The Path of Ascension 4: A LitRPG Adventure

14

Liz slashed with her spear before using its butt to crush a second beetle, and Luna waited until she was fighting two beetles to say, “What will you do when Matt leaves you behind? Will you be able to keep up with the man who can cast siege-level spells as if they are free? Will you watch him excel and blame fortune for your inability to keep up, or cling to his leg beg him to carry you up with you? Will you rely on him like you relied on everyone else in your life? You’re not even a proper blood mage, you’re just aping water mages with none of their tricks to help you. If others come to take him away, will you be there protecting him, or the weakness they use to make him surrender?”

That last comment caused Liz to lash out with a scream that was more of a growl.

Luna noted the damage accruing as she cut the weakness from her charges and decided to let it accumulate. She would have Melinda heal them tonight. A missing limb or three was good training, but she would have to be careful to not let them get accustomed to perfect healing.

When it did happen in a rift, it was better they know how to deal with it. And there was no safer environment than with Melinda.

Days blended into weeks as the toll on their bodies started to show. They had all lost weight, even if just a little. The weightlifting regimen that Luna had had them on put muscle on them like nothing had before. Their meals were filling, and they were focusing on different exercises than they were used to.

Matt, Kyle, and Mathew all showed the greatest changes without their cultivation’s regeneration to slow the degradation of their muscles during the day. They lost upper body mass, quickly becoming leaner with thicker legs. While their overall weight only fluctuated by a few pounds, their body composition had changed quite a bit.

Everyone else actually buffed up slightly, thanks to the increased workout loads they were put under. None of them were unfit, but a mage usually didn’t undertake the same kind of strenuous training that a melee fighter would.

With Melinda keeping them healthy and in one piece, they were able to train at a rate that was impossible elsewhere. Getting an arm eaten was a lesson learned for the next fight, instead of a month-long recovery process, or death in a rift. It was jarring, but Luna never let them forget that this was a special thing, and heavily punished any mistakes that led to a loss of limb with grueling exercises.

That was good because, at the two-month mark, Luna put them through what she called a crash course in high Tier fighting which Matt felt was a touch overboard. She practically tortured them by forcing them to fight with missing limbs, while burning, or having their flesh melted off with acid. The goal was for them to keep fighting through the pain, and if they were inevitably going to lose, to lose as slowly as possible.

Without Melinda, it would have taken years, but she was always able to heal them up perfectly. She even was able to give everyone the start of the perfect bodies she had copied from Matt. This let them push their physical boundaries to levels that they hadn’t known were possible, and that excited Luna until her tail twitched in delight.

Sometimes, the training lasted days, where exhaustion was the true enemy and they had to keep fighting on. One particularly brutal training was getting themselves out of simulated capture, which usually meant sacrificing a limb to escape.

Extreme hot and cold were mixed with wet and dry climates to help them acclimate to surviving in any rift that they could encounter and learn how to deal with those conditions.

They were given time with a local therapist and down time between each training method, but the thing that helped most of them recover was their friends knowing exactly what they were going through and being able to share that understanding.

Matt was glad that this more brutal iteration of the training only lasted a month because they were all breaking. There was just only so much pain, even pain that was perfectly healed, that the mind could take before the adverse effects would be too great. Luna pushed each of them to the edge of their personal cliffs, and then let them recover before finding it once again.

That second month was the worst of Matt’s life, and he was happy when at the three-month mark, the training took a sudden turn. Their cultivation was returned to them for brief but increasing periods of time. It was mostly for actual combat experience against the various monsters that Wrangle had in his arsenal, while each of their training times became more specialized for the individual and their weak points.

The overall difficulty was kept at more manageable levels, where they only lost when failing to quickly react to the ever-changing situation.

Their teamwork as two separate groups, and all together, increased dramatically. By the six-month mark, they were able to effectively defend against a large horde, just like the one they faced on their first day.

The rest of Melinda’s team had replaced their bottled Concepts with individualized ones by that point, which increased their morale to the point that they happily accepted all the brutal training Luna threw their way.

Mathew created a defensive Concept around that idea that he was a porous rock. In conjunction with his Tier one Talent, it allowed him to tag someone and absorb a portion of the attacks targeted at the tagged individual. He could take the damage into himself while remaining steady and stable. It was an incredibly draining Concept for his willpower, but it was a perfect pair to his role in their team.