She was really lamenting the loss of her armor as she started on the grind, having a backup set of level two hundred armor that wasn't anywhere near as good as the epic armor that was all part of a set she had been using. She would have to try to acquire some as soon as they were done with this miserable, wet dirtball of a world, but she couldn't really do anything about that right now. She would ask the locals, but she doubted their smiths could do any better than the mismatched blues she was wearing right now. A rare set would only be a bit better, and she was doubtful anybody on this backwater world could make level two hundred epic armor, let alone epic set equipment.

It presented some danger, and losing the stat bonuses was a real bitch, her rare armor having much lesser bonuses, but she was tough enough with enough stats that she could still bull through. Her fights weren't about just surviving and killing everything, however, as she was going for weaponskill levels right now, and she was heavily focused on that. She was fighting individual orc-type beasts with her sword, concentrating on every swing and every movement. She needed training, practice, and focus to level right now, really paying attention to every movement she made, every parry, block, deflection, strike, cut, chop, and thrust important to pushing her skill to the next level.

Hours blurred together, but Beth didn't slow down, not stopping between fights for long stretches, simply dealing the killing stroke to one enemy and then teleporting right to the next. She did that for days of subjective time, fight after fight, until she was too mentally exhausted from the efforts to keep going. She would go back to near the gate, move her armor into her necklace, pop out a cot and fall on it still in her clothes and sleep. She would get up after a few hours, physically fully prepared if still maybe a bit tired mentally, have a mug of hunting spice with some redgold salt dashed in, and then head out, killing more and more orcs. She had to reset the gate a couple times to not get too far away from the center, but she mainly continued with that routine for weeks upon end.

Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks passed and she was still fighting. She didn't bother with checking her stats or stat screen, not wanting to poison herself with either overconfidence or under confidence. She didn't even bother to check for level-ups, as she didn't really care about the extra points from her free points per level. Going from forty-five hundred STR to forty-five hundred thirty STR would make basically no difference, particularly for what she was currently doing. A little more DEX would always be nice when talking about finesse and trying to more precisely control fine movements with a particular weapon type, but even that was very minimal. Another ten points of DEX or even twenty points of DEX wouldn't really make a major difference in how she was fighting or what she was trying to do.

She spent much of the time using her sword, though she used her fists and feet a little bit. She reserved that for the last couple weeks, spending the first seven or eight weeks on the sword. She spent the last two weeks or a little more just ditching the sword entirely, leaving it in her necklace as she used her body and powerful physicality to kill the orcs. She had always been better with her fists than the blade, though the difference wasn't enormous, but now she was pulling ahead a bit in Unarmed and she didn't mind pushing that. It would be more valuable for what she was doing now and in the nearer term to get one of her weaponskills as high as possible versus trying to keep bringing both up when she wasn't as good with one. Swords were still important, a valuable weapon and tool in her arsenal that combined well with her style and gave her additional range and power when needed, but getting her fists and feet to the level of Master would be a bigger near-term benefit.

It was almost eighty days of fighting, continuously battling enemies with weapons with much higher levels and much more toughness, before she was done, and only because she was pulled out of it by Baelvyr. He had come to grab them because the beasts had been stirred up and there were several opportunities for them to cull the beast population. Beth did suspect they were being used a bit as bait in that way, but she was happy to get the money, experience, and challenge, and possibly the chance to go after the plant monster a second time.

They were given two target locations to go after beasts this time, and both were on other continents, so it was more airship time. That gave Beth some time to rest while Blood flew, calming her mind as they made their way to the first location. She hadn't checked how far her insane leveling push had taken her, other than to distribute stat points, and she decided to do so now. She knew she had made at least one or two levels in her skills in those weeks, and she knew Sera had used the gate as well, though sticking to her own area, but she didn't know what their gains were.

