Limitless Path

The first thing Beth noticed from her perspective on the ground was how well-maintained everything looked, not just that everything was seen to in a nice way, but even the way the plants and walking paths were arranged looked nicely done. It was clear that quite a bit of thought and time went into building this little miracle in the desert, as well as an awful lot of mana, which really translated into a lot of coin and resources. Building something like this, not just a small city, but one full of life an greenery in one of the harshest environments the planet currently had to offer, would have taken the kind of investment that made even Beth narrow her eyes in deep thought. This was way more than a way-station or throwaway camp, and a lot more than a small place to try to take advantage of the rich people that would be coming, from across the galaxy, to use the tower; this was a city built with both beauty and utility in mind.

She was shaken from her thoughts as the group had started moving forward and was intercepted by a man dressed in solid plate armor, mana steel, if Beth’s much more advanced smithing knowledge was working properly, and asked to hold a moment. The man informed them that there was a five gold fee for ship parking, which he was waiving as their ship had disappeared, and a one gold fee for each person entering the city. Beth thought it was rather steep, but then again, they were catering to a crowd that could drop a diamond coin per attempt at the tower the city was built around, so gold coins weren’t that extreme for prices. She just made a note that hanging around the city was probably not going to be a great idea; sure, her group was massively wealthy, but they could get everything the city offered elsewhere for a fraction of the price. No reason to squander gold if they didn’t have to, especially when Beth thought of everything they needed to buy on top of the fact she was expected to pay quite a hefty property tax on her new mansion every year.

The group paid the fee and made their way to the tower, not really stopping to enjoy the city. It was an impressive place, to be sure, but nothing compared to the neighborhood where Beth, and the rest of the team, by extension, now lived. As eager as Beth was to get on with everything, they did have new members of the group since last time, or a new member, in terms of Neph, and they wanted to have someone walk her through a few floors just to make sure she was comfortable. A person could go back down to a lower floor in the tower without a problem, but they couldn’t shuttle someone up to a higher floor. Blood and Val went in with Neph, choosing to sacrifice the extra diamond, as they were going to escort her, but once she had adjusted, everyone was going to climb on their own. They were making a bit of a competition of it, though still remembering to be safe about it, as the tower was dangerous, but the group also knew they were competing for second place. Nobody they had was going to beat Beth, not without the others forming a team and racing her as a group. She was amenable to the idea, but they were all going to see where they could get themselves over the next few days first.

Last time they had left off in the tower, which was a couple years back objective time, none of them had gone past floor two hundred, and some of them hadn’t even gone that high. She also remembered the guards had, at that time, given them a warning that floor two hundred and fifty was where someone should stop if they were below Enlightened. The tower itself was a thousand floors, and she was a little curious exactly how tough things got; she suspected she could clear most of the floors that were set aside for Ascended, but she didn’t even know where those floors started. The guards had said last time, and they still maintained, that there wasn’t all that much information on the tower, or at least, on the upper floors. Their faction didn’t run the tower anymore and only used it as a way to milk---er, to earn a little money from wealthy people and factions in the galaxy. There was surely somebody in the faction that knew more about the tower, but a couple of nobody guards that just had to watch the entrance and get the fees wouldn’t know all the intricacies of the place.

Beth resumed from where she had left off, finding the floors to be even less than trivial compared to her current power. Sadly, the rewards were just as lackluster, meaning she didn’t stick around to train or try to get anything more out of each level. Plowing through floor after floor at a rapid pace, she assumed the others were up to the same, though it was likely they would start slowing down once they hit the high two hundreds. Beth did not, continuing on without any real challenge or threat until she was past floor three hundred fifty, at which point she had to start putting in some real effort. The floors weren’t exactly the most challenging thing around at this point, but she could just fire off a couple attacks and run to the door to the next floor. She was having to really fight now, dodging attacks, tactically using her skills, using her weapons to attack and defend, and even use brief bursts of her Presence as she approached floor four hundred.

Once she hit floor four hundred, she knew she was getting into pretty serious territory, as she had to really try at this point. Just the four hundredth floor alone was a challenge, with five large beasts that were the equivalent of level five hundred special variant dungeon bosses all attacking her at the same time. It wasn’t enough to force her to go all-out, but she absolutely wasn’t breezing through fight like this, either, and needed to focus and use much of her skill and strength to win. She pushed on after four hundred just to see if each floor was a sharp jump after that, which didn’t seem to be the case, but the challenge was increasing rather steadily at this point. It was at the level where a strong Enlightened could still handle it, but many Enlightened wouldn’t be able to put up with this kind of pressure and would either get seriously injured or have to bow out at this point. She was curious if she could push past five hundred as she was now, which would be the halfway point and was her guess for where the challenge that basically demanded the participants be Ascended started.

She pushed up to four hundred fifty given some time, and was starting to be a lot more cautious in the fights at that point. The challenge had been growing each floor and, while it didn’t dramatically spike at any one floor, the increase was a noticeable amount. Given ten, twenty, or more like fifty floors of that, the difference between four hundred and four-fifty was quite noticeable and made her think she might not be able to get any further than five hundred. She found she was having to use almost everything after four hundred and eighty, just holding off on making use of her Ideal to progress. She was using the passive boost of her Ideal, of course, as that always affected her strength and power, but she wasn’t infusing her attacks with her Ideal or using the flame and space destruction of the Ideal itself to attack.

