The Path of Ascension

Chapter 237

Matt was ready to spring to his feet and leave to assault the noble's estate right now, but Liz’s firm grip on his hand kept him steady as they boarded Luna's ship. As much as he wanted to rush there immediately, that was impossible, and the frenetic energy that demanded he do something was counterproductive. Liz kept him grounded enough to plan out their next steps beyond saving the target. He wasn’t Duke Waters who could just rush in and crush everything without a plan.

Though Luna was technically a fallback, ensuring that they wouldn’t fail too badly on a mission of this magnitude, the cat was absolutely not above allowing their success or failure to determine who lived and who died. It was unlikely that Justinian would actually die, if he were valuable enough for the Gerble family to keep imprisoned this long Luna probably wouldn’t watch him die, but Matt certainly wouldn't allow the man’s freedom to be compromised any longer. If they failed utterly, the worst that would happen was that he would need to wait for higher-Tier enforcers to free him.

Matt frowned. Actually, there was a distinct possibility that if they failed this, the nobles would simply kill Justinian to remove the prime witness and evidence against them, and Luna certainly wouldn’t save him just for them. If they didn’t do this perfectly, it really was the man’s life on the line.

Meanwhile, Liz was requesting official dossiers about the Gerble’s assets in far greater detail than the basic mission brief. Luna had clearly prepared for this, as instead of waiting for the full back and forth of authorizations, clearances, and warrants that was usually present in such cases, their AIs were suddenly granted permission to every last record, official speculation, and lightly classified document they asked for. Liz directed them towards his AI, and Matt pushed his willpower and mana alike for categorization and analysis.

Matt wanted to be impressed by just how thoroughly the Empire watched its noble families, as it was far more than they usually got for guilds or corporations, but instead, he was just grateful they could plan with a nearly complete picture in mind.

Fewer variables meant fewer chances for things to go sideways.

And Matt refused to let this mission fail.

He’d been in Justinian’s position, after all. Even if it were just an elaborate illusion courtesy of Minkalla, he had felt the emptiness of being confined to a box, reduced to little more than a machine, then subjected to continuous agony until you capitulated, and how it could render you into an insane and hollow shell of your former self.

It wasn’t a fate he would wish on anyone.

Because they were taking Luna’s ship, Matt was able to divert practically all of his mana to his [AI], simulating everything he could about a possible rescue operation. Unfortunately, there were few useful results from all his computation. While the nobles themselves had been meticulously watched, their estate hadn’t been analyzed in any depth for over seven hundred years, and the next official inspection was nearly two centuries away. Given that they had a new source of income and a large desire for secrecy, the error margins on Matt’s assessment of the estate were wide enough to run a train through.

Sideways.

Compounding the issue, the Gerbles obviously had no reservations about subverting the law, which opened the door to any variety of otherwise illegal or restricted enchantments. As a final issue, Matt had no clue what Justinian might require to produce essence stones. If Justinian could merely guarantee that a rift reward distortion produced essence stones, then the mana requirements to fuel that rift would impact the warding scheme, as hiding a rift was difficult, but not impossible. If his power created essence stones from something like raw mana, his captors would need a way to easily access the prisoner. If he created the stones out of thin air that wasn’t an issue, but he was still presumably mortal, and needed food. The possibilities they needed to plan around were, literally, endless.

Instead, he and Liz turned to Linda Gerble, the current matriarch, and tried to figure out how to best counter a Tier 19 with their current abilities.

That in and of itself was a monumental task. Even using their real identities and with Aster's help, Matt wasn’t sure they could take even an average Tier 19 on in a head-on fight. That difference in cultivation was generally unsurmountable, but they had a few advantages.

Namely the entire Quill identity. As a talisman fighter, his style revolved around planning for and countering his opponents, and with Matt's ability to supply each rune with a few million mana, they had a chance of making runes strong enough to affect a Tier 19. Talismans and their corresponding runes were ideally used on targets of their own Tier, if not lower. But that wasn’t a hard rule if you were a Talented talisman crafter, or had enough mana to make a few thousand talismans to make up the gap in power.

That was their only real chance of fighting a Tier 19 who had earned her fiefdom through combat as a Tier 15, almost five thousand years ago. Matt figured he should be surprised that a noble who had fought their way to power from the common masses was not more empathetic to the average person's plight, and would partake in such nefarious deeds. But he had seen enough of the human heart to know that those who felt they had risen above their station could be even more protective of that position than those born to it. After all, they couldn't have too many others like themselves around, or else they would no longer be special.

