Limitless Path

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.

Name

Elizabeth Anne Bell

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 Badge

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 were 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 DEX 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 DEX. And more STR. 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 Beth 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 STR 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.

She opened the round by taking a step forward. This was something she had figured out in the first handful of failed rounds, where she found she could take one step off the starting circle to get into a better position and stance. She had her greatsword in her right hand, and when the shadow of her opponent appeared before her, she swung a backhanded slash horizontally across her front. She immediately followed up with a half-step forward and a left jab, slightly disrupting the shadow woman's rhythm, as she had to respond to the quick follow-on strike as well.

Beth didn't stop there, slicing her right leg up in a swift rising kick at her opponent's torso. The woman used the edge of her knife to deflect Beth's armored boot, a good decision on her part, as she used her right knife to shunt aside the overhead slam that followed before Beth had even planted her right foot back on the ground. The woman slashed Beth's right arm with her left knife in passing, scoring a wound for Beth's trouble, but had to juggle deflecting an uppercut from Beth's heavy left gauntlet at nearly the same instant.

The woman was quite skilled, however, and turned that deflection itself into a stab into Beth's neck. It wasn't a lethal blow, not in the first instant, and Beth continued to attack through the pain, feeling the hot blood gushing over her left shoulder before cascading across the top of her left breast. She responded to the wound by bringing her greatsword back in from her right, slashing in a downward cut meant to bisect her opponent from shoulder to hip. The woman moved back and around the blade in a blur, but for the first time was caught slightly off guard as Beth kicked straight up with her right leg.

The kick grazed the woman's left arm, likely slightly bruising it, and causing her to have to stutter step for just a moment. This wasn't enough time for Beth to really capitalize on it as a mistake, her speed just being too low, but it did break the woman's stance slightly, preventing her from landing the counter-hit she had intended after dodging Beth's slash.

With one leg in the air Beth decided to be stupid and let the end of her sword swing continue with full momentum, turning her back to her opponent. She jammed the end of her blade into the arena floor and used the spinning momentum to pick herself up above the blade itself, scything her left leg upward to kick behind her at her opponent. She barely grazed the woman again, the knife-wielder clearly stunned by this foolish move for half-a-second before resuming her attack, getting clipped by Beth's heel in the process.

Beth was now suspended in the air above her sword by a one-handed handstand, and she had twisted as she kicked and flipped so she was facing the shadow woman again. As the opponent closed with her, Beth used her legs and waist muscles to twist to her left, or counterclockwise, and bring her sword up out of the floor at the same time. She slashed upward from close to her opponent's feet towards her torso, trying to again bisect her, but this time from left hip to right shoulder. The woman actually managed to slide back just far enough that she could use both knives to deflect the sword, but this was just fine for Beth, as it helped her continue to spin after landing so she had completed a full three-sixty and was facing the woman again.

The only problem with this was Beth was just too slow; though she had landed facing her opponent, the woman was already upon her, not impressed with Beth's antics. Beth continued her strategy, blending her sword swings and punches and kicks, but it wasn't enough to do more than draw the fight out a little longer. She attempted a downward slash followed by a left straight punch, but the woman somehow slid around both with one movement, sliding a dagger into Beth's neck a second time as she finished her footwork. Beth, already on her last legs, collapsed from this, ending the match with another quick loss.

She wasn't at all discouraged, however, as she really felt that she was on to something with the way she had fought in that last round. The combination of both her weapon skills into one fighting style was still barely in its nascent stages, but she felt it was a viable path for increasing her battle prowess at the same level. This was the kind of thing Baelvyr had mentioned briefly, where skill levels were important, but they didn't tell the whole story.

Beth developing her own fighting style born of the combination of her two weapon skills elevated her combat capabilities without any of her numbers changing. Her level remained twenty-eight, her stats remained the same, both her weapon skills were Apprentice[8] still; nothing had changed on her status screen. But, at the same time, she was becoming stronger.

Beth continued working on her technique with her new training partner for the rest of the evening, only stopping at night when exhaustion was setting in. Still, she had to admit, the progress she made in just one day felt great. She was able to hold on for thirty or more seconds consistently against the assassin-type opponent until she got too tired to properly react and started getting killed quickly again. She knew that being able to defend herself just barely for half-a-minute was pretty pathetic overall, but the difference between the start of the day and the end of the day still felt like a win to Beth.