Will reabsorbed the bulk of the corruption he’d thrust outwards, focusing it around him and using his demonic eye to spot and kill the worst of the ash-plague that was everywhere in here. His passive mana expenditure was even higher in here than it had been when Equilibrium Mantle had been working overtime to protect him from deep space, which was saying something.

Despite that, he didn’t think he was going to need to fight. Not just yet.

Though there was malice in the air, it was overwhelmed by a different emotion that Will hadn’t seen expressed through aura very often. Part of it was instantly placeable, though, because he’d seen it coming from Jessie when it had been under the control of the late Nymlera Brooksoul.

This was the sensation of despair. Taken as a whole, the aura gave him the impression of a sleeping monster that hadn’t been able to move in ages, not the cold killing machine that the report had stated she was.

“You know my name,” he said. “How?”

“I saw it on the leaderboard,” Cinder said, her voice surprisingly loud for how hollow it sounded. “And we were briefly on the national math competition team together during high school.”

Will frowned. “I feel like I would have—oh, wait, you’re an otherworlder, right? I guess you weren’t always Cinder.”

“I wasn’t,” she said. “Why are you still here? I don’t know what resources you’re burning to be here, but you’re going to die. Nobody survives this close, even with a medic.”

Pinpointing her location through her aura and her words, Will started navigating further down the tunnels. He was as blind as he’d ever been right now—vision was unreliable at best in the thick clouds of ash, and he’d grown to rely on Sen enough that not having the familiar made him feel naked.

He mentally thanked himself for focusing so much on developing his aura. Without it, Will actually would have gotten lost instead of just turned around.

You have been afflicted with a level of gold-rank [Blightfire].

You have been afflicted with a level of gold-rank [Hollow Hunger].

Sensing the magic make contact with him, Will immediately activated Chaos Transfer. While Blessed triggered nigh-automatically to negate damage, Purified took about half a second to fully activate. He’d been relying mostly on his built-up charges because he hadn’t wanted to waste mana when Equilibrium Mantle was chugging so much, but he wanted to see how sustainable doing both was. If he couldn’t maintain both Mantle and Chaos Transfer, then there was a real possibility that he would actually need to leave this place.

As it was, though, it looked like he’d be able to manage the mana loss thanks to Destructive Synthesis and an inventory chock-full of items he didn’t need.

Will realized shortly after that he hadn’t replied to Cinder. “Well, I’m not dead yet, am I? I feel like I know the current state of my body a bit better than you do.”

He slid further down, growing closer to the central aura. It was even hotter here, to the point where the rock beneath him looked like it was beginning to melt. The grey ash had a decidedly red-orange tint to it now.

Slowly but surely, he found his way to an area where the ash thinned and the heat rose to a temperature that was nearly unbearable even through his high-silver skill. Will cycled his hunger phantasm over himself, which helped a little but probably made him seem at least three times as evil as he actually was.

Okay, maybe twice as evil. His body count was pretty high.

The clearing he’d entered was a small cavern about the same size as his studio apartment back in college, though it was mostly spherical instead of rectangular. The walls glowed red with heat, and even as he watched, parts of the stone crumbled, melting into the growing pool of lava that marked what passed as the floor.

Sitting in the center of it all, face buried in her knees, was Earth’s number one ranked human. Cinder Solace had acquired gold-rank equipment that synergized with her skillset, it seemed, because her seemingly leather armor was the only other item in this magma well that hadn’t gone up in flames.

Even from here, Will didn’t recognize her. Had they actually been on a team together?

To be fair, he didn’t carry many fond memories of that time, so maybe he’d just blocked her out. She was a redhead, though, and he didn’t remember any redhead women from the team.

Whatever. The old world had so little relation to this one that he couldn’t be bothered to cross-examine that.

“Cinder,” he said. “Or Solace, I guess. Which do you prefer?”

“Cinder is fine,” she said. “How the hell are you alive?”

“Same way you are. Magic.”

She raised her head out of her knees, turning to look at him. A tear leaked out of her eyes and instantly evaporated.

When Cinder spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. “Nobody else’s worked.”

That would be the plague, most likely. Will didn’t voice it, but just like him, Cinder had a uniquely powerful skillset. Plenty of people could defend against the elements, and some could protect themselves against afflictions, but those who could do both at a high level were few and far between, amounting basically to Dread Executors and their candidates.

“You’re not fighting me,” Will said. “Given the attitude of the last two leaderboarders I went after, that’s a bit surprising. What were you planning on doing if I was here to kill you?”

In the corner of his vision, the Reaper challenges for reaching gold hovered, reminding him that he was still at three out of seven on his list of targets who’d killed ten thousand or more. Judging from the report and the ominous 1 hanging over Cinder’s head, she would very much be a valid target for this.