Name

Elizabeth Anne Bell

Class

Crushing Hierophant

Level

230[5]

Strength

4660

Dexterity

2330

Endurance

3146

Intelligence

870

Wisdom

870

Free Points

0

Mana Physique

True Flame Mana Physique[Platinum]

Titles

Silver Flame Empress' Inheritor

Skills

Ancient World Gate[3]

Beastly Tyrant Platinum[5]

Blacksmithing Journeyman[1]

Celestial Annihilation Gold[4]

Corruption Resistance Gold[1]

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Elemental Resistance Gold[0]

Focused Meditation Silver[8]

FrostFlame Eye Gold[1]

Indomitable Heart Gold[4]

Lordly Reconstruction Gold[6]

Monstrous Blow Gold[4]

Pain Tolerance Gold[9]

Spatial Mana Detection Silver[9]

Spatial Obliteration Platinum[4]

Spatial Resistance Copper[9]

Spatial Step Gold[9]

Swift Gold[3]

Swords Expert[5]

Unarmed Expert[7]

Wealth

2o 22m 20d 68p 54g 88s 92c

Emblems

CRA Silver Emblem (300CP)

Bonds

Blood

She just couldn't help smiling as she looked at her stat page. Fighting beasts over level three hundred for hundreds upon hundreds of hours was certainly lucrative, with more than twenty diamond coins worth of earnings in that period. That totally paled in comparison to the serious gains she had made in that thousand-plus hours of battle, with her weaponskills both increasing another two levels. She had seen gains in other areas as well, including two levels in Lordly Reconstruction, as her battles had not been particularly safe. She would be so much better prepared for the monster now, though still being in Expert wasn't going to give her that much of an advantage, but pushing to Master was going to be a process of a ton of time and even more effort.

They approached the first area that they had to clear only to find it wasn't as simple as the previous times. Nothing to do with the monsters or the beasts, but more to do with a person who seemed to be fighting the entire tide on his own. Beth exchanged glances with the others, seeing the surprise and confusion mirrored in their eyes, before looking back at the man. He was holding a point at the edge of the tide of beasts and slowly whittling down their numbers, killing them as they were attracted by the sounds of battle and the scent of blood.

And slow was right, as he was only killing around a thousand a minute; in any other situation, that would have been a very impressive number, but this wasn't any other situation. Beth could kill that many of these lower-level beasts with a flick of her wrist, and Blood and Sera could kill that many in only a couple seconds, so nearly a minute for those numbers was, well, bad. Beth watched as the person slowly retreated, but continued killing and maiming the beasts as he steadily backed up. Everything that tried to get close to him would get injured in some way, and he would eventually cull all those injured beasts, but it was a slow process. It did let him stay in the fight for an extended period without sustaining any grievous injuries or tiring himself to the point of exhaustion, but by ten minutes of watching, Beth had seen enough.

"I don't know who that is, but quite frankly, he's bad. If we wait for him to do this, the monsters will have destroyed the world before this one tide is even cleared," Beth said, signaling for the other two to follow her.

"Yeah, he's not bad, but he's not incredible," Sera muttered, following her down to the cargo bay.

"He's slow," was Blood's only comment.

They jumped out of the cargo hold into combat, falling more than a hundred feet before crashing into the ground, throwing up clods of dirt, chunks of rock, and pieces of beast bodies by the dozen. Beth immediately cleared them a space with her sword and fists, slicing, obliterating, and annihilating a huge swathe of beasts around them. That gave the other two room to maneuver, and they fell into their standard rhythm quite quickly. The amount of disturbance they made was far more than what the other person was doing, and the beasts were soon focused on them, solely on them, going so far as to entirely ignore the other person. The fighting was a muddy, bloody affair, the rain that was often constant on the world never seeming to do much to wash away the dirt or grime.

They slaughtered the beasts as always, tearing through a million beasts in two hours, to the point it was just a few stragglers left when the person approached them. He was a tall human, or at least appeared fully human, with a rugged face and overall grizzled appearance. He had simple and rough armor that covered his vitals and gave moderate protection for his limbs, but Beth could tell it was not crafted by an especially skilled smith. If she had to guess, the man himself may have patched the armor together on his own, based on its piecemeal appearance.

