Chương 624: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Forty-Three

A third reason they took so long was demonstrated as they exited the dungeon while Beth's group was taking a very short rest between runs. The whole team was alive, which was a small mercy, but it was clear the final boss hadn't really been kind to them, with much of the team suffering from burns and the elven leader having a seriously injured left arm. It looked like he had stuck the appendage in a blender and then set it on fire, which had to have been painful, and he was just about the worst of the group.

They were all singed, scorched, slashed, and beat to hell. Even considering they all had regenerative or healing skills, they must have really cone through hell in their last attempt. The team leader stopped in front of Beth while the rest of the team made their way to their own camp.

"Beth," he said, nodding at her.

"Careful in there. It's rough right now."

"We're used to it," Beth said with a shrug, glancing back at his team as they entered their camp.

"What the hell happened in there?"

"Final boss was a variant we haven't seen yet," Del replied.

"Don't know what happened, exactly, but it had some kind of fire mana stuff that we weren't ready for. Noren had to use his full strength to fight against it, and it still mauled him kinda bad. We need to take a long rest after that, it's gonna be some time before we can get fully healed up. At least the rewards were nice…"

"Yeah, we've been hunting rare variants," Beth replied as her team gathered.

"That's our main mission, though don't tell anyone I told you."

"Someone asked you to hunt rare variants of a level five hundred spiked dungeon?!" Del asked.

"We can handle it," Beth replied, shrugging.

"They need a specific material from a specific variant of the boss. That's what we've been doing here all this time."

"That's pretty shit," Del said, nodding at Kris as she used a healing spell to aid in his regeneration.

"Not only having to do spiked dungeon runs, but the materials you're hunting is chance. We've tried to avoid taking contracts like that, but if the pay is good, well…I wouldn't necessarily say no. You did say it's for someone important, too."

"Maybe we'll introduce you at some point," Beth said with a small grin.

"We've got more than one connection like that. You do remember Baelvyr, right?"

"Blood Stars, you think someone would forget the Adamantine Colossus? Especially when their team guardian pissed him off? I haven't even felt anything like that at any point in my life," Del said.

"Ha! Well, we're almost done here," Beth said, indicating for her team to get ready.

"Maybe we should take you guys through a spiked run before we leave? Show you what the difference really is?"

"I'll have to think about it," Del said, glancing between her team and where his team disappeared into their camp.

"We're already having enough trouble as it is. Wouldn't want to drag your team down." Beth glanced at the others before looking at Del and shrugging again, saying, "I don't think it would drag us down. Just think about it; we're almost done here. Probably another three weeks, four if we're really unlucky? Maybe two if we're lucky, which we haven't really been the last month. Maybe it's time for a turnaround."

"We'll talk about it. I'll let you get to it, now," he said, walking towards his camp.

"Thanks for the healing, there."

"Good move," Beth said to Kris after he was gone.

"Building a little rapport with them doesn't hurt."

"He was hurt p-pretty bad…" Kris said, clutching her hands at the base of her stomach, a habit that she had started doing more recently. It was a nervous tic that wasn't all that uncommon, and Beth thought it made her look cute, which was a bit of an odd juxtaposition considering Kris was very tall and had a stately, refined beauty that would have made professional models gasp in envy. It was that sort of difference between her refined beauty and her cute actions that made her even more attractive.

Beth shook the thoughts off, especially considering how dedicated to each other and just each other Kris and Bjorn were, or gave the impression of.

"Let's get these last few runs done," Beth said, pulling out a spike and hitting the dungeon portal with it.

"I'll talk with them about a big group run after we're done with the next couple," Val said, making some notes in her communicator.

"Wonder how far they are on their task?" Beth hummed as the spike completed its work.

"If I had to guess, maybe not even halfway," Val said.

"Hard to know since they were cagey about which materials they were gathering and the exact quotas when I last talked to them, but they haven't been clearing the dungeon all that fast. Even after adapting to it and wringing a couple skill levels out of the challenge, they're still a good bit slower than we are."

"And there's isn't even spiked," Blood scoffed.

"Not everyone can be as amazing as we are," Beth said, striking a pose and flexing. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"Don't hurt yourself," Andrea said while rolling her eyes, the others joining in to rib Beth.

"Anyway," Val said, ushering them through the spiked portal entrance, "we're going to be done long before they are, pretty much regardless of what happens. I think helping them with a spiked run, both to show them the difference and to build rapport, would be a great idea. They've got some great backers, and having those connections think about us in a positive light would be a bonus."

"You're such a PR bitch, sometimes," Beth said, causing Val to huff and shake her head.

"Not saying it's bad. Just saying that I was just offering it to help them a little, not to form some debt connection to whoever's funding them or whatever."

"Two birds, one stone," Val returned, gesturing for Beth to get started. They did another couple runs before Val went over and talked to the team, Blood trailing behind her while Beth observed from afar. Not that she didn't trust the World Walkers, but she didn't trust anyone apart from her small group, Baelvyr's group, Veren, Mortaine, Zane, Fallon, and Serena and Alex.

Laselle she still didn't really know all that well and their interactions had had a 'this is business' feel to them that didn't inspire closeness or warmth. She had talked to Sera about getting friendly with Laselle's daughters, but Sera had said that wasn't going to work for now. The oldest daughter worked solo while the other daughters were, in essence, going through their rebellious teenager phase, though Sera had also said the middle daughter was just a straight-up bitch.

Still, even counting Baelvyr's whole team, that wasn't a lot of people, and she was always cautious of others, especially when they were already established teams and not just an individual or two. Val's talk went well, and she came back with a proposal for them to do a joint run in two weeks, Beth marking the time and date on her communicator.

