Chương 576: Limitless Path Chapter Five Hundred Ninety-Eight

None of the Empyreans spoke to her, however, so she left them to whatever they were doing, both with the gems and with their other projects and focused on the continuing search. The search that would be greatly slowing down as they were now headed for the first of the two gas giants and Beth was pretty sure this was going to drag on.

It was almost exactly as she had predicted, with them first doing some orbits of the world to get some general scans, all of which turned up basically nothing, and then they flew down into the atmosphere. Beth did remind Blood to be a bit careful, as she didn't want them to randomly fly into a hidden dreadnought somewhere in the murky soup they were currently plowing through.

Not only was the atmosphere thick, which didn't pose a problem for flight or navigation, just for sensors, but it was laced with heavy layers of mana. Beth hadn't seen a place so thick with bands of mana, but it turned out that that was to their benefit. Not just because the drive of the cruiser could inhale large amounts of mana without any worry about creating a localized low-mana zone, but because they were able to follow the clues.

The bands of mana weren't just random occurrences, but happened in line with certain principles that the team were able to take advantage of in their search for anything unusual.

"And how are you calculating this?" Beth asked Val.

"The bands all have a resonance," Val explained.

"They are forming from some magical current that is pulling certain mana types and pushing others. It's subtle, but after studying it for a couple hours, I can definitively say that there are at least ten nodes that are manipulating the mana in the atmosphere."

"So, that helps, but then we still have to check all these nodes, right?" Beth said.

"Yes, though it should be obvious which place has the proper item, or the proper layout. The gems, despite being contained and having only six arrays around them, are able to harness and move enormous amounts of mana. The other nodes will all be regulatory nodes that simply pass mana through. We shouldn't need any more than three nodes to figure out the full pattern as well as get the baseline."

"And if all the nodes are the same but the one that has the gem, we can just look for the node with more energy," Beth filled in.

"Yes, that's correct," Val nodded, watching the scanner.

"Alright. Take us around the nodes in whatever order Val wants, Blood," Beth ordered the wolf, who started immediately flying them to the first node. The first node wasn't what they were looking for, or so it seemed, as Val just told Blood to fly on and get to the next point to investigate. It was on flying around like that that Beth was so glad they had something to go off of because it would be such an insane time sink to fly around looking for a needle in a haystack.

Instead, it was tracking down a dozen needles that they knew the location of in a very turbulent haystack and figuring out if that needle was the right needle or not. That effort took them a couple days in total; they were able to figure out what the baseline for the nodes was and that most of the nodes were just junctions for the mana. They each had some valuable materials, but Beth didn't want to tear any of them apart before finding the node with the gem.

Beth felt like her luck was really taking some swings up and down, though it was a small thing overall, as they needed to go through all the nodes Val had identified with the scanners before they hit the node that was very clearly the one with the gem. Not only was the node gathering and manipulating far more mana than the other nodes, but it was pretty obvious when they pulled up to the node and there was a mile of area around it that was clear of any mana or any other gases.

It wasn't a perfect vacuum, according to the ship's sensors, but it was clear of almost everything else present in the planet's atmosphere. Retrieving the gem was a bigger pain in the ass than the last three, and that was saying something considering the effort the last gem had taken them to get it free without damaging it, but they persisted.

Blood piloted the ship while a group headed out to work on the node, all of them using some kind of equipment to help with hovering or moving in space, though Sera and Kris just manifested their wings in their human forms and used those to maneuver.

"This is such a pain. Can't I just fucking smash it?" Beth grunted over the communicator, hovering in place using nothing but her Ideal.

"No!" blasted back over the channel from at least four different people.

"I wasn't actually gonna do it," Beth grumbled sullenly, crossing her arms as she watched the others work.

"Don't play dumb. You can feel the energy just like we can," Val snapped back.

"You just attacking this would create a big enough explosion that it would try to turn this gas giant into a brown dwarf. If you're not going to help with the decoding, then just wait until we're ready for your monkey brain to smash and we'll tell you to smash."

"That's a bit rude," Beth said. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"But true," Sera said.

"Betrayed by my own wife," Beth moaned, just dodging a swipe from a huge, draconian tail.

"Enough you two! Go get a room if you're going to do that! You're messing up the mana," Val huffed, working on a whole block of runes at once. Beth just hovered and watched while the others worked, though she was observing what they were doing rather carefully. Not only was she picking up what was happening, but she was the only one of the whole group that had a chance of grabbing someone and getting them out if what they were working on blew up in their face.

The Empyreans could help, she was sure, but there were times where their help was limited and where there were very few options for what they could directly do or even give advice on. Beth thought it better to let them stew still and just have her crew handle everything. Besides, one of the reasons she had asked to just smash the whole thing was she was rather confident that she could just tank the entire explosion to the face and be fully, or mostly, unharmed by the blast.

Then again, she didn't smash the framework because she couldn't guarantee the gem wouldn't be damaged by her more concussive approach to solving this little problem. She also did keep in mind that what Val said was largely correct; too much force would compromise the whole network and set off a rather large blast. Luckily, none of them had all that much trouble working under the negative conditions they were in and they didn't have any problem staying there until everything was done.

