The Path of Ascension

Aster and Matt left the odd double rift and headed out into the cold. There was another rift not too far away. It wasn't overly strong, but it gave him an odd sensation that caught his attention.

This rift was hazier than any he had seen before. It seemed almost immaterial, or like it was about to dissolve into the background of the world. It felt stable, so he decided to enter the rift.

The other side of this rift was a clear blue sky with a chunk of the sky simply gone. Looking around the area, it was full of holes that led to missing sections of the world. Where the ground was supposed to be, there was only emptiness.

Carefully, he picked up Aster, and they retreated through the entrance. This rift was not stable enough for his liking. His AI had nearly stalled when trying to analyze the missing sections of the rifts. The one thing it did see was the sections of emptiness were moving.

The risks were not worth the potential rewards.

The duo took off in the direction Matt felt another rift in. He had a vague impression of direction, but it was too far to get much more than that.

When they approached, he found a small, fully armored figure approaching the rift. He was about to send a challenge, when the figure pointed a finger, and a massive blast of mana shot out in the shape of a spear.

The [Mana Spear] punched into [Cracked Phantom Armor], and its power sent Matt stumbling back and scrambling to hold the skill structure stable in his spirit.

Retreating, he waited for a second follow-up attack. When one didn't come, he turned and ran with Aster.

They were either a peak Tier 4 or Tier 5. I didn’t even get a chance to feel them out.

Matt felt his chest after checking with his AI. It said that [Cracked Phantom Armor] had failed for the briefest of moments, but he wasn't injured.

Feeling through the skill, he only felt his shirt was charred and a small hole where he could feel unbroken flesh. That was far too close of a call.

On his run to the next rift, he encountered no one else. He and Aster quickly slipped inside when they arrived.

The damp air hit him first. It was like trying to inhale water. They were underground, surrounded by crystalline walls that shimmered with a teal light.

The first monster that attacked was the puddle of water that was sitting quietly at the side of the entrance to a tunnel. It wasn't a large or very formidable creature, as a single slash broke through its outer layer. It splashed to the ground, giving Matt a minuscule amount of essence.

Checking his AI, it found the monster to be a variant of slime. It was called a Shallow Water Crystal Slime. The breed was exceptionally weak to physical attacks, but had massive resistance to magical types. The AI determined that Aster’s ice shards would injure the monster, as they were physical shards of ice, not mana constructs. The only trouble the slimes presented was that they could grow to absurd sizes, if the location permitted the expansion.

The duo trekked down the tunnel, with Matt killing most of the monsters, while Aster trailed behind, letting her mana regenerate.

When they came to the cavern in the tunnel system, they found a blob of water sitting chest high, and dozens of slimes sitting around the larger one. Aster just backed up while Matt charged in slashing. Each cut popped the slimes, and they fell to the ground, essence draining into him.

Less than a minute later, he was standing in a puddle of slime water while Aster nosed around looking for a morsel to eat.

The pattern repeated itself for two more caverns, until the fourth, which presented a much less monotonous challenge. A crystalline golem, standing nearly 10 feet tall, was walking through the slimes. They were careful not to get in the pacing monster’s way, and Matt paused to assess the situation.

He pushed his spiritual sense to the max, and got a slight feel for the monster. It seemed like a standard golem variation. The problem was, he only had his Tier 3 longsword and no Tier 3 blunt weapon. Trying to break the monster apart with his only Tier 3 weapon would be risky at best.

If the weapon broke, he was done. Looking at the sword, he debated on what he could do. After a moment, he decided to turn and leave.

This is why delvers don't just carry one weapon type. If I wasn't so poor, I could have done this rift.

Cursing the nature of unknown rifts and his lack of blunt weapons, Matt hurried to a different rift he felt in the distance.

This rift didn't feel odd like the second one, nor did it have a powerful mage at the entrance. Matt hoped this one didn't have rock monsters or the like.

As they stepped through this portal, Matt first noticed the starry night. He wasn't sure where he was. The gravity felt normal, but the ground was a dark craggy structure that his enchanted blade couldn't even scratch.

