Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 657
🕑 Added 2024-06-27 17:57:29 +0000 UTC“You alright?” My mother asked Zeke as she briefly put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. My uncle looked ghastly, half his face a pristine porcelain white, half a burned and mangled mess. All three of the fighters from our side were watching the skull masked man, worriedly waiting for his next move.
Zeke nodded tightly. “M’fine.” He mumbled. “Split my attention trying to help you. Rookie mistake. I’ve been getting cocky, just because I’ve never heard of this guy I assumed he wasn’t anything special. Hey, you, the macabre bastard in the headgear, what’s your name.”
The witch doll cackled from where it sat between the demons horns. “You speak to the chosen of the Lady of Lamentation, his excellency Tartarus, youngest of the Unholy Eight.”
“Are you two also members?” Zeke said snarkily. “Because that’s a lot less impressive to me. I don’t think I could be afraid of a group with members like you.” Despite his casual words, I could tell he was keeping a close eye on Tartarus, worried he might attack again.
The demon snickered, earning a hiss of disapproval from the doll. “Fool.” The witch doll sneered in its high pitched voice. “We are no members of the Unholy Eight. Merely underlings accompanying Lord Tartarus on his journey. The Eight are comprised of the most dangerous champions of the six gods. To reach that step at merely A-rank, one can truly see how monstrous Lord Tartarus is.”
Smirking, the redhead chimed in. “Our Lord follows the Path of Lamentation and has been given a Domain seed by the lady herself.”
My stomach dropped out. That…that was bad. My mom had been teaching me more about cultivation. One of the biggest things was that Domains shouldn’t be established early on except in VERY specific circumstances. The only time she’d mentioned it being anything less than a crippling problem was in the case of Bethy, whose legend was most likely going to be close enough to her father’s to use a piece of his Domain to form her own.
Bethy was probably the scariest E-ranker I’d ever seen, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t just because I was inexperienced. If this guy was like Bethy, we might be in serious trouble. Hell, he might be worse, because for all his terrifying strength, Lark wasn’t a god. No wonder this person was admitted into a group of people that sounded like they were almost entirely comprised of S-rankers.
I was pretty sure I was right about how bad a situation this was, because my mom’s face had gone ghastly pale. My mom, who had two abilities and was considered one of the strongest A-rankers in the entire Red Revenant Church, was afraid.
“Sasha.” Zeke said stonily. “You and Andrew deal with the small fries. You can jump in to help when you’re finished.”
Her eyes widened in horror. “What? Ezekiel…Zeke. What are you going to do?”
I saw the cracked and burned skin of his face tear as he forced himself to smile. “Whatever I have to.”
Reaching down, he withdrew a mask. Then another, then another. Five different masks, then he reached up and peeled the half destroyed one off his face. But he didn’t stop there, he reached down and did something I’d seen him do one in battle, he grabbed his own burned face and peeled it off slowly, revealing a blank mask of white porcelain underneath.
He placed those two in the air in front of him with the others, all of them floating in a line, and then he snapped.
The first mask exploded, then the next. One by one they burst, and each time they did the pressure around him redoubled, stacking and condensing,slowly pushing him to a higher state of being.
Power beat the air like a maelstrom as the masks burst, until finally, the last one broke. The mask that looked like Zeke’s face, and there was one final shift. No, not a shift, an ascension. Zeke grew, his Impact pushing him higher up until he stood just beneath the S-rank. He hadn’t crossed that line, because I was pretty sure it would kill him, but he came infinitely close.
“What are you doing?” Snapped my mother in terror. “You can’t break that mask. You could die. No, more than that, your soul could shatter. If he kills you in that state…”
And I closed my eyes in pain, because my worries were confirmed. Zeke could destroy his masks to overclock their powers, but destroying the mask that was his own face…what the hell was going to happen? Was he already dead? My mom seemed to think not, but how easy would it be for him to lose here?
“You talk too much.” Zeke said, power beating on the air from his words. “Go deal with the minions.” And then he vanished.
He reappeared behind Tartarus, fist lashing out like a shooting star and smashed into the still turning mask. The huge man staggered, the air cracking like the boom of a cannon with the impact, but didn’t go down. He turned on a heel, palm smashing up at Zeke’s chin from a low angle, but my uncle was gone.
