Wish upon the Stars chapter 1146 (Patreon)

I woke up the next morning excited to greet the day. A quick scroll production session and then I was in my armor and ready to take on anything that came my way. I strode down the street, stopping at Sorwen’s door with a quick knock. My friend emerged a few seconds later, looking nervous but determined. “Winnie,” I said with a nod. “You ready for this?”

She snorted. “Are you? Do you even know who we’re up against, Shane? You’ve been buried in your classes and training for months now. Did you consider it might be a good idea to interact with other people in our major? Scope out the competition?”

“Socializing,” I said with a grimace. “Gross. Besides, didn’t you do it for me? I happen to have advance knowledge about the test, though not much of it. I’ll trade you my info for yours.”

Despite my flippant dismissal, I HAD made friends here, I’d just gone for quality over quantity. Sorwen and Elonwy were both knowledgeable and competent people. That hadn’t been why I’d befriended them, obviously, but it was a happy coincidence, and hey, maybe it was my nonsense fate at work.

Rolling her eyes, she just sighed at me. “Fine. I suppose that’s a decent trade. But you go first.”

I smiled at the exasperation. Over the months I’d been training, I’d interacted with Sorwen (now Winnie, because it amused me to see her expression when I called her that), regularly. Time had taken some of the shine off the apple, and while she wasn’t exactly shit talking me like Benny did, she was a lot less…respectful. Which I preferred. Friends should be informal. It felt less like she was looking at me as a meal ticket to endless wishes.

So I gave her a quick rundown on what I knew, what Dantalion THOUGHT, and what we were pretty sure wasn’t the case. Like I’d told her, it wasn’t much, but it was more than she knew now, which was useful. She still pouted at the fact that I’d gotten one over on her, but she ponied up her information anyway. “To start with, I should ask what you already know. Do you know the names of anyone in the major?”

I shrugged. “The people who were in orientation with us? Technically? I forgot them, but I could have Dan dig them up if needed. Does that help?”

“No,” she sighed. “It doesn’t, because none of them are relevant here. Freshmen aren’t expected to place in the midterms. We’re MOSTLY not expected to place in the finals, though that’s more common. You’re going to be going up against upper classmen, mostly. No post grads or anything, but some of these people have been here a few years.”

That brought me up short. “That’s…how? Like we’re not frozen in time, because I’m still getting renown from back home regularly. And the tower was sealed for ages before the current crop went in. So wouldn’t all the upperclassmen be gone by now?”

“They covered that in one of my classes, actually,” she said with a somewhat excited gleam in her eye. “It’s fascinating. The tower exists in a sort of atemporal state of quantum uncertainty. Each person is connected to their own timeline, but also to the tower’s timeline, and they exist in both simultaneously. The tower is considered a marvel of temporal engineering, and the whole thing is unique to the Dean’s school of temporal mechanics.”

I blinked. “That actually is fascinating. And weird. But fair enough. Anyway, upperclassmen are the competition, got it, now why don’t you tell me WHICH upperclassmen I’m worrying about.”

“Right,” she said, shaking off her academic fervor. “So, there are five people in the major you need to worry about. I’ll list them from least to most troubling. Build the suspense. First up we have Crash. He’s an upperclassman with some kind of fistfighting Domain. Not sure how it works, but apparently he can just kind of…break time. He punches and things slow down. He’s a musclehead and a thug, but he’s surprisingly well versed in temporal mechanics.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Punch based time powers? That’s novel.”

She shrugged. “Takes all kinds. Next up is Sylvia Strohm. Her Domain is water based, and she appears to treat time like a literal river. Desrick Flint traps time in amber and then throws it at people, he also has a Domain, as do all the top five I’m aware of. I haven’t seen any of this, mind, it’s just information I gathered from friends in the program.”

“The amber thing seems kind of gimmicky,” I observed skeptically. “Is that really useful?”

“It’s important to remember where we are,” she warned. “Most of these Domains only lightly touch on the time attribute, but they don’t NEED more than that/ Having the attribute allows Mythcrafting with the attribute itself. The actual function of their Domain is less important than the techniques and knowledge they can bring to bear after being in the program for multiple years.”

We walked as we talked, stopping for coffee (which she paid for because I was broke now), as we headed for the exchange, where the test was being held. “What about the last two?” I asked with interest. “They’re the strongest?”

“The most inconvenient, at least,” she snorted. “Orion is an archer with causal arrows, and Kent Masters Domain appears to involve stealing time in some fashion. No one is actually sure what he does, but he’s widely agreed to be the most likely to take first. Besides his Domain being pretty mysterious, he’s also top of his class in a lot of advanced courses. He’s considered something of a prodigy.”

