Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 716
🕑 Added 2024-09-18 20:46:56 +0000 UTCIt was time. I felt my hands tingle as I clenched and unclenched my fists. A hundred people with me. Callie was gone, taking her fifty along. The angels, Abel, Jessie, Randall, and dozens of others were standing behind me, and all of us were stationed right outside the canon where Wintervale was situated.
“Go.” I said shortly, and we went. The formation training had been useful, helping us maintain a cohesive assault force, but Ascendant tactics were kind of paradoxical in that they prioritized being the best individual team player. Our movements were in synch, but very individual, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I triggered Beelzebub, letting my clones move out to attend their own tasks, and then Mephistopheles, before blitzing over the canyon cliff with Mephisto’s Waltz. Ripple running came to my like divine providence and my feet tapped the air in a mesmerizing cascade of shifting movement as I flickered across the open space toward…an army.
Travis had set his people out in rows, and it took me an activation of Eye of Revelation to see WHY. A Path. Travis had a Path, and he was using a very large and scary technique. The fighters were laid out like a giant chess board, with the Wendigos as pawns and his own people in the back as power pieces. Travis himself was the King, and I could see his smug smirk as he watched me descend from the sky, my forces behind me.
Three hundred. Three to one odds. That meant two hundred were waiting for Callie and the others, four to one, and I hated that ideas, but I couldn’t let it break my focus. They needed us to make enough noise to potentially pull in their reinforcements, and damned if we weren’t going to.
We hit Travis’s lines like the fist of an angry god, and I slammed down my staff in a brutal Cosmic Collapse, setting off a wave of black flame. Abel’s bloody fist manifestations rained down, the angels manifested their metallic light powers, and Randall expanded with a roar of horrifying bloodthirst as Jessie saty on his back, channeling a torrent of green energy into him.
The other worked the formations we gave them, maximizing their abilities in the context of smaller group while sticking to the plan, and for a second I thought we might win this easily…but that wasn’t happening.
Abel’s fist hit a massive wall of dark iron and rebounded, his body suddenly wrapped in a labyrinth of energy as he tried to slip away with his spatial powers, the angels were attacked by some kind of dark liquid mass, and Randall hit a pair of very large Wendigos that operated as a unit more effectively than I’d seen.
All over the battlefield, people were suddenly matched against their perfect counters, and I snarled as I watched Travis flicking his hands like a conductor, transporting his attackers this way and that, swapping out the worst possible enemy for each and every one of my people. This chess technique was letting him dictate the pace of the battle, suck us into his tempo, and his translocation was letting him perfectly counter our every move.
But I could transport too. I triggered Double Trouble, my staff licking out at him, and he vanished in a blink, the blow crushing the skull of an unsuspecting swordsman that had previously been matched against an ice used we’d brought along. I reoriented, found him again, and repeated. He glared at me from afar, flickering constantly as I matched him beat for beat, a run and gun battle across the chessboard.
Left and right, I left broken and dead enemies, his people plucked from wherever he could find them and unprepared for an assault with my most powerful offensive form.
As we moved, the technique started to break down, dissolving at the edges as I forced him to snatch pieces from wherever he could to survive. I had him on the back foot, but he was far too smart not to have a backup plan.
After my tenth kill, he glanced off in a seemingly random direction, and vanished…replaced by Mad Madigan. I felt my Danger Sense scream and, kicked off the air as the other man gestured dramatically. The labyrinth slammed down across the board, twisting lines of energy coruscating around us as they spatially separated the squares, locking all of our people into individual battles manipulated by Travis.
I prepared myself for the fight. I hadn’t been planning to fight Madigan, he was supposed to be Abel’s prey, but I could figure that out later. Or at least, I would have, if not for the colossal crimson fist that smashed through the spatial warping to one side of us, carrying the battered form of Travis, who had apparently ended up in a square WITH Abel, and had regretted it.
The translocator rolled off the momentum, coming up to his feet with a snarl as he glared at both of us. “You know.” He said with frustration. “The whole rabbit out of a hat thing goes from cute to annoying REALLY fast. Can’t you just fucking die like you’re supposed to?”
Without waiting for me to answer, he switched with a piece of rock behind me, ready to cave my skull in with a wicked looking black mace…and not at all ready for the staff that came down unseen on his ankle. He blinked out, appearing across the enclosure created by the two labyrinthine chess squares we now inhabited since Abel had collapsed a wall.
He glared at me. “What the fuck was that?”
I smiled unpleasantly. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. You were just about to backstab me again, right? Please, be my guest. I’ll wait.”
His eyes narrowed, and he scanned the area. Off to one side, Abel had engaged Madigan, and their fight was kind of hurting my head. The crazy labyrinth architect was using some kind of short range hand to hand style that warped space inside his guard, and Abel was bashing through and around it with spatial lubrication and his Path.
