Limitless Path

She immediately ducked a slash with a quick bob, charging Monstrous Blow from the start of the motion. She stepped forward into his next slash, bringing her blade around from the right with a fast twist as she took his slash on her shoulder from his righthand blade. Just as her blade was about to bite into the armor of his left side, his lefthand blade moved with a preternatural speed and precision, slamming down into the center of her sword and blocking her attack completely. The man was forced to take a small half step back from the impact even after his skill use, and he slashed at Beth again before being shoulder checked by Blood.

His return slash against Blood was far worse this time, both blades lacerating her face, cutting deep gashes as they grated against her skull. The wolf danced away, too fast when using her max copper version of Swift for the man to pursue, but now mostly out of the fight. Beth didn't think about it anymore and sent a quick communication to Blood.

'I'm going to hit him fast with a huge smash, then we run,'

'Yes, sister,' Blood responded firmly.

Beth put words to deed, darted forward with all the mana she could pump into Swift active, swinging a fully charged slash into the man's side again. He again blocked with a far too fast and precise single motion, cementing in Beth's mind that it was a skill. What he certainly didn't expect, judging from his wide eyes and gaping mouth, was for Beth to let go of the hilt with her right hand as her sword came to a sudden stop, allowing the momentum to carry her arm right. She used a little force to pull her arm back as well, charging it with Crush as much as she could before suddenly launching it forward. The whole process took only fractions of a second, Beth relying on both her high STR stat and fully blasting Swift to execute the attack so fast. The man tried to deflect but wasn't able to get his second sword in the path in time.

The force of the strike sent him sailing, his feet leaving the ground as he was thrown away from her. Blood had already started sprinting north, and Beth followed hot on her heels. They made very quick time across the field the shaft leading to the kobolds was in, entering the wooded area beyond and running north rapidly. Beth thought about mounting Blood but dismissed the idea as too time consuming. They ran for another handful of seconds before Beth could hear the man approaching from behind. He wasn't being very careful in hiding his approach, either too confident, or too angry, to care much.

It was clear he had also taken the gloves off, as the saying went, as he was rapidly closing on them. If he could catch up with her this easily, then even Blood would likely have a hard time getting away, especially if Beth was trying to ride her at the time. They continued for another five seconds before Beth spun with a leap, blocking a double chop from his swords as they both sailed through the air. The strike pushed her back down quicker, and her feet dug into the loamy earth of the forest floor as the man fired a rapid burst of slashes at her head.

Beth blocked all the blows quite effectively but was caught off-guard as the man seemed to take a play out of her book, suddenly lashing out with a thick leg to kick her in the chest. Beth very clearly understood he had been holding back at least some part of his power before, as the single mighty kick cracked at least two of her reinforced ribs. Blood attempted to close in to help again, but Beth reproached her.

'Get to the CRA Hall,' Beth sent as she blocked several light slashes at her stomach, not able to parry the final slash from a surprise angle that cut open her shoulder where her armor had lost scales from the earlier exchange.

'But, sister-' Blood tried to argue.

'This fuck's been holding back and still is Blood. We need help. GO!' Beth snapped across their link. Blood didn't hesitate after the reprimand and sped off, leaving Beth to continue to try to block the man. Try and only mostly succeed, blocking the next snap kick from him and feeling her left gauntlet practically shatter from the force, her left forearm faring better only in that it cracked instead of breaking completely.

Beth tried to distract from Blood's sprint away with a mix-up of her own, swinging a quick overhead chop at the man's shoulder before letting go with her left hand and punching with Crush at his stomach. When that was blocked, she followed with a neck-targeting slash before her arm had even returned, leaning back slightly as he deflected that to lash out with her own kick. The power of her legs, combined with dumping a crazy amount of mana into Crush right before the kick landed, sent the man staggering back several steps, an opening that Beth took advantage of to sprint off, taking an oblique angle from Blood's path, trying to distract from her sprint toward the CRA Hall.

"Oh, the little doggy's off?" the lizard-like man cackled, noticing Blood's absence. "None of those CRA bastards are close, so I'll take the mutt later."

She stopped suddenly and planted the blade of her sword into the ground with a jerk before charging her right fist and arm with Crush and smashing the limb into a large oak tree.

"Gardening now?" the man taunted as the tree fell. The taunt quickly turned to a snarl, however, as Beth looped her left arm around the trunk above where she had obliterated it, stepping forward and pulling forward and down. The tree came loose from the surrounding trees and vines and, as it tilted, Beth pushed the end she was holding up and forward before twisting around and grabbing the center of the trunk with her right gauntlet, sinking her claw tips in. She took a step forward with her left foot and grabbed the center of the trunk high up with her left hand. Once the tree was in her grasp, the whole process only taking a second, she took a massive step forward with her right leg, flexing every muscle from her toes to her jaw, hurling the massive trunk directly at the psychopath.

The trunk twisted slightly as it flew but was still more or less directly on target to take the man in the chest. He snarled as the trunk closed, slashing upward first with his left sword and then his right, smashing the trunk up then apart. His winning grin from the deflection died immediately, however, as Beth's face was now less than a foot of splinter-filled air from his own. She stomped her right foot down, sword held back and to her left with both hands, and poured all her remaining mana into her body. She could feel her muscles scream in protest as her bones groaned in agony, but she ignored it all as she twisted with all her might.

The murderous man snarled in response and chopped downward with both swords at the same time in an impressive display of skill, the blinding speed the motion was executed with obviously coming from a skill, perhaps the same one he had been using with only one blade to block up to this point. Greatsword met dual longswords with a toll like a bell signaling the world's end, followed by a loud *bang*, a shockwave exploding outward in a ring. Beth was driven into the ground almost to her knees while the man was lifted up and hurtled through the air like a ragdoll. He slammed into nearly a dozen trees before a large chunk of rock embedded in the side of a hill stopped his momentum with a thunderous crash.