Before he could ponder further, Aster alerted him to their first encounter with the monsters of the rift.

They looked like giant maggots and felt strong. Mid Tier 4 at the weakest, but they were slow. Matt had trouble believing this could be the true encounter monster. When he dispatched them and got a massive amount of essence, he began to understand why they were so weak.

Maggots were larvae, so the question was whether they were the normal monsters, or was it whatever they hatched into?

Matt held out hope he wouldn't have to fight a giant flying bug.

That hope was quickly dashed when he heard buzzing around the corner of a larger crag.

It was a giant fly. This one was pulling itself out of a pool of gunk, and Matt quickly closed in before it could get its bearings or take flight.

The kill was easy, too easy. He stopped and looked around again. Something was wrong here.

He was in a rift, and they could take nearly any form, but this felt wrong.

This was deep space, as the sun was a distant dot in the distance, but there was breathable air, and gravity felt normal. An asteroid was the most logical answer, but that didn't make sense. Rifts usually were small ecosystems.

How do giant larvae and flies make sense in space?

Matt pushed the odd situation to the back of his mind and AI. He needed to complete as many rifts in the next few days as possible, and standing around to question the scenery didn't help any.

The rift was annoying, as the flies couldn’t hurt Matt when flying, but he couldn't do anything to them while out of melee range. The flies realized that and landed to fight him, but the wait took time that he felt was wasted. He had Aster save her mana, the flies weren’t too much of a challenge, and he had the feeling they would need her ice shards later..

The rift was easy. He killed giant flies and navigated through the floor of the canyon, trying to make his way towards the faint resonance of the exit. The uneven ground made the trek much more irritating, as the landscape’s hills and valleys turned the rift into a maze.

When he got to the final monster, Matt was surprised to find a half translucent tree with purple branches. Even stranger, this tree was a peak Tier 4, and had corpses of flies and larvae decomposing in its branches.

His AI brought up a window. It determined that the boss was actually draining the prey it had impaled in its branches.

That brought him up short. After a few moments of analysis, his AI predicted that he could fight the tree monster, but there was an eighty-two percent chance that it was a void monster. That was extremely dangerous, as any void element attack would be able to ignore nearly half of [Cracked Phantom Armor]’s resistances.

It would be the closest thing to a fair fight he had ever encountered since acquiring the skill.

The reward distortion next to the exit felt ready to burst. It was tempting him. Matt looked at Aster, and she looked back. Was he being as reckless as when he had found her?

After thinking it over, he decided to risk it. This wasn't a rift challenge. If it was, the boss wouldn’t only be peak Tier 4. It would be higher. And fighting the unknown was part of delving rifts.

Worst comes to worst, I just retreat.

Matt and Aster took the step needed to enter the arena.

Nothing happened.

He had expected the tree thing to do something, but it sat there, waiting for him to approach.

As he got within what he calculated to be its range, the entire tree slammed down at him.

Jumping back out of range, he swiped his sword and cut a branch off.

When the branch hit the ground, it started to vaporize. At the same time, the ground rumbled slightly. The tree clearly didn't like losing its limbs.

Matt's plan of standing back and whittling the tree away was quickly negated by the tree standing up. Its very roots broke the incredibly hard ground as the tree lumbered towards him.

Sending as much mana as his AI could handle, he demanded a combat prediction for this encounter. The threat of a moving tree was on a completely different scale than a stationary one.

The tree lashed out with a single branch, more of a whipping attack than the full-bodied slam it had tried earlier. Aster tried to pelt it with shards of ice and waves of slowing cold, but it seemed to ignore her spells. Its void element’s resistance to magic was already showing its strengths.

Matt sliced through the appendage, and the tree bled purple sludge that ate at his armor.

That gave his AI confirmation that this was a void affinity monster, but the blood, while thick and sticky, was diluted. It would eat through his skin, but his armor was able to hold its own, without destabilizing the skill.

