Limitless Path

"Oh, before we get to any of the good stuff, I did have one more thing," Beth said, shaking her head before pulling an item out of her necklace.

"And this is…?" Selene asked before examining it.

Wall of Eternal Stone

{This shield is designed to prevent any damage from ever cracking it. The weight and density mean it takes a substantial amount of Strength to wield.

20% increased Strength

10% increased Dexterity

20% increased Endurance

10% increased Wisdom

Minimum level 320.

Can briefly make user's body harder than any other stone.}

"Shield we found," Beth said with a small shrug. "We want to consign it for sale."

"Definitely enough for a monthly auction piece," Alex commented.

"Perhaps enough for the next yearly auction," Selene stated. "It all depends on exactly what people decide to put up."

"I'll leave it in your hands," Beth said with a shrug.

"Anything else interesting you've found…" Selene said, trailing off in a bit of a leading manner.

"Nope, that's it," Beth said, grinning at all three of the others.

"Well, I can take care of the shield, but in the meantime, I can think of some things to pass the time," Selene said, letting the grin creep into her voice as she spoke.

"Oh really? I'd be interested in such things," Beth said, sharing a knowing look with Sera.

The four of them retreated to Selene's house, which she informed Beth and Sera was just a temporary residence. It was extremely impressive for temporary quarters, and the two of them had been staying in the house for years, but for an Ascended that was just a quick wait. Selene and Alex had no plans to run the branch they were currently working for in perpetuity, and they would be moving on one day and likely just sell the place to another Ascended. If an Ascended didn't like the location, they could pick the house up and move it somewhere else, and rather easily, to boot.

The only downside was that Beth and Sera were on the clock, meaning they could stay for a couple days before they had to return to their home Hall. Still, those couple days were extremely enjoyable, as all four of them got along quite well, even if their interactions happened once or twice a year at this point. It felt like the weekend just disappeared, and, in the end, Beth had to be roused out of bed, and Selene's embrace, so they could make it back home in time to clock in. There was a quick goodbye as they were already practically out the door, though Selene tried to extend the goodbye a little longer with some long kisses to both Sera and Beth, but they were soon on their way back home.

Another week of referee duty passed uneventfully, with everyone mainly working on their professions in their downtime. The girls had a decision to make, as well, though it wasn't exactly pressing right at this moment. They would need to figure out if they were going to do their next rebirths as soon as humanly possible, then spend a decent bit of time leveling again, or if they were going to stay at max level for a little. The advantage of staying at max level was that they could continue to explore the high-level areas for a while without having to pause for a month to regain the necessary levels. Of course, it was not like their exploration was at a critical point, though Beth was worried about a couple of the places possibly overrunning, so taking a month or so off of clearing dungeons wouldn't be that great. It was a bit of a trade-off, and Beth was thinking they might just rebirth as soon as they had the materials in hand if they weren't going to show up quickly. They would take time, in the meantime, to try to work down some of the dungeons, including spiking the golem dungeon at least once, and see if they could get the area more stable.

Speaking of having to wait, Alex contacted them that weekend to inform them of her updated estimate on the amount of time and money getting their resources would require. Beth had reached out to Mortaine as well, hoping he could get her the rare material, and he had told her it wouldn't exactly be a fast process. They were likely looking at around five mithril coins for the total price, and that would get them everything in two months, which was the expedited timeframe. If they weren't willing to pay top dollar, it could have taken as long as four months for most of their components to be gathered. Still, they had the money and would love to save the time, so Beth had told Alex that speed was more important than price. She had agreed and said she would see what she could do to get everything ordered as fast as she could.

That meant Beth's next task was securing some spikes from Jaq to use for the dungeons, and her second task was to secure an extra day or two off the next weekend. It would have been a few weeks since they had taken a day off so the rotation could absorb them taking another. Beth was thinking about making it four, which would be on the safe side, and went to get permission directly from Baelvyr that they could make the next weekend a four-day weekend. After getting ribbed by him for a minute about being all play and no work, he approved them stepping out of the rotation for that long. With that taken care of, it was just about getting the spikes, and how she was going to convince Jaq that they were an expense for the mission.

