Chapter 1037: Considerably Concerned (Patreon)

Over the course of a year, Jason had cleansed numerous villages, towns and cities, in the corrupted afterlife. The souls within, purged of taint by Jason’s ghostly fire, were connected to the land, which grew more vibrant as the souls within it were freed. Jason was sauntering along a busy street that would not have been out of place in medieval Europe, if Europe were populated by bizarre interdimensional warriors. He only noticed at the last second as a figure shot from the shadow of a roof’s underhang, a punching dagger aimed at his neck.

The attack was a blur of movement, too quick to dodge fully. What would have been an impaled throat become a gouged neck and the attacker was on him, too close for Jason to draw his sword. Instead of trying to break away, he grabbed the attacker and pulled her close, ramming his forehead into her nose with a sharp crack. She staggered back, dropping her dagger as she put both hands over her face, blood leaking through her fingers.

“You broke my nose!” she complained nasally.

“You stabbed my neck,” Jason pointed out, using crystal wash to clear the blood from the already-healed wound.”

“How is your regeneration so strong?” Melissa asked. “After a year in this place, my power level has been dragged down to the beginning of gold-rank.”

“As has mine. I just have a lot of recovery powers.”

“What was with that headbutt?”

“What do you mean?”

“The Way of the Reaper is meant to be an elegant style for assassins, not thugs banging heads together.”

“You may have been caught up in the romance of your assassination fantasy and overlooked a simple fact: a fighting style is for fighting. For killing. That’s true whether you’re an adventurer fighting monsters or an assassin murdering people. What matters is what works. You’d never catch me saying that it’s not about fighting monsters but how good you look doing it. That headbutt may not have been elegant, but it knocked you right out of your combat trance, immediately diminishing your effectiveness.”

“At this point I’d settle for pushing you hard enough that you had to use yours.”

“I always use mine. I’m in my combat trance right now.”

“What do you mean, you’re in it right now?”

“When mastery of your trance reaches a state of completion, you can slip in and out of it at will.”

“I know that, but how are you holding a conversation? Doesn’t it mess with your head? When I concentrate enough to enter my combat trance, my entire being focuses on myself, my target and my environment. I can’t string three words together.”

“That’s because you have an assassin power set, whereas I’m an affliction skirmisher. Your powers are all about the moment, so your combat trance is as well. Utter focus on being invisible until you pinpoint and maximise the key moment of attack. My combat trance is broader and more strategic. It helps me spot where I should be, or where I shouldn’t. Where an ally needs help or a weak link in the enemy can be exploited. The trade-off is that I don’t share your focus. Moment to moment, blade to blade, yours is superior. I’ve done the kind of training you wouldn’t believe if I told you, yet I have swordmaster friends who still outpace me in raw technique. Their combat trances are simply better suited to the task. They’re better at direct confrontation while I’m better at avoiding that to murder everyone around them. Then they kind of just fall over and die without ever actually fighting me properly.”

She looked at him from under raised eyebrows.

“You kind of have evil powers, don’t you? And I’m an assassin saying that. This can’t be the first time you’re hearing it.”

“It may have come up. Let’s go get some lunch.”

They set off down the broad boulevard, filled with boisterous hunters and warriors. Some strolled down the street while biting into haunches of cooked meat taken from street vendors. Others carried kills with them, beasts slung over their shoulders. Their violent interaction had garnered only minimal interest from the crowds, with more than one similar clash taking place in the time they’d been talking.

Jason had learned that this afterlife had originally been akin to the Elysian Fields: a place for heroes and champions to spend the hereafter in revels, battles and hunting. Boisterous and combative individuals were to be found all over, and there was no death awaiting the already dead.

“I’m worried about the vampires,” Melissa told Jason as they strolled. “I think these minor skirmishes they’ve been throwing at you are more than just wariness of you killing them. They’re trying to lull you into a false sense of safety before making their big move.”

“I agree. They’ve seen enough of my patterns and methods to plan a major attack. We’ll know it’s the real deal when Thadwick shows himself. I think he’s been holding off so I don’t get a sense of how potent the power of his sword will be on me.”

“How bad to you think?”

“Disastrous. I’ve seen how dangerous the other weapons are to a gestalt entity like this avatar, and they’re just imitations of what Thadwick has. I suspect that, without my soul to bind it together properly, this avatar will fall apart if the real thing even touches me, but touching me is the trick. He knows how elusive I am in a fight. How skilled. Even with our power levels normalised, I’m taking his vampires on in groups and winning. He loses a few every time.”

