The Path of Ascension Chapter 468

Chapter 468

 

Entering the strange realm, Matt could have been convinced he was Tier 11 and back inside Minkalla.

After a moment, a pulse of light washed through the world and Matt found himself floating beside the rest of his team, but still unable to move or coordinate.

None of them had bodies but he could feel each of their minds, which made it very obvious who was who and he was happy to see the whole team, including the crew, were together.

As so few people had entered the strange realm already, they only had general outlines of how it operated. But their Tier, at least, didn’t matter so much as their combat experience, though even that would only be a larger part of the puzzle.

Matt was just starting to wonder if something had gone wrong with the strange realm when he felt an energy start pouring into him.

It was cool, almost like water, but that was his mind trying to give the experience a frame of reference. As the energy continued to pour in, it picked up flavors of him, but he sensed the pieces it sampled.

His Talent was the largest influence, which surprised him, but it took samples of everything in his spirit. The second largest was unsurprisingly his growth items. The energy seemed to pick up samples from each of them, even the ones like his house, despite it being on Palustris.

It even sampled his bond with Aster, though the influence was the second weakest. It was only a hair more important than his Domain, which was sampled to such a limited degree it barely influenced the final product at all.

He had thought the Domain would have been more important.

Unlike the small rush when the energy had entered him, it exited like the bottom had fallen out and it took his awareness with it.

When his vision stopped blurring, Matt found himself standing in a valley surrounded by small mountains with the rest of the team.

Or what he assumed were his teammates.

None of them looked like themselves, but it was obvious who everyone was.

They all stood at the same rough height, ten feet if the evergreen trees the strange realm had populated the mountains with weren’t different in some way from what he was used to.

Susanne was the shortest, but there was only a five inch difference between her and Stenson, who was the tallest.

He also wasn’t human.

None of them were, but his body was made entirely out of mana crystal. He suspected that wasn’t the planet’s aspect affecting things, as he was the only one. Rather, he was fairly sure it was an expression of his Talent.

Considering how much worse that could have been, he accepted the change easily enough.

Liz also looked humanoid but was clearly not, as she was more ichor in the shape of a winged woman than her normal form, though she didn’t have any weapons or armor.

Aster had become an otherworldly ice sculpture reminiscent of her human body. She still had her fox ears and tail, but where she normally looked put together, her new body looked like a feral monster queen of some child’s nightmares. He quite liked it.

Next to her he’d expected Susanne to be a sword of some flavor, but he was wrong. Instead, she appeared to be a set of floating armor surrounding a stick figure drawing of herself.

Where Susanne defied expectations, Zack embraced them.

A floating mass of arcane energy, he didn’t have a body so much as he had a form, though he didn’t seem bothered in the slightest, casually inspecting himself and the mana reactions going on inside of him.

In fact, he paired well with Allie, as her body, while humanoid, was more like an inverted hole in reality. She also had far too many eyes that seemed to appear with no rhyme or reason, which added an otherworldlyness to her.

From the information he knew, these new bodies represented their new lives in the strange realm, and if destroyed, they would be limited to the ‘command room’.

Splitting his consciousness, Matt found the room they had been in now had a view of the world they’d appeared in.

At the center, the only place not covered by a deep layer of fog, was a large clear crystal. It was very distinct from the rest of the map that had a day-long timer already counting down.

It also showed small representatives of each of them, and Matt noted its real time updates as Aster turned around, removing more of the fog.

Already knowing what she’d see, he turned to see a pillar of crystal standing tall at the center of the valley a few hundred feet away.

In the overview room he tried mentally pressing on the crystal, but he got a mental slap on the wrist as he was forcefully informed they didn’t have any free units.

Magnus, as it turned out, was a bit of a strategy enthusiast and had only been waiting to get inside to start strategizing.

Seeing the crystal pillar, the Seeker pointed with one of his hooves still perfectly balanced. “Let’s mine as we talk.”

Matt still wasn’t quite in the mood to joke, but he made a mental note to poke fun at their Seeker for turning into a satyr.

Digitigrade legs or not, Magnus was correct, and no one hesitated to assist.

Their intentions were great, but they didn’t have tools or magic to assist them and as such had to resort to punching and kicking.

Thankfully, their new bodies, even Zack with his lack of traditional body, were moderately resilient and strong. It still took them minutes of dedicated effort to chip a piece off one of the smaller side crystals.

The crystal should have only been a finger’s width in size, but it popped off perfectly formed, and as large as Matt’s crystalline fist.

When Rah, the closest to it, grabbed it, he completely stopped moving, still bent over.

Before they could start to worry, a three foot tall replica stepped out of him and immediately started punching the crystal with fists that turned into spikes.

