The Path of Ascension Chapter 524

Chapter 524

With Tick and Tock’s return to the battlefield, they captured everyone's full attention. Each Great Power wanted to see how the newly returned Ascenders would fare, and when their first battle happened, there was a brief moment where the tight surveillance that all the other Ascenders were subject to loosened.

It wasn't much, and it wasn’t long, hardly a blip on the total coverage. However, On The Last Line, along with Matt, Liz, and Aster, were ready and waiting for exactly that instant where attention wavered.

The three of them had to use a combination of their ship's defensive equipment, a strange realm reward, and two of their crew’s Talents to break contact, but they managed it cleanly.

In the end, it was only the Ascender Chat that made coordinating their plan feasible as three teams kept in contact.

Matt was sure no one expected their move, even if they weren't surprised. In preparation for this moment, both Ascender teams had been playing nice with their Generals’ orders for the last thirty years.

As they’d told Esther and Lawrence, they needed the distraction for what they wanted to do. All of them had hated the current stalemate, and they’d all been pushing hard for some kind of way to break the status quo that wasn’t a detriment to their own sides.

He’d initially tossed the idea of raiding the Federation’s Dankor system as something closer to a joke than a real suggestion, but the other six had jumped on the idea. It had started as idle chatter about how mad the Federation would be, but the more they discussed it, the more they realized how good of an idea it was.

It wouldn’t be easy, all of the Great Powers kept their Dankor systems deep in their heartlands and they were always defended by several teams of Tier 35 high elites. Long standing policy meant they knew the Federation would retract their frontlines rather than let them strike that deep inside their heartland. But while six or so pinnacle elites would be more than enough to repel most Ascender teams, it wasn’t nearly enough to stop two of them.

The core problem they had to solve had been getting that deep into Federation space without them catching on to their true target. They knew from the outset that they wouldn’t be able to make it that far, but the longer the confusion lasted, the less time the Federation would have to concentrate their forces.

Stealth was undoubtedly the first part of the plan. That was why, after they cleared out a battlefield, Liz ordered their captain to veer off course and to a seemingly random location in between world nodes.

Even with the crew knowing the plan, the ship’s atmosphere grew a dozen times more tense after the order went out. Crew members rechecked their systems, gear, and personal weapons before most idle chatter dimmed until it vanished.

This deep in the war none of them bothered with speeches, but they did make the time to do some rounds and chat with those they found.

It didn’t help that by being in chaotic space the rest of the crew only had limited access to data sources, but for this mission they’d needed to put the ship on full lockdown. With their cloaking they couldn’t risk a signal being traced, which meant only the Ascender Chat still worked.

The three of them used their travel time to watch Tick and Tock’s return.

Matt’s first real impression was that the duo’s time based fighting style made things look easy. He also knew a part of that was them engaging with a lone team of peak elite Paladins who’d been holding down a front Maya hadn’t been able to get around to in over a decade.

What he found unsurprising, but the military reports seemed baffled by, was the duo didn’t have rust to shake off so much as they needed to get back in the groove. Their first fight proved that to all the watchers as they overwhelmed the four man team in an instant when they’d decided the fight was over.

At first there had been a few rounds of back and forth, with both sides feeling each other out, but in an eerie approximation of watching Max fight, the flow of battle fully shifted to the Republic Ascenders.

Lawrence used his spatha like a scalpel as he ducked under a grab that appeared through a [Portal] aimed for his head and severed the limb, despite its armor plating, as he found a seemingly minute stress point in the armor. At the same moment, Esther used her whip to shatter one of the Paladin’s attacks, before it slithered around the shield and yanked it out of line for her previous spell, which landed at that exact moment.

The Corporations probably could have recovered, but Lawrence then split into three copies of himself that each attacked one of the remaining Paladins, where he overwhelmed them in short order.

It wasn’t necessarily anything new, everything they’d done had been seen before in their previous wars, but few people would assume they were anything but the relatively seasoned Ascenders that they were.

