The Path of Ascension Chapter 373

Chapter 373

Matt and Liz moved to meet the two Ascenders in space, but Wun Miloan skipped on golden air and arrived down at the front door of their house before they could do so.

Raising his hand, he politely knocked while pulling out a bottle of wine.

Rolling his eyes, Matt opened a [Portal] inside their house from their office.

Opening the door, he pretended to be surprised. “Oh, a guest. How unexpected!”

Wun Miloan was tall and lanky, defying the stereotypes of his home Great Power by not being a dwarf and not even aping them. According to him, he already had enough aping going on with his bloodline, and didn’t feel the need to add on any more.

Seeing the man in person, Matt definitely agreed. His wiry body rippled with muscle and generic primate power. While it was impossible for him to hide that he had some kind of monkey bloodline, he’d never revealed any details of his bloodline to anyone; not Clan leadership, not the other Ascenders, nobody.

Wun wiggled his bottle even as Max landed next to him, having taken the non-magical route. “I told him to be normal, but that’s impossible for him. I apologize for dropping in like this, but he wanted to meet you two.”

“Three! I heard there was an ice mage. I love supports. So cuddly and cute!”

Wun wiggled and hugged the bottle of wine before seeming to notice it.

Looking down, he seemed to hold the bottle at arm’s length and slapped the bottom forcefully. Without so much as a ripple of mana or Domain usage, the cork was sent flying out of the bottle’s stem, bounced wildly around the kitchen, and landed in the trash incinerator. As soon as it hit the bottom of the container, an errant flicker of mana activated the disposal enchantment, and an outsized gout of flame burst out of the hole in the counter, punctuating the landing.

“Score! I am impressive.” he said with a small wiggle.

Liz raised an eyebrow, and her phoenix body ruffled itself in surprise.

Max ruined Wun’s showboating by saying, “Last time he tried that, the bottle broke and he impaled himself in front of over a thousand people.”

Wun sighed. “Terrible evening. I was trying to impress this very pretty new widow. Hippopotamus bloodline, you understand.”

Liz poured the wine as Matt set out the glasses and asked, “Failed to woo the maiden after failing your entrance trick?”

Wun snorted. “Of course not. I am a debonair seducer extraordinaire. The bad luck is that I succeeded. While I was in a delicious post-coital nap, she found out that I was apparently the one who made her a widow. How was I supposed to know she was married to the guy who tried to break into the house I was crashing in a few years before that?” He turned a glare onto Max. “I still think it was either you or Ellen who ratted me out.”

Matt couldn’t help it. He needed to know more. The story was also a good distraction from the awful wine Wun had given them. “So she tried to kill you then?”

Once more, Wun looked honestly confused. “What? No! She was so happy that I killed him, she wanted to have a kid with me. But I can’t get saddled with child support like that, so I had to leave, pronto. But it took me ages to get out of there.”

“Fifteen years,” Max chimed in.

Wun gestured to the Chosen in agreement as he drank deeply of his wine before wincing. “Damn, this is shit!”

Having said that, he splashed the rest of his glass into their sink without making a mess. “I just grabbed something off the shelf, but I guess I didn’t get lucky.”

His eyes unfocused as he started rummaging around in his storage ring. A few moments later, he pulled out a dusty bottle of wine that was much better. So much better that Matt asked where they could get some, but as luck had it, the vineyard had burned down a few hundred thousand years ago and they were drinking one of the last bottles.

In a hospitable mood, and to celebrate the bottle and occasion, Matt cooked while Wun regaled them with stories. He was… an interesting fellow.

Like most Ascenders, Wun was fairly relaxed and easygoing. It was basically a necessity for the sorts of lives they lived, but Goldenrod took that to another level. His Talent guaranteed that he could never live a quiet life, as it drastically increased the likelihood of improbable things. Good or bad, it didn’t matter. Doubly so because, as he grew in Tier, the more improbable the events got. While he could force things to happen, he could never stop them from happening, which seemed like an interesting quirk to a luck Talent.

That much was demonstrated when the four of them sat down to play poker. Liz had been wanting to test her mettle against Max for a while now, and Wun managed to somehow convince the rest of them that it was a great idea to do so right now.

Max was apparently something of an expert poker player, but while Matt knew the rules and could play, he wasn’t a master by any means.

Until he played with Wun.

At the start, he kept getting absolutely amazing hands and kept winning round after round as a result. Then, he started getting bad hands, but still won anyway. Then, he went back to getting absolutely amazing luck, only to lose every round.

