Chương 593: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Fifteen

Sweeping for monsters would have to wait for a little bit yet, as they still had to finish disassembling this place before looking around to make sure they had everything. Beth was probably the best of them for taking things apart, so she spent time pulling the machines apart or taking them from the floor after Val said it was okay.

That whole process took a couple hours, and after the two rooms were entirely empty, they resumed investigating the facility, though Blood had already resumed scouting before Beth was fully done with the deconstruction. They were now deep in the ruins, near the center and likely, though Beth couldn't be entirely sure, near the bottom, which was their final goal for now.

Beth didn't want to leave any loose ends, including random monsters that had somehow gotten into the rest of the place past all the traps and such, so they moved in and down. It turned out there was only one level left, as they made their way down a floor, continued exploring for a time, and then found a doorway in the structure that led to a small cave that extended below their current floor.

The ruin could just be broken up, but it really didn't look like it, so Beth was labeling that as the farthest point down in the structure, telling the other two to sweep the lowest floor and start heading back up from there.

Beth herself wandered around for a time, trying to see if her enhanced senses and greater power could twig her to anything that the others might have missed, but she largely struck out in this case, showing how important it was to be specialized in something, having both the skills for it as well as the experience performing such operations repeatedly.

She was called over by Blood and Val after about two hours, the two with all the experience and the few skills having actually found something else of interest and not just wandered around for hours.

"What's happening?" Beth asked when she found the two in a hallway, inspecting a wall.

"There's a door here," Val said, not turning to look at her.

"Really?" asked Beth, a bit skeptical at the declaration. As just discussed, she wasn't an expert on this topic, but the hallway looked like just that, a hallway. She had wandered around the place a bunch now, and they all looked very much the same, to the point she could have already been in this hallway if she didn't have a perfect memory that allowed her to remember the exact layout of where she had walked.

"Yes, really," Blood grunted. The wolf carefully, though firmly, tapped the wall with one of her long, strong claws, the sound just a faint clicking noise. Blood then took a step to the left and tapped the wall again and Beth immediately heard it; the second tap was more solid and metallic, compared to the first that she now realized had a very faint echo.

"How did you even find something like this?" Beth asked, glancing between the two of them.

"I would have just walked by this without realizing it."

"That's why your team should have scouts and infiltrator," Val said in a lecturing tone.

"You need people to both chart paths through wilderness, ruins, dungeons, and more, as well as needing people who can recognize both traps and hidden caches. We've probably missed a good bit of things here and there, considering how Blood, despite being wonderful, isn't exactly focused on this."

"Don't need to flirt so much," Blood grunted, Val adopting a slightly indignant expression.

"We're already mates." The added sentence had caught the kresnik flat-footed, her pale skin flushing heavily as she stared at her partner.

"Give her lovey-dovey looks later," Beth grumbled, stepping up to tap on the wall herself.

"Let's get done with this place first."

"I can't find the mechanism," Blood admitted after elbowing Beth for her 'lovey-dovey' comment.

"I think there's a switch somewhere."

"Uh, can I teleport in?" Beth asked, glancing between the two of them.

"You're the spatial expert," Val replied with some exasperation.

"But I'm not the trap expert," Beth shot back.

"Is there something blocking or twisting teleportation here? I can't even figure out where the outline of the door is."

"Don't smell it," Blood grunted, squatting down and examining the edge between the wall, or rather the door, and the floor.

"There's no movement of air. It's sealed up; might be no atmosphere in there."

"I can survive in space without a suit. Well, for a while, at least," Beth shrugged.

"Let me see if I can just fool it by teleporting."

"Careful," Val warned, but it was more by rote, the kresnik still having flashbacks to her time as the unofficial chaperone of the Young Scions.

"I know what I'm about," Beth muttered as she walked into the wall. Or rather, she walked forward towards the wall, using Spatial Step to try to move beyond what the other two were insisting was a door. It turned out Blood and Val really did know what they were doing, as she stepped through space and appeared in a hallway that definitely wasn't the one she had just been in.

She turned to find the door much more obvious from this side than it was from the other hallway, though she wasn't sure if it was trapped or not. Deciding that she could handle whatever it was, she took a step forward and reached out a hand, engaging with the latch, twisting it carefully as she observed everything with a keen eye. There was a slight click and then a very slight hissing as the edge of the door cracked open before the door swung wide, Beth finding the other two in guard positions in the hallway.

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"Did you…did you just open it? Without checking?" Val asked, her voice starting to climb at the end demonstrating a certain level of indignation.

"Sure did," Beth said with a shrug.

"Worked, didn't it?"

"You're a dangerous moron!" snapped Val, poking Beth in the chest with one of her extremely long fingers.

"A dangerous moron that's hard to kill," Beth corrected, glancing over to see Blood had already flowed by her and into the hallway to explore more of the new area.

"Trap," the wolf said over her shoulder, getting Val's attention right away. The two then stuck their heads together for a minute, arguing about what was there and what it did before Val eventually sighed.

"Feeling tough?" the pale woman asked over her shoulder, giving Beth a slightly exasperated look.

"Sure. Why?" Beth said.

"Trap shoots out bolts," Blood grunted.

"Just trigger it."

"Bolts like bolts from heaven, or bolts like crossbow bolts?" Beth asked.

"The latter," Val said with a slight sigh.

"Eh, shouldn't be too tough," Beth responded with a smirk and a shrug, walking past the two and continuing down the hallway. Not only was she extraordinarily tough, but she had incredibly keen senses combined with the ability to instantly teleport, making the act far less dangerous than it first appeared. Still, she was on high alert, and was going to go with a strategy of dodging as much as she could rather than just blissfully walking forward and tanking every hit without bothering to use her brain.