I frowned. That was bad news for me. I had a natural talent for Mythcrafting and I had my bloodline to increase my affinity for temporal attributed energy, but I didn’t know nearly enough about how time worked. I could only hope that the test, whatever it was, leaned into the aspects of temporal engineering that I DID know. Which was basically watchmaking and broad scale theoretical nonsense. Plus whatever weird pseudo infinite structure Kronos gave me access to. Which I had a feeling was probably WAY more advanced than anything I was supposed to be able to access, and that using my staff to essentially lever the gears around was the stupidest, most brain dead way possible of exploiting that power.

We would see in a moment, however, because our little walk was over. We’d arrived at the exchange. I stopped at the edge to consider how to proceed with Winnie coming along, but to my surprise, she kept walking right in. The resistance field around the place seemed to just be gone. I guess they’d turned it off for the exam.

I exchanged a look with Winnie, wondering exactly what we were walking into, and then we headed inside. As we entered, I was shocked to see exactly how packed the place was. I knew that there were more people in the department than I’d met, naturally, but I hadn’t know there were THIS many. Easily into the three digits, and this was just the B-rank section of the major. I imagined there were similar or even larger amounts of people in the other two sections.

To my surprise, when we got inside, the counter and the screens that displayed the exchange rates and jobs were all gone. The space where I usually met Elonwy had been completely filled with something I could barely even process.

It was an hourglass. Kind of. It was huge and exceptionally fancy, with strange glowing blue sigils etched into unnaturally silver mercurial metal. The glass portion of it seemed to be so polished it was almost invisible unless you caught it at the right angle, and the top was full of an odd diamondlike sand that sparkled too much to be natural.

That wasn’t even the part that shocked me. The part that blew me away was that not only was the dust not FALLING, but it was apparently being kept aloft by the spherical metal contraption floating in the neck of the hourglass. A spherical metal contraption I recognized.

“That bastard,” I groaned as I stared at it. It was the device that Professor Hawkins had been tinkering with when I approached him about Kronos.

Winnie grimaced. “Oh come on,” she complained. “We walked past that thing every day for weeks. Did you even ask what it was? Because I didn’t even bother. Every time it caught my eye I got distracted.”

Our pontificating was cut off by a loud bang as a familiar figure stepped up next to the hourglass. “Greetings, students,” Elonwy said mildly as she withdrew the oversized hammer from the crater she’d just made in the floor. The surface repaired itself immediately, but she’d made her point. “My name, as most of you know, is Elonwy. I’m a post graduate student and a clerk at this exchange. Today, I will be acting as your proctor.”

“Wait, Elonwy is proctoring?” I asked in disbelief. “Why did they put her in charge. Isn’t she just a normal post-grad student?”

“The post-graduates are S-rankers,” Winnie said scathingly. “And Elonwy isn’t JUST a clerk. She’s the CHIEF clerk. Did you seriously not bother to do even a modicum of research into the person you talk to every day?”

I shrugged. “Who researches friends? That’s super creepy.”

“Some of you,” Elonwy said loudly, glaring at me in an obvious ‘shut up idiot’ way. “Might have ideas about this test. Some of you might have worries. I assure you those worries are unnecessary. Not because the test won’t be difficult, but simply because they won’t accomplish anything. Many of you will probably fail, no use worrying about it.

“Now, on to the specifics,” she said grandly, gesturing at the hourglass with her hammer carelessly, and pretending not to wince when the hammer smacked into the glass. It didn’t break or even crack, but I could tell she was embarrassed. “THIS is the Tachyon Timeglass,” she said grandly. 

She gestured at the glass again, this time avoiding the hammer blow. “It possesses the power to distort the laws of temporal causality. Each one of you will approach, will be scanned by the time sphere in the center, and then will be posed a challenge. Time will be distorted to speed up the passing of the sand. You will be expected to resist that passage, by whatever means you have at your disposal.

“Be warned, however,” she said threateningly. “The sphere will adapt to your condition, posing the greatest possible difficulty based on your knowledge and experience. This test will be the most difficult test possible in the exact way you wish it wouldn’t be. It will NOT, however, be impossible. Room will be left for you to succeed, or even thrive if you can push yourself to greater heights.”

She slammed the hammer down viciously, sending chunks of floor flying as her eyes burned with enthusiasm. “So give it your all, because as you know, great rewards await past this point if you can take them.”

I saw a fanatical glint mirroring her own in the eyes of many of my fellow test takers, and I grit my teeth. The sphere would scan us and adjust to our capabilities, but I was guessing it would adjust more to raw attribute power than it would to knowledge, despite what she said. This would be a test of finesse, not muscle. Luckily I had plenty of both, and in Kronos, the two were even the same.

The upperclassmen were probably able to operate above their level, all of them sitting at peak of B-rank and probably good enough to cross the divide, but I had my own methods of pushing the envelope. Like everyone else, I felt a fire ignite in my blood as I stared at the huge timeglass, ready to begin my test. I couldn’t wait to see how far I’d go.