The Path of Ascension Chapter 527

Chapter 527

Matt, Liz, and Aster flew out of Collective Space, feeling as if they stood on top of the Realm. They’d strolled into one Great Power and ravaged two of their most important worlds, and immediately gone to another to do a repeat, where they’d been bribed to go home.

Liz had already idly wondered if they could manage a three-peat, but they’d run out of legal war targets. As much as the three of them had fun, they didn’t need or want another war thrown on their plates, which was why such musings were kept limited to the Ascender Chat.

The three of them lost a lot of that levity as they floated back through the frontline, but the crew didn’t. If the three of them felt on top of the Realm, the crew’s mood was in the next and living luxuriously. While they were happy to have survived the jaunt into the Federation, even if they’d collected a few new things to haunt their nightmares thanks to Brian's frog, Liz had made it clear the Tier 38 upgrade orb was a ship prize, not their personal loot.

No one, from the freshest Tier 15 enlisted to the most seasoned Tier 35 general, would have said a word if they’d claimed it as their own, but that was exactly why they didn’t. Ignoring the fact it was unlikely to be allocated to anyone except them, the crew had been in greater danger than the three of them.

If their ship had been damaged or destroyed, the three of them had enough combat prowess to fight their way out, but the rest of the crew wouldn’t have been so lucky.

They reentered Empire space and finally let their ship link back into the greater information networks. The moment they did, they were bombarded by messages from their time off the grid, but most went directly into the trash. They were questions, inquiries, and orders that were too old to be applicable after several years of time.

Matt only found their latest orders after he’d scanned and discarded all of the reprimands, but he didn’t mind. What he found more interesting was that the orders had been made and sent out only a day after their meeting with the Tier 47.

The content wasn’t all that surprising. They’d been ordered to rejoin the frontline with the Collective. Just in case there was any question of ambiguity, a follow-up order stressed they not enter the Federation frontline until specifically told to.

It was at times like that where Matt hated his Insight. Thanks to it, he understood exactly why the orders had been given, and he didn’t like it despite knowing they’d follow. The Federation had taken such serious Tier 35 losses that the entire bracket was close to collapsing. No one, least of all the Empire or the Clans, wanted to find out what lows the Federation might stoop to should the highest Tier bracket crumble around them like that.

A moment of consideration told him that On The Last Line were likely being kept on a much shorter leash as well. He got his confirmation with one glance at the Ascender Chat, though he didn’t feel any better for being right.

Matt had little doubt that the orders had come from Manny himself, which meant any attempts to buck them would have the Tier 50 come down hard. For a brief moment, he hated the older man for being strong enough to make the hard calls.

The feeling didn’t last long, as it was replaced with the knowledge that their job was basically done. While their orders hadn’t explicitly stated it, they’d stated in no uncertain terms they were encouraged to capture Collective elites or allow them to escape rather than kill, if they could avoid it.

With the knowledge that the Collective wanted to go to war with the Federation sooner than later, he wasn’t all that surprised, but wasn’t going to complain about the reduction of their duties.

He was a little bemused and very amused to see that while they’d been yelled at by everyone in their chain of command, even getting some flack from what felt like random army Generals, the crew had been unanimously given commendations. They deserved it for getting dragged along, but he still felt it was unfair the three of them didn’t get a single word of praise sent their way. They even got yelled at for not dropping the Federation vault contents off before they risked them in the Collective.

He leaned over to Liz and grumbled about that plenty loud enough for the helm’s crew to overhear. “Can you believe this? They are yelling at us for everything? Some? Sure, I won’t argue that! But aren’t we young and impressionable Ascenders who were led astray by our seniors? What happened to our excuses?”

Liz sighed as she slumped into him. She cheated by making some of her bones less solid than normal, but he didn’t mind. He simply forced himself to think flexible thoughts as he did his best to bend with her. “It's so unfair! We didn’t even get to use any of the excuses everyone came up with. Screw that shit! What about a break? If we are getting yelled at, we might as well earn it? Break time as we drop all our loot off?”

Matt opened a [Portal] at the same time Aster popped to her feet and punched the air shouting, “To a supply point!”

The crew didn’t need to be told twice.

Their stop lasted almost a week as the ship prevailed upon the armies' floating city that was a back line Tier 35 supply depot. Along with all the necessary army requirements, it had a bustling lounge area dedicated for groups as small as their ship’s crews, or as large as entire armies. They existed to give some semblance of normalcy to the troops before they returned to a post for what could be decades at a minimum.

