Limitless Path

Clearing out all the beasts took them quite some time, mainly from the size of the cavern and the strength of the beasts. Beth was pretty sure everything in the surrounding tunnels had been attracted by the sounds of battle, clearing out most of the lower level of the caverns of any beasts. They spent some time harvesting the beasts after the fight was over, all three of them avoiding the center of the room. It wasn't because the center was toxic or anything, but because that's where the holy and sacred mana were coming from.

At that point, they found once they started investigating it after they were done harvesting, was a large array. It was a bit of a weird one, as it wasn't just a circle, but was some kind of complex shape laid out on the ground with little pillars at different points. That wasn't the end of it, as over the shape on the ground was hovering a three-dimensional object in the air, one made up of a bunch of spheres and cubes and diamonds. These were arranged in a sphere and connected by rods, with none of the rods crossing through the center of the sphere the shapes formed. The sphere was about three feet across and within was contained a massive amount of sacred mana, a huge quantity of it refined to the purest state possible and compressed into a small sphere.

The holy mana was actually all waste, shockingly enough, as it was a byproduct of this array creating or filtering out the sacred mana. The holy mana was pushed up from the array, directly up from the sphere, and it didn't take Beth much to figure out that was directly under the very top of the hill. That's why the top had such a thicker section of holy mana billowing from it; the holy mana was literally being beamed up directly through the center of the hill in a tight beam. All the mana around the hill and wafting from it was just the off-gas of that beam, and the thickness of the rock in the way was why it wasn't just an obvious beam of mana at the top.

"I have no idea what this is," Beth said, glancing at the other two as they looked over the array.

"Well, it's making concentrated sacred mana. At least, I think that's what's happening," Sera said with a frown.

"It could be doing something else. We don't have an Enchanter and we're still shit at runes," Blood commented.

"Thanks for reminding us," Beth quipped.

"No problem," Blood shot back.

"I think we just scan it, inventory it, do everything that we can, and just add it to the report," Sera said. "I have no idea if we can stop it, get the mana out, or anything else. I wouldn't want to touch it and have it explode; that's enough mana that I'd be hesitant about any of us surviving, especially Blood."

"What? Why me?" Blood asked, pouting.

"Beth has a Mana Physique and I'm built like a bunker. Your defenses are just weaker," Sera replied with a shrug. "Beth and I could survive; she would be even likelier than me, with her current skills combined with her Mana Physique. You're the least resistant of us."

"I need a new skill," Blood grumbled.

"I'm sure we'll either find one or can buy you one," Beth said. "We could put in a request and see if we can get a line on something good, if you want."

"Do it," Blood told her.

"I'll contact Selene," Beth said with a shrug of her own. "We'll see if they can get you anything."

"Thanks," Blood muttered with a nod.

Not being able to do anything with the massive concentration of sacred mana or the formation itself, they took pictures, videos, scans, and made notes before leaving. They trekked back up through the caverns, not encountering any beasts, as they had killed all of them on the way down. The hillside itself was empty, excepting the grass, and they walked down just to the base of the hill and tossed out the airship, Beth noting that there was still no frost. She was going to have to take that gem out at some point and figure out what it really was; she was going to check everything that she pulled out of her necklace until she knew everything was safe for sure.

Blood took the helm just as soon as the airship was deployed, getting them in the air and flying before Beth and Sera even made it to the bridge. Their destination was the third site they had marked out, even though it would be their fourth stop of the trip. It was late Friday night, or really it was early Saturday morning, but that didn't matter to them. They needed little sleep and the few fights at the strange hill certainly weren't enough to tire them out. They studied or chatted a few minutes as Blood took them to the destination, the sites close enough that fifteen or twenty minutes of flying could get them there. While the territory they were covering was pretty large, sites weren't more than four or five hundred miles apart, and the airship could fly close to fifteen hundred miles per hour at its top speed. Even not pushing it into the red line, they could travel to a site three hundred to four hundred miles away in less than half an hour.

This site was super obvious what was going on, even from the air. Their previous scans had been enough, at least to understand exactly what it was, though they still needed to get up close and look to get all the details. The place was a dungeon entrance, and a really clear-cut one, but their current long-range scanners didn't have the capabilities to exactly pinpoint the details of a dungeon from a distance. They would have to walk right up to the entrance and examine it themselves to find out what level it was, what type, size, and all those fun things. That would mean wading through a ton of beasts, as the thing had been kicking out excess beasts for some indeterminate amount of time. Given that fact, it likely also needed cleared out a good handful of times, and Beth put some of the dungeon-boosting spikes on her list to ask Jaq about.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The dungeon itself was a massive doorway. That sort of undersold it a bit, as it was a big, square frame that was over a hundred feet high and more than fifty wide, with the material of the arch itself over three feet thick. It was made of something black that glittered and shined in the reflected lights of the airship, looking almost like obsidian or black glass, but the readings were wrong for even mana-enhanced obsidian. The dungeon was also producing some kind of humanoid creatures that were made of the same stuff with shining eyes, and on closer inspection, Beth figured they were golems, even before landing and confirming it. This would be a dungeon that they could get done pretty easily, provided the levels weren't anything really crazy. They had also come a long way from the first time they had fought golems, with Blood barely able to scratch the stone that made up their tough bodies. Now, all three members of their group would have little trouble smashing the stone enemies to pieces.

