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Limitless Path Chapter Two Hundred Sixty
🕑 Added 2024-07-18 17:00:03 +0000 UTCBeth opened the righthand of the two large doors at the back of the warehouse, nearly taking a spear to the armor over her gut for the trouble. They were right back into the middle of the endless war from that attack onward, fighting through battle after battle as they slowly made progress through the city over the next couple days. They had to deal with several more elite enemies during the course of those few days, Beth continually surprised by just how tough they were. They weren't necessarily very strong, Beth taking a couple hits during those fights that she mostly shrugged off, but they could absorb a massive amount of damage. It was more dangerous for the fact that they had to stay in combat for a long time, and the elites were capable of calling more enemies from the surrounding area, making killing them a real war of attrition.
The dungeon ground on and on, with Beth checking to see they had been inside for over a week at this point. The good news, on the other hand, was that they had made some significant progress in the last number of days, both in leveling several more times, as well as clearing a larger portion of the city. They still hadn't come close to the center, as they were really struggling with fighting up so many levels, and fighting the level two hundred fourteen enemies they were finding in massive numbers in the current area was already a bit of a stretch. They had to spend nearly three full days clearing those out before Blood led them deeper in, the fact they had hit two hundred a nice addition, but there was no special prize there, unlike the first time where they could do a true rebirth.
Beth was a little concerned that they might have to do a second rebirth, but she didn't think it would wind up being necessary. She hadn't really made much use of her Presence so far, and that would allow them to fight quite far up level, though it would exhaust her and slow them down. Even still, she was pretty sure they could kill even the boss, as long as they got at least close to their new maximum level of two-twenty. She really didn't want to do the rebirth, as there was no way they could possibly get the items they would need for the True Rebirth without leaving the dungeon, which was not an option until the dungeon was beat.
They fought for another week, killing a few more elites, before they stumbled on a rather odd building. It was a single story, with hardly any windows, the few which were present being very narrow with the wall around them sloped inward, clearly meant to minimize visible area of the people inside while giving a wide firing line. Beth led the way here, pushing in in front of Blood to find a half dozen heavily armored lizardmen within. They weren't elites, but their better gear did let them stand up to even Beth's armor-crushing power a little better, prolonging the fight quite a bit.
That extra time allowed more heavily armored lizardmen to pour from the depths of the building, like giant, scaled bees swarming from a hard-kicked hive. That swarm included what had to be an officer, a lizardman with a very fancy set of armor that included a helmet with a bright red plume sticking up from a mana gold ridge. Beth didn't really understand their insignia and she was only guessing that it was an officer, likely a captain, swarming with the rest. If these were sapients, Beth would say the captain was coming to check what the problem was and take command, issuing orders to the foot soldiers. These being beasts, however, changed that concept to the 'captain' just being attracted by the noise and running towards the fight to try to join in the killing.
Beth supposed that was the one good thing about fighting beasts, and ones that were still relatively low-level. They were pretty mindless and would be attracted by sounds, sights, or smells that were out of the usual, piling up to be more easily killed en masse. Though, they had encountered some minor exceptions to that, including those stupid mantises that camouflaged themselves and tended to operate as ambush predators. She supposed that there would always be some exceptions, and even these enemies were exceptions to an extent, as they wielded weapons competently and wore heavy armor.
Not that that armor would save them, as Beth and Blood tore them apart, quite literally in Blood's case, as she often ripped their limbs off while they fought. Beth's ability to crush anything particularly solid did wonders as well, not just against the lizardmen's armor, but against their hard scales and tough flesh. She did have to pause several times to grab corpses and toss them out onto the street, the last two bodies she threw out to clear the lobby tumbling down the four ochre stone steps to the walkway with a clamorous clanging.
Clearing the lobby did clear most of the building, considering how many of the beasts mindlessly ran to them, including all three captains, but there were still a couple holdouts that they found afterwards as they explored the floor. Aside from taking care of them, they looted anything of interest, though that really turned out to be a few coins and one very well-made dagger that Beth found in a drawer. Beth enjoyed finding money, but the fact it was only a handful of gold coins when they were making up to a couple platinums a day from killing lizardmen non-stop, didn't really get her heart pounding.
