Limitless Path

There were beasts around, so they still did have to pay some attention to where they set the ship down and keep their heads on a swivel once they debarked, but it wasn't anything like around the golem dungeon. After she had packed up the ship, the three of them started moving around, Blood the clear favorite here in scouting and detection. It took them a while, even though there weren't that many beasts to fight through, but Blood eventually found something. Not something so nice as a cave opening, because of course it couldn't just be that easy, but she did find a thin seam in the ground about twenty feet long and no more than two inches wide with a bit of mana leaking out. The seam was narrow and uneven, and the amount of mana leaking out was weak even for its size. That led Beth to believe that whatever the hell was under them, it was a much better contained system than the one they had found to gather sacred mana.

"Think we should just crack through?" Beth asked.

"I don't know…" Sera replied hesitantly. "Whatever's here isn't leaking damn near anything. It's way more structured than even that array we found. I'm nervous that smashing or slashing our way in might hit something, well, important. And that could be bad, like big boom bad."

"I was thinking similarly," Beth said, staring at the finger-wide crack in the ground. "I don't know, what if we cut in, but carefully? We shouldn't just come up blank, shrug our shoulders, and then fly off. We need to get at least some idea of what the hell is happening here."

"Can Blood do it?" Sera asked, looking at the wolf, who just shrugged.

"I'm cutting into something I don't know, which is positioned in a way I don't know, at a strength I don't know to not blow it up. Sure, yeah, I can do it," Blood replied sarcastically.

"Well, just start cutting and if we sense something wrong, everybody run," Beth said, getting an exasperated look from Sera and an incredulous one from Blood.

"Easy for you to say. It's not your ass on the fault line when something goes wrong," Blood snorted in response.

"Yeah, but you're really fast, right? C'mon, you can just leap away. Unless you want me to-" Beth said, not finishing before she was interrupted.

"No, I think that's quite alright," Sera said, holding up a hand.

"This isn't work for a gorilla," Blood scoffed, shaking her head at Beth before motioning her to back away.

"Fine, fine, I get it," Beth said, holding her hands up in defeat as she backed away.

Blood started cutting into the ground, very careful about where she was cutting and how much energy she was using. When her claws sunk a few inches in and nothing exploded, she carefully moved along the seam, cutting with both hands out beyond shoulder width as she walked. Beth took out her sword and walked over, carefully cross-hatching the ground where Blood had started. She walked along after Blood and did it again after a few feet. Sera picked up what she was doing and carefully moved in, breaking the ground apart with her own claws and fingers and moving chunks of stone out of the way. The effort took a lot of time, both because they were being careful and because the rock was rather hard and difficult to cut and move, especially while they were being careful about the amount of mana they were using.

They cut up and moved rock for a width of three feet for the whole twenty feet the crack extended, having removed not quite six inches of stone from that area. That was still close to thirty cubic feet of the very dense, heavy stone, and that had turned the crack into a trough in the ground. Under the crack, they found that parts of the seam were much more even. It looked like whatever was down there was very even and geometric, and that geometry broke up as it went up. The seam had been over some kind of thin vent or seam in whatever was down there and as they carved the stone away, they were starting to see the even geometry of whatever it was.

They repeated the process a second time, Blood going deeper this time, allowing them to get the trough down to nearly eighteen inches in the ground. The vent was clearly much more even and geometric here, though they still hadn't found anything else. Blood repeated the process twice more, allowing them to get down several feet into the ground. It was on the fifth time that she suddenly stopped, very carefully moving her hand around a bit right after she had started trying to carve the rock. She had a frown on her face, and very carefully cut out just a small section, about half a foot in each direction, removing the stone and tossing it to the side.

"What's wrong?" Beth asked, stopping near the wolf.

"Something's there," Blood replied.

"Well, duh, we knew that," Beth said, rolling her eyes.

"No, you dummy, there's a wall or roof here," Blood growled back. "It's made of metal, it feels like."

