Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 744
🕑 Added 2024-10-28 15:56:50 +0000 UTCI groaned as I thumped down into my seat in the inn’s dining room. “Oh gods. My stomach. What the hell did she give us? I’m still in pain, even after it ‘wore off’. Also I’m so hungry, but I can’t imagine eating.” I looked at the others. “Are you guys hungry?” Dropping all the false formality was a relief, since I actually liked everyone I was working beside here.
Ray moaned pitifully. “Please don’t talk about food. I’m pretending to live in a universe where I don’t need to consume sustenance to live. Do you think there’s a racial trait that lets you live off photosynthesis like a plant? That sounds pretty good right now. Just lay out and work on my tan when I’m hungry.”
“Dryad maybe?” I said slowly. “I’m not even sure if they’re actually green. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Now I’m curious.”
“You’re really going to keep going?” Vesper said with a groan. “After that? From what the second trial for Delthrys was like, I assume that they get harder. That was…agonizing. I can’t imagine the next one will be better. I’m not taking the second one, I’ll wait for one of the other gods.”
I nodded. “It’s what I’m here for. I’m honestly relieved that its not torturing small animals or something. Pain is inevitable.”
“You sound like HER.” She teased. “Are we going to start hearing long diatribes about pain and how it brings us together. Don’t you feel CLOSER to us now Fist?” She crooned that last bit in a sugary voice that was so over the top it couldn’t be anything but mocking, and we all burst out laughing, yes, even me.
“Well, when I get offered salvation by the Lady of Lamentation and welcomed into her super special best friends afterlife where everyone is at peace with each other, you guys aren’t invited.” They stared at me in shock, and I wondered what the hell they were so surprised about, since it had obviously been a joke, until I realized something had felt different. “Huh.” I said in my normal voice. “I lost the demon tone just then, didn’t I?”
They nodded slowly. “Yeah, it sounds weird.” Said Vesper. “Like…human. I don’t associate you with that. What brought about this change? You trust us now?”
I shrugged. “I’d already let my real personality show. Might as well drop the pretense.” Also voices weren’t particularly distinctive, and no one I’d be interacting with had met me. People took pictures of faces, but I doubted anyone was going to be sending recordings of my speaking voice across the galaxy on the off chance I showed up somewhere.
Plus, now that I was in the right series of trials, I had no reason to keep people at arms length. I wasn’t competing with any of them anymore. They were all dropping out of the Lamentation trials because they weren’t fucking insane (or working for someone insane), and I wasn’t taking on any others, so I was officially out of the running for their respective goals.
It felt nice to let my guard down a LITTLE. I’d already accepted maybe making some friends, but this felt different. I could relax a little more, even outside of my downtime and training Bella (she was currently working on her movement technique, hoping to get it functioning after my last round of advice). Of course, a poorly timed spike of stomach pain reminded me I wasn’t exactly out of the woods.
This series of trials was going to push me beyond my limits. Mornax might help with some of it, but I was going to have to come up with another technique to help offset some of it. I even had an idea of how it might work.
Triggering Mephistopheles, I focused on the pain in my stomach. That was a mistake, my Focus homed in on the pain, amplifying it, but that didn’t matter right now. I let myself feel the suffering, like a flame in my gut, and then I pushed my power into it. Black flame flooded my gut, condensing inside the pit of my stomach into…well, a pit.
I could feel it readying, hungering, I pushed the pain into it, and I felt it slam into that pit and start to break apart. It wasn’t enough though. I needed not just a place to put the pain, but a way to shunt it out of the rest of my body. I had to turn myself into a vessel, a spout to pour the agony down that led right into that endless yearning pit of black fire.
I triggered Mornax, then Dark Reflection, False Fatality. Both methods of reflecting or altering the impact of damage. I felt something start to click, to blend together in a familiar way, and suddenly…I felt it snap into place.
A pseudo Domain manifested in me, condensed to the size of my body. The second circle of hell: Gluttony.In the original myths circle two had been Lust, but I had no use for that, and my circles weren’t going to follow the original script anyway.
I spun myself a story. About a monstrous place where Mephistopheles and Mornax created a pit of destruction contained within an unbreakable body. A consuming chasm that chewed up their enemies and digested them for strength.
Gluttony was a powerful ability. A condensed domain that operated within the limits of my body. Mornax made me nearly indestructible at my level, but Gluttony didn’t just tank damage. It ATE it. Gulped down attacks and burned them away in the destruction of the pit in my stomach. I could feel that it would synergize with Abomination Engine too, providing another way for my body enhancement technique to gain power faster.
The others were staring at me in shock. “What the fuck was THAT?” Desria demanded, having been mostly keeping quiet in her suffering.
“That was a new trick.” I laughed. “I can’t go into details. Just a technique I was working on.”
