Wish upon the Stars chapter 1047

“You know, you scare me,” I said to Dayna conversationally as I stared up at the giant bronze lantern fish pinned to a large nearby tree. This was the third time I’d felt the need to mention that to her, but the pincushion she had made of the giant fish still made my skin crawl. Granted, Asmodeus had helped, but she was still MUCH scarier than I remembered her being at D-rank.

She shrugged. “As I said, I have a special gift for dealing with ambush predators.”

“But these aren’t ambush predators,” I pointed out, struggling to keep a straight face. “These predators am flower.”

She stopped, turned to stare at me, and glared right into my face for a solid minute. Well, into my mask. Finally, she eventually just threw up her hands in frustration and turned to stalk away. I pumped my fist, noting that Bethy might be onto something with this whole zany schtick, it was pretty fun.

I strolled over to Oz and Dan. “So, how we looking, boys?” Beelzebub had joined them, and Dantalion was using the clones as semi autonomous drones to map the forest. They’d been at it for about two hours now, and I was beginning to get a bit antsy.

Dan grimaced. “Apologies for the delay, my lord. The terrain is quite treacherous. Some of the traps appear to have become sentient after the invasion of the mechanical energy. We haven’t identified a clear route, but we HAVE managed to find one with minimal trap presence. The only downside is the sentient pit trap that appears to have mutated at the end of it. We have a good enough idea of how to progress, however, it should be workable, especially with the Minister aiding your steps.”

“Works for me,” I shrugged. “Dan and Beelzebub, you’re dismissed, Oz you’re with me.” A quick snap of my fingers sent them back into the Domain, and another summoned my favorite lime green bird of prey. Who promptly took one look at me, trilled, and flew off to the other side of the clearing to land on Dayna’s shoulder. “Well that just seems unnecessary,” I said waspishly. He scoffed and looked away. “Fine then, be that way,” I scoffed, turning towards the exit to the clearing. “Oz, you ready?”

He nodded, and with a flex of my will…I incarnated him. There was a shift in the world, a sort of fundamental alteration in the balance of my thought process. It was hard to describe, really, because it didn’t feel like anything CHANGED, but it did feel like I had changed my way of looking at things.

A series of memories flooded my brain, and I immersed myself in them. Memories, power usage strategies, there were so many tidbits of information pouring into my brain.

Striding forward, I reached the edge of the clearing, Dayna on my heels, and I called back to her. “Do exactly what I do.” Then, I took off. My wings beat the air, pushing me off the ground with extra force as I danced into the sky. At the peak of my arc, I twisted gracefully, and a series of thunks sounded off to the side as an arrow trap that had been aimed at me missed and the arrows thudded into the trees nearby. I felt the whoosh as they split the air inches from my body and wings, but ignored them. I was in motion.

As gravity caught me at the peak of my jump, I tucked my wings, rolling forward into a spinning dive. I bounced off the ground, my feet barely touching the dirt, and continued into a series of cartwheels finished out by a twisting backflip, flicking my legs out to increase my spin and remove them from the path of a pair of scything axe blades.

Dayne, to her credit, didn’t complain for a second about the fact that I was doing insane acrobatic dance moves with wings. She followed behind me pretty flawlessly, which made sense because we weren’t under suppression and people above D-rank could fly.

We bounded through the traps, the bonds of gravity shattered behind us as we swept across the space in a dizzying ballet of acrobatic skill and dexterity. It was…honestly the most fun I’d had in ages. I’d forgotten exactly how much the suppression of the various planets and worlds we’d been on had held me back. It was like normal gravity. You walked around in it all the time, so it just felt like nothing, but step OUT of that weight and…

I was so intoxicated by the fun of being unleashed, I barely caught the danger warning from my Danger Sense in time. Or rather, Danger Sense warned Azazel, who predicted the attack and showed me how to dodge it at the last second.

My wings snapped like whips, jerking my body back, and rolled in midair to slam both heels into the soles of Dayna’s boots, pushing her back and launching myself out of the way as a pair of monstrous orange forms tore through the spot we’d just been hanging with a speed so great I had to process what they were in retrospect.

Landing on a branch, I stared coldly at a crated on a nearby tree, seeing one of the animals that had attacked us in all its glory.

Well…not glory. Horror. Weirdness. The monster was huge, but deeply misshapen. It appeared to be some kind of orangutan, but its faced had been mutated or corrupted by some weird technorganic plague of bronze gears and smoothly melding metallic plates. One of its eyes was a red lens that glowed with an infernal rage, and the other was bloodshot and mad with pain and hatred. Its teeth were coated in bronze, and several of them appeared to be literal spinning drils, with motor oil drooling from the tips.

