Chương 619: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Thirty-Eight

"You don't have any issues with it, considering-" Beth started.

"No. If it's not sapient, then it doesn't matter," Sera said.

"Even if it was sapient, some people are assholes and need a beating."

"Okay, cool," Beth said, staring at the massive dragon that was coiled around a mountain in the opposite direction of the boss, near what Beth suspected was the edge of the allowable space in the dungeon instance.

"Well, it's level six hundred," started Val.

"I've killed level six hundreds before," Beth said confidently.

"A dragon is entirely different than some little wurm, even one that can survive in a planet's upper atmosphere or space," Sera corrected.

"At level six hundred, most of the rest of us aren't going to be able to do much damage to it with any of our attacks. This fight is going to rely on you, dear, to do almost all the work."

"A dragon's defenses…" muttered Kris from behind them, standing next to Neph as they surveyed the landscape around them. Perhaps it was the dragon's presence, but in addition to their not being any of the wurms that constantly dug through the stone and attacked them, they hadn't experienced constant attacks to the usual extent from the other beasts in the dungeon this run.

They had been attacked, sure, but it wasn't to the level it would normally be, and now that they were close to the dragon, no other beasts even dared to come near. Beth looked up at the massive beast once again, seeing its dusty brown scales with streaks of red across its back and down its tail, the massive wings folded up neatly, and the enormous head resting on the mountain's peak.

The beast was bigger than a city block and probably weighed a hundred times as much; heaven's knew, Sera weighed literal tons even in her human form, not that Beth minded, but they needed a reinforced bed just to contain them when they were sleeping normally. This beast had picked a mountain for that task, and black smoke trickled from its mouth and nose, though with its size, that trickle still looked like a massive flood.

The dragon they were looking at gave even Sera a run for her money in terms of size, being twenty or twenty-five percent larger, and considering how big Sera was in her dragon form, even twenty percent was a massive difference. Just fighting against it would be a challenge, considering the immense defenses of the beast; they would need to hit the head or penetrate through to the heart to do real damage, but a beast that big, moving around, well… it was going to be a real challenge.

Beth was hoping that she was strong enough she could hold it down, or at least manipulate its movements, letting the rest of the team get some damage in along the way. If it fell to her to fight it mostly herself, it was going to be a long, tedious slog and be a danger for the rest of the team, especially if they go swarmed by beasts from the rest of the dungeon that might try to investigate what was happening.

"Should I give it a chance, first?" Beth asked Sera.

"If you mean talk to it, you can always try, but the chances are crazy low that it's actually intelligent. What happened with Blood when we got Neph was a big fluke, for example," Sera said, shrugging.

"You can try if you want, but I wouldn't really bother with it. It'll just give it a chance to wake up and prepare its defenses."

"Let me line up," Bjorn grunted, waving a hand to stall anything else as he moved to get in position. Despite his enormous size, Bjorn could move silently and at a rather rapid clip; it wasn't anything like what Blood or Val could do, but compared to most people, he was very fast.

"Give us just a minute. And some warning!" Val said before the rest of the team split, moving around to get in ideal positions. Either the dragon was deeply asleep, or it didn't care about a group of rather powerful beings moving around it. They were being stealthy, as much as they could, but anything that strong should be able to detect them from literal miles away, even when sleeping.

Beth waited a minute for the team to be in position and signal their readiness; something the dragon absolutely could not detect was them using their communicators, which functioned just fine within the dungeon, even if they couldn't communicate outside of it. Everyone sent a ready signal when they were in place and then Beth took just a couple seconds to get ready, making sure to go all out right from the very start of the fight.

A level six hundred dragon was not an opponent to joke around with or to feel out bit by little bit, it was an opponent that demanded respect, that demanded power, even that commanded absolute perfection on the battlefield. She engage everything she had, summoning her Presence, the crown descending to her head, fifteen of the wolves' eyes lit up, the very air around her cracking at the power the first of her core powers brought with it.

She exploded in white flames after that, the dragon atop the mountain waking at this point and sitting up, but it was already too late. Perhaps some natural arrogance of the species led it to be slow to respond, even when feeling such an immense power, but Beth was emitting enough force that space around had started to twist and slightly fray before the dragon even made to stand up.

It wasn't able to fully get to its feet before Beth hit it like a runaway freight train, not physically, but magically, lashing out with both hands while combining a range of skills and utilizing her advanced Unarmed that sat now at the peak of Master.

Celestial Annihilation, Light Beyond the Edge, and Tyrannical Domination were all attacks that could be used at range, and a very far range at that; in fact, Beth hadn't really done any limit testing in a long time, and she wasn't even sure just how far she could make any of those attacks reach. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. That was something for another time, as now she had a dragon to slay, quite literally.

The combination of attacks certainly caught the dragon off guard, lifting it off the mountain peak and flinging it back before it could use its wings and powerful magic to right itself. Beth didn't let up, firing off more attacks, including shattering the space between the two of them using Spatial Obliteration, tearing everything apart and destroying it with the addition of her Ideal.

In response, the dragon roared and then unleashed its strongest weapon, a weapon to rule the skies, the land, and the sea, a weapon to make the very stars tremble. A stream of fire, so hot it melted the very air itself, exploded from the beast's enormous maw, washing over Beth in less time than it took to blink. Were it any other in her place, serious injury were likely the best outcome they could hope for.

But it was not any other standing in Beth's place, it was Beth herself, and she regularly bathed in her wife's flames for fun and comfort. Sera, a direct descendant of the rulers of the Black Dragon Clan and an incredibly powerful dragon with a high humanization factor, had an enormously strong fire, even as an Enlightened.

