Chương 603: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Twenty-Two

Beth waited just a moment before even setting down on the floor, hovering and listening to see if she had triggered any alarms. She could have triggered a silent alarm, of course, but this wasn't like a regular warehouse where the owner and the local authorities might want to be alerted to a little B&E right when it happened and show up quietly. This was a large, or certainly well-funded and disciplined, organizations that was responsible for a planetary rebellion.

They would want everyone in the building to know full well that somebody that didn't belong had broken in and was snooping around where they really should not be. Beth, thanks to whoever was too hot in that small office, or the person who didn't want to walk down through the building and then go through the external security just to have a smoke, had slipped in without any kind of perimeter system detecting her entrance.

She set down on the floor, her feet making very little noise despite her heavy armor boots thanks to her spatial control, before she quickly and silently checked around the room. There were a few papers on the two desks, but it was clear that most of the work was done digitally, as there was nothing of real substance in the office at all.

She was walking over to the door when she sensed movement outside, years of fighting and training combined with tens of thousands of stats letting her be far more sensitive than even most Enlightened, quickly ducking back behind a desk. Someone walked in, Beth senses the weight and spacing of the steps as they moved over to the second desk and looked at something. They paused for a minute before walking towards the other desk, right where Beth was crouched.

She wasn't sure if the person had sensed her, but after three steps, when she was sure that they were heading for her, she teleported, using just her Ideal and just the faintest touch to move herself. It was a lot different now that she was in the building, as everything was focused on keeping people out or detecting them. Now that she was inside the perimeter, there was little preventing her from sensing everything in the building or moving around it.

Not that she couldn't have used her Ideal to get in before that; few places were really banned to Exalted, as Mortaine aptly demonstrated whenever he just appeared some place, including heavily warded places. Then again, Mortaine was a dimensional mage, which was an even rarer and more powerful mana type and capability than spatial mana, so he was a little tough to use as a measuring stick.

Beth had appeared in, of all places, in a bathroom, it being rather convenient to teleport into an empty stall, though it was rather inconvenient to teleport to an occupied one. She stuck her head out of the stall briefly, seeing that there was nobody else in the small room, the place only having three stalls and three sinks, before she stepped back inside and probed around again with her heightened senses.

She couldn't see through the walls, though her hearing was strong enough that it could be said she could hear through the walls, and she was leaning on her Mana Physique and Ideal to detect what was happening and who was moving about. After a moment, she teleported again, and then again, moving three times before coming to a stop in a small room at the bottom of the office section.

It was clearly a storage room of some kind, a bit ironic considering the whole thing was a warehouse, but she supposed they wouldn't want to store office supplies out with the general goods. She had hopped down here not because of the room itself, but instead she could walk out the door and be in a hallway that had a conference room right next door. It wasn't the conference room itself she was interested in, however, as she had thought she had felt something strange in or beside the room.

Luckily, today wasn't a meeting day, or it wasn't a meeting time right now, and she slipped inside and moved over to the far corner, carefully peering at the wall. There was definitely something funny going on there, and she formed a little sphere of white flame on the tip of her finger before moving it in a careful pattern.

Her Ideal was not just something that manipulated space or burned things away, it was concept strong enough that it could truly annihilate things it came in contact with, things such as wards or illusions or defensive barriers. Not just that, but it could burn and destroy the runes, and the mana that powered them, making it all disappear with just a thought. When she had been at it for a moment, the wall in front of her wavered for a second before revealing a section that was different from the rest.

It looked like someone had come in after the building had been built and cut part of the wall away, from the floor up to just under Beth's height and about four feet wide. They had done that to insert some metal and wood reinforcement and, on the top of that, a safe about the size of Beth's torso, which was also where the very strange feeling she was getting was coming from.

She couldn't really sense much even with all her enhancements and powers, but there was something powerful in the safe, something odd that was playing with mana and space around it. Unlike many others in her situation, Beth wasn't at all stymied, but she did put her ever-growing knowledge of runes to work in analyzing the safe and the surroundings.

