Wish upon the Stars chapter 926

Our first order of business after meeting with Tyrus was find a place to stay where we could FINALLY start working on our elixirs and reap the benefits of the frankly ludicrous things we’d been accomplishing since we got here. Aside from being watched by a bunch of S-rankers, we’d ALSO made enemies of the Void en masse, so I was expecting a pretty decent bump to my stats beyond the elixirs, even if we were still low enough priority that I didn’t think it would be on the level of some of my recent boosts.

My seven rings were dispersed to their new owners, with Jessie, Benny, Callie, and I retiring to the domed chamber underneath Tyrus’s store to take our elixirs in peace and sort out the oncoming stat boost.

I went first. We’d given The High Society a list of everyone’s preferred stats, and I’d made sure Creation and Fantasy were on my list though, not the highest priority. Fantasy was an expensive stat, and one that was tougher to make elixirs for, as well as less in demand. I got twenty five thousand Fantasy, and the same in Creation, then ten thousand each in Focus, Vitality, and Perception, and twenty thousand in Might.

Given my current base of stats, a hundred thousand wasn’t enough to shake me or cause much pain, nor was the additional forty six thousand spread across Might, Focus, and Vitality from other sources. Twenty five thousand in Vitality (Zagan, Leviathan, and my other life based forms must be making an impression), ten thousand in Focus, and eleven thousand in Might, to cap off my already huge gains from the elixirs, had me at around nine hundred and five thousand points, a mere five digits from C-rank, and so close I could taste it.

And that wasn’t nearly as much as Callie had gained from all this. My wife was a singular entity now, a Heretic Angel who struck fear into the Void. I didn’t know who exactly had been talking about her, but SOMEONE was aware of her new capabilities, because she netted a solid two hundred and fifty thousand total points with the elixirs included, a full hundred thousand more than I had, and I’d been making waves.

Fifty thousand of that was Might, and fifty thousand Fantasy, but she’d gained that on her own, and had mainly used the elixirs to smooth our gaps in the rest of her stats where they’d fallen behind. None of them were at less than a hundred thousand now, and though that was still half what her two main stats were at give or take, her total was still up to a whopping eight hundred and thirty five thousand or so, well on her way to joining me at C-rank.

Benny, sadly, had gained much less outside the elixir boost. And even that had been hard fought, given his stat total was only two hundred thousand to start. Nearly a third his total in incoming stats, with another maybe twenty two thousand or so put him at three hundred and twenty five thousand, which was decent for where he was in his journey. 

He’d only hit D-rank very recently, and hadn’t had a chance to make much of an impression, but with the infinity crystal and that D-ranked soul to work with from the fight back at the siege, I was expecting him to come out swinging, and he had a lot of low stats that would rise on their own as his reputation got larger, since the lowest stats couldn’t drag that far behind when a powerful warrior rose through the ranks. A rising tide lifts all boats, and all that. Even BEING at D-rank gave people a certain impression of power that would slowly even out the worst of it over time.

Jessie, of course, saw some of the most dramatic improvement for that exact reason. Not as much as Callie, obviously, but a solid two hundred and twenty thousand points, albeit almost all of it going into Vitality. Between the fifty thousand Might from a combination of her bond to Randall and the elixirs, and the hundred and thirty thousand Vitality, it was clear that even with her new nature, our healer’s reputation was heavily skewed towards her most useful talent. 

The other forty thousand was a flat ten thousand apiece in each of her other stats, which had fallen SO far behind the others that some of them weren’t even in the five digit range. With over three hundred thousand Vitality (that wasn’t even mentioning the modifier), having less than ten thousand Focus would have been absurd, so I wasn’t shocked she was starting to see her other stats creep up.

Sitting at slightly over four hundred and fifty thousand, she was almost halfway through D-rank, and her absurd hyperspecialization was almost completely to blame. With a triple stat modifier from her racial trait, she had a higher effective Vitality than I had TOTAL stats, and with a slightly higher Impact than others her rank, it made her probably one of the most powerful D-rank healers in the universe at this point.

With that taken care of, we rejoined the others, who mostly didn’t bother elaborating on their own stat choices, not that we asked. While Jessie, Benny, Callie and I had come up together and were always happy to share with each other, most Ascendants played their stats a bit closer to the chest.

While Paths and Chronicles tended to blur the lines enough that raw stat values couldn’t represent real strength, having an in depth assessment of your opponents stats could tell you almost everything about them, both as a person and as an entity of renown. That kind of information was deeply personal, and unless you were VERY close to someone, it was considered good manners not to bring it up unless the situation called for it in some urgent manner.

Having taken our elixirs and set everything up in town we needed, Tyrus immediately dispatched Devlan as our guide to bring us to meet his people at the labyrinth that would take us into the B-rank zone.

“So…” I said as I turned to regard the mountains to the north of us. We were traveling with Devlan, all of our people making good time through the forest after leaving Draycia. “Why is the labyrinth necessary? I’d have figured someone would have built an elevator or something, or tried to climb the mountains. They’re tall, and those cliffs look sheer, but we ARE Ascendants, I’m sure someone has what it takes.”

