Limitless Path Chapter Four Hundred Eighty-Five

"What's the plan going forward?" Sera asked once everyone was settled in. 

"Rebirths, leveling, spiked dungeons, yearly auction, finishing ref duty, all roughly in that order," Beth replied, ticking things off on her fingers. 

"And what about you?" Sera asked, turning to Val. 

"What about me?" asked Val in response. 

"What are you up to? How's the whole Scions thing working out?" Sera asked. 

"Well, it's going," Val said with a sigh, getting her pipe out and lighting it up. Beth got up with a grunt and started the fan in the room running, which she was pretty sure was there for just such things. Val puffed away for a moment before saying, "We're heading towards our fifth rebirths fairly soon, another year maybe, probably less, and they're prepping us to try to create a Mana Physique at that point. There's no failure penalty there, nothing permanent anyway, and even one of us doing it could be spun to be incredible PR. They are pumping tons of resources into us for it as well, which is both nice and annoying at once. I don't know, my heads all over the place and I'm just really tired. The people in charge don't get involved all that much, so it falls to me to babysit. It's so fucking annoying." 

"It really doesn't seem worth it to me," Beth said. 

"It is and it isn't," Val said, puffing on her pipe. 

"Thanks, that cleared it right up," Beth said with a frown. 

"Relax, I'll explain," Val said, rolling her eyes. "It's great for a number of reasons; we get tons of resources for absolutely free, which we might not have even with wealthy families. We get access to some of the most powerful people in the galaxy and some of the best training there is, also for free, which is a huge perk. On top of that, we make connections with those people and other people who are both powerful and extremely influential. We also get a lot of publicity, which is both good and bad, but I tend to think the good outweighs the bad, and that celebrity fades over time, which removes most of the negatives. On the other hand, it's a major pain in the ass and really tedious. The progress is also often artificially slow because we have all the PR commitments and the whole thing sometimes operates more like a circus than anything else. It's just life; you take the good right alongside the bad and fuck the rest." 

"So, you get to quit after that, or what?" Beth asked, glancing between Blood and Val. 

"Maybe," Val said, rocking a hand side-to-side and taking a deep draw.  

"What's that mean?" asked Sera. 

"At the very least, there'll be a bunch of wrap-up stuff we have to do," Val explained. "It's going to be a few years, if not even fucking longer, until we're done. Shit, they might want us to go all the way to Enlightened." 

"You'll be stuck that long?" asked Kris quietly. 

"Nah," Val said with another dismissive wave. "They've talked about it, but the ratings and viewership is already dropping and the interest just isn't there. The point of the thing was to have a big impact and get people hyped up, not to make the thing into an eternal soap opera, though that's why a lot of people tuned in. We'll wrap the main body of the filming and stuff up within two years, probably, but after that we're still going to have to do more press junket stuff for a while. It's a major pain in the ass, but at least I won't have to be babysitting the other morons after we get through the fifth rebirth and do some more stuff just to show how amazing that made us." 

"How long until you're fully free?" asked Sera. 

"Eh, five years?" Val replied in an unsure tone. "But two years or less until I have a lot of time on my hands. Fuck, I can finally level and do shit I want to do. And did I mention no more fucking babysitting? Blood Stars fuck off, watching the rest of them is so annoying." 

"Well, tell us how you really feel," Beth said with a laugh. 

"Why don't you just quit? It sounds impossibly tedious," Bjorn said, the first he had spoken since he and Kris had returned. 

"It's almost over," Val said with a shake of her. "I can endure it for a little more. Besides, Ancestor said she'll take me for a special vacation followed by personal training when it's done. I'll be so much stronger after she's done helping me; that alone almost makes up for all the shit. Almost." 

"Better you than me," Bjorn grunted, returning to his calm silence.  

The next item on the agenda, as Beth had pointed out, were the three girls' rebirths. They had all the materials and they had some free time, which was perfect for getting it done now. Having everything, including a room, they just made sure they had all their stat points distributed before doing the rebirth. This time, neither Blood nor Sera experienced any major changes or increases in their humanization. Beth also didn't have anything out of the ordinary; she already had a Mana Physique and it would likely be quite a while for her next class evolution.  