The last thing they did before returning to the war was to meet up with a prisoner transport ship, where Aster filled nearly half of their Tier 35 capacity herself with the Federation elites she’d captured.

There was only one peak elite and no pinnacles, but the sheer quantity of lower elites she’d captured more than made up for any such shortcomings.

She remained smug for days after they checked their individual war score contributions once her latest batch of prisoners were accounted for.

“I hate the fact we’d only have a chance to beat her if we merged our contributions.”

“You guys can’t do that! That’s cheating or something. Collusion!”

Matt responded to Liz as he pointedly ignored Aster, “Honestly, I think this whole business of individual accounting is a net detriment to team unity. —”

“Yeah, because you're losing!” Aster futilely interjected with a bit too much energy to match her expression.

“Maybe we should do away with them all together? Just go to a bucket strategy?”

Both human and phoenix Liz nodded along, causing Aster’s pouting to escalate into her turning into a statue.

In the end, they didn’t change their arrangement but they did agree they’d need to talk before the next war. Aster just accumulated war score faster than they ever could hope to match without a similar ability to store people.

When they returned to the battlefield and its repetition, Matt used the time to look into some kind of miniaturization formation that might be able to recreate the Volume Frog’s ability. He’d gotten to see it in action more than anyone in the last few million years, but he had no luck not crushing what he was shrinking more than anyone else had.

His testing was a nice, if useless, distraction to occupy his time with until they engaged with the Collective. He felt proud to have eased himself into the exact same thing early on a different scale.

He at least enjoyed his sloppy ideas and its equally sloppy testing. He’d known when he started fiddling around that a warship’s helm was an unlikely place for anything so complex as recreating a singularly unique frog.

Matt already knew he would have way better chances trying to get them to reappear in a rift. Given how many millions of years it had already been since the frog’s extinction, that wasn't at all likely, but he still sent the guild everything Brian had collected on the Volume Frogs during their week break.

He’d found the time while Liz and Aster settled a bet on who could disguise themselves better among the resting army cultivators. He hadn’t been dumb enough to stick his nose into that, and used work as the excuse to keep his hands clean. The consequence was that Erwin, Aisha, and Theodore were already having the real fun of trying weird item and mana combinations with a weirder goal, while he had to fight in an effectively won war bracket.

Their fights with the Collective after their last orders were more like serious spars, where their opponents had to try to kill them or be defeated in short order. It grated his nerves to feel hobbled, but they kept to their orders and took out their pent-up emotions by capturing any elite they could get their hands on.

Sadly, that number was fewer than they liked. It was also probably more than their opponents liked. The Collective had started giving their elites a plethora of aura escape talismans and orders to use them the moment capture became an option. Combined with their orders, it meant short, unsatisfying fights.

Matt had hated it at first, but after almost a hundred years, he’d come around to its unique challenge and kind of liked it.

Against anything less than two pinnacles and a half dozen peak supporters, the Collective had no chance of getting anything but a lucky coincidence. With two of them having their Aspects, fights were far more even, which meant they weren't close at all without an amount of dedication their temporary enemies were unwilling to spend.

Matt mainly went into fights with a set of restrictions he tried to play by, in order to push a part of his skillset he didn’t often get to use. It was why when he thrust his sword at Alfonso’s face, and the elephant had to brace himself with his Aspect to take the blow on his armored trunk and tusk, he didn’t think too much of it.

He was more impressed by the Irontree Elephant’s resilience, as he was only a peak elite, and while he had only doubled the weight of the blade, he also had the sword in as close to a true cutting form his ultra heavy weapon had any more.

While Matt was content with being able to treat his sword like a club and get away with it, he wasn’t willing to lounge there. He’d known it would take an enormous time investment to learn the multitude of control skills that would be required to be able to use his blade at its baseline weight as a proper sword again. He’d been preparing well before he’d upgraded his weapon, but his Aspect sped the process up and using both in a real fight did so further.

As he retracted the blade and reset his stance, he saw the metal inlaid tusk was already cracked at its edges. While he saw them recovering, he suspected it wouldn’t be long before the elite activated an escape talisman and fled. Two more controlled blows, and the tusks risked shattering, and that would take months for the smiths to reinlay his tusks, if not years.

