Wish upon the Stars (Original Superhero cultivation sci fi litrpg)

[Sp0rkG0d]

eh. Picking two relatives isnt that far off from picking one of them and one of your own people as far as it goes for trying to build connections. I feel like this should at least be addressed even if just offhand like 'damn that ability is broken enough that its worth losing the connections we'd get from picking someone with different connections' or having someone else point it out to him which would show how inexperienced he is in these things and maybe setup some future growth. At this point I'm assuming the story has already been written past that point though so I guess I just hope its the second.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

After I completed Astaroth, I headed for LeClaire's headquarters under Murmur. In order to use my new form, I needed to study LeClaire and his people. An understanding of the person I was mimicking was pretty much required.

Dantalion was all but made for this kind of thing, so as I settled in for my stakeout, I only had to create a parallel to manage things as I took stock of my new domain.

Astaroth had been complicated to create. Mainly because I needed to construct a complete framework for deception, and I didn't really have the base components for it. I'd considered for quite a while before I settled on the ingredients, and the final results had seemed pretty much perfect for my purposes.

I'd started with Double Trouble. Teleportation was only one of its abilities, and a useful one, but not what I was looking for here, at least not yet. Rather, the second portion of the subskill, the one that left behind an exact duplicate, had been the seed I'd needed to grow my masterpiece.

Secondly I'd used Murmur, the manipulation of the senses was its whole purpose, so that had been a no brainer, but my third choice had been a little unorthodox. Mornax for solidity, melted together with Adherent Fire tied into the spatial aspect of Double Trouble, all of it blending to create a unique deceptive framework.

Essentially, after I used Dantalion to create a profile, I'd trigger Astaroth, and the original me would vanish. Rather than changing my features with some kind of illusion, Double Trouble and the Adherent Fire shifted my physical form into a semi Void state, taking advantage of the Void's stealth capabilities. My Void self remained out of synch with reality as the illusion simulated the aura and physique of the person I'd copied, which, after solidification from Mornax, because a perfect duplicate that even higher ranked watchers couldn't identify without certain special skills.

It had taken an exceptional amount of creativity to create Astaroth, because unlike Stealth, which just deleted me from people's perception, Astaroth was designed to operate under scrutiny. The key to good Stealth was not being noticed, but Astaroth was another level of difficulty entirely because the POINT was to be noticed, and still pass undetected.

The project was one of the most complex I'd ever undertaken. Barring a few with special senses, it should withstand cursory scrutiny even from high ranked Ascendants. AND it would work even better in the Void, considering the nature of Adherent Fire and how it could intrude in realspace.

I'd been somewhat inspired by both the lessons learned from the old man's tome and by Callie's brilliant and unconventional approach to her own powers when she'd created her new form, and I'd been right, it was nice to stretch my creative muscles.

I was so excited about testing it out in the field, I barely noticed the time passing. Finally, my parallel informed me I'd gathered enough information to begin my infiltration, and that LeClair himself had just left for the night. I turned to Zeke. "You coming along for this? Or are you going to watch from a distance?"

He shrugged. "You don't need me underfoot. If anyone too scary gets the drop on you I'll step in."

I smiled at him. "You've been awfully quiet lately," I told him sadly. "Nothing to say?"

"I'm not sure how much right I have," he said after a pause. "I'm not your dad, Shane. Sure, I was always around, but you raised yourself. And now especially, with Eli and Sasha back in your life…you don't need another parent."

"No. I don't," I agreed. "But I still need an Uncle. You're not replaceable. Not even by my dad. I know you and him have a ton of history, but I barely know the guy. I don't need to be parented. Not by any of you. But that doesn't mean I'll ever stop valuing your contribution. I always want to hear what you have to say."

He smiled sadly. "Maybe. But you're growing fast. The day is coming when you won't need my protection anymore. You're almost as strong now as I was when you stepped onto the Path, and that's nothing to scoff at. Only a few short years and that dumb little introvert I raised is about to become the Wishmaster. I don't want to step back either, but it's about time you start learning to stand on your own. Not all at once, of course, but one day you'll turn around and I'll be far in the rearview, too weak to help. When that day comes I don't want you to get blindsided."

