"Well, that was good fun," Andrea said as they were walking back up to the suite.

  "Time for a nice break," Beth agreed, leading the way into the common room.

  "Shower first, though," Andrea replied, now leading the way as they walked into the bathroom.

  "How many stats, or whatever you got, did that device give you?" Beth chatted as they stripped down.

  "I got a hundred points in END from it," Andrea replied as Beth started the shower and tested the water for a moment.

  "That's actually a bit better than I thought," Beth said.

  "Why? What'd you get?" Andrea asked as she stepped into the shower with the tall girl.

  "Two hundred END and that upgraded skill," Beth replied. "Oh, yeah, and a level of Pain Tolerance even though I was basically at the peak of Gold."

  "Eesh," Andrea replied with a wince. "The extra END would be really nice, and the skill upgrade was insane, but I don't know about that much pain for a hundred points. It already hurt like fucking hell."

  "Hey, what's the old saying? 'No pain, no gain?'" Beth asked after soaking her hair, chuckling as Andrea stood under a showerhead on heavy flow, looking up with her eyes closed and letting the water hammer away the sweat.

  "I don't think I'm into that much pain, sorry," Andrea said when she came up for air, chuckling a bit as she saw Beth lathering up and trying to balance on one leg.

  "What?" Beth asked as she managed to get her legs scrubbed.

  "I can't believe you're that strong and you can't balance on one leg," Andrea scoffed, laughing at Beth's sour expression.

  The two of them finished washing up quickly, Beth enjoying the hot water for an extra minute while Andrea got out and dried off. She followed soon after, using the drying feature of the shower to finish getting dried just a bit after Andrea was done. Andrea clearly had some kind of spatial storage just like the others, as her clothes appeared on her body in an instant, and Beth mirrored that.

  They rejoined the others in the main room, where there was an awful lot of drinking happening. The two had only been gone a couple hours, but some of the others were already approaching a couple hours gone themselves. It was pretty impressive, considering the amount of tolerance that stats gave people, combined with resistances. It was pretty hard for Beth to get drunk even with magical alcohol considering not only her stats but her resistances, and she didn't even have a powerful combined resistance like Sera did.

  Drinking to blow off a little steam was rather common in adventurer circles, and the group was able to produce so many different liquor bottles and casks and kegs from storage that it literally wouldn't fit on the central table. Beth sampled some of most everything, being assured by Veren that all his bottles were only of the finest and highest quality. The others jeered at Veren in turn, though Sera then started a competition, pulling out a bottle that was worth substantially more than anything on the table. Veren reciprocated, pulling out a bottle pricey enough to cause one's eyes to water before Sera one-upped him again. They went back and forth like that until Sera finally won, though she secretly confessed to Beth that that was the most expensive thing she had on her, more valuable than her current armor and spear. If Veren had had even a slightly better bottle she would have lost, despite having a whole liquor store's worth of booze in her storage space.

  Beth woke up sometime the middle of the next morning, finding Andrea slumped against her and Sera laying on top of both of them in one of the bedrooms. She remembered everything except going to bed at the very end of the night, but Andrea had seemingly joined them, though Beth was sure all they had done was sleep. She stayed still for a bit, laughing when Andrea woke up and found herself trapped under many hundreds of pounds of dragon girl. The shorty made a great show of pushing and heaving at the huge girl, 'accidentally' managing to sink her hands deep into an expansive section of breast. Beth laughed more as she realized Sera was now pretending to be asleep, whether to annoy Andrea or to enjoy her very tender ministrations, she was unsure.

  "Alright, enough you two," Beth finally said, sitting up and taking Sera with her.

  "They're so big, though," Andrea protested, chuckling as she sat up and rolled out of bed.

  "You're telling me," Beth replied with a laugh as she scooted to the edge of the bed with Sera on her lap and stood with the dragon girl in her arms.

