LimitlessPath
patreon
Limitless Path Chapter Two Hundred Fourteen
🕑 Added 2024-03-26 17:00:03 +0000 UTCIt wasn't just a river in the sense it was some little trickle of water; no, this was a massive torrent of water, over a mile wide at its widest and hundreds, if not close to a thousand feet deep. Not only would crossing it be a nightmare just in consideration of the volume of water itself, but there were certain to be immense dangers lurking deep in the turbulent waters. Not just the depths of the river posed a danger, but the banks as well; as with all such things, it was a source of water for animals and beasts in the surrounding area. Being such a gathering place meant it had an absolute plethora of beasts to fight or avoid, depending on the circumstance.
They decided to follow the river for a time, heading upstream first. They didn't move along the banks, but instead stuck to the trees, and a little distance away from the edge of the wood cover at that. The sounding of the river was quite loud, something Beth hadn't even thought about, but she had never actually been near anything bigger than a moderate-sized creek before, and the amount of noise a very large river produced was rather startling. It didn't totally drown out other sounds, but it was loud enough to be a constant presence that they couldn't ignore.
They spent the entire day moving upstream, only stopping when it was close to getting dark. Ahead of them, very far ahead, they could just barely make out the peaks of distant, massive mountains, which was likely where the source of the river was located. After spending the whole day on the move, with very few fights during that period, they had covered a vast distance, multiple hundreds of miles. Returning to the base from the very edge of where the mountains could be sighted took them well into the night, and the planet they were pioneering was certainly a different beast in the dark. Not least of which because a wholly different, more powerful set of beasts appeared during that time, and they were not shy about fighting: the girls, each other, and sometimes inanimate objects that moved too much for their tastes.
They found the base as they had left it, with only a single nighttime predator sniffing around, which they adroitly dispatched. They made sure the makeshift gate was secure before returning to the building, locking it tightly before turning to other matters. Beth stored the beast cores and a few other small, interesting items they had found in the small storage room in the building while Blood stripped down and entered the shower. Beth then started cooking, getting everything to the point where it only needed to be lightly monitored for a while before taking care of washing up herself. The two ate a massive amount of food, seemingly ever needing more calories to keep up with their daily expenditure, before hitting the sack for the night.
Day seventeen they repeated the previous day, except they moved with the river instead of against it, following it downstream as far as they could. They wound up not finding anything particularly interesting; the river had a heavy wood surrounding it, and the further west they went, the denser and broader that forest became. They didn't find any other vastly different biome, however; no oceans, deserts, or any such apart from what they had already experienced. The only thing of great importance they noted was the increasing average level of beasts, until it got to the point where they weren't seeing anything under level one hundred fifty, deciding at that point it was too hot for their blood and retreating slightly early.
Day eighteen they turned about and went directly south, circling around the rocky outcrop at the back of their base before setting it at their back as they headed off. They were in the plains for a long time that day, moving for hours through waist-high grasses under a large, orangish sun. The plains had much of the same they had already experienced in terms of beasts, though the levels they were encountering did increase as the morning wore on. It wasn't until mid-afternoon that they experienced something new, and it most surely wasn't something pleasant.
They had found the edge of some very rough, broken up terrain that stretched as far as they could see. Not only that, it was definitely a desert climate, with the temperatures greatly increasing, the moisture content of the air decreasing, and the amount of sand skyrocketing. They surveyed the terrain for a few minutes before deciding to give it a shot, moving into the area of broken escarpments in front of them. It was not an easy place to navigate, though this was not the first time they had gone through similar kinds of terrain, but the area here was even more broken up and uneven that what they had gone through before.
It was also filled with ambush predators and beasts that sat in a semi-slumber, waiting for anything living to get close before bursting forth to try to kill and consume it. This made the area doubly or even triply annoying, with it being difficult to progress through the terrain while adding the complication of always looking for beasts to be bursting out towards them. It helped even less that the beasts were almost all venomous in some way, though the girls' Toxic Resistance came in handy there, staving off the worst of the effects any time they managed to get caught by a fang or stinger.
They didn't make it particularly far into the desert area, but they did find a hidden cache of mushrooms that they carefully harvested before heading back for the day. The mushrooms were labeled as Sun's Bane Mushrooms in Beth's sight, and grew in a small but very dark cave that Blood had sniffed out as something suspicious. They made their way back to the base they had set up with their one prize for the day, apart from beast cores, arriving after dark again. This time, they found a group of the night-stalking beasts attacking a section of the palisade they had built, Blood guessing it was the blood that had been spilled in that area that attracted them.
The two girls battled the group of predators, taking a few minutes to kill them all. They were having more trouble with fights now, at least given that Beth didn't use her Presence, the toughness of the beasts they were facing vastly increasing as they were moving through the hundreds. It also really put into perspective just how strong some of the things they had encountered, such as the level two hundred twenty wyrms, really were.
They finished their slaughter of the beasts and then had to spend time dragging the corpses far away from the base. It was dirty, bloody work, and Beth couldn't wait for a shower afterwards, though she was still sure to shut the gate and lock the door of the building. They went through their evening routine before bedding down and getting a good bit of sleep for the night. They awoke the morning of day nineteen and went through their morning routine quickly before heading out for the day, finding that the area hadn't experienced any other attacks during the night.
