Will wondered if this would be the time someone finally listened to him asking for them to talk. Historically, that hadn’t gone over well.

  To be fair, a number of times, it was him deciding that the other person wasn’t worth trying to save and going ahead with a field execution. He did have to admit that part of it, at least, was his own fault.

  That said, this did seem like a situation that would be ideally resolved a different way. There was the sticky part where he’d murdered one of the three immediately, which would certainly make any negotiations more challenging, but in all fairness they had tried to orbital strike him first.

  He summoned Aza back to his side right as the Guardian Angel finished transmitting what Will had ordered him to say.

  “You realize that I’m not going to hear a response if I’m by your side, right?” the Dread Executor aspect said.

  “Right,” Will said, forming a pair of wings and air-dashing to redirect his momentum. “I’ll go talk to them myself, then.”

  “You truly do have a talent for bad ideas,” Aza said. “You are aware of what those two are, right?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Will said, answering both parts of his familiar’s question in one go. “I’m riding a high right now. Can’t let a good rank up go to waste.”

  “I should have known better than to think the early cycle optimism would be beaten out of the likes of you,” Aza sighed.

  “Yep. You should have.”

  Will dove.

  As expected, the two Speakers didn’t exactly take his invitation with resounding agreement, though that might have also been because they’d been briefed on Will’s favorite way to enter a fight—namely, with his opponents deeply confused and him traveling at subsonic speeds.

  They didn’t respond with their full power either, which was promising. Granted, their full power involved a good deal of preparation and an orbital cannon, but Will had read through a good deal of the skill list of both. While the defensive skill the Speaker of the Flesh was using was a pretty top-tier gold-rank one, the offensive one from the Soul wasn’t. It was a pretty standard death beam with little finesse to it.

  Will grinned. Under a certain lens, one could view that as a warning shot. Maybe negotiating wasn’t a total lost cause.

  That beam would, of course, still kill him if it hit, so he navigated away. Wings and dashes weren’t the only tool he had anymore—a quietly powerful passive he’d been relying on since the goblin caves had been upgraded once again.

  Skill: [Escape Artist]

  - Passive (body).

  - Cost: none.

  - Cooldown: none.

  Gold

  Never look back.

  Your movement speed is increased at a rate inversely proportional to the amount of equipment you are wearing (maximum of 100% increase).

  Your movement speed is increased by up to an additional 100% if you are currently being attacked. If you are being attacked, you gain greatly increased control of your aerial mobility.

  Gold-rank addition: if you are under attack, you can temporarily treat non-solid surfaces as solid.

  Will had never been particularly acrobatic, but his stats and skills were doing a damn good job at making him look like he’d been practicing this all his life.

  Caiyeri: What are you doing up there? I’ve seen untrained goblin berserkers look more graceful than that.

  Okay, maybe not that good, but put him against any Olympic gymnast and he was sure he’d be the better one at avoiding a beam that would overload his nerves until he was a paralyzed brick dropping at terminal velocity.

  Will: You can see me up here?

  Caiyeri: [Gambler’s Intuition]. Class skill. Gives me pretty great senses, and sight got upgraded a ton once I got to gold.

  Will: Great. Tell the others not to shoot until I start shooting. I might be able to scrounge something out of this.

  Caiyeri: Your history does not inspire faith in me.

  Will: Hey! I mean, fair, but hey!

  At gold rank, Escape Artist let him paint his path downwards using anything as a canvas. He used the air as a springboard, spreading hunger phantasm around him as he dropped. Will didn’t extend it aggressively—instead, he acknowledged the incoming shots and tried making the Speaker of the Soul’s job a bit harder.

  Skill: [Wraith Cloak]

  - Spell (invisibility, movement).

  - Cost: low mana-per-second while not moving. Mana cost increases with speed up to a cap of moderate mana-per-second.

  - Cooldown: none.

  Gold

  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 use an attack or cast an offensive spell.

  Also increases your speed while in shadow.

  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.

  [Intangible] (gold) - No longer ceases functioning when you are moving too fast. If you are not moving, you may make yourself temporarily intangible for a very high mana cost.

