Hammering away at their ninth rebirth took a lot of time, though they were a lot faster than many that had to make the same slog, especially those choosing to go to max level. The bigger issue, though it did give them a lot of time where they didn't have to worry about gaining yet another level. Enlightened was feeling closer and closer, which didn't have Beth particularly excited, but she did have a Mana Physique already. It was a much bigger deal for the others, at least apart from Adam and Val, who also had made their Mana Physiques early, and the rest of the group was greatly looking forward to the major increase in power. For Beth, Enlightened was a bit more of a headache, as that meant going and meeting Sera's family, as well as possible officially getting engaged, which did have her stomach in knots just a bit, though she was trying not to think about it.

More importantly was that they weren't even close the big goal they had at this point by a long shot, that being not just Ascended, but getting to the peak of Ascended, and doing that fast. The biggest decision they would have to make would be if they would stick with the pattern of True Rebirths or if they would be willing to accept some Perfect rebirths along the way to keep themselves moving. Beth was just waiting to see what the quest requirements were when they got to Enlightened; the quests didn't get any easier as one went, and the Enlightened quests were a good sign of how things were going to go from that point forward. The thing they needed to work on now was their ninth rebirth quest, but that was still just gathering rare and powerful materials and ingredients for their rebirths. Beth expected that might change for them, at least some of them, at the next rebirth, but that was still a while away.

Something that Beth did want to work on a little, and the downtime of having to wait and search for rebirth materials gave them a good opportunity, was CRA missions. They didn't have to do any of them right now, but there were several reasons for them to keep working on them, especially Gold missions. Firstly, Beth wanted to keep the contact network they had started to grow polished, as the saying went, and to keep expanding it. Secondly, it absolutely wouldn't hurt them to build up Contribution Points, as that was a currency used much more often at higher ranks in the CRA for the exchange of goods. They had over a thousand points each right now, but that wasn't really all that much. Gold mission usually gave a hundred points while Platinum missions gave two hundred and fifty points. Beth and her group would have to wait a little while before they could access any Platinum missions, however, as they could only do that as part of the rank-up requirements for hitting Platinum. They had to have a certain amount of time at Gold and a certain number of missions and jobs done at that rank before they could start trying to get Platinum.

Still, the rewards were worth it, including rare items that were obtainable elsewhere, but the CRA had vast stores of those items. Dungeon spikes were just one example; they were rather expensive and often hard to find on the market, at least for regular people, but the CRA had vast supplies that could be bought with points. Beth could get spikes through a number of channels, so maybe not the best example, but it was all in that kind of vein; goods that were rare and valuable, though not impossible to find, that could be bought with Contribution Points instead of money. The exchange rate was usually rather good for the rarer items as well, which was another reason to make sure to always have a large supply of Contribution Points on hand. Running the missions would also get them out of the place and seeing new and exciting places, as well as giving them more opportunities to encounter something fortunate, so Beth considered it a win all around. They were at the point where sourcing all the supplies for a True Rebirth might take eighteen months, depending on how lucky they were and their budget, so they definitely had plenty of time to spare, time where they were stuck at max level.

The biggest thing Beth was after were kill quests as, even though they were stuck at their current max level, it was the kind of work her team excelled at. Not only that, just because they were stuck in terms of level, that didn't mean that their skills couldn't advance at all. Beth was pushing everyone to work on their weapon skills as much as they could stand, which included getting everybody up to Master as soon as they could. Sera had recently managed to accomplish this, meaning that Val and Kris were now the only two still in Expert, though Val was a good bit ahead of Kris, being at the peak of Expert. If they two keep pushing for another couple years, they would likely be able to push over the barrier and hit Master. Master was not a huge dividing line really, as anyone with even a bit of skill with a weapon and the time and dedication could reach that eventually. It was pushing into Grandmaster that was the real dividing line, and it made Veren all the more impressive to Beth. He was still quite young, and he was not only a Grandmaster, he had likely advanced several stages through Grandmaster since they last saw him. It didn't make him all-powerful or anything like that, but very few people that were close to them in age would be able to put up a good fight against him if he really got serious. If he managed to make it to Sage within a decade or so, well…the only people who could challenge him would be people with a lot of seniority on their group.

Something else that Beth was keeping in her head, along with the other million things, was that she should be focusing on pushing her spatial skills to the max. She did have a bit of natural talent for them, and she had started practicing with Spatial Step and Spatial Domain quite often, even though the domain skill was still behind. Using the two of them together gave her an unprecedented level of control, not to mention combining them increased the power of the step skill pretty significantly. She was constantly using Spatial Step for everything, whether it was walking to the kitchen to get a drink or walking to the bathroom to take a piss, she was stepping there, sometimes directly, sometimes using tons of rapid micro-steps along the way. She was even doing manipulations like starting out standing and ending up sitting down with her legs on the table and her arms on the back of the couch, or teleporting herself into the tub naked, having stepped out of her clothes when she teleported. She did usually wear some kind of clothes around to practice with, and because she still preferred it a bit when the boys were around, but Val and Blood clearly didn't share her bit of hesitance, and it was a coin flip on how dressed Sera would be from day-to-day.

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They were also traveling around now, so they were keeping a bit tighter rein on things than what they would when they were home, though having access to the residential zone of Beth's gate meant that a version of home always traveled with her. Then again, the house was still stacked full of parts and pieces from the dreadnought they had taken apart, including even rooms of the house having gears and circuit boards and wiring and bolts and window frames and so on laying about. Maneuvering around in the residential area of the gate could be a bit tricky right now, and Beth was checking in with Selene almost weekly at this point to see how the parts were selling. The greater demoness had a lot of patience with her about it, but Beth could tell she was starting to drive the Exalted up the wall a little with her constant check-ins. Then again, Selene wasn't having to climb over bulkhead doors to get to her kitchen, so Beth thought she could handle a little bit of excess messaging here and there.