Matt wished he could be a fly on the Federation's wall as they realized what they’d accidently given the Republic, but he tempered that feeling with the knowledge he’d have to fight the duo sooner than later.

Still, their reentrance into the war did its job perfectly. When everyone finally managed to pull their focus off the show, they found out the Empire and Clans’ Ascender teams had vanished.

Matt was sad to see that the Federation wasn’t as stupid as they were cruel, and almost immediately recognized the threat. Only hours after both team's disappearance, they started retracting their elites. However, they had to contend with the fact that the Federation had far more places of value than they had pinnacle elites to defend them all.

After all, one pinnacle elite couldn’t repel a single Ascender.

As Matt, Liz, Aster, Zack, and Allie had proven in the previous war, two teams of Ascenders needed far more assets dedicated to stopping them. Spreading their pinnacle elites out across all of their high value areas would only see them picked off one by one. Even if they couldn’t kill all of their closest things to a peer before they used an escape talisman or other lifesaving measure, they’d get one or two, and there simply weren’t that many pinnacle elites in each Great Power to make such losses sustainable.

Best of all, this time the Federation didn’t have two other Great Powers ready to share that burden or widen their applicant pool. Nor were they Tier 25 any longer. They were Tier 35, and those pinnacle elites were even rarer than their lower Tier compatriots. The Federation were undoubtedly unwilling to sacrifice any more of such units than was absolutely necessary to repel them.

Only an hour after they arrived at their featureless destination, a Clans ship appeared next to them as it dropped its active shielding. It was smaller than their ship, but had around the same crew capacity, which made things a lot easier.

Matt floated out with Liz and Aster as the three of them waved at the quartet who got stuck in the single person hatch as they all tried to leave at the same time.

Moe quickly punched Brian’s head off to dislodge them all, which pulled a laugh out of Matt, who couldn’t help it given the spectacle.

Moe shook his fist as he growled in his thickest dwarven accent at Matt before dropping it almost immediately. “I’ll ‘ive ‘ou ‘ne too ifin ya wan! I will! Can you believe people have been asking me if I think you are stronger than me? Do you know what I tell ‘em?”

Matt never got the chance to answer as Moe fluctuated on. “I tell em, of course you aren’t stronger than me! I’m the strongest person at Tier! And I’ll prove it on this voyage!”

“Terms?” Matt didn’t quibble and stuck his hand out to take the bet.

He didn’t necessarily think he’d win in any kind of competition of raw strength, but he was confident enough to try now that he knew the dwarven team didn’t intend to linger in the war Tiers any longer.

Moe broke out into a wide grin as he took Matt’s forearm and squeezed. “Good man. Hey, you really are tough now. I have to use serious strength to move your flesh. How durable are you when fully buffed? Ellen says you have to have some serious spikeage. Show me a little!”

Matt was glad he wasn’t wearing his war gear as his flesh indented in a way it hadn’t since his augment was implanted. Instead of giving away any more information than his passive durability increase, he clapped the dwarf on the shoulder and looked into his eyes as he said. “There’s no way I’m giving you any advantages if we are making a bet.”

Before Moe could puzzle out a counter to that logic, Ellen and Krodag arrived and he traded the dwarf off to Aster, who immediately got pestered for ice cream.

Not that their reunion was private for long. The rest of the Clans’ ship’s crew followed them out not long after. Although most of them used the larger cargo hatches and no one needed their head knocked off to fit.

They were universally short, with the humans riding the legal limit, but Matt didn’t think that would make things all that much more comfortable for what they were about to do. Neither of their ships were lightly staffed, and space was always at a premium when traveling in chaotic space. It would make merging crews an ordeal in and of itself.

It was also a sad necessity, given how much faster their ship was than the Clan one. Their ship was good but it wasn’t built around Matt’s level of mana.

