LimitlessPath
patreon
Limitless Path Chapter Two Hundred Eleven
🕑 Added 2024-03-20 17:00:05 +0000 UTCOne clash in particular left a deep impression on her, as a girl that looked just as young as she was wielded a spear with such skill that Beth had a very difficult time keeping up. It felt like every time the young woman even twitched her hands Beth was in danger of dying, barely deflecting or blocking every strike. The pressure she felt was enormous, and Beth was no longer some fresh recruit with her weapons, both her Swords and Unarmed skills being more than halfway through Journeyman. She knew, she absolutely knew, that this young woman had already hit Expert, and she was likely two or three levels into the tier.
The went back and forth for ten, twenty, fifty strikes, sparks and bursts of air blasting off of them. Other Wayfarers actually gave them a wide berth, as getting close was more likely to get them hit or even killed than to overwhelm either of the young women. The fight was even difficult to follow for much of the audience before a replay camera slowed it down on the large screens overhead, as the two were simply too fast, not just in their attacks, but in how they moved from one sequence to another without a pause or stutter.
The only thing that gave Beth any chance in the fight was her combination of weaponskills; many other Wayfarers, particularly young ones, simply having no experience in battling split-weapon fighters. Beth's constant use of punches and kicks threw the spear-wielding woman off her game, the lady clearly not having dealt with someone who alternated attacks in such a way before. The other area where she had an advantage was strength, as the woman couldn't compete in raw power. Not that it made a huge difference, as Beth was outclassed in skill and slightly outclassed in speed, though that was only until she threw Beastly Body into the mix.
Now her strength was vastly superior to her opponent, which she took advantage of to knock the opponent's weapon further out of line than she expected. This let her get a few hits in that she might otherwise not have landed, something that clearly upset the other woman. The spear-wielder had a frown on her face, her brow furrowed as she thrust in a rapid-fire manner, trying to impale Beth by any means necessary. When every strike was knocked off course, with Beth stepping in and elbowing the woman in the face at the end, she seemed to become enrage, the air around them bending and twisting as she summoned her Presence. A mask appeared on the woman's face, seemingly made of onyx, her spear lashing out like a hundred people were attacking Beth at once.
Beth's response was simple. The air around them once again twisted and bent as the blood red crown appeared on Beth's head, the wolves leering at her opponent. The disturbance was enough to throw even her Presence-empowered opponent's attacks off, with Beth not hesitating a moment to lunge forward and slash out with a full strength Monstrous Blow in that fractional second before the spear-wielder could recover. The woman only barely managed to blocked with the haft of her spear, her eyes widening as the pure mana steel shaft bent from the force of Beth's strike.
The woman attempted to use a skill or technique to make multiple thrusts so fast on top of each other that it was like she was stabbing out half-a-dozen times at once, but Beth charged into the attack, knocking the spear aside with her blade before punching it with a fully empowered Crush. This further bent the woman's spear, distracting her for another split second, and that split second was all that Beth needed. She dove in close with a massive thrust from her legs, once again proving the teaching that Baelvyr had explained to her, "If ya know what yer doin', STR can become speed." She arrived inside the woman's guard in just a split second, planting her right foot almost between the woman's legs before slamming her left knee into the woman's gut, hitting with all the impact of a rocket.
The sand exploded around them from the force of the strike, the spear-wielder folding in half as she was lifted off the ground, bile shooting out her mouth as she puked from the force crushing her stomach through her armor. The woman didn't even really have time to register what was happening, nor correct her flight, as Beth leapt forward as the woman was leaving the ground and brought her sword around in a massive strike, smashing through the woman's helmet and partially crushing her skull. She disappeared from the simulated area, and Beth took a second to look around before releasing her Presence, not wanting to exhaust herself any further.
Fight after fight went like this, the action getting far more intense now that many of the "weak" contestants were eliminated, and fatigue was setting in big time. She was really struggling with holding on, her armor dented, dinged, and damaged, while her body was bruised and battered. She was nursing multiple fractures, with at least two of the bones in her left hand broken. She fought through the pain, gritting her teeth and telling herself that it was just levels for Pain Tolerance.
