The Path of Ascension Chapter 432

Chapter 432

Tim grunted as he brought his blade down with all his might and the distorted goblin-like creature screamed in agony as it transformed into other shapes to stop the pain. The lightning arcing around his blade tried to prevent it, but the damn mini-boss was incredibly resilient to all forms of damage, and so it managed to escape the net of energy and dash into the underbrush and vanish.

Panting, Tim searched for movement with his eyes, ears, and spiritual perception.

He saw nothing, but that didn’t make him drop his guard at all.

The bloody gash that ran down his left bicep and made his left arm and hand useless was proof of how dangerous the things were. Thankfully, the wound was already healing due to his merged entry of Body Strengthening. Normally, the entry acted like he was working out any time he used a muscle, but the advantage to his strengthened body was that when he was injured, his body tried to heal itself a little better than the average cultivator.

The scientists had studied the ability for months but they had progressed beyond Tim’s current abilities and he didn’t care enough to add low-Tier body strengthening methods to his already busy schedule.

No, he was too busy delving into rifts where the monsters weren’t even what they seemed.

At Tier 4, everyone at the Ascenders’ academy had been encouraged to delve into the sick and twisted abominations of rifts that Titan’s Torch’s scientists created.

Tim didn’t really get it.

The other scientists were so normal.

They talked to him about his Talent and the things they were learning from it. They helped him puzzle through anomalies of his Talent, like why it didn’t create entries for things such as breathing or walking. Their current theory was that his spirit just wasn’t strong enough for such a broad entity or that he’d need to combine several breathing related entries together to get the highest category of entry. Similar to his body strengthening entry which had been made exactly that way. They helped him to learn how to get more out of an action too. It was mainly about putting his entire being, mind, body, and spirit, into an action, even if the action seemed unrelated, like mixing a soup to improve his alchemy.

They even taught him how his Talent was actually working. Or they gave him their best guess, which was that his Talent’s proficiency acted as a preparatory phase for the greater transfer of knowledge which was achieved when he reached a threshold. There was information transfer even during seemingly unrelated things like mixing soup. Even if he couldn’t realize it in the moment, each added point of proficiency gave him a tiny bit more of disjointed information that would only truly make sense when he reached his threshold.

If they were right, that was why doing alchemy to practice alchemy or fighting when practicing a fighting entry gave more proficiency than the simplified version per action. He was better at absorbing the information because he was practically applying what he was learning.

There were, however, a million and one caveats to those answers, which was why he was fighting stupid shapeshifting goblin creatures in a rift the rift scientist people had created.

They were insane as far as Tim was concerned.

He had been around them just long enough to watch a half dozen rifts get created, with Ascender Titan hopeful he would get an entry after seeing it enough. Tim hadn’t, but that failure didn’t seem to dissuade anyone with Ascender Titan, saying he’d probably get it when he was higher Tier or his spirit improved and not to stress on it.

It had seemed like such an innocuous comment at the time, but it had clearly given Ascender Titian an idea as shortly after, they were all encouraged to start delving the rifts Titan’s Torch rift ‘aperologists’ made on a seemingly daily basis.

Just as he started seeing two areas of bushes start to wiggle, meaning there were two of the little fuckers waiting to attack him, his teammates’ clattering got close enough he shouted.

“One, possibly two, right in front of me.”

An arrow whizzed by and thunked into the tree, sending a monster launching itself out of the bush, with a spike of rage accompanying it in Tim’s chest.

It wasn’t a goblin anymore but instead a ferocious wolf with two heads.

Tim’s swordsman proficiency gave him the experience to know exactly what he should do but he didn’t like it.

Raising his sword, he thrust at the rightmost head while forcing his left arm to work long enough to present it as a tasty snack.

The metal plates in the leather held for the briefest instant, but it wasn’t long enough to save him the agony. Worse yet, the lightning from his blade followed the morphing flesh into his very human body and shocked the shit out of him.

Still, Tim didn’t let his blade slip free from the thrashing creature and that was enough.

Brandi, in even heavier armor than Tim’s, raced forward into the bush, startling free the other monster which attacked her as a tangle of vine-like limbs.

Tim could hardly pay attention to the commotion even as an arrow whizzed by him for a second time and instead slammed himself onto the ground, monster-first.

His blade slipped out from the monster’s flesh, which stopped the lightning but the pain lingered.

The monster, however, didn’t.

Tim cast a point blank [Solar Flare] and evaporated a large part of the shapeshifter.

It tried to recoil and slip away but its teeth were stuck in Tim’s arm and they had learned from painful delves that these creatures couldn’t morph when in contact with something alive.

When the second [Solar Flare] didn’t kill the monster, Tim cast the spell for a third time, finally feeling the burst of essence that confirmed the kill but he was unable to absorb any, having already reached the peak of Tier 4 two kills before.

His anger didn’t lessen for its death as he moved to help Brandi kill the creature she was fighting.

Using his limited spells in such close range was less than ideal, so he stuck with his sword, cursing every time the enchantment arced to her.

For a third time, an arrow nearly grazed him and Tim had to resist turning around and driving his blade through Randy’s chest.

The arrogant archer would have deserved the healing cooldown but now wasn’t the time as they had at least two more of the creatures to kill before the rift was cleared.

As if the morphing creatures weren’t enough, the rift didn’t even have a proper boss or exit and corresponding reward distortion.

Before he could call out to him, Argo came over to Tim and put his hands to Tim’s mangled left arm. But then he stopped.

“I— there is metal bent into the wound. I can’t heal it.”

