Teresa did not sleep well, even if she was exhausted. How could she? There were a million things running through her mind, and none of them were pleasant. Could they have sped up the operation somehow and made it back in time to save Thomas? She wasn’t about to pretend she had the highest opinion of the guy, but for all his faults he definitely didn’t deserve that.
They still had to talk to Mathew and Gabriel. Was it a good idea to talk to them immediately, should they get some sleep and let someone else do it, what was the right move here? Teleporting to The Mall for her would be extremely expensive. She was likely to make a return trip there anyways since it sounded like they had discovered a lot of important information, but she would likely be needed here to ensure Arconette would actually start taking steps towards finding missing people.
Was that even her job? Shit, what was her job exactly? She was an Ambassador, so technically she was supposed to find cities and negotiate teleportation agreements, but it sounded like Saylee was managing that on her own as well. Teresa also wanted to find her family, but if they weren’t on the same planet then she was kind of at a dead end there. She could help her friends find their families, which was definitely a plan of hers.
A lot of people had just died. She didn’t know the numbers, but she was sure they could have done worse. Teresa still hadn’t talked to Mathew and Gabriel yet, they were at The Mall wondering where their dad was while Teresa knew he was dead and was just trying to get some sleep. She could send them a message through the City Monolith, as that was a feature.
You could message someone you have met post-System via City Monoliths, though the other person needed to access a City Monolith as well to see it. Of course, Teresa wasn’t just going to do that. It’d be like sending someone a text message reading ‘hey, your dad is dead, sorry.’
When the time came, what was Teresa supposed to tell them? They were 14 and 16, old enough to put two and two together. She heard they saw him get taken, will they blame themselves? What if they ask how he died, what was she supposed to say? She could lie and say it was quick, but then they’d probably figure out what really happened on their own. Should she tell the truth? That their dad was tortured and mutilated for information he didn’t really have, then died of dehydration?
What about the fact they hadn’t caught Angelo yet? Would they sneak out on their own in an attempt to find the man? Mathew and Gabriel seemed pretty smart, but they were still kids. They just might try something like that, and Teresa wasn’t sure if she was in any position to stop them. It’d take months for them to catch up in level, and even then they’d be plotting against four Completionists while they themselves were unlikely to have many titles to boost their stats.
Teresa of course wanted to kill Angelo as well, but it’s not like they could just track him very easily. It wouldn’t be surprising if he never showed his face in Arconette again, he had played it carefully and got away. They could track family members with Randall and Teresa herself could track monsters, but there was nothing to help track Angelo. If he and his party just started running in pretty much any direction for a while, they wouldn’t be found for a long time.
In the end, Teresa maybe got four hours of sleep, not nearly enough but at some point she was confident she wasn’t going to fall back asleep. She left the house she was staying in, needing to get some air. It was late in the afternoon, the sun was setting. They had gotten the chance to rest at a weird hour, so their sleep schedules were likely to be messed up for the time being.
Teresa started out by making her way to the City Monolith, which was under guard by Arconette’s government. After some discussion, she was allowed to pass and interact with the structure, finally able to view more rewards from the System. Upon touching it, a screen appeared in front of her.
Questline Rewards Store (Individual)
Points Available: 5296
Consumables
Equipment
Skills
There were three categories available, and they each broke into subcategories. ‘Consumables,’ expanded into potions/pills, combat, and enhancement. The first subcategory showed potions for recovering resources and pills for temporarily boosting attributes, the second one showed things like flashbangs, ammunition, and monster lures, while ‘enhancement,’ showed evolution feeds for various races along with ‘domestication feed.’ Out of curiosity, Teresa looked at the description of one.
Cost: 1,950 points
Materials: ???
Status: Ready (100% Remaining)
A consumable capable of domesticating a Failinis with rank F+ or lower. Repeated feedings are required to fully replace Monster Soul. Will result in a new sentient Soul within the target, response to user will vary.
So it was possible to domesticate monsters with this? It looked like there were specific feeds for specific monsters, though Teresa didn’t really plan on going down that route. The idea of having a monster army under her command crossed her mind, but that was unrealistic. She would have to take care of the monster, feed it, and train it. By all means, it wouldn’t be that different from any other pet, except it would be higher maintenance.
