Beth pocketed the skill crystal, throwing it in her necklace before starting to make her way back out of the little cave through the cramped tunnel. She had to say, the grating noise of her armor scraping along the rock walls was not at all pleasant to listen to, but punching through the stone would be just as loud, take far longer, and make a mess. Not to mention that it could bring the whole cave down on her head, which would not be pleasant. She was able to Spatial Step out once she was partway back, as she was able to step straight back through the end of the tunnel into the cave.

"You alright?" Sera asked, sticking her head in the larger cavern they had turned into a furnace.

"Found something nice," Beth said, waving her hand to indicate they should leave.

The group finished cleaning up after their hunt, Beth not even using her looting power on the monsters because they didn't want to leave anything of them behind. Harvesting materials from them, especially the cores, was more than fine, but they weren't going to leave pieces of the monsters laying around. They gathered everything up, including even patches of grass and bushes that had a lot of blood on them and burned it all. Beth waited until they were done with everything before showing the others the skill, but she was able to grab and manipulate Sera's fire just fine even without the new skill. They finished after about four hours of intensive work and were ready to head back to the city. Blood, conveniently enough, had continued piloting the airship on overwatch and hadn't gotten dirty and bloody, but the one good part of that was that she was able to start immediately flying them back to the city without needing any cleanup.

Back in the city, and clean, they turned the mission in before they did anything else. It was one of those rare missions that counted for multiple people, given the difficulty of the mission and the amount of time and effort that was estimated for completion. The entire team got credit for a Gold-level mission, which was quite valuable considering the amount of points that the CRA had to distribute to the team collectively. They filed all the reports and checked for new Gold missions, of which there were none, before retiring to a suite to rest for the night. Beth introduced the team to the real prize of the mission after they were secure for the night, with food and alcohol to boot.

"Check this," Beth said, tossing the crystal out onto the central table. There was a quite moment as the entire group scanned the crystal, Beth watching as several pairs of eyes went wide and mouths dropped open.

"Where the hell did you get your hands on this?!" Val exclaimed, staring at the crystal in genuine shock.

"Found it after we finished cleaning up the monsters," Beth replied with a casual shrug.

"Shut the fuck up," Val replied, though her tone was absentminded as she pondered the skill crystal.

"It's true," Beth said, shrugging again.

"We gonna sell it?" Blood asked lazily.

"I want to use it, but I want to figure out who wants it or not first," Beth replied.

"Wouldn't help me," Bjorn answered shortly, barely surfacing from his food and beer.

"It conflicts with my elements, so I would only use it if there weren't other interest," Kris said.

"I can breathe fire," Sera added helpfully, pointing a thumb at the center of her own chest.

"Thanks dear, we didn't know that," Beth shot back sarcastically.

"I use blood," Blood said, as if it wasn't quite obvious.

"I would really like it," Val said, chewing her lip. "It would technically shore up a minor weakness, but it's not really a good fit. I have the next two skills I want to buy or make planned out, and this would be too big of a departure."

"Hey, I want it, but I'm poor," Andrea said, waving a hand.

"It's not that interesting," was Adam's comment, the plain man shrugging before going back to his meal.

"Val, Andrea, and I," Beth said. "Nobody else has interest?"

"Seems like it," Sera said, confirming as everybody else either shook their head or ignored the discussion entirely.

"How serious are you, Val? You said it wouldn't really work that well for you," Beth said.

"Well…" Val replied, chewing her lip. "It's fucking amazing to just have it fall into our lap, and kresnik don't do amazing with fire, but we're not super weak to it. It's just annoying; if I were still with those meatheads, I could take them to the cleaners on this and have a powerful skill. I'm guessing you really want it."

"Sorry, it works quite well for me," Beth replied with a shrug. "It combines with at least one other of my powers, and possibly more, and makes a really good fit for what I'm doing. I think the one thing we can say, before discussing it further, is that we're not selling. That seem right?"

