Wish upon the Stars chapter 864

We headed for the exit straight away after combining the groups. Once we were all together, I could see a change in Crell. His previous easygoing snark melted away, and his eyes started to shine with a feverish intensity. Anyone who could hide as deeply and work as hard for a cause as he had must be someone of supreme determination, and I could see that in him now. When his victory was at hand, he seemed almost like a sword, drawn at last to free his edge.

“I have to ask,” I finally said as we walked. “How have you not been caught? I mean, I know that you leveraged Skartaris into a position where he couldn’t really investigate anyone too deeply for fear of unbalancing his government, but even then, he NEVER figured you out?”

He grinned wolfishly. “Did you forget my Legendary Skill? It’s good for more than just shutting off powers. Doubt is insidious, it creeps in and infects anyone who hears it. Did he suspect me? Maybe? But was I really suspicious? Wasn’t Alanna a more likely candidate? Or Carmine? Even that ridiculous dragon was more suspicious than I was. So elusive and greedy. I’m the Master of Ceremonies, if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to put on a show.”

I gaped at him. Because…that made a weird amount of sense. Even within the first few hours of asking around, he’d seemed like the likeliest suspect. Carmichael had even said as much. But in a way, that made him even LESS likely. The longer it went on, the more ridiculous it seemed that he could keep getting away with it. And with him in Skartaris’s ear, not only defusing his concerns but actively shunting them onto others, he was almost uncatchable. 

How much of this ridiculous power distribution system was Crell responsible for? How much doubt had he sown into Skartaris’s mind about his own competence to handle it all, about his desire to do so? Had things been like this when he arrived? Or did they change over time.

No wonder he’d been able to build an organization like the Ghost Bone Tranquility Tower. In this dungeon, where C-rank was the limit, no one would be able to resist that insidious Skill.

As we walked, his expression became tighter, less gleeful. The focus was still there, but now it was starting to get more…exposed. If he’d been a drawn sword before, now he was being waved around in a threatening manner. But he wasn’t threatening ME. He was just…pissed. I raised an eyebrow behind my mask. “Everything ok?”

“No,” he said in frustration. “This isn’t…this is too easy.”

“Ok,” I said slowly. “Isn’t that good? We want it to be easy. You’ve been preparing for this for years, right? You outmaneuvered him.”

He shook his head. “Not like this. Skartaris isn’t stupid. Arrogant, lazy, a little petty, yes all of those things. But he isn’t an idiot. Letting us group up this easily is dimwitted. It would make much more sense to ambush the groups to prevent us from gathering. Now we’re together and we haven’t seen ANYONE. My plans are effective, but they’re not THAT effective, not unless…”

Freezing in place, I saw the blood drain from his face. “Formations,” he said in a strangled whisper. I froze, then triggered Dantalion, focusing hard on the form to begin the process of deducing our surroundings.

After a minute or two of focusing, I finally caught something. “Fuck,” I spat as I held up a hand, stopping everyone. I turned and looked behind us. The energy currents around us were just that. Currents. Energy sat in the air, Impact native to this world, and the natural warp and weft of that power was different everywhere. That was what formations were. Steering the power into patterns that could achieve certain effects.

But the power here was…off. I couldn’t SEE a formation, mind, but I could see the power moving in ways it shouldn’t. Specifically, boxing us in and subtly pushing us forward.

I informed Crell of this, and his eyes hardened. “I fucked up,” he said tightly. “I missed something. I was too busy leading him around by the nose, I wasn’t watching where the bastard was putting his feet.”

Carmichael and Delilah both stepped in to check on the situation. They heard that last statement, and Delilah looked disturbed. “Missed something? What did you miss?”

“I missed that we aren’t the only ones here with Legendary Skills,” he said darkly. “Skartaris is a formation master. I thought it was just a hobby, and not one he ever seemed particularly good at. He would practice when he was bored, laying down formations in the palace, rearranging things. But it was just…nonsense. Casual bullshit he did to pass the time.”

“Except it wasn’t,” I said slowly. “Do you think he knows it’s you? That he was able to break through your Doubt?”

He nodded. “If he had proof he could have bypassed it. And formations can be used for all sorts of things. Monitoring and information gathering would be easy. Which means this is a trap. He outmaneuvered me.”

“But why?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Why do all…THIS? Why not just take you down when he discovered you?”

“The same reason I didn’t join up until you beat Dastan,” said Selvara as she joined us. “He’s making an example. With the Void Children coming, this place is going to get NASTY. If he has dissenters, that’ll be a prime time for them to split his forces. But if he lets all of us gather together and crushes us in front of his people?”

