Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Seventy-Eight (Patreon)

"Could you do that?” Blood asked before they moved out.

“Could I do what? The make people walk past thing?” Beth asked in return.

“Yeah, like, make people ignore a place?” Blood said.

“I mean, I could do it, I think,” Beth said, examining the area and frowning. “It would have to be through raw manipulation, since I don’t have a skill that specifically does what we’re seeing. I would have to use a combination of my Ideal and possibly Spatial Domain to be able to reproduce the effect, but I could do it.”

“That’s pretty fucking strong,” Val said. “Spatial stealth would be fucking crazy.”

“It’s not really spatial stealth, though,” Beth said, glancing around at the others. “It’s just messing with people’s sense of space, and their sense of time a little, to make them walk by a place. We weren’t super focused at first, but even then, all it took was a single other person reviewing our routes to figure out that something was wrong. It would take longer to put the pieces together if we didn’t have a spatial expert on hand, but it wouldn’t be all that hard to figure out.”

“But if the other people, whoever they are in this scenario, doesn’t have a spatial expert, they’d still be stuck,” Sera pointed out.

“Not really,” Beth said, shaking her head but giving her wife a smile to let her know it was fine. “It’s really just messing with perception. I want to investigate to see what’s happening, but a team without an expert like me could get through in a more direct way.”

“You mean blowing it up?” Andrea asked.

“Got it in one,” Beth said. “We could, if we really wanted to, just bombard the area from range. It’s not really diverting things around it, whatever ‘it’ is in there, it’s just changing perceptions. Our attacks should—key word there—should just tear through the space. But I don’t want to just blow it up, so I’m going to go in, since whatever it is can’t actually fool me.”

“Spread out,” Sera said to the others, the team already moving before she even finished speaking.

The team assumed positions around the block, which wasn’t as tricky as trying to walk towards it, since it was only just around the buildings and on the street in front of the block that the warping was really happening. Moving through the surrounding blocks was far easier, and the entire team was positioned on roofs and buildings around the area in just a minute, all of them ready for anything. It was likely to be nothing, or to be some kind of strange object that Beth, their only spatial expert, would have to unravel, but if it did turn into a fight, they were all ready at a moment’s notice.

Beth waited until everyone signaled they were all set before moving in herself, not nearly as easily confused as the others. Again, it wasn’t an illusion or a mental attack, and her ability to very clearly see both the fabric of space, given her high rank of Spatial Resistance and even higher rank of Spatial Domain, and to manipulate space around her meant she was basically immune to the affect. Her Ideal helped as well, but she found she was strong enough that just those two skills and her own knowledge were enough to carry her through, though she still didn’t count herself as a master. It was hard to guage since there were so few people that knew much about space and spatial mana, but she was only really comfortable with the label of expert.

That was something to worry about later, where she stood in the ranks, as she walked right up to one of the eight buildings that were on that block. She was pretty sure it was coincidence that this block had been selected or had been where the outbreak happened or whatever it was that was going on. There was no strategic or tactical value, as far as she could see, to any of the buildings, and there wasn’t anything else special around that she could detect that would make it a good place for such a high level effect to be placed. Despite only being really good at spatial manipulation, she was an Exalted-in-waiting, in essence, and her senses were extremely good, especially given her Ideal was fully complete. She could at the very least detect other mana types or anomalies around herself and even identify what they were with some small certainty, and she was detecting nothing.

That didn’t mean this would be a cake walk, as it were, but it was going to be a lot easier if she didn’t have to deal with any other mana types or some kind of second weird effect added on top. Any other than fire and she would be out of her element, and the rest of the group had mixed results with various mana types. Blood had blood well in hand, obviously, Kris could do water and all kinds of lightning, not just void, Val had lightning and a broad coverage thanks to her enchanting, Bjorn had earth and metal, Andrea had dabbled in momentum and pure force, Adam was generally neutral but had some small understanding of ice, Sera had void and overlapped Beth on fire, and Neph had a combination of blood and poison, or venom, or toxic. Beth wasn’t really sure exactly what Neph’s stuff counted as, but things that were venomous and toxic fell under her understanding quite a bit and had aided her in her alchemy.

Still, nobody was quite as deep into their specialty or mana type as Beth was, which might change when they made their Ideal, and it might not. Ideals were often related to mana types or concepts, but they didn’t have to be, at least with mana; an Ideal could be related to the concept of conquest, which didn’t really have its own mana type, or be something as esoteric as transcendence of the physical, though that was something seen more in higher realms such as a person’s Truth. Regardless, the others could help with other effects, assuming they cropped up, but Beth still had to figure out what the primary effect was and find a way for the others to not be fooled by it without just torching the whole block.

It wasn’t that she was breaking the effect as she walked through it, but it was a combination of two factors. As she had explained to the others, it wasn’t affecting their minds or anything like that, just twisting the space around the area to make it hard to walk towards a specific group of buildings. The way that the space was twisted couldn’t fool her eyes or senses, however, so it was fairly easy for her to walk through the area without getting shunted to the side. The second factor was that she was able to just push aside the distortion, simply with her will power alone, allowing her to entirely ignore the effect even if her senses hadn’t let her bypass it, but both combined meant she just walked right up to the first building.

The building was on the corner nearest where they had all stopped a few minutes before and was pretty nondescript, something that might have housed some apartments or maybe a few small businesses, one of those kinds of buildings that large cities had in abundance. There were no signs outside, which pointed towards residences and not businesses, but not everywhere hung signs outside to advertise what was inside. Beth stuck her head in the building but didn’t think it was what she was looking for; yet another good thing about having such good senses and capabilities in the mana type they were investigating, allowing her to narrow things down very quickly. She went around the building to the next down the block and found it much the same.