  The intangibility part didn’t matter to him much at the moment. Even Will himself had a dozen different ways to attack something intangible, and he didn’t doubt that the Inanis contingent had the same. What mattered here was dispersing his aura signature into the hunger phantasm and rendering himself invisible, minimizing the targets the Speaker of the Soul had to target. Without Rhodium alive, the aliens no longer had someone who could precisely find where Will was when he was deliberately obfuscating his position.

  The Speaker of the Soul didn’t use any wide-range attacks, reinforcing Will’s belief that he was, in fact, open to something of a parlay. He doubted that it would be nearly as easy as any of his conversations with humans had gone, but he figured it was worth a shot.

  To be fair to them, Will didn’t even fire a warning shot in return. That was mostly because he didn’t want the rest of his party to resume attacking before negotiations could even start, but he figured it was a nice gesture.

  When he started getting closer to the pair of them, he slowed himself down with Wind Walker and a quick formation of wings. Just to be safe, he activated a ritual that he usually kept attuned towards corruption but typically didn’t bother thinking much about.

  Skill: [Favored Element]

  - Ritual (resistance).

  - Cost: moderate mana (very high mana).

  - Casting Time: 10 minutes (10 seconds).

  - Cooldown: 1 day.

  Gold

  Allows you to pick one favored element and one hostile element. Until this ritual is no longer on cooldown, you gain extreme resistance to attacks using your favored element if they are of your rank or lower. If this resistance completely nullifies the damage you would have taken, you are instead healed proportionally to the power of the attack.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  You take increased damage from the hostile element, but if an attack is made upon you using that element, your next attack against that enemy will be greatly increased in power.

  [Augmented Resistance] (silver) - Your resistance ignores rank boundaries.

  [Elemental Intuition] (silver) - If you do not pick a favored element, it will automatically select the most prevalent element in your area upon casting. This is currently aligned to Fear.

  Gold-rank addition: for a very high mana cost, you can now cast this ritual at a greatly enhanced speed.

  It proved to be useful when Will entered the area of effect of the Speakers’ aura. Earlier, he’d come into contact with one of the few humans who could even come close to matching his own. He’d dealt with Fan Laozi without ever learning what the man was fully capable of or why his aura had been the way it was, and he was thankful for that—he was sure a direct aura-on-aura contest would have been a massive pain.

  Iridium and Osmium, unfortunately, were also stronger than their rank suggested.

  It wasn’t quite in the same way as Laozi and Will, though. The humans had power that spoke of repeated reforgings. Hell, Will’s soul had been literally torn apart by one god and barely patched back together by another.

  These two, on the other hand, had power in multitudes. Will’s analysis of their classes had shown them to be hereditary ones, passed from User to User. Their cycle had been going on for years on their side already, according to Ayla, and the results of that were clear in these two’s auras. They were built from the powers of literal dozens of past owners of the class, consolidating and multiplying their powers many time over.

  Thanks to Shattersoul and his damnable Outcast title, his aura had been buffed and trained enough that it wouldn’t just shatter in the face of even two of these monstrous presences. Still, he was going to have a damn hard time trying a soul attack or even general aura suppression on either of them. He hadn’t noticed this with the Speaker of the Mind, but that had almost certainly been because of the circumstances he had managed to force. Absurd amounts of corruption would make anyone’s ability to focus worse.

  Will came to a steady stop about a hundred feet from the hovering duo, forming a solid platform for himself under his feet.

  “I’m surprised you agreed to a talk,” he called out.

  Since he didn’t actually have a voice amplification skill, he started walking towards them, forming shadowy platforms under his feet with each step. Shouting got tiring after a long fight.

  The Speakers, fitting for their name, did. Iridium was the one apparently designated either as a leader or their spokesperson for the time being. He’d been the one to announce that everyone else would be okay if they let the two aliens kill Will, too.

  “Conversation favors us,” he said. “The stealth-assassination attempt failed. Our abilities may recharge by the end of this.”

  Iridium was not-so-subtly threatening a second use of the orbital cannon, Will could tell. Was he trying to provoke him into an early confrontation? Reading the aliens’ aura was harder than reading a human’s not just because of their raw power but also because the insectoid Hive were so different from his species. Elves and elementals had had human-like reasoning, at the very least, but according to Ayla, this planet operated in a completely different way from Earth or Arcadia.