Their first stop on their mission to, well, do more missions involved a contact they had made a few years ago as they were trying to clear for Gold. They went to a planet that was still actively being settled, one that was beyond just the scouting phase, but people were still moving there and trying to clear the place out. There were only a handful of heavily fortified cities, two of them constructed much more like war forts than like cities, and one built to be the planetary capital that was nicer but had crazy defenses around it. The mission was out of said capital and involved clearing an area of a small monster infestation and, as always with monsters, what was a small infestation today could be a calamity tomorrow. The beings were some weird kind of chimera things that were an amalgam of various lion, snake, eagle, goat, and ox parts, not entirely consistent in their strangeness. One might have the body of a lion and the head of a goat, one might have the body of an ox and the head of an eagle, and so on. Some of them walked on two legs, some on four, and many of them had more than one head and more than one tail. It was a little odd to see some of the combinations that rampant, corrupted mana had come up with, but such things always produced oddities.

Beth and the team were pushed hard on this one, as the monsters were not some weak pushovers as the last few they had tackled. By the end of the second day, Beth was dreaming of the Pit where they had killed the two minor wraiths or ghosts and done so easily. Compared to that, these chimeras had super tough bodies and a pretty insane regeneration factor. It was strong enough that lopping off a head wasn't always enough to take care of the monster, especially on the ones that had more than one head, but even some of the single-headed ones needed some more killing after their head had been cut off. It was the kind of fight that became really draining for most teams after a while, but Beth's team largely had stats that were on par with Enlightened, many of them had Master-level weapon skills, and several of them had Mana Physiques. Fighting with monsters between six and eleven rebirths was a major challenge, but it wasn't a critical danger.

The thing that was a critical danger was that they couldn't kill the damn things fast enough, and that went both for their speed in hacking them up as well as how quickly they were killing them. Spending a long time hacking through a monster meant they would get attacked by more, to the point where they could sometimes be fighting three chimeras each at a time, and they were slow enough in clearing them overall that more kept being created. The real issue was they needed to somehow correct the corruption in the area, which might not be particularly hard to do, if they were free to try to do it, but the chimeras made even investigating what was happening a nigh-impossible task. They eventually had to retreat for half a day to rest and tend their injuries while coming up with a new gameplan, though Beth could only really think about defending one person who could work on the source or calling in somebody for help. Since the team didn't like the idea of running to somebody else to handle a mission they thought they could handle, they decided to go with a slightly different tactic. There was no law against using some heavier firepower, and they didn't really need the experience, so they deployed the airship to give them a bit of an edge in firepower. They couldn't use the cruiser, which is what Beth really wanted to do, as they hadn't flown it over to this world but had teleported there through the CRA network.

With Blood flying the airship and using it to pound the creatures from the air, they had a better time on their second foray into the monster nest. They were able to get enough breathing room that Beth could find the corruption source, though it was only really random luck that had her stumble into a cave with a whole bunch of animal and beast corpses that had been mangled together and seemingly cursed. The mana density in the area was also through the roof, almost literally, and that had all looped back on itself to cause the spawning of, and even some of the leveling of, the monsters. Beth and her team were able to take care of the problem after that, and rather easily, though it really involved Sera and Beth, as Beth acted like a homing beacon, standing so Sera could breath huge amounts of dragonfire into the cave from the air in her dragon form. Beth took that fire and manipulated it with her Mana Physique and spatial magics, making the corrupted cave into an inferno of fire, a furnace that purged all that was unclean within.

After taking care of the source, they were far from done. There were plenty of monsters for them to kill still, including chasing down several that had attempted to leave the area and start dominating some of the surrounding beasts. That was a recipe for a monster-caused Tide, which was sometimes referred to as a Corrupted Tide, and that was really bad news. Beth, Sera, and Blood had had plenty of experience with that kind of shit thanks to Baelvyr taking them on the mission to the world with the monsters. Beth still remembered the hit she had taken from that forty-plus rebirth monster that was trying to toy with her before Baelvyr taught it what a real hit should feel like.

Rubbing at her chest after they were sure all the monsters were dead, she went back into the furnace she had created with the help of Sera's fire to check that everything was cleaned up. The cave itself had been purified, but she noticed something deeper within that she investigated. There was a cleft at the back of the cave that had a glow coming from within and, looking in, she saw a long tunnel leading downward. Heat blasted her when she slid into the narrow passage, but her Mana Physique meant it just felt a little warm; she would sweat shuffling down the tunnel, but it wasn't anything that would injure her. She pushed forward for a minute, maybe two minutes total, before she popped out in a room that was almost directly under the cave where she and Sera had turned it into a furnace. The room was small, not quite as big as the bathroom in the suite they usually rented, and had only a single thing within. At the center of the room was a little jut of rock that had a small, brightly glowing crystal sitting atop it, one which glowed with a bright red and golden light. Beth examined it to check what she had just found, her eyes widening as she saw what their power revealed.

Dominion of True Fire

{This crystal is a one-time use item that teaches the skill Dominion of True Fire. The skill gives the user a domain around them where they can manipulate and perfectly merge all fire, allowing them total control over fire. No flame can rebel against true dominion.}

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