Chương 479: Limitless Path Chapter Five Hundred One

When these kind of investigations happened, with a CRA Gold Emblem or above taking the lead to look into something, local authorities often played second fiddle to them. That was true here, as Beth and her team went to several locations that had associations with Stellar Scheduling and its businesses, including some of the residences of the employees.

Those residences were a treasure trove, sometimes quite literally; it looked like some of the employees hadn't minded being on the take, as it were, and had kept or bought some quite expensive things. The leader of the company, the one Beth had stopped torching everything, had filled his house with tacky paintings, gaudy sculptures, and overwrought furniture.

That alone might not have been such a terrible thing, but the amount of money he should have been making, even as an Enlightened, wouldn't have outfitted such a large house with such a massive proliferation of tacky, but expensive, art pieces. The chief of the company also, speaking of him, wasn't particularly good with data safety, at least not at his residence, where the team found a pile of documents showing his participation in the conspiracy.

That also got them names, names of those who were part of the bandit group and raiding the depots, as well as names of other conspirators who were working with the bandits to aid them, including guards who were bribable or corruptible in some way. That shifted their list, as they now had the bandits to go after, though Beth didn't want to do that directly.

The bandits, led by a woman who was a bit smarter than the company chief, but not that much smarter, had a set of two raids planned in the next two days in outlying areas. Beth wasn't sure they would both happen, but she hoped to intercept that first raid, which might happen, catching the bandits in the act and stopping them. They coupled that with putting a few of the bandits under surveillance, allowing Blood and Kris to bounce around, Blood using her scouting skills and Kris her spells, to track all the bandits.

It was a difficult job, to be sure, but they only had to keep track of a couple dozen individuals between two different cities. That wasn't an insurmountable task, and the people from the scheduling company being held in jail, one without access to the Net, let them know, or at least hope, that none of the bandits had been informed. Beth was just hoping that none of the bandits would skip town, particularly through some means where they went interstellar, like a teleport, or chasing them down would be hell.

Luckily, CRA teleporter access was already restricted to center members or ranks, and that could very easily be locked down further. Beyond that, there were not that many organizations that had extensive teleporter networks, and all of those both tended to be locked down and expensive.

Beth and the others often got around the restrictions on other networks precisely by being CRA members of some standing with good repute, allowing them to only have to worry about the usurious prices other networks charged for anybody that wasn't a senior member of their organization. Stellar flight was also complicated, as passengers not only had to pay quite a fee even for very basic accomodations on a one-system jump, they were also subject to more scrutiny than many of the teleporter networks.

Teleporters were expensive to build and maintain, but they were nothing compared to interstellar capable craft, which were often either bulk haulers or fighting ships clearing out space-based beasts. Those kinds of ships cost a small planet's fortune to build and maintain, so one person without the best intentions was an incredibly expensive liability to let onboard.

They needn't have worried, as there was no love lost between criminals, the former employees of the scheduling company, as well as any of the security contractors working with them, not telling anybody in the gang what had happened. Beth knew nobody in the bandit crew had gotten any information when the whole crew moved to raid the first warehouse the day after Beth's team had raided Stellar Scheduling.

Blood tailed them, following at a distance where the raiders wouldn't possibly notice her while Beth and the others trailed her. This was going to be a bit loud, and likely quite messy, so they didn't want to start anything until they were outside the city, at the very least. Beth held off on interference as Blood reported back to them, waiting until the target was in sight.

Very conveniently, almost all the guards were missing, either on 'breaks' that had them away from not just their assigned areas but away from the warehouse itself, or simply having been no-shows. The three guards that were present were also clearly in on it, as they were all in a single room eating when the bandits showed up. For how much noise the bandits made when they entered the facility and started stealing things, those guards having their mid-shift lunch were certainly doing a good job ignoring everything.

That made the whole thing a lot easier, as Beth told Blood to circle around the building while the rest of the group approached and got in position. Despite Beth's group not being particularly stealthy, outside of Blood, nobody noticed them until Beth gave the greenlight to give the bandits the old beatdown.

Kris stayed outside, mainly because her spells and casting ability could most easily respond to anybody trying to escape while also responding to calls for assistance from long-range with a blast of water, lightning, or both. The treasure Beth had given Kris had clearly helped her increase her power, and now she was a real monster at range; given that nobody could get up to her to interfere in time, she could lay down some serious firepower for a damned long time.

Electrical attacks also had the benefit of stunning and incapacitating, as long as Kris didn't hit too hard and kill, which did become a problem when they were fighting what Beth would consider small fry. Everybody in the bandit gang was a small fry, in Beth's opinion, skewed as that opinion may be. Even the leader didn't really impress her, the woman unable to withstand more than a minute of sustained combat against her.

For most people, that would have been rather good, but Beth wasn't using all her cards, nor was she here to kill; capturing would be much preferable, though it wasn't strictly required to complete the mission. The bandit leader had two rebirths on Beth and should have been at the minimum her equal, if not vastly her superior, but that wasn't the case at all.

Beth had a little thing called a Mana Physique, for one thing, and another thing called seven True Rebirths for another, not to mention her multiple skills in Platinum just as a bit of icing on the cake, making for a rather lopsided fight. Beth basically bullied the woman, who really gave it her all, but it was just no contest, and Beth was pretty sure the bandit leader was in the process of surrendering as she teleported beside her and delivered a genuine knockout blow to the side of the head.

Stolen novel; please report. The rest of the operation was much the same story, and the team didn't spare the security guards, either, as they were definitely accomplices. It made for a nice, uneven twenty-nine people that they had to haul back once they had secured everyone and documented the robbery. Luckily for the unfortunate bandits, and security guards, Beth had an airship, one she was willing to make fairly copious use of whenever the need arose.