"Over here!" Blood called out as they were finishing their sweep. Beth walked out of the room she was browsing through and down the hall a bit to one of the last rooms in the building, finding Blood standing before an opening in one of the walls. It was very clearly an entrance to a basement or underground floor, as Beth could see the area beyond sloping downwards and the outline of stairs.
"Basement level?" she asked rhetorically as she came up alongside Blood, reaching up to ruffle her between the ears.
"Hmm, nice…" Blood growled, ignoring the question and leaning into the petting.
"Alright, alright, enough," Beth said, bumping the wolf with her hip before walking down the stairs.
"Let me lead," Blood insisted, but Beth stopped her from pushing past.
"No, we know what this is," Beth replied. "I'm our tank, currently. If something surprises us, I'll soak the damage. You shouldn't be scouting in buildings, not unless you figure out how to find and disarm traps."
"Hmph," Blood grunted, but subsided, walking two steps behind Beth.
Beth wasn't wrong in her reasoning, and the first large hallway they walked into was filled with captain-level beasts, the heavily armored lizardmen charging Beth as soon as her right foot was firmly planted on the floor tiles. Ten of the fully armored beings all tried to get close enough to hack into her at once, jamming up the hallway, though they were unfortunately just smart enough to not trip each other as they crowded in. Not that Beth couldn't push them into each other in the narrow space, which she certainly did, but they weren't jumping into or over each other to try to hit her and Blood.
Cleaning up the hallway didn't attract any other beasts, Beth carefully scanning the place twenty minutes later as Blood tore the last lizardman apart. The hallway stretched along what would be the north wall of the building, and only had doors branching out from the south side. The middle door led into another hallway that ran south all the way to the opposite end of the basement. There were no other hallways that branched from this one, but more rooms did branch out from doors along this southward-running hallway. They had to be careful about searching both hallways, as there were plenty of beasts still left in just about every room, all of them high-level and many being some kind of elite or special variant.
An hour later, Beth shook the last of the squished brains of an elite from her hand, having had to pulverize its head to kill it. They were done with the whole building now, as far as she could tell, which meant the only thing left was to loot it, taking everything that wasn't nailed down. She could actually do that, take everything not nailed down, but she was already finding herself hording random junk in her necklace and was determined to not fill it with any more crap. She split from Blood and started rooting through the rooms, trying to find anything valuable that would be worth it. She found a room filled with armor, but she wasn't really interested, none of it being of a high quality.
It was all decent mana steel, but little of it was enchanted, not with anything more than durability and possibly repair. The enchanting might prove interesting, but she was sure Soph had better stuff to study than some barely enchanted steel plate armor. She had snagged an undamaged set from the last lizardman she had killed as his chest piece was still in good shape, though she certainly couldn't say the same for his helmet. She checked the rest of the armory to see if there was anything even mildly interesting, but everything inside was rather plain, all of it being just simple, serviceable equipment.
She moved on to another room, paging through a few desks before checking a shelf in the back. It was mainly full of books, though nothing truly interesting caught her eye, though she did find it fairly amusing that the books were fully written. She supposed she could take a few and sell them or read them later, since most of them were in Standard, but she didn't find any of it particularly fascinating. There were also a lot of reports, which she supposed would have been a nice touch, had a ton of them not been for an entirely different species. There were absolutely some things on the shelf that would have belonged to an elven civilization but were made to look like they were reports based on the operations of the city she was currently in, meaning the Path just couldn't seem to get its randomness to line up all that well.
She did find a couple gold coins laying around and one tier two beast core, tossing the coins in her status screen and the core in her necklace before moving on. The next two rooms weren't really any better, and she was a bit frustrated since the street-level floor had been just as poor in terms of loot. This was clearly an at least moderately important building, but even the weapons and armor were very plain and generic. She started rummaging through another set of shelves at the back of the fifth or sixth room she had checked, pulling out a random book to page through for a moment, when Blood walked in.
