Limitless Path

Beth rolled her shoulders as she looked down at the supposed leader of the bandit gang, though she had a suspicion that he wasn't the true head honcho. Mortaine had asked them to retrieve a specific item for him, something that had come into the spotlight in a conflict on some backwater nothing world. These guys were either in possession of the item Mortaine wanted or they had the information of where the item was and what it was. For all that, the leader was barely an Enlightened, an eleven rebirth chump that didn't hold a candle to any of Beth's group. Well, getting to Enlightened itself was rather impressive for most people, but it wasn't really the true mark of an elite, as Beth had learned over the years.

"Alright, talk," Beth said, poking at the man, who they had sat in a chair in a room they had rented in the city. "Where's the doohickey."

"I don't know what that is, and I ain't tellin' ya nothin'," the man said.

"What if we made it worth your while?" Beth asked.

"Huh?" he said.

"Like, we paid you?" Beth said, thinking she might not be working with the sharpest tool in the shed.

"Ya'd pay me just fer that?" the criminal asked.

"If your information isn't shit, you little asshole," Val snapped, the criminal's eyes going wide at the response.

"Hey, ain't ya the one on TV all the-" he said.

"I'd stop right there," Blood cut in, leaning close to the man and making blood energy thrum on her claws.

"I didn't see nuffin'," the guy hastily said.

"Look, you already gave us the key you were given," Beth said. "Just tell us where the box is so we can unlock it."

"Look, I ain't gonna just rat out the boss," he started.

"The 'boss.' Aren't you supposed to be the boss?" Andrea asked, swinging her legs on the table she was sitting on.

"Well, yeah, but, uh…" he replied.

"Eloquent," Bjorn, looming behind the man, said coldly.

"Look, I can't just give it to ya fer nothin'," the criminal said, eyes shifting between them.

"What about a handful of nice shiny gold coins?" Beth asked, making a literal handful of gold appear.

"Golds?! Fer this?!" he barked a laugh.

"What do you want?" Beth asked with a sigh.

"It's definitely worth mithril," he said, smirking.

The gold disappeared from Beth's hand in a blink and said hand then shot forward and grabbed the man's throat in a crushing grip. "Don't get fucking cute with me. We have plenty of ways to find things, they just take time and effort and even more money. I'd rather just pay you for the info and let us both go on our way. If you want to wind up in ditch by the road, we can still get on just fine without you."

"F-fine," the man gasped. "I-I'll talk…*cough*. Just don't-*cough*-kill me!"

"Better," grunted Beth, letting go of his throat.

"Give me a platinum and I'll tell you," he said.

"Better," Beth said again, pulling out a platinum coin and holding it in front of the man.

"Here," he said, sending her a data burst through his communicator, which Beth immediately decoded and double-checked.

"Well, looks good," Beth said, scanning over the information and verifying it was at least a location on the planet. "Here's your coin."

"Ya know what, ya lot aren't all that bad, really-" he said before disappearing.

Sera had grabbed the man's arm and teleported away with him, returning after a minute while quickly brushing off her clothes. Much to the mercenary company, or rather gang boss's chagrin, he had been dumped in the Black Owl's hotel room, right in the middle of a meeting between Lily and her senior executives, which was surprising, to say the least. There were a lot of surprised exclamations and a lot of drawn weapons and cursing, but Sera just shrugged, grabbing a spell out of the air and crushing it in her fist before teleporting out of the room.

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"The hell?" was all the gang leader had time for before he was dogpiled and captured.

"This isn't what they promised!" he raged as he was sat in a chair, bound and suppressed.

"They promised to pay you," Lily said calmly, now that her heart had stopped hammering from the giant dragon lady just suddenly appearing and casually snuffing out a Gold-tier spell with a off-handed ease that was terrifying. "They never promised not to turn you over to the authorities, or us, for that matter."

"Damn them!" the bandit leader raged, but didn't have anything he could do about it.

Beth, meanwhile, started the team moving towards the location the bandit 'leader' had given them, a cave about a hundred miles east of the main city they were using as a base. The 'key' that the man had given them was a little cube made of some type of special mana steel that Beth was pretty sure was made out of frost iron, a throwback to a much earlier time in her adventuring career. The metal itself wasn't all that special, but the enchantments that were woven into the key were pretty special. Val said she would be able to crack them if she were a high Master, but she was still an Expert, despite the hours she had spent training. They didn't really need to pirate the key or crack the code, as they knew where the lock was and they had the key.

The cave wasn't anything special, but it was chocked full of temporal mana, which was a very weird thing to even walk through. Such a high concentration of mana was unusual for a world that wasn't at the higher end of overall mana concentration, but such things happened. Beth had more control over the area as spatial and temporal mana were linked, and her control of the space around her let her clamp down on the time a little. She took the key to the back of the cave, slotting it into a large box that was embedded in the back wall. The box opened with a satisfying clicking sounds, one which was weirdly muted due to the strange mana in the cave, before the lid popped open to reveal a…chain? Beth had only been given a vague idea of what Mortaine wanted, something about a metal object that could hold back the ravages of time or something. Honestly, a lot of what the Exalted said made little sense, though she knew much of that was intentional. There wasn't anything else in the box or the cave, so Beth assumed that's what he needed, taking it and throwing it in her necklace.

They weren't quite done, however, as Mortaine had assigned them two tasks to complete before teleporting to his home. Retrieving the chain was just the first part of the job, as they also needed to go and kill a particular monster. Yes, that was correct, they were hunting a monster, and a rather fearsome one at that. The evil incarnate had wrecked a low mana density world before jumping through a teleporter to a much more mana dense, and densely populated, world that had quite a lot more people. The world also had quite a few more beasts, which was the far bigger problem, as the monster was whipping up a few nice big beast tides to destroy as much civilization as it possibly could. The monster itself hadn't shown its face to anybody on the world, though the beast tides it had inspired hadn't done as much damage as it might have hoped, so the theory was that it was currently hiding.

