Limitless Path

Running out of spikes wasn't hard, especially when they were running the golem dungeon on repeat, over and over until the mana was under control. That was a half dozen spikes used, and that wasn't counting the ones they had used before the auction. Beth made a trip to their home Hall, finagling another five spikes out of Jaq for free, who confessed they were expensive but almost went unused. The things had a shelf life measured in decades, but they had a tendency to sit around that long or longer in CRA storage. He was quietly happy they had a team that was capable of using them, and not just on level fifty dungeons or something inconsequential. He did make her pay the full price for an additional five, making her total ten new spikes, but he charged her the base rate without any additional fees even for such a rare and sensitive commodity.

The next six months passed in something of a blur for Beth's team, as they all pushed very hard to excel. Fighting such powerful, high level enemies pushed their skills, and certainly their levels, quite hard. Bjorn and Kris rebirthed again at the end of that half-year period, coinciding with Kim and her team undergoing their fourth rebirths, having spent plenty of time abusing Beth's gate, giving them years of practice and leveling in the span of a few months. Kim's team was always going to run behind, especially as they were taking a long break after pushing so hard for so long, but they still had great potential. Even beyond that, whether she was influenced by Beth and Blood, or for some other reason of her heritage, Neph didn't stop when the others did. She requested to keep using Beth's gate almost constantly for the next couple months, pushing extremely hard to catch up in levels with Beth's team. It was an effort that would take objective years, even with using Beth's gate constantly, but Neph seemed very dedicated to trying to bridge the gap. Not that she couldn't or wouldn't do things with Kim's team anymore; no, she just wanted to push harder than they did.

Beth supposed it was nice to have a goal to work towards, and speaking of that, their next goal was in sight. After the golem dungeon, they had transitioned to working on some of the other areas, other than the wraith area, which the White Lotus company had already gotten under control. They paid her a whole ten platinum for her fee, which Beth thought was somewhat stingy, but Bjorn explained that was quite good for a finder's fee slash quasi-leasing fee, considering Beth's team had first rights to exploit the wraith area. In the meantime, they had worked through a more detailed cataloguing of the surrounding area and had gotten another of the dungeons under control.

That put them pretty close to finishing up there, which would get them several Gold mission credits from Tazeen. They would need to get a couple more missions each, all three of them being at six right now and getting credit for two missions with their current work. Ten Gold-level missions were needed before testing for a Gold Emblem, which they could hopefully get done within a year or less. That would just leave them with the tests and paperwork to do to upgrade their emblems, though Beth knew that would take a bit of time and effort as well.

Whatever the case may be for the amount of time, she had the spikes and they were back at work. Bjorn and Kris had stolen some time in Beth's gate to get some levels, and they were able to catch up further with a few dungeon runs. Those were done without any spikes, of course, and they use a level two hundred eighty dungeon for the first two runs, just to help them get a bunch of fast levels into the low two hundreds. After that, they moved back to the golem dungeon for a few regular runs before moving on to their current project with spikes. Beth was back over level three hundred at this point and was able to equip almost all of her really good gear, the only exception being the crazy gauntlets. She still had getting something to lower the level requirement on her list of to-dos, but she had put some feelers out on that in the last couple months. Likely Selene and Alex would get what she needed first, but Mortaine said he thought someone that worked for him had some extra items that could be used for level requirements and he would check and get back to her. Mortaine, however, was notoriously bad with time management, Beth sort of expecting him to let her know sometime next decade without even realizing how much time had passed.

The work, which was what it was, even though it was way more palatable to all of them than a nine-to-five, continued for several more months. Beth wanted to get them a bit of breathing room, keeping in mind that she wanted to both help Kim's team now that they were getting some decent strength, and she also had a thought to get what she thought of as her extended team together. Likely Val could only show up for a weekend if at all, as she had just sent word that they were doing their fifth rebirths and forming their Mana Physiques now.

She had confided in Blood, who shared it with Beth and Sera only, that Val had managed, with several helpful items Tera had secured for her, to form her Mana Physique. That meant she wouldn't actually be very far behind the rest of them when she joined up; in fact, if she could catch up in terms of rebirths, she would likely be a little stronger than Sera and close to Blood. Blood's very high stats, high level of humanization, and high skill levels made her quite powerful even without a Mana Physique, so she could likely hold her own in terms of power when matched with a similar level Val. Beth was fairly far ahead, however, as she had quite good stats, very strong skills, and a very powerful Mana Physique that made her quite strong.

The whole massive PR campaign that was going to surround Val, and likely two or possibly three of the others, making their Mana Physiques would still take some time to wrap up. In fact, the news was still hush-hush for close to two months, as it wouldn't even be widely known for that long. The whole big press thing surrounding them would take months after that and Val was currently expecting them to have to keep on their whole Young Scions schtick for about another year, maybe even another eighteen months, so she still wasn't going to have much time free until that really wrapped up. She also did warn them that her celebrity was very hot right now and would be so for the rest of her time as leader of the Scions and that heat would likely take a couple years after the whole thing was through to start dying down. Beth was not really looking forward to that, though after the first month or two it would likely just mean that Val would have to be a little more secretive and she would likely get stopped rather often on the street or asked questions by press people from time to time.

