Wish upon the Stars chapter 862

The first thing I did the next morning was create and distribute my scrolls. I ended up asking all fifty of the C-rankers to try to offer Creation stats. It wasn’t a commonly used stat for most Ascendants, and mine was laughably far behind the rest of my stats at this point. Once that was done though, we officially split into groups, getting ready to head out on our assault.

Delilah, who was going with the other group, gathered us all up to go over our entry points before we left, just to make sure the plan was fresh in our minds.

“Alright,” she said as she pointed at the diagram she’d drawn on the wall. “Here’s where we’ll be entering the palace. There are a total of thirty six hidden entrances. Three of them are Skartaris’s personal escape passages and are under heavy observation, twenty are in common usage by various criminal organizations for trades with palace personnel, and three of them are used for moving sacrifices for the Abyssal Lords. The last ten are used by various servants and staff for event prep and other purposes, and those were the ten I suggested we break into.”

She reached up and circled two of them. “Among those ten, however, four of them are basically abandoned, and are even more secure, and I’ve selected the two furthest from each other for our entry, to give us the best chance of a quiet infiltration.

“This one is the quarry entrance off the third district.” She pointed at a spot on the hand drawn map. “It’s incredibly cramped, wet, and fairly dangerous. The whole thing is halfway underwater and it's full of snakes. The snakes are all venomous, and while the venom isn’t LETHAL, it’s deeply painful, and they tend to swarm. I cannot describe to you how much I hate this fucking quarry.”

We were all staring, and Delilah stopped, flushing slightly. “Sorry, that was inappropriate. When I was younger I lived in the third district. We would often dare each other to swim in the quarry.”

I wondered if the snakes were left there on purpose to prevent kids like that from accidentally stumbling into the palace entrance. It didn’t matter. I was sure we could get by them. I had tricks for dealing with beasts. “We’ll take the quarry.” I said decisively. “You can have the other entrance, whatever it is.”

She let out a relieved breath. “The cave system off the ninth district. There are a bunch of cave bats, but otherwise the only real problem is getting lost. The whole place is basically a labyrinth. I have a map, of course, so that won’t be an issue.”

“Honestly, I’m kind of surprised you gave us a choice,” I said as I noted her relief. “You could have just assigned the entrances directly and I’d never have known.”

She shook her head. “I work for you now. And besides, we’ll need all the help we can get to push through Skartaris’s forces. Alienating our allies for no reason is stupid. If you’d wanted to force it I’d have just gone to the quarry. I’m relieved you didn’t though. I really hate that damned place.”

Laughing, I went and collected our people. Carmichae, Dezcarta, and Carmine were the only C-rankers among our twenty five that I recognized. All the really impressive ones had gone with the other group. Our group, however, had all my friends, so our D-rankers were leagues above theirs.

Dezcarta and Caladwen had shown up last night, along with their mother, a cheerful woman named Delia. She was also pretty high in D-rank, of course, and she was coming with us when we left. As was, to my surprise, the Ordinary Citizen, who had tagged along with Caladwen and her mother.

Because it would be too obvious for a giant crowd of powerful people to stroll down the road together, we all split up after getting directions, agreeing to meet back up at the quarry, but the trip was quick and effortless.

We all arrived there pretty quickly, and we gathered at the top of a small cliff overlooking what appeared to be a tiny lake or a very deep pond. “So, this is the quarry,” I observed as we stared down into the chalky water. “Why would anyone dare kids to swim in this? And why would they do it?”

“What, no kids on your home planet made stupid dares?” Carmichael asked in amusement.

I paused, thinking about my childhood. Benny had dared me to do some pretty dumb shit when we were children. After a couple moments, I just shrugged. “Not that I can think of,” I lied. “I guess I was just too mature for that kind of thing, even as a child.”

Callie snorted, and I turned to glare at her. She averted her eyes, lips twitching as she coughed something that sounded suspiciously like “mugs”, and I very graciously ignored her.

“ANYWAY,” I said loudly. “How are we doing this? I assume none of us want to swim in that shit and get ambushed by a horde of pain snakes. Anyone here have a water abi-” I paused. “Wait, I think I have an idea.

I’d been planning to make a chute through the quarry and then have someone drain the water, but thinking about it, there was a much easier way. I knelt down, and a quick flare of Dantalion allowed me to get a good image of the surrounding area. Once I had it memorized, I dropped the form and activated Agares.

With a slight effort of will, the stone in front of us began to dissolve and contract. I condensed it into a much denser rock, and in the process, created a series of black glass steps leading down into the earth. They were a bit steep, because I swept down and underneath the water, and I had to focus a lot of the hard stone into the ceiling of the tunnel as I went so it didn’t collapse, but it only took me about ten minutes.

