Limitless Path

The wolf eventually finished, nearly five minutes later, shaking some eponymous fluid from her claws before saying, "That sucked. Way too slow."

"Bet the experience was pretty good," Beth replied from where she still stood, arms crossed over her chest.

"Hmph," Blood grunted. "Good experience doesn't matter if a single kill takes an hour."

"It wasn't that bad."

"Close," the lupine woman frowned as she glanced around. "Should we level more?"

"We're not under that much of a time crunch," Beth replied. "Let's take some time to get used to fighting them, and see how much experience we can farm over the next few hours."

"But, we're not under time compression or anything in here," Blood commented.

"No, but like I said, that doesn't really matter," Beth explained. "The dungeon isn't going to overrun in six seconds. We can take a few hours to adjust."

"Hmph," Blood just grunted again, stalking forward to find their next victim.

Beth took this one, moving up a moment later as Blood found another isolated lizardman on the edge of the city. Finding ones alone wasn't particularly difficult this far out from the city center, and Beth took advantage of that to really hammer the beast. She attacked full force from the start, pushing the beast back with full strength punches and kicks. She waited a few moments before using any skills, not wanting to burn mana before she had some sense of the challenge. Her heavy gauntlets let her deal some damage, and this is also where the advantage of her STR being much higher versus Blood came into play. Her standard strikes just did more damage, and her pulverizing hits were more easily able to penetrate the armor or especially the scaly hide of the lizardman.

After a minute, she noted that she hadn't made much progress, other than in increasingly angering the beast she was battling. Not that that really mattered much, as most beasts wouldn't really vary much other than becoming sloppier as they became angrier. The lizardman followed the standard pattern, slashing and chopping at her over and over again, its frequency and frenzy increasing as she succeeded in little more than pissing it off. Fortunately, it wasn't very fast, even compared to her with her lower DEX, and she was very easily able to dodge its sloppy sword work.

She decided after two minutes that she had seen enough, and started burning some mana to overwhelm the beast. She activated Beastly Body and Swift first, running circles around the lizardman as she started smashing it back down the street. She followed that quickly with empowering her punches with Crush, transferring literal bone-breaking force through her fists into the lizardman's arms and torso. The beast starting to cough blood after just under a minute was a pretty good sign that it was not having a particularly great time, and she finished pulverizing its internal organs over another thirty seconds.

"Still slow," Blood commented, head on a swivel as she made sure the greater racket Beth had caused didn't attract a horde.

"Well, then we need to go hard from the start and see just how fast we can tear a two-ten apart," Beth replied. "We’ll do it as individual fights first, then we'll tag team one."

They did just that, each going as hard as possible from the moment they found an individual lizardman to kill. Blood still had more trouble, the cutting power of her energy claws just not strong enough to deal any significant damage to the much higher level enemies. The level difference normally wouldn't be so oppressive, but the massive leap in power at level two hundred, combined with the small leap in power every ten levels kicking in at two hundred ten, made the beasts extremely difficult. They were still killable, but the major concern was the amount of time it would take. And that wasn't even considering they were on the outskirts right now. Who knew what the boss, especially if it were past two hundred twenty or even two hundred thirty, would be like.

"Together now," Beth said after finishing a lizardman in just under a minute.

"This is going to really suck," Blood grumbled as they found their next victim.

"A week of farming could get us another handful of levels," Beth replied with a slight frown.

"Hmm, not worth it," Blood answered with a small shrug. "Let's just work on this for a while."

They found another isolated lizardman as soon as she had said that and attacked, Blood leading with Beth following up while the beast focused on the lupine woman. Rending and smashing, they overwhelmed the poor bastard extremely quickly, its toughness slowing them down just a bit. It was about a thirty second or just under fight for the two of them to kill one lizardman, Beth sighing and kicking the corpse over onto its back when they were done.

"Fight together," she concluded.

