Chương 605: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Twenty-Four

"You're back," the most assertive of the four guards said when she walked back in.

"Need to keep working," Beth said with a shrug.

"Thought the soup was good."

"She liked the soup," one of the guards whispered to another, both of them shaking their heads.

"You need to do more checks here?" the lead guard asked.

"Nope, I'm off. Unless you have a problem here?" she said.

"Hell, I wouldn't know. It seems like it's working. Shouldn't you be telling me if there's a problem?" he said, squinting at her slightly.

"Sometimes people notice things," Beth said with a sharp nod.

"Strange noise, like a light hum or a slight whine. Too much of a flash of light and movement of air, like the energy isn't being controlled properly. You get the idea."

"No, haven't seen anything like that," the guard answered, shaking his head vigorously. Dispelling his sudden suspicions had been rather easy.

"Then I'm off. You need to authorize it?" Beth said to him.

"Right, sorry," he said, doing the same thing the first guard she had tricked had done. Beth performed the same trick, swiping a fake badge while making the runes acknowledge they were ready for teleport before stepping on the pad.

"Good luck," the assertive guard said, Beth nodding at him before disappearing from the pad in a flash. She reappeared in a different solar system, the change subtle enough that most people wouldn't be able to notice, but she wasn't most people, she was a very power spatial mage that had part of her core powers built around spatial mana.

For others, it would have been a nerve-wracking experience, understanding that if anything happened to the teleporters or an issue popped up, they would be stranded far from anywhere friendly with no way back. For Beth, who had teleported across half the galaxy just for fun when testing her Ideal, it wasn't something she even really thought about, knowing that she could just pop over to a different solar system if she needed to.

She still had trouble moving other people, particularly anything more than a few hundred feet, but that was another reason why she sometimes worked on her own; if she got trapped, she wasn't really trapped, but if others got trapped with her, they were stuck. The room she had appeared in was clearly not something that saw much traffic, as it contained but a single guard that took a few moments to even notice her appearance.

Based on the fact that short woman was sitting on a chair and staring off into space with a distracted look on her face, Beth guessed she was using her communicator to read or watch something. Some of the more advanced models, ones like Beth and her crew had, allowed all kinds of functions, including things such as dictation, interactive controls for recordings, and even the ability to load up games, though the interactivity with video games through communicators was limited.

Beth assumed this was some kind of location that acted as storage or something for this group and didn't see hardly anyone teleport in, meaning the guard just slacked off all day.

"Who are you?!" the woman exclaimed, shooting to her feet, trying to cover the fact she had been spaced out.

"Maintenance," Beth said, gesturing at her coveralls and showing her spatial rune tool.

"Checking the pads. Routine." She didn't even wait for the woman to acknowledge the answer, already bending down and starting to scan the pad, which seemed to alleviate the woman's worries. The guard muttered something about surprise inspections or something along those lines, which Beth thought was both strange and interesting, and then she resumed her seat, though she watched Beth.

That was fine, as Beth wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary, just doing some standard checks, though she was scanning the teleporter pad and registering usage and destinations. She was also guessing she was right about this being a storage location based on the fact that it was connected to only the office she had just been in and to one other location that was new, or new to her, Beth having not seen it on the network before.

She scanned the record of uses, too, most people not knowing that pads kept that record within the pad itself, any console or system hooked to it just reading that record. She found the last teleport before hers was nearly a week ago and the one before that was exactly a week prior, likely being routine visits. Also explained the guard slacking, if she thought there wouldn't be anybody showing up for nearly a day.

That did raise an interesting question, however, in that this group, unless she had stumbled into a whole different operation, was the one funding and participating in the rebellion. If they were doing all that, why was it so… normal, for lack of a better term, in all of their buildings and locations.

She didn't necessarily expect a panic or everyone to be on red alert at all times, but if she was running a group that had instigated a war, to put it bluntly, she would expect her people to be more serious and focused, the guards in particular. She supposed she could understand if the office workers were just going about their day and were rather blaise about the whole thing, but it was strange to see all the guards so lax.

She finished her checks and gave a nod to the guard, who only noticed after a second, before heading for the door. That was when she ran into her first real problem, as that perked the guard right up, making Beth just resist rolling her eyes as the woman confronted her. The weird person in bland coveralls showing up off-schedule and scanning all your shit didn't trigger alarm bells, but that same person wanting to go into the building they were in was a red flag?

These people were pretty stupid, she had to be honest about it. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

"I need to see some authorization to let you in there," the woman said, trying to sound authoritative but coming off as unsure.

"What kind of authorization?" Beth asked, having to work to display a confused expression rather than an amused one.

"You need blue clearance," the woman said, her eyes narrowing a little bit.

"How don't you know that?"

"Have you seen me before?" Beth asked in response.

"Well, no, I haven't," the woman said, shaking her head.

"You do know that we can hire new people, right? And you know that you didn't have anybody checking the pads before, right?" Beth asked. She could see the woman chew on that for a few moments before it appeared the light bulb clicked on. Beth almost face-palmed on seeing it, understanding she really wasn't working with the sharpest tools in the shed here.

That was the problem when people thought of the standard guards or security as dumb muscle; they would hire dumb muscle, and then they would get these kinds of situations. Beth shouldn't have gotten a tenth as far as she had already gotten and it looked like another ten times as far was in her future, considering how easy it was to lead this woman to conclusions.

"Oh, so you're a new hire to do maintenance. Well, there's three levels of security you need for restricted areas, which are white, blue, and red, in that order. If you don't have a pass that can scan for blue security, you can't go into this building. I guess they didn't tell you because your pass works on the teleporters," the woman said, nodding at the end as if her own made-up explanation was very satisfying for her.