Unluckily for the bandits, they were relegated to a pile in the cargo hold, though they had all been cuffed before joining the pile. Not the most glorious way to travel. They didn't have far to go with the airship, though getting permission to fly the thing into the city anywhere other than the city airport was a huge hassle. The easier solution was just to land at the airport and have the city law enforcement come over and pick the suspects up.

That put a lot of extra onus on the police, but Beth had a rather dim view of local law enforcement already, and she didn't really care about a little extra work for a few officers. They needed to bring a handful of vans and one large truck to fit all the people, not in the most comfortable of manners, but criminals were even lower on the totem pole than cops, so they were just lucky Bjorn wasn't dragging them all through the streets by chains or ropes. He could easily do it, too.

The wrap-up was more time consuming and tedious than actually completing the mission, as there were interviews, paperwork, documentation, and a bunch of debriefs with both the police and the security companies. The whole thing was a bit of an embarassment for the security apparatus that had been confident in securing the factories and warehouses of the world.

It was also something that was going to be damned difficult to cover up, with the waves it was already making, meaning things were going to be disturbed for a while. That was all outside the concerns of Beth's group, considering it was just a single Gold mission that they were working and nothing more.

They spent a couple weeks getting all the post-capture work and processes wrapped up, finally getting the Hall Master to give them a mission complete, meaning they were just eleven more missions away from their Gold tests. That one mission was close to a month of time, more if the amount of time they had spent searching for it was considered, and they had to go looking for their next mission.

That process was more annoying than doing the missions, possibly even more annoying than the post-mission paperwork and interviews, but they were working on a network now. If the Halls they did jobs for had any missions pop up that Beth's group could handle, they knew who to call to get them done quickly and quietly, or relatively quietly, as the case may be.

Knowing Beth's group was skilled, powerful, rich, and willing to do hard and dirty work really put them at the top of every Hall Masters list for who to call to get Gold missions done immediately. The next section of time was a long, boring search for missions that ate up a month of time, not that they were under a serious time crunch, but Beth wanted to get this done sooner rather than later. Weeks ticking by as they were just searching for a mission was annoying, but there was little they could do about it.

The more high rank missions had more prestige and more buzz surrounding them, so Diamond missions, for example, were widely known even right when they were posted. Conversely, Silver missions, or even Gold missions, just weren't nearly as important and would not have nearly the kind of buzz or rumor surrounding them as those Platinum, Diamond, or Mithril missions.

That made it a lot harder to track down those Gold missions, and Beth was thinking about what it would cost the CRA in the Milky Way to unify their mission system so prospective Golds didn't have to do this runaround. When she asked Sera and Bjorn about that kind of thing, the cost, not just in materials and systems, but in labor and time, quickly spiraled way out of control. She supposed that was why the people in charge hadn't bothered with it.

The system as it was now was slow and not super efficient, but it did manage to work, and change was expensive and tedious, not to mention sometimes scary. Without that change, the search was a slog, and they finally found a difficult extermination mission, something requiring them to kill a horde of beasts all above level three hundred. Luckily for both Beth's team and the Hall they found the mission at, that was their specialty, destroying massive numbers of beasts in tight timelines.

This case wouldn't be any different, with hundreds of thousands of beasts needing to be killed, preferably within a couple weeks or a Swarm would start. That wasn't an issue for their team, and Beth led them in the slaughter, though the mission wasn't for her, tearing through the beasts in just seventy-two hours. That was a speed that really impressed the Hall Master, earning them yet another contact and another looking for them, ready to dish them up a juicy mission the next time it popped up.

That might not be for a while, though, as Gold missions weren't that common. Gold missions were in this weird position where they weren't the simple kind of daily work or busy work that needed done that occupied the ranks of Silver missions, but they also weren't highly important missions. Things like negotiating with dignitaries, making contracts with governments, and even fighting against powerful monsters, those missions were often Platinum and above.

They had been able to skate on a few things here and there because they had Baelvyr and Tazeen tipping the scale in their favor, with Baelvyr able to just create and cross off missions without much question. Not that his decisions wouldn't ever be reviewed, but he had an awful lot of latitude compared to just about anybody else, considering he certainly was above Diamond Emblem in rank. That review would come up during audits, which would go over much, if not all, of the work the team had been doing.

Audits were a bit of a tricky thing, but in practice they worked in the CRA by having the strongest, most standout Hall, the White Hall, audit the other Halls while those other Halls banded together to do a joint audit of the White Hall. Nothing that Tazeen or Baelvyr had done was a real violation of the rules, so Beth wasn't expecting trouble.

The audits themselves also couldn't be work for them yet, as none of the associated work was trusted to anything less than Platinum, though that could possibly be some of their work to prepare for the Platinum test. That was a long way down the line, however, as Platinum wouldn't be something they would be doing until they were all firmly in Enlightened, and likely not for some time after that.

Getting to Gold was already a big enough pain, and they had been working on that for quite a while, including the favorable treatment by Baelvyr and the others, treatment they wouldn't be getting as much of for their future ranks. That wasn't something to worry about for now, and they focused on finishing the beast hunt quickly before jetting off again.

The teleporter fees alone would be a real pain in the ass for any team that didn't have the kinds of princesses and legacy inheritors, and just lucky bastards, that Beth's team had. Spending gold and even platinum coins like water just to bounce between places with nothing for them to do was a luxury a lot of teams wouldn't be able to splurge on. None of it was reimbursable, either, Beth having had that requisition form shot down the second she had thought about it, or close to it.