Chương 615: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Thirty-Four

That was all fine and well, but they weren't there to do runs of the normal dungeon. Well, describing it as the normal dungeon was a bit odd, but they were there to specifically do runs of the dungeon once a spike was applied, which was a whole different ball game. They took a bit to rest after the first delve, having spent several days in the dungeon, which had worn on Kris in particular. Her having to constantly use her water magic at a very high level had been mentally, magically, and even physically exhausting.

While they had taken breaks, a fifteen minute rest wasn't really enough, and even a couple longer breaks didn't really let her fully recharge. Once Kris was fully rested, and the rest of the team had a chance to relax for a moment, Beth got ready to spike the dungeon. They hadn't seen anybody else around and there was no sign of any other camp having been set up in the surrounding area.

Beth was a bit concerned about someone else showing up only because the only other people likely to even attempt this dungeon un-spiked would be Ascended, and that kind of situation had the potential to get messy. Then again, that kind of situation wouldn't just go in the Ascended's favor, as the previous fight she had had with the incredibly named 'Mark' showed that she could stand up against Ascended and push them back, even if neither of them had been going all out at the time.

She could certainly provide time for the team to use any one of their several capabilities to escape even if she was against more than one Ascended. For now, they didn't have to worry about that, and wouldn't likely have to worry about that for some time, considering the lack of popularity of the dungeon, but it was something that she was paying attention to whenever they were out of the dungeon.

For now, she used the first of the spikes to boost the next instance of the dungeon, still impressed that the things managed to do their work in under twenty seconds. When the full concentration of mana was focused on the next instance and the spike had fallen apart, they were ready to go, stepping into the spiked instance to see what they were up against.

"This is…different," Val said, rubbing at her forehead.

"It's even hotter," Beth commented, though she still looked cool and collected. Her mastery of fire gave her immunity to heat and high temperatures, making her likely the only one entirely comfortable where they were standing.

"It's not so bad," Sera said, the only other person that could reasonably deal with the heat without much issue. Even then, her nature as a dragon only did so much, especially considering her mana alignment was void and not fire.

"This is going to take forever," said Blood with a sigh, scanning the horizon.

"We were under some time compression last time," Val replied.

"Any dungeon at this level and beyond will likely have at least a little bit."

"I didn't really notice," Beth said, giving Val a raise eyebrow.

"I'm not sure it was even a full two-to-one ratio, but we spent three days inside and less than two days passed outside," Val explained.

"Dungeons of this level are so large and so tough that they start taking a long time to do. Whether it's from that, or just due to the massive amounts of mana we're talking about, they tend to have at least at least a little time compression."

"But hang on," said Andrea, getting out some ice from her storage ring, watching it start to melt immediately.

"I thought that Ascended often struggled to get to rebirth forty-nine. Don't a lot of them not even make it that far? If everything at level five hundred and beyond has at least a little time compression, shouldn't they have an easier time."

"No, not really," Val replied.

"Also, just a point of order, but not everything has time compression, it just starts to show up fairly often after five hundred. Anyway, that's not the point; the point is, most people just don't have that much time. Ascended are often busy doing a thousand other things, so even having time compression on the higher level dungeons doesn't really help all that much. Every rebirth has both a higher minimum level and a higher maximum level, right?

And Ascended starts at rebirth twenty already and goes to fifty, so it starts higher and then covers a broader range than everything up until that point. That means by even rebirth thirty, the minimum level is four hundred to do a rebirth, and getting just to that level takes a lot of time and effort.

"If you want to actually keep progressing and not be a bottom-of-the-barrel, total weakling that can't stand up to even low rebirth Ascended, you're going to want to go beyond the minimum every time, if not to the maximum level every time. That takes a bunch more time, time that Ascended don't really have both due to being busy with other responsibilities and because they only have so long to live.

Going up in rebirth increases lifespan, but not all that dramatically, and when people slow down at rebirth twenty or just after, they're burning years and years of their life while barely progressing."

"Some people live a lot longer," Andrea replied, holding the ice against her forehead, which was mostly performative.

"That's true, but those people are a minority," Val said.

"Even dragons and phoenixes only live so long, and they're usually not the most driven of species."

"What's that mean?" Sera asked with faux outrage.

"Come on, you know this," Val said, rolling her eyes.

"Your people don't exactly try the hardest to level and get to the wall before Exalted, do they?" Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"No, you're right," Sera said with a sigh.

"All that's great, but can we get going. It's hot," Adam complained, frowning as he stared at the terrain and mopped his forehead. They had found themselves this time in a mountain range, one that boasted quite a few peaks and stretched over an impressive area. The place also had multiple volcanoes, if the lava flowing from several of the mountains was any indication, and the sky was dark and filled with dust and ash, casting the mountain range in perpetual twilight, even at noontime.

There were rivers and pools of lava along the slopes of the mountains and spread out through the valleys below, with several valleys being nearly entirely consumed by the molten rock. On top of all that, the place was teeming with beasts, with elementals and magma crawlers and all kinds of other nonsense scattered about.

At the sound of a distant roar, Beth looked to their right to see the maw of some kind of massive wurm emerge from a pool of lava, the molten rock sloughing off it in great globules as its massive body extended out, its maw snapping up several other beasts before it re-submerged with a mighty crash and gout of liquid stone.

"This is going to be tedious," Kris muttered with a sigh, likely envisioning all the water spells and skills she would be casting as they cleared the dungeon.

"Let's get going," Beth grunted, leading the way. The dungeon was a high enough level that they didn't have Blood or Val do any kind of scouting. With them still in the middle of Enlightened, and not even at their current max level, it was just too dangerous for them to wander off in a level five hundred dungeon. With the spike applied, it was deadly dangerous for the group to get separated, especially considering a lot of their damage output and defensive capabilities came from Beth.

