"I hate orcs," Blood said as they stepped out of the door five hours later.

"I think that's speciest," Beth replied.

"If orcs have a problem with it, they can come find me," Blood replied lazily.

"Don't jinx yourself," Beth said before shoving her way back out of nook with the dungeon door.

"Let's go," Blood said after crawling out and hopping to her feet.

The wolf resumed her scouting, moving through huge stretches of territory and getting a rough idea of what was there. Beth combed through smaller areas in more detail, killing a large number of beasts at the same time. Blood scouted for a number of hours, getting a vast swathe of forest covered before returning to Beth to join her in more detailed exploration and slaughter. Killing their way through the forest took the rest of the first day.

"I have an idea," Beth said at some point into the night as they were getting tired.

"What?" Blood asked.

"There a dungeon nearby?" Beth asked in reply.

"The second one we just found," Blood replied, her forehead scrunching as she looked at Beth.

"Let's go," Beth said, not explaining further.

It took them twenty minutes to leap through the treetops to the dungeon entrance. This one was a bit more obvious, just a giant portal in the middle of a clearing in the woods. They had passed it by a handful of minutes before because they were tired and didn't want to start the dungeon while needing sleep. That wasn't true any longer, as Beth had had an idea.

"So, it's like this," Beth said, as they stood in the clearing after killing the nearby beasts, eying the portal. "We have the ultimate cheat; my gate. So, we go in there, use my gate right away, go in the gate and sleep ten hours or a little less, come out of the gate after just under a 'real' hour passes, clear the dungeon, and keep going. We spend, like, fifty minutes to rest, and we get way more out of it."

"Sounds good," Blood said with a shrug.

"Take your badge off," Beth then commanded.

"Okay," Blood said, making the badge disappear into her necklace.

Beth didn't think the badges were recording everything they did, but she thought better safe than sorry. They were able to take advantage of time compression to get a full night's sleep and prepare and eat food while only a single hour passed in objective time. After they had rested, they proceeded to blitz the dungeon they had set up camp in, remembering to re-equip the badges before starting. The clear took about eight hours, though it was still early morning of day two when they were done, as not taking seven or eight hours to rest and take care of breakfast but just under one hour meant they started the dungeon at about midnight and finished not long after dawn. The world of the contest, as yet unnamed and only given a unit designation number, had slightly longer days than Earth, with nearly the same tilt to its axis but a slightly slower rotation giving it just over twenty-six hours in one day. That meant, considering other factors, Beth and Blood could get all their rest, including sleep, done in two or three hours, leaving twenty-three hours a day for exploring and fighting.

That presumed, of course, that they would always have a dungeon nearby that they could hide in to summon Beth's gate, but that didn't prove too problematic. The two of them moved incredibly quickly and, a card she didn't want to reveal too early, they had an airship. While they weren't permitted to leave the planet, there was nothing in the rules that said a team couldn't use a vehicle to move around more quickly, though Beth didn't think it would be quite that big of an advantage. If every team were even slightly close to Val's in terms of backing and strength, they would all have at least some kind of vehicle, likely some kind of airship, meaning that Beth's fancy ship didn't really give her and Blood much of a mobility advantage. Not only could they move to a dungeon if they wanted to be extra safe about not revealing the gate, but the airship was at least minimally shielded, making it hard for someone to notice the gate. Then again, if people anywhere close to Val's grandma or even someone just a little further down the pecking order like Jaq were monitoring the competition, Beth wouldn't guarantee their privacy on the ship. Looking into an active dungeon instance was a lot harder than making it past a few rudimentary enchants and a simple tech scrambler, so she still felt safer in the dungeons.

It was only a few days before they were out of the forest and exploring a plain. They spent six days on the plains and some hills to the north, moving through waist high grass and fighting under a clear blue sky, before they moved on. They stopped in the mountains next, a huge chain of sky-piercing titans of rock and dirt that kept a pure white shawl of snow about their shoulders the year round. The range was craggy and rough, filled with waves of beasts so thick that they resembled the beginnings of a tide, though it was just the density of the unexplored range. Beth eyes had lit up upon first climbing a hard shoulder of rock jutting from the first slumbering giant of stone and seeing the endless hordes. This was their specialty and their ticket to a strong placing in the first half all rolled into one. No need to hop in the airship for anything but taking a rest; they had to just move forward and fight, continuously, to achieve their goals. If there was nothing else that they were good at, what they were was putting their heads down and fighting without rest.

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"This is going to be a lot of fighting," Blood said with a sigh.

"But we're gonna place real high," Beth said. "And then the second part is, what, a dungeon contest? We have to do dungeons fast? How could we not place high in that?"

"Should we not, uh, count our chickens before we have them? Or whatever that saying is?" Blood growled.

"It's chickens before they're hatched, and let me counter that by saying, have some damn confidence. Let's act like we're gonna win and we just might," Beth retorted sarcastically.

"Whatever. Just don't be surprised when we're not first," Blood said with a roll of her eyes.

"Let's fight," Beth said, still looking at the innumerable beasts as she smashed her gauntlets together.

She led the way into the first tide and, despite her protests and light cynicism, Blood was right there with her, shoulder-to-shoulder. They fought for hours…and hours…and hours. That first battle likely stretched more than a day, Beth wasn't sure, as she hadn't bothered to look at the time when they started or when they finally had a clear space to retreat and get out of the mess. Beth had constantly moved them forward, mowing down goblins, hobgoblins, trolls, and a type of fat, dumb cave brute that had flesh like old, waterlogged oak and bones hard as steel. When they pulled back after nearly thirty hours of constant, mind-numbing slaughter, they jogged through an absolute charnel house of bodies and body parts. Blood looked at the corpses with some longing, thinking of all the cores she could claim, but Beth kept them moving. It just wasn't worth the time to harvest the cores, as they would have to be turned in but weren't worth very much in terms of score. If they had a larger team, they could have one or two people resting and harvesting cores while the rest fought, but they didn't, and anyway, even teams of four might not be able to do that kind of rotation. Not when faced with the kinds of numbers that were in this mountain range.

