Limitless Path

"So, plan?" asked Sera when they were in the room.

"We should go use a training room," Beth said. "We'll do our rebirths, get ourselves sorted, and then grind some levels. We can rest for part of the day, but we should start this evening at latest. We'll grind levels for a week, objective time, that is, and then see where we're at."

"Sounds like a plan," Sera nodded.

"Fine," Blood growled.

"Then let's get this done," Beth said, bouncing on her toes just a bit. She led the way back out of the suite and down into the underworks, where they took a training room and locked it out for an hour.

"Ready?" Beth asked as she finished locking the door and leapt onto the training platform with the other two.

"Sure," Sera said.

Blood didn't even respond, just directly taking out her materials and starting her rebirth then and there. Beth scrambled to catch up, dumping everything from her necklace and starting her own process, seeing Sera mimic her from the corner of her eye. Energy quickly swirled around all three of them, mana gathering in the room in building waves. It wasn't very much different than what Beth had experienced several times now, other than she felt a greater sense of power and greater mana fluctuations from both Blood and Sera. Of course, they hadn't done a rebirth with Sera before, but the energy coming from her as the items swirled around her and dissolved into motes of mana was quite strong.

The other thing Beth noticed was that there was a slight pull between her and Sera. It was difficult to describe, but as the energy began to fill their bodies and remold them, she felt a very deep connection to the dragon girl, like a string was stretched between them. It felt like she could sense Sera's emotions and feelings, though just very faintly, and she could feel in a strange way, some way beyond her physical senses, that the tall girl was sitting there. It was an interesting feeling, but the final part of her rebirth quickly distracted her, as the mana pushed into her body, remolding it and rebuilding her mana reservoir to be even larger and stronger. She could feel that it was more than twice its original size, probably somewhere around two and a half times the size it was when the Path first appeared on Earth if not slightly larger, providing her quite a bit of mana.

That brief feeling of weakness and strangeness hit her, Beth having to adjust to her new, somewhat weaker body. The great thing that she discovered now was that her new stats at level one were so high that she didn't have to adjust to being incredibly weak. She wasn't dropping from a couple thousand stat points to a hundred, but from a few thousand to a thousand or so, which was not nearly as big of a swing. She was weaker than she had been a moment before, but she was still rather strong, and she would never experience undergoing a rebirth and being that weak ever again. She would still experience those low stats sometimes, including in stat-limited duels, but she would never again experience that feeling of having so little strength or speed that it felt like she could barely move.

The last of the energies swirled around them and dissipated, with Beth the first to stand and test her current strength. She flexed a bit and then punched out, her fist producing a sharp snapping sound even though she didn't hit anything. Blood and Sera both stood up at the same time, with Sera flexing and twisting her body a bit before lashing out with her arms and legs in a few strikes, testing her current limits. Blood didn't even deign to do that, just waiting for the other two to be finished with their little tests before following the two out of the room and back up to their suite. Blood was clearly disinclined to care, slumping on the couch once they were back inside and passing out, but Beth and Sera both were going over their stat pages and reviewing their various changes.