Beth grabbed Sera and Blood and left the main building, taking them out to one of the buildings that was acting as temporary housing. They took the free time to get a hot shower and get cleaned up, Beth looking over their gear to make sure everything was in good shape. The two hours passed very quickly, the commander calling them to get to the main building and get ready. They found the other members of the expedition already assembled, excepting for one Enlightened that showed up right after them. Their group put the total numbers at twelve, with three Enlightened and nine Empowered, though Beth privately thought that most of the other Empowered weren't really that impressive.

She did quick scans of all the members and found that the Empowered were a mixed bag between rebirth five and nine, while the Enlightened were all fairly early, with two being rebirth eleven and one being rebirth thirteen. One of the rebirth eleven Enlightened was being put in charge, Beth not quite sure what led to him being the top of the pecking order. Based on her experiences, and her rather good senses, she wasn't seeing any of the signs that the other nine Empowered had built a Mana Physique yet. If that was true, it was likely she was the fourth strongest on the team, and she wouldn't give Sera or Blood bad odds of being more powerful than the other Empowered either.

The group was a real mixed bag, Beth took time to note, as they moved out of the camp and towards the rift. There were several humans, not surprising with them being one of the most widespread and plentiful peoples in the universe, several elves, two other sapient beasts, a troll, a dwarf, and one man that looked like he was made of stone and was noticeably taller and thicker than the others. Despite the general mix, there were no hostilities between the members, at least not openly, and several of them chatted as they moved out, even talking as they started killing their way towards the rift.

The group was, if anything, over-leveled and overprepared for the adventure they were setting out on. If there really wasn't anything down there above five rebirths, they were going to clear the area easily, and if there was anything stronger, well, Beth had aces up her sleeve, as she was sure others in the group did. The man who had been appointed leader looked calm and cool, ably guiding them to the rift through the hordes of monsters, though that was not a particularly challenging feat.

They arrived after about an hour of fighting, looking down into the gap, feeling the unusual mana sliding across their skin and brushing their reservoirs. It was such a high concentration that flickers and bits of discolored purple and black lumps would appear in the air for a time before winking out, the manifestation of void mana visible to the naked eye. Beth's vision showed her even more, the area showing pockets of extreme cold interspersed into the region, all of them containing ice and cold mana in abundance, a secondary, run-on effect of the void mana going out of control.

The rift was very clearly not natural, the ground having exploded outward with a great force at some point. There was rubble and debris strewn about, as well as the remains of trees and large plants, smashed or blown to bits during the initial blast, scattered across the ground for thousands of feet. It made the terrain difficult to navigate, though the stone man cleared that up rather handily, creating a wedge of solid rock he used as a ram to push through all the debris, and one of the Enlightened, the thirteen rebirth woman, put her hands to the back of the wedge and helped push, greatly speeding its progress. The rest of the team fought off the monsters, though fought off would be a bit of a misnomer, as they were just slaughtering weaklings still, without any powerful opponent showing up.

The wedge cleared the way quite ably, with the Enlightened helping push, and they were at the very edge of the rift in no time. The pit yawned wider and even more menacing up close, though Sera was entirely unbothered by it, reveling in the mana that leeched out, her large, golden and purple eyes half-lidded as she drank it in like fine wine. The rest of the group discussed the pit and the best way down for a moment, eventually concluding that one of the Enlightened would brave the thing first and see what was what down there. The woman who had pushed the plow and cleared their road down volunteered, not quite the strongest among them, but very powerful and easily able to cut her way through hordes of monsters alone.

The group watched her tackle the problem the most direct way possible, leaping into the center of the pit and falling into the depths, not displaying even an ounce of nervousness. It was a short period of waiting, then, as the woman fell into the depths and then explored about for a minute before calling back up. She informed the expedition leader, the man going by the name Bolt, which Beth suspected was a nickname or some type of codename, who relayed that the pit extended over three hundred feet before it bottomed out in a large cavern. The area was absolutely swarming with an ungodly number of monsters, the better hearing of the group able to detect the woman, Ash, fighting even from their height.

"Anybody can't just jump it?" asked Bolt.

"I can't," the stone man said. "But I can move through the earth, meeting you down there."

"Then the rest of us are off," he ordered waiting a moment for everyone, including the stone man, to start moving before he flung himself into the pit.

Sera led the way for their trio, the large dragon woman having the toughness that not only the fall, but any attacks she might sustain along the way would be little more than a tickle. Beth and Blood followed just behind her, plunging into the depths with barely a blink, Beth especially used to falling from high places at this point. They hit the ground with a solid thump, popping up and getting to fighting right away. The area down here was where all the monsters were spawning from and it was totally overrun, the group having to wade through thousands of the beings just to get to an edge of the cavern. Sera and Blood easily carved a path to the wall to join up with the others while Beth moved slowly behind them, firing off skills and lashing out with her sword to clear large numbers of the monsters from the center of the cavern.

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Once they had gotten a position at the edge of the cavern, they circled around until they found a tunnel from which the monsters were boiling up. The idea was that they weren't going to be able to sit and kill everything, as that would take days, or even weeks, and they just didn't have that kind of time. That was also assuming that things weren't getting any worse or didn't progress any further, which they had no guarantee of at all, so they determined to keep moving and just deal with constant fighting. If it got to be too much, which Beth was silently critical of but kept her peace, they would retreat back to the fort and report what they had found so far. Beth didn't foresee this happening, considering the amount of heavy hitters they had and the low level of enemies.

