Reporting back to the commander was something the whole team had to do, as they had to divvy up the rewards and loot. The commander had them gather in a large room, expressly for the purpose of having space to dump out their loot, and had them go over the delve. Bolt was very professional in his report, little surprise considering how well and efficiently he had run their little delve. The commander listened to everything, two aides there taking notes and writing detailed reports on their own clipboards as Bolt outlined the trip.

"Let's see this power cell," the commander said at the end, giving Bolt a nod.

The man made it appear from his storage item on the floor, the stone structure not giving at all under the enormous weight of the cube. The front plate still glowed a dim purple, highlighting everything in the already brightly lit room in a strange luster. Beth could quite literally feel the mana within the thing, enough that it pulsed outward like a low, continuous drone in the background of any room that it was in. She glanced over to see Sera with her eyes partially hooded, clearly enjoying the effects that just the power source being present brought about.

"Well, good," the commander said, eyeing the power cell with no little suspicion. "It's time we figured out total contributions and what everyone wants and what they can get."

"We had some high performers in the group," Bolt took the initiative to say, tilting his head at Beth and Sera.

"So it would seem," the commander said, giving a short, sharp nod. "Let's tally it, then."

The process was long, though not quite painfully so, and involved a standardized metric for figuring out how much each person had contributed. It was flexible enough it even included things like someone evolving a skill to solve a highly dangerous problem, slotting Beth right into a certain number of points and weight of score. Sera also received quite a bit of contribution for her help in figuring out how to disable the array and free the power cell, which not only retrieved that item, but waylaid future dangers by removing it from a decaying situation.

Even combined, they didn't have enough points that they could outright just take the power cell, but Beth was curious if they could bargain for it. The commander quoted them a price, twenty diamonds, and almost couldn't finish the word diamond before Sera had the coins out and ready. That let Blood exchange her contribution for the rest of the items they needed for Sera, which the team had gotten plenty of during their quick two days of delving. All in all, they came out very, very far ahead, but thinking about it logically, Beth had contributed a massive amount to the killing, let alone evolving a skill to handle the core problem the expedition was supposed to deal with. Sera knowing what was going on with the void magic and that it was safe to break certain parts of the array and remove the power source also contributed a great deal, and then to top it off, Beth had used her inhuman strength to pull the power source out and away from the array before it could go on the fritz.

"Good working with you," Bolt said to them afterward, exchanging contact details with everyone involved.

"Good job leading," Beth returned the compliment, going through all the handshaking and backslapping before their trio departed.

"What now?" Blood asked as they were finally back on their own.

"We should hit up the place for your item," Sera said. "We can then see if anybody's found anything for us."

"That's right," Beth confirmed. "I sent Mortaine a message and he said he could at least get some, if not maybe all, of my items, so we should find most of yours first. If we can harvest or buy everything for you two, Mortaine and Selene might have the rest of what I need."

"Sounds good," Blood nodded.

"It's going to be a lot of searching and probably spelunking," Sera warned.

"What?" Blood asked.

"We're going to have to go through a lot of caves, most likely, for your next stuff. Caves with blood and blood-related mana in them," Beth explained.

"Oh. Well, that's fine," Blood said, not really that bothered.

"Underground's tough," Sera said.

"Shouldn't be too much for us," Beth replied, frowning a bit.

"High concentration of special mana types can be unpredictable," Sera replied in warning, but Beth just shrugged.

"I think we can handle ourselves at this point," she said.

"I like that you're very confident, but don't become arrogant, dear one," Sera said, wrapping her long arms and much longer tail around Beth before showering the shorter woman in kisses.

"Oh, I like this," Beth said quietly, sinking back into Sera's embrace.

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"We're still outside," Blood reminded them, which made Beth start a bit but Sera just grinned, very toothily.

Despite their ability to fight for weeks on end without rest and do so in some very grueling conditions, the group didn't really want to stay on a frontier world like this any longer than they needed to. Beth had them in the ship in just a minute and Blood piloted them back to the capital, and only, city of the world in just a few hours. They disembarked with some alacrity and quickly made their way to the teleporter, which they used to start a series of jumps that saw them on their next destination; a world more towards the center of the galaxy and boasting a much more developed and thriving population.

It wasn't the first time they had visited a world much more developed than the others they usually schlepped about on, but Beth always found it a bit of a surprise, seeing the massive city with people no more than level twenty, and no rebirth, walking about without a care. Leaving that city by a gate that remained propped open practically year-round without ever closing and finding miles of farmland and business and even residences set up outside the walls. Even after that, finding logging camps and mines and other places, many worked by people of no rebirth or just on their first, people that would find even low-level beasts a real challenge, particularly without either the leveled skills or gear to handle them.

But that wasn't the way of these worlds, these manicured and tamed and safe places that practically only spawned beasts in designated locations and had highly controlled, highly managed dungeons, labyrinths, and pocket dimensions. There was still danger, of course, as there always was; one could walk out one's front door and get struck by lightning and not that much one could do about it, but these places didn't present the kind of barely controlled chaos of a frontier world. Or the mostly uncontrolled chaos of Earth as it was right now, still struggling to adapt and change, still losing a lot of people to beast attacks, to random dungeons and other odd areas, still having to contend with a fractious and contentious people now all suddenly with the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound and punch harder than an artillery shell.

