The Path of Ascension 2: A LitRPG Adventure

9

Aster was no help in that endeavor, as she just discovered a new best friend, and didn’t seem at all biased when pushing Matt to keep the woman around. He probed their bond, and found the fox thought she smelled nice.

As he thought over the information she was sending to him, he mulled it over. Nice wasn’t the right word. Kind was closer but even then, he wasn’t sure it was right. Aster liked Camilla, and that was all she needed to know to want to keep the woman around.

Having Aster seemed to break the tension, and Matt felt Camilla open up slightly during the time they sat around. She even chimed in with a few interjections of her own while he and Liz bickered about random things.

It wasn’t much but it was progress.

Two days later, as the train was approaching the station, Matt and Liz sat next to each other in their room. Their [Endurance] skills were about to breach their core spirits and fill the third and final skill slot. They would then be immediately removing the skill and putting it back to their Inner spirits to free up the slot, but they needed the skill in the Core spirit for the modifications they wanted to do.

Matt also wanted to improve [Mage’s Retreat] but as it was already settled into his spirit it would be a much slower process. According to Madam Delver’s guide, he could improve the Durability boost to half as strong as the Strength boost with the right changes to the skill’s structure. It was a nice adaptation that could make him harder to kill, which was something he very much wanted.

He wasn’t that happy with being forced into a pure tank and support role, but he didn’t have a viable ranged attack skill that he could use.

At Tier 10, I’ll potentially be a better mage than Liz and Aster. Let’s see how they like it when I kill everything in the rifts myself, and they’re the ones left trying to scramble and catch up.

Matt brought his attention back into his spirit after daydreaming about the distant future. [Endurance] was about to cross the dividing line, and when it did, he acted.

He had practiced this so many times that it was second nature, but he was still nervous.

The skill structure was an incredibly complex 3D lattice formation that interwove itself in hundreds of places, but Matt didn’t hesitate as he started grabbing and expanding spots of the skill with strands that channeled mana.

In his mind’s eye, they were pipes that handled water and the junctions where more than one pipe met up had incredibly complex functions, so he was extra careful when manipulating the skill near them.

It was hard work, and he nearly messed up a few times, but his practice paid off. Without knowing exactly what the final result was meant to be, and without hours of repetition, he knew he would have ruined the skill. He would have either crippled its functionality or shattered the skill completely by adjusting the wrong part.

Matt tweaked the pipes, and while his muscle memory took over, he examined the skill as a whole.

Skills came in four main categories.

The first were skills where the mana cost was up front. Those were where the skill was instantly formed in the mana pool and immediately cast. That instant forming was why he couldn’t trickle feed a normal skill, like [Fireball], the 10 mana it needed to cast. It was the same reason he needed to fill his mana pool to cast [Hail].

Channel skills were the second type of skill. They came in two different versions, one was like [Mage’s Retreat] and functioned like an expanding balloon. The cost scaled exponentially to increase the size of the balloon, though because Matt’s mana regeneration would also scale exponentially, he expected those channel skills to remain a core part of his fighting style.

The other type of channel skills was like [Hail]. Those typically had an initial cost but needed a continuous mana input to maintain the effect. They had malleable ‘pipes’ that could expand to handle more mana. They couldn’t expand infinitely, but they typically scaled linearly which made them more popular uses for large amounts of mana. It also made them much more flexible, since the effect could be scaled to the current threat, unlike a standard [Fireball] which needed months of work to change significantly.

The third type of skills were reserve skills. They took a chunk of mana, and locked it away, though some percent of it was expended in order to instantiate the skill. They generally created fake essence to improve an aspect of cultivation, or some other effect with the locked down mana. The normal [Mana Strength] that melee fighters used worked like that and it was hugely popular.

[Phantom Amor] also worked like that third type. Mana was reserved to protect the caster against one strike. His [Cracked Phantom armor] was a cracked skill and had more of the properties of the second type of reserve skill. The pipes could expand, but they weren’t like [Hail]’s where they expanded freely. The pipes of [Cracked Phantom Armor] were instead like steel. He had to slowly expand them through long meditation, advancing his cultivation, and pushing the skill through practice.

The final type of skills was the entirety of manipulation skills. They were similar to the second type of channel skills but were considered a distinct category. In addition to the fact, they could expand infinitely, the vast majority of enchantments, skills, Talents, and similar effects treated them as separate from other channel skills. A staff that improved lightning skills wouldn’t affect [Lightning Manipulation] unless that effect was separately added in.

As the final moment came, Matt brought his attention back to the task at hand.

With a mental effort, he mentally ‘blew’ into the skill, expanding all the pipes. That final bit was at Aunt Helen’s suggestion and would help the skill handle more mana from the onset. She figured that he’d be spending a lot of time getting his type two channel skills to handle his absurd mana input especially at the higher Tiers, and if he helped [Endurance] now he could be a step ahead.