When I was done, I turned to the others, gesturing to the tunnel with a flourish. “There you go. Snake free. Probably. For now. We should hurry.” I held out my arm to my wife. “Shall we?”

She beamed at me. I’d felt her distress about diving into murky water in her new costume. It had enchantments to prevent stains or tearing, but I imagine even with absurd strength, swimming in a ball gown would be annoying. Hooking her arm in mine, she followed me down into the tunnel, our heels clicking on the steps as we descended.

My sister was right behind us, looking intrigued. “One of your utility forms. I have to say, this one is pretty damned useful.”

I tried to remember if she’d SEEN Agares. I was surprised to realize that she probably hadn’t. I’d been on Rackham when I developed it, and I didn’t use it much here. The only reason it was feasible now was that all the void energy had been drained into the clouds, leaving the ground slightly more brittle than one would expect from C-ranked rock.

Glancing back, I checked how far the others were from us. It was a decent distance between my group and the C-rankers and even the other D-rankers, so I went ahead and triggered Murmur, adjusting the domain to only filter sound. “Alright, we can talk freely. Yeah, this is Agares. You guys all ready? For the assault, I mean. I’m not sure exactly what this fight is going to entail, but I doubt it’ll be pleasant.”

Bethy and Abel, both supremely confident, just nodded casually. Mel, to my surprise, shrugged. “I’m not…I’m starting to fall behind. The training helped, your mom is a badass, but this idiot is on a whole other level now.” He hooked a thumb at her boyfriend. “I feel off balance. Might need to ask for some wish priority. I want to start hyperfocusing into Might like Jessie does with VItality.”

I’d been under the impression she was ALREADY doing that, but thinking about it, I didn’t really know what her stats were. “Yeah, I’m down to help.” Reallocating stats like that was easy, and it paid me as much as it paid them. We entered a bend in the tunnel, and then shifted from vertical to horizontal. This section of the tunnel was flat ground, and it was a pretty casual trip. “What about the rest of you? Any easy fixes for problems?”

Dom shrugged. “I could probably use more focus on Might and Vitality. Condensing my stats like that should help refine my ability on my next rank up. Honestly, it’s probably a good idea for most of us.”

I nodded. He wasn’t wrong. Callie and I were exceptions, because her stats were distributed across too many specialties because her legend had grown WAY too fast, and I purposefully kept mine balanced so my ability DIDN’T upgrade (among other reasons). But Jessie had seen some absurd results from the focusing she’d done.

Honestly, along the way it would have been detrimental to stack everything into one or two stats, since most of us were still figuring out our Paths and abilities. But now that we had our combat styles confirmed, it was something to think about. 

Originally, most of us had more versatile abilities than Jessie, whose entire portfolio of powers was pretty much covered under Vitality. Now though, with Paths and refinement of skills and techniques, we could mostly fit our combat styles into narrowed boxes.

Extreme specialization would make the abilities we DID have incredibly overpowered for our rank, which would snowball into more renown. Jessie got almost as much renown as Callie and I, and she hadn’t killed any gods. She just did one thing and did it WELL. In all honesty, while the rest of us used tricks and shortcuts, Jessie was the best traditional Ascendant in our entire group in terms of gaining renown.

We let ourselves get distracted by that during the walk, though I kept an eye out for snakes. With Murmur active, nothing could sneak up on us, and I speared a few of them with steam arrows as they tried to slither out of wall cracks.

Eventually, we took another set of stairs I’d made up and ended up in another cavern, this one entirely empty and mercifully dry. We’d bypassed the quarry. We came out at the edge of a sort of…hallway. It was still kind of a cave, but the walls were made of ancient looking brick. An extension of the old ruins, I assumed.

“Alright, look alive people,” I called over my shoulder, dropping Murmur. “This area is supposed to be abandoned, but we all know how that kind of thing usually plays out.”

I heard some murmurs of assent, and we slowed down, taking our time as we picked through the tunnel, listening for any signs of ambush. Happily there didn’t appear to be any, and we reached the exit with a surprising lack of trouble.

The passage up was a spiral staircase, and we took it up without any suspense. The area above was pitch black, which was creepy, and Dantalion couldn’t pierce it. Some side effect of the ruins, I assumed. Once we were all out, we shut the passage, and I sighed with relief. “Ok, I think we’re good. I don’t think they noticed us. Anyone see anything to convince you otherwise?”

“I did,” whispered an urgent sounding voice from the dark. “I’m pretty sure they know we’re here.”

I frowned, turning toward it. I didn’t recognize whoever it was, but I was here with a lot of strangers. “Why do you say that?” I murmured back, trying to puzzle out my next move if we were ambushed.

There was a scratching sound, and the green flame of a candle illuminated the room, showing a crowd of people surrounding my group. A man stood at the front, smiling cheerfully as he held the flame aloft. “Oh,” he said smugly. “Just a guess.”