The Path of Ascension 2: A LitRPG Adventure

45

Camilla withdrew her mace and brought it down on the crystal. Not a single spark or scratch appeared from the impact. Seeing that they couldn’t damage the core, they started to back out without needing to speak.

All was for naught.

With his spiritual sense, Matt could feel the slight draw of the core pulling in ambient mana. With a bit more checking, he found the conduits that were feeding mana to the core.

The increase in light and spin was visible, but slow. The problem was that both were increasing. After a few seconds, the rate of increase became somewhat concerning.

Matt’s AI raced with the calculations, and the output was bad. Warnings from his AI started covering his vision even before the predictions were finished.

“Oh, s**t. Run!”

Matt’s shout jolted them out of their stupor, and they ran back to the vault door. Pulling out his flying sword, they jumped on and flew through the ruin, toward their dug-out exit.

This time, Matt didn’t worry about being subtle and flying near the tall ceilings. No, he flew as fast as he could while braking hard to take the corners.

As they passed the various golems and factories, they watched as the denizens of the ruin slowly came to life, and all of the mana within the ruin was being sucked to its center.

Matt watched his HUD as it calculated the mana drain, and while his regeneration was being sucked away.

The drain on his mana hit 5 MPS when the air was practically drained of all mana, and it rushed in from the outside to fill the void.

Not slowing down, Matt flew them out and through their dug-out exit.

As they passed the hangar, he had enough time to spot dozens of golems with what seemed like skeletal wings.

They were arranged in neat and orderly rows, standing at the hanger doors.

Waiting.

As they reached the outside, Matt pulled them up, and increased their speed as much as he could. The mana drain was getting worse as they flew through the ruin, and they were unable to increase the distance faster than the mana was being drawn in.

Once he was outside and able to open the throttle up, Matt put the remaining 25 MPS he had into the sword, with a paltry 5 MPS going into [Cracked Phantom Armor]. But as the distance increased, the mana drains from the ruin lessened. When the drain was back to nothing, Matt stopped the flying sword and hovered.

He thought he would need his AI to point out the mountain that the ruin was hiding in, but it was visible from their position.

Matt could see the ambient mana rushing into the mountain, which seemed to be growing.

Liz figured it out before he did.

“The damn ruin is flying.”

As they watched in shock and horror, the entire mountain rose into the sky. Eventually, a landslide occurred, and it revealed the ruin in all of its glory.

Before their eyes, the entire ruin was exposed and ascending. To make matters worse, small figures swarmed out, as if the floating mountain was a kicked over anthill.

The collector spider drones were the first out, and they swarmed in dark clouds. Trees, rocks, and seemingly random objects were collected by the swarms, and brought back to the newly activated fortress.

Matt quickly checked his bag, but the two drones he had snatched were still dormant.

The next golems to exit were the humanoid golems that they had seen in formation as they left. They seemed to be slightly smaller than the melee golems, and their skeletal wings were now glowing with mana. They took flight in squadrons, patrolling the ruin’s airspace in tight formations.

As the three of them watched, Matt whispered, “What have we done?”

With its winged guard in tow, the ruin was still floating higher and higher into the sky, while draining all of the mana in the surrounding area.

Even Matt couldn’t fathom how much mana it was absorbing.

His AI unhelpfully spat out a number for him. If the volume was a near-perfect sphere, and it had a Tier 6 planet’s normal ambient mana density, the ruin would have absorbed nearly two million mana thus far. That number was only increasing as the ruin’s area of effect grew.

Ambient mana and ambient essence tried to equalize themselves across a planet. The only exceptions were rifts that pulled in ambient mana and expelled essence. Ambient mana was created when anyone cast a skill or was at their maximum mana. Any mana regeneration that would put an individual over their cap was expelled into the surroundings.

All of that mana, built up for however many years that the planet sat unexplored and Tiering up, was being dragged into the ruin. As the predicted mana consumption crossed the five million marks, the draw slowed. The planet’s ambient mana stopped rushing toward the area near the ruin to fill the void it had created.

Matt and Camilla let out audible sighs.

“Well, fuck.”

Liz’s curse summed up Matt’s feelings perfectly.

Then, the ruin started to move.

It wasn’t moving directly at them, but near enough that Matt didn’t feel comfortable. So, he flew to the side. As they watched the ruin move through the air like a castle given wings, several groups of the humanoid golems broke off from their patrol perimeter.

They were heading directly toward them.

“What do the golems want with us?”

Matt started to fly, but Liz, who was turning her head over her shoulder, shouted, “Go faster! They’re gaining on us!”

Aster started yipping over the heavy winds, and Matt felt the added cold of her launching [Ice Spear] s at their pursuers.

From his HUD, Matt watched the red dots grow closer.

How are they faster than us? This is a Tier 7 flying device. They’re only Tier 6. They should be slower by my calculations! What did we awaken?

The terror was building in Matt’s stomach, and he was starting to fear that they had set something in motion that they couldn’t undo.

A flash of light brightened the entire area, and while checking Liz’s perspective, he saw a beam of light lance straight into the sky. The beam from the ruin burned a hole through the sparse cloud cover. It had to be an attack at something above the sky. Three more shots of the beam brightened the sky in the next few moments, and the sinking feeling in Matt’s stomach grew deeper.

There was only one thing he could think of that would be that high in the sky.

He corrected himself. Not the sky, the atmosphere.

The ruin was taking down the satellite coverage.

That was a declaration of war if he had ever heard of one. The ruin was proclaiming that it was the master of this planet and dared anything to challenge it.

I hope a Tier 25 comes and makes a move. There has to be one here, right? I saw Driver fight. He was so fast, even if they needed to come from the city, they should be here already.

Wait, what about all the Tier 20s going to the world next to us? Can’t one of them slap this thing out of the air?

There was only one answer that Matt felt explained why no one was reacting. This was within their expected limits.

The ruin was only Tier 6, so they would have to deal with it.

Before he could think any further, he felt a jolt, and a cry of pain escaped his mouth.

The flying golems had caught up, and they had crossbows. One of them had landed a shot in his lower back, and it was everything that Matt could do to not collapse from the pain.

His HUD flashed. The bolt had punched through both his physical armor and [Cracked Phantom Armor] and was lodged in his small intestines. Going into evasive maneuvers, Matt tried to make them a harder target to hit.

Being able to see from Liz’s perspective was helpful, but the golems were fully charged with mana, and were using the crossbows to great effect at their maximum range.

With the two teams of six golems each steadily gaining on them, Matt let their altitude slip, aiming for a hole in the canopy of the forest. They didn’t have a speed advantage, but Matt hoped that all of his time playing tag with Travis would give him an edge in flying through a dense forest.

Another bolt missed him and slammed into Camilla, who took it much better than he had, and barely let out a whimper.

If he wasn’t mistaken, he thought he saw a grin on the woman’s face.

Just before they sunk down into the trees, Aster let loose a barrage of ice. Matt watched as two of the golems on their left went down.