Wish upon the Stars chapter 1014

The Sword Dance Symposium was in full swing, pun intended. And our particular target was at the center of the action. Looking…very bored. The Moonlight Pope, or ‘Uncle Moon’ as my mom called him, was a tall stately man with grey hair. Not the grey of old age, but the silvery white-grey of moonlight off polished steel, a uniform color that told me his hair was naturally that color, or that he dyed it frequently.

His expression wasn’t half as bright as his hair color as he sat on a raised dais next to a dozen other swordsmen, listening to them all chatter with his chin on a palm as he stared down at a pair of D-rankers duelling.

“That is…disgraceful,” Fade hissed. “Look at those idiots. Flailing their blades around like sharp baseball bats. No artistry, no intent. Imagine displaying such incompetence in front of his excellency.” His tone was scornful and dismissive, but between his hard gaze and the tightness in his jaw, I could tell he was genuinely offended.  I half expected him to attack them.

Luckily, that didn’t seem to be necessary, because the Moonlight Pope’s stern iron grey gaze, which had been drifting over the contestants, found our group, and a smile split his mature face.

Unlike most of the Ascendants I met, the Moonlight Pope didn’t look young OR old. He was pretty firmly middle aged. He looked somewhere around a well preserved forty, which meant he as MUCH older than that. Being the oldest of the Red Revenant’s disciples, that wasn’t surprising. He would probably have been around when the Revenant was still a mortal, or at least not long after. Still, as a Demigod his lifespan was upwards of fifty thousand years, so it wasn’t like sticking around for a while was unusual.

He took a step, and suddenly, he was standing in front of us. It took me a second to process, because it happened instantly. It wasn’t speed, there would have been air displacement, he just kind of…ignored the space. I couldn’t resist trying to see what had happened, so I focused on Dantalion, shifting my form to pick up any traces. I doubted I’d get any legitimate results because whatever he’d done was WAY out of my weight class, but I wanted to at least check.

To my surprise, I WAS able to pick something up. Or rather, I couldn’t NOT pick it up. As soon as I turned my eyes on the empty space, I screamed and doubled over, grabbing my face.

Blood flowed from my eyes sockets in rivers, and I could feel that my eyeballs had been literally clawed from my skull somehow. Given my pain tolerance, the scream had been more of a shout of pain, but I clamped down on even that, hissing between my teeth as I got the agony under control.

“Shane!” my mom said worriedly. “What happened?”

“Ah, that was my mistake,” an apologetic voice rumbled. “Sorry about that, Sasha. I used a quick sword step to cross the distance. I wasn’t aware your son had such an astonishing analysis technique. I’m surprised he could even spot the traces. That said, just because you CAN do something does not mean you should. Here, allow me.” There was a snap, and suddenly…I was fine.

I blinked, shaking my head to clear the blood from under my mask, wiping under my chin with a rag I pulled from my ring. “Sorry,” I rasped. “Was just curious. Though now I’m even MORE curious how you fixed it.”

“The energy cut your eyes when you tried to study it,” he shrugged. “So I cut the damage, and then they were fine.”

Demigods, I decided, were absolute bullshit. That was theoretically a technique I could see someone making, but judging by his tone, he hadn’t USED a technique. Just sort of…intended it kind of hard. Granted, techniques were related to Domains, and I knew part of the Demigod level was integrating your Domain into yourself. Maybe it was similar to Fade’s sword body thing, where anything could be a technique.

It was more impressive than Fade’s though, because swords are made to cut, so cutting with a sword technique made sense. HEALING with a sword technique was absurd.

But then, I’d seen people do more with less. In fact, I’d seen a DEMIGOD do that. Morgan Lark had once, in full view of a large group of people, consumed a large amount of dangerous S-ranked lightning because it was ‘made of plasma’. I’d dismissed it as crazy Bethy shit by proxy, but maybe it was crazy Demigod shit instead. I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse.

“Impressive fortitude though,” the Moonlight Pope said with a smile. “Most people would have been screaming their heads off if their eyes were gouged out by sword energy. After that first shout you barely made a noise.”

A booming laugh shook the area and a big man stepped up beside him with a grin. My Uncle Sam was beaming ear to ear as he slapped the Pope on the back. “I told you so, didn’t i? He’s got that Anders grit. None of that wisht washy Wyndham whining.” He seemed completely unconcerned with the fact that he’d just potentially offended the whole WCP.

The Pope, meanwhile, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Is tact a foreign concept to you, Samuel, or do you just forget to consider what comes out of your mouth before you say it.”

Uncle Sam shrugged. “Whatever. If one of their council tries to mess with me you’ll cover them, and anyone at A-rank I can more than handle.” It occurred to me that my dad, who was one of the most feared A-rankers I’d ever heard of, considered Uncle Sam scary enough to treat him as a potential threat, and had even taken a punch from him to avoid escalating things. Part of that was for my mom, sure, but part of it was probably also his own skill. Exactly how strong WAS my mom’s oldest brother?

