Chương 617: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Thirty-Six

It wasn't like they were getting tons of skill crystals, either, nor were they getting tons of tier six or seven crystals. They would get a skill crystal every couple runs and they were mainly getting tier four crystals with a few tier five crystals scattered in, and a single tier six crystal after more than sixty runs. They were almost all single-use crystals, as well, which were obviously less valuable than multi-use crystals, but they would still sell for a crazy amount.

They would have just a little less value because they were all fire skills, especially if they tried to sell a batch of them or all of them at once, considering fire skills were fairly common, even higher-tier fire skills. Beth's plan was dole out a lot of the stuff they found or made during this period, sending some to the Black Ships, some to the Seven Lights, and so on. They had done dozens of clears of the dungeon with spikes before they took a slightly longer break.

Part of that was that even their 'short' breaks were aided by Beth's gate, meaning that even a few hours of downtime was a full day or more of rest. Beth had kept them consistent in their grinding away at the dungeon, and now they were getting a little longer of a break, which accomplished a couple things. Beth herself was going to have a bit of a shorter break than the others, as she had some shopping to do.

The group needed and wanted a few random things, and she needed to grab more spikes, so she set off to go and get that stuff, leaving both her gate open and the cruiser with the group. She used her Ideal to travel, vanishing from the moon they were on in a wash of white flame and reappearing in their home on Zephyr Prime. This way, she could stop by the Black Ships and some of the merchants on their home world first, then use the regular teleporter network to get to any other places she needed to be.

Spikes were the first order of business, but she then started to offload just some of their goods. She had been making sure they either harvested stuff or grabbed the corpses and dissected them later, so they had plenty of stuff packing full various storage spaces at this point. She had been using her looting powers on some of the beasts as well, which got them some nice rewards, but she had been very careful to not use the power on any of the boss kills yet.

It still wasn't consistent in Gold, and she knew they were going to need hundreds of boss kills, and her destroying one in every four or one in every three boss corpses wasn't going to be helping them cut down their time farming the same dungeon over and over. The Black Ships as a company was quite happy to provide Beth with spikes and other equipment the team needed, Illiem already being prepared after she had asked around and bought extras months ago before they went out to the dungeon.

He had managed to acquire, at a reasonable rate, another fifty spikes, which would be a great help in refilling their diminishing pile; they were already burning through them at a prodigious rate. Illiem was also very interested in many of the goods they had on offer; while the Black Ships were a very prestigious trading firm, things changed at level five hundred.

Even low rarity or lower quality items at and past that level were of great interest, and Illiem was willing to take most of what she had, either for auction or for direct sale. He only really passed on the worst of the loot, which included some of the few things they had crafted in the meantime, ironically enough. She made several more stops after that, dropping off items or buying small bits of equipment that the team needed, as well as stocking up on food.

It was a bit of a lazy thing, but she and several of the members of the team didn't cook all that often, and they had the money to buy groups of meals from restaurants. She was glad for all her storage space, as she wound up picking up hundreds of what were, essentially, to-go orders that would be used for delivery, but they would eat later, even in the middle of dungeon delving. Her meandering took her, after quite a few hours, back to the world they had teleported to before flying to the moon.

It was a lot less taxing on her to teleport with her Ideal if the distance was only within a few light years or so, and teleporting from one place in the same solar system to another place in that system was rather easy. She didn't use her Ideal to teleport in battle all that often as it was a bit more taxing than just using her skills, but it certainly came in handy outside of combat for distance travel.

She could, in theory, never really be trapped anywhere, as she had a teleport of such power that it was basically impossible to contain her. Maybe it would have been possible to trap Beth, considering that high ranked enchanters were a thing, but her Ideal was not purely spatial in nature, but also had a destructive component. Anyone or anything trying to stop her from teleporting would also have to be reinforced to a ludicrous degree to prevent her from destroying it as she used her Ideal to teleport.

Distance and other factors didn't really affect her, either, considering she could already teleport three-quarters of the way across the galaxy and only be a bit tired afterwards. She returned to the group with a little burst of flame, finding that nobody had attacked them, or even approached the area, in the roughly one day she had been gone. Most of the group was still resting within her gate, using the residence area to truly rest or to work on some light crafting project in their downtime.

She didn't rush the team to finish and resume what they were doing; after all, she had promised them a longer break, and a little over a day in objective time wasn't really all that much longer. Besides, she had been running errands and hadn't really had a true break, so she decided to spend a couple weeks subjective time with her wife before they resumed their dungeon running. Beth's timing was almost prescient, as, when they emerged from the gate, or thereabouts, they found another team had appeared nearby.

They were all immediately on their guard, as even a 'weak' team that was out here would be a group that could give them some trouble, and a strong team might be a group they had flee from, on an outside chance. Beth scanned the group as soon as they noticed them, sending Sera back into the gate to get the last few of her own group out and ready.

It was telling that, even thought he groups were miles apart at this point, they were still fully cognizant of the others presence and scanning them and analyzing the situation. Beth was hoping against hope that this was just some group that had randomly decided to come here and farm the dungeon a couple times, but she wasn't going to just bank on it.

"Withdraw your house?" Beth asked Val as she scanned the possible enemy group. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"That would be seen as an aggressive action," Val replied quietly. They weren't exactly whispering, but at their level, who knew what kind of powerful skills the other group had. It was a whole different problem set and type of pre-fight preparation that had to happen in their weight bracket.

"I suppose your grandmother can just buy you another," Beth replied in a slightly teasing tone.

