Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Seventy-Seven (Patreon)

The group fanned out into the city, though Beth kept sorting through the tedium of paperwork they had retrieved while they explored. They had, rather intentionally, made a beeline for the city center and the administrative building when they entered the city, but now they were going to search every nook and cranny to see if they could find anything unusual. Beth was less worried about monster activity or random, high-level beasts than she was about mysterious magic phenomena. Despite living with magic as a constant in her life for years now, she was still relatively new to the wonder and danger that it could bring about, though it wasn’t really something to blame her for. Even others steeped in the Path like Sera or Val were still surprised by things they found, and, considering how magic made basically anything possible, it was no wonder they stumbled upon strange and odd happenings.

As much as the city looked like an orderly evacuation, it could also be some kind of lure or hypnosis or mental influence. A magical effect that had caused all the residents of the city to decide it was a great day to drive out to a remote location and throw themselves off a cliff was something that would be rather hard to resist, though Beth was confident that she, at least, could hold off some of the effects long enough to get them out if things went bad. That was another factor, in that the city had likely been filled with people who hadn’t even hit level one hundred for the first time, or had just done that and rebirths, leveling a few more times after to get some more stats before giving up on the grind for good. A powerful and weird magical effect could influence a city full of people like that, causing them to do strange and bizarre things at seemingly random, while the same effect would be much less effective against Beth’s group, and that was just considering how much rebirths and stats strengthened them. Add in skills, core powers like their Mana Physiques and such, and Beth’s group might actively be under the influence of a magical oddity but so strong they couldn’t even feel it.

She doubted that last part was really true, however, unless the magical effect was extremely insidious, and such a thing occurring naturally likely wouldn’t be. A magical effect that had been created by some kind of massive ritual or formation that had lured people out of the city could be insidious or subtle to such a degree, but Beth was a bit doubtful that it was a created thing. Then again, what gave her pause was the city was clearly not supposed to be here. By that she meant that the city looked like many other cities she had visited the last few years…on the surface of various planets. The city had nothing in its design or architecture that led to the conclusion it was supposed to be underground, and was, in point of fact, quite the opposite in every single element. It was very clear to her that the city had been built on the surface of this world, or some world, and had been moved here at some point, and not all that long ago.

The thing was, even though some of the buildings did have some enchantments or magic in them to help preserve them and keep them clean, it really looked like the city had been down here for less than a year. The enchantments could throw off her estimates, obviously, and it might have been a decade it sat abandoned, but it certainly wasn’t a century or a millennium down in the dark deep underground. Also, it was a bit comical to see some of the roads of the city just cut off, leading directly into walls of the massive cavern the whole thing had been placed within. It was very clear the city had been teleported, and it was a mixture of inelegant and extremely precise that she had come to know and be annoyed by. The Path moved things around sometimes at random, or so Beth found it to be, and it was always a strange sensation walking through something that should have been a thousand light years away and five centuries in the past.

It had, in fact, led to the team in general going on a wild goose chase as they had spread out to explore. They had been laying down repeaters as they went underground, a standard practice for any team and one they always kept up with, and they still had Net access down here. They were looking for any documented cases of a city going missing, but it could wind up being something they just didn’t have the information for. The one limitation of the ubiquitous and powerful Net was that exchanging information across intergalactic distances was more difficult and costly. If the city they were currently exploring had been on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, they would very likely have no record that it had disappeared or even just about the city’s existence in general. That was why Beth thought of it as a wild goose chase, even though they might very well find something regardless of her skepticism.

The whole thing with the city having been teleported, something that finding it in records on the Net might confirm, is that it was unlikely they even could figure out the mystery. If whatever had happened had occurred before the city was teleported all the way down to some random cave two miles under the surface of some random world, then they certainly weren’t going to figure it out by being on the random world. They would need to go back to the source, a source that would be extremely difficult and time consuming to find, even if they were willing to dedicate their time to doing so, to really unravel the mystery.

At least, that’s what Beth assumed would be the case, but it turned out that things weren’t quite what they appeared, not that that came as a massive shock. If the Path had bothered to invest the time and effort of moving this entire, ‘abandoned’ city to this other planet and placing it deep underground, it would have some kind of reason. Beth had encountered things along her journey that seemed more than a bit nonsensical, but there was always some value or some meaning somewhere in what the Path did. It never did anything for pure randomness or pure pique, just teleporting things around because it felt like it, if it even could feel like it. Beth turned away from that metaphorical path, however, as pondering the nature of the system wasn’t something she was going to get deeply enmeshed in at the moment. She had read a bit about that years ago when her journey was first starting and she was rather curious and the best summation was that some of the greatest minds in the universe were still trying to figure out the Path’s nature. Not necessarily counting herself among their ranks, she was going to leave such questions of a more philosophical nature alone for the time being.

Given her thoughts on the Path never doing anything out of sheer randomness, she had the group investigate rather thoroughly, dedicating more time than she might otherwise to some strange, empty city deep underground. It was something that was subtle at first, but eventually, a couple hours later after mapping most of the town, Beth had realized that the team had avoided a specific block a handful of times. It was on reviewing where everyone had looked and what buildings they had checked that she noticed the dead zone; it was small, but it wasn’t that small, even in a place the size of a fully operational city, and it stood out now that the rest of the mapping was basically done.

