LimitlessPath

Limitless Path Chapter One Hundred Four

What they were currently exploring, in contrast, seemed to be not just living quarters, but an entire living area. She was assuming she might run into a whole city at some point, if the trend of the areas becoming larger and more complicated continued the deeper she went. She wasn't sure if there could be another dungeon so close, especially considering the one they had found in the mining area seemed rather large and powerful, but she made a mental note to keep her eyes peeled as they contin...

Limitless Path Chapter One Hundred Three

She was done playing around at this point, and pumped mana into her arms and torso following the patterns of the skill to activate Monstrous Blow, bringing her sword around as the kobold recovered from the improvised flame slash and lunged at her. The center of her new, longer, heavier sword smashed into the side of the beast's torso, the rings of the mail shirt shattering as the blade passed right through. She continued the motion, twisting with her hips as her blade dug in,...

Limitless Path Chapter One Hundred Two

"I know I said dungeon yesterday," she started, the huge wolf simply looking at her, "but we really shouldn't leave what could be a huge area unexplored at our back." 

Blood shrugged in response as she made a chuffing sound, seeming to indicate that she was ambivalent about the whole thing. Beth took that for as good as she was going to get in terms of agreement from the wolf, turning to examine the opening of the leftward tunnel. It didn't look any different fro...

Limitless Path Chapter One Hundred One

Her first task now was to find Elana. If she couldn't locate her smithing instructor, she knew she could find Tazeen in the lobby, so she made her way up to the lounge the enforcers claimed as theirs first. Entering from the side door opposite where the girls usually piled in, Beth saw that she was still early enough that the girls had yet to arrive for their day’s training. Most of the senior members were in the lobby, and Beth made a beeline for Elana's table. 

Limitless Path Chapter One Hundred

*The Big One-Oh-Oh*

"Holy shit," Beth breathed as Jaq re-sheathed the blade with a snap and set it back on the counter. "Uh, I have one problem though," she continued, snapping herself out of the reverie his words had induced. 

"You can't equip it properly," he replied, already figuring out where she was heading. "One moment."  

He stepped over to the door on the left, Beth again narrowing her eyes at his choice of ...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-Nine

The commotion interrupted the other commotion at the front desk, the crowd turning to see what was happening. The thin man had seemingly found his courage once battle was joined, though his follow-up to his friend's attack consisting of incoherently yelling and flailing at her was less than impressive. Beth's response was to twist back towards him and plant a hammer fist into his gut using a slight bit of her strength. The gangly man doubled up with a pained wheeze, staggering before falling ...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-Eight

"Let's not mess with this just yet," she said to Blood before turning and leading the way back to the main room. 

When they had returned to the main room, she led the way to the fifth doorway, journeying down the tunnel therein. After about two minutes of walking, they came upon a huge room, the ceiling lost in the gloom as the massive rectangular space extended away from them into pitch darkness. Beth could see some boxes and crates scattered around in the light...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-Seven

She didn't find anything else of value before Blood came to get her, leading her to a shelf with the last item in the room sitting atop it. It was a little box made of a dark blue material with a little silver symbol on the top. Picking it up and inspecting it carefully, Beth decided to open it as well after finding nothing amiss. When she popped the lid of the foot wide by six-inch-deep box open a wave of overbearing heat slammed into her, immediately drying out her eyes and causing her to c...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-Six

With a big sigh, she attempted to clean the blade off using the least dirty parts of the beast's crude clothes and a cloth she pulled from her belt pouch. It took some doing for the blade to start to look clean again, and Blood had approached the corpse and sniffed it once before sneezing and turning away in disgust. 

"Not good eating?" Beth tiredly laughed as her companion just growled in response.  

