[System Decay] Chapter 50: Stretching New Limbs (Patreon)

There were four spiders creeping down the base of the crystal tree. Will had no idea how Liam fought, but he was itching to blood his new skills.

He leapt forward with silver-rank speed, marveling in how much smoother his movements were. His mind and body were in perfect sync, as if he was controlling an avatar rather than having to deal with clunky reality. Even with the improvements he’d made at bronze rank, Will had still felt the soreness and cricks that came with improperly resting after heavy physical activity.

Right now, he felt on top of the world. He took a bounding step forward, propelled by his upgraded Wind Walker.

Skill: [Wind Walker]

- Spell (stealth, movement).

- Cost: very low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver.

Draw upon the power of the winds to lighten your step and increase your speed.

[Zephyr’s Cloak] (bronze) - While this skill is active, you gain a slight blur effect, making you harder to see and target while moving.

[Galeforce Dash] (silver) - While you are not touching the ground, you can spend mana to send yourself flying forward with wind-aided dashes. This also imbues you with storm power, increasing the amount of damage you deal to foes afflicted by [Charged].

Will whooped with glee. For the same low mana cost, each of his steps now covered the distance of a professional long jumper.

“Whoa there,” Liam called from behind him. “I’m a defender, but I don’t know if I can protect you at your speed!”

“You’re good!” Will shouted back. “I have a get out of jail free card!”

Not that he was going to use it right now.

Will looked upon the spiders. They didn’t trigger his arachnophobia as bad as the giant spiders had, thankfully, which was almost certainly because of the crystalline composition of their bodies. They resembled the kind of quartz statues he might’ve found in a hippie store down in Vegas more than actual spiders, though the shape was correct.

Will marked all four for death.

Skill: [Mark for Death]

- Spell (affliction).

- Cost: moderate mana.

- Cooldown: 1 hour.

Silver

Target any creature you can see or sense and mark them for death. During the next hour, the effectiveness of attacks and afflictions against the creature are increased, and you can track the creature through your minimap and through walls. This skill’s cooldown resets if the targeted creature dies.

[Soul Link] (bronze) - A fraction of all damage dealt to the marked creature is converted to healing for you.

Silver-rank addition: When using this skill, you can target any number of creatures that you can see. You must kill all of them to trigger this skill’s cooldown automatic reset.

The mass target effect of this was a welcome addition to his arsenal, and it meant that he was no longer going to have to carefully manage who he was targeting with the skill.

With his air dash, Will could launch himself a dozen feet straight up, giving him the space to use his Hunger Phantasm.

Skill: [Hunger Phantasm]

- Spell (sigil, conjuration).

- Cost: low mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

Conjures a dark phantasm with a volume of 20 cubic feet. You have fine control over this phantasm within a moderate range of your body. You can control parts of the phantasm at a range of up to 120 feet. Lasts until dispelled or destroyed.

[Starvation] - The phantasm counts as a weapon and doubles the effect of all drain conditions. Every attack you successfully land on a target that is touching a phantasm drains their stamina and mana, restoring yours. This also restores your health if your stamina and mana are full.

[In the Flesh] - For a moderate mana cost, the phantasm can take physical form. For the purposes of touch-range spells, you can use the phantasm. At silver-rank, the physical form increases in its ability to affect the material world.

[Echo of Despair] (silver) - When a target that the phantasm is touching reaches critical levels of stamina, mana, or health, the phantasm emits a pulse that applies the [Wither] condition on the target and any other enemies within a short distance.

The new aspects of the phantasm that he’d weaseled out of the Hunger were primarily offensive, but the increased fine control that it granted him as well as its new ability to further its effects on the world were greatly appreciated for making the half hang glider, half wing formation that he used to glide towards the spiders.

They recognized him as a threat, flinching away from his oppressive presence.

Skill: [Hunger Aura]

- Aura (sigil).

- Cost: none.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

Your aura changes, gaining elements of Kadael, the Hunger.

[Insatiable] - Enemies within the aura passively lose stamina and mana. You and your allies restore stamina and mana proportional to the amount drained. This amount can be increased with application of mana. Excess stamina and mana is discarded.

[Devouring Embrace] (silver) - Enemies within the aura also passively lose health. You and your allies within the aura gain health proportional to the amount drained. Excess health is discarded.

Will’s aura control had grown nicely through a combination of his unlikely elf friend’s training and his weeks of dreaming battles against the Hunger’s divine strength, and it made it all the more effective when he deployed it against spiders whose innate aura control was mediocre at best. 

They were unable to resist him, the air around him darkening despite a lack of any actual shadow or visible power. Hunger tore through them, and they chittered in confused pain. The sound set Will’s spine on edge.