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Those were worries for some time later, however, as now it was just a stolen weekend with Val, though it was going to be longer with the rest of the team. Andrea and Adam both showed up, having no problem with getting a bunch of time free. Adam was rather impressive in his own right, as he really was some kind of crazy savant with Mana Physiques, though Beth wouldn't go quite as far as calling him an idiot savant like Andrea did. Still, she was blown away that he had already reformed his Mana Physique once, something that bordered on the impossible, most people insisting it was far easier to go through a process where one basically undid their Mana Physique and redid it rather than evolve it. The rules didn't really seem to apply to Adam, however, as he had taken his Gold Mana Physique, which he formed sometime during his second rebirth or when doing his third, and upgraded it to Platinum.

"So, you just...upgraded it? When you rebirthed?" Beth asked the quiet, gangly man.

"Sure, it wasn't that hard," Adam replied. "I just felt like it was, I don't know, right? I could see my Mana Physique when I was undergoing the rebirth and I just felt like I could twist it a little. So, I reached into the framework I had built and moved it a bit, adding a new rune set, and made sure everything realigned. The network wasn't quite as robust as I wanted, so I tweaked the rotation. It wasn't really that hard."

"I'm not even sure what you just said," Sera said, causing some laughter.

"You really are strong," Bjorn said then, getting some laughs and jeers from the others but quite some surprise from Adam. Getting a compliment from the massive man was about the same level as getting blood from a stone, so it was a bit of a surprise for him to randomly drop one on Adam.

"I didn't even think you could fucking do that," Val huffed. "You just…upgrade your Mana Physique? Without remaking it? And you didn't even use a fucking Physique Array?"

"It wasn't that hard," Adam repeated, scratching the back of his head and wilting just a bit under all the attention.

"I told you, he's an idiot savant," Andrea said.

"Hey!" Adam exclaimed, nudging at Andrea with his elbow.

Adam, Andrea, and Val had made time, and Veren had sent a message that he would show up some time later, as he was busy with something. Beth knew the man was both incredibly powerful and general fairly reclusive, so she wasn't surprised that he was off on his own. She still remembered the way he ghosted them the last time he had been there, so it was just nice that he was going to show up at all. She expected he would still be the strongest of them, regardless of people building or upgrading Mana Physiques or anything else. A Grandmaster was just something they couldn't really compete with quite yet at this point, though Master was a nice step up for many of them.

They were at least able to spend time with most of the group that weekend, and Beth had them go out exploring some of what else Earth had to offer. They flew around the Americas for a while, seeing the massive changes that were still ongoing, though to a much lesser extent than they had been, thanks to all the mana saturating the planet. The rainforest was back in a big way, though it had seemed to spread over the Andes in a way that Beth wasn't sure was something that had been there before the Path appeared. She knew that the mountains did have forested areas, but this seemed a bit…aggressive, if her memories were correct. On top of that, there were quite a lot of beasts there, so many to the extent that they could easily count numbers running into the high hundreds just hovering a couple hundred feet in the air and glancing down at what was below them. Some of the more adventurous beasts tried to attack the airship, which is when Beth got to demonstrate the power of their defenses and weapons, which shredded everything that came near them.

They crossed the Atlantic, which was totally changed, a massive section of the ocean now given to whirlpools and turbulent waters that Beth wouldn't want to get anywhere near. On top of that, the depths were filled with crazy beasts and possibly even monsters that were the stuff of real nightmares. Being surrounded in a massive body of water with tons of giant beasts with huge teeth that wanted to eat her? No, thanks. Beth was perfectly happy to leave the oceans, and their depths, to people who were a lot braver, or more likely, a lot crazier than she ever could be. It also was a very difficult environment to fight in without specialized skills, tools, and training, and they had little to none of what was required. Sure, Beth and the others could likely brute force it, but there was no telling what was down there, and going in so unprepared would just be sheer madness, even for her.

Luckily, the ocean held nothing they were interested in, now or into the future, so they could avoid having to wrestle hundred-foot-long mutated sharks with an extra row of teeth and heat sensitivity. The stuff she could find about deep ocean beasts and fighting them was horrifying; one had to be totally out of their absolute ever-loving mind to go down there. Apparently, there were teams that made a royal mint's worth of coin annually by doing deep ocean missions, but Beth thought it would be better to fistfight a starship than do such a thing. The coin being so good was a pretty clear indication of what even most Wayfarers thought of the ocean, so that should tell a story all its own.

They flew over Africa, the continent having seen some massive turmoil since the Path came to Earth. In many ways the poorest continent before the Path, a large part of that not at all their fault, though there was plenty of blame to spread everywhere, the different countries of the continent had reacted quite differently. Places like the Congo that were already on very shaky footing essentially collapsed and something like a patchwork collection of principalities and warlord-held zones of control had taken over the place. It wasn't quite as bad as it sounded, there and many other places; after all, a lot of times all it took was a single person with the motivation, often the madness and anger, getting strong to change everything. A single person who had nothing left to lose and could push way further, way faster than anyone else could bring about serious change.

Such a thing was much less common in more established places, but on Earth, often people were only trying to surpass someone that had done two rebirths, those not even both being Perfect Rebirths, let alone True Rebirths. A person could walk into the woods or the desert and walk back out two or three years later strong enough to shatter the current power structure. It had happened more than once, and not just in places in Africa.

It had happened enough at this point that people with more despotic tendencies were starting to be a bit more wary and a bit smarter about how they approached things. In some places, it led to more bloodshed than might otherwise have happened, but in other places, there was more freedom than there had been in decades, sometimes centuries. The Path was a mixed bag to many, but it offered just as many opportunities as it did hurdles, and it was often a great leveling of the playing field. Anybody could be anything, after all, and that was a powerful lesson that some people were quicker to learn than others.