The full seven days passed like this, the details of the next section of the competition being sent to the groups on the seventh day. Beth read over the information as she lounged on one of the two couches in their suite's living room. The next thirty days were pretty simple, even if she was sure a lot of the teams were not going to be very happy about it. They would have to clear out the overfull dungeons on the world below; the more dungeons a team normalized the mana of, the more score they would earn. It was the teams' responsibility to make their way to each dungeon, but the organizers were providing the dungeon locations.

"They send the information?" Blood asked as she joined Beth on the couch.

"Take a look," Beth said, forwarding the data packet.

"This'll be annoying," Blood grumbled, failing to get any sympathy from Beth.

"It'll be easy," Beth said with a shake of her head.

"Did you get more supplies?" Blood asked.

"Here," Beth said, reaching out and passing some rations and food to Blood, which she stored in her necklace as soon as they appeared.

"Anything else?" asked Blood.

"No, go back to your girlfriend," Beth said, getting a growl in response and just laughing.

Their last free day passed quickly, and everyone was assembled in the hangar bay early the next morning. All the shuttles were loaded at nearly the same time, and they filed out of the bay one after the other, waiting until all shuttles were out before dropping towards the atmosphere. The groups were dropped at various starting locations near one or more dungeons and, once everyone was in place, a message was sent for them to start, putting thirty days on the clock.

Beth and Blood had been dropped, no coincidence, by the first dungeon they had discovered. Every dungeon on the planet was close to or at the point of overrunning, as a few teams had found out during the first thirty days to their detriment. The dungeon that was a stone door at the back of a cleft in the rock was close but hadn't overrun yet, giving them a good first target.

"We should try to clear this as fast as possible," Beth said.

"I just thought that was the plan?" Blood questioned in reply, raising one eyebrow.

"Yeah, but, like, total speed. We see if we can do this in less than two days, maybe even a day, and then immediately hit the next one on the list," Beth explained.

"Draining the extra mana with one team in less than two days? That'll be really tight," Blood replied, sighing as she realized she was in for a long thirty days.

"Not only do I think we can do it, I think we can go faster," Beth said with a nod, staring at the door.

"Fine, but we're not gonna be unsafe about it," Blood replied.

"We got a good amount of levels the last thirty days, we should be fine," Beth said with a slight eyeroll.

"Ten levels isn't that much," Blood grumbled, walking into the door with another sigh after Beth opened it.

The dungeon had orcs, and just orcs, as the enemy type, without any kind of variation in the orcs. It was a lot of tall, green-skinned, muscular brutes screaming and wielding primitive weapons. The good thing about it was that they weren't particularly skilled, nor did they have uniquely high defenses, allowing Beth and Blood to easily cut large swathes of them apart. They were now higher leveled than the last time they had tried the dungeon, and with their focus on speed, they finished the first run in under four hours. Beth was quite happy with that, but this was a level two hundred and forty dungeon on an untamed world that was just at the brink of overflowing. It would be a much different experience than the first dungeon they had to bleed excess mana from, and it wouldn't be a matter of five or six runs to get it stabilized.

Each run they made they got better and better, however, also being helped by the fact that they were fighting up-level and gained two levels over the course of the clears. Four hours turned out to just be their benchmark, but they were able to do better than that on subsequent runs, with their slowest being just under four hours and their fastest being right at three. Even given time to rest, they still did six runs the first day and were working on a seventh when the first twenty-four hours officially ticked over. The dungeon only got easier, and they also used their trick of sleeping in Beth's gate to further speed up their progress.