“Sera, what’s this block?” Beth asked, the whole team back in the city hall or administrative center.

“What block?” Sera asked, leaning against Beth as they were gathered around a table on the second floor of the building. They were in a large open room at the back of the second floor that might have been some kind of break room or some kind of administrative room with a combination of desks and a large conference area. The group was spread out around the area, having either assumed seats around the table, on the furniture, or own their own furniture, in Bjorn’s case. They were still reviewing files and examining everything they had found about the city, but the prospect was looking a little bleak at that point.

“This block here,” Beth said, pointing at a map layer spread out on the table. “Nobody’s gone in here and you were by it twice rather close, and you circled it a third time without going in.”

“Huh, that’s weird,” Sera said. When Beth glanced up, rather far, to give her a look, she said, “I thought I had covered everything, but maybe I just missed it. I was trying to be thorough.”

“I think maybe it’s something odd,” Beth said, frowning at the patch of map.

“You want me to go back?” Sera asked, quirking a brow.

“Yes, but I want everyone to pay attention, and I want to try to get in there,” Beth said, snapping her fingers. Given her stats, even a simple finger snap could produce quite a noise, and the rest straightened up and got ready, still reviewing some documents, but they had largely given up.

“Let’s double check this and pay attention, just to be safe. It could just be nothing, but Sera isn’t that inattentive to miss something three times when we’re searching a grid. Let’s make sure that nothing weird…well, even more weird, is happening in there,” Beth said, getting nods from the team.

They left the city hall and headed what Beth’s sense of direction and communicator said was west, moving down a broad thoroughfare through the city. The closer they got to the block, the stranger Beth found everything, though it was a feeling that was hard to put her finger on at first. When they were within less than three blocks, however, she definitely started to notice oddities that didn’t really make a lot of sense, and she stopped the group a block away to give herself a little time to look at what was happening.

She hadn’t come over to this part of the city herself, and now that she was here, she had a few other thoughts on what had happened to the place. She also had about a hundred new questions that what she was seeing had immediately inspired, but one thing at a time. What she could detect that likely nobody else in the group even had a vague sense of was a series of disturbances in the spatial fabric. There wasn’t anything that was obvious to any of her other senses, but she could feel some kind of strange warping coming from the block in question. She also could see strange wisps of disturbed space that twisted out in small, bundled strands from the block in question, traveling outward for several blocks in all direction before slowly dissipating. The whole city wasn’t affected by it, not as far as she could determine, and her senses for such thing were rather finely honed, but whatever was in that block was greatly disturbing the surrounding space.

“There’s something in that block that’s messing up space,” Beth told the group, everyone gathered up on her when she had said to wait. “I can see strange twists in the spatial fabric emanating from the central building of the block. Something in there is messing space up and twisting it, and it’s doing in a way I haven’t seen before. Certainly nothing like a standard teleporter pad or formation.”

“Spatial manipulation is always very dangerous,” Val cautioned.

“Good thing we have a spatial expert here,” Beth said with a grin.

“We do?” Val instantly retorted, and Beth teleported her to the other side of the street.

“Whatever’s in there is messing with space and people’s perception of it, which is why Sera walked by it three times without going in and checking anything. She might have not even perceived that the block was that. Not that she didn’t see it, but it would sort of turn into a kind of blank area in a person’s senses,” Beth explained.

“Let me just test how strong it is,” Sera said. “I’m more than durable enough.”

“Just be careful,” Beth said, giving her a quick side hug before Sera headed out. “Even you aren’t fully immortal.”

“I know, I got it,” Sera said with a grin, walking towards the building with determination.

It turned out, even with Beth’s explanation and Sera’s determination, it didn’t matter at all. Sera walked towards the block they were investigating, walking almost right up to the first building before turning north and walking along the street past the block. She then turned west again, strangely enough, and walked past the block that way until she was on the other side of it from the group. The whole group were exchanging glances at that point, as the thing was really quite odd to watch, and Sera seemed totally fine while doing exactly what they hadn’t wanted her to do. Beth might have tried talking to her while she was walking, but she didn’t want to influence the test in any way other than observing, which she thought would be negligible.

“Well, that was really weird,” Andrea said, staring at Sera’s position in their communicator overlays. “She literally walked around it like she was told to avoid it.”

“Sera, where are you?” Beth asked through the same interface, frowning, though she wasn’t particularly worried. It wasn’t really altering the others’ minds, it was just messing with their perceptions of space, which would be almost impossibly confusing to someone that wasn’t a spatial expert.

“I walked over to the block, but now it doesn’t look right,” Sera said. After a moment, she continued, “Wait, I think I went past it. Are you guys on the other side of me now?”

“Yeah, you walked right by it,” Beth said with a nod, even though they weren’t in a video call.

“That’s so weird. I didn’t just try to walk towards it, I had the map open the whole time,” Sera explained. “I thought I was walking right up to the block until the very moment I thought I was there, then I was looking at the block on the other side of it.”

“It’s definitely warping everyone else’s perception of space in a way that’s also slightly throwing off your sense of time,” Beth said, frowning down the street at the strange block. “I guess we’ll just have to test it and see how strong the effect really is.”

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