The Path of Ascension 8: A LitRPG Adventure

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The woman looked Liz up and down before glancing at Aster then snorting, “I don’t see any competition here.”

Matt smiled as Liz leaned back in surprise.

While they were wearing masks, neither of them were unattractive, and the woman was being far too pushy for polite company.

The alcohol that wafted off her spoke to the reason why Liz didn’t immediately explode, but instead said in a clear and firm voice, “When I was in my twenties, I would have laughed this off, but lady, you are drunk and barking up an owned tree. Leave before I remove you myself.”

Matt smiled at her ferocity, but frowned as his spiritual perception caught a man moving up to the bar and bringing his hand over the drink of the man next to him.

It was an innocent enough action, but Matt felt the liquid in the drink shift slightly, and while that could be explained away with the ice settling, his spiritual perception instantly started identifying it as a threat, bringing Matt’s full attention to the glass.

Before he was able to say anything, the man took a sip of the drink, and nothing happened.

Figuring that his intuition was wrong, Matt went back to the argument between Liz and the woman. That lasted only a moment, as the man crunched into an ice cube and his mouth, throat, and upper chest melted as though coated in a potent acid.

With a quick [Bandage], Matt threw himself past the woman and at the assassin currently trying to vanish into the shifting crowd.

Not wanting to show off his more identifiable spells, like [Cracked Phantom Armor], Matt rushed forward, and with some assistance from [Mage’s Retreat], grabbed the man who had waved his hand over the glass.

As his hand grabbed the man’s upper arm, the assassin turned and spat at Matt’s shoulder. Matt could see decay mana swirling around the spit, and his spiritual sense instantly assessed it as a potent acid, just like what the assassin’s target was dealing with.

Considering the man went for a nonlethal strike, Matt chose not to put a [Cracked Mana Spear] through his head, and instead twisted to dodge the spittle that landed on someone else’s back and started to burn.

Matt tugged the man back toward himself and hit him with a vicious left hook.

The man’s eyes went wide as his head bobbled, and Matt wondered if the assassin would go down that easily, but it was never quite so simple.

With a mouthful of blood, the man seemed like he was going to spit at Matt once more, so he did the one thing the man never expected.

Covered his mouth with his hand.

Matt smirked as the man seemed confused as to why his hand was fine with what was surely acidic blood, but with the Stygian Gossamer having transformed his hand into a near invulnerable form, he wasn’t concerned by the tests of a Tier 15. His hand had been able to block the lightning blast of a Tier 18 golem without an issue, and that monster hit far harder than the Tier 15 could ever wish to.

The assassin tried to run away, but Matt had already slipped a foot around his ankle and pulled hard, sending them both tumbling to the ground. As they hit the ground, Matt twisted to get the man’s back and flexed, pushing the man’s face away from him and into the floor.

The floor was made from higher Tier materials and resisted the bubbling spit and blood that threatened to eat through any flesh.

Matt drove a hard punch into the man’s temple, which caused the man to go limp.

Not believing it, Matt didn’t relax, but was still sent into the air as the man used a skill to increase his strength explosively for a moment.

If Matt was alone, the man might have been able to get away right then and there, but he ran headlong into a wall of ice Aster had created.

Before he was able to do anything else, the ice grew around him, completely encasing the man.

Matt was able to tell when the assassin tried converting the ice entrapping him into frozen acid, aiming to interfere with Aster’s control. Against most ice mages, it would have worked, but his bond was no ordinary ice mage.

As Aster loved to say, anything frozen was ice.

Matt didn’t have nearly that level of flexibility, but he didn’t need to. He had Aster.

Once the man saw his escape was helpless, he sent an AI message acknowledging his capture.

What Matt found interesting was the man’s credentials, which clearly stated he was a registered assassin with one of the local assassin guilds.

Kurt had taught them about assassin guilds, and so Matt knew that he had no obligation to let the man go, nor would he face reprisal from the guild for interfering as he had.

While assassin guilds weren’t well liked, they were legal entities that had to follow the rules of the Empire. When Matt had asked Kurt why the Empire allowed such things, his trainer had simply shrugged and asked him why they wouldn’t.

Assassin guilds would always exist, and it was better to legalize it and make the rules clear for everyone, rather than dealing with endless startup organizations or freelancers who might not respect the rules of the Empire.

That had prompted Matt to ask what the guilds got out of it. In return for following the rules of not attacking down or attacking Pathers, the guilds didn’t get razed to the ground and have their members hauled away. The guilds also got a safe place where they could operate semi-openly that the local guards wouldn’t raid. The members also got lesser punishments in the event they were caught in the act of an assassination.

Luna had then explained that the assassin guilds were given such freedoms because, during times of war, they were all contracted by the Empire.

Instead of sending their own people to kill spies, infiltrators, terrorists, and defectors to the other Great Powers, the Empire handed out missions to the local assassin guilds and would reward those same assassins for jobs completed.

Matt had found it a little too mercenary for his taste but had to admit that it at least sounded like a workable solution to a tricky problem.

Turning his attention to the target of this assassination attempt, Matt found Liz with blood covering her front, sitting back on her heels.

The man was clearly dead despite having been Tier 15.

Either he hadn’t been able to control his cultivation well enough to keep his brain functional without blood, or the acid had made its way to his brain somehow.

Then, almost as if they had always been there, guards and healers rushed into the bar and started controlling the situation, cuffing the assassin the moment he was loose with cultivation-suppressing enchantments.

Those who had been injured were healed, and everyone started getting questioned, Matt, Liz, and Aster especially.

The guards seemed familiar with the acid man and said he had been operating in this system for a while but had always managed to get away before his acid dissolved enough to be lethal.

Thankfully, there were a plethora of [AI]s, and after they gave their statements, they were allowed to leave, where they immediately encountered a black cat seemingly being ignored by the walking crowds.

“An eventful evening.”