Limitless Path

"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 of her lightstone, and she noted several pillars supporting the vast space, more light fixtures attached to each of the aforementioned pillars.

She did a quick scan to see if she could detect anything hostile, the memory of the Kobold Hulk still fresh in her mind and likely to stay that way for quite some time. Nodding after checking the immediate area, she moved forward to the first pillar and fed the fixture a little mana, creating a warm glow in the area around her. She continued on through the room, lighting the fixtures as she scanned the area. Blood joined her with the fixtures, surprisingly, able to turn them on herself with a bump of her nose.

When the entire room was lit and exposed, Beth estimated it at over two hundred feet in depth and three-quarters that in height. It was a little more than a hundred feet in width, a truly massive rectangle of space, the lights unable to fully drive away the clinging shadows pooling thickly about the ceiling. Scanning the room, she pretty quickly made a determination from the small stacks of boxes and crates that this was supposed to be a warehouse of some kind, though having only one small entry/exit would have made it terribly inefficient. The floor was in better shape than the main room, smooth and covered in some kind of clearcoat or resin to increase its durability. The area was also somewhat dusty, Beth able to see motes floating about in the light of column lamps, though it wasn’t to the point she had to even rub her nose.

She moved back to the start of the room as Blood nosed around, confident that the wolf would sniff out anything unusual with her powerful nose. Beth set about checking a few of the boxes and crates, prying the first crate closest to the door open with nothing but her raw physical power. Peering into the three-foot-wide container she frowned, seeing a small pile of what she could only describe as awful mana copper ore. It was more rock than copper, with the copper itself having a very distorted coloring indicating a high level of impurity within the metal itself. If all the crates were like this, they would be practically worthless; she imagined the whole pile she was staring at might be worth a couple of silvers and only if Jaq were feeling generous.

She worked her way through several of the other crates, prying them open with a little strain on her arms and a grunt. What she found was simply more of the same, anywhere from a few pieces to the crate being three-quarters full of rough, dirty ore. Even if she had had a full spatial item able to store things in a pocket dimension, she wouldn't have bothered with the contents of the crates. Filling her entire storage space with ore so poor it was little more than discolored rock would have been a total waste.

She moved on to examining the boxes that were also scattered about, finding them to be of little more interest. They mainly contained cheap mining supplies, old ropes and slightly worse versions of the pickaxe she had found earlier being their main contents. She found a few other small tools scattered through, pitons and hand drills of fairly cheap make and low quality, the wood rough and porous while the metal was dull and poorly hammered. The largest room they had found yet, and it was piled with nothing but junk and dross.

There was one bright glimmer in the gloom, however, as Blood's powerful nose and seeming sixth sense pulled through again. She drew Beth's attention and led her over to a pile of crates, pawing at them before jerking her head in a specific way and giving a loud *yip*. Beth was still trying to get a handle on precise meanings with Blood's communication, but she had a fairly good idea that there was something interesting in the stack. She adroitly set about unstacking the crates, simply piling them in an open space to the left of the original stack. Moving six or so of the ore crates revealed a space in the back of the stack, and moving another two crates showed a small chest sitting within that space.

The chest was about two feet wide and deep and roughly eighteen inches high, made of a dark grey stone with a faint embossing on the front. Beth stuck a leg into the area of open space between it and the crates and half-squatted to grab it, letting loose a deep grunt as she was startled by the weight and nearly dropped the container. With a heave, she lifted it up to her armored stomach and managed to half stumble back over the crate she had been straddling before setting the chest down in an open area on the floor. She had some guess as to what was inside already from the weight, but was proven right a moment later as she flipped the lid open to observe the chest was full of metal bars. It all seemed to be good mana steel stock, ready to be forged and worked by a smith.

She frowned a little at the chest after closing the lid. Her STR stat was definitely higher than Blood's and it was already a strain for her to just move the damned thing, it would be a real effort to get it all the way back out of the mine and to the CRA Hall. She could take it a few bars at a time, but she felt like that was a little lame, compared to slamming a heavy box full of bars on the counter to an exasperated look from Jaq. She decided to just make note of the chest for now, the bars likely worth a decent couple gold, but not enough that she was desperate to get them out right this second. In fact, she likely wouldn't sell them anyway, as at some point in the not-so-distant future she would be ready to move on with her own smithing from copper to steel. It wouldn't hurt to have her own supply of high-quality bars ready to forge. Maybe she could level a handful of times as well, not really having a concern as long as she stayed under fifty for now, where the monsters experienced a significant jump in power.

Shaking her head to clear out the jumble of thoughts, she reached out to hug Blood, ruffling her neck before giving her some hearty slaps on the side. Unlike with a pre-integration pet, she didn't really have to worry about holding back, the six-hundred-plus pound wolf able to enjoy a good solid thump. With another heavy grunt, she squatted down and picked the chest up before leading the way back to the main room, walking over to the second door with the offices. She entered the old office space and placed the chest in the corner with a heavy thump, wiping the sweat off her brow as she stretched her back after carrying what was basically a huge block of steel in a stone box for a few hundred feet.

Beth returned to the main chamber once again, followed closely by Blood, before checking the sixth and final doorway. It turned out that this was similar to the second area they had just walked out of, a moderate sized office area with a number of desks and shelves scattered around. Beth was once again slightly amused by the differences, as this space had a few papers and small documents scattered around, making it look like a lived-in space. The lack of anything else, including wear and tear on the furniture, showed that it was all just made up, but Beth appreciated the randomness of it all.