“God, I hate spiders,” he muttered.

“Same here, mate!” Liam called from under and behind him.

Will rolled upside down in his glide, adjusting the phantasm to keep him going. Liam was a solid thirty feet behind him, and he hadn’t said that very loudly.

“Enhanced senses?” Will asked.

“You betcha. Hey, watch—“

Before Liam could finish his sentence, the spiders struck, shooting long webs that glimmered with the same crystal-like material that their bodies and the trees they came from were made of.

One of them hit Will in the back, knocking the wind out of him as it pierced through his shirt and into his flesh.

While a direct hit from the spider-silk that was apparently as sharp as it was sticky might have been a genuine threat to him just an hour ago, Will was silver rank now—at the bottom of it, yes, but still silver. He himself had experienced how hard it was to deal with someone a rank above, and he had a type of magic that tended to spit in the face of rank disparities.

He spiraled in the air, using another air-dash with Wind Walker combined with drawing his slayer sword and severing the bronze-rank thread.

Will’s slayer sword was disappointingly still at bronze rank, but that couldn’t be helped. The Hunger had given him a boost, not all his associated items, which meant that for the first time in a while, his weapons were actually going to be punching under his weight class until he got better ones or put enough into their growth to increase their power.

Liam caught up as Will returned to his glide, slayer sword glowing with fresh power.

Interested in what the other man had to offer, Will held off on flooding the area with corruption immediately, instead hovering over the battlefield like a vulture. He covered himself with immaterial phantasm, using one of his skill combos that would make him harder to hit.

Skill: [Wraith Cloak]

- Spell (invisibility, movement).

- Cost: low mana-per-second while not moving. Mana cost increases with speed.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

While in areas with low light or no light, you can have shadows surround you and render you invisible. This invisibility ceases to function if you move too quickly, use an attack, or cast a spell.

Also increases your speed while in shadow.

Silver-rank addition: You can move more effectively without breaking the cloak. While you are cloaked, you can see perfectly in the dark.

[Ethereal] - For a high mana cost, you can pass through very thin barriers while invisible.

While in the air, the new movement feature wasn’t terribly useful, but becoming invisible amongst his shadows certainly gave the spiders a harder time trying to snipe him.

Will was barely bleeding from the first hit, a bronze-rank potion just about doing the trick to patch him up, but he didn’t want to take too many more. He had just bought this shirt, after all. Too many holes in it too quick and that’d just be a waste of money.

Using his newfound darkvision, Will peered down at the ongoing fight.

With a battlecry that sounded suspiciously like product placement, Liam charged. Red magic swirled around him, coalescing into a sort of massive, glowing exoskeleton. A portion of it glowed brighter as he tensed his legs, and then he leaped.

The spiders were too busy with the cloud of hungry darkness above them to counter Liam’s sudden charge and subsequent jump. He rose half as high as Will, but rather than glide, he fell straight back down, slamming into a spider’s abdomen.

Liam acted as a human wrecking ball. With Mark for Death worsening the damage and their stamina and mana being sucked away by Will’s aura, the spiders lacked the ability to defend themselves past whatever innate abilities they had.

The one that the Aussie (at least, Will assumed Liam had been Australia before the concept of “Australia” had ceased to exist) landed atop shattered like a knocked-over china bowl, its legs flying and its main body crumpling into the desert ground.

In the moment of impact, Will sensed the difference between himself and a core user.

While the skill had been deftly used and clearly trained, there was a level of sloppiness to it that wasn’t present there in Will, Lev, Allie, or any of the others he’d faced who didn’t use monster cores as a cheat code to leveling up. Perhaps because Liam hadn’t trained his body to use his skills at maximum effectiveness, relying on the monster cores instead, he’d misaligned himself with exactly what his powers did. 

There was a disconnect there, and Will imagined it was the difference between pressing a button to activate an ability in Final Fantasy 14 and the natural, flowing way he and Caiyeri used their skills. It wasn’t lethal now, but Will could easily see how these little imperfections would stack together and add up over time, ultimately leading to a path that would deviate from his own and restrict Liam.

That said, it clearly wasn’t an issue for him right now. Liam practically bounced off the corpse of the first spider he killed, soaring up high for a second.

The crystal spiders were starting to take notice of Liam instead of Will, and while Will wasn’t sure if their sharp sillk would be able to break their way through Liam’s armor, he didn’t want to chance it.

He let his wings drop, descending lightly thanks to Wind Walker. Instead of using the phantasm to support him through the air, he let the darkness descend on the spiders beneath him, granting him the usage of his favorite touch-range skill.