Except, that wasn’t what happened at all.

The space over and around the fortress world changed as something truly new and unique happened.

He was trying to appreciate the sight, but he didn’t let himself grow complacent as he sidestepped the charging elite. Because it was still a fight, he forced them to discard their nearly molten flank armor with a point blank [Dragonflame] during the move.

He figured it would buy him at least a few moments to appreciate the view for later study and dissection before he needed to truly pay attention again.

He suspected Aster would kill him if he missed even a moment.

***

Aster felt Ginna before she saw her.

The Ant Queen’s Spirit Space flared out from a bunker in the fortress world where it devoured the ground around her, the sky, and then space itself as it spread towards them. The tunnels that were revealed as more of the colony entered reality spoke of Ginna’s millennia of constant effort. It also gave them a preview of both her hardened defensive outposts fortified by Collective troops, and the countless ant drones she had at her disposal.

The drones were everywhere a human or beast wasn’t. They climbed on the floor, the walls, the ceilings, and each other if they needed to. It was an ant colony through and through, and a daunting sight to have them pop up with no warning.

However, through it all, the main thing Aster noticed was the Spirit Space’s deep brown color that came with earthy scents. It registered to her Spirit Space just as much, if not more than, to her nose.

It was familiar yet foreign, a small sample of what was to come, that she’d learned to distinguish from her early years of inviting people to her Spirit Space Forum. While things had gotten easier after the first two dozen, those first ones had nearly all been in-person meetings that inevitably came with exchanges.

The brown made sense for the Earth Burrowing Ant Queen.

Aster almost felt a sense of pride realizing what the peak elite's presence meant, but it didn’t stop her from opening her own Spirit Space in response to the ambush.

Ice, snow, and wind stretched out to meet earth and tunnels across the vacuum of space from where they’d been approaching the small fortress world. They collided like tectonic plates vying for dominance with a spiritually resounding clash.

She felt Matt’s shock, and the Liz on her shoulder seemed equally taken off guard, but she wasn’t. When she normally overlaid her own Spirit Space, there was a ground and sky. It was simply centered on her mental orientation and desire. This time, it appeared in relation to Ginna’s Spirit Space and turned empty space into a flat world with what felt like normal gravity.

Their Spirit Spaces were far more durable than any mere equally Tiered planet, but that would benefit Ginna more than her given their respective… design choices.

Aster could have overpowered the effect, but she didn’t. It was something she got to experience so rarely and it was genuinely helpful in high Tier fights, as it could greatly limit the collateral damage from such battles.

Space and gravity seemed to shift as those closer to her found themselves standing in her frozen forest on the frozen ground, with her massive tree at the center making everything colder.

It was people on their side including the two fighting Matt and Liz, versus a few million on the other, but she was okay with those odds any day of the week.

The enemies that had found themselves inside a world of ice and snow reacted as she grabbed at them.

They'd clearly been prepared, and the one fighting Liz proved to be a smart one, using an aura escape talisman the moment they felt the cold. The one fighting Matt didn’t seem so inclined. As for the non-elite stragglers who’d helped bait the trap, anyone who was slow in activating their talisman found their limbs sapped of strength and their cores freezing solid.

After counting, she was disappointed to find the actual numbers were quite small, but she didn’t begrudge them a good ambush.

As their Spirit Space pushed against each other, Aster felt like a weight settled over her shoulders. For a brief instant she felt like the Winter Queen she’d met in Minkalla. A monarch ruling over a dominion at war. She wasn’t just the country and its people, she was everything. The wind, the snow, the cold, the trees, the very land itself, and she ushered them to battle.

It was invigorating.

Matt tossed an elephant into her forest before he dove into a tunnel after the world settled down. He didn’t go far, only a few dozen feet inside. There, he halted midway through an ant corpse, where he stopped to cast [Dragon's Breath] and [Dragonflame]. The turbulent flames raged their way deeper, through miles of interconnected tunnels, where they roasted thousands of ants and singed any of the soldiers who’d been holding the truly fortified positions.

The flames were cut off as Ginna collapsed Matt’s tunnel, but it was a moment too late. Her bond moved forward in response, but Aster tugged on their spiritual link and he immediately reversed direction.

While immediately going after Ginna would solve the fight, that wasn’t how she wanted to win this one. How many other times would she get to fight a newly promoted pinnacle elite who had a similar Tier 25 Talent as herself, as well as a few newly advanced peak elites?