The Enlightened took over the leadership, pushing ahead, though not fast enough that the Empowered couldn't keep up. Beth struggled the least of anyone, all but confirming her theory that she was the only one, apart from those three Enlightened, that had built her Mana Physique. She took a rearguard position, easily holding off the waves of monsters that tried to pursue them down from the cavern. Theirs wasn't the only path down, which meant they were constantly being attacked from the rear as there were other paths that led up into the cavern, monsters taking those and then following their trail of destruction back down. Beth was easily able to kill the level one hundred to two hundred monsters that made up the bulk of what attacked them, keeping the path back clear with little effort.

It was hours and hours of tedious movement forward, the whole group participating in the fighting at times, sometimes taking pauses to gather from the corpses, sometimes to just burn sections of them away. The problems would only become even worse if they left mountains of corpses in a mana rich environment; that kind of thing could lead to something much, much scarier than a few little void monsters and some mana corruption. It was at times like that the group was glad for both Sera and the stone man being on hand, as she burned the bodies with just a breath and the stone man buried the ash and small remnants that were leftover.

Hours more passed and the party made their way deep, deep underground. The fighting didn't slow them down one bit, only their short breaks to loot and clean up causing their pace to drop. They eventually reached an area that leveled out and, just shortly after that, an area of worked stone and shaped corridors. The monsters were thick as old molasses in winter down here, clogging the hallways and clawing their way over each other to attack the party. There were also monsters with a rebirth, or two or three, in this area, which slowed the team just a bit. The monsters still weren't really a challenge, but the increased toughness meant that it would sometimes take some of the others a few hits to kill them.

The Enlightened, and Beth, still had plenty of mana, letting the party stop and rest for a little while the four of them defended the group. After a short break, in which a number of potions and pills were consumed by the rest of their number, they were moving again. This time, they were following the third Enlightened, a man that had a very high-level tracking skill that could help him find unusual things, including unusual mana sources, within a very large distance of himself. He led them unerringly forward, taking turns and moving down hallways without stopping or slowing at all, quite sure in their destination.

As they moved, they found the halls becoming more detailed, moving from carved rock to bricks and pavers. There were old light fixtures scattered down the length of the halls, and doors started to appear, doorways and entrances to rooms and side areas that all needed checked and noted. They were more concerned with the source of the problem than with leaving enemies at their backs, obviously, as they were constantly and continuously attacked as they were in the ancient facility. The whole place was so worn down that some of the aforementioned light fixtures had rusted and decayed to little more than chunks of dusty metal.

"Some of the foundations are cracking," said the stone man. "This place is so old that the cement and binders they used when they built it are breaking down."

"A lot of the hallways are in rough shape," said the dwarf of the group. "A lot of this stonework is old and solidly done, but it hasn't been maintained in far too many years. Lot of this place is falling apart."

"Just be careful," Bolt said. "We don't want this place coming down on our heads."

"Understood," most of the team replied, others just giving nods.

Continuing down further into the structure, they found some remnants of civilization, broken bits of furniture here and there, little pieces of cutlery and tableware scattered about, as well as tattered fragments of scrolls and books. Nothing was salvageable, with anything the expedition touched just falling apart into dust, crumbling away at even a breath. They left the bits and pieces lay where they were, moving towards the heart of the ancient complex. Beth noted that the place did have windows, meaning that it was not always buried deep under the earth. Considering that, she was rather surprised it was in as good of shape as it was, with only one or two passages collapsed out of all the places they passed through.

The dwarf in the party explained that it was due to the fact that the stone used in the place's construction was very mana rich. On top of that, skilled masons had built the whole place, infusing more mana and magic into the construction. Enchanters had, of course, come along afterwards and reinforced everything, shoring up any small weaknesses and add durability and repair to every brick and flagstone. The magic was old enough that even that was starting to fade, but it had done its job admirably over the many long millennia the building had been abandoned.

When they approached the core, the mana in the air was so thick it was practically liquid. Several of the party members used enchanted items to absorb that mana, something that was normally a rather slow process, but they could fill containers with the rare mana type in just a few minutes in this density. Beth wished she had thought to stock up on a few more consumables of that kind and made a note to grab some extra stuff that would be useful in such situations in the future. She did observe some interesting changes in the space around them, as well, with areas that were a little different. It was hard to explain, but she noticed things that she hadn't seen before, likely noticing some of it from the increases in her skills thanks to the cube they had used in acquiring the reliquary.

"Space is weird here," she said at a pause, others covering the rear for a moment.

"How so?" asked Bolt, turning from the front to speak with her.

"I have Spatial Mana Detection and it sees weird twists in space here. I would expect that from what I'm seeing, there's a rent in space, like an unstable portal, down here," Beth said.

"Well, we were expecting an anomaly, and it's something to do with a power source left here that went on the fritz," Bolt said. "Let's keep heading in, but everyone stay alert. Enough power to rip open an unstable portal is enough power to fry just about anyone below Ascended."

Everyone nodded in agreement or signaled their understanding before moving out again. It wasn't much longer before they were in the heart of the old complex, a series of large rooms that contained far more than anything they had passed so far. Old furniture, scraps of paper and notes that were crumbling before their very eyes, workbenches and ancient consoles, as well as several storage spaces and containers, most of which contained nothing but dust, dirt, and broken pieces of who-even-knew-what. The team made their way to the center of the complex, finding a large, open room with a big platform in the middle, with two steps leading up to the platform on each side. There was a rent in space over the center of the platform from which strange and twisted beings poured like a purple and black rain of malformed death.

"That's not good," said Bolt eloquently.

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