Chương 441: Limitless Path Chapter Four Hundred Sixty-Three

Flying up to the first site that evening, they slowed just as they got within a few miles, Blood very competently piloting them to within less than a mile of the target. Blood put the ship down and Beth folded it and returned it to her necklace, not wanting to leave it hovering more out of concern of others than for the ship itself.

They were in a section of field that might once have been marsh or a swamp, but the whole thing had been dried out years ago and was used to grow soybeans at one time, if Beth was any judge. She looked around to assess threats, finding a group of level two hundred forty beasts off just a bit to their north and lumbering towards them. The things had clearly been attracted by their arrival and were driven to fight whatever it was, and likely eat whatever was leftover.

The things looked like some cross between a rhinoceros and a woolly mammoth, with long legs and shaggy fur, but thick and powerful bodies topped by broad, blunt heads with a long horn projecting from a stubby nose. It was the giant tusks curling from their mouths that had made Beth think elephant or mammoth, and those tusks gave her the most concern for a fight with the beasts.

Still, while the girls were pretty highly out leveled in this area and by these beasts in particular, their stats and skills meant they were likely far stronger than the pack beasts. Beth glanced at the other two and saw Sera shrug while Blood started forward, moving towards the beasts at a rapidly accelerating pace.

It didn't take the lupine woman more than a few seconds to come into contact with the creatures, and she launched a series of withering attacks that immediately had the beasts enraged and bellowing, trying to stomp or gore this puny creature hurting them. Beth didn't bother joining in, just watching as Blood's skills shredded the enemies in just under a minute, all nine beasts chopped up and dismembered.

It was a bit painful for the wolf to cause so much damage, always thinking about if she could harvest the hide in a way that let her get the most leather out of it, but the beasts were rather tough, with their thick fur and dense skin helping blunt the force of Blood's sharp attacks. She had had to use a bit more oomph than she had wanted, and a few more attacks to ensure the beasts were down for the count, harvesting what she could with a bit of grumbling after she had won.

Beth and Sera waited for Blood to get done, the wolf having become rather expert at breaking down corpses over their years of adventuring, the two other girls keeping their heads on a swivel. Nothing else popped up to attack them in the couple minutes it took Blood to roughly skin the bodies and grab the cores, the wolf determining it wasn't worth it to grab anything else, and Blood then led the way towards the first site.

They had to cross over the field and then pass through a section of trees, a little shaded area that small stream meandered through, creating an area of soft and marshy ground in the center of the patch of woods that the girls simply leapt over. Blood was able to bounce around rather freely, moving as she liked, though she was being careful how she stepped and hopped despite appearances.

Beth and Sera had to be much more careful, however, as they weren't quite as agile and they were both even heavier; a bad step or jump by any of the three of them could see them breaking a branch they landed on or going hip-deep into soft ground before they even knew it. Apart from having to be a bit careful about their growing mass and density, the three had to keep an eye out for beasts.

While most beasts were brash, bold, loud, and aggressive, they had had plenty of experience with beasts that hid in ambush or stalked prey. It was another reason to be careful when jumping around; that tree might not be a tree but a beast that looked like a tree, or a beast that hid in the branches of the tree in camouflage. Better to be careful and constantly scanning their surroundings than have to tear their way out of the grasp, or maw, of a hungry beast that they had failed to notice.

There was little in the area that suggested there being ambush predators out and about, but caution didn't hurt, and they passed through the section of forests with only having to kill five beasts. On the other side, they leapt out into a small area of broken rocks and what might have been an old mine shaft or maybe an old storage area dug out of a broken hillside.

It wasn't a large area overall, maybe five hundred feet one way and a little under a thousand the other, but the terrain had been bad enough that they didn't want to land directly there. That and they liked to be a little cautious; setting the airship down directly on top of an anomaly or strange site that they didn't have full confidence in sounded like a recipe for disaster.