The skeleton that Brian was using as his main avatar put on its own special brand of show as he pulled a small zombie frog out of his sleeve. It wasn’t a pocket space in the traditional sense, but Matt could instantly tell that it was related to Brian’s Domain in some ancillary way.

The second it was free, the frog pulled in a deep breath, sucking the ship into its stomach where it shrank down to a pea sized figurine.

Liz reached up and closed his mouth, to the other’s delight, as he did the same to Aster, who reached back around to help Liz.

On The Last Line chortled as they reveled in pleasure at their shock.

Brian pet the frog with a malicious skeletal grin. “This little guy’s a Volume Frog I keep on hand for storing sensitive things without worrying about the weight. I still can’t believe people hunted these poor guys into extinction. Why didn’t they think about everyone else and make a breeding program?”

“What the fuck is that!?”

Liz’s small gasp mirrored Matt’s feelings perfectly.

Ellen was immediately unhelpful as she added more fuel to the fire of his curiosity. “The records indicate they did, but sabotage ensured they all died. That probably exacerbated the problem, given how they’d deliberately collected all of the wild ones. Records indicate it was three to four cycles of Great Powers ago, which puts it at least a hundred to a hundred and twenty million years old. Truth be told, all we know is from what Wun found. It's a little sketchy.”

Aster leaned in and added her own question. “The more interesting question is, where did you find a corpse so intact that it can still swallow things if it's from so long ago? I’ve never even seen something like this before, and I watch the worst kind of movies that would love something so powerful.”

Brian’s skull looked smug despite not having any features as he shot Matt a haughty look. “After someone decided to show off with their house, I decided I needed to have something super awesome myself!”

Krodag coughed into his hand as he elaborated, “Wun found it when he fell into a slipstream in chaotic space and stumbled upon a broken world. According to him, most of what he found was useless, but a museum was mostly intact and this was one of the things he found.”

Moe piled on as he added, “He plans to make a splash with the reveal during the after war party, but Brian begged Wun for months to get the frog so he could use it for the war. Don’t tell Lila or Max, because he’s planning on fleecing both of them. As for the frog. Well, it's been useful.”

The last was only added after a small sigh, but that didn’t lower Matt’s awe.

Brian deflated as the story came out, not that it took away from the fact he’d managed to turn a taxidermied specimen into a working undead that could swallow objects the same way the previous living specimens had been able to. That should have been impossible for so many reasons, and that it was Brian to do so meant all his questions would go unanswered

Matt had never heard of such a wondrous creature, and was mildly shocked that something so valuable had existed. He was less shocked to learn about their fate, according to the museum’s plaques.

It did explain why the Clans team were so willing to go along with them flying in their ship though. He’d thought it was because On The Last Line accepted that their engines were hard to match, but now he realized that it was simply because they were going to keep their ship with them.

Not that he was upset in the slightest. While a skeleton crew could have run the Clans ship silently in the void of chaotic space, the more visitors they had the better. More than that, he was ecstatic to let some of the Clans best technicians get a good look at the ship and how it operated.

It was a core, if secondary, part of his plan. Because more than the ship itself, he intended to add every member of the Clans’ crew to his Concept and tap them for their mana as they ‘pushed the ship to its limits’.

After all, what better way to prove his mana came from his Concept than giving a foreign Great Power a multi-year first hand crash course? Who could deny it as his source of mana after he kept both teams full of mana and used them to refill their ship’s mana storage?

The answer was no one, or so he hoped. Ultimately, while impressive, nothing on the ship was unique or special to his Talent beyond the scale it had all been built to.

Not that he needed to wait long for the prying to start.

Ellen didn’t even pretend to go to the bridge and settle in. She just dragged Brian’s skeletal form to the engines the moment they were inside. She happily got lost twice as she pathed her way through the unfamiliar ship’s interior, but given the way Brian got slammed into a door frame or six, Matt couldn’t be sure it wasn’t intentional.

Matt didn’t need to be dragged along to know he was expected to follow.

