The Ascender's Legacy [A CHAOTIC STORM LITRPG]

"Every symphony needs a conductor. Even the ones written in blood, played in screams, and orchestrated by those who have nothing left to lose."

Dunestrider Seretta Sorrows,

Calodan, 2255.

20 years ago.

The Dune River, Calodan.

Seretta Sorrows—once Seretta Vaelwyn of the fallen clan of Vaelwyn—stood in the center of the dune river like a monument of grief made flesh.

The desert around her stretched wide and solemn—a sea of muted gold and faded ochre, where the wind carved ripples into the sand like echoes of forgotten music etched in silence.

Amidst the towering dunes and shifting earth lay a winding path, dry as old bone—a natural curvature of finer, paler sand that snaked through the desert like the ghost of a stream, its current long since stolen by time.

It was the same path Seretta walked, dressed head to toe in thick clothing to shield herself from the cutting winds. Still, strands of reddish-brown hair peeked out from the folds of her hood, sweeping across the narrow gap she had left for her eyes—twin pools of burnished copper, ringed by steel blue and ash.

Her gaze swept across the desolate expanse, without visible emotion. There was no one in sight for miles—but Seretta had a purpose here, and she could almost feel it drawing near.

Memories of the families she'd lost flashed across her mind as she walked, layering themselves across her sight like a vision of the past. Seretta could almost see them now, a company of bards and musicians passing this very road, filling the dunes with melodies so joyful and pure they'd made royals weep.

Music had been their joy, their comfort, and their profession—it was everything to them. It was all she had known, and she had been happy. But then came the plague of the Mourning Chord, a deadly affliction that swept through the dunes like a tidal curse, sparing neither noble nor commoner.

The plague had devoured her clan from within, a nemesis of sound itself, turning their songs to screams until silence had claimed them all.

Seretta had been the only survivor in her clan, forced to watch her parents, siblings, and kin succumb to the malady that devoured their musical souls.

Now, she carried that melody in her new name—Sorrows—and its power had twisted her once-gifted affinity into something darker, more destructive.

The irony was not lost on her that she, who had once played lullabies to soothe crying children, now used her gift to compose symphonies of death. But she hadn't made herself this way. This was her reaction to the hand that life had dealt her, stealing her entire clan away and then leaving her to bear the weight of it.

She had shattered under all that grief and loneliness, but she had come out stronger. She had gained skills no one could ever have imagined and had made it her sole purpose to avenge her family, for the plague had not come upon them of its volition; it had been inflicted.

And she knew who was responsible. She could sense them nearby, and with each step she took forward, her emotions surged, growing steadily until her aura began leaking from her core.

The cult of the watch.

Those twisted fanatics had been the ones to unleash the plague of the mourning chord upon Calodan when a search for their damned legacy had gone awry. But Seretta didn't care whether it was intentional or by accident. Her family had paid the price in blood, and blood was what she required as payment.

For the last three years, she had hunted cultists all over Calodan, moving from clan to clan to root them out. She had honed herself into a blade fashioned against them, but this particular one was by far the most important, because this specific outpost was the one responsible for the plague. Every other outpost and cultist she had killed was in preparation for this moment.

Breathing deeply, she continued her trek through the dune river, eyes scanning the dunes around her for the outpost she knew was hidden here.

With her keen senses, it didn't take long for her to find it, and as she reached the top of a particular dune, it finally revealed itself in the distance—a ramshackle fortress of rotting wood, squatted in the valley like a carbuncle on the landscape, its walls covered in moss.

It was an ugly building, seemingly standing on its last legs, but Seretta wasn't deceived. She could hear the music magic emanating from the building, too strong to look so weak. Invisible runes sang to her like violins, their tunes vibrating through the air like whispered warnings.

For a moment, she just stared at the rundown building, her training the only thing keeping her in check. She wanted to race down there and tear every single cultist hiding in that building apart, but like every other thing in the universe, this was a performance, and it had to be perfect.

Taking in another deep breath, she approached the gate, her steps measured and deliberate if a little shaky from the emotions surging within her.

Shouts echoed from the building as she drew closer, confused and questioning, but Seretta ignored them. She hadn't come here to parley or ask for their surrender. She had come for slaughter.

Her magic crescendoed as she drew even closer, frantic movements echoing as the cultists sensed the danger in the vengeful symphony of her leaking aura. To Seretta, their panic was just more sound. Discordant. Ugly.

Protection runes sparked like off-key violins, shrieking in her mind. Desperate enchantments rose like trumpet blasts, too bold, too proud—and immediately silenced by the expanding weight of her presence. She could hear the weave of their skills and enchantments activating in real time—choppy, rushed, and unrefined. Pitiful. Magic, when cast in fear, always broke rhythm.

