Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Seventy-Nine (Patreon)

Beth spent an hour examining the strange spatial anomaly before she made any progress, and even that was a little slow. The problem she was having, initially, was that it was a little unclear whether the effect was the point or was a secondary effect. If she studied the distortion in space, it looked like the pushing away of people’s awareness of the space around it was just a secondary effect, but there basically wasn’t a primary effect. It took her more than an hour just to figure that it was, indeed, a secondary effect, though if they anomaly had been made by someone, the secondary effect could have still been desirable.

That led to the question that if the pushing people away from the area was a secondary effect, then what was the primary effect? Beth was pretty sure it wasn’t teleportation, which the records in the city also seemed to support. Firstly, there had been nothing about the anomaly or about teleportation in the records they had found, which also pointed to this having either happened very quickly or been hidden here for a little time before it went off. Something this power, using this much mana, should have been rather easy to notice, but the fact that there wasn’t a single record of it, or of any new teleportation formations or pads or attempts to create an organized system, pointed to this having not been something that was known about.

The second point was that…Beth was pretty sure it wasn’t a teleporter at all. Essentially, the anomaly wouldn’t teleport anything, no matter what the layman did, so working backwards from the conclusion, if this was an effort to make a teleportation point or portal, it was a piss poor job. The good layered on the bad was that the thing was making people avoid it, in a manner of speaking, so it was highly unlikely that anybody had gotten anywhere close to it, but somebody trying to leap through it to teleport somewhere would have had a very bad time. Well, that was assuming the person could even get in there; the anomaly wasn’t a small thing, in terms of strength, and most people in this city had been very low level. The amount of force contained here would have kept somebody under level one hundred from even getting within fifty feet of the center.

That wasn’t a problem for Beth; her power was great enough that she could walk right up to the anomaly and stick her arm in, if she wanted to, which she did not. The irony was that she didn’t need to do something like that, as her senses were so great that she could closely examine the spatial distortion from even the edge of the block. Not that she was doing that, and closer did get her slightly better definition, but she could approach the anomaly, even though she didn’t really need to, whereas those that might have needed to couldn’t have gotten anywhere near.

Her examination continued for another couple hours, though she wasn’t really learning a whole lot new from this thing; it was more like disassembling a puzzle of a type she had solved several times before. She knew the distortion of the area around the block wasn’t the point of the anomaly, but figuring out what was happening took her more time than she would have liked. It eventually clicked for her when she ignored the spatial interference entirely and focused on the flow of mana through the anomaly itself without examining any of the changes in the space around them. That led her to the conclusion that it was indeed created by someone, as there was a very clear signature of the effect of runes in the way the mana moved. It was done rather cleverly, she had to admit, as there weren’t any runes left, either in the disturbance or around it, but the mana patterns, when she could finally distinguish and trace them, gave the game away.

Once she was sure this was something manufactured, she quickly scanned over the way the mana flowed, which is what led her to the definitive conclusion that the secondary effect was just that, a secondary effect that had cropped up because the person making the spatial distortion had been a bit sloppy. It really had the feel of someone who had studied spatial runes but didn’t fully understand what they were doing, which brought a scenario to mind. A skilled enchanter could do what she was seeing, perhaps even a high rank Grandmaster, and they would produce such a result if they weren’t a spatial mage themselves but had used knowledge from enchanting, enchanting resources like old books, and tools that let them measure space. The whole thing really had the feel of someone that was, in essence, guessing their way through the problem, using tools and techniques they didn’t wholly understand to accomplish a specific goal.

As to the specific goal, that one took her a bit longer to piece together, as it was puzzling why someone would make something like this if they weren’t going for a portal or teleportation. That wasn’t the only thing spatial mana could be used for, obviously, but it was the most common use case that a person would encounter. Given the rarity of spatial mages as a whole, let alone skilled spatial mages, it was very rare to find anybody doing anything else other than making teleportation technologies with the mana type and its subtypes. That had thrown her for a slight loop, but she had managed to piece together what the anomaly was supposed to do, and it was a bit…odd. She couldn’t help but feel the whole thing was either an accident, or it was one of those things that the Path did that sort of defied common sense or logic and left everyone scratching their head.

The anomaly was an attempt at creating a change in a distant place. It was not a portal or teleport, as it wasn’t meant to move a thing from point A to point B, but was instead meant to use a large volume of mana to reach across space and manipulate the spatial fabric in a distant location. What the exact desired effect of this was to be was rather unclear; Beth was pretty sure the bumbling enchanter that had set the thing up had failed, and pretty badly. She had managed to divine the intention of the thing after a few hours of study, but the anomaly wouldn’t actually do what it had been constructed to do. Instead, other than the strange, if mostly harmless, secondary effect of making people walk by the place, it would randomly shift a large area of space. For example, it would take a hill in the far distance and suddenly flip the hill upside down without warning. Beth would have said a mountain in the distance but, despite the power present, it was neither powerful enough, nor well constructed enough, to accomplish something so grandiose.

If her guess was right, she was thinking the thing had actually been a bit of brilliant design work that was botched in the implementation. She was suspecting, the more she studied it, that the point of the anomaly had been to create the effect it was currently doing, but at a remote location. A scenario formed in her mind, one that she was pretty sure was the correct sequence of events, but she and the team would have to do a bit more investigating to see if her hypothesis was correct. It was also going to be a bit tricky to investigate in full because the city had been moved; whatever the original target of the anomaly was, it was very likely not there anymore, unless that exact spatial point had also been moved by the Path and kept in alignment with the anomaly. Beth doubted that had happened, so it was going to be a pain to trace the thing back without the original target area present.

