Chương 591: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Thirteen

Clearing the surrounding and beasts wasn't their biggest problem; exploring the ruin was a lot worse. With Beth's power and skills, even with the others at a bit of a disadvantage, she was able to take care of all the monsters the others couldn't and get the area relatively clean. Moving into the ruins and clearing them out, however, was a whole different story, as the place was an endless maze filled with traps and their only scout was Blood.

Not that Blood was bad at the job or anything, she was just more a dedicated fighter and attacker than she was any kind of scout or thief, and she was the best the team currently had in terms of rogue-like capabilities. She didn't know that they'd ever have someone like that, and she was rather against the idea of hiring someone into the team, much preferring people joining in a more natural, organic way, but she could see them bringing someone in for just one job or a day's worth of help.

That wasn't going to be for this job, however, and Blood was skilled and powerful enough that she could do the job, able to even trigger some traps and survive, as long as she was being a bit cautious, so they continued their exploration. Beth spent a lot of time moving around the outer perimeter of the ruins, or as much of it as they could access, killing any monsters that tried to slip out, hopefully not missing any.

They would have to do a more thorough sweep after they took care of the source, which would be a whole endeavor on its own, but she was reasonably certain that they had taken care of everything they could so far. She really wished they could dig around the ruin, but she didn't want to bring the mountain down on their heads, which is likely what would happen if she tried. Not that they couldn't survive something like that, but it would become a major pain if she did that and make things more complicated, no less.

She supposed it was another weakness they had, to an extent, as them not working with a large support staff meant they didn't have the kind of people a large team or mercenary company would have. She was sure a much larger group with a support staff and secondary members would have at very least one, and likely several, personnel that could mine and tunnel in an expert manner.

She wouldn't give up their team's relative autonomy, concentrated strength, and speed at leveling and even completing jobs in exchange for what she considered small benefits and a big headache, so she was left lamenting the handful of gaps they still had.

"We're going to need your help," Val informed Beth when the team briefly regrouped after a day.

"With what?" she asked, taking a swig from her canteen.

"There's an area Blood can't get past, but we think somebody with enough power could just directly teleport past," Val explained.

"We want to see if you can push past it, and if you can, see if you can disable what's blocking us. Not only that, we think we're starting to really get close to whatever is causing this issue, so you might stumble into it, given that you can get past the area."

"And the two of you can't teleport past it?" Beth asked.

"Tried," Blood growled.

"Space doesn't feel right. Can't get Spatial Step to connect with anything beyond the hallway. Have to have somebody more knowledgeable, powerful, or both, give it a try."

"Take me there," Beth said, following the other two as Sera and Bjorn went back to clearing the surrounding area of beasts. At this point, the two were more just farming coins and materials than anything, but it was a decent opportunity to make a little, so Beth didn't tell them to stop or hold off.

"Down here," Blood said a minute later, having led them through a complex series of twists and turns, down three staircases, and past two areas where they had to be very careful not to trip still active traps.

"Down this hole?" Beth asked skeptically, looking at the two as they stood by a whole leading down to what would be, essentially, the fifth floor of the ruin.

"Landing area is safe," Blood grunted, hopping in the hole, Val following right after.

"This seems sketch," Beth muttered, jumping down after them, being sure to control her fall. She still slightly dented the floor when she landed, her mass now quite considerable, though she wasn't at the same kind of level that Bjorn was.

"Maybe it's time for a diet, Sister," Blood said.

"Maybe it's time for some shutting up," Beth shot back, glaring at her.

"Just a thought," Blood said, walking down a narrow hallway to a small room.

"In here."

"It's a room?" Beth said, confusion evident in her voice.

"Door to the right," Blood grunted, walking over and showing her the very faint outline of a door.

"We open the door, there's a trap there. I partially wedged it, but stand away from the opening area." Beth and Val stepped back behind Blood, watching her fiddle with the door for a few seconds before it swung open. When it was about two feet open, maybe a little less, three darts shot out and hit the wall, clattering to the floor with a metallic clanking sound.

Beth could clearly see the greenish-blue liquid glistening on the tips of all three darts, something telling her without even getting close that it was a very high-grade poison that would do quite a number on anyone making contact. She wanted to grab the darts and inspect them, but managed to hold herself back, thinking there might be more dangers behind the door, which proved to be an accurate assessment, as Blood swung the door open to the ninety-degree point and more darts shot out.

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"Okay, safe now," Blood grunted, sticking her head around the edge of the door and looking into the hallway.

"Define 'safe'," Beth commanded.

"Well, nothing else will shoot out, but don't walk in there," Val explained.

"The hallway itself is not safe, and we don't know how powerful that poison is."

"There's another mechanism in the hallway, too," Blood was quick to point out.

"And, we don't know what kind of enchantments are in here, other than it's messing with spatial stuff."

"Well, it's certainly causing issues in the surroundings," Beth muttered, peering around the door herself and into the hallway.

"The spatial mana in there looks like somebody threw a grenade in a soup can."

"Weird analogy, but okay," Blood grunted.

"Everything's all messed up," Beth muttered, ignoring Blood's comment.

"Yeah, this wouldn't be possible for anyone else on the team right now. As for me…well, it's going to take a couple minutes, at least. I'm not a hundred percent that I can even get through at all, but I think I might be able to brute force it. There's a lot of stuff I can do both because I have my Ideal and because it's spatial related. Give me a moment."

"Whatever's at the end is likely trapped," Blood added.

"Especially because this room wasn't trapped. It's not a consistent pattern, but every other room has had some kind of danger in it. Be careful."

"Yeah, yeah, I got it," Beth said, waving a hand.

