Wish upon the Stars chapter 979

We ran into a slight problem with Callie using all my scrolls…she couldn’t pay for them. If she’d just been reshuffling her points it would have been fine, point for point, but unfortunately, wishing for MORE stats meant cost, and she just didn’t have enough to pay for it. We’d tried paying with stored attacks, but the bond gave me full access to her Heretic Flame, so it didn’t work as payment. In the end, she’d been forced to postpone the scroll usage until she could find a source of income.

Still, she had become incredibly famous in the time since my initiation ceremony, and she’d raked in quite a number of stats with her powerful reputation. The more people heard about her the more they learned about her past. Not just being the daughter of a mysterious god, but her feat of slaying Suvaya back in the Moonsong Glade, her identity as my grandmother’s disciple, not to mention her recent status as a revered member of the Seraphim Tower, though that one hadn’t really had time to spread.

“You sure you don’t want to wait on this?” I asked her worriedly. “I mean, the extra stats might be important. There’s no need to rush, right?” It was the next day, and I’d gotten my scrolls packed away and prepared to have our little sparring match, only to realize the issue too late.

She grinned at me wolfishly. “Nuh-uh, you’re not getting out of this. I’ll accept the stockpile that I have waiting from the last six months, and then we throw down. I want to know what this new form can do. Besides, I can’t let down my adoring public, now can I?” She gusted behind us to where the stands set into the walls of the training room sat FULL of angels.

Which was…disconcerting. I wasn’t a stranger to fighting for an audience, but they didn’t have to look so eager to see me lose. Which I wasn’t even sure would happen.

The only reason I was willing to do this at all was that while Callie was accepting the points from the last six months, I was still withholding mine. My soul was clamped down tight on all my stat income, so I was still sitting at one point one million and change, while she was most likely going to pass that with this next boost.

Despite her abilities, some of my abilities, including my staff’s power to bump one of my skills up a rank, would make it impossible for someone at my own level to beat me, barring people at the peak like Ellie or absolute bullshit artists like Bethy.

Who…I hadn’t actually SEEN today. Which worried me. She and Chelsea had vanished after we arrived. At the very least Holly and Serah weren’t here so they were probably together, that made me feel a bit better. My sister and the angels should keep Bethy from burning down the tower. Plus it was some sort of god artifact based on flames, so it should be at least SLIGHTLY fireproof.

Callie, meanwhile had closed her eyes and allowed the weight of her growth to settle over her. I could feel through the bond when the stats slammed into her, but given her powerful soul and high total points it wasn’t enough to cause any real problems. When she opened her eyes again, they gleamed excitedly. I raised an eyebrow at her and she pushed an impression through the bond as a thought, essentially beaming her stats right into my head.,

Calliope Wyndham. C-rank. 

Ability-: Grandmaster Trait: Heretic Archangel. An instrument of the will of a faded god. A child of the flame that burns back the heart of the Void.

Weapon:Gossamer (huge black sword housed in Callie's new soul space, a massive cathedral created when she formed her Chronicle)

Chronicle:Book of the Final Flame

Might-307,012

Impact-155

Vitality-229,236

Fantasy-246,541

Focus-209,302

Perception- 218,186

Creation-210,643

Progress to next rank: 1,421,075/10,000,000

Soul Strength: Tanzanite Soul Body.

Skills: Minor Tracking, Beginner Dual Dagger Mastery, Intermediate Stealth, Intermediate Trap Mastery, Beginner Disguise, Lesser Balam Mastery, Grandmaster Adherent Ascension

Path of the Heretic Scion- Solid. Technique: Guilt in Gossamer

I blinked in shock. That was a lot to unpack. Not the changes to the skills, really, that was expected. More the sheer number of stats. It felt like a lot until you realized it had been six months. I expected a lot of her reputation boost had been with weaker Ascendants and had probably run out of steam after a month or two. Still, it was a solid bump without having to actually DO anything, and I was betting it would explode after word spread of her addition to the ranks of the tower.

I also noted the change to her technique. Guilt in Gossamer was…new. I assumed it was the sword art she’d been training in, or some aspect of it, but it reminded me that maybe I’d been taking her too lightly. My wife might not be a monster like Bethy, but she was a powerful warrior. I considered possibly letting myself bulk up after all, but resisted. I’d already committed to fighting as I was. I WOULD use my staff to boost Mornax if necessary.

She seemed to take in my hesitation, grinning wildly at me as she tapped into her grandmaster Skill. It was interesting that her form change manifested itself as a skill and not just a pseudo-Domain. It could be a factor of perception (lower case p) I knew that people influenced their stat readouts with intention, or it could be because of her trait based body. Either way, it was clearly a powerful skill, and one that made a hell of an impression.

Before my eyes, her hair rippled, bleeding to mostly blue that faded to black instead of the opposite. Likewise her isises became black voids that lightening into eerie pinpricks of glowing blue, and her wings inverted color alongside her newly drawn sword.

