Wish upon the Stars chapter 880

The Mountain Mammoth was…well, mountainous. The thing was colossal, standing easily two hundred and fifty feet high once it got up off its folded legs. Its hide was made of dark brown stone, and its eyes were magmatic orbs of burning hate that flicked desperately along the nearby horizon, looking for…something. I wasn’t sure what exactly, until I noticed the small hole on its right flank.

“Fuck,” I spat in annoyance. “That’s why the damned thing woke up. The drop pod punched through its outer layer. We basically stabbed it. It must be pretty slow moving to take a full ten minutes after impact to wake up.”

I doubted we were the only drop pod to land on a mammoth, but I also doubted many of us had. There was no need. That monstrous trumpet of rage had woken up all the rest of them.

“So…how do we do this?” I asked the others, glancing around. “They don’t know we’re here, but if we attack they’ll figure it out. Especially if we do something big and obvious. On the upside, I was wrong about drawing attention. The big guy woke up all the others so it seems like we should blend pretty well. But I bet we’ll run into problems if we don’t take out all the ones nearby quick and get gone.”

Abel grimaced. “I’d love to fight one head on. But I get the feeling that won’t do much for our stealth.”

“You have Murmur up, right? You getting any details of their anatomy or weaknesses?” Callie grimaced at the huge beast. “Because somehow, I don’t think hitting them in the head a bunch is going to do the trick.”

I squinted up at the Mammoth. My Murmur domain used pieces of Dantalion and Bael, so it was good at gathering intel as well as stealth. I focused on the form of the Mammoth, where I was slowly gleaning more and more information. It had a fairly pronounced rock hump on its back that had camouflage it from me when I first triggered the domain, and it had woken up before I was able to notice what it was.

“Actually…maybe it will,” I said slowly. “They seem to have pretty big empty skulls, believe it or not. Very small ear canals, but only relative to the rest of them. A person could fit in one of those if they could make it past the ears.” I shot a quick look at Abel. “Could you take one of these things head on? Temporarily? Just enough to pin it down and distract it.”

He shrugged. “I mean, if you don’t care who sees, sure. Give me a minute.”

I glanced at the others. “Get ready to bolt. We’re heading for the treeline in that direction,” I pointed the way the compass was indicating. “We’ll sortie out to hit the Mammoths that we see, but we can’t roam around in the open. It’s too risky.”

Abel circled around, and once we were all in position, I shot off a quick flare of green fire and he engaged. Seeing the massive Ragam Blood Body expand to a size comparable to the Mammoth, I winced. That wasn’t its strongest from, but it would do for now. I was reassured when I saw Bethy appear beside him and overlap her domain with the manifestation, stabilizing the huge bloody simulacrum. 

The Mammoth caught sight of him almost instantly, and it trumpeted its rage. With a roar of hatred, it rushed forward. It actually moved really slow, but it had incredibly long legs even for its size, and it crossed the distance shockingly fast.

Abel didn’t even flinch. His giant blood body stepped forward and seized the two fierce tusks of the mighty beast, and he planted his feet, twisting to pin it in place as best he could. It didn’t work that well, at first the monster mostly just kind of…slowed down. But it was enough. He slid for about fifty feet before coming to a final stop.

I spread my wings, flying forward with a blaze of black flame as I triggered my waltz. As I did, Abel shoved back against the tusks, jerking to one side to send an ear flying up. I blitzed into the gap beneath the ear, blazing down the ear canal as I headed into the skull, searching for…the brain! I noticed my target and zoomed toward it, drawing my staff.

Whirling it a few times, I triggered Mephistopheles, firing off a series of Extinction Events into the slim chords of tissue connecting the tiny brain to the rest of the body. To my surprise, they didn’t break. The black flames sunk in but they couldn’t break through. I scowled, then triggered Belial. I had another idea. A better idea. An EVIL idea. Belial was about corruption, normally I couldn’t use it on huge enemies like this. The bigger they were, the more corruption was needed to influence them.

Except this thing was just a huge rocky shell for a very tiny dumb brain. I jammed my staff into the base of the brain stem, pouring corruption out into it. Where the brain chords had resisted destruction, they did NOT resist corruption. I focused on my bond to Callie, letting my wife know to contact Abel and have him release the Mammoth.

Then I abandoned that train of thought, focusing entirely on corrupting the Mammoth brain. This Mammoth was D-rank, but it was VERY high in D-rank. Peak almost. It was resisting, throwing its will against me, but a quick Piece of Mind was all I needed. I slipped the parallel in through the corruption, subsuming the brain, and suddenly…I was the Mammoth.

This little trick required a lot more development in Belial than I’d had before my trip. The staff had been working overtime upgrading all my forms, and my Domains had benefited. I looked around, and I could see all the other Mammoths. They were far, but also very close. The towering legs made crossing the distance a snap. I drove the giant beast’s body forward, pushing it into acceleration that would probably have injured it normally…if it had time to register that.

