The Path of Ascension 7: A LitRPG Adventure

25

But she had come out of it victorious.

Now, it was just time to synchronize with the armor and hope that she got another floor with a growth item reward.

She was in a better position than the gray Paladins, who bound to the armor by themselves, but got no floors related to growth items. A fourth floor Courtly Warfare meant she was already on track to be a Green Paladin, but reaching the ranks of Blue or Indigo would only make her victory all the sweeter.

Unless they were both relevant, she wouldn’t be a Rainbow Paladin, and becoming the next nigh-mythical Pearlescent Paladin was already dashed when her entire run wasn’t made up of growth item floors.

Still, it was only a starting point. Size-changing was a classic Paladin power, but she’d also gotten the ability to manipulate her suit’s force fields, and that opened a whole new set of options for her.

Her synchronization and combat skills were more important for her long-term growth, which was why she threw herself into battle time after time.

As the first eagle approached her, she relied on her shield to block the wings set ablaze while she slashed out at the eagle with her integrated blade, wrapped in a cutting-edge force field just for good measure.

It was decidedly overkill—the blade was already some of the finest enchanting work around—but the force field took it to the next level, allowing her to slice through the monster like it wasn’t even there.

Spinning and falling, she dodged the talon trying to grab at her and fired her mana cannons at the second eagle’s underbelly, smiling as the two streams of Genesis Energy rushed into her.

Valerie was ready to take on the world.

Chuck dropped his invisibility at the same time he activated his glaive’s lightning, scything through the Sect healer in a single blow.

Always kill the healer first, his father would say, which was the first of many lessons Chuck had taken to heart over the years. He had tried doing it the other way a few floors ago, just to see what would happen, and it took so much longer to actually finish the fight. Also, there was nothing more demoralizing than taking down a party’s nursemaid, which was an edge that he wasn’t eager to ignore a second time.

He sent a follow-up beam of lightning through the healer’s head with a snap of his fingers as her body fell to the ground in pieces. Chuck locked eyes with the party’s presumed leader as he did it, just to really drive home the message of who was in charge here.

The Realm is vast and contains many tricks. Do not simply assume that someone is dead. Ensure it.

That was lesson number two. Another good one. Or two, technically. The first part was worth being a lesson on its own.

There was no burst of Genesis Energy when she died, which would normally have been suspicious, very few people collected exactly enough to buy the floor rewards with nothing left over, but he thought he knew the cause in this case. There was that Corporations trader from the last floor who had been buying and trading Genesis Energy, and they must have sold off exactly enough to ensure they still got the floor reward. It was frankly pathetic that they had been on this floor for four days and still not managed to kill anything, but he could believe it.

He pulled the girl’s bags to himself with a crackle of his Concept and latched them to his belt. Probably nothing spectacular, but you never knew.

“I’ll give you a fair shot, since I’ve been itching for a real fight for ages. For every hit you land on me, I’ll let one of you live. I think that’s fair, but if you barbarians want something else, I’m sure we can come to terms.” Chuck challenged them while casually holding his glaive out to the side.

Honestly, he was pissed, though he thought he was handling it well. Summer should have been a sure thing; it should have been the easy win and boon for the first cycle of Courtly Warfare.

He deserved that win. But now it was gone, and he was stuck on a mediocre fifth floor with these ingrates.

Maybe their corpses would have something to make it worth his time.

The party charged at him without even acknowledging what he had said. There was one guy with a spear that looked decent enough, the leader with the tower shield and short sword, and a mage of unknown ability, though she struck him as a mud mage. She had that slimy, grovelly feel to her those types often had.

Like necromancers but less interesting.

From the Sects he expected better of Tier 12s, this group was hardly enough to give him a warmup. Fighting at Tier opponents was easy for someone like him.

The leader came first, at least doing the bare minimum as a tank after failing to protect his backline. He tried to go slow, let his team get into position, but slow and steady had never been Chuck’s thing. A short feint at the head made the oaf duck behind his shield, then Chuck latched onto the top of the shield with the hook on his glaive, pulled the shield down, and made a quick stab to the throat.

He’d be down for at least a bit before Chuck could make the rounds and finish him off. Besides, the tank living meant that his gear wouldn’t decay. A tad risky, maybe, but so was this whole thing.

The others fell in short order. A good spear fight was always a nice way to greet the day, but the spearman was sadly not up to snuff. Three exchanges were enough to prove that and leave the other man dying on the ground, even with some support magic from the girl. He actually got a little excited when the girl showed that she was a mud mage. She shot a blast of mud at him, which he simply teleported around. He actually waited a second just to see what she did next; he so rarely got to see what his opposite element could do.

Sadly, she just made a boring wall of mud between the two of them. Chuck did need to care about efficiency on this floor, at least a little, so he elected to smash the wall with his glaive rather than overpower it with lightning. The new growth effect on it was nice, and he wanted to utilize the armor breaking as much as possible. He cut the girl’s hands off to neuter her as a threat; it might be amusing to keep her around for a few more minutes, just so she could grovel at his feet before he needed to move on.