Achievement earned: Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes

  You avoided a scenario that would have started a cycle-wide interplanetary war quest. Congratulations would be in order if the possibility of that scenario occurring wasn’t your fault to begin wtih.

  Reward: [Peacemaker] title has already been rewarded. You have instead received experience.

  Level up!

  Your level has increased to [Gold 1].

  1 attribute point earned.

  “Seriously?” Will said aloud. “It literally wasn’t.”

  The level up was appreciated, though, and he decided to allocate the attribute point to Power, his current lowest stat.

  With the immediate threat gone, Will sent a message to the rest of his party to stand down.

  Yui: Unfortunate. I had hoped to fight them.

  Will: You’ll get your chance. Give it a few months.

  Yui: I know I will.

  Nathan: I, for one, am glad we didn’t immediately gank them. The skills and tech they’ve got are absurd, even for Selrethnir.

  Yui: Not quite absurd, but they are powerful. It would be a boon to study their bodies.

  Will: Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here. We do have an angel summoning in the next few months.

  Nynn: The corruption wielder is right, for once.

  Will: For once?

  Caiyeri: What was that about getting ahead of yourself?

  Banter was good. It meant that despite a terrifyingly close brush with death, they were all managing. They’d scraped by another fight without losing one of their own.

  Lu Jie: I cannot call this debt repaid, but I have matters of my own to attend to.

  Lu Jie: Contact me if you need my assistance. For the time being, I must clean up this mess you left me.

  Will: I’d say my bad, but I’m pretty sure I saved your life twice.

  Lu Jie: Which is why I did not request an apology.

  Will: Fair.

  Both of the Speakers had beaten Lu Jie to the punch. Kudos to them, they actually acted on their decisions when they made them. The moment Iridium agreed to stand down, they both started flying away, ruffling Will’s hair and cracking the air with a sonic boom as they left.

  Will had achieved what he’d come for and then some. His initial goal in coming to Shanghai had just been to eliminate Fan Laozi and complete his ascension to gold—and he’d done that, but that wasn’t it. Caiyeri had increased a rank as well, which had major implications for every fight moving forward. Now, he’d also secured the potential cooperation of two extremely powerful aliens in holding Peace off.

  Whenever the Speaker of the Mind came back, though, Will could expect problems. The class had passed onto whoever was next designated to receive it, and they would almost certainly know the details of their predecessor’s death.

  That was a problem for the Will of several months from right now, though, and the Will of right now wanted nothing more than to consolidate his power and take a nice, long shower.

  Will: Let’s wrap it up here and head…

  He paused partway through the message. He’d meant to say home, but he realized abruptly that he didn’t really have a sense of what that was.

  During the past four or five months, ever since the end of the trial of the champion and the beginning of the doomsday timer between the two planets, Will had gone from location to location almost without stopping. Sure, he’d slept, but that had mostly been in safe zones or in whatever housing his allies in the area had whipped up.

  During that time, his party also hadn’t been posted up anywhere permanent. They’d had decent living conditions, but that had been carved from their own inventories and non-combat skills, not any real attempt at establishing a base. The superdungeon was far too hostile towards life of any kind to consider a real home, and yet it was also where they’d spent the majority of their time.

  This entire time, Will had been focused entirely on what would come next. Dealing with Peace, the burgeoning demon inside him, and now also the looming threat of the other planet—to do that, he’d had to single-mindedly focus on being the Reaper he was.

  Caiyeri: Not the superdungeon, I think. It was good practice, but I doubt that there’s anything in there that we haven’t found already.

  Nynn: I concur. If anything, I would suspect that the goal of the rogue goddess would be establishing contact with the other planet, but that has clearly occurred.

  Will: Yeah. She keeps pulling more Users out of a hat, and she obviously doesn’t care if a ton of them die, so I’m starting to think that even if there are legitimate goals, it’s more of a diversion than anything else. Maybe it’s even a training camp of some kind.

  Nathan: I could buy it being for training. After acclimating to the monsters there, it was a pretty good way to get good loot and do free stat and skill leveling.

  Will: Where to next, then? A good chunk of us still have grinding to do, but the deadline for Peace’s bullshit is approaching pretty quickly.

  Yui: I am going to continue training with Wisteria. Though her power is not yet at a fully acceptable level, she will eventually prove her worth.

  Nynn: I will likely join them. Will, whatever you get involved in is likely going to be too much for me. My soul is too damaged to do anything but gradually recover for the time being.