With the Empire crew handling the Clans crew resettlement, everyone else followed along, though Krodag grumbled about the delay of sitting down and drinking.

Ellen whistled as she entered, the sound seamlessly and unconsciously sliding to Brian who finished it.

“You know, I didn’t quite believe the initial reports that you guys were using the Hendric’s layering system, but it makes sense. There is no way anything else could handle this level of design spec.”

Brian wasn’t far behind as he ran his boney fingers along a formation. “What if we rep—”

Matt immediately interjected before that idea could take route. “We are not doing any modifications mid-trip. I’ll happily play with models, but we aren’t touching anything in reality.”

“Bu—”

Brian tried to interject but Matt shook his head as he said. “You know it's a terrible idea to touch this kind of work outside a dedicated shipyard. I can be dumb sometimes, but I’m not stupid.”

With a defeated sigh, Ellen bumped Brian on a rib, making a sound that was a little too chime-like to be entirely natural. “At least if we take battle damage we can just prepare things how we want.”

“Thats what I was going to say!”

Matt tried to wrangle the two, but they were immediately lost in their investigation of the ship's engine and auxiliary systems. He kept up a mildly disgruntled expression to help sell the act to the rest of the Clans crew, but secretly he was beaming inside.

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Even more so when Krodag proffered him a bottle of something strongly alcoholic before tapping it with a copy in his own hand. “Cheers! To a new adventure, and fun along the way!”

Matt raised his drink and his eyes to see Liz and Aster, similar drinks already in hand. The sip he took proved it was one of the dwarf’s better brews, and he savored it as he hung back to chatter with the others about less technical things.

“So, when can we get in on that extra mana, hmm? I may have nearly emptied my mana pool earlier and could use a top off.”

Moe didn’t make it more than two seconds before he bumped Matt’s hip with an elbow. Rather than argue, he used the excuse and spread his Concept to the entire crew, including the four members of On The Last Line.

Moe clicked his tongue. “That’s a mite bit useful. A casual low six digits of extra mana every second? Yah, I do that in my sleep! No big deal or nothin.”

Liz laughed as she seamlessly pushed the conversation where it needed to go with a wink. “Pshhh. Maybe in your dreams. It's how we run this ship like we have been. Everyone gets boosted by Matt and everyone chips in mana to the fund.”

“Hey, I do my fair share too. Credit where it's due please!” Matt played off her words before taking a pull from his drink, earning a small chortle from Krodag and Moe, who’d almost immediately started playing with spells in their free hands.

Aster finished things off perfectly by hooking an arm through each of the dwarves’ arms as she steered them out of the engine bay and back to the helm.

“We can sit around and chat in comfortable seats where I can serve ice cream. I’m not eating while we stand, and I see no reason to wait for the two of them if they are just going to ogle the engine. Booorrrrrrrring!”

And just like that, they'd neatly covered and passed over what might have been a sensitive topic.

The mood in the ship remained surprisingly buoyant, even with the cramped and shared quarters, as the dwarven crew grew used to the increased mana generation. To facilitate Matt’s plans of keeping to the official story, they started working to integrate the crews for the eventual ship to ship battles they’d find themselves in.

As their Great Powers’ respective Ascenders, their personal crews were all the best of their field, with most having a Talent or at least a Domain in their specialty. Doubling up on that advantage had small but noticeable impacts as unique advantages were carefully applied where they wouldn’t interfere.

Matt kept his Insight watching everything that happened within their ship and he was quite content with the results. The Clans crew, experts in their own fields, marveled at what his Concept enabled, but never thought to look beyond that for anything deeper.

Even with his own generous and very public contributions to the energy costs through the throne, not a single one questioned the mana’s source. They all felt his Concept bolstering their spirit to create far more mana than normal, and they all knew that his Concept was more effective on himself than them.

The conclusions made themselves.

It had been risky, he knew that, but he was happy with the results, even if they turned around right then and there.

