The Path of Ascension Chapter 469

Chapter 469

 

Matt’s form changed as he responded to the newest incursion from what they were calling the Sword Sect.

That was to differentiate them from the Flying Sect, which was one of the two aerial-based teams still in the running. There had been a third from the Clans, but they made the mistake of clashing with the Monster Collective Swarm team.

No one had known they’d done it, but however they managed to merge units together, it had been effective. Tree spiders were scary, but spider wasps were another breed of nightmare.

The Dwarves hadn’t known what hit them, and they’d contested the Swarmers on their shared border over the remnant of the flying citadel’s growth item gems.

They hadn’t succeeded, but Liz led wings of her phoenix units deep into their territory and burnt down several of their farmed forests, drastically reducing their troop production, which had allowed them to take several of the more important radiant crystal mines needed for the top level research.

Liz herself was a terror.

In the three months they’d been inside the strange realm, she’d used the dual reality of the place to further her own mental training.

Last he checked, she was at forty two fully independent raiding wings. They took losses, but thanks to one of the unique upgrades Liz had unlocked along the way, she could revive her units so long as a few survived. Recovery took time, but with so many groups operating, she was a menace.

Though, not quite as much of a menace as Allie.

Matt wasn’t sure if it was genius or idiocy that prompted her to have the idea, but it had paid off handsomely. Thanks to two of her normal upgrades, Allie had been able to create invisible sentries, giving them real-time coverage over large portions of the enemies’ bases.

So long as her units didn’t move, they were completely invisible, and their teleportation didn’t break their camouflage thanks to her second upgrade.

It wasn’t perfect, they were still physically there and could sometimes be detected through other means, but the information they revealed let them always arrive ‘just in time’, as he was doing now.

It was a careful dance to keep their enemies guessing, but it was exhilarating.

With everyone fighting through the medium of the strange realm, ingenuity, team work, tactics, and politics made the strange realm a treat Matt sorely needed.

Crushing two of the most common Sword Sect units, a glowing floating sword that tried to rush into the breach, Matt also commanded Stenson’s ships to repair the wall.

As if time reversed itself, the wall and the turrets recovered in time to block the next wave of a dozen swords.

They weren’t alone, but neither was Matt.

Two dozen of Gan Le’s tanks marched forward, intermixed with as many of Susanne’s units, and behind them were twice that in support units.

In the command room above, Matt selected and commanded the rest of their prepared units along the border to advance. While only numbering slightly over five hundred, the attack was a substantial investment when it came to the gear each unit was equipped with.

Most teams had chosen to go down similar paths, and the Sword Sect were no different, which meant the numbers in their clash were fairly even.

Matt kept his hero unit in the back, only moving in to support his units when he was about to lose several, as if he didn’t care about such losses. To reinforce that feeling, he then commanded his back-up troops into the battle, firmly outnumbering his opponents.

They didn’t give up the border region easily.

Their units amassed just out of range of the still-faltering frontline, preparing for a fighting retreat through their well-reinforced valley region. They had been skirmishing with the Sword Sect over this border for more than a month now, and both sides had known this day would come.

It had only been a matter of time, but the moment was now.

They would have to see whose preparations were better.

Smiling, Matt commanded his troops to advance fully.

Using part of his consciousness, he corrected formations, redirecting Susanne’s soldiers into weaker flanks, baiting the enemy into overextending, and shifting his own troops out of their counter-maneuvers on the fly. He even made sure that Gan Le’s units were tanking the ranged magics that half-heartedly peppered his units from afar.

He knew there was more to the attack but he didn’t react, simply commanding his army to advance.

The field exploded as Matt’s units reached the frontline, but he lost less than five percent of his vanguard units. Seeing that, he didn’t change his tactics, instead watching for his opponent’s response from their deeper position past the entire battlefield, from what Allie’s scouts revealed.

It took a long time for the response to come, and he had some suspicions as to why. Thankfully the response came exactly how they expected it.

A large army of close to five thousand mixed units marched in response to Matt’s incursion. Said attack was in response to the Sword Sect’s original probing attack, but that’s all it had been.

They hadn’t expected this level of response, and Matt even feared they wouldn’t respond, wasting his and Rah’s effort, but they finally sent their army forward.

Commanding one of Rah’s units to move in a pattern, Matt bypassed the strange realm’s normal range communication limitations.

It was limited, but they’d already discussed and planned around every variation they could think of, and seeing a large army was their best case scenario.

Outnumbered four to one, they stood little chance of beating the army in the field, but Matt didn’t intend to. Instead, he pretended to create his own skirmish line a few miles into their territory, acting as if he wanted to hold his position to wait for reinforcements. He knew they could see him but tried to order his units around as naturally as possible as the larger army marched ever closer.