Enormous tusks, speared into the side of the nearest Mammoth, miles away and only a few steps. I gored the other beast, shoving it sideways, and it toppled over, dragging me down with it as the two Mammoth bodies collapsed into a pile of too large limbs and bloody wounds. Bones snapped under the combined weight of two behemoths of earth and tusk.

I snapped back to my body, grimacing as I realized where I was. I charged over to the ear canal, flapping once and shooting down the passage. I hit the ear on the way out, but I was leading with the staff and managed to bat it aside, emerging into midair with a snap of my wings and then shooting off toward my friends.

Somewhere, inside my head, I heard a pair of chimes. I knew I’d gotten credit for those kills, and I grinned as I touched down next to the other. “We gotta go!” I shouted as I dropped Belial and reasserted Murmur. Abel had resumed his normal size, and he and the others rushed to join me in the domain.

By the time we made it a few miles away and turned to look, a colossal bronze titan had plummeted from the sky, smashing into the empty space where out hill had been with a roar. He stomped and flailed and generally threw a giant sized toddler fit to approximately no avail. We made it to the trees within minutes, and when we did, we stopped and allowed Murmur to sink in, really concealing us from anything that might be watching.

“That was interesting,” Abel said after a minute. “Did you just fucking POSSESS that thing?”

I waggled a hand. “Kind of. I slipped a parallel into it through the corruption after hijacking its brain. The only reason I was able to do it was because of a confluence of factors. One, those things are barely sentient. Most beasts at D-rank have consciousness, but those thing appear to just be giant pissed off mountain elephants. Second, I had literal physical access to its brain. Third it was distracted.”

He nodded along. “Right, right, I get you, but you seem to be missing something. All those circumstances, they’re STILL the case. You can get access to more brains. If you can hijack another one of those things, and you can bring us with you, we can try to amplify it like a giant weapon. We can use the Mammoth like a SIEGE engine, and attack more of them as we go on. Hell, imagine GABE at the helm of one of those charges.”

I did…and it was fucking amazing. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t thought of it. I turned to Bethy. “Can you sneak us into one of those things through your domain if you turn into mist?”

She froze. “I…I think I can. In fact I know I can. They’re big and stupid and won’t notice me, and I can definitely bring things along in my Domain even when I change forms.” She beamed at me. “This is going to be SO MUCH FUN!”

She flung open her Domain, and the rest of us were swallowed up, suddenly standing in a black field of grass under a red sky. Behind us, a towering black castle loomed, and the rest of our D-rank force was surrounding us, obviously watching the events outside with interest. Bethy had been projecting her line of sight onto the MOON, which I hadn’t known she could do. As we all watched, she dissolved into bats, the viewpoint fracturing into a thousand tiny visual inputs as she swarmed across the barren space towards the nearest Mammoth, which was currently engaged with a group of people we didn’t get a good look at, as she dissolved further into mist and flowed up its trunk.

I’d expected her to go in the ears, but the trunk worked fine for our purposes, and within seconds, we were being pulled from the Domain, all standing inside the large mostly empty skull with only a tiny brain and each other as company.

Without waiting for a response, I drove the staff into the base of the brainstem, triggering Belial and flooding it with corruption as I channeled my parallel inside once again. Once I had control, Callie joined me. She didn’t need any physical contact, our bond was enough, and she flooded it with Heretic Fire, pouring out into the Mammoth and bolstering the power of my soul that was controlling it.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and Abel pushed his infinite blood sea through the brain and into the circulatory system, Bethy poured her Domain in after it, reinforcing the body with powerful blood.

Chelsea put a hand on my other shoulder, and I sense the conglomeration of her powers, dark and light, as her yin yang diagram was layered over top of our working, amplifying it with pure and overwhelming power, balanced on a knife’s edge. I grinned as I took control of the Mammoth, turning it away from the candidates toward another Mammoth off in the distance. “Gabriel,” I said hoarsely. “You’re up.”

Chelsea’s power was something completely unique to me. Her new Path integrated opposites, merging things together in ways that shouldn’t work. Where originally purification and enshrining darkness exploded when they were superimposed, now they became…more, and they pulled in any other energy around to amplify that growth, becoming a sort of universal supercharger. It was staggeringly potent.

It was also EXACTLY what we needed. Under the influence of the diagram, all of our disparate powers melded together, becoming something pure and potent and undiluted. And when Gabe added his power, Chelsea let it sweep through and overbalance her working.

Like a match dropped into a barrel of oil, it went from being oil to being FIRE. Gabe’s power converted all of the energy into itself, consuming and overtaking it as the force exploded out, and suddenly we were CHARGING. 

An Adamant Mammoth, unstoppably fuelled by the combined force of the strongest group of Ascendants under C-rank. We hit that next Mammoth like a speeding train, punching into it and carrying it alone towards the next one without even slowing down. I needed to congratulate my sister after this was over. Her new Path was fucking amazing. For now though, we had elephants to smash.