Together, they started parsing through the accumulated analysis of her public fights, registered skills, items, and habits for more than a week. The primary takeaway Matt was able to form was that the woman was intensely interested in secrecy. Not only did she advance to Tier 15 while only publicly purchasing two skills, indicating she earned the rest of her skill set directly from rifts, she had also seemingly learned enchanting purely to ensure that she was able to make her own weapons and armor without any record of their capabilities.

When she did fight where other people could see and record her, she was a quintessential melee fighter who relied on a generic sword and shield combo to close in and stick close to her enemies, like a leech. She always requested limited-skill duels whenever she had to fight, and only ever used her publicly purchased [Shadow Armor] and [Mana Slash], in addition to whatever skills she had enchanted into her items. Afterwards, she made a point of never using that item again, and bringing in a new gear set to the next fight.

The most incredible note on Linda Gerble’s file was that, starting at the age of twenty, every single one of her delves took precisely the average clear time for that rift, down to the minute, regardless of any noted difficulties, mana aspect, or quirks in terrain or enemy type. She was obviously waiting at the entrance after having completed the rift quickly, but it meant that there were no visible tendencies, specialties, or weaknesses in her delving style.

Naturally, all this secrecy caused people to get curious, and some information had come to light. A spy had snuck into one of her delves and recorded a scant number of her skills, various people she had fought testified to her abilities and provided recordings, and in all the circumstances where disclosing a Talent was mandatory, she had never registered anything relevant.

Although Linda primarily relied on generic Concept abilities in her fights, as Matt had come to expect from the secretive woman, spending nearly seven billion mana on analyzing her every waking moment finally revealed something unknown even to the Empire’s analysts. “Look at this clip right here. Howard Metma is reinforcing his mana shield with a spell-disrupting Concept, but Linda doesn’t know that. Her sword does more damage than it physically should, which can’t be explained with mana. Cross referencing that with a minor competition when she was Tier 8 which didn’t register any effect that would help her batter down barriers, we can almost conclusively say that she has an armor piercing Concept.”

Matt was feeling almost giddy as he spun in his chair and narrated to Liz. He got up to make himself a hot chocolate as a reward, since it had been three solid days of watching her fights, and finally finding something tactically useful was exhilarating.

“Great work, that’s a fantastic find. If that's true though we still have nothing on her Talents. The most likely conclusion is that she simply doesn’t have anything relevant, or they’re so minor that she can hide them easily. She hasn’t delved in a century, despite having the opportunity, and her latest tax records put her at thirty seven point two percent of the way through Tier 19, verified by an auditor.” Liz stopped watching the looping clip of Linda’s sword and went to reference some of her notes. “Preliminary combat analysis is that she’ll start the fight like in her duels using minimal skills, and only use her more secret skills once she realizes she can’t kill you quickly.” She looked up from her notebook in order to stare Matt in the eyes. “I’d recommend you don’t get hit by her sword. Allegedly, it hurts.”

Matt wasn’t entirely sure he could block a Tier 19’s armor piercing Domain, even with the training Manny had given him in the legacy, but he was glad he had that training either way. Without it, he was confident that he would be cut into ribbons even with [Cracked Phantom Armor]. Though, if he used Matt’s signature skill, they wouldn’t be able to take the noble alive, and that defeated one of the main purposes of this mission.

Out of the two months it took to reach Cysora, they spent almost all of it planning how to counter each and every one of the members of the Gerble noble family itself, along with their security detail, their guards, and even some of the local notable figures who might decide to interfere.

Most of them could be outright ignored, as they were below Tier 14 and would add a negligible combat prowess to the overall defenses, but there were nine people of interest other than the Tier 19 mountain that was Linda Gerble.

The first was the Tier 18 head of security, and Linda’s rumored lover, Seymour York. Despite the known stereotypes of the profession, he was a wind mage of some renown. Matt would have preferred to have Aster with them to counter the man, but that was true with all of their opponents. Aster was a vital part of their team, and her loss was felt, even if it was temporary.

Not that he didn’t miss her all the time, but he was at least able to watch her messages to sate his normal longing for his bond. That didn’t really help when they needed to punch someone.

The next person they needed to worry about was Linda’s son, Hardy, a Tier 15 who was by all accounts an unremarkable, layabout, noble heir. At least on the surface, the Empire’s information agents had noticed he was running an underground smuggling operation between the Empire and the Clans, transferring a number of rare resources, mostly skills, between the two Great Powers. That illicit activity added a layer of danger to an otherwise unremarkable figure that they would need to plan and account for. You might be able to start a smuggling ring if you just had a backing, but you didn't run a successful smuggling ring by being a pushover, lazy second-generation noble.