The one she had just undergone, in terms of class transformation, was a bit early, which was influenced by several factors including the person's experiences in combat. Beth was consistently ahead of the curve, but class evolutions would slow down a bit as people progressed. She wouldn't get another one until a rebirth or two into Enlightened, based on everything she knew about them. It was also possible to force one or do something extraordinary when following the Limitless Path, but Beth wasn't foreseeing anything like that with her classes for a while. 

They had even less time needed to get used to their new stats after this rebirth, as all of them had every stat except Intelligence and Wisdom over a thousand, and the rest of their stats were into the territory of multiple thousands. Beth's Strength alone was scaling so hard at this stage that she had more Strength now than when they were getting ready to do their sixth rebirths. Blood was in a similar boat, though not quite to that extreme, as her last increase in humanization had been a good bump, but it hadn't been the same kind of massive leap that Beth's class evolution had given her. Beth checked their stat pages when they were done to see where they were at, noting that they had actually gained money even after buying their materials, mainly because of just how many high-level beasts they had killed over the last couple years, subjective timewise.  

All of their skills were coming along quite well, too, with Beth's grouping of spatial skills improving quite steadily. The combination of their monstrous stats and their very high skill levels meant the three of them could easily fight things into the low two hundreds at this point, Beth just disappointed that her gate power hadn't quite kept up. There was little she could do about it as it was due to level sometime soon; the whole thing was a bit nebulous and basically just boiled down to her having to use it a massive amount to get it to grow. The fourth increase in level should allow her to more precisely control several conditions, though the biggest thing she was looking forward to was better control of the beast levels and strengths. That would be a big bonus for several reasons, chief among them being the situation they were in right now, which would continue to happen to an even greater extent. Beast scaling as levels increased wasn't exponential, though it was pretty serious, but as their stats after every rebirth got higher and higher, and as their skills increased, they would want to fight increasingly powerful beasts at level one. 

The experience gained from fighting far above one's level was enormous and there was very little fall off for it, though it didn't exactly scale infinitely. Killing a level two hundred beast when a person was at level one would give far more than just double the amount of experience of killing a level one hundred beast though, again, the scaling wasn't quite exponential and did have some scale of diminishing returns the further out one went. It made a bit of a frustrating experience for them to have to go in Beth's gate, kill for a couple hours at most, leave, reset the gate, and rinse and repeat multiple times before it was satisfactory. It took longer and longer to get to that point each rebirth as well, considering their massive starting stats coupled with their big increases to stats each level. Their skills getting so strong was also another factor; combined with their high stats, it made them very strong, even at level one, as skills were a force multiplier for stats, but that also meant it took them quite a while to get to anything challenging with the gate. 

Well, they could always take the airship and go find some challenge, which is exactly what they did the next weekend, dragging Val along, who was there for two whole weeks. As she had explained, the Scions were at their fifth rebirths, which would also give them the slight boost for making a first attempt at their Mana Physiques, so they had a lot of time right now. Just went to show how Val had fallen behind the rest of their larger group, considering even breaks could turn into weeks off. Well, Val wouldn't be relaxing the whole time, as she would be getting perhaps all of those final levels with the other five. They had come out to the golem dungeon to do a run, not with a spike, just with the dungeon as it always was. Once they had fought their way to the entrance, something a little bit easier this time, though the place was still overflowing quite a bit, they stopped for a very short break, Val looking up at the massive doors. 

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" she asked with a slight frown. 

"What? It's not like Beth's spiking it," Sera answered. 

"I'm thinking about spiking it," Beth said, tapping her chin. 

"Don't," four people said all at once. The fifth, Bjorn, just grunted, looking as if he wouldn't mind taking on the dungeon with a spike used in their current state.  

"Well, it'll be too easy otherwise," Beth argued, only to get shot down right away. 

"Beth, there's no time crunch here. Even the mana overflow has been largely stabilized; we can stand to wait two or three weeks to do the dungeon with a spike," Sera said calmly. "Besides, we don't have enough time; the three of us can't get any extra time off for a few weeks, at the least. Just wait until we have a long weekend again." 