Beth deployed their airship once they got clear of the mud and blood and guts and shit, the two of them boarding and quickly making for the captain's cabin. They took off their blood-soaked gear once they were in the bathroom, leaving everything on the floor as they got clean quickly before taking a minute to pile up the clothes. Beth made a huge pile of all her dirty clothes, Blood adding to it before taking everything to be washed, as the airship did have a small cubby with laundry machines. It had two washing machines and two dryers that were very similar, only looking like a slightly different model than the ones that the CRA used, and Beth had picked up a small thing of detergent during one of their little shopping trips, having Blood take it and put it in the little storage nook by the machines when she was down there.

Blood returned and groaned as Beth insisted they get their armor clean and fixed before doing anything else, though she did let Blood start some food heating in the galley once they were mostly through the task. They both ate like T-Rexes that had been starving for a month before heading to the bridge. Beth wanted them to do a little flyover of the mountain range for an hour, though the area was massive and not something they could nearly fully map in that time. She just wanted them to get a sense for the areas around them, as well as use the sensors on nearby beasts and to see if they could find any promising cave entrances. They also found a couple good places they could land; shoulders of rock high up on the massive, craggy peaks that had little wildlife, few beasts, and plenty of space for the ship.

They used one of those spots to rest, not using Beth's cheat this time as she thought it might be suspicious if they used it too much. Case in point, if they did such a massive and very long fight, stopped flying for one hour or so, then suddenly flew to a beast pack and started fighting again. Once might be ignored, though there likely would be some questions, but several times would be a little tricky to explain. When they were using the dungeons, they could more easily make excuses, as they disappeared for quite some time and there were ways to explain what was happening. Fighting for thirty hours, resting for one, then starting to fight again would be a tough sell, and Beth didn't think it was entirely necessary. She planned to use the trick once or twice more, but doing similar to the dungeons and getting out of sight for a while before resuming doing something that could be noticed by the orbiting ship's scanners or, more likely, the powerful people acting as competition administrators, was a better bet.

They were back at it again after their sleep, geared up and in freshly clean clothes and ready to go. They spent the next two weeks in the mountains, though they didn't venture into the fetid underbelly of the range during that time. They did spend hundreds of hours over those fourteen days fighting, cleaning up a sizeable sections of the southern part of the range, grinding down the overpopulation of beasts. They didn't go as crazy as on the first day, but did fight seventeen or eighteen hours a day. With six hours or so of sleep, and time during their fighting where they pulled back and rested for a little, that filled out each of the twenty-six-hour days.

They changed tactics again with a little less than a week left before the thirty-day timer was up. They had spent a few days in the forest, six on the plains and in the foothills, and fourteen in the mountains, leaving them six days to rack up as many points as they could with their final couple gambits. The first of those was two days of Blood, with a massive grin on her face, flying the ship low and at maximum speed to map as much as they possibly could. It was a world just a small bit bigger than Earth and, with their limit of around Mach two at full power, they couldn't really explore too much of it. It would take many hours to circumnavigate the planet, and that would give them a band a few miles wide from the ship sensors around the world. Rather than that, which would include a lot of surface scan of the oceans which would be of little value, they instead opted to start with the mountain range. After that was fully scanned, they moved on from there to the areas around it, trying to get good scans of as much of the continent they had been dropped on as they could.

They passed by two other airships during those forty-eight hours, but both other teams seemed very content to be ships passing in the night, neither starting a fight nor a friendly chat. The contestants were allowed to interfere with each other, but there would be very serious questions if it escalated to the point of deaths, and most teams seemed to think it was best to just leave the others alone during the first segment while they did as much as they could. Beth was also a little secretly delighted to note their readings of the other ships put them under Beth's ships. Both other ships were smaller, had weaker power readings, were flying at slower speeds, and didn't register as many or as powerful of armaments or armored plating. Beth knew at least some of that could either be faked or a cover, but she was still rather proud that these other teams, sponsored by powerful people and with massive backings, didn't have the kind of powerful airship they had managed to get their hands on.

After their two days of intense mapping, getting quite a lot of good data from their airship's sensors, they went for what Beth hoped would be their Hail Mary to put them at the top. Having learned from their time on Luttraine, Beth led the way down into the earth, deep into the underbelly of the unnamed mountain range. The cold, dark, damp caverns were not at all pleasant, especially when they found the first section of them crawling with giant millipedes that had bodies thicker than Beth's torso and huge, barbed mandibles that were coated in some kind of venom or paralytic agent. Beth and Blood's resistances came in quite handy, as the poison that could have had them entirely frozen only made the place the mandible cut a little numb and wooden.

Millipedes, as gross and annoying as the red and black bugs were, were far from the worst of what they encountered under the mountains. The biggest danger, as they had now encountered several times, was some type of wyrm or dragon-kin that lurked in the depths. These particular beasts weren't out of their level range, at least, not at first, and they could be killed, but they were insanely tough bastards. Beth had grappled one of the massive, six-legged, wingless Rock Wyverns at one point and Blood had slashed, and slashed, and slashed to get through just one leg joint. They wound up killing it when Beth got it flipped over and they pounded and slashed its neck into a bunch of bloody confetti. They were a bit more cautious after that, but persisted, continuing deeper into the mountain range's dark heart as they watched the timer for the final few days tick down.

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