The sounds grated on her nerves, echoing within her mind like shattered instruments dragged across broken strings. Seretta unleashed her aura in defiance. It did not explode—it resonated. A low, thrumming pulse that spread outward from her core, vibrating through the sand to create a bubble shield of pulsing notes.

Her mind calmed, her emotions subsided, but Seretta didn't turn back. Every step she took forward was a song. Every breath she drew pulled the rhythm of the world closer to her tempo, and by the time she was only a dozen feet away from the cultists, her steps struck the desert like a drumbeat, a steady rhythm of doom that roared in her ears like her very heartbeat.

Musical notes clung to her like a second skin—low, minor, aching with her grief, twisting and pulling the ambient energy into harmony with her rage.

Fear mounted within the outpost, and eventually, the cultists rushed out, over a hundred of them. If she was hearing the tune of their magic right, nearly all of them were in the advanced class, tier 50 at least. But Seretta was unfazed.

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At the 65th tier, she was only a tier or two stronger than the strongest cultists present, but rather than scare her, Seretta simply saw it as a challenge, and a minor one at that. These were the people responsible for the death of her family and her clan. Today, they would pay in blood, just like all their brothers who had encountered her.

With eyes laden with grief and a heart singing a sound of rage, Seretta watched the cultists as they began to ready their magic, hands weaving notes of chaos and wrongness.

Flames burst to life around her, shrieking like a violin set ablaze.

The earth shuddered beneath her feet, groaning in percussive protest.

Water spun upward in fractured spirals, dissonant and weeping.

Lightning snapped through the air, and wind howled like a choir gone mad, raising a storm of dust into the air.

Shadows spilled across the desert like a bassline crawling out of tune.

Light itself fractured into shards, each one humming with an unnatural pitch.

And beneath it all, blood stirred, thick and slow, like a cello dragging through wet silence.

The cultists protested with their own panicked songs, skills activating to form an orchestra of destruction, but they failed to realize that she was the conductor of this symphony—and there would be no encore.

Seretta raised one hand, slow and deliberate, finger poised like a conductor before a downbeat. Energy surged wildly around her—fire, lightning, shadow, water, and blood, all clashing and screaming to be heard.

The cultists attacked, unleashing their skills in desperation, but their rhythm was broken. Their harmony, false.

Seretta corrected it.

With a flick of her wrists, the flames bent sideways, mid-flight, curling back towards their master like rogue hounds. Her foot tapped against the earth—a single note—and the ground responded, splitting beneath the cultists' feet and swallowing dozens of them whole.

But like ants, with each cultist that fell, more poured out of their shambling fortress, roaring curses and hurling skills at her. Their voices rose in discordant battle cries, but all of it added to the symphony she was weaving, and a good conductor never stopped correcting even when the performance was off.

With that in mind, she spun, cloak whirring behind her, even as her hands weaved patterns of symphony in the air. A thread of lightning rethreaded itself, arcing through the air in perfect intervals, a calculated cadence of pain.

Cultists fell as their own skills were turned against them with brutal efficiency. A wind blade turned mid-cast, slicing through his throat in a spray of arterial blood. Another earth spike erupted beneath his feet, impaling him through the chest before he could so much as blink.

Seretta moved through them like death itself, her hands conducting their destruction. A gesture here sent a cultist's own lightning back into his skull, cooking his brain in an instant. A flick of her wrist there turned conjured flames into searing whips that lashed across three men, opening their throats in perfect succession.

Heads rolled across the sand, leaving dark trails behind them. Bodies dropped with wet thuds, their blood seeping into the golden grains until the desert floor looked like a painter's palette mixed with crimson and gold.

Still, more poured from the fortress, stepping over the corpses of their brothers, their boots squelching in the growing pools of blood. Somebody screamed, joining a dozen other cultists to reroute a furious tide of water, spiraling in the air. They poured their energy and willpower into it, far more than she could ever dream to have, but conducting wasn't about magical power, nor was it a battle of wills.

No, it was understanding.

It was a command, and with a low, mournful hum that cut through the water like a blade through silk—the water froze in place, then shattered into glasslike shards that rained down on them like promises.

Shadows lashed at her, space heaved, and light burst violently, but Seretta stepped through it all as if it were smoke, raising both hands now. The entire plain pulsed, a single note, loud and resonant, as though the battle itself waited for her cue.

A smile stretched across her expression as pure bliss surged within her, temporarily replacing the rage and grief she had carried for dozens of years.

And then she conducted.