My chest tightened. He was right. I was C-rank now, and I'd be B-rank in time, and then I'd reach A. At the rate I was growing, there was no way Zeke would break through to S-rank before I caught up. And once I passed him…what would that be like? Zeke had never been overt about his protection, but he'd always BEEN there. No matter what I did I'd known I had him on my side. Supporting me. Keeping me safe.

"What are you going to do when that happens?" I asked him. "I know you aren't planning to desert or anything, but you and Stella have been getting closer with so much time together. Mom has been bugging ME to have kids, albeit subtly, I can't believe that someone your age isn't thinking about it."

Not that I assumed everyone wanted children, but Zeke…Zeke was good with kids. He'd seemed unreliable growing up, but over the years, the comments he'd made and the discussions we'd had made it clear that he'd always looked out for me. He'd be a great dad, and the way he talked about his family sometimes…I was pretty sure he wasn't opposed to the idea. Once he was free of his responsibilities to me and my dad what reason did he have to avoid it?

"I've considered it," he admitted. "Stacy, Stella, whatever name you want to use, she's just starting out on her path with Celia. But she's made a few comments that make me think she wouldn't be opposed. You were a surprisingly cute kid. I do kind of miss that."

"First of all," I said in faux outrage. "HEY! And second of all, you would be good at it. I can arrange for you to have a place to settle down here. Somewhere lavish and well protected. Assuming I don't lose this trial, get exiled, and then get brutally assassinated the second I step out of the Wishworld."

He snorted. "Are there no lengths you won't go to in your quest to evade responsibility?"

I just laughed at that. Trust Zeke to reassure me I'd be fine by openly mocking me. "The offer is open," I reiterated. "Now. If you'll excuse me, I need to go effortlessly bypass one of the most complex security systems I've ever seen with the poise and grace of a professional thief."

I stood up, stepped forward, and, with a slight shift of my perspective, triggered Astaroth.

There was a kind of…dissonance. The world doubled, like I'd gotten incredibly drunk of had my head injured. One of the sides stabilized into a normal point of view out of my eyes, albeit a little lower to the ground, and the other was my normal self.

I stood behind a figure, towering over them. The figure was shorter than me, with curly red hair and a mustache, wearing a wine red pea coat and orange scarf. He had on a pair of half moon glasses with smoky black lenses and his eyebrow was raised insouciantly, like he was defying your expectations just by standing in front of you, and was proud of it.

Raising my hand, I examined it, and the figure did the same. Zeke, who was standing where I'd left him, GAPED at me.

"Shane, what the actual FUCK?" he sputtered. He squinted, and I felt a sense of exposure. Zeke was one of those people with the unique senses to penetrate this kind of deception, especially as he'd just seen me use it. It still took him a minute to manage. "Gods, kid, that's…holy shit. I can barely see through that. What did you DO?":

I explained it to him, and he shook his head in awe. "That's kind of brilliant. Seeing through a disguise is easy, but that avatar ISN'T disguised. It's a construct, and it's made with excruciating detail. It's not foolproof, but it's nothing to sneeze at, even to someone at my level."

Which was a huge compliment. Zeke was an A-ranker. Two full ranks above me. I didn't know if it would hold in front of an S-rank Ascendant, but even if it didn't being able to do this much was incredible. The things I'd managed to learn from the tome, and the various unique power interactions I had access to, they were all coming together to form something unique and powerful.

Shooting him a grin, I saluted grandly and then turned to head over to the huge warehouse complex LeClaire used as his business headquarters. Sure enough, as I approached the gate, the guard snapped to attention. "Boss?" His voice sounded confused. "You forget something?"

"Yes, I left behind some of the shipping documents for the Renaud exchange," I said with a relaxed smile. While many high ranking Ascendants were assholes to their subordinates, the interactions between LeClair and his people were pretty harmonious. He was more carrot than stick when it came to those already in his employ.