The next five were the team of Tier 15 delvers that Linda had hired close to two hundred years ago as an auxiliary add-on to her security staff. They generally acted as quick responders to any emergencies instead of standing post or anything so routine. They were a variable that was at least well known, as they had sold their services for close to a thousand years, and had been in many a fight that was recorded during that time.

Janet, their leader, was a healer with an ability that let her transfer wounds to her opponents. She was reportedly a good shot-caller and directed her team with the precision of an elite making her a prime target to take out first if necessary.

Their front liner was one of a pair of twins, Marcus, who went for a simple dual shield combo with heavy plate armor to either protect his team from attacks, or get in close to enemy melee fighters and overwhelm them in raw strength. His brother Ruthis went the melee damage route, and wielded a mace with immense strength, though his propensity to wear light armor made him an easier target for most.

Their mage, Brianna, focused on mist-based debuffs, giving her a toolkit quite similar to Aster. Disorientation, lockdown, and battlefield control were her areas of expertise, but she still had an array of spells to utilize as either finishers or extra sources of damage.

The last member of the team was the most dangerous, at least to them. Keppra was nominally the team's archer, but his Talent was to destroy anything made of mana that his arrows hit. While that meant he was limited in his offensive spells, he could destroy a lot of Matt’s talismans if he was given even a second of breathing room in the fight.

The final two people they were worried about were the local magistrate, and a friend of Linda’s. The magistrate was Tier 18, but not a fighter, and had connections to the local Dukedom. It could be a problem if he tried to report an attack was happening and left out key bits of information, such as they were Empire agents acting in an official capacity. While they could and would neutralize him at the start of the mission with an Imperial gag order, he still posed a risk to the operation. The friend was reportedly very loyal, and would most certainly try to aid Linda, but they were fairly confident they could either attack when he wasn’t on the planet, or stonewall him before he entered the fight. For all that he was purportedly loyal, he had never engaged in any illegal activities, and showing him a warrant for the arrest of Linda might prevent his intervention entirely.

In an ideal world, all but Linda would be cowed by the warrant, but Matt and Liz seriously doubted that was possible.

Linda had had five hundred years to prepare for this possibility, and they were sure her hired team of delvers would fight along with herself, her son, and her security agent, even if they had an official warrant. She would claim they were impostors while trying to stall for time to destroy the evidence. Namely, Justinian Miller.

That was a possibility they needed to prevent at all costs. Not because of the case, but because Justinian deserved a better fate than being sacrificed due to their shoddy planning.

Matt wasn’t sure Luna would step in to save the man if they failed. After all, Matt had seen her stand by passively as an assassin killed someone right next to them, then allowed them to escape custody not minutes later.

No, they needed to do this properly.

They couldn’t just knock on the front gate and say they had a warrant to search the estate; they needed to rescue Justinian before doing anything else. So, they’d need to sneak inside, somehow find where he was being kept, and then bypass the plethora of security measures that Justinian’s cell would be kept under.

Looking at the official layout of the estate, they noted down a few of the most likely possibilities of where to hide a cell. Thankfully, the fact they were only selling Tier 14 essence stones strongly implied Justinian was still Tier 14, so they needed to feed him and provide things like fresh air. If he was an immortal, they might have been able to shove him in a coffin and bury him somewhere deep, so long as Linda or her representative could get the essence stones from Justinian. A small [Portal] could easily complete that feat, and while that was a higher Tier skill, her son was a skilled smuggler that could have gotten his hands on it, making their job that much harder.

They could at least narrow down the location of where Justinian’s cell could be located by cross-referencing the areas where spiritual perception wouldn’t be expected to be restricted. The room would be blocked to casual spying, of course, but people would ask questions about a garden shed being shielded from viewing in a way they wouldn’t about bedrooms, bathrooms, and more private areas.

Of course, that was only something of a backup plan. Simple common sense dictated that the Gerble’s most valuable asset would be kept in the most secure location available to them, the vault.

Every noble family had one. Meant to lock away money, any number of valuable resources, keep prying eyes away from sensitive family documents, and for more military-minded nobles, a final stronghold when they were under attack, it was a black hole of spiritual perception. For many reasons, it was illegal to keep living people within a family vault for extended periods of time, but that was mostly unenforceable, given the extreme protections afforded to noble vaults.

That they suspected they knew where he was being held didn’t make their planned rescue any easier, though.

A vault was still a vault, and they weren’t dealing with mind-controlled guards, but rather well-trained ones who would notice almost every possible attempt at breaching the walls of said vault through the outside.

Essentially, they needed to get in through the front door, but that wouldn’t be any easier of a task, thanks to those same security measures.

