Limitless Path

"Looks like that's it," Beth said, sticking her head in the cleft they had made and shining her lightstone around.

"I'll go back to scouting," Blood said with a nod.

"You seem to be getting a bit better at it," Beth said, straightening up and making the lightstone disappear.

"I got Stealth," Blood replied with a shrug before trotting off.

"Hmm, interesting," Beth muttered, waiting a few moments before following along behind her companion.

She trailed behind Blood for a short while before the lupine woman sent her a mental communication that she had encountered a beast. It was the way they had handled pretty much every fight, not just here, but during their journeys whenever Blood was acting as scout. If she got in trouble, or just spotted something dangerous, she would send an instant and silent communication to Beth to join up with her.

The danger this time was something they had a bit of experience with before, however, not in handling them when they were over level two hundred. It was a cave troll, nothing really special in its description or the mana that infused its body, but trolls were tough, with great defense and high regeneration. At least, they had high regeneration compared to other beasts in the same level bracket, but nothing that was truly shocking. This one did present as if it was influenced by stone and earth, with what Beth could barely make out of its hide appearing rocky and heavily hardened.

"Level two-ten," Blood muttered, the sound attracting the beast's attention, but not enough for it to fully detect them. It's blocky head swiveled their direction and it growled, low and menacing, as it twisted its body and started slowly shuffling in their direction.

"Nothing we haven't dealt with before," Beth said in return, the beast clearly hearing her this time. It let out a scream that, while not loud, made the stone in the rough tunnel twist and groan. "Guess that's one reason why these tunnels are all torn up."

"Less chatting, more killing," Blood grumbled, launching herself forward in a red and black blur.

The fight wasn't anything too special, but the troll did possess the ability to regenerate even faster than normal thanks to the surrounding dirt and stone. It was an ability similar to the elementals they had been fighting for a few hours, drawing on the rock deep in the earth and the rock mana to revitalize itself. The regeneration was only a problem in that it drew out the fight, not in that it posed some kind of danger. If Beth and Blood were much weaker, or if it were some other team fighting the beast, maybe the team would run out of mana and stamina before the beast was dead, at very best having to burn through potions to keep going.

That problem was something the two girls had yet to worry about, as only mana management was really an issue, and that only for multiple tough fights where they didn't have a chance to rest in-between. There wasn't really a concern with the troll, as they could easily overwhelm even its strong regeneration, tearing it apart faster than it could regenerate. Despite the rock-like appearance and composition of its skin, it was still a flesh and blood creature, and boy, was there an awful lot of blood. Beth eventually had the damned thing pinned against a wall, partially embedded in the rock as she beat it into a gristly pulp.

"I don't think shoving its head in the wall is making this any easier," Blood commented from the side, the backs of her hands pressed against her hips and a frown on her face.

"Little busy," Beth grunted back, taking an elbow to the stomach as the troll continued to flail.

"I'm just saying, I think you're helping it regenerate," Blood said with a shrug.

"And you're not helping. At all," Beth growled, charging her entire right arm with Crush and vaporizing the object of their debate, the troll's head, and pulverizing a three feet section of stone around it.

"You had it," Blood said with a shrug before starting to tear apart the remains of the troll, looking for its beast core. Beth just stepped back, grumbling as she tried to wash her arm off with her canteen before getting frustrated and taking a long pull, throwing the object back in her necklace afterwards.

Once Blood had cleaned up, or at least cleaned up the kill, she moved back out front and continued charting the path. Again, she wasn't some kind of caving or exploration expert, but merely was following her nose in finding anything that smelled unusual, which mainly led them to new beasts. Of course, if she saw anything that looked odd or out of place or different, she would follow that lead until they discovered what it was. She didn't find anything strange for quite a while, just more trolls, which were still just as much of a boring pain to deal with as the first. All of them were over level two hundred, though thankfully not by much, and it took a huge amount of time to go through them one-by-one, wearing them down slowly until Beth could perform a finishing blow.

Eventually, after many trolls and a moderate rest period to recover, Blood's nose led them to a giant cavern deep beneath the earth. Beth didn't want to shine a light through it and alert every beast, and possibly monster, present to the fact that they had entered, but she couldn't see the end of the cavern with just her heat vision, which had quite a range to it. There were obstructions throughout, stalagmites and rock outcroppings that blocked lines of sight, but she still estimated the cavern to extend over a mile. The height wasn't consistent, either, with the ceiling dropping low enough at some places that Beth would have to crouch to shuffle through the gap, which made estimating the size even more difficult.

Stalagmites and narrow gaps weren't all that were present, however, as there were plenty of beasts wondering the giant cavern. "Water," Blood said by way of explanation. "I could smell it very faintly from that last tunnel, but I'm now getting a strong scent of standing water in here. Things are likely drinking from a pool in here, and other things are eating those things."

"Let's look around, but carefully," Beth said. "We're in rather deep at this point, and this is just the kind of area that a strong beast or group of beasts would take over as their territory. And I mean strong by our standards."

"I know how to be careful," Blood replied, slipping off between the rocky outcroppings to see what she could find.

Beth moved into the cavern herself, though much slower than Blood, walking between the cracked and jagged escarpments at a slow and steady pace. She had her greatsword in hand and her head on a swivel, keeping alert for the beasts she knew where lurking about. She needn't have bothered, though, as Blood encountered a group of weird troglodytes that bore some similarities to kobolds, though they were bigger and…scalier? They lacked almost all hair, and had scaled sections on their heads, limbs, and especially torsos, though the scales were rough and jagged, and there were noticeable gaps in their coverage. Blood contacted Beth as soon as she detected the beasts, and a good thing, as the troglodytes jumped her only a moment later.