The guard, Theo, chuckled. "Ouch, yeah, you don't want to mess that up. That miss Lacey was a scary one."

We shared a chuckle, and I strolled past him, heading inside. He didn't notice a single issue. Astaroth wasn't a simple disguise, it was a CREATED being deduced from the traces read by Dantalion. My information gathering form could unearth and deconstruct myriad phenomena, not just baked on observation, but on various psychic resonances and special senses designed to detect metaphysical information buried in the very aura of a place or thing.

Dantalion's model didn't just make a face, it made a whole body. Vocal chords, muscle memory, balance, gait. After reverse engineering years of interactions engraved in the very stones of this place, the construct I was currently controlling was so thoroughly like LeClair, I doubted LECLAIR could tell the difference, much less his guard.

I strode through his complex, ignoring all the workers except those few he would normally greet, and even those I mostly just dismissed with a nod. Finally, I stepped into his office, situated in the back of the lot.

Closing the door, I turned to the safe. Dantalion had, of course, deduced the code during my stakeout. But the code was only half the battle. I had to hope that the aura I'd copied was good enough to fool this thing. Which was no mean feat. This was an Archimedes Ten Didexotronal Temporal Script safe. It was top of the line. A B-class security device that should be completely impossible to fake or bypass.

I punched in the code without hesitation, following the muscle memory of the hands that had done this a hundred times before. The screen was a series of complex pictograms and each touch sent frissons of exploratory chill through me as it scanned my body, looking for any signs of deception. And found none. A solidified illusion projected through the Void and deduced from perfect information gathering. Flawless.

With a beep, the door opened, and I pulled it clear, sifting through contracts until I found Marco's. I didn't destroy it yet, not wanting to tip my hand. LeClair would notice when it went up. I pushed the safe door closed and headed out in the direction I'd mapped as Marco's lab. Time to go pick up my Master of Development.

 

[drake_azathoth]

My Void self remained out of synch with reality as the illusion simulated the aura and physique of the person I'd copied, which, after solidification from Mornax, because a perfect duplicate that even higher ranked watchers couldn't identify without certain special skills.

Click to shrink...

which, after solidification from Mornax, BECAME a perfect duplicate

Thanks for the chapter! Shane and Zeke's relationship remains one of the most inspiring parental relationships I've read lately. Half the love I have for this series is how realistic yet wholesome the relationships in it are. It's like bizarroworld xianxia. And Astaroth is scary stuff.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

Walking among the employees at LeClair's compound as LeClair would have been just asking to get approached, so as soon as I was around the corner, I did a quick switch to another random employee who had left around the same time. I'd gotten a pretty decent catalog of potential forms from the stakeout, given Dantalion's range and the time I'd spent.

The new guy, Bill, was an unobtrusive porter. He didn't talk to anyone and was pretty much always moving around the complex, so I was unlikely to get stopped.

After walking for about fifteen minutes, I stopped outside of a large brass door covered in gears. It was set flush into the wall, and all the gears were built around a central wheel with a handle. You turned the wheel in in a complete rotation and the gears would withdraw bars of metal that were driven into the brick at intervals up the length of the barrier.

Reaching out, I rapped on the surface in a particular pattern. The sheer amount of insignificant details I'd picked up after a few hours of Dantalion research on this compound blew my mind. The longer I stayed, the deeper I got. Names, dates, food preferences, allergies, composition of items. Luckily this place was just a business owned by a C-ranker. If the materials were too advanced my senses would have bounced off. As it was, it had taken me quite a while to deconstruct the safe. I could do one rank higher with enough time invested, but that was my limit for Dantalion.

The clanging of my knuckles on the door rang out through the hallway, breaking the strange stillness of this area of the compound. It was quiet here. Unnaturally quiet. An oppressive, overwhelming stillness that made it seem like someone had killed everyone who had ever set foot here.

