Chương 638: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred FIfty-Seven

"What the hell are you doing here?" Beth asked, or more demanded, as she turned around, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Practicing," Veren replied in his usual deadpan manner that always managed to hold a bite of sarcasm.

"And what are you doing here, interrupting my practice?"

"Mission," Bjorn said in a deep grunt.

"Eloquent," Veren replied.

"I'm assuming you have been dispatched by someone to take care of the terrible monster threat that haunts this world."

"Something like that," Beth said, giving the swordsman a dubious eye.

"Surely, this isn't all that much of a challenge for you?"

"Ha! I could very much say the same about you," Veren replied with a snort.

"Point," Beth said.

"And yes, we're here on the CRA's behalf. We're working on our Platinum Emblems right now, and this got foisted on us as one of our missions."

"Fine, then. Follow me," Veren said, turning and striding off. Beth exchanged glances with the others, who all shrugged before following the recalcitrant swordsman. Veren led the way, picking up the pace to move quite fast, but it wasn't anything the group couldn't keep up with.

It wasn't tiring for any of them, Veren included, to move at that kind of rate; to a freshly Awoken, like Beth was all those years ago—well, not that many years ago, but the point stood—to such a freshly Awoken, they would be blurring across the countryside. One might wonder what kind of crazy skills they were using, but that person would be shocked to learn that no skills were involved, other than a little manipulation of mana to obviate some wind resistance.

It was purely stats and raw power that let them stride across half a continent in a hour, which might have been even more terrifying to discover than if they were all using specialized movement skills to cover so much ground so quickly.

"Down here," Veren said, tilting his head down as they stood on the shoulder of a mountain. Below was a broad valley with an area of broken rock and jagged terrain near the center.

"Down there what?" asked Val, a bit peeved at the wayward swordsman.

"You didn't have us run for an hour to show us some rocks, did you?"

"No, he's right," Beth said, eyes narrowing.

"There's a monster down there."

"How are we handling it?" Sera asked.

"You lot spread out. I'll go in and shake it up. If it tries to run, crush it," Beth commanded. The whole team immediately moved to follow her commands, even Veren, which was nice to see, though she didn't really have a right to issue him any kinds of orders. He was basically the equivalent of her, or roughly so; reaching Sage at such a young age put him on the same kind of pedestal, if not an even greater one, than her finishing her Ideal so early did.

He still moved with the team, likely knowing that his time of training was up, considering Beth's team could have hunted the monster down in short order even without his help. Beth, meanwhile, waited a moment for everyone to be in position before she leapt into the air, easily throwing herself over the center of the valley before falling toward it at speed.

She wasn't going for anything subtle here, as was obvious from her approach, and she started to burn with white fire as she fell, the air around her burning and disappearing, creating a rumbling, tearing sound as she fell. Beth wasn't sure whether it was the inherent senses of monsters, or the amount of power she was already radiating, but her first plan of just leveling the place proved unnecessary.

The monster, some kind of strange, twisted lich, rose up from the ground to meet her, summoning a vanguard of grossly twisted beasts, all clearly undead. A monster like this could be an even bigger problem than what they normally were as it used the corpses of beast and sapient alike to create more monsters, spreading its vile filth further. Of course, the one saving grace, at least for now, was that as a lich and undead controller type, it kept the other monsters under its thrall, but that didn't always last.

They would also have to be careful even after killing the lich, as they couldn't risk one of the other, lesser undead surviving the lich's doom and continuing to propagate its evil. The creatures the lich controlled, those that could naturally fly or use mana to boost into the air, attempted to intercept Beth, but she didn't even bother with them, not slowing or deviating in the slightest, which seemed to surprise both the lich and the stupider thralls.

She fell straight towards the lich, her Ideal billowing our around her as space twisted and the wolf crown settled on her head, most of the empty eye sockets now lit with a glowing gem, proof of her rebirths. Her Ideal alone vaporized most of the monsters that got close, and those it didn't she shredded with Tyrannical Destruction, which she didn't even need to gesture to use.

To her team, it looked like a bright white line slashing down into the center of the valley while all the monsters below and around her simply exploded into cloud of gore and blood, right up until she impacted against the lich with a thundering explosion. The lead monster had deployed a powerful barrier, some kind of spell fueled by death mana that glowed an eerie purple with pulsating black edges that seemed to drink in the light and gave off an ominous, sickening feeling.

Beth's initial impact hadn't been enough to shatter the barrier, which might be a surprise if one wasn't paying particularly close attention, but she hadn't used any of her skills or abilities other than her core powers. Considering the lich was at thirty-two rebirths, it certainly tracked that, even with her Ideal and Presence active, she wouldn't be able to just bull through a powerful shield spell by such a strong creature.

The shield had wavered, though, and driven the lich down into the ground nearly a dozen feet, and Beth was just getting started. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. She moved back, though only a handful of feet, and unleashed an onslaught of punches and kicks, not even making physical contact with the shield, but smashing it repeatedly with a whole slew of Platinum and Diamond skills.

She held back on her trump card for this engagement at first, just testing how strong the shield was as she hammered it with Tyrannical Destruction, Celestial Annihilation, and Spatial Obliteration. Celestial Annihilation was already doing quite some work, the celestial elements of that skill eating away at the undead and its powerful shield.

The monster wasn't passive, though it was clearly taking it some effort to maintain the shield under her crazy onslaught, and it tried to attack her with beams of death mana and some kind of curse that Beth largely ignored. With her combination of skills, plus her insane stats, plus her incredibly strong core powers, getting a curse to land on her and stick was a pretty tough ordeal, as the lich was finding to its detriment.

