The Path of Ascension 5: A LitRPG Adventure

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The essence rush this time felt far more earned, and Matt smiled as they moved to search out the next boss.

It was essence two Tiers higher than their own, and as a sub-boss, it gave quite a bit more for a single kill than killing dozens of the regular Tier 12 monsters would have.

As they neared the exit, they were unable to find the third sub-boss, and decided to kill the main boss before looking around more.

The final boss of the rift was a pack of massively scaled-up versions of the elemental dogs that they had seen throughout the rift.

Before they went into the fight with the mid-Tier 12 monsters, Matt and Liz went and killed several packs of the lesser monsters, to see if they had any surprises or unexpected skills.

As it turned out, the monsters didn’t. They mostly used breath or ranged attacks of their elements while closing in, and tried to finish the two of them off in melee range by biting and clawing as much as they could.

While there were four types of the elemental dogs, the main ones were the decay and lightning-based dogs that they first spotted. They had little issue dealing with them, though Matt tried to fight the poison monsters himself, as he was practically immune with [Cracked Phantom Amor]. Liz had to fight them from a distance, so she focused on the other two dogs.

The last two types were wind and mud elementals, but they were even easier to kill than the other two variants, which made them feel almost like afterthoughts.

They didn’t bother to fight fair against the rift boss, and Liz started the fight with a wave of blood that she had taken from their previous enemies.

As the wave crashed over and then clung to the bosses, Matt followed up [Mana s***h]es charged with 2000 mana and aimed at the monster’s legs.

Together, they had the monsters down in less than ten minutes. Eventually each of the elemental dogs’ throats were cut by Liz as they futilely grappled with the manipulated blood.

Checking their time, they saw that they were closing in on three hours in the rift already, and after opening the reward distortion and receiving three bottles of Tier 12 mercury, they started to look around for the third and final sub-boss.

It was Liz who noticed it after half an hour of looking.

The third sub boss was a giant whale swimming around the edge of the rift, hiding in the lava flows that they hadn’t particularly investigated.

Since Matt had [Lava Manipulation] in his arsenal from his spending spree after the vassal war, the fight was absurdly easy. After pulling the section of river where the monster was waiting into the air, they simply attacked it while the monster fell helplessly to the ground.

Even as it tried to gather up lava from the nearby river, it was unable to put together enough of a defense with Matt fighting its every effort. Meanwhile, Liz drilled holes through its craggy flesh with all the blood that she had gathered from the Tier 12 bosses.

With a final time of three hours and eleven minutes, they exited the rift to see that they were actually the first team to have completed it, which put them firmly in first place.

Not that they expected to stay in first place, as they were sure that now that they knew where the monsters would be, they could cut down their time spent in the rift to simply flying around and killing the bosses.

Still, it was nice to see they had beaten the team that had gone in before them, and the ones that had gone in after hadn’t bested their time.

Their delve earned their team fifteen points, which was pretty nice, but they both wanted to delve the rift once again with their knowledge of the boss’ locations and abilities.

With a second attempt, they might be able to actually win the fastest time, if they could cut down their delve by about an hour.

With less than an hour to their rift delve as Quill and Torch, they went back to their rooms and exchanged their personalities with Luna and Kurt after getting a warning that they were pushing their shown power a little too far in their real identities.

The rift they had been signed up for was a simple race of a Tier 11 rift.

Wanting to show off in their masked personas, Quill and Torch were already hovering in the air with their matching flying ankle devices as the countdown to their entrance time began.

This rift could be run only once a month by each team, which made the first clear of the rift a blind one, but they were able to gather some information beforehand. The rift’s designation was a speedrun, but it had a second, more telling category.

It was a maze rift.

As flying would have implied that they could bypass most mazes, they could conclude that the rift was underground, or had natural anti-flying restrictions. The two teams they had seen exit the rift so far had flown out, so they were able to remove the second possibility.

That information, combined with the current fastest clear being two hours and thirty-two minutes, gave them quite a bit more information than they had had for their first rift. The current first place team finished only ten minutes faster than the second and third place runs.

Luna’s training with information gathering showed itself useful once again, as they were able to make preliminary plans without even entering the rift.

When the two of them entered, they were immediately proven correct in their initial assumptions, considering that they were in a natural underground tunnel with four openings. Of course, each path branched off in the four cardinal directions.

Interestingly, the direction of the exit was clear to their spiritual senses. Quill had expected it to be obfuscated in some manner to increase the difficulty, either by means of the rift itself, or by the hosts if it were possible.

Without even a glance, they took the path that led them toward the exit, only to find that it almost immediately looped up and around, to send them in the completely opposite direction.

The Tier 11 monsters they found were almost an afterthought.

Quill was able to kill entire packs of the monsters with a talisman or two, if Torch didn’t skewer the monsters first. Whatever this rift was meant to be, the monsters were weaker in actual combat than the average Tier 10 monster despite being technically stronger.

Their greatest issue was the looping tunnels and all the backtracking it took to actually reach the exit. With no way to find the clear path, the two of them just followed their instincts and flew at their fastest speeds.

Despite their lack of clear path, they were able to clear the rift in just two hours and six minutes, putting their names firmly in first place over the next fastest speed of two hours and fourteen minutes.