The other Great Powers were far less at peace with their extended absence.

The Ascender Chat kept them informed as reports flooded in from all sides.

The Federation had ceased its offensive and had even started showing signs of withdrawing some of their Tier 35 positions. That was a gamble that left their lower Tier troops more vulnerable, but it would take time for Clans or Empire armies to be rerouted to take over the abandoned worlds. It would take longer still for those high Tier anchors to lead to lower Tier victories as no one could directly strike down. Despite that, it was one of the three most important war brackets for a reason, and its loss immediately put the Federation on the back foot.

Sadly, they knew their disappearance couldn’t last forever. The Federation had already started to redeploy the same surveillance network of small scout ships along the border. Even without that measure, it was outright impossible for them to traverse so deeply into the Federation heartland without being spotted.

They’d known all of that, but then again, they expected to be seen. It was why they wanted to make a splash large enough no one could ignore to kick things off.

Their first target was one of the Federation's most important locations near the border. It was a place no Great Power wanted enemies. One of their secondary capital planets and a Tier 43 world.

A bustling metroplex with four additional inhabited worlds to help support the immense populations that gathered around such a world, it was well defended by two armies with two peak elite teams. At least during normal times. Such positions were kept as backline rotations and quite cushy during normal times but their disappearance meant such times had ended.

Those typical troops had been reinforced by only two pinnacle teams as the Federation sought to cover more locations, but none of that mattered to the two teams of Ascenders.

The seven of them descended on the outermost fortress world like ravenous wolves as they came out of Matt’s long range [Portal].

Krodag started them off by singing a jaunty tune that also happened to cast several of his group buffs.

Matt felt his physical capabilities rise with each buff, but a moment later Aster’s own buffs piled on to him like a layer of snow. The combination made him feel like he was at the peak of his Tier instead of the early middle of it, thanks to the allotment of Tier 35 essence stones they had been given as Ascenders.

He reveled in the feeling, even as he pushed it further by activating his half merged [Cracked Phantom Armor] and [Archmage’s Presence]. Boosted, he and Moe recklessly raced at the shielded world and the three armies dug in and at the ready. The defenders on their side of the shielded planet unleashed everything they had from their towers, cannons, bunkers, turrets, guns, and personnel at the two of them, but buffed beyond the norm as they were, neither of them had any problem in barreling through the onslaught.

Matt pulled slightly ahead with a sudden burst of effort, which let him land his sword on the shield with a resounding but silent crescendo as the shield shattered under the blow.

Moe never stopped and barreled into the world hammer-first, laughing the entire way down.

Unlike Matt, who typically punched through the fortress world’s surface when he did that, the dwarf seemed to halt in his momentum an instant before he hit the ground. That was because he’d hit the planet with his hammer and focused all of that energy into the ground, while also using his Domain to ensure he hit the planet in its entirety, the same way he hit spells or clouds.

From Matt’s perspective the entire fortress world lurched, but he felt how the dwarf had sent it careening off its original orbit. More than any of that was the effect his blow had had on the world. His Domain hadn’t been extended to the people, or even anything beyond the ‘planet’ as a whole.

Towers were obliterated as sudden immense lateral forces rent them from their foundations in an instant. While the Tier 35 cultivators were able to survive, most were seriously injured as they were slammed into their own equipment and each other from the shift.

Not to be outdone, Ellen zipped past Matt, followed an instant later by a hundred winged Lizzes.

Not wanting to be left behind, Matt rapidly cast [Cracked Air Slide] to build up momentum once more, but he might as well not have wasted his effort.

The peak and pinnacle elites weren’t at the army base, and he knew the fight wouldn’t last more than a minute.

Wanting to speed that up, he set his Insight to find where the planetary spatial lock was based out of. When he had the most likely location, he obliterated that section of the planet with a [Breach]. With fifty million in the original cast, he was able to scale the spell up to a ship sized fifty billion mana projectile that cratered the entire region.

