The Path of Ascension Chapter 107

Chapter 107

 

The group landed on the small front lawn of the floating house. Wrangle waved them in.

As they walked in, the man held the door open for them. Matt nodded and echoed the thanks of everyone else.

Wrangle just responded with a gentle smile to each of them.

Matt reached out with his spiritual sense to inspect the man, but found nothing. If it wasn’t for his vision, he wouldn’t believe the man was even there. Matt couldn’t stop himself from scrutinizing the man as he shut the door, and the scorching heat was replaced by a refreshing breeze.

“Everyone, please drink. I know how hot it can get out there.” Wrangle smiled and waved a hand as glasses of icy water hovering in front of them.

Matt took large gulps until his thirst was quenched, then quizzically peered at the glass in his hand. It was still three-quarters full, though the cup should have been drained many times over. Unlike the others, he’d been protected from the heat by his armor, but he was still parched enough to enjoy the refreshing water.

“Thank you.” Matt received another smile in return, and a table appeared in front of him, set with coasters for each of them. Wrangle hardly brought his attention off Aster while providing for them.

Looking at his bond, he saw that her entire face was submerged in the provided bowl, and she was blowing air bubbles as she tried to guzzle the endless water bowl dry.

Shaking his head, he told Aster that she was being rude. But she shot back, “I’m not climbing inside.” A hint of threat tinged that statement. Even if he didn’t think Aster meant it that way, he still let it be.

Wrangle didn’t seem bothered, so Matt let Aster cool off. His bond really was suffering, and he didn’t begrudge her any comfort she could find.

As everyone else drank their fill, Wrangle waved them to a seating area with enough chairs for everyone. It faced a massive window that had a view of the oasis and desert all in one. It was a stunning sight, and Matt was only pulled out of his trance by Wrangle beginning to speak.

“Let’s get introductions out of the way. I am Wrangle. Peak Tier 24, and a summoner.” The man nodded to them as Melinda introduced herself, and the rest of her team followed suit before Matt’s team did the same.

Out of nowhere, Luna stepped to the side of the two groups.

Matt was startled, but managed to restrain himself. In contrast, Wrangle only stood straight and clasped his hands in front of his chest as he bowed deeply. “Great Lady, it is a pleasure to welcome you into my home. Please treat it as your own.”

There was a traditional cadence to his words, and Matt worried that they might have broken some protocol with their entrance to Wrangles house.

Luna matched the clasped hand, but her bow was more a nod than the deep bow Wrangle had made.

“Thank you for the gesture. It is received in the spirit it was given.”

Wrangle seemed quite pleased with the response, judging by the smile on his face. That, or he was a fantastic actor.

Luna snapped twice, gathering their attention. She then glared at Aster, who was passed out on the pillowed chair next to Matt. He moved to nudge her awake, but Luna’s hand seemingly stretched across the intervening space and snatched his bond off the chair. She then dunked Aster into a pot of steaming water that suddenly materialized.

Aster screamed her torment both through their bond and out loud. Matt was going to race over, but he didn’t miss that Aster wasn’t burned or hurt, just indignant.

Luna, still holding a now dripping Aster by the scruff, met the fox’s eyes as she held her suspended in the air.

“Need another dunk, or are you awake?”

Aster yowled at Luna, “That wasn’t nice! I’ll…”

Luna dunked Aster again to more yowling and protesting. Afterwards, a now thoroughly soaked Aster replied that she was awake.

With a flick of her wrist, the fox was mostly dry and back on her seat.

Luna met all of their eyes. “Does anyone else need extra incentive to pay attention?”

When no one dared speak, Luna smiled.

“Good. Now your break is over. I’m glad you took some effort to train while you traveled, but playtime is done. Now your time is my time. You will not waste my time. The start of training is harsh and hard like the land around us. For a better foundation you must break what you have and reforge it.”

The shorter dark-haired woman nodded to their host. “Wrangle here will be supplementing the next portion of your training. If you would, please.”

Wrangle nodded. Next to him, a ghostly blue beetle appeared and clacked its pincers.

“As his chosen name suggests, Wrangle is a summoner, and an exceptional one at that. This little bug is an Elemental Beetle. Matt, fry it.”

Matt paused and looked around the house they were in before saying, “I don’t want to burn anything.”

Luna met his eyes, and he swore he saw swirling pools of purple darkness in them.

“This is your one warning. When I tell you to burn down a forest, I expect you to light it up and not ask questions. You don’t know enough to question me. Torch the bug.”

Every hair on his body stood on its end and he swallowed. It felt like something harsh was caught in his throat, but he turned to do as she said.

