Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 785
🕑 Added 2024-12-24 20:30:49 +0000 UTCThe first thing I needed to do was to establish the degree of threat. My Danger Sense was screaming at me, and I felt all my instincts insisting this guy was dangerous. Dantalion couldn’t tell anything about the temple, but it could read a D-ranker easily enough. Except when I focused on him…
“You’re at C-rank,” I said flatly. “Were you hiding that too?”
That meant Solid Path, at least, and way more Impact than I had. No wonder he seemed so confident. I wasn’t sure if I could take a C-ranker. I knew up to this point it had been basically impossible for me to cross that divide. But with Sammael boosting my other forms…it might be doable. If I played it right.
He just chuckled. “Not hiding it, no. Suppressing it. My Deception Path is strong, and with my Lord’s blessing I can accomplish plenty, but fooling the senses of the divine in regards to Impact is functionally impossible, even for someone like me.”
His gaze flicked to the others, and even from the depths of his hood I could see the implied threat. He couldn’t hide from gods, but he could hurt Dom and Sable.
Which obviously wasn’t allowed. Aside from me liking them, they’d just signed extensive employment contracts, and I wasn’t letting two valuable supporters get killed in front of me even if they hadn’t been new friends.
“So, this is the part where you wax eloquent about your evil plan right?” I asked with faux boredom. “I mean you clearly put a lot into it. Might as well share.”
“See, I know you’re stalling,” he said gleefully. “But you’re actually kind of right. And since I can crush you any time you decide to come over here, I suppose I’ll enjoy myself. Deception is always so much more clever in retrospect, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “Sure, whatever you say. So, I take it you knew who I was from the beginning?”
“My Lord did,” he admitted. “While the god of secrets may not be able to pierce the veil of ongoing subterfuge, that mask of yours is still a form of Deception. But of course, it was child’s play for him to deduce the thoughts of a toddler like Black Sorrow. Your heritage is no secret from anyone of import anymore.”
So they’d been letting me slide and maybe even helping me go unnoticed so I’d come here and retrieve the objects. “I don’t buy it,” I said with a shake of my head. “I don’t believe you knew everything from day one. Otherwise you wouldn’t have needed to scout anything with the birds. You were looking for me. Which means you had some way of track-” I froze. “Oh you son of a bitch. The pendant.”
That fucking tracking necklace. Ray hadn’t been able to steal it, he’d needed to ask me for help. I’d thought the task seemed a little harsh for such an early trial. Because they KNEW he’d come to me. Hell, Echelon might have been the one to give him the trial and he might have steered the conversation towards me subtly. He WAS a priest of a Deception god.
His laugh this time was colder and more smug. “Took you long enough. Yes, touching it when you retrieved the stone was more than enough. Your energy signature was imprinted on it. We used it to track you from there. You vanished a few times, oddly, but we always reestablished contact. See, we knew about the fields, but they’re D-rank exclusive. You can rank up here, but can’t come in at C or above. And this temple is fairly well hidden if you don’t know the general area to look in.”
It wasn’t, really. I mean, the marsh was legendarily toxic, so I guess people might avoid it, but it probably would have been my first guess for the location of a place like this. Plus with Dantalion I could have found it even without the stone, even if it might have taken longer. The sharklings had been more help than anything, though admittedly the stone had gotten me to a tribe close by.
More than anything though, I was fucking annoyed. Ray was my friend, and he’d been used by this complete asshole. I knew he hadn’t been aware of what was happening, I’d been trapped in a room with him in Dantalion form for like a week. No one was that good a liar.
So this dick had hijacked my friend’s trial (albeit the trial of a god who was obviously terrible and he was probably better off not working for) to mess with me, and it had worked.
This was also an important lesson on the limits of Dantalion. Knowledge was power, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Things that were hidden from the people I was looking into or that had been removed from the situation by other means wouldn’t be picked up. Dantalion was powerful but not foolproof.
Clearly having worked himself up to a full head of steam, he continued explaining, bragging about how he’d manipulated all of us, how brilliant he was and how he was in line to be the next high priest.
As he spoke, I considered my options. I was already active in Sammael, but I let Zagan fade. It had been covered by Mornax so he didn’t notice when I replaced the form with Mephistopheles, maximizing my power output. Just to stack on top of that, I also triggered Belial. Three forms was theoretically my limit, but Sammael was such a minimal drain that it didn’t really count, and actually kind of helped with the strain a bit.
I started towards the platform, stashing the objects of power in my ring, and he took notice as I jumped from rock to rock, but he clearly assumed he’d already won and didn’t bother to pay more than cursory attention to me. He DID slowly drift toward Dom, the more accessible of my two companions.
He definitely was NOT expecting me to appear behind him, staff blurring forward into a storm of explosive thrusts.