Every time a different foe appeared, it was a new, even tougher fight that pushed her ever further, wearing her down and injuring her more. But none of that mattered; every time she was knocked down, she rose again. Every time she was injured, she pushed past the injury to strike a decisive blow against the one who injured her. Every time she was attacked by multiple opponents, she didn't give in to the overwhelming odds, but struck down everyone who stood against her.
She came up against three opponents at the same time, all of them extremely powerful, all three of them already burning brightly with their Presences out. Beth activated her just as they attacked, noting with a slight smirk that those she was fighting just weren't used to fine control of Presences. Her near-instant activations in the middle of a fight, often in the middle of an opponent's attack, always threw them off their game and caused them to stagger or to be oddly interrupted. She took advantage of that brief staggered moment to lash out, first with a horizontal swipe of her blade, then followed by an upward slash during which she also lashed out with a snap punch, which all flowed into a powerful side kick.
She didn't eliminate any of the opponents with these attacks, but she did interrupt their combined assault, which also led to two of them engaging each other in battle. They had combined their attacks on Beth almost out of happenstance, but this was a grand melee, and nobody was on anybody else's side. She used that opening to focus on the third opponent, hammering him repeatedly with her sword and fists before rolling into a snap kick, following that up with a lunging thrust.
She didn't kill him with the series of attacks, especially considering he deflected several of the initial strikes. She did, however, do him some serious damage, crippling one of his arms and causing him to bleed quite badly. She knocked him back with another three frenetic attacks before turning and dishing out a powerful one-two combo to one of the other combatants that had staggered up next to her. She quite literally tore him apart, what was left of his body disappearing from the arena floor in a flash.
She refocused on the one she had already heavily wounded, dashing into him and knocking his mace aside with an artful angled slash of her greatsword, opening his face up for a powerful snap punch. She followed up with a kick to the inside of his right knee as he staggered, sending him tumbling before finishing him with a thrust to the throat. Just as she pulled her sword back up, she felt a massive strike smash into her right arm and side from outside of her peripheral vision, lifting her from the ground and sending her tumbling. She corrected her movement as she tumbled, sliding into a crouch before springing back to her feet, meeting her assailant head-on.
The woman used a massive greathammer with a head larger than Beth's torso, focused even more deeply into STR than Beth herself was. Her Presence burned, a set of ghostly spaulders glowing around her shoulders with a blue, ethereal light. The woman was huge, likely having some kind of giant blood or blood of a gigantic race flowing in her veins, and every swing of her weapon carried the force of a crashing freight train. The only thing that held her back was that she was slow and ungainly, clearly not having put even the minimum amount of points necessary into DEX to allow her giant body to keep up with all that rippling muscle.
Blocking the woman's swings directly made Beth's hands, arms, and body ache from the transfer of force. Parrying and deflecting were definitely the better options, with the opponent's low DEX doing nothing but working to Beth's advantage as they clashed. She got several good strikes in, sliding the massive hammer just out of line before slashing at the woman's elbows and throat, multiple exchanges leaving her opponent's eight-foot frame covered in fresh blood. Before either of them could get a decisive blow in, another of the participants dashed in from the side and took a cheeky swipe at the giantess, trying to get her in the side while she was open. The woman reacted quickly, letting go of her hammer with her right hand and twisting her torso a little, allowing the new opponent to slice her side before backhanding her in the face so hard they could all her the dagger-wielder's neck shatter.
That left the giantess too wide open, however, and she wasn't able to recover before Beth lunged in and gutted her, literally opening her stomach the same as one might gut a fish. Just by sheer instinct, the large lady tried to scoop her guts back into her torso as she slumped to her knees before she disappeared from the floor of the arena. Beth let her Presence go, now starting to run seriously low on stamina, taking a few deep, heaving in great lungfuls of air before getting hit yet again. She tumbled across the ground for a dozen feet before punching below her, lifting off the ground with an explosion of sand, landing on her feet while still holding her greatsword in her right hand and clutching her broken right arm with her left hand.