If they were really lucky, her team would be entirely finished with their task at that point and could just do the run as a nice little final send-off for the dungeon, hoping they wouldn't be back any time soon. Even with their resistance skills having increased, and the team gaining some new skills based around fire or solar or lava or some such, the heat and fire mana in the dungeon was still annoying.

It didn't really hurt them, or interfere with them in any way, but the overabundance of the fire-type mana was just aggravating. Even Beth, who didn't even feel it thanks to her fire-based Mana Physique and Ideal, and her skills that let her handle fire, was getting annoyed with it at this point. Whether it was Beth's optimism or just a lucky break for them after not having gotten one in a bit, they did exactly as she thought, which had the team in a celebratory mood.

They even had had time to do two runs to test Beth harvesting the boss, having gotten a full one hundred and one of the cores Mortaine needed. They could stick around even longer, as they were still well within Mortaine's tentative time limit of just over an objective year, but they were metaphorically, and to some small extent physically, burned out on the dungeon and ready to move on.

They had a lot of business to take care of, including the last few levels and their rebirth quests, which were both going to take a while. Beth hadn't let it really bother her, but the several times she had been told they needed an Ascended or to be Ascended within just the last two or three years were very much still front-of-the-mind for her.

Having the whole team hit that point would open up so much, from the mega instances to expeditions with groups like the Black Ships to other possibilities, such as becoming Maze Delvers, or just called The Delvers. She would have to talk to Zane about that, as he had said that he didn't like started people on the path to Delve the Maze of Eternity before they hit Ascended, not to mention she was pretty sure rebirth twenty wasn't going to cut it.

That would all come up in the next few months to a year, but for now, they needed to focus on the task at hand. The other was definitely nervous, if both their speech and body language were anything to go by, but they also seemed to be reassured by just how normally Beth's team was treating it. It also helped that they had seen Beth's team go in and out of the spiked version of the dungeon dozens and dozens of times at this point, which assured them they were in good hands.

"You guys are too nervous," Beth said, shaking her head as the two teams mingled and finished prepping right by the dungeon entrance.

"You saw us a couple weeks ago," Del responded, scratching his head.

"Even Red was pretty badly off, and he's tougher than basically anybody." Red was the name, or nickname, Beth wasn't sure which, of the man with Behemoth blood. She was pretty confident he was the strongest member of their team, maybe even stronger than Noren, the elven Ascended, considering Noren had ten rebirths on the man and was in a different bracket of rebirths and Red was still close to his power.

She also thought, though she didn't say it to Del, that Red hadn't been that badly off and was just empathizing with his group, which made them feel connected with the big man, but behemoths were insanely powerful. Not only were they naturally very tough with good natural regeneration without even adding in any skills, they had massive physical strength. Beth had done just a little research on the members of Del's team after bumping into them again, and the stuff she had found about behemoths was pretty surprising.

They were one of the few species that didn't get the standard stat allocation at a rebirth without either doing something special or being a mutant version of their species being the biggest shocking item she had found. Instead of the normative distribution, behemoths got more Strength than their other stats, though they got less Intelligence and Wisdom.

It wasn't a massive difference, but if Red did a True Rebirth, instead of getting twenty percent retention in every stat, he would get thirty percent in Strength and fifteen in Intelligence and Wisdom. It might seem like a big change, but if he invested heavily in Strength early, and pumped Dexterity to make sure that stat kept up, his raw punching power would be horrifying.

Even without doing True Rebirths, he still got a lopsided spread which favored Strength, leading to his physical baseline power being through the roof.

"Well, you'll be fine," Beth said, her reassurance making Del smile nervously.

"It's not like having more people makes the dungeon harder. Not this kind of dungeon, anyway, and we're not close to the group size limit for a level five hundred, even not considering the spike."

"I do understand why the limit is a hundred people for 'regular' level five hundred dungeons now," Del replied, shaking his head.

"Even doing the normal version with our groups is pretty crazy. I can't believe you convinced us to do a spiked run."

"Come on, worst comes to worst, you guys can just turtle up and wait for us to beat it. We've done more than two hundred runs in total of this dungeon with a spike now; not like it's going to throw anything at us we haven't already dealt with or can't just beat into submission," Beth said, puffing up a beat as she smacked her own chest with her fist in a confident gesture.

"Well, that's true. Noren is rather strong, though maybe not quite that strong," Del said, glancing around.

"I resent the implication-" the elf started, the other close to twenty people all rolling their eyes perfectly in sync before Beth cut him off.

"We're ready?" she asked, glancing at both teams. When nobody protested, she pulled out a spike and twirled it before slamming it into the dungeon entrance.

"Buckle up, kids, this is about to get exciting." The typical swirling light happened, though again, it wasn't all that impressive as it was a bunch of internal changes happening before the dungeon entrance started shining a little brighter. The other team's nervousness clearly spiked a bit even at the muted light show, but Beth just gestured everyone in, Bjorn and Sera leading the way. The rest of the mixed group piled in behind them, Beth waiting until absolute last to enter.

She was sure there wasn't going to be any trickery or anything, but she was confident her team could handle the other team, even with Noren added in, without her help. She made sure she was last in because she was more worried about trickery of the kind that had extra Ascended or an Exalted showing up to dive into the instance to attack either or both teams.

She was strong enough she could hold off even an Exalted for enough time that instance would close, which would leave her team without her, but they well knew what they were doing at this point. Fortunately, none of that happened, and she hopped in just a few moments after Noren and right before the instance closed off.

Instances were usually locked to specific groups, but people at the level of Exalted had ways to forcibly join an individual instance before it cycled closed, and waiting until the last second insured that that wasn't happening.

She also wasn't worried about what she had thought about a little bit ago with someone able to force their way into an active instance, considering that she wasn't sure even Zane or Fallon had that level of power and skill; if someone at that level were hunting either team, they were basically fucked anyway.