39
1017 Words
Matt looked at the distortion in the fabric of reality with a sense of trepidation, irritation, and hesitation.
He could read Liz and Aster well enough to know they felt the same way.
This was one of their final attempts at beating the pinnacle of challenge Luna had set for them once Liz and Aster had reached Tier 13 and beat a peak Tier 17 rift.
A Tier 18 rift.
For three average mid-Tier 13 cultivators, that was an impossible leap even in their dreams, but they were anything but average.
After digesting their gains from Minkalla, the three of them had had a substantial increase in their combat prowess, and with Luna’s direct teachings, they had been forced to push themselves every step of the way.
Matt was 80% sure that if they had been able to enter an old Tier 18 rift with a known layout and with easily available guides, they could have cleared it, but that would have never counted in Luna’s books.
Or even his books, really.
Matt didn’t really expect to ever go into a fight knowing everything about an enemy, and understood how that false security dulled the adaptability of a cultivator. At the same time, it made their few forays at Tier 18 rifts far more difficult. They’d been randomly created right before they went in, and as such, they had no idea what they would face. It made Matt jumpy.
Their most recent attempt at a Tier 18 rift was three weeks ago, when he had his leg twisted into a pretzel, after which they needed to retreat.
Swamp trees were an unfair combination of elements and monster type. Trees should be burnable, everyone agreed on that. However, that particular rift had proven that trees who wielded mud and water were less than susceptible to their ancient foe.
Luna paced in front of the rift while still in her cat form, something none of them had missed. She had implied that she would be fine in just a few years, but it had been almost five years since their manager had been in her human form, showing just how badly she had been hurt from delaying Matt’s inspiration.
She didn’t say anything, but April, standing to the side, did. “Are you three ready? Are your exit plans in place?”
Matt nodded as Liz went over their exit plans for their liaison.
Luna had been pushing her into a mixture of Kurt’s and her own role over the last few years, and this had become routine before all their delves.
When they were done, Luna jumped into the air to hover behind him out of the way. Matt activated [Cracked Phantom Armor] and all of his channeled physical cultivation buffs, stepping through the distortion in reality with Liz and Aster close on his heels.
Once he was through the distortion, Matt instantly sent [Earth Manipulation], [Air Manipulation], and his spiritual sense outward as far and as fast as he could, taking in all the information at once and letting his AI process everything with the help of his Minkalla reward.
While inside the copper planet, the reward had been magnified as the restrictions placed on the pseudo skill had been largely lifted. But even after leaving, he retained the ability to supercharge the skill for short periods of time.
Alas, his willpower wasn’t quite as Endless as the rest of him, at least when pushing his Concept this far from its basic abilities. If he wanted to stay at full capacity for the rest of the delve, he couldn’t use his AI empowerment for very long, no matter how useful it was.
In less than a tenth of a second, Matt had a complete layout of the surrounding three miles of the rift entrance, with a resolution that would put most Tier 15 scanners to shame.
This rift was odd, to say the least, and the more he saw, the more Matt’s guard went up.
If he didn’t know better, he’d say they were coming in after another team had already cleared the rift. The nearby forest had giant holes in it, with large swaths of the forest toppled as though Aster had fought in it.
Behind him, at the maximum range of his skills, he was detecting a mountain range that seemed peppered with craters, which only became clearer as his AI processed the information.
Even as he took a step forward, Matt looked upward.
The sky of this rift was in a semi twilight, with just the inkling of a sun peeking over what Matt suspected was a false horizon.
A Tier 18 rift was large, massive even. But they had limits, and generally maxed out at one-third the size of a standard habitable planet. The giant moon hovering in the sky, with tentacles of pulsing and twisting flesh that had burrowed through its surface, told Matt that the moon itself was also in play for the rift, meaning this area couldn’t be a true planet.
Aster, who had entered and was already looking up, asked, “What the f**k is that, and why is it eating that moon. I know it’s not made of cheese, and who wants to eat rocks?”
Liz brandished her spear and settled in behind her shield, looking outward. “I sense something out there. Thousands of signatures.”
Matt glanced over, catching the faint red haze surrounding Liz’s left hand, signifying her use of blood magic to find potential targets.
It was, to date, the only bit of unstructured blood magic she was capable of performing. It was intensely difficult, time-consuming, and took tremendous preparation to pull off. In short, it was nowhere close to combat viable and was vastly inferior to her [Blood Sense] skill in almost every way, but it represented a massive step in the right direction. Minkalla may have shown her some of the possibilities of blood magic, but all the skills that she’d picked up in its false lives were just barely wrong enough that she had to functionally start from step one.
- Writer
