Limitless Path

It was, in fact, so easy for both her and Blood to kill the beast that by the fiftieth crab Beth was running around aggroing extra beasts that weren't currently fighting her to speed the process up. In all, it took slightly less than forty minutes to kill all one hundred crabs, as crippling their movement was exceptionally easy. Killing the crippled crabs proved only a slight bit harder, a single good thrust in the right place from Beth enough to deal a one-hit kill.

The two girls were barely any more tired after the fast fight, and as eager as Beth was to tear through the remaining floors, she stuck to their strategy. They first rested up, Beth looking over their gains and distributing their points from leveling up once each. After noting their pathetic money situation as she did every time she checked their screens, she hopped up with the large wolf to explore around the floor.

Beth first led them up the beach away from the crab slaughter ground, and they spent some time just enjoying walking on the soft sand. Even the light of the strange double suns was pleasant, and Beth enjoyed the smell and sound of the ocean as they walked. It was nice, given the constant and hectic fighting, to have a chance to relax for a little and calm down. They walked for quite a way without finding anything but more sand, and Beth finally decided to turn and head back.

They weren't done, however, but turned inland once they had reached the area where they had killed the crabs. They walked through the dunes, which stretched for almost a hundred feet at that point before they came out into a kind of scraggly scrubland. This stretched for a little while before giving way to something more like what would come to her mind when Beth thought 'forest.'

As they were approaching the more forest-like area, Beth noted an area that looked a little different. When she and Blood approached, they found a decent sized patch of flowers. They were about eighteen inches tall and of a moderately deep bluish-green color in stalk and leaf. They each had a single flower a couple inches across of a light red color with a dark yellow center.

The girls approached the flower field cautiously, alert for any kind of poison or toxicity in the area. When Beth got close, however, she felt more alert and aware, as well as having a fully refreshed feeling across her body. She wasn't yet fully aware of it, but this was the result of a medicinal herb that's pollen and general mana had a positive impact on a person. Blood seemed to be a little more cautious, sniffing the air from a distance for a while longer, but Beth dove into the field and attempted to harvest the plants. She wasn't going to win an herbalist prize any time soon, but she managed to cleanly harvest twenty stalks of the refreshing flower.

Beth decided that was enough for this level and led the way back to the beach. She tossed the herbs in her makeshift pouch with a grimace followed by a heavy sigh before turning to see Blood worrying at one of the dead crab's claws. Being inspired by her companion, she found a fairly large, flat rock that was decently thick, likely weighing a couple hundred pounds. What would have been an impossible lift just a few weeks ago was now a weight that she could easily hoist onto her shoulder and walk around carrying.

Beth found a relatively flat area where the sand was fairly compacted and set the rock down, wiggling and tapping it to get it set in place and level. She then moved around the beach, using the blade of her sword to wedge behind the claws of the crabs, combining that with her massive strength to snap them off. She piled a half dozen claws by her new work bench and fiddled with the first one for a while before resting the flat of her blade against it and slamming the heel of her hand down onto it. The claw cracked with a heavy crunching sound, and Beth pulled away the pieces of shell on the side near her.

"You want me to try to figure out a fire?" she said, turning to Blood, who had walked up next to her in the meantime. The wolf merely rumbled a little and bent down, snatching the succulent meat up in her huge jaws. Beth proceeded to crack the rest of the claws, and even tried a little of the meat herself. It was surprisingly fine raw, salty and buttery and rather smooth. She ate a few handfuls worth and decided to rest for a while, just to make sure there were no complications to not cooking the crab meat first.

In a blink, half an hour had passed by, and the two were ready to move on. Beth took up her makeshift sack and moved over to the door, pushing it open and stepping through with Blood on her heels.

They emerged from the door into a slightly dim forest, the trees smaller and the undergrowth thicker than the forest they had navigated a few floors ago. The bark of the trees was a very dark brown, with mottled patches of light green moss on the trunks providing a stark contrast. There was a lot more undergrowth scattered throughout the area than the last forest they had been in, far more than in the wooded areas around her house back on Earth.

The concerning thing that she noticed after looking around for a minute was the lack of beasts. There was nothing around her in the woods, and she became rather concerned after scanning the area for a minute and seeing nothing. This pointed to a number of possibilities, none of which were any good. It was likely that the enemies here either had some kind of stealth skill, were excellent climbers, or even had some kind of flight capabilities.

Looking up into the canopy yielded no further results, so Beth assumed that her first guess was likely correct. Her Identify was no help, the basic skill combined with its relatively low level meaning she had to be near a visible being to use it. She thought that teamwork might be their best bet to solve the problem.

"Any way for you to sniff out the problem, girl?" Beth asked Blood.

The wolf immediately started to sniff around, putting her nose near the ground before straightening up and moving through the trees. She moved cautiously, scanning the air with her nose, keeping watch with her powerful eyes, and constantly flicking her large ears to catch any hint of movement. She proceeded this way for several minutes until the inevitable happened.

Blood barely managed to lurch to the side, just avoiding the slash aiming for her throat, taking a small wound on her left shoulder instead. The attacker was now revealed in all its feeble glory, looking like a three-foot-tall insectoid of some kind. Beth quickly used Identify on it as Blood started circling the beast, growling in a low, rumbling tone.

Level 16 Stalker Mantis

It basically confirmed her initial guess that the enemies in this area would be stealth based. Even worse, in her opinion, they were a type of ambush predator that waited patiently in one place for their prey to get quite close. The only redeeming thing about it that Beth could see was that they seemed to crouch in the thick bushes in the area to set up their ambushes, though she wanted to lure out a few more to confirm that theory.

