Limitless Path

The only thing she could really think to do was to go hunting herself. It was kind of the reason she relied on the trading firms; running around for weeks looking for somewhere that might or might not have just a couple of the items she needed was both a huge pain in the ass and a big waste of her time. It became an even bigger waste, technically speaking, and she was happy to lean on technically speaking for this, the stronger she became. Asking some level fifty who hadn't done a rebirth at all to go run a couple errands and fetch a few things was just fine, but nobody was going to be going to someone like Laselle and asking her to go buy some apples. Then again, the things Beth needed weren't exactly apples, even magic apples, so it was a bit more understandable for her to be trying to get them in person, but it was still a massive pain.

The first place she started was the place closest to home; right here on Zephyr Prime. While it was the main base of the Black Ships, they didn't have a monopoly on trade on the planet, and such a prosperous world was bound to have a few others with some rare and valuable goods for sale. She wouldn't mind doing a bit of window shopping, but she didn't need just any random rare goods, she needed some very, very precise equipment with some very specific purposes in mind. It was such a pain, as even if she was looking for some kind of relic-level sword, even something beyond level five hundred, she would likely be able to find it rather easily. Paying for it might or might not be another matter, but find one on sale? Not all that difficult. Finding specialized equipment that was quite difficult to craft, made from rather rare materials, that enchanters didn't bother with as they were tedious to manufacture and often had a slim profit margin? A much harder ask.

She struck out with the Black Ships, unfortunately, not that they couldn’t secure what she needed, it was just about that hated foe: time. She had a request in for a separate set of equipment that would be useful for the next beasts they were after, but the Black Ships couldn’t get them the thing they were in need of at the moment without it taking months. She put in the request anyway, as even if they sourced them elsewhere in the meantime, she could always spend a couple weeks using the extra equipment to get the resources and sell those resources. They were in the rarefied air where the materials they were gathering were valuable enough that the Black Ships was actually interested in buying certain amounts of them, sometimes very large amounts of them.

Her next attempt was to make her way around to various worlds that might have the goods, including places like where Sera had taken her to shop some time ago, a planet that had a lot of commerce and various shops and specialty stores. This was a rather time consuming process as she had to figure out where to go, travel through the teleportation network to that place, then check around to see if anywhere had the items she needed. Other than that, she could request a commission from a high-rank enchanter or alchemist to get the required gear, but that was just circling right back around to the earlier problem. Anybody at that level would be booked out for months or years in advance, if they were taking any commissions at all, and they would also, very likely, charge an arm and a leg for their work. Not to mention how much they might try to add as charges for the rare materials required in the thing Beth and the team needed.

She was, essentially, window shopping across dozens or hundreds of high-end stores, all just to hope to find a single, very specific set of enchanted plates that worked for one type of monster. The old idea of a needle in a haystack was rather apt here, if not moreso, though she did like to think that modern technology could help with some of the burden. She was able to get listings from a lot of shops as soon as she was on a planet, sometimes as soon as she was even nearby in terms of the teleportation network, and check what their inventory availability was. It didn’t always work, but she was able to eliminate dozens of shops without visiting in person, and sometimes that was also enough that she could just skip a planet entirely. She wasn’t trying to be overly negative or insult people of certain worlds, but just from shop listings, she could often tell that places were just not flooded in wealth. If she checked five shops’ inventories and found that they all were listing a selection of goods that were quite common and were mostly between a few silvers and a platinum or two in price, she didn’t even bother. She was buying things where individual pieces were five mithril or more; seeing every shop that had a public sell goods for less than fifty golds and not have anything rare listed usually meant the place was a bust.

She devoted two weeks to the task, traveling through over a hundred worlds during that time, which gave her a slightly new perspective on how a lot of people lived. It wasn’t anything shocking, but it was a little bit of a surprise to see so many people living very normal lives, going about their daily tasks and just trying to get by. She always had this idea that more people were involved in the business of fighting and supporting fighters than what was really the case, finding the difference between what her imagination conjured and the reality to be strange. It’s not that it was truly shocking, but she spent so much time fighting and killing and being involved in these grand struggles that to see so many people doing office work or mundane jobs like cleaning and cooking did give her a slight jolt. That and the fact that so many people just never bothered to level any more after getting a few dozen levels the first time, so few people even bothering to go through their first rebirth that it was a bit startling to see. Still, there were more than enough people like her and her team on most planets that the rest of the populations could sit safely behind strong walls and not ever have to worry about being attacked by either beasts or monsters, including of the two-legged kind.

Two weeks of work got her just about nothing, though she did find a couple shops that sold rare and powerful enchanted goods and items, which were nice connections to make. Still, that didn’t help with the enchanted equipment they currently needed, but there was nothing else she could do about it. They just had to use the plates they had, which the team had already started on, and just hope the Black Ships could get in a shipment faster than they broke all their current supply. The current supply would last for a few more weeks at the least, and hopefully a couple months, but as Bjorn had said, they weren’t going to get nearly what they needed out of the limited number of plates they had been able to source so far. Beth’s looting power, if she pushed it into Gold in the next few objective months, could help to fill in the gap, but they couldn’t wait for that. If they tried to supplement with just her looting power, they were going to be taking a couple objective years to get all the essences they needed, and that was if they were lucky.

