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Limitless Path Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Five
🕑 Added 2023-12-13 18:00:02 +0000 UTCThe next group was far larger, well over a hundred beastlings, and a number more trickled into the back of the ranks as the first were nearing the two girls. Beth used a trickle of mana to activate Swift, not fully bringing the boosting stat up to the max it could output at Copper[9], but instead running it more at about forty percent. This jump in speed let her easily outclass the individual beasts, and it gave her more time and precision in staying free from getting totally mobbed. The only good thing about the attack so far was that the beastlings hadn't tried to mob her with wild abandon, instead still making use of their weapons, be they swords and clubs or the long, gnarled claws at the ends of their fingers.
Beth dove into the fray this time, swinging her sword in what would be little more than a black and red blur to a level one. She focused on going for killing blows above all else, knowing that in such an environment dealing what would otherwise be a serious wound would not cut it here. A beastling without an arm, or even missing both arms, was no threat on its own, but during such a tide would do everything it could to take the two of them down. Leaving such opponents up and about would just lead to a scenario where a mass of crippled beastlings were throwing themselves bodily at the two girls or the walls, using the sheer weight of their numbers to inflict damage and death.
Beth danced across the field, still holding off on running anything but Swift, and that only at a limited amount. She tried to move around the open area as she killed and, in particular, stay away from the walls. Letting the bodies form a pile wouldn't be great, and it was better to let them start accumulating at the edge of the field rather than the center. Anything she could do to buy them more time, such as slowing the rush and fouling the footing of the beastlings as they came into the field, would go a long way towards helping them achieve victory.
As Beth danced Blood sped by, the wolf moving the entire breadth and length of the field in just seconds. Any beastling not paying attention would suddenly find itself in the grip of a massive set of jaws with teeth like dirks, its hot lifeblood shooting out into the cool morning air. The combination of woman and wolf was devastating, and the more than one hundred enemies fell in a matter of minutes, with the two none the worse for wear. Beth had stopped running Swift near the end and now stood in the center of the clearing, taking the chance to meditate for just a minute to recover as much as she could.
As she stood with her sword in front of her, embedded point first in the ground while both of her hands remained firmly clasped on the hilt, she had a vision of another time, another place. A vast field of orange and golden grasses spread out in her mind's eye, stretching to the horizon under a peerless blue sky. In front of her was a thin line of troops wearing crimson and silver armor with a sigil not unlike a tree on fire emblazoned upon the back. Crashing against this thin line of warriors was a massive tide of beastlings, thousands upon thousands of the creatures clawing and slashing and howling and bleeding upon the defenders. The scene was crystal clear, as if Beth stood there herself, feeling the warm breeze and smelling the sweat of the troops, the iron and coppery scent of so much blood on the wind.
Then she was back, awoken from the memories of Liveria as the beastlings in her current time and place howled and charged. This time there were aught upon a thousand swarming into the open field, so many that they appeared as a kicked hive of ants, or a swarm of locusts set upon denuding the countryside of anything they could reach. This would be the full wave, as there was no way, even if there was a pause at the end of the thousand beasts charging them, that they could clear the field before more started. They were fully into the wave proper, and Beth took a second to breathe deeply before the tide slammed into her, snapping her sword up on the exhale as she stepped forward into the beastlings.
When they labeled it a tide, whoever had first done it all those eons ago, they had been almost purely literal in the appellation. The beastlings crashed into Beth like the leading wave of a massive surge of water, an ocean of swords and clubs, teeth and claws, fur and mange. She didn't do anything to avoid it, welcoming the enemies with blade and fist. She slashed forward, a tiny pulse of Beastly Body at the last moment allowing her first strike to hew through the head of the first beastling that ran into her range. She slid to the right, chopping up across another beastling, shearing off an arm before cleaving open its throat in a fountain of red blood with a one-handed slash as she let go of the hilt with her left hand at the start of the motion, punching to her left with a pulse of Crush to shatter the skull of another beastling.
She used her mana conservatively, dancing back and forth across the field as she swung and punched, a graceful engine of death that tore flesh and filled the air with a pink haze. The black of her leathers remained the same as the blood coated her, only the copper scales changing from a glossy bright orange to a dull brown. Her body count rose to first one, then two hundred, before passing through the three hundred mark. An elite appeared beside her, its muscles crackling with electricity as it managed a glancing blow to her right elbow that hit just above her gauntlet and cut her arm. She dispatched it in an exchange of four furious blows, her blade glimmering darkly in the late morning light.
She looked back to the fort's walls then, finding them holding strong, the archers and mages more than enough to kill what made it past Beth and Blood before they even made it within arm's reach. The floodgates had been jammed wide at this point, and the endless howls and snarls of the enraged pack crashed around her like a maddened sea without shore. She threw herself across the field, running at max speed while swinging a horizontal cleave fully empowered with Monstrous Blow as she moved. The long, ripping strike tore a path of blood and viscera almost fifty feet long across the battlefield, Beth hoping the mana expenditure was worth the return.
She ran into another elite, almost literally, as she turned back from her sprint, finding a massive club about to crush her skull. She leaned while taking a half-step back to her right, managing to shed some of the force of the blow, the rest crashing against the shielding of her force-helm. Her brain was slightly rattled, but her overall strength and having Pain Tolerance in the silver bracket let her mostly ignore the bludgeon. She brought her left leg around in a high side-kick that was partially empowered, crushing through the thin leather armor the elite wore before destroying its ribs. She moved forward as she planted her left foot down ahead of her, continuing her momentum as she slashed across the beast's face, her blade biting deeply into its unarmored head. She jerked her sword back with a wet sucking sound before lashing out with her left fist, planting her empowered knuckles directly into the wound, cracking the elite's skull apart.
