Limitless Path

Another week came and went, and the referee duties were just as boring as they had been before the week of inter-Hall fun and excitement had happened. Beth was starting to get a bit of the suspicion that this was more a punishment detail than it was that much of a learning experience, at least for them, as watching a bunch of people that had barely hit level one hundred the first, or maybe the second time, fight wasn't exactly either entertaining or educational. Maybe if they had gone to another Hall not on Earth they could have watched some more interesting matches for their time in the box, but that wasn't really happening here.

They spent the evenings and nights of that week working on their crafting skills, mainly, as Beth felt like that token they had from Mortaine was burning a proverbial hole in her pocket. It was blacksmithing in the evenings, her and Sera sharing space next to each other in the forge, while Blood worked on her leatherworking or did her own thing. On the weekends, they did a bit of scouting and then used Beth's gate for a hundred or so hours of subjective grinding. They kept that pattern for a couple weeks, getting a level or two in their professions each while steadily working through the two hundreds in terms of overall level. After about a month of that they had some visitors, but not who Beth had expected to show up first.

They had a knock on the door on a Friday, the three of them about to start leveling for the weekend, as they had basically finished their scouting for now. Beth gave the other two a raised eyebrow, getting a shrug from Sera in response, so clearly this wasn't any kind of expected visitor. Her sisters were out and about still and wouldn't be back to Earth, along with Neph and Sabs, for at least another few months. Depending on how things went, Beth and Sera and Blood might finish their whole year of refereeing before any of those four were back, but they were making good progress, so Beth hoped they just kept their noses to the grindstone.

When she walked over and opened the main door into the suite she found that the whole doorway was blocked. That wasn't a particularly unusual sight for her, considering the people she knew that could fill the doorway were mostly based in this Hall. The one she did that wasn't was the person in the doorway, as she craned her head back to see Bjorn glowering down at her. She dug her shoulder into his torso as she heard the noise of someone clearing their throat outside, pushing him aside to see Kris had come with him.

"Kris, so good to see you," Beth said, ignoring Bjorn to take hold of the phoenix and guide her into the suite.

"I'm here, too," the titan rumbled behind her.

"I didn't know you were coming over this weekend," Beth said, continuing to ignore Bjorn, who stepped through the door and closed it behind him.

"Well, your last message about the leveling was tempting," Kris said quietly, glancing down as she spoke. Despite how powerful and skilled she was, and her quite impressive background, Beth had noticed that the tall girl was quite shy. That was surprising, though not quite as surprising as Bjorn stepping up behind Kris and putting his massive hands on her waist, which the demure girl didn't protest at all. Apparently, the two had gotten even friendlier in the time since they had all worked together to clear the tower in the desert. Beth gave Kris a glance with a single quirked brow, but of course the phoenix missed it, as absorbed as she was in inspecting the pattern of the carpet.

"Good to see you two," Sera said, having sat up on the couch to see what was going on. "We were just about to train, but we can take a break."

"No, that's okay, we're here to train, too," Kris said, quiet but firm.

"Well, we're using my gate, so it's going to be a little boring," Beth said with a small shrug.

"Oh, we thought you were exploring that high mana area," Kris said, glancing up at Beth.

"We were," Beth explained. "We have it pretty well scouted right now. We're trying to get up to level three hundred or so before we do any more exploration there. There's a lot of stuff that would be a lot easier with a lot more stats, and we could go all the way to three-twenty and see what our True materials are. At least having an idea and starting to work on that would be nice in the meantime. Could also let us decide specific places to go when we're out there."

"You're close," Bjorn commented with a grunt, talking about their levels.

"Not as close as we'd like," Sera commented.

"Well, can we join you?" Kris asked nervously.

"You're always welcome," Beth said, taking Kris' hands and guiding her to the sofa, still ignoring Bjorn, which got a frustrated grunt from him but nothing more.

"We're about to start, right after we eat," Sera said, rousing herself to get up off the couch and start seeing about food, making true to her word.

"We don't mean to intrude," Kris said, glancing down only to see Beth still holding her hands and blushing slightly.

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"It's not a problem, Kris," Beth said, watching as Bjorn very delicately lowered himself into an armchair next to Kris, the chair creaking a bit as it accepted his weight.

Sera cooked them all food while they sat and chatted, mainly catching up with what the other two had been doing. Bjorn had gone off on his own for a little bit, working on some research inspired by their delve of the titan facility on Earth. Kris had gone back to her clan to study alchemy for a little before joining Bjorn in leveling and trying to reach their next rebirth. The two had been together for quite some time and worked well together, though Beth was sure there was more to it than that. Their personalities did seem to match, though she wasn't an amazing judge of such things, but they were both quiet, Kris being more reserved while Bjorn just disdained speaking, and they made a good team. Bjorn was a powerful frontline and could absorb mind-blowing amounts of damage and keep going while Kris was a very powerful and proficient spellcaster that could do enormous amounts of damage in just seconds.

The group ate, Blood only waking at the smell of the food finishing cooking, though Beth was quite sure the wolf had been awake and paying attention since the knock on the door. When they were finished with eating, Beth did a quick poll on what everyone wanted to fight, which basically meant asking Sera, as Bjorn just grunted, Blood didn't care, and Kris was too shy to give her opinion. They decided on wyverns, both for a little bit of challenge as well as for the materials they could get from them. Nothing really dropped in Beth's gate apart from them getting money from their kills, but they could still harvest the bodies and get all the valuable loot from them. Wyverns, in particular, were quite worthwhile targets, with their blood, bones, flesh, and organs all being highly valuable. They would also have powerful beast cores, but that wasn't really any different from other beasts at higher levels, as they all could have beast cores, one of the big reasons that Beth's team was absolutely rolling in the things.

