Wish upon the Stars chapter 1032

Stepping out of the shadow passage, the three of us looked around carefully. Callie had Gossamer drawn, Devon had a pair of familiar demon horns, and I had my wings spread, my body currently inhabited by no less than four demons. Leviathan, Azazel, Sammael, and Mornax.

Sadly, Callie wasn’t able to undergo incarnation easily. There was a recovery time from her last time playing host. According to Azazel, incarnation was a unique ability born of my connection to the Domain. Apart from Asmodeus, who was designed for it, the other demons couldn’t inhabit the bodies of people who weren’t me. Callie had cheated, using Angelic bond as a carrier to bypass the natural defenses on her soul, but it was still a soul strain she wasn’t really suited for.

Asmodeus, therefore, had to be attached to Devon, which worked out because my cousin, despite his competence, wasn’t playing on the same level as the rest of us.

Beyond the incarnation mechanic though, I’d ALSO released Dom to act as backup. My Doom Sovereign demon was one of my three ministers, and was able to tap into almost all of my various skills and techniques by virtue of being PART of most of them.

“You sure he’ll notice this?” Devon asked worriedly. “I mean, he didn’t find us before…”

“He didn’t find us before because we were are the bottom of the ocean,” I assured him. “And inside my Domain. Now we’re neither of those things.”

Callie nodded. “He’s right, don’t worry. This is the only reasonable chance he’s going to get to finish me off. No way he’ll leave it to chance. Plus he’s got to assume that Shane is in bad shape. Healing from soul damage that severe would normally be impossible. Even with Wishes, paying for something like that would take far more value than anything Shane owns.”

My dad had really saved my ass on this one, it was true. His contract based Wish power was designed to be inherently unbalanced, which meant despite having a lower peak output than a bloodline user his level, he had far fewer limitations. It was why he’d become a devil to begin with.

Of course, we didn’t mention to him that we were more than strongly presuming. Azazel had managed a few divinations to help us narrow down the ideal spot and time for our encounter. The enemy was coming, and coming in force. We knew that. We were just waiting to find out when they’d arrive. In fact, we’d made several preparations in that vein, including having Dom hiding in Callie’s shadow directly to wait for the inevitable assault.

We walked through the gravely dirt of the mountain slope slowly, small rocks crunching underfoot. We were on a small, innocuous dirt trail. We walked for about a half hour, never stopping, never slowing. I followed the trail as instructed, not deviating from the plan even slightly. I was beginning to doubt whether ths was going to work myself when I caught sight of a trio of dark forms ahead.

One of them towered above the others, long dark vines rolling from his head covered in thorns. Horns stood out from his skull and his eyes blazed with an unearthly blue light. Roland, still clad in the power of the Apostate Fire. Whatever he’d done to himself hadn’t faded, if anything, it had gotten more extreme. It seemed like Morwenna had learned from Atlas, imbuing her servant with a powerful racial trait. The Apostate. The monster that I’d been dreading since I’d heard its name, and ironically one partially of my own making.

Callie and Devon split off in opposite directions, and I called out my staff, tapping into Glory as the condensed blade of black flame extended from the tip in a brutal makeshift spear. Roland’s eyes tracked Callie, but he didn’t even have time to pursue her before I appeared behind him, spear whirling as I aimed to take off his head.

Roland, of course, wasn’t even remotely put off. His sword blurred as he spun, clashing violently against the black flames as his Apostate fire consumed my destruction flame.

I retreated calmly, calling for Callie’s Heretic Fire as I reformed the spear, making sure the next clash wouldn’t disperse it again. Roland sighed as he looked me over. “I really wish you’d just stayed down, Shane. I really don’t want to have to kill you. But you aren’t giving me much choice.”

He stepped forward, his body nearly vanishing as his blade carved the air, seeming to split into multitudes as he attacked so quickly it was all but covering the sky in front of me.

I didn’t panic. My eyes closed, my body loosening as I allowed all my muscles to relax, shedding their tension to the maximum. Mornax kept me from just falling over, but my body was completely serene, empty of all stress as I listened to the pulse of my heart. To the song of the wind. To my instincts.

I fell. Not clumsily or with lacking grace. I just sort of…changed my position. My wings angled slightly, twitching just a beat, and the momentum carried me slowly to one side.

But it wasn’t slow. Not really. I drifted through the air, seemingly lazy as I slowly floated in between the attacks. Azazel foresaw, Sammael empowered. Beyond anything I’d felt before. I was diving into their lives, their hopes, their fears. I was becoming them, and only the radically opposing points of view stopped me from freezing up.

I saw techniques honed by Sammael over years on the battlefield, I saw formuli from Azazel for calculating the future in any situation. A warrior angel, a genius of combat unparalleled under the heavens, and a demonic diviner whose infernal eyes gazed up on the infinite scope of creation, intertwined in my head.

