Chương 614: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Thirty-Three

"First of all, supplies," Val said, once the team was gathered.

"Don't we have plenty of stuff?" Andrea asked, a bit confused.

"We need more supplies than what we have," Val said with a shake of her head.

"Trust me; I've lead enough groups going out on long trips that I know that we always come up short on something. Whether it's food, alcohol, extra equipment, materials, or anything else you can think of, we need to make sure we have more than enough of everything."

"We're also going somewhere to spike dungeons, so we need supplies for that," Beth added, leaning back in her chair.

"I'll secure us extra batches of spikes for the dungeon, but we'll need a bunch of other stuff. The dungeon isn't underwater or anything, but we might need some breathing supplements and other goods. I don't know how much of that we have on hand."

"I can get us what we need," Sera said confidently.

"Especially the alcohol."

"That's not the priority," Val said in some frustration.

"Make sure there's beer," Bjorn said.

"There will not be beer!" Val huffed.

"I'll help you buy the liquor!" Andrea volunteered, getting up from the table.

"Hey, wait!" Val said.

"I'll get more food," Blood said, Val giving her a betrayed look as the wolf left.

"I need to buy the spikes," Beth said with an apologetic shrug, getting up from the table and leaving. In short order, Val was left alone in the dining room, still with talking points to go over for the trip.

"Well, fuck you guys, too," she huffed, running to catch up with Blood. Beth, meanwhile, had several stops to make, starting with the CRA Hall nearby. She could buy spikes from the Hall for a certain discount, and the Hall was also guaranteed to have some on-hand, which made it a good first stop. Based on what Mortaine had said, and the number of spikes he had left, she knew she needed a lot more.

Just thinking about the core from the final boss of the dungeon, it was only a chance to drop with the mana types they needed and in a way they needed on each run. Given that Mortaine wanted a hundred of the things, at a minimum, they would likely need to do well over a hundred runs just for those.

She also didn't really have any data on just how much of each of the two kinds of crystal they could get per run, but she was assuming it was a small amount, maybe not even a pound of crystal in a run, and Mortaine wanted hundreds or thousands of pounds of each type. He had given them fifty spikes to start with, but Beth wanted at least two hundred of the spikes on-hand, and she would be much happier with even more.

The CRA Hall had a stockpile, but the commissary officer was hesitant to let her take all the spikes. There wasn't a high demand for the objects, but they were requested enough, and hard enough to make, that he wasn't going to let her just clean their supply out. Even if he had let her buy everything, they only had seventy spikes on hand, and out of them, he let her buy forty.

Once again, she was running into this problem where the spikes were hardly used, but they were rare and difficult to make, leading to people not wanting to sell their stock, or sell them all cheap. Beth left the Hall with ninety spikes, but that was far from enough for her, and so she spent the rest of the day just trying to secure more of them.

That involved several teleports and, while she could have hurled herself between planets with her Ideal, that was still highly exhausting and they were on a mission for Mortaine. She was keeping track of everything they were buying, planning on delivering that tab to the Exalted when they had finished gathering all the requested materials. Beth visited almost all of her contacts, speaking with people and keeping the connections polished, as the saying went, and she managed to secure another sixty spikes.

That put her at a hundred and fifty spikes in total, which was significantly less than what she wanted, but she would just see where they were at after using up all the spikes. Maybe the dungeon would be generous with them and they would get all the materials they needed in under a hundred and fifty runs, but she wasn't going to just hope on their luck being that good. Still, it would take them a very long time to run through the spikes she had on her now, and by that point other places might have restocked.

She could also get more from Mortaine, but he was paying for them (whether he knew it or not), so she wasn't concerned about having enough spikes by this point. The team met back up the next morning, having secured all the supplies that they needed, or just wanted to have on hand, and went over the plan, which was pretty simple. Get to the location, set up their camp, make sure the area outside the dungeon was secure, then start doing runs.

Despite Beth's gung ho attitude and eagerness to get into it, the team decided that doing at least one run without a spike, just to have some kind of idea of what they were up against, would be the prudent course of action. Spiking a dungeon could produce a lot of changes, but it wasn't going to change a lightning based dungeon into an earth based dungeon or something like that.

Running the dungeon without any alterations to the dungeon's structure or mana would give them a decent base to understand what they would be up against once they started spiking the place. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Once they had the basic plan laid out they got underway, moving through the teleport network first.

They had a dozen jumps or more to get to where they needed to go, after which they had to get in the cruiser and go off-world. It was very convenient that they could have the cruiser with them anywhere now, or rather, with Beth anywhere she was. If the group was split up, as they had been for a time while some of them were doing Platinum missions, the others were just sort of out of luck until they were all back together.

Beth was able to open a portal right beside the ship and have Blood run in, start the ship, and fly it out for them to board. They had moved out of the city before doing so, Beth not wanting to open strange portals in populated areas, especially as the portal from the medallion could cut into things. She also didn't want any random people wandering into the medallion and getting trapped on some random world or moon inside and it turning into some kind of incident.

Once they were in the cruiser, they flew from the second world in their current system to the largest moon of the fifth world. The place was somewhat hostile, that place being the solar system, and they had to fight several space born or space-capable beasts on their trip. None of them were of a concerning level, meaning they didn't need Beth to hop out and fly around killing things, but they did give the cruiser's weapon systems a really good work out, probably the first time they had really pushed the weapons.

