"What's up, boss?" Beth asked him as she walked over, just having finished the last of the fire.

"I figured it'd be ya lot," he grunted, looking around. "Ya killed a lot here?"

"It was something like three million," Sera answered.

"Yeah, figured," Baelvyr grunted. "Ya gotta be careful 'bout that, but ya took care of it well enough. I gotta go report on some stuff to the brass, as they say. The three of ya should take a quick break. Get a couple hours sleep. Then I got some stuff for ya to take care of."

"Well, I'm not really that tired, but I guess we can chill for a little. Is there somewhere we're supposed to be?" Beth asked.

"I don't rightly give a damn, just pick somewhere. Ya can use Megoria's ship, if'n ya want, or wherever," he replied with a shrug.

"My gate has a rest area," Beth said, which got a raised eyebrow from him but no more.

"Stronger'n I thought. But it ain't that secure, if'n I remember. Ya can't close it when yer in it, right?" he said.

"Yeah, sure, but I'm not that worried," Beth said.

"There are monsters here, girlie. Gotta pay more attention," he grunted.

"Yeah, right, guess we'll go to Megoria's ship then," Beth said.

"Yes, for some reason, I don't feel entirely safe around the people of this world," Sera added off-handedly.

"Can't imagine why," Blood said, having returned from her scouting during the fire after Baelvyr showed up.

"Let's go. Is Megoria still parked in the same place?" Beth asked.

"Yeah, she is, just make sure to signal it's ya lot," he said. "Don't want to sneak up on her. Ain't good things gonna happen."

"Is she just waiting in her ship?" Beth asked with a slight frown.

"Naw, she's doin' some work, but trackin' monsters is hard. Even if she ain't there, she can let ya in remotely," Baelvyr said before starting to head off. "I got other shit goin'. I'll see ya girlies later."

"Right. Have fun," Beth said, turning to the other two before wrinkling her nose a bit. "Don't want to go to her ship like this. Let's cheat for a second."

"What do you have in mind?" Sera asked.

"Let's just use the gate for a quick minute, literally, to get showered," Beth said.

"I'll stand guard," Blood tried, but Beth wasn't having it.

"Nah, come on, it'll be quick," she said as the gate rose from the ground.

They did just as Beth suggested, and nothing happened in the end, no monsters bursting through the gate in the few objective minutes they took to wash and clean up. They left the gate and headed back out into the rain, which meant they were also back out in the mud. Luckily, though they had bathed and changed their clothes, they hadn't cleaned their armor yet. They were definitely going to have to spend some time hosing it off and soon, as they didn't want the mud, blood, and dirt to start deteriorating parts of the equipment.

Megoria's ship was still parked in the same muddy field that they had landed in several days before, and the three approached it cautiously, though it was unnecessary. Nothing blasted them from the ship as they got close, and nothing moved to interfere with them, the ramp coming down and the door opening as they got close. They put their armor in their storage spaces when they were in the airlock, heading into the main corridor of the ship afterward. Megoria wasn't around, but they had two cabins that she had given them to make use of during their time onboard and they used them now for their rest.

They got up the next day and took some time to get their gear cleaned off, a daunting prospect, considering the amount of mud and blood it was coated in. After they had cleaned up as best as they possibly could, Beth looked around to see if Megoria was onboard, but the woman was either absent or ignoring them. With nothing else to do, they decided to head out and talk to someone in the command structure, getting new targets to hunt. Their work had already helped push back the beasts by more than a bit, and now they wanted somewhere even heavier to get into a big fight. Well, Beth was itching for more battle, Sera liked to fight, and Blood just went along for the ride much of the time.

Beth led them back to the place they had met with the weird asshole that had tried to suppress them with his power, hoping to find someone in charge. They had to go through several verification checks, which did amuse Beth, as she wasn't sure how these people who disliked the CRA would distinguish if their emblems were fake. Eventually, they were let through into a room with someone, thankfully not the power-tripping asshole, that had enough authority to assign them targets. It was, very thankfully, a brief conversation, and then they had new targets, including a massive force on another continent that was basically entirely uncontested.

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Beth knew just the solution for that, including how to get there. They went back to the field where Megoria was parked before deploying their ship, not wanting to do it around the two factions on the planet. None of their interactions so far, or anything they had seen or heard, had given them great confidence in those factions, and Beth wanted to reveal as little as possible as well as give them as little temptation as possible. This was yet another world where Blood still not having completed her license certification for piloting didn't matter; who was going to stop her? She took over control of the ship right away and set the course, staying in the chair even though they could have used the autopilot.

Their ship was fast, but not that fast, especially not compared to Megoria's, which had given Beth a new goal for saving wealth. The ability to fly to any planet they wanted, and to fly around that planet, hell, that solar system at an appreciable speed, was something she now really wanted. That would be far in the future, however, as even a cheap, and rather crummy, starship was many adamantine coins. Even with all their wealth, they weren't even a percent to that kind of money, and they would still need tons of money for all kinds of other things, including their ever more expensive True Rebirth materials.

It was a day of flying, all of it with Blood in the hot seat, for them to get close to their target destination. They could see groups of beasts in long lines and clumps as they approached, stragglers from the massive beast tide or individuals clumping up as they tried to join the tide. Beasts would normally be more confrontational, even in a tide situation, but these were being either directly or indirectly influenced by the monsters, which changed their behavioral patterns quite significantly.