Very few times she was sure, and she wanted to enjoy it properly, one layer at a time.

Thousands of ants rapidly turned into tens of thousands as they marched out of the tunnels and into the cold and snow fearlessly.

The heavily armored soldier ants were robust enough they weren't immediately frozen, but she knew a large part of that resilience came from the aura of Ginna’s Spirit Space that each drone carried with them. Born of her Talent and in her Spirit Space, they helped the Collective elite’s Spirit Space encroach into Aster’s with every step they took.

It did more than remind her of Minkalla, but she didn’t have the time to ponder how that particular blend of powers and Domain mirrored that enigma of a planet's Courtly Warfare floor. And while she didn’t have her own inhabitants to spread her Spirit Space like Ginna, she was far from helpless alone.

Her first move was to cast into her tiara and summon two Golems. The first was a skill she often cast that way, [Winter’s Mirage], but the second was a skill she rarely used in such a manner due to how it manifested: [Dampening Snowfall]. The [Winter’s Mirage] Golem shimmered as if it was only halfway in this reality, but the [Dampening Snowfall] Golem fell apart after looking around. From there, it spread into the ever falling snow, crawling upward into the abstract sky of her small world.

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The moment it did so, the ant's relentless advance slowed as their buffs and abilities were diminished greatly. That, in turn, allowed Liz to start her own rampage against the fodder enemies.

It did mean Aster was forced to work doubletime to include each new Liz in her buffs as they appeared. Ginna’s Talent-made bodies had quite a lot of blood, but despite the insects' bodily strength, their conversion rate to ichor was certainly subpar. She noted it took almost two dozen of the horse-sized ants for Liz to make a new body compared to the two or three of a normal rift monster.

That might have been a problem in other circumstances, but the ants seemed endless as they flooded out of the canyon wall that buttressed up against her world of ice and snow.

Liz was more than up to the task of keeping up with the outpouring swarm.

Two of her cast [Ichor Tidal Wave]s back and forth across large swaths of the battlefield, but only Aster knew enough to know how Liz had transformed the spell over the years. Well, her and the ants; but they weren’t in a position to tell Ginna about how Liz transformed the entire wave of blood into herself, which let her magnify the skill’s lethality dramatically, increasing the speed it killed, then converted, the bodies. The formerly uncontrollable tides, swirls, and eddies had transformed into razor sharp needles and blades of golden blood that honed in on any weaknesses.

The tempo of battle started to shift their way as the battle continued, but they started losing ground when the ants charging forward grew thirty percent larger.

Aster recognized the formations being similar to the Federation’s rune soldiers without Matt’s update, but she appreciated his assessment because the similarity was only surface deep. While Ginna’s ants inherently grew stronger based on her own strength as a part of her Talent, Matt had noticed the runes were perfectly integrated into the ant’s flesh with zero sign of rejection. He’d speculated that they’d been born with the enchantments.

Which was exactly what she’d bet had happened. Ginna, or more likely the Collective army, had enchanted the freshly summoned eggs. According to Matt, while it had increased their size by thirty percent, it had also given the constructs a forty percent physical boost in return.

It was enough to confirm to Aster that the Ant Queen had risen to the status of pinnacle elite. She’d already been close, and with that level of combat prowess, her ant soldiers were now enough to rival a true Tier 35 soldier, two or three to one. With her millions, that was a battle very much in her favor without elites to turn the tide.

Ginna had properly elevated herself into a one woman army, and Aster was happy for her.

The new ants didn’t last much longer against Matt or Liz, but with their entrance into the battle, the rest of the Collective assault was finally sent forward.

Most of the troops were simply the fortress world's defenders and normal soldiers, but there were two newly minted elites, who were most likely only at the peak level. She suspected they were there to support Ginna, as they weren’t the three the world had already attracted their generals to send them towards it.

That put them at five peak elites and one pinnacle, but Aster had already frozen the elephant, putting the Collective down one before the real fighting even got started.

In response to the new advance, Aster pulled her towers forward and started casting through them, widening her own reach across the battlefront. Each wave of casts made her mana pool drop but she tapped into the mana stones stored inside the towers to replenish herself.

