Corruption Wielder

Blurb

When the world ends, humanity must fight to survive—but where others struggle in fear, Will sees only an opportunity to thrive.

April 3rd, 3:46 AM. Planet Earth merges with the magical world of Arcadia, and a system gives humanity a choice: 40 years of indentured servitude, or entering a tutorial as a user to fight against the chaos incursion.

Will doesn’t hesitate—but the system thanks him for stepping into the fight by throwing him into an impossible tutorial. With little chance of survival, Will has a simple response: “Screw it. Might as well fight fire with fire."

Warning: [Corruption] has been chosen as primary attribute.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read the first book and all the available chapters (67) on Royal Road.

I can’t help but feel like if this book was published before the other heavy hitters like Defiance of the Fall, that it might become one of the reference stories for the genre as a whole. It’s got the right beats, the solo-MC who still helps his friends, the tournament arc, the overwhelming odds, the MC standing up to literal gods and getting away with it, and the ridiculous skill combos and juicy rewards that constantly smack that dopamine button in our brains.

What it doesn’t have are ten thousand pages of backlog, to my frustration.

Right, so to expand on the blurb a bit, the story follows Will. He’s a pretty chill dude, classic introvert MC who hates the wage-slave system we’ve got going on in reality, and he takes the apocalypse with just as much gusto and aplomb as Jake from Primal Hunter. While Randidly gets his tutorial zone in a dangerous dungeon, Will gets teleported to a corrupted area of the planet that’s just been smushed into Earth, and as you may have guessed, this leads both to him not having a good time, and also him becoming stronger than average very quickly.

He has his tutorial helper to try and guide him, and the worldbuilding here is nice as the helper has personality, and this deepens into the wider plot and characters that come later. He also makes a friend! An elf lady that’s three parts savagery and one part cutting wit. As expected, they get on like a housefire that warms my heart as a reader. Friend’s aren’t Will’s strong suite anyway, so if you’re wanting this to become a party-focused story with a wide cast of common combatants, this isn’t for you.

Think more Portal to Nova Roma, wherein the MC goes at things mostly alone but has a core group of friends he’s loyal to and would go out of his way to help. Those side characters get some development, and it’ll be interesting to see how Slifer (Aaron, I guess?) manages to continue adding dimension to them without pulling narrative focus away from Will and his more chaotic shenanigans.

As the tournament arc starts up, the global plot starts to press down on Will, and the author has dropped tons of hints for accelerating timelines and big events just over the horizon. As to what they are, I don’t know, I’m out of chappies!

Definitely recommend this story for anyone going on a system-apocalypse binge, especially fans of DotF, Primal Hunter, Randidly, and the other heavyweights.