Limitless Path

"It's just one guy," Blood said, racing back up the side of the cliff before leaping over them and landing on her toes, bouncing around to face the group. "He's fighting the bigger beasts, the ones using those scream attacks. He's winning, too, by the looks of it."

"Shall we go introduce ourselves?" Beth asked.

"Careful; we don't want him to think we're after him or his kills," Val warned.

"Relax," Beth said, waving a hand. "Is there any group out there that looks more harmless than ours?"

"Harmless…" Val echoed, looking around at the titan, the dragon, the multiple people with Mana Physiques before rebirth ten, and the weapons and armor that pulsed with power. "Right, fucking harmless, sure. That really describes this group."

"Glad you agree," Beth said before turning and leaping off the cliff, plummeting to the tier below.

The others followed her, moving forward a couple hundred feet to find a large pile of beast corpses, made all the larger given the size of the beasts involved. The man in the middle of the action was tall and broad-shouldered, his African heritage rather obvious. He had long black hair that he kept bound in a loose tail with a leather band, a sharp face with a strong jawline, and rather powerful arms that he was using to great effect to punch the enemies to death. He saw their group approach and managed to get enough free time to give them a wave indicating to wait before he continued with his fight. A few of the beasts noticed Beth's group despite them hanging back, but a couple swings of Bjorn's greathammer saw to them rather easily.

Beth hopped up on a big rock, pulling one knee up and resting her arms on it while letting her other leg dangle while she watched the mayor fight. He was clearly a skilled Unarmed fighter, and beyond that, he had explosive electrical or lightning attacks that he weaved into his punches and kicks. He was one of the strongest and fastest fighters outside of her group and the CRA Senior Enforcers Beth had seen on Earth, and she watched him pulverize all the beasts.

Eventually, he cleared everything out and started gathering his loot. Beth was tempted to offer the use of her new loot power, but she wanted to make a new friend, not enemy. In over eight months, she had leveled it twice, and that wasn't for lack of trying. She remembered Jaq warning her about how greedy looting powers were and he wasn't joking; she had used it on tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of beast corpses and had mangled most of them. Leveling the power was crazy costly; it wasn't just that the power would fail, it was that it got a very small, just a teeny-tiny amount of experience for every corpse, and it would mangle almost all of those corpses until it got to late Silver, at the least. Beth watched as the man quickly and efficiently harvested the most valuable parts of the beasts before walking over to them.

"Strangers," he said, speaking English, though with a bit of a thick accent.

"I take it you're the mayor they talked about up above," Beth said.

"That I am," he said, looking over their group. "I take it you were able to speak to Andre, yes?"

"The man who knows some English and is fluent in French?" Beth asked.

"That is him," the man nodded, crossing his arms.

"Yeah. He said it was alright for us to explore down here," Beth replied.

"Oui," the man said. "The Pit is open to all. But, where are my manners? My name is Oumar and I act as the mayor of the town above. You have come here from far away, I take it?"

"Well, I'm American, if you couldn't guess," Beth said with a laugh, seeing the man shake his head slightly with a smirk. "Everybody else in my group is, uh, from a little further out."

"Off-worlders, then?" Oumar asked, catching on quickly. Beth relayed what he was saying to the group and translated back when they responded.

"That's right," Sera said, giving the man a nod. "We're all here under her leadership, though, so don't worry."

"I do not worry. If it is a problem, I solve it," the mayor said, gesturing with a fist that sparked with lightning.

"That's an attitude I can get behind," Beth said.

"Ha, inshallah!" Oumar exclaimed, laughing. "I see you use the sword, but you are a woman that understands my heart."

"I use my fists, too," Beth replied with a laugh, demonstrating a few punches. "Sometimes, the sword is just a bit better, but I'm really good with just my body."

"A true warrior, yes?" Oumar said, giving her a nod. "What have you come all the way to such a backwater for?"

"I have an airship and we were sailing around, looking at interesting things," Beth explained with a shrug. "We saw this and got curious, so we landed to investigate. The people up in town said it was dangerous and that you were the only one they knew of that went deep into the pit in any way."

