Limitless Path

Despite the presence of a top predator like the Devourer nearby, the tunnels in the area were not empty, quite the opposite. The main opponents they faced were more troglodytes, but they also encountered a healthy mixture of cave trolls in amongst the horde of beasts they had to fight through. The cave trolls didn't give a damn about anyone or anything around them, often doing more damage to the troglodytes that they were amidst than Beth and Blood wound up doing before a group was wiped out. It wasn't a constant stream of enemies, but it was a big slog through the depths with one group after another fighting them, and sometimes several groups jumping them back-to-back.

A couple hours of this cycling of battles and moving deeper saw them in a depth that few had ever plumbed below these mountains. They stumbled upon another cavern, thankfully much smaller than the one they had encountered the Devourer in, and not containing any kind of beast that was more than a hundred levels above them. It did contain an absolute ton of troglodytes and cave trolls, with two beefy and powerful elementals taking up space in the center of the room. Killing everything in the room took them an hour, and Beth made them take a pause after they were finished to scout around. She didn't want their battle and the piles of corpses to attract another powerful beast that they could only run from.

Their luck held this time, no massive beast far stronger than them coming to investigate what had happened in search of a tasty snack. Blood got to work on the fresh pile of corpses, harvesting more beast cores and anything that could vaguely be of use otherwise, though that mainly meant any scales she could get that were in reasonable shape. Beth, meanwhile, decided that her time was better spent looking around the cavern to see if there was anything worthwhile present. She used her lightstone for the task, not needing to worry about alerting anything, as everything was already dead.

The first thing that caught her eye was something familiar from just a handful of hours before; a distinctive dark purple glimmer. Beth quickly moved to the wall to find an area with several crystal nodes sticking out and a large section of discoloration. She knew what to do, or what had worked last time, as she certainly wasn't a professional miner, though it might be a good idea to learn more about the trade if they were going to be doing more spelunking. She got to work on the wall while Blood worked on the corpses, the sound of her fists and feet hammering the wall far overwhelming the quiet cutting sounds coming from the center of the cavern.

Beth pulverized quite a section of rock around where she had seen the crystals before tearing into the wall, tossing the debris across the cavern floor before hammering the wall again. She repeated the pattern a couple times before she was able to cut free a big section like the last time, likely securing a couple hundred pounds of crystal alongside other materials. That wasn't all, though, as there were more minerals embedded deeper into the wall, and she continued using her crude but effective mining strategy to pull more out to store in her necklace.

When she had pounded out all the easy-to-grab minerals from that area, she moved on to roaming around the outer walls again, trying to find anything that easily stood out in the lightstone's light. It only took a minute to find another deposit, though it turned out much smaller than the first in the room, only a bit more than the size of a basketball. There were also a handful of minerals of various descriptions around this cluster, though Beth wasn't really sure of the value of any of it. She chucked it all in her necklace anyway, figuring she had plenty of room left and she could just starting dumping hunks of rock if she was starting to get full. She continued her search after a few moments, scanning the walls of the cavern to find any more deposits she could punch out with her ultra heavy gauntlets.

She walked most of the circumference of the cavern before she found anything else unusual, a little cleft in the rock. She could see a few unusual marks around the edge of that opening and, as she got close, she caught a reflected glimmer when the illumination from the lightstone bounced back from inside. The cleft was a little narrow for her just over six-foot frame, especially when her armor was added into the equation, but luckily, she had the perfect solution to that problem. She started whaling away on the rocks around the opening, breaking away chunks and widening the gap. Despite her strength and general inexhaustibility, this was the rock of a mana dense world, and that located deep underground, meaning it held even more mana. Despite her skill as a human jackhammer, it took quite some time for her to widen the opening, enough even that Blood finished with her…well, bloody work, and came over to investigate just what Beth was up to.

"The wall piss you off?" Blood asked when Beth paused to move some rock out of the way.