"Oh, let me see," Beth said, squatting down by the little hole.

When Blood moved back and Beth looked inside, she was able to make out some kind of metal at the bottom of the hole the lupine woman had carved. It looked like steel with a bit of a reddish hue, Beth not recognizing the material immediately, but she could recognize the runes on the surface of it. She motioned to Blood and the wolf spent two minutes carefully carving the hole bigger, allowing them to see a metal wall or roof with runes etched across every part that was visible. The runes glowed just very faintly, allowing Beth to make them out even while peering into the pit, though she didn't recognize everything she was looking at. There were some for reinforcement and warding and something like mana suppression or something, she wasn't quite sure, and then there was stuff she was just clueless on. Sera came over and took a look but just held up her hands palm-up and shrugged, not recognizing much beyond what Beth was able to tell at a glance.

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They worked out from the hole, carving around it for just over an hour while they tried to figure out what the hell they were looking at. It was some kind of structure, that much they got, but just how big it was, what it was, what it was for, and so on, were all complete mysteries. The more of it they revealed, the more runes they saw, and eventually Beth had them stop. She was pretty leery of continuing to tinker with the thing when they didn't have a good understanding of what was going on, so they took as many scans, pictures, videos, and notes as they could before they packed it up and got back in the air. It was a little disappointing to leave it for now, but Beth knew some of the runes were for intrusion detection and a couple she suspected were intrusion prevention; she really didn't want to see what whoever had built that thing meant by 'intrusion prevention.'

They redeployed the airship and were back in it, flying to the next destination in the mid-afternoon. This place was a big caldera, but not on a mountain, which was pretty strange, though the way it had a lake at the bottom and was giving off steam and fumes matched a caldera pretty well. It could have been a meteor crater, but there weren't any other signs of a meteor having impacted the area, and the Path did some weird stuff on new worlds, so Beth just accepted it as a weird caldera. They could see the lake was quite hot as they circled it, Beth giving a little whistle at the list of readings on the screen, which included the ambient mana values and some initial data on beasts in the area.

"This is crazy," Sera said. "It's like a million degrees in the center of that thing and the mana concentration is almost at tier nine. What the fuck is this?"

"There're beasts estimated at level four hundred fifty to five hundred in the center," Beth shot back. "I think this is a place we don't go for now, is what this place is. Any objection on that one?"

"I want to at least look," Sera said with a small frown, still scanning the data.

"It's so dangerous, and that's me saying this," Beth retorted.

"Well, sure, but we can just go up to the edge," Sera replied, turning to give Beth a little grin.

"This doesn't sound like a good idea," Blood said.

"I'm sure just the edge will be safe," Sera said.

"You know, she makes a good point," Beth added, nodding thoughtfully.

Outmaneuvered, Blood steered the ship to a point outside the crater where they could set it down without being attacked by some insanely strong beast. Once it was packed up, they slowly made their way up the sloping outer wall of the caldera, a long section of rock that stretched for a couple thousand feet and rose rather steeply. They encountered a few dozen beasts that were from the mid two hundreds in level to the low three hundreds as they climbed, killing all of them rather easily. The beasts were sparser at the top, which Beth took for a good sign, right up until they reached the rim of the caldera and were attack by a level four hundred wyvern. Four hundred was a massive turning point for beasts, after the already large bump in power at three hundred fifty, and this thing shrugged off their attacks with barely a twitch. The three had to engage in a fighting retreat down the caldera, slowly working to injure the twenty feet long beast as they went.

"I told you this sounded like a bad idea," Blood growled as they fought their way down.

"If you can talk, you can fight harder! Hit it with everything you've got!" Beth roared, channeling all her mana through Beastly Tyrant as a crown settled on her head.

