Limitless Path

She was surprised when the beast didn't react immediately, not even when she got fairly close, and Beth wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She charged up as powerful of a Crush as she could while sprinting forward, already running Beastly Body and Swift with as much mana as she could pump into her body. When she got to within a dozen feet of the beast, she called forth her Presence, that moment of twisting and churning more than enough to finally alert the beast to what was about to happen. The creature had been playing unaware itself, for as soon as Beth's Presence began to manifest, it leapt up, landing on all four limbs before slashing at Beth with its long, powerful left arm.

Beth slipped to the side as the crown settled firmly on her head, bursting forward to slam her armored right fist into the beast's jaw. She had the mass turned up on her gauntlets to the maximum level, Beth able to get a bit of a feeling of feedback from the enchantment when she pushed enough mana into it that it started to strain. The combination of these factors increased the power with which the strike landed by a massive amount, the addition of Crush further adding to the strength of the hit.

All that strength did very little on impact, Beth feeling like her right hand had just slammed into a block of mana steel. The lizardman's head twitched to the right and an explosive snort burst from its nostrils and partially open mouth, washing a blast of fetid air across Beth, causing her to grimace heavily from the stench. She didn't step back or flinch, however, stepping forward slightly and smashing her fist into its face several more times in rapid succession, her Presence allowing her to move far faster than she normally would. It turned her arms into little more than blurs, stirring up the air around her and pushing away the beast's stinky breath.

The massive brute barely noticed her barrage, giving a deep snort and slashing at her with a fast, extremely powerful blow from its right arm. Beth slid back out of the way, just barely dodging the swipe before leaping back in. Based on the way the lizardman was moving and how its swings felt, she was sure that it was much more heavily invested in STR than in DEX. Not that that meant a huge amount for boss-type or boss-level beasts and monsters, as they were incredibly powerful all around, but it was good to know that it had a specialization leaning towards a particular stat. She was not looking forward to fighting more spell-focused bosses like the lich from the boss rush in the Trial she and Blood had done some time ago, but for now a STR-type boss was something she could manage.

Beth was right back in its face, slamming her fists into it again and again, feeling her knuckles and hands bruising already from the force bounced back. Even she wasn't strong enough to punch something with the toughness of good mana steel without suffering damage to her own body, not that she wouldn't ever get to that point, but her flesh was still weak. Far weaker than her will, as her injuring of her own hands and wrists didn't slow her down in the least. She dodged several more powerful but slightly slow swipes as she continued to hammer the creature's head with both her fists and feet.

She wasn't the only one having trouble, either, as Blood leapt upon the beast and slashed it with her claws. Her soulbound claw weapons were extremely tough and very sharp, but even so they did little more than scrape along the sub-boss's hide, red and orange sparks scattering out as barely a thin, white scratch was left on the surface of the creature's scales. The beast's tail swept up rapidly and tried to slam Blood to the side, but the lupine woman was far and away too fast even for the agile tail of the boss to swat.

The boss was also not particularly intelligent, as it wasn't able to concentrate on both Beth and Blood at the same time. As soon as Blood had started trying to carve into its back and the backs of its arms, it had switched its full attention to her and essentially ignored Beth. Not that it wasn’t right to do so, based on the performance Beth had given up to that point, as very slightly cracking a single scale on its cheek likely shouldn't have warranted much threat. Her next strike should warrant that greater threat, very much so, as she used her big guns, pumping a truly gargantuan amount of mana into not just her arm but also her torso. She channeled enough energy that Blood could see her glowing with streaks of gold, red, and silver energy. The blow she delivered to the beast's jaw turned its attention back to her; perhaps the strongest strike of Celestial Annihilation she had ever done.

Compared to her prior punches and kicks, like a regular human trying to punch a battle tank to death, this blow had far more of an effect. She could feel, see, and hear the scales on the side of the creature's face shatter and crack, as well as the flesh basically vaporize from the concentrated blast of annihilating mana. The bone of the beast's jaw cracked, with a few sections losing some bits and pieces due to the true annihilating effect of the mana, greatly lessened by having to crack through the scales and rend the flesh.

