Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Eighty (Patreon)

"So, is there anything we can do?” Sera asked.

“Can you get me close?” Val also asked.

“I think I can get Val close,” Beth said after thinking a moment. “Let’s see if we can figure anything else out while I go over there and investigate it with her.”

“You want us to check where the place would have pointed?” Andrea asked, picking up on what Beth was implying.

“Yeah, see if you guys can even get there,” Beth said.

“Might need teleports,” Bjorn grunted.

“Just mark it off and I’ll see if Val and I can get over there after looking at it again,” Beth said.

“We have a plan?” Sera asked, glancing around. When no one protested, she said, “Then, Bjorn is on point with me. The rest in the usual line. Beth and Val will meet us later.”

They split up then, Beth walking to near the distorted spatial area with Val while the rest of the team headed for where the spatial distortion would have led based on the few notes they had recovered. Beth’s job was going to be the harder of the two, especially considering if the group got stuck, she would have to act as teleporter for them. The others did have teleport skills, but the tunnels required both a level of sensing of terrain and precision that most of them couldn’t achieve. Trying to Spatial Step randomly in the tunnels would mostly fail, and a few of the members of the group had trouble stepping to somewhere that they couldn’t see, so they needed her help to get to hard-to-reach places.

Beth and Val stopped at the edge of the block and surveyed the area, though Val just couldn’t detect what was different. It was fortunate that spatial anomalies like this didn’t really occur all that often, and were usually quite limited in scope. When they did occur, it would need someone like Beth to come in and figure out what was going on, and now she had to partially solve the thing to get Val close. Well, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration; she had to figure out how to get Val to not get confused right away, just enough that she could walk into the city block without just walking around the place. That was going to be an easier sell than trying to partially or fully solve the disturbance.

It took her a few minutes, but she managed to figure out how the place was messing with Val’s head after observing her try to walk into it twice and studying the spatial mana. After that, it was just a matter of creating a slight counter that let Val sort of pierce the veil, as it were, and walk through the area without getting turned around or shunted to the side. Having solved that problem, it was now time for them to approach the anomaly and get to work, though Val needed quite a while to adjust. Well, first she had to adjust to her sense of space being just a little weird, which Beth couldn’t do much about, as she had to adjust the space around Val somehow. Maybe if she were even better with spatial mana, she could make the effect undetectable, but she wasn’t quite that skill, certainly when it came to manipulate space it regards to others.

Once Val had her head on straight and was able to move about with hindrance, she approached the anomaly and started studying. Val was a bit more professional than Beth, who still relied on her senses much of the time to figure things out. The kresnik, on the other hand, had a bevy of tools she could use to scan things, looking for the runes and their linkages while noting down the general pattern and mama flows of a formation. A lot of it started going over Beth’s head as Val progressed, but the tall woman seemed happy and was jotting down all kinds of notes as she studied what the disturbance was doing and how it was changing mana around it.

Beth just stood by and watched, though she was observing the anomaly and pondering on how she could close it. There were two methods, really, and she wasn’t sure which she would use if push came to shove, but she had a few ideas. The first was to unravel what was keeping it active, which Val could provide a little insight on, and then try to genuinely unravel the thing. That would be pretty tedious and time-consuming, but it would be the safer path and likely generate a better experience for all involved. The other method, the one she would prefer, was to brute force it, using her spatial powers and her core powers to suppress and crush the anomaly until she was able to extinguish it.

“I’ve got it,” Val said after a couple hours. “Well, I’ve got what I fucking can out of this, considering the general formation wasn’t left intact, and the ancilliary formation is part of the damn anomaly itself. Not something that was intended, by the way, but the rube who set this shit up was a fucking moron and couldn’t get the two to work together correctly, and then everything went tits up.”

“Pass me the data,” Beth said, scanning the anomaly again as Val compiled her findings and then sent them to Beth’s communicator.

Scanning what Val had found, Beth was able to identify a few key runes, and a few mistakes that had likely led to this. Well, mistakes might be a bit harsh, but there were definitely things she would have done differently, including recommending different runes than what the man had used to create this mess. The general shape of it was about what she had expected, and the data explained the twisting in space, to a degree, and Val had even highlighted how the energy was flowing. With that, she had everything she needed to try to solve this problem, and then they could go to the others, who still hadn’t encountered a place that absolutely needed her help, though they had rerouted more than once to keep moving forward.

“Alright, I recommend standing back,” Beth said to Val.

“Why? For what?” Val asked, confused.

“I’m going to, what’s the saying? Blow this whole thing wide open?” Beth said, now grinning as she stared at the anomaly.

“You crazy bitch!” Val huffed, though there was no teeth to it.

The kresnik fled, though Beth was sure Val would come up with some PR speak about how she had ‘retreated gracefully while under duress’ or something equally trite, but that cleared the field for Beth to work. She had an idea of what she was going to do, and Val’s data let her combine her approaches. She was going to start by unraveling part of the tangled skein that the previous enchanter had made this thing into, straightening out some of the mana flows and getting things operating a bit more normally. She’d have to observe what that did for at least a few moments before moving on, but she suspected it would cause the field to expand a little.