With a thought, he activated [Flamethrower]. To his surprise, the flames took a few seconds to destroy the mana construct. Nothing else was even scorched, which put his prior worries to rest.

“Wrangle, please.”

Half a dozen more beetles appeared in a formation at Luna’s words. A glance at his manager was the only prompting Matt needed to activate his skill, and fry the summons.

This time, only a few seconds passed when Luna called out, “Enough. Now look.”

Matt halted the gush of flames and saw that only one of the beetles was dead, and that the rest of their carapaces were now a mottled red.

Wrangle seemed to take this as his cue to speak, “Elemental Beetles are a fascinating monster that can change their bodies to perfectly negate a single elemental type of damage. A single beetle is weak, but a swarm is a death sentence to a singularly specialized mage. The higher general Tier the element’s level is, the harder they find it to shift their defenses against it. Unfortunately, these little guys are only Tier 21. They can’t change to resist complicated mana aspects like storm or void. I can make them weaker but…”

Matt swallowed. If they were expected to fight these things, Liz and Aster would be effectively countered. He doubted that blood skills ranked anywhere near void or storm mana. He might be able to fight them with a combination of [Flamethrower] and [Hail], but Aster only had ice skills to use. Plus if he used [Hail], he might prevent her skills from being effective.

Luna took back over. “These little monsters have a major weakness, though. They are unable to counter mundane attacks. This is where we will be training your melee skills. Before I find you a proper trainer, you need to reach a certain basic proficiency. Otherwise, you would just waste everyone’s time.”

The higher Tier woman looked outside, and another house appeared floating next to Wrangle’s. “That’s where you will be staying. Training starts tomorrow morning.” She waved at Wrangle and said, “If I were you, I would take the time to ask Wrangle about creating spells inside yourself. That is where his true expertise lies. When he was Tier 14, he created a limited specialized copy of the Tier 32 skill, [Barrage].”

She must have seen their lack of understanding as she elaborated. “For those that don’t know how impressive that is, let me give you an example. If you attempt to make a skill and fail, it’s normally a death sentence. Doing so under Tier 15 is almost guaranteed suicide. I don’t care what healer you have near you. It will always kill you, as without a functional spirit, you can’t survive. And that’s for skills near your Tier. Doing so with even a limited version of a skill double your Tier is pure madness.”

Matt followed her gaze to a pale-looking Melinda, who only nodded in recognition of the warning.

She glanced at Wrangle, who seemed to preen under the attention. “Wrangle here was able to create a skill that let him create copies of his summon skills, while still only counting as a single instance to control. You’ll find out what that truly means tomorrow.”

Wrangle held up his hands like he was trying to defend himself from her praise, though the smile never left his face. “You flatter me, Great Lady. I still failed on my second attempt.”

Luna cocked her head at his chest and stared for a few seconds before shaking her head. “I read the report, and I must disagree. You were only a hair’s breadth away from success. What skill were you trying to make? It wasn’t in the report I read.”

Wrangle patted his chest. “I had… Well, I still have the desire to make a skill that will let me merge mana constructs. I feel that I should do it before I advance to Tier 25. The feeling I get from my spirit is my Talent won’t be in that direction.”

Luna tapped her chin. “I’m even more impressed then.” She looked to Matt’s friends, “Creating a completely new skill is far harder than simply copying one.”

She then pointed at Wrangle’s upper chest. “Your spirit’s reconstruction is going well, but you need to focus more on the quadrant near your shoulder. The framework is misaligned slightly. That will delay your other repairs if you don’t address it quickly. What technique are you using?”

“Indiana’s Third Method was the one that helped the most when I started, and I have continued to use it.”

Luna didn’t seem surprised. “I’d recommend switching to Indiana’s Sixth Method for your remaining recovery if that style works better for you. In theory, it will be slightly slower, but it will ensure you don’t run into any issues like this again. If you avoid even a single such flaw though, then it will still be much quicker and more efficient.”

Wrangle stood and bowed deeply. “Thank you for your wisdom, Great Lady. I shall do as you suggest.”

Luna held out her hand, and what looked like a tomato plant growing in a vase appeared. “Here is the payment my liaison promised. If you take this now, it will reduce your recovery time to mere decades. Alternatively, if you choose to wait, it will greatly assist you in creating the skill. It is yours to do with as you wish.”

Wrangle set it on a table in the sun and beamed at it, then back to Luna.

“You have my sincerest gratitude, Great Lady.”

Luna waved off his thanks and turned to the rest of them. “Tomorrow at dawn. You won’t like it if you’re late. Be down in the sand and be ready to start.”

Just like that, she was gone.