One minute after my knock though, the gears began to spin, and the door popped open, releasing a cacophony from the other side. Waiting to see if anyone invited me, I shrugged and pulled it open, stepping inside.

Marco sat suspended from a harness in the middle of the room, a large can of some kind of chemical accelerant burning in a tight, controlled jet. I'd have called it a blowtorch, but the flames looked like they were made of glass and had frozen mist coming off them, so I wasn't sure that was the right word.

In front of him, hanging from the ceiling by a series of thick chains, a giant mechanical spider dangled. He seemed to be working diligently to perfectly merge disparate pieces of metal with the torch, and where it passed, the surface became smooth and conjoined like they were being remade into a single unbroken plane of metal. He was wearing a pair of thick goggles covered in lenses that could be flipped down or up in succession, and he had several of them down and was observing the melting metal.

"What is it Bill?" He called, distracted by his work. "I'm on a deadline today. I need to get this done for the Rayken Expo on Saylar 4 next month, and the transit time is going to be hell. I have three hours to get everything sewn up."

"Think you're going to miss your deadline," I said wryly as I withdrew his contract from my ring. "In fact, I think you're going to miss a lot of deadlines. Your sister sent me."

He paused, flame hanging in the air, tongues off glass fire warping the space strangely before he switched it off. Turning in his harness, he pushed up his goggles to stare down at me in confusion.

His face was shockingly young. Not like actually childish, really, he was probably physically around the same age as me. But he had round cheeks and big eyes that made him seem excessively youthful. One eye was green, the other blue, and under his mop of curly dark hair, they stood out even more than they would on most people.

"How do you know I even HAVE a sister?" he asked suspiciously. "LeClaire can't mention her to anyone. That was part of my-"

"Your contract," I interrupted. "Yeah, I know, I'm holding it right now. I know what it says. But I don't work for LeClaire. Bill does, but I'm not actually Bill, as you may have already begun to surmise. I'm your sister's new boss, and I'll be YOUR new boss too, if you accept my terms and allow me to get you out of here."

He seemed too stunned to react. "I…what?" He was staring at the contract. "Where did you GET that?"

"From the safe," I said with a shrug. "Where else? Now you ready to go? Because I've got stuff to do today. I can explain the details once we're out, but your sister drew up a job contract for you to sign." I produced it and flicked it up to him. "Don't sign it now, wait until we're out, just read it over and let know if it works for you."

Frowning, he scanned the information. Anyone that deep into crafting would be heavy on the Focus, so remembering and reading over a contract wasn't hard. It was a little denser than most documents, but he finished it quickly, then tossed it back.

"You said my sister already works for you?" he asked slowly. "I can believe she helped write this. The rider forbidding me from gambling sounds like her."

"Yeah, I'm not letting you do that," I informed him bluntly. "It got you into trouble last time."

He scowled. "Because they CHEATED. I calculated every possible vector for that horse race. Physical condition, windspeed, I even modeled the potential interaction values and the chances of injury. They were doping those horses. The whole thing was a trap to get me into their service. I don't have a gambling problem."

"That's a relief," I said cheerfully. "That means stopping immediately won't be hard for you at all. Look, your sister told me that you only started gambling to pay for materials to grind your skills. After so long working for LeClaire, I'm guessing that's not an issue anymore, and I'll supply your mats once you're working for me. You'll be too busy to play the ponies anyway. So are you coming with me or not?"

From what Holly told me, the situation with Marco really WAS LeClaire's fault. Marco wasn't so much a gambling addict as a desperate scientist in need of funds. He'd managed to calculate several optimal strategies for gambling when starting out, and had made lots of money for his work. Unfortunately, he'd gotten arrogant and become obsessed with winning. He'd forgotten the first rule of gambling: never bet anything you can't afford to lose.

Honestly I had no issue with gambling, having been to casinos myself, but if this guy was going to be my Master of Development I needed him focused on ACTUAL development and not trying to calculate odds for horse racing. Hence the stipulation.

