[Instant Death selected.]
Zero teleported even as Caiyeri’s bullet burst from the gun, flying off into the deep abyss.
“You don’t have to tell your friend to back off,” the template said. “That might make this fair.”
“I don’t need ‘fair,’” Caiyeri said. She eyed her counterpart with a baleful eye, watching her return it in kind. “I would very much like you to be dead, though.”
She sensed the template’s magic before Zero moved, then dodged ahead of time, using a skill to imbue mana into her legs and bounce away, activating Emergency Shield as she did. Bright magic exploded out in a dome around her just in time to dodge the template appearing, her arm intersecting with the shield and shattering it.
“Not bad,” Zero said, eyes tracking Caiyeri’s form as she arced into the water.
As she landed, Caiyeri—who refused to think of herself as Seven, she was Caiyeri and nothing would change that—inventoried her revolver and replaced it with a conjured hammer, slamming it into the ground to stabilize herself, pulling herself out of the way of a suddenly-manifested dagger slicing through the area she’d been moving towards.
It was funny. Zero was a gold-rank, and not even a core-using one. Like the majority of elves, both Caiyeri Seven and Zero found extremely diminished returns from using cores, so they had elected to train themselves up the old-fashioned way.
And despite that, Caiyeri couldn’t help but think that Zero was slow. The last time she’d seen the template had been in the tournament, where Zero had been at the peak of silver and Caiyeri significantly lower. Now, the template had ranked up, but somehow it didn’t feel like she’d advanced that much.
Caiyeri had been facing gold-rank monsters day in and day out for long enough that she’d lost count of the nights by now. Zero was fast, sure, and one hit would probably mean death, but…
“That’s disappointing,” Caiyeri said.
Her senses, primed by the constant danger she’d been in for who knew how long now, pricked at the beginning steps of a mana manifestation, and she dodged instinctively, avoiding the energy attack Zero sent her way.
“Disappointing?” the template said. She clicked her tongue in an annoyingly familiar manner. “I should be saying that of you.”
“It’s already an unfair fight,” Caiyeri shot back, changing her manifested weapon from a warhammer to a pair of daggers, both of which she hurled at Zero. “I didn’t want to make it harder on you, and it looks like I was right to do so. You’d be dead by now if Jessie raised a finger.”
The gestalt looked her way and made a mournful sound, its aura empowering its cry.
Caiyeri sighed, dashing to one side as Zero attempted another energy attack. The teleport has a long cooldown, it seems.
“Sorry, Jessie,” she said. “If you lifted a… pseudopod? Leg? I forgot you didn’t have fingers.”
“You could at least take this seriously,” Zero said, cold hatred masking irritation. She raised a finger, and the ground beneath Caiyeri erupted, a spatial rift tearing its way towards the silver-rank elf. “You don’t have much time left to breathe.”
The attack’s direction was transparently obvious. Caiyeri had spent a fair amount of time with Nathan—well, compared to Will, it hadn’t been much, but both Will and Nathan had space affinities of their own, with the latter using it as his primary attack form.
“You’re being outdone by humans,” Caiyeri said, casting her Emergency Shield downwards to absorb the brunt of the attack. “How long have you been alive again? A hundred years? Two hundred years?”
“Three hundred and sixty-four,” Zero said haughtily, casting her hand to one side. “And you are not even a tenth of that. You know nothing of true power, child.”
Caiyeri ducked, rolling through a barrage of spatial distortions that looked like they cost a lot of mana. She couldn’t avoid all of them, but her shield covered what she couldn’t dodge.
It hadn’t been too long, but she’d come a long way from that elf in the caves. In just two months, she had progressed at a rate that vastly outstripped ten years of isolated foundational training. She wouldn’t have even dreamed of standing in the presence of a gold rank before, let alone keeping pace with one.
Caiyeri laughed, applying pressure with her own Manabursts. They weren’t meant to deal actual damage, serving the purpose of distracting Zero and weakening her own defenses in the meantime. Just like Will, Caiyeri had learned how to make the most of the skills she had. One or two attacks was all she needed to end this fight.
“True power?” she snorted. “You and I and everyone on the planet saw true power close up when a gold-ranker from another world blasted three thousand people with corruption.”
Another exchange of skills. Despite the difference in rank, the two elves were evenly matched. The difference, Caiyeri realized, came in their experiences. She hadn’t spoken to the higher ups directly since she’d been assigned to Will’s case right after the tutorial, but she knew that they were at the level of power where they didn’t directly deal with things. Whenever one of the Zeroes got involved, it was almost never a fight for their life.
Caiyeri Seven, on the other hand, had been fighting for her life for a long, long time.