It was as she had suspected from the start, but whatever was happening was in the center of the block, not in one of the buildings, unless it was in a building that extended into the center. The block had one alley that ran down the center east-to-west, and she walked around to that, walking into the center of the block. She updated the team on what she was doing, but there wasn’t much to say, and besides, she was the strongest of them. Not that she couldn’t be hurt or overwhelmed, but it was unlikely that whatever was in here was going to be truly dangerous for her just based on how easily she was able to see through it and bypass it. It could be a trap, of course, but setting up such a powerful and rare effect just to lure a spatial expert in and harm them seemed…excessive, even compared to some of the things she had seen over the years.

Her musings were unfounded, it turned out, as it wasn’t any kind of trap, though it was more complicated than she had hoped. She had been dreaming that it was just some strange item or artifact that somebody had activated, not understanding what they were doing, and it had messed the area up. Maybe it wasn’t even related to what had happened to the city and why everyone had disappeared, but those had just been idle thoughts. What she found in the center of the block was a small cleared area, giving room for a truck to maneuver, she assumed, since the large building on the north side of the block had two dock doors on the back and a loading area. In that clear space was the source of the disturbance and what had caused the change in spatial mana.

“This is going to take a while,” she sent to the team over their communicator call.

“Why? What is it?” Sera asked for the group.

“I’m not a hundred percent sure,” Beth said, frowning at the weird effect in front of her. “But it’s some kind of large formation, or natural phenomena, or just, uh, thing, that’s twisting space all around it. I also hate to say this, but it looks like it isn’t active right now, so this might get a bit more sketchy.”

“What do you mean ‘it’s not active’?” asked Val. “It’s clearly messing with the damn space. How is it not fucking active?”

“The way it’s twisting space right now is a byproduct,” Beth declared, moving around the thing she had found. “This thing can handle way more energy than what it’s currently using, and would produce a way bigger effect.”

“Like an effect big enough to, say, cover a whole city?” Sera asked.

“Well, let me look at it,” Beth replied, frowning, which the others clearly couldn’t see, but she was thinking rather hard. She had an instinctual understanding of spatial mana, and she had backed that up with a decent bit of study, especially after epiphany-ing her way into a spatial Ideal, but the math wasn’t exactly either, and neither was just gut feeling her way through something so complex.

“You think that’s what happened?” Andrea asked in the meanwhile.

“Well, think about it,” Sera said as Beth worked. “If the same effect that had me walk around the block and not even realize I had done it covered the whole city, and was even stronger, what would that do?”

“But it’s not a mind-altering effect,” Neph was the one to argue. “At least, Beth said it wasn’t messing with your mind, and you can remember it affecting you, you just couldn’t stop it.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Sera agreed.

“Then it doesn’t make that much sense,” Neph continued. “Unless the effect was covering the whole city for weeks or months or something, everyone who left would know it pretty quick, when five hundred thousand people all tried to park in the same parking lot outside the city and realized that they had left for a reason they couldn’t identify. And then they would talk and realize roughly what happened, and some people would try to drive or walk back, and they’d get turned around, and people would figure out the general shape of it pretty quick.”

“I guess that’s true,” Sera said. “But it’s not like it’s something you can just get through because you know it’s happening, like you just said. If it did affect the whole city for even a week, it might have been enough to drive most people away.”

“That seems real fuckin’ unlikely,” Val said, subconsciously reverting to her cruder speech patterns.

“It could have been a lot longer than a week,” Beth cut in. “This, uh, thing, whatever it is, can hold a lot of power. Like, it can be charged up with a ton of energy and it wouldn’t use it all up that quickly; it’s not some kind of explosive or anything, it’s a steady presence, from what I see. If it was heavily charged without expanding while it charged, I could see how it could expand rapidly to a certain distance and then stop, though why it would not just expand until it started running out of energy, I don’t know.”

“Can you stop it or dispel it?” asked Sera.

“Maybe? I mean, I could try a few things, though I might have to use my Ideal; there’s a lot of power still stuck in this thing and I might not be able to manipulate it with only my domain skill,” Beth answered. “I think I could figure out a way to shield other people from the effect. That’s what I’ll try first, but even that’s going to take some time and effort. I think we’re safe for now, if you guys want to take it easy and work on something else. Don’t go too far, especially since I’ll need one, or more, guinea pigs coming up, but you can relax for now.”

“Anything we can help with?” asked Sera.

“Not unless one of you lot suddenly became a spatial expert and didn’t share that information with the rest of the class,” Beth replied, rolling her eyes slightly at the thought. “Otherwise, go about your business and let me try to figure this out. I think it’s some kind of natural formation, or whatever is being used to create it isn’t physically present. Maybe spatially locked by coordinates…no, that wouldn’t work with the distortion. But if they used different reference frames…”

Beth trailed off over the comms, already having dove into the work after telling the group to relax. Most of them did, though Sera stayed alert; she wasn’t going to go take a nap or something while her wife was in what could be argued was intense danger. Blood wandered off, but it was in her nature to move and investigate, so it wasn’t a surprise, even though they had scouted the city pretty thoroughly by that point. Everyone else either amused themselves with their own recreation, mostly reading since they were in the middle of nowhere, or worked on their craft. Or kept refining their abilities or core powers, such as Adam, who was still working on refining his Mana Physique.

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