If her observations aligned with her predictions, she was then going to fully undo the anomaly, but she would have to be a little…forceful in her methods. She wasn’t going to be able to shut it off, not like one just shut off a sink or the like, not with the original formation not persisting. She was going to have to do something more like twisting the faucet until no more water could flow into the sink, but that came with its own problems and potential pitfalls. Still, she was strong enough she could do it, and she could also survive if the entire thing blew up in her face, but that wouldn’t exactly be the most pleasant experience she had had in recent times.

Once Val was far enough away to not be in the blast radius, or the estimated blast radius, Beth got to work, starting by manipulating the area around the anomaly before gently grabbing little bits of the anomaly itself. It was a long, tedious process to correct the errant flows and get the thing more stable, and it did have the effect of expanding the radius of the warped area, but not by quite as much as she had feared. Besides, the only one close enough to be affected by the warped space was Val, and Beth had already shielded her from getting wrapped up in it, so she wasn’t worried. As long as she didn’t expand it to what the original size had been, or been intended to be, then she was fine.

The untangling was a bit of a slow process, but Beth finished it in just over an hour. That had been the easy part, however, and now that the anomaly was a little more stable, it was also more solid and harder to mess with. The hard part was next, which was grabbing the whole thing and twisting it with her spatial powers in a specific way, one that was going to be very difficult and demanding, but a way that should result in the anomaly disappearing. Beth was flying just a bit by the seat of her pants on this one, as the old saying went, and she would have loved to be more confident, but there was a certain irony in that she couldn’t really do it the ‘right’ way because she didn’t have the skills.

Mainly, Beth was a very proficient spatial mage, but she wasn’t an enchanter. There were some things she could do, or would be able to do in the future when her smithing was high enough, but she lacked the skill and flexibility that enchanters had with laying down complex groupings of runes in multiple layers. She had the right knowledge, essentially, but the wrong skill set for a job like this, which was a little amusing. However, she couldn’t really take the time to teach Val what she needed to know; the kresnik knew spatial runes as part of her toolkit, but they were complex and finicky and weren’t something she specialized in. Nor did Val have the required senses to work with the spatial mana easily, relying on tools and secondary formations to interact with it.

That left Beth to do a little brute force rearranging, and she studied the new, calmer anomaly for a minute before getting started, which also gave her a chance to hone her focus to a razor’s edge. This was going to be both very difficult from a pure force side of things, as well as a highly technical operation all rolled into one. She started out with full force right from the get-go; she wasn’t going all-out, using a hundred percent of her energy, but she was using all her powers. The crown settled on her head and the flames of her Ideal started to surround the space. Her Mana Physique only really came in in that it was able to help with her Ideal’s flames just a bit, but it was otherwise just something that made her sturdier.

She surrounded the entire anomaly with the flames of her Ideal before starting to twist the entire space, crushing the anomaly while also warping and twisting space around it. There was a sound like half of reality was being fed through a wood chipper, but Beth ignored it, only listening enough to adjust what she was doing slightly based on the auditory feedback. She was mostly focused on the space itself, the fabric of reality shifting and bouncing as she tried to do a combination of a repair job and a surgery at the same time. It wasn’t easy to grab the anomaly, and her initial idea of just snuffing it out had to be quickly adjusted as that proved practically impossible based on her current strength and understanding.

That led her to her plan B, which wasn’t something great to have to fall back on within the first ten seconds of making the attempt, but she was going to have to be a little more clever about this. She twisted the space in a certain way, making sure she wasn’t damaging anything else around, or at least, not excessively. Space was pretty durable and could heal from some level of damage relatively quickly, but she didn’t want to tear some portal into some strange sub dimension open while she was already contending with some weird spatial tomfoolery.

As she crushed the space, she twisted it and used a few runes, drawing them on the air with just her willpower. It was an intense operation, keeping everything sorted and not letting the anomaly fight free, which it seemed determined to do at every turn. She had to crush the anomaly, bend space in certain ways, and try to create a way to contain or dispel the formation as she went. She was going to try the first, containment, but she wasn’t sure that she would be able to bottle the thing up, or even what that would look like. Going for a solution that she wasn’t sure would work and didn’t have a good working idea of what it would look like when she got there wasn’t a great start, but she was, again, flying by the seat of her pants on this.

The anomaly wasn’t alive, certainly, but it did fight back, kicking at her as she tried to manipulate it with her Ideal and a series of runes. It was like a beast that had decided it wanted to wrestle, and she was doing her damnedest not to get grabbed by the thing or pinned down. It took agonizing minutes to stabilize the space around the anomaly, and she was already covered in sweat by the time she had managed to get a sort of rough containment around the thing. Now, however, came the hard part, and she had to redouble her focus and she twisted and pushed and crushed down on the anomaly itself, unraveling and breaking it apart as she managed the surrounding space to not create any worse problems.

There was a moment where she thought she lost it, and one of the buildings in the block just simply disappeared. Whatever strange sub-dimension that had fallen into, it was gone for good, but she had precious little time to worry about that now. Her attention was wholly consumed with getting the anomaly to stop and unwind, and there were a few more flares of power lashing out, with similar devastation, before she was able to finally, with much swearing and grunting, succeed in unraveling the core of the anomaly and crushing it down into a fine point. With a bang and a final twist of space, the anomaly disappeared with a final pop and there was nothing left but a crystal about the size of Beth’s fist, which was something she hadn’t expected, but it looked like she had gotten a little extra reward for her efforts.

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