Despite the power of the strike and the fact that it was the first bit of damage they had dealt to the boss, the wound itself was not at all large. Considering the beast's massive frame, the small wound to its face was not something severe, let alone anything close to fatal. It wasn't even enough to anger the beast as it went back to swiping at her with little more power or speed than it had been using originally. Part of that was likely also due to its high regenerative rate, as Beth could see the boss healing, albeit slowly, from the wound on the left side of its face. They had started to reach that point in their explorations, though, the level ranges at which stronger beasts would have some form of regeneration or healing. Not all of them, but it was something they would have to worry about more going forward, and there were several ways to counter it. Some had more effect on beasts and monsters than people, some less so.

Beth's second big attack, Celestial Annihilation, was itself one of those methods. Since it fully vaporized most of what the mana blast made contact with, at least after armor, defensive skills, and other powers such as Presences were taken into account, it left wounds that were harder to heal. Stitching together broken flesh was much easier and less mana intensive than regenerating that flesh from pure mana to fill back in a gap, though the boss likely had access to enough mana to keep this game up long after Beth would pass out from exhaustion due to burning her Presence so strongly.

The fight continued as she observed the damage healing, Beth taking great care to avoid the swipes from the beast as Blood was attacking from odd angles. The lupine woman was having real difficulty dealing any damage, which was also a problem in that the boss was just ignoring her. If she could take the focus for a moment, she could give an opportunity for Beth, who could deal a fair bit of damage, to get a good strike in. Beth settled in for a longer fight, being a bit sparing about how much stamina she pushed into her Presence, though she didn't release it for the moment.

She started concentrating her strikes around the boss's jaw and neck, trying to build up a large amount of damage that would snowball into something more serious. She threw in a few Celestial Annihilations every once in a while, but she was mainly interlacing normal punches with Crushes. The normal punches were really just to pace herself and get in a good rhythm, but the constant uses of Crush were building damage over time. It was gradual, but after a couple minutes, Beth became pretty sure she was hurting it faster than it was able to heal.

The damage eventually pissed it off, as the boss suddenly changed tactics, leaping forward and swiping at Beth rapidly. It moved in a blur and, while Beth was caught by surprise, she had subjective years of combat experience at this point and adapted instantly. She twisted and turned, her greatly enhanced speed thanks to her Presence allowing her to dodge the now much more spritely boss. The worrying thing was that the boss didn't slow down after a few seconds or even half a minute, continuing to slash and swipe at her much quicker than previously. Beth was quite good at dodging and controlling the pace of a close-up fight, but even she couldn't go forever without making a mistake or getting caught out.

And a single mistake in a fight of this magnitude was brutal, as was demonstrated when the boss caught her with a heavy swipe of its right arm. Beth managed to get her left arm in the way, partially guarding against the hit, but she was still sent flying. She tumbled through the air before finding out just how strong that force screen to protect the audience was, smashing into it at greater than highway speed. She bounced off the barrier and turned in the air just in time to see the boss's mouth opening, lightning gathering in its jaws as it prepared to take her out of the fight in a more permanent manner.

She dug her right gauntlet into the wall, the stone shattering in a ring around where she embedded her fist in the tough material, that ring then exploding as she threw herself down with explosive force. She made contact with the ground, cracking the arena floor as her feet dug in before she launched herself forward, directly towards the boss. The breath attack blasted out as she was blurring across the arena floor, the lightning hitting her and washing over her, but she had altered her position enough before the boss had gathered the requisite energy that it wasn't a direct hit.

It still felt like a living hell, Beth's muscles seizing up as she went tumbling forward, bouncing across the floor from the high speed she had been traveling at when the boss's attack hit her. Her noble sacrifice hadn't all been in vain, however, as Blood had used the time Beth had been getting pummeled to set up an incredibly powerful strike. She charged her energy claw attacks while she moved, pumping more and more mana into her soulbound gauntlets as she got in position. She was a little surprised as she just kept pumping mana in, building up the specific arrangement of mana that created the skill, gathering more and more power as she got ready. Her soulbound gauntlets didn't complain at all, greedily drinking up all the mana she dumped into them, working with her to build the skill to an even greater degree.

As Beth was finishing her tumble and righting herself just in front of the boss, her armor burnt and still sparking, Blood was ready. She moved in from the side, getting lucky as the boss decided to swipe at Beth with its left arm, whereas Blood was approaching from its right. She planted a foot as soon as she was beside the boss, pushing hard and leaping forward across its front with both her arms raised. As she was under the boss, sliding over its arm, she slashed upward, unleashing ten massive blades of energy all overlapping each other, all of them slamming into the beast's neck at the exact same point.