Wrangle clapped and rubbed his hands together. “Let us feast! We will have no time in the coming days, and I wish to get to know you all before the days pass us by.”

Melinda stood forward and cautiously asked, “I’m a healer, and if you don’t mind, can I look at your spirit? I’ve read about the dangers of trying to heal this type of damage, but I’ve never seen it before.”

Wrangle just offered her a hand with a slight smile that seemed forced.

Melinda touched him, then went sickly pale. She looked as if she would vomit as she quickly retreated.

Wrangle just chuckled. “Quite bad, isn’t it?”

“Worse than I imagined. I… I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t help, and I didn’t do it to you, but I’m still sorry.”

The Tier 24 seemed unbothered. “The damage was far worse right after it happened. This is almost completely fixed. But worry not. In a few short centuries, I will be recovered, and able to try again. Then, I will truly race ahead. Let me go set up a good dinner. If you wish to clean up, I shall be ready in an hour. I’m sure you need it after the flight over here.”

Everyone turned to Melinda, who answered before they needed to ask, “I learned about this while researching spiritual damage and modification. Creating a skill in the spirit and failing isn’t like normal spirit damage. That can be healed and tries to right itself, given time and rest. This was like someone chopped his spirit into cubes then mixed the locations all over. But his spirit wasn’t trying to heal. I could feel that it considered that messed-up state as the natural one. He’s having to manually reconstruct his spirit.”

She shook like Aster did when trying to get water off her coat. “If that was almost fixed, I’d hate to see what he looked like when the injury was fresh.”

Liz hefted the still pouting Aster and said, “Let’s go shower up and get ready for dinner. I think we should call it an early night. I don’t know what Luna will have in store for us, but I don’t think it will be easy.”

***

Matt and everyone else stood in the sand under the flying houses and watched the sun slowly creep up over the horizon.

They kept waiting while nothing happened, despite them being out here for over half an hour.

As the bottom of the sun cleared the horizon, there was a rumbling, and from over the dunes came a swarm of thousands of beetles.

Everyone started shouting, and they started to launch off attack after attack into the horde.

Aster took out a swath of them with her initial [Hail], but the proceeding monsters were blue speckled and unaffected by the falling ice.

Liz lashed out and attacked the leading monster with a tendril of blood, which was quickly countered by a lighter blue that greatly reduced the damage she did. Unlike Aster, she was able to deal damage, but not more than half her normal amount.

She, like everyone else, started bashing the beetles with her spear. They were only mana constructs, but they still had thick outer shells that resisted the cutting edge of her blade.

Matt didn’t have that problem with his heavier blade, but they were forced to retreat to prevent them from being surrounded.

Even with Melinda trying to give direction, the two teams were unable to effectively coordinate an impactful defense. With that lack thereof, the mass of beetles soon flanked them, and they were quickly surrounded, fighting back to back.

To everyone’s horror, even Sam’s poison was unable to affect the beetles for long. The most effective method they had was her and Aster teaming up alternating their elemental attacks. The beetles were killed as they changed back and forth, but after a few successful skirmishes, the beetles turned a blue and green mix. Then, neither attack was particularly successful in killing the monsters. The best either of them could do was slightly weaken them.

Matt wanted to yell, but he didn’t have the time to do so. With the nine of them, they had more than enough elements to rotate through and kill the beetles, but their attacks all landed in separate locations. Or worse, they attacked the same monsters twice, which just wasted mana.

Melinda had started an AI group to coordinate their attack. It helped, but they were still getting crowded, as the two teams failed to anticipate each other’s actions. Matt, Liz, and Aster were used to doing their own thing in a battle, and completely failed to react to Melinda’s rapid orders. Even in the war, orders were more big picture and not individual.

They had researched both normal summoners and the elemental beetles last night.

A normal summoner used the Tier 14 skill [Summon Mana Monster], which created a copy of a monster they had killed before from its corpse. That monster was then recorded in the skill structure for future use. The base number of recordable monsters was five, while the skill could summon three monsters at once unless it was modified.

Since they were able to damage the constructs, Matt assumed that Wrangle was lowering the Tier of the monsters that they were fighting somehow. But he hadn’t seen that listed in the information pact they bought.

The packet detailed a skill called [Barrage], which was a meta-skill that only affected other skills, and was cast in conjunction with them. It increased the number of effective casts by a multiplier, based on the skill it was coupled with and how that skill was expanded with mastery. The example given was [Barrage] cast with [Fireball]. Instead of one fireball, you could have five for a minimal, percentage-based increase in initial mana cost.

The skill was incredibly valuable, and the more they learned, the more they were impressed with Wrangle’s achievement of creating the skill for himself early.