She was most concerned about alarms, obviously, hoping she hadn't triggered anything already by destroying the illusion, but she was pretty confident that it was fine, considering she wasn't swarmed with security already. She spent a minute studying the safe and the runes around it, very clearly etched into the metal that supported the safe.

She was assuming, based on the reinforcement, that they really didn't want anyone stealing or breaking into this thing, as it was some kind of special alloy or blend of alloys that looked like it weighed, in technical terms, a metric shit-ton. Unfortunately for the rebel leaders, or whoever was running this interstellar smuggling ring, a mini-Exalted was a little more than they had bargained for. She had the safe open in just under three minutes, not have even had to destroy anything in the process to do it.

Instead, she had used a little clever manipulation of her Ideal to burn away a little of the mana and the mana flow around the runes, doing just enough to short-circuit the security for a minute. It was almost like people who relied too much on technology without any good physical backups or checks; the safe had been locked and protected almost entirely with runes, just a very simple lock that she twisted the internal mechanism using her spatial skills stopping the door swinging open when the runes were disabled.

She was still careful, peering inside and finding that it looked like there wasn't some tertiary layer of defenses in the safe itself, which would have been a bit dangerous to the contents. Said contents were several stacks of papers, a little bit of coin, likely kept to pay out big transfers without having to dip into a digital account or the person's personal wealth in their stat screen, and a little round disk.

The disk was what she was interested in, but she wouldn't say no to some free money and incriminating documents, swiping everything with her spatial magic before moving on. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. And lest one think she was running around robbing innocent merchants, she made a quick stop in her favorite hiding spot, the bathroom, checking some of the papers to make sure a prospective Platinum Emblem wasn't robbing random citizens.

It turns out that she needn't have worried at all, as just the first paper from the safe showed these guys were into smuggling, big time illegal smuggling with hundreds of diamond coins riding on it, as well as a bunch of other tomfuckery. That included supporting the rebellion, which she quickly deduced was done for far more than just the freedom of the masses or stirring up some trouble.

She didn't spend too long reading, but five minutes or less of skimming was enough to get her a very good idea, Beth flicking the documents into the Reliquary before continuing her search. The people running the warehouse were the masterminds of the rebellion and the smuggling operations on this world, though they weren't really in charge.

What she had just stumbled into was a bit larger than that, and there was a mention of more than one Ascended in the paperwork, their power level being very clearly stated to reinforce the threat. It was a clear threat, that much she could easily pick up on; criminals weren't often subtle, and whoever was pulling the strings for this overall operation seemed to know they needed to reinforce some things in plain language.

That also meant everything had just gotten both harder and more complicated, as they were likely to run into somebody they couldn't easily beat into submission or kill outright on this planet, or the planet through the teleporter. And speaking of the teleporter, that was the next thing she wanted to look into, still digesting what she had learned from skimming the papers.

It was clear there was both money and power behind this thing, in several senses of the words, and she wanted to figure out more about everything going on. She needed to know more about their resources and capabilities, more about their goals and motivations, and more about their capabilities, the last being the most important by far. She was sure she could, at this point, tussle with a freshly Ascended, though anybody beyond the first couple rebirths might be a little much for here.

The cumulative increases in stats and mana didn't slow down in Ascendancy, that was for sure, and just hitting rebirth twenty did provide a bit of boost more than it normally would have. Now, that was more than countered by Beth being an Ideal-bearing Enlightened, but every rebirth in Ascended represented a decent jump in power, and she wouldn't want to tangle with a rebirth twenty-eight Ascended, let alone a rebirth forty one.

The only thing she had going for her that let her keep going without even contacting anybody was the reliquary. While her pocket-Ascended usually just helped them with crafting, training, and a bit of interesting work from time-to-time, they could help her against anything that was considered at the Ascended level. For beasts, and even monsters, at that level, she normally took a crack at them herself, even winning those fights consistently, before she thought about calling them.

