The Path of Ascension 2: A LitRPG Adventure

52

Geraden rubbed a hand on his staff, while murmuring something too low for Matt to pick it up. He spent nearly a minute looking around the fissure, eventually shaking his head.

“I can’t do more than an off chance at best. I think we’re going to have to rely on your ice mage and hope of the best while we do this the hard way.”

After a slight pause, he added, “If you can get the protective casing broken, I can probably take out that processing unit, but that won’t do much good if we’re already fighting.”

Matt had been watching the factory intently as well, and said, “Looks like one spider gets popped out every thirty seconds or so. We can definitely kill them faster than that but taking it out would be nice.”

When he looked up to Liz, Aster, and Camilla, the girls flew down for just long enough to let Camilla join them on the ground.

Geraden looked around and shook his head, clearly irritated.

Matt understood. There were a lot of golems, and waiting would only make the problem worse.

Camilla broke the silence, “We can always just hit and run with our mages in the air. It’s a lot easier for them to disengage that way.”

Matt answered, “It’s not them I’m worried about. I don’t want us swarmed. They’re Tier 6…” He paused. The golems in the ruin had been Tier 6. These were being made from local materials, which meant that they could be weaker.

Reaching out with his spiritual sense, he felt the golems. They were weaker than Tier 6, but not by much. They were Tier 5 if his spiritual scan of the nearest golems, and the ones at the edge of the ore vein, was correct.

“Actually, they’re only Tier 5 because of their source materials. This isn’t impossible. I can block out these golems’ attacks for the most part.”

Looking around, Matt searched for a suitable place to stage their attack on the factory but found none. These spiders had already proven that they could climb on ceilings, let alone the walls of the fissure just ahead of them. A steep wall would only give them a way to climb above them.

“I think Geraden is right. We’re just going to have to fight this out.”

The three of them moved to the edge of the fissure and watched as blood and ice rained down on the swarm. The first ice spear was massive but shattered on the ore processing unit’s hard outer shell. There was a rent, but the overall lack of damage confirmed that the factory itself was Tier 6.

That first strike signaled the spiders to go into action and swarm. After seeing the mages were out of range, they dove at the trio of targets within their reach.

Matt stood with his longsword charged and at the ready. When the combatants came in close, he brought his blade down, and released the mana accumulated inside with a massive explosion. The ground quaked from the shockwave; the wash of mana destroyed all of the spider golems within five feet of the blow.

The area wiped clean of enemies was quickly repopulated and Matt cast [Hail] right in front of their position. The ice slowed the spider golems down, but the real advantage was the ice that tumbled down the steep cliff they were defending. It was instantly grabbed by Aster, and she used it to sweep across the terrain, and wiped out a whole slew of golems.

As new monsters replaced the destroyed ones, Matt fell into a rhythm, and started killing in earnest. When they got under his feet, he stomped down and crushed their fragile bodies. When they tried to leap at him, he used his free hand to rip them off his body, crushing them underfoot or throwing them off the cliff.

Essence flowed into his core in a stream.

On his right, Matt could see Camilla in brief flashes. She was using her whip more than her mace. The range and length of the weapon was doing more than the mace could, even against enemies made of metal.

His AI also registered that the damage she was inflicting to the Tier 5 metal implied that the weapon had been upgraded past her own Tier. Matt took note of that, but it wasn’t exactly a priority.

To his left, Geraden was mostly an unknown, but the Tier 6 seemed to be holding his own against the waves of spider golems.

After dispatching a group of spiders with a spinning sweep of his blade, Matt was facing the Tier 6 man, and got a better look at the man’s fighting style. He was doing a lot more than just holding his own.

Spikes of stone rose out of the ground to impale the skittering golems in waves. Matt thought it was an odd use of [Earth Spike], or possibly a cracked version. But the man wasn’t limited to that single skill. He used his staff like a club. Each swing crumpled the golems, and when they surrounded the man, he would slam the butt of his staff down on the ground. Thick roots would surge out of the ground around the earth mage and grab the golems, before retracting into the ground, leaving the earth completely unscathed.

Matt was pretty sure it was [Entangle], but the skill should have been a single target ability, instead of an area of effect.

The last thing Matt noticed was that his staff seemed to hit with more force than it should, considering its apparent mass. When Geraden swung the weapon and knocked a spider out of the air, it didn’t just get sent flying… It was completely disintegrated.

All was noted with his AI for future use.

But for all the good they did in killing wave after wave of golems, they were all overshadowed by Liz. She was constantly using [Create Blood] and the skies rained red. As the blood increased, it started to form veritable tidal waves that crashed down on the spiders. When the golems started to avoid the mass of blood, she split the mass of liquid into quarters and sent four smaller waves of blood in different directions.

From his vantage point, Matt watched as spider after spider threw themselves into the blender of blood and metal that Liz had created. As she approached the factory, the spiders gave her blood constructs more and more attention. Soon, nearly all of them were attacking the blood rather than the melee fighters.

As Matt watched, Geraden threw his staff toward the giant ore processor. It flew more like a javelin than a large staff, and he threw it with extreme precision.

When it landed in the small c***k Aster had made, Matt was impressed. When the staff expanded in a mass of leaves and roots, he was shocked.

It made sense that the staff had felt alive to Matt earlier, as it was turning into a giant tree before his very eyes. Its trunk expanded throughout the factory and destroyed the ore processor in the process.

With the device taken out, and the production of golems halted, the spiders seemed to lose cohesion. Each of them started to act independently, instead of as a unit.

Matt and the other two melee fighters moved into the fissure. As they advanced, they picked off the few remaining spiders in a rush.

Aster sent sheets of cold at the fleeing spiders from Liz’s backpack, which slowed them and limited their movements. Their small size meant that they were more susceptible to frozen joints. Their limbs would stop working as the ice took hold. Soon, the last of the spiders were swallowed up by the newly formed tree.

Liz and Aster floated down, with Liz rubbing her armored head. She had overused her [Blood Manipulation] while killing the golems. Meanwhile, his spirit was nearly full of essence from the nearly thousand golems they had killed.