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By the time she hit floor five hundred, she was forced to use everything she had to survive. It was the place she had become, somewhat ironically, the most comfortable in her life as a Wayfarer, dancing on the very edge of death and loving every minute of it. She did know her limits, however, and after almost dying on floor five hundred, she chose to exit rather than continue to five hundred and one, further risking herself for little gain. Oh, the floors at that point were giving her rather generous rewards, each giving her nearly enough to make up for the entry fee of a diamond coin, but a diamond coin paled in comparison to the value of her life. She hoped the others had given up at reasonable places, though she was more concerned about the less sturdy members of the team such as Kris or Val, each of whom could put out massive damage, but they could take very little punishment. Reaching even the four hundreds required a certain level of toughness that she was only confident Bjorn and Sera had; sure, the others could survive on those floors, at least for a time, and adding damage instead of toughness would let them kill the enemies faster and reduce the damage, but a bad hit was more dangerous with less defense than taking a little more time when one was very tough.

She exited the tower, finding that a few days had passed, checking her communicator for messages. She saw something from her father, something from Bai, something from Zane, of all people, and a message from her wife. Sera let her know that she was out and where the group was staying, though she didn’t say who else was there at that time. Her father was just thanking her for the work her team did with the situation in China and letting her know that it had brought her some attention, which wasn’t really anything new and didn’t really bother her. If other people on Earth needed her team’s help, she would do a few favors for people, but she was also going to start charging fees if people started knocking down her down to get her team to handle their dirty work or fuck-ups. The latter was certainly what she considered the China situation; a team that should have known better went poking into things they shouldn’t have and stirred up a hornet’s nest. It was also just the sort of thing the CRA handled, but hadn’t gotten bad enough for the CRA to directly interfere without the request of the local government, and the local government had been more concerned about egg on their face in front of a prestigious group like the CRA than with people’s safety. It was no skin off her nose; if things had gotten really bad, the CRA would have stepped in, even if that required a Hall Master to personally go and take care of the problem. That, or they would have sent out requests for help, which would have likely come across Beth’s desk, so to speak, and she would have wound up doing the same thing but getting rewards from the CRA for it.

The message from Bai was a combination of thanks, frustrated complaining, and humble request for some help with improving her team’s strength. Beth sent her some details on where to go and how to get there for leveling and let her know that her team was going to be free in about three months, which she came up with by giving herself some buffer for their current explorations. Bai’s team had enough wealth that they could afford to use the CRA network to travel off-world for training and exploration, though there was plenty on Earth to keep them occupied. Really, though, it was about finding something that they could reliably and safely farm for levels, and other parts of the galaxy had those kinds of things in spades. If they met up with Beth’s team later, she didn’t mind letting them use her gate, which would help them get to the point of their tenth rebirth quickly. Bai’s team hadn’t been as concerned with doing True Rebirths, or even Perfect Rebirths, though Beth told them Perfect Rebirths were certainly worth it and that she could help them with the experience, which was the biggest hurdle for many teams.

The last message she had waiting for her after the five days she had spent in the tower fighting was from Zane, and it was something low priority. She read through it while fiddling with her little spatial cube puzzle that she had secured from the auction, now able to see that there were two more layers for her to crack through before the whole thing was solved. She had been idly playing with it a bit here and there, but she needed to set some time aside to make a good run at it sometime in the near future. She finished Zane’s message, finding he had identified an area in the Milky Way that had some kind of spatial anomaly happening and had told her before anyone else. Such a tip from such a powerful individual was worth its weight in gold, and even more beyond that, but he just asked that her team take detailed measurements and recordings when they investigated the area and forward the results to him. Beth also wasn’t very worried about anyone else discovering the area; for one thing, Zane was far more powerful than anyone else and had all kinds of skills and technology that others didn’t that could detect such things, and for another thing, the Milky Way was always running behind. Everybody in the galaxy, apart from basically Zane and Fallon, the two of them quite literally being out of consideration of the rest of the power structures, had more to deal with than they could handle. Sure, there were Wayfarers that explored and did discovery work, but the number of teams doing that was low compared to the amount available to explore, and many of those teams were, quite frankly, weak. Beth’s team was already a real outlier in their strength and would only continue to shatter the curve as they grew; most teams stuck to at least already settled solar systems, which left a big chunk of the galaxy for only a tiny handful of teams to investigate.

Beth met up with the others after finishing sending her responses, finding they had book a small suite for a couple days in the cheapest hotel in the city. It was still a nice hotel, but the prices were eye-watering, or would be even for most people that would want to challenge the tower. The idea of the rest racing Beth had also been put aside for now; them grouping up would make the tower easier, to an extent, but not that much easier. The challenge on each floor was scoped based on the number of people challenging the floor, and on the higher floors that really mattered. A group of ten could go in together on floor one and do just fine, but they all better be at the peak of Enlightened or at Ascended if that same group was going to challenge floor four hundred together. Adding one extra person might only add two or three more beasts to a floor, but when those beasts were individually enough to give most entire teams pause, it really added up quick.