The battle ebbed and flowed, the tide constant and relentless as the hours wore on, Beth doing her best to balance conserving her mana with slaughtering as many as she could, as fast as she could. As the time passed, her wounds also accumulated as well, whether it was stray blows or confronting multiple of the elite variants at once, by the time the early afternoon hit, she was tired, low on stamina and mana, and coated in blood and guts. They had been at it for a few hours by this point, and while Beth was starting to run low on steam, the good news was they had hewed through quite a few beastlings while managing to keep the walls entirely clear.
The tide continued flowing in, the weird, hyena-like, snarling faces of the beastlings all blending together, Beth able to only distinguish them when an elite with some type of mana skill boosting them popped up. Most of the elites were at level seventy-two, while a few even hit level seventy-three, though they still weren't enough to really challenge Beth. Blood had only a little more trouble with them, mainly because their toughness meant she had to do a few attacks, darting in and out, before they were wounded enough that she could get a killing blow. Beth just bowled over the field, crushing anything in her way into a bloody, muddy pulp.
The big benefit they had from being deep in the soup for so long was that their levels were rising at a noticeable clip. Killing so damn many enemies, all of them of a higher level, without rest nor pause, was doing wonders for propelling both the girls through the sixties. Beth had some hope they might get all the way to seventy, given that they managed to survive the stage and not get eliminated partway. That point was certainly in contention as they hit the mid-afternoon, the sun having made quite a trek across the sky by that point. Beth was really starting to wear thin, her mana fairly low and her stamina drained quite a bit, her leaden arms starting to really feel the chore of swinging such a big, heavy hunk of metal for so damn long. She was lucky her END was already past the one hundred mark, or she would already be at the point of collapse, even with the tide still stretching far back into the trees.
The exhaustion was playing with her mind a bit, causing her to have brief flashes of the first tide Liveria had ever fought, that massive, undulating field of tens of thousands of beastlings. She clamped down on herself hard, forcing herself to focus through the exhaustion as the beastlings simply wouldn't stop, feeling like for every three she killed, four more popped up. She held on to that grim edge of determination, willing herself to not just continue, but to even excel. It was in that haze that she found her true momentum, falling into a place she hadn't been since she had fought the plant monsters what felt like a lifetime ago, though it was barely a few months.
In that strange fugue between sleep and hyper-focus, she found a place where every step counted, every degree of twist in her wrist mattered, every muscle group she used for even the most basic of slashes or chops was important, and every single tiny drop of mana became precious. Her skill use was squeezed, compacted, melted and hammered as it was refined into something more precise, more agile, and far more deadly. Whereas before she would run Swift almost constantly, now she used it to enhance just the speed of a single limb. Whereas before she would use Beastly Body to fully enhance her body for a clash with an elite, now she would pulse it through just her arms as she swung a precisely calculated sweep to decapitate an elite caught by surprise from the side.
She lost all sense of time and place, not noticing the lengthened shadows, the light fading, the defenders on the wall lighting mage lights and casting a luminance spell above the battlefield, the howls continuing unabated as enemies poured in and were cut down. She had to move in a more careful way, picking her paths around the field as the bodies piled up, closing off some routes while giving her the opportunity to split the enemies and attack at different angles. She hunted through blood and gore up to her shins, wading through the turgid mud that had turned near-red from all the liquid life it had drank down. She noted in some far corner of her mind, partitioned from her fugue, that Blood was still up and about, the wolf carrying wounds but still dishing out damage, slaughtering as only an apex predator of the battlefield could.
She heard a call at some point, but when she spared the wall a quick glance, saw that it was still standing and the defenders still appeared to hold it. She ignored all the extraneous noises at that point, focused only on swinging, slashing, punching, kicking, dashing, and pulverizing anything in her way. She started flicking bodies with a fast kick, snapping them out of the way and into ever growing piles, stacks of charnel effluent that built and built as they killed. In a different time, in a different place, she wouldn't have to do this. In a place that wasn't so poor, so rundown, so forgotten, she would have helpers to keep the wings clear, runners to clean the field, even replacements to change out for her to give her time to rest.
She had none of that here, running on absolute fumes as the night progressed, midnight passing as the moon hung swollen and bright in a dark sky. Beth's wounds had built, a very hard hit from the highest level elite yet cracking one of her ribs before three quick, brutal rabbit punches with an incredibly precise use of Crush turned that elite's skull into meat paste. Her armor was cracked and sliced, scales missing and rents in her gauntlets while the leather was turning to ribbons. It was definitely an eye-opening experience, seeing that her sword was the only thing that could hold up to real, true extended wear and tear, and it was something she found in an area outside a dungeon. It would definitely be time to grab some upgrades after the trial, and possibly after this stage, depending on what the counter in the main hall charged.
Beth snapped forward and lashed out, first with her left fist, followed by her blade, followed by her left leg, before spinning fully as she took the hilt in both hands and pulsed Monstrous Blow as she spun, ripping apart three beastlings with the blow. She paused then for a moment, searching for her next opponent, finding the field around her strangely open and empty of beastlings. Taking a deep breath, she assessed the area, seeing an injured but alive Blood stalking across the far side of the field before leaping on a lone beastling at the wood-line and tearing it apart.
