Road to Mastery: A LitRPG Apocalypse

Strawpin creased her brows as she fed energy into the formation core, a five-sided diamond crafted specifically for this purpose. Their squad’s victories were nowhere near as easy as they seemed. They were constantly besieged by shockwaves erupting all over, not even aimed at them. Her Dao perception was so overwhelmed she’d shut it off, relying completely on eyesight to navigate the battle, which meant she couldn’t see in every direction at once for the first time in many years. It stressed her out.

A powerful tug slipped into her soul, requesting more power than she was putting out. She complied, also wiping her Dao off the energy she sent away, gritting her teeth as some of the straw floating around her dissipated. Overhead, Min Ling unleashed a powerful attack fueled by the energy she’d just received. An enemy A-Grade fell screaming.

“Are you okay?” Starhair asked, close beside her.

“Of course,” she lied. “You aren’t?”

“Of course I am,” he lied back.

“I’m better than both of you,” Fiend Prince declared through gritted teeth. A constant stream of crimson energy left his body to sink into the diamond. Strawpin would have laughed if she wasn’t exhausted.

A powerful aura fell over them. Strawpin looked up in fear to find a peak A-Grade cultivator hovering above their formation, cold eyes glancing down. It was a species she’d never seen before—some sort of gray, taut-skinned humanoid. The cultivator aimed its palm downward to release a hail of needles. Heavenly Spoon and Min Ling turned towards them, galvanizing their powers with a painful tug at the three peak B-Grades’ inner worlds. A spoon-wielding green phantom, red lightning, and purple flames surged upward, wrapping around the needles in a colorful showdown. It would only delay the inevitable, however—they did not possess the power to fight a peak A-Grade.

“Leave my friends alone.”

A powerful aura appeared nearby. Strawpin turned to find Jack, his body covered in shallow wounds and purple sparks, holding the lifeless body of an amazonian-looking Archon in one hand. He was panting, but not overly hurt. The moment he appeared, the enemy cultivator’s eyes turned from cold and merciless to terrified—it tried to teleport away but found space around it sealed. Jack punched out, a river of purple power which crashed into the enemy and shattered their body, throwing away all needles just by passing by. The energy flow continued deeper into the battlefield, turning smoothly to avoid allies and only strike at enemies. One punch took down over a dozen enemies—most of them B-Grades.

“We are now,” Min Ling replied, flashing him a warm smile. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

He let the Archon’s body drop and teleported away, escaping Strawpin’s vision. As Heavenly Spoon and Min Ling looked for the next opponent, unperturbed by their near-demise, a golden aura flooded their surroundings. “Join the bro train,” said a majestic, familiar voice. Brock smiled at them. “We’re riding to victory.”

Strawpin found herself assenting, sensing the golden aura wrap around her body and subtly tie her powers into everyone else’s. Their previous formation collapsed, the diamond running it shattering into dust, as all five of them joined a massive golden formation centered by Brock and containing dozens of other cultivators.They formed the outline of a massive golden brorilla, with each cultivator’s power not annexed, but contributing to the formation’s uniqueness. Different energy signatures merged harmonically. Strawpin felt useful.

“Choo choo,” said the massive golden brorilla, diving deeper into the battlefield, trailing behind it a majestic golden aura. The enemies in its path were swatted away like bowling pins.

***

Jack was rushing through the battlefield, searching for a weak Archon to fight, when an imposing voice slammed into his mind.

“BRING ME THE CORE,” Axelor commanded.

The God hovered in the distance, clashing repeatedly against the thirty-three-pointed polygon created by the Immortals. His dark tentacles found little purchase, and his attacks were growing wilder by the moment.

Jack paused mid-stride, hesitating. “If I bring you the core of the God of Mass, will you promise to let us all live afterward?”

“NO.”

“I’m not sure you know how negotiations work.”

“I AM A GOD. I DO NOT NEGOTIATE WITH MORTALS.”

“Well, I’m kind of a god too, and I’m known to be quite stubborn sometimes, so you might want to reconsider.”

“WE ARE ALLIES. BRING ME THE CORE OR WE RISK DEFEAT. MY ENDURANCE WON’T LAST FOREVER.”

“If you don’t promise to let us all live afterwards, I’m not giving you shit. Not yet, at least. I’d rather get both you and the Immortals exhausted so the Church can finish the job.”

The God did a long pause. “I SWEAR,” he said. “NOW BRING ME THE CORE.”

“There you go! That wasn’t difficult, was it?”

Jack had recently realized he was strong enough to defeat weaker Archons without a prolonged battle. That didn’t mean he should approach the highly volatile clash of Axelor against thirty-three Immortals. He took out the core of the God of Mass—a dark, spherical thing the size of his fist, which he suddenly found himself wishing he had the System to identify. The void before him parted like a curtain into which Jack slid the core. Sensing the incoming teleportation, Axelor briefly let the space lock surrounding his body fall to receive it. He then quickly re-teleported it somewhere else.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The other Gods reacted immediately. They disengaged from the Archons and A-Grades they’d been fighting, a God made of stars reaching out to grab the core which materialized out of thin air in front of it.

“MY FELLOW GODS,” it said, “LET US UNITE.”

A bright light blinded the battlefield. Besides Axelor, the other nine Gods melted into bright liquid, then gathered together in two large groups. One contained five Gods, while the other four and the dead god’s core. In front of everyone’s stunned gazes, the two large masses of reality-making liquid solidified into new shapes—two new behemoths superior to even Axelor in size and aura.

One was perfectly solid, containing the essence of matter and physical energy. Even from afar, Jack felt such intense ripples of strength that he knew his nascent Universe of the Body couldn’t hold a candle to this God’s physicality. He realized, without a doubt, that this was the God of Physical, the God of Matter. Everything physical fell under his purview.

