Chương 590: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Twelve

Two weeks was an optimistic time line, it turned out, but not for Bjorn's mission, as the diplomats were able to crawl, ever-so-painfully, to a settlement on land and funding that let them sign agreements with the CRA before the full negotiations were concluded. Getting those papers signed was still an exercise in pulling teeth, let alone getting them written in a way that everyone walked away mildly unhappy, which was key to a good negotiation, but they got it done in eleven days.

Sera had left before they were even finished to head to her mission, which they had deemed the most time sensitive of the three remaining, while Val had stepped up to sit down at the table and enter the negotiations. Beth and the others learned quite a bit by observing, but Val was the one with real experience in dealing with dignitaries, foreign polities, and high stakes arguments where a bad showing, a single wrong turn of phrase, could have terrible consequences.

The kresnik was also used to the spotlight and to working with such high profile cases and, to some extent, enjoyed showing off her diplomatic and social prowess to get otherwise tricky agreements signed, sealed, and delivered. Well, they would be delivering it in a couple weeks, but a digital version was already transmitted through the Net by the time they left the building on the eleventh day, taking marking Bjorn's mission complete.

The group then had to hurry to catch up to Sera, who was working on her own mission already, though it wasn't something the dragon was going to struggle with compared to the other missions. They only rushed over to her because the mission, like many others, would take a lot more time for someone to do solo; that was, after all, the big benefit of them moving and working as a team for these missions.

Sure, Beth could have wandered off and done a couple missions by herself before the others even got one mission done, but it was a lot faster for the team overall to tackle everything together, even if that did make time lines much tighter for whatever they chose to work on last when given a batch of jobs.

Speed and completeness were both key factors in Platinum missions, as they were in any mission, but timeliness was prioritized highly; by the time one was doing Platinum missions, successful completion with no lingering problems was already expected to be a given. Sera's mission was very similar to one they had done previously, tying back in with their recent discussion of expeditions, as a strange ruin had been uncovered on a world and was spewing out weird, rare monsters.

The monsters, just like the ruin that was churning out monsters that they had previously explored before they had the full team fully formed, were at low rebirths and generally low levels, but they would not stay like that for long. If the problem was left to fester, the monsters would destroy just about everything they could get their hands on, ending with each other, before one would emerge to reign supreme, a monster on the level of the one they had just take care of a few weeks prior.

With Sera already headed there before them, they could be confident in the tide at least being stemmed, if not outright stopped, and Beth expected they would simply do a quick cleanup and move on to mission four. Her expectations and reality were at least a bit different, as they showed up to find the problem, while not spiraling out of control, was more complicated than the mission briefing suggested.

Not that that was unusual, especially for Platinum missions and above, but it did tend to make things a lot more tedious and annoying, when even the provided information was so far off-base. The main issue was locational, well, that was one of two big problems that the brief hadn't covered.

The ruin, it turned out, was in the middle of a range of mountains, which was already bad enough, as places of concentrated mana, but the ruin was also underground in the mountain range, which amplified everything by several times over.

On top of that, conditions where the terrain and situation were far more dangerous than what they had initially thought from the brief, the monsters were far more annoying to deal with than what Beth might have thought of as a 'standard' monster, if anything with such corrupt and blighted beings could be normal. The monsters were a type of shade that were partially incorporeal and could shift through shadows and darkness, making them very difficult to hit and even harder to kill.

Their partially incorporeal nature meant that much more mana was needed to deal with them than might otherwise be needed, especially considering their lower levels. Their ability to fade into shadows or darkness also made them tricky to pin down and eliminate once and for all, making the whole task much more time consuming.

"We need to clean the area around the ruin, too," Sera said when the rest of the team had met up with her and gotten a quick update.

"Nothing about that in the mission brief," Beth said.

"Not that I'm going after you, but you know how these things go."

"Right, and we normally wouldn't, but the shades are more of a problem than you might think," Sera explained.

"They're monsters, so they're controlling and dominating beasts nearby, which are the beasts underground in a mountain range. Beyond that, the shades have some partial ability to jump into nearby beasts and at least hide within them for a time, if not outright puppet them, though I have seen evidence yet that they can directly take over another being fully."

"I'm starting to understand why they rated this mission at Platinum," Blood growled.

"Oh, it gets better," Sera said to frowns all around.

"That ruin is a fucking nightmare hell pit, with all kinds of nasty traps and weird dead ends. I hope you're all looking forward to raising your Corruption Resistance or whatever it is you have, because there's a lot of poison and acid in there. Like, when I say a lot, I'm talking about tons of the stuff."

"Oh, joy," said Val in a very sarcastic, monotone manner.

"Resistance training is always good. Always pays off, down the line," Beth said.

"And sucks to get done in the present," Val muttered with a sigh. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"So, let's recap what we have," Beth said, leaning against a wall in the small room they had met Sera in in the CRA Hall.

"We have a strange ruin that is pumping out monsters. We haven't figured out why or how, which is what we're here for. Beyond that, the place is a highly dangerous zone with a multitude of dangerous beasts and oddities nearby. On top of that, the ruin exploration is going to be dangerous and take a long time because the whole place is trapped and confusing maze of twisting dead ends. Oh, and the monsters themselves, while weak, are hard to kill and extremely slippery. Did I miss anything?"

"Just to point out, we don't know the size of the ruins, either. Because they're underground, we just don't have a good way to even map the outer edges," Sera added.

"Great, so this place could be a thousand feet wide and one floor, or ten miles across and a dozen floors deep," Beth said, rolling her adds at the added information.

"Yeah, think that's pretty much it," Sera said.