Without Beth in the party, they would still do alright, the group being extraordinarily strong for their given rebirth and level, but it would be an immense slog. Separated into smaller groups, or caught out alone, the dungeon was powerful enough that it would be a death sentence for anybody but Beth. The danger was real, and a real worry, but the team was used to danger, as they were always on dangerous missions or going to unexplored places.

In that respect, Beth's team had a lot more experienced that most Enlightened teams and even many teams led by Ascended. Very often, other groups would play things much safer than Beth preferred to, only tackling known dungeons and instances and only going through pre-approved routes and networks. Beth, on the other hand, would casually throw herself into an unknown dungeon or Trial, and she thought of the safely navigable routes through the stars as suggestions more than the only safe ways to travel.

Much of this had worn off on her group, though there were still leveler heads there as well, especially Val. The dungeon itself, as they soon learned, was just an endless war of attrition. The beasts kept coming constantly, even when they stopped after a big fight to try to rest, meaning that Beth was often holding the line while the others relaxed, though the attacks were sporadic and contained far less beasts than the larger groups they initiated combat with. Still, she imagined a more…

traditional team trying to tackle this dungeon would find it incredibly tedious, as once the action started, the dungeon seemed determined to keep it going until the final boss was defeated and the instance cleared. It hadn't really been like that without the spike, however, so Beth was assuming it was just another facet of the 'upgrade' the spike gave the instance with the huge dose of extra mana injected into it. Not only would they have to deal constantly with beasts, but the heat was ever present.

In a way, it was rather good for Beth, as she spent a lot of time after they entered trying to manipulate the fire mana around them to keep the team cool. Doing all that mana manipulation while also exploring, fighting, and commanding the group was a very good exercise in control and manipulation of her output level. It was rather amusing that the group's first big complaint was that Beth kept losing focusing during the first couple fights and just grabbing all the fire mana around them.

In turn, that meant the group was suddenly in an icebox instead of a volcanic hell, which was both jarring and just as bad, if not worse. The team, in fact, dealt with cold even worse than they dealt with extreme heat, and Beth had to focus to make the are cooler, but not actually cold. On top of the constant fighting and the temperature, there were the burrowing beasts and the size of the dungeons. The beasts like the lava wurms didn't seem to really care about timing or even about what they were attacking.

They would as happily fight or eat anything, from other beasts in the dungeon to the team, and they found out rather quickly that the massive creatures weren't just limited to the lava. Anything that could survive in massive pools of molten rock with immense amounts of fire mana and lava mana swirling within wouldn't find solid stone all that challenging, and they proved that by burrowing anywhere they wanted in the dungeon.

The team had to constantly be on alert, listening for the grating sounds and feeling the ground beneath them to try to detect the wurms' approach. Considering just how large the dungeon was, sprawling over a massive mountain range that stretched for hundreds of miles of very perilous conditions, the wurms were even more annoying and frustrating.

The only saving grace was that the wurms did seem to need to return to the lava from time-to-time to rest or to feed or something, meaning their attacks weren't entirely constant. There was also the fact that, despite the massive size and the dungeon being a mountain range, there were very, very few caves or caverns or underground areas. They did, in fact, find only one large cave in their entire clear of the dungeon, and that was the one place they found a bit of metal.

A bit of very rare, quite valuable metal that Beth had been warned about beforehand, thought the amount they were able to pull out of the cavern was less, in total, that one of Beth's fists curled up, not counting her gauntlets in the measurement. Even that much Queen's Blessing, as the metal was colloquially called, was worth a fortune, and that was just selling it raw to a crafter or company.

If they had someone work the metal to make a weapon or piece of armor or so on, it would be worth many times that amount, though Beth wasn't sure if the metal was rare enough to interest someone like Old Tom into making something for them without breaking the bank. The last thing they had to tackle in the dungeon after overcoming all those obstacles was, of course, the final boss.

While everything else in the dungeon had been annoying in the spiked version, the wurms in particular, the boss was on an entirely different level. It started just with the fact that they had an awful time even finding the damn thing, as it turned out to be some kind of creature that loved lava and was hidden inside one of the volcanoes.

And when Beth said it was inside a volcano, she meant it was quite literally inside the volcano, sleeping in the depths of a pool of lava that sat in the heart of one of the belching mountains. The beast was a massive lizard with six legs and four huge tails, not thin and long things like lizards and other creatures might have, but much more in the style of massive cords of scale and muscle that ended in blunt tips that were still nearly as thick as Bjorn's waist.

The boss was a nightmare on every front; it was armored, it hid in an opportune element (lava), it had very thick scales which, given its level advantage, were quite hard to penetrate, it could spew lava and fire, it liked to hide often and attack from range, and, given everything else, it was both very physically strong and quite fast.

The group would have really struggled with the boss if they didn't have Beth, as her abilities with manipulating fire, combined with her spatial powers and mastery, really gave them a lot of advantages. She was able to even partially cool the lava the beast swam in, making it quite uncomfortable and forcing it to fight on the edge of the volcano and the slope of the mountain rather than in the liquid stone.

The beast was so durable and resilient that it took them nearly an hour, even with Beth's might added in and the fact they had gotten it onto 'dry' land to battle, before they were able to kill it. The kill was almost immediately set upon by her pocket Ascended as well, who had passively watched the battle but were eager to properly dress the corpse and get some of the goods.

If they could do something interesting with it, fine, but Beth insisted on setting aside the core, regardless of whether it was what Mortaine needed or not.