Wish upon the Stars chapter 954

I stared down into the very large hole with trepidation. “Look,” I said slowly. “I feel like no one will take this seriously, and it might not even matter since we have to go down there. But I feel like it needs to be said. Literally NOTHING good has ever happened to any of us in a hole in the ground.”

Callie rolled her eyes. “Let’s be honest. Bad things have happened to us in almost every imaginable biome. I think pretty much the only ones we’re missing are the ocean and the desert.” Then she paused. “Except after we came out of that underwater city in the dungeon, which I guess was technically both?”

I snorted at that, looking around at all my friends. “Guess I can’t argue that. We have everyone here?”

“We left some of the D-rankers to guard the houses,” Callie said with a grimace. “Well, not really, there’s nothing they can do if someone attacks, but they’re being punished. Bethy hired a bunch of them to follow her around and serenade her with a theme song they made up on the spot. She liked it so much she decided to hire them to do it to the rest of us too. Sadly, we couldn’t punish Bethy for it because it’s not on the list.”

I groaned, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Of course she did. It’s fine, we don’t need most of the D-rankers anyway. The higher ranked members of the group will have a hard enough time keeping everyone safe. Are we sure splitting into groups like this is a good choice?”

She sighed. “I mean…no. But we have to maximize our odds of finding Void infiltrators. Based on what I know about the Void ladder, they’ll be setting up relays along the staircase. Considering the pressure gets heavier the deeper they go, as long as our people don’t go too deep they should be fine, especially with a few C-rankers on each group to protect them.”

“Fair enough,” I said grimly. “My people need to get out on their own and fight, otherwise they can’t build their rep and get stronger. Keeping everyone locked up in Bethy’s Domain all the time isn’t a viable long term solution. Groups of twenty five should do it. Obviously, we’re going deepest, so my parents and Zeke should come with us. Sebastian and Killian can each head up a group of our second liners. Fade’s people, some of the leftover C-rankers, what have you. Does everyone have the orbs we made?”

With Callie coming along with me, I knew at some point we’d run into problems supplying heretic fire to the rest of our group when we were separated. So last night after our family dinner I’d settled in to spend hours making more of the heretic fire spheres we’d sold. They wouldn’t last forever, but if any of our people hit the Void spawn, those should be enough to handle the problem.

It was a unique advantage we had. Most people didn’t have an easy way to destroy Void creatures. They were nasty and hard to kill. Most of my cousins would be concentrating their forces into large groups and trying to dive deep to maximize their point gain from the bounties of the stronger Void creatures. Spreading out like we were wasn’t a viable strategy for anyone else. Which was the only reason I was agreeing to it, despite my reservations about leaving the people I was responsible for unprotected.

I glanced back down into the hole. “So…this thing leads all the way through the planet? I wonder what happens if you fall in. Do you get stuck in the middle?”

“Eventually,” Zeke said as he stepped up next to me. “You kind of ping pong around in the center until you reach equilibrium between the two gravities and then stop in the middle once the momentum runs out. We’ve seen stuff like this before, though the heirworld’s is bigger than most. It’s also…unique. The staircase has floors that descend surrounding it. Every few hundred feet or so there's a new level with some other new bit of nonsense. The one in the center is kind of a mess.”

That made me frown. “Why are there floors like that? It’s just a hole in the ground. Why dig out levels along the staircase.”

“No one knows,” he shrugged. “The staircase wasn’t created by the WCP. It was here when we took control of the heirworld. So were the levels. We suspect it might be a resource thing, like they were digging for ore and stuff on the way down. But no one can say for sure. The levels get pretty wide. They run under basically the whole city.”

Mom grinned. “They’re ALSO full of treasure. Kind of. They’re unstable spatially and move around pretty much all the time. Hallways changing places every few days and things like that. So the various items lost by explorers tend to pop up. It’s why this city isn’t ALL A-rankers. The levels closer to the surface have pretty low pressure, and the things lost there are fairly worthless. They send D,C, and B-rankers to explore for them at various depths to dig out treasure.”

“It’s one of the WCPs major revenue streams,” my dad added. “The heirworld has been producing artifacts for millennia. No one is sure how much is down there, or how big the floors are. Since they move around constantly they’re impossible to map.”

Callie looked upset. “That’s bad,” she said bluntly. “If they get any of the receivers down there and they get shunted away into some random part of one of the levels…not to mention the spatial instability down there will make it much easier to construct the Void ladder. What about the central level, you said it was a mess? What did you mean by that?”

“Most of the levels change places every few days,” Zeke clarified. “But the central level does it every few MINUTES. It’s constantly in flux. Not just sideways either. Up is down, left is right, it’s a deeply unsettling place.”