"Anything?" she asked over her shoulder.
"Junk, mostly," the wolf replied, disgruntled.
"Same. Couple golds and a beast core, not really much else so far," Beth murmerred, setting the book back down.
"Should we move on?" Blood asked.
"Sure, I guess. Just a disappointment," Beth sighed, idly running a hand along the shelf before grabbing a book with a red spine and embossed gold lettering. It must have been a good turn in their fortune after grinding away for so long, not just in the dungeon but the months leading up to this, as the book didn't come out in Beth's hand. She stopped and turned to face the shelf full-on, Blood walking over curiously as she noticed Beth going on alert right away. Beth slid a long index finger up the spine of the volume and rested the pad of her finger on the top of the pages, noting that they appeared to be totally normal. She pressed down very lightly and curled her finger, pulling back on the top of the book as if she wanted to lean it back from the two books it sat between. The volume slid fairly easily until it reached a certain point, wherein Beth had to exert a decent bit more force to get it to move, which it suddenly did with a jerk and a loud *click*.
The two were already on alert, but they got ready for a fight as they heard a deep rumbling noise before Beth realized a section of the floor was moving. She left the shelf and stepped over to stand at the edge of the rectangular section, watching as a slab of granite that had been perfectly blended in with the rest of the stone floor slid back into a hidden recess below the level of the floor. It revealed a set of dark stairs, no light of any kind shining in the gloomy depths, and a cold, slightly musty air wafting up to their noses.
"Think it's safe?" Blood asked.
"No," Beth replied immediately before cracking her knuckles and rolling her neck. "Just what I like."
"What if the air's not safe?" Blood asked as she followed the Brawler down the stairs.
"I'm sure we'll figure it out. Besides, the fact that the air started moving should mean that with the door open here, there's airflow now. Hopefully, that's enough," Beth replied.
"As long as the door doesn't close behind us," Blood commented.
"Why are you being such a doomer today?" Beth asked with a huff, turning and walking back up the stairs to the door. She pulled a huge hunk of mana steel out of her necklace, something that she had found much earlier in the city and thought it might be good to take since it was of unusually high quality. She thumped it down on the top two steps, the four or five hundred pound lump slamming into the stairs with a bang before she turned and led the way back down to the bottom of the steps.
"There. If the door closes, as long as the mechanism isn't insanely powerful, we'll have some time to solve that issue," she said, pulling a lightstone from her necklace.
"I smell something," Blood commented, her nose's power being demonstrated a moment later as the lightstone lit up the corridor, revealing two hulking forms a few dozen feet further down from them in the gloom. A quick Identify showed that they were both level two hundred twenty Oath Breakers, which didn't sound very good, and the fact they were massive and fully coated in heavy armor didn't do anything to ease the impression they gave.
"Corridor's not that big," Blood commented as the two beasts shifted and glared at them.
"We'll handle it," Beth replied, readying herself as both the beasts roared, not shouted, but genuinely roared in rage as they stomped forward, the sound having an intimidating effect, though Beth was able to ignore it entirely thanks to Indomitable Heart.
She met them in the middle of the hall, engaging them alone as there just wasn't enough room for four to fight. Blood was forced to stand back, pacing side-to-side as she waited for the perfect opportunity to dive in. The wait lasted a while as the two beasts were insanely tough, and Beth traded blows with them for multiple minutes before she had any indication that any damage was even being done.
Even that was only the cracking of the vambrace of the lizardman that had been consistently on her left as they battled. She continued hammering both of them, pumping a ton of mana into Crush to try and work through their ridiculous defenses as she punched and kicked repeatedly.
"You think it's all gonna be like this?" she asked over her shoulder as she dodged three sword swipes.
"I mean, I guess so," Blood shrugged in response, continuing to pace. "Shouldn't you be paying a little more attention?"
