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Limitless Path Chapter Two Hundred Twenty
🕑 Added 2024-05-09 17:00:00 +0000 UTCIt had been a while since Beth had done it and, come to think of it, she had gotten at least a little bit of an upgrade since then. Beth brought up the options to see what she could do and what had changed and was pleasantly surprised by what was available. She poked around in the menu for a minute to view the new features and see what all was available before making her selections. When she was sure, she entered the all the parameters she wanted and flowed a little mana through the skill, waiting for the effect to start.
A beam of marble and crystal rose from the ground behind Beth on two ornate pillars. She kept her eye on the wyrm as the edifice rose up and, thankfully, the high-level beast didn't so much as twitch. When the skill had finished its work, she turned and confidently stepped through the arch, Blood just a few paces behind her.
Beth had, of course, used her Ancient World Gate power to once again try to save them from the sticky situation they had found themselves trapped in. She had seen there were several new options, including a new time multiplier of ten X, as well as an option to randomize the enemy type and level. She had chosen the randomized settings option, which had let her know that the enemies still started at her current level and went up from there. She had also selected the terrain to be a forest, adding in some variety to what was about to be a brutal session of grinding.
Beth had to say, after they had spent a few hours fighting, that the ability to randomize the enemies, in terms of their type and level, really helped to cut down on the monotony of the grind. It was also good that no beasts approached the gate area, as was usual, allowing them to have a safe area to rest without needing to leave the gate. It was also more dangerous elsewhere in the gate, however, as they could just randomly stumble into a level one-forty or one-fifty beast with the random option, but that did help keep them on their toes.
This was the first real taste they got of what it was like to level past one hundred outside of the Trial and Beth had to say; it sucked. She had already thought it was slow in the Trial, where they might spend days to get a single level, only balanced out by being rewarded bonus levels at the end of the stage. Now, they spent days and days, a week or more, just to roll a single level, resting for as little time as possible whenever they were exhausted, just enough to get their stamina and mana back.
They were trying to do something pretty crazy, even with Beth's power, considering they were looking to gain twenty-four or more levels, post level one hundred, before re-emerging from the gate. Twenty-four levels might not sound like that much, considering their progression through the levels so far, but that was a bit of where the deceptiveness of the Limitless Path started. People got used to early gains and rapidly flying through levels and then became immensely frustrated as that really slowed down at later levels, one of the many factors that led people to rebirth early. Going through rebirths at a relatively low level greatly reduced the person's future potential, though many people were either happy with one or two rebirths or simply lacked the will or skill to strive for more.
The time didn't decrease, either, taking seven days, seven days and a few hours, eight days, and so on. Weeks turned into months getting the levels they wanted, and this was in a basically ideal environment where they had an infinite number of high-level enemies to fight. Beth couldn't imagine being someone, even on a frontier world like they had experienced in the Trial during stage twenty, trying to quickly level up. It must just take ages to level up, especially going for level two hundred. Beth shuddered to think what going beyond that level must be like, when someone's maximum level they needed to hit for a Perfect Rebirth was two-sixty or even three hundred.
The only saving grace for them was Beth's bit of a cheat power dilating time, meaning eight months of grinding for level one-fifty turned into twenty-four days of objective time, which was the absolute flow of time in the universe indifferent to magical or technological modification. She did feel a bit bad about not telling anyone they would be out for a while, but she figured they would probably be used to them disappearing for long times at this point. If they weren't, they would just have to get used to it, as Beth wasn't planning on sitting around and resting any time soon.
The level up to the Gate skill did also seem to slightly lessen the strain on her, though it was a bit hard to tell considering how much she had leveled and grown stronger since the last time she used the skill. She did emerge from the gate thoroughly exhausted; even with them spending plenty of time sleeping and resting in the gate, she was weary from the strain the skill put on her soul. They found the wyrm was still sleeping, or was sleeping again, for who knew what it had gotten up to in the past few dozen days. They moved just slightly away from the center of the top floor of the tower; even though it was strangely windless, they were a little concerned about being close to the edge. Blood set up one of their tents before Beth crawled in and passed out, Blood sitting outside on the ground and watching the wyrm with one eye. She was starting her own little mental list of things to get, especially with their necklaces giving them so much space to store things, and she was definitely adding a comfortable chair to her list. Maybe she would just take her favorite chair from their living room, though the CRA might have protections to stop stuff like that.