“Okay, we have work to do,” Beth said, emerging from the block. The team all perked up at that, other than Blood, who had been sleeping and needed to be roused by Val.

“What did you find?” asked Sera as they gathered up a short distance from the block.

“First off, the thing in there is definitely man-made,” Beth said, seeing a few frowns form in the group. “I don’t want to go into too much detail until we’re done investigating, but a person definitely made it, and it looks like they did a bad job. But that’s what I want to look into; let’s head back to the city hall.”

They made their way back to city hall and went through the documents there again, but this time they were looking for anything related to the anomaly. With Beth’s new understanding of what the spatial disturbance was and what the point of it likely was, it was easier to look through the records. They weren’t looking for the aftermath this time but the cause, and three hours of tedious searching brought up one document of three pages that mentioned a project that fit the bill. It discussed the creation of a way to ward off beasts in a certain location and how the project was stalled because of the lack of proper tools. There was a footnote about how the project lead was pursuing all avenues to get it done, which would have given Beth a sinking feeling if that bozo had cocked it up any worse than he did, but it looked like nobody had died, not initially, anyway, from the result of his failure, so she wasn’t going to get too upset over milk that had long ago spilled.

“That explains it all,” Beth said with a sigh, rubbing her eyes. Even her new, overpowered eyes could get tired from hours of poring over documents.

“I’m guessing the guy mentioned in the paperwork kept experimenting, but I don’t know how we got here,” Andrea said, giving Beth a confused look.

“Alright, let me lay out my hypothesis, but I think it’s the right sequence,” Beth said, leaning back against the counter behind her. They were in a large room in the basement of the city hall, one with good lighting, where they had sourced many of the city records they had paged through to find the one correct document.

“It goes something like this,” Beth continued, laying it out. “They had found an area that had a cache of spiritually rich herbs, but they didn’t have anyone strong enough to harvest them given the distance and all the beasts and dangers involved. They came up with the brilliant, and I do use the term very loosely, idea of having the only highly skilled enchanter, the lead of the city’s enchanting division, devise a method of either remotely collecting the herbs or guaranteeing their safety. Well, one was harder than two for him, so he decided to remotely ensure their safety, which still seems dumb.”

“Why didn’t they just call somebody in if nobody in the city could handle it?” Sera asked with a frown.

“Because they were greedy,” Beth answered with a shrug. At her wife’s look, she explained further, saying, “They didn’t want to split a cut, probably a large cut, of the highly valuable herbs with an outside team or company. They wanted to do it all in-house, so to speak, and get everything themselves. If they didn’t need any outside help, then all those juicy diamond coins would belong to just the people involved.”

“I…see,” Sera said, shaking her head slowly. “They were both motivated and at the same time lazy in the way they did it. It’s like they engineered the scenario to encompass the worst of all worlds.”

“True,” Beth agreed. “Anyway, what happened was pretty predictable, if you think about it. The lead enchanter was a Grandmaster, so he had quite a bit of skill overall, whatever else can be said about the dope. Not that he was all that strong; he was old and spent much of his life dedicated to the craft, from what his file said. Rebirth three at the time the incident happened, which would have been on the high end for the city, but incredibly weak overall.”

“What was someone like that even thinking?” asked Kris, more than a little mortified.

“Greed makes people do stupid things, and sometimes people don’t assess the risks properly. Besides, it probably made sense for him,” Beth said, shrugging. “He was a shit fighter but a good enchanter; it’s not unheard of for a skilled crafter, especially an enchanter, to solve a problem with their crafting rather than their brawn. He probably had reason to figure he could enchant his way around the beasts and solve the problem, and, if the documents are correct about him, he was a bit, uh, egotistical, let’s say. I’m betting he thought he was some really hot shit and could solve everything with his incredible skill and intellect.”

“And he was clearly overestimating his damned self,” Val muttered.

“Right,” Beth agreed with a sigh. “He tried to create a formation that would create an affect where beasts were pushed away from a certain corridor.”

“Oh, I see where this is going…” Sera muttered.

“Yep, he fucked the whole thing up and did what he was trying to do to the city instead of the pathway to and area where the beasts were,” Beth said with another shrug. “Why they area he picked was behind a grocery store and a bank, I haven’t the faintest clue. Then again, this guy clearly thought himself quite a bit smarter than he really was, so it’s not strange that he did some weird and dumb stuff. He created the formation, just like he had envisioned, but he didn’t get everything quite right, likely because he wasn’t a spatial mage himself.

“When he turned the formation on, bzzt, it started to run but wasn’t targeted correctly. Or maybe it was and he just didn’t contain it correctly; little hard to say without his original designs still existing, unless we can find them somewhere in the city. His formation, instead of clearing a corridor that nothing walked in because it got confused by the spatial distortion, he created the effect localized. Again, it could have bled over locally and still made a corridor, but that’s really beside the point.”

“He made it so the whole fucking city got super confused and wandered off,” Val said, snapping her long fingers and pointing at Beth.

“Yep, exactly,” Beth agreed with a firm nod. “He messed the whole thing up and made the distortions here. Think what’s happening to that block we were at a few hours ago, but the strength way higher, meaning it covered a larger area. If my estimate is right, he covered an area over twice the size of the city, so I’m guessing quite a lot of people wound up somewhere they didn’t want to be by the end of it, including him.”

“How long?” Sera asked, shaking her head.

“He powered it enough to last at least a month, if not a lot longer. Likely why the city was abandoned, though I don’t know why it was placed here,” Beth explained, gesturing around them.

Previous

Next