Knowing there was only so much they could do without seeing the location, they moved on to prepping for the fights.

Matt began with making talismans out of the materials they had on hand, simply to restrain the low Tier guards and such. More importantly, they needed to plan counters around each and every one of their possible threats, and to best do that, they stopped by a Tier 22 planet and delved into a single Tier 19 rift.

Aster’s absence was keenly felt as they delved up four Tiers, but by taking it slowly, they were able to clear out the entrance of the rift and start harvesting the hide of the minotaurs. It was an exhausting month, not only because of the large Tier difference and their lack of a third member of their team, but also because they needed to kill as many of the monsters as possible without damaging their hides excessively.

With their massive size, Matt was able to use some of his crafting skills, primarily [Field Dress] and [Treat Hide], to make large quantities of quality leather, mostly for rapid testing of putting the most powerful runes he could onto the leather. Through some quick and dirty testing, they found that Matt could increase the power he put into a Tier 18 rune, the limit of what his tools could work with, by almost twenty percent just by using the higher Tier base material.

When that was combined with his Folded Reflection power from his life as a solo delver, he could then overcharge the talisman right before using it to increase the base power again by another twenty percent, closing the gap between a Tier 18 talisman and a Tier 19 fighter even more. He actually needed to be careful when doing that, as his now greatly increased mana generation created so much energy that he could easily burn out the runes he inscribed into the parchment.

That led them to stage two of their testing.

While most talisman makers didn’t bother, there were a number of expensive treatments one could do to the parchment before, during, and after it was cured to allow the material to hold more runes or more mana.

With Liz’s help, the two of them recreated some of the more public variations of methods by abusing her portable garden orb and stocks of herbs they had purchased beforehand.

In the end, they went with a more simple method. Instead of just casting [Treat Hide], they soaked the hide in a mildly acidic solution, which when injected with mana, would increase the amount of mana the final product could hold. Once the hide was saturated, they proceeded to treat the hide through normal methods to turn it into parchment, and they rubbed a herb paste on the resulting product. When cured with more mana, it would increase the spiritual capacity of the parchment even more.

Their final change to the normal pattern was to create individual inks for each talisman instead of using one of the more generic ones. They weren't able to make more efficient versions of the talisman ink, even though they knew they existed, due to their limited time and resources. But all said, the processed talismans were about seventy percent as strong as a normal Tier 19 talisman, making them good enough for tying down one Linda Gerble.

Going through the process, Matt better understood why most talismans crafters never bothered with the extra steps. Each only imparted a minimal increase in effect while more than quadrupling the total cost in material, let alone the millions of mana Matt used to saturate the parchment in each step.

It just wasn’t worth it for most people, most of the time.

While they intended not to have to fight Linda at all, they focused on making talismans and talisman arrays which could slow her down, rather than outright kill her. Not because they didn’t want to kill her, though Matt would rather Justinian be able to see justice served to her in a court of law officially. It was a matter of practicality.

Not only would there be hefty legal complications that arose from killing a noble in their own house, but if they were fighting Linda, they were either escaping with Justinian and would need to protect him, or they were breaking in, and would need to prevent her from activating any kind of methods to kill him. Matt personally doubted that anything would be remotely activated, as it led to too many security concerns, but it was possible enough that they needed talismans to block communication magic in all forms. After they finished clearing the rift for more leather and essence, the two of them returned to Luna’s ship, where they made the final jump to Cysora.

For all that Quill felt like it should be an evil planet, somehow always cast in shadow or having perpetual rain storms, Cysora was a beautiful and young world, only settled a few thousand years ago. As it was only Tier 4, their Concepts were slightly easier to call upon, but that didn’t matter for their plans.

While Torch and Quill knew their Domains were quite advanced compared to anyone else in their age or Tier group, they weren’t in the business of only fighting people their same Tier and age.

And frankly, they couldn’t afford to be cocky.

Once they were on Cysora properly, the two of them immediately split up while pretending to be normal mortals moving to the planet. They each picked houses close, but not too close to the Gerble estate before settling down to watch everything that happened.

Matt watched as the gates opened and a pair of Tier 10 guards inspected the service truck, and noted how thorough of a job they did. They weren't lazy, which would have made their lives easier, and instead did a thorough sweep with both their own senses and a pair of wands that Matt recognized as more advanced versions of the mana-sensing wands he had seen used at his orphanage and Benny’s.

Using his [AI], Matt found the exact model and tried to see if there were any flaws in its design that they could exploit, but found nothing useful.

