Limitless Path

Beth found her parents and sisters all in residence, which was a bit unusual, though it wasn't such low odds that she was shocked. Her parents were looking good, considering their age, but then again, as she had just been pondering, every rebirth gave a few extra years of life and more energy. That was until Enlightened, where each rebirth gave a decade or more, depending on person and species, and then there was Ascended. Every rebirth in Ascended gave a few decades, while just getting to Ascended gave a couple centuries itself. There were also the crazy exceptions like her fiancée who was, for all intents and purposes, functionally immortal. She wasn't even sure if Sera was even killable, even when done what should be fatal damage, but that was a discussion for another time.

"Beth!" her mother exclaimed, the first to notice she had entered the house.

"It's me," she said with a bit of an eyeroll as her mother hugged her, returning the hug, though very gently.

"It's good to see you. Do you have time to stay for a while?" Rachel asked.

"I'm in the area," Beth replied non-committally. "What's been going on around here, anyway?"

Beth's mother proceeded to explain some of what had been happening in the neighborhood while Beth had been mostly absent. The visitors from out of town were the big topic that she discussed while they sat in the living room, which had itself been transformed. The work on the house had been a bit of an ongoing project, which Beth mentioned, but it had been little improvements over time. This whole rebuilding of the house into a different building was rather new, for the whole neighborhood, and it had apparently been sparked by a group of flying beasts wrecking two houses in town. The town walls did provide a rudimentary shield, but it was just that, rudimentary, and some beasts were able to bypass it or force their way through. The houses getting destroyed prompted the rebuilds, and it was during that time, when they brought in outside help to work on the rebuilds, that word really started to get around about the town and its favorable location. Word of mouth did a lot of work for them, and the upgrading and expansion of the hotel that they had also undertaken certainly didn't hurt.

"Beth! You're home," her father said, interrupting them in the living room. He had been upstairs when she had entered and had just come down to ask Rachel something.

"Dad. Good to see you," Beth said, giving him a quick hug.

"We were just talking about all the new visitors," Rachel said.

"And the problems they bring?" Thomas asked with a sigh as he sat. Despite all the remodeling that had been done, his favorite chair had somehow managed to survive, though it was definitely going to need some attention by someone who could do upholstery work very shortly.

"Well, I hadn't exactly gotten into that, but that's a good point to bring up," Rachel said.

"Any kidnappings? Killings?" Beth asked.

"No, no, nothing like that," Rachel said, seeming aghast at the suggestion. "We've just had a little petty crime; a little theft and a few small fights."

"That's local law enforcement's job," Beth replied with a wave of her hand. "Enforcers don't handle that kind of thing. If the worst you've got is somebody snatching the neighbor's vegetables, you're doing alright."

"It's still strange to hear you talk of things like that," her father said. "Even after years, I'm still not used to you being this big, hotshot law enforcement person that doesn't even work on small cases."

"Well, not that we don’t do small cases, just a different definition of what really is small," Beth said. "But that's all beside the point; any other problems here?"

"Nothing that we need to bother you with," Rachel replied.

"And the other girls are here?" Beth asked, but she needn't have bothered, because the aforementioned others joined them right at that moment.

"Speak of the devil," Beth said, greeting her sisters as they entered the living room. Kim was sporting a new scar on her face, a small mark over her right temple. To still have that show up like that meant that it was something particularly nasty that had injured her, all the more serious because it was to her head. That was absolutely not there the last time Beth had seen Kim just a handful of objective months ago, less than a year, so she was interested to hear what the story behind that one was and why the mark remained.

"This?" Kim asked, touching her temple with a small, self-deprecating smile.

"No, Kim, the other old head wound," Beth replied, rolling her eyes.

"Right, sorry," Kim said, not sounding sorry at all. "It was one of those rare mana types, one that you don't really see that much, especially not in beasts. There was a dungeon that a group of us did that was supposed to have dark-type beasts in, but the boss was a rare variant spawn the very first time we did it. Had a type of void-aspected dark mana that caused nasty, lingering wounds that took forever and tons of mana to heal. It looks and sounds worse than it is; I took a glancing blow to the temple that cut the skin and just barely nicked the bone, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I was able to heal a lot of the damage myself just with my upgraded Regeneration."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"You boosted Regeneration?" Beth asked. "I was going to see about teaching the two of you my regenerative skill if you didn't have anything better at this point."

"Soph has a better skill that she got as a reward for doing something," Kim said. She quickly added as Soph was about to interject, "But that's her story to tell, which I'm sure she would be more than happy to. As for me, I spent a lot of time working on the basic regen skill, and the last year or so, really a couple years in subjective time, I've been really focused on it very heavily. I had an idea of what I wanted to do with it and what direction I wanted to try to get it to evolve in, and I managed to get pretty close to exactly what I wanted. It's not the greatest upgrade in the world, but it is a tier two skill, so I can take the skill not just to Platinum but even to Diamond, if I really focus on it."

"That sounds good, Kim, but what's the skill, exactly?" Beth asked, frowning slightly at her middle sister.

"Oh, right, sorry, I got a little distracted. It's just called Full Rejuvenation, and it's a faster, more complete regenerative skill than the basic ones. It takes the same amount of mana but heals faster and in a more focused manner. It's actually a little better than it sounds because not only is it really efficient, it has a lot of potential for upgrades and evolutions. Not that evolving a skill is easy, and I can certainly say that after evolving one now, but Full Rejuvenation gives a better path to a lot of really good self-directed healing skills."

"Well, it's still not at the level of what I'm using, but it's pretty good. Let me know if you need help with it at all; I can't really give much advice, but I've done a couple skill evolutions and I have a bunch of connections that would know a lot about it," Beth said. "Anyway, I think it's Soph's turn."