The trap started three steps after where Blood was crouched, Val standing next to the wolf and absentmindedly stroking her ears while watching Beth with a serious expression. The trap wasn't anything special, as it turned out, but the bolts it shot out were made of a hardened metal that didn't break or bend even on impact with Beth's legendary armor, though the few that hit her did struggle to penetrate the masterfully crafted set.

She also used her gauntlets, which were much more powerful, to block some of the bolts, and those missiles barely scratched the surface of the armor on her hands and forearms. Walking to the end of the hallway, a distance of about fifty feet from where the trap had started firing, took about two minutes, and Beth found another closed door, this one also much more obvious from this side.

There was also a small lever that she pulled, stopping the bolts, which had still been firing randomly in the hallway, including at her where she stood at the second door.

"That was impressive," Val said when the other two walked over.

"It wasn't that tough," Beth said, shrugging yet again.

"The bolts are pretty strong; we should collect the ones on the floor. But they weren't fired with all that much force, considering even my regular armor just shrugged off the hits with little damage."

"Except for here," Blood said, grabbing the top of Beth's right hip at the top of the right edge of her butt. Beth was confused for a second before feeling Blood give a sharp tug, pulling out a bolt that had punched through a slightly soft area in the armor and just barely into her back.

"Oh, I didn't even feel that," Beth said, her passive skills and tens of thousands of Endurance literally healing the small wound as Blood pulled on the bolt.

"You should pay a little better attention," Val admonished absently, examining the door.

"No traps," Blood said, storing the bolt in her ring before walking back down the hall and grabbing all the bolts that hadn't disappeared back into openings in the wall and floor.

"I'll check," Beth said, lightly grabbing Val and picking the tall woman up, placing her a few feet back down the hallway. Val put her hands on her hips but didn't say anything, just giving Beth a bit of a stink eye, though the effect was slightly ruined by her bit of a blush. Beth grabbed the door latch, ignoring Val's look, twisting and pushing to open the door, the same effect happening as had happened at the other door.

There was a slight hissing, a slight click, and the door seemed to move just a bit horizontally before it swung open, revealing a rather plain room beyond, lit by a couple mana lamps and not containing all that much. Beth made to take a step forward but was stopped by the kresnik's hand on her shoulder, looking back to see Val was still two steps behind her but grasping her pauldron; sometimes Beth forgot just how long the tall girl's limbs really were.

Val gestured to Blood, who hustled over and carefully stuck her head in the new room, ready to leap back at a moment's notice. It proved unnecessary, as no devious trap or terrible explosion was set off just by looking in the place, though caution was key in such explorations.

"Traps?" Beth asked, putting her hands on her hips as Val walked up beside her, dropping her hand from Beth's shoulder.

"Not smelling anything," Blood said, continuing to scan the room.

"Space looks normal," Beth commented, still on alert for anything that warped and twisted the space like the trap the two had been struggling with earlier.

"Smells and looks normal. Val?" Blood said.

"Not seeing any unusual runes," Val said, sticking her head in the room.

"Correction; there are some unusual runes on the two shelves or containers at the back, but not on the room in general."

"Hmm, something interesting?" Beth asked with a quirked brow.

"Let me get in there; I can tank another trap better than anybody but Bjorn."

"Fine. Be careful," Blood said, brushing firmly against Beth as she passed before crouching by Val, the tall woman resuming her ear scratching. Beth entered the room, prepared to duck, dive, dodge, and teleport, but found all that unnecessary. She walked the perimeter of the room first, carefully, before moving around the center of the room, looking back at the other two a couple times to make sure nothing was messing with her senses or teleporting her or anything else funky.

Everything seemed to be well in order, and she wasn't attacked or moved or messed with in any way she could detect. After a couple minutes, she waved the other two forward, and Val and Blood cautiously entered the room, looking around to make sure there was nothing Beth missed, or even a trap triggered by multiple beings.

The latter was a bit rarer, but such things definitely did happen, and even some people with large homes would set something like that up to trap burglars or intruders, wanting to try to catch multiple people if their house were invaded by a group. Not common outside ruins and dungeons, but they weren't the only places such things could be encountered.

"There's definitely a seal on these shelves," Blood said after a minute, examining the two shelves of the otherwise empty room.

"Can't see in," Val muttered, examining them while her eyes glowed.

"Bunch of simple runes chained together. Should take a few minutes to unlock whatever these are. Stay alert while we work."

"Yes, mother," Beth replied sarcastically, rolling her eyes at the woman sometimes defaulting to that chaperone mode when giving instructions. Blood and Val worked on the cabinets for about an hour, the layers being a bit more complex than Val had first assumed, but nothing that she couldn't handle. Each of the two units was locked with a separate combination that they needed to figure out, though they weren't interlinked, luckily enough.

Solving two different rune locks at the same time using two different people or groups of people was really tedious and not something Val really enjoyed, though others viewed it as an entertaining puzzle. The cabinets were independent, thankfully, and after the runes were disabled, they were able to be opened with a simple latch and lock.

They didn't have a key for the lock, or the right key, if Val were to describe it, but they did have a Beth, who could grab the covers over the shelves and just rip the physical locking mechanism right out with a single tug, revealing the items beneath. The cabinets had been stuffed full of mostly random tat, at least in Beth's opinion, but the other two grabbed things off shelves as she busted locks, herself trying to be careful not to be too destructive with the process.

She ripped open the dozen shelves that were blocked off before examining the bottoms of the units, which looked like larger storage areas, though a closer look revealed each cabinet to have a large drawer at the bottom. This was a bit trickier, and the other held the first unit to keep Beth from just picking the whole thing up or pulling it over onto the ground as she dug her fingers into the metal, still trying to be careful, before slowly prying the drawer open.

The three then repeated the same operation on the cabinet before all three grabbed all the items inside and laid them out on the floor to examine.