Teresa managed to knock out two Portals before meeting up with the rest of the party, the second Portal having spawned level 76 Ursine Molerats. They were a creepy cross between moles, rats, and bears that tunneled through the ground and tried to attack her by suddenly bursting through the earth beneath her.
They were dealt with pretty quickly by just flooding their tunnels with
She, like all of the other Completionists she had met, was able to punch above their level quite a bit. Especially against monsters. Teresa felt confident in taking on Portals with levels in the low 90s, though any higher than that would require her to use all of her resources and would be far too risky. If she aimed too high, she would be taking on E rank monsters, and if they were anything at all like the Prime Avatar she had no confidence in taking on more than one monster at a time.
The others in her party, who had less experience taking on Portals entirely by themselves, struggled a bit more. They didn’t have the same titles that gave percentage boosts to their stats, only getting an extra 5% from
That, and Completionists had better classes. She hadn’t heard a lot of details about other Completionist classes, as they all had a tendency to keep things hidden, but she knew enough that there was a pretty big gap that she hoped her party would be able to overcome somehow.
At the same level, most other classes would let someone have more points in a single stat or two than Teresa, but she would beat them in every other stat. She was in the prime time of her class, where she could really reap the benefits of her early efforts.
At least until she got to E rank. She wasn’t sure how that would work, but they all had their guesses. It was reasonable to assume they would get more stat points per level, but it was impossible to know anything for certain. Preston guessed there might be another class change available, and had latched on to a piece of text from Teresa’s
There, he had a lot of guesses as to what that meant, but there wasn’t a lot of data to work with and they wouldn’t know anything for sure until they actually hit E rank. For all they knew, Teresa would suddenly be able to start firebending or alter her appearance.
Not that she expected that to be the case, since the Prime Avatar hadn’t done anything along those lines.
Since everyone else still had levels in the mid 40s and, in Randall’s case, low 50s, they had gone to hunt Portals exclusively in the low 40s. While soloing Portals had been something Teresa did from the start, it wasn’t common and they all needed practice with it first before tackling a Portal their own level solo.
They needed to use hit and run tactics similar to what Teresa did in the Tutorial, as resource preservation was still a glaring issue for them, especially when dealing with large numbers of enemies. Sarah could take two monsters down at a time with
Preston would be great at dealing with this issue since he mostly just used movement skills and relied on his high Agility that dwarfed even Teresa’s more than anything, but he was busy with his dad. He also would be the only one that wouldn’t have issues with travel time, as it took a while to actually get to the Portal in the first place.
Teresa had underestimated how long it would take the others to take out a Portal and come back. She thought back to the time she fought a level 40 Giant Serpent Portal, that had taken quite a while. She had eventually found out the monsters could be blinded by using
Since she was the first to finish, she took some time to experiment with a skill she had been curious about for a bit now. When they completed the Contaminated Zone questline, her
Type: General
Gain the ability to store physical objects within your Soul. Capacity is determined by skill level. Items can be forcefully removed from your soul by a sufficiently powerful enemy. May interact with items contained within your Soul by entering a meditative trance, temporarily shutting down all external senses.
It added a line about being able to interact with items in her Soul by entering a meditative trance, which reminded her of the
Type: General
Internal understanding includes not just the body, but the Soul. Transfer your consciousness inward, your mind exists not just in the body but the Soul. Enter a deep state of meditation, reducing all senses of the outside world to drastically increase resource production.
That one would let her increase resource production, though its method seemed very similar to what
Teresa sat down criss-cross applesauce, figuring that was the go to position to mediate in according to Hollywood movies. A part of her was already aware of what exactly she needed to do, as with all of her skills. Due to this, she was aware sitting down wasn’t actually necessary, but did it anyway.
She tried to calm herself and focus on her breathing, and she did something with her Soul she wasn’t quite sure about. It was like flexing a muscle in her Soul, one that she had never noticed she had. Her consciousness began to slip, and it felt like she had been pulled inside of herself.
Her vision became distant as if she were being pulled away from her eyes. Her body went numb and her senses all vanished, and for a brief, horrifying moment she saw nothing.
As in literally nothing. Not black, not darkness, nothing. It was like trying to see out of her elbow, there was just nothing. Her sense of vision didn’t exist, and therefore she couldn’t see at all. Saying she ‘saw,’ nothing wasn’t even accurate, as she simply wasn’t seeing.
Then everything was orange.
The same color as her Soul.
Everyone’s Soul had their own colors in the same way people had different colored eyes and hair, and Teresa’s Soul was orange. It was a peculiar experience, one Teresa would even describe as completely novel. She wasn’t seeing orange everywhere, as she wasn’t actually seeing at all yet, but she was still aware that it was orange. It was like the information was skipping the part where her brain processed visual data and represented it as an image for her to perceive.
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Shit, she couldn’t actually feel her brain either, not that she normally felt her brain. She wasn’t thinking with her brain anymore, she was thinking with her Soul. Her memories were scattered until she looked for them, then they became present and accessible immediately. All of the processing power of her brain was diverted to her Soul, meaning her brain was not affecting her in the slightest.
It was fucking euphoric.
Her emotions were completely stable. She could still feel them, including the negative ones, but only the ones that were related to something going on. Teresa was still stressed about her party members going on their own to fight monsters and there was anxiety about what would happen if something went wrong, but it was a reasonable amount of emotion.