Skill: [Decaying Touch]

- Spell (affliction).

- Cost: high mana.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver.

Deals necrotic damage. Inflict one level of silver-rank [Corruption] on a creature or item you touch. This skill cannot stack afflictions.

Of all the skill evolutions he’d stacked up, this one was the least involved but quite possibly one of the most powerful. Simply increasing the level of corruption that he inflicted was insanely strong, and now?

Now, rather than trying to give corruption to higher-rank monsters and hoping it would slow them down, he was the one who benefited from the tyranny of rank.

The only sticker was that the cost of Decaying Touch was high, but his aura made up for it, greedily siphoning away mana from the spiders as they struggled to shoot at either of them.

Will settled on using two instances of Decaying Touch, targeting the monsters that Liam didn’t. Even that took over half his mana, but his regeneration kicked in quickly. With this many sources, he didn’t need to worry about mana depletion unless he used Ghostflame.

The silver-rank corruption set in scarily quickly, burning through the spiders like wildfire. In instants, the darkness of Will’s hunger phantasm was joined by the distorted smoke driving through the hard, crystal bodies.

They screeched, but the darkness of the phantasm muffled them. As they got low on health, their condition worsened with the phantasm’s new Echo of Despair ability, afflicting them all with a level of wither as well.

To seal the deal, Will spread his hands to the sound of a bell tolling.

Skill: [The Bell Tolls]

- Spell (esoteric).

- Cost: high mana.

- Cooldown: 1 hour.

Silver.

Cleanses all afflictions from you and targets a creature you can see. The creature cannot benefit from magical healing for the next minute. Inflicts necrotic damage scaling with the consumed afflictions and any injuries the target is suffering from.

[Withering Decay] (bronze) - Death approaches. Increases any affliction on the target by one level. Inflicts one level of [Wither].

[Escape is Futile] (silver) - Cooldown resets if the target dies.

One of the crystal-spiders reached an earpiercing pitch before simply bursting to pieces, necrotic damage coursing through its veins.

A moment later, a second bell tolled, annihilating the second. The mana from Mark for Death’s Soul Link flowed into Will, restoring him back to full capacity.

Liam’s wrecking ball gambit hadn’t worked as well on the second spider, and so the Aussie was hammering away at it with a weapon that looked to be infused with the same energy. It reminded Will of Axl’s war hammer, though this one seemed more directed in terms of its feature.

Will stole the skill with the slayer sword, air-dashing toward the spider and slicing through it.

He looked behind him, getting an eyeful of the gory corpse he’d just made. The crystal spiders leaked blueish-green blood instead of red, but that didn’t really make it any better.

“Aw, man,” he said. “I wanted to do that anime thing where they don’t realize they’ve been cut until I get a cool shot.”

“Oh, mate, you should meet Sabrina,” Liam said, putting his hammer on his back. “She’s got something like that.”

“Teammate of yours?” Will asked, looting his two kills. A handful of awakening shards, a few bronze credits, some crafting materials that were probably going to go the way of Destructive Synthesis—nothing super mind-blowing.

“Yep,” Liam said. “She’s got that whole supervillain thing going on too.”

“Oh, come on,” Will sighed. “I’m not a supervillain.”

“Hey, no hate to the aesthetic,” Liam said. “We’ve all done a morally dubious war crime or three after the end. It is what it is. Just try to be excellent, yeah?”

“There are so many things wrong with that sentence that I don’t even know where to start.”

“Look, mate,” Liam said. “I don’t have my party, you don’t have yours—what say we team up for a bit?”

“I don’t mind,” Will said. “Though I question the wisdom of being with someone who self-admittedly commits war crimes.”

Then again, Will had done a bit of the same, especially during the tutorial. Oopsies.

“Look around you,” Liam said. “Do you think any of them want to be with you?”

Will did as instructed, using his enhanced perception. At first glance, nothing seemed off, but then he realized that almost every human who’d dropped in the same area as him had since gone away, occasionally casting wary glances his way.

The only exception was Liam.

“Ah,” Will said unhappily. “Looks like my reputation precedes me.”

“Or your aura,” Liam said. “Don’t go getting too big of a head yet.”

“I think I might like you, Liam,” Will said. “Wanna bet on who can top the tree first?”

Liam chuckled. “You’re quick and dangerous. An assassin. I’m a tank. Do you think there’s a contest?”

“Are you saying you think you can’t do it?” Will challenged.

“Of course not,” Liam replied, holding out a disc of alien metal that Will recognized as a sigil—though not one to any god he knew about already. “Last to the top is a rotten spider.”