The Path of Ascension 7: A LitRPG Adventure

7

The man seemed to be avoiding confrontation by denying anyone the ability to determine where he was from, which was an interesting strategy. Few people would be willing to attack members of their own nation; national loyalty ran strong in many cultivators, so plausible deniability on his origin would at the least give people pause. Just like what was happening now.

Matt assumed that the man must have a spatial storage implanted in his body somewhere, as there would be no way that anyone would be willing to go through Minkalla without the ability to carry items around. In addition to being a waste of loot, all the growth item floors wouldn’t do anything if one didn’t have an item to use them on.

Liz shook her head. “We were just looking for monsters to fight and stumbled upon your battle.”

The man nodded and pointed to their right. “From your direction, I assume you came from the rat caves?” At Liz’s nod, he continued, “There’s a Horse-Lizard ruin that way, if you wish. Or if you would rather fight for this ruin, I will welcome your challenge.”

Liz shook her head. “Not necessary. We’ll take our leave.”

Having said that, the four of them turned and started walking in the indicated direction while keeping a portion of their spiritual sense on the nude man. He didn’t make any aggressive moves, and after they passed through the tree line, he similarly turned around and moved deeper into the ruin.

As they went in the direction he had indicated, they were attacked by a few of the monkeys that hadn’t been defeated by the naked man, and they slowly killed their way forward.

Upon reaching the dividing line between ruins, the surroundings went from a lush forest to a grassy plain, where they found a herd of horses with scales and long, thick tails.

Matt shot a [Mana Bolt] at the nearest one, and the entire herd of twenty turned on them and started charging. If it had been a normal rush forward, that would have been fine, but they all used [Charge] to accelerate their mad dash. They seemed to be pouring mana into the skill because they continued to run even faster as they came closer, each step carrying them farther than the last.

Matt and the others simply took to the sky and used the height advantage to kill the monsters that tried to curve upward with their Concepts. While [Charge] was a dangerous move, it had the weakness of making it hard to change one’s direction, and they ruthlessly took advantage of that fact.

Sadly, the horse lizards weren’t mindless beasts. Seeing that their first collective charge only yield aerial counterattacks, they canceled their spells and turned in various directions before trying once more to use [Charge] and attack them. Being in the air and having three different attack vectors to worry about increased the threat of the horses’ advance, but Matt and his team didn’t have any issues dodging the monsters, even without their AI tracking them.

There were a few close calls, but they finished the horses off and started to loot the items they dropped, when all four of them felt the new arrivals with their spiritual senses. A group of ten people came out from the forest and immediately started casting spells directed at them.

Matt didn’t hesitate to cast [Bulwark], relying on the spell to defend his allies. Even still, he was staggered by the damage that the spells did to his own. Their attackers weren’t holding anything back in their initial bombardment.

Aster immediately cast [Hail] and used the ice as a screen to cover the follow up attacks, while gathering the ice on the ground and sending it forward at their attackers in a small wave.

Their attackers split at the sight of the wave, and in two groups of five, tried to flank and pincer them. But Matt and Aster broke off to face one group, while Liz and Susanne held off the other.

A five versus two wasn’t impossible, but it would be a hard fight, and Matt disregarded any concept of rationing his spells usage during the engagement.

As he closed in on the group, an arrow glowing with silver mana raced toward him, but he summoned a shield from his spatial ring and used it to block the attack. He was forced to toss the shield away with his Concept as he sensed danger from the arrow. Before it did anything, he quickly pushed it into the group of enemy cultivators. Half a second later, it exploded in a blinding flash, which unfortunately didn’t seem to harm the other group.

However, it forced them to scatter, and he charged at the closest attacker, a woman who was blocking for her team with a massive tower shield.

Matt wasn’t willing to deal with these people, and quickly slapped a talisman on the shield before deflecting their retaliatory attack with his sword. Spinning, he rushed to where two of the attackers were trying to overwhelm Aster.

The fox in question darted around the battlefield, keeping a number of their enemies tied up in fending off her [Snowblind] afterimages, which were empowered by a fog of snow coming from her tiara.

Using that slight distraction to his advantage, Matt drove his sword forward in a lunge that skittered off the armor of the shortsword wielder.

The other woman tried to rush Aster but was met with a snowflake the size of her chest that appeared and impaled her, then spun and cut through the woman like a saw blade.

That seemed to earn the group’s ire, and while a healer went to see to their mutilated teammate, two of the others tried to attack Aster in retaliation.

Seeing the woman’s body start to pull itself together, Matt lashed out at the healer with a [Mana s***h], but one of the men attacking Aster threw themselves in front of the crescent of mana, trying to protect their healer.