Limitless Path

"Well, if it's starting to be a problem, I ought to take a look," Beth said, levering herself off the couch. "This is, after all, something that definitely is within my area of responsibility, even if it weren't my home we're talking about."

"We have it under control, Beth, especially with your sisters around," Rachel said.

"No offense, but I'd still like to take a look," Beth said, glancing between everyone before heading for the back door. Or where the back door used to be, as the house had been rearranged and now the back door was in the back right corner, if one were looking at the house head-on, that is.

After figuring out how to get into the backyard, Beth headed across it, glancing around to see the greater area contained within the town walls. To her right was a section of greenhouse or buildings for indoor farming, while the hotel building was off to her left. The hotel was looking pretty impressive at this point, with a whole area set out around it where it had been landscaped, with sets of tables and benches spread around as extra places to sit. Beth had checked the prices and while they wouldn't really be much to somebody that had some levels under their belt, it was more expensive than a room at the CRA Hall. Then again, the hotel rooms were commensurately nicer than the CRA suites at the same price point, so she could understand how they were getting to be so popular.

Beth led the way back to the rear wall, which she jumped by just taking a single step. Her parents protested just a bit at that, as it didn't really follow standard safety procedures, but Beth could make her own rules. The rest of the group was still following after her, her father having cleared up their odd exit with the guards patrolling the wall. Beth walked forward, finding herself already in the small field that had separated the woodlot from the small line of trees in front of the field where the ant dungeon was. The town walls had already encompassed the woodlot and were just a bit into the clearing, and Beth saw that the pushing out of the walls had brought the town into deeper conflict with the ant nest. The combination of the dungeon getting larger and more powerful and the town expanding meant there were more beasts attacking a longer section of wall more frequently. Beth casually grabbed a level twenty ant as it charged at her, oblivious to the unimaginable difference in their current power levels, and casually tore it in half, making sure the ichor spumed away from her.

"That was…impressive," her mother said. "Even I might not be able to rip a level twenty in half without weapons."

"I have enough stats that I could punch from here and crack the dungeon open. A level twenty isn't even in the same solar system as me, these days," Beth said with a shrug.

She started forward after that first ant, casually flicking a finger and using spatial skills to bisect three ants in the clearing to her left before flicking her right middle finger at an ant to her right and crushing it into pulp. She was walking forward and leading the group, so she missed the shocked expressions on even Kim and Soph's faces, but the rest of the family was agog at her level of power. She continued across the field, flicking out a finger and slicing two more ants in half before walking through the copse and into the old farmer's field. The field had undergone radical change since the last time she had visited, which had been a good long while. She didn't always come visit the dungeons when she was in the area, so it had been a couple years since she had seen either of them.

The ant dungeon used to be a big mound of dirt a few dozen feet into the field and about twenty feet high. Now, it was a massive ant colony that extended nearly a hundred feet into the air and covered a ground area of close to half a mile. Ants swarmed the place, and there were waves of the beasts that headed out in every direction, not just towards the town. Beth hoped that somebody was taking care of the ants going the other directions, as letting too many build up could be quite bad. It was also going to be dangerous if the dungeon wasn't run enough, but she had to hope that both the townspeople and the visitors were hitting it often enough that they kept the excess mana under control. If not, she might have to take a day at some point and spike the thing a couple times to bleed the excess mana the town wasn't able to handle. Hopefully, that would be a last resort and they could continue to get by as they were, which would help to encourage more people to come to the town and explore the dungeons.

"Gotten a little bigger since I last looked," Beth commented, glancing at her sisters. Her parents would have the best and most complete picture about the place, but her sisters came back often enough and handled things that they would have a good idea. That and she trusted their much more complete experience to be a better litmus test of things than her parents, whose experience was still rather limited even after all this time.

"The entrance is still on top," Kim explained. "You have to fight through a bunch of ants on the way to the entrance now. Once you get there, it's now a fully instanced dungeon that you select to go into solo or as a group and get your own break off. I've run it recently as a solo right before I rebirthed and it was pretty challenging, but it didn't seem overly packed. They've done a good job with the mana, at least, in my opinion. I think the main thing is it's just continuing to grow, which isn't overflow, it's just still not at it's stable state with the amount of mana in the area and that its core has access to."

"That seems to be true, but I'll have to check," Beth said, striding forward again.

"Beth! Careful…" her mother said, seeing a level one hundred ant had locked on Beth, rather unusual for the exterior of the nest. Beth didn't seem to care, either about her mother's warning or about the ant, and just strode towards the new base of the nest. When the ant was close, she pulled a move straight out of a comic book, holding her hand forward and grabbing the ant with spatial mana. She then lifted it off the ground and crushed it by closing her fist, the whole beast exploding into gooey shard that she sent flying by opening her closed fist and flicking her fingers. Since spatial mana manipulated, well, space, she could use it to do all kinds of things in terms of not only attacking, but moving objects around. That was before one even considered teleportation or the like, which further increased the utility of the mana.

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"That was new," said Kim, keeping up with Beth.

"New use, old principles and skills," Beth replied with another casual shrug. "Anyway, you think having to replace the exterior beasts a couple times in rapid succession would slow it down much?"

"It does crank out a lot of beasts externally," Kim replied, looking to the side and getting a bit of a far-off look as she ran some numbers in her head. "It's always done that, but with its recent growth, its just been pouring out beasts. When I ran it recently, the instance itself was challenging just because there were so many beasts and I was running an at-level instance. Doing it solo was enough to push me a bit, but there aren't really any challenging beasts in there, even in the boss room."

