The Path of Ascension 3: A LitRPG Adventure

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Matt readied his men. “Form up! The enemy approaches. Let’s see if we can bring the tally up to a million casualties with this wave.”

There was a loud but wordless cry from the fighters at his command. Most were Pathers, but around a third were kingdom troops who were filling in the gaps from their losses. Even with that help, there were still thin spots on the walls. Matt tried not to think of what would happen once they were unable to repel the assaults.

There was a scream from below, and Matt looked down to see a woman pointing up. He followed her finger and nearly looked into the sun, but then he saw them.

“Air assault! Dropships incoming!”

He repeated the message on all the commander level channels. Though it was already too late.

Dozens of giant, flying battalions were using the sun as cover, and had flown up miles into the sky. They hovered beyond the edge of the anti-flying formations with their immense, needle-like packages, each carried by a hundred plus people with various flying devices.

They let them go, and nearly as one, the fifty-seven dropships arrowed down, spelling doom for anything in their way.

The dropships were crude, angular cones, designed with minimal thought given to anything but reducing drag and preventing rotation during descent. The ones Matt had seen in movies were dropped from low orbit and had fins to allow mundane flight for bypassing anti-flying runes. They always caused devastating damage when they landed behind enemy lines.

Matt heard orders for the QRF teams going out but ignored it to give his own.

“Second and fifth companies. Turn and guard our rear. Lookout only. Get the QRF teams to deal with the fighters. They’ll all be Tier 7s, or at least fight like it.”

The enemy vessels slammed down into the empty city center, where it was mostly just wreckage from the attacking trebuchets. They landed with ground-shaking rumbles as the heavy metal dropships punched into the ground. As Matt and his troops tightened their grips on their weapons, the heavy steel doors smashed down, creating ramps that teams of a dozen people poured out of.

“Annie?”

“Is it time? Am I free?” She sounded eager.

“You still have the giftboxes I made for you?”

“Yes!”

Matt was almost worried about the exuberance in her voice. “Then do what you do best.”

He moved his position down after seeing that the queendom wasn’t trying to take the half-crumbled walls and gathered his best fighters from the QRF teams. They were all Tier 6 Pathers, but they fought like monsters. They had to, as they were the ones used to defend the worst case scenarios and plug breaches in the walls.

“Be ready to deal with the airborne troops. Each pod seemed to carry a dozen people in it but be ready for larger or smaller teams. I don’t know if they’ll try to gather together and attack one position or harry us all around. Maybe both. Don’t go down needlessly and call for help when you engage. We have the numbers here, let’s use them.”

The next hour was hectic, as other sections of defenders reported hit-and-run tactics over and over. They were targeting valuable structures and facilities like the healing tents. The drop ship forces’ coordinated strikes gave the other teams time to protect the more vulnerable areas, but both sides incurred heavy losses as the day crept along. All the while, they had to defend from a continuous assault from the queendoms main forces.

Even with the sound of battle just in front of him, something felt off to Matt. Things got quiet, and he turned to the rear to ready both his team and the other QRF teams. Something wasn’t right. This felt like the times in a rift when a monster stalked in the shadows. You never knew when it would strike, and the feeling slowly wore away at you.

Matt widened his eyes and watched for movement, not focusing on any specific thing. His arm shot left, and he let loose a [Mana s***h]. A scream quickly followed the explosion. A few seconds later, a much larger explosion rocked the entire courtyard.

Annie skulked through the shadows cast by the noonday sun in the rubble-strewn city. Streets were more vague suggestions now than actual clear paths.

She was stalking the queendom drop-troopers as they made attempts at hit-and-run tactics. They were all foiled by her sending messages to any group of kingdom fighters they tried to approach.

They still succeeded more than once, simply because they were Tier 7 and could move so quickly through the rubble. But the greatest damages were mitigated.

She saw they were about to move again and raced around their projected path. They always moved back into the central, deserted portions of the city between strikes.

They were about to hit her team’s location, and now was her time to strike.

The army assassination test had given her far more than she expected. Going in, she thought it would just be a practical test, one and done. Instead, it was a series of puzzles that she had to solve in real-time, while stalking and killing a foe. There were dozens of tests with a theoretically infinite number of possible solutions.

She failed the first dozen scenarios, but eventually she adapted and started succeeding. By the end, she was almost always killing her target without being spotted. She knew her Talent made it easy for her to do some of the shadier things in life, but she learned through the training that she had quite the knack for it, too.

Worse yet, she enjoyed it.

But that was a problem for future Annie. Now, she got to revel in it.

The group of Tier 7s moved forward to attack her team, and she waited on top of a collapsed roof.

Loading Matt’s golem crossbow with a special bolt, she waited for the right moment. Matt, the competent i***t, launched an attack at one of them, causing the attackers to charge, so she was rushed.

As the Tier 7s came within proximity of her traps, she launched the detonator bolt at the bomb wedged into the rocks. She was already sliding down the roof when the explosion went off.

In a white-blue flash, one of the mana bombs Matt had charged for her detonated.

Using a shadow to conceal her, Annie waited as a retreating Tier 7 ran past her so close, she could reach out and touch him.

So, she did exactly that.

Grabbing a shoulder pauldron, she pulled and jumped, raising herself onto the stumbling man’s upper back. A quick flick of her knife ended the man’s time in the war, before they both tumbled to the ground.

Rolling off, she broke into a sprint, off to find and hunt the other teams.

She tried to remove the smile from her face.

Somehow, it kept slipping back.

Matt looked toward the explosion and concussion force coming from an area behind their defensive lines and shrugged after ordering two teams to watch their rear.

If Annie was handling it, he could worry about other things. There was a frontal assault to deal with. He doubted that this was the last time they would try this strategy on them either. So, they needed to prepare more substantial countermeasures for the other teams out there. It wasn’t as if the queendom sent only one drop pod of fighters, or that they wouldn’t send more.

The work never ended.

Three days later, Matt sat in a command meeting with the remaining staff. Their forces were down to seventy thousand men from their original five hundred thousand, and they were exhausted.

The queendom had battered them down with sheer numbers.

There was no respite from the waves of enemies. Even after adding another million to their casualty count, they were still outnumbered and outgunned.

At first, they had defended themselves well enough. Then, the queendom tried four more frontal assaults, before sending another larger wave of drop pods yesterday evening. Those troops focused on a concentrated push to take the city’s west entrance. Between the combined tactics and dwindling defenders, they were unable to plug the breach, and the invaders started taking the city. With attacks from both sides, Juni was forced to call a full retreat back to his fortified position.