A sweeping motion of her arms, a silent rhythm only she understood, and chaos exploded. Flames swallowed screams, light went haywire, cutting several cultists to pieces before exploding in a shower of sparks. Blood magic thickened and twisted into binding cords, latched onto several cultists, and then forced itself into their mouths, their noses, their ears—any opening it could find. They gagged and choked, clawing at their throats as the liquid death poured down their windpipes.

But choking was only the beginning.

The moment the blood touched their own circulation, it crystallized, forming jagged spikes of hardened crimson that tore through veins and arteries from within. Cultists screamed as their own bodies became prisons of agony, crystal shards bursting through their skin like thorns breaking through soil.

One man's chest exploded outward in a shower of blood and bone fragments. Another's skull split as crystallized blood erupted from his eye sockets. A third doubled over as spikes of his corrupted blood punched through his spine, lifting him off the ground before he collapsed in a twitching heap.

Dozens fell in seconds, their bodies becoming grotesque sculptures of crystal and flesh. The desert sand drank deeply of the carnage, and still Seretta's symphony played on.

Screams rose into the sky, raw and tortured, but they were no longer discordant; they were harmony.

It was a requiem.

Each death was a beat. Each scream, a rest. Each silence, a measure passed.

The cultists died in the hundreds, and when they realized that their skills and abilities were useless against her, they abandoned their magic and brandished their steel.

Weapons gleamed in the evening light, sharp and threatening as the cultists surged toward her, their intent clear. But Seretta's smile only widened.

It didn't matter whether it was a symphony of magic or a song of blades. It was music nonetheless. She was the conductor, and this was a new movement.

Narrowing her gaze at the approaching cultists, she raised a hand, the movement barely a whisper, and a low, thrumming note rose from her lips, haunting even to her. The frequency found in the steel in their blades, and the weapons began to vibrate in their grips, then sing with violent resonance.

Swords, polearms, shields, spears, hammers—all of it became unbearable to hold, vibrating so violently that the metal screamed at frequencies that made teeth ache.

Many of the cultists dropped their weapons immediately, eyes wide with fear, but a few still held on to their weapons, gritting their teeth in pain as the metal vibrated violently in their hands.

Seretta refused to allow their stubbornness to ruin her performance, and with eyes as hard as steel, she commanded, "Drop them."

Willpower surged through her pathways like a rising tide as the rule shook reality for a moment, her voice carrying impossible harmonies that bypassed their ears and spoke directly to their bones.

Weapons clattered to the ground immediately, alongside dozens of decapitated wrists and flayed skin. Agonized screams filled the air, and with no other option, the cultists turned to run.

But Seretta was already weaving the closing piece.

Her left hand rose as it began another melody, and with a sense of finality, she found their heartbeats—hundreds of distinct rhythms thundering in panicked syncopation.

They were like drums, all beating wrongly, ruining the piece and distorting the music.

They had to be silenced.

All it took was the clenching of her fist—and two-thirds of her willpower pool.

The world dimmed—not with shadow, but with silence. Not the absence of sound, but the extinguishing of it, like a candle crushed between fingers.

Hundreds of hearts, once thundering, stuttered to an immediate halt.
Others burst apart like balloons of blood, painting the already-drenched ground crimson.

The cultists fell where they stood, mouths open in screams that never left their throats.
No cries. No clatter. Only the sound of bodies meeting sand as the orchestra came to its end.

And then—silence.

Seretta swayed on her feet, nearly completely drained from the battle. The emotional release left her feeling hollow and empty, but mostly, Seretta was tired. She had used up a lot of energy and willpower in this battle, but it had been worth it to finally carry out the performance she had dreamed of since she first understood what the word meant.

Her heart echoed with relief. But the grief remained, aching like a wound that would never heal.

She fell to her knees, too tired to hold herself upright any longer.

Tears welled in her eyes, thick and hot, as the satisfaction she had hoped for failed to make an appearance. Grief sat heavy in her chest—heavier now, it seemed—despite the revenge she had finally exacted.

Hours passed, and Seretta just sat there, amid the chaos she had created, crying. Evening turned to night. But with the emergence of stars came the urge to sing. And sing she did.

It wasn't a song of triumph or victory but a song of grief that seemed eternal, never healing, and ever bleeding. Her voice, raw from the battle, carried across the desolate landscape like a prayer, each note a goodbye that wasn't reciprocated. Each pause was an added weight rather than a release from the burden she had carried for so long.

But as the last note faded into darkness, Seretta Sorrows raised her eyes to the sky where the residual harmony of her orchestra hung. Blood, pain, and music swirled around the sky, bound together by willpower and chaos, creating an aurora of beautiful lights in the sky.

Seretta smiled.

Even in grief, even in emptiness, she had created something beautiful.

Her family would have been proud.