Limitless Path

It was strange, traveling with such a large group, as normally Bai would have still been very tense and buried hip-deep in intense combat. Not that she let her guard down, or let her group slack in any way, but she was seeing the kind of benefits that could come with traveling with a more powerful team. It really felt like a team of Enforcers was escorting them towards a goal, which almost made her feel more like a guide than the center of the force role that she and her team usually played. She wasn’t even entirely sure, if she was honest with herself, what she was doing down here, her team more a superfluous guide than actual, valuable players in the fight. Not only that, she watched as just the big man, Bjorn, and the tall woman, the dragon, she reminded herself, took care of basically all the beasts in the tunnels. It seemed superfluous for even the entire group of Beth’s to be down here; it was good to cover each others’ backs, and Bai wouldn’t operate in even a moderately dangerous area without her full team.

She was a bit envious, if she had to admit, both of the other team’s power, and of the effortless way in which Beth directed all these monsters. Sometimes, just a single word or gesture was enough for the other team to reposition and get themselves reordered and fighting in a different pattern or formation, all done effortlessly, like a well-oiled machine. Bai didn’t want to disparage her own team too much, but they definitely had more problems moving like that than Beth’s team did, though a part of that was that they weren’t fighting beasts that were orders of magnitude weaker than themselves. Case in point, a massive thing of too many teeth that looked like a naked badger, though about four times the size and with an extra set of leg, leapt for Beth with a furious scream, going right around the wolf girl. The tall leader of the team remained entirely unconcerned, catching the beast by the throat and looking into its gaping maw with several rows of serrated teeth, saying, “Way too many teeth.” When the beast tried to bite her, she casually punched it with her free hand, the head exploding in a shower of blood and bone as the woman frowned slightly. A moment later, the remains of the beast dissolved into mana and dust, a slight sigh escaping the raven-haired beauty.

“What was that?” Bai asked, intensely curious.

“What was what?” Beth asked as they walked forward, giving the other girl a confused look.

“Why did that beast just dissolve out of your hand like that? What happened to it?” Bai asked.

“Oh, that!” Beth said, snapping a finger. “I have a looting power, which I’ve been using on a lot of this dross. It’s at the peak of Silver right now, just a few hundred or thousand loots away from hitting Gold, and I’ve been working it as I can.”

“Aren’t those ridiculously rare and expensive?” Bai asked with wide eyes.

“You bet your sweet ass they are,” Beth huffed in response. “Don’t even asked how much I had to spend to get this one. It’ll turn your hair white, and you’re way too young for white hair, though…it might look pretty good on you.”

The tall was giving her a critical eye, which made Bai uncomfortable, though for different reasons than many might be think. It was just hard to measure up to someone so far beyond her and it made her a bit nervous and, if she was being honest with herself, ashamed. Still, she answered with some verve, “Go on and try me.”

“Fine, then, the price I paid, which was maybe a little much because it was an auction, was seventy-three orichalcum,” Beth said with a small shrug.

“Orichalcum…wait, how much is that,” Bai said, scrunching her brow to remember. She knew it was more than platinum or even diamond coins, but she couldn’t remember the specifics beyond that, though she did have a vague notion of the value.

“Copper, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, mithril, orichalcum,” Beth recited off. “It’s two steps above diamond, so every orichalcum coin is worth a hundred mithril, and every mithril is a hundred diamond, so seventy-three orichalcum is seven hundred and thirty thousand diamond, or seventy-three million platinum, or seven-point-three billion gold coins.”

“Holy fuck!” Bai cried, covering her mouth with a hand in embarrassment a second later, smelling the oiled and hardened old leather of the palm of her gauntlet when she did so.

“Told ya it was a lot,” Beth said with a grin, punching forward and tearing apart a whole line of beasts with a single attack.

