Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Ninety (Patreon)

Before anyone could speak or even react, Abigail floated through the air to hover in the middle of the auction house venue, saying, “This place has really gone downhill over the years, hasn’t it?”

Her tone, while soft, carried both a cutting edge and a great deal of sarcasm, slicing those present, even just metaphorically. It was hard for anyone but a few on the third floor to respond at this point, given the amount and weight of power being casually thrown around; it was all most could do to even remain conscious. Considering the auction venue, given the fact that even most on the first floor were Enlightened with quite a bit of power, that was already saying something. Abigail’s voice, demeanor, and surging power certainly didn’t do anything to make the situation any better.

“Amusing, that you think even this can get you anything,” the voice resounded, though now one of the front faces of one of the far private boxes unfolded and an old man walked out. He was short and swarthy, with thick limbs and a barrel chest, and his hair was pure white and trimmed short. It was clear he was a fighter and also clear he had been the one who had been the source of the pressure as he stood in the air, glaring down at Beth.

For her part, Beth slowly turned to glare back up at him, as did the Empyreans, and the combined weight of their power was more than the man had bargained far, based on how he faltered and swayed just a bit. It wasn’t enough to really throw him off, of course, but he had been expecting to steamroll, perhaps not realizing that Beth’s group was both a group of empyreans, far stronger than other Ascended, and had all started to touch upon their Ideals. Even for an experienced Exalted like him, there would be no steamrolling this group and moving on like nothing had happened.

“Why don’t we see which of us is stronger?” Beth asked coldly, power swirling around her, further crushing the surrounding area. Her fire burned white, blinding the eye, her presence a weight that crushed one into the floor with no compromise, the edge of it threatening total annihilation.

Even the old fellow seemed rather surprised by the weight and power she displayed, doubly so considering she was just some measly little Enlightened that hadn’t even made it to Ascended yet, despite having already fully realized her Ideal. Beth was fully prepared to go after the man, regardless of the consequences, though they were still feeling each other out and making their positions clear, partially because there were a lot of bystanders around, though she didn’t think he really cared. More, it was because there were many other Exalted present, many of whom were watching curiously, but there was no doubt they could become involved at a moment’s notice, which the one or more there on behalf of the auction house would very likely do.

“You really won’t accept your place and back down for this old man?” the old fellow asked, a very slight note of surprise in his voice even as he flexed his power and continued trying to smash Beth’s group flat.

“You won’t just roll over and die like a good old bastard for this young lady, will you?” Beth responded sarcastically, making her own position abundantly clear, causing some laughter to echo from other third floor boxes.

The laughter clearly did nothing good for the old fellow’s already abysmal mood, and he clearly made ready to do something about it. Beth was certainly not confident in winning, but she had plenty of cards to play, not ready to just roll over and play dead because some old asshole thought she should. She had contact, connections, tokens, I-owe-yous, and more that she could burn to make this into a far bigger, and far more important conflict, than she thought the old man might be ready for. Even with that, it was going to be tough just living through this; she just wasn’t ready to fight a true Exalted yet, and despite having all the empyreans on her side, she knew this was a losing proposition. Still, she wasn’t going to back down, and redoubled her own efforts while getting ready to start calling in favors.

“Don’t even think about it, ingrate,” the old man said, lashing out with his power all around them, disturbing the mana enough that it would interfere with most communication. A rather handy trick, though Beth was wishing her opponent wasn’t quite so skilled and adaptable at this moment.

“How about I think about it?” a new voice joined the rumble right as several of the empyreans had readied to launch attacks.

As soon as Beth heard the voice, tension eased out of her shoulders, though she didn’t relax, not in the slightest. Just because she now had some appropriate backup didn’t mean the old bastard wouldn’t take full advantage of even a single moment of inattention to do her in. She was even more worried about that now, to be honest, than about an open confrontation with him, though she was watching the stage out of the corner of her eye, where the auction house’s security had finally deigned to appear. Another random variable they would have to keep their eye on, depending on how things developed.

A second booth unfolded, not unprecedented for this auction house, but something that many in attendance had never seen, never even heard about, and someone walked out into the air. That people at this level could fly or manipulate the environment around them wasn’t a surprise, but the airspace was started to get crowded pretty fast, doubly so because of who it was that had stepped out. Standing over eight feet tall, with his dusky red and brown skin, bald head gleaming in the light, was Baelvyr. Beth had had no idea he was even on the world, let alone that he was here, at this auction house, but it looked like she wasn’t going to have to call in quite so many favors. In fact, knowing what she knew about her mentor, how he had built himself up to be one of the strongest in the galaxy by wading through an ocean of blood and death, she would not give the random old bastard that had challenged her very good odds. Not unless he was hiding that he was a Manumitted, but the color starting to drain from his face gave a pretty good impression that that wasn’t going to be an ace he pulled out of his sleeve.

“Baelvyr…” the old fellow said, hesitating after saying his name before finding his confidence again. “What makes you think you can interfere in this business? Is the deed too tempting for you as well? I should have known a blunt instrument like you wouldn’t be able to come up with anything properly subtle.”

“Maximus,” Baelvyr rumbled, letting the name roll of his tongue in a manner that left no wiggle room in interpreting his feelings. “I been wantin’ to do this a long fuckin’ time.”

So saying, having basically ignored everything Maximus had just spewed, Baelvyr let his armor unfold, the massive set of adamantine wrapping around him as a hammer the size of a small truck appeared in one hand. There had been some whispering when Baelvyr had stepped out from the first two floors, but now the exclamations of “The adamantine colossus!” and “The Battlemaster!” started growing in volume. His armor was so iconic that many recognized him from that alone, or perhaps solely because of that, and there was a decided shift in the atmosphere, one that even carried up the other third floor booths. It was one thing to hear about someone and understand, on an intellectual level, their strength and power, it was another to have the person front-and-center, ready to smash everything surrounding one into dust and ash.