  "Clothes," Beth said, getting a disgruntled grunt from Sera, but clothes appeared on her nonetheless. Well, the absolute bare minimum of clothes, but enough to be appropriate.

  "Breakfast first," said Sera.

  "We should order stuff," Beth muttered as she walked out into the common room. Bjorn was asleep in his massive chair, Kris was in his lap, Veren was sitting on the floor in a meditative posture, Neph was sleeping on the center table, and Blood and Val had taken the other bedroom the suite offered for some private time.

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  "Done," said Sera, glancing at the destruction from the night before, though they hadn't really caused any lasting damage. There was a stain on a section of the carpet, but Beth assumed that they could get that out with a little scrubbing. She set Sera's massive butt on the dining table just outside the kitchen before starting to put together some more food, knowing that whatever Sera had ordered might not even cover her.

  Once the ordeal of breakfast was done and everyone was fed, they took turns moving through the bathroom until everyone was prepped and fresh. Beth led the way out of the room, bringing everyone today, and heading out of the Hall. She wanted to very briefly stop by the neighborhood and see if they needed anything, as it had been a couple weeks since they had stopped in. After that, they could head out to check out the tower and maybe anything else they could find that was interesting that had cropped up on Earth.

  "Where are we going?" Bjorn asked, itching to take the lead out of the CRA Hall.

  "North, then west," Beth replied, sending him the rough location.

  The big man set off north, not really bothering with going around anything. Even on a high mana world, Bjorn was an unstoppable force and there really weren't any immovable objects around. Those very movable objects also included a few trees, but there were quite a few of them around, likely even more than there had been a couple years ago, so Beth wasn't really worried. She figured they still had quite a few bigger fish to fry versus Bjorn doing infinitesimal damage to the environment. He stopped when he reached the old state highway and looked back at Beth with a raised eyebrow and she just jerked her thumb to the left. Bjorn grunted and trotted down the center of the street, his weight not quite enough to crack the asphalt as he headed down the road.

  Bjorn, amusingly enough, was just about the size of the gates to Beth's home neighborhood, his head just short of the top of the structure. He also, amusingly enough, was a cause of very great consternation for the guard in the tower, but Beth had already learned to ignore their ranting and rambling, pushing the gate open. Her parents had given her permission to the town at the same level of a guard captain, meaning she could activate the main gates whenever she wanted, no other permission required.

  Beth didn't even have to lead the others to the town hall, as her parents and Zack were all out and about today, and they had been attracted by the guard's yelling. She couldn't help but laugh in seeing the reaction of her parents, though Zack merely glanced at the assembled circus she had brought and shook his head slightly. Bjorn stopped in the center of the road leading into the town and crossed his arms over his chest, a massive mountain of man and metal in the path.

  "Beth…" her mother said hesitantly. "You've brought, uh, more guests…"

  "Mom, everybody. Everybody, my parents," Beth said.

  "Beth!" several people exclaimed at once in different tones.

  "What?" Beth asked, looking between her parents and the rest.

  "I'll do introductions," Sera cut in, placing a hand on Beth's head and moving Beth behind her. "We have Bjorn here in front, Kris is next to him, then we have Veren here beside me and Andrea next to Blood, while the one holding Blood's hand and pretending not to is Val. These are Beth's parents, Thomas and Rachel, and this is the head of their town guards, Zack."

  "A pleasure," said Rachel.

  "N-nice to meet you," Kris was the first to reply.

  "Greetings," Bjorn said.

  "Hi! How are you?" said Andrea.

  "Greetings," Val said with a smile.

  Veren just grunted and nodded.

  "And these are more friends of yours?" Rachel asked Beth.

  "Yeah, we're just making a quick stop," Beth replied. "You guys need anything?"

  "No, I think we're good," Thomas said.

  "Then let us be off," Veren added, hands crossed behind his back as he watched the exchange.

  "Yeah, we're gonna head out. Just wanted to check you were fine," Beth said.