Mentally, he sent Aster away from her position behind him. This wasn't a fight he wanted her near. If he had to hack his way through the entire tree, blood would end up everywhere, and she didn't have any resistance at all to void.

He checked his sword next. The durability enchantment was draining mana at an alarming rate in order to combat the blood’s corrosive effect. Even so, Matt’s mana output kept him ahead of the problem. This would indeed be a mana expensive fight, but he could easily fill the drained mana stones after his delve.

Matt dodged the next blow and ran towards the tree’s trunk. He was hoping to take out the larger roots and limit its movement.

Before he could advance more than a few feet, he was attacked from multiple directions by lashing branches. He cut through the first two and dodged the rest, until he was sent flying by a limb he didn't see.

The massive blow didn't get through [Cracked Phantom Armor], but it did strain the spell structure keeping the skill active. The direct hit was right on the edge of what he could handle.

He increased the skill’s mana throughput to nearly 8 mana a second. It was right at the edge of the mana [Cracked Phantom Armor] could handle without destabilizing. If he messed up and overloaded the skill, it would dispel the skill in the middle of a life-or-death fight, but he needed the extra protection.

He was still disoriented from the tumble. He'd have to do this the slow way, one branch at a time.

He kept the tree monster at a distance, and baited out the slam attacks that would expose more of the monster’s limbs. He lopped off as many branches as he could before the boss would pull back and try to shuffle after him.

Twenty minutes and two rechargeable mana stones later, the tree had no branches longer than a foot. Matt approached the trunk, trimming the remaining roots that lashed out at him.

Step by step he advanced. The tree tried to retreat to its previous hole, but Matt ran to cut it off. He didn’t know what the monster wanted with the hole it crawled out of, but he knew stopping it was definitely a safe bet.

Once it was little more than a trunk, he reached back for a deep stab, just to have his blade penetrate only an inch, before being halted on the thick bark.

Hacking with the enchanted longsword, he methodically ate through the protective bark, and eventually hit something vital. This tree monster’s bark was softer than the crystal golem had been, so he was safe to rely on his blade’s durability enchantment to protect the blade from chips or warping.

The slow trickle of void blood soon turned into a geyser. Matt jumped back to avoid being soaked, he wasn’t confident that he would survive being doused in this blood. It wasn't long before the tree monster bled out, and he felt the essence rush into him.

Aster pushed her intentions at him, and he looked at her skeptically. She wanted to eat the heart of that monster.

After some mental back and forth, she assured him that the heart wouldn't be dangerous to her. So, he stepped forward and cut its heart out.

The core was something he would have expected out of a normal monster, but not a tree. Instead of a knot inside of the void wood tree, there was an actual heart.

Aster distracted with her meal, Matt went to the reward distortion and dispelled it.

A block of metal fell out. A metal bar that radiated power. He picked it up and scanned it with his spiritual sense. It didn't feel like an inert metal, but instead one with an enchantment in the bar already.

His AI had no luck scanning for more information. He had purchased a Tier 8 skill shards database, but this was many times more complex than anything in that repository.

Matt was still happy. He was sure it would sell for a good price. Rift enchanted items always sold for more than their Tier.

This was the kind of reward that made delving worth the risks. He was sure if he could get a few more rewards like this, he could afford [Mages Retreat].

Before Matt could celebrate any longer, the ground began to shake. A silent roar that seemed to fracture the very air around him slammed into him. The edges of the rift trembled. Clearly, it was blocking whatever made the noise. The ground continued to tremble like it wanted to shake him off.

Then Matt saw it. It was a darkness that blotted out the distant stars, but the glimpse was enough for his AI to recognize the outline and shape.

It was the head of a dragon. The maw that blotted out half of the visible vista of stars opened again, and this time the fabric of reality shattered like a pane of glass.

Matt never even heard the noise as he appeared back on the training world, the cold biting into his unprotected skin.

The final roar had shattered his [Cracked Phantom Armor]. Reactivating it, he found Aster with her paws over her ears. His AI didn’t pick up any actual damage to her, nor did he sense any immediate danger through their bond, but his partner was nearly unconscious.