"Let me round some up," Blood said with a slight grimace, rolling her neck before taking off down a side street. She returned three minutes later with four lizardmen chasing after her, having grabbed them from two different buildings just down from where Beth was still standing. She slowly started walking forward, allowing Blood to reach her and circle around, spinning back to engage the enemies before Beth joined in with rapid bursts of Celestial Annihilation to soften the beasts up.

Four beasts took four minutes, six beasts took five, and ten beasts took more than nine. They moved slowly, circling through the sprawling outskirts of the city, finding the layout of the place to be a fairly rough circle, with clear delineations of the edge with sheer cliffs and steep drops in the land marking the abrupt ends of streets. All of the buildings were built of the same yellow-tinted stone, slightly roughly cut and mortared together, though Beth could see the center of the city looked brighter, possibly built of a white stone or dressed with some type of high-quality stone, such as slabs of marble attached to the outer walls of the buildings.

That was something for later as they slowly, very slowly, worked their way through the outskirts. They fought for hours, having to take a break, and an extended one, much quicker than they were used to from the past six months or so objective time of grinding they had done. The huge problem they were running into was they had bottomed out on mana, or at least come dangerously close to emptying their reservoirs before they stopped to rest. That was definitely going to be their biggest hang-up, and they were now realizing that the reinforcement their first rebirth had done to their mana reservoirs was still rather much on the smaller side.

Hours turned into days as they fought the lizardmen, the only upside in all of it that they were getting an insane amount of experience. Two full days of fighting would normally not be enough to get them one level in the one-nineties, even when fighting a bit up-level, but that was very different when fighting above the level two hundred threshold. Those two days saw them get two levels and then some, not quite enough experience for three levels, but it didn't take the full two days for them to get the second level.

That wasn't the only bright point, Beth mused, as Blood finished harvesting beast cores from the latest group they had killed. The fact everything was over level two hundred meant they were getting tier three beast cores from everything. Tier one cores were the weak cores they had gotten early on, and from beasts up to level one hundred fifty, while tier two cores were generally from beasts between level one hundred fifty and two hundred. Tier three cores were anything in the two hundred range, while tier four cores came from beasts between three hundred and five hundred. There were, of course, exceptions, including bosses sometimes dropping more powerful or higher rarity cores, but the amount of cores they would be harvesting from normal beasts meant that was what they based their common parlance on.

The next group they fought was mainly level two-eleven, as they had started to moved slightly inward toward the center of the city. The level jumps were immediate and continuous, the two finding that the beasts increased in level every block they progressed. Looking out at the city, Beth estimated they would get into the two-twenties, the high two-twenties, by the time they made it into the heart of the ancient city.

The fights also became progressively harder over the next few days as the groups became larger, and the city more populous. Starting a fight with a group in the middle of a street would cause more beasts to swarm from the buildings, which could sometimes cause even more lizardmen from streets over to come running. Turning small fights into little battles, which became big battles, which turned into a brutal war. A war of two versus ten thousand, but a war where the two were clearly winning.

The first few elites they faced came from the buildings, the first one running out of a warehouse as they fought a large group in the middle of a street. They were surrounded by two and three story high buildings, an orange sun beating down from directly overhead with not even a hint of wind moving through the city. Beth intercepted the elite after a quick glance around, slamming into the tall, muscular lizardman at nearly her top speed, only causing it to take a half step back. It was like the other beasts they had been fighting, only in every way it was more. It was taller, broader, more heavily muscled, faster, more adroit with its weapon, and shrugged off heavy hits like they were feathery taps.

Despite its toughness, it could still only shrug off so many of those aforementioned heavy hits, especially when Beth burned mana like her soul had left the tap on, hammering Celestial Annihilation into the beast's head over and over, some from range, some from up close. The lizardman wasn't wearing a helmet or head protection of any kind, apart from simply having incredibly tough scales and resilient flesh, and Beth slowly pulped its skull and brain. And slowly was right; considering the amount of mana she was pumping into pure destruction, the fact it took half a dozen minutes to mostly vaporize its face and head was astounding. They certainly weren't in the easy modes or areas anymore, considering the toughness and power of a beast not even close to the power of a boss.