I won't stop.
The person that had jumped her was dual-wielding one-handed maces, each of them with an elongated head and many flanges. The armor on Beth's right arm was thoroughly crushed and shattered at this point, with her torso armor not faring that much better. After tearing the twisted metal from her arm, she gritted her teeth and charged the man, seeming to take him by surprise, if the widening of his eyes and slight opening of his mouth was any indication. They engaged in a fast, heated exchange, the man's eyes only going wider as Beth fought at essentially full strength even with her shattered arm and damaged body, giving just as good as she got.
She spent a minute, then two, smashing down that man, ignoring the further damage she herself was doing to her arm the whole time. When the opponent was dead, she quickly scanned around herself, finding that there wasn't anybody within at least a few dozen feet, and she took that opportunity to try to heal. She didn't use her meditation skill at all, but focused on pushing her healing skill as hard as she could, overloading it with mana and flooding her right arm with the power of the skill. She paid careful attention to her surroundings while also devoting attention to how her arm should be, to restoring it from its heavy damage to the perfect state.
She only had two or three minutes before she had to dodge a wild swing by an opponent on his last legs that had charged her recklessly. Killing him ate up enough time that she was back embroiled in the thick of everything again, trying desperately to hold out while also remember to land as many killing blows as she could get in. She didn't know if she flat-out needed to win the melee to beat the stage, but once again, she knew the better she did, the better the rewards would be all around. She broke free of any battles four kills and ten minutes later, quickly checking her arm to see what state it was in, noting that she had managed to pull the bones mostly back together and regenerate what was lost. She only had a minute to keep trying to pull herself back together, ignoring the damage in her left hand and her ribs to try to get her right arm back to a point where it could handle her going at full strength.
The minute ended when she was pincer attacked by two of the remaining enemies at the same time, the one in front of her arriving first, while the one that came from behind her arrived two seconds after. Two seconds was a long time at the level Beth was already at, and she had exchanged four blows with the woman in front of her before the man approaching her back had arrived and swung at her. The woman was another annoying spear-wielder, while the man was a mirror match with a greatsword of his own, striking at her with a heavy horizontal chop while the woman lashed out with a double stab motion. Beth blocked one stab and turned just enough to take the other in her left arm, allowing it to glance along her armor and off to the side, utilizing the momentum to spin and block the heavy chop. She lashed out with her right leg as she deflected the chop, still carrying the momentum of the spin to hammer the man's side with a roundhouse kick.
The woman struck out again, and Beth leapt into the air, making use of the remaining energy from the kick to continue the motion, moving forward and up with her jump to dodge the spear. She still caught the tip above her left kidney, the force propelling her forward and causing her to spin a little, making her tumble as she landed. She moved with the momentum of the impact, getting a slight bit more distance before popping back up, a fierce snarl on her face as she reversed direction and slammed back into the two opponents. Luckily for her, everyone was exhausted at this point and instead of following up, the spear woman had taken a bit of a cheap shot at the man with the greatsword, dealing him a glancing blow that didn't do much damage but sent him staggering.
Beth took advantage of their unfocused nature, slamming into the man with a renewed fury, knocking him further back before knocking him down. The spear woman interrupted, thrusting at Beth over the man laying on the sand, but Beth pulled a move that caused a shock look to appear on both of their faces, digging her right sabaton under the man and snapping her leg up and forward in a kicking motion. She launched the greatsword-wielder into the air, causing him to take a direct strike from the woman before bouncing off of her and tumbling to side. Beth stepped in as the woman staggered from the force of the large, blunt weight smashing into her, lashing out with three deceptively quick strikes, so fast that they were a blur, her skill and speed combined with her high STR allowing her to move her greatsword much more rapidly than many would think possible at her level. She knocked the woman's spear down, away, and then reversed with the third slash to give her a second, gaping smile.
Comments
Arkeus
The weakest part of the story by far is how skill levels are both meant to matter but are always irrelevant when it comes to 'beth knowing a basic skill'. Would be nice for them to actually matter once and have her be slaughtered