"Let's get ourselves sorted...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-Five

With a groaning shriek of long unoiled hinges, the doors slowly began to move. They were certainly not hung in a way as to make them easy to move as some large doors were, the hinges being set in a way to help with the weight when pushing them. She was pushing against the entire weight of the steel while fighting the hinges and, considering the size of the doors, even if they were half an inch thick, they would each weigh close to half a ton. If they were more than half an inch, and if the st...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-Four

With a sigh, she stepped back out and around Blood, once again leading them back to the side tunnel and towards the next room. This one was a little larger than the standard uniform size, and also a little more annoying with two kobolds sitting on the remains of bedframes in the corners.  

She took care of the beasts quickly, still not bothering with her sword. These had both been level fourteen and were fairly slow, allowing her to snap out two quick punches with...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-Three

The splits here turned out to be much shorter tunnels, each leading to a stone room with slightly more in them than the previous ones. The first room had a small table in it upon which the little lamp for the room was placed, making it cast a bit of a shadow on the ground once Beth had lit it. She examined the place afterwards, noting a small stool on the other side of the table that she hadn't seen before, as well as a small box in the back right corner. 

This b...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-Two

"Well, thanks, I think," she said, still frowning. "But I had another question, if you're done breaking my brain with all that stuff." 

"Yeah, yeah, go ahead," he said, thumping a hand against his massive gut before taking another drink. 

"Blood and I encountered a couple things yesterday, but there was a weird one I wanted to ask someone about," she said, and he just waved to indicate for her to continue. "There was a pit thing we're gonn...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety-One

Beth woke up with a great start, sitting straight up in the bed next to Blood. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew that she had both been the silver flame in the dream and that it hadn't just been a dream. It had, in fact, somehow been a kind of memory, a memory of a fight that had happened centuries in the past, a thousand or more years grinding on since the time of that great battle.  

As she wrestled with herself to get a grip on what she had just ...

Limitless Path Chapter Ninety

"I think Blood's fine using my stuff, might just have to get a couple extra things for her," Beth answered with a slight handwave. 

Jaq grunted in response as he turned and walked through the center door, Beth narrowing her eyes at his choice. She was almost positive the doors were basically meaningless to him, and he was just doing it to mess with her. She stretched a little, feeling and hearing her back pop, before leaning her left hip against the counter and l...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-Nine

Beth steeled herself and took a breath before stepping into the outbuilding again. Thankfully for her, it was both small and rather barren, taking only a few moments to rummage through. She found nothing of interest, only a few very crude stone tools and a few animal hides and less…savory…bits strewn about. 

She burst back out of the little shack, coughing and waving her hand in front of her face. Blood merely glanced at her before going back to her patrol, c...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-Eight

The object had certainly been what had caught Blood's attention, the nearly three-story high edifice of black and silver metal emitting both a certain presence and smell into the surroundings. The best Beth could describe it as would be old vegetable oil; a greasy, oily, vegetal smell that wasn't quite rancid, but certainly wasn't pleasant to the nose. 

The two approached the new discovery cautiously, not wanting to be caught by surprise by some beast or security...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-Seven

Sabs didn't say anything to Beth as she entered the kitchen, walking up to the taller girl and reaching up to wrap her arms around Beth's neck. She buried her face in the top of Beth's now somewhat ample chest and breathed deeply, enjoying the slightly sweet, somewhat musky scent of Beth's body. Beth, in turn, wrapped her arms around Sabs and kissed the top of her head gently, holding her quite tightly in a warm embrace. 

The two stayed like that for a few minute...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-Six

"The difficulty isn't exactly the point…" Zack replied, rubbing his right temple as he squinted his eyes shut with a long-suffering sigh.  

"I'm sure you guys can figure it out," Beth answered, waving to Blood while Zack was fighting off his mounting frustration. The huge wolf loped over to her just as Zack opened his eyes and lowered his hand, Beth jumping on her back as he made to say more. 

"I expect you to come by this eve...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-Five

Beth raised an eyebrow at them, not sure how the group thought a low level with what amounted to a long knife going after a higher-level boar was a great plan, but she remained unconcerned. Even Soph could likely punch the weaker boars to death at this point, let alone her ability to let one of her patented "babies" loose in under a second and fry the beast in an eyeblink. 