Speaking of Beth's gate, she had a chance to look at the new level during their downtime and found that it came with two new functions. Firstly, she could set the starting level of the enemies, a boon when they were trying to fight somewhat or very up-level and didn't want to spend an hour or more sprinting out from the gate to find enemies of the desired level. Secondly, the forge function had changed entirely; now, instead of a forge, the function led to an entire residence, with the forge being only a part of it. Whatever dimension or space it was connected to was also unique per user, as Beth's hope of finding something of Liveria's was dashed on finding the place empty of all but a couple very basic pieces of furniture. The good thing, they had found, was the space was a permanent area. They had stored some items inside and come back after closing and opening the gate to find them in the exact same condition before doing a live test with Blood, at her insistence. When Beth closed the gate and re-opened it a few minutes later, Blood was still alive and perfectly intact and had experienced the time passing at the dilated rate.

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The improvements to the gate were nice, but the time dilation still maxed out at ten times what objective reality was moving at. Even so, that let them get a full night of rest and downtime in the span of just under one hour on-world time, giving them a massive advantage. They were able to eat, sleep, clean up quickly, and resume their dungeon grinding after their seventh clear, having already started their eighth before retreating into the gate, in only fifty minutes. They did another six clears in record time before Blood said the gate was settled, her eye power at Gold rank able to make that determination. They decided to move on, targeting a dungeon that they had also discovered in the forest that was really close. Even so, Beth still broke out the airship to get them there just that much faster.

"It's really starting to feel like a race now," Blood said as she flew almost right towards the dungeon.

"And it didn't before?" Beth asked with a skeptical tone.

"No, well, yes, but this feeling of actually racing to somewhere really makes you realize it's a race, right?" Blood argued.

"I guess so," Beth replied with a shrug. "I'm just focused on maximizing our speed."

"You have such tunnel vision," Blood huffed. "We're definitely taking a break after this."

"That all depends on Mortaine," Beth said with a slight shake of her head.

"Just tell him we need a vacation. For a guy that loses track of what century it is, I'm sure he won't care," Blood argued.

"I'm sure Tera was just being a bit…exaggerated," Beth said, not that confident.

"Well, fine, whatever, but we're here now," Blood said, rolling her eyes as she landed the ship at their destination.

The next dungeon was in the heart of a little glade, surrounded by small hills and tall trees on every side. What they found when they broke through the undergrowth was worrying, as not only were there beasts around the dungeon entrance, but it was far too many. Having beasts leave a dungeon at a slow, steady rate was one of the several reasons there were so many beasts on many planets, but the numbers they were looking at now were way too high. In such a case, the beasts would build up over the course of a few days, or even a couple weeks, into a massive tide, one that would sweep outwards, devouring and destroying anything in its path. The number of beasts gathered outside this dungeon entrance already spanned into the low thousands, and they were spawning from the dungeon at a clearly visible rate, another worrying sign.

"We need to handle this fast," Beth said, getting only a grunt in response.

The two moved down into the teeming clearing, attracting the attention of hundreds of beasts as soon as they entered. For many others, that kind of pressure would have been terrifying, but it was something they were quite well used to by this point. The main kinds of opponent they would be facing were a type of giant rat beast, which made the whole thing that much more unpleasant. Like non-beast rats, they weren't shy about swarming around and overtop of each other, creating a nauseating wave of giant, angry, squealing bodies that tumbled toward the two girls. The only good thing was that the rats weren't particularly strong or tough individually, meaning that even with a huge wave of them, they were only a modestly strong opponent.

Beth had no problem resisting the onslaught, her Platinum-level skill letting her slam into the wave of rats and knock them back, surprising the not-so-little buggers, if their screeching was any indication. Blood was smarter than that, moving through and around the beasts with her incredible agility and maneuverability, dodging every bite and claw scratch as she tore open throats and severed spines. Beth was far more direct, firing out punches and kicks that broke rats apart, limbs and crushed heads flying in different directions from mangled bodies. As the swarm became less manageable as the entire clearing converged on her, she started adding Celestial Annihilation to her strikes, firing beams of celestial mana from her fists with annihilating properties that carved huge holes, both in the rats and their chaotic formation.