  "Well, you can stop by whenever, sweetie," Thomas said, Beth visibly cringing as Andrea hid a laugh behind her hand and Bjorn smirked at her.

  "Yeah, yeah, that's great and all. If you're fine, we're out," Beth said with a roll of her eyes, taking a step and appearing near the end of the street. The others politely bid farewell, other than Veren, who just hmphed, and Sera, who stayed for a moment to talk to her future in-laws. They all quickly followed after Beth using various movement skills, and she led them to the open lot behind the town, the walls of the town now acting as the clearing’s southern edge.

  "Let's get going," Beth said, deploying the airship from her necklace and setting it up.

  The others were familiar with the airship and simply boarded it once it was fully unfolded. Beth saw the people on the wall on patrol duty react, but just shook her head and jumped onboard herself. They had to wait another minute for Sera to catch up, then they were up and away. Blood still wasn't a licensed pilot, but there wasn't any authority other than the CRA that would take issue with it, and Beth doubted they would much care. She would have worried about opposing air traffic or such, but pretty much every old plane and helicopter was currently grounded until their systems were updated to handle the mana density. That was not a high priority right now, as the CRA Halls across the planet allowing for teleportation everywhere to members, so get planes back up and running was a backburner item for most people.

  Blood steered the ship eastward, heading towards the Atlantic Ocean before steering a bit south, flying across the ocean at more than Mach one. What could have been a fairly long trip was reduced down to about five hours in total, with Blood letting the engine run hot when they were over the middle of the ocean. They had hit North Africa and trailed along the coast of the Mediterranean until they hit the Middle East, flying out over the desert east of Egypt. Their ship's sensors were able to ping the anomaly shortly before they could see it, a tower reaching up beyond the dome of the sky. Beth wasn't quite sure how it could even stand, or what it was, or much of anything, but it looked almost like she imagined a space elevator would. Except it was bigger.

  It became obvious when they closed in, but the tower was quite thick, far more so than what most space elevators would be, if built as proposed. The tower turned out to be thicker than basically any skyscraper Beth had seen, their instruments reading that it was over a mile wide for the entire height they could detect. The whole surface of the tower was smooth as glass, gleaming silver and without a single visible break or seam on any part of it. The only exception was what was at the front of the tower at the base, what Beth would consider to be the front door. There, five very broad stairs led up to a massive set of double doors guarded by two large beings that Beth wasn't able to see the details of from their current distance.

  Blood landed the ship a couple hundred feet from the front of the structure, Beth noting that there were a few people in a simple camp off to the side. The whole party debarked and then Beth stored the ship in her necklace after packing it up. They approached the tents first, finding a couple of people set up there with two old SUVs out back. Beth was guessing they had figured out some way to jerry-rig the cars to get them running even considering the mana density issues.

  Of course, they didn't speak English, other than one of them and just barely, at that. They didn't speak Universal Standard, either, so the group was left scratching their heads a bit. Beth tried to walk through a conversation with the one sun-weathered man with salt-and-pepper hair who spoke a bit of English and a little French, but she wasn't able to understand too much. What she got basically amounted to them being a group of nomads that traveled the desert, which she knew only a tiny bit about. They had come to look at or investigate or talk with the tower, Beth wasn't sure, and they were confused. Well, Beth was confused too, and exchanged a few merci beaucoup’s with the man before the group walked over to the tower themselves.

  The steps and doors were made of the same metal as the rest of the tower, and Beth immediately noticed that the tower didn't radiate heat. It was rather odd, as the tower was in the middle of a sweltering desert and should be bouncing off quite a bit of solar energy, but Beth could feel the temperature drop in the area around the tower. The guards were rather strange as well, being two large men with very thick legs that had more than one joint. When the group approached, both the guards rose up to their full height, which was well over ten feet, glowering down at them with fierce expressions on their blocky, angular faces. Their skin was a dark brown with small veins of red, almost like small slits of red had been cut into it, and their eyes were both glowing gold and red. A common eye power of their species, perhaps?