Aster, Brian, and Krodag arrived only a moment later, but he signed them not to go down.

His bond understood what he meant and used his removal of the spatial lock to scoop more war score for herself by grabbing as many soldiers as possible. While he was happy to be nice, they were officially on a timer, and what she did was little more than clean up the remnants so no one could contest their official control over the world according to war rules.

They needed to follow the rules because they were about to twist them into knots.

The world finally started to drift apart from Moe’s earlier hit as the others met back up with them having finished off the army. Matt immediately opened a [Portal] that put them right above the inhabited planet. He was the first through, but none of them hesitated to follow.

Legally speaking, now that they’d captured the inhabited world, they officially had control over the civilian sector. While they couldn’t interfere with the mortals, there was nothing stopping them from raiding the world's vaults except good sense and logic.

The vault was very much outside the war and they were skirting many legal lines by virtue of their status as Ascenders, who no one wanted to punch down upon. Having talked to Lila who’d been their Great Power's most recent Ascender to manage the feat , they understood that they would be pushing the Federation's patience to the absolute limit, but they were going to do it anyway.

The prize was simply too tempting.

A capital vault like that carried far too many goods that were basically impossible to find on the open market. It wouldn’t be the truly best goods, being a secondary capital, but the defences were still hardened to the point a single pinnacle team could hold out three or four times their number with the local guards as support. Normally more to prevent the planet's

capture, which would give a truly tideshifting amount of points if an enemy could hold it, but an attack on the vault isn’t going to make them less motivated.

Not to mention the vault being sturdy enough even local T45s would struggle to break into it before being arrested.

A large part of the reason it was so rare for such resources to change hands was mainly because few Great Powers ever allowed such locations to fall. Aiden had made his last stand on Rusty’s equivalent, but the Federation didn’t have their own Ascender to counter them, which meant there was little they could do to stop two teams striking from the shadows.

The seven of them flew down and through the clouds at their fully boosted speeds, moving so fast the Tier 35’s outer layer of defenders seemed to move in almost slow motion.

One more [Portal] got them past the impromptu line of defence and they hit the ground near the seat of governance, where the defenders had dug themselves in.

Officially, it wasn’t a royal palace, but to Matt’s mind it had more in common with one than it didn’t. Large, opulent, well defended, and warded to its teeth, they ran into their first issue when a cultivation suppression field flickered over them.

Matt hardly minded, but the others all felt the effects to greater or lesser extent. They weren’t keyed into the wards and he suspected that they’d been bolstered by a Talent and-or Domain, because they were far stronger than the ones they’d just faced on the fortress world. From Ellen’s spiritual fluctuations, he trusted her to find the key formation nodes’ locations and disable them.

As he had the thought, the two pinnacle elite teams arrived, with three peak teams backing them up. He felt as more elite palace guards started to surround the area in an attempt to contain them, but it was too little too late, even before the suppression field fell.

They each rushed a pair of teams and cut their way through, trading small injuries for large ones. Neither of them had any reason to hold back with another team there to support them, and they cut their way through the defenders in record time.

Both pinnacle elites and one of the peak elites managed to save their lives by activating their life saving measures early, but the other two peak teams were both captured by Aster and added to her spirit space.

With one more layer of defenders temporarily routed, they raced deeper, cutting straight through the ground with Matt’s [Earth Manipulation]. They arrived at the third basement floor by barreling through the wall and directly into another barrage of spells.

[Mana Beam] cut everyone in half but killed relatively few of the defenders. Liz did that by taking over the freely flowing blood.

Brian whistled as the group raced deeper to reach the vault. “I’m a little jealous at how well you guys can handle groups. That and not worrying about mana in a fight is a nice change of pace. I feel fantastic. Just finished a fight and I don’t need to recharge or think about mana conservation. I just cast things. It's kinda weird.” Turning to Aster, he stage whispered, “Do you guys happen to want a new support?”