It took three hours, or just under, for them to clear the area around the dungeon entrance to a sufficient degree, meaning it was now day three of the second half of the competition. It was frustrating, but Beth knew they wouldn't be the only team encountering such a situation, and she hoped their speed at dungeons would make up for the delays they faced even entering some of them. They were in the rat dungeon without even stopping for a breather, finding the inside a dense and chaotic jungle full of...well, rats. It was a massive slog to get through, as the dungeon was very freeform, without a set path for them to follow from A to B to C. That meant they were left hunting the boss, which added unnecessary time, even if Blood was able to sniff the giant beast out. Still, every run being an open exploration versus something more streamlined meant they'd be wasting ten, fifteen, or hell, even thirty minutes a run to wandering around.

Even with the problems involved, the rat dungeon was only at level two hundred and twenty, meaning they were able to plow through it at a very rapid pace. Their first clear was a blistering two hours and fifty-five minutes, and they only got better from there. The one downside was the dungeon had way more mana to burn even than the orc dungeon, so they would need even more clears to work it back down to a normalized level. Beth didn't fail to note that they were really doing the drudge work for the United Stellar Hegemony in this half, clearing and prepping overrun dungeons to be at a manageable level. Still, a job was a job, and they would be getting paid rather handsomely for this one. Even if they couldn't score quite as impressively on this section of the competition, they were basically guaranteed a top five spot, and if they did even moderately well, they would be in contention for first place.

She put those thoughts to the back of her mind as they focused on the rat dungeon, running it time after time, Blood even forgoing complaining about their pace to try to push the clears faster. They held off as long as possible on their next long break, wanting to make every second count, pushing through the teeming hordes of rats over and over, including when they left the dungeon, as it was still pumping out beasts at a prodigious rate. That meant they were continuously fighting, in and out of the dungeon, which was much more the norm. The orc dungeon was rather unusual in that it didn't produce any beasts to wander around, but they hadn't found anything else about it that would explain that. The rat dungeon was much more normative, though that made clearing it a real pain, especially with the rats tending to be a bit weaker but more numerous.

It took nineteen clears to get through the excess mana on the rat dungeon, and that was just getting it back to what was considered a 'normal' level. At that level, it could still handle multiple teams delving it at once without burning up its mana, it just wasn't in danger of that extra few percent building up into a tide. It took a long time for that build-up to reach critical levels, but could easily happen on a planet such as this, where it was introduced to the Path at some point and had no sapient creatures to handle the dungeons. The dungeons would spawn and then build and build and build over time until they were too full, the mana starting to billow out in the form of dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of extra beasts. That was the makings of a tide, and what everyone wanted to avoid, even on a so-far uninhabited planet. A tide was always dangerous, as they had the chance of, instead of petering out, growing larger and stronger over time. At the least, that would make reclaiming a world that such a runaway tide was on a very tedious endeavor, but it could also get worse. Much worse.

Beth wasn't really concerned with that right now, as the ship in orbit was monitoring the planet, and alerts would be sent out for the formation of even a minor tide. Under such a circumstance, bonus points were up for grabs for any team that participated in breaking the tide, with more points possible than was available for some of the dungeons up for reclamation. If a tide happened, it happened, and they would respond…if it was close. Beth was a lot more concerned about their pace, having taken another two days to clear the rat dungeon, making it early on day five. Their next destination was a short hop in the airship away, though it would take a bit longer than the flight from the orc to the rat dungeon had taken. Blood piloted the ship while Beth prepared them both some food, and they ate at a point where Blood could point the nose in the right direction and let the autopilot feature handle everything.

They had cleaned up and were approaching the site when they got an alert, nobody working navigation or tactical meant the two girls just received the message directly. There was another ship at their current destination, hovering a hundred feet off the ground and some distance from the dungeon. It was clear the team that owned the ship was already in the dungeon, as an attempt to hail the ship received the equivalent of a voicemail. That left them with a decision to make, and time ticking on the clock.

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