She found him in the commissary, which wasn't always a guarantee these days. He saw her coming and ignored her, finishing what he was doing before deigning to speak to her. When he finally did, he was just as short as always, saying, "What?"

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"Need dungeon spikes," she answered him.

"They're two diamonds a piece," he replied calmly, though one of the few customers in the place at the time did a spit take.

"They're for a mission," Beth tried.

"What mission?" he asked pointedly, narrowing his eyes at her.

"Scouting and clearing a high mana zone," Beth replied, forwarding him the mission they did, in fact, have for clearing the area they were working on.

"Hmm," Jaq said, the noise not sounding like he was particularly convinced by her explanation. After he reviewed the information and examined the data for the area they were clearing, he reluctantly agreed to give them ten spikes. "These are just to take care of those two overrunning dungeons. Also, I expect the spares back, and that's not a request."

"I'll make sure there aren't any spares," Beth said, grinning at his sour face.

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that," he replied tartly before disappearing into the back.

He came back about three minutes later with a bundle of spikes that he set gently on the counter, giving her a glare as she swiped them and made them disappear into her necklace. Beth then got out of the way for a customer, who was eyeing her warily, that wanted to buy something. She did note, once again, that Jaq was much more pleasant with a random stranger than with her, but she supposed that was a mark that she had some form of his respect. She turned and left the shop, nodding at the patrons who gave her strange glances for casually taking twenty diamond coins worth of items and walking out without a care in the world. She thought that she might just be used to operating in a bit of a different world than others.

She took the spikes, and their permission to miss days, back to the suite, where she informed everyone of what was happening, including Bjorn and Kris. The had a few days to get ready for the next weekend, and Bjorn and Kris wanted to level some more, some of which they had already done in the week since Beth got back from her weekend excursion. They used the gate for two objective days, Beth able to leave it open while she was up on the arena floor taking care of her ref duties, both Bjorn and Kris getting some good levels out of it. That gave Beth just about two days to rest before they were getting on the airship and leaving, not that the gate had really strained her at all.

Blood flew the airship, which she had been doing a lot of lately, taking them to the golem dungeon rather quickly. The wolf had gotten quite a huge amount of time in with instructors and would easily finish not just her basic pilots license but could likely finish her starship license by the time they were done with their referee duties. The starship requirements were more intensive, but Blood really needed little sleep these days, especially with her napping, and the people doing the teaching were at least Enlightened, if not even Ascended. Blood could also take lessons from people on other worlds; she certainly had enough money to teleport somewhere in the late afternoon, do starship training for the entire night cycle for them back on Earth, and then teleport back in the morning and do the ref work.

Either way, Blood was a great pilot, very skilled and precise, and it was quite clear that she really loved the work. She got them to their destination quickly and problem-free, which was something Beth was glad for, considering they might start encountering quite high-level flying beasts at some point. The things in that caldera were high enough level that the airship would not have an easy time defending against them, and some of those beasts could fly or even propel themselves high through the air with mana or skills. Beth wasn't seriously worried about it, as the airship was pretty sturdy after they had upgraded it with the additional core, but she still didn't want it to get damaged. If anything sounded like a massive waste of money, it was having to do repairs to an airship, especially when they could fly safe and avoid spending mithril coins on fixes.

The dungeon was once again surrounded by golems, and Beth thought they might be even more numerous than the last time they had been here. She had Blood land some distance away and put away the airship before she had Bjorn take point for the team. After that, it was usually just about if they could keep up with Bjorn, not due to his raw speed, but he tended to truck through anything in the way and not even slow down, which usually meant a lot of cleanup and killing for everyone else. Following him did get results, however, as they were able to cover a lot of ground and kill a ton of beasts in a relatively short amount of time.

