Limitless Path Chapter Seven Hundred Twelve (Patreon)

Elizabeth Bell

“Well, I’d love to stand around and chat, but I’ve got stuff to take care of today, so you guys take care,” Beth said, giving the group a nod before disappearing. She didn’t see the reaction to that, but several people with skill to observe in a broad area were rather surprised that they couldn’t detect her after her teleport.

Beth, meanwhile, had teleported back to her neighborhood, easily able to bypass the defenses thanks to the token; not that she couldn’t have brute-forced it, but there was no reason to do so, and it would have taken her time and effort. She popped up on a random street, glancing around before taking a step and appearing in the city hall building, taking another step and appearing in the council offices. There were plenty of people around, including in the offices, but she ignored them to step over to her parents and let them know about the situation up north and that it was fully handled. She didn’t dawdle, either, and took a step after saying goodbye, appearing in the CRA Hall by the teleporters.

Normally, someone should have come down and checked who was in the room and what was happening, but she didn’t use the teleporters to get there, and her Ideal was strong enough and high enough level that she went unnoticed slipping in. That would not have been the case had she not been an Emblem-holder, but with her Emblem, she didn’t trip any alarms appearing directly in the room. She used the teleporter to start chaining teleports, moving between Halls until she had to switch to a different system for one hop. It was only one more hop after that on the CRA network until she was back at Zephyr Prime, finding the house was still largely empty.

She had some time on her hands until people would be free, but she didn’t have all that much to do. She couldn’t really level, as she was waiting for people to come back to rebirth, and she didn’t really feel like grinding her skills after having pushed everything so hard recently. That left only one or two options, those mainly being smithing or relaxing, and given those choices, she spent some time in the forge. She had just hit Grandmaster, given the help of Old Tom, and that felt like a big achievement, but it felt like she hadn’t really done anything with it afterwards. She was busy, of course, and had many things to take care of, but Grandmasters were basically the premier crafters in the Milky Way. Sure, there were people who were better, even much better, but they were few and far between. Quite a lot of people would never even contract the services of a Grandmaster, even if they might acquire a piece made by a Grandmaster or at the same level through one of a number of other means.

Beth wasn’t quite sure she was good enough to make things for sale right now, though that was more just her confidence being a bit low after having just achieved her new level of mastery without really stretching and flexing it much. She knew what she made was a lot better than most of the gear she had used for years while leveling, though she hadn’t created anything truly fantastic. Then again, based on the kind of gear she was wearing and using, her standards were pretty high, so hoping to create a level five hundred relic or something as a Grandmaster, and a fresh Grandmaster at that, might have been just a touch unrealistic. She did hammer out a few dozen pieces over the next couple objective weeks, making use of her gate set on the residence to work for a couple months on master the finer points of her new skill level. While she did literally hammer out many pieces, she did also practice with the way that most other would eventually achieve Sage, despite Old Tom insisting not to ‘lose the original feel of the craft.’

Her time was interrupted when Sera returned, having spent a few objective months seeing to dragon clan business, which was tedious but necessary. As much as she did whatever she wanted, she was still being positioned to inherit the clan eventually, so she did need a good grasp of running it. Beth secretly thought Sera was probably going to just foist the duty off on somebody else, but getting a good understanding of the function of everything first would let her review what was happening and not have the wool pulled over her eyes. If Sera also continued leveling right alongside her, then it would also be nothing but a fool that would try to pull anything with the clans reputation or finances, as the clan head being by far the strongest member would set a certain precedent.

The others trickled back in over the next few weeks, none of them with anything strange or urgent to report, and the team enjoyed a bit of downtime considering they had all been busy with actual work. Well, other than Andrea, though she partied hard enough that it just might be counted as work if one squinted enough at the problem. Not that the woman needed any more encouragement, but that was a discussion for a different time, and it wasn’t something that Beth cared to bring up as long as Andrea wasn’t putting everyone’s secrets out in the open or failing to live up to expectations when they were working. Since none of that happened, Beth just dismissed it from her mind, for the most part.

Everyone being back together let them get a quick rebirth done, the nineteenth and last of the Enlightened levels. Again, not a record by any means, especially with them having been a bit more lax recently, but they were still making great progress and well ahead of many of their peers and even those of older generations. None of them were a hundred years old yet, not even close, really, and some of them, like Neph, were still not even thirty, which really did make their progress remarkable. Even Sera, who was technically the oldest of the group, was on an amazing fast track, considering she was a dragon. With their naturally very long lifespans, dragons didn’t feel the need or urgency to rush through rebirths quite as much as many other species did, so to be sitting on the cusp of Ascendancy at less than seventy years old was a big accomplishment.

The first task after that was leveling, which was becoming something of a breeze, at least at first. Getting a couple hundred levels now took only a day or two, and that was subjective time, not objective time with the gate speeding them up to a few weeks of time. Getting to level five hundred only took about three months, subjective time, which only ran about ten days objective time, and that was mostly because they were able to refresh Beth’s gate and get much higher level beasts much closer to the gate several times as they were leveling. Her gate wasn’t nearly as much of what might be thought of as a cheat now, not with them having access to dungeons that had time compression or dilation and plenty powerful beasts within, but it was still very handy.

