Limitless Path Chapter Seven Hundred Seven (Patreon)

Allison Caldwell

Guarding the neighborhood that her cousins had grown up in and now their entire family lived in was a cushy gig, Allison had to say. After the world had changed when they, her sisters and her cousins, were just young teens, she had felt lost, like many had. The reforms that the families living in what was now the aptly named Woflsburg, though it didn’t account for the ants, had helped stabilize the place and made it super desirable to live in full time. What had been just a neighborhood of the nearby town was now its own small metropolis with over twenty thousand permanent or semi-permanent residents, thanks mostly to the expanded space that was applied to basically every building and part of the city, and had a rotating list of guests that could top over fifteen hundred at any one time.

The wealth that the now three nearby dungeons generated was also obscene, with two of them having scaling difficulty to allow for groups of different strength to challenge them. Not only was the small city able to pull out huge amounts of wealth from the dungeons, they were a highly prized spot for budding Wayfarers, so much so that there were often queues of up to a couple months to rent space in the hotels or the town for teams to stay. The town was wealthy enough now that they were discussing adding a teleportation hub, even though those were crazy expensive, but Allison had heard that there was a family member, even a member of one of the council families, that could help out in some way. Someone had told her the person in question knew about space magic or something like that, but that was supposed to be really rare and Allison was doubtful.

She and her husband had done well enough for themselves the last five or so years since they had gotten married and acquired their own apartment in the city. Michael was one of the best smiths in the area and a lot of the out-of-town adventurers and teams would come to him for work, so much so that he had two full-time assistants and two apprentices helping him in the shop now. On top of that, Allison was a sergeant in the town guard, which both paid well and gave her a number of privileges, mainly related to dungeon spots and leveling. She had managed to drag Michael through his first rebirth and pull him towards his second, and she had just finished her third and was leveling towards her fourth already. With every rebirth giving at least a few extra years of lifespan, and higher rebirths giving more, they would be happy and productive members of the city for many decades, if not several centuries or more. There was always that tantalizing whisper, though with the Outernet it wasn’t just some crazy rumor, of people that lived thousands of years or even forever. That wouldn’t be so bad, not if Allison could keep leveling and Michael could keep making money.

She was brought up out of her thoughts by one of the people up on top of the gate tower above her yelling at someone outside. She could hear the young man, a new recruit if she remembered the voice right, yelling in a bit of a nervous manner at someone outside the shut gates. She remembered what that used to be like, especially a few years ago, when people from other parts of the world and even other worlds showed up at all hours and it was nerve-wracking to see them and confront them. These days, it was so much different, and she had to roll her eyes a little at the nervous recruit trying to shout someone down that was just here to visit and likely run the dungeons a handful of times.

Still, they had a policy of closing the town up at night, though there were exceptions for letting people in and out, but that just made everything easier, and visitor quickly became used to the routine. A lot of people knew that they wouldn’t get a warm welcome if they rolled up to the gates at two in the morning, so they made plans for their dungeon runs to be back at certain times or to camp out and wait for the gates in the morning. By now, it wasn’t unusual for people to gather on both sides of the gate early in the day, with groups returning from being out for a few days and groups ready to go out and explore. Even so, Allison better go see what was going on before a fresh recruit caused some sort of interstellar incident, which would not be the first time, but they all got smoothed over in the end.

Allison stomped up the stairs of the tower from the room she had been using as an office. They had a guard barracks in the town now, a four-story building that they used as living quarters, training grounds, offices, and more, though she lived separate from that. It was a bit amusing to ponder, because she lived with her husband and worked in the towers or patrolled all the time, she was very rarely even in the guard’s building and often only went there to file or pick up new paperwork. The guard up top called back down that there was a stranger outside the gates, which made her roll her eyes even harder than earlier as she thought of all the paperwork still on her impromptu desk, her head clearing the floor of the top of the tower.

“Jones, this better be something good,” she said crossly, giving the recruit a glare.

Jones was young, just in his early twenties, which was especially young now that the world had changed and there were people who were literally a million years old running around. He had short-cropped brown hair and light brown eyes, almost a hazel color, and was a scrawny kid, though kid was being a bit unkind. That also didn’t matter with stats figured into the mix, considering a little slip of a thing could punch hard enough to shatter mountains and that she had personally seen a very short, petite elf take a hammer strike that could have split the atom and not even stagger from it. Anyway, Jones had a simple chain armor set that all new guard recruits got, with a long chain shirt, thick gauntlets, heavy leather pants with armoring in the thighs and knee, and heavy boots with armored tops and fronts. Each guard used their own preferred weapon, though they had a few trainers for sword and ax, which wound up being the preference, and Jones had an ax at his hip and a round shield on his back.

“There’s a strange woman outside the gate just studying it,” Jones said, a bit of nerves still coloring his voice as he pointed down at a woman standing outside the town.

“And how many times have we had individuals or parties come to enter town and arrive a bit early?” Allison asked crossly, giving Jones a dirty look. The woman wasn’t doing anything hostile, just studying the gates and the gate towers, which could maybe be interpreted as a slightly aggressive action, that is, if she could really see and understand all the runes and magic work. If she couldn’t, then she was just likely impressed with the edifice, which was way better than even what they’d had when Allison had first started as a guard a few years ago.

“Hold one, Traveler,” Allison called down to the black-haired woman, grinning a bit when Jones started as the woman looked up at them to reveal her silver eyes. “We open the gates in ten minutes.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” the woman said, before disappearing and reappearing standing next to Allison, which shouldn’t have been possible.

