Wish upon the Stars chapter 1144 (Patreon)

The next month (thirty two days actually, but the estimates for the midterm had been just that, estimates) went by both slowly and quickly. Slowly because I spent it constantly grinding mechanisms for the two timepieces, and quickly because I could feel the midterms approaching and felt like I never had enough time.

Professor Hawkins hadn’t been kidding about how hard he was going to be on me either. Constant berating, constant correction, information jammed into my head non stop in a way I had never experienced before. I had taken to incarnating Dantalion at all times during lessons because it was the only way I could absorb the information he was force feeding me, and I still needed a parallel or two active to catch the overflow.

I hadn’t wasted the time outside of study either. Aside from the full five hundred scrolls I had on hand now, I’d managed to grind another mile of Domain out during my downtime, bringing me up to a respectable thirty five. I was tempted to burn the scrolls on stat bumps immediately, but decided it would work better if I waited until after midterms. My reputation around here wasn’t too expansive, but if I could hit advanced or do well on the midterms it would probably give me quite a boost in terms of stat points.

More than that though, I had managed another three pages of my Chronicle, one for each of the completed timepieces. I’d bumped them up to thirteen movements apiece and that had seemed like a particularly notable accomplishment, especially given what I had hopefully managed to pull off with the finalization of the project.

Which was what brought me here now, to the bunker where I had been told I’d be able to take my advanced student trial.

I gripped my staff tightly as I stood outside the door. I hadn’t needed to pay for this trial, but apparently that was a one time thing. We got one free attempt, and then it cost a hundred credits each try. The teacher who had helped me set it up had mentioned that they wanted to dissuade reckless idiots from challenging it over and over again until they passed. The comment had seemed particularly pointed, presumably because I was so low in B-rank, but I hadn’t worried about it much. I had plenty of confidence in myself.

Not that I was sure I’d win here, but I was confident enough in myself to make the attempt. Taking a long, slow breath, I stepped through the door. “Trial taker,” came a voice much different from the one I’d spoken to about my original trial. “Do you wish to proceed with your assessment?”

“I do,” I said immediately. “Specifically, I want to take the advanced student trial.”

As I spoke, I scanned the room. It was strange, sort of an endless grey space, except it had a floor. No walls that I could see, and there were clouds of mist drifting aimlessly in the distance. It was kind of unsettling, like I was looking into a bottomless pit, but sideways.

“Trial begins in one minute,” said the same voice. “Please prepare.”

And prepare I did. First thing on the docket was defense. I summoned Mornax immediately. I could have incarnated him, maybe boosted by my staff, but that wasn’t what I was here to test. I would have him on hand to help, but I didn’t want to rely entirely on one ability to pass. It would probably be pretty easy, if time consuming, but that wasn’t what I needed.

This was about preparing for my midterms, which meant it was about learning to use my attributes, to explore my mythcrafting, and to push the boundaries of my Domain. Because ultimately, that was what this was about. Me getting stronger. Becoming more.

With Mornax on hand to act as cover, I could let loose without worrying about being drowned in long range fire. Especially if I combined him with my temporal abilities. I selected my most useful demon for this phase of the training. Overlay. I let out a pleased sigh as the familiar arrows filled my vision, some green, some red. There were no enemies yet, but the predictions came anyway, which was interesting. Presumably it was the temporal aspect of the demon.

“Challenger,” came the voice from the mist. “Your trial begins. Hold back the hordes or fall in the attempt. Should you wish to submit, you need only shout your surrender. Good luck.” And then, within one breath and the next, the army appeared.

It was a lot of robots. Maybe that sounded obvious, like it would be common sense. A hundred thousand is a big number, so of course it would be a lot. I had expected it to be an immense number, enough to fill my vision, to stun me into silence. I had prepared for the sheer mass of my enemy ahead of time.

Except I really hadn’t. I couldn’t have, really. It wasn’t possible. If you’ve never SEEN an army of a hundred thousand people, you can’t imagine it. It doesn’t compute. It’s not logical. Hell, a hundred thousand people was enough to fill a medium sized town, but even THAT didn’t really explain the scope of it. Because towns were abstract. You saw a few people at a time, maybe a small crowd of a hundred or a large one of a thousand. You didn’t see an entire town worth of people all committed to a singular goal. Gathered and prepared to do violence with the sole and supreme purpose of taking YOU out of the world.

It was so shocking, I almost died. If it hadn’t been for the Overlay, I probably would have, but I woke up in time to move aside, vanishing from the path of a series of fireballs.

The back line of the arms was mages, and they all had powerful ranged capabilities. Archers rained shots on me, knights rushed me. It was like a flood, a torrent of violence and death pouring down on me like it had burst from behind some horrible infernal dam.