Beth had a thought a handful of minutes into them killing the wyverns that it wasn't really fair, and that thought didn't go away for the rest of the weekend. Bjorn and Sera were a wall impossible to overcome, and she and Kris did so much damage that the wyverns died in seconds. Blood was able to round the beasts up and hinder them in a way that let the group fight even more and go through opponents faster, and their efficiency was really on another level beyond when it was just the three of them. It was a bit of a trade-off, considering that having five of them meant the experience was distributed across more people, but they moved so much faster that Beth thought they were still gaining more than they might be losing because of the wider distribution.

Considering they had started on Friday afternoon, even with resting a bit more to accommodate for Bjorn and Kris not being used to their pace, they were able to get a couple hundred hours of subjective time in the gate done with relative ease. Even fighting as a group, that was another twenty levels for all of them, bringing the girls firmly into the mid two hundreds. It would still be hundreds and hundreds of hours of farming before they were able to get to three hundred, and that was just three hundred. They would need hundreds, if not thousands, of hours after that just to get from three hundred to three hundred twenty. The levels only got continuously steeper, in terms of experience requirements, as a person went through them, and every hundred levels was a big jump. Going from three hundred to three hundred one needed as much or more experience than going from two hundred ninety to three hundred, and that was already an absolute metric ton of experience for those ten levels.

Kris and Bjorn were happy to stick around after the weekend; well, Kris was likely too shy to express any dissatisfaction with having to wait for them, and all Bjorn did was grunt at her, so that was pretty hard to parse. She was glad the fancy suite they were in in the main building had more than one bedroom, as Kris and Bjorn made use of one of them, and Beth was rather happy that she didn't have to experience any of what they got up to firsthand.

The two spent a lot of time in the room during the week, which was just as well, as Beth and the rest were split between refereeing and working on their professions. The professions were a real grind and there was no way around it, other than just putting in the time and effort to make item after item and slowly get better at the profession as a whole. Beth and the rest could cheat a little, using her gate to get them extra hours of work, but she was still a little leery about using that gate so much. She didn't want to overtax her soul and lock them out from the gate entirely for a few weeks or even a month or more. It also was just a good idea to spend a little less time in accelerated time; as Fallon had pointed out, most people suffered fatigue from that eventually. Even if Beth's power was different, or their little group was different, she didn't want to push too hard with it and get burned out. That kind of burnout was the kind that often took a couple years to recover from. It wasn't a couple years of bedrest, but it was up to a couple years of needing to avoid compressed time spaces, which would seriously hamper their training and progression.

The next weekend was there before they knew it and Beth was of the mind to go out and try to work through a bit of some of the places they had found in their scouting. The dungeon that was around level three hundred forty or just over would be pretty good fodder for them at this point, and it would be rather low risk if they also had Kris and Bjorn with them. Both had done their fifth rebirths and were already right at the cusp of their sixth, putting them a little less than a full cycle behind Beth and the others. It was also hard to tell much of a difference, other than with Beth, who had rocketed ahead a bit with her Mana Physique; Bjorn was so tough that very little in their level range could even injure him and Kris did so much damage it was hard to believe she was much behind them at all. Bjorn also revealed he had already reached Master with his chosen weapon, meaning that even that wasn't an advantage for Beth, so it was only really Mana Physique that was giving her much of an edge over them. If they really focused, as well, the other two could likely do their next rebirth in the next few weeks, or maybe a couple months, all depending on how easily they could find their materials. Bjorn commented that his were easy and, when prodded, revealed he had a stockpile of materials that were common requirements for titans that meant he had to do far less searching and wouldn't need to worry nearly as much as the others until he was hitting Ascended.

The last little element was the reliquary that was floating around in Beth's soul, which she had not yet revealed to the others. She wasn't hiding it, per se, but hadn't found a good opportunity to bring it up. She was basically just holding it in reserve as her special trump card, though there were several of the empyreans that would likely be good for the others to talk to. She would like to get a bit bigger of a swathe of her extended group together for that, however. Ideally, she wanted Adam and Andrea there, as well as Veren and Val, and even her sisters. Not that she couldn't just use the box repeatedly, but she wanted to get more bang for her buck, particularly with seeing everyone's surprised expressions. She knew if she showed someone like Andrea before she showed it to others that it would get blabbed about within less than a day, no matter that the girl promised her silence on the matter.

They decided on the Dark Golem Processing Facility, which was the dungeon that started at level three hundred and forty. Beth would have been a little hesitant at that still, if it were only the three of them, but Bjorn's insane toughness and Kris' mind-blowing damage added in would let them work through it. They weren't going to use any of the spikes on it this weekend, obviously, as Beth thought that was still a bit much for them, but they could do some clears without spikes to get a feel for the beasts and the overall layout of the dungeon itself. With all of them close to or at three hundred now, the level gap wasn't that big of a deterrent, and they could always take their time and level if they needed it. If they were really in trouble, they had many options, including Beth's gate to accelerate them through another handful of levels, though that wouldn't work for Bjorn and Kris, who were just two levels away from their current max. Still, they could get the other three some forty plus levels, if they needed it, and they could also level and improve some skills, which always gave a big boost in power. Even one level in a skill at Platinum could really boost a person's toughness or damage output, sometimes both, which could make a very difficult dungeon dramatically easier.