“Gentlemen, perhaps we-“ started the head of the auction house security, but Baelvyr interrupted him.

“Ain’t no gentlemen here,” he growled. “And, ‘sides, we ain’t gonna smash up yer precious house. I been waitin’ a long fuckin’ time for this, and I ain’t lettin’ anybody get in the middle of a good beatin’. Not one so justly deservin’, anyway.”

So saying, Baelvyr reached out, his grasp enveloping Maximus even from across the room, a display of nothing but raw, brutal power, seizing the man despite his best attempts to resist and tearing him out of the auction house, ripping apart space to drag both of them outside. There wasn’t any delaying after that, a distant booming sound and the sound of something solid, perhaps about the size of a squat, barrel-chested old man, impacting something very solid ringing out. It was impressive how easy it was to follow the fight just by hearing the exchange of blows, though calling it an exchange was a little one-sided, if Beth’s read on it were in any way accurate. It sounded a lot more like a thorough, complete, and absolute hell of a beating, and Beth didn’t think it was Baelvyr getting beat on.

That was proved after only a couple minutes, minutes in which the the whole auction venue listened, many of them trying to get some view of the outside to witness what was happening, even going so far as to move to other parts of the building to look out the windows. Beth didn’t need to go anywhere, just following the action with her spatial sense and Ideal, able to very clearly detect every time Baelvyr smashed that hammer, weighing as much as a small planet, into Maximus, and every time Maximus tried to block or defend, all of it pointless. Baelvyr wasn’t holding back, either, not from what Beth could tell, though she didn’t think he was going at his absolute maximum strength, mainly because a large section of the City of Mended Dreams wasn’t a crater.

The beating continued for a while until Baelvyr got it out of his system, and he had clearly done a lot of damage to Maximus. At their level, just getting smacked around wasn’t all that big of a deal, and Maximus could have weathered the pain and humiliation fine, but Baelvyr wasn’t just giving him a good thump. He was clearly using more than just the basic hammer and his weapon skill to pummel the man, and Beth was pretty sure she knew what he was up to. She hadn’t encountered much, if at all, herself so far in her travels, but she did know it was possible to damage someone’s Mana Physique, the same way it was possible to do severe damage to their body. Damage to a Mana Physique was slow to heal and required tons of time, effort, pain, and resources to do right. Sacrificing any one of them, resources for instance, meant the others went up in equal measure. Aids weren’t necessary to heal what Baelvyr was currently doing to the man, but without them, the time, effort, and pain were going to be a lot greater. She was also pretty sure Baelvyr was doing more than just mashing the man’s Mana Physique, but she would ask about that at a later time.

When the ogre was satisfied his message had both been sent and very clearly received, he returned to the auction house, the absence of the man he had just given a beating to rather noticeable. Baelvyr looked down at the security team and something clearly passed between them, though none of them spoke out loud, and the head of the team, an Exalted himself, bowed his head before the guards disappeared back into the woodwork. Baelvyr gave Beth a nod, but just more as a measure of assurance, she was sure, before he returned to his booth. Before it sealed up, Beth could see there were two other people inside, one of them Tazeen, which meant anyone who picked a fight was so fucked they couldn’t even comprehend it, and the other was a woman Beth didn’t recognize, but one that was clearly extremely powerful.

After the booth sealed up, the auction house resumed, though there was a more subdued tone on the first few bids on the deed. That didn’t last very long at all, as the buzz of excitement from the fight was still percolating through the crowd and that quickly got them fired up. Beth was sure she was going to have a lot to discuss with a lot of people after the last few items had gone through the process, but she didn’t much care. She hadn’t been the aggressor there, technically, and it was clear she had at least one person with a very big fist, or hammer, in this case, on her side. She was not expecting negative repercussions from the incident, though she was expecting some very interesting talks, not least of which with Baelvyr himself. Were he and his team finally done with whatever the hell they had been messing with for the last few years? Beth wasn’t sure, but she was going to try to wrangle some answers out of him, one way or the other.

For now, she returned to the bidding, not wanting all that effort to go to waste. It wasn’t lost on her, or others, that her biggest competition had just been, quite literally, knocked out of the running, and no one else was at all eager to jump in to fill in the gap. There had been one other that was bidding against them, and that person threw out a token bid, or two token bids, before they gracefully bowed out, likely imagining Baelvyr’s hammer rearranging their face in a similar manner to what had just happened. Beth wasn’t going to look a gift horse, or a gift ogre with a big hammer, in the mouth, winning the deed to the manse by spending a stupendous one black ruby and seventy adamantine. Even with that much expenditure, the team still had more than a black ruby between them, meaning they at least had the right to participate in the final few items of the auction. Now, winning any of those items was a different story, and Beth wasn’t even sure if the team would really want any of them, but they had at least accomplished their goals in coming here today, despite Beth making a bit of a show of herself.

The next item two items weren’t the secret two items yet, but were still finale items, though Beth was right that she didn’t have any interest in either of them. One was a token of a kind she had gotten her hands on before, almost the same thing as she had used to meet Old Tom and his group, though it was a different token. The person that owed a favor for the token was, apparently, even more impressive than Old Tom and his group, so the bidding was plenty fierce. There were people who didn’t even get involved in crafting or just had no head for it who would pay extravagant sums to have a person of unimaginable skill create even a single piece for them. The token was more fiercely contested, in fact, than the other lot, which was a entire suit of armor, all of a set an clearly intended for a powerful Ascended to wear. The suit was pretty tempting, but it was already made and set; compared to having someone make one a custom piece, even just a single item, something that had already been crafted wasn’t in quite as much demand.

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