Chương 611: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Thirty

"There's not a lot about that, but there's some information in CRA records if you want to read a little more about what's coming up for you and your team," Arianna said.

"I appreciate it," Beth said.

"And everything else, though not the interruption of the fight."

"Yes, well, we can't really let things like that spiral out of control," Arianna said with a sigh.

"Honestly, I would have loved to have let you beat that moron into a bloody pulp, but we can't risk the public and the overall fallout from that. Also, even given how upset he was, or acted, I think Mark was playing a slightly deeper game, but then again, he's never been known for his brilliance."

"It sounded like you guys knew him well?" Beth asked.

"He's been around a while, unfortunately," Arianna said, the last part mostly under her breath.

"He does have some talent, to be able to get to Ascended and progress a few rebirths through it, but he's one of those people that thinks he's the best there is. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, he struts around like he's some kind of Manumitted."

"Manumitted aren't that performative," Beth said.

"I'm not even going to ask," Arianna said, shaking her head.

"Is there anything else you need from me? Or else I'm going back to Argand to oversee the issues that are going to crop up from this whole fiasco," Beth said.

"I don't have anything else right now," Arianna said.

"Just make sure to send me a simple report when you're done, considering this touched on our affairs now."

"I'll keep you informed," Beth said before white flames wrapped around her body and she disappeared without a sound. Arianna stared at the empty couch where Beth had just been for a moment before shaking her head and muttering, "Damned Exalted." Back on Argand, the first thing Beth did was circle up with her team, gathering them and informing them of what had happened. With the now not-so-mysterious off world backer sorted out, the rebellion on Argand had nothing and no one.

Beth's team was way more than enough to mop up and sweep up, and her team had already done much of that before she even finished dealing with her fight with the so lamely named Ascended, Mark. The results of her infiltration made the cleanup both easier and harder, though it was all working out better than she had first hoped.

It was harder because they had to deal with disentangling company assets without causing more damage, as Beth didn't want to keep sparing with Prime Explorers or whatnot, but it was much easier in that they had the information to disassemble the mess with little challenge. Nobody that wasn't a company asset was of much skill or strength, either which made the whole process far easier. It was probably one of the easiest Platinum missions they had done or would ever do, all things considered.

Beth had spent most of the time they were working pretending to be a repairwoman and teleporting around to various buildings to investigate the enemy. At the end of the day, she hadn't really done much fighting, even after she came back and updated her group on the status of their mission and what she had found.

They had wrapped the entire rebellion up within four days, and that was total time that included their arrival and Beth's investigations, as well as the hour it took her to write a quick after action for Arianna over on Teolos III. Wrapping up a rebellion in less than ninety-six hours was pretty impressive, though Beth did make sure to stop by the offices of Argand's planetary governor and lay down the law.

That didn't go over so well at first, until she 'accidentally' burned away a small paper that had an official notice on using her Ideal, which the governor was experienced enough to recognize for what it was, and then the conversation suddenly went so much better. That mission wrapped up their first batch of missions in going for Platinum, and it was exactly as they had been told and expected; Platinum missions were rare and highly sought after.

It would likely be a couple months before the next mission cropped up, now that they had cleared the five missions that had either been in the backlog on just been created on Arbitus. There was always a chance they could shop around and find a mission in a random Hall, but that chance was rather slim, considering Platinum missions were much higher in priority than Gold missions; they often got passed up the chain immediately.

Even if Arbitus wasn't immediately aware of a mission, there were always eager Gold and Platinum Emblems ready to take a mission, up to and including Hall Masters themselves, so Platinum missions were far more of a needle in a haystack type of situation than even Gold missions tended to be. Their network of connections with Hall Masters didn't help much, either, considering that even Hall Masters would be interested in doing Platinum missions.

That was a perfect break for them, however, as they were basically ready to undergo their next rebirths at this point. The requirements were skewing more into combat every rebirth, though they still had rare and valuable items to find for their rebirths at this point, but those things could be sourced given time. They had all their materials, and Beth's gate made much of the combat work trivial, at least up to this point, though Beth knew it would get a lot harder as they kept going.

Still, she didn't see any reason at this point to stop doing the True Rebirths, and the rest of the team certainly agreed. They had to take a couple weeks, objective time, to finish out the last of their requirements, but they'd managed to get the rest of the materials over the last few months, much of that sourced from the trading firms, but some of it gathered by themselves.

It was another thing the members of the team not concerned with getting an Emblem any higher than Gold could do in their downtime, though sometimes the best way was to use Beth's gate and they might not be together with the rest of the team. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. They would use the gate now, but not for farming, just for undergoing the rebirths, with the whole doing it in the private residence area she could set the gate to.

It was still the most convenient way they had of doing it, with the medallion creating a portal that was rather large and very obvious in terms of mana signature; her gate created a much smaller portal with a very faint mana signature, by comparison, and was good for anything they wanted to do in private. This rebirth was something private for them, not that it was embarrassing, or all that secret, but it was something they wanted to keep from certain prying eyes.

That and the fact that it could cause a big disturbance in the mana and surrounding area if they weren't in the gate was all the excuse they needed to disappear for an hour and get it done, with the rebirths going very smoothly overall. Nobody discussed their class selections ever, if they got them, which applied to Adam, Andrea, Bjorn, and Val. Kris, Neph, Blood, and Sera didn't get classes as sapient beasts and instead had their humanization and species strength to rely on.