At one point, when he had two aces in his hand, Wun responded to his bets with going all in, and despite the fact the other Ascender only had a six of clubs and a two of diamonds, he was the only one to have any clubs in his hand. And thus, after the seven, eight, nine, and ten of clubs were revealed in the middle, he managed to win that round, clearing Matt out of a lot of his winnings.

The immediate next round, he got a lot of those winnings back, and a comment from Wun about how his Talent typically worked made Matt frown. Was he really so unlikely to win that Wun’s Talent was basically forcing it?

It was kind of insulting when he thought about it like that.

That was when he bowed out and acted as the permanent dealer, just to see how the other three battled it out.

That gave him a fair amount of time to look and properly ponder what Wun’s life must have been like, and how hard it must have been for him to become an Ascender. Then again, perhaps it was easier because of how unlikely it was for him to make it?

No, that couldn’t be the case. Or at least Matt would never buy that. No Talent alone was sufficient to complete the Path. It couldn’t just take a nobody and make them great. Even Emmanuel hadn’t completed the Path, a fact that Luna had made certain Matt remembered any time he got too cocky about his odds of finishing.

Not that the Talent was all sunshine and rainbows. Wun’s Talent gave out bad as often as it gave out good, and Matt could see how hard it would be to live with such a Talent, let alone become strong enough to be Ascender level. The only real advantage it gave him was that it changed the nature of a battle so much, albeit in a way he was used to, that most opponents couldn’t cope before he defeated them. And Matt was sure that the fact he could make the really unlikely things happen on command helped battles go in his favor.

Besides, if he had somehow coasted on his Talent, he would be a very weak Ascender, and he certainly wasn’t weak. Not when his record against both Max and the presumed-late Master of All was so good, back when they’d all been active together.

Really, his Talent reminded Matt a lot of Eleanor Mallick, the girl he’d sponsored on the Path so long ago. Lots of good, lots of bad, and the only constant being uncertainty. Granted, while her odds had shifted more in her favor as she grew, Wun just had even more extreme things happen around him.

He really should reach out to Eleanor, actually. She and her cousin Ethan had returned to their clan after their trip to Minkalla, and from what he’d heard, they were serving as very young elders.

As Tier 16s, they were immortals and had a say in the traveling merchant collective their family formed. As former Pathers, they were lacking hundreds of years of experience moving through Tiers, but thanks to the family charter, they needed to be on the family elder council. Even if only as junior members. Though neither of the kids particularly liked being treated like kids, they also didn’t have a good way to get experience thanks to technically being elders.

Matt and Liz had offered their duchy as a stopping point if the clan wanted to branch out and earn some credit from the family, but they adamantly refused, as they were trying to prove they could stand on their own.

Through it all, Matt got the feeling that they were still happy to be back with family.

Eleanor at least, thanks to her advancement, had reached a point where her Talent didn’t hamper her daily life any more. Which had been her main goal on the Path in the first place.

Eleanor’s Concept had leveraged the ideas of chance and catastrophe, imposing similar restrictions as the ones she operated under on those she fought, making fortune and misfortune land randomly on them, with none of the tools she had for mitigating said fortune. It was, naturally, far more limited than what Wun passively did, but it might be worth sparring with her a bit to get some more practice against luck-based opponents before he fought Wun.

Which, after meeting the man, was most certainly on his list. Even getting his ass handed to him— hopefully not literally— would teach Matt where his deepest hidden weaknesses lie. Not the typical ones, but the ones that wouldn’t normally happen and would be forcefully made manifest in a fight with Wun.

How could any self-respecting Ascender pass up an opportunity like that?

And Matt kinda wanted to kick Wun’s ass just in general. A common occurrence, according to Max.

The same Max who had given Matt an information chip he certainly wasn’t going to be opening himself. Instead, he sent it off to Harper’s people who would run a battery of tests on it to make sure there were no undue influences, but the lessons were part one of her teaching him mind magic defenses. No matter how much Lila and Aiden had vouched for her, he was still in the ‘trust but verify’ stage of the Realm’s most notorious mind mage.

Even knowing she was a master manipulator didn’t help, because she was just that good. She was sociable, easy to talk to, and came across as genuinely liking everyone. Even watching her code switch when talking to Wun or Liz just came across as her being excitable about different things, a genuine expression of enjoyment rather than a means of social manipulation. She seemed incredibly trustworthy, and that was why he’d made sure he was following protocol regarding suspected mind manipulators to the letter around her.

He even checked the procedures just to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. Twice.

In contrast, Wun seemed incapable of taking anything seriously during their two days spent hanging out. Everything was either a tragedy Wun treated like a minor inconvenience, or it was a positive, generally good thing he couldn’t bother to get excited about.