"Yeah, selling it would net us quite the profit, but it would be a waste. Our group doesn't have anyone that strong with fire," Val replied, getting interrupted by Sera.

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"Excuse me," Sera said.

"Breathing fire for thirty seconds, at most, before you need thirty minutes to recharge without spewing your breakfast and lunch everywhere isn't exactly giving the team tons of fire options. Not even when your fiancée controls that fire," Val replied tartly.

"Hey, better out than in," Sera said.

"Puking your lunch out isn't what that phrase was meant for, dear," Beth said, shaking her head.

"We're getting distracted," Andrea said. "We're not selling it, and it's between us three on who to use it. I don't need it, Val just considers it a bonus, and Beth could actually use it as part of her current set of powers. I think it's pretty obvious."

"Yeah," Val said with a sigh. "Shit, I just wanted a cool new power to play with."

"Let me check something first," Beth said, holding up a hand. She sent a quick message to Selene, asking if she could talk for a minute to answer a question.

'Call me,' Selene texted back.

"Hey, sweetheart," Beth subvocalized, holding up a finger to show the group she was on a call.

"What can I help you with, my love?" Selene said.

"I like when you call both Alex and I that," Beth replied.

"Oh, you're so sweet, but don't change the subject. I can't get any more time free for a while. What do you need?" Selene said.

"Check this out for me," Beth said, sending the crystal's information. "Can you give me a rough price, just real rough estimate, on a skill like that. I want to split reimbursement with my team for the skill and I need an estimate."

"Hmm, good fire skill, fairly rare category, hampered by being a single use crystal," Selene listed off, thinking out loud. "This is a skill that a wide variety of classes and people could greatly benefit from. If I had to give you the even numbers, I'd say we would sell this to interested parties through our channels for fifty orichalcum. That would leave some nice meat on the bone for us. If we sold it at auction, it could really be anything, but I would expect that kind of fire skill to do anywhere from three to ten times my base estimate. We would likely wait to feature it as the last item in a monthly auction or one of the ten final items at the end of a yearly, if that gives you a good idea of how we would handle the piece."

"Shit, well, I'm going to pay out the nose for this," Beth muttered over the line.

"Well, like I said, it is quite a good skill. A dominion skill is very powerful, technically more powerful than a domain; a domain lets you use a type of power or ability in an area around you, but a dominion gives you control over anything of that type in the area around you. It might not sound like a big difference, but a fire domain would let you generate fire around you and send it further off as blasts. A fire dominion, however, lets you not only do that, but you can also take control over any fire around you. It's based off a list of factors, but something that calls itself a dominion in the name or description is stronger than a domain. Paying out your team to get a dominion skill is definitely still worth it, even if it's a lot of money."

"Well, I didn't understand that a dominion was better than a domain, so thank you for explaining that," Beth said. "It makes it sting way less to know it's a stronger skill type than domains, which are already really strong. I don't mind paying the team out for that."

"Good. Call me or visit sometime soon," Selene said.

"We'll come visit for the next yearly auction and make sure we have free time afterward, sweetheart," Beth said.

"Oh, you're lovely," Selene cooed over the line. "I'll get back to work but call me more often. I enjoy just hearing your voice."

"Sorry, I will," Beth said.

"It's okay, I know you get focused when you fight," Selene giggled. "Goodbye for now, my love."

"Later," Beth said, ending the call.

"Good news? You got a strange look on your face for a minute," Sera said.

"Got an evaluation," Beth said with a slight sigh, pulling out a stack of coins. "I'm not going to take the skill for nothing. Selene said it's worth about fifty orichalcum at retail and there's eight of us; that's about six orichalcum and twenty-five mithril each for the value. I'm taking it, but I'll still pay out the six and a quarter orichalcum for it."

"You don't really have to do that," Andrea said, eyes wide as Beth flicked a few stacks of coins in front of her. The thirty-one coins glimmered in the light of the common room and Andrea just stared at them for a minute.