Beth had only had to suggest through two questions what was going on and why and the woman had filled in the rest of the blank pieces herself, which also made it more convincing that that was what was happening.

"Right, sorry. I didn't know this location was off-limits," Beth said with a slight sheepish look.

"Are there any locations on the network that were off-limits. They told me I should be able to go anywhere."

"Oh, no, the teleporters are fine," the guard said with a small smile.

"Just be careful, because you might not be allowed into some of the buildings."

"Right, sorry. This is the first place that was on the circuit that had restrictions, and they didn't warn me about that, they just told me to go to all the pads. I guess they thought that I would just do all the work and not need a bathroom break or anything," Beth said, smiling back at the guard and shrugging.

"Right, sorry, but I can't let you into the storage area without a card," the guard said.

"Hey, no problem. I'll just move on to the next one," Beth said.

"You need to activate it like the other guards? They always insist on verifying."

"Two step is the protocol," the woman said with a sigh, walking over to the console.

"Sorry about the hassle. The pad's fine, right?"

"Working like normal," Beth assured the woman as she tapped at the console.

"I came from location B."

"Right, and you need to go to Location F next?" she asked.

"That's the plan," Beth acknowledged.

"Well, just present your ID and it's good," the woman said, stepping back over to her chair.

"No problem," Beth said, giving her a grin while swiping her ID before standing on the pad. This time, she did not teleport out, though the guard didn't know that. Beth, while not a master of spatial magic, she wouldn't claim that kind of title, not yet, was still quite good with it. When the teleporter pad tried to activate, she canceled the activation but still made it look like the pad activated and teleported her, creating a slight flash as she disappeared from the room.

In reality, she had teleported about fifty feet, appearing in a different part of the warehouse. Whereas the other warehouse that she had started in had clearly been used to move goods back and forth, only acting as temporary storage as it was a busy hub, it was quite clear just from the dust that things weren't moved much. This looked like, and she was sure the documents would confirm, that this was a long-term storage facility, holding goods and equipments that wasn't needed.

There were plenty of empty spaces on shelves and the large racks that stored bigger containers in slots. She assumed, as she walked around and carefully inspected everything, that the group running this whole dog-and-pony show had gotten all their supplies out and prepared in the last couple months, everything they needed for the rebellion getting readied and deployed, and now this was what was leftover, the backups and secondaries.

She found her longtime old friend and favorite, ration bars, taking up quite a lot of storage space at one end of the building, a few dozen pallets of the thing stacked on the shelves. Thinking about it, she supposed warehouses would work generally the same even with magic and everything; most people who did work like this didn't have too many stat points or powerful skills they could fall back on.

It was also probably just easier, and definitely more efficient, to use equipment like forklifts and pallet jacks to move things around. She now had a bit of a dilemma, because she was definitely of the mind to say fuck this organization and whatever they were up to. They had attacked CRA members and hadn't played by the rules, which might sound a little foolish, talking about a war and all, but rules of war existed for a reason.

For several very good reasons, actually, and not following them was often a deliberate and intentional choice on the part of one or more sides. Not staying within the bounds and attacking the CRA was also, to be blunt, just a monumentally stupid decision, as the Association did not take things like that lying down, and their first response had been to assign a Platinum mission to stop what was happening.

Attacking CRA members got people like Beth assigned to the case, and she wasn't putting odds on this organization, the entire organization, even if it had just been her alone, without her team or the loyalist forces, fighting against the entire group. Considering the actual circumstances, she could hope that things didn't get too bloody. She shook off the thoughts and returned to her survey, deciding not to just shove the whole warehouse in her reliquary or anything like that.

While it would be amusing, she still wanted to spend a bit more time in spy mode before she blew her cover and even taking a few pallets of goods would likely be noticed. It was in thinking about that that she had the brilliant realization that, hey, she was a very talented space mage. Why take the pallets of goods when she could take the goods out and leave things like they were?

She didn't need to maintain her cover for months, weeks, or even days, really, she just needed a few more hours, and she was sure nobody was going to figure out what was going on in a couple hours. Having made her decision, she grinned and started walking up and down the aisles, scanning the boxes and sacks and various goods stacked and wrapped on the pallets.

Anything that was in a box or a crate or a tough storage container was her target, and she used her Ideal to reach inside the boxes and grab the contents without moving the box. Whole pallets worth of ration bars, ammo, simple tools and tools parts like axeheads, bar stock, extra papers, writing implements, bottles of cleaner, bottles of water, bottles of beer, cheap potions, dried herbs, magical clay, magical water, tanks of gases like hydrogen, and so much more all appeared in her necklace and the reliquary.

She didn't want to open the gate to her skill or through the medallion, but her storage items like the necklace had tons of room, and the reliquary was vast, even if she didn't send anything to places where the Empyreans had their residences. When she was done, thirty minutes later, no alert had gone out or warning been sent, and the whole warehouse looked the exact same. It was, however, stripped bare, with hardly anything left of the already partially depleted stockpile.

Even just that was probably a massive blow to this organization, depending on just who was in charge and how much capital they had in reserve, but she had no intention of stopping there. She knew the coordinates for the next gate and she was pretty sure she could land herself right on the pad if she so desired, making it look like she had teleported in from another pad.

After a quick double-check, making sure she had gotten everything she could from the place, she activated her Ideal and hopped over to a different part of the planet, positioning herself to land directly on the pad, which should look alright if she added just a touch of power to create a small flash of light when she arrived.