“Ah!” Jones exclaimed, fumbling to draw his ax as Allison sighed and rapped him on the side of the head with her knuckles. “Sarge! She’s attacking us!”

“Nobody is attacking anybody, you complete dolt,” Allison huffed angrily. Honestly, maybe Jones wasn’t really cut out for this work. “She got past the barrier and defensive magics, for one, which either means she has a token, which she’s holding in her right hand, by the way, or that she’s so unbelievably skilled and powerful that our barrier means nothing. Either way, this would be well above our pay grade, but considering she has an authorized token that she is currently presenting, then she’s just fine.”

“Sorry about the scare,” the woman said, though she wasn’t nervous or timid about it. Allison got the distinct impression that, while the woman was actually sorry about bothering the new recruit, she wasn’t truly bothered about it, nor was a little incident like that enough to throw her off her game. “Didn’t mean to cause trouble. Have my Emblem here, too, just so you know everything’s fine.”

The woman held out her left hand and a Gold Emblem appeared in it. Allison pulled out a little cube of metal, about and inch or so to a side, as she said to Jones, “Now, Jones, she already presented her token for the town, which is an older one, by the way, though that’s fine. I’m just going to check both; even if the token had something up with it, if the Gold Emblem comes back fine, then she’d be fine to process, we’d just send her to the city council to update the token.”

“Why would she be fine?” Jones asked, scratching his head, causing Allison to sigh slightly and roll her eyes. The woman, who she was now noticing was a bit taller than even Jones, gave her a bit of a commiserating look, which made her feel a bit better, though it also made her slightly annoyed, as well. Not at the woman, but at Jones causing them to be so far afield that she was getting sympathy from a visitor.

“She would be fine, Jones,” Allison said in more than a bit of a huff, “because the CRA is in good standing everywhere, at least on Earth, and they can come and go as they like. Also, if the Emblem comes back genuine, then there’s no issue. CRA Emblems, if you don’t remember from the two weeks of training you were supposed to have and to have retained, are linked in really complex ways with their holder. Somebody can’t steal one and use it to impersonate another person, and the detectors can pick up a mismatch between person and Emblem quite easily.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Jones said, nodding to himself as he watched the process. The little detector flashed green when she used it to scan both the token and Emblem, though the real result was fed to Allison’s communicator. That had not been a cheap buy, but even the basic communicator had proved worth it so many times over that she thought anyone with the money who didn’t get one was a right fool.

“Both are green, ma’am,” Allison said to the woman. While she didn’t have to show deference to someone from the CRA, anyone who had made it to at least Gold Emblem was someone to be reckoned with, and it wasn’t a great idea to get on their bad side.

“And the token’s working fine?” the woman asked.

“Still shows green for the detector, so you don’t need an update,” Allison replied quickly, throwing the detector back in her pocket. “That’s an older one, but they still work, and getting a new one right now would probably be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Yeah, I’m not feeling a bunch of paperwork right now,” the woman said before leaning over to look down at the main street behind the gate. “So, can I ask what’s going on? Why are there so many people lining up behind the gate? Is there a lockdown or something?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Allison quickly assured her, holding up a hand. “Seems like you haven’t been around in a bit. Was just thinking of this myself, but the long and short of it is that we lock the town up at night, both for safety and to manage population movement. We don’t keep exact track of where everyone is and what they’re doing, but we want more control of who’s where and who comes in and out. People have gotten used to that, and anyone that wants to go hit the dungeons or the kobold area gets lined up in the morning.”

“Oh, the kobolds are still down there?” the woman asked, though in a little bit of an absent-minded manner. “Man, I remember going down there and killing those bastards before I even did my first rebirth. That was some fun, though I grew out of the place pretty quickly.”

“Don’t want to try that today, ma’am,” Allison said. When the woman gave her a confused look, Allison continued, “I mean, wouldn’t want to go down to the kobold area without having done any rebirths. The place has likely grown a lot since you were last down there, and I mean both level and size. There’s miles and miles of tunnels down there, and a lot of it is interconnected in weird ways. On top of that, the kobolds and other beasts can get into the upper two hundreds by the time you get down to the deepest part, or so I’m told. I haven’t led a team down there in a while, and the last time was a training run for some of the guards that stopped just within the tunnels.”

“Hmm, maybe I’ll have to go check it out myself. Could be something interesting down there,” the woman said, nodding. “Well, anyone, sergeant, I’ve kept you long enough. I’ll go check if my parents are hanging around and then be out of your hair.”

“No reason to rush, ma’am. Not any kind of hard limit on who can be here or not and you’re clearly familiar, so take your time,” Allison said, nodding. Just then, there was a rumbling that caused them all to look down before the gate started to swing open. “Looks like it’s hit that time of the morning already.”

“I’ll leave you to your work,” the woman said with a small grin and then just suddenly disappeared.

“How’d she do that?” Jones asked, looking a bit perplexed still.

“Jones, she has a teleport skill. This shit isn’t that hard,” Allison grunted, rolling her eyes as she stomped back down towards her desk. She knew she needed to file that a CRA member had come into town, even if it was some kind of personal visit, and she would need to make sure that nothing went wrong this morning with the gate before she was off shift right after lunch. Maybe she could even track the woman down and pick her brain a little about what being a CRA member was like; Allison had thought of pursuing that path after her stint in the guard was done.

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