Almost a mirror of what happened during his initial attack, the ground turned against the mobile force. However, instead of exploding, the ground collapsed as Rah commanded his sappers to complete their missions, causing the western flank of the Sword Sect to drop almost sixty feet.

The damage itself wasn’t too bad and the attack didn’t kill any of the Sword Sect’s army, not that they’d expected it to. The world was so gamified, they’d made sure to test if fall damage worked the way they wanted and it was a good thing they had as falling couldn’t but it could damage.

That was where the labyrinth came into play.

Commanding his army along the carefully intact paths, Matt used his ranged units to attack from above, while his melee units interfered with the Sword Sect’s attempts to climb the walls.

When that proved a losing proposition, they tried attacking the walls, but that was an even harder challenge.

While the strange realm allowed underground alterations, that wasn’t what Rah had done. That might have worked, but it never would have been as effective as what he did.

The original idea of the attack had come from a unique building they gained access to when they killed a giant golem boss: a labyrinth.

Scalable to nearly any size, they struggled to decide on how to apparently use such a large ‘building’ in anything but a defensive manner.

Rah had already considered using his units as sappers before that, but the lack of fall damage to units made the efforts not worth the time investment.

That was until he merged the two ideas.

Not limited to making the labyrinth on the surface, he chose to create it only a few dozen feet underground. The moment his units completed it, the ground above crumbled inside, along with everything standing on top.

As a proper building, the walls were now reinforced with crystals and far too strong for even fully upgraded units to reasonably damage.

Matt couldn’t help but laugh at how well Rah’s plan came together as his army quickly annihilated the enemy army.

Pushing deeper, he finally met up with Rah’s hero unit on the far side where he had been hiding.

“That worked perfectly,” he couldn’t help but say the moment he could speak to Rah in the command room.

Rah was equally jubilant. “We can secure this entire region’s flank with the labyrinth while we start moving the resources.”

“Oh I wanted to ask, did you see why their response was so slow?”

When Rah said he didn’t know, and nothing was visible in what Allie’s troops revealed, they decided to push deeper into the Sword Sect territory.

Seeing nearly no resistance as they passed by mines and buildings, their confusion was finally solved when they saw the other army approaching the heart of the Sword Sect.

Sixty foot tall monsters, reminiscent of the bosses the Republic team had killed, Matt saw them tearing into the final remnant of the sect troops.

Seeing the core of the base, Matt and Rah led the attack, rushing to try and claim the growth item gems.

With only a week left in the strange realm, they weren’t the only ones to go on the offensive, it seemed. And with both of them acting at the same time, the Sword Sect stood no chance.

While unintentional, Matt and Rah had no desire to share if they didn’t have to. Unexpectedly or not, they weren’t going to pass up the fortune. They did, however, inform the others to pivot as many units to their flank as possible via troop movement signals.

The battle’s opponents shifted, but that also made them much scarier.

The Republic Monster team was a formidable one that they’d clashed heavily with in the battlefield the day before.

They hadn’t lost, but they hadn’t won either, and Matt was eager for a much more interesting round two as they fought over the corpse of the Sword Sect.

Heavily defended with both buildings and units, the Sects team did their best to hold on, but under a relentless full-scale assault from two other factions, they crumbled.

When the final Sects hero fell, the rest of their units stopped moving and their buildings and resources became ripe for plundering.

They clashed at the growth item gem pillar.

The Sword Sect had performed admirably up until their downfall, with nine gems already incorporated, but the fruits of their efforts became a battleground.

Knowing they needed to hold on in the crucial early moments, Matt moved his hero unit up with Rah as the two of them clashed with three of their opponents. At the same time, they commanded the attack, watching as reinforcements crossed their vast territories.

Falling into an acceptable stalemate, as neither side was able to claim control of the growth item pillar long enough to mine a resource from it, Matt scanned the rest of the map.

Liz was still skirmishing in the other groups’ bases, but the others hadn’t been idle.

Aster, Allie, and Susanne were holding off an attack from the Ranged Corporations group in their south.

They were aiming for the radiant crystal mine in the area, but the three of them managed to hold off their assault without too much effort.

Their south, at least, was far more industrialized, with proper supply trains to move resources and half-finished products deeper into the base from their ever-expanding sprawl.

It was almost amusing, but the crystals then came back in the form of newly arriving units who matched their attacker.

They’d named the Ranged Corporations group that because they preferred ranged combat, not because they could only attack from a distance. They were one of the stronger remaining competitors, with their own vast territory.