Devlan laughed bitterly. “It’s been tried. But those cliffs aren’t SHEER, they’re GLASS. They’re not completely smooth all the way down, but the rough spots are razor sharp. B-ranked obsidian, the whole ring. Raised by an absurdly powerful A-ranker centuries ago. Scaling the black cliffs is a fools errand, and everyone who tries it dies. And that’s not even bringing up the birds that nest up at the top.”

“Are these birds…friendly?” Benny asked hopefully. “Maybe the cute kind that sing pretty songs as they help princesses get dressed in the morning?”

“That depends,” Devlan said innocently. “Do you enjoy hellish screeches of victory from fifty foot monstrosities as they rip the bones out of still living human beings? Cliff Ravens are abominations of nature. Their feathers and talons are MADE of the obsidian from those cliffs, which they EAT when bored. They can fire the feathers at you like projectiles, and they’re so light they almost can’t be tracked. They’re NOMINALLY C-ranked creatures, but being effectively naturally armored in B-rank material makes them a much bigger threat than anyone below B-rank has any business dealing with.”

I shuddered at the description. Especially considering tasks were generally based on location, and I had a sneaking suspicion trying to CLIMB those cliffs would spawn one we wouldn’t want to be involved in. Of course, we were bound to wind up with a trial in the labyrinth anyway, but if it meant avoiding angry glass covered hate birds, I’d take my chances.

The mountains grew as we approached, sheer walls of black shining glass that had been tough to distinguish at a distance, but became clearer as we approached. If I’d been nearer to these when I had my earlier thought, I wouldn’t have needed to ask. Whoever had erected this ring of impenetrable black glass had clearly wanted to dissuade anyone from easily crossing it. “Stay out,” it seemed to say. “Some things are not meant for the likes of you.”

Of course, I ignored that bullshit. I was a Wyndham, and even if I had been the kind of person to take things like that to heart, this planet belonged to my family. There was nowhere in the Heirworld I was scared to go. Or at least, that’s what I tried to tell myself.

The truth was that with so much Void interference on the planet, I was plenty scared to heed the call to adventure. Despite being fairly sure the forbidding cliffs had nothing to do with the Void at all, the whole aesthetic just reminded me too much of the dark powers the Void had at their beck and call. A monolith of cold darkness, shadow and death frozen into solid form and carved into a jagged warning to all those who looked upon it.

“That’s super dumb looking,” Bethy said casually, as she stared up at the cliff face we were approaching. “It’s so…dull. They need to add some colors. Maybe some pretty wildflowers growing in the cracks along the cliff. Ooooh, or maybe a mural! I think a butterfly would look super cute.”

Devlan stared at her in horrified fascination. “A butterfly?” He asked numbly. “Forgetting HOW you would even paint a mural in glass on the side of a giant cliff populated by furious murder birds, why a butterfly? And even if you COULD do it, I wouldn’t. The Wallmaker is notoriously petty, hence him building a giant glass wall to seal off the inner two rings. There’s no wall around the A-rank zone, of course…there doesn’t need to be.”

That sounded ominous to me, but Bethy just shrugged. “Whatever. His fault for making it so ugly. If he gets mad about it I’ll just have Sebastian beat him up. He sounds mean. I guess I could just wait and do it myself, but that would take ages, and I have better stuff to do.”

Considering the old man was Lark’s personal butler and one of his most effective lieutenants, making him probably one of the most dangerous A-rankers alive, I thought that idea was much more intimidating than Devlan seemed to give it credit for. Benny, for his part, looked torn between horror and eagerness, and since he had spent the most time with the terrifying old man, I took that as a pretty firm sign.

Deciding to spare Devlan the confusion of trying to argue with Bethy (who was honestly right in this case, the cliff WAS morbid and boring) I gestured ahead of us. “So, how do we access this labyrinth? I don’t see an entrance.”

That seemed to snap him out of his confusion, bringing his focus back to the matter at hand. “The entrances are concealed,” he said, clearly happy to be back on familiar footing. “We had a problem back in the day with people sneaking in. The labyrinth is HUGE and dangerous, if you don’t know the proper paths through or aren’t strong enough dying is a certainty. We lost a lot of C-rankers trying to cross when they had no idea how. Eventually the local powers sealed off the labyrinth entrances except for a few hidden paths down, just to be safe.”

We strode forward, access cracked and hard ground peppered with chunks of broken obsidian, not B-rank like the cliffs, but C-rank, probably tiny damaged pieces that had degraded and snapped off. Still, I saw Benny kneel down and start scooping as much of them up as he could find.

 He had to stop and catch up to us eventually, but he rejoined the group just in time for us to stop in front of a HUGE monolith of black glass a few hundred feet from the base of the cliff. Devlan stepped forward, knocking a pattern on the side, and there was a grinding rumble as a section of it slid down, revealing a long set of rough glass stairs descending into the earth. I sighed. Back underground, I supposed. I was beginning to hate caves.