Limitless Path

They found the room empty, though said cyborg quickly appeared from the middle door with a dour look plastered across his face. He halted behind the counter and simply glared at them as they stopped in front of him, his hands clasped behind his back in an at-ease stance. Beth gave him a quick once over before glancing around the shop, making sure that nobody else was there.

"I would ask 'What?', but I know what," he said. "Show me the list."

Beth showed him their lists, saying, "We have most of the beast cores, that part’s not hard. We also have the fell beast heart, so we need the royal wolf hearts, the mithril, and the Blood Light Gem."

"How many cores do you need?" he asked.

"Another fifteen," Beth replied after they checked their necklaces.

"I have that," Jaq replied before bringing up a screen and checking. "The royal hearts are fine, I have those. The mithril might be more difficult; give Elana and Tazeen a call, check if they have extra stock. The Blood Light Gem…Let me make a few calls."

Beth called both Elana and Tazeen, bringing them both into a conference call with ease. It turned out Tazeen had nearly half the amount she needed, an extra five kilograms of pure mithril he could sell her for half a diamond coin. Jaq confirmed he had enough to fill that out, and Beth thanked the two before hanging up. The other thing the grumpy shopkeeper had confirmed was that they had a line on the gem, which Baelvyr sent down. Jaq handled all the monetary exchange, leaving Beth and Blood's pockets considerably lighter by the time they had all their materials sorted out.

Once they had everything dealt with, Jaq recommended they go to a training room to undergo the process, as it could produce waves of force that, while not overwhelming, wouldn't do any favors to, say, the furniture in their suite. They thanked him, getting another surly grunt in response, before they made their way to their typical training room, which still wasn't seeing any use apart from the two of them. Beth made sure to lock the door behind them, which could only be overridden by someone with a higher-ranked emblem, and even then, it would need to go through a process and wasn't just instant. The only exception might be Baelvyr, as he had either a Mithril or Orichalcum Emblem, but he was more responsible than that; after all, getting to that rank wasn't done just by completing a few missions and answering a few questions about which end of a sword was the pointy one.

It wasn't something they would need to worry about in any case, and the two moved to the center of the dueling stage and took seats on the floor opposite each other. Beth turned the stage on, but only to create a low-level force screen powered by mana around the edge, more than enough to contain the small amount of backlash or disturbance a first rebirth would generate. The two of them pulled the items they needed out of their necklaces, the biggest issue being the pile of spherical beast cores that, being spheres, had a tendency to roll away.

That all ceased to matter, however, when the small windows showing the requirements for the True Rebirths lit up green and both girls willed them to happen. Every single item sitting, or rolling across, the ground froze for a second before floating into the air, hovering around each of them in a complex, tight formation. The air trembled just slightly as a feeling of power infused their bodies, energy coursing through them in overlapping waves. The various items, Beth's centered around the heart and Blood's around the gem, started glowing and orbiting around them, spinning at a slow but steady pace. The glow increased over the course of ten seconds before hitting a peak, at which point a silver fire softly whispered around Beth's shoulders while blood red energy ran up along Blood's arms.

The effect lasted for a second, gaining a slight intensity, before two things happened. Firstly, Beth's crown appeared around her head and glowed briefly, while Blood's wolf ears disappeared again and she seemed a bit more human-like. A second later, there was a sound like someone had snapped quite loudly, or maybe snapped in a room with incredible acoustics, and all of the hovering items fragmented and broke apart, dissolving into glimmering dust that dissipated into the air without leaving any remnant, likely entirely converting back into mana. Beth was a little too distracted by the end of the process to notice that happening as power flowed through her.

That power twisted and flexed inside her before crushing inward toward the center of her chest. She felt a great warmth, her limbs tingling in a pleasant way, before the next second she nearly fell over from a wave of weakness. It wasn't exactly that she experienced being hit by anything like an attack, it was simply the effect of having both the pleasant sensation gone and having her body so much weaker than it had been just a moment before. She took a minute to sit and rest, meditating and examining the changes that had happened both to her body and her mana system.

The body was the easiest, as she had clearly lost quite a bit of power, all of her stats dropping rather significantly. On the other hand, every benefit she had from the various elixirs, including her denser blood and stronger bones, was fully intact, though she wasn't a hundred percent sure how that would interact with her END now being much lower. In examining her body she saw that she was the same height and the same size, her muscles just as big and dense, even if they didn't have the same power. It was a very weird feeling, especially since she had the same level of flexibility, but felt like she was slower and couldn't react quite as fast. She did notice, however, that her mana system overall was improved, the only real thing that she had to examine her mana reservoir, which was definitely bigger. It was supposed to refill just a tiny bit faster, but it was full now and she couldn't test that theory out.

Standing slowly, she stretched before glancing at Blood, whose wolf ears had already reappeared atop her thick, silky hair. Beth couldn't really see any external differences in her companion, none so obvious they jumped out at her, and she proceeded on to her own set of tests. She walked, ran, jumped, shadowboxed, and performed a few attacks, happy that her stats weren't quite as low as she had feared. They had retained a full twenty percent of what they had at level two hundred, added on to the meager 'base' that had been their stats at level one, and that twenty percent was enough that she didn't fully feel like an invalid.

She noticed Blood had done the same testing and asked, "Spar?"

"Sure," the wolf replied, shaking her limbs to loosen them before squaring up. The two burst towards each other, much slower than they had been, but still at a very high speed. Both still getting their footing, they had rather intense frowns on their faces as they exchanged a rapid series of punches and kicks, trying to adjust to being slower and weaker. Thankfully, it had only been a couple years, subjective time, since they had had stats at this level, and they were able to get a feel for them after twenty or so minutes. Not that they were perfectly adapted, but it was enough they wouldn’t be a total embarrassment to Baelvyr if they got into a fight at this point.

“Like the addition to the crown,” Blood mentioned.

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“Hm? What’s that?” Beth asked, having dismissed her Presence after standing up from the floor the first time.

“Your crown has an eye in it now,” Blood explained.

Beth summoned her Presence and pulled out a large, reflective hunk of metal from her necklace. Looking into it, she saw that the lead wolf of her crown now had an eye formed of what looked like obsidian, greedily drinking in the light and adding a fierceness only slightly diluted by the lack of a second eye. She admired the new look for a moment before dismissing the crown, ready to move on. She checked to see what their points were before they left the training room to head back to their suite.