Krodag laughed at his fellow support. "If they’d take anyone, they’d take me! I do something they don’t already have, amazing healing, and I come with charm.”

“You have charm? That’s only something a dingus would think!”

“Who calls people a dingus? What are you? Four?”

“So what if I am, huh?”

The bickering quieted to whispers as Ellen and Matt reached the Tier 45 metal of the vault and pressed their hands against it.

Matt tried to reach out and move it with [Metal Manipulation] but it was infinitely harder to move compared to the normal ground outside. Between its Tier and the exceptional quality of the many enchantments that were inscribed into it, including several to prevent exactly this, he achieved absolutely nothing. Not that he truly thought something that obvious would work, even with his mana, but he’d have been dumb not to try.

Lila had been forced to just rip the vault out and take it back to the Empire, but [Metal Manipulation] was far from their only option.

Ellen had closed her eyes but she opened them as she started quickly transmitting the security protocols she felt and identified to Matt who sifted through and categorized them. While every vault was well defended by definition and design, nothing could be good at everything. If they could find the vault's weak point, even if it was only relative to its strong ones, they might be able to save themselves the time and effort of dragging the vault back to Empire or Clans space.

While they worked, the pinnacle elites rejoined the battle from afar, along with more but weaker reinforcements.

Matt encased them in a solidified [Bulwark] but Brian and Aster dispelled, deflected, or absorbed most of what was thrown at them.

Brian even showcased two monkey-snake rift monsters that managed to cast dark gray barriers that were excellent at blocking any physical projectiles. Matt pulled the two minions under his Concept’s umbrella and he didn’t miss the fleeting but genuine look of pleasant surprise as it flashed across the skeletal face.

Matt was glad his Concept really was fantastic when a moment later, thousands of rats started crawling out of Brian’s robes.

Not that he could keep that much attention to it. Most of his attention had to be on the vault cracking operation, but he still had enough spare awareness that he was able to watch as the rats spread out like a wave, covering the floor around their group. Instead of rushing their enemies as he expected, they each opened their mouths and started gathering light mana.

After a moment, they unleashed their own synchronized barrage of death.

Through his Concept, Matt felt their mana pools drop to over half, but by the time their spells came off cooldown, he’d already refilled their tiny reserves back to full.

Brian was cackling himself into a speech when Liz smiled and interpreted. “They tried to take out the ship. Aster’s Golems and I just got two more peak elites. One was one of the ones we pushed off, but one was new. Good job buffing the Golems though, Matt.”

While they trusted her skills, everyone also knew their ship was the most vulnerable piece of their raid and any damage to it could force their early retreat. It had taken Ellen to point out that Matt’s three time upgraded [Reinforce Mana] could probably be used on his bond’s golems, the same way he used it to buff all of his own skills and items.

From Liz’s more detailed report that followed, he was quite impressed with the results. They’d been measurably stronger and more durable.

Those thoughts were interrupted as, after almost a minute of effort, Matt and Ellen’s Insights came to the same conclusion after analyzing everything together.

From there, it only took them moments to carve temporary formation plates and place a mana barrier around their section of the vault wall. Matt went further and added his own personal efforts by using one of his Minkalla secondary Concept abilities to drain that area of the wall of its mana. He further boosted its effect by activating his Aspect and slotting his white hole into it. It had taken work to get the boost to encompass his secondary Domain abilities, but he’d completed that in the first decade.

Their seals were far from perfect, being so hastily made, but by lowering the amount of local mana, he weakened the formations that strengthened the vault's wall, creating a small but localized fault.

As a capital level vault, they needed to be careful to not collapse the spatially expanded area inside, which would destroy most of the valuable contents, and that would be nearly as bad as letting the Federation keep it all.

Without needing to be told what to do, Matt opened up on the wall with focused [Dragonflame] and [Dragon’s Breath], superheating the metal wall even as Ellen explained everyone else's part.