Picking her up as gently as he could, he looked and saw the rift was simply gone. That was a relief, as he didn't want to be anywhere near that monster. As he turned to set off, he saw that half of the heart was on the ground near her. He picked it up for Aster to enjoy later.

As he walked towards the nearest rift with a groggy Aster in his arms, the shakes started. His AI unhelpfully calculated the dragon’s size from the head’s outline and distance from the sun.

The beast's head was somewhere between the size of a standard planet on the low end, and a dozen times larger than that on the upper end.

It was all he could do to keep his feet moving. If that monster came for vengeance, he wouldn't know how he died. Or how an entire planet was eaten along with him.

That brought his attention back to the fact that a Tier 4 rift had materialized on its back. It wasn't unheard of for a rift to localize a piece of real space and use it as the location, but it was incredibly rare.

The logical conclusion was that killing the boss of the rift was somehow responsible for the dragon’s awakening, and its reaction at the end.

As Matt went over the possible repercussions of his actions, his AI gave him more bad news. That dragon shouldn't be possible.

Dragons got bigger with age and Tier, that was common knowledge. There was even a formula to calculate their approximate Tier and age, based on their size.

It was hundreds of times larger than even the largest Tier 50 dragon ever recorded. There was a Tier 50 dragon who ascended to the higher realms a few centuries ago, and it would be a mere snack to that monster.

Had that rift been in the higher realms?

He didn't think so. That wouldn't make sense. The essence density of a higher realm world would have instantly killed him. That was the main reason for people waiting to reach Tier 50 before ascending. Even, the crazy ones waited until Tier 45 at the earliest.

It was a well-known, established fact that even children knew. Matt fed his AI all the mana it could handle and reran the calculations. The answers only changed by a few decimals.

A thought query to his AI gave Matt a hopeful answer at best. It was an unknown variation of dragon, so its growth could be different from all the species’ members.

The .00000000000000000001% probability didn't exactly dissuade Matt from questioning his sanity.

Even that absurd probability was more likely than being transferred to a higher realm. That was a number so small, his AI just gave up calculating it after a few pages of zeros.

By the time they neared the next rift, Aster was groggy but now awake. When he offered her the remaining heart, she refused, so he placed it back into his spatial bag.

When the rift came into view, a figure crested the far hill.

Another person.

Matt drew his sword. Bringing it out in this temperature wasn't ideal. The steel was magically tempered, so it would fare better than normal steel, but the cold ate at its mana reserves. While he had recharged the crystals on the walk over, he still had to wait for the mana to settle in order to use one on the sword.

The far figure raised a hand and gave a shooing motion. They were clearly signaling that they wanted the rift.

He didn't want to give it up either. While it wasn't as bursting as the dragon's rift, it was practically singing that it had an abundance of essence and a juicy reward.

And I've already had to retreat from three rifts today. They don't feel much stronger than me.

Matt repeated the gesture at the figure, then pointed at the ground and tried to point out he was at least a few feet closer to the rift than they were.

The far figure shook their head and pulled out a spear, but they didn't advance. Matt then received a ping from his AI. He viewed the message.

‘Single combat until surrender? No intentional killing blows. No maiming. AIs calculate the winner? Winner gets the rift. Ascenders guarantee’

It was pretty standard, and Matt could use a good fight against a normal person. It beat worrying about a monster that could eat planets by a mile, so he agreed to their terms.

Their AI’s paired, and started tracking the fight by comparing damage dealt versus damage received. They would be able to calculate a winner without one side having to cripple the other.

After setting down Aster, who was still feeling queasy, he watched the lone figure as he bent down to comfort her.

They didn't try to take advantage, and when he stood up, they walked towards the center of the distance between them, after dropping what he assumed was a spatial bag. He was grateful [Cracked Phantom Armor] covered his own slim-fitting bag.

When his opponent was within fifteen feet of him, they took an aggressive stance with their spear and waited. Matt stopped as well, taking a more relaxed, neutral stance.

