “Eyes aren’t the only way to see these days, mate. Might not be able to read properly, but if someone’s lighting up like a bloody lighthouse, it’d be a bit sad to miss.”
“Good thinking,” Nynn said. “We should continue.”
Nynn: Target down. 19 others eliminated along the way.
Will: Good. I’ll highlight the next targets to take.
#
Some poor sap who’d decided that assassinating Will was more important than keeping her own mind was Will’s current target. His group had been the fastest to kill their marks by far, though that was in part because Will was gaining extra juice from other enemies taking damage thanks to Mark for Death also applying at range.
This was… three? Yeah, three. Olivia Niessen had been a high silver before taking Peace’s offer, and in fact she still did display as a Silver 9 on the leaderboard, two dozen or so spots below Will. By being on the leaderboard himself, he could actually see the exact spot she was without referring to it—51.
Of course, Silver 9 didn’t accurately reflect her current power, because Peace was cheating. Will’s read on her through Sen told her that she was functionally a Gold 7 or 8 thanks to the plentiful buffs that had been applied to her.
A month ago, Will would have chosen to flee. She didn’t seem to have any reservations about doing this, if her behavior was anything to judge by, and he preferred not to mess with people who were either insane or had nothing to lose. Based on nothing but his brief examination of her, he guessed that she was both.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she drawled, sparks flying from the edge of her oversized gold-rank butcher knife as she dragged it behind her, scraping the metal on the stone of the dungeon. It dripped with the blood of the monsters she’d slain during her time in the superdungeon, along with residue that was very recognizably human. “You make this a lot easier for both of us if you just show up. Have a fair fight.”
She was, of course, hiding the fact that there were two other gold-rankers in close proximity to her, though only one of those was a current leaderboarder and even then only by a very small amount at 97.
“So,” Caiyeri said, eyeing Will. “How’s it going?”
Jessie raised its head at the elf’s voice and turned towards Will, eight eyes blinking in what Will chose to interpret as curiosity.
The three of them were in the same room that they’d started in, the walls still blown out into a strange abyss of dungeon magic that Will had decided to look at later, not now. It was a solid place to rest, especially after Jessie had… hollowed it out a bit.
Will had also chosen not to look at the steadily growing pile of monster skeletons in the corner that Jessie had been spitting them into.
“She wants a show,” Will told his allies. “I’ll give her one. Get ready to roll.”
Caiyeri frowned. “Why would I roll? There are no wheels on me.”
“Come on, there’s no way Lev didn’t teach you that one.”
“I have spoken to humans other than you for purposes other than violence for a sum total of roughly two weeks,” Caiyeri said. “Forgive me if I haven’t learned every ridiculous piece of meaningless language your tongue has to offer.”
“Fair. Be right back.”
About half a mile away, Olivia Niessen frowned as a message popped in front of her.
Will: I’m right here.
Will activated Weapons Free. Since three of Sen’s eyes were within sixty feet of Olivia, he targeted her butcher knife. There was no way he’d be able to steal it, not while she was a full rank higher than him and had Peace on her side, but he could pick it as a teleportation destination pretty easily.
“Hey!” Will said cheerfully, leaping off the butcher knife—well, calling it a knife was generous, it was taller than he was—and activating Wind Walker midair to hurl him to safety. “How’s it going?”
Olivia’s reflexive swipe was easy enough to avoid thanks to Wraith Cloak and Escape Artist significantly buffing his speed thanks to the darkness of the dungeon and his current state of being under fire, respectively.
The sudden backstab was less easy to dodge, but Will didn’t have to. As one of the hidden gold-rankers dropped his stealth skill and lunged forward with a dagger of the same rank designed to shut down a User’s Affinity attribute, Aza materialized, wings spread around Will. The blade sunk into him, doing no damage besides draining his life force.
That wouldn’t have been lethal, Will thought. They definitely could have done better.
But Peace didn’t actually want him dead, did she? Maybe there was a way she could harvest the plausibility from his dead body, but given the way the other gods had acted when he’d threatened to off himself, that was almost certainly much harder than just taking it from him while he was alive.
That meant he had more room to play.
“I thought you said you wanted a fair fight,” Will said, affecting an expression of deep sadness. “I thought we were—“
He ducked as a metal disc hurtled through the space his neck had just been.
“—friends!” he finished, turning his best attempt at puppy-dog eyes on the third gold-ranker.
“Now!” Olivia shouted, her earlier bravado traded for pure, animal bloodlust.
A familiar aura burst forth from all three gold-rankers, coursing through Will’s with a ferocity that…
Okay, he was going to say that it rivaled his own, but this was the same old trick she’d pulled earlier. Sure, Pacify was nigh-guaranteed to hit him thanks to his new Heretic title, but still…
“You know, never mind,” Will said. “This is totally fair.”
To be fair, three gold-rankers directing their efforts entirely on him instead of hundreds of people made it harder to resist, but they were still just gold-rankers, and boosted ones at that.
He frowned, looking up.
“Peace,” Will said. “I’ve had to endure this from you. What makes you think these three D-tier goons are going to get me?”
Instead of waiting for an answer, he acted.
You have consumed one level of [Purified] to negate the cast time of [Sanctuary].
“What the hell?” Olivia barked, staring dumbfoundedly at the black tear in reality where her target had been. “How did—“
A monstrous, skeletal wyrm-like creature larger than the room they were in crushed her into the walls, cutting her sentence off.
Caiyeri, riding atop of Jessie, aimed carefully and fired, using the last of her Instant Death bullets to pierce through Olivia’s armor. Will’s shadows crept through the gaps a moment later.
The already chaotic room flooded with darkness, punctuated only by the crash of thunder and flashes of intermittent lightning.
Before long, bells began to toll.
“Oh, yeah!” Will whooped. “Now it’s a fair fight!”
Progress to [Eternal Throne]: [276/1000] (+30, 3 gold ranks killed)