Limitless Path

Blood proved invaluable here, though not directly for hunting minerals, as it was her nose that was extremely helpful, and she couldn't really smell minerals from very far away. What she could smell, however, was the scent of new and different beasts, a scent that led them to a cave opening around the side of the mountain they were currently roaming over. The rough opening was a jagged gash ripped into the side of the mountain, a scar filled in with boulders and scrap, hidden under a long ledge from which gnarled vines hung like spindly old weeds. Blood couldn't really tell what she smelled, as her internal 'database' of smells wasn't yet very robust, but it was much different than the hordes of land shrimp, scaled wolves, and other weird fauna they had been tackling for several hours.

Beth followed along behind Blood, content to let her nose and sharp senses lead, not wanting to alert anything under the earth with a lightstone. She instead relied on her powerful vision in combination with her ability to see deep into the infrared spectrum, letting her follow after Blood at a distance without meeting any trouble. She noted the tunnels they traversed were extremely rough, the floor uneven and torn, the walls scraggly and jagged. The ceilings were pocked and broken, with cracked stalactites hanging like an old beggar's last few crooked teeth.

Beth didn't know if whatever had swept through the area had done so a day before, a month before, or a millennium before, but it was clear the area was more than just naturally cracked and torn. Something, or perhaps even someone, had rampaged through here, maybe multiple times, ripping apart the stone and tearing apart the solid rock. While there was much torn stone and many broken chips of rock and flint, there wasn't any moisture to be found anywhere. No water dripped from the fractured teeth clinging to the shattered ceiling, no trickles of some distant glacier dribbled down the walls, and no liquid pooled in the divots or cracks on the floor.

It didn't take very long for them to find trouble, or for Blood to find trouble and Beth move forward to assist her. A group of strange lizards, long-bodied and long-limbed, surged out from the darkness to attack the lupine woman. There were almost a dozen of them and all were in the one-eighties in level, something that would have been a tough fight for many groups, but Blood and Beth were quite strong. The two pulverized the lizards in a couple minutes, Blood harvesting their cores and a handful of the tougher scales before continuing to scout.

They encountered a half dozen groups of the lizards over the next half hour or so, each group being a bit more numerous than the group before. The levels, however, remained relatively consistent, with even the last group mostly composed of level one hundred eighty-eight and one hundred eighty-seven beasts. None of the battles were in any way difficult, they simply ate up some time, and moreso when the girls had to clean up afterward. Beth was always glad for her infinite canteen, one of the best, and cheapest, purchases she had ever made, but she was really going to have to invest in a small mobile house or vehicle with a living area at some point. Trying to sluice her armor, and herself, off with the canteen after fights was pretty annoying, and even having a hose on the outside of a small portable house would be so much better.

The cave system didn't get any brighter or more hospitable as they continued deeper, Blood still scouting the way. Beth was a bit encouraged as they forged further and started noting signs of ore and minerals on the walls, mostly what looked like iron ore and possibly nickel. The strange new fantasy reality they lived in had its own rules and while typically on Earth before the Path mineral veins would follow certain patterns, often with areas producing a large amount of a single type of ore and only trace amounts of others, the Path changed much. One of the biggest changes was that veins of ore often had valuable caches of gems or high-grade minerals deep within them, which was often what small adventurer teams and independent explorers looked for. Ripping a vein of iron ore was a huge amount of work requiring quite a few people, even using high-level experts, and quite a bit of time, whereas diving into the heart of a mountain and tearing out a few dozen rough gems and a hundred pounds of high-quality minerals was much easier. Though, of course, the deeper one delved, the greater the dangers lurking in the inky depths.

The lizards were done with them for now, as they didn't encounter any more of the scaly bastards as they ventured deeper into the dark. They did, however, run into a massive earth elemental a few minutes later, something that was doubly a pain in the ass to fight buried under a thousand tons of earth. Very luckily, it hadn't yet hit level two hundred, though even at a hundred and ninety-eight, it was still extremely tough. Unfortunately for it, Beth's newfound strength was a bit overwhelming, even if she did have to be careful about managing her mana with how much it took to use the active component of Beastly Body after she had pushed it to gold. With the newfound power the skill in gold brought her, she was able to hammer the elemental, which looked like a tall, fat man with a stooped posture, except made entirely from dirt and bits of stone, into a bunch of a slushy rubble.

Blood wasn't entirely useless in such an encounter, either, as she was able to do quite a bit of damage with her claws, especially using her energy claw ability. She proved that true when they encountered the second elemental and she used a very precise attack to the center of the beast's back, wherein all ten of her energy claws overlapped to impact a point the size of a pencil eraser, to slice through the center of the beast's torso, cracking its core and leaving it very vulnerable to Beth's even more powerful fists. It was a bit of a poor demonstration, however, considering the cores of the elementals, much akin to 'normal' beast cores, were quite valuable, a value that was significantly diminished if cracked or damaged in any way.

"Oops," said Blood, shaking the last of the dirt off the core as she held it up, the tiny wisps of mana leaking from the side of the object rather obvious.

"Shit happens. Who cares?" Beth responded with a shrug before continuing down the tunnel. Blood shrugged and made the core disappear into her necklace, another benefit they had, considering the necklaces froze everything within them; at least the core wouldn't leak any more energy while it was stored in the separate pocket space within.

It was elementals all the way down, which was decidedly not goods news, not when they changed the playbook and hit level two hundred. Everything that Beth had initially worried about came true at that point, with the beings able to use the mana present in the environment to rapidly heal themselves. They were also able, after level two hundred, to much more easily manipulate the earth and stone around them, trying to bury the two girls under tons of dirt and stone. Beth still wasn't particularly worried, as the tunnels and caves under these mountains weren't so easy to collapse, and she was pretty easily able to punch out of an entrapment and back into open space with her overwhelming strength.