Beth slept eighteen hours, Blood watching over her the whole time. Being in the gate did nothing to stress Blood's soul and with well over one hundred END herself, she was able to stay up for several days before getting tired, so an extended shift on watch wasn't a problem, especially as she lightly meditated the whole time. She crawled in the tent when Beth was out and moving, sleeping a couple hours herself to be back at peak condition before they tried the boss. They had both hit level one fifty and had improved several of their skills by a decent bit, and Beth observed their stat screens before they did anything else.
Beth had distributed most of her free points in catching her DEX up to a place where it wouldn't be dragging her STR down. She had put a few extra points in so that she wouldn't have to do another big investment before two hundred, not unless she got yet another elixir before hitting that point. Blood had invested a good bit in her DEX and had also sunk a decent chunk in STR, as well as what each of them had done in tossing a few spare points in END to try to boost their stamina and natural defenses a little.
Beth finished looking over their screens, seeing that they both had several skill levels boosted in their eight months of fighting, but nothing had jumped tier. Beth needed a lot of work to bring her weaponskills up from Journeyman to Expert, and Blood was struggling a little bit with the jump from Apprentice to Journeyman but was right on the cusp of it. They also hadn't boosted anything to Silver, and the only other thing close was Beth's Pain Tolerance, and she didn't see that hitting Gold any time soon. They packed up the tent and all the other items in their necklaces before turning to the boss, or boss-like monster. It was a little hard to tell, since their vision powers still didn't give them any indication of the power an enemy possessed apart from level and any extra adjectives in the name.
Approaching the massive wyrm, Beth got ready for battle, running her boosting skills a little and getting ready to use her much-improved Celestial Annihilation. Blood opened the fight by slashing at the beast's head with her claw skill, sending a wave of energy claws slamming into its skull. Beth followed a fraction of a second behind with her one ranged skill, a punch from her turning into a golden fist that flew through the air to smash into the skull behind Blood's claws.
The reaction to the attacks was nothing like either of them expected, however, as both of their strikes seemed to hit a wall. The wyrm woke slowly, its massive eyes opening to peer at the both of them with an almost indifferent attitude. Beth was still ready for a fight, seeing Blood in a fighting stance, crouched at the ready a few dozen feet from her current position. The wyrm didn't leap to its feet or lash out at them, puzzling Beth as she watched it very carefully to make sure it didn't suddenly attack if they let their guard down.
'Battle will not break the dream,' a voice echoed out in their minds.
Beth stayed in her ready stance but replied, "What do you mean?"
'The dream was lost. Now, we slumber until the dream is realized,' the wyrm, which Beth assumed was who was talking, answered.
"Sorry, but I don't really understand," Beth replied, straightening up by staying ready. She saw out of the corner of her eye that Blood was crouched down, resting on her haunches but still ready to spring forward at a split-second's notice.
'Find the sleeper. Answer their plea. Give us release,' the wyrm answered, putting its head back down and closing its eyes.
"Wait! At least tell us how to get down!" Beth cried as the wyrm's head slumped down.
'Mana…in the center…' drifted through their minds as the beast resumed its sleep.
Beth looked over at Blood, who glanced back at her and shrugged, so Beth took that as agreement and walked back to the middle of the room. It felt weird turning her back on something that felt like a boss to her, but there was no alert from Blood and she didn't hear or sense anything, glancing back when she was at the center of the room to see the wyrm was truly asleep. Refocusing, she knelt down at the exact center of the room, noting that the floor was made up of a pattern of alternating black and white tiles like the first floor, but much more intricate in design, with tiles of different shapes interlocked together. In the very center where she was crouching, there was a strange circular design, almost like a flower with twenty short petals and an octagonal shape in the center made of red tiles.