It did make Beth dread said boss a little, as she leapt back in to assist Blood with the rest of the lizardmen that had been attracted by their rather loud and extremely flashy fighting. It also made her excited, a wicked grin spreading the bottom of her face into an almost rictus-like expression as she pulped the pathetic weaklings around her. It didn't even matter that she was starting to run low on mana; she was eager for the next battle and had to be reined in by Blood before she went charging through the next building.

That building in question was the warehouse where that first elite enemy had been laying in wait, a large structure that was two stories tall, both externally and internally, with no second floor dividing the space. The front of the building had a small office space with three little rooms branching off a small hallway, while the rest of the building was a huge open space with shelves lined up in rows from front to back occupying the entire space. Beth curiously poked around a bit, wondering if there was anything of value, but was deterred by the fact that all she found for twenty minutes were grains, stone, and some dried fruits. Or maybe they were dried vegetables? Whatever they were, they certainly didn't smell appetizing, and it seemed much of what was on the shelves was meant as animal feed, which wouldn't be anything unusual for a warehouse.

The main thing that stopped Beth from just turning and leaving was Blood, as the lupine seemed to have picked up on something. She was circling around a section of shelves, sniffing the air repeatedly and scratching at a few boxes and crates before taking deeper inhales. Beth hopped up on a shelf, planting her large butt rather firmly and slowly swinging her legs as she watched the tall woman nose through the two sections of shelves. It seemed she was keyed to something very pungent, though even walking near her hadn't alerted Beth's nose to anything other than grains and old vegetables.

Blood eventually figured out where she needed to search, simply pointing at a pallet at the center of a row of shelves. Beth leapt down and landed near her, stepping over and grabbing the pallet before pulling, dragging the couple thousand pounds of goods, stacked head-high, across the cement floor with a grating squeal. She shuffled back with the pallet, steadily pulling it out into the aisle until she had gotten it far enough that there was space to walk behind it into the space it had occupied. Blood slid into that space, sniffing around for just a moment before grabbing a small crate that had been placed on the floor, sized just right that a pallet on each side of it would still fit under the upper shelves.

She brought the crate out and handed it to Beth, who set it on the floor before getting her gauntlets wedged into it and prying the lid off. The box was about one foot high, three feet wide and two feet deep, and the three-by-two lid was solidly nailed to the side walls. When Beth had slowly pried it off, urged to some caution by Blood, they saw the crate had a bunch of padding inside, protecting several bottles. Blood immediately reached in and grabbed one of the bottles, carefully hoisting it out of the box and holding it up in the light, inspecting the label closely.

The bottles were very simple, but extremely well made, crafted of what appeared to be a very high-quality glass. There was no ornamentation or ostentatious flare with the glass itself, and the labels were very simple papers laminated to the side of the bottle with some type of clear sealer. The only notably fancy part was the crest on the front of the label, made with red and gold ink and displaying a stallion on a field with a complex set of scrollwork on each side and a detailed image of a polearm lying horizontal at the bottom of the field.

The back of the label was absolutely filled with small text in Universal Standard, and glancing through it almost made Beth's eyes cross. It seemed like an awful lot of yapping just to say the bottle had a very rare vintage of what was essentially brandy within. Beth lost interest, prying open one of the boxes on the pallet to find more dried fruit, not at all smelling particularly pleasant. Blood, meanwhile, had finished reading the label and placed the bottle, very carefully, back within the crate before making the crate disappear within her necklace.

"Anything actually good?" Beth asked as she glanced around the warehouse.

"That brandy's worth, like, ten or twenty platinums. Per bottle," Blood answered.

That got Beth's head to whip around, saying, "Twenty a bottle? Surely it can't be that much? It's pretty much just boiled juice, isn't it?"

"Beth. Stop," Blood replied, rolling her eyes.

"Fine, but it's crazy that people would pay twenty platinums for a bottle of off juice," Beth grunted back, leading the way to the back of the warehouse.

"That was the only thing you found?" she asked further as they approached the large doors at the rear.

"Nothing else that smelled interesting," Blood said with a shrug.