The greater strength of the elementals did mean that they spent far more time on each and every fight, having to slog through slowly wearing down just one of the tough bastards. The only bit of good news, at least so far, was that the elementals really didn't seem much sociable, sticking to their own areas of the tunnels and never group up, even in pairs. That at least kept the pressure on the two girls fairly low, and made it possible to bull through the fights quickly if they acted a bit reckless. Not that they stopped paying attention to their surroundings, of course, but if they were only going to face single opponents in this section, they could afford to act and attack more aggressively than they otherwise might.

After they had been underground for a few hours, Beth called a halt. They weren't really at the point where they had to sleep, but it would be pretty good if they got something to eat, and also they could use a little time to rest and reset their mental. It was a good opportunity to meditate for a set block of time and mostly top their mana back up to full before pushing any deeper. They had, by this point, reached a place where the ore vein was rich enough that there were great swathes of ore in the walls and ceiling. It wasn't just chunks of iron sitting around, either, as even with magic involved that wasn't how things worked, but instead there were large seams of a very iron-rich compound that also contained other elements, including oxygen and often nickel, bound up together with the iron. The ore would have to be mined in bulk then smelted to separate out the different elements before it could be used for anything, including be made into mana steel, as most mana iron was.

That wasn't what they were here for, regardless, and they continued further into the heart of the mountain, having started to descend pretty steeply by that point. They hadn't just been going one direction the whole time, nor had they been at a stable elevation, but they had mostly been working their way into the center of the large mountain they had found the opening torn into the side of. Now, they were heading deeper into the depths below that mountain, into deeper and more uncertain danger, but into the territory where the real juicy finds were much more likely to reside. Beth only had a faint hope to find any gem hearts or similar items, but finding a decent hunk of unprocessed ruby or sapphire, or hell, even topaz or amethyst, would still prove immensely valuable. Having more money never hurt, and they could use a big pile of cash to directly buy the rest of what they needed, even if it were at sky-high prices, as long as they could throw money around without worrying about it.

The lack of light was starting to become a bit of an issue, at least for Blood during combat, and she had started to use a lightstone to see after they had encountered a beast. That was both the way Beth had seen the ore buried in the walls, and the way she knew they were getting close to their target. The latest fight had been a tough elemental that didn't seem to want to die, no matter how hard they hit it, dragging things out for a long damn time. The effort was worth the reward however, as Beth spotted something on the wall at the end of the small cavern they had fought in.

"Blood," she said, nodding at the far wall. The wolf turned to look after retrieving the elemental core, walking over with her light.

"Is that what it looks like?" Blood asked, holding the light up as she peered at the wall.

"Well, it's purple, and there's a ton of iron here, so it sorta fits," Beth answered with a shrug, walking over and leaning close to get a good look.

"What's iron got to do with it?" Blood grunted.

"Well, I'm pretty sure amethyst gets its purple color mainly because of iron," Beth replied, reaching down to grab at the crystal. She lightly twisted and turned it, trying to see if it was at all loose, which was a no-go.

"Uh, we don't exactly have mining equipment," Blood pointed out a bit pedantically.

"We are the mining equipment," Beth grunted, waving the wolf back a bit. She then stepped a bit to the side, pulled her arm back, and twisted her hips with a quick motion. She slammed her fist into the rock wall a couple feet to the side of the amethyst, repeating the motion several times before stepping forward and doing the same on the other side of the gem. She then stepped back slightly and hammered on the wall above where the gem was, this time using some Crush to shatter the rock. Finally, she gave a couple empowered kicks to the area below where the crystal was sticking out, cracking and shattering the wall with her heavy greaves.

"Alright, your turn," Beth said to Blood, pulling out one of her own lightstones as she stepped back.

"Me?" the lupine woman asked with a raised brow.

"You think I'm talking to the elementals?" Beth asked sarcastically.

"What am I supposed to do?" Blood growled back.

"Use those damn energy claws and cut away all that shit I just broke up," Beth huffed back, rolling her eyes. "See if you can cut a section loose."

"Fine," Blood grumbled, moving up to the wall after putting her own lightstone away and getting in position. She stood back a bit further than Beth as she wasn't trying to physically hit the wall, but instead use Blood Queen's Claws energy component to carve into the stone. It proved surprisingly effective, considering the damage Beth had done to the wall to start, and Blood was able to carve away a large amount of stone, the rock falling away as small chunks and bits that scattered across the rough floor.

"Alright, my turn," Beth said eventually, after Blood had carved away a huge amount of stone around the area where the crystal was embedded. Beth stepped up and grabbed hold of a section of rock that they had exposed from their mining efforts, seeing that there was a bit more crystal embedded within it. She didn't do anything fancy, it wasn't in her nature anyway, but instead put her enormous STR stat to use, digging her gauntlets in and increasing their mass. The stone started almost immediately cracking and breaking and she had to stop after a handful of seconds and readjust her grip, as she had torn apart the area around her gauntlets quicker than she had damaged the spur of rock.

Slowly, over the course of five minutes, Beth broke apart the spur of rock they had created and got a large section worked free. There was still a bunch of rock, iron ore, and various minerals in the big chunk, but there was quite a bit of the amethyst crystal present as well. It had a very rich, deep purple color, which Beth thought was pretty good, but then again she wasn't really an expert in gems. Metals were more her thing right now, but if they were going to be deep mining, she might want to do a little gemology studies as well.