  “If you say so,” Will said. “Hopefully, by the end of this we won’t have to use those recharged skills.”

  “You are a corruption wielder,” Iridium said. “Unclean. Against the cycle. You must die.”

  Oh, excellent, Will thought. He’d gotten the general idea of what a cycle-complaint society would be like from Ayla, but he hadn’t expected it to be this… direct. Maybe something was translating wrong?

  He could spin this, though. There were real concerns that anyone concerned with upholding the cycle should have been focusing on—it was just that at the moment, he was the loudest. Some beings (like, for instance, a goddess who’d lived through a million cycles) knew when to be quiet.

  “Alright,” Will said. “Let me get this clear. You need me dead just because I play around with corruption?”

  “The demon as well,” Osmium interjected.

  “Oh, the fuckin’ demon,” Will said, throwing his hands up. “Have you ever considered why I might have a demon inside me?”

  Well, he supposed it shouldn’t surprise him that they had a way to detect Richard. They’d been able to identify Earth’s sole corruption wielder and come after him, after all. Demons were likely noticeably more impactful on the mana around them.

  “No,” Iridium said. “It is pointless.”

  “Fantastic,” Will sighed. “Please tell me you’re not the brains of this operation.”

  The insect tilted his head, antennae twitching. “Do you have anything of substance-matters to say?”

  “Yes, I do. Do you think I wanted a demon inside my head? I know what your answer to that is going to be, so I’ll reply for you—no, I didn’t! Here’s another question. Given the choice between containing a mid-tier demon and letting it devour an entire planet, what would you choose?”

  That actually gave them pause, which was kind of disappointing. Will had hoped that they would have at least considered a few basic possibilities before full-sending the assassination attempt.

  “Then your presence is what maintains the demon’s presence in our reality,” Iridium said. “You contain it within yourself and use its power for your own.”

  That was true, which made this a bit inconvenient. Will was well aware of what Richard could do if unleashed. In a very real way, making that contract had saved the world. Still, he had to admit that he hadn’t exactly exercised restraint when he’d utilized the demonic eye for his own purposes.

  “I sure do,” Will agreed amiably. “But you know what that means? It means that there’s a demon’s power in me. If you kill me now, that power isn’t just going to disappear.”

  “This is known,” Iridium said. “After your death, the fragments of your magic will be contained, isolated, and ejected into deep space until there is no longer a threat to our worlds.”

  “Our worlds, you say,” Will said. “Do you mean Inanis?”

  “The three planets,” Iridium said. “We have no desire to crush your peoples. The Unification Front welcomes all.”

  “Holy evil empire name,” Will snorted. “Alright. So, hypothetically, if there was a threat greater than a single corruption wielder with a contained demon, you would look towards that instead?”

  “That would depend on whether or not it was a fabrication-fake by another,” Iridium said. Though Will couldn’t read the alien’s expression, he recognized the universal emotion of I don’t believe you in the Speaker’s aura.

  “You came here through the superdungeons, didn’t you?” Will asked.

  That was a question he already knew the answer to. Ayla would’ve notified him if there were people making the many-million-mile trip between the alien planet and Earth, not to mention how easy it would be to spot with aura senses. At gold rank, there weren’t yet movement skills that were strong enough to make that trip both stealthily and quickly. The only possible explanation, then, was the spatial anomaly that connected them both—and hadn’t the group who’d been fighting the Peace sigil-holders in the superdungeon talked about seeing technology from an alien society in there?

  “We passed through the dungeon anomaly,” Iridium said. “You are aware of it?”

  “I was in there for a bit. If you came through it, I’m sure you came into contact with a certain goddess’ followers.”

  “The servants of Peace,” Osmium spoke. “I recall them. They attempted to slow us. They were ineffective.”

  Caiyeri: This has to be the longest I’ve seen you talk with someone without at least one murder attempt going down.

  Will: Oh, come on. I’ve definitely made it longer.

  Will: That said, it’s going surprisingly well. Given their initial response, I thought that they would just jump straight to killing, but they’re hearing me out more than a human would. Or an elf, for that matter.

  Caiyeri: Looks like bugs have their upsides. Have you told them that you killed their brother yet?

  Will: One step at a time.

  Caiyeri: Got it. Weapons ready.