The tree it had landed on was shattered and bent, so damaged it was forming an actual platform for the creature to crouch, and its already oversized arms had been replaced with huge beefy bronze smashers, replete with giant grasping hands it used to balance its unusually squat body.

“Huh,” I said dryly. “You don’t see that every day.” I dismissed Azazel, having already seen that this wasn’t going to be a place where prediction was useful. Instead, I called Abaddon into my body. My physical strength surged, amplified by the converted energy of a dozen Zagans pushed even higher by Sammael. Abaddon’s ability to convert energy into raw power was easily my most effective weapon here. With the power filling my body, I cracked my neck, lowering my stance slightly. “Come on then, beastie,” I growled. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

The techno-orangutan roared its outrage and hurled itself toward me. I waited until the last second, then stepped back, dropping off my branch and grabbing it as I fell. I swung my body up, slamming my feet into its back as it went by, sending it streaking into the distance. I swung through, popping back up and then launching myself after it, determined to hit the thing head on while it was down.

It was pulling itself out of the ground as I landed, and I surged forward, jumping onto its back and hooking my arms under its armpits, locking them behind its neck in a sort of modified hook hold that stole all the leverage from the huge monster.

Tucking my head, I arched my back, bringing the thing up and over in a back bridge and then slamming its head into the ground. And then I did it again. Over and over I battered its skull until I felt the struggling stop. Then I plopped down, hooking its legs with my own, and allowed it to roll as I locked the neck from behind in a move I had been told by Callie was called a “double grapevine”.

I slumped after I got him locked down, panting with effort. “Hello?” I called. “Dayna? Archie? I need some help here.” I paused. “Actually, wait, no I don’t. Belial.” I summoned my most corrosive demon. “Dose this thing up until it can’t move. You can focus on a paralytic, right?”

He nodded casually. “Corruption without purpose is chaos. You know that my main ability is battlefield control. The toxins are simply a vector. Tranquility is a form of control in and of itself.”

“Yeah, that’s lovely,” I grunted as the thing began to struggle. “But this big bastard is really strong, and even with my current enhanced power I’m struggling. Less talking and more knocking unconscious, please.”

He chuckled, kneeling down and placing his hand against the organic side of the orangutans head. Green magmatic cracks flared out, climbing across the monster’s body, and I felt it shudder and shake. Finally, it went limp, and I held it for another two minutes just in case, before releasing the thing and calling for Agares. Twisting it into the most awkward position possible, we created a set of tight chains to keep it at full extension twisted into a pretzel, all leverage stolen.

When we were done, I hoisted it up on my shoulder and carried it back to the where we’d been last, looking around for Dayne and Archie, who had been dealing with the OTHER one last I saw.

I spotted them nearby, Dayne sitting casually atop a batter and unconscious orangutan, the best still breathing despite the multitude of arrows lodged in its flesh. I dumped mine on the ground next to hers. I deincarnated Azazel, calling him out, and then summoned Dan again to examine the monsters.

After about five minutes, the old man winced. “It’s the pit trap,” he said with a grimace. “It appears to have parasitized some of the animals and is using them to heard living creatures toward it.”

“That seems…complex,” I said slowly. “Like maybe I’m crazy, but that doesn’t seem like the behavior of a random barely sentient trap.”

“Because it isn’t,” Dantalion grimaced. “It appears our presumptions about the location of the artifact were incorrect. Or rather, they were originally correct but things have changed. Based on the readings from these beasts, I believe a member of their social group stole the arrowhead and then was devoured by the pit trap. Exposure to the artifact appears to have mutated it into some sort of guardian being.”

I cursed. That fit with what I knew. Integrating a Domain Seed into yourself could give you a Domain early without sacrificing potential, like my great grandparents had done. If this monster had done that, it made sense it would have absurd overpowered abilities.

The question was what KIND of absurd overpowered abilities. Domain Seeds didn’t just give people copies of a god’s Domain, it gave them a fragment they could integrate with their own understanding to derive their own unique Path. My great-grandmother's Enshrining Darkness was RELATED to Strakenthar’s Domain (the Lady of Lamentation’s father and the god whose fragment granny dearest used to become a goddess), but wasn’t exactly the same.

Still, if the pit monster had even STARTED the process, it was going to be a nightmare to kill. Also how did you even kill a hole in the ground? I was already getting a headache just thinking about it.

“Alright, we’d better try to get closer,” I said finally. “Not TOO close, mind, just enough for Dan to do his thing. We need more information before we go at this thing head on.”

They all nodded, and we resumed our trek towards our final destination, the pit where the arrowhead was currently located. Hopefully, once we got it, we could find a spot to slip back into the Void on the Void Roads, and it would lead us to somewhere closer to our destination. After all, this shallowing was made with Verdyn’s power, so there was a decent chance that the roads would lead to his territory. Fingers crossed, I supposed.