Then, when the wave of ants continued to spill out despite their losses, she started activating hundreds of Matt’s liquid mana stone talismans. She spent them as if they were free, and each spell crushed hundreds of ants, but rather than destroying large swaths of her world,

the damage was mostly contained to the few hundred feet near the border of her Spirit Space.

Unlike a planet, the sturdiness of her world limited how much damage even those overcharged spells could do, but she was grateful, as those trees weren’t common ones. They were the offspring of her hard work shoving every type of tree from every rift she went into until something managed to grow. They weren’t magical, but she didn’t want them destroyed if she could help it either.

As she battled Ginna’s troops on the ground, she hadn’t forgotten about the larger battle for spatial dominance and shoved.

Thanks to Aster’s forum, they were both far more prepared for the clash, but it was also because of that platform that they both knew Ginna was going to lose from the first exchange, even if she was able to drag the fight out into a slow and difficult one.

While the Ant Queen clearly had Aster beat on the ground, she didn’t have Aster beat in spiritual strength, and that was what a large part of Spiritual Space clashes froze into. Even if Ginna’s ants advanced, pulling her territory forward by the foot, she lost dozens of feet every time Aster shoved, and she couldn’t overcome that difference on her own.

Aster thought the battle was over when she felt a Liz vanish and everything went to shit.

***

Matt felt the Liz vanish and halted his swing as he looked through the tunnel's walls to where he’d felt the anomaly. She’d flowed toward a semi-renowned peak elite, Oakar, with a sponge bloodline, intent on driving a spike of blood into his center mass, when she was pulled into the aquatic creature.

Oakar wasn’t the first such fighter they’d battled, but he was the first one where absorbing Liz hadn’t resulted in their immediate death.

Instead, it was the Liz who died.

He’d felt it as that portion of her spirit vanished when one of the links to their teleport rings had popped out of existence in a way it had only a few times before when Liz truly died.

What was strange was that it seemed to only apply to the absorbed Liz, and not the collective.

However, any such questions went to the back of his mind as he felt Oakar absorb another nearby Liz who’d been forming out of an ant’s body. Before the sponge could get a third, he swapped places with that Liz and appeared in a tunnel directly next to the one Oakar was in.

That was close enough for Matt.

He solidified and concentrated [Mana Beam] as soon as he’d made the swap, and the sponge bloodline cultivator realized his own death was imminent at the relocation. The quickly activated aura escape talisman let him punch through the Spirit Space battlefield before the black bar of death reached him.

The other Collective cultivators immediately moved to protect the elite that had proven he might be a possible hard counter to Liz. They moved to swarm Matt’s location but they were already too slow.

Matt activated [Portal], punching through the suppression of the Spirit Spaces and stepped through before any of them arrived. From his vantage point above the fortress world, he watched the fleeing Oakar and tracked his movements. He waited until the elite had used a good portion of its energy before he cast his next.

The talismans had a lot of range, but so did he.

If Oakar could harm Liz in liquid form, Matt was no longer willing to play nice with the Collective. He wanted the man dead.

He stepped through a second [Portal], but the elite had timed things perfectly.

Oakar’s exit was near the edge of the local star's gravity well, just barely inside the zone where it was possible to tear through to chaotic space. So far from the highest Tier planetary core that was incredibly difficult, and the moment his body was corporal he activated a second talisman.

Matt saw it burn up right as the ink black [Mana Beam] reached him. Even as the bar of mana burned its way through his chest and searched the hard way for the cultivator's brain, the talisman punched a miniscule hole through reality.

Oakar slipped through it and into chaotic space before the [Mana Beam] did its job, but Matt was already following him. He didn’t have any nice and convenient talisman to assist him, but he didn’t need one either.

A spear lodged itself in his throat in an attempt to distract him, but he ignored it as he mustered his Domain and spirit. Together, he grabbed reality and pulled.

This far away from the wonder of essence that was a planetary core, it felt like trying to tear concrete. He knew that one [Portal] next to the world would make it as easy as punching through the thinnest gauze, but that would have wasted time.

He shredded a portion of reality as he stepped into chaotic space.

The [Mana Beam] he’d never bothered to stop casting swept out, but all it hit was the intangible form of Oakar as he fled towards Collective space.

Instead of chasing, Matt turned back to the floating spark of light that was the world he’d just been in and tore his way back to real space. It was infinitely easier the second time, but he was right next to the essence core of the world node.

