The Path of Ascension 3: A LitRPG Adventure

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At five people abreast, if they all tried to cram through the front entrance, they could probably do this. They didn’t need to kill all of them, just weaken them enough. When their reinforcements arrived, the queendom fighters would either flee or stay pinned between two attacking forces.

The party of fifty people moved forward in a ragged formation, with shields in the front and the archers and mages behind them.

Matt slapped Conor’s side to get his attention, and they moved to either side of the opening. A quick glance at his AI showed him that Emily and Aster were slightly forward, but still guarding their side. Annie had mirrored their actions, and Matt steadied his breathing while he peeked around the corner.

The approaching unit was peppering the tunnel with arrows, trying to keep them pinned down. But with the thickness of the wall and construction of the gatehouse, there was little chance of him or Conor being hit.

Matt looked to his left and nodded at his fellow melee fighter when the group reached the fifty-foot mark. They both burst forward as the attackers did the same.

With how close the groups were, there was no chance of stray arrows taking them out, and they wanted to have the whole entrance to retreat back through.

Together, they took the charge head on, and stopped it dead in its tracks, but it wasn’t without cost. Matt took a spear to the chest, and while it wasn’t able to punch through his armor, it stymied the swing of his sword. The weakened blow only cut into one shield and got stuck halfway through. He kicked out and freed his sword, but he took three chopping strikes in retaliation.

As he was bringing a [Mana Charge] empowered blade around, he felt a phantom blow on his shoulder. As everyone in Conor’s [Demon Zone] also flinched at the same time, he knew it was the chance for an attack in the zone to reflect to everyone. With [Cracked Phantom Armor], he was unharmed by the weak blow, but everyone else was unprepared for a sudden blow, and stumbled under the force.

When his blade slammed onto an unbraced shield, the soldier wielding it and the two people behind him were gone in a flash of light. They might have used 10,000 mana to break down a wall with the war cannon, but Matt used 1,000 mana to obliterate three people with his enchanted weapon.

With Conor at his side, Matt fought on. They were mostly in a melee, with few spells being cast. Most of the skills used were weapon enchantments or melee skills. Anything that needed range was simply too hard to use in such close quarters. After what felt like an hour of fighting, the battle began shifting to a more and more defensive struggle as the minutes dragged on.

He was breathing heavily. Even with [Endurance] running at a full 2 MPS, fighting was hard work. And with stakes this high, Matt was giving it everything he had.

A glance at his AI told him everything he needed to know.

Time until reinforcements: minus three minutes and four seconds.

They were pulling back because they were retreating, with their retaking of the fort a failure.

Matt checked his team’s status and found everyone except himself and Aster with slight injuries.

Conor’s leg was flashing red, causing Matt to reach for him and pull him back deeper into the tunnel.

“What happened?”

“Sharpness enchanted blade got my thigh. Didn’t hit anything important, but I can’t put much weight on it.”

Matt internally cursed while he pulled out a clotting potion and just dumped it onto the bleeding leg. It had an anesthetic effect, which would help Conor remain active. Though, without full use of his leg, the man would be essentially stationary for anything they needed to do next.

Annie, Emily, and Liz all had shallow cuts on their upper body, and Matt wondered about how they sustained. But what was more worrying was their mana situation. All of the mages were all sitting at around one-quarter of their maximum.

Matt left Conor propped against a wall at the entrance to the tunnel at the man’s insistence, and moved to the wall to get a better view of what was happening.

He expected to see the enemy retreating, or fighting off more forces, but his brain ground to a halt when he saw none of the above. They simply retreated, with around twenty people, back to their encirclement line.

In the group chat, he asked, “What’s going on?”

Liz snapped back, “Our f*****g relief went dark, and no one can contact them, but they know they aren’t dead.”

Matt froze at the unexpected situation. He just didn’t know how to comprehend that. Afraid to attack a wounded party of roughly equal numbers? Who would make such a call? Even if they just wanted to play it safe, they could have fought their way to the fort then joined Matt’s party in the walls.

“What?”

It was only half-coherent, but Liz seemed to understand.

“I’ve been talking with Juni, and he’s as mad as we are. My best guess is the reinforcement group is led by a coward. Headquarters is trying to find us help, but they already had to scramble to get us that idiot.”

Annie said, “Okay, so we’re f****d. Same with this fort. I vote we get the f**k out of here.”

Matt nodded. “That’s the best plan. I’m not dying just for the kingdom to still lose the fort.”

They still had to figure out what to do with Conor, but the man seemed to understand and said, “I can’t run to keep up, and I’m happy to try to buy you some time.”

Matt had already run the simulations and found a course of action where he didn’t need to do that. They only needed to fight their way out of the fort and to a mile away, where the anti-flight formation didn’t have an effect. If he could’ve simply shut down the formation, he would have done that while still inside, and just had them fly out from here. But, sadly, that was impossible.

“I don’t think that will be necessary. We can carry you with Liz’s blood and get us all out of here.”

Matt looked around and said, “How’s everyone else? Any problems?”

At the chorus of no’s, he peered over the battlement at the attackers. They were performing triage on their wounded, though there weren’t that many. Most had either ‘died’ and were teleported out or didn’t take much damage.

They needed to escape. And they needed to do it now.

Matt was quickly joined by Annie, Emily, and Aster, while Liz made her way down to them. In just under ten minutes, they were ready to leave. Conor’s large frame draped an arm over Liz while being held up by tendrils of blood.

The six of them were getting ready to make a break for it, when another group of queendom troops came through the woods.

This time, it was easily more than the one hundred that first came to the fort, and Matt saw their chance to escape vanish when he noticed that the far-off figures had spread out to make the encirclement stronger.

He cursed, “f**k! Back into the fort.”

It was their only chance, and it was a bad one. At this point, they had to hope that they could hold on to the smaller and more defensible fort itself.

Matt had an idea percolating but wasn’t happy with it. Still, it was their only chance.

He wasn’t willing to tell anyone about his Talent, it would paint too large a target on him. But he could reveal his Concept. Giving mana was rare, but not unheard of, and it was limited by willpower. It wasn’t an unlimited resource, so it wasn’t as dangerous to expose.

With a few carefully crafted lies, he could keep them going while giving them a chance to hold out for more reinforcements. As long as they held the inner fort, the queendom would need to dedicate a sizable force to prevent them from sallying forth and attacking their rear. A hundred kingdom fighters not led by a coward could easily harass this border fort enough to make it too costly for the queendom to continue to bleed troops in a losing position.

It was a faint hope, but it was all they had, and Matt refused to give up. If retreat wasn’t an option, they had to stand and fight.