  At least the former Dread Executor was finally realizing that he had limits. Will hadn’t wanted to say that Nynn would be an active liability out loud, but it was obvious to anyone with eyes. He’d given up a lot to end the leader of the corruption cult that had interfered with the trial of the champion, and he’d given up even more to save Will this one last time.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Will didn’t need to publicly admit that he’d been saved. They both knew that he wouldn’t have tanked that shot alone. He had, however, held a single charge of Eternal Throne, which Nynn didn’t know about. For the time being, he had decided to keep that quiet—in part so that Nynn wouldn’t realize he’d done a ton of damage to his own soul for something that wouldn’t actually have fully killed Will but mostly because a resurrection was exactly the kind of thing you kept up your sleeve.

  He had to wonder whether the Crown had foreseen this when it had given him this. It had been pretty clear that the god had wanted nothing to do with Will—at least, so he thought. Back then, a thousand kills had seemed like an absurd number, but it was steadily becoming clear that this was to survive and protect the people he cared about, that number was never going to stop growing.

  Another thousand kills, even if they had to all be gold-rankers? That seemed plausible. Will was more worried about his lack of worry than the knowledge of what that would entail.

  This was getting pointless to think about. Will could agonize about his morals and what the gods were planning all day, but the latter was more useful and that could only be wild speculation when he hadn’t even seen a hint of the Crown’s existence in months aside from the skill he’d gotten from it.

  For the time being, he just needed to figure out where to go next. Will drifted down from the sky, using his newly buffed movement skills to control his fall.

  “I should really get some wings,” he muttered to himself. “Need to figure out if I scam Kadael into giving me some.”

  The rest of his party had been scattered around the city, using various parts of it as cover as they simultaneously fought back against the Speakers and cleared out the remaining Peace sigil-holders, but they all had their ways of moving quickly as well. Without a leader to amplify their power and direct them, the Peace group had been rendered toothless. The same went for Fan Laozi’s titans—while they were still semi-active, they responded to threats on their own bodies and nothing else.

  It took a few minutes, but Will got most everyone remaining gathered just outside the city. Lu Jie had a pair of cities to deal with, so he wasn’t there, but the rest of the party remained.

  Hua: I’m hearing it’s over? That’s disappointing. I was hoping to get damage in. I’m close to gold, I think.

  Will: Aren’t you supposed to have been leaving?

  Hua: Liam and Yui are like ten miles off on a sniper mount. I’m still in the city.

  Will started at that, then looked at his minimap as a single extra allied indicator appeared on it.

  He’d been able to see through her sigil skill disguise back during the trial of the champion, but that had been with Pages of the Past, which he only used on his immediate surroundings. It took extra effort and mana to pass it to any of Sen’s eyes, let alone all of them. Add on the fact that he rarely had to deal with stealth and most traps could be dodged after he triggered them, and Will hadn’t been passively scanning the area with the skill for a while.

  She wasn’t even a quarter mile from them, and with her movement items and skills, it didn’t take long for her to get back.

  “You know, you didn’t have to go to the effort of hiding yourself from me,” Will said. “We wouldn’t have known you were here if you went down.”

  “And you wouldn’t have had to,” Hua countered, a silver-rank glow on her boots fading to nothing as she arrived at their loose gathering. “That’s exactly how it was before I grouped up with you, and that’s how I like it.”

  Will frowned. ”That’s—“

  “How the world works,” Hua said. “I left Australia to join your little black ops party because we’re making more of a difference here than we were there. Military tactics worked great for military purposes, but we kept letting problems go. You’re part of one of the few groups cutting out the rot in the world, and I’m not going to get in your way.”

  “You weren’t getting in my way.”

  “Be serious,” Hua said. “You look at everybody like an obstacle, and you care too much about some people. I wasn’t going to leave, but I wasn’t going to make you prioritize me over the actual fucking fight.”

  “You should think a little less of him,” Caiyeri advised drily. “He’s not nearly that kind.”

  “Kind? No. He’s practical in a way that makes him act more for others than himself,” Hua said. “You saw he tried to send an asset away.”

  “Surprisingly insightful for someone so young,” Nathan said.

  “I’m within three years of Will,” Hua said. “Probably of you, too.”

  “Three years or thirty since birth makes little difference,” Nynn said tiredly. “Your time in the system is the same, and that ages us the fastest.”

  “I would believe you if Will acted anywhere near his age,” Caiyeri said.

  “I’m right here,” Will said, vaguely offended.