“True power was when a Dread Executor showed up and obliterated that gold-ranker from existence with such strength that every star in the sky went black,” she continued. “You think this is power? You’re throwing untrained gold-rank skills at me like you think you’re overwhelming me, but you can’t even match a silver-ranker’s flexibility.”
Jessie’s aura was helping a little, but Caiyeri kept that silent.
The fact of the matter was that the templates had been left behind. Caiyeri hadn’t seen it before, but now that the newest cycle was a couple months in, the truth had become apparent.
Their race had failed. Humans were going to inherit Arcadia, and there was nothing the elves could do to it but adapt.
The Zeroes had tried, of course. This template’s fresh gold rank was proof enough of that. Even then, though, Caiyeri had the impression that they hadn’t truly earned it, not in the way that she or Will or Hua or any of the others had.
Just slaughtering the weak wasn’t enough to develop a foundation for real power, just like how abusing cores had led a large chunk of the human side to their own downfall.
It was the constant struggle to survive that drove real progress. She’d been punching upwards for long enough that fighting a gold-rank of her own kind was normal. Zero, on the other hand, had forgotten what it was like to actually fight.
Every time she casts a skill, she leaves herself open. Her defense stops for a fraction of a second.
Bit by bit, Caiyeri began to overwhelm her counterpart.
Will had given her an item that he’d never found a use for—Hot or Cold, a coin he’d picked up in an early dungeon with cryptic system text. She rigged the dice, ensuring it would land on cold, and it exuded a wave of chilling energy that froze Zero’s feet to the shallow water they fought upon.
Though Caiyeri didn’t have Will’s Destructive Synthesis to make the most out of the monster parts she’d looted, she did have the wherewithal to process their effects and maximize them, adding an extra layer of unpredictability to her fighting style.
A slime-spider’s venom sac combined with a hand grenade she’d picked up from an armory of mimics created a wide-spanning acidic explosion that set water boiling where it landed, forcing Zero to reposition to land. Layers of wyrm intestine proved to be a very useful conductor for the heart of a flying electric eel, giving Caiyeri a disgusting but effective mockery of Will’s lightning damage to attach to her weapons.
She laughed as she fought, growing increasingly crazed as she did. This was fun. Though it was a battle to the death, Caiyeri didn’t feel any real risk to herself. She’d built up her template as a threat in her head for a long time, but now that two of them had actually come, she realized that compared to what she’d been facing, the templates were… unimportant.
“You should try fighting with the humans sometime,” she suggested. “Every single one of them fights up the ranks. When was the last time you did that?”
“You would do well to be silent, child,” Zero hissed. She thrust a hand out.
Caiyeri took that opportunity to line up another shot, exploiting the gap in Zero’s cognition and defense to fire one of her few remaining shots from the seven-shooter.
[Instant Death selected.]
Zero’s eyes widened in surprise, and she tried to dart to one side, but it wasn’t fast enough. The bullet caught her in the side of her throat, smashing through her weakened defenses and tearing a gory hole in it.
Once again proving the name of the seven-shooter’s bullet wrong, Zero didn’t immediately die. Instead, she drew on the sigil skill Mother’s Grace, restoring her body to full health in an instant. Caiyeri hadn’t placed any afflictions on her opponent, so no levels of Blessed took hold, but it reversed all the progress she’d made in an instant.
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“Oh, look at you,” Caiyeri said drily. “Favored by the goddess, are you? I’d call that unfair, but…”
She smirked, then activated the exact same skill.
Caiyeri Seven was not exactly favored by the Elven Mother, but the deal she’d gotten out of it was better than anyone else’s. Her magic surged into overdrive as the Mother’s Grace passed through her body, temporarily elevating her to match her opponent.
You would do well to end this fight quickly, a soft voice seemed to whisper.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Caiyeri said, talking to the air. “I will.”
“What are you—“
She surged forward, emptying the majority of her inventory in the span of moments as she made use of all the loot she’d gained during the superdungeon. Expendable items, assorted treasures, and weapons she couldn’t even attune to alike popped out with her temporarily boosted Affinity skill.
Skill: [All In]
- Spell (conjuration, esoteric).
- Cost: extreme mana.
- Cooldown: 24 hours.
Silver (temporarily Gold).
You can’t win big without big stakes.
Select a portion of your inventory (min. 5 items). All items selected manifest simultaneously and activate as if you are actively using them. Items that do not land a hit on a target are consumed; all expendable items are consumed. Charges will be refunded to all items activated if this skill kills a target.
There were too many items to count, assembled mostly from looting the superdungeon, and Caiyeri made full use of her enhanced state.
Not every attack hit, but not every attack needed to. The ones that did counted for more—it was a roll of the dice to see what Zero could fail to defend against, but that just meant Caiyeri knew she could rig the game.