There was rage about what was happening in Nouarosso, sorrow over the losses in the Contaminated Zone, joy from finding her father and her friends’ families, the thrill from feeling herself become more with each level up, the parts that were her were all there. It was an incredible distinction. These were the emotions Teresa felt, rather than the emotions her brain produced.
She didn’t feel a crushing weight bearing down upon her existence whenever she thought about something she could have done better, nor any of her mistakes. Even thinking about her life pre-System, she didn’t feel any sense of suicidal ideation about the direction her life was heading. She felt anger directed at the state the world had been in, she felt sad her life had resulted in jumping from one temporary job to another with a slowly dwindling savings, but it didn’t make her feel suicidal.
It made her want to fight. Even if it was fruitless, even if it never got her anywhere, she wanted to fight every obstacle in her path until her Being gave out. Regardless if she alone could shape the world how she wanted it, she would simply keep fighting with spite that came from her very Being.
Teresa felt like she was just touching the surface of something there, but the sensation was gone so fast she wasn’t sure she felt anything at all. Considering she literally no longer possessed the sense of touch, whatever sensation she had just experienced felt literally impossible to recreate.
Floating as a formless existence in what was essentially an endless expanse of orange, a part of Teresa didn’t want to ever leave this place. It was so comfortable, even if she couldn’t physically feel. Here, she was free from the nonsense her brain could make her experience. Her emotions were truly hers, in a sense that had never been true before. In this state, she was the person who operated her body, the one who took the information her brain fed her and made choices.
Sometimes. It was undeniable the brain was oftentimes what presented choices and heavily encouraged actions. Hell, the brain was the thing making a lot of decisions, Teresa just couldn’t find a way to explain the separation of herself and the organ. She just didn’t know enough about how any of it worked. If the brain made decisions, was that really her? If so, how many of her actions had really been Teresa?
This line of philosophical questioning might have been enough for an existential crisis in normal circumstances, but Teresa didn’t feel a sense of panic at all from it. She knew a way to get an answer to it.
If she exited this state and was in the same position she had been in when she started using the meditation portion of her
That reminded her of why she was here in the first place.
The sensation of feeling without a sense of touch was more than a little weird. She knew she would never be able to explain it to her friends, it was like trying to explain what the color red looked like to a blind person.
Within her Soul, there was a lot of chaotic movement. She sensed something literally popping into existence out of nowhere, and with some probing she could tell that it was her Mana. With some more roaming around, she found a giant mass of moving energy, rapidly being funneled and changed through a multilayer labyrinth of channels moving at different speeds.
It was mesmerizing, but also utterly confusing. Trying to track a single channel of that energy was like trying to follow a strand in a knot the size of a boulder. Probably because the thing was the size of a boulder, as she was pretty confident she was sensing the Elephant’s Foot in her
She kept examining the object. She felt if she just studied it long enough, she’d get an idea of what was going on. Maybe she wouldn’t understand how it works, but she might be able to figure out what it was doing at least. With how nice it was to exist inside her Soul, she could easily see time slipping away from her and staying there forever.
However, Teresa wasn’t that kind of person.
As nice as it was, Teresa had meant for this to just be a quick test of her skill. She wasn’t going to sit in her Soul forever, and she wasn’t even sure if she could. She had too much shit to do, too many responsibilities. While normally those responsibilities would weigh her down and stress her out, in her Soul she felt proud.
Teresa pried her attention away and exited her Soul in a similar manner to how she got there in the first place. Rather than being pulled away from her body, she felt pushed into it, and her senses returned to normal.
She was laying flat on her back, her legs still crossed. As she stood up, she realized her body must have completely gone limp and she fell backwards. The fact her body was incapable of even sitting up on its own without her present answered her earlier existential questions. Her decisions were her own.
Unfortunately, any stress and anxiety she had felt was totally manageable and within reason came crashing back, though she was used to that by now. How long had she been laying there? She was expecting it to be fast, and it was quick enough that no one else returned yet, but that temptation to hide away in her Soul was eerie to think back on.
Once she got the chance to do so safely, she would experiment with her skills some more. She missed doing that. There were a lot of things she wanted to mess around with, but she was just so damn busy all the time. She was curious what would happen if she got the
Several minutes later, Jake returned, wearing his new helmet that covered his entire head. He had the visor pulled up to expose his face, and he quickly commented on his new piece of equipment.
“It’s translucent on the inside, not transparent.” Jake said as he approached. “I can see out of it just fine, but it does limit my Perception a bit.”
“Between
Over the next several minutes, Sarah and Randall returned as well. Out of all of them, only Jake and Teresa still had resources left to take on another Portal. Okay, that wasn’t actually true, they all had the resources to take another fight, but they had enough experience getting ambushed to always leave a bit in the tank in case they got into a fight they weren’t expecting.
Sarah and Randall went back to meet up with Preston, Benjamin, and Saylee. Meanwhile, Teresa and Jake went out to grind levels a little more. She repeated the process of finding a Portal for Jake, then went out in search of one for herself.
It was tough finding Portals at the appropriate level for Teresa. Generally, the closer they were to a city, the lower level the Portals. Whether this was a mechanic of the Portals themselves or just the result of the Portals in the area being hunted regularly, Teresa didn’t know. Either way, it meant she had to settle for taking on a level 74 Portal.
By the time she was finished grinding some levels for the day, she was level 74. They all grouped up once more and began making their way towards Sasha once again, while Teresa shared what happened with her new
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