Snarling, he scattered into pieces, crows bursting out, but I’d been expecting that. With a quick flare of Dantalion to confirm something, Limbo exploded out around us, each thrust destroying a possible route of escape as I poured my most destructive power out through my staff. To my concern, the wood of the weapon groaned slightly at the output, but luckily didn’t actually break.
An explosion of black corrosive fire swallowed one of the crows, then another, and I hit a third before the rest were too far away to catch and coalesced on the other side of the platform. I laughed spinning my staff around me in a slow circle, winding up for a possible attack.
“How did you do that?” hissed Echelon. “You don’t have the power to damage anyone at the C-rank!”
I grinned under my mask. He was wrong. I didn’t have the power before, but he’d just told me he was BARELY C-rank. The gap was substantial, but between my domain, Sammael, my techniques, and the sheer power of my corrosive flame energy after combining Mephistopheles and Belial, I’d managed to bridge the gap.
Of course, there was another important factor. Echelon used a sort of coalescing body ability that let him turn into birds. But while each of those birds might be nominally C-rank, they were actually slightly below that level. The dispersion of his body created vulnerabilities in the individual pieces.
My shots had infected not just three birds. But the three WEAKEST birds. After analyzing them with Dantalion it had been simple to identify the three most vulnerable of the constructs. Whether it was because of what part of the body they had been or just uneven distribution, the three I’d picked had been enough to seriously throw off the newly minted C-ranker. Who had revealed his face when he coalesced, not having time to re-don his cloak in the hurry.
Sure enough, one of his eyes was crackling with horrifying black energy, the destructive power radiating out from the socket to chew away at his face. I couldn’t see the other two spots I’d struck him, but I could tell from the way he was holding himself that they had fucking HURT.
“Shame you don’t worship the Lady,” I taunted him. “That kind of pain wouldn’t even make you blink. But I guess being a priest of a god of lies is useful when you want to convince yourself you don’t really suck.” I flickered again, Double Trouble bringing me behind him, my attack aimed right at the base of his skull.
Unfortunately, he must have just not noticed me teleport before, because his Deception Path allowed him to see right through the illusory me and he whirled with deadly speed, fingers extending into razor sharp talons as he swiped at my face.
My Danger Sense warned me ahead of time, so I triggered my Waltz and vanished, but he was fast enough to catch me on the way out. I heard a grinding screech and sparks flew up, my mask perfectly stopping his attack and possibly even damaging his claws. With the extra time, Sable dropped her root cage for a second, the arm of the giant upper golem snagging Dom and hurling him into the cage with her before it closed up.
“How’s that eye doing?” I smirked at the enemy priest. “Probably barely works. Your depth perception must be going to shit.”
In reality, his eye didn’t seem to be degrading as much as it should. The combination of energies was hyper corrosive and Sammael amplified it massively, but despite how hard I was trying to play it off, the rank gap from mid D to C was substantial. I’d gotten lucky and scored a serious hit and he was wary, but he was going to figure out how hard I was bluffing soon.
I considered my options. I could try to use the scythe…but I hadn’t inherited my great-grandmother’s power. My bloodline made me resistant to the passive lingering energy in the air, which was probably left as some sort of blood lock, but it didn’t make me a fucking practitioner of Enshrining Darkness. My sister could probably do some damage with the scythe without needing training, but if I wanted to access it, I’d need lessons.
The inkstone had a similar problem, and I wasn’t sure what good using the wreath would even do me, considering it was apparently designed as a fun and exciting new method of soul torture that just happened to make it easier to reach A-rank.
My powers were impressive, but they weren’t enough to bridge the gap. Not really. I needed more. Needed to be stronger. My story wasn’t over. Not here. Not after so much time and effort. I wouldn’t die forgotten in some bullshit temple belonging to a long forgotten god. I was better than that.
I wished my friends were around to help, but even if they weren’t with me, I wasn’t alone. Not really. I wished I could call Callie for help. Could call Zeke. Could call anyone. Even my fucking DAD would be an acceptable source of aid against this bastard.
And then I felt it. That strange little click. I’d experienced it before. Like someone had shoved a lever under my consciousness and shifted it about an inch to one side, and suddenly it slotted into place in my brain in way that just hadn’t lined up before. Flames exploded across my vision, not black or green, but the familiar purple.
My sight was consumed by the fire, and when it cleared, I wasn’t in the temple anymore. I was in a pitch black void, and the only other person there was the person I’d just been thinking about. My father, sitting in an armchair reading a book in the empty void of nothingness. When I appeared, he sighed and shut the book, looking up at me with annoyance. “Well. It took you long enough.”
Comments
Michelle Ray
Thanks for the chapter. 🖤 That cliffhanger is brutal! Happy Christmas Eve.
thaughton2
Deus ex Padre