They picked east for that day to scout, finding that the plains continued for quite some time in that direction. It was a little tougher going than through the woods, as they were much more obvious on the plains and were forced to fight more often. They made it to a point where the land started to take on a marshy quality by the evening, and they could just barely make out the mountains in the distance. The range was quite vast, though they weren't that much further south at this point than when they followed the river, but Beth was pretty sure it was a huge mountain range.
Day twenty was the opposite, where they ventured west instead of east, heading away from the mountains. The had gone this direction along the river, as well, and had encountered the large forest, which was exactly what they found after a couple hours. They ventured into the woods, which was terrain they were intimately familiar with, and journeyed quite deeply, their understanding of the terrain and ability to move through the treetops allowing them to avoid fighting an excessive amount. It was a good thing, too, as the woods were just chocked-full of high-leveled enemies, things that were definitely very far beyond them.
Day twenty-one dawned bright and early with the girls deciding to stick close to "home." Beth was worried about their…less than stellar efforts in building up the base and the area around it, and decided they needed to spend some time working on making it slightly more defensible. And presentable. And functional. In fact, it needed an awful lot of work, and Beth could at least get some of that done over the next few days. Blood couldn't help quite as much, but she could still hunt and help clear the area, as well as venture further afield and gather more resources to build up their supplies.
Beth could at least do a few things to secure the place better, including building an actual set of gates. She wasn't a Carpenter, but she could get some of the best logs and wood they had, then use her skills as a blacksmith to nail them together. Beyond that, she spent a day making a set of heavy, reinforced hinges to hang the gates on, which then necessitated another day building up the area around the gates into an actual wall, taking up all of day twenty-two. Day Twenty-three saw Blood help her with deepening the moat they had built and reinforcing the embankment with roughly cut pieces of stone. Even lacking the tools and skills for stone masonry, having the level of STR and DEX they did still let them do some rough work of that kind that a skilled craftsperson could either build off of or replace later.
Day twenty-four had Beth start on rebuilding their rather pathetic palisade, with her getting large sections of stone from the rocky outcrop and surrounding area. She roughly hammered those pieces into columns, which she planted every fifteen feet in the reinforced embankment. It took until partway through day twenty-five to finish this, and Blood had resumed working on scouting the area and gathering resources in the meantime. Beth spent the rest of day twenty-five and day twenty-six rebuilding the palisade as a heavy log-wall, with the logs between the stone columns nailed together with large spikes she forged for the purpose.
Day twenty-seven she built a rather decent shed to be used as a forge and shop, moving the forge, anvil, and smithing equipment out there when she was finished. They final day, day twenty-eight, she roughed out an area for several more structures, though she didn't do any building. Even though she had dipped into a number of other professions, it seems the work was tied in enough with Blacksmithing that she didn't get any new skills from any of it, but she did get one level in Blacksmithing itself, taking her to the top of Apprentice.
Beth stuck her head in the storage room that night, seeing the fruits of mainly Blood's labor, the room packed full of materials the wolf had harvested. They took long showers that night after eating and went to bed slightly early, ready for the next day and the end of the stage. They had worked hard, but not enough to really exhaust themselves, so a little less than five hours of sleep saw them up and getting ready for the day of handover.
Once they had eaten and geared up, they were out the door and in the area they had walled off. Beth putted about for the next hour or so before dawn broke, cleaning the area around where she had been working and making sure everything was put away. She was glad she was outside for the early morning and the stage end, as she would never forget the experience of that day, even many centuries later after she had become well used to such sights.
It started with a thunderous crashing sound, like a clap of heavenly might echoing out with a rolling aftereffect, causing both the girls to look up instantly while getting ready for a fight. They mostly relaxed after a second, their jaws dropping open as they watched a ship descend from the sky. This was no mere plane or small aircraft, but a massive starship, the hull a very dark and dull matte bronze color, with quite a few protrusions that were everything from cameras to sensors to weapon turrets. Beth wasn't really that great at estimating distances, but she figured this ship had to be at least five hundred feet from bow to stern, and likely over two hundred feet wide.
The ship didn't land, even in the flat area around the base, but hovered over and just in front of the outcrop with the keel about fifteen feet off the ground. Even hovering so high off the ground, a large set of doors opened near the rear of the ship and a long, thin ramp extended all the way to the ground. A pair of men wearing heaving plate armor marched down the ramp in lockstep, followed by a tall woman with a set of ethereal wings wearing an armored robe, and then a quartet of moderately heavily armored guards.
Beth had pulled the doors to their little "fort" open and was standing outside in the sun, the heavenly body's position still low enough in the sky that the ship overhead didn't occlude it. The two leading guards marched up to Beth and stopped in front of her, with the woman coming to stand directly in front of her. She eyed the woman up for a moment, noting the quality of all of her equipment, not to mention the fact that the woman was seven feet tall with what seemed unusually long arms.
"So, you are the preparatory force?" the woman asked with an arched brow.
"I guess that's us," Beth said, glancing at the armored soldiers and then up at the ship. "Though, I'm not really sure why."
"Ships are expensive and always overbooked; we can't dispatch one everywhere all the time. And mana interferes with scanning and other technologies and techniques. Having a preparatory force scout and start the initial settlement on a new world is a very standard practice," the woman explained. "Let's examine what you have for us."
After saying so, Beth led the woman and the front set of guards around the area, showing the improved walls, small smithy, and then the storage room full of supplies and valuable items. After that, Blood joined them to go over the scouting report, the woman spreading out a basic map with only the barest hint of features in the surroundings on the dining table. Blood filled in a huge amount of detail over the next hour, answering many questions that the woman posed, with occasional help from Beth.