He returned to real space next to the inhabited world and immediately rejoined the battle with a [Portal].

He had a spear to return.

However, despite his intentions, the battle was already over, as Aster had overwhelmed Ginna’s Spirit Space and captured everyone after Liz had rushed the newly advanced pinnacle elite and forced her to surrender.

Things were tense as they flew back to Empire space, but Matt, Liz, and Aster’s full attention went to helping Liz.

Sadly, the Collective reacted exactly as they knew they would. They recalled Oakar and dumped resources into him. They wanted to make him as strong as feasible in as short a time as possible and were willing to spend.

Which is why it wasn’t all that surprising that only a decade after their first fight, they had their second when the Collective used the peak elite and three pinnacles to ambush them.

***

Liz felt a twinge of anticipation burn through her as she looked at the first person to overcome her liquid form’s defences in such a way.

Far from being as angry as Matt, she only wished she could have understood what he’d done to her. It would have made all of their planning so much easier, but she’d lost connection to those portions of herself the moment they were absorbed into him.

The first thing she noticed was both the pinnacle they’d paired the man with, Rachel ‘Bulwark’ Ferreira who was one of the better human tanks in the Great Power. She wasn’t quite on the level of Yun Me, but she held her own as a solo defender pinnacle elite.

Liz darted forward, careful not to shift any portion of herself to liquid form.

It hadn’t taken a genius to figure that much out from their previous fighting, but the Collective had come prepared to try and force the shift.

Oakar crushed a vial of teal liquid and it detonated into a cloud of gas that ate away at her. Its main effect was a mind bending itchiness it induced as it sought to drive her to shift into a form where she wouldn’t be so affected. It wasn’t pleasant, but her own combat potions ensured she had partial resistance.

She met Rachel’s skill empowered shield bash with her own upraised shield, taking the blow and holding firm. At the same time, she tapped into her Aspect and her anchor, using the cauldron to refine the poison that settled on her skin.

The grenade unleashed vibrations Rachel activated when they connected. They were so powerful, they threatened to rattle that Liz’s teeth loose. She was grateful her other bodies weren’t touching the shield, as they only had to deal with the spillage that was transferred spiritually.

Oakar then darted in and took a swipe at Liz, doing so with a razor sharp sword that was clearly newly made. The instant she saw it, she knew her armor wouldn’t be able to block.

Her intuition proved correct, even if it cost the blade its structural integrity. Halfway through her, it shattered. That caused a larger wound, but she was forced to leave them there, as she couldn’t simply transform her body to liquid and reform.

Not yet at least.

Liz feigned left, then

followed through in the same direction, momentarily spinning around Rachel, who’d expected her to go the other way. Rather than react to her less dangerous opponent, Liz went after Oakar with all three bodies.

The peak elite started to panic until Liz had one of her bodies shift into liquid to dodge a crossbow bolt that would have speared her in the head.

She carefully felt and analyzed as the Liz was immediately drawn in. This time, she had her own Domain ready to resist, but it didn’t change the result in the slightest.

The moment any part of her entered his spongy body, it died.

Liz didn’t feel anything and was left with thousands of questions about exactly what his Domain was to cause that reaction, but she’d also come prepared with her own counters.

Another Liz activated [Inexorable Exsanguination], channeling its impending doom at her enemy.

It did more than nothing, but it didn’t kill her attacker; a sacrificial spiritual layer took most of the hit and shattered.

Liz followed the attack up with a [Ichor Sickle]. It was absorbed as soon as it got close to Oakar, but she’d more than expected that. It was the [Congeal]ed core of the spell that she was surprised he’d managed to absorb.

She sidestepped Rachel once more and ignored her taunt spell by virtue of never taking her focus off her real foe. It was in that shuffle that she finally landed a blow on Oakar and cut into the bloodless creature.

With that cut, she believed she'd figured out the trick and knew the plan that would work to counter him from those they’d prepared for this fight.

Blood flowed as she let her second body get pulled forward and absorbed without any resistance. It was with that reframed mindset she cast [Blood Crystal Armor] and blocked the feeding he was doing at all times.

Weird as it was, Liz had been part of the natural ecosystem a sponge might feed off as a blood. Ichor was no doubt a weird nutrient, but it had been close enough to something that Oakar could feed off, which was how he managed to kill her so efficiently.