It looked exactly like Rah, a sandstone statue but miniature.

Pausing, they all watched it work, judging its performance.

It didn’t result in no progress, but where it had taken them a minute to break off a single piece of crystal as a group, it would take the mini Rah closer to five.

Rah, however, gave them an interesting bit of news. “My creations aren’t great for mining. They start with a small earth manipulation ability, but it’s limited to itself right now. I know they can become stronger, but the how eludes me.”

Hearing that, Magnus went back to work, prompting them all to do the same. “Okay, that’s good to know. With that in mind, let’s check everyone’s disposable units before we go for multiple. Once we can see what everyone specializes in, we can make better plans. Hopefully we can cover everything we need without too much overlap or missing coverage. For now, let’s abuse these hero units.”

Alone, it took Matt closer to two and a half minutes to chip off a single crystal, but that time seemed to vary slightly for each of them with no discernible rhyme or reason.

He didn’t mind. His repetitive actions helped clear his lingered anger that wanted to find a reason to boil up. The mining didn’t remove the urge, but it did help him distance himself.

It was very unlikely for the world to fully de-aspect, which was a compress he kept applying, but it wasn’t treating the heart of the issue. He could save the planet, but he’d need to be strong enough when those same greedy people turned their gazes on him.

When Matt got his first crystal, he understood why Rah had frozen.

The part of his consciousness in the command room felt the energy arrive and a new ability to create an autonomous unit appeared as a new discrete ability his ‘hero unit’ could activate for the cost of a single clear crystal.

Having no reason not to do so, Matt created a unit and directed it to mine the ore.

With his crystal body, he watched as it also started punching the stone before doing anything else.

It didn’t look like him as much as Rah’s had, but the difference only made it blend in with the crystal it was mining better, rather than stand out. If the color difference wasn’t so distinct, even he might have mistaken his new unit as part of the strange realm.

Poking around at the still unfamiliar mental controls, it took him a moment to find his unit’s ability that Rah mentioned. It wasn’t as overpowered as his Talent, but he immediately saw its usefulness. Every tenth crystal mined was duplicated, giving them a free ‘eleventh’ resource.

Sharing that with the other’s, Matt had the next nine crystals funneled to him to buy more units and increase their mining output as quickly as possible.

It also triggered a new unlock for them, which Magnus was more than eager to learn about.

In their overview room, Matt found he could direct his units to build a ‘storage yard’. After discussing it they chose a location near, but hopefully not too close, to the mine. Without actual knowledge of what was coming they could only guess where the previous information was lacking.

Once they had enough clear crystals, they used everyone else’s singular unit to build out the wire frame representation.

That taught them two things. They could stack units doing the same actions, like building, but there were diminishing returns and their current sweet spot was around three. They also designated Stenson’s units as the construction workers after seeing their bonus in action.

While building or repairing a structure, his floating spaceship units were ten percent faster in their actions.

Like Matt’s units, they didn’t come with much of an advantage at the start, but their uniqueness and advantages would become clear as they progressed.

Magnus used it as an example of what they needed to watch out for. “A large part of success in these types of games is about abusing our units’ advantages and trying to snowball faster than the other teams. The same is true for the other teams so we need to watch out for the inverse. We might run into something crazy.”

Once the storage building was finished, it then allowed them to automate their mining units but it also showed a glimpse of the strange realm’s next challenges.

As a level one building, their units still needed to deliver the crystals. If left alone, mining units would mine and then walk to the storage building to deposit their haul, but that was slow and inefficient.

If someone actively controlled the units, they could command the mining units to drop the crystal and continue mining while another unit picked it up.

Not too bad at the beginning, when they only had a handful of units, but when they had hundreds, then thousands, that would become infeasible.

Thankfully, there was an answer: building upgrades.

For the small price of a resource color they hadn’t yet discovered, the storage building would create its own porters who could automatically do the walking back and forth. They were range limited and slow, but that was fine.

Creating their first building also unlocked a slew of new things.

Only able to interact with the more game-like elements in the overview room, Matt split his attention, letting his body assist in mining while joining everyone in the room, where they talked about what to build next.

They now had the ability to create unique buildings that would allow them to automate the production of units as well as upgrade them. The problem, as they already discovered, was that all level two buildings took a new type of resource they hadn’t encountered yet.

Following the theme of the first resource, everything was some variation of colored crystals that teased both their upcoming challenge as well as the things they’d unlock.

Thankfully, the most basic buildings only cost the clear crystals and were fairly cheap.

Doing some math, they plotted out what they felt was the best balance of bootstrapping and outward expansion, but that ultimately depended on what they found beyond their single little valley.

