Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Sixty-Eight (Patreon)

Monster hunter was, however, something Beth and the team were pretty good at by this point, and even with the advantages someone hiding technically had, Beth was still very, very hard to evade. Even before she locked on to someone, she was difficult to fool and evade; she was so fast, combined with being able to instantly appear anywhere on a planet, that running from her was almost impossible. It became more a factor of luck and chance, and Beth had enough perception and good enough understanding of surrounding mana that it just become a slow slide towards the inevitable. The best way a monster had to avoid her was to leave the planet through some means, but that was much easier said than done, and Beth and the CRA monitored for those kinds of things. Even with how small one being’s body would be, it could still be detected if it was strong enough that it tried to fly into space on its own, so the whole thing just turned into a long game of cat-and-mouse with a very predictable end.

It didn’t mean it was fast, but Beth’s team was methodical, and the longer she was hunting for the monster, the fewer and fewer beasts there were. The team was a real meat grinder at this point, tearing through tens of thousands of beasts a minute, every minute, for hours, if not days, at a time. That kind of effort, those kinds of ridiculous numbers, meant even beast waves tens of millions strong took little more than a few hours to clean up. They didn’t even have to wipe out every single beast, necessarily, especially with Beth playing intercontinental hide-and-seek with the monster; it was hard for the monster to reform a beast wave with Beth’s team hanging around and Beth, the mini-Exalted, chasing it relentlessly.

Chasing down and eliminating the monster was Beth’s team’s responsibility, but that didn’t mean they were the only ones working on the problem. Such a beast tide situation was a prime opportunity for others to level and even earn some merits with the CRA, taking some lesser missions to defend certain points or clear out certain amounts of beasts. It led to a kind of patchwork force of various Wayfarers out and about, some moving around and some holding specific points and reporting on the beasts they repelled and the movement they witnessed. All of them knew to stay well clear of Beth’s team, however, as bothering the group going directly after the monster was stupid, for one thing, and Beth’s team was wading into the kinds of heat that other individuals and groups just couldn’t handle.

Catching the monster this time was more annoying than it should have been in part because the thing was some kind of shadow beast that slipped through shadows and darkness whenever Beth got close. It also had a much better understanding, though still not full sapience, of what was going on and what the general level of danger seemed to be. The only positive that Beth could see was that it was doing something with shadow magic that had a bit of a spatial element, much like the shades Beth had fought a while ago with the team. Given that, she could lock down space and give it a very hard time teleporting, if not block it outright, but that still didn’t let her catch it. The monster could slide into the shadows and do something like ‘surf’ through them without teleporting and Beth couldn’t really do much about that, or not at first.

She did get an idea from the others after getting a little frustrated three days into the chase. Sera basically told her to try to manipulate the shadows by lighting the place up and moving the lights around, which was better than her first attempt at just making everything bright. Moving different spots of fire around, which was easy as breathing for Beth, let her light up most of the area and manipulate the shape and direction of most of the shadows, which made it significantly easier to track and heard the monster. Getting it out of the shadows and into a real fight was still another matter entirely, but she had mostly cut off the second of its two major escape routes. It certainly wasn’t running from her, either, despite technically being several rebirths stronger; Beth’s stats were ludicrous, coupled with powerful movement skills and her master of teleportation, making the monster’s attempts to physically run like a baby trying to crawl away from an Olympic sprinter.

After the fire ideas from her wife, Beth put in a more serious effort and managed to get the thing cornered after six hours of fairly strenuous work, locking down the space around her. She could tell she was going to answer some questions about that later, as she felt a moderately strong Ascended probe at the edges of the area. To be fair, she had done the equivalent of grabbing a big chunk of space and crushing it in her mental ‘grip,’ which likely had caused the couple strongest people on the planet, the one Ascended and the peak-Enlightened, to go on alert. After those two, there wasn’t really anybody else there that could likely even sense what Beth was doing, so she was going to be able to brush aside what had happened pretty easily.

With the monster in her grip, at last, it wasn’t all that hard to pin it down and kill it. What might have been a serious challenge and a danger for other teams or individuals was little more than child’s play to her; her power was really overinflated for the task at hand, considering her level of training and skill factored in on top. A monster like this would have given most early Enlightened a hard time, even someone at her rebirth might have really struggled, but having a core power unlocked dozens of rebirths early was a huge game changer. Having a bunch of skills in Platinum and a couple in Diamond, when coupled with mind-blowing stats, also didn’t really hurt the equation.

After Beth confirmed the monster kill, in several ways, the team only stayed for four hours in helping with the cleanup. They had already slaughtered more than their fair share of beasts, and with the source of the threat dealt with, others could move in and clean up. Besides, it would provide some good Silver and Gold missions for a few CRA members to earn some contribution and make some progress, if they were pursuing an Emblem level at the time. Beth’s team got a single mission credit and little else out of it, and after a very brief conversation with the planetary administrator, Beth never more glad for the ability to label everything she did ‘CRA business’ as the governor questioned her, they were off. They had done, now that the other members of the team were finishing up their mission, eight of the assigned missions. With a tenth mission having been given, that left two more to go before they were out, and Beth had a feeling they weren’t going to be getting anymore for quite some time, which was just fine with her. She had plenty to pursue right now, including seeing about actually getting a house in or just outside the City of Mended Dreams.