John moved forward in front of the group, his weapon of choice held in a slightly trembling, whi...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-Four

She made her way down to her room in the basement, finding Blood waiting outside. She let the both of them in, saying to the wolf, "Don’t know where you've been going, but we've gotta make a trip home tomorrow. Also, gotta hit the dungeons up." Blood gave a clear nod while flicking her ears in response, letting Beth know she understood. 

Beth shucked her equipment in the living room of the suite before heading into the bathroom to use the toilet and shower off....

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-Three

Beth nodded 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. 

&nb...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-Two

Beth woke at a decent time the next morning, likely right around dawn, though she couldn't tell from inside the suite due to the lack of windows. She rolled out of bed and headed into the bathroom to take care of her morning business and freshen up. Afterwards she prepared some food in the kitchenette while also getting something for both her and Blood to drink. She did wonder exactly how the food and drinks were getting replenished in the suite, as she never saw anybody else entering or exit...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty-One

Once they were all fed and watered and the kitchen was relatively clean again, they geared up and headed for the ant nest. The path was one they were quite familiar with by this point, and they cut right for the dungeon, entirely ignoring any ants or other beasts that didn't directly attack them. They made good time and were up and into the dungeon in short order. 

They tore through the first three floors of the dungeon with little appreciable resistance, mowing ...

Limitless Path Chapter Eighty

"Elana," she said at one point, drawing the dwarf's attention away from a screen she had been looking at while Beth worked her latest piece. "How high a skill level do you think I would need to work mana steel? I want to upgrade my current equipment away from copper, and sooner would be better."  

"Hmm." Elana replied thoughtfully. "You could do it at the top end of Apprentice, but I wouldn't really try making full pieces of mana steel until yo...

Limitless Path Chapter Seventy-Nine

She withdrew the stock from the fire a final time when it was nearly white-hot and moved it above the anvil, picking up the nail header with her left hand. While the stock was still glowing, she put the end into the nail header and twisted the bar, separating the small section that was left between the nail and the bar. She then put the stock down quickly and picked up the hammer with her right hand before moving the nail header over a hole in the anvil into which she inserted the nail. She t...

Limitless Path Chapter Seventy-Eight

"Alright, aprons first," Elana said then, moving to a rack to the side with heavy aprons hung on it. "Until you can withstand the sparks and metal bits with your stats alone, an apron is always a good idea. Plus, if you have decent clothes on, it's better to wear one to preserve them. Though, you shouldn't really be forging in nice clothes." 

Beth put on a heavy leather apron made of some kind of dark hide that had multiple large pockets on the front. She looped ...

Limitless Path Chapter Seventy-Seven

Blood had apparently decided to find her own accommodations for the night, likely in Soph's room, as she was not sitting outside Beth's door when the two walked up. Beth opened the door and let the two of them in, closing it behind them before turning to Sabs. 

"You need to shower?" she asked.  

"Uh, y-yeah, sure. If you don't mind?" Sabs replied. 

"Not at all. There're fresh towels in there, just u...

Limitless Path Chapter Seventy-Six

Beth was endlessly fascinated with the book, as it really felt to her similar to what a skill book would be like from a game. In a number of different RPGs, the characters could learn skills or abilities by reading certain books, and she thought that this was almost the same thing. She read the entire book cover-to-cover in a single rather long sitting, and her thoughts of skill books came back in full force when a message popped up as she closed the book. 

2023-07-27 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Limitless Path Chapter Seventy-Five

"Let's go," Beth said, taking the lead. 

"Go where? Shouldn't we go to the lounge?" Kim asked, a little unsure. 

"I don't want to spend the whole day coated in ant goo and wolf blood. You're welcome to just go right to the lounge yourself," Beth replied over her shoulder as she walked off down the hall. 

"Fine, let's go," Kim said, gesturing to the rest. 

Beth led the whole ...