The Path of Ascension 6: A LitRPG Adventure

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Behind her, Aster took care of her portion of the area by spreading and compacting her ice. She crushed anything in her path, including a few of the smaller trees, like they were little more than toothpicks.

The ice moved like a facsimile of her [Blood Tidal Wave] which, while slower, had much more weight behind its movement.

Still, Aster was only responsible for taking out a third of the area while Liz did the rest. Ice was harder to move than blood and Aster preferred more of a support role.

[Blood Tidal Wave] was nearing the end of its strength, and to push it all the way to the finish line, she used [Blood Sacrifice] on her thorn field to refill her mana and dove the given power at the wave. It only took a thought to merge with the tidal wave and directed it to demolish the still surviving ants within its depths.

Far overhead, Matt released [Cracked Mana Spear] and started another as Liz and Aster directed their respective waves together, creating an enormous crash that sent both elements flying into the sky.

From there, the primary difficulty was simply getting to the last few ants in less time than it took for Matt to finish off the elephant.

Susanne cursed as she pulled Matt along behind her while she cut and dodged the elephant’s swatting trunk and swaying tusks.

Their relative size was working to their advantage, as the monster was so large, each of its attacks were generating enough wind pressure for her to be able to anticipate the attacks and avoid them.

It was only a viable strategy because the elephant was designed to be a punching bag, and didn’t have any spells to attack them with. But one mistake would mean being hit by its trunk, which must have weighed a few thousand tons and traveled at medium Tier 14 speeds.

Matt was being carried in her left hand as she used her sword manifestation to unleash [Wind Cutter]es and [Mana s***h]es one after the other, as fast as she could.

They did little damage to the elephant, but it must have at least stung, as the beast always veered slightly when she landed a good hit.

Or it could be because of the beam of death that Matt was firing.

She preferred to take the credit.

Mana normally didn’t have heat unless it was used for a fire spell, but the unaspected beam of mana that Matt was casting was screaming through the air as if it had a personal grudge against the world itself. Part of the energy came off as waste heat as it tore through the air, and she could feel it through her armor, even as they were flying and dodging the swaying nose of the monster.

Susanne was more than impressed by both Matt and [Cracked Mana Spear] after seeing him unleash it in their training, but that paled in comparison to what he was doing now.

What was usually a beam two fingers wide was now thicker than her wrist, and pulsed with overwhelming energy as he kept it aimed at the elephant’s eye.

It had only taken seconds to ruin the eye and bore a hole through the soft flesh, but the skull behind it was far more reinforced, and took much longer to burn through. Matt’s first attack ended while barely leaving a mark, even after she had thrown her best armor-piercing skills his way to speed things along. His subsequent attacks had each blackened and fractured the skull a little more, bit by bit.

Every so often, the beam would swiftly grow more frazzled, leaking more and more power into the surroundings, and warbling in its flight path until Matt cut it off, with the energy lancing through the air and vanishing for an instant, until he started it up again. He’d gone through the cycle five times so far, and he was currently on his sixth iteration, with the beam growing ever wilder.

At this point, Matt was forced into holding his right hand with his left, pushing his own Concept into stabilizing the attack and keeping it on-target. She joined with him, pushing her own Concept to add her willpower to his own as best she could, but her Domain was only tangentially related at best. The fact that the base skill had been [Mana Spear] was the only reason she could do anything to help him at all and the different weapon time made it incredibly ineffective.

Even with her aid, the beam wavered, growing less and less stable with every passing moment, even as the trunk of the elephant approached them at near-supersonic speeds.

Seeing the approaching attack, she could tell that the latest blow would be incredibly close. Either Matt was going to kill the elephant in time, or they were going to have to take the hit.

With most of her remaining mana, Susanne prepared two [Hypersonic Edge]s and [Wind Cutter]s to try and cut through the trunk that was over thirty feet in diameter. She wasn’t entirely sure it would work, but Matt said to hold her ground, so she would do exactly that.

Just as she was about to unleash her attack, the world went black.

Matt felt like vomiting as they were ejected from the challenge room, the complete sensory deprivation doing nothing to give him reprieve from the spiritual nausea he was dealing with.

Using [Cracked Mana Spear] this much in succession was exhausting, and the spiritual slap it gave him grew from an annoying slap to a fully debilitating blow in time. He could use it a maximum of ten times in a row at full mana before he straight-up passed out, and even six times in a row required him to use his Concept to stabilize not only his own spirit, but the beam itself. Otherwise, it tended to go wild once he couldn’t keep directing it naturally. Normally, he could manage just fine—his mana manipulation skills had been deemed ‘adequate’ by Luna, which translated to ‘insanely good’ by anyone else—but as his spirit got more and more frazzled…

He’d practiced a lot, but it drained his willpower enough that essentially ‘continuous’ use of the spear at full power was only practical as a finishing move, on what was already a skill predominantly used in that role. The net result was that Matt felt like his spirit had been hit by a wyvern, and his body wasn’t faring much better. At least Queen had been able to lend a bit of strength to the attack, which helped…but it was far, far from enough.