Limitless Path

All of that to say that whatever it was that was down there, it was something rather important and/or powerful, at the very least. Holy mana didn't mean that the object or thing was objectively good, either, just that there were certain mana types being produced in large volumes. Holy and sacred mana would have a restraining effect on corrupt creatures and anything using or focused around something such as, for example, death magic. A shame Beth and the others didn't know any place with lots of creatures like that that was in desperate need of cleaning out.

"It's producing a lot of mana," Sera finally commented, tossing a graph up on the main screen alongside the view of the hill. "That's something I'd expect from an array built by a Grandmaster. I wouldn't expect a natural treasure to make it, nor would I think it's a dungeon. We'll have to be careful."

"We don't have to get all the details right now, but the more information we have, the better off we are," Beth responded. "We'll land out in the open and jog over. Put us down a mile out, Blood."

"Right," grunted the wolf, easily navigating them over to an open area and setting the ship down.

Once they were on the ground, Beth had the ship fold up and return to her necklace. She was much more cautious about leaving it out when in such a high mana density area; though it was unlikely there was anything on Earth that could fully destroy they ship, they were entering the territory where things could do some damage to the ship, especially if it was attacked by a large group of beasts or even monsters over level three hundred. All that aside, the easy way to deal with it was to put the ship away, which she was already in the habit of doing since long ago.

They trotted across the open ground towards the hill, Beth very easily being able to see the mana drifting off it even from a distance of thousands of feet away. They didn't encounter a single beast on the way to the hill, but that peace was short lived, as they encountered plenty at the base of the hill. There were large packs of a reptile that had four thick, sturdy legs and a big ridge of bone and spikes around the backs of their heads. They were all a greenish bronze color, reminding Beth of old copper, somewhat like a penny that had been left to the elements for a long time. They were not pennies, however, but were hostile creatures that attacked almost the second they sensed Beth's group's approach. Despite being squat-bodied and thick-limbed, the lizards were shockingly fast, darting across several hundred feet in only a couple seconds.

The lizards were quite tough as well, taking a couple hits each from Beth to bring down, which was quite a lot considering they weren't even level three hundred. Beth told Blood to gather quite a few scales from them and some of their bones, but only once they were done with the fights. Blood was quick and efficient with the harvesting, cutting the beasts apart in nearly record time, though she only kept a couple bones. They did wind up with a large stack of the thick, heavy scales, more than enough for them to try working with, though most of that supply would be used by Blood when her crafting skill got to a high enough level. The beast cores they got from the lizards were all rather high in grade as well, a nice little bonus for a small, ten minute long fight in the middle of nowhere.

Blood was truly fast, and they were moving on in just a handful of minutes, approaching the base of the hill and starting to try to figure out what they were looking at. The mana was so thick in the air that Beth could feel it sliding over her skin, a warm and comfortable feeling, though she wasn't fooled. Ambient mana wasn't really anything dangerous, or not most of the time, but even a small change in the environment could cause a storm or collapse that would pose a serious risk to them. The three of them knew to always stay on their guard, especially when the place they were exploring contained a vast amount of unidentified power, so much so that it radiated into the surrounding air. The sacred mana was much sparser than the holy mana in that same air, but it was clearly there, and it gave Beth a slightly cold, slightly stiff feeling when it brushed against her.

The hill itself was covered with a short grass that looked like it had been recently mowed, though Beth knew there hadn't been anybody else out here in more than a year. It made walking up the hill rather easy, and scanning for dangers the same, though there could always be something hiding under the ground. They started circling the hill when they were only a slight distance up, trying to find anything unusual on the surface or if there was an entrance into the hill. The entire base of the hill was swarming with the lizards, causing them to have to fight around the circumference, with Blood gathering another stack of the best scales to store in her necklace. They harvested and killed everything around the hill and didn't find anything unusual, causing them to move further up the hill, which wasn't that massive.

The upper part of the hill had fewer beasts, but these were much tougher variants at over level three hundred and twenty. Beth, Sera, and Blood had a much harder time with these, the beasts' toughness at that level taking them much longer to work through. They were a bit under-leveled, but that didn't matter as much with how strong they currently were. The beasts weren't lizards, either, which was actually better, as they didn't need to spend even the handful of minutes Blood required harvesting the corpses. Those at the top of the hill were a spattering of bears and wolves, as well as a few insects, looking like some kind of termite things. The fights were vicious and dirty and took a minute each, with not a lot left usable of the beast afterwards, not that they had much to harvest from wolves and bears. Even the insects didn't have much, outside the beast cores, that they were interested in putting in their necklaces.

Speaking of necklaces, Beth quickly checked hers after they were done with most of the hilltop, finding that nothing she popped out was frozen or altered. She was rather glad of that, as she had a vision of pulling the ship out in its folded format and having it being frozen in a giant block of ice. She had this continued vision that included Sera breathing fire on the frozen ship to get it to properly thaw, which would not be particularly safe. Fortunately for her, nothing came out frozen, which likely meant her necklace had a more powerful enchantment overall than the icy gem that she had tossed in there earlier that day.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Putting the extra tat back in her necklace, she turned to the top of the hill, leading the other two up to the very top. The mana up there was rather more concentrated than anywhere else, pointing to the source either being directly below, or that the top of the hill wasn't as shielded as the rest. Beth was betting on the first rather than the later, especially once they reached the top and found that there was no obvious opening, meaning the hill was generally solid on the surface all the way around. That also meant that if they wanted to get at whatever was producing or altering the mana, they were going to have to crack through the hill.