Beth was quite patient in waiting until the others had all confirmed that they had finished their part before she moved forward and cracked the framework apart, grabbing the yellow gem from within. She thought it might be some kind of citrine, though she wasn't really sure, but she could sense the enormous amount of energy the gem held even without using any skill to analyze it. She tossed the gem into the reliquary along with the others and returned to the ship, whereupon they started heading for the moons.

The gas giant had a dozen moons of varying sizes and they would have to check all of them to make sure that none of them had a gem, though it was unlikely that they wouldn't find one there. There was, according to everything they had figured out, a gem on the fifth planet, and then two gems on one of the other bodies in the system.

With the other moons eliminated, it was the moons of this gas giant or the next or it was a random planetoid that would, for some reason, be classified as a moon, with Beth thinking of Ceres in Sol system as an example of what else they might have to look for. Scanning the moons took a long time, not just because there were a decent number of them, but because several of them were more like small planets, including having their own atmospheres and ecologies.

Beth was also feeling pretty confident at this point, in terms of them finding all the gems, and decided to have the team start clearing a few more things as they went. Rather than just do a quick check to determine if there was a gem present, they would clean up some of these unexplored sites and see if they could find any treasures or valuables that would do well at one of the trading firms.

Beth also wanted to take a moment and look for some ore, not just for their smithing and enchanting, but because bulk sale of metals was worth a very good amount, with large factions happy to pay extra to buy a large lot rather than have to supply their crafters and assemblies in a piecemeal fashion. The first place they explored was a series of caves, something Beth was very familiar with at this point, tracing back to the roots of her rise to power.

Going through the system of tight tunnels and large caverns did put her in mind of the kobold area a little bit, but there was enough of a difference that she was able to appreciate it as its own experience. They started by moving through a few tunnels with nothing but swarms of a giant, rat-like creature that had wickedly sharp claws and swarmed in packs of fifty or sixty.

They were tough beasts but nothing that the team couldn't handle, to the point where it only took a few of the team members to deal with each pack. A good thing, too, as the first cavern they got to was not only swarming with the rat creatures, but there were so many of them that they flowed over each other like waves in a surging tide, overlapping almost as soon as the previous one broke.

This was not a more difficult fight, just more tedious, as the numbers and swarming tactics meant the team stayed grouped tight and worked their way through the beasts slowly. The rats weren't the only problem just in that first cavern, however, as some kind of thing and spindly bat creatures joined the fray as well.

The things were frail, for sure, but they swarmed in almost greater numbers than the rats and Beth thought the bats very much looked like a giant set of teeth with broad, leathery wings and a small body attached. Getting a set of those chompers clamped onto an arm or a leg would not be a pleasant experience at all, and Beth was doubly glad that she wore extremely heavy armor on her hands, with her fingers especially protected from random bites and nibbles.

The bats were also, they found early on, very weak to lightning, meaning Kris devastated their ranks with little effort, the phoenix being able to cast all manner of both lightning and void lightning spells in rapid succession. Kris was also very proficient at dual-casting; casters very often started only able to cast a single spell at a time.

Soph had been limited as such early on, though she had done some simple experiments with casting two different spells by focusing one through each hand when they were clearing the dungeons by the neighborhood. Then again, Soph was a bit of a genius herself and Beth had no doubt most other casters took far longer to even start experimenting with two simple, body-directed spells. Kris was very good at dual-casting, to the point she did it almost naturally in battle.

Beth didn't comment on it much, but Kris was almost always casting two spells at the same time. A part of it also tied into her dual-affinity, with the phoenix having practiced early on to take advantage of her power with both water and void lightning, the result being that she had grown very used to throwing out a water and lightning spell simultaneously.

Years after she first started adventuring and she was not so limited, often dual-casting lightning spells in situations where water spells would not be as practical, though she could multi-cast just about anything in any way. She had demonstrated to the group some time ago that she had the basics of tri-casting down, but the effort involved was still extremely high and the added power of the third spell wasn't worth it, not when dealing with swarms of beasts.

Kris was actually in the position where she didn't have enough targets, even in a massive swarm, as two lightning spells at the same time cleared more area than she and the team could even take advantage of. If Beth had to point it out, it was the one slight disadvantage of their team right now, in that they didn't have a dedicated caster or ranged specialist other than Kris.

They did make up for it with the amount of ranged attacks the team had between them, but she did hope they could recruit one or two more people that had ranged capabilities. Someone that wielded guns and other ranged weapons as efficiently, hell, half as efficiently as Jaq would be an amazing addition. Another caster wouldn't hurt, either, though Kris did beautifully in that spot and didn't necessarily need another person added into the mix.

If Beth had any kind of plan for boosting the team, it would be to get at least one more ranged fighter, get Veren to sign on full-time (or another weapon prodigy that wasn't as temperamental, but those weren't exactly a dime a dozen), and get somebody that was more focused on support. Ideally, they could grab someone who specialized in something a bit more esoteric like barrier magic or something similar that could also act as a healer, but Beth wasn't exactly picky.

It was more about if a new addition would be a good fit and blend well with the team's dynamic, though she wasn't rushing out to post recruitment notices, either. If someone showed up, they showed up, and if not, well, she was a mini-Exalted with a box full of Exalted-wannabes and a team that had the power of early Ascended at mid-Enlightened and were well on their way to Exalted. She wasn't exactly super stressed about filling in more positions.