  “I wouldn’t be saying it if you weren’t. You were saying something about next steps earlier?”

  Will glared at her, though he couldn’t muster up enough actual anger to make it count. “Yeah. I was. We’re clear of the immediate threats and two of us have gotten rank ups. Our next deadline is Peace, which comes in about a month and a half. The aliens come again after. Past that… probably not worth worrying about.”

  “I’m assuming you don’t want to grind the superdungeon for the next six weeks,” Caiyeri said. “There’s good monsters in there, but… diminishing returns.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” Will said. “Actually, I was thinking something a bit different. Yui, I know you said you were going to train with Wisteria, but I think there’s a better place to go than the superdungeon.”

  “I’m listening,” Yui said. “The journey matters less than the destination in this case. I would like to get our group to a level where we can properly compete with what is coming.”

  “That’s part of what I’d like to do. We’ve been reacting to threats for a while, and this next one’s going to be the same. We still don’t know exactly what to expect, but we do know the general shape of it. Since we do, why don’t we get the upper hand for once?”

  “That was the idea,” Caiyeri said. “You have anything special in mind?”

  Will shrugged. “Sort of. I was thinking that an ambush is probably optimal for whenever the summon completes, since I doubt the Contractor is going to be able to hide something that big.”

  “I concur,” Nynn said. “The summoning process may be hidden, but an actual angel will have ripples so deep that even your dreaming friend will likely see it.”

  “Not a high bar,” Will replied. “She sees everything.”

  “What’re you thinking?” Nathan asked.

  “Well, it’s a rough concept more than a plan so far,” Will said. “But I was thinking a really, really big gun. And I know a place that can do them pretty damn well.”

  #

  Regina’s day had been going considerably better before Earth’s number one pain in the ass had teleported right into the middle of one of her most heavily guarded cities.

  Oh, sure, the mostly-rebuilt city dubbed by most in the ESNA as Newer York wasn’t her headquarters—that would have been an abysmally stupid move, given the fact that a potential enemy had an indestructible portal smack dab in the middle of the city—but it was a pretty critical one.

  At the moment, William Li-Brown, gold-ranker and corruption wielder extraordinaire, was not, in fact, an enemy of her state. Regina was, however, very aware of how tenuous an alliance could be. She hadn’t been the leader of the faction that had come to be known as the ESNA at first, but she’d been forced to take control after far too many betrayals.

  Still, he had been useful and cooperative and generally understanding—a fantastic ally, if not for the fact that he was terribly, terribly unpredictable.

  Case in point.

  “Let me get this correct,” she repeated to a group of some of the least conventional, most lethal fighters on Earth’s surface. “You want to build a gun.”

  “Doesn’t have to be a gun,” Will said. “Could be some other doomsday device. I had a friend, briefly, who had access to a whole bunch of nukes he stole from his country’s stock. If we have a supernuke or something on hand, that could probably help.”

  “A bomb would almost certainly fail,” a strange, dark man she’d been told was called Nynn said. “Angels have defenses against wide-range attacks like that.”

  “You heard the man, then,” Will said. “Gun.”

  “Or a very long bow, which I suppose amounts to the same thing,” the elf named Caiyeri said.

  Regina still had to tamp down on her reflex to blow her away every time she saw the elf. They’re not the same here.

  Okay. She had been given information already about what the corruption wielder suspected a contingent of the fuckers that controlled the west were doing. In exchange for that, he’d gotten information out of her, but they both knew it was information that he could’ve gotten himself if he had more time.

  Overall, she was fairly sure their arrangement had been about equal up until this point, with neither of them going much further than staying out of each other’s way. Will had solved some of her problems, and she’d solved some of his—but neither had done anything that they couldn’t alone.

  This was asking for something that Will certainly could not do, so in exchange…

  Hmm. Regina could think of something. This could tie up one of her ongoing pain points quite nicely, actually.

  “You can’t just ask me to commission you a superweapon without anything in exchange,” Regina said, recovering her focus. “William Li-Brown. Have you heard of the special instance challenge dungeons?”

  The corruption wielder’s aura control was too good for her to read his emotions properly, but the look on his face told her everything she needed to know. He was hooked.

  “Nope,” he said casually. “I’m assuming there’s something in there you want me to kill.”

  “Something like that. Are you in?”

  “Show me what it is, and then we’ll talk.”

  Regina smiled pleasantly, radiating an aura of satisfaction.

  Well, this would either kill him and remove a potential threat, or it would solve one of her problems. Win-win!