Their mammoth units were like walking tanks with the layers of armor piled on them, while their more offensive units rode on their backs or from hot air balloon-like drives they used to snipe from.

The Corporations’ rifles were items, but they’d fully leaned into them and it paid off. They could field not only larger armies than most others, thanks to their cheaper base units, but their rifles were head and shoulders above the best portable mana cannons that their own group had access to after they ran out of ranged research upgrades.

Liz had originally run rampant in their area, but they’d set up scout towers to snipe any flying units that tried to cross the border with their range advantage. When she did succeed, her units were quickly hunted down. With her help, they’d recovered several weapons to study, but they learned little, having already advanced down their own individual paths so far they could no longer pivot to take advantage.

Destroying the weapons was easier and far more punishing, given the horrendous costs of fully upgraded weapons. The Flying Corporation, having not invested in their units themselves, had mass producible units still available from the lower strata infinite crystal resources. The weapons to arm them were far harder to pump out, and each one destroyed was a painful blow, so they’d long changed their focus when fighting them.

The battle was still active, but with Matt pulling most of the attention to the former Sword Sect, the trio’s offensive had ground to a halt.

Gan Le arrived first and Matt sighed; the fight became much easier as the numbers finally evened out and he could change out of his defensive form. While almost indestructible at this point, the upgrade lacked a meaningful way to deal damage.

Gan Le, after his own series of upgrades to his base units, as well as his hero unit, had turned into more of a mana-crystal-steel turtle than a man. But his defensive reduction aura was vital to letting Matt form swap.

Flipping into his offensive stance, Matt’s form slimmed down as it sped up. Using that sudden shift, he landed a deep cut on the enemy hero unit he was dueling, forcing them back and giving himself breathing room.

Gan Le’s arrival wasn’t enough to fully control the most important prize, but the tide started to turn. That was until the giant monsters arrived and threw their weight into the fight, evening things back out.

Slow to move, they were mere shadows of their former selves, but that was still head and shoulders above three of them.

Pulling back, they let the Republic secure the pillar momentarily.

When Liz and Allie arrived, they launched their own counter offensive and pushed them off the pillar, having only been able to mine a single gem off it in the meantime.

Matt personally mined the growth crystal with a unique pickaxe that had a thread of amber weaved through it. Said thread was so small, it didn’t appropriately represent the effort that had gone into slaying the giant pterodactyl that had taken over a windswept valley, but the effect had been worth it.

Swapping into his harvesting form, Matt was left incredibly vulnerable as he concentrated on hitting the pillar in the precise strikes this strange realm preferred, rather than trying to power through it.

Counting in the control room, he cheered as he reached the magic number, three, and an extra growth item gem appeared out of nowhere.

Through exhaustive testing, they’d learned his passive could only work once per mined resource that was able to be reclaimed from enemies’ bases, which prevented them from mining and then giving back someone’s pillar of growth item gems over and over to farm infinitely. Exploits aside, the upsides were more than worth it for him to risk the mining himself.

He could have used one of his own units, but they were slower and he only had the one pickaxe that let him push his upgrade from an extra resource every fifth to every third.

They’d hoped to find a way to go lower to abuse their advantage, but Matt was personally content, given they already had the most growth item gems out of any remaining team by a long shot.

Still chipping away at the crystal, Liz and Rah worked together to protect Matt as he grabbed three more gems before backing away.

Leaving the final gem to the Republic team was a bit of politics all on its own, but the other side seemed to accept it and their advances stopped. Both sides settled down on their newly-created border, content to feast on the corpse of the Sword Sect and the resource nodes that were either undepletable or not fully tapped out.

That just meant more free resources for them.

Chances were they’d be fighting each other sooner than later, but that wasn’t now. They were running out of time and crystals, which led to everyone saving up strength for a large final push, most likely at them, given they had the most to lose.

Their daily battleground was against the Flying Sect group, but they weren’t keen on avenging their compatriots. Their attention was focused entirely on the singular growth item gem waiting to be harvested.

With a floating island as their base even in the battleground, they were more mobile and immediately aimed for the resource, but it required a full uninterrupted ten minutes to mine the ore, ensuring speed wasn’t a determining factor.

The Flying Sect team started building ground-based fortifications as they floated above with flocks of harpies patrolling the sky.

Rah used his units to carve trenches through the ground, making it hard for the harpies to swoop down and use their now-glowing claws to attack, and usually kill, a unit.

From inside the fortifications, their own ranged units returned fire.

Zack’s units cast protective spells as attacks rained down from above.

Dozens of unit types assisted the harpies as they struck devastation into anything they hit.

