Path to Transcendence

"No, of course not. I ju-" he stopped what he was going to say when he saw who Julius had brought along. "Huh. Hello, Tia."

Tia gave Joshua an anxious wave in return. "Hey."

"Have you reconsidered my offer? I thought you were planning to go solo?" Joshua asked.

"I was. But Julius was very convincing," Tia stated.

Joshua gave an assessing look to Julius. "It seems he is. I didn\'t know you guys knew each other."

Tia gave him a small shake of her head. "We don\'t really. We only recently had a run-in. I was actually really surprised to get an offer."

"Well at least we have a controller now," Nessa said with a happy grin.

Polux nodded sagely. "I agree, this is a good addition. Having her along will help us immensely."

Tia blushed lightly. "I don\'t know how much help I will be. I am not very used to working with large groups, so I apologize in advance if I hold you guys back."

"Don\'t worry, you will get the hang of it really quickly. You are already very skilled, so it\'s all a matter of practicing," Joshua assured her.

The five of them briefly reintroduced themselves to Tia and waited for Professor Rowe to give them further directions.

***

The class was escorted to the rift entrance. Along the way, Professor Rowe explained the general ground rules. They weren\'t that complicated. The first and most important one was to stay within sight of their supervisor.

The second was not to take any unnecessary risks. Any infractions would be noted by their proctor and the offending parties would be punished as seen fit. This rift delve was supposed to be an introduction to rift delving and it wasn\'t supposed to be a thorough exploration of the rift. That would come later down the line.

The way the class was split up depended on the sizes of the groups. There was usually one large group with a smattering of smaller groups of two or four that a supervisor had to oversee.

This would mean that groups would have to take turns fighting against a group of monsters. For this particular rift that meant fighting against packs of goblins. Which was to be expected, they were one of the most common rift monsters for a reason.

Their group entered the rift without much fanfare. There was another group of four that accompanied them with the supervisor in the lead. The rift itself was quite normal. Normal in the sense that the environment looked like one you would find just outside of Heston. Relatively close croppings of trees filled the area with the occasional large open fields.

As Julius and his team entered the woods he immediately started to pulse [Spatial Perception] instinctually. Even with the suppression bracelet on, his skill was still very effective. The restriction it placed on him didn\'t seem to affect his perception skill as much as his mana-based skills.

Their proctor, who Julius was seventy percent sure whose name was Mitchell got their attention. "Okay, this is the deal. Whoever finds the first grouping of monsters gets the honor of going first. There will be no fighting among the two of your teams. Any fighting will be punished personally by myself and Professor Rowe."

Julius and his team were seriously taking in the proctor\'s words. However, it didn\'t seem the other group was doing the same. The other team consisted entirely of girls and they were too busy talking amongst each other loudly to listen to Mitchell\'s words.

Julius heard a couple of the girls bragging about their other experiences delving to their friends. Curiously enough, Mitchell didn\'t seem to reprimand them. Instead, he gave the group of girls a disappointing look and ignored them.

The eleven of them kept on walking around. That was until Polux suddenly said, "Up ahead. Approximately six goblins."

Of course, Julius had already noticed them a little bit ago, but he was surprised that Polux had noticed them as well. The goblins were still a good distance away after all. Polux wasn\'t merely boasting when he told them he had a good aura sense.

Mitchell didn\'t seem to be surprised either. Either he had a similar perception skill or he had another way to sense the opponents. Or that was what Julius was assuming. He didn\'t believe that the school would allow a group of students to head into a rift without a way to control the amount of monsters encountered.

Julius reminded himself to pay attention to Mitchell when he had a chance to see how the young man was able to sense the enemies.

"Okay, Joshua, your team has the go-ahead. Deal with them as you see fit," Mitchell directed them.

"What? Why do they get to fight them first?" One of the girls whined.

Mitchell gave the girl a cold stare. "I already explained the reason not too long ago. Pay attention next time when I give directions. Lack of attention is what kills many people in a rift."

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The girl pressed her lips together firmly in anger as Mitchell scolded her, but held her tongue.

Julius\'s team ignored the commotion and Joshua was already giving out instructions. "James I want you to cause as much mayhem as you can. You don\'t need to kill any of them, but creating havoc is good enough to allow Julius and Polux to get close," he then turned to Nessa. "Nessa I want you to give buffs to the two of them, don\'t use too much mana though. Let\'s be careful how we use our resources. Tia, I want you to hold down as many goblins as you can without interfering with Julius\'s and Polux\'s attack."

Hm, Joshua is actually a pretty good leader. He\'s organized and well-spoken.

"What are you going to do?" Nessa asked curiously.

"I am going to watch for now. I want to see how everyone works together and then I can decide where I can fill in the gaps," Joshua said to her.

Nessa nodded at him, not finding anything wrong with that reasoning. The six of them quietly headed right toward the pack of goblins with Polux leading them. It wasn\'t long before the goblins were within view. The little green monsters were strolling through the forest.

Unfortunately, they also had the other group of girls following along with them and one of the girls made a sound of disgust upon the sight of goblins. "Ew, do we really need to fight goblins? They are so gross."