Something that pointed to the monster, which did have greater intellect than a beast, still not being all that bright was it took it a long time to realize that there was too much fire surrounding it. It had been focused for over a minute on trying to keep Beth from smashing through its shield and pulverizing its face and hadn't been paying attention to the surroundings, but now it was starting to notice things weren't exactly right.

Not that the lich would have been able to do anything about it had it noticed the problem any sooner, other than try to scour away the mana with death mana, but Beth had been using her mastery of fire as well. One might forget that she was more accomplished with fire than many flame mages, based mostly on her personality and brawling nature, but the combination of a Platinum Mana Physique that controlled flame and a fire-type dominion skill allowed her to be one with fire on a fundamental level.

It also really didn't hurt that her Ideal was partially fire-based and could add quite a lot of intensely powerful flames to an area, flames she could perfectly control and bolster with her other skills and powers. On top of that, she had a wife who had lined up perfectly for a massive, forty-foot wide blast of dragonfire, all of which Beth grabbed before it even got to her and added to the raging inferno boiling against the lich's shield. A shield which was not, unsurprisingly, doing all that well at this point.

It was starting to warp and distort in places from the intense heat and fire mana, the purple shimmer brighter in some areas and transitioning to a kind of red color in others. That was already basically the end of it, whether the lich realized it or not; with the shield weakening at a rapid pace, Beth's unbelievable physical strength and combination of strong skills would crack the barrier apart in a matter of seconds.

Which is exactly what happened, and before the lich could get over its moment of surprise at such an arguable weaker creature getting the better of one of its best spells, Beth hammered it with the trump card she had been saving. Light Beyond the Edge was a skill that was massively destructive to all things evil and vile, and a lich was almost the perfect target, a foul being corrupted by undeath and warping death mana in terrible ways.

Beth didn't move through where the shield had been, but instead blasted the lich directly in the face with a monstrous wave of energy, pumping a quarter of her mana pool into the skill, which light up the whole valley like a Christmas Tree and forced the others to close their eyes to avoid getting flash-blinded.

The lich was not so lucky, both in that it didn't have eyelids to close anymore, and that this was an insanely powerful, very high-tier skill being wielded by someone that was excellent at mana manipulation and control, a skill that directly targeted its weakness. The power of the skill was so great, so overwhelming, the lich couldn't even think anymore, couldn't even react, trying and failing to cast several spells as that otherworldly light tore apart its very nature.

If Beth had been a little stronger, or just a little better with the skill, or the skill had been in Diamond and not Platinum, the lich would have perished right then and there. As it was, even for a thirty-two rebirth monster, it had definitely seen better days, and that was already saying something, considering it was a lich. Unfortunately for the now gravely wounded monster, Beth still had plenty of mana left and plenty of zeal left within her.

If one attack wasn't enough to finish it, she would just use many attacks, and her fire, which now mixed a powerful dominion skill, dragonfire, and a powerful Ideal, not that any Ideal was weak, but Beth's was particularly destructive. The lich was buried in a sea of sweltering flame, overwhelmed by heat and destructive, melting, annihilating flame as Beth pounded down skill after skill, freely using everything in her arsenal to crush the monster.

The whole valley had been rearranged at this point, though it was more a massive crater now than anything else, which also brought to mind her abortive fight with the Ascended. Neither of them had been going all out, and the amount of devastation she was causing to the surrounding spoke to why the other Ascended had stepped in and got them to talk rather than fight. Now, though, she was in the middle of nowhere and had a monster in front of her and she didn't need to hold back.

She had all her senses focused on the lich, and she could feel it through feedback from her strikes and through the flames surrounding and melting it, and she knew it didn't have all that many cards left to play. The only concern she had at this point was, well, it was a lich. Those things, at least in stories and video games, usually had a phylactery to store part of their soul in, which was the whole thing that made them undead and, until the phylactery was damaged or destroyed, eternal.

It would be all well and fine to destroy the lich and all, but then not being able to find the phylactery would put them back mostly at square one. She was hoping that this place Veren had led them to was the lich's home and that it had the item stored close by. Hell, she might have destroyed the thing already based on the amount of damage she was doing to the surroundings.

And speaking of surroundings, the lich had long ago given up having its minions attack Beth, and had instead commanded them to flee, but it hadn't realized that was a fool's errand. It took a bit, with Beth rattling its brain case constantly, for it to realize that every connection with its controlled monsters had winked out. Beth hadn't come alone, and every monster that tried to leave the valley, or crater, as the case may be, was systematically destroyed by her team.

Sera burned every single body with fire, leaving not hide nor hair of them left. Even the bones were melted beyond the point of slag, leaving little more than ash and some excess mana to return to the world. The monsters were much weaker than the lich, whether that was due to the lich having poor skills or, more likely, that its materials weren't at all the best to work with.

Sure, the monster could reanimate something weaker and pump mana into it and level it, to an extent, but it wasn't going to make a level one hundred beast into a level eight hundred, rebirth twenty-five monster. Not given the amount of time it had been active, at least. The end wasn't long in coming after that, as Beth broke the monster's body, likely some time after breaking its will, and then proceeded to pound what was left of it into dust.

She waited for the kill confirmation to stop attacking, but she wasn't as thorough as Sera was, for two reasons. One, she wanted to see if she could detect the being fleeing for its phylactery, which she had some doubts about. That was soul magic, and she wasn't any good with anything like that, nor was anyone on the team, though who knew what Veren could do or knew.

The other reason was she had a particular skill she wanted to use on what remained of the lich, a skill that she was eager to use on such a powerful monster, just hoping that it didn't fail and leave her with nothing but a few fading motes of mana.