Whereas Blood had been doing very little to the thick scales and tough hide of the lizardman previously, this incredibly powerful attack against the boss's already weakened neck proved quite destructive. Blood felt her legs getting showered in a hot liquid as she was leaving the area in front of the boss, realizing as she looked back after landing that it was a massive gout of blood exploding from the beast's shredded neck. She had absolutely shredded the beast's flesh, the boss's head hanging almost solely from its spine, with all the scales and muscles torn into shreds.

Beth, despite her very recent close encounter with far too much lightning, was ready, having seen Blood's approach while she was recovering and dodging the boss's swipe. She had shaken off the lightning and focused up, charging herself with mana much the same way Blood had, though there were a few differences in the precise manner how she moved and concentrated the mana. Likely that those differences were very significant, but that was something for her to exam later, as she had a boss to take down right now.

The mana built and built, Beth burning almost everything she had left to empower her next attack, charging her entire body from head to toe with mana. She had built up so much mana in the forms laid out in the Celestial Annihilation skill that the ground under her had started to shatter. She focused that mana, compressing it in a way she hadn't tried much before, crushing the mana down into smaller segments, concentrating the mana more deeply. She was starting to discover, through actions like this, that she had absolutely no idea how anything related to mana worked. Not that it was some unknowable thing that she couldn't figure out, but that everything she had done so far wasn't even comparable to reading the first word of a work that stretched on for more than a billion pages.

Again, distracting thoughts about the nature of mana and the universe would be great any other time, but right now she had more pressing things to think about. All that prep and pondering had only lasted a second, Beth's improved body and brain, thanks to her stats and first rebirth, allowing her to process such things so much faster than before that she was on the attack as soon as she was ready. She had figured out a few more things about how Spatial Step worked since she got it, including that it was incredibly versatile in its own right, and she was able to keep momentum with the skill if she manipulated her mana just right. That discovery had led her to have all kinds of thoughts about space and how it worked, but those weren't germane to the present endeavor, either.

She slammed her right leg into the ground and shot forward and up with a massive burst of strength, teleporting almost instantly, only allowing a fraction of a second to build speed. The other end of that instantaneous movement dumped her out directly in the boss's face, quite literally, and her right fist smashed into the beast's lolling head with all the force of a crashing meteor. The combination of her momentum, strength, and overcharged Celestial Annihilation led to utter devastation, the energy from her blow and the angle she was at causing the boss's jaw to mostly disintegrate while a beam of annihilating force traveled through the bottom of the creature's head. That beam exited directly out the back of the base of the boss's head, quite conveniently exactly where its spine was located, the only thing holding its head onto its body.

The creature's head went flying up and back, tumbling through the air before it was intercepted by Blood, the lupine woman slashing five bloody claws directly into the skull through its open bottom. The energy lacerated the beast's brain, killing it in no uncertain terms, not that Beth thought even such a powerful being could live through its skull flying away from its body like that.

Beth saw they had gotten more than a full level from that, considering where they had been at before the fight. They had just hit two hundred three and they had hit two hundred five as soon as Blood had ensured the beast was dead. Beth sighed and collapsed onto her back after she finished allocating her free points. She hoped they could get through the rest of this dungeon without being forced to do another rebirth and, based on them being able to kill this sub-boss, she thought they had a decent chance.

She dropped into deep meditation without bothering to clean up or remove any armor, Blood working on the corpse of the boss in the meantime. Blood hadn't expended quite as much of her resource pools, and was also their leatherworker, meaning she was eager to get the powerful scales off the boss. That, and she wanted to get into the corpse and see if it had a unique beast core that would be more valuable than a regular tier three core.

Beth slept-meditated, it was meditating, for a couple hours, giving Blood more than enough time to skin what remained of the boss and harvest its, sadly, normal core. The lupine woman just shrugged in slight disappointment, tossing the core in her necklace before moving over and settling down next to her companion. She got her own turn to sleep-meditate deeply, after Beth had restored most of her mana and a bit of stamina.

They were both somewhat tired, but not enough that they wanted to have a longer rest period yet, and they decided to press on once Blood was done resting. They moved around the arena, examining all of the regular doors to see if there was any indication any of them were special in any way. Sadly, after five minutes of inspection, there wasn't a clue as to whether any of the doors led somewhere different than the rest of the underworks, and the two picked one at random and entered. Beth still led the way, the disgruntled Blood still barred from scouting duties in the tight confines of the underworks.