The Path of Ascension 4: A LitRPG Adventure

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Panting, they moved back into the trees where they rested. They inspected each other for injuries and recovered over the next few minutes. Matt’s stab wound was poisoned, and it took them three hours to get the black tendrils to vanish, even with him putting 75 MPS into [Endurance], and Liz casting [Ranged Heal] over and over.

They had even started dumping potion after potion onto the wound, but none of them seemed to work better than their repeated efforts.

After they were healed and recovered, they entered the base and found a tunnel descending into the mountain.

They encountered no opposition until they found a miner orc, who attacked them with a pickaxe. He was no threat, and was quickly dispatched, but they found an increasing number of miners as they pushed deeper into the mine.

When they turned one corner, they found a Tier 9 iron ore pile. It was enough that they weren’t able to keep it all, but it was an interesting fact, as it meant that the orcs were actually mining while the instance was active.

According to all the information they had found, most rifts didn’t have active miners at this low of a Tier.

It took them nearly seven hours to wind their way through the mines but, eventually, they found the second sub-boss of the area. It was a massive turtle eating a vein of iron ore that seemed to rise out of the ground like a strand of pasta.

Matt used [Earth Manipulation] to feel how the turtle was drawing the iron out from deeper in the mountain. That small magical probe was enough for the monster to notice him, and it charged.

The walls rumbled and began to move as if to trap them, but Matt threw his prodigious mana generation into [Earth Manipulation] and held the walls and floors back as much as he could. The walls still started to edge in, but he was able to slow things down long enough for Aster and Liz to throw themselves into combat.

The pressure increased, and Matt was forced to use his Concept’s repulsive force to add additional pressure on the encroaching walls. If Liz and Aster weren’t fighting the monster, he was sure that he would have been quickly overwhelmed, but they kept enough of the sub-boss’s attention to allow him to resist the monster’s trap.

It felt like decades, but his AI told him that it was only five minutes later when the resistance ended, and Matt let the spell drop.

Aster jumped into his arms and thanked him. “I don’t like being in tunnels with earth monsters.” She licked his armor and added, “Thanks!”

Matt sighed into his bond and saw Liz limping over. A distinct chunk was missing out of her thigh, but she otherwise seemed okay.

She grinned at him from under her helmet. “So, I learned I can move the blood inside of me to move a limb when I can’t use my muscles.”

They once again rested but were unable to totally heal Liz’s injury. There was more damage than the body could normally heal, and [Ranged Heal] couldn’t accomplish more than that.

Still, Liz was up and moving with her armor’s assistance. Despite Matt’s protesting, she insisted, and eventually proved that the wound didn’t hamper her mobility.

He was just impressed that she had been able to get her spear into the monster’s shell hole, and then used her Blood Iron to create a cyclone of death that minced the sub-boss from the inside out.

They exited the tunnel and found themselves in a palace’s rear entrance, in front of what seemed to be a nearly forgotten garden. The flower beds were overgrown with small trees and other weeds, but they hid the entrance of the tunnel that they came from nicely.

Just on the other side of the overgrown shrubbery, hiding their egress from the turtle’s tunnels, the sight was something to behold.

For a deathtrap designed and approved by a sometimes-sadistic cat, it was breathtaking.

The walls of the palace cut into the sky, with roofs that matched the chicken’s tower in shape, but cleaner and much more well-kept. The pointed roofs of the guard towers pierced the clouds, with the sides sweeping down to cover the grounds and lower portions of the place in a canopy of sorts. There were walkways and ramparts along the walls meant for guards and watchers, with stations that had braziers that could be lit. Matt could only guess their purpose, but they were all similar in style to the ones that glowed in the garden.

Inside, they discovered entire squads of red armored orcs that grew stronger with each of their allies’ deaths. Still, the three of them were strong enough to carve a path of death to the exit rift. They could feel it in the area as they moved through a section of the palace with thick, red logs that acted as fine pillars. Matt and Liz used them to their advantage while engaging with the squads patrolling the area.

The forest orcs, with their ambush tactics, also started appearing as they entered an even more ornate portion of the palace. Carvings of Jade, gold, and other precious-looking pieces in the shape of vases and urns adorned every nook and cranny of the network of halls. The air of luxury, power and wealth only intensified as they got closer to the exit.

They took breaks inside cleared-out rooms when they needed to. The thin, paper-like walls offered more cover than being in the open, but the rooms were rare. Rest came at the cost of a loss in potential damage, as they could convert all the essence from their kills thanks to [Lesser Sacrifice], which encouraged them to kill as fast as possible.