It was when the two Ascenders were leaving that Wun dropped a bomb onto his and Liz’s laps.

“Oh yeah, I may have brought a few extra worlds with me when I delivered the promised ones to your duchy.” Holding up his hands, Wun tried to placate them. “Uninhabited worlds! Don’t get fussy. Was I supposed to just let a trio of Tier 9 worlds just drift by? No way. So I batted them into the current I was overseeing. Added them to the procession, so to speak. The other guide lost his shit and tried to get me to return them to Clan space, but he was annoying and I stopped listening to him. You guys might want to deal with that?”

Matt ignored the lilting tone and instead checked his [AI] just to notice that he hadn’t been getting updates from Cato for the last few hours. There didn’t seem to be any obvious bugs or flaws, but forcefully connecting to the EmpireNet and hard resetting the entire planet’s EmpireNet system caused a flood of messages to come through all at once, telling them what they had missed in the last few days. Even the alerts that should have bypassed their do not disturb had been caught in the… monkey wrench that was Wun.

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Matt turned to Liz and tossed the problem into her lap. “I beat you at poker. I deserve this.”

Phoenix Liz petulantly spread her wings on Liz’s shoulder, while human Liz crossed her arms. “You had better have all of the paperwork done by the time I get back! I can’t believe this. My streak ended. Gone out with a whimper, not even a last desperate struggle. Ugh.”

Seeing he won, Matt grinned. The paperwork would suck, but he didn’t want to be the one to go and argue that they weren’t violating the no new planets rule since Wun delivered them, and they didn’t capture the worlds themselves.

It was doubtful that the situation would escalate, but it would undoubtedly be annoying, and Matt would rather slog through his and Liz’s paperwork than deal with that.

He was two days deep in his battle with Liz’s stack of paperwork when he got an alert from his [AI].

VIPs had arrived and were demanding to speak to him.

Reviewing the alert, Matt had to wonder if his luck was still being tweaked by Wun.

A flight of down-and-out fire bloodlines led by a young phoenix had arrived, and were not-so-subtly demanding a plot of land be given to them.

All he could think was that Liz would have been much better equipped to handle this.

Hopping into the Ascender group chat, he cursed Wun up and down before closing it as he got laughing faces from everyone else.

With a [Portal], he arrived in space where one of Palustris’ many administrators were going from ship to ship and registering and issuing permits to land. Temporary passes of up to a decade were available for those not automatically approved for permanent residence, and according to the message the man’s supervisor had forwarded up the chain of command, that was precisely what the administrator had tried to issue. It had even been a provisional permit that would have gotten the group’s foot in the door and would have made it easy enough to get a permanent one.

According to that same report, the leader of the group, Rebecca Etha, had pitched a fit.

Dropping his perception down to Tier 20 levels, Matt looked at Rebecca, letting the weight of his gaze quiet her still ongoing rant.

Turning to his administrator, Matt asked, “Is there anything else you need in your report?”

The man flinched but shook his head. “No, my lord. I—”

He was cut off as Rebecca flexed her spiritual pressure harder, effectively shouting over him. “Ascender Titan, I expect this man to be reprimanded thoroughly. He was rude and denied me passage to Palustris.”

Matt just stared at Rebecca for a long minute, letting the silence ask if she was done speaking. “Firstly, do not interrupt me or my people. It is rude. Second, Dominic was assisting you. You are not rated for a permanent residence. The requirements are all listed. You do, however, rate a temporary residence permit and can work on converting it into a permanent one.”

Rebecca looked genuinely confused as she asked, “But why not a permanent one? We are fire bloodlines. We deserve access to a fire world like this.”

The entitlement in her statement caused Matt’s hackles to rise, but he stomped it down and inspected the group she had come with.

According to his [AI], Rebecca Etha was a Tier 15 phoenix bloodline offspring of a male phoenix and a human woman. Her father had officially severed parental ties, but it appeared that Rebecca’s mother had pampered the girl something fierce, resulting in a spoiled rotten brat who was wholly unprepared for her mom to never return from a delve one day.

Filling in the blanks regarding her public appearances since then, that had been something of a turning point for Rebecca, and she had been forced to throw herself into unfamiliar circumstances as she adapted to not having a protector. If the reports didn’t also explain the almost five thousand other people packed in the small fleet of time-worn ships in Rebecca’s convoy, he would have dismissed her. But for all her faults, Rebecca had something of a soft streak, and she had turned her loss into a drive to gather other misfits.