Sasha sprinted along the flat terrain, absolutely hauling ass. It would have been better if she had the
Being a level 70 Shock Trooper, she didn’t have to worry about getting tired. Her class gave her a lot of Agility as well, she currently had 183. The Ranger class had given her 2 points per level, which hadn’t changed after her class change. Combine that with the percentage boost from beating the Tutorial with her party, and Sasha was one happy camper.
Only complaint she had was the lack of Intelligence her class gave her. It limited her reaction speed and how fast she could think. At least she had been able to put most of her Unallocated Points into it, along with a bit into Vitality since her class gave none of that either.
She had split up with her party right after the Tutorial, though they all agreed to meet up again at some point. Mara got
At level 5, the skill let her see Sarah’s level. By the time she unlocked this, Sarah had been in her 20s. Not bad, but she definitely didn’t beat the Tutorial. It was likely she got through the first part and was forced to leave during the second stage if Sasha had to guess.
What it didn’t explain was why Sarah didn’t also have
Type: Karmic Magic
The link between twins is solidified by karma. Harness the unique nature of your karmic connection, allowing for you to gain a sense for your twin. Should both ends of the karmic link be accessed, mental contact can be established.
If both Sasha and Sarah had the skill, then they should be able to communicate telepathically. At least, that was Sasha’s understanding of the skill description.
Once she saw Sarah had a decent enough level to protect herself, Sasha slowed down. She had been far as fuck from Sarah, but there was a proper balance to traveling and leveling. Purely focusing on traversing the distance would have actually been slower, as the speed increase from gaining a few levels would let her cover that distance quicker.
Plus, she kind of wanted to see how far ahead of Sarah she could get for bragging rights. Who wouldn’t want to shove their higher level in their sibling’s face? Unfortunately, that humorous thought process ended once
It let her see Sarah’s resources displayed as a percentage. She couldn’t tell what exact number represented Sarah’s HP, Mana, or Stamina, but she knew how full they were. Seeing them fluctuate was pretty normal, until her HP started fluctuating a lot more than Sasha was comfortable with.
As a matter of fact, Sarah almost died multiple times. Recently, her resources started dropping dangerously low very frequently. Sasha could understand it if her Stamina or Mana got below 10% from time to time killing monsters or experimenting with skills, but when they started staying consistently below 30% and her HP began dropping, Sasha knew she was involved in something serious.
That sped her up, and she began traveling in a straight line towards Sarah. It didn’t matter what was in her way, Sasha blasted through it. She skipped past each city she found, ran straight through the depths of Portals without bothering to actually eradicate them fully, and she ran for 16 hours a day thanks to the
Sasha definitely wasn’t sleeping 8 hours a night at that pace, nor had she been eating as much as she should have. It’s not like there were a lot of safe places to sleep and make camp by herself anyways, so she kept her focus on moving. She killed monsters when she ran close to them for the experience, but she never paused if she didn’t have to.
Just when Sarah’s situation started to look better, she felt something strange through their karmic connection. Sasha only noticed it because she happened to be using
Sasha tugged on that weird connection thingy, the golden rope connecting them turning into a game of tug of war. Sasha won that, significantly. It wasn’t even close. She wasn’t even trying to, she just wanted to see if she could contact Sarah through that karmic link, but whatever skill she was using was inferior to her own.
Figuring maybe Sarah just needed to level up the skill a bit more, or that maybe someone else was using a skill on her, Sasha relaxed a little, for all of a couple minutes.
Sarah suddenly became thousands of miles farther away out of nowhere. Sasha tried not to panic as she slightly adjusted course, wondering what the hell just happened. A day later, and she was thousands of miles closer again. A few hours after that, she was suddenly a thousand miles in another direction once again, a little closer but once again requiring Sasha to course correct.
Sasha was pretty sure her sister was teleporting somehow. That, or some karma nonsense was going on. She wasn’t sure how Karmic Magic really worked in the first place, just that it worked and was a tad intrusive when it came to people’s privacy. She didn’t know enough to rule out interference.
Thankfully, they were getting closer and closer. When Sasha got up that morning, she was confident they would finally meet up soon. Sarah had gotten a few levels quite recently, which was reassuring, though Sasha wouldn’t feel comfortable until they met up.
As she was running with only 12 miles separating them, Sasha encountered something that required her attention. Two groups of people were fighting, and they were definitely trying to kill each other. Sasha’s initial idea was to just ignore it and keep going, but she would feel bad if someone got murdered right in front of her when she could have stopped it.
Sasha didn’t know why these people were fighting, and in reality it was none of her business, but there were already too few people left in the world from what she had seen. Just as she was thinking of what she could possibly do in this situation,
Huh, they all had (MAX) next to their levels. She hadn’t seen that before.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“How much farther?” Sarah asked for the hundredth time. Teresa didn’t blame her.
“Somewhere around 10 miles.” Randall answered, the party traveling at relatively high speeds. They could have been a little faster, but Benjamin was still level 0.
“I’m going ahead, this is taking too long.” Sarah said, adjusting so she could take off.
They watched as Sarah sprinted ahead of them, everyone else was either too slow to follow or carrying someone.
At that distance, it would only take minutes for them to get there, especially if Sasha was moving towards them. With Sarah fully using her 108 Agility, she could run well over ten times faster than the top speed of most pre-System humans. That was a conservative estimate as well based entirely on the number assuming a pretty fast professional athlete started with an Agility of 10. Teresa had started with 4, though she hadn’t ever been a good sprinter, and saying anyone actually started with 10 Agility might be pushing it. It was just a nice round number is all.
