Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 560
🕑 Added 2024-02-15 00:08:59 +0000 UTCAfter training with Randall for a while, I went to bed. I was exhausted and needed to rest up a bit before formation training the next day. In the morning I met with Camden, granted seven wishes (he’d started having me give formation skills, albeit low level ones, to his elite units) and stockpiled another two, bringing my tally to fourteen.
I was planning to use a few of those for my own stats soon, I was falling behind, and a big jump was necessary to rollover some of that godslayer renown that should still be waiting to hit. Probably on the low end given how many points I’d already been getting and my recent rank up, but I couldn’t stop growing just because I was at E-rank now.
Luckily, training today was much easier. Randall had a better grasp on how much to hold back, the unit was less afraid of him, and in general they improved a lot, learning to work together properly with their fellow formation members.
To my surprise, after things ended and they all left, before I could start on working through my Skills and tuning them up, I had a surprise visitor. My sister was waiting for me at the edge of the training ground, smiling at me nervously as she waited for me. “Hey…Shane, good to see you. Seems like its been ages doesn’t it?”
“Nope, saw you two days ago.” I said flatly. “What do you want?” I chuckled to let her know I was mostly kidding, even if I did suspect she was after a favor.
She flushed, looking guilty. “I know you’re busy but…I was thinking of breaking through to E-rank. I know I should talk to my guards, but I was kind of hoping you would watch over me while I rank up.” She swallowed, looking away. “Actually, nevermind, it’s stupid I can go ask Callen to-”
“Chelsea.” I said firmly, stopping her self-conscious babbling. “Why would that be stupid? We’re twins. You helped keep an eye on me and Callie when we ranked up.” Mostly because her purification flame would have been really useful if anything went wrong with the elixirs, but regardless of reasoning, my sister needed my help. I was happy to be there for her.
Holding out my hand, I smiled at her before realizing she couldn’t see my face. I coughed in embarrassment. “Um, I can help. Keep you under cover while you rank up. I have a skill that makes an area impossible to see into.”
Giggling slightly, she grabbed my hand. “I know, I’ve seen you use it, moron.” As I activated Moonlit Night, I let the skill flow through my hand and tag her, making it easy for her to see through the fog, then I let go. “Thanks.” She said with a smile. “You sure this will be enough to stop us from being spotted?”
Chances were good that Chelsea’s rank up would be uneventful, but I knew part of her reason for coming to see me was to be watched over by someone who knew her secret. And to keep anyone else from finding out. “Definitely. Unless someone with a Perception focus walks right up and tries to penetrate it at point blank range we should be fine.” Even then it would be tough to manage. I was going all out here, having created a parallel with Piece of Mind to tap my girlfriend’s Perception, and having another going specifically to study what was happening while my main parallel held up the fog. Even for my soul it was tough to manage, but the extra insurance was worth the price.
“So, what are your specialties stat wise?” I asked. “I know you have a lot of Might because of the physical nature of the flames, and a lot of Focus from all your research. Any other big stats? And are you using an elixir to make the jump like I did?”
She nodded, sitting down in a cross legged position and closing her eyes as she tried to center herself. “Those are the big ones. Purification isn’t healing, so it’s not a vitality thing. It also has enhancement properties for the use, but that’s an advanced technique I haven’t mastered yet. Once you can do that, Vitality starts coming into play more, since people associate you with being an unwavering bastion of physical power.”
Once again, I felt jealous. My sister got these awesome powerful abilities she inherited from our grandparents, and I got a support power. Wish was an amazing power, but it didn’t help ME nearly as much as it helped others. I loved buffing my friends, but part of me just wanted to blow shit up. That was what excited me so much about Path of the Doom Sovereign.
The further I went, the more I was able to offset the issues with my inherent gifts. In fact, I was expecting quite a few bumps in stats with my next milestone, I’d demonstrated some scary abilities back at the temple, and stories about that had to be disseminating, even if they weren’t as widespread as the godslaying stuff.
She nodded as she finally opened her eyes, exhaling slowly.. “But yes, Might is one of my highest. I made some wishes with Nat to push me up over the threshold and I’ve been holding back my rank up the last few days while waiting for you to be free.”
“Alright then.” I said with a grin. GO ahead and do it. I was a bit distracted during Callie’s, it’ll be nice to get a better look at the transition to E-rank, especially from this side of the line and fully stabilized.
Instead of just watching normally though, I elected to try something different. I triggered Eye of Revelation, focusing on my sister the same way I had focused on the gem on my crown. I wanted to see what changes would happen during rank up. Despite having a basic idea of what I was looking for though, when I turned my eye on a full person in that headspace it became difficult to process anything.
