Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 929
🕑 Added 2025-07-14 19:19:03 +0000 UTCWe ran across another candidate not too far into the maze. Or rather, two candidates working together. Rather than be in the dark about these though, I was pleased to note that Belsara seemed to know them. I was LESS pleased that she tried exhaustively to convince me to stab them in the throat from stealth.
“Rega and Pallux are MONSTERS,” she told me bluntly. “I’ve met them several times, and every single one they tried to kill or capture me. They control their subordinates through fear and constant competition, pitting their people against each other to keep them under their thumb, and their guard captain, Strelk, is a sadist who torments his own people for his own amusement.”
“Where did you meet them, exactly?” I asked after she finished talking. “It seems like some of these candidates are more…immersed in branch politics than others. We were all raised away from the family, how do they know so much?”
She sighed. “What you need to remember is that while this war was moved up, it’s still been DECADES since the last one, at minimum. Every Wyndham born since that event is involved in the current succession war. Lots of them hit D-rank years ago. Once your guardian is no longer active, you’re technically not bound by the rules of non interference. A lot of the older D-rankers, or hell, anyone who has been in D-rank more than a few years, made their way back to check in with the branches and start vetting their factions.”
I was curious why we hadn’t done that. Was it a timing thing? We ranked up FAST, even for a candidate party. My library and natural talent let me accomplish things at E-rank most people didn’t manage until years later. It was possible we’d just done it so fast there was no time for a check in with the family.
Then again…it might not be that simple either. Grandpa’s branch was a mess, my Uncle was an asshole, and other branch heads hated me. Maybe dad had foreseen some of this nonsense and had Zeke steer me away from trying to involve myself too heavily with the family until I had the authority to keep myself safe. Hell, maybe he didn’t want to change the way I saw the world. I knew he actually loved mom’s heroic spirit, it was part of why he’d left me in the Congolmerate to begin with. The Unity had an idealized perception of the universe compared to most factions.
Still, dicks or not, I didn’t like the idea of actively attempting murder on unsuspecting people, especially relatives. I shook my head. We’d been following them in stealth for maybe ten minutes, waiting to find a decent environment for an ambush or encirclement. Currently we were in a long glass hallway, and that didn’t really suit for either. “No. When we get a shot, we take it, and we take them down hard, but no killing. Not from ambush. We restrain them and leave them here to rot. That’ll have to be enough.”
We stalked behind them silently, waiting and watching, until we came to an open room. My mud field had preceded us (and keeping them from noticing it was shockingly easy, considering it was an extension of my will, Murmur was able to erase it easily, and it got easier and easier the longer the substance spent in my domain. This really was an amazing combination.
Spreading out, we surrounded the pair of candidates and their minions. Three hundred of them, surprisingly. I was pretty sure we’d done better with local recruitment than the majority of factions we’d seen so far. Since we outnumbered them three to one, I decided to show up directly to discuss things at the start. It had worked pretty well with Alys.
To my surprise though, when we appeared they didn’t seem bothered. Not like they were expecting us, mind, they just appeared to be completely at ease.
I had no clue WHY that would be a thing, but to my complete shock, my attempt at discussion was interrupted…by a growl. From BETHY. I froze, turning to stare at my friend, who was looking at the tall man in the black armor behind the two candidates, her eyes blazing an unearthly red, her lips peeled back in an ENRAGED snarl. “Harpy!” She hissed, her voice guttural and animalistic.
My sister, standing behind her, went pale with fright. “Shit,” she spat, stepping forward to grab Bethy. “That’s BAD.”
I frowned at them both. “Bethy? Are you alright?” Bethy got bloodthirsty and amused, she got cold sometimes when she was doing something she needed to do but didn’t like, I’d even seen her lose control. But THIS I had never seen. This was…HATE.
“No, she’s not,” Chelsea answered grimly. “We need to put these assholes down and leave, now. Bethy can’t be around a harpy. Maenads and Harpies are OLD enemies. The reflexive drive to fight them is one of the few things Bethy inherited from her mom. Something about stealing wine grapes, I don’t really know. She doesn’t talk about it. But we need to-”
She yelped as she was cut off by a fucking SONIC BOOM as Bethy crossed the distance to the armored figure too fast for even MY eyes to track, her fangs snapping and claws flashing toward’s the big man’s throat.
To my utter shock, he didn’t tank the hit. He just sort of…leaned back. Her nails passed a micron in front of his gorget, the wind creating a scraping gouge as her fingers cut through it. The man’s arms snapped out and forward, metallic feathers sprouting from beneath then as his hands flickered forward, creating a shower of metal shards that Bethy effortlessly flowed between like a dancer.
Despite the ease of avoidance though, dodging gave him time to retreat, and I was barely able to follow the motion as he launched himself into the air, sweeping upwards and then unleashing another shower of razor feathers, this time at US.
Abel snorted, tracing a circle in the air above us, and the feathers fell into the spatial lubrication, swept into a circular motion that appeared to be gathering speed with every rotation. He flicked his fingers again, and they launched back out the same way they’d come, moving three times as fast. His eyes, barely visible behind a strange black birdlike helm, glowed an unsettling orange as they flicked to his boss and then back to Bethy, refocusing on his own fight.