Matt did take note that the truck wasn’t inspected on its way out, and pinged Liz that he was going to investigate it.

Getting within spiritual range of the truck without being in visual range wasn’t an issue for the Tier 15 Matt, but he still kept a dozen streets between himself and the truck before methodically checking every inch of it over.

There was nothing of note to be found, unsurprisingly. The Gerbles hadn’t made it this long by being sloppy, but that didn’t mean they could just ignore potential sources of information just because they suspected there wouldn’t be any threat.

Returning to his apartment, Matt focused his attention on the perimeter wall of the estate and frowned. As expected, the enchantments on the wall weren’t the same as on their previous inspection, but the secrecy runes were so potent that he could only barely make sense of the underlying functions.

While the wall physically looked the same, Matt was able to see a little more of what was happening at the gate with his mana sight, as well as some other detection wards that had been hidden from his spiritual sense. They were obviously expensively done, draining the local ambient mana to power themselves, and likely using internal reserves of mana as well. But for someone with an essence stone hen in the basement, mana would be of little concern.

With that new development, Matt and Liz took two full days to scout and record the new perimeter formation before having his [AI] come up with the best way of bypassing it.

The answer it came up with was surprising and unhelpful. They simply couldn't bypass the perimeter wall with their current capabilities. The defenses checked a full mile into the ground, creating a hemisphere around the air space of the estate, and anything that crossed either barrier would alert the watching security teams. Even Liz in bird form wouldn’t be able to get past, without her Tier 15 spirit setting off every alarm from the moment she crossed the border.

They would either need to kick the metaphysical doors down, or slip in through the front gate, which wasn’t nearly as impossible as it seemed.

Frankly, that was the case for most instances of breaking and entering, as the only way to have perfect security was to never let anyone close, but that just wasn’t possible on a multi-mile estate that had dozens of people coming and going on a daily basis.

That was the how and why of their initial plan.

Matt would get a job as one of the local couriers at the shipping company that handled deliveries to the estate, and after working there a few weeks, would position himself to take over for the regular guy who would win a sweepstakes of some kind that would take him off planet for a small while.

They would need to pay for all of that themselves, but a single teleport and an all expenses paid vacation for a mortal didn’t even add up to a rounding error on the value they could earn from selling a single Tier 15 mana stone.

They were still working on how to get Liz inside the gate, but she had a few ideas she was working on, having spent most of their time on the planet locked away in the alchemy lab. Everything hinged on Matt being able to get inside the gate himself, but there were a few different options Liz was working on to get herself in with him, some more palatable than others.

Once she was inside the estate, Liz would try to locate and extract Justinian, while Matt went to make a distraction to draw everyone's attention. Launching an assault on Hardy’s smuggling drop off point in the outer solar system was sure to cause enough of an alarm to draw out the majority of their combat forces.

That, more than anything, should get at least Hardy and Janet’s team to appear, where he could easily subdue them. Even a dozen Tier 15s posed little threat to Quill and his more limited fighting style, though if the plan went off properly, he wouldn’t even need to fight them.

That would hopefully draw out Linda, and possibly, Seymour.

Matt didn’t entirely like the idea of taking even an asshole like Linda’s son hostage, but he was willing to do it, as it was the best chance they had of getting Justinian out of the place safely, which was all that mattered.

He was also pretty sure that Hardy was fully aware of Justinian's plight, thanks to a number of gifts the man had given out in the past. Essence stones, as it turned out, worked as wonderful bribes to get people to look the other way when you smuggled goods into the system.

After almost a month on Cysora, and a month longer than Matt had wanted to wait, they presented Luna with their plan, who okayed it with just one change.

She wanted them to call up the military garrison of the neighboring system to ensure that no one tried to interfere. They hadn’t wanted to do anything involving the military, as while local nobles had no official control over the garrisons stationed in their territory, those on duty in a local system often visited the inhabited planet for local leave, and ties could be made there.

Luna pulling the neighboring garrison nicely sidestepped that issue, but needed a level of authority they didn’t have yet. Ideally, they wouldn't have to use the army until they had iron clad proof, because it would muddy the whole situation. The Empire had very very old laws about higher Tiers finding evidence on lower Tier nobles, which dated back from the founding of the Empire as a way to curb the Emperor's official power. While Matt might agree checks and balances to a sovereign’s power were great in theory, it made any situation where Luna or the army needed to step in very iffy. The charges would probably still stick due to the evidence the Empire had already gathered, but it was best to avoid that altogether, which was why they needed to get Justinian out themselves.

With the green light, Matt started working at his new job, and Liz finished up her refresher course on breaking and entering.

They had a captive to rescue.