And yet, despite how calm and tame everything here was, there was certainly still many dangers. The underground, in particular, was a place that always presented problems, on any world, as the core of a planet was always extremely mana rich and mana dense. That density had a tendency to drop off as one approached the surface, but even a couple hundred feet down, the density could vary wildly, including being far higher than the densest point on the surface. It was exactly this that the group was here for, as caverns and caves could have all kinds of crazy and weird things in them. In this case, there was a Domain of Blood, an area that had been influenced by a huge amount of blood mana within a huge cave system deep underground on this world.

Beth did have them stop off at a set of stores and grab a few more supplies, though they still had quite a bit from when they had done a little spelunking on Red II to go find the device that broke the sky. They had used very little of the equipment Megoria had dumped on them with barely a thought, and that combined with their usual supplies was more than enough to carry them through a very long expedition, never mind that Beth thought this would take them about two weeks. They did restock on food before heading out anywhere, filling up several of their storage spaces with pallet-loads of various food and drink including quite a lot of premade meals and restaurant food. Beth had the devious thought for a second of dumping a few pallets of food in the reliquary, if for nothing else than just to see the reaction of one of the empyreans getting a pallet of mac and cheese in their very fancy living room, but she opted not to tempt fate with that one. At least, not yet; she was sure she could come up with something much more devious and still relatively harmless to put in Liveria's bathroom or some such.

Packed, stacked, and loaded for bear, the three set out from the city heading north on foot. The world was cool in temperature, and it was the edge of winter to boot, with snow and sleet likely for the night. They couldn't use the airship right now as they were certainly on a settled world and Blood was, of course, still in her certification course. Luckily, the CRA offered those courses and well understood members' habits in running all over the place, including having urgent business come up from the CRA itself, and such courses relied heavily on self-study. Blood was in a bit of a bind with her course, though, because becoming a licensed pilot not only required time in the air, but she had to have qualified instructors with her for much of it, so all her time flying around frontier worlds didn't count for the one hundred hours that a CRA certificate required. Blood had, in fact, looked up the old regulations on Earth and found that general licenses hadn't usually included a specific number of hours, just a certified proficiency across a range of actions including landings and takeoffs.

The CRA was more serious in their process; air certification had a one-hundred-hour requirement for the pilot in flying with an instructor. That was nothing compared to the space certification, which required three hundred hours for the general license, and another requirement of a hundred hours of specialized training and flight for jump drive or warp drive operation. If Blood was intent on being fully, one hundred percent certified, she was looking at five hundred hours of training time for all the licenses. Beth and Sera would also likely get licenses at some point, at the very least the atmospheric license, and likely the space licenses too. It didn't really make sense for them to own an airship, and eventually a starship (hopefully), and have only a single person in the group able to fly them anywhere there were other people without getting in massive trouble.

Thinking about and discussing licenses had gotten them through the cultivated lands and now they were heading through the wilderness. When the Path had just come to Earth, a journey like this would have presented a lot of danger for Beth, even after a month or two and her having gotten quite a few levels. Now, however…she was level three hundred, with a sword that she still didn't even know the upper limits of, with two level three hundred companions, all of them having done True Perfect Rebirths for every rebirth and Beth having her Mana Physique. Anything on the surface of this world, or most any world that had been so thoroughly settled and the government had put so much effort into taming, wouldn't even be a joke to them.

Case in point, a level one hundred wolf tried to jump them about fifteen minutes out into the woods they were jogging through. Of course, their jog was at a pace much greater than pre-Path highway speeds had been on Earth, likely breaking a hundred miles an hour, making it a wonder the wolf had even been able to track them or try an attack. The three didn't even bother giving the stupid beast a glance, Sera slapping it out of the air and likely breaking almost every bone in its body with the light backhand. The wolf was most certainly dead, and it turned out to be the strongest creature that challenged them in any way as they made their way to the cave system, which was very clearly marked on the map, easily accessible by communicator. They killed a handful of other low-level and very weak beasts as they progressed, nothing even worth skinning or searching for a core, traveling for ten hours before reaching the destination. It was into the night at this point and snowing heavily, though there was only a little extra cold mana in the air, meaning their resistances didn't even come into play, and they were a little tired when they arrived at the area outside the caves.

They didn't go in right away, instead taking a bit to rest, Beth deploying the airship to act as the mobile base as she still didn't quite want to telegraph the gate power to the entire universe at large. It wasn't unusual, either, for somebody to have a ship that they used as a temporary base, though it was a bit more unusual for it to be a portable that they stashed in a spatial item. The three of them rested for a couple hours, making sure they were in top shape before their first delve into the caves. They were hunting the blood cores that were the last requirement for Blood to do her rebirth. After that, they had the void ruler hearts for Sera and then both of Beth's last items, the singularity cores and the space-aspected monster hearts. The blood cores would just take them some time, and hopefully nothing crazy, and the void ruler hearts were going to be tough but possibly doable for them. The space-aspected monster hearts likely weren't feasible, and Beth didn't even think about going for the singularity cores themselves.

It was still dark out when they were up and ready to go, Beth packing the ship back up before they headed down into the caves. The first section was a long series of tunnels that were narrow at parts, forcing Sera to carefully move through or even modify her height a bit, but they made it through that with a little effort. The next part was a chasm that extended down a few hundred feet, something that would have been a hell of a climb without the Path, but now something they could navigate with four or five good leaps. The bottom of that long chute already had some little bits of blood mana and signs of a changed environment, and the proceeding tunnels started to get thick with a cloying smell, a stench that permeated the place and had a tang of iron and the sting of copper when one breathed in through the mouth. It was a place that Beth wouldn't want to spend any large amount of time in, but it was something she would happily bear for Blood, and the wolf really appeared to be in her element, much like Sera was on the last world.

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