That meant the group was really getting close to the next objective, which was the Eternal Depths, but there were complications and other things taking priority, because of course there were. One of them was something that Beth had been thinking about anyway and had just been talking with people about, and that was their progress to Platinum Emblems. There were a couple new missions available and their contacts had wanted them to take the two that were open, but Beth had pushed back a bit. She didn’t want them to get uneven with the number completed, but Sera managed to convince her that was a bit silly. With the demand currently for Platinum missions, they would be real fools not to jump on them as soon as they were available and snap them up, so they took the two that were currently open. Bjorn and Kris took them, meaning they not just got them assigned but quickly went off to complete them. Beth would have been worried, but it was at the point where Platinum missions just weren’t that much of a challenge for the team, and even having only two people working on them wouldn’t be a big problem.

That had started a cascade, as things popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain after that. Mortaine sent her a message that he needed three people to help with a specific dungeon instance, which sounded intriguing based on how he worded it, but Beth wasn’t going to be able to go to that. She sent Blood, Val, and Adam to take care of it because she had gotten a personal visit from her mentor at the same time, almost like the Exalted were planning this shit, and Baelvyr need her and just her for an assignment. That also had her intrigued, but she was going to find out the details after they were on the move, which Baelvyr insisted on as operational security but she thought might have been just to fuck with her a little. That meant Sera, Neph, and Andrea were at loose ends, but they all had multiple things to work on, between crafting and training and leveling, so Beth wasn’t worried.

The only thing that had her in a bit of a grumpy mood was she wanted more time with her wife, but they got to spend plenty of night together during this little stint, so it wasn’t as big a deal as it otherwise might have been. If Beth had wanted to dig her heels in, she might have insisted Sera come along with Baelvyr, but that would have been a huge headache to fight through just for their comfort for a week or two, though Sera’s comfort was important to her. She could go without being close herself for a while, which was maybe a bit of her battle maniac poking through, but she definitely didn’t want Sera to feel neglected or left out. The dragon insisted that wasn’t the case at all, and Beth being perfectly fine with the dragon have a wandering eye also really helped with that, but she didn’t want them to grow distant at all.

That was something to keep working on going forward, however, as Baelvyr hadn’t explained anything other than he needed her help and had simply brought her to the CRA Hall. It wasn’t a piece of CRA business, however, as they were just borrowing the teleporter network to get near where they were going, though Baelvyr cut through the bullshit; he was wealthy enough, and high enough in the CRA, that he didn’t bother jumping all around when he had important business on the move. He went directly to Arbitus and then directly to the best destination from there, not caring about the expense or anything else. From there, the two of them had four jumps off the CRA network, which was always a pain in the ass, as it wasn’t always nearly as easy as just flashing an Emblem and paying a small fee to use other teleporters. There was even a pair of guard, both fresh Enlightened, or at least just at rebirth ten, that tried to stall and harass them.

Beth didn’t think the two men were being malicious, not in the main, and not even that they had been hired by someone that was out to get either of them. Honestly, she just thought the two of them were kind of fucking stupid, considering it took them a little to realize exactly who Baelvyr was; Beth didn’t even mean that in the sense of who he was in terms of his legendary reputation. No, it took them two minutes just to realize they were fucking around with an Exalted, having only done a cursory exam of Beth, for some reason, before they started hassling the two of them. After they realized they were fucking around not with just a more experience and leveled set of Enlightened, but an Exalted, their tune did a near-180 real fucking quick and Beth and Baelvyr were on their way in just a few seconds.

“I hate bureaucratic pricks like that,” Beth muttered as they finished their teleports.

“Just gotta learn to shrug it off,” Baelvyr said, to which Beth rolled her eyes.

“I’ll roll their damn heads off next time,” she grunted. “Anyway, what’s this super important business? Can I finally know why you needed me and just me?”

“Ya been keepin’ up with yer duelin’, girlie?” he asked in response, which didn’t really give her all that much of a hint.

“I mean, I’ve been fighting a lot. You know me,” Beth replied, shaking her head a bit out of exasperation.

“But how much against other people, girlie?” Baelvyr pressed.

“None,” Beth shot back before holding up a hand. “I’ve fought against simulations of people quite a lot, especially considering where I just was a short while ago, but I haven’t been in the arenas in, like, nearly two years or something. I just haven’t put it as a big priority. So if you’re asking about the arena specifically, my record isn’t anything special right now. If you’re asking just about how good I am at fighting other people? We can talk about that in more detail, then, since I do have a lot of experience.”

“Huh. I guess it’ll have to do, for now,” he said, starting to lead the way away from where they were. “Ya got yer ship on ya or something? We got to move to a different planet here and there ain’t any teleporters.”

“Send me the details,” Beth said in response. He sent her a small packet on the communicator and she opened it to find a layout of the system they were in and where they had to go marked out. “Should be no problem. Don’t resist when I pull on you.”

“Well, if ya think ya can bring me along for whatever yer doin’,” he said a bit dubiously.

“I think I can try and if you’re too damn big, then you can just walk there yourself,” Beth replied before lighting up in white fire, cutting off any response he could have made to the quip.

She grabbed Baelvyr metaphysically, attaching her mana to him and finding that he was, in terms of mana and power, quite heavy. She still wasn’t going to be pushed beyond her limits, at least, she didn’t think so, as he wasn’t actively resisting her powers or skills. She took them both and wrapped them in her Ideal before chucking them across the solar system, arriving just a couple miles from their destination.

“We ain’t that close. That all ya can do, girlie?” he said.

“No. In fact, I could have landed us exactly there to the inch, but you refuse to explain what’s happening, so I’d rather be safe than sorry,” she replied.

“Well, guess I can tell ya what’s happenin’ while we walk over,” Baelvyr grunted, leading the way across the frozen plain they’d found themselves on.

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