Chương 68: Limitless Path Chapter Sixty-Eight

Kim returned her attention to the arena after his explanation, watching her sister struggle with the more skilled opponent. They went back and forth several more time before Beth took another slash to the arm, but this time she returned with a headbutt and punch combo, knocking the man back. It seemed like it wasn't as effective as Kim had hoped, as the man almost immediately returned with a vicious series of short, sharp slashes.

Beth defended herself as best she could, but Kim could tell that it was becoming increasingly difficult.' I wonder if it's the wound on her arm. That asshole should just fight her fairly,' she grumbled in her head, watching another quick exchange of blows. It seemed Beth was poised to get a good strike in with her blade before everything suddenly went pear-shaped. The opponent cut Beth's swing off as he just started with a powerful circular swing of his own, knocking her sword out of the way.

He must have predicted the exact timing and angle of her swing, as his strike perfectly opened Beth up for his follow-up thrust, his blade effortlessly slicing through Beth's neck.

"BETH!" Kim screamed, leaping out of her chair. She found herself unable to move, however, as Navere gripped her shoulder in a hand like a steel vise.

"Let me go! I have to help her!"

"Watch," he commanded calmly.

"What do you-" Kim started before he forcefully turned to her look back out the window, whereupon she saw Beth stand up, still clutching at her throat, and start moving back towards her starting point. She let go of her neck after another two seconds, and Kim saw that the skin was whole and entirely undamaged.

"The arena has systems that will revert damage to participants and their equipment at round end, including deathblows," Navere explained in his deep, calm voice.

"I-I see," Kim said, dropping bonelessly into the chair behind her.

"You could have warned me beforehand."

"It would have lessened the impact," he replied.

"I guess," Kim said, frowning slightly while biting the edge of her lip.

"Is this what you wanted to show me?"

"Not all of it. Watch," he answered. So she watched, looking on as her sister fought the mysterious swordsman again, and again, and yet again. The result was always the same; Beth often managed to get a little minor damage in or inflict a moderate wound on the man before he killed her with a swift, decisive blow. She couldn't really imagine what it was like, shuddering at the thought of fighting someone so strong only to die, over and over.

She knew she couldn't do something like that, just the thought causing her to break out in a cold sweat.

"This is what I wanted to show you," Navere said calmly.

"This is what you have to look forward to, not just in training, but in the future. Opponents like this, battles like this, training like this. It is not always wise to long for what you are not yet ready to grasp." He then stood and moved around the chairs, opening the door as he got close. Kim took a last look at Beth with a slight frown on her face, watching as her sister started yet another round.' I don't know if I can be what you are, sister, but I can try.'

The two moved out of the viewing room and headed down the hallway to the stairs. They walked in silence back to the elevator before heading down to the third basement floor, where they were using a training room Navere preferred. Kim took her place without a word, drawing her blade and facing off against her instructor, ready to continue learning all she could.

Beth Bell Beth, entirely unaware of her sister's impromptu spectating of her bouts, continued facing off against the swordsman for hours. She felt a little frustrated that it was such slow going, but then again, she couldn't really expect it to be like a game, where everything was sped up so it didn't take years to beat. Even with game-like mechanics, this was reality, and the path to mastery of a skill was long and arduous. Despite her frustrations, she was improving as she trained, if ever so slightly.

She had to just put her head down and keep plowing forward to see results as, even if she wandered around and found something like another Endless Trial, she would still only reap minimal gains at her level. She wasn't at the point yet where she was stuck with no way to progress her weapon skills, so fighting in the arena was just as good if not better than anything else she could do.

Other opportunities would be great for increasing her stats or overall level, or gathering riches and treasures, but she didn't really need a new challenge to hone her weapon mastery. Steady, hard work would yield its own reward in this endeavor. Beth woke at a decent time the next morning, having crashed after showering and eating multiple meals the previous night, checking her phone to see it was a bit before dawn.

She got down to the forge quickly and started working, not even noticing until around lunchtime that Elana had entered and was working on her own piece. The dwarf reviewed a few of Beth's nails and made some comments about her hammer swings still being a bit too forceful before demonstrating how to forge a hinge, then showing how a more complex piece, like a latch, could be made. Beth soaked it all up, nodding at Elana before she resumed her work, putting one of the bars of round stock back in the fire to heat.

She spent the rest of the day working in the forging room, noting at the end that she was starting to amass a small pile of nails in the back corner of the workbench, though calling a few of them 'nails' might be a little generous. Still, progress was progress, and Beth decided to check her stat screen for the first time in a while to see how she was coming along. Name Elizabeth Anne Bell The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Class Brawler Level 28 Strength 84 Dexterity 40 Endurance 62 Intelligence 24 Wisdom 24 Free Points 0 Titles Silver Flame Empress' Inheritor Skills Ancient World Gate[0] Blacksmithing Apprentice[3] Crush Copper[9] Focused Meditation Copper[6] Identify Copper[7] Lightning Resistance Copper[4] Lordly Reconstruction Copper[8] Monstrous Blow Copper[8] Pain Tolerance Copper[9] Swords Apprentice[8] Toxic Resistance Copper[4] Unarmed Apprentice[8] Wealth 0g 9s 49c Emblems CRA Copper Emblem Bonds Blood She was pleasantly surprised to see that she had made gains not just in her new Blacksmithing skill, but her weapon skills had improved since the last time she looked.

