Limitless Path

The whole time, Blood was using very thin, fine, and precise blades of energy to slice into the rock. It was slow going, as all the rock in the area had already absorbed a massive amount of mana over the last few years, becoming absurdly dense and tough, the mana even working to block out the mana of the skills that Blood was continuously throwing at it. She had made progress as Beth had killed most of the wraiths on her side and then helped Sera out by controlling her fire, widening the gap and pushing deeper into the area behind it. Long minutes of cutting and chopping while Beth and Sera mopped up opened the area where the item was to her inspection, and she backed up once the path was clear. The cold emanating from the small room that was behind the crack in the stone was enough that it caused her ears and hair to be coated in frost, her gear snapping and popping as ice formed on it and then broke loose.

"You through yet?" Beth asked over her shoulder.

"Yeah, but it's too fucking cold," Blood growled, walking down the tunnel past Beth to where she could start fighting the wraiths.

"Fine, you big baby, I'll get it," Beth scoffed, though she was just joking with the wolf. She moved back and to the area that Blood had widened, wincing a bit at the cold as she put her face right up to the split. It was a lot colder than it was earlier, Beth feeling her eyebrows freeze just from looking into the little open space behind where Blood had been working. The first thing that caught her eye was a bright white glimmer and it took her a moment to realize it was light emerging from a crystal the size of both her fists put together and then some.

She stepped into the cleft, grunting as the power of the cold struck her like a hammer, the air whooshing from her lungs and freezing solid in front of her. She was tempted to grab some of Sera's fire and pull it back down here and use it to shield herself, but she had no idea how dragon fire and whatever was in the little space would interact. That could be a recipe for disaster, leading to destroying the item, perhaps violently. Besides, the extreme cold that was freezing the hair off her head and stiffening her armor into something harder than rock was good training for her resistances.

She eventually got right up next to the crystal, having to shimmy through three tight steps worth of space to get her hands on the gem. She felt the fingers of her right hand freeze as soon as her armored gauntlet touched the thing, hissing at the pain even through her Pain Tolerance. She tried to toss the thing in her necklace and, for the first time she could remember, an item fought her. The crystal just wouldn't go in, at least not at first, and she felt her whole hand freeze into a block of ice while she stood there struggling. Finally, she used a massive burst of strength and mana to force space to fold and the crystal to go into her necklace, hoping that that wouldn't destroy the thing. Or, more concerningly, destroy the contents of her necklace or the necklace itself. She only had one of the damn things and they were really expensive and, while she could use her gate power to store things, opening and closing it was many, many times more inconvenient.

It seemed safe, as her necklace didn't suddenly grow cold, or barf out items, or randomly explode. She would have to check back in after a few minutes had passed, maybe after a couple hours, as well, and see if everything was fine. Just as a secondary sanity check, she waited five seconds and then pulled another random item out, checking to make sure it was fine, including still unfrozen. The item was totally okay and not at all frozen, proving her fears might have been a bit unfounded.

Now that the source of the cold and gloomy mana was stashed away, the wraiths slowed to barely a trickle, Blood attempting to harm them with her energy attacks to see if they had any affect at all. She found that she wasn't able to do nearly as much as the other two; she could still kill the wraiths, to be sure, but her attacks weren't nearly as effective as Beth's skills or Sera's fire. Still, it wasn't that much of an issue, as they had cleared out quite a few wraiths and were left to their own devices for a time. They used that respite to quickly explore more of the area, with Blood mapping the tunnels in stealth and Beth and Sera following behind, ready to deal with any wraiths that popped up.

The whole operation didn't take very long because the total area the tunnel system occupied wasn't very large. They were able to map a large chunk of it while avoiding the wraiths in just over an hour, which also let them figure out exactly what the place was. There was some kind of portal buried at the bottommost section of tunnel that was the source of the wraiths. They were just able to get close enough to give it a look while only alerting a small number of wraiths, which they were able to kill without setting off the whole complex. It looked like either the wraiths were coming out from the portal, or were being generated from the mana surrounding the portal, which is something they had seen at least once before.

They didn't go any further with that site, at least not for now, as they weren't exactly prepared for it. Like Sera had mentioned, there were tools they could use when killing wraiths to harvest special materials from them, at least somewhat similar to the arrays for devils to harvest their essence. They didn't have any of those tools, nor the support tools that could make killing the wraiths go faster and could let them resist the death magics that surrounded the beings and that they cast modestly often.

Such magics were something that monsters specialized in; not necessarily death specifically, but magics that had a very deleterious and harmful affect on any living beings around the wielder of said mana. Monsters' tendency to be evil, to fall to corruption and dissonance, to try to hurt and bring pain, led to them delving into magics that, left uncontrolled, were a great danger to countless peoples. Monsters were feared not just because of their strength, but because of the incredibly inimical types of magic they specialized in. It wasn't that something like death magic itself was inherently evil, certainly, but was more that monsters would use such magics that had a high chance of injuring and debilitating all around them to do the maximum damage, even if it was a subconscious instinct.

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Retreating from the underground, they made their way back to the open field they had first landed in, having to kill only a few more beasts on the way. Beth deployed the airship and they were up and away in just a minute, flying towards their next destination. Beth was thankful now that they had taken the time to chart out where they wanted to go, as they could just fly to the next place if one of the places didn't pan out or only took a handful of hours to solve. She suspected their next destination would be rather quick, as well, so it was good that they had a third and a fourth lined up to go to after that.