If his opponent was going to treat this duel with respect and honor, he would return both in kind. There were more than enough rifts to go around, but anyone who shied away from combat on The Path wouldn’t remain for long.

The wind was too fierce to communicate, so he had his AI send a countdown.

3.

2.

1.

When the countdown reached zero, they both sprung at each other. Matt didn't activate the sharpness enchantment, just the durability one to keep things slightly less lethal.

When he slashed with his longsword, his opponent met the blow with the bottom half of the spear, instead of what he expected, and kept their weapons range advantage. What actually shocked him was their strength.

He could tell this person was his equal at early Tier 4, but they felt slightly stronger in that exchange. Matt didn't feel any active skills, but they could have a strong veil, and his AI was predicting some blessing of physical strength.

It made him smile. Usually, focusing all of his essence into physical cultivation was an advantage that left him without equal at his Tier. This made things interesting.

With a thrusting lunge, his opponent's spear scraped against [Cracked Phantom Armor] but was not able to pierce.

He used the exchange to lash out and land a blow on their more traditional armor, cloth with thin plates attached over vital areas.

Considering his AI didn’t count that as a deciding blow, it must be strongly enchanted. The AI’s would account for the unused sharpening enchantment, so that meant it was amazing armor.

They both stepped back, and even through their full helmet, Matt could see them analyze his [Cracked Phantom Armor]. It truly was a broken skill.

He could aim for the pure cloth parts of their armor, but unless they had something that let them hit a lot harder, they wouldn't get through his skill.

Their AIs were constantly trying to counter each other, and essentially rendered each other useless. That left Matt with only his skill and training. He landed another blow, but it was blocked by the butt of the spear planted in the ground, stopping his momentum. He took a fist to the kidney in retaliation. It was far weaker than he and his AI were predicting.

His AI drew more mana as it tried to figure out the discrepancy.

Stepping back, they seemed to realize something as they visibly sighed with their shoulders. Matt’s opponent drew their spear’s blade along their wrist, between their gloves and armor.

Matt was wary of the move. Losing a match-up wasn't a reason to commit suicide, but it didn't feel like giving up. He sensed that the fight was about to turn much more serious.

The blood did not freeze as it should, and instead flowed like the water it was mostly composed of. When it gathered into a glob about head high, it started to crystallize in the cold. When it was solid, the blood mage launched their shard at Matt.

He didn't need the AI’s warning to get out of the way of the skill. His spirit screamed danger at him. This was a powerful skill. So powerful he was wondering if it was a Talent.

After his dodge, he faced the spear wielder, who had transitioned to a staff grip. The change in style made sense when he saw the blood hovering like a snake around them. As the cold froze the blood, it was pushed up and launched at him.

Matt prepared to rush in, closing the distance was the only way to end this fight. His only other option was hoping that they would run out of blood, but that was a vain hope. No one would use a skill that required bleeding out this early, especially if they couldn't manage the side effects.

When he reached the mage, he lashed out with his blade, aiming for one of the cloth gaps between pates on their hip.

A strand of blood intercepted him. He expected to cut through it like water, but instead, his blade bounced back. This allowed the mage to slam the butt of their spear into his knee. [Cracked Phantom Armor] took the hit without a problem, but between the defensive tactics of a staff user, and the ropes of blood keeping him at bay, the combatants were at a stalemate.

After several more exchanges, his bleeding opponent tried to trip him with a whip-like tendril of blood,, but that gave Matt an opening. It seemed that they could make their blood strong or flexible, and for it to be flexible enough to wrap around his leg, it also was easy to cut through.

Matt heard them say something, but it was lost in the howling wind near the edge of the canyon.

Blows continuously lashed out from one to the other. As Matt was debating conceding to end the waste of time, he felt an energy convergence. In a flash, there was a group of four approaching, draped in the Dual Stars colors.

The newly teleported group drew their weapons and shouted something, but it was also swallowed up by the wind.

Matt and his opponent shared a glance, and pivoted to face the new threat. Better to band together and fight off the intruders, than to both be pushed off the rift.