Chương 604: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Twenty-Three

"The pad is functioning normally?" one of the guards asked when Beth looked like she had concluded her inspection and looked towards them.

"Seems to be so," she said, mimicking their slight accent in Universal Standard. She wasn't amazing at accents, but she had a knack for it that let her pass her speech off to somebody who wasn't already suspicious.

"The destination at alpha open right now? I need to check the pads are working to complete the maintenance schedule."

"We have to send the signal," the guard said, sighing when Beth just stared at her with a slightly raised eyebrow.

"I'll authorize it, but you know the rules. They'll have to check you over there, regardless of the maintenance schedule."

"That's fine," Beth said, shrugging, barely managing to keep her grin internal. The two clowns she was chatting with were Awoken, neither one more than three rebirths, so weak that they weren't even a blip to her senses. If the guards at the other installation took issue with her, she could handle them, even if they were many times stronger and more numerous.

"I could also not, you know, and we could just gamble on the pads working without the proper checks…"

"Right, right, I get it," the guard said, sighing again as she tapped away at the control panel, sending some kind of message while verifying the settings.

"Step on and I'll authorize you through, unless you want to do it?"

"I could force the pads to activate, but that would breach security and might cause them to go into full maintenance mode," Beth replied, shrugging casually. This whole undercover thing was easier than she remembers, but then again, a lot of people had trouble with it because they got very nervous trying to pass as someone who should be there, or just nervous in general about the whole thing.

Like Beth had said to her team and then thought about herself earlier, even if there was an Ascended working for the other side, she could still survive and escape at the very least. With her own pocket Ascended able to hop out and join in against any Ascended or Ascended-level beings, the odds were skewed in her favor even if she were far outmatched in terms of rebirths.

"No, no," the guard, said, waving a hand quickly.

"Let's not do anything that would jeopardize the pads, especially not now. You know how Mason gets…"

"I haven't been on the receiving end," Beth lied naturally while shaking her head.

"I just heard about it. Guess I'm either too low on the totem pole or too important as the only one that knows how to do maintenance on the pads to scream at."

"They say you can hear him from here on a clear day," the other guard, who was still standing against the wall by the door, muttered while shaking her head firmly.

"Very loud." Beth was getting more curious about this organization, especially as the people didn't really seem all that crazy. It wasn't always true that criminals, or even rebels, were wild-eyed fanatics that dreamed of dying for their cause, but Beth had expected a bit more fire and zeal from the people, even the guards.

These two women were more like bored shop security, paid to do a fairly important job but not really all that interested and not really anticipating that anything terrible was going to happen while they worked. The first guard finished all the setup and verification, stepping back and gesturing at the console as Beth watched.

"ID and you're good to go," she said. This would have been a big problem for Beth, but she had a bit of a cheat code. The console was only checking if someone was authorized to teleport, and she had figured out the security when she was studying the pad. She stepped over to the console and pulled out an old ID she had from somewhere, swiping it over the console while she also manipulated the console and runes to give her the all clear.

She did it in a smooth, casual motion, looking like she pulled the ID from her pocket and swiped it before returning it there. It was good enough, apparently, that neither guard even blinked, both of them resuming their bored indifference when the console beeped a friendly chime and showed a green light. Beth stepped onto the pad and nodded at the guards, the more friendly one even smiling slightly as she nodded back before Beth disappeared in a small flash of light.

She appeared only a second later, able to somewhat track the teleport itself, finding that she was on just about the exact opposite side of the planet from the secret base in the warehouse. There were four guards in the room when she appeared, and all four were rather surprised, if their wide eyes and slightly open mouths were any indication. Once again, she thought she just wasn't dealing with the best and the brightest here.

Even a low level guard should be reacting after a second, getting ready, getting in position, drawing weapons, preparing spells, and authoritatively demanding to know who she was and what her business was. Instead, these four slack-jawed oafs just stared at her for a full three seconds, or even longer, as after three seconds she had knelt down by the teleporter pad and started examining it.

While she was pretending to do maintenance, the examination was very real and was giving her a whole bunch of information that she might not have been able to get at all through other means.

"Who are you? What's your business here?" one of the guards demanded finally, far too long having passed with Beth being able to do whatever she wanted unchallenged.

"Teleportation maintenance," Beth replied, still kneeling next to the pad. She showed not her ID but the tool she was using, the spatial fluctuations obvious even to a blockhead like the guard.

"I'm using some tools to adjust the mana flow and monitor the spatial twisting caused by repeated use. The pads need calibrated, too, or their going to start to deviate within another couple weeks, which will eventually lead to somebody getting teleported somewhere in the target city, but not even in the targeted building. I have to adjust the spatial mapping coordinates to take into account flow variations-" Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

"Alright. Alright," the guard replied, having nearly gone cross-eyed listening to her explanation.

"Just make sure it's working when you're done. We can't afford for the pads to be down now, of all times."

"Don't worry, I'm the expert," Beth said, getting a noncommittal grunt from the guard while she had to hide her grin yet again. If only these rubes knew just how much of an expert she really was, they might be running for the exits right now. Not that that would save these clowns, though fleeing before her might inspire her to do more capturing rather than killing, but this organization was pretty much doomed at this point.

"Are you sure we can trust her?" she heard one of the guards ask the one that had confronted her in a quiet voice.

"Does it look like she's lying?" the first one responded with a roll of his eyes.

"What if she sabotages it, though?" the nervous guard asked.

"Then she'd blow up right along with us, dumbass," the lead guard replied in a peeved tone.