So far, the second situation hadn't happened, but the rules of the reliquary were very clear: if Beth came under attack from someone at least at twenty rebirths, the Empyreans both could and would interfere in that scuffle. She wasn't relying on them one hundred percent, but it was a great ace to have in her back pocket. Back to the teleporter, she was a little conflicted about how to go about investigating it.

Unlike the random safe in the conference room, this thing was going to be guarded at all times, and likely quite heavily. She thought about sneaking around and trying to spy on people, but espionage was not her strong suite at all. The only reason she could play the spy so well was that she was spying on people who were far weaker than she was using a power that very few people could even detect, let alone counter.

Oh, it was clear what her Ideal was to most of the people she had showed it to, but even a lot of regular Enlightened, and they were already considered the top elites of a faction, would struggle to recognize it as anything other than a strong skill with a high tier and rank. It was sort of like she had an invisibility cloak or, a lot more accurately, a teleporter while all the other spies and guards had to play by the normal rules of no magic, but she didn't mind abusing the privilege.

What she could do, though it was a pretty harebrained scheme, was to just act like she belonged there and walk up to the thing. She didn't think it was an awful idea, getting a message sent to her mind from Liveria that the Empyreans were all looking at the strange disk and they would tell her some info when she wasn't in enemy territory.

Apparently, the thing was not just a novelty, but a real item of significance that had drawn all her pocket-Ascendeds' attention, so it had been rather a good idea to swipe the thing. She acknowledged them before changing her clothes, having nabbed something from the storage room in a box where they had some spare uniforms. She threw on some of her regular day clothes, nothing fancy, just stuff she would wear around the house or even running an errand, and then threw the coveralls she had grabbed over that.

There had been two kinds in the box, and she picked the one that looked like a mechanic or technical worker's suit, seeing she had guessed right when the first people she passed ignored her. That lasted until she approached the teleporter, which was in a large room at the back of the building. The guards were inside the room, and they hadn't reacted to her entering, not at first.

It was when she approached the pad, which was like the pads the CRA used and not just an array drawn on the floor, that the two women stopped her to inquire what she was doing there. Normally, this is where everything would fall apart and Beth would just punch her way out of the problem, but that wasn't going to be happening today. Fortunately for her, and fortunately for the guards, in many ways, as they would not have survived Beth's normal methods of problem resolution, she was an expert at this.

This being spatial magic, not sneaking around and espionage. All it took was a simple demonstration of her immense spatial prowess, toned way down to match something that a skilled and knowledgeable array technician would be capable of, and the guards were immediately off their guard.

It seemed she had so overawed them with her display and her one tool for checking spatial runes that they didn't even question her presence, instead asking if there was anything she needed and if there was a problem with the teleporter pad. When Beth said it was routine maintenance and started talking about spatial fluctuations that had to be tracked, which was a real thing, she could see both women's eyes glaze right over.

They were quick to stop her long speech on spatial theory and tell her that she could work on it however long she needed as long as she didn't get in the way of people using it, at which point they would have to call their boss. That was just perfect for Beth, in both respects, as she both needed time to study the pad, and then she might want to study their boss, before and after she cracked said boss's head open.

She spent a few minutes on the pad just watching the mana flow and taking some readings, finding her initial guesses had been right. This thing had a range of about eighty light years, but further study showed they weren't using it for that. It had three destinations programmed in, which she could read clearly enough from the pad itself, and two of them were in a solar system about fifty light years away.

The third destination was somewhere else on this planet, which she made note to get to ASAP and see if there was anything interesting, or incriminating, therein. She took detailed notes, in her communicator, on everything that was in the pad and how it was made and setup. The things weren't so common that they were really considered mass manufactured, but there were companies that would produce them in batches every year, so she was hoping to match this one to a batch.

Once she was ready, she decided it might be better to use a little diplomacy rather than cause an… incident. For now.