"You know I do not rely on her for anything. These days," Val said, only hesitating slightly before saying the last part.

"It was a joke," Beth chuckled, having now started picking details on the other group. She was surprised to find that they were almost all Enlightened, as she would have expected it to be a group of Ascended or to have a decent number of Ascended among their ranks. To bring a group of Enlightened here, even with a strong Ascended escorting them, was quite a risk, in Beth's opinion.

It also didn't make her any less, wary, as anybody that thought a group that could easily survive on a moon that had random level four hundred beasts wandering about and was heading towards a level five hundred dungeon were either crazy or genuine elites among elites.

"Oh, it's them. How strange," said Blood.

"You've got the best eyes of us, so tell us what you see. You recognize them?" Beth said.

"Yes," Blood said. When Beth gave her a decidedly unamused look, she continued, "You remember that fight we had? The one Baelvyr set up for…uh, whatever it was we were doing there. I wasn't really paying all that much attention."

"Yes. The one against that arrogant elf and his little band of knuckleheads?" Beth returned.

"Hey, the elf was an ass, but the other guys weren't actually that bad," Andrea cut in.

"Yeah, yeah," Beth said with a grunt.

"You're saying that's them?"

"Yep. At least, it looks like their team, and they have the same names," Blood said.

"Could be some kind of hoax, but I think it's just that team. Don't know why they're all the way out here, though…"

"Yes, that is the million dollar question, isn't it," the idiom translating almost exactly into Universal Standard, though it became more 'that's the million coin question,' in that language. The group mainly spoke Universal Standard these days, as not all of them spoke English, or all that much English, as they all had been to Earth and all had skills or items or gear that helped them learn languages.

English hadn't been uploaded to communicators the last time Beth had checked, but she hadn't checked for it in a while and assumed it was likely there by now, which meant anyone with a decently nice communicator could have the languages auto-translate, though that wasn't always fully error-free.

"Well, no sense in just standing around," Val said, leaving her house where it was and moving towards the other group. It was clear the other group had seen them, and that they had also been tense about who or what it was, which told Beth a couple things. Or she could make a couple assumptions based on their reactions, but she wasn't going to settle on any course of action herself without seeing how the other team acted first.

She was, and so were many of her team, Gold Emblems, and they didn't just go around attacking random people just because there might be suspicious circumstances. She wanted to deploy the team in a better formation, but that would also be seen as a quite hostile action, so she merely had them spread out a bit, making it look like they were just casually moving towards the other team at slightly different speeds.

Her biggest concern was either a trap or huge attack that they had prepared beforehand that would hit her entire team all at once.

"Hail!" Val started when they were within spitting distance, Beth able to see that the other team now also definitely recognized them.

"What is it that brings you out here?" the disagreeable elf started before even a hello.

"Hail, friends," the leader of the team replied, seemingly ignoring the elf. Beth was reminded a bit of when her parents' friends would sometimes talk about having to 'manage up,' or the idea that a lower-level worker at a company was more knowledgeable, and more personable, than a manager and had to essentially manage their boss as well as do their own work.

She was now getting that kind of impression from this group, having some idea that the elf was strong but not very competent and was with them just as a sort of powerful backer, but the tall and rugged-looking team lead likely spent a good deal of time and effort, as they say, 'managing up.'

"Strange to see you out here," Beth said, though she gave a small smile to make sure there wasn't any sting in her words, unlike the elf.

"We're on a contract," said the behemoth member of the group with a shrug. Beth remembered him as being a fierce fighter but also an affable person outside the ring.

"Crazy, but we're here for the exact same reason. Got a job to harvest a few resources," Beth said, giving the behemoth a nod.

"Great, more competition," the elf scoffed.

"You know dungeons don't work like that," the team leader said with a small sigh. Definitely managing up.

"Still, we don't know if they're cutting into our contract," the elf said. Beth, and the rest of her team, and the other team, shared something in that moment, as Beth first looked at members of her team, seeing the other team doing the same thing out of the corner of her eye. The two teams then looked at each, all with the same kind of look as if saying 'is this guy serious,' most of them finding the idea more amusing than anything else.

Anyone who would have a contract for a level five hundred dungeon was going to be both rich and powerful and they would be able to pay very well for multiple team's acquisitions in said dungeon. It was one of those shared moments where people bonded over the idea that someone they had to deal with, or put up with, more like it, was a raging idiot, but wasn't a person they could just replace out of hand.

Speaking of that, the elf was rebirth twenty-nine, which made Beth question even more his boldness in confronting Baelvyr what was now several years ago, but Beth knew there were plenty out there with more guts than brains. It wouldn't have spoken well for his team, but again, it was pretty clear he wasn't in charge of this team, per se, but was much more a guard doing a kind of chaperone duty or protection of them as they went out on adventures.

Not all that uncommon, and with how strong this team was, now all firmly in Enlightened and much more powerful than when Beth had last seen them, she wasn't sure the elf was really all that far ahead. If she had to fight him, she was sure she could take him, given enough time and that he didn't go after any of her teammates, which had also made her relax a bit.

She was still wary of this being some kind of trap, but they would need to have done a lot of prep work and/or have others waiting out of sight to skew a fight in their favor.

"I'm sure our buyer has plenty of funds," the team leader said with a slight shake of his head.

"Besides, we don't even know exactly why they're here." Turning to Beth, he said, "You're here for the Bright Line Corporation deal?"

"Uh, no, hate to disappoint," Beth said with a shrug." I've done some work for some powerful people in the past, and that gave me some connections that want rare materials. Noting to do with any company or corporation."