The teleportation power was the same as the one I’d seen from the Duke, and black destructive energy wreathed his fists. He stomped his foot and dark twisted roots tore from the ground, ones I remembered well from the games.
His masks had been made from new souls, perhaps ones he had saved, I didn’t know. I could see some duplicates of his old powers, as well as some new ones.
These weren’t discrete abilities though. They were part of him. They’d blended together into one gestalt whole, amplified by the breaking of his self mask, and his mastery over those powers was instinctual and brutally efficient.
Tartarus was driven back, and my mom and Andrew attacked the other two, pushing them back in their shock as they watched their boss get pummeled. But sadly, it wasn’t over yet. Tartarus pressed his palms together as if in prayer, and the crackling green energy on each hand harmonized, then expanded.
Before our eyes, a Domain took shape, a black jagged cliff made of blood stained iron overlooking an ocean of poison green light. Above the sea sat an unearthly stretched face, pale skin pulled up at the corners to reveal a gaping black abyss of a mouth ringed with jagged black iron teeth, black sclera’d eyes with glowing green irises beaming gleefully down at us all.
Zeke stumbled, the power on his body wavering, but it didn’t falter, just sort of crushed inward as if restricted. His blank white mask reflected the unearthly light.
Tartarus flickered, a palm smashing down at Zeke as he appeared in front of my uncle, and Zeke’s teleportation seemed to stall slightly under the Domain. He forced it through, but the palm grazed him as he blinked out, and as he reappeared, there was an explosion of blood as a palm print appeared from inside his back, blowing away muscle as if launched from within him.
He hissed in pain, and a golden light lit up the palm print, but it fizzled as it met crackling green energy, stalling out whatever that was supposed to do.
Tartarus came again, and Zeke teleported faster, having clearly figured out the trick, but while his teleportation was back to full speed, his body wasn’t. He traded blows, tearing gouged from Tartarus even as more palm strikes landed on him, and the bloody exposed palm gouges on his back started to accumulate.
The more they fought, the weaker Zeke seemed to get. Tartarus was flagging too, the pseudo S-rank power my uncle was wielding too much even for his Domain, but it wasn’t happening fast enough, and I was pretty sure the power was as tough on Zeke as it was on the enemy.
There was a pair of explosions, and my mother appeared, Andrew at her side, at the edge of the Domain. She snarled, body flaring with white light, and punched out. The edge of the green see was so close, but so infinitely far. There was a ripple in the Domain, but no more.
Her eyes widened in panic and she screamed, fists crashing into the bubble of otherworldly space like rain sheeting on rough stone. Implacable as the tide, she punched, a torrent of white flame exploding against the edges of a world, trying to get inside to help her friend, but no matter how hard she struck it wasn’t enough.
Zeke was barely standing now. His pseudo S-rank body was all that was keeping him up, but something was happening. The mask on his face was cracking, and rivulets of warm mercury were oozing out.
I remembered what my mother said earlier about his soul shattering. Zeke’s soul was mercury, one level off from mirror. If a mercury soul broke you couldn’t bring that person back, even with a Wish from the Wishmaster himself. Only mirror souls would retain their selfhood when shattered. That was why you needed one to become a god.
My uncle was dying right in front of me, and nothing was going to be able to bring him back. I heard someone screaming, cursing and pleading and crying, and I realized it was me, and Bethy and Abel each had one of my arms, and they were holding me back because I was trying to charge out of our protective sphere to run to my uncle and help him.
Mom was openly weeping, pounding on the Domain until her fists cracked and bled shining burning blood, but she couldn’t get in, and we watched in horror as Zeke collapsed to his knees, mercury soul leaking from that blank white mask.
Tartarus pulled back his palm and it blurred down towards the mask, towards Zeke’s face and soul, to deliver the final execution blow that would shatter my uncle forever and wipe him from existence.
And then he stopped. His palm froze an inch from Zeke’s head, unable to move forward another inch. I saw something twined into his fingers and up his arm, and followed it back to see his whole body was wrapped in liquid metal chains. No, not liquid metal, mercury. He was wrapped in souls.
Behind him were three figures, a pair of creatures of living mercury, kneeling down and pressing hands to the ground, extending their essence around him like restraints, and in the middle, a man with pitch black hair and blood red skin, with horns on his forehead and golden eyes that used to be the same green as mine.