Beth and the team were quite experienced at this sort of thing and, while the monster was strong, it wasn't a match for the monsters Baelvyr had taken her to hunt. Well, it was a little stronger than the weaker of those two monsters, but Beth had killed that monster, with Sera and Blood's help, when she was far weaker than she currently was. She now had a larger, far stronger team, and they were well-versed in fighting against enemies at or above their supposed level. The team had to take a dozen teleports to get to the planet in question while Beth reviewed the latest information on the monster, but nothing she saw worried her. She was also going to be taking the teleport fees, despite being able to cover them, out of Mortaine's recompense for the jobs, though he had presented it as one job with two parts. Just because he needed both things done for the same project he was working on didn't mean Beth was going to give him a pass, as she was still going to insist it be counted as two full jobs in their accounting.

The world they arrived at was on a bit of high alert, but they came in through the CRA, which was always on alert, though their Gold Emblems got them a lot of leeway. Not enough leeway that they didn't have to undergo checks, but they weren't treated like an invading army every teleport when they flashed their Golds, so that was a bit nice. They rented a suite in the CRA Hall, which was rather packed as many people had flocked to the world to fight the beast tides and go after the monster. This was a little unusual compared to what Beth was used to, but this world was a trading hub and center to several teleportation networks and thus had far more traffic and ease-of-access. Lots of people were farming experience, farming money, farming beast parts, or trying to get some fame and a big payday by hunting down a monster. An awful lot of those people didn't impress Beth at all, and it seemed the Hall Master in the capital was of the same mind, as she was stomping around the Hall and yelling at all the Copper and Silver Emblems getting under foot and making a nuisance of themselves.

Beth and her team prepped for a day, though it was almost entirely gathering information and working to see if they could triangulate the position of the monster through available data. The monster hadn't been seen in more than a week, and the data they could get access to was all old. Beth gave up after three hours and had them go about doing things the hard way, moving out of the Hall and the city and starting to track the monster themselves. They were in quite a good position, as many of the people that had flocked to the world were not nearly strong enough to go out and roam around the planet far from the cities. Beth's team was easily able to go out into the farther reaches of the wilderness and fight through hordes of beasts to try to track down the monster, something that basically no other group currently on the world could do, at least for any length of time.

One of the greatest difficulties with monsters, as Beth had experienced several times before, was that they often hid or worked from the shadows while inspiring beast tides. That was one way to catch them, as they often had to be among the beasts to stir them up, though stronger monsters would take much less time to whip up the beasts. Stronger monsters not only needed less time, but they could be further from the beasts and still inspire a tide. It was the need of the monster to be near the beasts that let them track it down, though they only got close after that first week, and they spent another four days chasing the monster around before catching up to it. The team also slaughtered an immense number of beasts, which they later learned had done an awful lot of good for the cities, even if some of the weaker people that had flocked to the world were a bit upset about missing out on the experience and money. Those people hadn't really been doing all that much to help with the tides, however, and there was still plenty for them to fight, including out in the deeper wilderness.

The team eventually caught the monster, quite literally, trapping it in a cave that Val had built an array around to slow and confuse the monster. Getting it in the cave had been easier than Beth thought, using some mana crystal they had on hand from the dreadnaught salvage that attracted the monster, which had tried to gobble it up. Well, some monsters were not that bright, as most didn't ever develop any kind of sapience. Sera and Bjorn had been in place and jumped in to fight the monster head-on when the trap was sprung, and the rest of the team followed afterwards. Beth dropped in from high in the air, having Spatial Stepped up to a great height and then gathering mana and momentum as she fell until she slammed into the monster like a meteor thrown by an angry god. The monster wasn't an easy one, being something like a bear but with flesh made of metal and a ridiculous ability to heal, and the fight took them nearly an hour. Several of the members of the team hadn't ever fought a powerful monster yet, including Andrea, so it had also been a rather good learning experience for them.

When they finally got through the fight and killed the monster, they harvested the corpse very carefully, as that had been what Mortaine had been interested in. Something about the metallic nature of the flesh and its ability to heal was what Mortaine needed for the project involving the chain they had to get from the first planet. Beth didn't use her harvesting power on the monster, obviously not wanting to destroy the very thing they were after, though the risk might have been worth it had they had another monster convenient to go after. Considering they didn't have a second one of the things to go after, they would have to be satisfied with chopping the thing up the old-fashioned way, though they mostly left Blood to do it, as she was the most skilled with taking apart corpses.

Harvesting the monster was a matter of a few minutes, during which Val cleaned up the area around the site of the ambush, not wanting the remnants of the array to linger and harm anybody that stumbled on it. They also wanted to clean the area just a bit as the land was destroyed and ruined, and they wanted to not leave a gargantuan smoking crater after they were done. They didn't have to worry too much about making everything perfect or fixing all the plants or anything, but they did want to backfill a bit of the destruction. That took nearly an hour, by which point they had finished everything else, so they were immediately able to return to the city and talk to the Hall Master. They provided proof in multiple ways on the monster kill, slightly surprising the Hall Master, but they hadn't taken a mission for it, so they just dropped the information on her and moved on. They had to return to Mortaine themselves, but Beth had the accesses to teleport to the space station that he used as his home base. The same man that had greeted Beth years ago the first time showed up to check them over, though he made it seem a greeting rather than a security check. He led them to a room to wait for Mortaine, who was busy with a project, or in another dimension, or doing a project in another dimension, or, well, they got the idea as the list went on.