Tim groaned, about to complain about the man’s stupid Talent, but instead pulled at the arm guard wanting to tear it from his limb silently as the other two kept a lookout.

He had finally worked the arm guard free when they heard a rustling from a nearby bush. They all got ready to fight but when they heard cursing, they all settled down.

The left side of Halley’s face was covered in mottled blisters but she seemed otherwise unharmed. The blisters weren’t even from this rift but rather had something to do with her Talent. Some days she was blistered, which always meant fire powers, and other days it was another type of wound. But it was always a facial wound and it always looked fresh. And painful.

“Three dead on my side. How many does that leave on yours?”

Brandi sighed, her mountain form sagging as she said, “We killed eight. That leaves one or two more. I was hoping you had created the exit.”

And truly, it was the worst outcome given how damn hard the monsters could be to find when they were deliberately hiding, which they tended to do when most had died.

As Tim finally got to his bicep wound and pried the bent and deformed metal out, Argo cast his healing spell.

Tim sighed as a measure of stress left his body with the receding pain.

It wasn’t perfect like the higher-Tier healers on staff could do but Argo, for all his faults, was a damn good healer. He should be given that was literally all he could do.

His Talent had been partially spread around, saying it was detrimental and he couldn’t hurt anyone. As it turned out, the rumor had been confirmed after someone tried to bully the younger man and Argo had put the man in a seemingly impenetrable box and left him there for nearly a full day as punishment.

The story had later come out and then spread through the school like wildfire. The spell was a cracked skill gift from the Ascenders as a way for him to protect himself without causing harm because his Talent wouldn’t let him harm anyone in any way, shape, or form and his Tier 3 hadn’t fixed the issue.

That was almost more surprising than the side effect itself, but it did explain why he was brought into the academy with seemingly no other outstanding aspects.

That, Tim had learned, was the largest change from his home world.

Everyone at the academy had some exceptional aspect about themselves, usually their Talents but not always.

Tim had thought he was special but being around his presumable peers, he knew how laughable that was. He was good but the saying there was always someone better had been drilled home many times over the last two years. He was lucky if he was still in the body of the bell curve, and no matter how much he improved or the people in charge told him he was ‘doing great’, he felt like he was falling behind.

Arm healed, he took his shield from Brandi who had picked it up before he got separated and brought up his Talent.

Apprentice Sword Fighting: 999,011/1,000,000 Proficiency — Dance to gain proficiency.

Novice Shield Fighting: 9,999.7/10,000 Proficiency — Brace to gain proficiency.

Bracing himself against an invisible enemy that resembled their archer more than it should, Tim felt a wave of knowledge wash through him. It felt like he had been fighting with his shield for a century but he knew thanks to the researchers he worked with that such bits of information weren’t quite as quantifiable as that.

A century was generally correct, but it was ultimately limited experience.

The more he had done related to things in the entry, the more targeted his knowledge was. That was also modified by the entry itself. An entry for a potion was very specific to that singular potion and its information could only go towards improving it. Whereas his entry for shield fighting gave him more information based on the enemies he had fought while gaining the proficiency, which was less detailed on any one, as a specific enemy entry would have been.

If he hadn’t actually done much with the skill beyond grinding a single thing, like he had with herbs, the time-allotted information would be filled in with the next valid subjects he encountered until he used up the time. That allowed him some control over what he learned if he so wanted to narrow down an information surge.

His knowledge proved itself almost immediately useful as some of the information he got was about how to better fight shapeshifting enemies. While most of the information was solely about how to best block their amorphous attacks, he also learned that the monsters couldn’t actually sit still.

Some part of them had to be moving at all times.

Just wanting this rift to be over and to not be traipsing around the several mile-long rift any more than he needed to, again he shared the information. “Look out for movement. They can’t sit still.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Randy raised his bow and with a fluid motion, loosed an arrow that flew so close to Tim that he felt the projectile’s wake like a lover’s caress.

A burst of lightning exploded and fried the monster that was disguising itself as a tree branch over the path.

Randy smiled as if he hadn’t nearly hit Tim. “Good call. The branch had been moving but I didn’t put that together and just assumed there was more wind over there.”

Tim just stared at Randy and contemplated punching the man in the face, or worse, but knew it was an awful idea.

At least not inside the rift.

Fighting with one’s teammate inside a rift, even one that had an exit and reward distortion appear signifying it was over, was a good way to get ostracized. No one wanted to be delving, risking life and limb, with a mad man who might turn on them.

The angry part of him tried to point out that Randy had been threatening him with each of those close calls, which meant he acted first, but ultimately Randy hadn’t hit him.

That might be the answer, but Tim didn’t like it.

It was a coward’s way out.

And it was tempting.

Instead, he nodded. “Good shot.”

Randy smirked as if Tim and everyone else should expect nothing less. “I always hit what I intend.”

As far as Tim knew, that was true.

Even with apprentice level archery, he wasn’t half the archer that Randy was. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t been beaten. One of the instructors apparently had a friend with an archery Talent who came and wiped the floor with all of the ranged Talents a few months prior. But it unfortunately had only ignited Randy’s competitiveness instead of quelling it.

Tim took a slow breath as he turned around, letting the moment pass.

He would simply refuse to take on any more delves with Randy, even if he was the best Tier 4 archer at the academy.

In fact, their whole team was a bit of a shit show and he didn’t need any special entry to tell him exactly why. They were all the bests of their respective fields except Tim, who while not the best at a specific field, was a one of the better all-rounders, which helped the team cover any potential weak points.