Matt chose to stay behind and keep micro controlling his units, as Allie, Liz, Gan Le, and Lura went scouting.

The Seeker’s paper body looked strange, with moving words crawling over her, but her unit’s inherent power was one of the most useful when it came to scouting. By sacrificing themselves, they could reveal a large area around them to the observation room with a chance to discover hidden resources.

Loaded down with a handful of crystals so she could create new summons while they were exploring, the four moved out.

Only five minutes after they left, they returned. Once they were out of sight, they felt themselves become separated from the main group in the overview room and could no longer communicate with anyone else.

Proximity was apparently a large factor in the strange realm, and so they started testing that restriction.

It wasn’t as bad as they feared.

Their speaking ranges were abysmal; less than mortal range, with a few hundred feet being the limit.

That restriction only seemed to apply when they left the range of their base, their starting location, or possibly the buildings.

Their command room maps as well as unit control followed similar, if longer range, restrictions.

Not being able to communicate unless inside the base or next to each other made scouting far more dangerous, but they’d dealt with worse.

The rest of them concentrated on mining more crystals and feeding Matt the products to create new units, as they hadn’t actually built the spawners yet.

Once they reached an acceptable number of units that could harvest the resource node, they focused on creating the few buildings that only took the base level crystals.

For an egregious cost in crystals, they were able to make a turret at each corner of their small clearing.

It wasn’t much, little more than a pile of glowing crystals that could fire [Mana Bolt]s, but they knew attacks would happen and they’d need to defend themselves.

For more long-term protection, they started funneling the crystals to Susanne. Her units were inherently armored, which did come with more durability, as they found through testing. Their main advantage was, however, that they still took after her Talent and had a passive speed boost that made them a perfect quick reaction force.

Long term, Allie’s units would probably turn into their scouts. If standing perfectly still they were almost impossible to detect, but they were more worried about fighting.

They were still collecting floating sets of armor hours later when their scouting team returned. Without them having to say anything, their return updated the overview room with everything they’d uncovered, letting them follow their path and what they’d found.

Thankfully, everything was well labeled as it was last seen.

Things could have, and probably had, changed but he doubted the resources had grown legs and ran away.

Matt whistled as Magnus’ plans pivoted.

The four of them had hardly begun exploring, but had already found several resource nodes, despite having only traveled through two of the mountainous valleys that surrounded them.

The resources were well defended.

They’d expected that, but the crystals weren’t clear, they were silver and purple things they’d only seen on the higher-level buildings.

They didn’t have any buildings unlocked that took the purple crystals, but they did have one that required the silver.

Matt just hoped the forge would do what its name implied.

Not that unlocking it would be easy.

Liz’s irritation was clear as she said, “We tried to fight a lone goblin close to the purple resources, but it took all four of us working together to kill it. The summons helped, but I don’t think we can kill the whole guardian nest given our current strength. The wolves were somewhat easier to fight as they didn’t have spells.”

Having their first target, they gathered all of the units, beside Matt’s who they left mining, as well as burning through all of their loose crystals from storage, creating more troops for their first attack.

Leading a small group of miniature versions of themselves into battle was novel, but a failure. The wolves managed to take down two or three units for each of their deaths, but they’d only sent a probing attack for a reason.

In the fighting, they did discover there was a small chance of the unit dropping a seemingly random colored crystal when killed, but it was far from sustainable or reliable.

Checking the time before their daily first battle, they decided to explore the other valleys and expand as far as they could before they tried to tackle the spell-wielding monsters guarding the better resources.

They were only able to gather a single additional clear crystal mine, found in a secluded nook, thanks to Lura’s units, but it sped up their unit production significantly. Even if the crystals needed to be transported between locations.

Most of the resource nodes they found were various colors, covering most of their available upgrades, but not all. A trend they did notice was the creatures that defended the higher-level resources had spells, while a few, like the silver, didn’t.

Without their own access to magic, Matt’s group could only throw numbers at their problems and hope the forge was worth the cost.

Their first real attack against the wolves with fifty of Susanne’s units failed. It did, however, have the desired effect, and the wolves followed the trickle of units back to their now much more robust line of turrets.

They didn’t have walls, so their units had to hold the frontline, but that was acceptable.

Similar to their un-upgraded units, the turrets took several hits to kill one of the attacking wolves, but they attacked from range, which bought them some time as the wolves targeted them over the units. They took damage, but they’d kept Stenson’s units out of the fighting, using them to repair the damage.

They only delayed the inevitable, as their turrets fell one by one, but combined with their second wave of attackers, they finally managed to clear out most of the wolves.