I’d succeeded too. Gluttony didn’t JUST eat pain, but it definitely did that too. It gave me a way to withstand what was coming.
“You just…invent techniques?” Said Ray in an impressed tone. “Because that’s kind of terrifying. Most people take a lot longer than…a minute or two to make them. Techniques require focus and structure. Imagination and vision. Making them is one of the hardest parts about being an Ascendant.”
He sounded serious, which was kind of a shock coming from Ray. But honestly, what he said didn’t seem right to me. My mother’s surprise at my ease of technique use had seemed odd to me for a long time. Techniques were easy. You just…made them. You came up with an idea and then put it into practice.
But hearing Ray talk about them like that made it clear that I wasn’t the norm. I’d helped a lot of my friends make Techniques, but they didn’t have as many as I dad and theirs didn’t seem to be as powerful.
Was I really just a natural genius at techniques? I mean, I’d gotten my Path by accident way too early. Was it some mixture of having a lot of Path to work with and a strong soul? It was an intriguing thing to think about. It felt good to have a talent like that, but it seemed to have come from nowhere. If it was Skills I’d get it, the original Wishmaster was a Skill genius, so maybe it was genetic. Could my ability with techniques just be some kind of mutated bloodline talent? Did those even exist?
“Hellooo?” Said Vesper, waving a hand in my face. “Fist, you in there? Or did the black flames on your head literally fry your brain?”
“I was just considering how to tell Ray that he’s probably just bad at techniques.” I said in a faux contrite tone. “He’s already D-rank, I was worried that finding out he’s not cut out for being an Ascendant might break his poor little heart.”
Desria, Cavallo, and Vesper all burst out laughing. Ray just gasped. “I liked you better when you were pretending to be all menacing and silent.” He grumbled. “Talky Fist is mean.”
“You’re just pissed you don’t get to be friends with Devilghost.” I snorted. “Sorry I’m not the fictional character you idolized as a kid. I may be badass, but I’m a perfectly normal person under this C-rank armor.”
Vesper snorted. “Sorry Fist, but jokes aside, Ray isn’t wrong. You absolutely are NOT normal. You have a partial Domain at D-rank, and not a fake one. You also have way more techniques than you should. I’m betting we haven’t even seen all of them, but I’ve seen you use a couple at least.”
I suspected she was assuming some of my forms were techniques of their own, which…they almost were? But not really. Still, I wasn’t going to explain to them how my powers worked, that would have been absurd. Instead I just shrugged. “It’s ok.” I consoled them teasingly. “Someday you too may be as strong as I am.”
“I mean, that day might be pretty soon.” Reasoned Ray. “If you get tortured into insanity by that crazy nun.”
“Gee, thanks Ray.” I said wryly. “Because I needed more reasons to have nightmares.” I paused after that. “Actually, I have surprisingly few nightmares considering all the things I’ve seen.” Admittedly, having Callie around probably helped. I always slept better when my wife was next to me. Which was still a crazy thought to have, but if I went down the ‘holy shit I’m married’ rabbit hole every time I thought the word wife I’d never do anything else.
I felt a surge of amusement and affection through the bond, and realized that even without a direct communication thought Callie was good enough at reading my emotions to pick up the general shape of my thoughts. I sent a burst of warmth through the bond, just a quick I love you, and got one in return before going back to talking to my new friends.
They were going on about possible trials they might have to face, and some of them made me kind of glad I was locked in on my current series. I wondered how many others would be involved in the trials later on. I was pretty sure that there were other groups of people on Rackham for the selection and they just weren’t nearby, there was no way there was less than ten of us total.
On the upside, it would take a…special type of person to follow the path I was taking, so I doubted it would be too busy. I was betting the Lamentation trials were the least popular of all the trials, actually. Which probably improved my chances if I could stick them out.
We spent the rest of the night talking, going on about all the crazy shit we might have to deal with, and talking about what we’d do if we got selected. None of us knew how the internal structure of the vanished gods forces worked, so it was mostly guesswork and nonsense, but it was still a lot of fun.
When the night ended, we said our goodbyes and headed up to our rooms, and I stripped off my armor and flopped into bed. After a quick conversation with my wife to let her know how the trial had gone (and ignore her laughter at my absurd experience) I was finally ready to head to sleep.
Tomorrow I’d be talking to Sister Bernadette again to see how long I’d need to wait for my next trial. I didn’t know how many rounds the Lamentation series had, or any of them had, really, but I wanted to get started as soon as possible. Dragging it out was just going to make things ten times more agonizing. Surprisingly, I was smiling as I fell asleep. Painful and imposing things might be, but at the very least I wasn’t bored.
Comments
Lucas
Great!
CamChains
tftc!