Try as he might though, Travis couldn’t see anything around us that could have attacked him. He was favoring his ankle and he had no idea what to do next.
Last time we’d fought, Travis had backstabbed me. His battlefield control was unassailable, and he had a nearly limitless number of options for how to attack. Predicting him was too reactive, and I wouldn’t be able to keep it up. I’d burn energy dodging and slow down the more we fought.
When I was a kid, I’d had these weird little colored blocks. They were tiny and had bumps that locked together, and they were infamous among parents in our childcare. Kids would leave them out and parents would step on them in the dark, and they were apparently INCREDIBLY painful. Zeke never seemed to care, but he was a B-ranker, so that made sense.
The thing was, those blocks were basically impossible to avoid, because they were small and blended into the carpet, especially in the dark.
Moral of the story: invisible obstacles could really fuck you up.
Secondary moral of the story: invisible CLONES of the person you’re fighting scattered across the battlefield in perfect stealth waiting to attack no matter where you landed could fuck you up even more.
I’d put a LOT of thought into beating Travis. My issue came down to the fact that he could just go anywhere, and if he went somewhere I wasn’t, I’d still be in the same spot. I couldn’t be in two places at once. Well, fuck that. I’d be in two places. I’d be in ALL the places. If he wanted to hop around the battlefield like a menace, I’d be there waiting every time.
He had no clue what was happening, because the clones (which had been marking me and following my trail as I Double Troubled around the battlefield waiting for him to do THIS exact thing) were all using their one form to lurk around in Bael, waiting to see where he went.
There was a lot of debris around (because Abel was not a precision instrument) and he was trying to figure out what was going on. He blinked around a few times, assessing the battlefield.
My clones had good reach, especially with staves in hand, and the layout of their positioning meant he basically couldn’t get within a hundred plus feet of me. He wasn’t coming in close though, just sort of circling, trying to suss out not only where his limits were, but exactly what was happening.
Sadly for him, that wasn’t going to work. I triggered my overlay, as did the others, and a parallel Piece of Mind was activated to track and sort all the data as I rushed toward him. He froze for a second, but then appeared off to one side of me, swinging his mace down at an angle to cripple a leg.
It was deflected, one of my clones knocking at aside as another swung at his head. I drove forward, explosions of black flame erupting as my staff blurred in a series of short, brutal thrusts. He deflected it with his mace as best he could, wheeling backward in panic, he tried to swap out with something nearby, but another clone tripped him, and the entire dozen of us just dogpiled on the bastard.
An explosion from above dragged my attention away from my enemy long enough to look up and see the rainbow manifestation of the formation above the snowglobe shatter, a cascade of falling fragments of colored light sprinkling down like rainbow glitter snow.
Unfortunately, that was when things started to go wrong. The snowglobe had been woven into the formation, at least as far as was necessary. Releasing the popsicles shouldn’t have broken the cold storage, which meant something ELSE had done it, but with the cold storage gone the snowglobe was falling.
Seeing his chance to escape, Travis bellowed. “DROP THE MAZE!” And the separating labyrinth keeping the squares of the chess board dissolved even as the technique itself fell apart.
It. Was. Chaos. Formerly separated groups of clashing enemies unleashed into a single large area, reinforcements from both sides falling from the fucking skies as the now unleashed E-rankers from both our team of fifty and the cold storage battled the two hundred soldiers (mostly Wendigos) Travis had position to block them.
They hadn’t gotten INSIDE, obviously, but the bastards had been waiting on the rainbow paths, and now the pandemonium of the falling battle was mixing with the chess board battle and no one knew which way was fucking up.
I glared at Travis as he blinked away, but I triggered a skill with one of my clones as it tapped him with a grazing blow. Marked for Death. It mostly worked to bypass armor, but it WAS a mark, and I could track it.
I left Abel to handle Madigan (breaking the labyrinth was the last step to elevating the planet and letting the high rankers back in) and took off after Travis, my feet blurring as I blinked across the sky in bursts of black fire.
He was a pain in the ass to follow. Fighting he’d been tough, but running he was a menace. Constant switches with random people, sometimes friends sometimes foes, and always in an erratic direction and distance, made him a nightmare to close in on. But I didn’t care.
Travis had done all of this to hurt me. To hurt Callie. Killing my friends and family and even my wife had been his main goal, just to make a statement for his gods.
Well I had a fucking statement to make two. I’d make it with his shattered corpse. He wasn’t getting away again. My clones were following behind me, but not able to keep up because they weren’t in Mephistopheles, but I ignored that. They’d get there eventually, and I wasn’t giving up my chance at revenge because of a slightly more even fight. Travis died tonight.