However, as Liz’s Aspect’s Image proved, Ichor came in many forms, and just because her Talent made her prefer a liquid one, she wasn’t beholden to that by any means. A golden faceted fist slammed into the peak elite and crumbled half of his body rather than be absorbed like the others.

Liz wanted to absorb him, but with no blood, she had no connection to his bloodline form, and he wasn't dumb enough to transform now that the battle was turning. He continued to try and feed off her, but just as she had no purchase over his bloodless form, he had no way to eat a crystal.

The other pinnacles either noticed or were informed by Rachel as they tried to disengage, but all three of them redoubled their efforts to make this hurt.

Both she and Matt activated their Domains, striking at their enemies aggressively. She did so with her Aspect, but he did so with his Meld, boosted and harnessed by his Aspect. It turned the world into an inverted black and white painting, where each of the fighters with Aspect’s maintained their own islands of color.

While she and Aster were able to function relatively freely due to his control over his Domain and their familiarity with the technique, their enemies found their Domains heavy and sluggish, as if a wet blanket had been thrown over them.

Some fared better than others, but many crumbled under the weight of Matt’s amplified Meld.

A wave of ice threatened to end the fight, and the elites realized their counter hadn’t proven as effective as they wanted, and they retreated before losses could truly occur.

Liz knew that she’d probably be seeing a lot of Oakar in the following wars as tactics evolved, but she felt better after their second encounter than she had the first.

As the fight ended, the three of them returned to their ship and the battlefield at large.

Liz threw a message into the Ascender Chat, thumbing her nose at Gideon and Eclavorn. The two had been insufferable since the first encounter with Oakar, and she wanted to thumb that back at them.

However, she was to be disappointed, as neither seemed to mind as they had something far more interesting to talk about.

“You guys don’t understand, these three are going to go all the way. You didn’t see them. Little fuckers are a menace. They are only eighty and midway to Tier 17. I’m telling you, I’m betting you, they are going to finish. Speaking of which, I may have been off about the timing of the next Alpha in the Realm, but I was right they were going to come from the Collective. I think that probably obligates everyone to pay me out for those previous bets.”

Liz felt a twinge of interest as she knew that age and Tier combo meant they were well ahead of the requirement to reach Tier 17 by eighty eight years old. They’d been behind that pace, though mostly just because they’d had to make up for Aster's decade of absence at the Bond Academy.

Instead of wondering more, she looked up information about the three in question. It was very easy, as someone had already pinned the relevant information.

Seeing a video pinned as well, she brought it up to see three young men carving their way through a wave rift. Unlike the Empire’s propensity for promising Pathers to mask up and hide their birth identities, the Collective preferred the reverse - flaunt the names and identities of their rising stars, but then have them go undercover and assume less prominent identities whenever not at a public event.

Liz obviously thought the Empire method was better, because it didn’t depend so heavily on assuming all of their members could innately shapeshift between a distinct and probably less distinctive form after Tier 15. It also made figuring out their probable builds way easier, because they could trawl through all kinds of public records, going back to the very start of their careers, instead of just going off what they chose to show once they became prominent.

Of course, the unique… style Horatio carried around had really only taken off when Tier 15 gave him the control needed to swap between his bloodline forms.

He erupted from the ground of the rift as an Earthen Worm, shifted into a tiny Wind Mouse in order to be swallowed whole by a sub-boss, only to tear his way out of its hide with the razor sharp claws of an Obsidian Wolverine a moment later.

And none of those were even his primary bloodline!

He’d only recently stopped being a full-time hybrid octopus, even if nobody was quite sure what his proper Chimera hybrid was. Octopi were just too good at changing their shape and coloration to gain any hints from his appearance, and his Talent allowed him to change out his actual bloodline core to a ton of alternatives.

Even though there was only evidence of him becoming Rank 1 bloodlines, she wouldn’t take any bet, no matter how tempting, that it was his true limit. He was too confident in battle not to have a backup plan with far more power, given the way he fought. Whatever the case, it still gave him a dynamic fighting style that he’d taken full advantage of for most of the Collective’s Path.

Liz got briefly distracted watching a video of him at Tier 9, firing off spells from eight wands held in eight arms before she moved on. However, she’d noticed all of the wands were different elements and boosted by bloodline affinities.

