Limitless Path

She paged through the listing of fights, selecting another at random and watching. She watched the entire fight, a duel between two young women, before moving on. Fight after fight played out, all of them incredible, including one where two teams fought against each other on an open field.

The team starting from the white side was led by what looked like a paladin, who started the battle at the ref's call by using some kind of insane ability. He held his shield before him and leaned forward a little, his knees bent and sword held up to the right. His shield seemed to grow to triple its already enormous size, but Beth quickly realized it was some kind of energy form. The man tensed himself, the ground under him cracking, and six massive streams of energy appeared around him, trailing back towards the far wall of the arena. With a sudden flex of his legs, the man shot forward toward the opposing team, appearing like a massive blue and gold meteor hurtling across the battlefield.

A man on the opposing team wielding a massive maul stepped forward, his height and musculature increasing as he did so. He swung the enormous hammer at the paladin, slamming the head of the weapon into the center of his opponent's shield. There was an incredible explosion, a blasting shockwave spreading out as if a bomb had detonated in the middle of the field, accompanied by a reverberating sound like a bell toll that signaled the end of the world.

Beth watched the rest of the four versus four play out, the paladin's team eventually emerging victorious, though not before the paladin was eliminated. The systems of the arenas kept the participants from dying, but they still experienced the 'death' before being teleported out of the field. Beth checked the teams' stats, finding them to be stronger than the first pair she had watched, but they were still just within the bounds of Awoken.

Beth pulled up more matches, watching one after the other, until she realized that it was late into the night. She roused herself from the couch after turning the screen off, Blood following her into the bedroom, where they lay down again for a few hours of sleep.

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Beth woke the next morning and checked the time, noting they had only slept about three hours, not much more than a long nap. She hopped out of bed and proceeded to the bathroom, where she got ready for a new day, including throwing on one of the new sets of clothing she had grabbed from Jaq earlier.

Finished with her morning routine, she moved back out into the main room. She stepped into the kitchen for a moment to discard the remaining bottles and packets she had in her pouch before returning to the main room and equipping her armor. Strapping on her sword, she exited the room with Blood, heading up to the front desk, where Tazeen waited as always.

"Greetings," Tazeen intoned, a slight warmth in his voice as Beth walked up to the counter.

"Uh, good morning," she replied, noting that Tazeen was alone at the counter currently. "Can I extend my rental of the room?"

"Of course. For how long would you like?" he asked in return.

"Um, what about ten days?" she asked, taking out ten silvers and putting them on the counter.

"Your key, please," Tazeen replied, taking the silver and the key. He made the silver disappear behind the counter before setting the key on a spot on the counter and adjusting something only he could see for a moment. He then picked the key up and handed it back to her, Beth placing it in her pouch when she received it.

"Thanks, Tazeen," she said cheerfully, receiving a nod in response. She turned and led Blood back down the corridor, heading all the way into the arena complex area before moving back down to their room. Upon entering she put several of her extra sets of clothes in the dresser and put her old gloves off to the side. She then led Blood back up to the lounge, where they found Baelvyr just finishing a massive breakfast in his usual spot. Beth joined him at the table, pulling a bottle of water from her pouch and taking a swig before setting it on the table.

"See ya had some results," Baelvyr said after a moment.

"Yeah, but I have a bunch of questions. And we definitely need more training," she replied, Blood tilting her head and giving Beth a look, as if saying "What 'we'?"

"Haha," Baelvyr boomed out a teeth vibrating laugh. "Anybody who's anybody needs more training, good to see ya learnin' that early," he chuckled again and took a deep quaff, today from a large tankard.

"Yeah, that's for sure. We were having some real problems yesterday in the dungeon," Beth said, wiggling her eyebrows at him when she said dungeon.

"Yeah, yeah. I get it," he replied with a snort.

"We were having trouble actually dealing damage to the enemies we were fighting," she continued. "Do you think we should get more attack skills?"

Baelvyr shook his head before taking another swig. "No, ya need to hone what ya have right now. Getting some other weak skill at copper zero won't help with the problem."

"So, what do we need to do, just train more?" Beth asked with a frown.

"I told ya before girlie, the next thing you should do is get those weapons skills to Journeymen. There's no kind of magic requirements for that, just skill and understandin'. Ya get even one, like Unarmed, to Journeyman, you'll be twice as strong."

"It just seems like it's going so slow," Beth complained with a sigh.

Baelvyr couldn't help laughing at that, a deep boom that rattled Beth's water bottle on the table. "It's always like that, girlie, with everything in life. Seems easy at first, but once ya get into it, ya figure out it takes time and effort to master. People can spend a year to get where yer at, so doin' it in a month is really somethin'. But, and I tell ya this to make sure ya know what yer in for, it will only get harder from here. Tougher physically, tougher mentally, and hell, even tougher spiritually. If ya want to be strong, yer gonna hafta suffer more than little to get there."

Beth had her arms crossed on the table in front of her and looked down at them while frowning. Having one of the strongest people around, probably one of the strongest warriors in the entire galaxy, tell you doing what you wanted was going to be incredibly difficult was no joke. She finally sighed and took a huge drink of water before turning to Baelvyr again, "What about professions, like Blacksmithing?"

"What about 'em?" he responded, finishing off his mug.

"You think I should pick one up? What professions are there, anyway? And are you able to teach me any?" Beth fired off rapidly in response.

"Most people at least dabble a little. There's a whole slew of things ya can learn, best to read one of the summaries of 'em in the library," he replied, leaning back in his chair and settling his hands on the top of his stomach. "I know a bit of smithin', but not really enough to teach. Ya'd need to go to Elana for that, and that'd cost ya a decent bit."