Blood had to set the airship down a considerable way away to prevent it from immediately being attacked by some kind of beast, the area further out from the dungeon heavily populated with beasts that had been pushed back from entrance of said place by the surge in the number of golems. They had just enough time for Beth to get the ship to fold up, just putting it in her necklace as a group of beasts bursts from the undergrowth and attacked. It was a small group of cat-like enemies, with massive claws and large fangs in powerful jaws, all of which were aimed right at them. Despite the appearances, however, the beasts weren't exceptionally high level; well, they weren't for the girls, but an awful lot of people on Earth would still have trouble with a level two hundred fifteen panther.

Beth finished off the last of the beasts and signaled them to move, giving way to Blood for just long enough for her to carve out the beast cores from those beasts that had them. They headed into the area controlled by the golems, which covered quite a few miles at this point. If they were left alone much longer, they would form a beast tide and start wreaking havoc, maybe even without sweeping up any other beasts. There would be enough golems to just go on a tide-forming rampage all on their own without even any other beasts necessary to get it all moving or to participate. There were going to be several areas like this that would need to be dealt with in the area they were surveying, and Beth was hoping they could take care of it all themselves. If they could manage to do that it would bring a ton of rewards and, hell, maybe they could weasel two Gold-mission credits out of Tazeen for everything.

If the golems Beth had fought previously were weak to her old skill, Crush, then these golems were horrifically susceptible to Spatial Obliteration. The move totally shattered them, cracking whatever substance they were made of quite badly on the first strike and blowing it apart on the second. Beth wasn't dumping tons of mana into the skill, either, as she was carefully controlling both her mana usage and power output. It was good to work on precision, especially in live combat, as that helped her hone both her overall control and her understanding of particular skills. She tried to use as little mana as possible and still destroy a golem in two strikes, finding that getting the balance just right was quite difficult. She was still having an easier time of it than both Sera and Blood, though Sera wasn't struggling as much as Blood was.

The dragon didn't really do any more damage or kill the things any faster than Blood did, but she was just so tough that she wasn't under a serious threat of injury, even when she was buried in the middle of a big pile of the beasts. Blood wasn't in that much danger, either, provided she could keep moving and running about, though she was so fast and precise that getting caught out by the slow golems wasn't as likely. At the end of the day, Beth supposed, it was just two different strategies for accomplishing the same thing, with Sera preferring to just shrug off the hit while Blood preferred to never be in the path of the hit in the first place. Beth preferred killing the thing before it even swung at her, but nobody was asking her opinion on avoiding damage, in any case.

The golems were in the mid two hundreds as they moved into the outside of their area, killing them pretty easily, but that didn't last long. They climbed through the two hundreds and into the high two hundreds by the time they were within two miles of the dungeon entrance. Beth wasn't exactly super confident about the dungeon based on what they were finding, though it wasn't like she didn't think they could do it at all, but she was really thinking about effectiveness. They were going to have to use the spikes on this thing to make headway, and if it was well into the three hundreds even before they hit it with a spike, that was going to be a major pain in the ass. Her fears were somewhat founded when they got close the massive doorway and the golems broke the level three hundred mark. It was over an hour before they got to the door itself and another half-hour before they cleared the area enough that one of them could look at the information without coming under attack during the handful of seconds they were examining it.

Dark Golem Processing Facility

{A factory and research lab that was long ago abandoned for more…fertile ground. The golems produced within used a special metal in their construction and carry a dark power within.

Properties: Closed, Massive, Mana Lodestone

Starting Level 340}

That was a bit worse than Beth had hoped, shooting the description to the other two as she rejoined the effort to create a clear area around the massive doors. Starting level of three hundred and forty meant that it was very likely to hit three hundred and fifty before the end, which would be a bit too much for them right now. Alongside that, she wasn't liking the description of it being Massive, which meant the thing could stretch on for dozens of miles in multiple directions. And again, the thing she was really keeping in mind, whatever she saw in that description, increase it by twenty or thirty percent in terms of difficulty and add even more beasts, increasing clear time, given a spike was used.

They weren't going to be doing this one today, or within the next couple weeks, though Beth thought they might attempt it when they got back up to the three hundred range. By that point, their stats would be pretty crazy, and if they did just a bit of training as well, she felt they had a good shot. They would have a great shot of just doing a regular clear, which they likely would do first, but it was going to be a lot harder with the spikes. Doing it without the spikes could get them good rewards, but it wouldn't do enough to really help with the problem, so if they were going to farm it, they would need to be doing spiked runs of it.

Beth had them turn around and cut a way back to free space, getting away from the golems eventually. They deployed the airship once they were out of the mess, Blood informing them that she had managed to snag several of the cores from their kills while they were all wading through the throng. She took over pilot duty afterwards, lifting them in the early hours of Saturday morning, the sun having just crested the horizon.

Their next site was quite literally five minutes away, barely enough time for them to get comfortable in their chairs before they were circling it, though this one was a bit of a head-scratcher. The readings indicated a massive amount of energy just a short distance underground, but from the air nothing looked all that unusual. Beth couldn't see any kind of mana in proliferation that would indicate anything like the array generating sacred mana, nor could she see the signs of a dungeon. There wasn't a massive number of beasts or monsters present that would indicate something strange there, either, just the normal amount Beth would expect for that kind of place in that kind of mana density. It was all passing strange.