A failure is a failure. Helping Charlotte had been a fiasco like no other. I was able to corrupt her, and in a way, I did give her a class and open the door to regaining her power. Which was a start and also miles far from what I had intended.

A few days ago I hadn't been counting on her at all, and admittedly, her visit had caught me completely off guard. I had made all sorts of plans for her. She was going to be the general. She had to fight the Fourth in their attempted invasion. She should have played a central role in my empire.

But that was not going to happen any time soon. Not when she couldn't even cast the most basic of the spells. Practice and time would solve it, and I would be waiting for her.

Not everything was lost, though. The information she had shared was still more than useful—the key to staying alive. The Fourth planned to attack, and Charlotte had revealed all of their plans.

They had heard that our base was not in the city, and as such, they were not planning to invade it. They had traced a route from the nearest summoning site directly to this one.

Apparently, as they had filled me in, the infrastructure in this world was quite well thought out. All the summoning sites had direct roads that made going from one to the other easy.

Historically, the roads had already been there before the System existed. They connected important travel points, such as inns and smaller settlements. When the System was introduced and summoning sites became common, they used these very same roads to erect them.

The general population has access to summoning sites, and teleportation within the same planet is normally within most people’s reach. Not if you had to use it every day, but it was affordable for twice or three times a year.

Our attackers thought a direct line to us, that they could use these connections that had existed a long time ago. And to be fair with them, the roads did still exist, just that they were completely immersed in corruption.

No matter what, we had to find a quick remedy for the situation. Our city was purposely isolated from every other civilization, which made them run on reserves. Before all food and other primary goods were gone, we had to take control of the supply chain and restore order; we had to dispatch the Fourth as soon as possible.

We began our preparations for the attack as soon as Charlotte informed us. Even before I knew of it, Yasmin had already put people to work, and Pol had been reinforcing the side of Core that they would attack.

And I was not an exception. Far from looking and doing nothing, I had been pestering the route they would take with all sorts of monsters. Now I knew where the line between corruption and destruction lay, and I also knew how living beings would naturally resist change. So, corrupting animals had been a child’s game.

Wolves, birds, rabbits, insects, and absolutely everything else I found. I was making no distinctions—I didn’t care for the natural balance of the fauna nor for the vegetation. The goal was simple: if they wanted to attack us, they would first have to plunder through all these monsters.

My creations weren’t strong. And they certainly weren’t intelligent, as I realized the third or fourth time I had corrupted a small mammal and it tried to rabidly bite me. But that was good. They wouldn’t have reservations about jumping on much stronger enemies than them.

Stolen novel; please report.

I knew that they wouldn’t be making much of a difference; most certainly, they wouldn’t even be hurt by them. What I wanted to achieve was just a demoralizing effect. I wanted The Fourth to be mentally broken when they realized what was happening.

This was not as simple as someone beating an [Oracle]. It was a monster spreading corruption. For all I knew, they might even think that I was controlling the monsters pestering them.

I was not counting how many of them I had transformed successfully. And neither was I keeping track of the many failures. Some monsters had encountered others and entered deadly battles. Others had formed groups by following some primal instinct that they still retained.

Overall the dungeon was starting to look like a proper dungeon, like those in videogames, were monster encounters happened often and chaotically. I wanted chaos to reign, to make the Fourth struggle as much as possible.

Scouts had been scattered on the route and around it to make sure we spotted the Fourth before they were right onto us. Between the corruption and the monsters, seeing them without being found out was almost certain.

I spent a whole day non-stop sending pulses of corruption to several animals at the same time. And, almost without exception, I always got a corrupted version of the species, without any special title or name.

Almost because, just once, something changed.

[Corrupted Abyss]

The dog looked at me with pitch-black eyes, and I thought it had lost its sight. An unbearable wave of guilt washed over me as I fell to my knees. I was a monster, and I had done exactly what they had done to me. I had played with another being, and, instead of freeing it, I had crippled it.

The [Corrupted Abyss] sprinted to me, drool and slime falling from its mouth as it shook its head in a motion you’d expect of a dog—not a monster. It must have been using its smell, or it had a good visual memory, because it managed to pinpoint my position.

I sighed; it was about to bite me as the many other monsters had tried. Normally, I would have just stepped back and disappeared far enough that it lost interest in me. But how could I do that now?

I had to kill it. Letting it be like that was crueler than just ending its life.

I was preparing to strike it when I suddenly realized—my enemy sight passive has not activated! I stopped a second short of sending a blade of energy just to have the [Corrupted Abyss] bump against me.

It didn’t crash on me with unmeasurable strength. Rather, it just pushed me enough to send me rolling on my side. Its eyes tracking me for the whole duration.

“You are not blind, are you?”

How cool would have been that it answered? Sadly, it didn’t. Corruption did many things, but apparently making animals smarter was not one of them. Nor was it giving them skills that allowed them to talk.

“Be a good boy and defend this road, will you?” I continued talking, ignoring the fact that he was probably not understanding a single word. “There will be bad guys coming in a while. Scare them. Bite them. And kill them if you have to.”

It didn’t follow me when I left, and although I was tempted to adopt it as my pet, I stopped myself from doing so.

There was a time for games and love, but it wasn’t this one. This was the time for war, and we had to come up on top.