The Path of Ascension Chapter 392

Chapter 392

Matt frowned as he watched the ongoing scene below the surface with his spiritual power.

The Empire’s people were almost uniformly going in the wrong direction. If he was a more cynical man, he would have suspected that someone was messing with them. But even the Corporation people seemed to be heading in the wrong direction, if less so than the Empire’s people, thanks to their initial coordination between scouts.

Looking over to Aster who was snacking on an assortment of vegetables one of their chefs had brought down, he asked. “Is there any kind of mental effect hitting the Tier 15s? They should be choosing to spread out in a spiderweb but they almost always choose the wrong direction every time. Once or twice is a coincidence, but dozens of times? I don’t buy it.”

Aster crunched through her food a few more times before swallowing. “I can’t feel anything and neither can any of our guards. There are no pervasive mental effects, illusions affecting them, or even physical optical trickery going on that might account for what we are seeing.”

“Then how can you explain what we are seeing?”

Aster flicked her ears in a shrug. “Sometimes random is random, and random can be weird.”

Matt frowned and scanned the ruin again. Once he finished checking for the obvious things and found nothing he started looking for more subtle things, like small gradual inclines or declines that might be subtly shifting people’s perceptions but while there was variance in the slope of the floor it wasn’t uniform enough to explain what they were seeing. He then checked the mana flows, which almost looked like a promising lead, as the mana flows didn’t directly move into the reward room but instead swirled around almost similar to a whirlpool before being absorbed around the boss room. Sadly, the flows had no discernible relation to the movement of the Tier 15s inside.

Watching a Tier 15 Corporation mercenary scout, someone who was battlefield trained and tested, go down the path that led away from the ruin’s boss room after being given the option between two paths.

He had already been inside the ruin and hadn’t felt anything odd but given his Tier that wasn’t too surprising. He was tempted to go back in and see if there was something he was missing when he watched an Empire scout finally go down the correct path.

Looking up her information he found she was an ordinary delver with an ordinary track record. One Alice Everdon who, unlike seemingly everyone else on the planet, managed to go in a nearly straight line to the ruin’s boss room.

It was only for three rooms before she turned slightly off course, but it was still progress.

Her progress was quickly overshadowed by two of the Corporation teams finally running into each other and linking up.

That would speed up their progress as they knew which directions not to go and could focus on the others but they were still mainly going in the wrong direction.

Things were interesting though and Matt watched as one of Aster’s guards pulled an Empire team out of a bear beetle hybrid’s clutches just before they were going to be crunched.

They would need some healing, which they were providing for free, but then they would be cooling their heels for a month until the agreed upon waiting time for a death passed.

Matt was personally waiting for one of the scouts to make a fatal mistake so he could pick their mind about the choices they were making. The first scouts who had ‘died’ didn’t have enough time in the ruin to be of any use, and those who were still active were mostly good enough to avoid the dangers present in the ruin.

Being at the same Tier, Matt wanted to say none of the delvers should have any trouble with the monsters inside, but watching the spectacle below was a stark reminder that they were not normal.

Matt watched as a team of three delvers encountered a single wind empowered rhinoceros and get absolutely beaten down.

Sure, the monster was slightly faster than a typical Tier 15 thanks to its elemental affinity, but its attack pattern was incredibly basic with just three main attacks and only three variations of each main attack.

The only reason they didn’t need rescuing outright was the fact another team entered their room and took the monster’s attention long enough for them to pull back into the tunnel, where they were able to fully disengage and return to a healing outpost.

Compared to the Corporation mercenaries who were battle hardened, it was almost shameful to compare the two.

He watched as a Corporation fire team from the third mercenary corp slowly whittled down an interesting troll variant. It wasn’t as tall as a typical troll but what it lost in height it made up for in bulk and durability which, when paired with its racial healing ability, made for a hard fight.

A hard enough fight that without the team’s scorpion bloodline healer, who was seemingly able to weaponize her healing spells into offensive poison spells, they would have failed to do enough damage to outpace its healing factor.

Still, their team’s coordination stood out and Matt looked over to where Clyde and the mercenary leaders who were higher than Tier 15 were.

Flexing his spiritual perception around the team in question, Matt asked. “What’s the story behind that healer? She seems good.”

The mercenary leader smiled politely back. “Michelle Skoren, she’s a pick up from our own Path. Even pushed through to Tier 12 before stepping off to focus on her Minkalla run. She had a decent run. 72ATY411 to be exact. Once she left Minkalla she, let’s say, bounced between jobs for a bit before we pulled her out of the fire and offered her a job. Quite the good catch, as you see. Did damn good work on our contracts in the war.”

Matt didn’t comment on her performance in their last war, it being against the Empire itself and their ally the Guilds, but instead focused on her Minkalla run.

Looking up the designation, he scanned the layout she had gotten.

A first floor Wasteland, a second floor Mind Over Matter, a third floor Folded Reflections, a fourth floor The Hills Have Eyes, a fifth floor Courtly Warfare, a sixth floor Unskilled, and a final seventh floor Blood is Thicker nicely rounded out her cycle.

