The Path of Ascension 8: A LitRPG Adventure

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Essentially, she needed to establish a connection to other blood around her, either to draw power from it or direct a curse to it. Or, in this case, to detect it. “Camouflaged enemies. Be careful of ambushes.”

With Liz trying to decipher more information from her spell and Aster scanning the air, Matt took the ground and sent out a ripple with [Earth Manipulation], looking for anything which didn’t heed his command.

While he didn’t directly find anything but stone, it did indirectly reveal the rift monsters as they erupted from the ground in a rage.

Masses of tentacles burrowed out of the ground in rapid, but short, jerking movements that made it seem like they could move in any direction, which completely broke his AI’s movement predictions.

A [Bulwark] held back some of the monsters as his AI predicted their attacks with tentacles that grew needle-like protrusions. In response, the monsters whipped their appendages to send the needles as projectiles whistling through the air.

Matt dashed forward, with [Mage’s Retreat] and [Air Slide] combining with Aster’s already-established [Tailwind] to let him cross the distance in the blink of an eye. His [Sword Twin] was already established, and the mage-focused enchantments turned a simple [Bolt] into an arm-thick bar of lightning that arced from the tip of his blade to the closest monster.

It twitched, trying to dodge, but Aster’s [Headwind] fought its progress long enough for the lightning to strike. The first monster hit by his attack exploded in a wash of silver gore, but the second and third monsters his lightning bolt hit went rigid before seemingly turning to stone as they froze.

Liz arrived by his side with fire announcing her presence and blood following in her wake. As she buried the metal portion of her spear inside the creature’s body and drank in silver blood, the trails of blood from her [Bloodrush] whipped out to cut through the tentacles of another frozen monster. She then continued to burn and corrode the body of her victim.

[Corrosive Blood] had been one of her tournament rewards, but it had taken her literal years to modify it to the point where it would only function on blood outside of her body. The acidic blood proved quite the potent weapon, and as a burst of willpower and essence signified Liz’s [Hungering Weapon] had finished its first target, she ripped the spear from its tentacled housing, ready for her next victim.

She spun her spear like a staff, gathering a vortex of flame around it to ward off some questing tentacles moving fast enough that Matt could barely keep up with them. She singed then with the maneuver and left dark streaks of ashen blood in her wake. As soon as she was able to see her actual target, blood coalesced around her spear and [Bloody Cleave] took off the remaining threatening appendages. Silver blood flowed through the air from the wounds and into Liz’s body.

While Matt’s attempts at making spatially expanded storage areas for Liz went nowhere, and some minor commissions didn’t hold up well inside her body while also not affecting her health, he had managed to craft a tiny metal insert for the back of her wrist that could either allow blood to pass through or not as she desired.

It had been decades since Liz had needed to cut herself to access her blood, and Matt didn’t want her to be forced to resume the habit. [Hypertension] and [Blood Storage] helped with her volume issues, but only sparingly. The former drastically increased the density of blood in her body, which was most useful for skills which reserved blood, such as [Blood Storage].

[Inventory]’s conversion wasn’t nearly as useful as they’d hoped; instead of spatially storing blood, it allowed Liz to reserve some blood to transform another object into blood. It took up less volume than the original item had, but unfortunately, it didn’t yet work on blood that was already hers. Still, Liz’s Tier 3 Talent allowed her to very rapidly refill on blood during combat, so she was rarely short on her primary element, even if she had to scale back the size of her workings.

Once they were off The Path, they’d figure out some form of solution, but if Liz could figure out a way to properly store her own blood inside itself, she wouldn’t need to worry about it.

Aster arrived borne upon a [Tailwind] elemental steed, flitting around the battlefield at high speeds as [Meadows of Rime] and [Absolute White] slowed the lashing tentacles to a speed that was best described as ‘only very fast,’ which they were more than equipped to handle.

Unfortunately, the monsters didn’t seem to be particularly affected by the cold that Aster passively created as a byproduct of her skills, likely indicating a resistance to the element.

It wasn’t a great resistance to encounter, but at least they weren’t immune. Not that there was such a thing as comprehensive immunity. If something wouldn’t burn, that just meant your flame wasn’t strong or pure enough. The same applied with cold.

True to form, Aster yipped in triumph as her Concept took hold in the monsters, allowing ice and frost to creep along their tentacles.

The armor and spiritual defense piercing effect she had received from Folded Reflections had been focused and practiced with more than any of the others, at Luna’s insistence. It benefited from a substantial reduction in cost thanks to Mind Over Matter and prevented Aster from ever being truly deprived of her greatest tool. It was, admittedly, only a first step. Immunities and counter-immunities were in a constant arms race, but that only applied outside of rifts. Or when Luna decided to buff the monsters they were fighting, but she wasn’t making this rift any harder than it naturally would be.

Matt finished frying his third monster and switched his sword to its melee form, allowing the wind to catch him and whip him up into the sky and leaving a trail of [Afterimage]s in his wake. The illusions did their job, and several were destroyed as the monster took vengeance for its fallen comrades. At the peak, he reversed direction and sped downwards, draining mana from the mana stones sewn into the inner lining of his sleeve to fuel a rapid succession of [Wind Cutter], [Double Tap], and [Wind Cutter] again, this time further strengthened by [Hypersonic Edge].

The spell combo would be pricey for a normal warrior, but for him, the drained mana stones were refilled in a fraction of a second. [Double Tap] doubled the power of his second [Wind Cutter], and between that and the modifications the skill had undergone in the past years, it was even larger than Susanne’s had been with her greatsword. It was now a massive crescent blade of wind that stretched out to a thirty-foot arc before finally carving a massive furrow in the ground, leaving five dead monsters in its wake. With his boon from Winter, Matt was able to guide the cutting edge somewhat, striking weak points and chasing down any who attempted to dodge, while also fighting off another monster who had gotten close.

From behind, a nearly-invisible projectile slammed into Matt, piercing [Cracked Phantom Armor] and embedding itself in the underside of his arm, only stopping on a [Barbarian’s Hide]-reinforced bone.

He sent a quick message to Liz and Aster warning them to reinforce their defenses, then did so for himself.

The years it had spent in his innate skill slot had been good for Matt’s oldest skill, and it had reached the point where it was impractical to put as much mana as he possibly could into [Cracked Phantom Armor] at all times. His second layer now took enough mana to manifest entire plates of armor over him, and he focused those plates primarily on his head and chest, giving himself a blue breastplate and helmet over his normal armor. He’d already seen that he could take an attack to the arm and be fine, after all.