I winced. “He makes an example of us, massively boosts his own prestige, and he has a bunch of C-rankers at his mercy. He can choose to “pardon” some of us in exchange for a change in loyalties. He gets his forces back in line, ousts his only rival, and solidifies his grasp on power all at the same time. But the fight will be the same, won’t it? How is he so sure he can win?”

“Formations,” said Crell sourly. “He’s been reworking the palace for years. It’s his home ground. With enough preparation, a formation master can do almost anything. Suppression, amplification, even direct killing formations exist. He probably rigged up a perimeter around the exit, reinforced it to hell, and has his people laid out in the most advantageous possible way waiting for us.”

“Can we push through?” My tone was urgent. “We know he’s waiting for us, and I can try to study the formations…”

But even as I said it I knew that wouldn’t work. Dantalion could barely map the energy here. A Legendary formation was a B-rank construct. I had zero chance of deciphering it without a LONG time working on the problem. Even that would only be possible because the actual ENERGY wasn’t B-rank, just the techniques. But we didn’t have weeks for me to case the place.

“What if we use the scrolls,” Callie suggested. I hadn’t noticed her approaching, but I nodded happily at the idea. It was easy to forget just how versatile my power was, given that I couldn’t use it myself. Subconsciously, I’d long since begun to rely on my DS Mastery more than my wish power, treating the latter as a means of accruing points. Luckily, I didn’t travel alone, and I had other people to pick up the slack in that department.

We had more than enough scrolls to use. Ten of them were needed for the new C-rankers that Crell had brought, but that left forty. Sadly, it took some doing to get the details we needed. Just asking for a map of the formations didn’t work, because they were theoretically “secret” and the cost was a bit excessive. But we were able to work around that by going room by room. Still expensive, because the information wasn’t common knowledge, but even with the extra cost it was within my price range.

Unfortunately, there were more than forty rooms in the palace, so we couldn’t get all of it, but with a bit of work, Crell helped us make a map of the closest rooms to the exit, and after filling it in with formation info and doing a bit of induction, we were able to roughly determine what we would be up against.

On the plus side, I got two thousand two hundred and fifty points of Creation out of the deal, and it was well worth the time spent, even if we kept having to move as the formation slowly closed in on us.

I had originally worried that might be a problem, given the information gathering aspects of this whole thing, but Chelsea assured me after studying the formation layouts that the formations had been reconfigured to maximize entrapment and power suppression. There wasn’t room for them to keep an eye on us, so we were just trapped in a slowly closing inescapable death box, not being spied on. Joy.

“Alright,” my sister said as she studied the layout. “I can see a few things. These formations are complicated and VERY polished, but gaps are gaps.”

Crell looked skeptical. “He made mistakes? After all that preparation?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. Formations are the art of arranging natural energy flows to create specific effects. But the key lies in that last phrase. Specific. There’s a finite amount of energy in a given area. You can supplement it, but it’s rarely done with large scale formations because if the energy supplemented isn’t distributed evenly across the breadth of the formation it creates holes.

“Even if the energy IS distributed evenly though, at least in a general sense, it still needs to be used.” She pointed at a room. “This formation here is a fairly simple splitting array. It’s a kind of subformation that splits energy flows to allow for more complex variations in construction. I don’t recognize about half of these, mind, but some of them are very polished versions of things I DO understand.”

She pointed at a partial formation that bled into the exit chamber. “Based on the half we can see, this is a containment formation. Containment formations, obviously, contain things. But the process of containment requires that you sacrifice lethality for durability. Otherwise it’s a killing formation. Moreover, there are a lot of details that can be seen in blueprints. Where the energy flows meet, where they arranged the fulcrum for the transfer array that lets people OUT of the formation. These are all weak spots, but not really weak spots. It’s just the energy is being used for something other than being strong.”

“Ok,” I said slowly. “So can you use the blueprints to design us a safe path through?”

“Not a chance,” she said immediately. “I’m a dabbler. Having all the formation blueprints in front of me is a huge cheat, but these are way above my level. I can give you some basic formation breaking advice based on placement, but you’ll need to actually apply it. And by you I mean the C-rankers, because there’s no way any of us will be able to break this directly.” She glanced at my staff. “Or at least not on our own.”

I focused on the formation blueprint. I knew…not much, about formations. But I had some ideas for ways to apply the little I did know, especially if Chelsea helped. But she was right, we’d also need to be able to actually break through.

Turning to Carmine, Delilah, Crell, and Carmichael I cocked my head. “Well? Any of you interested in helping us overthrow a tyrant?” We’d just been planning to push through and leave, but now that it had come to this, might as well do this world a favor and take Skartaris out. I didn’t even need to worry about his Impact. Without even considering my staff, we would be right next to the exit, and he was C-rank. I wondered what would happen if we pushed him through.