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The hunt for rare materials was also hampered by the fact that Beth couldn’t have them fighting multiple different beasts at the same time with any accuracy. She could set the gate to be more like a simulated dungeon and they could have several different kinds of beasts in it at once, but controlling what and the ratios was very difficult. Besides, they needed both beasts and monsters to fulfill the request and she still couldn’t mix those, meaning they were also partially blocked on that strategy in another way. If she could just set the gate to have groups of beasts of all the remaining types they needed, they could at least work on a few different things at once, but she did not yet have that level of control. Liveria was also a bit unhelpful with her advice and knowledge, just telling Beth to use the gate a lot and to try to push it as much as possible to get it to level, whatever that really meant.

It was during this time, after Beth was back from her little jaunt around the galaxy for a couple weeks, that she got a call one evening from her father. Nothing particularly unusual about that, at least at first, but it was rather more unusual when he was requesting her help, though her allayed her worries before they could even really form, telling her that it wasn’t an issue with the town. That was always her biggest concern, that somebody from her family would call her and tell her the town was under attack or the dungeons were overrunning or something similar, especially if she were in her gate or involved in something where she couldn’t just sprint back home immediately. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case today, but her father was reaching out to her as he had been contacted by someone he had worked with after the world changed. Her father had made contacts all over the world, mainly through his advertising of the dungeons and the ability for people to come to the town and stay to train, though Beth thought there might be more to it than that. Either way, he was passing on a request to her, and her team, that somebody was in some serious trouble and needed some heavy hitters for something.

“Okay, okay, explain it to me,” Beth said to her father after getting through the initial confusion.

“I have a contact over in Asia,” her father said, which was still a weird thing to hear come out of his mouth, but the world was different now. “He got ahold of me to let know that they have a big problem over there and he needs some help. He remembered I mentioned that one of my kids had undergone several rebirths and had a team that she worked with, so he called asking me about your strength. I didn’t go into all the details, but I did explain roughly how strong you and the team are-I hope that’s not a problem-and then told him you might be able to help out.”

“Okay, that explains some things, but what’s going on? They have some strong people over in China and Japan, or what were those countries, or are those countries. And, hell, I hear the new, reunified Korea has a couple ace teams; you’re saying this is something those guys can’t handle?” Beth asked.

“Exactly right. Basically, what he told me is that a team in northern China, or what they would call Manchuria at one time, I believe, went delving underground. From what he said, they stirred up some kind of hornets nest, though not literally, but they ran into more than they bargained for. Nobody that’s come in, and they have quite a lot of people assembled over there right now, has been able to deal with it. He tried to spin it in a positive, or more like neutral, light, but I think they’re really struggling right now. It sounds like they’re just barely holding down the fort and what they’re facing isn’t even all of it, whatever it is,” he explained, his tone sounding worried over the communicator, but not alarmed.

“Anything more specific than that? Beasts, monsters, levels? They have a tide forming or its some kind of dungeon or something else?” Beth asked, firing off questions in a rapid sequence as she started rounding up the team.

“Lots and lots of powerful beasts, and what they’re facing isn’t even the worst of it,” her father answered. “I’m sending you a small file; it’s really not much, I understand, but it’s all my contact was willing to provide. Apparently, they’ve got hordes of several nasty types of beast at two hundred or higher flooding out of the underground, and what’s further in hits three hundred. The team that stirred all of this up, also, reported finding a massive cavern system no that far down that was acting as some kind of nest for something, though I think those somethings are part of what’s attacking the teams over there right now.”

“Right, got it. Hear about any monsters or anything out of the ordinary? Or more out of the ordinary, I should say,” Beth said.

“Sorry, not much else to go on,” her father said. “It’s not a crisis-level situation yet, according to who I talked to and what the word on the street about it is, but it’s pretty concerning. I was thinking of calling your sisters and your ex in to help handle it, but Soph is out of contact, Kim is busy with some kind of rare training opportunity, and Sabs is doing some kind of Trial.”

“Soph alright?” Beth asked as she gave the team a quick rundown of the situation, not having much trouble holding two conversations at once.

“Planned outage,” her father replied. “She’s doing some, well, magic thing that she had planned for a while. It’s something to do with upgrading a skill or something; sorry, she explained it but the details were a bit confusing for me. I just know it’s something planned and fairly routine. None of them are in danger, or much danger, I should say, but they can’t easily drop what they’re doing. I told them I’d only get ahold of them again if I couldn’t get anybody else. If you’re busy, I still have a few people I can contact, but none of them would be nearly as strong as your team, or Kim and her group.”

“It’s fine, Dad,” Beth said. “We’re just grinding materials for a request right now. We’re not quite halfway done and I think most of us are going a bit loopy from the repetition. We’ll head over now and stop by there first, unless you think we should just go straight over to China?”

“It should be fine if you pop in here,” her father said. “I don’t know that we’re at emergency levels yet, like I said, so stop by and we’ll go over what’s happening and then you guys can head over.”

“Right. We’ll be there in a couple hours, tops,” Beth said before ending the call and turning to the team. “Some kind of situation underground. Anybody not interested or feel like sitting it out?”

“I think we’re all in,” Val said, glancing at the rest of the team to see only affirming looks and nods. “It’ll be nice to travel a bit and get a bit of a change of pace. Besides, there’s a bunch of things on your home world we can check out, including both the tower we were working on as well as some of that stuff with the runes near your home town you were telling me about.”

“Right, be good to check that underground stuff and see what’s happening. Never did finish with all of it,” Beth said with a nod before leading the team out of the mansion, Andrea locking the place up as she left last.