Limitless Path

The first of the big rewards they got wasn't even from the boss, but from the sub-bosses. There were really two rewards there, as all the sub-bosses had very valuable beast cores that were worth quite a bit. They would likely keep all of them, however, adding to their growing beast core collection, both an extra monetary fund as well as resources for crafting and rebirths. The other thing they got from several of the bosses was highly valuable ore and minerals, everything of high mana purity and extremely valuable. Beth and the others had grabbed the dungeon rewards and left, setting up the airship and getting in the air. Beth had them in the cargo hold at the start to lay the items out, as the ores and various materials took up a lot of space. They all looked over the materials, deciding on an allocation for who would take what or who would sell what.

The cores and materials took a while to sort out, but they were flying back to their home Hall while they took care of that. An hour of flight had the general materials sorted and also had them back at home. They postponed the sorting of the actual good loot, much to Beth's chagrin, until they had worked their Tuesday shifts. The slow, boring matches she had to officiate couldn't have crawled by at any more of a snail's pace if the duelists had tried to slow play it. Beth had all the items they had gotten as rewards stashed in her necklace, unexamined, and she thought about what they were and what they could be, and how much they could be worth, as she watched two barely competent women sloppily thrust at each other with rapiers. Beth would have said neither should quit their day job for adventuring, but she supposed everyone had to start somewhere.

The day was finally over, freeing the three of them to return to the suite, where Kris and Bjorn were waiting, having known the time the others would be done with their shifts. Beth carefully pulled all six items they got from the overcharged boss out of her necklace, setting them all on the table in the center of the living room. Even Blood was perked up, paying attention as Beth brought the items out and scanning each of them. And speaking of scanning them, Blood had always been really good with her eye power and it was likely she had the most advanced one out of the whole group, excepting anyone far senior to them like Selene or Baelvyr. Beth knew the last time she had checked Blood's eye power it had been most of the way through Gold, which was certainly higher than either hers or Sera's. All that meant that really meant for this was that Blood likely identified all six items first, but that didn't really make all that much difference.

"Are we keeping these or selling them?" Sera asked as she stared at the item descriptions.

"I think we might be keeping all of this," Beth said, reviewing the items herself. The first item in particular caught her attention, as it was a pair of heavy gauntlets, almost perfect for her.

Gauntlets of a Frozen Moment

{Gauntlets forged by a Grandmaster of ages past. They lack a critical component to achieve the perfect level he dreamed for them, a great power of frost and cold, but they are still a work of surpassing strength and power.

30% increased Strength

15% increased Dexterity

30% increased Endurance

10% increased Intelligence

10% increased Wisdom

Requires level 360.

Punches create blasts of ice and frozen space around the wielder.}

Not only were the gauntlets insanely strong, beautiful, and would work very well for Beth's current build, but the piece in the description that said about them missing something that generated frost had all the little lightbulbs in her head going off at once. She just so happened to have an item thrown in the back corner of her necklace that was quite the source of frost and cold. Maybe she could unite gauntlets and icy heart as one and see just what happened. Before that, however, she wanted to go through the rest of the items from their first spiked run.

Heart Shadow Blade

{A legendary sword created by a Master ascending to Grandmaster, this blade creates a second strike out of some swings, always aimed at the opponent's heart. A skilled swordsman will make every strike blend together into a seamless blur of death.

30% increased Strength

20% increased Dexterity

20% increased Wisdom

Requires level 300.

Duplicate strikes sometimes seek the opponent's heart.}

The blade was interesting, and Beth thought the secondary effect quite novel, but it wasn't a very large weapon, meaning her interest waned considerably. It was much more the form of a standard arming sword or a simple one-handed blade that was quite common throughout the universe. Even with their ubiquity, they were still in-demand, especially ones that were rarer or had unique effects, and Beth expected this might be the one piece of the six they would be selling.

"Just to check, is anybody interested in the sword, even for somebody else?" Beth asked the group, only getting four headshakes in response. "Okay, I'm going to set that one aside for sale."

"No objections," Bjorn grunted, waving for her to take the sword.