Holly seemed pretty sure he'd do it. She didn't think he really cared about the gambling itself, he was just unhappy with giving up when he was beaten. Eventually, he sighed and nodded.

"Excellent," I said with a grin. "Now, since we're here and not coming back, why don't you tell me which of these things is valuable so we can steal literally all of it." Breaking into the safe had me feeling heisty, and I had zero qualms about robbing someone who fixed a horse race to trick someone into eternal servitude.

He blinked at me, thrown by the rapid tone shift. "Umm…ok?" he said slowly. "There are a few valuable materials earmarked for other projects, and a couple pieces of equipment that he bought at my request." He raised his hand to show off the glass flame blowtorch. "Like this Freearuk Condenser. The fuel comes from the blood of a rare mutated offspring that belongs to an A-rank monster called a Valbeshir. They are extremely dangerous and difficult to catch, and that's when they AREN'T mated."

"Cool, pass it," I said, holding up my hands. He tossed it over and I put it into my ring. Marco himself didn't have one, presumably for this exact reason, so I was going to need to carry everything personally. Which I was fine with. I had the space.

So we spent the next hour or so grabbing everything that wasn't nailed down. And some things that were. And the nails that were securing them. We ended up with quite a haul. A lot of machines I had no context for, but also some really interesting materials. Various types or rare energy infused ores and metals, gemstones with special properties, and even a few plants still in the pot.

When we were done, I glanced around the room and couldn't help but let out a soft whistle. The floor was totally empty, with big outlines where machines had been, and only the odd bolt rolling away from the empty spaces we'd cleared. We'd even taken the door off its hinges (apparently it was made of some special silencing metal that was pretty expensive on its own), and now it was definitely time to go.

With the security out of the way and the contract retrieved, I dismissed Astaroth and called Murmur into existence. Seeing me turn from Bill the inconsequential porter to a six and a half foot tall behemoth in high grade armor wearing a frankly terrifying mask was understandably jarring for Marco, but after the last hour or so he was getting used to surprises, and he barely even flinched.

"Now that we're under concealment, I can introduce myself properly. My name is Shane Wyndham, have you heard of me?" He nodded slowly and I smiled. "Good, that makes this much easier." He hadn't heard of the cabinet positions, being much too young, so I filled him in on everything, including his own potential position. Then I pulled out HIS contract with LeCLaire and burned it up with a casual flex of Mephistopheles.

He didn't hesitate for a moment after that, requesting the contract his sister had written out and signing it immediately. I just laughed. "Impressive resolve. I like it. Come on, let's go see your sister. Don't worry about anyone noticing us, we won't be seen."

My Dantalion stakeout had given me absurd levels of data about this place, down to the bedrock. Murmur contained Dantalion as well, which was why it deduced and improved stealth from sitting in place for a long time, but after hours of mapping the complex, my Stealth was pretty much unbreakable by anyone who wasn't an A-ranker. It wasn't as good as Astaroth, but it was good enough, especially with another person on hand to hide.

As expected, we ran into no issues strolling out of the place, even after someone noticed the missing door and all the stolen materials and activated a lockdown, we strolled right through the panicking security like they weren't even there.

We met Zeke outside, and he was grinning at me with what I could only describe as overwhelming pride. "You robbed them!" he said enthusiastically. "I was worried you'd just get in and out with no benefits."

"They tricked Marco into eternal servitude," I said with dignity. "They deserved it."

Marco nodded along, and Zeke just laughed. "Of course they did, kid." There was a lot of subtext there. Zeke thought anyone who had something he wanted deserved to get robbed, and that I was making excuses. Which I wasn't. But it didn't matter.

"Come on," I told them with an eye roll. "Let's get out of here." As we walked down the street I left Murmur active, and I chatted with Marco about what it would be like working for me and what his duties would be. It was a nice, pleasant conversation. And if we occasionally got sidetracked discussing where to sell the materials we didn't need…well that was pleasant too. For me at least.