Julius rolled his eyes when he noticed that the goblins heard the girl. The goblins all simultaneously turned toward the direction of the noise and let out snarls, hefting their weapons in front of their chests.

Does that girl not know that goblins had good hearing?

He saw that his entire team gave the girl in question a dark look but that didn\'t last for long. Knowing that their location had been compromised, as well as the element of surprise they all leaped into motion. Polux was the first one to start running toward the goblins with Julius fast on his heels.

He then felt a coating of mana latch onto him and Polux. It was Nessa\'s buff. This particular buff seemed to give Julius a hardened coating of mana around his body. It was clearly some sort of defensive buff.

Julius was pumping as much kinetic energy through his body as he could to enhance his speed, however, he was kind of surprised to see that Polux was easily outpacing him. The beastkin boy was fast and Julius didn\'t think this was close to his maximum speed. Instead, of focusing on it too much, Julius just pushed himself harder to keep up.

He then noticed two large bolts of fire mana screeching over his head. The resulting attack exploded the dirt and the goblins, scattering their formation. It didn\'t kill any goblins but it sent all of them stumbling.

It was perfect timing. While they were getting back to their feet Polux was already on top of them. The beastkin boy launched a heavy punch and hit the goblin squarely in the chest. Julius was able to sense several layers of intricate aura manipulation over the boy\'s fist as it pummeled into the goblin. The goblin didn\'t stand a chance. It was blasted back with a sickening crack of bones.

Julius wasn\'t that far behind either. Just as the other goblins were getting back to their feet, he was also there to deal with them. Instead of punching the goblin like Polux had done, Julius jumped off his two feet. He used every bit of momentum he gathered while running and slammed his feet into the goblin\'s sternum. It didn\'t have the power of Polux\'s attack but it got the job done. The goblin\'s ribs were broken and was sent rolling away, removed from combat.

Just as he noticed two other goblins reaching out to attack him when he was distracted, he felt a surge of mana through the ground. Suddenly, a flurry of vines tangled around the legs of the goblins, having them trip over themselves.

A ball of fire quickly burnt one of them and the other was wrapped up and choked to death by Tia\'s vines.

Julius looked over to Polux\'s side, where he had dealt with the other two goblins in quick order. Julius noticed that neither Tia nor James had helped Polux out. They probably thought the beastkin boy could handle it himself.

I mean they were right, but I feel kind of sad that they didn\'t have the same confidence in me, Julius pouted internally.

***

The team quickly gathered the cores of the goblins. Tier 2 cores didn\'t have the most value, but the school still used them to keep the school running and functioning.

Joshua seemed pretty pleased with how things went. The only thing they had to reconsider was how far away Tia was able to use her crowd control abilities. Her reach wasn\'t infinite and she would need to get closer for her to be effective. However, that was an easy fix. They would have gotten closer before if the other girl hadn\'t made so much noise.

Speaking of the all-girl group. They didn\'t fare that well. Unlike their team\'s good performance, theirs was a mess. They found a group of five goblins but compared to Julius\'s team, the girls were sloppy.

Their skills weren\'t actually that bad. Two of them were long-range mages, one was a close-combat fighter, and the last one was a healer/support mage. It wasn\'t that bad of a composition if not for one thing.

They had no teamwork whatsoever. The two mages didn\'t wait for their close combat fighter to get closer before bombarding the goblins. Their accuracy left a lot to be desired. The first bombardment wasn\'t that bad, but as soon as the goblins started to move, they couldn\'t hit anything.

It was like they weren\'t used to fighting monsters who could move around so dynamically. For the previous weeks, they had been fighting a single monster within an enclosed space and weren\'t used to fighting in such an open space against several monsters.

The only saving grace was how powerful their attacks were. The amount of mana they were able to output was quite impressive for Tier 2. It was just unfortunate that most of that mana was wasted since the attacks rarely hit.

In fact, they almost took out their friend on multiple occasions. They hadn\'t paid attention to what their close combatant was doing and their attacks scraped the other girl when she was engaging with the goblin. It was fortunate that the girl had a pretty good defensive ability.

Their support mage wasn\'t doing much of anything either. She was just nervously staring at the fight with wide doe eyes.

Eventually, the sheer amount of mana and power overwhelmed the goblins. However, to Julius\'s bafflement, the girls celebrated their win with excited cheers and jumped around giggling. It seemed all of them were oblivious to how sloppy their fight went.

Julius took a look at his teammates, seeing if they were feeling the same way he was.

He was thankful that he wasn\'t alone in his concern. Every one of his teammates had frowns on their faces as they looked at the group of girls. Then simultaneously all of them gave each other a knowing look.

Although they didn\'t say a word, Julius was able to interpret their expressions. All of them were secretly thankful that their team wasn\'t like that. He gave the girl group one last look.

I didn\'t know how I felt about this team thing, but I think I lucked out with my teammates. While it was too soon to really tell, so far all of his teammates seemed to have a good head on their shoulders.