My staff rose, flickering out as I smashed aside a blow, my body drifting in the other direction to take cover behind Mornax, who stood unwavering under the sea of attacks, turning them aside like a stone in the middle of a river. I deflected blasts of fire, redirected bolts from crossbows, and sidestepped sword attacks as the enemy surged around me. Valtek had been upgraded during my month off, Goetia Staff Art taking his place, and the demon had been hard at work, using the spare time to grind up the Master rank the staff art had been at since I last trained my apprentice.

Dipping back, I pressed my spine to Mornax, using him as a wall to defend myself as my staff wove a symphony of destruction in front of me. Despite the sheer number of them, it started out as being mostly manageable. Only so many robots could attack me at once, and the long range automatons weren’t exactly careful with their blasts. But as the battle wore on, the machines started to adapt. The mages got more precise, the combatants learned to take their time and wait for openings, and they backed off to avoid getting in each other’s way.

As their formation smoothed out, I realized this situation was untenable. There was no way I’d be able to keep this up. Which was fine, I was just putting Overlay through its paces to see where I was at. Now though, now it was time to test out my newest unique ability, the form I had spent the last month perfecting and preparing, the one I had only last night managed to activate reliably. Closing my eyes, I reached into myself. I pulled on Limbo, on Overlay, on Mephistopheles, calling to mind the mechanical clockwork of their timepieces, the ones I had worked so hard on and knew so well.

In my mind, I found the gears I wanted, the seamless mechanical perfection marred by seeming irregularities to leave an opening. Then I slotted them together. One. Two. Three. I felt a weight settle on me, a colossal gravity crushing down on my shoulders like an iron mantle, crushing me to the ground. “Archdemon of time:” I intoned as I opened my eyes. “Kronos.”

The clockwork joined together, not just the clockwork of the watches but the clockwork of all reality around me. I could hear it echoing through the world. Tick. Tick. Tick. It slowed with every beat, until finally, it all but stopped. Not complete silence, but a gaping pause between reports of the clock that I stood inside.

I took in the world around me coldly. I stood in a field of silent statues. Knights with drawn swords, balls of flame and bolts of lightning hanging in air, bolts from crossbows suspended as if in amber. I took it all in, processed it, and couldn’t help the slow, cold grin that pulled at my lips.

Time. I could see it. Not in a way that I really understood. The complex webwork of gears that overlaid the space around me was dizzying and hard to track. Limbo allowed me to glimpse actions associated with each gear, Overlay showed me how they affected the ones nearby, and the black ruinous flames of Mephistopheles flickered between the gears, the slow march of ruin an ever present metronome in this temporal tapestry.

Of course, I couldn’t keep it up. My head all but split as soon as I accessed it. I had to focus on individual gears to even process what was happening, and even then, only after I triggered my staff, pushing this form to A-rank, was I able to actually ACT on the gears.

I took a long, slow breath, processing the factors, triggering a parallel or two to helps sort through it all. Then, ever so slowly, I reached up with my staff and jammed it between two of the ethereal gears that lay atop the skin of the world. With a colossal effort, I hauled down on the staff, moving the gear, which moved another few gears nearby, and as I did…about a dozen of the robots dissolved into greyish dust.

Gaping, I stared at the space where they had been, swallowing hard. The dust floated in the air, suspended in time, and it was easy to see what it was. It was remains, the leftovers of ruin, of the ceaseless march or time’s destruction.

I whooped with laughter, shoving the staff into another gear, I ground my teeth and grunted as I hauled, the same flash of black fire consuming the nearby robots.

Again and again I worked the level, ratcheting the gears, destroying the enemy. Of course, it only worked because they weren’t real beings. Robots were objects, rendering them far more vulnerable, not to mention I was an A-rank archdemon scrapping B-rank bots. But still. It was absolutely amazing. I couldn’t stop, it was almost addictive…up until I collapsed.

It took me a second to notice, actually. One moment I was standing swinging my staff, then I was on my back, staring up at the ceiling. My head was swimming, my body shaking and twitching with exhaustion. Whatever I’d been doing, even for an A-ranker it was too much. I blinked, the darkness that had begun to claim my vision chased away for a moment, then I shifted back from Kronos, resuming my normal form.

“I concede,” I shouted into the sudden flood of noise. The clamor went silent, and I looked around to see all the robots gone. I should have been upset, but I wasn’t. I was elated. I let my head thump back against the floor of the grey room, my chest heaving with bellows of mad laughter as I took in what I had just accomplished. As trials go, that one hadn’t been bad at all.