LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter Seven Hundred Thirteen
The next month was surprisingly peaceful. I spent it relaxing with Callie, repairing the planet, hanging with Benny and Chelsea, and just generally taking some time to get my head right after the pressure cooker of tension and nightmares that was running an active opposition to a planetary occupation.
Of course, I still did my wishes every day, and I focused most of it on Fantasy again. Sadly, the majority of my point gain was from renown, and most of that probably ended up going into Focus and Might.
Callie and I had decided to take in our gains together out of the public eye, so we were down in the caverns, in an offshoot that was out of the way of any of the passages in consistent use.
“You ready for this?” I asked her with a laugh. “I haven’t seen your numbers in like…half a year. Never had a chance to check in after the trip, and we’ve been down here for months. I’m looking forward to seeing how far ahead of me you are. And with you on the streets for the last month helping with repairs, your profile down here is as high as mine. Maybe more, what with Valen trumpeting your victorious return.”
She grinned at me. “Well I need all the help I can get. With you putting all your wishes into progressing, it’s tough to keep up.”
I laughed. The truth was we were both on the express train. Between the wedding, the occupation, and our big victory, we were practically bathing in renown. Smiling over at her, I took in a deep breath and let it out. “So. You ready? I’m going first.”
Wishmaster candidate status. E-rank. Ability: Expert Wish- Seven times a day grant an Expert wish in return for proper compensation. Wish must be feasibly achievable by the candidate's own efforts within a three day period with current statistics.
Expert Path of the Doom Sovereign- A Solid Path toward a great destiny.
Might: 21,200
Impact: 65
Fantasy: 14,020
Vitality: 12,674
Focus: 15,920
Perception: 15,004
Creation: 14,054
Progress to next rank: 92,937/100,000
Soul strength: Sapphire Soul Body
Stored: 7 shadow attacks, 10 shadow jump (seven in reserve), 10 Stealth charges, 0 fire attacks, 10 triple strenth tranq blows (ten in reserve), 0 triple strength density shifted attacks. 10 spider leg attacks (ten in reserve), 0 heal bursts (0 reserve), 3 gravity attacks, 1 shadow clone, 18 scan heals (I-rank ability so Shane can hold more)
Pet: Wolf named Jin
Financial resources:
50 E-ranked chits 42 D-ranked(worth 100 E-ranked, past master rank is a watershed)
Skills: Expert Path of the Doom Sovereign, Lesser Valtek Mastery, Intermediate Cooking Mastery, Lesser Inventing Mastery, Beginner Balam Mastery, Minor Fire Manipulation Mastery, Minor Piano Mastery, Minor Guitar Mastery, Minor First Aid Mastery, Expert Paired Dueling, Expert Dust Construction Mastery
DS Subskills: Monk: Stone Limb, Moonlit Night, Consecration of Flame, Ripple Running, State of Grace, Steam Arrow, Afterburner, Pit of Despair, Mountain Stance.
Rogue: Mercy Kill, Double Trouble, Touch of Tears, Flurry of Blows, Heavy hands, Marked for Death, False Fatality
Diviner: Overlay, Song of the Soil, Rhythm of the Wild, Eye of Revelation, Danger Sense, Piece of Mind
Goetia Staff Art:
First form- Belial. Touch of Tears, Stone Limb, Consecration of Flames
Second Form- Mephistopheles. Consecration of Flame, Afterburner, Mercy Kill, Marked for Death.
Techniques: Cosmic Collapse: comdensed sphere of black flame that explodes out one side amplifying force. Mephisto's Waltz: Movement technique, Damnatio Memoriae: causes the ground iself to dissolve best used on mountains to cause avalanches
Circle of Damnation: defensive technique through destruction
Third form- Mornax. Stone Limb, Triple Strength Density Shifting (x10 F-rank stored attacks), Mountain Stance
Fourth form - Zagan. Heal Burst, Purifying Flame, Consecration of Flame, Afterburner
Techniques: Life Nova, purifying and healing version of Cosmic Collapse.Genesis Burst: enhanced version of Life Nova designed to repair soul damage.
Fifth form- Bael. Moonlit Night, Eye of Revelation (inverted), Afterburner (full effectiveness is seven times base Perception due to stacking, can only currently stack a single stat, unlike wish power which stacks them all)
Sixth form- Beelzebub. Piece of Mind, Stone Limb, Dust Construction, Shadow Clone. Create twelve copies (thirteen versions total) of Shane, each copy able to use a single form without straining Shane's soul past the strain of the original technique, which is only slightly more of a strain than a normal form and still allows one additional form to be used without overstraining. Can't remote control the forms, but can communicate with them remotely via telepathy principles from Paired Dueling. Might and Perception stacking, most versatile and well designed form yet.
Pseudo Domain: First Circle of Hell- Limbo. Belial, Mephistopheles, Moonlit Night, Eye of Revelation. A psuedo Domain of confusion and mental manipulation, distorting the senses and controlling the body.
The difference was…staggering. My Vitality hadn’t gone up by much, only a bit under five hundred, probably since it was already fairly high. Might had skyrocketed, which I supposed happened when you started dropping districts on people. My Focus had spiked up by another four thousand points, and the power leveling of all the other stats had dragged Creation up by a few thousand as part of the package.
All in all, it was a colossal month. Seventeen thousand four hundred and thirty two points. I was less than eight thousand points from reaching D-rank. My wedding, this occupation, it was the perfect storm of renown. Not just on planet, there was no way word of the siege wasn’t getting out, and the fact that we hadn’t been ritually sacrificed yet must be making the vanished gods look like idiots.