In direct contrast to the shapeshifter was the most directly eye-catching member of the trio. Atlas was the only pure human of the group, and the one who was highly inconvenienced by the Collective’s masking policy. He had a taunt effect in constant use, and while Liz was far too experienced and high Tier to be affected by it, she was legitimately impressed at how well he wielded it.

Like Mathew of the Unbroken, he clearly had a Talent that let him manipulate the ‘threat’ of his team, which was a fancy way of saying he could mess with danger-based spiritual senses. It was most effective against rift monsters, but not useless against cultivators. Liz had fought with and against enough taunters and, assuming he wasn’t holding back too much in this recording, he could probably snare more than a few at Tier individuals into the effect.

Regardless of that, he was more than capable of keeping every monster in the rift laser-focused on him, even while his two teammates absolutely tore their kin to shreds.

The third and final member of the group was the least flashy, but possibly the most deadly. Alex the Void Deer absolutely annihilated anything within reach of his jet-black antlers, cutting through magic and scales alike, leaving trails of Void that hampered, cut, and even debuffed those beyond his immediate reach.

She was so absorbed watching the trio in action, both in the present and their historical records, that she didn’t even notice the obvious problem until Aster said something. “Wait, how is he a Chimera and on your Path equivalent? How is that not banned?”

Max chimed in with the answer before the Collective Ascenders could say a word. “Long, long explanation short, bloodlines are a specific listed exemption to ‘inherited magical power’. There are no disqualifications for prenatal medical procedures specifically enacted for the purpose of conception or saving the life of the preborn, and all the fancy stuff that Chimeras get comes after they’re Awakened. Their childhood, which they are sapient for like a second gen beast, doesn’t provide anything beyond what a standard Tier 35 family might be able provide. So, good lessons and standard medical care. Still, his technical eligibility has been quite the storm.”

“Shit, the way Horatio joined sparked a storm itself.” Gideon explained further after the truth was out. “He ‘ran away’ from their housing area days after awakening and straight to one of the Trailblazer’s recruitment centers. First thing he does after climbing a statue is proclaim that he only wants to work with the best of the best. That would have been fine, but he then accepts the applications for the first two idiots to walk up and accept his proposal. Worked out for them though, so what do I know?”

“Anyone want to bet that if the kid does make it all the way, the rest of the Great Powers ban any future Chimera from completing the Path equivalents?” Liz’s idle thought found unexpected success from the others as they agreed.

That immediately riled up the plasma dragon. “Of course you’d all try to remove the legitimacy of the next Alpha-level fighter we make!”

“You guys have had one out of how many Chimera who have joined the military? What is that ratio?” Lila was happy to point out.

“Better than any of your Great Powers’ elite programs!”

Sien weighed in on their side against the irate dragon. “I do think the argument that a Chimera's advantages are purely pre-birth won’t be acceptable if Horatio does make it to the end. It feels like it’s against the spirit of the rules, even if I don’t begrudge him his origins. After all, why have restrictions if they aren’t applied? I can’t see it being allowed again. I’ll bet on it!”

“I’m with Sien on this one. Sorry E. No way this doesn't get altered.” Olivier weighed in as the dragon tried to counter her without much success.

Liz didn’t weigh in quite yet, too busy catching up on eighty years of the kids’ lives. That was objectively nothing to her these days, the last century was basically just a blur of fighting, but that alone was half of the Path’s completion time. She’d been so engrossed with the day to day minutiae of fighting a war that the time had just… slipped away in a blur. That realization started to give her a new appreciation for just how suddenly new Ascenders came around.

It had felt like such a slog when she’d done it, she felt a sense of whiplash.

Before Liz could comment on that, Matt followed up, stirring the pot and with it the conversation, by dropping a full essay, complete with citations and references and a caption of “Even if he doesn’t make it all the way, there’s no way they’ll allow a repeat. The Knightly Orders are what caused non-lifesaving prenatal procedures to get a specific callout in the common rules. So I’m with Sien, it’s definitely getting banned.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Lila added fuel to the fire by tossing out a bet clearly targeting the only other dragon in the chat. “Does anyone want to bet against the idea that the relevant councils have already agreed to ban it or are arguing about it? I’ll put up a Tier 35 drop of crystalised Unicorn tears.”

That sparked another round of debate, but Liz watched it with one eye while reviewing more of the videos shared with the majority of her attention.

The trio were good. She couldn’t deny that, and their existence at least gave her something to look forward to while they continued to fight in the war.