Extreme Conductive Focus

{This focus is meant to be used as a secondary enhancement for a dedicated caster. Any spells aligned with any type of lightning experience a boost to power and range when channeled through this item.

20% increased Endurance

25% increased Intelligence

25% increased Wisdom

Requires Level 340.

Lightning spells channeled through the focus hit additional targets at no additional casting cost.}

"Kris. Focus," Beth said, tossing the girl the glowing blue and golden sphere.

"Really? I can, uh, pay, if you want…" Kris said.

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"Kris. Take it," Sera said seriously, giving the shy phoenix a look. Kris accepted the orb and made it disappear somewhere about her person.

Swift Darting Boots

{Powerful boots meant to aid the wearer in any terrain. Worked from the hide of an Ancient Griffon, they provided a lightening effect to the wearer's steps.

30% increased Dexterity

10% increased Wisdom

Requires level 340.

Boots grant the skill Air Stride at Silver[0].}

"Blood. Boots," Beth said after examining the leather boots, tossing them to the wolf.

"What's Air Stride?" Blood asked as she accepted the boots.

"Let's you take several steps through the air," Sera answered. "At higher levels, you can take more and longer steps. It's not really flying, but it does let you move through the air for a while in a kind of pseudo-flight."

"Neat," Blood grunted, putting the boots in her necklace.

Gargant's Visage

{Helm of a well-known warrior with a massive frame. Though no giant blood flowed in this warrior's veins, his massive size was still renowned on the battlefield.

20% increased Strength

20% increased Endurance

Requires level 300.

Increases wearer's resistance to force attacks.}

Bjorn reached over and took the helm without anybody have to say anything. The thing was red and black and looked like somebody welded a handful of thick plates of metal together and called it a day. It was a perfect fit for the titan descendant, though he only tried it on briefly before stashing it wherever he kept his items, which Beth was assuming was a spatial skill and not an item. She just had a hunch that he had a skill, and she had a kind of feeling for it based on Sera having a skill for spatial storage and feeling what Sera using the skill around her was like.

Old Mountain Elixir

{Elixir created to reinforce the strength of the imbiber's body and connection with the earth. Increases Strength and Endurance while also reinforcing earth-based affinities.}

"You want the elixir, Sera?" Beth asked her. "Everybody else basically got something they can use so far."

"Nah," Sera said with a shrug. "I'm mostly elixired out, and I think it's probably better if we sell this one. Judging by the description and what I know of elixirs, this thing is pretty damn high-tier. It'll likely go for at least quite a few diamond coins, if not into the low mithril coins."

"Alright, if you don't want it," Beth said, checking to make sure before pocketing the elixir to have sold later. "Now, who wants to watch me do something stupid?"

"I do," Blood volunteered immediately.

"I don't," Kris said nervously.

"Huh," grunted Bjorn very loquaciously.

"Stupid how?" Sera asked, eyeing Beth.

"Well, I'm gonna take these gauntlets, then I'm gonna try to put that ice heart thing we found in them. Should be a good show," Beth explained.

"That sounds like a bad idea," Sera said with a bit of a warning tone.

"I love it," Blood added.

"Your what now?" Bjorn asked.

"Can't show it here. Come on," Beth said, opening her gate behind the couches and walking inside. The house-like area had a large, open area behind it that didn't have anything in, and by that Beth meant anything. It was just a big, open, empty white space that stretched for over a mile and had no discernable use or purpose other than providing an open area if one didn't want to, for example, test something dangerous in the house that might blow up and destroy other valuables.

"So, we have these," Beth said, taking the black and white gauntlets that she had snagged from the factory out of her space. "You might wanna step back."

Kris and Blood faithfully stepped back, while Sera and Bjorn both crossed their arms in a near perfect mirror of each other.