  Will: Shut up.

  Realizing he still needed to respond, Will spoke aloud again before the two Speakers could start preparing attacks of their own. “Their forces aren’t concentrated in the superdungeon. I’m not actually sure what they’re doing there, but it’s far from their only endeavor. Iridium, you have like fourteen different lie-detection skills. Am I bullshitting you?”

  “You speak the truth,” the Speaker of the Soul said reluctantly, unsurprised that Will had detected his skill list. “Continue.”

  “Peace herself is directing a contingent of her factions to summon something from beyond our world,” Will said. “Judging from her usual repertoire, we’re almost certain that it’ll be an angel summoning.”

  That got a reaction from the two Speakers. Fortunately, it looked like angels were as anathema to their idea of what was acceptable as demons were. Ayla had said as much, but he’d still half-expected them to just ignore it.

  “You believe this,” Iridium said.

  “I know this,” Will shot back. “That contingent is targeted at me.”

  “Only because you are the only possible target,” Iridium inferred. “This kind of power is only possible to counterbalance-destroy another transgressor.”

  That was probable. Will didn’t know how much the two Speakers understood the concept of plausibility, though it seemed like they had more understanding than most Earth Users did.

  “Yeah, because I saved the world,” Will growled. “It was transgress or let seven hundred million people die screaming. My fault for doing a good thing, honestly. Now I’m facing a god again and she wants to tear me apart and use everything inside me as fuel.”

  “More reason to eliminate you sooner than later,” Iridium said.

  “Except without me, you’re not going to have anyone to deal with the angel,” Will said. “Unless one of you has a whole lot of magic outside what the system considers permissible? Because last I checked, you’re not going to defeat a demon with fear.”

  “You are not speaking of a demon.”

  “No, I’m not, but the same principle applies. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of tech you can apply, too. You two are strong, and you’ll be pretty critical if you actually fight against a cycle-breaking cult.”

  “Your information is appreciated,” Iridium said, his aura showing Will that he was actually genuine about that. “After your death, we will bring this information to the high council.”

  Will barked out a laugh. “Have you listened to a single word I’ve been saying? I’ve been around for almost six months now and haven’t even tried to shatter the cycle. Hell, if anything, what I do has been closer to what you do. This angel is going to break it immediately.”

  “We will fight the angel alongside your people,” Iridium said. “Your sacrifice will not go unheard.”

  Will laughed in the Speaker’s face. “You think so? This conversation isn’t about begging for my life. It’s a last ditch effort for me to not waste another pair of promising lives. This is for your sake, not mine.”

  Iridium and Osmium flickered, suddenly appearing directly in front of Will. Their auras overlapped, reinforcing each other and pressing down on his.

  “You overestimate yourself,” Iridium said. “We have more than the capability to eliminate you and the angel alike.”

  Will looked at the two Hive aliens and glared. He rarely had an opportunity for his various titles that rendered his aura more evil than anyone else’s on the planet, but he made full use of them now, pushing back their auras without wasting much effort.

  “I killed your brother,” he said coldly, taking advantage of their surprise at having their auras repelled. “It took me less than five minutes. I tell you what I know about Peace because I have faced her down in single combat before and won. Do you really think you’re going to kill me here? You’re putting yourself at the end of a long line of people who’ve failed. My own sigil tore my soul apart, and I’m still here. That demon you’re so scared about? I faced that fucker down alone and walked away stronger. I’m already giving you a chance by letting you walk away alive right now because I think you’ll be helpful against a mutual enemy. Don’t waste it.”

  With each word, Will increased the amount of energy he put into his aura. He’d faced gods and pushed back. These two insignificant shits might have been at the top of their food chain, but compared to what Will had faced so far? They barely registered as a threat.

  He pushed far enough that he could sense his aura starting to brush up against their souls. There, their defenses consolidated enough that he couldn’t pop them without further exertion, but his point was made. Will stared them down, his aura as steady and inevitable as ever.

  “Your execution can wait until after the angel’s,” Iridium allowed.

  I can sense your fear, Will thought. Was that a new emotion for them? He found that he didn’t particularly care.

  “See?” Will asked, flashing them a smile that didn’t reach his aura. “Wasn’t that easy?”