While the beasts were a bit over level two hundred, they weren't enough to prove a serious danger to Blood, even with a large group of them versus just the wolf. She was able to easily keep many of them at a distance with her energy claws, and those few that did get close met the business end of her soulbound claws very quickly. Unlike the elementals or even trolls, the troglodytes' scales weren't particularly tough, and didn't present full coverage, so Blood was able to savage the beasts with both kinds of claw attacks without having to slowly break through the skin or outer flesh.

Beth joined in the battle after only a few moments, assisting Blood in slaughtering the group of beasts down to the last. Unfortunately, things weren't going to be that simple, something that they had encountered a bit in the past coming into play. Beasts, particularly as their levels increased, and despite still generally being fairly dull of wit, had greatly heightened senses. They even possessed the ability to detect mana or mana fluctuations nearby, starting at about level two hundred. Beasts in the two hundreds could detect mana, or the bursts of mana brought about by skill use in combat, from a few hundred feet away, and such beasts could have senses that were far sharper.

All of that to say, their battle was rather noisy, echoing through the large cavern, which attracted a swarm of the troglodytes. They piled on the girls by the dozens, sprinting from every corner of the cave to try to rend them to bits and get at their tasty meat. It turned what had been a very small skirmish into a massive battle, with several hundred of the beasts swarming across the cavern, at the very minimum. Beth estimated, by the time they had been fighting for close to ten minutes, that they had already killed around a hundred, and maybe three times that number were now swarming them. They had to move locations several times as the bodies were piling up too high underfoot and leading to a problem in hindering their movement, something that was more detrimental for the girls versus the beasts.

Bad news for the beasts, on the other hand, was they had encountered the two people, maybe the only two on the entire planet at that point, that were highly experienced in battling hordes. Beth and Blood had cut their teeth on beast tides and, compared to fighting for thirty hours straight against fifty thousand or more enemies, fighting for less than an hour against six or seven hundred beasts was nothing. It was only a little annoying in that they weren't getting any experience at all, seeing as how they were at their current level cap, though the harvest of beast cores and materials would be a nice bonus. A harvest that would take the two of them a couple hours, so more time spent, but time spent making money never really felt like a waste to Beth.

The bigger problem, as they discovered into their efforts to harvest all the bodies after the fight, was that much more serious trouble might be attracted by the sound of battle. This hadn't been something that they had had to deal with too much up to this point, as they had often been some of the most serious trouble on Earth, but now that they were on an old, high mana world, there were…things, lurking in the dark, things that weren't to be messed with. Especially if one was talking about that endless, inky blackness deep below the mountains, where old beasts forgotten by the light made their dens.

One such beast had noticed their fighting, or been attracted by such a tempting pile of steaming, bloody meat that they had turned the troglodytes into. Beth was first made aware that something was wrong when a growl echoed through the cavern, deep enough that it set her teeth vibrating and with enough force behind it that loose stones on the ground jumped and bounced back and forth. Blood had sensed it at almost the same time as the growl, immediately stopping her harvesting and closing ranks with Beth, the two looking towards the source of the noise. The growl repeated again as they moved back a bit, getting to clear ground that wasn't full of corpses and coated in blood and guts.

"Bad position," Blood said.

"We can make it clear," Beth replied.

"No, we're heading away from the entrance," Blood said.

"Oh, shit, you're right," Beth cursed, checking the mapping function on her communicator.

"Let's see what we're up against first," Blood said.

The two got clear of the bodies and moved through a small, clear section of the cavern before slipping in between some jagged rock formations. That would hopefully give them a slight edge, as Beth was more thinking about the beast being too big to maneuver in the broken up terrain versus having an advantage by claiming the open space. It wasn't a bad strategy, and was particularly good this time, as the beast that emerged into the cleared area a minute later was way out of their league. It stood on six massive legs, each nearly two feet thick and close to a dozen feet long, though the way they were bent meant the beast's body still hung low to the ground. That body was the size of a bus, covered in thick scales the size of dinner plates, with heavy, knobby spikes sticking out from its spine, joints, and even random parts of its back and sides. Its head was a massive wedge of scale and bone, with a maw the size of a small dumpster containing multiple rows of dagger-like teeth. Beth would've loved to fight the massive brute, if she hadn't used her eye powers to Identify it as soon as it was in the open.

Level 350 Ancient Depths Devourer

A hundred and thirty levels on them, including three major jumps in power at two-fifty, three hundred, and three-fifty was an absolute no go. It would genuinely be such a massive difference that it would be like an unenhanced person trying to fight a T-Rex. Beth and Blood needed no other prodding and quickly retreated, moving back through the cavern at a rapid pace. The beast pursued them for a bit, slowly crashing through stalagmites and rocky outcroppings, but it gave up after a few minutes, just long enough to drive them to the far end of the cavern. The temptation of a massive pile of corpses, many of them still containing their cores, was obviously far too good to give up to chase something that only registered as potential prey.

This did, however, force Beth and Blood into an unfamiliar tunnel, leaving the level three-fifty at their backs, cutting off the only way they knew to return to the surface. They resumed their movement the same as before with Blood scouting and Beth following behind, though going a bit slower now that they understood more of the dangers. It was going to take them a long time to find a different way out, even if that was all they were looking for, but they weren't quite there yet. One chunk of amethyst wasn't enough to sate Beth's desire, especially considering that wasn't what they were there looking for originally, and they were determined to continue on. The path they were following led deeper and deeper into the underground, heading down far deeper into the pitiless depths, where no light ever reached.