"Okay, then, don't say I didn't warn you," Beth said, taking out the icy heart. Instantly, everything around her started to freeze, but in the next moment, the gauntlets on the ground starting sucking in the cold. Not really knowing what else to do, Beth leaned down and forced her frozen hands to shove the crystal against the gauntlets, at which point the gauntlets grabbed hold of the crystal with some kind of force and started pulling it into the very fabric of their being. Beth watched, eyebrows frozen now, as the gauntlets absorbed the crystal and underwent a rapid and extreme change, becoming both sleeker but somehow denser, the black thinning out to a series of lines across the back of each gauntlet and one slightly thicker line down each side.

"Well, that worked…I guess?" Beth said, picking up the gauntlets and examining them.

Gauntlets of Frozen Space

{The magnum opus of a legendary Sage, these gauntlets freeze and chill the space around them, stopping movement and skills. The power of ice is so great as to overwhelm even space itself.

50% increased Strength

25% increased Dexterity

50% increased Endurance

20% increased Intelligence

20% increased Wisdom

Requires level 400.

The gauntlets can freeze everything around them, including space.}

"Well, the level requirement is a bit much," Beth said with a sigh.

"You can get a level reducer for it," Sera said. "It won't be cheap, but you could reduce them to level three hundred without too much trouble."

"I'll have to look into it when I go to sell the other stuff. I'll wait a while till we have some more stuff, even though we just dumped the shield on them," Beth said.

"Should send a message," Bjorn said. When Beth gave him a raised eyebrow, he elaborated, "Hundred-grade level adapters don't grow on trees. Your contact will need time to get their hands on one."

"Right, thanks," Beth said, firing off a message to Alex and Selene about it.

Beth let the others use her gate to level while they were doing ref work. They also wouldn't be able to use the spikes for a bit, as they couldn't take any extra days off for extracurricular activities for a while. Beth was hoping they could do two more runs of the golem dungeon in the next two months while using the spikes, and that would let her take a nice load of items to Seven Lights to put up for sale. They would still do runs of dungeons on the weekends and keep working on getting the mana overflows down, but doing it without spikes was treading water at best. They could still get levels, skill levels, beast cores, and other rewards from the dungeons even without the spikes, so it was still worth their time.

Beth got updates over the next couple weeks from Alex a couple times about their order and it was slow going. It would definitely take at least two months for all the items to come in, and Beth was thinking that even with her monetary incentives, it was going to be longer. In the meantime, they were several months into their referee duty at this point, not quite halfway but still making good progress. At the same time, Beth felt like it was watching paint dry, doing at least forty hours a week or more of watching very low-level people fight quite slowly. At least that made the job easy to do, and there were times where there weren't enough people fighting at their Hall for all the refs to be working, though they still had to stay in the arena while on-shift. Beth would sit with the other refs, including her companion and girlfriend, and they would talk about various topics, including matches they had seen and participated in. The most interesting of the other refs, apart from the other Seniors that Beth was used to, was a woman that had done guard duty for a trading caravan for years before ever signing up for the CRA.

She had a lot of stories about what it was like to travel constantly and deal in general trade, including a lot of stories about punks trying to start something with the merchants or guards and getting a justified beatdown. The best stories were when she talked about some of the more exotic places the caravan visited including a city that stretched further than the eye could see built entirely underground and a city that was a series of dozens of floating islands hovering over a pitch black sea. Her stories included plenty of discussion of the other guards and merchants, usually involving the merchants conning some rube out of their silvers and some guards getting drunk and doing something foolish. They were interesting stories, and more than enough to pass the time when few people were using the floor of the arena itself.

The only other thing that was occupying them was their work on their professions, which was still progressing steadily. Slow and steady was the motto of profession work, and Beth and Sera were slowly pushing through Journeyman to make their way to Expert. Beth hadn't had a ton of free time to devote to it for a little while, but she was really on the grind while they were waiting for their materials to be purchased and ready. She worked most evenings and nights, spending sometimes a hundred hours on it if she could use her gate for smithing practice and not to help Bjorn and Kris. That became increasingly easy as Bjorn and Kris moved into and through the two hundreds and slowed their leveling using the gate. They weren't in a crazy rush to add levels, and the weekends spent in the dungeons were doing quite nicely with that in the first place.