This, the fifteenth rebirth, put them halfway through Enlightened, approaching Ascended at, while not a record pace, an extremely rapid pace that would see them there in just a a handful of objective years. Well, a handful might be a bit of an exception, but they were going to get there much sooner rather than later, and the whole team was still in lockstep at this point, meaning they would have a full group of Ascended, plus or minus whatever Veren was up to.

Still, Beth wasn't at all worried about him; the very worst case scenario would be that he would still be in Enlightened and a Sage whenever they saw him next, which was more than enough to make him a terror in his own right. To be a Sage already at Enlightened was enough to prove his insane level of skill, and he would still likely be the strongest on the team based just on being a Sage. Speaking of Sages and the like, it was also a good chance for them to work on their weapon skills.

Beth didn't want to spend too much money, but they were at a point that hiring instructors for a couple weeks, or even a few months, wouldn't be all that much coin and would provide some extremely powerful benefits. They didn't even need to pay for all that many lessons, as most of them could be taught by the Empyreans, but hiring instructors did a couple things for them.

They had kept the reliquary pretty close to their chests so far and they wanted to keep it that way for a while yet, so hiring instructors for a it here and there would give them a paper trail, a time that people could reference for their skills being at certain levels and them having certain levels of instructors teaching them.

If anything, that was a bit of a well-known bluff that many people participated in, with many wanting to hide their current skill or hide their path through the ranks and thus hiring instructors at certain points. Often the instructors did really coach them, but it was also a way of laying a trail down that, while pointing to certain conclusions, could also mislead about relative strength and progress. A second reason to hire instructors was that ever valued and ever frustrating term: networking.

The kinds of people they would need to hire to teach them efficiently would be Grandmasters, at the very least, and those kinds of people were quite strong, knowledgeable, and well-connected themselves. Forming a bond with a combat instructors was neither something nefarious nor something all that difficult to do, and it could provide them with some great networking that alerted them to people, places, and opportunities that they might otherwise have missed.

That much was true with Blood's very first instructor, who provided training for both Blood and Val, who became friendly with the whole group and let them in on a little secret. Well, it wasn't so much a secret as an exclusive opportunity, which was a special trading session, not an auction per se, but an opportunity for the rich and powerful to mingle and directly exchange needed items and resources.

The whole thing, while not all that secretive, was very exclusive, with only a hundred invites going out for the trade exhibition once a year on Zephyr Prime. Each invitee could bring up to two people with them, and other than the organizor and whoever they brought, that meant there were a total of three hundred guests at maximum.

On a world with in the high single digit billions in population and hundreds of millions of powerful Wayfarers, an event boasting only three hundred entrants at maximum was extremely exclusive. The problem they had was the same as everybody else with some wealth and power; even after having heard about the event, they didn't have any way to secure an invitation. Beth even went over and leaned on the Black Ships, haranguing Illiem for information about the gathering.

He had, surprisingly, or maybe not surprising at all, a lot of information on the gathering, but he was unable to secure an invite. That was both personally and through the Black Ships network; he explained that he could secure a single invite, if the incentive were big enough, but the kind of price he named cause Beth to burst into flames and teleport away, his stifled laughter chasing her through the teleport.

For that kind of money, she would just buy a whole continent on Zephyr Prime, one of the premier living spots in the whole galaxy. Honestly, the nerve of some people, even considering the wealth and connections that would be on display there. A neutronium coin just for a starter, and that wasn't even a guarantee of getting the invite? Outrageous! Beth took a minute to calm down before going to her fourth session of the week with her own instructor, a much older Ascended who had seemingly given up on Exalted.

It was a bit sad to see, but somebody so far through the rebirths, and with so much wealth, could extend their lifespan for quite a while. A'Mhach spent time training in the sword and spear to get a little spending money and help keep himself active, but he was one of the few high-rebirth Ascended that Beth had found that seemed genuinely retired, at least in the sense of not going for the next stage.

He was still training and working, still sometimes fighting beasts, but he was also spending a lot of time relaxing and enjoying himself. He had agreed to teach Beth only after she demonstrated her combined fighting style of using both her fists and her blade and demonstrated her overall power. The old elf had been impressed with both her raw power and the skill at which she could blend everything, her skills included, together when she was fighting and had agreed to two months of training.

This was also somewhere where a third, though just as important benefit, presented itself. While the old Ascended in the reliquary, those busybody Empyreans, were quite skilled and strong, they had only their own perspective. Sometimes, when training with a weapon or with an overall combat style, getting a second, third, fourth, and even more opinions and perspectives was very important for growth.

Not everyone used the sword the same, not every thought about the sword the same, and not everyone fought or understood combat in the same way. Getting the perspective of another Ascended that had been around for quite a while, someone who had fought some of the greatest of his time, was invaluable in helping Beth push through a few more levels. Also, not for nothing, but while A'Mhach had advertised his services by talking about how he was a peak Grandmaster, Beth had experienced Grandmasters several times by now.

She was still a far distance from that realm herself, but she had no doubts that the old elf was at least a Sage, which stemmed also from the way he trained her, displaying a keen and wicked insight into her fighting and bladework that she doubted even such an experienced Ascended at Grandmaster would be able to display.

The old elf was a wealth of knowledge on techniques and movements, often demonstrating, in slow motion, the exact movement pattern and muscle flexes she needed to do to hit in just such a way or cleverly deflect an enemy's weapon just so.