Teresa was tempted to follow along, but she was carrying Saylee. Besides, it might be good for Sarah to see her sister first and get some time in. They might only be a few minutes behind, but it wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
At least, that was Teresa’s plan until they saw flashing in the distance. Spells were being slung back and forth, people were fighting and they were fighting hard.
“There’s no chance that’s roughly 10 miles away, right?” Teresa asked as they kept moving.
“What is?” Jake replied, squinting.
“Shit, I gotta go, fight up ahead.” Teresa said, setting Saylee down before activating
“You see that?” Sarah asked.
“Yep.”
“Get me there.”
Teresa lifted Sarah off the ground and carried her, running faster than Sarah would on her own. Running full speed on flat open terrain like this always felt fantastic to Teresa, especially since it always felt like she was faster than last time. Probably because she was. Considering what they might be running towards, Teresa didn’t let herself get distracted thinking about that too much.
The issue with running at high speeds boiled down to air resistance. While Teresa and Sarah had the Strength to push through it, air resistance still heavily slowed their top speed. Looking purely at the stat numbers, Teresa felt she should be able to run about 50% faster than Sarah, but really it was closer to 20%. The faster you were, the more air resistance mattered.
Teresa wanted to get around this by using
Okay, she just told herself she wouldn’t get distracted thinking about something else, she should stand by that. Even if she totally could think about that on the side easily without actually being distracted thanks to her mental stats, but she wasn’t about to figure out the trick to higher speed travel in the next minute.
Long story short, air resistance mattered more the faster you were going, and until they solved that problem, Agility increases would have diminishing returns.
As they got closer, Teresa was able to see what was going on more clearly. There were two groups of 8 fighting each other, and they were all pretty strong from the look of it. They were moving like Completionists, except it was clear all of them actually knew how to fight.
They weren’t relying purely on stats to overpower others, they were actually avoiding attacks and countering with skills of their own in a fluid manner. Now that they were closer, Teresa was able to make out the finer details. Someone who looked like a tank archetype managed to pull off a parry skill of some sort on a light warrior archetype, then smoothly attacked with a punch from a spiked gauntlet. Right before the gauntlet hit the light warrior, they pulled out a dagger and deflected the gauntlet slightly causing it to hit him in the hip instead of the chest.
That dagger then followed the path left open by the tank’s extended arm and stabbed at his neck. The tank was armored, but the blade angled down through the collar of the armor and struck his neck on the side, stabbing barely through the light layer of armor beneath the metal and piercing what seemed to be the tank’s vein. Or artery. One of the two, based on how much the tank started bleeding.
Surprisingly, there were no healers present, but instead one of the tank’s allies pushed forward and warded the light warrior off while pressing his hand against the tank’s neck, causing a flash of bright orange as the man cauterized his ally’s injury.
All of this was moving at a speed that almost seemed choreographed. While they didn’t seem to have stats superior to Teresa’s, they were all significantly better fighters considering they were all able to keep a fight at their level going for more than a few minutes without serious casualties yet.
What was their level?
{Human (F-) (lv 60)(MAX)}
{Human (F-) (lv 60)(MAX)}
Shit, they all had level caps. Both sides of the fight, too. Teresa wasn’t sure why they were fighting, but it would be better to just stay out of-
“There’s Sasha!” Sarah exclaimed, the both of them looking at this while still miles away, or about a minute of sprinting.
Sasha was standing not far from the fight, but still clearly visible. At first, Teresa was worried she was going to do something stupid like split up the fight, but thankfully Sarah’s sister had more sense than that. Sasha was watching the fight, and while at first it looked like she was going to get involved, it was clear she changed her mind after getting a good look at what was going on.
She was wearing the standard ranger gear, including her weapon. Despite the distance, Sasha’s eyes were locked onto Teresa and Sarah, and she began to run around the fight.
Sarah waved her hands as if to tell her come here, and thankfully Sasha was receptive to that. Teresa did not want to get involved with whatever was going on. Sasha was fast. Very fast. Not quite Preston fast, but close. A quick
Behind her now, the fight began to change rapidly. One of the combatants stepped back to dodge a swipe of a sword, only for an arrow to strike them through the side of their head. The arrow killed them instantly, making it an 8 vs 7.
The weaker side began getting cut down due to the number inferiority, and things escalated. One of the losing fighters grabbed onto an opponent even as they were being stabbed, pulled something out of their pocket, and exploded to kill both of them. It quickly became clear which side was losing, and rather than run they suicidally tried to take as many opponents with them as possible.
In the span of seconds, the 8 vs 7 fight experienced multiple casualties, just as Sasha reached them.
“Fuck it’s so good to see-” Sasha started, but Sarah interrupted her so Teresa didn’t have to.
“We have to run, now.” Sarah said, patting Teresa on the shoulder as she was still being carried. They turned and began to run, and even though Sasha was confused she followed along.
“What the hell is going on here?” She asked, the fight coming to an end behind them.
“Long story, but if we stick around they’ll definitely try to kill us.” Sarah explained.
“Shit, I was going to try and step in before I saw them doing some crazy ninja shit, did you see that?”
“They’re human traffickers, the level cap gives them away.” Sarah continued.
“How does that even work?”
“They’re not from our universe, if we draw their attention too much they’ll go after our family. Best to just stay out of it.”
“Well, they’re following us so I don’t think that’s an option.” Sasha said. Teresa glanced back, and there were three people chasing after them. That was all that remained of the original 16, and they were injured.
The rest of the party wasn’t very far, so surely they could take care of just three injured people that were lower level than both Sasha and Teresa. Right?