The gold-ranker’s aura stirred at that, though not by much.

“Kill you, I guess,” she said, her voice unsteady. “Are you here to kill me?”

“That depends,” Will said honestly. “I had assumed you were like Lance or Cross.”

“The Hydromancer and the Necromancer? I saw them disappear off the leaderboard earlier. Was that you?”

“It was. You’re monitoring it?”

“It’s lonely and quiet in here. I have the leaderboard and the books I downloaded onto my system, but I’ve read all of them a dozen times over by now. Why did you kill them?”

“They needed killing. Lance was throwing tsunamis at the East Coast and Cross had a body count of something like two hundred thousand.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

That was the wrong thing to say. Cinder flinched at him mentioning Cross’ killcount, her aura fluctuating with such power that Will had to actively contest it with his own to keep his life-preserving skills from faltering.

“Intentionally, I should add,” he said, hoping his guess was on point. “They were monsters. You don’t seem anything like them, for what it’s worth.”

“Does it make a difference?” Cinder sounded like she was on the verge of tears now. “Whether I meant to or not? Two hundred thousand, you said. Do you know where I’m at?”

“No,” Will said, sensing that he had to tread carefully here. Given what they knew about each other, he was sure there was a resolution to be found, but this could easily turn violent.

“One million, four hundred sixty seven thousand, eight hundred three,” she said morosely. “I’ve gotten so many achievements for what I’ve done. I didn’t even realize it until ten thousand were already dead, and I buried myself as much as I could, but… they just keep dying.”

Briefly, Will considered if that number was simply too high. It was clear that Cinder was the person with the single highest kill count that he’d seen so far, and just from traversing “her” territory, he could tell that her power was the monstrous kind that would just keep on killing if left alone.

On the other hand, there was no way he could stomach killing someone that had apparently been—not quite a friend, but close. She was nothing like the remorseless mass murderers he’d eliminated thus far.

No, he decided. If there was a way to resolve this peacefully, he would take it. Everything else aside, she seemed amenable to speaking, and when push came to shove, he would much rather have someone on Cinder’s power level to call upon when Peace came knocking.

“There is a difference, and that does matter,” Will said. “I give second chances to people who deserve them, and you seem to fit that.”

“Do I?” she asked flatly. “Can you look me in the eye in this little slice of hell I’ve made and tell me that I deserve a chance? You don’t even remember who I used to be—and I’m okay with that, because I didn’t like that person either—but how can you judge me for who I am now?”

Will took a moment to assess the situation, slowly realizing the headspace the gold-ranker was in.

She didn’t want to live anymore, but she was too scared of death to let someone walk in and kill her. Cinder kept trying to get him to move to action, then sabotaging her own efforts. She couldn’t decide what she wanted.

But most importantly, she needed someone to talk to. Will didn’t know what her situation was—he’d assumed she was an otherworlder, given her sudden rocket to the top of the ranks, but he knew nothing about the other worlds. Given the way she’d been talking so far, though, the rust of disuse clear in her voice, it had likely been a long time since she’d had a living human to speak to.

He could talk. That was doable.

“Tell me about yourself, then,” he said. “Give me the story, and then we can both be confident in my judgment.”

“I could lie,” she said, but her aura betrayed her. Cinder could, but she wouldn’t. If anything, she’d do so in a way that made her look worse than she actually was.

“I’m pretty good at finding the truth,” Will reassured the gold-ranker. “I have some time. Let’s talk.”

He sat, consuming a silver-rank dagger he’d picked up from an assassin for mana, and he listened.

#

Cinder Solace was not, strictly speaking, an otherworlder.

That surprised Will, but it explained why she still had a first name and last name instead of just the one name that every otherworlder currently had entered into the system. During the first stage of the system integration, she’d been on vacation in Yellowstone. She and two of her college friends had been one of a million who had been thrown into the extreme difficulty tutorials at the same time Will had been thrown into space.

Their first stage had also taken place outside the atmosphere of the planet. They might actually have been in the same cave system as him for some time, but theirs had connected to a pocket dimension of some kind. Eventually, it had led them back into the volcano, which had integrated with Arcadia’s caves. Her first friend, a college sophomore named Sophia, had died valiantly holding off a silver-rank enemy at unformed.

That had left two of them at the time of class selection. Cinder hadn’t quite managed to make it to bronze yet, since Alice, her grad student companion, had done the bulk of the work in keeping them alive.

She had gotten the class of Reaper.

Will had noticed some strange magic during the tutorial, and he’d gained more insight into it when space had started shattering to the Beyond during the trial of the champion. Alice and Cinder had experienced this firsthand when their portal out of the altered space led into another world, one that was neither Arcadia nor Earth. It had been a volcanic hellscape that Cinder compared to the surface of Venus. Their skin had started melting within minutes.