“Can you two maybe not discuss how impressive my son’s resistance to TORTURE is,” my mom said sweetly, her eyes glinting with barely suppressed malice. “And don’t think for a second I believe that was an accident Uncle Moon. If you were sloppy enough to go around shredding the eyes of random C-rankers, grandpa wouldn’t let you leave the Holy Dominion.”

He froze. “I…well, that’s not…I slipped?” he tried weakly. Her glare pinned him in place and he sighed. “Fine. It was just a little test. I fixed it didn’t I? And I didn’t MAKE him look. It was still his fault. I was going to magnanimously offer him a reward and make a good impression, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

I sighed internally. The worst part was that I could tell he meant that. The higher the rank, the more detached from reality people got. At S-rank especially, when the body merged with the Saga, it refined a lot of the humanity out of an Ascendant from what I could tell. The Moonlight Pope was a swordmaster, and swords weren’t known for being kind of cuddly. Of course, that didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying. S-rankers weren’t gods, they still had some humanity left, and he SHOULD have known that was a shitty thing to do.

“You’re going to teach my wife,” I decided aloud. “She got a sword recently, and she needs a teacher.”

His mouth gaped open. “Excuse me?” he sputtered. “I’m an S-ranker! I’m a godsdamned Pope! I’m-”

“A very poor guest,” I finished. “You came here for my coronation, and playing little tricks on the guest of honor is very rude. It’s also a huge waste of all there’s people’s time. They were distracted by your antics, and as such, a lot of time learning swordplay was stolen. So in return you’ll pay that time back teaching Callie. That seems fair, right?”

His expression wavered. “I…but it was only a minute or two!”

“Sure,” I said reasonably. “But there are thousands of people here.” I did a quick head count. “Four thousand six hundred and fifty, to be precise. Which is ninety three hundred minutes if we use your generous two minute allowance. Which is one hundred and fifty five hours. That’s not too long. You’ll be done in no time.”

My mother was snickering. This was honestly his own fault. If this had been a family meeting, or an informal dinner, I could have let it slide, or at least let him get away with a bribe or something. But this was my coronation. The WCP wasn’t like the Church, where people obeyed the leaders out of respect. The WCP was a vicious tooth and claw free for all, and there was no WAY I was showing weakness in front of all these jackals, not even to an S-ranker.

Which he understood, I could tell. This had been partly a test for me as a junior, sure, but it had also been partly a test of the new Wishmaster’s bottom line.

While the different lineages of the Church might be mostly harmonious, there were divisions. I knew several of the Popes were at odds. Given my mom’s relationship with the Moonlight Pope, I’d assumed he was an ally, but it appeared things were a bit more complicated than that. Despite my dressing down, and his grudging acceptance, my mom was still glaring. I didn’t think she was going to forget this anytime soon.

I was ambivalent, honestly. Now that I knew where I stood, a little agony for top tier sword lessons for my wife wasn’t a huge deal. I wouldn’t be trusting him at my back anytime soon, but then, he wouldn’t need to go behind my back to hurt me. Barring the old man’s intervention, literally no one here could stop him if he decided to kill me.

So I just put it out of my head. Worrying about getting swatted like a fly wasn’t productive, it would happen or it wouldn’t.

I was about to ask him about the autograph, if only to break the tension, when there was a low boom and the ground beneath us shook. I was intrigued, figuring something interesting was happening with the fair, but when I saw my grandparents, the Moonlight Pope, and several other powerful people nearby perk up their heads intently, the bottom dropped out of my stomach.

“What was that?” I asked quickly, looking around to try to spot some kind smoke or something. Anything to tell me what was happening.

The Moonlight Pope’s face was grim. “Something just fractured the walls of the Wishworld. Something BIG. There are cracks in the world membrane, and something seems to be seeping through.”

“What?” I sputtered. “What the hell could do THAT? Is this a Void Incursion?”

My dad shook his head grimly. “Not the Void. There aren’t any Void Gods right now, and even if there were they’d be new. No nascent god is going to be stupid enough to try to pick a fight with the old man in his own territory. His authority in here is absolute. Only another god would even think to try it. And the old man isn’t just any god. He, the Emperor, and the Queen are the oldest and strongest living deities. Each of them is at the peak of the divine rank. Coming here alone would be suicide, which means-”

“It’s more than one,” my grandfather agreed. “And I can only think of one force that could field an offensive like that. The Vanished Gods. But even then, they have to be insane to think-” He froze, his expression twisting with disgust. “What IS that?”

But I already knew. I’d been thinking about what the Pope had meant when he said “something was seeping through”. If the Vanished Gods were here, that meant Hatescream, and I knew exactly what my grandfather, whose Domain was purification, must be sensing. Liquid Lamentation.