As Blood engaged the Mantis-like insect with long, scythe-like arms, another positive quickly became apparent. Her companion was fairly easily able to outmaneuver the strange beast, and when she closed for the attack, her massive jaws made surprisingly short work of the beast. It looked like this floor was going to be a total game of cat-and-mouse, stalking the stalkers until they were all eliminated. Their long and powerful scythe arms posed quite a danger when ambushing, but the girls had the insectoids beat in both power and speed.

The floor turned into just as much of an interminable slog as Beth had thought it would be. She also came very close to disaster twice, the tenth insectoid she killed almost slashing open her throat, while the thirtieth slashed her leg, coming very close to massively cutting the leg open, an easy way to bleed out. Fortunately for both of the girls, the insects didn't move to attack them for quite some time if they stopped to rest. This allowed the two to spend at least a small amount of time healing if they received a bad slash from an ambush.

After several hours of ambushing, counter-ambushing, and healing, both of them were thoroughly exhausted. Beth was even more wrung-out, as she was also frustrated that they hadn't actually even leveled from the combined one hundred kills. The two moved some way from the slaughter field and found an area they could set up a sloppy shelter in and proceeded to do so. They curled up together under a roof of fallen branches on a bed of leaves and moss.

The two woke up maybe seven hours later, the forest maybe just a little brighter than during their fights. Beth guessed it was early morning when they arrived and fought, and was now early afternoon. They made their way back to the scene of their earlier slaughter, Beth looking around for a minute before deciding on a direction for them to wander. They set off to what might be the south, but Beth wasn't entirely sure. She definitely needed a compass, something to add to the list of all the things she wanted to put in the storage ring she didn't have.

They journeyed for nearly an hour before finding what was essentially a large stream flowing through the woods. Beth decided that a wash was in order, and after only a minute of walking found a small pond formed under a little waterfall. It was an incredibly picturesque area, with the dark trees and bright moss, the pool of clear, sparkling water, the small waterfall running over the lip of a section of white rocks, and the small flowers of a purplish color around the edge of the pond.

Blood went around sniffing the area and a little further out while Beth stripped down and jumped in the pond. She didn't have anything to use as soap or shampoo, more items on the ever-growing adventurers list, but she did her best to scrub clean, using some coarse sand from the bottom of the pond to at least try to get her torso somewhat cleaner. Once she had "thoroughly" cleaned herself off, she trudged out of the pond and grabbed her clothes, giving them as good a wash as possible, given the circumstances.

Having cleaned her clothes, or what was left of them, and scrubbed her gear, Beth sat on a rock near the pond with her back to the rocky escarpment. Blood returned a minute later and entered the pond herself, rolling around in the pond to try to get fully clean before sitting under the falls for a while. Beth had her clothes hanging up on a tree while she stretched her legs out, watching Blood cavort in the water for a while. She thought about just how crazy her life was now, fighting giant insects before hanging out naked while watching her giant wolf companion frolic.

Blood eventually emerged from the water and shook herself dry, while Beth and her clothes had dried off. She got fully dressed, including her equipment, before the two of them hopped up to the top of the rocky area and drank deeply from the upstream waters. Beth took a glance down at the flowers around the pond but decided not to take them. She only had so much space in her makeshift pouch, and the flowers hadn't elicited any kind of response from either her or Blood.

The two moved on, deciding to continue for some time before returning to the gate to the next floor. They strolled through the forest rather leisurely, Beth still making sure to keep her senses a little heightened in case of any dangers. It was especially a good idea as her clothes, practically reduced to rags, she noted with a frown, offered no defensive value at all.

Having walked for some time in this way, the two of them came upon a clearing in the woods surprisingly free of undergrowth and bushes. In the center of the clearing was a single flower, having a long and thick dark green stalk. The flower itself was a dark red with a dark orange center. The leaves at the base and along the stalk were triangular in shape with barbed serrations along their edges.

Beth entered the clearing slightly warily, checking the surroundings for any danger before she approached the flower. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she walked toward the flower itself, but was interrupted by Blood, who interposed her body between Beth and the plant. The wolf looked at her and gave a low growl, signaling to back away.

"Poison?" Beth asked the wolf, assuming her companion's powerful nose had alerted her to a problem. She was proven right as the wolf immediately nodded before body bumping her, urging her to move.

"You know that's probably the treasure of the floor, right? And you want to leave it without trying?" Beth continued, frowning at her companion. Blood shook her head emphatically and body bumped her again in response. While a normal person would have been sent flying from these bumps, likely left with several broken bones in the best case, Beth's STR and END already being quite high meant she hardly swayed.

Blood finally relented, but she stood back only a little, her muscles tensed as she stared almost unblinking, watching Beth approach the strange flower. As she got closer and closer to the plant, Beth started getting lightheaded before she had to stop. She bent over with hands on her knees, panting and gasping for air. She heard a growl from behind her, but she waved her hand back in a negative gesture.

Righting herself once more, Beth staggered the last few steps forward and knelt down in front of the flower. Her lightheadedness increased further, but she pushed through it, pulsing mana through her body by instinct. She reached down around the base of the flower and dug her hands into the soil, tearing up several great clumps of it. After she had excavated an area around the flower, she reached under the plant itself and heaved upward, pulling it up with most of the roots intact. She then stood, swaying in place for a minute, before she turned and stumbled back to the edge of the clearing.