"Well, I suppose you're right…but it would be fun…" Beth replied. 

"You all have a very different idea of fun," Val said crossly. 

"Don't 'you all' us; that was solely a Beth thing," Blood grunted at her girlfriend. 

"Right, sorry," Val said, looking only a slight bit contrite.  

"It's fine; we're more used to it," Sera said, curling her tail around Beth. 

"What's that supposed to mean?" Beth asked, tilting her head back to look up at her girlfriend and narrowing her eyes. 

"Nothing, my love; you're incredible just the way you are," Sera said with a laugh. 

"Enough," Bjorn grumbled, ushering them into the dungeon. "Less talking, more fighting." 

"Now that I can get behind," Beth said as they crossed the threshold.  

The dungeon could still accommodate them with a party of six without any restrictions, so Val being with them wasn't a negative in any way. The dungeon went just as fast if not even faster; Val wasn't quite as strong as they were, though she wasn't exactly light years behind, either, and she still was able to put up quite a good fight. The others, meanwhile, had only become even stronger in the meantime, with the three that had just undergone a rebirth having gotten more than a hundred and forty levels before coming to the dungeon. That might sound a little low, but that represented thousands of stat points; thousands of points that were being added on to base stats that were now incredibly high, enough so they would give some people at the top of Empowered a run for their money.  

The one drawback to having Val there was that she wasn't used to the kind of speed the other five were, though she tried not to complain. Everything with the Young Scions was about the PR and the moment; whenever they fought through a dungeon, it was all about glitz and glamor, about getting good angles and great shots of the action. That, of course, necessitated a far slower pace than what they would otherwise be doing, and the whole circus of the production wasn't the only thing that slowed them down. Conversely, when Val was running with Beth's group, they just went and went and went without even slowing down a bit. It was a pace that Val hadn't experience for basically four rebirths, since she was a novice Wayfarer before joining the Scions; not even her other experiences with the group had been as fast-paced, especially considering those experiences had involved Veren, the ultimate cheat for their group. She was doing a good job, regardless, of hanging in there and toughing out six or seven hours of combat leading to only a fifteen minute break and then another six hours of combat, though she needed an extra break the first day and extra time to rest when they decided to camp out in the dungeon for an extended break.  

They still cleared the whole thing in close to record time, though the layout was rather complicated this time, which stymied a record attempt. Not that they even had gone in with the intention of racing, but that was apparently a thing people did, though it was much more a hobby than something that was a big sport. A lot of people, including people with a lot of seniority at the CRA and other such institutions, took a dim view of hotheads rushing to their death for momentary bragging rights. Beth thought the idea was fun, if everyone doing it was both prepared and understood the risks and dangers, but a lot of dungeons were so variable at high levels that racing would rely on a huge amount of luck on top of the skills and talent to make it through quickly.  

Either way, they were done and out with plenty of time to spare, though Beth gave them a break from leveling, seeing as how Val was there and they likely wouldn't be seeing her again for a while. That let Beth spend a little time with Sera while the others did their own thing, though Beth was being a homebody in particular for the rest of that weekend, even agreeing to be a true homebody and go visit her parents. Speaking of parents, she would be meeting Sera's sooner rather than later at the rate they were going, but the dragon was a little reticent in describing them. Well, that wasn't a hundred percent true, but Sera just gave a lot of generic answers about them being boring and stuffy and old fashioned, none of which painted a great, nor very detailed, picture for Beth. Still, she supposed it could be a lot worse, though she would have to hold out on her judgement until they had actually done the meeting.  

Seeing her parents for a day, and watching them do some rather boring work for an hour, wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but they appreciated the gesture any time Beth stopped by, especially hauling along the love interest she was still doting on to a high degree, so that was nice. After the visit, and some time back in the suite doing just about everything but sleeping, it was time for another super exciting week of watching people one percent of her strength try to beat each other up in record time. Record slow times, that is, as some of the fights Beth officiated could take ten minutes or more…for two people. In a standard duel.  

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