They scrounged around for a few minutes, Beth paging through the documents and items scattered on the shelves and one of the desks, but they didn't really find anything particularly interesting. Looking at the documents, they were all written in Universal Standard, and Beth actually laughed attempting to read one. She still wasn't sure what the entire deal was with the Path making random areas like this instead of copying or importing ones from other places, but the document was nonsense. It was to the point where one of the two sides was just a jumble of random words, thrown together in a messy pile across the page with no order or reason.

Beth gave up first, returning to the main room and looking about as she stretched and waited for Blood to decide there was nothing interesting present. The wolf joined her after a minute and Beth frowned a bit, tapping her chin as she looked at the fourth doorway for a minute.

"It's already late. Dungeon tomorrow?" she asked Blood, receiving a bark in response. Taking that as confirmation, she adjusted the straps of her pack and turned to the first doorway, heading back to the main tunnel.

They spent some time retracing their winding path through the main tunnel all the way back to the initial pit, where Beth took a glance down the other tunnel. It clearly led somewhere else, as they hadn't found any kind of cross connection after exploring one hundred percent of the righthand tunnel. She didn't see anything with a quick peek other than more tunnel, to nobody's surprise, and turned back to the ramp to start hiking up out of the pit.

It was dark when the two returned to the surface, the daylight fading early as fall was starting the transition into winter. They moved away from the pit a slight way before Beth mounted Blood and the two set out for the CRA Hall. They encountered a small number of beasts on the way, all below level twenty, all of which mindlessly threw themselves at the pair, snarling and howling and roaring as they attacked. They were all just as easily dispatched, Beth or Blood needing only one or two strikes to take care of them, the former shaking her head at how almost all low-level beasts were mindless balls of anger and hunger. Of course, low level here referred to basically anything under level fifty, yet another reason why it would be quite important for places like her home neighborhood to build up a force of moderately strong guards.

The two arrived back at the CRA Hall deep in the evening, the time feeling like it was already night, one of those tricks of wintertime in the northern part of the US where more hours of darkness made even earlier times feel later. Beth dismounted at the main doors, still preferring that entrance over using one of the handful of side doors to get into the building. She was unpleasantly surprised to find the lobby far from empty, with quite a few civilians gathered around the main counter having a heated argument with Tazeen. Well, the civilians were getting rather agitated, if their raised voices and aggressive body language was anything to go by.

Beth made to move around the group, not wanting to get involved, but was stopped by two men who had been standing off to the side near the hall leading back further into the building. She halted as the two stepped in front of her, looking them over as they blocked her path. Neither was a particularly impressive specimen, the one on the left an inch shorter than her and rather gangly, with unkempt blonde hair and watery blue eyes, while the man on the right was short and fat, a lot of flab around his middle showing he perhaps enjoyed too much fatty food and too little exercise. His messy brown hair and pallid, sneering complex did little to add to his charms, Beth sighing as he crossed his arms. She did a quick Identify to check them over just in case, but she felt nothing from the two.

Mark Shields, Level 2 Human Young Warrior

Alexander Thompson, Level 1 Human Fighter

Beth was even less impressed than her initial poor opinion and stared the two men down as Alexander, the fat one, opened his mouth. He said to her, in a rather grating tone, "Nothin' for you here, girl. Turn around."

Beth laughed directly in his face, which seemed to greatly displease him, judging by the sneering frown and the sudden set of his round shoulders. The other man, the gangly one, placed a hand on his companion's shoulder, a well-worn gesture that did little to calm the shorter one. It seemed like the gangly man wanted to take a more conciliatory approach; that, or he had actually thought to use Identify on the tall, muscular girl in medium armor with two huge swords and pack on. Or maybe it was the seven-hundred-pound wolf standing just behind the girl that had him reconsidering their current course of action.

"Let me say this in a way that you will understand," she replied. "Move, or I will move you, and option number two will be very unpleasant."

"You think you can talk such shit to your elders just because you have a bit of armor on?!" the man snarled back, his face turning quite a bright shade of red.

"No, I think I can talk like this because you have no right to mess with me. Oh, and I'm way stronger than you. Final warning, get out of my way or I'll make you move," Beth answered calmly, gripping the hilt of her new sword in her left hand while flexing the fingers of her right hand hard enough the knuckles crackled.

"You little bitch," he snarled in response, causing Beth to grin a little in a slightly wicked way, considering how she towered over this fat little twerp. What was far less amusing was his lunge forward as he raised his fist, clearly intending to strike her. Beth reacted almost instinctively, blocking his fist with her free right hand before clamping down, locking the man's fist in her grip. Before he could react, she tugged in towards herself, unbalancing the man. As he started to stumble forward, she released his fist before lashing out and grabbing him by the throat. She spun on her left leg, stepping forward as she finished rotating over ninety degrees, twisting her hips and shoulders as she stepped. She flexed the muscles of her right arm and heaved, lifting the man off the ground before letting him go. He sailed rather gracefully through the air before landing rather less gracefully atop one of the tables in between two of the comfortable chairs. He didn’t stay there long, bouncing off the table before landing on the floor with a meaty thwack.