This was a time where the ship's ability to fly and manage itself was key, despite how much it annoyed Blood, as they made a flying entry to the tide. They left the ship to hover and maneuver in the air, dealing with the relatively small number of flying beasts that were part of the tide. The three girls plummeted to the ground, slamming into the very heart of the enormous tide, killing even as they entered the battle. They opened a small clear area, enough to allow Blood to start moving quickly, killing around them in a storm. Sera stood her ground, slowly moving forward with her spear, striking multiple times a second, almost every thrust killing a beast. Beth mixed up her skills, using her sword, her fists, Celestial Annihilation, and Spatial Obliteration to kill enemies by the truckload. She was an absolute machine, far surpassing the other two, and with the kind of stamina and mana pool that let her kill for hours on end without tiring even a bit.

As usual, the beasts were disturbed by their entrance, and more so by their slaughter, focusing on the girls. The whole tide halted as the beasts tried to collapse on them, but there simply wasn't enough room, meaning the entire tide was stopped around them. That wouldn't be a problem for all that long, as the rate at which they were killing was really phenomenal. Beth alone was killing hundreds of beasts per second at her best, and even Sera could kill a couple dozen a second, and that was the kind of pace they could keep up for endless hours.

And endless hours were what this tide would be taking them to clear, as there were many, many millions of beasts for them to kill. Maybe because of the mana density, maybe because they hadn't had anyone or anything fighting against them, but this concentration of beasts was fairly low-level overall. That made it both easier and more tedious, as slaughtering level one hundred twenty beasts was not difficult or even time consuming, but it wasn't challenging or rewarding, either. Beth was starting to understand what the work of the CRA would often be like, even after making fun of Baelvyr for hanging around and doing nothing, but it was now she could see how tedious it was for Senior Enforcers. Tasks like this would take a ton of time and offer very few rewards, but the Gold Missions from the CRA would be rather rewarding, allowing them to get Gold Emblems and more points. The points would be far more valuable at Gold and beyond, as they would be exchanging for both good materials and even could use points to get certain postings or jobs.

Hours and hours and hours of fighting had thinned the tide a bit and Beth had them move quite a distance, as they were getting bogged down. Even though they had already been mobile a bit, they were still overwhelmed by the piles of corpses and body parts. The cleanup for this was going to be just as big a pain in the ass, even with both Beth and Sera working together, as they would have miles upon miles of corpses to clean up. Beth didn't want to think about that now, as she ordered the group to move further out and keep killing. The ship followed them overhead, staying locked to their position through locating against their communicators.

When the tide was really starting to clear up, there was a change, whether it was something Beth sensed in the air, or something she sensed directly, she knew as soon as it started. There was no confusion or surprise as things started to transition, rather, she was able to directly and immediately warn Sera and Blood. It would have been a danger if their team had been weaker, and the warning would have been incredible, but the sudden change hadn't truly presented them with a threat. The beasts had suddenly increased in strength and ferocity, but Beth found the increase a little lackluster, for lack of a better term. Another team might have been overwhelmed by that sudden outburst, but the three of them hadn't been anywhere close to struggling before the beasts' power increased.

Beth wasn't sure how she had sensed what was happening, as it happened, but she knew that it was likely something the others were missing. That narrowed it down by quite a lot, as her Mana Physique was the only thing that truly set her apart from Sera and Blood. That had her thinking about a few things, and she started trying to use her Physique as she was fighting. She was trying to find that resonance, to isolate exactly what it was that she had sensed and how she had sensed it.

There was something there, some connection to mana and the way it moved that she hadn't truly been aware of, even observing her Mana Physique after she had made it. She focused on that connection as she continued the slaughter, not bothered by the increased strength and rage displayed by all the beasts. There was something fleeting, something just on the edge of her mind, something that she could very vaguely sense. It gave her a sense of a direction and spoke to her of a danger that was far greater than anything else she had encountered on this world.

"Sera! Stay in the center and cover. I've got something I've gotta look into!" Beth said, moving towards the source of the feeling she had sensed, finally having locked onto it.

"Beth?!" Sera called out.

"It's fine! Just keep killing!" Beth called back with a laugh as she shot off towards the north.

Beth started wading through the tide at a prodigious rate, slaughtering tens of thousands of beasts as she moved towards what she had sensed. Eventually she broke out of the tide, her speed so great that the tide wasn't able to stay solidified around her, finding open area with few beasts before her. She still sensed whatever it was some distance off and engaged her fastest speed possible, sprinting towards the source while also using Spatial Step to further boost the rate she was covering ground. It still took her dozens of minutes to arrive at the location, the place where she sensed whatever it was that was different, though it wasn't apparently obvious what she had sensed.

It was as she was looking around and investigating the area that she got a sudden, powerful sense of danger, so great that it was like alarms were blaring deep within her brain out of nowhere. She moved, and fast, leaping back and using Spatial Step to disappear, reappearing at a place quite far away, as her Spatial Step allowed her to cover a very great distance now. She could step as much as a mile at once, though she very rarely used it for that, as she was always within tightly focused combat situations where she needed to go from one place to a place that was just a handful of feet away. She looked at where she had come from as she readied to use the skill again, her pupils dilating a bit as she observed what had nearly happened to her.

A massive cluster of huge vines had thrust from the ground, both where she had been standing and the several places she had stepped before she teleported. She saw that the vines were very thick and strong, and she could sense an extremely powerful mana emanating from each of the dozens of vines. If those had hit her, it wouldn't have exactly been fatal, but it would have done her a lot of damage and put her in a very bad situation. She still didn't see what, or who, had attacked her with such a powerful skill, but she could still sense something in the surroundings. She had narrowed it down to a small grove of trees off to her right and a few hundred yards away. Rather than allow something else to attack her again, she took the initiative, using Celestial Annihilation to fire out a dozen thin, powerful beams through the grove, hoping to blast whatever was inside and at least get it to move.

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