"They're really tough and fairly strong, but they're pretty slow," Beth replied as she dodged several more swipes. "And their skills aren't really up to snuff. As long as I halfway pay attention, I’m fine."
"If you say so," Blood growled, looking for an opening before firing off a claw attack. "I think we're at a point where everything's gonna be 'tough.'"
"It's why so many people can't make it past nine rebirths," Beth commented, dodging a lunge before slamming a knee into the beast's chin. "People get too complacent fighting in the hundreds, between a hundred and two hundred, and they're not prepared for beyond two hundred. The minimum level for rebirths after ten is over two hundred, and that's assuming you build your Mana Physique, which tons of people get stuck on and never get past."
"So, it's a good thing we're doing all these fights taking forever?" Blood asked with a bit of an eyeroll.
"Yeah, it's good that we get used to it now," Beth said, smashing the beast she had previously kneed with a rapid series of straight punches directly to the jaw and mouth. "Guess we're just gonna have to adjust our timelines if we keep going to max every time."
"Maybe we can use something a little easier than armored beasts that are also naturally armored," Blood grunted, firing off a series of slashes as Beth danced first left and then back right, dodging every attack from the beasts, including a powerful kick that blasted air down the tunnel.
"Alright, I'm starting to get tired of this shit," Beth said after another minute, Blood recognizing that tone of voice. Not even a full second later, reality twisted in the tunnel as Beth's crown settled upon her brow. Red, black, and silver energy swirled around her, joined a moment later by pure gold as she overcharged Celestial Annihilation to fire off a single attack of devastating proportion, enough so that the walls of the tunnel shook and cracked. If anyone capable of higher reasoning had been present on the street above, they would have been rather startled to see a wave of dust and dirt explode upward into the stifling noontime air.
Blood used that moment to jump in, precisely Spatial Stepping behind the two opponents before the aftershocks of Beth's first strike had finished fading. She still wasn't totally in control of her humanization, and the amount of strength she put into her attack immediately after her teleport caused her wolf ears to disappear and her human ears to resurface. She slashed the lizardman that Beth had hit with her first strike, burying her claw weapons in a gap in its armor that had been broken open by Beth before rending and tearing, firing her energy attack off against the surface of the scales of the beast.
Beth attacked the other lizardman as Blood eviscerated the one to Beth's right, hitting it with a rising uppercut to the torso while the added mass factor was applied to her gauntlets. Adding Crush to the mix caused the blow to land with an almighty clangor, the beast's heavy mana steel breastplate crushing inward and cracking from the immense force. The lizardman was lifted off the ground and slammed into the wall of the corridor, causing the whole thing to shake and more dirt to rain down on them. Beth would have been more concerned about the integrity of the tunnel if they weren't just a handful of feet underground, but even if the tunnel collapsed, she would be able to punch her way free with the use of a little mana.
Punching her way free was far from what she was currently thinking about as she focused a barrage of hammer blows into the lizardman's torso, so overwhelming that the beast had trouble mounting any defense. It attempted to swing at her, but she was hitting it so fast and so hard that its arms could do little more than flail to the sides. She sped up even further, striking the beast's torso a dozen times in just over a second as what was left of its armor was thoroughly shattered. She was burning stamina at an unbelievable rate to keep her assault up, tossing in mana just as quickly to destroy the armor, the tough scales, the bones, and even the organs of the beast. She didn't stop, understanding the insane toughness of even standard enemies above level two hundred, let alone an elite sitting at two hundred twenty. Increasing the mass of both of her gauntlets to the max, she made very sure there was little but crushed meat and splintered metals scrap left of the beast.
She turned to assist Blood with her kill, but found it was entirely unnecessary, as the lupine woman had steadily shredded the other beast, using an insane amount of energy to leave little more than ribbons of flesh left hanging off chunks of cracked bone. The two of them rested for just a minute before retreating up the tunnel, returning to the armory building they had just raided. Setting up in a random room in the basement that was rather easy to barricade, they spent a few hours just resting, the second time they had taken a long rest since starting the dungeon.