That was for in a little while, as they were on to their last assignment. Beth didn’t feel it was necessary to bring the team back together, and that was likely the right call, as even split into smaller groups, they could pretty easily handle whatever the missions needed. Luckily, they needed brawn for one and brain for the other, which made it easy. Beth’s whole group had brawn, to be sure, but there was nothing like a little tactical air strike from Beth to demonstrate a real powerhouse. She redistributed them, just taking Sera with her to a the ninth mission to engage in some fighting, while everyone else went to do some diplomacy in the tenth mission. It was mostly them hoisting the flag there, or much of the group looking impressive while Val did most of the talking, but it was still very effective.

They had Bjorn handle several negotiations up to that point because, well, he was rather intimidating, walking into a room and sitting at the head of a table with two surly, middlingly powerful groups staring at him. This mission, conducted while Beth and Sera were on a different world, laughing maniacally and slaughtering insane numbers of creatures, was a bigger diplomatic deal. Beth had offered, or just backed up the group by saying she could pop over and flex her Ideal a little, but Val had insisted it wasn’t necessary. Best not to rely on that too much, and not everyone was floored by such a thing, even if they were a bit impressed that Beth had realized hers so early.

Instead, Cal was content to play politics and talk with those in attendance, a list of wealthy and powerful people from two governments. Normally, such a function might have a bit of security from the CRA if they thought it was important, but having CRA Enforcers do negotiations at such an inter-governmental meeting wasn’t typical. In this case, the sensitive nature of what was being discussed, and the impact it would have on three planets, warranted the CRA having people in the room, and actively working in that room. Val was a great choice to front this mission as well, given her fairly recent massive popularity and name brand recognition. Many people knew her from the Young Scions and even respected her work with the group; people who saw only the attention grabbing aspects failed to realize how much work had gone into the project, particularly on Val’s part. Those who did understand the work, and how key a role Val played in it, were the ones who were more perceptive, or higher in the food chain, or both, and were the ones worth working with.

Val also found it amusing that, despite all that, her fame and reputation and even her perceived power, both personally and from her connections, there was just something about walking into a room with a ten feet tall walking battleship behind you that looked like he ate hammers for breakfast and shit nails that made a certain…point. It wasn’t that she and the others were specifically trying to intimidate anyone they were working with or negotiating with, it was just a little thing that they could do to make a certain point, not least of which was, at the most basic level, their team wasn’t a team one wanted to fuck with, if that wasn’t already clear from their fame, rebirths, perceived power, and status as prospective Platinum Emblems.

The negotiations themselves were something Val did with a bit of relish; she was much more a social butterfly than much of the rest of the team apart from Andrea. Neph was a bubbly person, but she wasn’t as outgoing as Val or Andrea, being far more upbeat with those she knew and was personally acquainted with. In this kind of setting, the bee would have been rather out of her element, but it wasn’t at all so for Val. She was directly in her element, moving between people, Blood on her arm, talking and seeing and being seen. While the intimidation factor was one thing, and her own fame was another, nothing really replaced simply being able to talk to people and understand them.

At the end of the day, Val was able to build up far more credit, and make far better decisions, simply by walking the floor of a gala and talking to a person hear, listening in on a conversation there, swaying an opinion of this wealthy magnate over here. She was almost effortless in the movements, gliding around the room, a touch on the arm here, and leaned in sentence whispered in this ear, a quick gesture and a laugh in the right place. It was an art, one Val had been working in and understanding for a few decades now, and even some of the seasoned politicians couldn’t help but fall into her flow.

That was just the start, the first evening, or the first evening they were there and that had a big function to attend, but the board was already set at that point. Val had done something that was a fairly traditional tactic, in that she made herself, the negotiator and outside enforcer, the center of attention. One could do so in a strong way or a soft way, and Val had chosen to do so in a soft way, pulling the delegates into her orbit while making them feel seen and heard. The fact it was a gala, a ball, and not a meeting in some council room somewhere, actually played even further in her favor. A lesson she had learned a long time ago from her grandmother was people much preferred the personal touch and the more intimate feel; most negotiations and deals were done behind closed doors, in places far away from the conference rooms and council chambers that most typically thought of when discussing big deals between nations.

The groundwork was a good start, but they still had to actually sort through the problems and get some kind of deal that both sides could agree to, and more power to them. Beth was much happier doing a final mission involving hunting and killing, Sera and her working through their assignment quickly, but not quickly enough they would have to join Val and the others at the negotiations. Beth just wanted to get the missions done by now, even though it had only been a couple months of work in total, but she still did a thorough job. A very thorough job, knowing that joining the others was the ‘reward’ for doing the current hunt they were on quickly.

The mission Beth and Sera were completing was a monster hunt, but an atypical one, which is the other reason it took them a little longer than Val’s big negotiation thing. This monster wasn’t causing a Tide, which was fairly rare, but was instead hunting, targeting individuals and small groups that it thought it could kill and devour without anyone escaping or any reinforcements coming to the rescue. It was also clever enough a fake bait operation, first trying to use Sera, which the dragon had insisted was a bit silly considering she was…well, a dragon, failed. They tried some better bait after Sera, a person that agreed to the idea and was a lot weaker than them, but the monster hadn’t bitten that time, either.

It was Beth’s awesome, amazing coolness that really did it, in the end. She monitored for signs of an attack, using both her skills as well as the comms network, and when she got a hit, she used her Ideal to rip open space, transporting her and Sera right on top of the monster. Quite literally, too, as they basically fell on top of it. Destroying it after that wasn’t all that hard, especially considering it was more an ambush predator than a fighter, though it still did put up a fight. Beth was even able to remove its prey, which had not just confused it but pissed it off, which is also likely why it didn’t just try to flee in that final confrontation.

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