“He’s got more. A lot more.”

“Yes, and he won’t commit them fully unless he’s confident they can set me up for a definitive strike from his sword.”

“How long do you think he’ll wait?”

“He’ll make his move before I hit diamond. If I break the seal on my soul, I can tap into my full power. The sword may work less well then, or not at all.”

“Or it might still have full effect.”

“Maybe, but I’ll be able to pull in a replacement avatar at that point.”

“You’ll have to do better than the one you have now,” Raythe said, stepping out of the crowd. “Once you reach diamond rank, you’ll need avatars significantly more sophisticated than your current example.”

“I saw one that the leader of the messengers was using,” Jason said. “It was a work of art.”

“As yours will need to be. As of diamond-rank, you draw much closer to possessing a true prime avatar, and you’re not just another astral king. You will need an avatar as good or better than Jamis Fran Muskar if you intend to express even a portion of your true power.”

“Is that why you’ve come for another prison visit? To teach me?”

“Yes.”

“This isn’t going to be a quick seminar situation, is it?”

“It will be a lengthy endeavour. I will need to visit this realm as much as I can around my other duties.”

“Okay, but first we’re having lunch. You want in?”

“I have time.”

***

The corruption of the afterlife was centred in the souls it contained. As the souls were purified, so was the land beneath them. This included the animals and magical beasts of the land that many of the souls spent eternity hunting. The largest city liberated so far was unusual compared to many of the others. Rather than a collection of stone and wood that would have fit into Earth’s Middle Ages, it was a metropolis of steel and glass. Unlike other cities, however, it had not been returned to a pristine state of recovery. It remained a ruin, the jungle surrounding it encroaching heavily. Some buildings had collapsed entirely, while others were reduced to leaning frameworks in imminent danger of toppling. Trees grew through cracked streets and vines climbed over shattered freeways and crumbling cathedrals; futuristic vehicles lay crashed and scattered, some sticking out of the sides of buildings, high above the ground.

Jason walked the streets alongside Shade and Gordon, the latter using his eye orbs to gawk like a tourist. Leading them was Yujin, one of the few humans in this afterlife. He had the temperance of a monk from Earth and the combat skills of a monk from a video game.

They were not alone in the city, but there were far more beasts than people. They would occasionally spot another soul stalking a creature, although it was not always easy to tell hunter from animal. What looked like an upright bear with four legs, a loincloth and a spear paused from stalking a deer-like creature when it spotted their group. It stared briefly before nodding and returning to its task.

“It was like this before the corruption,” Yujin explained, gesturing at a ruined and overgrown storefront. Jason didn’t recognise the language on the dirty, faded sign, but his translation power allowed him to read it. It was some kind of food store, although what it sold he didn’t know.

“What’s comipo?” he asked.

“Street food,” Yujin explained. “Similar to makale.”

“I don’t know what that is either.”

“You can buy them from carts in some of the liberated cities. Not this one, obviously, but I can show you, if you like.”

“Please and thank you. Why headquarter out of this city, if it’s a ruin?”

“While the city’s condition is dire, it contains some of the most advanced magitech in the realm. Lalia understands enough that she’s been able to repair tools that will be useful in monitoring the corruption. She has apparently sent machines into the sky to float around and watch the ground.”

“Satellites?”

“I believe that was the word, yes.”

“She’s been busy while I’ve been clearing towns and baiting vampires.”

“We all have. The people of this realm are deeply individualistic, but we have been forming organised groups to confront the corruption as it tries to reclaim territory. We can explain more once we arrive.”

Yujin pointed out a skyscraper that was mostly intact, a glass edifice with little more damage than dirty or broken windows. There were even lights on some of the upper floors.

“I’m sensing something in there,” Jason said. “Kind of like mana lamps that let you conduct high-end rituals in low-magic areas. This is more complex, though.”

“Lalia managed to scrounge up and repair something to give the building power,” Yujin explained.

“Likely some version of a mana reactor,” Shade said. “They are typical power sources in advanced magitech societies.”

They went into the building, through the hole where a rotating door has once been. The twisted metal frame and shattered glass of the door were found inside, in a large atrium.

“It looks like a corporate lobby after a superhero battle,” Jason said. “Are you seeing that?”

He pointed past a stone-top reception desk that had been broken in half to a bank of four elevators. One had doors too dented to open, while another had no doors at all, exposing an empty shaft. The third did have an elevator, but the doors were held open by what looked like the back half of a speedboat.