But the fact that there were thousands of monsters boggled the mind. Wrangle shouldn’t be able to summon that many monsters, unless his custom [Barrage] allowed him to create more than the normal skill would have. Even if he could summon them, he shouldn’t be able to control that many. Summoners rarely went for numbers because of the mana cost to summon an extensive amount was untenable. They also needed to split their concentration for each cast of the skill.

The fighting continued, but they were eventually overwhelmed. One by one, they fell.

Matt’s armor helped him last the longest, but eventually even it was overwhelmed. When a beetle clamped its pincers around Matt’s actual leg and shook him, he found himself sitting with the rest of his friends, off to the side next to Luna. She was looking down at a watch on a chain.

She tsked as she put the watch away in her breast pocket. “Seven minutes and eleven seconds. Two hundred and fifteen kills against Tier 7 summons.”

The short woman met their eyes one by one. “That’s far worse than I expected. Clearly, we need to back up a bit and work on our basics.”

Luna gestured up with a single hand and an obstacle course rose up from out of the sand. Or at least, what Matt thought was an obstacle course.

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“We will be working on this for the next few hours, before we start a lesser program.”

She pointed imperiously and commanded, “Start climbing.”

Matt and everyone else turned and started walking, but it was apparently too slow for their trainer. From Luna’s fingertips, a small bolt of lightning zapped them all.

It went right through [Cracked Phantom Armor] and thoroughly shattered the skill in his spirit, while also locking up his muscles. To his relief, it didn’t actually hurt. It was more of a tingle than any real pain.

Matt scrambled to run with everyone else.

They reached the front of the course to find ropes hanging over a pit of some kind of sludge. Whatever it was, it smelled gut-wrenchingly awful.

The smell was so bad, Matt’s eyes watered. As he hadn’t reformed [Cracked Phantom Armor] in his spirit yet, he couldn’t protect himself from it either. Luna’s attack destroyed the skill structure far more thoroughly than Keith’s skill had when he trained with Liz’s brother in law.

Mathew reached out and grabbed one of the two ropes and handed it to Sam, who was closest to him.

Liz hooked the one next to Sam and swung over with Aster in her free arm. To all of their surprise, Aster appeared back on the other side. They turned to see Luna filing her nails in the air next to them.

The message was clear. No assistance allowed.

Aster just cocked her head back at Luna, and then to the still swaying rope.

Everyone paused as the difficulty of a fox with no hands crossing a pit of sludge with a rope was pondered.

No one answered, but Aster didn’t seem bothered. She sent Matt a picture through their bond.

He grabbed the rope, allowing Aster to create a platform to stand on with [Create Water] and her bloodline. They looked up to Luna, who still seemed to be ignoring them, so she jumped over while standing on the platform.

She didn’t reappear on their side, but the ice platform vanished as soon as Aster was off the rope.

So they could help each other, but couldn’t directly carry each other through the obstacle course.

The rest of the course was a child’s playground twisted to a sadistic level. They climbed over and under swinging logs, and traversed balance beams only a finger’s breadth wide that were suspended over pits with chains. There were areas that they needed to climb with only their fingers able to hold on to a ledge, and a ladder with only one rung that they needed to use to climb over thirty feet up and back down. The hardest obstacle was a section of poles sticking out of the ground five feet apart from each other. They needed to jump from pole to pole, but since they weren’t in a line, they needed to stop and pause between jumps.

All the while, failure came with the threat of falling into the pit of foul sludge.

Still, the course wasn’t that difficult to complete. They were Tier 6’s and well beyond mortal limits. Completing each obstacle was more tricky than hard. Particularly for Aster. The fox was faced with a new puzzle to solve for each of the obstacles a small beast couldn’t possibly complete normally. Whether through ice constructs or clever schemes with Matt and Liz assisting, the fox was expected to complete the same challenges as everyone else.

Despite taking time to work out Aster extra challenges, the whole group finished in just over a half hour, with nobody stumbling into the sludge once. Matt wondered what the point was.

Luna sent them through the obstacle course twice more. With each pass, their speed increased. Even though the armor made the dexterity focused parts of the course unwieldy to navigate, it mattered less each iteration. After their third repetition, Luna told them to strip into their under-armor clothes.

Then she tossed them each a wrist band and told them to put them on.

When Matt did, it felt like his cultivation vanished in an instant. His cores slowed their rotation until he felt like a mortal before his awakening.

Matt activated [Mage’s Retreat] to alleviate his weakness, but looked up to find Luna’s piercing, slitted eyes staring into his chest.

She met his eyes and warned, “No cheating.”

“I’m not cheating…”

All he got for his protests was another zap from her finger.