Better to have to hoof it a mile on foot, even in quite bad terrain, which this hadn't been, rather than to plant the airship down and have it attacked by something extremely powerful or hit by some kind of strange magic or weird power. Speaking of strange magic, there was quite a lot of it emanating from the ground, mostly out through that aforementioned old mineshaft. Blood was still their scout and led the way over to the opening and down into the rough tunnel that was contained within.

Beth felt the air with not just her primary physical senses, but also with her mana senses and her spirit in general. There was something there, something that tickled at a memory in the back of her mind, and it took her a few moments to realize that it wasn't a memory of hers, but a memory out of the lot that Liveria's crystal had stuffed into her head. She pushed at it, not getting fully lost in the memory, but getting the flavor and feeling of it for a few moments.

That was more than enough, as she told Blood to stop. The other two huddled up with her, giving her questioning looks, but she held up a hand for a moment to sort through her thoughts. The memory lingered in her mind, a time when Liveria had fought against untold thousands of wraiths, suffering from their deathly magics and debuffing abilities.

Beth could recognize the taint of death magic in the air, that chill and haunting feeling that weighed at a person's soul and drowned their senses in a cloying, suffocating sense of impending doom. It was a terrible thing to experience, and they weren't even experiencing it at nearly the strongest, as the memories attested, with Liveria getting a much worse feeling being in much closer proximity to the wraiths.

They were far more damaging even just through proximity at closer ranges, and Beth wasn't looking forward to poking their heads further into the tunnels.

"What's wrong?" Blood grunted finally, giving Beth a questioning look.

"Wraiths," said Beth, getting a groan from Sera but a blank look from Blood. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Beings that are considered monsters but aren't as cunning. They're attracted to life force and siphon it out of their victims. Luckily, they tend to stick close to areas of cold, death, corruption, and foul air. Unluckily for trying to fight them, they stick close to areas of cold, death, corruption, and foul air," Sera explained with a sigh.

"Good experience?" Blood asked.

"Not much more than beasts of the same level," Sera shrugged.

"We don't have anything to gather essence or anything else from them, either, which is kinda a waste. We should just scout for right now and then peel out and come back later when we're better prepared."

"I don't like running," Blood growled, Beth immediately flicking her forehead with thunderous force.

"Don't be like that," Beth scolded.

"We're getting better prepped and getting a better idea what we're working with. Tactics."

"Fine, fine," Blood grumbled, turning and slinking further into the tunnels, using Stealth to blend in and try to avoid detection. That was going to be a tough ask, as the wraiths could sense life force and living beings, and Blood's Stealth wasn't a particularly good version of such skills. It was enough to help her avoid the notice of most beasts, and even people weaker than her, but anything that was stronger or had unusual or high-level detection methods was going to be able to see through her skill right away.

That was going to be a big problem against the wraiths if they were even close to the group's level, let alone if they were on par or even higher. Blood was moving slowly and focusing on the area around her, using all of her senses to detect any movement, unusual mana, or other changes that would indicate the presence of enemies. Blood's senses weren't to be underestimated, however, and she discovered something other than wraiths after ten minutes of slowly making her way through the tunnels.

She stopped at a long, thin vertical crack in the wall of the second tunnel they were walking down, an area that contained something that smelled very strange. It was her nose that had pulled through again, Blood's high sensitivity to strange smells, especially those that influenced the mana around them, had never failed them, and it had led her to something quite good this time. She waited for Beth and Sera to catch up to her, the three of them examining the crack with all of their various senses and skills.

"It's very cold," Beth said, staring both at and into the thin line.

"The heat sense of my eyes sees it as extremely dark blue just at the thin seam, and then darkening almost to black further back, and not from lack of light. That's some serious cold in there."

"Some cold treasure?" Blood grunted.

"Could be an ore, too," Sera said.

"Some of them display very extreme temperatures."

