The Path of Ascension 5: A LitRPG Adventure

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Before the monster could heal its burned eyes, Quill moved in for the kill.

Throwing out two [Wind Blade] talismans, he cut the monster’s muscular rear legs off, and despite the rapid regeneration, he knew that he had already won. He just needed to stop the monster from jumping around for a second.

His follow up [Fire Bolt] talisman punched right through the monster’s head and burned out its brain, putting an end to the wolf monster. He felt the rush of essence course into his spirit as proof.

Quill looked over to see that Torch had her monster pinned to the ground and was already testing the regeneration capabilities of the werewolf.

They kept slitting the monster’s vocal cords to prevent it from crying for help while they tested its ability to heal.

The results were worse than feared.

The wolf continually healed from any non-cauterized wounds for almost fifteen minutes, before it finally ran out of mana and died.

It had sustained itself through an hour of severed limbs and being eviscerated over and over again.

After they felt the rush of essence, Torch kicked the monster and messaged. “Troll levels of regeneration and a mana pool way above average for a Tier 13 monster. Great. Just great.”

Quill agreed. This was a less than ideal rift. Nonetheless, they weren’t hard countered here, and completing the rift would greatly boost their status.

Most Tier 10 teams enter a Tier 13 rift with more than one team, and only while choosing rifts where they had the advantage over the monsters.

With neither of those advantages, they would look all the better for completing this rift.

It was worth them pushing through despite the rift being a slog.

The revelation of the monster type also explained why there was no speedrun of this rift. No Tier 10 team would be completing this rift in anything less than a full day.

Quill looked to Torch and ran their odds with his AI.

The predictions actually looked decent.

The lycanthropes had massive regeneration, but they paid the price for that absurd healing with slightly weaker bodies for their Tier. Additionally, the whole group had only displayed three skills the entire fight.

Four, if he counted the howl.

Theoretically, they could mop up this rift in a little under nine hours, if they really pushed themselves.

After sharing his findings with Torch, the two of them began clearing out the back edge of the rift. To their surprise, the deep forest didn’t have a sub-boss, just a small den of werewolves that tried to overwhelm them with numbers.

Quill pulled out a dozen [Fire Bolt] talismans and cast them in an arc, which slowed down their attack enough for Torch to move through them. She lashed out at the wolves with a potion and talisman assisted flurry of attacks.

Now that they knew the monsters’ weaknesses, they were more confident to press their advantages.

Between the two of them and their liberal use of fire and lightning spells, they quickly had the dozen monsters slain.

After that, they moved onward to the city, where they encountered their second and third monster types of the rift.

Giant bats and skeletons.

The two seemed to work in unison as they defended their destroyed town from the two delvers.

Quill mostly fought the skeletons, while Torch took care of the aerial opponents with her greater range and fire attacks.

While she dealt with them, Quill used a variety of earth talismans to batter the animated skeletons to powder.

He had quickly learned that the skeletons would piece themselves back together and reform if their heads were not thoroughly shattered.

As they advanced, he fell into a rhythm of killing them by self-casting [Earth Spear]s to knock the monsters apart, and then smashing their skulls with [Earth Manipulation].

He attempted to overwhelm the monsters with various elemental attacks, but they seemed immune to anything but good old-fashioned skull-crushing. Even then, they had to be knocked down and separated into pieces first.

That made clearing the surprisingly large number of enemies a slow and arduous process, but they persisted until they found the town center. There, the skeletons were burning a pile of werewolves at the behest of a giant skeleton equipped with arms and armor.

The fifteen-foot-tall sub-boss almost immediately noticed them despite the fact that they were hiding behind a building two blocks away.

Unlike its slow and easier-to-kill brethren, this skeleton raced at them and crashed directly through the buildings like a wrecking ball.

“I’ll take the boss, you take the rest of the skeletons!”

The boss wasn’t alone in its greater armament. Those thirty, normal-sized skeletons were also equipped with combat gear.

With his ability to batter the thing with talismans, Quill knew that he was better suited to solo the boss. Meanwhile, Torch could dance through the lesser monsters’ greater numbers with ease.

Casting an [Earth Spear] and running in the opposite direction of his partner, Quill led the monster away and deeper into the city.

Not willing to take to the air, where the bats might still be flying around in the darkness, he flew fast and low along the city streets as the giant skeleton raced after him.

Seeing that it couldn’t get close to him, the monster started to grab and throw pieces of stone from the building with worrying accuracy. After it nearly clipped him for a second time, Quill turned to face the sub boss. They were away from the city center, and here, his attacks shouldn’t affect Torch.

Tossing out three talismans, he peppered the monster with ice attacks. While they didn’t affect the skeletons as his earth spells had, he was more focused on setting up the battlefield.

Dodging the boss’ club strike was easier said than done. It seemingly had unlimited stamina to swing around its oversized mace. Each missed attack cracked the cobblestone street and created new hazards for Quill to navigate. But with [Mage’s Retreat] and a general physical boosting talisman, he was quick footed enough to evade everything the giant skeleton threw at him.

After littering the battlefield with ice attacks, Quill pulled out five [Create Water] talismans and cast them in a pentagon around the battlefield.

A small lake’s worth of water flooded into the street, but the giant skeleton remained largely unaffected by the water as it passed through its boney figure.

Throwing out a talisman that stuck to the boss, Quill hovered slightly as he quickly pulled out a five-talisman array. He slotted and connected the talismans in under a second, even while avoiding the boss’s attacks.

Waiting for the delayed activation of the talisman he stuck to the boss forced him to dodge another five flurries of attacks. But as all the water started to rush to the boss, he pulsed power through the talisman array connected to his staff.

As the water gathered around the boss, a pulse of cold mana exploded from Quill, forming a sphere that flash froze everything in almost a two-hundred-foot radius.

The stones and buildings were suddenly covered in frost, and a few waterlogged bricks had exploded. The real sight to behold was what remained of the giant skeleton encased in a frozen obelisk.

Still, immobilized as it was, the bony bastard wasn’t dead yet.

There was no rush of essence, but Quill had not expected that trick to actually finish it.

No, he expected the next talisman to do that.

With a casual, accentuated flick of his wrist for the viewing drone, a single talisman landed on the towering pillar of ice.

After a two-second delay where he used an [Earth Barrier] talisman, the pillar shattered, demolishing the ice-encased boss with it.

The rush of Tier 13 essence hit Quill like a bull as the massive monster splintered into pieces no larger than his fist.

By the time he returned to the city center, Torch was finishing up with the final skeleton soldiers. They quickly exited the city after confirming that they had eliminated most of the monsters.

In the misty field leading to the mountain path, they encountered over four hundred werewolves in groups ranging from two to as large as nine.

The monsters seemed to have no issue seeing and hearing in the magical mist, and always called for reinforcements before they died.

Hours passed before they finished killing the hordes of monsters because of their crazy regeneration. The pair also needed to take breaks, so they allocated their essence gains while pretending to be recovering their mana.