"More digging," Blood grunted unhappily.

"Let me," Beth said, shooing the other two back before picking a place clear of dirt. She'd rather try cracking through stone than having to eat a face-full of dirt every time she hit the hillside.

The efforts to crack through took her quite a while, with the stone being reinforced from the high mana density. She started to use her skills, using her spatial skills to crack and destroy the stone in front of her. She spilt it into large pieces and tossed it away, throwing chunks weighing hundreds of pounds off the top of the hill with ease. She did hit a layer of dirt she had to deal with, but a couple blasts of Celestial Annihilation took care of that. She was sure whoever had first come up with the skill in the distant past would be quite mortified to know it was being used to vaporize dirt, but it was what it was.

The next layer was stone and took her even longer, with her having to crack through a thick layer of rock to get down to what was underneath. She broke this layer in massive chunks, lifting thousands of pounds of stone and tossing it away just as easily as she had done with the previous couple hundred-pound pieces. The chunks made massive booming noises when they finally impacted the ground a few hundred feet away, throwing up plumes of dust high into the air. The stone went on for a couple dozen feet before she cracked through, feeling like she had punched through the entire hill, though that was certainly an exaggeration. It was only about thirty or maybe thirty-five feet in total, with the hill itself being about three hundred feet high in total. Beth was glad she was anchored into the ground, her feet punched into the rock, as her last blow caused the rock in front of her to collapse into a cavern in a massive crash.

Beth was less glad she was anchored into the ground when a huge head snaked out of the hole for her, but the beast was deterred a bit when Beth hit its nose extremely hard with her armored gauntlet. Before the beast could swing around for another try, Sera plunged into the hole, spear leading the way down, slamming into the beast's head and forcing it back down into the cavern. The creature had clearly been attracted by Beth's smashing and pounding into the ground, the thing coming up near what would be the hole and investigating it. When Beth broke through, the beast had seized the opportunity and attacked her, the thing like a very long-necked badger, a weird amalgam of different creatures that looked odd. Despite its weird look, it was clearly a very lethal predator, having shrugged off both Beth and Sera's strikes to its armored snout and come back for more. Beth dropped on its head from the hole, timing it to hit the thing as Sera charged from the front, slamming into the beast fist first as her lover stabbed at it a hundred times in two seconds.

Despite its armored body and fierce nature, the beast wasn't any match for them in the end, especially not once Blood had also leapt into the pit to join the fun. When they had finally killed the bastard, they found themselves in a moderate-sized cavern, about fifty feet across and not quite half that in height. There were two obvious tunnels leading out of the room, and Beth inspected the place with Blood, looking for any other routes in or out as well as anything of any value. Sera stuck her head a bit down both of the obvious tunnels, looking and listening for anything else that had been disturbed by Beth's hammering or by the sounds of battle from the cavern, but the rest of the place was surprisingly quiet and calm, all things considered.

Finding nothing of value, and with no other obvious tunnel leading out of the cavern, they had a selection of two to choose from. Beth, as the leader, just shrugged her shoulders and picked a direction, walking down the first tunnel Sera had investigated before being overtaken by Blood. Their resident scout insisted on going first, always leading the way and working on her skills at the same time. Beth left it to her, more than happy to stick back and bring up the rear, watching Sera walking a short distance in front of her. It was a rather impressive view, and she definitely wasn't talking about the scenery. Even through the armor, Beth's vision was often riveted, particularly to certain areas.

Before her thoughts could go too far down that road, they found another cavern, this one much larger and containing far more mana than the top cavern or the tunnels. It still wasn't the source of the mana, evidently, as there was nothing inside, other than a couple dozen beasts who weren't happy to see the girls intruding into their territory. Fifteen minutes of fighting later gave Blood some more work to do on top of her scouting job, leaving Beth and Sera to investigate the rest of the cavern. It turned out that there was something of some value within, Beth finding some kind of ore embedded in the wall. She and Sera worked on that for a while, taking longer than Blood before they were finished with their harvesting.

They resumed when they had finished all their gathering and harvesting, Blood leading them deeper into the hill. They encountered a few more beasts in the next hour, killing whatever they ran into, though they didn't find anything else of value. Beth was almost convinced that the hill was just a gathering place of mana; almost, until they made their way into a very large cavern a few hundred feet under the base of the hill. The cavern was rather wide but wasn't very high, the ceiling low enough in places that Sera would have to duck her head, and that wasn't even including the stalactites. The place was also swarming with a massive nest of snakes and short-limbed lizards, some of them already in the process of battling each other when the girls enter. Beth could see them in her heat vision as sections that were only a bit brighter than the walls and floor, the beasts not generating that much heat, maintaining their cold-blooded nature.

The beasts weren't so preoccupied with each other that they couldn't all stop and make time to all attack the girls, all at once as well. It was wading through a lot of scales, claws, fangs, and even venom after that, Beth using all the skills at her disposal. If she hadn't just spent an hour punching through the same kind of stone, she'd be worried about pulling the roof down on them all, but she could target only the walls for five minutes and not compromise the cavern. The secondary advantage of Spatial Obliteration, especially in a confined space, was that it had a rather good effect of pushing beasts around. Coupled together with Beth's ability to teleport, it meant she had a great ability to corral and push the beasts into groupings or arrangements as she wanted them. This also let her get them grouped up for attacks from Blood and Sera that otherwise might not have been as damaging to really do the maximum amount of destruction.