"Yeah, real shit-talker, this," Beth grumbled back with an exaggerated eyeroll.

"Wait'll I let Jaq know you lost an argument to a stone wall. He'll love that shit," Blood said, arms crossed as she watched Beth go back to work.

"Don't you have, like, scouting to do, or something?" Beth asked between swings.

"Not much point till you're ready. Better I stand watch," Blood replied.

"I don't think standing watch means you watch me. Pretty sure you're supposed to watch the area around us for threats," Beth grunted between swings.

"Yeah, yeah," Blood said before wandering off.

"Hey, that's my line," Beth rumbled with a frown.

She continued to hammer away at the cleft, eventually breaking a larger area open that she could step through. What she found on the other side was pretty stunning, considering it was just a small random cleft that she had gotten interested in after seeing a small glimmer. She was in a small cave, maybe six or seven feet across and just under a dozen feet deep, that was full of gems. Not just amethysts, but some kind of orange gem and small pockets of a red gem that she couldn't be sure of on first glance, but thought might be ruby. The whole find was astonishing, but it was going to take hours to carve out of the wall, even if Blood came back and helped her with the work.

She got started with a light sigh, first just trying to figure out how to attack the wall to achieve what she wanted. This is where having some idea what she was doing would sure come in handy, but she was just going to have to do the best she could. How hard could it be?

It turned out that it could be quite difficult, considering the task was break some rocks without breaking the shiny ones. After thirty minutes, she gave up on the first strategy and moved back towards the cave entrance that she had widened, starting to crack through the wall to try to break through the rock around the gems. She wasn't confident enough to keep trying to break the gems away from the rock face directly, so she was going to try to shatter the rock around the gems to break them free. She was doing everything she could, despite hammering the rock with a huge amount of force, to not crack or shatter the gems.

It was hours of tedious work to start breaking the gems free, but luckily for her, she had both the strength and stamina to deal with it. On top of that, once she started to really get into it, she was able to pry great sections of minerals free with relative ease, storing chunk after chunk of precious gems and valuable elements in her necklace. Blood joined her some time later to lend her aid, the wolf's energy claws quite useful for slicing into the rock when used with finesse, something not a problem for the skilled lupine woman. Blood's help considerably sped up the operation since she was able to more precisely cut away sections of gems or valuable minerals at a speed that was even greater than Beth's bashing.

Many more hours of work saw them harvesting the vast majority of the gems and minerals from the area. They really had hit the jackpot, having pulled somewhere in the area of a few thousand pounds of gems and precious minerals out of that cleft in the stone she had noticed. Beth had absolutely no idea how much any of it was worth, but she would be shocked if they had less than a diamond coin's value in precious materials, and just from that area, not to mention any of the other materials they had gathered.

"Time to keep going," Beth said, fruitlessly trying to get all the dust and grime off her armor, and her exposed face and hair, with just her canteen.

"I'll scout," Blood said with a nod, slipping off into the dusky gloom of the cavern.

Beth eventually slipped the canteen back in her necklace, after a very healthy drink, and then made her lightstone disappear before following in Blood's footsteps. It didn't take long for the lupine woman to run into trouble, Beth moving up to assist as soon as they knew the fight was unavoidable. It went on like that for a couple hours, the two venturing even deep into the lightless depths, trying to find some way to start ascending.

'Beth, quickly,' Blood suddenly sent through their mental link. The wolf had been scouting after their latest encounter and was now calling for her.

'Right there,' Beth sent back immediately, sprinting through the tunnels to catch up to her companion.

When Beth arrived there seemed nothing amiss, however, as she found Blood waiting in an empty tunnel. When she gave the wolf a questioning look, the lupine woman reached up and tapped her right ear a couple times, Beth noting her left ear flicking at the same time. Beth tilted her head and waited for a moment, trying to hear what Blood was talking about, but she couldn't detect anything. Not really surprising, considering the lupine woman's greatly enhanced senses. Giving Blood a questioning look and a shrug, she got a quick 'come here' hand wave in response, her companion slipping off down the tunnel.