Alice had gained the same class Will had, but hadn’t gotten the same type of tools. Cinder, desperate to keep them alive, had consumed stored skill tablets to gain skills that shaped themselves towards the situation in an attempt to survive. Even then, it had turned near-instant death into a guaranteed demise in hours.

They’d slaughtered as many monsters as they could find, struggling to do so given their abnormally high rank, and Cinder had finally entered class selection.

Of the classes she could pick, there had only been one that had carried a passive that could keep her alive: Infernal Plaguespreader. It was a legendary rarity class, and a powerful one at that, but it came with the caveat of her universal abilities, Epidemic and Flameheart. Essentially, her magic would be empowered every time she killed someone, but while she wasn’t killing, she needed to be in a flame or disease-affinity area (say, for instance, the Yellowstone supervolcano) or her mana would rapidly deplete. The moment she hit zero mana, she would die.

To make matters even worse, every time she had excess magic power, which occurred when she was either killing someone or in a particularly hot or diseased area, she would involuntarily trigger as many of her Fire and Plague affixed skills as possible, continuing the cycle.

“It took me about five seconds to realize that it was going to kill Alice,” she said dully. “She told me it was okay. That at least one of us would make it out alive.”

Given her class now, it was clear what she’d done.

“This was the end of the tutorial, wasn’t it?” Will asked. “You didn’t get back after that?”

“No,” Cinder said. “I wandered around that planet for what must have been a month. I thought I was there for years. Every day was the same. Everything near me died. Everything that didn’t die ran.”

“Then the portals,” Will surmised.

“Then the portal. I walked back onto my home planet and realized I couldn’t breathe. All I could focus on was the heat in the distance. I didn’t even realize it was Yellowstone until I faceplanted straight into an inactive supervolcano.”

“Doesn’t seem so inactive anymore,” Will said.

“Which is all my fault,” Cinder said. “And then the notifications started coming and they didn’t stop coming. I know exactly how awful an excuse for a human being I am. I know I’m a monster.”

“But.”

“But I don’t want to die,” she admitted, looking anywhere but Will’s eyes.

“And you shouldn’t need to,” Will said. “You did what you had to survive.”

“Did I? Did I really? Could I have—“

“No.” Will cut her off. “Stop second-guessing yourself. Maybe you could have picked a better skill. Maybe you could have tried harder. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but we don’t live in yesterday. Hell, I have the Time element and even I can’t undo anything I’ve done. What’s done is done. We just have to pick up the pieces as much as we can.”

“I have no pieces to pick up,” Cinder said. “I was planning on just staying here… forever, I guess. I don’t need to eat or drink, so… I can just read the same series again and again until the sun goes out. You’re the first real person I’ve talked to in so long.”

“And you’ll be able to talk to me again,” Will said. “I have friends in high places. I’ll make sure we keep them from sending any more extermination teams.”

“I would appreciate that,” Cinder said.

“Also, I’ll get you some new books. Reading the same series sounds nice for a bit, but it’s got to be making you go crazy.”

“Like you can’t even imagine.”

The rank one gold-ranker was holding her composure pretty well, but her aura betrayed her. She was on the verge of breaking.

“So,” Will said, diverting the topic. “What kind of book do you want me to bring back?”

Cinder visibly brightened, which increased the temperature again.

They chatted for a bit—she was into fantasy and romance, which wasn’t quite Will’s taste but was within the realm of fiction he could appreciate. He resolved to find what was left of the libraries of this world and bring some back.

Unfortunately, they did still have business to address.

“Oh, quick question,” Will said. “Are you alright with potentially using your magic to help against some really evil motherfuckers?”

Cinder barked out a harsh, sharp laugh, her aura teetering. “I’m not alright with any of this, but if you bring someone in, they’ll probably die. If it’s a monster like me, then maybe I can actually do some good with my life.”

“I’ll hold you to that, then,” Will said. “Now then. I don’t have any useful shit on me right now, but I can grab some stuff from outside.”

“How long will you be gone?” Cinder asked.

“Days, hopefully. I need to get to gold, and I have a few more monsters to take down before that’s possible. Natalie Blurr of the independent new UK has a couple names for me.”

Will turned to leave.

“Wait,” Cinder said, extending a hand.

He paused, looking back.

“Can you… can you stay and talk a little more?”

Right. Everyone Cinder had ever known had died before they could so much as link up chat with her. She was, perhaps more than anyone else on this planet, alone.

Will stood there for a moment, deliberating, then sat back down.

Will: Blurr. Give me another hour or two. Something just came up.

Natalie: Not a problem. Looking forward to your arrival.

“Sure,” he said. “Just a little bit.”