It barely glowed, let alone grow red hot, but he stopped his flame right as Ellen directed Aster with a shouted. “Now!”

The wave of frost rapidly cooled the structure and at its most thermally stressed, Ellen commanded Moe to hit it with his hammer.

His first blow seemed as if he’d hit a pillow, but that was because he’d struck the enchantments, not the wall itself.

Then to end the loop Brian hit the wall with a brief beam of sickly purple and green energy. They repeated the cycle five more times before a crack started to appear in the formations. One more later, when Moe hit the wall itself, things started to change as his immense strength made the entire vault shudder under his world-cracking blows. It still took nine further cycles to make a physical crack, but as soon as they saw that, it spelled the end of the vault and they got inside with two more.

Thanks to their temporary formation plate and the vault's own amazingly robust construction, the space didn't collapse and they were able to squeeze inside one of the middle floors.

The vault was more of a building with nine floors stuffed with goods but from the moment they stepped inside, Matt keenly felt hundreds of Tier 40s watching them from a distance. More than that, he felt a weight that could only be the unseen Tier 47 eyes as they watched their every move with unconcealed hatred.

He wasn’t sure which Royal equivalent was present. It might be the First Crafter, who was the official ruler, but it might also be one of the more obscure Federation Tier 47’s, like Meadow Song, the Second Community.

They didn’t care.

The more eyes the better.

Without needing to be told, they all separated, aiming for a separate floor.

Matt wasn’t at all upset to find the stockpiles of rare Tier 40 and below resources. The skins of rare rift bosses already process into leather, specific metal alloys to cater to the Federation’s cybernetics, even the remaining slice of a Tier 35 ingot of neutronium. He took it all and swept it into storage rings they’d made on the way out for possibly tainted loot.

With Brian's Volume Frog they didn’t have to worry about the weight until they separated, and so they intended to take everything.

Despite everyone else's efforts, Aster and Brian managed to clear out multiple floors before they finished their own. Her spirit space and his undead let them collect items faster than even a hundred eager Lizzes could.

As they exited the vault there was another attempt to stop them, but no one over high elite was there, and they cut their way through without bothering to clean up any survivors.

They knew they needed to get a move on, and the moment they got to their ship, they ripped out of real space and into the chaotic.

There they found a familiar teleporting ship ready to try and track their moves, but the moment Matt opened a [Portal], they vanished in a preventive teleport.

The spell hadn’t been aimed at them, but the sudden flight told them a lot.

It all made Matt smile because he knew the truth. They hadn’t even hit their primary target yet.

***

General Raven wanted to curse as another day passed without news of his Ascender's whereabouts. They’d been so good, listened to so many orders, did what he’d ask for so long, he’d almost forgotten the cardinal rule of managing Ascenders: never get complacent.

He’d done exactly that and they vanished mid-war.

The Federation’s reaction was about what he’d expected, and the Empire and Clans had taken advantage of their withdrawal of high level combat troops to increase the tempo of the war. What galled him was that could have executed all of that so much better if they’d had any idea of what their Ascenders were doing.

News eventually reached him and as he saw the reports that their spies ferried back, he couldn’t help but grin a little. The Emperor was undoubtedly getting screamed at for such a blatant breaking of the rules but that wasn't his problem. His Ascenders could get that added to the things they were raked over the coals for after the war ended.

It couldn’t be denied that they’d grabbed a lot of resources and the loss would pinch the Federation's war efforts fiercely.

Such actions were one of the implicit benefits of an Ascender and past precedents or ensured they had a minor degree of safety. Doubly so given Lila wasn't the only Ascender in the Realm who'd pulled similar stunts.

However, rather than the expected return to friendly space, the now tracked Ascenders moved deeper. Following that line, he saw them headed not for any of the other sub-capitals which would have been bad enough, but the Tier 46 capital itself.

When General Raven saw that, any of his remaining good cheer immediately vanished as his stress blew past its previous levels and he wished they’d remained hidden just a little longer.