He stood there placidly, hands folded on a dark cane with a mirror skull at the head, and his eyes fixed coldly on Tartarus. “Who exactly,” Asked Elijah Wyndham, the wish devil. “Do you think you’re putting your hands on?”
The dark wood of the cane tapped the black iron cliff, and the mirror skull flashed as it cracked, splitting in two, fragmenting the Domain itself in the process, and it dissolved like smoke, leaving them all standing in the hallway we’d first been in.
Mom blurred forward, catching Zeke as he collapsed forward. She examined him worriedly. “I can’t fix this.” she said in panic. “My purification isn’t optimized for something like this, Eli, he needs-”
He reached into a pocket, pulling out a vial full of shimmering reflective elixir. “Soul Serum.” He said, tossing it to her. “That should stabilize him until we get him to someone who can heal the damage. It’ll stop his soul from shattering.” She shot him an adoring smile that I recognized as being just like the ones Callie gave me, and I felt a confusing jumble of emotions as I saw them interact. Now wasn’t the time for that though.
My father’s eyes slid back to the restrained skull masked man. “In the meantime, I’ll get this out of our way. Remind me to have a talk with the venue owners. It’s poor manners to leave one’s trash in the hallway.” Tartarus heaved, tearing through the soul chains and blurring towards him, and my dad tapped his cane again, and the fight was on.
Comments
CringeWorthyStudios
Bahahahahaaha fucking called it! This was absolutely amazing. And to answer your question, no, you weren’t getting predictable. I’m both an editor for other authors, and an (admittedly unpublished) author myself, so I’ve got some experience in working with these kind of patterns and tropes. There were a few key patterns that made me think this was likely, which is why I mentioned it yesterday, but even then I wasn’t completely sure. Just for context the clues I noticed were as follows: - Shane’s wedding is soon and from both a plot and character design perspective it would have been weird if Elijah *didn’t* show up soon. - For the same reason it would have been strange for Zeke to die here as that would have negatively spiralled into the wedding arc and not in a way that would have helped the overall plot. - When a secondary character is killed off, there’s generally a balance between “too important for the plot to kill” and “not impactful enough for the readers/character to be worth killing.” Zeke was too far on the ‘important’ side to be a good choice this time. Interesting Sasha is actually a bit on both sides as, while she’s important to the characters, she hasn’t really been around long enough for the emotional value of her death to readers to exceed her actual value. - Basically a lot of other things that can be summed up as “not the right spot for Zeke to die.” The reason I predicted Elijah to show up was the same, it was the right spot. I figured it’d be either him or Lark which would work to add a little more character development to Bethy, but Elijah was the better option. - Also, as a positive reason this was an incredible opportunity for Elijah to step in for major positive character development. He’s actually pretty underdeveloped as a character so far and much of that is just Shane being annoyed at him. This was a place in the plot where Shane *couldn’t* in any way be upset at his actions so that made it more likely. Especially since you’ve built Elijah as a bit of a dick but not truly a bad person. Err, a bit of a ramble there but I *really* enjoy this kind of thing, so yeah. Awesome chapter today and, as I said before, you’re not getting too predictable, I’ve just got experience at this. 🤣 Thanks for the chapter!
Kevin McGuire
Maybe but I'm hoping he becomes a Nephalem.
Matija Milošević
Honestly, I wouldn't beat myself about it. The moment it was clear how strong those guys were and just how screwed Zeke was, Eli was the only reasonable deus ex machina. Especially given how suspiciously absent he was from the whole arc. I was actually expecting him to pop up yesterday, but I guess situation was not as desperate lol. In any case, it was very well executed climactic and cathartic moment. Now to see what papa Wyndham can do!
Dylan Alexander
You know what I’ve been thinking? It would actually make sense if Shane became a devil too because it blends with his demonic forms.
Malcolm Tent
I appreciate that lol it's a high compliment to get reread. I'm having a ton of fun writing it.
Lucas
Literally I have re-read this whole mini summit arc 3 times because it is so good and keeps getting better!
Malcolm Tent
Someone called this yesterday actually. I would say that I feel like I'm becoming predictable, but catching the breadcrumbs the day before isn't too embarrassing for me lol. Let me know what you think I've been building to this for a while and I think it came out well.