Especially for someone with a bloodline like her. With what Matt could see of her skills, so long as she got out of the bottleneck that would have been her Courtly Warfare floor in the first or second wave, she should have had the ability to complete the planet and have enough Genesis Energy to get both an innate slot and the modification of her bloodline, which accounted for the healing scorpion bloodline.

Should.

Without being there himself there was no way to tell, unless he wanted to forcefully inspect her spirit and see if she did in fact have an innate skill slot. Even if he were to do that, though, it wouldn’t tell him if she had gotten it in Minkalla and wasn’t instead Talent-given, as he knew she hadn’t gone in at Tier 11 to get the flexible slot.

It was just possible she had managed it.

That potential, combined with her growth item staff, made her a person to watch in the upcoming fights.

Fights that happened all too soon.

Just two weeks into the exploration of the ruin, the sides finally contacted each other.

By then both sides had already linked up with all of their cohorts, and it was two scouts that noticed each other.

The Empire scout, feeling confident after just having defeated a room all by himself, chased after the Corporation scout who turned and ran immediately.

It almost turned into a disaster but the Empire scout sensed the trap he was being led into just in time to pull back, allowing both sides to spread the information.

Being the only side with the knowledge of where their enemies were would have been amazing, but losing that same knowledge wouldn’t have been worth it, and Matt made a note in the scout’s file that reflected his actions, both good and bad.

So long as he didn’t fumble something else in his time in the ruin and cost them massively, he would see a sizable boost to his reward potential when this was all said and done.

That did, however, kick off the second phase of the exploration as the fighting started almost immediately. Both sides began redirecting some of their combat teams from clearing rooms to the front lines, where skirmishes were commonplace but full-on fights were less so.

Watching the various leaders make calls and send commands, Matt felt anxious as he was unable to influence their actions.

Not that he would, even if he could get away with cheating— that would ruin the fun— but it felt very different watching rather than being the one to do whatever needed to be done.

At least if he failed he knew he had done his best. Here, things were far more nebulous.

Still, what had turned into the Empire leadership— one older army vet, one guild leader, and one person who had just been stronger than everyone else in their group— managed the situation well enough. It wasn’t perfect and Matt would have done things differently but it was acceptable.

Instead of settling into a fight, they kept their eyes on the goal and kept pushing their forces outward while butting up against the Corporation battle lines. Mainly by using their own better than average delving teams to make strike forces that tried to disrupt the mercenary battlelines.

It was a battle of coordination versus numbers. With more Empire people in the ruin they had a small but distinct advantage, and the leadership used it to harass the Corporation lines; surrounding and cutting off rooms and defeating the teams inside as they found them.

The tactic wasn’t perfect and they took losses, but it worked well enough that they actually stopped the Corporation’s expansion twice and forced them to backtrack at one point, to escape a possible encirclement.

It would have been more impressive if they had been blocking the correct direction, but Matt hoped it was a sign of what was to come.

Two months in, however, both sides started to run into a supply issue. The gear they brought in just wasn’t enough to cover every room they had expanded to, and if they didn’t secure the rooms by either keeping a person or some piece of connected technology inside, the room would merge into itself and reform as something else after enough time. If enough rooms were left alone in an area they had the tendency to start moving around all together, which resulted in a half a dozen teams from both sides being cut off from the main groups and then shifted to another portion of the planet.

Matt, Liz, and Aster wanted to give both teams more supplies to help ensure they could fully map out the ruin, and so speed things up, but Clyde firmly refused to agree which meant they couldn’t do anything.

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He insisted they had set the terms and couldn’t alter them.

Matt wanted to point out the Corporation mercenaries were being affected just as badly as the Empire delving teams but didn’t bother, seeing how unwilling the Tier 40 was to bend.

In the end it came down to a race of who would find the boss room first, and four months into the battle it finally happened.

As the two sides were spreading out to try and cut each other off, they also started expanding their controlled territory in near unison but their scouted areas were both much larger.

Being able to watch in an unobstructed manner, Matt got to see the Corporation scout who found the boss room.

Once he confirmed the boss’ presence, he immediately turned and ran back through the rooms he had passed through to report to his people.

It was almost the perfect escape, if not for an Empire monster controller who was controlling swarms of rats to creep through the ruin room by room on the Corporation side. His connection let him see the scout sprinting away and so he started looking. It took most of his remaining horde but he too managed to find the ruin’s boss room.

If not for that, the mercenary teams might have pulled off the coup of the century as they feinted a push in the opposite direction, while sending a smaller but more elite team to secure the boss room.

Without the report, the ploy might have worked but instead the teams clashed just two rooms away from their target, in a battle that saw neither side gaining ground but with both taking serious losses.

Neither side was willing to give in, throwing themselves into the narrow hallways until the floors ran red with blood.

Their guards and the higher Tier Corporation people worked overtime, pulling people out of the ruin to save their lives, but they managed with only a little help from Alice and Clyde, being the two highest Tiered people present.

With the goal in sight the two sides, as if by agreement, pulled back from their other exploration branches and started reinforcing their pathways to the boss room.

Neither wanted to have their supply lines cut which might lead to them getting randomized somewhere else in the ruin. Both tried to do exactly that to their opponents, knowing it could lead to a decisive win for their side, but defense was easier than offense and neither side managed it.