While this level six hundred dragon would more than give her a run for her money in terms of raw power, Beth could already tell it lacked finesse, and she was a very power target to try to overwhelm with strength alone, particularly when speaking on flames. The combination of her Mana Physique's ability to manipulate and tame fire, along with a genuine dominion skill related directly to fire and not some more complex element like ghostly flame or even plasma, made her a true master of fire.

It also granted her total immunity to flames and fire mana; at this point, she wasn't really sure what it would take for fire mana to hurt her, but she didn't think even an Exalted with their entire Ideal based solely around fire would be able to do much of anything to her. None of the Exalted she knew had anything related to fire, nor would Alex when she finally crossed that threshold, so it was hard to test.

Maybe, if her pocket Ascended go their shit together, one of them would have a heavily fire-based Ideal and she could do some testing with them, but they were still hard at work on realizing their Ideals. Beth wasn't passive while the dragon was roaring and spewing fire, of course, but she did let the full brunt of the attack wash over her, wanting to test her defenses and resistances.

Still, at the same time, she threw out over a dozen punches, even though she was more than a mile away, using the motions to fire off bursts of Spatial Obliteration, aiming them directly down the dragon's gullet. This move seemed to greatly surprise the creature, as it likely had expected her to char into ash from its breath.

She was glad she had taken Sera's bit of advice and just launched an attack without starting with a discussion first; the way the dragon was acting, she was pretty sure it was just a dumb beast and not at all intelligent. That was more than proven in the next moment when the dragon, responding to her punches making some kind of slight dent in it, like in terms of dental work, flew at her, covering the distance between them in a single heartbeat, if not far less than that.

For a creature half the size of the large mountain it had been sleeping on, it moved frighteningly fast, flying the mile to Beth in just a fraction of a second and attempting to bite her with its newly reworked denture. Beth wasn't having any of that, not wanting to try the old classic of killing a big enemy from the inside out just yet, and took a step back, teleporting a mile away.

This move, surprisingly, didn't throw the dragon off at all, as it charged her in practically the same instant, making her wonder if it could track her teleports or was smarter than she had just been giving it credit for. This was the moment when her team jumped in, Bjorn having positioned himself just off to the side and now hitting the dragon in the size, the mountain of a man not at all quiet now as he used his impossible strength and enormous size to move at terrifying speed.

His power might not have quite been on the same level as Beth's, but he was able to deliver at hit with enough force to slightly stagger the dragon, causing it to redirect its attention from Beth momentarily, a big mistake. Beth fired off a dozen attacks as soon as the beast's head turned towards Bjorn, distracting it as it seemed confused for a moment on who to focus on. This gave Sera the perfect opening, transforming as she launched herself off a nearby mountain, slamming into the dragon in her full form.

Beth had been right about the size difference being about twenty percent, though Sera could shift her size in both her human and dragon form, to an extent. Still, size didn't always mean a direct translation to power, and Sera was monstrously strong in both her forms, though her Endurance is what really was off the charts. That showed as the two dragons grappled with each other, claws and fangs screeching across scale and wing, finding no purchase nor causing any damage.

Bits of spark did fly on occasion, but the very small amount of material that would be scraped off to form those sparks wasn't even noticeable on a per scale basis. Sera's wrestling with the beast did complicate the other team members' targeting a bit, but they were all extremely experienced at this point. Adam and Andrea launched simultaneous attacks on the head, aiming for the eyes with a combination of powerful skills, causing the dragon to react instinctively and jerk back.

It put itself right in Kris' line, the phoenix not transforming like Sera but still hovering in the air and raining down void lightning on the beast's cranium. Blood and Val jumped in from the sides with lightning quick strikes, ones powered by actual lightning in Val's case, harrying and harassing the beast. Much of it was ineffective, but it was all to establish a rhythm and move the fight into their control, dictating the pace and giving Beth openings to deal the real damage.

Neph was the only one not actively attacking at the moment, but she was using the time to lay a few traps and kill a few beasts in the surrounding area, keeping the team free of distractions for a moment. Beth quickly realized this was going to be a war of attrition and take a massive effort on her part to see through. Sera and the nameless dragon wrestling showed both of their toughness, as the only thing sustaining any real damage from the two locked together was the surrounding terrain.

She attempted to move in at an angle and almost got clipped by the beast's tail, teleporting away only to see another swipe hit Bjorn, though it only moved the titan a single step back. Adam and Andrea attempted a second combination attack, timed to land alongside Val and Blood, all four running along the ground, but they had to roll away as two claw swipes almost caught them out. It only took Beth two more attack attempts, one of them fully thwarted, before she realized just what was happening.

"It's got earth mana and earth senses! It's detecting us whenever we touch the ground! Move through the air as much as you possibly can!" Beth shouted, also sending the message through the communicator.

"Annoying," Bjorn rumbled, the titan's voice, just like Beth's, able to be easily heard throughout the area. The realization changed the flow of the fight, but only to make it slower, though Sera kept up the same strategy for a long time. Neither of them were damaging the other at all, which was true, but Sera would eventually start tiring the beast out, as her stamina was likely far superior to even a level six hundred's at this point.

Her grappling the beast in her full formed, combined with the rest of the team's constant bombardment, really wore the dragon down and exhausted it, and did so rather quickly. The fact was so strong her attacks were doing actual, real damage and not just scraping a scale or marring a wing, also helped in tiring out and draining the beast. The fight was still a long, arduous, and dangerous one, with several of the team taking attacks, and not all of them as resistant as Sera and Bjorn.