Matt pegged them at nearly half as strong as a hero unit, which was impressive. His own units had been upgraded quite a lot, chasing after more resource improvements. But even accounting for the normal variation of upgrade paths, the harpies were damn strong. It did imply they’d pumped every special resource into that singular unit, which might open the Flying Sect up to other weaknesses…

After sharing that thought with the others, they started looking for any noticeable weaknesses.

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They were so interested in that, they actually stopped truly trying to take the growth item gem, only interrupting their competition to reset their progress when they had to.

With the initial blitz taken care of, they were able to settle in, with neither side willing to admit defeat.

With few other resources on the map, they quickly mined everything and started pulling from their reserves.

They’d won more than a few early fights by simply having deeper pockets than their opponents, but everyone entered with enough to fight for the entire hour, or risked being defeated in detail. They suspected the two teams they hadn’t encountered or seen had been eliminated like that, but they couldn’t be sure with their limited information.

When the harpies couldn’t stop their advance, the Sects team pulled out one of their trump cards.

They dared to risk one of their hero units.

A nearly human-looking man leapt to the ground from their fortress, grappling with and destroying one of Gan Le’s units in two hits. Shining with copper light, he quickly turned the tide in the Sects’ favor and the timer ticked down to the final minute.

Even the harpies’ attack tempo increased to the maximum, trying to slow their reinforcements down, regardless of the casualties. Aster and Zack sacrificed fifty of Magnus’ units to merge two spells and cast a massive blizzard that covered the airspace above the trenches, giving their units a moment of respite. One of their earlier upgrades, they’d been saving that move for the final clashes.

That was when Allie moved.

She teleported next to the Sects hero unit, and using one hand, grabbed his wrist while her other drove a yellow crystalline dagger into his neck.

The moment the attack landed, she vanished once more, which let her avoid the active spells cast around the hero to trap their response.

The poison that flooded the area killed every unit within its range, but upon seeing that they backed off, letting the final few seconds go uncontested.

Confident with their victory, the Sects group didn’t expect the massive ice golems that formed out of the still-lingering ice banks.

Envisioned to battle the Clans’ giant robot units, the golems had no trouble tanking the harpies’ attacks while rushing the mined gem.

The hero unit grabbed the gem and tucked it under an arm as he jumped into the air and grabbed onto a wisp of wind that tethered him to the platform and started reeling him in.

He nearly made it.

A golem clapped its hands together, trying to force him to jump away, where he’d have to start over.

However, to everyone’s surprise, he didn’t hold onto the growth item gem or try to save himself; instead he tossed it to a nearby harpy and sacrificed himself to the golem’s attack. The hero unit’s elimination ensured the enemy team got the growth item gem, but Matt and team didn’t have any quick ways of taking down the battlefield flying fortress, so they backed off.

They had plans, but they were centered on the normal map’s battlefield. They’d been planning for the final week’s inward focus for the past month, and had no intentions of playing their hand now for a single growth item gem.

Even their attack on the Sword Sect was meant to strengthen their borders more than it had been to eliminate an enemy.

They’d been doing too well and knew the other groups would eventually turn on them, hoping to cannibalize their thirty eight growth item gems.

Most groups had gathered enough of the gems, but they were the only one with more than two or more stacks of the reward, and it was unlikely for anyone to expand outward any more. The overworld monsters at their current range were simply too strong to be wiped out without weakening oneself to the point any other group would be foolish not to attack.

The Clans team who suffered that fate had stopped everyone else from expanding after the second month, leading to everyone consolidating their gains and preparing for the final week.

And they were right.

With three days left, every other group still remaining in the strange realm attacked them in near unison.

They were ready.

Their first response was to drag the Flying Sect’s fortress into a mountain range, where they tethered it with enormous crystalline chains that they hoped would take at least a day to break through. They tried a similar tactic on the Flying Corporation group, but they avoided the trap and forced them to meet them in aerial combat with Liz’s units. Still, that was acceptable.

They could handle one flying enemy, not two.

Having retrieved all of her harassing units in advance, as well as having prepared well for this final showdown, their team finally abused their crystal advantage. In a golden flood, they dumped more units onto the battlefield than anyone could have expected.

Keeping rough track of their extra crystal production after the first week, they’d saved a large portion of their unexplainable units, not wanting to let anyone know about their full capabilities until the final moment.

From the mountain they had started calling the Roost after Rah hollowed part of it out in his testing, two thousand additional Liz units took to the sky. They mauled the fighter jets, accepting horrific losses and then pushed through the withering barrage of laser fire to reach the Corporations flying base.

Matt and Zack added their own assistance as their defensive cannons opened fire, large projectiles of mana rising then falling until they slammed into their shields with enough energy to crack a mountain.