"Check what that poison is and see if there's anything else around. Like I said, this is gonna take a minute." Beth stared into the hallway while the other two busied themselves at various tasks, the poison quickly dismissed. Their alchemists were Neph and Kris, neither of whom was present on-world and just sending a communication to them with a very basic description wasn't likely to get them anywhere.

Sera had been placing relays all around, and they had slapped a few down as they moved through the mountain range, so they had a pretty consistent connection to the Net, but that wasn't really doing them all that much good. Val did a search anyway, finding a dozen things that closely matched what was on the tips, at least from what their basic senses could tell, but they would need further testing, an expert, or both to narrow that down.

The two of them then carefully started to comb the room and the area around the hallway for anything they might have missed, but they had been pretty thorough up to this point, so they weren't really confident in finding anything else hidden or the like. Beth had started trying to piece together what was happening in the hallway, her senses able to pick up on the spatial mana and the weird properties of the space.

It was something like what she had said; the spatial mana in the area was stirred up in a swirling, jumbled, jumping mess that was hard to parse through, and then there were all kinds of fragments in the walls, some of which she assumed were part of the runes that were causing the problem. Maybe the analogy of a hand grenade in a small pool would have been better, if she was looking into the pool right after the grenade went off, but everything was a confused swirl of mana and strange movement.

She was able to pick out a few of the flows, finding that there was a sort of pattern that the area followed, but interpreting it was going to be very difficult. She summoned her Ideal, not concerned with bothering anyone here, slowly pushing little pieces of the flame into the the corridor, the silvery-white substance not really a physically corporeal thing, therefor not triggering any of the traps.

At least, things like the darts and anything else made to strike someone walking in wasn't disturbed by her flame; the spatial mana, and the linked runes, were a whole different ball game. She watched as the space in the hallway twisted just from one little packet of flame pushing into a disturbed area, frowning as the whole hallway swirled and shifted.

Well, to Blood or Val, the hallway looked the same and would have felt very largely the same, but the patterns and spatial mana had all shifted when she tried to interact with them. She watched for a full minute after the shift, none of her Ideal or anything else in the hallway, and it seemed to have settled into a new normal, whatever that really meant, but it was still just as twisted and distorted.

Beth frown and lightly bit her bottom lip a bit, tapping her chin a bit as she examined the hallway and got lost in thought. There were a couple ways she could think to tackle this thing, and she wasn't sure any of them were a perfect solution. She couldn't see the runes, which was sort of the point of a well constructed trap, and she was only moderately competent in spatial runes, even with that sort of being her field.

Where her knowledge fell short, she could make up at least some of the gap with her instincts and perceptions, but the runes being embedded in the walls made things further complicated. She could try to destroy them through the walls, but she thought that rather risky, especially given she was pretty sure she wasn't seeing the whole web of runes contributing to the shifted space.

Her other thought was just to bolster her defenses and walk through, but there were just too many traps for that to be an efficient way to break through. Maybe, if it was only the spatial trap, she could do a bit of a brute force approach on just that, pushing through it and weathering whatever it threw at her, but with at least two other traps in the hallway that they knew about, that sounded like a bad idea.

It didn't entirely rule out the brute force method, but she was going to have to be a little less brute and use a little more force for the third solution she could think of. If it was going to be too much to disable or destroy the spatial runes, and it was going to be too dangerous to walk into the hallway, then the only remaining option she thought viable was blast past it.

She would have to gather a little bit more information, but she was pretty sure her two options right now were either blow the hallway up, which didn't sound all that smart, even to her, or to figure out the extent of the area the spatial disturbance stretched and teleport around or through it. Finding the extent was easier said than done, but Beth was quite powerful and very perceptive to space and spatial mana, as well as being something of a skilled practitioner of that type of manipulation.

Twenty minutes of work got her the rough area and a very rough idea of the force and power being put into the disruption, meaning she was ready to try a couple things. Teleporting around the area by literally teleporting around it, teleporting to the side and then forward, presented its own risks, given that many halls and rooms were trapped in the ruin.

She didn't want to teleport into any more traps or hidden dangers than she absolutely had to, thus she decided on the simplest and most brute force of options; go straight through. She had the other leave the room and go back into the first hallway, worried she would set something off that would blow back into the room they were standing in and cause them issues.

After taking a few seconds to analyze exactly where she was, where the disturbed mana was, and where she was going, she spent another moment gathering power before fully expressing her Ideal. She didn't want to bring the place down, but she summoned her crown and flexed her skills, enough energy running through her body the air around her hummed and crackled. With just a thought, no gesture needed, she grabbed the power of her Ideal and hurled herself forward, though it wasn't some random leap.

While she was using a lot of power in the effort, she was trying to be very careful of her exact positioning and coordinates, not wanting to throw herself well beyond the room she was aiming for at the opposite end of the hallway. She was just glad that teleporting into walls or floors or physical objects wasn't possible; it was, in fact, very hard to do, making it something that was not all that viable for attacking.

No teleporting a sword inside someone's chest and causing them all kinds of problems or anything like that, typically not even with a big powerful differential; objects, inanimate or not, really didn't like to be mixed while spatial mana was active. Her first attempt ended in failure, Beth slamming into something in the hallway, likely just the twisted space acting as a dragnet before fully stopping her.

She, fortunately, had even planned for that occurrence and had 'bounced' herself back out of the hallway with spatial mana, fast enough to prevent any of the detection methods from triggering any of the other traps within. She grumbled a bit to herself, crouching down and staring at the hallway for a minute before stretching her legs and straightening up, figuring out part of what she had done wrong.

This time, on her second attempt, she grabbed the spatial mana around her, forcing order on chaos to ease her passage and help block the block, so to speak, smoothing out the hallway's ruffled mana as she approached it. This turned out to be a much better approach, so much so that she found herself standing at her destination with barely a warble in the spatial fields or any other disturbance.