"Do you think she's stupid. Now shut up and keep watch; we don't want any spies sneaking in or an attack getting through the teleporter." They're so fucking bad at this, Beth thought, slightly shaking her head as she walked around the pad and knelt in a different place, examining some of the runes. She was also just mildly surprised that the goons didn't really understand sabotaging a teleporter, but she supposed it wasn't something that came up all that often.

If one were to sabotage such a device, the absolute worst scenario would be blowing it up; the person doing the sabotage would have to be even more incompetent than these guards. Beth honestly couldn't even imagine a scenario where that was the case, for if one had the skills and knowledge to sabotage the teleporters at all, they would have enough understanding to not make the damn things blow up.

She herself wasn't doing any of that, more content to keep investigating for a minute before taking action, especially if that investigation got her tons more documents, money, and strange artifacts before anyone realized their safes were being broken into or teleported away. She scanned the pad for destinations, made sure its functions were all nominal (not wanting an explosive or other type of surprise herself), and checked for registered connections.

This pad had four, with one being the other pad she had just arrived from, one being one of the two in the other solar system, and the last two were new. The more she was investigating, the more interesting things she was turning up, and now she needed a plan. She wanted to check all the other pads, but she also wanted to figure out exactly where she was and what was happening here before leaving.

"Hey," Beth said to the chatty guard on standing up again.

"There a place where I can hit the head and get a drink? I've been teleporting around all day and I'm exhausted."

"Yeah, there's the cafeteria on the second floor," the guard said, pointing over his shoulder and up.

"Thanks. I'll get something before moving on to the next one," Beth said, acting tired while stretching out and kneading at her lower back like she was exhausted and sore.

"No problem," the guard said, letting her out the door without scanning any ID. Maybe she had blinded them with science, but these four were even worse than the last two. She left the room, finding a hallway outside instead of a large warehouse, walking around until she found a stairwell. She climbed to the second floor, glancing out a window to see a town bathed in darkness, the sun being up on the other side of the planet right now.

It was pretty dim outside, but she remembered the window coatings, assuming this building also had some kind of dark tinting that made the windows one-way on every window. She walked around the second floor for a minute, not lingering anywhere for more than a second, but she was mapping the place in her mind and noting key features. She was also keeping track of people who were passing her by, Identifying them and scanning them against known databases, all without ever being detected.

Hell, let alone her scanning and work being detected, she wasn't sure most of the people even saw her, the coverall she had thrown on doing a ludicrous amount of work in hiding her by having her blend into plain sight. She found the cafeteria, getting a drink and a bowl of something hot that resembled a kind of soup. She sat and ate for a minute, just watching people come in and out of the room, which would seat about forty at max capacity but appeared to not be a popular place to eat.

On mostly finishing the bland soup, she returned the tray and strolled out, making another slightly wide circuit before entering one of the bathrooms. The building was only two stories, unless the access to higher floors was hidden, which wouldn't make all that much sense, and it spread out over a little bit smaller footprint than the warehouse, if her estimate was correct. She slipped into the bathroom, finding nobody inside, even in the stalls, and quietly entered a stall, closing but not locking the door.

She took just a second to scan around, having already gotten a good idea of the layout of the floor, before she teleported, disappearing from the bathroom without even disturbing the air. Short range and good knowledge let her be very precise with her teleports, even allowing her great control in activating it and the amount of disturbance it made. She popped up in a small room in the far corner of the floor, assuming she was above and a bit to the side of the front entrance to the building.

The room itself wasn't very impressive, no massive desk or shelves full of expensive bric-a-brac lining the walls, but it did have some important documents in two filing cabinets. Filing cabinets she checked very carefully before making all the folders inside disappear into the reliquary along with the requisite papers, Liveria and Erosh starting a quick skim of everything.

She was already on a timer, but every move she made accelerated that timer to a greater or lesser degree; robbing the safe might not be noticed for a long time, and it might be investigated quietly. Having every important document in an important office just vanish was going to be more noticeable, though it looked like the occupant of said office was out on the lines fighting, not flying their desk today.

She teleported again, appearing in a second unoccupied office, teleporting everything made of paper within the room into the reliquary, making sure a stack of paper fell directly on Erosh's head, which did not amuse the massive man, though Liveria found it funny. She wasn't just after papers here, however, as this office contained another anomaly, just like the last one she had detected in the warehouse.

The room was the most boring, nondescript place she had been in months, rivaling the most plain and awful of offices, but that was not a bad strategy to hide something important. She took longer this time in investigating the wall, taking more time to break the illusion before she could even start examining the smaller, more compact safe. This time, she pulled an even neater magic trick and made the whole safe vanish, there being nothing to detect that.

The assumption seemed to be that someone would break in or just yanked the safe out, ripping it from the wall with brute strength. Most people didn't prepare for an expert spatial mage that could cut out around an object and move it into a storage space with ease robbing them, so her method worked much better without sending out an alert.

With the safe stowed in the reliquary, giving her pocket Empyreans plenty of time to crack it, a task all too trivial for their knowledge and power, she returned to her teleporting, only doing it twice more and being much more selective with what she grabbed, teleporting again right as someone started opening the door of the fourth office. That was a bit close, and she reappeared in the bathroom, finding it still unoccupied before exiting and brushing at her hands.

She calmly walked around the floor and back downstairs, heading back down the hallways to the teleporter room at the back of the building. She had to say, the teleporter here was just as hidden, maybe even more so, with lots of runes around that specific room to hide what was inside and heavily mute the signature of the teleports. She was kind of curious where the building was located, that they would go to that much trouble to hide it so thoroughly, but she had other pads to check before coming back here.

At this point, if she had been to a place once, she could teleport back there again basically without fail, as long as nothing powerful interrupted the teleport itself. She would check the other places first and return here later, depending on what she found elsewhere.