They had to spend some time clearing the area around the dungeon entrance, which meant killing an immense number of golems, as they were attracted by the fighting and swarmed around the group. It took a few hours for everything to wrap up; not that they had cleared everything out in that time, but they had killed enough that the entrance area was clear. The team took a rest for a handful of minutes, though they didn't want to wait very long, as the dungeon was still popping out golems at a rather prodigious rate, so a rest in front of it wasn't all that restful. They alternated people relaxing for a couple minutes each while the others in the group killed all the spawns. Doing such a thing was a real 'holding back the tide with a broom' sort of effort; a dungeon could never be normalized by just killing everything that came out of it. That wouldn't take care of the buildup of excess mana, so sitting in front of a dungeon that was stuffed, or overstuffed, with mana was an exercise in futility.

Beth made sure everyone was ready before activating a spike on the dungeon, focusing the mana within to overload a single instance. That instance would be much harder, likely larger, and would present additional challenges at higher levels. In return, of course, the rewards for clearing the dungeon were much greater, including the coins dropped from the higher level and stronger beasts on top of the greatly enhanced clear rewards at the end. Beth expected to get a handful of quite good legendary items, or maybe a masterwork or two, and that was per run, not in total. If the rarity wasn't that high, it was likely because they would be getting very powerful items without a rarity scale, like elixirs, and/or just getting a massive number of items every clear. She was starting to get a bit excited to see what such a high-level dungeon would reveal when spiked, though wading through the whole dungeon to get there was going to be more than a bit of a pain.

That thought proved true almost right away, considering the very first beasts they fought were more than twenty levels higher than they had previously been and were led by a sub-boss. Beth thought that was a little ridiculous, but the dungeon wasn't done there. Every pack was led by a sub-boss, and they had fight through more than a hundred packs of beasts to get to the boss. The dungeon instances had a layout like a large factory complex, one that usually extended between four and six floors. The stairways only went up one floor, and they were almost always at the opposite end of the starting point, which did make finding them fairly easy, as long as at least one person in the group had a good sense of direction. It also meant that to clear the dungeon, they had to go the whole length of a floor, though they didn't have to go the whole breadth. The luckiest run they had, early on, saw the place be four floors and all of them have a nearly straight-line layout of rooms and halls that lead to the opposite side. The times when the factory had a more complex layout, with long series of interconnected rooms that had to be navigated, sometimes in specific orders, were the slowest runs.

The overcharged run didn't have a very complex layout on the floors, but it certainly wasn't a straight shot through each floor. Then, the simulated building they were fighting through had eight floors, instead of normal maximum of six, which also showed just how crazy things could get with a spike. On top of that, there were more traps then there usually were, including two that sealed the ends of a hallway and started pumping it full of a not very nice gas at a rapid pace.

Any other group would have had a tough time with that, and if they didn't have the proper resistances at the proper levels, it could have led to some, or quite a few, fatalities. Unfortunately for the dungeon, Beth and her team were all immensely strong with crazy resistances. Beth, Blood, and Sera were all walking tanks that had leveled their resistances well ahead of where many others would have at that point in their adventuring careers, Kris was an alchemist and used to dealing with poisons and harmful substances and had very good resistances for a whole gamut of things, while Bjorn was just built like a battleship and looked like he just shrugged the toxic cloud off with a grunt.

The run took a long time, a very long time, especially since the boss was some goddamn, multi-phase nightmare that took forever to beat, especially with how tough its defenses were. Beth might have thought it was rather clever and a good fight overall, considering it played on the theme of the dungeon, the boss assembling itself over the course of the fight as the team had to deal with a lot of adds in between trying to break the parts of the boss, but the whole thing just proved tedious. That fight was also much different from the typical massive golem with a horde of lesser versions of itself it ordered around, which was what they had fought every time before this in this dungeon. It got to be that the time was close enough that not only was she glad for the extra day off, she was worried about them getting back and getting to their duties Tuesday on time, but the crazy rewards they got from just the one clear made it all worth it.