“I’d love to hear the story behind that,” Jason said as Yujin led them to the last, and only functional elevator. As the doors closed on them, Jason couldn’t help but stare at the sign reading ‘do not use elevators during fire or emergency.’

When the doors opened to admit them to the top floor, it was a complete change from the dilapidated atrium. A single room occupied most of the floor, with sparkling floor tiles, clean walls and intact windows looking out over the city. A glass-walled conference area and three doors labelled as bathrooms were the only sealed-off spaces. It was set up as some kind of command centre, a briefing area facing a large screen and a central console around which three people were standing.

Lalia, the lizard-like techno-knight was wearing a sleek body suit, her armour on a rack by the wall, alongside what looked like a series of ray guns. Aeora, the wind fairy, was draped in diaphanous fabric as pale as she was, a stark contrast to Baloc, the hulking orc. The console in front of them was hexagonal, projecting a hologram of the planet above it. Jason wondered absently how far the afterlife realm extended beyond the solitary planet, as there did seem to be a sun at the very least. He kept his questions to himself, however, as Baloc was talking.

“…we’ve now confirmed that if we fight the corrupted and get taken down, the corruption does take us over again. The inverse is not true, unfortunately, and the uncorrupted taking down corrupted does not purge them of their condition. They will just get back up and keep fighting, even if we annihilate them. I saw one reform out of thin air with my own eyes.”

“Meaning we must continue to rely on Asano as the main source of purgation,” Lalia said. “We’re focusing our efforts defensively, working on holding cities and evacuating smaller population centres when corrupted forces move on them.”

“Is that happening a lot?” Jason asked.

The three turned to look at him.

“To an increasing degree,” Lalia said. “The population of the realm that remains corrupted is unintelligent, so far as we know, but as a whole, the corrupted are demonstrating what seems to be a collective will. We’ve been observing them and they appear to be reacting to the territory you’re retaking.”

“And by territory, she means people,” Aeora clarified. “The land seems to react to the people on it. Uncorrupted people, uncorrupted land. Tainted people, tainted land.”

“Reacting how?” Jason asked.

“In two ways, that we can see,” Lalia explained. “One is that we’re seeing movements to retake regions you’ve claimed. We tried fighting them, but we’ve shifted to evacuation, for the most part. Consolidating in the more defensible areas. Landscapes that make natural defence points, like mountain passes, or cities defensive measures. The more archaic cities have large walls, usually with embedded enchantments. The more advanced ones have emplaced weapons, although most are non-functional. We’ve been working to get them online, but we’re struggling to find people. Not many of us are from societies with developed magitech, and few of those that are turned out to have relevant skills. I’ve been recruiting engineers, scientists, anyone with magitech knowledge.”

“We aren’t the only one consolidating, though,” Baloc said, the big orc’s voice distractingly deep and sensual. He had thus far resisted Jason’s attempts to cover Barry White songs. “The satellites have revealed that deeper in corrupted territory, they’re starting to collect themselves. Where they do, we see them acting in more organised fashion. It’s as if the more of them there are in one place, the smarter they become. Closer to an actual intelligence.”

“Some kind of undead hive mind?” Jason posited.

“That’s what we’re thinking,” Lalia said. “What we don’t have is any idea of what to do about it.”

“You think I should go deep?” Jason asked. “Try cleansing one of these collectives and see what happens?”

“Not at this stage,” Lalia said. “We’d like to keep observing for now.”

“More importantly,” Baloc said, “we need to avoid pushback from the areas you’ve already purged. Evacuating regions where the corruption is counterattacking only works when we have the right places to withdraw to. We need to carefully maintain that territory or we’ll get undead hordes moving in to reclaim what you’ve already taken.”

“None of us want to end up corrupted again,” Aeora said, getting firm nods of agreement.

“We would like to start being more strategic in how we attempt to purge the realm,” Lalia said, “but obviously that is predicated on you, Jason. Your ghost fire is the only effective weapon we have, and I’d like to use our new satellite network to make the most of it. The question is, are you willing to let us plan out when and how you move?”

“Of course,” Jason said, “but I’m considerably concerned by their apparently growing intelligence.”

“As are we all,” Aeora said. “What happens when enough of the corrupted come together is an open question.”

“That we’ll get the answer to whatever we do,” Baloc said. “For now, we should keep working. Plan our next moves against the corruption right in front of us, as well as what to do about the vampires.”

“Absolutely,” Jason agreed. “On a side note, does anyone know where I can get a makale?”

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