"We wanna try to excavate whatever it is?" Beth asked, looking at the other two. Both immediately nodded, which prompted her next question, "How?"

"Let me. You're too sloppy," Blood grunted, moving to the crack and starting her claws glowing with energy. Beth and Sera moved back, watching Blood work, but also watching the tunnels around them. It was a good thing they were paying attention, too, as the first enemies showed up after Blood had spent a little time cutting. It coincided, not coincidentally, with her opening up a small area of the seam a bit wider, letting cold and a burst of frigid and haunting mana flow into the tunnels.

Almost as soon as the mana washed over Beth and Sera, wraiths appeared at the end of the tunnel and started floating towards them rapidly. The beings were of different shapes and sizes, but all had roughly humanoid figures and all floated a few inches off the ground. Many of them appeared to be wearing cloaks and robes, though they were spectral clothes that were translucent and partially faded just the same as the bodies of the wraiths.

The monsters floated down the hall towards them in a bobbing, though fast, motion that made Beth a bit dizzy to look at, and only when her Indomitable Heart pinged her did she realize it was some type of spell or skill.

"They're causing confusion," Sera warned.

"Yep, got that already," Beth replied, running more mana through her skill to clear her head.

"Let's just hold them off for now." She scanned several of the lead wraiths, thankful to find they were only in the low two hundreds in level. The other good thing she found, as more and more of the beings choked the tunnel, was that they weren't able to move through the walls. She wasn't sure why exactly, considering they were ghostly beings, but it seemed they had to navigate the place just the same as the girls did.

That at least limited the planes of attack, allowing each of the two of them to take a direction of the tunnel while Blood continued cutting through to whatever was hidden in the wall. The greater the opening Blood made, the more the wraiths became agitated and the more that flooded into the tunnel, clearly showing that it absolutely was whatever she was digging out that was attracting their attention.

The tough thing about fighting the wraiths was their incorporeal nature; while they weren't able to move through the walls, floor, or ceiling of the tunnel at will, many of Beth's attacks passed through their bodies while doing very little damage. That was true for physical strikes but was far less true for anything requiring mana to activate, as any of her skills was able to do big damage to the spectral beings.

Her spatial skills seemed a fairly good match, but then again, they were a pretty good match against just about everything, being able to pulverize whatever she fired them off against.

Her good old reliable prize for placing so highly in the Trial of Celestial Awakening was also excellent here, exceeding even her spatial skills, as when she cast Celestial Annihilation, the skill seemed to just vaporize wraiths outright, despite their higher levels and greater toughness as monsters, particularly monsters that had done rebirths. That did raise an interesting question, one that she would have to look into later, when there weren't a thousand wraiths trying to eat her life force.

Her assumption was a pretty easy one, considering the name of the skill, and she would have to do some research on figuring out what the mana types of the skill really were and what it was doing. For now, she just knew that the skill was absolutely dominating the fight in her direction, the wraiths literally melting away before her every time she attacked.

She used one of her old swords and just chucked sword waves down the tunnel, infusing them with Celestial Annihilation and watching as the whole tunnel cleared out in three swings. It wasn't even a challenge, and she was barely using any mana, as well, with just a tiny amount able to make the attacks fully destroy everything in the space in front of her. Sera was fairing a little worse, but only because she was being very selective of her use of dragon fire, which was a bane to all things evil.

If Sera really cut loose, not only could she run herself out of breath for a while, but she would also use up all the oxygen in the area. While the three could go a while without breathing, even while fighting, it would be a pretty terrible way to die, suffocating in a random tunnel because they burned up all their oxygen. Beth aided her without even looking back, grabbing the fire that Sera had breathed, which tended to linger for a while, and moving it around Sera's end of the tunnel.

Under the control of Beth's Mana Physique, the fire took on a life of its own and gained increased power, compacting down into small bars that spun further down the tunnel before exploding into cross-connecting tunnels, vaporizing a massive number of the wraiths.