Blood took them southwest, bringing them down to the city. They had found an awful lot of abandoned towns and smaller cities when they were doing the scans, but some places still had signs of life. From what Beth understood, a decent number of people had made it out of the center of the continent before the beasts became too much to handle, but they were still likely looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths over the last few years due to the extreme mana density. Several of the cities had fared much better, including the one they were flying into right now, New Orleans.

The city was a messy sprawl, even in the mana dense environment, with buildings stretching out along the bay and up the Mississippi river for miles. Blood had them flying somewhat low and rather slow as they came in, giving them more than enough time to analyze what was stretched out under them. Beth saw that there had been some major, serious efforts put into building walls, all the more impressive considering the lack of free land in and around the city and its narrow connection to the rest of the state, being on a jut of land extending out into the Gulf. They were scanning with the systems as well as with their eyes, making sure they had a good idea of what was what, when they came under attack.

It wasn't a serious attack, thankfully, as anybody that could really threaten their airship at this point would be a Senior Enforcer from the CRA or an off-worlder who just happened to be in the city for some reason. The attacks were nothing like those she would expect from such dangerous individuals, with some of the spells not even making it anywhere close, though part of that likely had to do with their speed. When Beth said they were flying slow, two hundred miles an hour was still slow compared to what even their measly little airship could do, and it was clear that the fools on the ground firing attacks at them hadn't ever had to hit a speeding target in the air. Some of the spells were weak enough they entirely fizzled out before even making it to the modest height Blood had the ship moving at, not even having impacted the mana shield around the craft before they vanished.

The attacks stopped just as quickly as they started, apart from one last hurrah from someone who was probably overeager to show off their power and awe the others. The last blast had lost a good chunk of its power by the time it reached them, harmlessly glancing off the side of the ship without even making a fully direct hit on the shielding. Beth just shook her head at the clearly unorganized response to something flying into their airspace, though she wasn't so lackadaisical that she didn't take scans of the people who fired at them, having the ship quickly compile them into a small database that she was marking as persona non grata. She wouldn't actively pursue the people who had attacked, as she could chalk it up to a misunderstanding, but she wasn't going to offer those people any help in the future, either.

Blood didn't bother responding to the attacks, trusting the shielding, especially since she had access to the same readouts the others did that showed the strength of the strikes definitely left something to be desired. They kept going with their scan, though they weren't being nearly as thorough as they could be as this was just for their personal records. The briefing for the scouting work they were doing had mentioned at least part of the city still stood and was even in communication with others, so it wasn't like it was a hostile or even unknown settlement. Beth just wanted their current records of Earth to be as complete as possible and she enjoyed that they had the capabilities to do that.

They flew on, eventually pulling up to the CRA Hall that served the city, finding the parking lot that every Hall had to be partially full, but still with enough free space for them to set the ship down. Beth couldn't help but laugh a little, in the privacy of the bridge, at the startled expressions of the locals the external camera feeds were picking up as they engaged the landing gear and the ship settled. If they had set down on a parking lot from before the integration, Beth would be worried about what the weight of their ship might do to the place, which would also be a concern for damaging the landing gear, but the CRA lots were built of much tougher stuff than the old asphalt of pre-integration lots. The ship's landers wouldn't even leave a dent where they had each settled in the center of a parking space, Blood showing off her skills a little bit, not that basically anyone else would even notice.

Beth and the others disembarked and she had to try to hide her grin at all the people gathered around the ship and gawping. She couldn't help letting out a chuckle, however, when she gave the command for the ship to fold up and there were many startled exclamations and looks of utter disbelief. It was even funnier when she made the ship vanish into her necklace, with one person flat out falling on their ass in their shock at seeing the large cube of metal just vanish from their sight. Beth just laughed under her breath and led the way across the parking lot and into the Hall, noting the motif was rather similar to their home Hall, but the decorations were a little different. It didn't take much to realize that the Hall was part of the Iron Hall, which was focused on mercenary work and work-for-hire. There was a lot of wrought iron around the place, including as parts of the tables, and there was a symbol of a sword and a coin on some of the rugs and some of the walls.

Beth hadn't dealt with this particular branch of the CRA very much, but she knew that they were the most involved in working with, and regulating, mercenary companies out of all the Halls. She still didn't know how it had been decided which Hall went where on Earth and who got to do what, but she was sure there was some type of system the Senior Enforcers used to determine that. It wasn't like people even had to care about what Hall they were a part of until they reached Gold Emblem, and even then, it wasn't such a big deal. Anybody who was a CRA member was a CRA member, regardless of Hall affiliation, and there were some people who were Platinum or Diamond rank and didn't even bother with swearing their allegiance to a specific Hall and that was perfectly fine.

Beth walked up to the counter and got a place in line, though many of the people in the Hall were giving her strange looks. Well, she decided that most of those looks were directed at Sera and Blood, but still, she was catching some odds looks herself. She waited for the people in front of her to be served by the lady she had queued for, it taking about twenty minutes to see to all their needs. Beth stepped up to the counter and leaned against it, showing the attendant her Silver Emblem before starting to ask a few questions.

The whole reason she had them stop there was that she wanted to see what info the Hall had about the territory they were covering. Tazeen had included a bunch of it in the reports for the missions, but nothing really beat talking to the people who had seen it and done it. It didn't take very long for the woman to figure out that it would be better just to get their Hall master and have him answer Beth's questions. Beth stepped out of line while the Hall master was on the way down to the lobby, watching as people resumed asking the woman questions and filling out forms. It was all very transactional, with a lot of people putting in requests for help or completing basic missions that the Hall would assign to anyone for a monetary reward. Very mercenary.