“Nice, right?” she asked giddily as she tapped her blade on the ground. With a single tap, it ignited into bright blue flames, with only a bit of black shot through the tongues of fire. “Ready?”

I nodded, spreading my own wings and calling on Glory, my most powerful combat form. My staff whirled, the end coalescing into a spear of black flame as I spun it crossways along my body to knock the blade aside.

My strike was heavy, leveraging the whirling momentum of my staff to bat aside what I perceived to be a powerful blow. But the second my weapon made contact, it deflected smoothly, and Callie spun off her back foot, bringing her whole body whipping around in a pirouette, using the momentum to lend speed to her slash.

My staff was out of position, but I was wearing my Seal of Solomon. I triggered Mornax and brought a fist up to deflect the attack with my forearm…and screamed.

I washurt. I blinked, flickering back as I cradled my arm. Not because it was that bad, but because I hadn’t been injured by someone my rank in Mornax in…a long time. I stared at my arm, stripping off my gauntlet to see a strange cut across my forearm, looking almost translucent.

“Shane?” Callie yelped worriedly, scrambling over to check on me. I flexed Zagan, flooding my arm with purifying fire, and it returned to normal, but it was still VERY interesting. “Are you ok? What was that? What happened? I thought your armor would stop it.”

I grinned at her, triggering my staff to bump Mornax up to B-rank. “I’m fine, Cal,” slipped my gauntlet back on. “You just caught me by surprise. That felt really weird. It bypassed my armor, somehow. I think the flames carried it through. I don’t think it was able to cut my defenses exactly, more like it erased a small portion of my body for a minute. Try it again.”

“I will NOT,” she spat. “That’s so dangerous, are you crazy?”

Waving her off, I shook my head. “It’s fine, I upgraded Mornax. You won’t be able to burn away a B-rank defensive form no matter how weird and off beat you attack is. I should be able to at least tell what it’s doing this time.” I triggered Dantalion, focusing on my arm as I held it out to her. Her attack couldn’t damage a B-rank me. Because it hadn’t damaged my armor. It had BYPASSED my armor by going around it, but there wasn’t a scratch on the metal.

Grimacing, she lifted her sword and brought it down on my arm again. This time, I caught what happened. I was watching closely, and I saw the fire flare for a moment. My eyes widened.

“That’s…holy shit that’s insane,” she stared at me in confusion. “Your sword cut me from the void. The Heretic Fire rejects Void influence on realspace, purifying the present of Void entities. This…Adherent Fire does the opposite. Rather than rejecting the Void from realspace, it embraces realspace from the Void. Like you summoned the cut from the other side of the veil right into my flesh. That’s why it injured me through Mornax, too. You were attacking the physical with the metaphysical, cutting away at my reality.”

In layman's terms, she’d transposed her sword out of reality and then used that illusory state to make part of ME illusory. It didn’t work on my B-rank defenses, nor my armor, they were too heavy for her to discount, but against anyone at our rank?

I grinned at her, stepping back and raising my guard. In this form she couldn’t hurt me, which meant she was free to test and experiment. “Again,” I told her bluntly. “Do it again and try to get a feel for it.” I could see her eyes shining with excitement as she raised her sword in a guard. When I nodded, she blurred forward, flicking out experimental cuts.

My staff deflected the blows, carefully offsetting the leverage of the strikes, but I could feel the flames rolling down the weapon, sometimes seeping into the cracks in my armor around my hands or elbows, or even my shoulders.

The flames seemed to act as a vector of some kind, carrying the attacks, and wherever it seeped in the cuts were carried from the Void to try to sever my flesh. I felt it scraping at my defensive form, unable to break through. As we fought, she seemed to become more attuned to it. She started flicking out slashes of fire that cut the air in great waves, aiming for as large an area as possible.

I flowed between the strikes, but as I did, I saw something click in her head. She lashed out again, this time with the blue jewel at the butt of her weapon, and it struck the air. Space SHATTERED. Cracks formed in the skin of the world, not enough to expose the Void, but galaxy fractures still radiated from the strike. Grinning, Callie lifted her flaming sword and drove it into a single piece of fractured air.

All around me, the shattered pieces of sky reflected the image of her attack, and a hundred blades emerged from the refractions, blazing with blue fire.

Cursing, I closed my eyes and turtled up, trusting my defense. There was a horrible SHRIEKING sound as the blades skidded over my armor, just strong enough to carve small furrows in about a dozen places. But I hadn’t just given up. Dantalion was active when she attacked, and I’d been scanning the world around my.

Zagan flashed and I slammed my staff into a seam in the air, unleashing a wave of green fire that wiped away the Adherent Flame, causing a flare of teal as the fractures sealed. I grimaced at my wife, who was smiling sheepishly at my now scratched up armor. “Ok, new plan,” I said mildly. “You need to do a LOT of training.” Despite the wryness, I couldn’t hide the unmistakable sense of pride in my tone. I had very little idea what that been just then…but when she mastered it, it was going to be TERRIFYING. I couldn’t wait.