"One of the nomads, from a tribe of the bedouin, has gone just as deep. You may have seen their camps above," Oumar said.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"So, what's down there, then?" Beth asked, gesturing at the pit.

"Nothing you can't handle," Oumar said, glancing around at the group. "I do not know how powerful some of you are, but I cannot imagine a group as large and feeling as dangerous as yours will struggle."

"Just higher-level beasts?" Andrea asked.

"Non, little miss," Oumar replied, shaking his head. "There are strange magics, I do not know what they are called, but they block sections of the Pit so that I cannot continue down. There are also strange things in the dark. Inshallah, but I do not dare venture too deeply. I cannot defeat the traps, and I cannot fight some of the strange things that lurk in the depths. Even my lightning does not affect some of the things down there."

"Strange," Bjorn grunted.

"So, we have some kind of arrays set up on the way down, and we have some kind of beast or something down there that you can't fight," Val said, Oumar starting when he noticed her red and gold eyes under her big, floppy hat.

"That's right," he said. "I know of, what do you say? Monsters? Instead of beasts? I believe they are monsters, those things down there in the dark."

"Have any ideas?" Beth asked, looking at Sera and Val.

"Not enough info," Sera said, planting her spear in the stone and leaning against it. "Could be a bunch of weird crap. Likely it's a couple fades or something like that."

"Could be ghasts, too," Val said, getting grunts of agreement from several of the others. "Unless they've already gotten a lot of rebirths, which I doubt since they would have been out of this pit by now, then we can easily handle them. As long as there aren't tens of thousands of them down there."

"Non, non," Oumar said, his thick accent coming out. "They do not take damage, and they hide in the dark, but there are not many of them, oui? I have never been attacked or sensed more than two of them, and I do not know that there are any more than that."

"Fades," Sera and Val said at the same time, receiving a grunt from Bjorn and nods from several of the others.

"So, a name for the enemy," Oumar said. "Can you handle such monsters?"

"I have the equipment," Bjorn said before anybody else could speak. "We can take care of them, provided they're not too powerful at this point."

"Like I said, I don't think that's a problem," Val said, giving Bjorn a look.

"We're not your useless little twits," Bjorn grunted. "Don't need the attitude."

"Right, right, I need to reel it in a little," Val said, rubbing her forehead. "I'm so used to having to sit on all those idiots all the time."

"Do you need me for this?" Oumar asked.

"Oh, no, sorry," Beth said. "Unless you want to head further down?"

"Non," Oumar said, shaking his head. "I have more than enough to do keeping the town in order. This place hasn't been doing well for…a long time. I am trying to build it better. The Pit gives us a chance, resources we can use, yes? I cannot risk too much, you see?"

"I understand. Don't worry, we can handle whatever's down there," Beth said to him.

"Stop by when you are done fighting," Oumar said. "I will treat you to some carcaje."

"What's that?" asked Beth, scrunching her eyebrows.

"It is a sweet, red tea we love here," he explained.

"Oh, that sounds great," Beth said. "I've never heard of that before. We'll stop and talk when we're done down there."

"I will see you then, inshallah," he said before leaping up towards the tier above them.

"He's done four rebirths," Blood said.

"Really? I didn't even check," Beth muttered.

"He had a skill to hide it," Blood said.

"He only showed up as one rebirth to me," Val said, frowning deeply.

"Don't frown like that; it'll give you wrinkles," Blood said to Val, poking at her forehead and getting her arms lightly slapped away in response.

"What's the equipment, Bjorn?" Beth asked, ignoring the byplay.

"Flashcasters," Bjorn said, taking out a stack of disks. "Inject mana, throw the disk near the fade, they blow up and cripple them. Only way to get a killing blow, or even a clean hit on the stronger ones."

"You have enough?" Beth asked.

"I keep a lot of stuff for intangible enemies," Bjorn grunted. "Only kind of beings I have trouble with. I keep the equipment on hand to deal with them. You can probably do decent damage with your space affinity stuff, and Sera can burn them. Nothing can fully escape dragon fire. The rest of us need to use the disks."

"Everybody take at least a couple disks," Beth said, tossing Bjorn a mithril coin to make up for taking his equipment.