Travis had poured a ton of resources and time into this plan to tank our morale, and I was betting it was having the opposite effect. It was almost enough to make this whole thing worth it. Callie took the paper I’d written out my information on and whistled. “Damn. You HAVE been busy. You ready to see mine?” Her grin was challenging and I knew she’d made similar amounts of progress, if not more.
She let her own stats hit her, relaxing her soul and letting a torrent of power pour into her. When she opened her eyes, she had an odd look on her face. “Oh.” She said shortly. “I guess we’ve been so busy I hadn’t checked. It makes sense, but I wasn’t really expecting it.” She glanced at me almost shyly, blushing slightly, which wasn’t really like her at all. She scrawled out her stats for me, passing it over and averting her eyes, and it took me a second to realize what she meant.
Calliope Wyndham. E-rank. Ability: Expert Abyssal Infiltration. Abyssal Infiltration- Enter the shadows and emerge where you will within range, shape the darkness to your call, moving it as if it were part of your body, and even extend your senses through the shadows to spy on your enemies.
Might: 25,550
Impact: 65
Vitality: 9,742
Fantasy: 17,520
Focus: 7,908
Perception: 22,375
Creation: 14,485
Progress to next rank: 97,645/100,000
Soul strength: Sapphire Soul Body
Pet: Wolf named Rellia
Skills: Minor Tracking, Beginner Dual Dagger Mastery, Intermediate Stealth, Intermediate Trap Mastery, Beginner Disguise, Lesser Balam Mastery, Expert Shadow Manipulation Mastery. Expert Paired Dueling.
Path of the Abyss-Illusory. Technique: Shadowed Glide
Putting aside the MASSIVE nearly fifty thousand point jump (I’d made an even bigger one, but I had wishes to fall back on) the thing that really stuck out to me was right at the beginning. It was clearly what had thrown Callie off so badly, and I couldn’t really blame her. I hadn’t expected the swap myself, though I suppose we both probably should have.
“Calliope Wyndham.” I said with a grin. “It sounds good, don’t you think? I mean I knew you were planning to take my name, but I didn’t know it would change in your stat sheet. I guess that means you’ve really internalized it.”
She smirked. “That’s your whole takeaway. Twenty thousand points in Might and you’re focused on my name change?”
I shrugged. “Godslayer. Plus you literally fell from the sky like a flaming meteor and decimated a giant Wendigo that was about to destroy a city. You have to figure that gave you a bump. It is a lot though.”
“Less than it seems.” She chuckled. “You were way further behind me not long ago. I was just holding back showing you my progress so I could drop all the big numbers on you at once.” She winked at me. “Still, I AM ahead by about five thousand points.”
I swallowed, staring at the paper. “Do you think we’ll hit D-rank when we unseal the planet?” I asked after a minute.
“Probably.” She admitted. “We’re already damned close. Elevating Callus to D-rank should bridge the gap. It’s going to be a huge operation, not to mention the E-rankers that’ll be there with us. We should be able to ride the event into Mastery. Why do I feel like you’re more worried than excited?”
“This foreboding feeling I’m having.” I tried to articulate. “It feels…close. Not in the next few days, not the fight with Travis. This feels bigger, more unstoppable. Something is coming, and I can’t help but feel being D-rank might be what’s bringing it. D-rank is when we really step into the higher orders of Ascendant culture. It’s when we become real players.”
She smiled knowingly. “And when we say goodbye to our safety net.”
“That too.” I conceded. “I do worry about life without Zeke. I’ve gotten used to watching my own back, but it still feels…dangerous.”
“Oh I get it.” She said emphatically. “I’ve been terrified. I’ve been talking to your mother about it. But I think you’ve overlooked a few things.”
I cocked my head. “Like what?”
“Well for one, when you lose your guardian, it’s not just sacrificing protection. It’s breaking the moratorium on external help. At least in part. Once you hit D-rank as a candidate, you’re officially under the protection of the WCP. Maybe not as personally as with Zeke, but messing with you means messing with your whole family.” She sounded triumphant, and I could see why.
I had been worried about being undefended, so that was good to hear. “I’ll be able to create wish scrolls too.” I said with a slow nod. “That means I won’t need to use my wishes on the spot every day. I can stockpile them. That’ll be useful when I’m not around anyone useful enough to worth wasting one on.”
“Exactly.” She beamed. “As for this foreboding feeling…we’ll handle it. Together. As a family. Once the labyrinth breaks and we ascend to D-rank, we’ll have your mom, Zeke, Andrew, and all their backup here with us. I’d like to SEE who can come snatch you out from under that kind of entourage.”
I laughed, letting my body relax, but deep down inside my stomach churned. She was right, I knew she was, but I couldn’t shake this undercurrent of dread. I DIDN’T want to see who could come take me. I didn’t want that at all. Because whatever the answer was, it would be someone too powerful to even consider fighting back against.
For now though, I was home, I was strong, and I was ready. Only two more days before we set off on our final raid. I still needed to check in with Jessie and Benny about their stats (and Jessie’s Path) before we left. Helping my wife up, I offered her my arm, and she took it with a wink and a warm smile, and we headed off into the cavern in search of our friends.
It was almost over. We were almost free, and then we could finally have our reception with all our family and friends and put all this nastiness behind us. After that, who knew? We had a year or so before the competition for the Wishmaster position came due. I was sure we could find some trouble to get into before then.