"Right, my turn," the youngest said a bit eagerly. "I won't bore you with all the dirty details, but I'll tell you I got a special request when I was out to study magic more fully. A group wanted help with a big research project into mana properties, looking into certain kinds of interactions that some people know about but keep secret because it's 'proprietary' and all that nonsense. The work itself was really fascinating, as we had to isolate certain variables…and, I can see I'm losing you. Ahem, anyway, the work was fun and I was deemed to have contributed significantly, so that activated a signing bonus in the little contract they had offered for the work. I was able to pick from a couple different rewards, and I picked this thing that upgrades skills. I already knew I wanted a better healing skill after some, ah, well, close calls over the years, so I used the cube thing they gave me on my Regeneration and it really boosted it by a lot. It transformed it into Elemental Body Reconstruction, which lets me use elemental mana to rebuild my body after I'm injured. It's highly efficient, as well, at least if I know what I'm doing and, well, I really do understand the principles quite well, so it does an awful lot of healing for very little mana. The best part is it can keep regenerating over time even after I stop focusing on it, though I heard that's just because I'm so good with elemental casting skills."

"I don't understand the intricacies, but you must have contributed quite a lot to the research," said Beth. "Those skill evolution cubes are not at all common, and they sure ain't fucking cheap, I'll tell you that much. If they gave you even one of the more basic ones, then you really must have done an awful lot for that project."

"Oh, you know about them?" Soph asked, perking up. "You haven't found any yourself, have you?"

"A few," Beth said, waving a hand. "I used one on one of my skills to push it up multiple ranks; it also pushed it up from tier three to tier four, which was pretty damn good. I did use it under a bit of duress, let's just say, so maybe I wouldn't have made the same choice if I'd had more time to think it over, but I can't really complain with the result."

"Wait, you found more than one? And what do you mean by under duress?" Kim asked.

"Yeah, I still have one," Beth said, pulling out the Ephram's Cube of Skill Enlightenment she had been holding onto. The others' eyes bugged out upon seeing the extremely rare, and extremely powerful, item just sitting casually in Beth's hand as she held it up in front of them. "I didn't really ever have anything I felt would be a great use of this one, so I've just been holding onto it. It technically belongs partially to the group, though we don't really worry too much about all that. Still, I think I'll have one of the others use it at one point, unless there's some other important situation or something that comes up. I can't really see that happening, though; I think I'll just have either Andrea or Adam use it. That would probably get the whole group the best bang for the buck out of anything we could do."

"I still can't believe you can just so casually pull out stuff like that," Kim said. "That's technically a Masterwork, right? Or it's basically the equivalent of a Masterwork based on however items like it are rated, right? Shit, I've never even seen something with that kind of pink rarity color."

"You need to pay a little better attention, Kim," Beth said with a chuckle.

"What do you mean?" Kim asked.

"You've seen me with my gear on fairly recently," Beth said, standing up and equipping her armor and weapons. "Don't tell me you haven't bothered to actually examine any of it?"

"Well, no, not really. You always have nice stuff on, but-" Kim started before swearing. "Beth, what the actual fuck are those gauntlets? Holy shit, they're level four hundred relics that are adapted to level three hundred by something. Fuck me, how much are something like them even worth?"

"I, uh, actually don't know how much they're worth. I always intended to use them, and they're still one of my strongest items," Beth said, tapping her chin. "If I had to estimate, and I'm not really a respected expert on such things, but going by my own guess, I'd say they're probably in the range of an orichalcum coin, roughly speaking. I don't know how well they'd do in an auction, but they might pull in more than double that if there were several people there that were looking for heavy gauntlets of this type and liked the spatial freezing effect."

"That's so much money I don't even know how to process that," Soph said, shaking her head as she exchanged some kind of subtle, knowing glance with Kim.

"Again, it's a little odd that my daughter is talking about wearing things worth a whole nation's GDP," her father added.

"I think these would be worth more than a nation's GDP, though I don't even know what that measurement would be like now," Beth replied with a shake of her head.

The five of them got to talking about countries after that, though Beth kind of lost interest. It was a little bit odd to hear about how the United States had tried to pull itself back together and mostly failed, but she was pretty far gone from the days where she thought of the USA as home and as some unshakeable thing. Apparently, ironically enough, a number of smaller countries, both in terms of geography and in terms of population, had managed the best. There were a few of the European countries that were running almost business as usual, just in a world of magic and beasts. There were other countries that had managed some kind of moderate stability, though with most things handled at the local level, of which China was the leading example. Then, there were countries that had tried to further consolidate power but hadn't had it go well, many for pre-existing reasons. Russia and India were both examples of that, though India was still doing okay, their central government had just gone a bit tits up and fractured. The people and the general area was doing fine, however, which was a lot more than could be said for Russia. The old bear had been greatly ailing and falling apart even before the world so dramatically changed, and the addition of magic, miracles, and monsters hadn't exactly stabilized the situation. Things had spiraled out of control, and there had been a long period of chaos, years of it, that they were only just now coming out of.

After that, talk turned to the dungeons by the house, and just how exactly they were doing and people were handling them. The news there was a bit mixed, so much so that Beth wanted to head out and check them out. First, though, she had her parents update her on what exactly was going on. Mainly, it was that the ant dungeon had continued to not only grow, but evolve as well, and it was a good bit more than what the neighborhood would have been able to handle without outside help. With others stopping by and contributing, they were keeping the thing under control, but it was several cuts above the wolf dungeon and would pose an ongoing problem for the town going forward.