Beth made her right gauntlet disappear and placed her palm against the red tiles at the center, instantly feeling a slight pulse of mana in her hand. Responding in kind, she pushed mana through the center of the floor and was suddenly surrounded by the same magic circle they had walked into a month ago, which also performed the same function and teleported her down to the first floor. She straightened up and looked around, noting that it appeared to be the same exact place they had disappeared from so many weeks before, verifying there was nothing unusual as Blood suddenly popped into being next to her.
"You know," Blood started.
"Don't say it," Beth cut her off with.
"I'm just saying," Blood said with a shrug.
"We'd have to level anyway…eventually," Beth said.
"Whatever helps," Blood replied grumpily.
Beth just grunted and led the way out of the first floor of the tower, finding that the same yellow sun was shining in the same blue sky. The temperature was still rather cool around the tower, with no flowers, though the grass was still knee-high on the girls as they started back to the center of the area, or what they assumed was the center. When they arrived at the center, after picking up the pace and running for a time, they found it was the same as when they left it. Beth also found it pretty unusual that they hadn't seen hide nor hair of the kobolds, leading her to believe they were coming from somewhere else. Her current theory was the area was pre-disposed to have kobolds in it, or there was something spawning them there, and the amount of mana the gate had washing off of it caused large numbers of spawns to appear near it.
"Back out?" asked Blood.
"Yeah, sure. We should go back and report what we've found so far, and also people'll probably be worried that we've been gone so long," Beth replied.
"I want to curl up with Soph," Blood sighed wistfully.
"Still can't believe you’re going after Soph," Beth muttered.
"She's cute," Blood replied as they walked to the portal.
"She's a little shit," Beth mumbled.
They hopped through the portal at the same time, finding another huge group of kobolds surrounding the gate with no brutes in the area. The kobolds had gotten stronger and more plentiful in the time they had been gone, but there was no way they could keep up with the two girls and their use of Beth's special ability. The two of them tore through the eighty kobolds in a dozen or so minutes, leaving a charnel house of corpses and blood and guts strewn about the gate. Beth hopped up on a small ledge and crouched there as Blood hunted for cores, ripping open any of the corpses that weren't already in pieces.
"They're in the one-thirties," Beth commented as Blood worked.
"Highest was one-thirty-eight," Blood said.
"I saw that," Beth said with a nod. "Looks like the mana content is still increasing. We'll have to ask someone at the Hall what the current mana tier is, and what they expect the tier to wind up being, at this point."
"Well, It'll be a good planet for a lot of people," Blood said. "Just considering they can level up into the mid-hundreds pretty easily, and the amount of mana will mean a ton of good resources will show up, too."
"Just hope not to get too many fucking pieces of shit like that Rothande guy," Beth muttered darkly as Blood finished up.
"Think about fighting him now," Blood chuckled, straightening up from the last corpse.
"Oh, I've thought about it," Beth replied hotly, hopping down from the ledge. "Let's get out of here."
She followed Blood out of the area, retracing their steps from weeks ago to get back to the tunnel, though they did avoid fighting anything else. Frankly, it wasn't worth their time, but was something they would probably have to do from time to time to keep the area under control. They were forced to kill a number of kobolds as they made their way up the tunnel towards the surface, and several more in the shaft that led up. When they emerged from the spiral ramp, they found it was morning and a bit warm, Beth checking her phone to see it was the end of April. The field was full of kobolds, and Beth and Blood went to work slaughtering them, the sound of battle attracting even more kobolds that they tore through.
Comments
Garrett Byers
She's going to keep it under wraps not because someone on Earth could challenge her, but because she doesn't want the information spreading. Baelvyr, Jaq, and Blood are the only others that know about the power, and none of them are going to talk about it with anyone. Telling everyone about it means that, well, everyone will know, and that information could pretty easily spread beyond Earth, which would put her in danger, if maybe not a huge amount of danger.
Arkeus
Silly Beth. Hopefully she'll share her levelling portals for other people soon. She's likely strong enough now to not need fear earthlings
Emanuil Glavchev
That was a really satisfying and somewhat funny chapter... The two stooges are doing well.
SDCard
Thanks for the chapter! Good progress on the levels, can't wait to see what happens with some rebirths