"That's right," their father added, stepping up beside Beth after having looked at the ant she had crushed. "Reports from various Wayfarers state that the dungeon is considered a challenge due to the numbers and constant attacks. It's a pretty long dungeon now, and a lot of people aren't that used to such long instances where they have to constantly fight beasts the whole time. The casualty rate here is still fairly low, because we have good information on the dungeon and share it, but it's higher than the Wolf Breeding Ground on the other side, which hasn't gone so wild with mana. We have reports that the only time anyone was really challenged by something unexpected was when the boss was a rare or special variant that isn't normally encountered."

"I think I'll help just a bit," Beth said, tapping her chin as she thought. "I'll scour the outside, then do a spiked run; I always keep a couple spikes in my necklace. Then, I'll come back later, since it won't take me that long to do a run, and sweep the outside again. That should eat up a decent bit of mana. With the other Wayfarers challenging the place, that will get you guys a bit ahead and will really lower the risk of a big break or Tide happening."

"How will you clear it?" Soph asked, seemingly interested in Beth's methodology.

"Well, a sort of fight fire with fire kind of thing? Nah, I guess that doesn't really work. Maybe kill them with science? Nah, that's not quite it…" she said, trailing off as she thought.

"You can come up with the witty repartee later," Soph scoffed. "I want to see the method first."

"Sure, sure," Beth said with a small sigh, still playing into the dramatic a bit. She then held a hand out and formed a bit of her Ideal on it before gesturing with her hand, tossing the fire forward and up. The gesture was just for show, as she mentally controlled her Ideal and caused the fire to bloom, sweeping across the entire ant nest with just a single thought. Every single ant outside the instance was immediately burned and torn and crushed, little left of them except for a few gross smears and some excess chitin. Beth had the flame sweep across the nest a second time, a rapid movement that scoured for any survivors, before sending it out in a pulse that tracked down dozens, if not hundreds, of ants that had left the nest and burned them all away. She then dismissed the fire, turning to see all four of her family members with slack-jawed expressions as they looked around at the devastation.

"Beth, what…? What was-no, what is…H-how did you…?" Soph, out of all of them, really seemed to be struggling the most to process what she had just seen. As their resident mage, she was far more attuned to mana, and its various uses, than any of the others, and she likely had at least one skill besides her eye power that let her detect and analyze mana. If she had had her full focus trained on Beth when she acted, her skills and senses would have gone a bit haywire. It was also no surprise that she was so confused by what happened, considering that it was rare to see an Exalted act even on video, let alone in person. Witnessing someone using their Ideal was still often at the level of a once, or maybe twice, in one's life kind of experience, and Soph had just had her first taste of that.

"A little power of mine that's a little better than skill," Beth said casually, shrugging and brushing her hands off as if it was no big deal.

"That was a lot more than a little power!" Soph exclaimed in shock. "I don't even have words to describe what happened. That was a fire, and it wasn't spatial mana, and it didn't behave like a skill or like a spell. What you just did shouldn't have been possible! You need to explain more clearly! AH, why are you always like this?!"

"Hahaha," Beth laughed quite generously, delighting a bit in confounding the genius of the sisters with her little trick. "It was something you haven't ever seen before, I can about guarantee that. You want to see it again, huh?"

"Yes! Show me what it was!" Soph pleaded, the short beauty grabbing Beth's arm and tugging on it, which had all the effect of a non-leveled person yanking at a mountain.

"Fine, have it your way," Beth said, chuckling and making the flame of her Ideal appear again. Soph was immediately overwhelmed, staring at it in rapt fascination without blinking as Beth had it hover over her hand, just a little white flame about the size of an apple, if not a bit smaller. She could feel Soph trying to scan it, and the short girl soon gave up on that to start casting one spell after another, Beth rather impressed with their complexity. She was not a mage herself, obviously, but she had done quite a bit of study of runes, which was the foundational language of all magic, and she knew the spells that Soph was casting would be considered quite impressive for even experienced mages, especially with the way she was casting them in rapid succession. After giving Soph a minute to analyze the flame, she cut it out, getting a squawk from the girl somewhere between disappointed, outraged, and exasperated, which was quite an impressive thing for one noise to convey.

"Excuse me, I was not done with that," Soph said testily.

"I know," Beth replied with a grin. "You could spend years studying it and just barely scratch the surface, and I want to get this ant thing done while I'm of a mind to do it. You can look at the pretty white fire later."

"At least tell me what it is!" Soph huffed, crossing her arms and looking away with a pouting expression. Some things never changed.

"It's my Ideal," Beth said with a too-casual shrug.

"It's your what?" said everyone except Soph. She said it more like, "It's your WHAT?!"

"Easy, Soph, no need to ask the question to somebody on the moon, I'm right here," Beth said, wincing and rubbing at her ear, even though her body was far too toughened for a loud noise to really affect her like that.

"I take it this is something amazing from how she's freaking out?" Kim asked with a roll of her eyes.

"You don’t know? Kiiiiim-" Soph said, a whining tone as she drew out the middle sister's name setting Kim's teeth on edge.

"Now, look here-" Kim started, but Beth interrupted.

"Look, have fun with the explanation. I'm going to clear this out quick. Let me just get out a spike," she said.

"A spike?" her father asked as Kim and Soph started arguing in the background.

"This," Beth said, showing him the device. "It concentrates mana on a dungeon instance. It causses the dungeon to use way more mana to generate the instance the person is about to do, and that makes the instance way harder, and the rewards way better. It's a way faction drain dungeons that are overstuffed of the extra mana without having to do a few dozen runs in a week or something like that."

"Way harder? Will this be very dangerous?" her mother asked her with a skeptical eye.

"Mom, I could solo this dungeon drunk, high, blindfolded, with both legs tied behind my back. That was not, by the way, an actual exaggeration. Just relax; I'll be done in a couple minutes," Beth said, taking a step and teleporting to the top of the empty nest before anybody else could reply.