Rega and Pallux seemed MUCH less calm now, their eyes narrowed under their platinum blonde hair. Each of them had one blue and one green eye, on opposite sides of their face. And their haircuts were incredibly similar, with Pallux’s being a bit shorter from what I could tell, though not enough that you couldn’t easily mistake him for his sister. “Drewnokk, what the hell are you doing?” Snapped Rega. “Put her down!”
I smirked. This wasn’t ideal, but it was better for us than them. Presumably, they had been leaning on this Drewnokk guy, who, admittedly, was fucking TERRIFYING to be capable of competing with Bethy. But with him out of the picture, they didn’t have anyone strong enough to protect them.
Between what Belsara said about the captain (Drewnookk I assumed) and their general demeanor, I was willing to kick their asses even if I still wasn’t ok with unilateral execution of family members.
Glory blazed to life as I flickered forward, my staff appearing and lashing out in the same motion, the razor edge of the black flame spear driving right toward Pallux’s face. He was the closest, and I held back enough that he wouldn’t have trouble dodging, but to my surprise, he just screamed and stumbled back, tripping over his own feet. I just stopped, standing over him dumbly. “Are you serious?” I demanded. “Come on, man, have some self respect. You’re a Wyndham.”
I was so disgusted I didn’t even bother with anything fancy. I just smashed the butt of the staff into his skull, knocking him out cold.
Despite being apparently a generally terrible person according to Belsara, Rega is NOT a terrible sister. Her eyes narrow in rage as she backs off from her brother. “Drewnokk, enough with her, get down here and tear a strip off this armored bastard!”
Cursing, I triggered Mornax immediately, planting my staff to tank the impact I knew was coming…and it was a good thing I did. In a movement too fast for me to track, the armored harpy man vanished, appearing in front of me with wings and claws flashing. His fingers were hooked with curved talons I hadn’t noticed under his gauntlets, and there was a screech as they carved divots in my armor.
My C-rank plate didn’t GIVE, exactly, but it certainly strained as he gouged out some of the metal. I was EXTREMELY glad to be wearing full plate, because if his talons did that shit to my plate, I didn’t even want to THINK about what they would do to my flesh, Mornax or not. I was durable, but not C-rank metal durable.
I didn’t need to find out though, because there was an incandescent scream of rage and Bethy fell on him like a fucking rabid animal. Her claws raked his armor, longer and sharper than I’d ever seen, and to my shock, something ELSE had changed too. Flowing blood red patterns had begun to wind their way along her skin, starting around her eyes, the sclera of which had been drowned in crimson. Not blood red. Something deeper and darker. More like…wine.
Drewnokk retreated, snarling and lashing out with a rain of feather blades. Before he could follow up though, a gleaming armored form smashed into him at speed, a lance concentrating the force into one spot as the unstoppable avalanche of power that was Gabe on horseback hit him at full force, sending him skidding across the floor to smash headlong into the black glass of the nearest wall.
Like Bethy, Gabe was in a state I’d never seen before. Raw, overwhelming fury. His normally amiable face was peeled back in a rictus of explosive fury. “Don’t TOUCH her!”
That was sweet, if misplaced normally, because Bethy was way stronger than him, but I could see what was making him angry. Bethy didn’t LOOK like Bethy. Not even vampire Bethy. This was a completely different version of my friend. Dropping Mornax and Glory, I triggered Zagan, then stepped between her and Drewnokk. Callie, aware of all this through the bond, surrounded us with a shadowy ward, and she sent Abel and my sister to help out against Drewnokk as our people dealt with the others.
The two candidates each had a hundred of their own C-rankers, meaning that despite our vastly superior numbers they had twice the high level combatants. Luckily, we had BETTER ones, and Ellisara, Felicity, and Argaunt were carving through their people with enough urgency that they didn’t have time to spare thinking about the D-rank fighters.
Especially since the two candidates had been essentially left alone, and now that I checked, I couldn’t see them anywhere. Rega seemed to have grabbed her brother and dragged him off who knows where. I didn’t have time to worry about it.
I put my hands on Bethy’s shoulders and she snarled at me, her teeth actually snapping towards my face. I didn’t move, it wouldn’t have done any good. “Are you done?” I asked my friend kindly. She stared at me, and I flooded her body with Zagan’s purifying flames of life. As I did, the red patterns on her skin began to slowly fade away, like they were being bleached off in the sun.
Her eyes, formerly wine red across the entirety of the orb, faded back to the normal red irises, and her pupils returned. She stared at me in terror, horrified that she’d just attacked me. I pulled her into a tight hug, not letting up on the life fire, and she just sat there and cried. There was a flicker in the dark and Callie appeared beside us, wrapping her arms around Bethy from the other side and joining me in comforting our friend.
I didn’t know who to blame for this bullshit, the elders, the twins, or myself. Regardless of anything though, if I saw Rega and Pallux again, I wasn’t going to be gentle with them. I had some frustration to work out.
Comments
LadyLark
That would totally make sense.
Void
I am getting a growing impression that him and his father might be accidentally forming the most martially inclined branch of their family.