Once properly equipped, they moved downward, not exploring the tiers any more than they needed to in order to figure out what the path forward was and if there were formations blocking them. It helped having Val there, as she was an actual, full-blooded enchanter and able to decipher an awful lot of what they ran into. The biggest thing to keep in mind was that most of what they were seeing were barrier arrays, blocking off large sections of the Pit and sealing off paths downwards. Val did warn them that they weren't all just barrier arrays, and that anything they mistakenly walked into down there could do very serious damage, even to someone like Bjorn.

The Pit went down for miles and miles, though they didn't have to descend all that much farther before they started finding the signs of monsters. Beasts dead and no human hand, or the fangs or claws of other beasts, having ever touched them or even ventured into that beast's territory. Then the whispering started, just a hint of a word here, a broken phrase uttered there, and some half-heard laughter echoing from the inky depths. Maybe, for somebody else, or for another team, this would have been something horrifying and terrible, something they couldn't face. Beth's team was rather different, and they just shrugged it off, even laughing at the whispering, which got the attention of the beings doing the whispering.

Bad for them, and by them, that meant the beings doing the whispering, not Beth's team. The monsters showed up two hours later, the first of them appearing from the deep dark further down the Pit and lashing out at Val. Perhaps a good target, as the blood mage and melee shredder didn't really have anything to fight against such immaterial enemies. She did, however, have the disks Bjorn had handed out, and she also had incredible reactions times and instincts, hurling out a charged disk as the fade approached. The disk exploded close to the monster, lighting it up and causing it to shriek in agony, the thing appearing as a big shadow with dark red eyes that was rather blurry around the edges, even after the disk had materialized it.

Beth grabbed the monster with her spatial powers, her Spatial Domain skill now at Gold and quite powerful. Gold hadn't really brought any new aspects to the skill, as it often wasn't a major transformation of a skill in the way the jump to Platinum was, but it did bring a great boost in power. She was able to lock down the immaterial enemy quite well, though it was mainly due to the power difference, as the thing was only a single rebirth monster. Again, something that would be very difficult for others to handle, but Beth's team killed it almost effortlessly. Val had stunned and slowed it, though using an item, then Beth had locked it down with one of her ridiculous skills, and finally Sera had turned and breathed a massive, concentrated gout of dragon fire right into the center of the being. The monster exploded into wisps of energy that still burned in Sera's fire as a wailing, haunting scream echoed down the Pit.

"Too weak," Bjorn grunted.

"I don't really need any more Monster Slayer titles," Beth said with a sigh.

"Wait, you have a fucking Monster Slayer title?!" Val shouted, running over and grabbing Beth by the shoulders.

"Yeah, sure. I got it doing some work for Baelvyr; it's not a big deal," Beth replied.

"I'm upgrading my count of idiot savants," Andrea said.

"Hey!" Beth said.

"No wonder you grabbed that thing so easily," Val huffed. "Even the most basic of those titles gives you a bunch of extra power when fighting against monsters."

"I mean, it was so fucking weak that I couldn't even tell," Beth said. "And that's not me being arrogant or anything; the thing was only a one rebirth monster. And it wasn't a high level, either, but just level eighty. The only difficulty is the intangible part; if it didn't have that, any of us could have super easily killed it."

"I hate you," grumbled Val, letting go of Beth's shoulders. "I can't believe I'm fighting alongside a fucking monster slayer. And she says it's no big deal!"

"It's not, though," Beth said, getting some laughs and jeers out of the others.

"Idiots, all of them," Andrea sighed, moving over and leaping down to the next tier.

"Look, I might be an idiot, but I'm a strong idiot," Beth argued, watching as the rest of the team slowly moved down to the next tier.

"Don't group me with the idiots," Adam complained before jumping down.

"What?" Beth asked, frowning.

"Don't worry, my love, you'll get it eventually," Sera said, ruffling Beth's thick, glossy hair before leaping down to the next tier, leaving Beth alone looking at the burning embers of the monster.

"I think maybe everybody still has a bit of cabin fever," Beth muttered before following the rest of the group.