"They're not going to fucking bite," Val said sarcastically, reaching across several people with her incredibly long arms and fingers and flicking Andrea's forehead.

"Right, sorry, just not used to the wealth you guys deal with quite yet," Andrea said, making the coins disappear.

With everybody paid out, Beth took the skill crystal and immediately held it up to her head, going through the process of imprinting and learning the skill. The images and techniques the skill taught were like an ocean, even just for the basic information, and that was when she realized this was probably the most complicated and in-depth skill she had. Several of her spatial skills were quite complicated and took a lot of calculating, often by seat-of-the-pants math on the fly, to properly use, but this skill was just…deep. It contained a truly massive information about fire, fire mana, flame types, and all kinds of info dumps about manipulating and control fire and various kinds of mana. Beth thought her skill at controlling and manipulating mana was going to jump to a whole new level just from learning and practicing this skill, let alone mastering it.

She also found that Selene had been bang on; there was a whole section in the information about not just controlling but dominating all flames and fire mana around the wielder. Beth did some quick napkin math to check and was shocked to see the skill would let her dominate almost any fire or flame around her for nearly a hundred feet at Copper[0]. If her napkin math wasn't totally failing her, she would have a sphere over a mile in diameter where all fire would be entirely subject to her will by Gold[9]. Considering that this was a tier five skill, as well, it meant that the skill could be pushed to at least Neutronium before needing to be evolved or merged to increase the tier. Not that she was going to get any skill to that level any time soon, but a tier five skill was really no joke, and she would have little difficulty with it before Diamond. If she was rather compatible with it and trained the hell out of it, she might not really struggle before the end of Diamond and having to push the skill into Mithril, which was always a big challenge, even with high-tier skills.

She was brought back from her reverie as the skill crystal finished its job and dissolved away into dust and stray motes of mana. Beth sat back with a big sigh, blowing a huge huff of air out of her lips as she settled back in the plush couch that took up a large section of the common room of their suite. The others gave her a minute to collect her thoughts before they started asking her questions, though it was pretty clear some of the group was rather more interested than others.

"So? Don't leave us just hanging out here," Sera pleaded.

"It's, uh, really strong," Beth replied a bit lamely.

"Holy shit, of course it's strong, it's a fuckin' tier five fucking skill," Val added, Beth still finding the juxtaposition of the normally very proper persona she adopted in public and the swearing, smoking, drinking, fucking person that Val truly was to be rather amusing.

"Cool your jets, turbo," Beth said, getting a weird look from Val at that. "Sorry, phrase doesn't translate super well into Universal. I meant to calm yourself."

"I am fucking calm," Val replied hotly.

"Sure you are," Beth said, rolling her eyes. "Anyway, the skills really strong; I can control all fire mana and flames around me for nearly a hundred feet at Copper[0]. The only thing that the skill calculates against is the total strength of the flame and if anything is controlling that flame. I can't wrestle away the fire an Exalted fire mage is throwing around, but I could dominate an Awoken with Fire Puff without even having to think about it."

"And the skill levels?" Val asked, calmer now.

"Bigger dominion sphere and more control up until Gold," Beth answered. "After that, Platinum jump lets me make a weak copy of fire skills that are used in the dominion and create additional kinds of flames, whatever that means. I'm still digesting the info dumps from the skill crystal."

"Hmm, the Diamond upgrade is often just way more power over the Platinum skill, though it can definitely have some fucking wild upgrades," Val muttered, fiddling with her pipe. "The Mithril upgrade is usually harder to tell much about until you've used the skill a long time and have a much better idea of what it can do, but it always adds at least a bit more capability. You getting that skill even to Platinum will be wild; the kind of strength you'll have, considering your obscene stats and Mana Physique, will mean that one skill will be devastating."

"Sounds pretty good," Beth said with a shrug, laughing as Val huffed and rolled her eyes.

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