The Path of Ascension 2: A LitRPG Adventure

13

They had kept busy during their downtime between train rides and waiting for the teleport times between planets. To that end, they bought out a single Tier 5 rift for a single delve during a long break between departure times whenever they could.

They wanted to see Camilla fight real opponents, and the delve allowed them to finish consolidating their Tier 5 cores with the remaining crunches which solved two problems.

With their time traveling together Matt learned a few things about Camilla. She never met anyone’s eyes, man, or woman, and while she could fake public interaction for a few minutes she always cut it short quickly, never letting a conversation stretch past the first opportunity that allowed her to make a break for it.

At the same time Matt had decided to hold off on taking the potion Aunt Helen had made for him until he was at the peak of Tier 5. He and Liz hoped that if he found a Tier 5 mana concentration natural treasure while exploring the new planet, he could save the much more expensive potion for later. The potion would work at any Tier, unlike a treasure which were generally Tier dependent.

With their fight over, Matt joined Aster at the edge of the room, and used her to practice limiting his Concept’s mana regeneration effect on specific people. They knew it was possible, as the Concept ignored anyone with full mana. It was just a matter of him learning how to do it consciously.

They also had figured out the math of his Concept with the help of Travis and Keith. He could impart extra mana regeneration to anyone in the area of effect. However, there were three limitations. First, his mana transfers lost efficiency with distance from his core but that was slight enough to only be an academic factor. Second, it seemed he didn’t actually give people his mana but stimulated their own mana core into generating more mana at the cost of his will power. Finally, he couldn’t control the rate of mana restoration between individuals in the area of effect.

At least, he couldn’t currently. In theory he might be able to control it but currently his Concept always tried to give to everyone in its area of effect the same amount of power, regardless of who had more or less mana in their cores.

That meant it was slower to refill Aster and Liz with his Concept mid-fight rather than recharging their fast-converting mana stones and having them pull from them. It was only a matter of time until he could limit the effect to them, and keep them going for as long as he could fight…

Endlessly.

Matt idly watched Liz take her turn against Camilla. Liz was kitted out in a forest patterned armor set that, while vaguely similar in shape to her old armor, was made from Tier 5 materials and was a step up in every way from her old set.

The most notable change was that she had retired the spear that she had ‘won’ at the auction on the training world.

Instead, she had used the baroness’ smith to remove the old rift enchantment and place it on a new spear more reminiscent of the one she had lost in the landslide on the training world. This particular spear had a hollow core that she could fill with blood, and her proficiency with the new weapon compared to the old one was night and day.

With her [Blood Manipulation] skill, she could make the spear hover, and if he didn’t know better, he would have sworn she had a weapon skill that made it automatically fight by her side.

The blood mage was able to use the spear to fend off Camilla, who had to devote a lot of attention to preventing it from poking her while also casting spells at her from range. Liz never pushed any more than that, but Matt knew exactly how infuriating it was to get poked at constantly, only for the weapon to dart away at the last second like a hummingbird.

This portion of the training was more for Camilla to get used to fighting people at range. She had quickly learned that [Bolt] cost too much mana to sustain against Liz, who had her [Blood Shield] ready to absorb the electricity if she decided to cast it at her, effectively wasting her mana.

After a few more rushes that only caused Liz to keep her distance, they changed the pace, and Liz started shooting out [Blood Bullets]. Camilla had to use her admittedly impressive flexibility to dodge the thumb-sized balls of blood, but she did much better at this portion of their training. Liz was working to put extra spin on the pellets of blood, giving them a bit more penetration power but she wasn’t able to guide them midflight yet.

The skill, [Blood Bullet] still automated the creation and manipulation processes for her like [Water Bullet] and removed the need for her to manually throw the blood or maintain their form like [Blood Manipulation] would have needed her to do.

When the blood mage used her Concept, the blood was as dense as steel and hit as if a Tier 7 threw them making them dangerous if they landed anywhere vital.

All of that raised the problem. Camilla was having a hard time keeping up. She did much better in a rift, where she could take damage and get a boost, but she didn’t have the experience to keep up with the trio in this type of human-on-human combat.

If Duke Waters hadn’t asked for them to help the woman, Matt wouldn’t have even considered taking her to explore a new world—

No, he corrected himself.

He wasn’t heartless enough to turn away from someone who needed help in front of him. She needed help, and he could understand the desire to get strong enough so that no one could direct your life.

He was still worried that this babysitting assignment would slow down their progress. While this excursion wasn’t meant to increase their Tier as much as dedicated delving would, they would still be dealing with a planet full of rift breaks. Monsters would be everywhere, and with it being a Tier 6 world, Matt was afraid that her inexperience would get her killed.

So, Matt and Liz were trying to book as many rifts during the last leg of their journey as possible, to get Camilla some much needed combat experience. The problem was that they had to buy the slot from a team that already held the position and not many people wanted to give up the essence and rewards delving it themselves would bring, so prices were sky-high.

It was so frustrating getting obviously fleeced, Matt was tempted to take out his homemade rift charging plates. They were shoddy work, with a terrible efficiency of forty-five percent, but they would have accomplished the goal of getting them a delve slot at the small cost of a few hours’ time.

But no matter how annoyed he got, giving out his secret would be monumentally stupid. No matter how much showing the arrogant teams that their precious rift slot was worth about five minutes of his time.

It was a beautiful daydream that would stay just that.

Still, Camilla wasn’t some genius at fighting, and her odd choice of weapons didn’t help her. For all those faults the woman was determined. And that was much more important in his mind.

Matt still worried that the temporary addition to their team was going to get in over her head with them. He didn’t want her death on his hands.

After watching Camilla dodge Liz’s attacks for a while longer, they swapped out again. He stood up with his longsword in hand. The weapon had gone from dangerous to deadly, with his spirit able to handle repeated uses of the embedded skill, [Mana Charge]. It gave every few swings a massive increase in power and had so far ended every fight with a rift monster on its own.

This particular spar with Camilla, he pressed aggressively and forced her to take painful slaps with the flat of his blade. The message that he could have bisected her at any time was clearly getting through to her if the scowl that grew on her face was any indication.