Critical hit!
Critical hit!
Critical hit!
Critical hit!
She didn’t even care that luck was going to catch up with her after this. There were enough ways to restore her balance back to neutral.
The barrage wore down Zero faster than anything else had, drawing blood with every successive strike. The boons from Mother’s Grace were eliminated almost immediately, and as Caiyeri’s array of swords, guns, bows, internal organs, bombs, and every miscellaneous offensive item she’d picked up over the last couple of months fired on Zero, the gold-ranker found herself pushed to the brink of death for the first—and hopefully last—time.
This time, when she threw up her hands, it was only to cast a defensive spell.
Caiyeri did not, however, account for the item in Zero’s inventory.
As the gold-ranker zipped around with her spatial magic, attempting to dodge the unending assault, she pulled a box from her inventory.
That shone with a power unlike anything else shown so far. Caiyeri paused for a fraction of a second, then turned the entirety of her power on the box.
Zero laughed a familiar, bloody laugh.
Caiyeri knew that eerie sound. She’d made it herself too many times.
If I won’t make it out of here, neither will any of the rest of you.
Zero called on her other sigil skill, opening a portal—
[Instant Death selected.]
The gold-rank template’s life ended before she could even process what had happened, a bullet blowing her brain to shreds. The portal winked out before the body hit the floor.
Which left Caiyeri with a gold-rank bomb ticking at her feet.
It glimmered with a very familiar magic.
Corruption.
She looked at Jessie, who was staring at the same thing.
“Fuck.”
#
Aza hadn’t been gone for more than five minutes when Nynn sensed the manifestation of corruption within the superdungeon.
His entire system tensed with alarm, ancient instincts kicking in to alert him.
No longer was he a Prince who could manage this with the blink of an eye. For better or worse, Nynn was part of the cycle now.
The amount of corruption that this was going to release was absurdly high. The fact that he could sense it from this far even with the senses of a gold-rank indicated that much, at least—this was far beyond the likes of even the corruption wielder who’d plagued the cycle.
That wasn’t the only difference. Will’s corruption was a controlled chaos, bottled up in the form of a single silver-ranker. This was controlled in a different way, engineered to cause maximum devastation to its surroundings. Nynn couldn’t tell from here, but he held suspicions of the intent of this device.
Whoever was next to it was almost certainly already dead, but there was a possibility that there would be survivors.
If it was handled. Without any intervention, Nynn suspected everyone in the superdungeon would be dead in the coming day.
He stepped into the Beyond, considering the situation. As he passed through the space, he sensed a friendly sanctuary and stepped onto it.
“Dreamer,” he said.
“Nynn,” the exiled User said. “You sensed that too, I imagine.”
“Your senses truly never disappoint,” Nynn said. “It’s a wonder you were ever caught.”
“Yeah, well, we all get disappointed from time to time,” Dreamer replied. “The corruption wielder’s friend is in the path of it. I imagine he won’t be the happiest if she died.”
“I wouldn’t be the happiest if she died. I became an Executor to help people, believe it or not.”
“I’ll go with not. The real reason I got you here isn’t to tell you that or lecture you about anything. Be careful, Nynn.”
“That comes as a surprise. One would think that you wanted me dead.”
“You are no Executor anymore, and besides, not all of you are awful. Fate has its hands on the scale. This entire operation stinks of it. I don’t know if this weapon is the one it infused with plausibility, but I can see Fate and Peace colluding. This ends with someone eating shit in the face of two gods. I can guess who that’s going to be, but there’s every chance that they take the opportunity to catch some undesirables in the crossfire.”
“I will keep that in mind,” Nynn said. “I will serve my purpose.”
“Yeah, yeah, eliminate, eradicate, whatever. Don’t die. We need you.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
After that surprisingly cordial interaction with a woman he’d indirectly contributed to the capture of, Nynn stepped back into reality right next to Caiyeri Seven—and, apparently, the dying Caiyeri Zero, the devouring gestalt, and the bloody corpse of Azure Zero.
Immediately, he slowed his perception down, using an advanced technique that required the mana ability of a diamond to properly utilize. Though he only had the capacity of a metal tier, these methods were still so deeply engraved upon his soul that not even giving up his former rank would be enough to take it away from them.
The device had already detonated, which was the worst-case scenario. Caiyeri Zero had almost finished the process of dying an extremely painful death from what appeared to be a swarm-item attack from her clone alongside the incredible corruption in the immediate surroundings. Caiyeri Seven and the devouring gestalt had already begun to suffer the first-order effects of being exposed to a massive source of corruption.
Just as he’d feared, this was no ordinary corruption bomb. Plausibility had been spent on bringing it into the superdungeon. The carrier must have been one of the mitigating factors to reduce the cost, since it didn’t appear that she knew anything about what she was carrying.
