The Path of Ascension 8: A LitRPG Adventure

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Ciceron smirked at him. “The Empire may be old, but the Sophron dynasty is young, only three generations, and there was a lot of knowledge lost when Agatha took the throne. It’s hard to interrogate the dead or read destroyed records, after all.”

Brushing himself off, the older man looked between the three of them and pointed at Matt.

“You first, kid. You’re getting the choice of one legacy, so we can skip the memory manipulation.”

Matt raised a finger even as he followed. “Only one choice?”

“Order from up high. You can always refuse, but —”

Luna appeared from around a corner and cut the archivist off. “It is certainly the best overall legacy for you, and I had to get special permission to even request it. Nominally, it shouldn’t be in circulation until its creator has ascended, but an exception was made. If you have something specific in mind, we can go over some of the mage, sword, or enchanting legacies, but you would be better served by my choice overall.”

Matt shrugged. After nearly half a century under her tutelage, he trusted that Luna knew what he would benefit from most, and it wasn’t like he had a single skill that he especially wanted to be developed at the moment. That he could skip the memory modification was a bonus, as was finding out just whose Legacy he’d been approved to use.

“What skill should I put in my innate?” he asked. He usually kept [Cracked Phantom Armor] in his innermost skill slot, but he could switch it with any of his other core skills in short order with the help of Liz’s potion.

“Leave your armor there,” Luna flicked her tail, “though in truth it doesn’t matter too much. Now, Aster…”

As the black cat started discussing options with his teammates, Ciceron waved for Matt to follow him to a side room. Going inside, he found an obelisk of black obsidian and a large beanbag chair waiting for him.

He settled into the pile of cushions and laid his hand upon the cool black stone, allowing his surroundings to shift into a blank white room with a familiar face awaiting him.

Aster felt as Matt’s mind slipped into something of a trance through their bond, leaving her thrumming with excitement.

She’d be getting a Legacy, and with the knowledge of how much Liz and Matt had gotten from theirs, she couldn’t wait. This second chance at Legacies was usually reserved for Pathers who were expected to make it past Tier 20, or people that were similarly promising for one reason or another. But even then, not everyone was accepted.

Even aside from her status as Matt’s bond and accompanying advancement speed, Luna said that her having made it through Minkalla at Tier 11 would have been enough to guarantee a Legacy. Still, Aster didn’t really care how she got the spot and was just excited to see what all the hype was about. The whole oath-swearing was a pain, but once she was done with that, she and Liz were led to a closed-off room and directed to put on helmets. Aster pinched her ears horribly, but she could ignore it well enough to read through the massive book in front of her. At the other end of the table, Liz was discussing some of the options she had with Luna.

Ciceron, meanwhile, was helping her. “To make things easier, and on Luna’s recommendation, I assembled the legacies of debuff mages, ice mages, and winter mages. There’s several, but one in particular you may find interesting is Harkens Mallow’s.”

With a flick of his fingers, the book in front of her flipped open, and Aster read the description provided. Harkens Mallow, according to this, was an Aurora assassin from the Federation who utilized the colors and illusions of aurora to confuse, isolate, and disorientate her targets to set them up for the kill. An unusual combination for certain, but it was usually speculated that she had a Talent for the element.

Her Legacy was geared toward making illusions that didn’t seem real so much as simply intense, making them difficult to ignore even with the knowledge that they weren’t real. There were also some small-blades skills listed, but Aster ignored them.

[Afterimage] was one of the examples given, and with the assassin’s help, Aster could use her skill to make all the created duplicates either vibrantly aurora-colored, or mere streaks of light. They would be completely different from Aster’s actual appearance, but they would gain the ability to overload and overwhelm even spiritual senses in the same way that exceptionally loud sounds made it harder to focus on a whisper.

Looking up at Ciceron, she asked, “Nothing else Aurora based? Really?”

He shrugged. “Aurora is an uncommon element, especially in the Empire. The only reason we even have this one is thanks to some war reparations in the wake of Duke Water’s Path completion and subsequent war. Whether or not it’s a good legacy for you I cannot say, simply that it bears some merit.”

Eventually, she narrowed her options down to about a dozen Legacies, and Ciceron pulled the corresponding pages out cleanly from his book so she could decide as he gave the book to Liz and started discussing what her options were. With Luna’s help, Aster eventually narrowed twelve options down to three, each with a distinct role.

Harkens Mallow, the aurora assassin, Aaron Dell, the offensive ice mage, and Aspen Erhulz, the winter wolf.

If she went with Harkens, Aster planned to try to make [Absolute White] into an aurora-aspected skill, ideally turning the concealment and slowing mist into a riot of color capable of stunning, freezing, and disorienting only her enemies while concealing her allies.

It was tempting, but nothing else he had on offer was useful for her.

She was a mage, and if she ever got in a fight with someone in her league who specialized in melee combat, she had exactly one good option.

Run to Matt or Liz before they hit her.

She didn’t have anywhere close to enough strength to wrestle a melee fighter and never would, which made the practical training of that legacy useless.

Aaron Dell was an ice mage who had eschewed the more common restraining and battlefield control aspects of the element for raw burst damage, unleashing icy destruction in as few skills as possible.

While Aster was primarily a support, she was also the bond to a future Ascender, and that meant she’d be expected to carry her own weight somewhat. [Cracked Shatter] and [Glacial Spear] certainly worked to give her a lot of ice power when the situation suited it. ‘Death is the strongest debuff’ was a saying among debuff mages for a reason. Matt’s power came primarily from his incredible endurance, but that resulted in him having very few powerful opening moves beyond his talismans. Liz was unstoppable once she got going, but against single, powerful foes she could sometimes struggle to build up momentum.

If Aster focused a few of her skills into being a powerful opening move, she could cover for a few relative weaknesses, and what else was a support mage for?

[Cracked Shatter] would be a good candidate, she felt. While her skill, or even the non-cracked version, weren’t listed on the page, she felt she had a fairly decent grasp on what Aaron would be able to help her grow it into. Currently, it almost turned her [Ice Spear] into an ice-aspected [Fireball], but she expected that she could make the detonation directional, turning an omnidirectional explosion into a torrent of jagged fragments of extremely hard and sharp ice, accompanied by a blast of freezing magic. If she was really lucky it might even become cascading, where anything frozen by the secondary blast of magic would explode as well, unleashing a continuous hail of razor-sharp ice, lacerating everything in their path.