Forcing myself to look deeper (pushing through overwhelming input was a natural trick that all Ascendants learned, and using Focus to offset the senses from Perception to keep from going insane was good practice here) I was able to see…something.
I’d never looked at Impact before, not like this. It was something you could sense normally, just by glancing at a person, but seeing it like this was different. It was almost like a weight on my eyes, like pressure in a visual spectrum. It was difficult to describe, but I could see it slowly begin to deepen.
And as I watched that, I realized something amazing. That deepening was something I recognized. Not just from having experienced it, but because I’d seen the inverse dozens of times. Zeke used it constantly. As I watched, something shifted within my sister’s spirit, deep resonant colors bloomed through her soul (which I hadn’t even realized I was looking at) the endless cerulean blue boiling up, turning into a shining sapphire as it spilled over from her spirit the overflow making her…more.
This was how Impact increased. The rank up process improved the soul, and the spillover weighted the connection between spirit and body, increasing the conceptual weight through the Impact stat.
It was like watching the sun rise over the ocean, I was blown away. And as I watched it I identified the exact process that it went through and…reversed it.
I pushed my soul down, hollowing it out and allowing my Impact to drain into it, letting my body lighten conceptually as my Impact dropped. Not for real, granted, just in the same way Zeke did his little hiding trick. But I’d been trying to figure out how to do this since I first realized what he WAS doing.
More than anything this underscored how much more Zeke knew about the soul and the working of Ascendant power than I did. I could have done this it at any time, but I didn’t ever realize what was happening to me well enough to reproduce it.
I was sure my uncle knew all about Skills and proper application and construction of them too. I cursed my dad again, enraged that there was all this information I could have used that I wasn’t allowed by his ridiculous geas.
Sadly, both my experiment and my thoughts screeched to a halt as I realized that either suppressing Impact weakened Skills or I hadn’t been doing it right because the damned fog was starting to dim. I pushed with my soul, flooding myself with Impact as I restored all the possible Perception to this fog to obscure my sister.
She hadn’t even noticed, and under my Eye of Revelation I could see the runes in her body, too complex and intricate for me to possible understand, but with an obvious plurality of colors, specifically black and white energy clashing into each other, neither one claiming dominance as they pushed her further into her upgrade.
I wondered how that worked, and if I looked like that on rank up. Were my two abilities clashing? Harmonizing? The one thing I was sure of was that whatever was evolving her soul and increasing her Impact was also changing her abilities.
Ranking up changed patterns, I knew this, but seeing it at Intermediate as the two abilities she already had (the ones far too complex for me to process) became even MORE abstruse was too much. I felt a snap in my head as the parallel I had studying her collapsed from the strain and I screamed, grabbing my skull as the feedback filled my brain with agony.
Luckily my main brain was the one keeping up the Fog, and the second parallel was still working on tapping into Callie’s Perception to help hide my sister, so it wasn’t a particularly hard task to keep up the concealment until she finished.
When she was done she seemed exhausted. “Wow, that was a biggie.” She said breathlessly. “Almost more Impact there than I had in total. Percentage wise that’s even more than Master rank. Though I know breaking a hundred is a big milestone and really takes it out of you, so the D-rank breakthrough is still a bit tougher.”
I was looking forward to that one actually. I already had my Solid Path as an ability, which meant I was good through C-rank and almost all the way up to B. I still didn’t know what breakthrough to B INVOLVED mind you, just that I’d managed to get partway there with my second ability. Yay me.
Standing up, I let the fog fade. Glancing around I checked no one powerful enough to see through my fog was nearby. Nobody was close enough to have brute forced it, and with my Impact being a few points higher than normal, not to mention the Perception Callie and I had combined, it should have been more than enough to put off anyone below D-rank who wasn’t standing five feet away.
Offering Chelsea my hand, I pulled her up and patted her on the back, helping her keep her feet as she wobbled. “Yeah, takes a bit of getting used to. Feels great though doesn’t it? Not being smashed under the weight of super gravity?”
She laughed, leaning way back and cracking her spine and then her neck. “Understatement. This is amazing. Should have done it ages ago. I’ll tell Callen he should break through. He’s been nurturing that sword long enough at F-rank. Gabe should be pretty close too. He got as much of that godslayer renown as you did.
That was true, and I was excited to see my friends make it to the next rank. Speaking of which, Jessie and Benny needed help getting there over the next few months, just like Abel and Mel. Nat was going to be busy. I’d help where I could too, but for the moment, we had to get my sister back to her barracks so she could rest. These next four months were going to fly by.
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