Beth's use of her Presence drew the creature's attention, exactly as she had intended, and she grappled with it as it tried to devour her. After getting a full blast of the beast's nasty breath several times, she was more than ready for the fight to be over, though she was also the hardest hitter on the team. It fell to her to keep the thing corralled and hit it where it hurt as much as she could, opening it up for the other two. She got ahold of it by the stinky jaws and lifted it off the ground, the creature giving a surprised roar as it was twisted through the air before that roar was cut off in a pained wail as the wyvern was slammed into the ground at a terrific speed.

Beth pried the thing's jaws wide as it was still stunned and pulled a Sera on it, leaning forward and firing off a Celestial Annihilation directly from her mouth. She roared as the beam exploded from her and shot down the wyvern's throat, damaging and destroying everything it hit on the way down. Even that wasn't enough to seriously injure the thing, let alone kill it, but it had injured it enough to knock it off its game more than a little. Beth let go of it right as Sera and Blood hit it simultaneously, impacting the exact same site, dozens of the blood claws and spear strikes hitting within an area the size of a dime on the weaker belly of the beast. It was enough to punch through a joint between the tough scales and tear into the thing's guts.

It roared in pain and scrabbled onto its feet, trying to turn to face the new threat, but it didn't get more than upright before Beth slugged it with the force of a collapsing star. The beast was lifted off its feet and sent tumbling, not getting a chance to halt its momentum before Beth hit it again. And again. She pursued it relentlessly, hammering it over and over, not giving it time to even get its bearings. She made every attack with the enhancement of Spatial Obliteration, the noise of her attacks a constant thunder that made it hard for the other two to even hear anything. Beth beat the damn thing into a crater of its own in the ground, hovering over it from the sheer force of the feedback of her attacks and raining down punches directly into the beast's guts. Sera and Blood couldn't get close, which relegated Sera to making sure nothing else interfered while Blood fired off her blood-soaked energy attacks from outside of Beth's blast radius.

Even after all that hammering, the beast still sat up and was ready for more, though maybe not much more. It was limping and both of its wings were askew, at least one of them broken from the amount of force Beth had put into it. Blood did a good job of finishing that little component, endless waves of bloody energy shredding what was left of its airborne capabilities as Beth hammered its head into the rock. The thing was tough as nails and strong, but it had met its match in their group, staggering to the side and trying to roar only to get interrupted by Sera shoving her spear halfway down its throat. She attacked multiple times with her skills while the spear was halfway into the wyvern's gullet. That was a lot of internal damage on top of all the damage Beth had done, both internally and externally, and the thing was staggering and puking up blood after her onslaught finished.

Beth followed up that attack, her renewed pummeling far too much for the injured wyvern to take. Her Presence in conjunction with her Mana Physique made her a true terror of the battlefield, and she was able to dish out an enormous amount of pain in a short amount of time. Having multiple Platinum skills certainly helped with that, increasing her devastation to a ludicrous degree. She wound up crushing the thing's neck, breaking its spine and shredding its throat, her skills overcoming the powerful, but fractured, defenses of the beast and putting it down for good. She only relaxed once the kill notification popped up, sighing as she let her Presence fade.

"See, I told-" Blood started.

"Not now!" Beth snapped. "We're going to attract everything over level three hundred from the entire country at this rate. Grab that thing in a storage while I deploy the airship. There's gold and platinum in every ounce of that thing's body; we're taking it with us."

"Right," Sera agreed, grabbing the massive beast and making it disappear into her spatial power. "That's a little bit of a tight fit."

"We can put it in the gate later," Beth said, giving the command for the airship to unfold. "For now, we need to be up and out of here. I don't want something a hundred levels above that popping out of the caldera and trying to make us supper."

"Right," Sera agreed again, watching for anything else after them.

They were all onboard as soon as the ship was finished unfolding and were up to the bridge, Beth sending the command to get the thing in the air even before Blood was in the pilot seat. She didn't think she was being too paranoid, either, considering the kinds of readings they had gotten from the caldera. There weren't tons and tons of beasts down there, but the levels were crazy, and she didn't want something even bigger and higher-level slithering or leaping or flying out of there and deciding they would make a nice, tasty treat.