"Money, money, money. It's always about money. How are you supposed to do anything if you're not from some rich family? Killing monsters gives you pennies, clearing entire dungeons a silver or two," she huffed angrily.

"That's how it is. Fight, kill shit, earn a handful of coppers, pay for dinner and a room, get up the next mornin' and do it all again," Baelvyr said with a deep sigh. "Ah, the good ol' days."

"What about arena fights?" Beth plowed on, gamely ignoring Baelvyr's reminiscing.

"I know I sound like a broken song-shifter, but get to Journeymen," he replied, patting the top of his huge stomach a few times with a thump.

"This sucks," Beth grumbled, resting her right cheek on her right hand while slouching slightly to the side.

"Ya can either mope or train. Figure out which one yer more interested in," Baelvyr grumbled back.

"Let's go, then," Beth said, hopping to her feet and starting for the door. Baelvyr stood himself with a deep grunt and followed after her and Blood, the three heading down to their typical training room.

"So. What are ya at right now, anyway?" Baelvyr asked her as he grabbed the control tablet from the front of the room.

Beth got what he meant after only a moment and shared her skill section of her stat page.

Skills

Ancient World Gate[0]

Crush Copper[9]

Focused Meditation Copper[6]

Identify Copper[7]

Lightning Resistance Copper[3]

Lordly Reconstruction Copper[8]

Monstrous Blow Copper[8]

Pain Tolerance Copper[9]

Swords Apprentice[7]

Toxic Resistance Copper[4]

Unarmed Apprentice[8]

"Unarmed first then," he said calmly.

The day proceeded rather similarly to other days, with the exception being the opponents Baelvyr picked for her. Rather than just the standard training dummies, she faced a variety of opponents from humanoids to four-legged beasts to even wilder beings. They focused on a slew of attack patterns and angles, and while just a human opponent could give almost limitless possibilities, it was also true that Beth would be fighting a large number of beasts of all kinds over what could be a very, very long life. It seemed to her as she fought the various conjurings that Baelvyr threw at her that their average skill level was definitely higher than hers.

The more she fought, the more certain she became of this idea. As the hours passed, she recognized many times where she was either stronger or faster than the opponent. In some cases, she was both, hitting harder and moving quicker, but she still would lose fights to such weak combat phantoms.

She hadn't seen it at first, and once she did it took her a few fights to process, but she eventually realized that this is what Baelvyr and the books had meant when they discussed a skill gap. You could balance out the gap by having stats a good bit higher than your opponents, but Beth had a suspicion that some of the phantoms that were both weaker and slower than her and defeated her were high Journeyman or even low Expert in rank.

At noon they took a break, Beth drinking enough to water a neighborhood and tearing through multiple nutrient packs. When she had fed and rested, Baelvyr restarted the combat arena, but with a new twist. He had divided it in half, and now Blood was assigned half of the arena. It had been fine earlier for just Beth to polish her skills, but now that they were both fighting beasts that pushed them to the limit, he had apparently decided it was time to get the wolf involved in the training regimen.

The two were subjected to the same treatment as Beth had undergone during the morning, facing a wide variety of enemies that could be of any sort of physical stat but were all of a greater skill. Beth could feel that it was definitely an improvement over what she had been doing, though it wasn't generating the kind of results that the battle trance had. Still, it would be an effective way over the coming days to increase her skills, and hopefully Baelvyr had a way to push over the large hurdle at the top of Apprentice and into Journeyman.

They stopped in the late afternoon and returned everything they had used to its places, Baelvyr heading back to his usual spot while Beth and Blood stopped in their room. They took some time to wash, and Beth took a minute to quickly change into one of the now many sets of fresh clothes she had available. They then left the suite and headed up to the lounge as well, sitting at the table in the back with Baelvyr.

The two sat in silence for a while, Beth watching what was playing on the large screen at the front of the room. There was another random fight on, and she watched with mild interest as two contestants squared off in a standard arena.

It wasn't much later that the rest of her group trudged in, though Soph, who was last, practically crawled into the room. They assembled around Baelvyr's table with only some nods to Beth and Blood, so tired that talking was apparently too great an effort. Once everyone had rested for a few minutes Beth took charge, getting up and urging the rest of the group to do the same.

Accomplishing this little endeavor in herding cats, she got everyone moving in the direction of home. They passed through the lobby, where Tazeen stood guard alone, before heading outside and cutting through the woods. Soph rode on Blood while the others trotted along behind, some more gamely than others. As happened frequently with Beth in the party, the group stumbled into one of the large wild boars that seemed to originate from the northern field.

Beth took care of the low-level beast with a single quick strike to the head, moving in on the creature before it was even aware she was approaching. Beth didn't even bother at this point with trying to contact anyone, simply grabbing the huge hog and lifting it over her shoulders. It was quite a sight they made as they came up to the neighborhood, with what looked like a giant, flopping boar accompanying the group.

Beth dumped the carcass just outside their backyard, not worried about it for a few minutes. It was best to take care of the butchering immediately, but the meat would stay good for at least a handful of minutes while she found either Zack or Bill or both. She trotted off to do just that, not even attempting to delegate to the clearly exhausted group a task she could take care of so easily herself.

She didn't need to look far, as Zack himself was walking up the short street leading to the cul-de-sac they lived on. She informed him of yet another kill, much to his chagrin at receiving a task so late in the day. Still, he was somebody who always got the job done, and he quickly made his way over to grab Bill before they sorted out their tools and headed into the Bell's backyard.

Beth, having dispatched that particular duty, headed inside the house herself through the back, taking the time to set her equipment in the mudroom. She kept her pouch with her, as usual, and made her way into the house, looking to see where the rest of the group had distributed themselves. She did not make it past the kitchen, lacking members of the group as it did, before she encountered a new trial; her mother.