As for the second form, it was an ethereal and formless, vaguely humanoid figure which seemed to contain every kind of energy. Its aura was equally imposing. This was the God of Energy.

Jack and everyone else were stunned as they watched the transformation occur. Thinking back to the different Gods, there were indeed five embodying physical properties or states and five pertaining to energy, if one decided to be loose with their interpretation, but he didn’t think they’d actually combine like this.

Their reasoning was immediately obvious. The power of each of these new Gods was greater than the sum of their parts. They were even greater than Axelor, each of them emanating an aura twice as powerful as his. They remained Archons, however.

Floating between the two greater Gods, the Arch Priestess looked tiny. Her aura was a breeze to their storm. “You didn’t do this in the First Crusade,” she managed to say.

“WE DID NOT KNOW HOW, NOR HAD WE FELT THE NEED TO LEARN,” one of the two new Gods replied, its voice pulsing with five different undertones.

“NOW WE DO,” added the other God, four undertones to its voice, “AND WE CAME TO WIN.”

They charged into the battlefield. The collection of Archons and A-Grades holding them back before gathered their powers, forming a massive, multi-colored shield. Jack knew he could be slamming that thing for hours and not even crack it. The God of Matter slammed into the shield, shattering it like glass. The God of Energy raised its hands and a reality-bending beam flowed out of them, smashing the gathered cultivators and sending them flying. Several died on the spot.

With the nine lesser Gods combining into two greater ones, their powers had increased massively. Watching the devastation they wrought, Jack wondered whether he’d messed up by giving away the core. If these two Gods and Axelor decided to turn against him or the Church afterward, there would be no resisting them. The Immortals and their army couldn’t stop them either.

The two greater Gods, however, didn’t share that thought. After blasting away the weaker enemies, they turned towards the Immortals instead of barreling into the main battlefield. Two powerful gazes, along with Axelor’s, landed on the Heaven Immortal.

“BRING OUT THE FORM WHICH KILLED OUR SIBLING,” they said at the same time. “LET US CLEANSE ENAS’S SIN WITH THE APEX OF DIVINE POWER.”

Facing such overwhelming might, the Heaven Immortal didn’t seem flustered—if it even could be. It tilted its head. “Very well,” it said. “Your divine power is impressive, but this will go no different than last time.”

The Immortal formation shattered. Thirty-three robots went flying in different directions, and Jack, watching from afar, realized that thirty-two of them were lifeless. Only the Heaven Immortal remained, its form shrouded with ethereal cogs, a vision similar to the mini-System core which had existed inside Jack’s body but much grander.

The wires which extended from the back of the Heaven Immortal’s head into spatial rifts were retracted, more of their length revealed as they pulled something out of the void. Complex machinery came into view. Jack felt a tug in his soul as he saw a sphere of polished cogs and gears completely suffused with magic. The energy contained in that sphere was the greatest amount he’d ever sensed, and that included the two greater Gods before him. He could tell that the sphere, only a few feet in diameter, was a marvel of magical mechanics—it contained compressed, endless miles of machinery interspersed with the Dao of multiple Archons—perhaps more of them than on the entire battlefield combined.

“By the System born, and by the System cometh,” the Heaven Immortal chanted. Every cultivator fighting for the Immortals shuddered. Some clutched at their chests and others screamed as energy rose from their open mouths, corporeal gears tearing through their throats. Each cultivator spat out a smaller sphere of magic machinery, which all flew into a side-door of the Heaven Immortal’s larger one. With every small sphere it absorbed, its power increased, as did the diversity and depth of its Daos. Even the Archons weren’t spared, and their cog spheres had the greatest impact. Every cultivator who released a sphere was left drained, their innards riddled with wounds and their energy siphoned.

This sounded slow, but it took place in the blink of an eye. Jack didn’t have much time to react. Everyone who tried to grab a sphere before it flew or teleported over were shocked, their bodies flung away by a burst of power.

“Arrogant flesh,” the Heaven Immortal intoned. “You may not interact with my power.”

Jack suppressed a shiver of fear. Those were the mini-System cores, he realized. I didn’t know they could be ripped out in such a manner. They basically stole the cultivators’ energy and copied their Dao understandings! If I hadn’t removed my System core before coming here, would I be like them?

He suspected that his Universe of the Body would interfere with the process, but he was glad he didn’t need to find out. He wasn’t glad for the massive amount of power now hovering behind the Heaven Immortal.

The large sphere throbbed, shrinking into itself with every pulse. In a moment, it went from several feet wide to just a few inches, at which point the Heaven Immortal grabbed it and swallowed it—a mouth was the only facial feature the robot possessed. The wires connecting the back of its head to the ball persisted, now crawling into his throat like futuristic worms.

The power radiating from his body suddenly spiked. It reached the level of Axelor before easily overtaking him. Even the two greater Gods paled before it. They frowned. “THIS IS DIFFERENT THAN LAST TIME,” they said. “YOU TRICKED US.”n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

The Heaven Immortal wiped its mouth, from which some green liquid had leaked, then smiled. Its mouth extended in a creepily wide grin which would have reached its ears if it had any. The wires and tubes still stretched into it, making for a grotesque sight. Jack realized he’d been holding his breath. Shivers ran down his spine—not from shock, but from pure terror. The current Heaven Immortal was seriously pushing against the boundaries of the Archon realm. Jack was confident nothing could get stronger without a breakthrough.

“Nevermind,” he whispered. “Giving them the core was the right call. There’s no way they could have handled this monster before. They barely can now.”

“Behold the peak of mortal power,” the Heaven Immortal declared over a frozen battlefield, “and behold the start of a new age. The Old Gods fall as the New Gods rise. Praise the Immortal System. Praise the New World.”