How would teleporting with a pet work? Would she have to pay an additional fee for that? What about experience? If her pet killed something, it only makes sense the experience would go to the pet. Additionally, it wouldn’t be sapient in all likelihood, depending on the monster anyway. Even then, what would domestication for a sapient monster look like?
She could see it having uses for sure, a pet Failinis would result in a constant production of wine, though from what Preston said it wouldn’t taste very good. Honestly it would be easier to just make wine the normal way at that point.
Other monsters being domesticated might be useful, but when a human being can become stronger than a bull with some monster hunting then it kind of defeats the purpose of animal assisted labor. Maybe there was something Teresa was missing, maybe there were some specific use cases, but domesticating a monster just wasn’t really all that useful to Teresa. Considering the situations she found herself in, any pet would wind up dead.
The evolution feed stuff was pretty useful though, especially considering there was something she hadn’t seen before.
Cost: 4,000 points
Materials: ???
Status: Ready (100% Remaining)
Requirements: Level 100 or higher
A consumable capable of increasing a Human’s race to E+, a necessary step for achieving a Rank Up. Provides a drastic improvement to lifespan with minor debuff resistances.
She couldn’t use it yet, but it was definitely an option for later. There was no rush to use up all of her points as far as Teresa was concerned. For once, Teresa wasn’t on a deadly time crunch, although that didn’t mean she wanted to waste too much time before helping her friends find their own families.
The equipment category was divided into tools, weapons, armor, and equipment upgrades. Anything from screwdrivers to chainsaws were included in the tools section, though powering tools like that would pose an issue of its own. The weapons section had a wide variety of options available as well, though there wasn’t anything crazy in there. A heavily enchanted bow was available for 3,500 points for example, but there weren’t rocket launchers or anything like that. There were a few guns as well, though they weren’t as high-end as some of the other weapons available like a 4,000 point dagger that inflicted wounds that were resistant to Restoration Magic.
Teresa was worried at first about the capabilities of some of these weapons becoming publicly available, but really only a small selection of people could buy a single item that Teresa was worried about. Only someone who made it past the oil fire at the heart of Chernobyl could get any of the good stuff, everyone else would have to settle for decent.
The armor was also pretty nice, and Teresa wouldn’t be surprised if she got something from there. She still didn’t have anything to properly protect her torso. She had steel boots with a comfort enchantment, leather pants that slightly boosted Stamina recovery, gloves that could help with climbing, and healer robes that could help against toxic gasses. All of her own armor was actually pretty weak and low level still, her gloves for example could hold Teresa’s weight just fine but couldn’t do much with her super heavy sword.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Teresa’s entire knowledge of body armor came from movies and video games. Looking for something to protect her torso, she was expecting something along the lines of ‘chestplate,’ but there were also things like pauldrons and spaulders. Oh shit, Teresa’s head had no protection either, but she didn’t want a helmet that would fall off or something that limited her visibility. She’d talk with people who knew more about this kind of thing before buying any armor.
Then there were equipment enhancements. There, the option to boost a weapon’s max level was available, along with getting enchantments on already existing weapons. Cher’s Blade had heat resistance, but it didn’t have self repair. That meant if it got damaged, Teresa wouldn’t be able to fix it easily with Mana. There were options available along those lines too, though once again Teresa decided to wait before buying anything. After all, someone else might buy something with the intent to sell it for money.
Lastly, there was the skills section. Every other section at least had cheap options, like a completely normal knife for 100 points or a singular arrow for 30. The cheapest options in the skills section were 2,000 points.
Cost: 2,000 points
Type: Refinement Magic
Refine an item with intense, controlled heat. Intuitive understanding of the target's structural response to this process shall be granted upon use. Cannot be used on targets containing a Soul.
Cost: 2,550 points
Type: Passive
Use less Stamina while moving outside of combat.
Cost: 4,500 points
Type: General
Gain a sense for Stamina and its movement, allowing you to manipulate it to perform physical feats.
Cost: 4,500 points
Type: General
Gain a sense for Mana and its movement, allowing you to manipulate it to perform magical feats.
There were skills Teresa hadn’t seen before, some that had been offered, and some she already possessed. The cheapest ones all had extremely specific use cases, but the more expensive ones caught Teresa’s eye. Specifically,
Then again, couldn’t she get some of these skills on her own?