It didn’t take very long for Beth to hear it as well, a sound of clashing metal and a slight tearing noise that she wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with, though it was something she wasn’t able to consistently produce. It was, unless she was way off the mark, the sound of a blade slicing through the air so fast and with such force that it was tearing the air apart. Beth gave Blood a nod while pointing at her own ear, signaling that she was hearing it as well. Blood replied with a hands upraised shrug, as if saying she didn't know what to make of it, or do about it, and Beth simply gestured down the tunnel for them to move forward and investigate.

They cautiously moved forward, eventually reaching the end of the shaft they were currently navigating and finding themselves at the mouth of a cave, though with the floor a handful of feet below them. The terrain had not become any more even or smooth as they had progressed deeper, but it had not become as terrible as some caves could be, with them having to crawl through narrow sections barely bigger than their body. They didn't even need to jump down into the room to see what was happening, however, as it was pretty obvious even from their distance of a hundred feet.

A young man was in the center of the room, a faint golden glow drifting from his armor, and he engaged in battle with two massive, armored…rock crabs? That was the only way Beth could describe the beasts, though they were some kind of nightmare mash-up of a fifteen feet long spider and a crab with rock hide. They also apparently had the ability to manipulate stone and earth, as they launched massive spikes of rock and hardened earth at the young man. Their attacks did little, however, as the single longsword the man wielded sliced through the spikes like a hot knife through butter.

Even more surprising to Beth, they had seen this man before, at the Trial of Celestial Awakening. It was the young man who had so easily crushed the very similar boss rush stage that Beth and Blood had taken hours to slog through, mainly through the overwhelming level of his swordsmanship. It appeared his monstrous skill had only grown since then, as the two level three hundred beasts were throwing everything they possibly had at him while he remained unperturbed.

Just as he had demonstrated many months ago, his skill with the sword was superb, sublime; something that transcended Beth's current crude understanding of the weapon. There was no way he was anything less than a Master, perhaps even a Grandmaster already, and he quite ably demonstrated that. As the crab spider in front of him charge towards him, intent on bashing him to bits with its massive left claw, he performed a very simple and nimble set of steps, swaying to the side as he flicked his blade up and to the side. The swipe of his sword was so fast that Beth couldn't even track the blade, even his hands and arms were little more than a series of afterimages to her, and she could only tell what had happened from the result, watching the crab's inner pincer section fall apart, the arm of the beast knocked off course.

The man didn't stop there, stepping inside the crab's guard where it would be a bit harder for the beast to attack him, though that clearly wasn't a concern. Nor would it ever be again, as he lithely spun around, his blade forming a twinkling storm of sword lights around him, all of which landed on joints, seams, or critical weaknesses of the beast. Despite its high level and stone skin, the man diced the beast into pieces, its arms little more than cubed crab chunks, with such ease that it looked like he was taking a quick Sunday morning stroll. He stepped forward with a quick motion and hopped up onto the beast, tapping the toes of his right foot against the hardened carapace of the creature's back, his sword a whistling series of afterimages, pushing off with that tiny motion to drift across the beast's back and land behind it. He flicked his sword after landing, cleaning the blood from it before slowly turning to his opponent, watching with a placid expression as the massive creature fell apart into seven distinct sections.

There was still a second beast present, one which was enraged at its partner's death, but neither Beth nor Blood thought anything of it. The young man didn't appear to be all that out of breath, and even if he was expending great effort and making it look simple, finishing off the second beast would still be little more than a joke for him. It turned out that Beth needn't have thought too deeply about him making the difficult seem easy, though he was doing that in a manner, but it clearly cost him little effort. He walked up to the enraged beast, a strange juxtaposition to the creature's screaming, frothing mad charge, and calmly sliced it into tiny pieces. He flicked his blade clean once again before turning his head slowly to where Beth and Blood stood, looking directly at them.