Nynn’s perception was not what it had been, but he could tell the intent of this item. If it was allowed to continue activating, it would infect the anomalous dungeon. What Fate and Peace planned to do with said corruption from there was beyond his understanding in many ways, but he could surmise that it would involve the other planet, and it was not going to be good for the health of either the Earth-Arcadia complex or the new one.
One fact he had yet to mention to any of the Users with him was the reason for the creation of an anomalous superdungeon. They tended to form around the time that a second impact was due to occur. Contrary to popular belief, that wasn’t always because a cycle had failed—in fact, many times, the second impact was a natural part of two successful cycles.
In any case, the superdungeons formed when there was an abnormality in the cycle requiring a certain additional bridge between the two worlds to make integration smoother. Essentially, this very dungeon was the primary link between the two planets that were due for collision in less than two years, and Fate wanted to bombard it with a truly ludicrous amount of corruption.
Nynn could not allow that to happen.
Problem: if he simply absorbed the bomb, he would die. Inventorying it would result in near-certain death, and while he could then eject it into the Beyond, he would simply be dead in the Beyond.
Despite his willingness to fight for this universe in his role as a once and forever Executor, Nynn was not so keen to sacrifice his life if he could manage it.
…there was a possibility here that didn’t involve killing himself, but not one that went without sacrifice. He’d seen it done before, and Dreamer herself had used it as a tactic during the last days before her capture, but it was a risky one.
There wasn’t much time. A gold-rank body couldn’t manage this perception speed for that long before it simply gave out, and deliberating any longer ran the risk of killing everybody in this room, including himself.
Do not doubt, he told himself. Eradicate. Eliminate. Execute.
Nynn used a burst of mana manipulation behind him to propel his body forward, then activated the skill that allowed him to traverse the Beyond.
Rather than send himself, though, he extended the tear in space in front of him. Not even the corruption wielder or the otherworlders, all of whom were drastically above where they should have been in terms of mana manipulation, would be capable of doing something like this. Nynn decoupled his skill from himself, preventing himself from entering the Beyond, and he forcibly expanded it to encompass the detonating bomb.
Time sped up, and the detonation went off in a plane that didn’t exist in the traditional sense.
You have been afflicted with a level of [Corruption].
That wasn’t good.
You have been afflicted with an additional level of [Corruption].
Around him, the residue from the bomb that he hadn’t been able to eliminate hit Caiyeri and the gestalt full-force, knocking them to the ground with its raw force. Dark energy began to creep across them as well.
You have been afflicted with an additional level of [Corruption].
The others started screaming.
Well, shit.
#
The funny part about this fight, Will thought, lay at least partially in the fact that his biggest takeaway from this had to do with the leaderboard system.
Xavier Jenkins had been a somewhat respected local politician in Canberra, as the stories went (and by stories, he meant the dossier he’d gotten from Hua). He’d abruptly disappeared some five years before the system had arrived, and he’d returned as a much less respected otherworlder politician with a necromancer army in tow.
During that process, he’d apparently switched identifiers. Nathan and Yui hadn’t mentioned this bit, but Will was starting to suspect that they may not have originally possessed those names. “Cross” was his chosen moniker and the one the system had identified him as, though everyone in Australia still referred to him as Jenkins. Will was pretty sure that was because it made him seem like more of a joke, but now that he was the sole proprietor of a dead Sydney, that joke didn’t seem particularly funny.
His control over the city was impeccable. The streets were full of the converted dead and buildings had been replaced by towers of bleached corpses that brimmed with necromantic energy. While there had been one necrotic wyrm in DC earlier, there were at least a dozen here. Will had slain a few of them, proving to himself that he had been capable of killing Druudrazil if not for the wyrm choosing not to fight back.
Will was in the bind of trying to decide if he wanted to prioritize going after the bone towers that dotted the city or just go after Jenkins himself when a message hit him.
Nynn: Help.
His blood ran cold. Nynn didn’t ask for help. That just wasn’t his thing.
Will dropped from the sky to avoid a massive beam of dark, purplish magic belching forth from one of the bone towers.
“Alright,” he said, assuming Jenkins would be able to hear him somehow. “I’ll be back for you later.”
You have consumed one level of [Purified] to negate the cast time of [Sanctuary].
Will entered the Beyond as he fell.
In his usual Sanctuary, nothing was amiss, but he realized what was wrong the moment he tried to get back.
A section of the Beyond right where there was supposed to be a connection back to where he’d left the superdungeon was missing. In its place, just like the result of souls that had been affected by Ataraxis’ Tears of Absolute Purification, was corruption.
Nynn, what the hell did you do?