"I appreciate the help, but you girls shouldn't be out here," was his opening line.

"Oh? Why's that?" asked Beth, crossing her arms over her chest as she looked at him. She noted he was just a bit taller than her, though that put him just under Blood's height and far less than Sera's human form. He had gray eyes, with dark blue pupils in the shape of a rune, one Beth thought represented sky, and long, dark brown hair that he had bound with a leather strap at the back of his head.

"This isn't your fight, it's mine. If those Heg bastards hadn't cracked the sky, we'd be in so much of a better situation, too. I don't know if you're with them, or with us, or somebody else, but I'm gonna clean up this mess," he said.

"Look, that's fine and everything, but we don't actually take orders from you," Beth said with a slight frown. "We're CRA members, here with two Senior Enforcers, and we're handling cleaning up this mess you've gotten yourselves into. You can complain all you want…to your superiors, but it's not gonna stop us."

He looked her over for a long moment, and she could feel the subtle shift in mana as he investigated her with his eye power, before responding. "You're rather powerful, but that doesn't mean I'll back down. You can't handle the monsters, and I don't appreciate you honing in on my fights."

"Again, I don't care," Beth said, shrugging. "We have targets, we'll kill those targets, the Seniors take out the monsters, we can get back to what we were doing, which is prepping for our Gold Emblems."

"You're not even Golds?" he asked with a slight note of scorn in his voice.

"Nope," Beth replied simply, just shrugging at him again. "Sera! Let's get this cleaned up!"

"Okay!" the dragon girl called over.

"You might want to stand back, uh, whatever your name is," Beth said.

"Delonne," he replied, giving her another hard look before turning and stomping off. Beth just shrugged, not really bothered by his slight attitude. If she remembered right, he was the one the commanders of the Republic had talked about, stating he had gone off on his own to fight a one-man war when the monster invasion had started. Looked like he was harboring more than one grudge, but like she had told him, it wasn't any of her concern.

Sera swooped in right after he cleared the area, though Beth could see him on a hilltop in the distance watching what they were trying to do. She ignored him after that, controlling the flames to burn hotter and in a larger area, aiding in getting the corpses taken care of in that interminable damp. The rain had basically let up, just a fine mist falling, but the heavy cloud cover wasn't going anywhere, making the whole process even more dreary. Beth could imagine how not just living on a world like that but having to deal with a monster invasion in such a depressing environment would make one lose their cool a bit, but she didn't care for the attitude she was getting because of it.

Shrugging again, she finished the last of their cleanup before calling the ship down, seeing Delonne had disappeared some time ago, not even appearing on scanners. She made sure the other two cleaned up before tracking mud and blood all over her pristine bridge, thinking she needed to get a cleaning kit for the leather seats at some point. Blood took the helm as they took off, piloting them towards the second location Baelvyr had told them to take care of. He was handling several locations himself at the same time while Megoria was hunting. The hope was, with the monsters having made some moves to replenish and inspire the beasts, they would be further aggravated by Beth's group and Baelvyr's actions, letting Megoria find them much easier. Beth was pretty sure Megoria could track the plant monster down easily, but it was likely they were leaving that alone not just to provide Beth a challenge, but as it could also make its partner monster more predictable.

The second fight the next morning was less eventful than the first, with nobody but Beth and her group there clearing things out, though Baelvyr or Megoria could always be somewhere nearby, unnoticed. Cleaning up this site took a bit longer, mainly because it was across a large series of rocky mounds and steep-sided valleys, causing Beth to have to put more effort into controlling the flames and scouring everything clean. The area also had a ton of water buildup, ponds and streams flowing in many places as the terrain was solid with a high water table that couldn't absorb any more water. That made scouring the place clean with fire even more demanding and annoying, just taking a lot of time to get through everything, or most of everything. It wasn't like they needed to burn every single corpse or anything, they just had to get through enough of them that there wasn't an air of rank death about the place.

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