She was also a little disappointed in being under ten silvers again and thought it might be time to try to do a little exploring. That, or level up more in the gate and farm money from higher level monsters. The gate leveling strategy didn't really appeal to her, for now, as she didn't want to lock herself out of opportunities too soon. She remembered what the controller of the Endless Trial had told her, that there were other tiers of the Trial available, and that they were locked by specific levels.

She didn't want to try to push past where she currently was in level without improving her skills further. She would just have to keep clearing the two dungeons they knew of every one to two days, as well as spend a little time searching for more. They couldn't be the only things in the vicinity, something that she had already proved by finding the Endless Trial several days ago.

She was a little loathe to spend any time exploring when she could be training, but she made a mental note to take some time at some point in the near future to do some more scouting. Having wrapped up her smithing for the day, she moved up to the arena to practice her fighting, stopping at her room along the way to grab her equipment.

She wanted to spend at least a few hours every single evening training against the phantoms that Baelvyr had unlocked for her, especially since it seemed they had been very effective in pushing her skill level up in a fairly short time. She decided on a change of pace for today, a little sick of facing the same opponent that had been beating her down nonstop.

She looked at the four options she had available to her again, briefly considering what she wanted to work on, before she selected the fighter using the dual long knives. She thought it would be a good opponent to challenge, depending on what tricks they had up their sleeves, and she might even learn something that she could pass on to Sabs. Though, in truth, she assumed John was doing a much better job training Sabs than whatever Beth could come up with by being sliced up by a similar fighter.

She moved out into the arena and took her place on the starting circle, waiting for the phantom of her opponent to load in. She took a good look at the simulacrum once it appeared across from her, finding that it was quite clearly a woman. She was tall and lithe, with form-fitting leather armor that covered every part of her svelte body from the neck down. She wore a half-mask on her face that covered everything below her eyes, and her long, silver-colored hair was swept up in an economical bun.

With the dark armor and mask covering her nearly entirely, the impression Beth had of her was darkness topped by a silver light, with two glowing blue eyes shining just above the darkness. It was quite a striking look, if Beth had to say so. The arena had already initiated the starting procedures, the synthetic ref checking the readiness of both fighters, Beth finding it checking if a training dummy was ready slightly amusing.

Once they had both indicated as ready, the countdown began before the ref gave the call to combat. Beth had time to take a step forward before she was shocked into almost missing the deflection of her opponent's first strike. Fast, was all she had time to think. Unbelievably fast. Beth found herself on the receiving end of a whirlwind of precise strikes, like she was dumped in the most lethal, targeted blender ever made.

She had thought the longsword user that had pumped Dexterity was fast, but this woman took it to a whole new level. Beth was literally having trouble seeing what her opponent was doing due to sheer speed, and she rightly assumed, though she didn't know for a fact at the time, that the woman had some sort of power similar to Blood's Swift.

The woman's knives didn't seem as sharp as the sword of her standard opponent, but it was cold comfort to a dying Beth as she collapsed to the arena floor, full of more holes than an old pincushion. Every possible gap in her armor, places where the scales didn't quite overlap or places where it was weaker due to a joint, the lightning-fast woman found. As Beth recovered to a kneeling position, she felt as if she had been fed through a mower while hogtied; nothing she had done had made any difference.

Clearly, she would need a different strategy to tackle this opponent. Well, a different strategy and a lot more Dexterity. And more Strength. And a lot more skill. And… well, no need to go on and on and beat the point to death. As with the other fights, however, in an area where she experienced great hardship, there was opportunity for great growth. She was determined to make the most out of the chance she had to improve basically for free, not willing to squander even a tiny chance at getting stronger.

She restarted the simulation by simply still having it queued up and stepping into the circle again, ready to try her luck a second time. She went through the usual starting procedure and, when the ref began the match, countercharged her opponent from the get-go. She had decided to try pure aggression this round and see where that got her. It turned out, pure aggression got her very dead, very quickly.

She had rushed the woman, slashing hard and fast almost immediately, trying to intercept the opponent before she was rushed down. This turned out to be almost useless, as it had only slowed the knife-wielder down for a fraction of a second, just enough time for her to easily slide around Beth's swing and close with the teen. What followed was a series of attempts by Beth to smash her greatsword into the woman while the woman, in turn, flowed around Beth and her clumsy swings like liquid shadow.

Beth's fate was the same this second round as it was the first, winding up with so many stab wounds to her torso and neck that she was more wound space than flesh by ten seconds into the fight. She once again slumped down, catching herself on one knee before she hit the floor as the arena system healed her back to top shape in the blink of an eye. She was panting lightly, both from her efforts to hit the insanely fast woman, as well as the mental trauma from being turned into chopped liver in only a few seconds.

Beth was extremely determined, however, and the injuries she sustained only made her angry. This burning coal of frustration and disappointment drove her, a fire within that she drew on as she fought the same overwhelmingly strong enemy time after time. It was in this kind of persistence that she found a certain kind of understanding, something that let her progress in close to the same way as entering the battle focused state she had used against the monster vines.

This proved true when she found improvement in the tenth round. She had decided that her current strategies just couldn't work against the speed demon opponent, and she had thought about what she could do to cover a greater range of attacks more rapidly. She then naturally remembered that her Strength stat was rather high and, despite her weapon being quite large and heavy, she could still do some interesting things. She switched starting in that round from a two-handed grip on her greatsword to a one-handed grip.

She then made use of her free hand to execute strikes in conjunction with the strikes from her sword. The first round was little different than the previous rounds, but it was different, and Beth noticed this right away.