They made it to the moon otherwise unscathed, finding there was a small city, really more of a fortified town, about three hundred miles from the dungeon. That was also the only point of civilization on the whole moon, and getting their and back wouldn't be convenient. Well, it wouldn't be convenient without a ship, but then again, only people with ships could get to the moon.

Beth supposed somebody who wanted to be on the moon to kill beasts and fight through the high-level dungeons could book passage there if they didn't have their own ship, but that seemed a little crazy. Still, they wouldn't have to worry about any of that, as they had plenty of ways to camp or stay in a safe place while still being in the wild.

Val insisted on them setting up a camp near the dungeon; she explained that it was just good practice to let others know that there were people on location using the dungeon or instance, though Beth thought that was a bit naive. There would definitely be times when announcing one's presence for everyone to see would not be a great idea, and Beth was even of a mind that this might be one of those times, but Val insisted that some things should just be done in some ways, so Beth acquiesced.

They set up Val's portable house, a portable home structure that Bjorn had, and a small dwelling that Kris had. Beth had never bothered to get anything like that, having her gate, the collapsible airship, the reliquary, and now the medallion. Blood had similarly never bothered with any of it, and Sera said she had one but it was a hand-me-down that she had left at her family's estate and didn't use herself, nor had she needed to once she had hooked up with Beth.

The others were either too poor or too disinterested to have their own portable structures, and they would likely be using Beth's gate when they weren't in the dungeon anyway, so it didn't really matter all that much.

"Time to see what we've got ourselves into," Val grumbled once the camp was set.

"Come on, it'll be fun," Beth insisted, laughing at the kresnik's sour face.

"It can't be all that bad," Blood tried to cheer her up, which seemed a bit of a paltry effort, but Val did give her current flame a weak smile.

"Me first," Bjorn grunted, heading through the gate with the rest of the team following a second later. They emerged into a non-spiked instance of the dungeon, finding themselves in a massive underground cavern, which was already a pain in the ass. Not many of the team enjoyed fighting underground, one of the reasons why they didn't explore subterranean areas more, and fighting through a cave system was not Beth's idea of a great time.

Still, it wasn't the worst thing ever, and they would just have to deal with the oppressive atmosphere and push through to the end. And speaking of the atmosphere, Beth understood why Mortaine had been talking about the final boss having solar and fusion mana types, which were advanced forms of fire mana, in essence.

She had expected something uncomfortable, even on a non-spiked run, but the cave system they found themselves in was filled with lava and had not just pools of the stuff, but flowing rivers of it as well. The beasts were all skewed towards fire and lava as well, with some of them being straight-up fire elementals, and even a kind of magma creature that swam through the lava and had a kind of semi-squishy body that was very annoying to attack as it absorbed a lot of force without taking much damage.

Kris was a bit of a lifesaver in the place, as her water element spells and skills were able to fight against the fire mana in the air and ground, the fire enemies that constantly used fire spells and skills, and the magma and lava. It was a lot of work, and relying heavily on one member to help with the clearing put a lot of strain on that member and caused them to need more than the average number of breaks.

Kris would get both mentally exhausted and drained of mana and need to take a longer rest every couple hours, making their progress rather slow. The only thing that let them get through everything with a reasonable speed was that Beth was able to just crush and shatter her way through many enemies. Despite either being partially incorporeal, like the elementals, or with big, gooey, squishy bodies, nothing could stand up to her space mana.

The other key was that Beth was something of a master of fire, and that control also helped the team immensely. They still had to rely on Kris' water spells to make decent headway, but Beth's ability to manipulate and control fire took a lot of pressure off the team. Considering the dungeon was a level five hundred instance at base level, and the beasts within got stronger than that the deeper they went, it was the only reason they were even able to do a relatively straight forward clear at all.

Without Beth's power, and huge mana control blocking off fire mana and fire attacks, they would have had to go much slower and take things one room, one tunnel at a time, with long breaks between and possibly using ambush tactics on some of the beasts. With Beth their to heavily hamper the enemies while Kris blasted out water, often adding her void lightning to the water, which was exceptionally good at dealing damage to the elementals, they made steady progress to the boss.

Ironically, Beth was a bit disappointed in the boss, as it was just a giant salamander, nothing crazy or wild. It did have a weird fire beam attack that it could shoot from its eyes, which was a bit novel, and those eyes were massive crystals, or looked like crystal, concentrating the fire mana within before blasting it out in a thin, scorching line.

Those attacks were harder to control, but Beth was still able to take away some of their speed and bit with her control of fire, and she also wound up doing most of the tanking. Her Mana Physique lent her immense resistance to fire mana and flame-based attacks, and her ability to control fire mana with her dominion skill only further enhanced that, making her even better than Bjorn at standing toe-to-toe with the boss and duking it out.

When they eventually killed the massive brute, they were very eager to carve it up for everything it had. Just like Mortaine had said, the core here was nothing all that special, the rare core only dropping from spiked runs. Still, it was an over level five hundred core from a boss beast with heavy fire aspecting, which would fetch a premium price on the open market. Beth was more interested in the eyes and, with Blood's help, carved the massive crystals the size of her torso out of the head of the fallen beast.

Despite looking like crystal, they felt like stone to the touch, and were also immensely hot. Blood had had to wear working gloves when helping with the carving to avoid getting burns, even with all of their resistance skills now in Platinum, and Beth was only fine because of her strong fire control. The eyes themselves were beautiful pieces, with spark of flame glimmering in the depths of the bright yellow crystalline substance.

Val commented that they would also make very good focii for enchanting, depending on the need, and that just farming some of the eyes would make the group quite a large profit.