“I can’t even imagine making that much,” Bai said a bit breathlessly before taking ahold of herself. “Well, we do make at least a couple golds a day, sometimes more if we have a good find or something highly valuable. I suppose I could see it if we had several very high value finds in a row, but even that would be platinums, or maybe a couple diamond coins at most. To have saved up the equivalent of thousands of diamond coins is, well…”

“It’s a lot, I know,” Beth said with a laugh as they pushed deeper, Wang offering a course correction to Bjorn when several paths were open to them.

“That’s a big understatement,” Bai said quietly.

The group continued deeper and deeper, moving towards the rough area where the team that had triggered the whole catastrophe was last known to have gone. They only had a vague general area, and as their depth increased, not necessarily deeper under more rock, but further within the cave system, Bai’s team became more restless. She could sense it before any of them even said anything; the shifting postures, the nervous glances, the frowns and strange looks. It was all well and good to have such a powerful team with them, but everyone knew that the further underground they went, the more dangerous and difficult everything became. They were already deep enough that the mana in the air was getting noticeably thicker and sometimes possessed strange properties or characteristics. Obviously, there was much dark mana down here, as well as earth and metal mana, but there were stranger variants, including things like silence mana or death mana, though that last one was more because of what a hellacious battlefield the underground was.

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Just as she was thinking about saying something to Beth, the entire other team went on alert, causing everyone to stop and scan their surroundings with all their senses, including skills that let them see beyond the normal into the supernatural. Bai didn’t detect anything, but she didn’t ask any questions, watching as the other team conferred for a minute, glances and hand signals exchanged as they discussed something that her team couldn’t detect. It was likely they were also using their communicators to talk; the updated, new-age replacements for cell phones had now become ubiquitous and many people had had some kind of accident from paying more attention to something overlaying their vision than what was going on around them. Seasoned fighters like her team didn’t fall prey to such simple distractions, and the team led by Beth was obviously even better than hers, but it was best to assume everyone had communicators and that they were constantly using them.

“What?” Bai asked quietly as Beth signaled them to start moving in a specific direction.

“We’re in the general area, yeah?” Beth asked, letting Bjorn lead the way.

“Yes, that’s right, though it’s imprecise,” Bai said, signaling to her own team to close ranks and proceed with caution.

“I think my team’s a little more sensitive to mana fluctuation than yours, no offense,” Beth commented. “There’s a very powerful source of mana just a couple klicks from here, maybe less, that’s sending out some waves of mana we can detect. I can feel it through an additional power I have beyond everybody else on the team, but we have several people that can vaguely sense it.”

“An additional power?” Bai asked as they turned a corner and met a fresh waves of beasts. Beth’s team tore through them with so little effort it looked like a casual stroll, but even they had their guards up now and were laser focused.

“Right, how much do you know about the various powers like Presences and the like? I see you guys are getting close to rebirth ten, so I assume you also know about Mana Physiques?” Beth asked.

“Right, yes,” Bai said, sending an attack forward around the big man that was still leading the way, scoring a direct hit on a beast’s head. “Presences happen at level one hundred, or humanization for beasts, we know that much. We’ve also done a lot of research on Mana Physiques and are confident we can build them at rebirth ten. Beyond that I’m less sure; I understand there’s another important power that acts as a roadblock much later on.”

“Right, right,” Beth said, pulverizing a dozen beasts in a side tunnel with a single punch before repeating the action to mostly clear that passage. “So, the next barrier is what’s called an Ideal. It’s not really something that you necessarily have to worry about for a while, but that’s what acts as a blocker, and a big source of power, at rebirth fifty. You can’t do that rebirth without fully realizing your Ideal, as they describe it. Well, just so happens that I had a sort of, uh, crazy epiphany a little while ago and realized my Ideal.”

Bai and her team had been listening with rapt attention even as they watched around them and threw their own attacks out to do some damage or get some beast kills. “You mean to say,” Bai said, “that you have already achieved the next threshold, the one that is atop Ascended, if I remember the term correctly?”

“Yeah, that’s basically it,” Beth said with a nod. “After Ascended is Exalted, whom are few and far between in the Milky Way, if you catch my drift. We know a couple of them, and they are pretty damn powerful and well respected. Anyway, with my having realized an Ideal, it means that I’m sort of guaranteed to hit Exalted, as long as I don’t die in the rebirths between then and now, knock on wood.”