A faint smile crossed Teresa’s face before vanishing as she had a great idea. The System was always a pain in the ass, putting her and her friends in borderline impossible scenarios with no regard for their safety. It wasn’t objectively cruel, otherwise leaving the Tutorial early wouldn’t have been an option, but it sure as shit wasn’t benevolent.
As a result, in Teresa’s mind she figured if the System was gonna give an inch then she’d take a mile. So long as she had a decent enough understanding of something, she could get offered a skill for it thanks to her class.
Instead of using the System to purchase new skills, she was going to use it to find skills she wanted to learn on her own. Now that she knew
If she were going to buy a skill, it’d have to be something that she had no idea where to start with.
Teresa closed the store without buying anything yet, and made her way over to Marty’s bar. She wasn’t going to get a drink or anything, not that they really had something that’d work on her, but she wanted to eat something before making any decisions. She was going to talk to Mathew and Gabriel, she just hadn’t worked out the logistics for it yet in her head. Should she even be the one to tell them? She really should see them in person one way or another, so she decided after this she’d bite the bullet and pay for the cost to teleport to The Mall and back, so long as it wasn’t absurdly expensive. She did have the Elephant’s Foot in her
“Heyyyyy, she’s back!” Marty exclaimed from behind the bar. His cousin Jeremy was there as well along with his aunt Tammy, who was responsible for their egg production. “How was the Contaminated Zone?”
“How do you know about that?”
“The quest went away while you were gone, then you showed back up right after. I can put two and two together, a lot of people have some idea of what happened. That’s why so many of the Completionists have been gone, right?” Marty asked cheerfully.
“Something like that.” Teresa answered, wondering if it would be a bad thing to talk about how half of those Completionists tried to kill her. She was still upset about the whole ordeal, and was definitely going to hold a grudge over it. That was a big contributing factor to Thomas’ death, along with so many others.
“We heard about Thomas. I’m sorry man, I hope they find him.” Jeremy said earnestly. Teresa had saved Jeremy from getting kidnapped not that long ago, but it still felt like ancient history at this point.
“They did.”
“Oh, well that’s-!” Jeremy faltered, reading the room. “Damn. I’m sorry.”
Teresa just nodded, taking a seat.
“You want a drink?” Marty asked.
“Nah, just breakfast.”
“It’s like 10 in the evening dude.”
“Really?”
“I have no idea, we don’t have proper timekeeping yet. I’m just guessing.”
“Right, well in that case for all you know it’s actually 10 in the morning so I’ll do breakfast.”
“I don’t think that’s how time works.”
“It totally is, scrambled eggs please.” Teresa smiled a bit, almost feeling normal for a moment. How many people had she seen dead in the last week? Quite a few, she wasn’t even really sure of how many people she had killed anymore. Could she go back to living normally? Should she? Teresa started thinking about how Liam had gotten his blood drained by a bunch of monsters covered in thorns, how many bodies did they bring back with them? How many allies had their corpses digesting in some monster’s stom-
“You guys really like those Hell Chicken eggs.” Tammy said, snapping Teresa out of her train of thought.
“The what eggs?”
“Well, technically they’re ‘Omnivorous Deinonychus,’ but that’s a mouthful. I just call them Hell Chickens.” Tammy clarified, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. In a way, it kind of was.
“Oh that’s right, you have a class for domesticating wildlife or something don’t you?” Teresa asked.
“Yeah, and Jeremy here has
“Why did you say it like that? You’re making us sound like drug dealers mom.” Jeremy said humorously.
“You know, I saw something called domestication feed. I can buy it from the System, it’s supposed to help domesticate monsters or something.” Teresa said, making Tammy groan.
“Oh no, the System is selling something like that? I can mostly calm weak monsters down long enough for me to go near them without getting eaten, but that’s about it. AI took my job once, and now the apocalypse is here and the System is about to do it again?”
“Don’t worry, it’s super expensive and only like 20 people can afford it. I doubt anyone’s going to really invest in it though, so you’re safe.” Teresa reassured.
“Good.”
Teresa continued to talk with the family running the place while she ate, welcoming food that wasn’t just super vitamins or previously radioactive monster meat. It was a nice change of pace from the last few days, though once she finished she’d see if the rest of her party was up and get the shitty part over with while the army was still gone.
It was about time to talk to Mathew and Gabriel.