Beth staggered back, her back slamming into a tree after she pulled her legs free from the ground. She pulled her emblem out of her status screen, remembering the function Baelvyr had explained, and fed her very last trickle of mana into it.

***************************************

Jaq was always busy. Despite how it appeared much of the time, he had several responsibilities to take care of apart from running the commissary, as well as his own personal projects to work on. One of these many tasks led to him having a small metal disk, about the size of his palm and no thicker than a nickel, kept in a pocket of his shirt at all times. The disk was heavily engraved, a truly massive number of enchantments layered into it.

It was what Jaq thought would be another typical afternoon when the disk started vibrating. Intensely. He pulled it out of his pocket in a motion far too quick for all but a few of the strongest in the galaxy to follow, saying, "This better be good, my favorite customer."

"I'm probably going to be killed in the next minute, Jaq," Beth's voice came out of the medallion, followed by a wheezing chuckle that turned into a hacking cough. "I hate that your shitty voice is the last thing I'm going to hear."

"What is happening?" Jaq asked immediately, what little playfulness had been present gone from his tone. At the same time, he had already stood as items from around the room began flying at him. A multitude of pieces assembled over his chest to form a high-tech hauberk, while various pieces formed cuisses and greaves over his legs. Other implements flew to attach to the armor as he started to move, exiting a door in his quarters that led the opposite direction of the commissary.

"I'm getting chased by one of those assholes rogues Baelvyr warned me about. He's so much stronger than me, and he's just toying with me," Beth replied. "I think he's getting bored, which means I'm dead. At least Blood got away. Just promise me you'll finish the bastard before he gets anybody else. I'll stall as long as I can," The disk in Jaq's hand then stopped vibrating.

Jaq manipulated the disk in a different way as he moved at a terrifying speed. "You old bastard, your favorite student is about to die."

"This better not be some kinda joke, punk," Baelvyr's voice came back from the medallion.

"Moving to her location now; transmitting coordinates to you," Jaq replied, fully in top-class operator mode at this point.

He left the Hall and started moving towards Beth's location at a speed so quick, an unenhanced person would have barely been able to see a flickering blur of washed-out colors. He arrived in a position he had located after a brief glance at the surrounding topography. With his much greater sensitivity to mana, he could already detect Baelvyr's approach, despite Jaq's extremely high speed and head start.

****************************************

Beth slumped against a tree in the middle of the woods, focusing everything she had on her regenerative ability. She could heal the damage she had currently sustained, given enough time, but as the lizardman approached her through the woods, she knew that her time was up. She had managed to hold on to her sword, and she clutched it in her right arm, too weak and injured to lift it off the ground.

"I will enjoy this," said the lizardman, slightly hissing the 's' at the end of the sentence. He approached Beth with his right arm out, sword extended toward her, guarded even with his massive advantage. It turned out, however, that his guard was useless.

His right arm was suddenly gone below the elbow, his body itself looking like it took a moment to realize that, blood only shooting from the stump after a second had passed. It was a problem he didn't need to worry about for very long, as Beth had noticed right after his arm had disappeared that the ground was shaking, and not just a little bit. As blood jetted out of the fresh stump like an enraged geyser, the shaking became so great that Beth felt as if she had been put in a bouncy ball and given to a child, the back of her armor scraping against the tree behind her as she actually left the ground.

She landed back on the ground from a quite heavy tremor just in time to see a sight she would never forget for the rest of her life. A tree surrounded by a clump of undergrowth to her right exploded, hit by a force so great it was reduced not to splinters, but directly pulverized into dust. What emerged was a hulking mass of deep red and dark golden metal, a moving wall of death. Beth didn't realize it at first, but it was Baelvyr that had smashed through the tree, standing now at more than ten feet tall in a suit of armor that had to weigh way more than a ton.

Baelvyr's footsteps had been what was shaking the woods, and the single step he took after obliterating the tree caused Beth to grate against the tree behind her a rather painful second time. She watched as after that single step, Baelvyr bent forward as he rocketed across the clearing, slamming the edge of his right shoulder into the center of the lizardman's chest. Beth heard a sound like a massive firecracker going off, realizing it was the lizardman's ribcage shattering after Baelvyr's shoulder pulverized his chestplate.

Baelvyr continued on out of the clearing, smashing through half a dozen trees and a huge rock spur before coming to a stop, not bothering to use a special skill or one of his abilities to slow himself, just relying on his huge STR to halt all forward momentum. Beth had never stopped her efforts to heal and, not wanting to remain vulnerable, forced herself to plant her sword in the ground in front of her, painfully levering herself up to one knee. When she looked up again, Jaq was standing in front of her, having appeared out of nowhere.

"And how is my favorite customer?" Jaq asked.

"Fuck you, Jaq," Beth growled, struggling to stand using her sword as an aid. "You're just as shit a sniper as you are a shopkeeper."

"I'm an excellent Commissary Officer, so I will take that for the compliment it is," he replied, taking out an ampoule from his gear filled with some kind of orange liquid. In the same smooth motion, he spun the ampoule in his hand before stabbing it into Beth's neck, the liquid flowing into her carotid artery with a *hiss*. Beth felt a slight pinch in her neck, but it was not even a noticeable pain compared to the breaks in her left arm and fractures in her right. Her final effort to at least wound the man had certainly been more than even her elixir enhanced body could fully withstand.