"God, this is going to be awful," Val complained, absentmindedly rubbing Blood's head with one hand while she frowned at Sera, or a point just over Sera's shoulder.

"Well, we work with what we have," Beth said with a shrug.

"We could get the others to come over, but I'm not really sure it would be worth their time, and we don't really have anybody all that good with traps and such. The two of you are probably the best we've got, all things considered."

"What about your former flame?" Sera asked.

"Isn't that little, cute girlie a rogue? Could you get her to help?"

"As much as I'd love to provide Sabs with work, I think it's a little too much for them," Beth said, waving her hand.

"They're not quite at their tenth rebirths yet, and I think bringing any of them into a mission this dangerous before they have their Mana Physiques would be too risky. They're also not quite up to snuff with their skills right now, either, so I wouldn't want to call on them for something like this for a while."

"Got it," Sera said.

"Well then, unless you can get John or one of the others, I'll get to work," Blood said.

"Do it," Beth said, giving Blood and Val a nod. The two immediately took off, leaving the CRA Hall they were using as their temporary base for the moment, located in the city closest to the mountain range where the target ruin resided. Beth and the rest of the team followed behind them more slowly; they were going to work on clearing out an area around the ruin and trying to cull the beast population, at least as much as was possible.

It was another thing that was just a continual pain in the ass with areas with extreme mana density in the way that they would spawn new beasts, and fairly strong ones, rather often. Areas with very low mana densities might have beasts appear from the ambient mana extremely rarely, with many of the beasts that formed being due to too much mana pouring into a regular animal and causing it to become a beast.

In contrast, that kind of even happened very rarely in a mountain range, while beasts spawning, and well into the hundreds in level, happened all the time. Still, there was a limit to how much ambient mana could do, especially over the course of just one day, and Beth's group was more than capable of culling the beasts faster than the spawning rate in the area.

They didn't just go after the beasts, of course, but went after the monsters as well, Beth trying a variety of attacks and abilities to deal with their incorporeal nature and powers. She found the things were very slippery, sliding into the shadows and disappearing as soon as she had done any real damage to them, but some component of it must have involved manipulating space, as she was able to partially lock down the area and interfere with their movement.

She wasn't able to stop them sliding through the shadows and appearing some distance away, but she did make it unreliable, lowering the distance they could travel before popping up again. She also found that, while a little cliche, the things of the dark really hated fire, being harmed to a greater extent by her using her fire-type dominion skill and Mana Physique to create and control the fire in an area, scouring the monsters with powerful flames.

Sera adding in dragon breath from time to time was just the icing on the cake, allowing Beth the ability to rapidly wipe out groups of the monsters. The best of all, however, was her latest skill, Light Beyond the Edge, which practically vaporized individual monsters in an instant, though the light the skill created could also create more shadows that would help other monsters slip away.

Her manipulating and controlling so much fire caused much the same problem, leading to there being more shadows and pools of darkness in whatever area they were working through, amplified even more because they were underground, with more walls and rocks and objects to create more shadows.

The shades were able to make use of all the shadows Beth created to flit about constantly, which also got around her crushing the space around her to a certain extent, as the huge number of shadows she produced rather offset her limiting the shadow movements of the shades. It was an exercise in frustration, overall, though one she was gradually winning as she killed shade after shade as she pushed through the dark, cold, twisting labyrinth of tunnels.

The others had spread out around her as they worked and were having… much less success, if truth be told. Only Sera was doing well against the shades, and that was when she was using her dragon breath to a copious degree, which fairly quickly had her hiccuping and belching smoke as she couldn't refresh her flame fast enough. Bjorn, while so tough the shades couldn't hurt him if he literally lay down in a tunnel and took a nap, wasn't quite equipped with the tools and abilities needed to handle such a tricky foe.

He was mainly relying on his weapon skill, unleashing powerful blasts of mana from his maul with every swing to try to pulverize the shades before they could slip away. It was not all that effective, but he was still able to kill the occasional shade, though he was much better suited to handling the beasts they were still trying to cull.

Blood and Val also struggled a bit, though Blood had it a little worse, considering her whole shtick was blood and shades were, well, mostly incorporeal ghost beings that didn't have much of a physical body and no blood at all. Blood could generate her own blood, which she did and used to attack, but the shades weren't nearly affected by that element and mana type in the same way that they fell to fire and light.

It was good that Blood was the one who was working on disarming traps and mapping the ruin out, as she only needed to drive inquisitive shades off and not necessarily kill all that many of them. On the other side, her tall lover, Val, was having just as tough a time as Bjorn, or nearly so. Val's new, or perhaps newish at this point, bursting skill made use of properties of lightning mana, but it didn't really exert all that much mana outside of Val's body.

The skill, overall, was to buff Val and make her faster and stronger, but it wasn't to attack externally. If it had been, the skill would have been perhaps the best thing they had, for creatures of corruption hated the power of lightning and thunder greatly and fell to it more easily than other power save pure light.

Without being able to channel the lightning mana outside of her body, however, Val was only able to use the skill to greatly speed herself up and slash at the shades with the claw weapons she preferred right alongside Blood. Essentially, she was using the same strategy as Bjorn, but Val was much faster, with faster and more cutting attacks, allowing her to make up for the fact that only her blade waves were really doing any damage to the shades.

On observing the rest of the team, Beth was realizing they definitely had a few weaknesses they could work on ironing out, though she was exterminating the monsters pretty well, and they didn't have their full strength, with Kris' lightning likely to do a large amount of damage to large numbers of the monsters at once.

Still, it might be time for everyone to pick up one or two more skills, though that did run into the problem that none of them were really interested in even tier three skills, let alone tier one or two skills. Maybe they could find a few tier four skills at the Black Ships or somewhere similar.