My mom rolled her eyes. “What Ezekiel means is that he’s HEARD it’s a deeply unsettling place. None of us were strong enough to get that deep when we came here last. It’s impossible to reach that depth without at LEAST a Chronicle. The reasons for the slowly growing pressure closer to the core haven’t been fully explored, but the Impact steadily builds as you descend. By the time you reach the center, it’s much too heavy for even a normal C-ranker to bear. And we weren’t nearly as powerful during the last succession war.”

“Alright,” I said, processing it all. “So the bounties are organized by…what? Floor? How does that work with the shifting?”

“No one sticks around for that in person,” said my dad. “The spatial warping is extremely dangerous. When it starts, anyone inside flees to the staircase. The stairs themselves are made of…well, we aren’t really sure. Something that anchors space.” He glanced at Callie. “I assume that wouldn’t completely spoil the attempts at the Void ladder?”

“If anything, the opposite,” she grimaced. “Ladders need to be set on stable ground to be climbed. A cylinder of stable space through the center of the planet would be an ideal foundation to use for the construction.”

I just sighed. “Fine. What’s our target today then? I assume with A-rankers working on information gathering we know at least enough to pick out someone worth some real points.”

“A B-rank vessel named Faustryche,” my mother said cheerfully. “When the purge of the planet started, several A and B-rankers already in the city fled to the stairs. It’s not a great environment for fighting, so the locals “conveniently” decided to leave them for us. As a fun obstacle in the succession war. Wasn’t that nice of them?” Her tone made it clear she was being deeply sarcastic, but my dad just shrugged.

“Not their monkeys, not their circus,” he said blithely. “Or at least that’s what they think. It’s shortsighted, but I imagine the A-rankers think they can flee when things get bad. It’s easy to decide something isn’t your problem when other people are around to be made to deal with it.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, shocking how bad most Ascendants are at long term thinking.”

“Not really,” Zeke countered as we began to divide up into groups. “Stories tend to change with the telling, warping over time to become something completely different. In order to survive as an Ascendant, you need to focus on the present. I told you this years ago, kid. You’ll never make it if you don’t live in the now.”

He had. It shocked me sometimes how casual conversations with Zeke could have so many layers. The things he said or didn’t say were often important later on down the line in ways I’d never expected. It clashed with the image of the sloppy drunk I’d grown up with, but then, a lot of his Ascendant persona did. Janus was a scary, competent, devious man. I suppose it shouldn’t be shocking he could put on such a good front. His entire path was based on masks and deception.

In a way though, that made him the most dependable person I could think of. Zeke could have left when I was a kid, I was convinced. Thinking about it now, he could have come up with some way to slip the contract. He was the craftiest person I knew, and I’d seen him kill A-rankers at B-rank.

The fact that he stayed was one of the reasons I knew I could trust him. And really…Zeke was the first person I’d ever trusted. He’d shown me what stability meant, gave me the sense of structure I’d needed to build the friendships I had today. Even with my parents back, Zeke was still one of the most important people in the world to me. I needed to make sure that once I became the Wishmaster, he was rewarded for everything he’d done. And I knew just how to do it. In fact, I didn’t even need the WCP.

“Hey Zeke,” I said as we descended the stairs in a group of twenty five. “I was thinking. What do you think about Stella apprenticing with my grandmother?”

My mom blinked. “Stacy?” It still confused the hell out of me that Stella’s name was a hero name and not her actual name. I knew it meant star, but the whole thing was deeply counterintuitive. “That’s a good idea. Mom does a lot with stars. I bet she could teach her plenty, and her Cosmic Witchcraft has a lot of potential. Witches can be pretty scary with the right tools.”

My uncle looked a little bushwhacked. “I mean…that would be great, but Celia is an S-ranker, and the daughter of two gods. I’m sure she has better things to do.”

“No way,” Chelsea chirped happily. “She would love to help out a member of the family. And it would be nice having you two around. Shane got to spend his whole childhood with you, but I never got any uncle time. You owe me like…twenty years of birthday presents.” She winked at him, and I saw him grin back at the audacity.

“I think I can manage something,” he said with a laugh. I couldn’t hold back my own grin. I hadn’t really considered that Chelsea might want to have a relationship with Zeke like I had, but I definitely approved. My uncle was one of the best people I knew, and my sister deserved to have someone like him in her life. I felt like it was fitting, too, that they connect when we were all doing this family thing.

Callie smiled warmly at me, reaching over to thread her fingers in mine, giving my hand a tight squeeze. Callie loved holding hands. She had ever since we got together, and I had to admit after years of it, I felt just as warm and protected as she did when her fingers laced into my own. And so, my wife and I held hands and chatted with my parents as we all marched cheerfully down to hell.