They did take hits but their bodies, like their units, slowly healed themselves. Though Liz and her units healed much faster once out of combat. They were sure there would be better methods of recovering, but they didn’t have them yet.

What they did have was an extra crystal mine to exploit.

Creating four turrets ate through most of the resources mined while they were fighting, but between them and the wall they managed to erect around the new base, the new silver crystal mine was well protected.

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It became immediately clear they’d skipped a step or two when their units were completely unable to mine the silver resource and they needed to do it themselves.

Mining ten crystals took considerable effort and nearly an hour, but with ten of them working on it at the same time, they had their first silver crystal and they were able to build the forge as fast as possible.

When the final piece of the building was put into place, it shimmered into existence. The building looked a lot like forge, but everything was replaced with crystals. Not only the walls and structural elements, but anything traditional made out of metal in a forge was replaced by a variation of crystal.

Matt tried to inspect the building, but without his real body, he couldn’t tell if they were unique or possibly something he could copy.

It wasn’t until they tried to interact with the forge in the overview room that something changed.

Dozens of possible tools and weapons were available, but they needed to both be researched and created, neither of which was free.

Zack figured out the research half easily enough. After entering the building, he’d been presented with puzzles of ever-growing complexity. With each puzzle solved, they got bonus research progress scaled off how hard the puzzle was versus the difficulty of the research.

Arden and Katya, both enjoying such things, assisted him. That turned a ten hour task into only four.

They started by unlocking pickaxes. For one additional clear crystal, they could equip their units, which doubled their mining speed and finally made it possible for their units to mine the colored resources, though at a penalty compared to their original speed.

Matt found the forge interesting.

It was the first building that almost followed normal logic.

While every unit could pick up and use any item regardless of body type or other incompatibility, it was ultimately that, an item.

Any unit that died dropped any items they had, and an enemy could likely pick it up or destroy it if they were so inclined.

Scanning the rest of the unlocked items, they quickly identified weapons and armor.

Weapons were simplified into two types: Ranged and melee. Though, ranged weapons were unavailable at the moment, requiring another building they didn’t have the color to build it yet.

They couldn’t find any mention of magic anywhere in the forge, leaving them to assume it was part of another building entirely.

Similar to the pickaxes, the melee weapons helped tremendously. From taking several hits to kill a non-magical creature like a wolf, they could now kill those weakest monsters in two.

That let them expand into two more colored crystal deposits before their first daily battle, hopefully giving them a lead over their competitors.

Teal and pink crystals weren’t the most vital resources, but they unlocked their first scouting building and a construction building that improved Stenson’s unit production.

The dedicated scouts weren’t as good as their own units, but they were entirely disposable. The scouts looked like glass orbs that floated around, but they were made out of the clear crystal like everything else.

Silent and with no combat capabilities, the scouts slowly drifted through the obscuring fog. Allie and Susanne’s units were faster and better at the job, but the scouts not costing the clear crystals that were in high demand meant a few of the group were at least using a couple to explore manually.

The construction of Stenson’s unit production building revealed to them the power of individual upgrades. Upon creating the building, Stenson was given the option of his first ‘unit upgrade’ which had the option to double the building speed of his units to a twenty percent bonus.

They hadn’t found the level, or the strata as they’d started calling the levels of resources, required for the upgrade, but they were sure they’d find it if they expanded enough.

It was only a matter of time.

At the end of their first twenty four hours, they were all pulled into the overview room where the day-long timer was replaced by an hour-long one.

The units that had been inside their base appeared in a dry scrublands, clustered around a central pillar.

Trying to enter his crystal body, Matt felt a resistance preventing it.

It wasn’t impossible, but he understood he had a limited time descended each round and he’d need to ration it carefully.

Without speaking, they directed their units to start exploring. In the process, they also learned they had final say over their own units, but others could command them when they weren’t actively doing so.

Useful, but it opened risks.

Being the first round, their battlefield wasn’t large, but they also didn’t intend to be hostile either if they could avoid it. While the strange realm allowed fighting and killing, destruction of their body would only lock them to the viewing room, not kill them outright.

From their bird-like view, they watched as their scouts found the edges of the area and started discovering deposits of crystals.

Each was small, much smaller than what they’d found in the main world, but they were also much easier to mine. Their pickaxes accelerated the speed even further, turning Matt’s units into miniature excavators, with a crystal being harvested every couple swings.

They discovered opponents a few minutes later when at a blue crystal mine. Three types of creatures walked up from further south, a humanoid rhino, a wooden puppet, and finally a slug of unusual size.

Carefully controlling a single unit, they tried to indicate they were willing to share the mine, but their opponents’ units vanished as quickly as they’d arrived without any indication of how they wanted to respond.