“So, what, people view you as a power on a galactic scale because of that?” Bai asked, not sure exactly what she was hearing.

“Something to that effect. Even if you count hidden experts, and give those hidden experts way larger forces than probably really exist, there are definitely less than fifty Exalted in this galaxy. There are really more likely to be less than twenty, something between ten and fifteen at most. That’s the level of difficulty of realizing an Ideal; there’s tens of thousands of Ascended in the galaxy, which is already a pretty rare group to be in, but as long as somebody can make a Mana Physique, they can get to Ascended, it’s not that crazy. Realizing an Ideal on the other hand, well…”

“Out of likely trillions of people in the galaxy, there are twenty, is what you’re saying?” Bai asked, having just a little processing that this blockheaded American was among such rarified air.

“Yeah, well, that’s how it is,” she said, scratching her head in mild embarrassment. “I have an Ideal, so I’m among that group, so I get treated a little different. I mean, having my Ideal already does boost my overall power quite a lot; I haven’t really been using hardly anything so far, even with the attacks that have been killing dozens of these guys at a time. But I explained all that really just to explain that an Ideal is a big deal, obviously, but part of it is that it makes you both stronger and more perceptive. It’s hard to explain, but the understanding that comes with an Ideal means that you can see things, and I mean understand them or sense them when I say see, that other people just can’t. This thing we’re walking towards kinda shows what I mean; I detected it way earlier and more clearly than anyone else, and I bet if we stopped right now and compared notes to try to figure out what it is, I would have a much better idea of what we’re walking into than anybody else.”

“I’m still struggling to understand that you’ve gotten so powerful,” Bai said, shaking her head. It was really ridiculous that this dumb brute had become so strong.

“Couple factors in that, including time compression,” Beth said with another shrug as they turned another corner, finding a narrow and craggy passage ahead.

“Right, we’ve experience that three times now, but it’s very rare or expensive,” Bai said, shaking her head yet again.

“Well, my team has access to almost unlimited time compression, let’s just say that and leave it there. When you can access that all the time, it explains some of how you can level so damn fast,” Beth said with a chuckle.

“I would imagine,” Bai said, just stopping herself from shaking her head once more. She would make herself dizzy at this rate.

“Anyway, I have a good sense for what’s up ahead, and I think it’ll be a good opportunity for us, but for your team especially,” Beth said then.

“What does that mean?” Bai asked, slightly more heat in her voice than she had intended.

“I think it’s something that will benefit you guys, and, if I’m right, it won’t be something that’s especially useful for my team. If you check our levels and rebirths, if your eye power or Identify variant is strong enough, you’ll see the math shows we’re at max level. Leveling isn’t as tough for us, it’s trying to do True Rebirths every time that is tough. Gathering the materials and doing the quests can really suck, else we’d all probably be at the edge of Ascended by this point,” Beth explained.

“Well, if you think it a good opportunity, let’s push forward and see what’s in store,” Bai said, signaling to her team to put some effort into it.

It didn’t take all that much longer to get to where they were going, or where Beth assured them the anomaly she had detected was. It also turned out, fortunately or unfortunately, to be the very thing that the other team had triggered to start all this mess. There were two signs that pointed to that, the first and less obvious being the insane tide of beasts they had to fight through to get close to the place. It could just be a place that was producing them en masse like that, but Bai suspected that this was the source of their woes, with the beasts pouring into the tunnels and heading up to the surface. The second sign, much less auspiciously, was them discovering what they assumed to be parts of the remains of that team, including a few bloody pieces of armor, a broken weapon, and part of a backpack that one of them had obviously been wearing. Beth grabbed everything when they found it, assuring Bai that she would deposit it with the teams up top for proper burial or whatnot. That then left them in an enormous cavern, so large the ceiling couldn’t be seen with regular vision, with a massive glowing pillar in the center.