It should have been too much. Incarnation gave me ACCESS to their histories, but diving in like this should have been beyond me. Would have been if not for Leviathan. I very carefully ignored the two other entities residing in my skull in favor of the first two, despite knowing that I was leaving a lot of potential power on the table by not delving in. It was impossible for me to incarnate four demons properly at this point. Even a third would be too much.

The deeper I went, the more fluid I became. Sammael wasn’t just a warrior, he was a savant. The petty bullshit I could do with my wings paled in comparison to the artistry my angelic form was capable of on the battlefield. And Azazel was severely limited by The Quiet Room, chained down by the restrictions here, but narrowing the scope of divination to such a short term value made it infinitely smoother to follow those instincts.

I flowed through the air, the song of whirling blades and beating wings blurring together into a symphonic explosion of violent melody that carried my consciousness through the blurry intertwining of being three people at the same time.

The song unfolded in front of me, lines of notes tracing themselves along the inside of my eyes like golden paths off into a distant, better future. Slowly, I opened them, having seen exactly where I was going, and my hands began to dance, my staff whirling like a conductor’s baton as I orchestrated the battle just as I’d seen it in my mind.

Roland’s face was hard and angry, and his blade was coated in black fire. The air was screaming under the flames, dying a little bit with every swing, but it didn’t matter. I’d known this was coming. The wails of pain were just part of my performance.

His sword flashed up into a dizzying combo, chasing my traces as he tried to tear into me, but I just drifted in close. I lashed out with a strike of my staff, and he sidestepped. I planted my staff at an angle, and his foot caught as he stepped back, eyes widening as he unbalanced. A pivot with the staff slammed it into the back of his sword hilt, jarring his hold and forcing him to adjust.

“You’re not going to beat me!” he snarled as he reengaged. “I can’t lose. Not after all this. Not after everything I’ve done.” To my shock, his eyes filled with tears. “I have to do this! It can’t have all been for nothing!”

My heart clenched. Because I could almost see the story. See the bitterness as he lost his wife. See the hate fester. Like I had lived it. Because I honestly probably could have. If Callie died, real permanent death or even just the temporary kind, I would shatter. It would break me in a way no power or wish could ever fix. It would ruin me. And that was what happened here. Roland was ruined.

I yanked my staff away, disarming him, and then hammered a stomping kick into his knee. Sammael was much stronger than a normal C-ranker, and Mornax had solidified me into pretty much a statue. Combined with the angle, Roland just crumpled, his eyes blazing with hate. He tried to stand, fumbling for his sword, but I kicked it away, stepping back calmly as he struggled to get to his feet.

This had to end. I couldn’t let him go, couldn’t let him continue. I had to destroy him. Utterly. End him forever. But it felt…wrong. Evil. Besides which I didn’t have a way to do it. I didn’t have a soul destroying ability. I had a soul HEALING ability but…

He was in so much pain. Hurting so badly. He’d do anything to make it stop. Anything to wear away at the sorrow until it didn’t hurt anymore. I dismissed Sammael. Dismissed Mornax and Azazel. Even dismissed Leviathan.

I called for Genesis Burst. For the power to heal a soul, and I triggered my upgrade ability, boosting it to B-rank. He snarled at me, surging forward, hands curled into claws and covered in Apostate Fire, but I was inhabited by a Tier 8 demon right now, so it wasn’t an issue. I was essentially a B-ranker.

Moving aside, I tripped him, then tackled him, bearing him to the ground and wrapping my arm around his neck. I locked him in a sleeper hold, and then pressed a hand to his skull…and I started to heal.

I purified his sorrow, his hate, his rage. He was an Apostate, an unnatural thing, and he was broken. Genesis Burst was made to fix broken souls. So I did. I fixed him. And I kept fixing him, choking him and purifying him as he twitched in my grip, until it was done. He didn’t scream. Didn’t make a sound. Until the very end, when he choked out a weak, broken, ‘thank you’. I just kept going. Until he was gone, and I dropped his soulless body to the ground, standing and stumbling away.

Jerking my mask off, I vomited into the dirt, heart pounding, blood rushing in my ears. I’d felt him at the end, felt his soul finding peace for just a second before it dissolved, scrubbed so clean and scoured so deeply it couldn’t even maintain its shape. 

A hand landed on my shoulder and I spun, staff coming up. Callie didn’t move, and I stopped before knocking her back. She smiled sadly, then knelt down, putting her arms around me and holding me as I shook. “I…I didn’t know what else to do,” I rasped as I buried my head in her shoulder.

“I know,” she murmured as she ran her fingers through my hair. “I know. He didn’t give you a choice.” I looked over her shoulder, finding Dom and Devon restraining the other two. I didn’t care. Couldn’t.

I’d been lying to myself. Telling myself that killing someone and ending them was the same. That I could destroy a soul as casually as I’d learned to take a life. But as I stared at the still breathing corpse of my former friend, I couldn’t help but wonder. Whose soul had I just destroyed? His or mine.