Chapter 165: Deadliest Catch

  Teresa cut through three Wyvern-Fish at once, twisting her wrist as she kept the sword moving in one continuous motion and directed her blade towards the last Wyvern-Fish. She stepped diagonally forward and to the left along with her swing’s momentum, then pivoted on her lead foot as she moved to attack again.

  Just as she cut into the fourth Wyvern-Fish, it swung its own claws towards her. Teresa slightly changing position had been enough to avoid it, though if she had stood still it would have been too close and too fast to physically react in time. Unfortunately, the monster still managed to land a hit on her. A claw cut a line in both of her arms holding the sword before the bisected Wyvern-Fish collapsed to the floor, an injury that healed with .

  Nope, she messed that up a bit. When she pivoted while swinging she had lost balance for the briefest of moments, making her move a fraction of a second slower. It also made her unsteady after her attack, meaning she couldn’t continue moving with confidence she wouldn’t fall over.

  Both of those things resulted in her taking a hit, so Teresa began repeating that exact set of moves to try and work it out. She had been drawing groups of Wyvern-Fish out from their Portal and killing them one batch at a time while working with her sword skills. This single Portal was taking far longer than a Portal even 10 levels weaker, but it was really good practice.

   hit level 10 already, which was extremely beneficial. Her sword felt more comfortable and balanced in her hands, and the skill was more focused when guiding what to do while fighting. When engaging in a melee, it’s tricky to define a ‘correct,’ set of moves. There are multiple good reactions to everything, and initially struggled in that department.

  When thinking of her stance, her weapon mastery skill would recommend both a wider and a more narrow stance. When thinking of sword positioning, there were multiple places she felt she could hold her weapon. When thinking of attacking, there were multiple ways she could swing her sword that all might accomplish positive results.

  Now there was some difference between the suggestions Teresa felt. While all of the suggestions the skill gave could essentially be boiled down to a bunch of conflicting gut feelings, now each of those gut feelings had extra information included. Keeping her sword extended away from herself felt more aggressive and engaged. Keeping her sword pointed to the ground strangely enough felt like she was in a better position to counter, keeping her sword above her head felt powerful….

  So yeah, Teresa was getting inclinations on how various stances worked while using the weapon. Even with the weapon mastery skill gaining experience rapidly thanks to Teresa fighting high level opponents, she was only a beginner. Teresa was improving for sure, but she had a long way to go.

  On the way back to the Portal, she ran into some stragglers. A group of level 60 Wyvern-Fish were quickly killed, though they hardly even counted. Teresa took her time returning to the Portal, walking so that her resources could recover more. Funny enough, Teresa was using just as many, if not more, resources trying to tear away a group of monsters than fight them. Fighting the monsters, Teresa mostly used the occasional and if things got out of hand, so there wasn’t much resource consumption beyond the standard Stamina drain from straining her body.

  Running from what was basically an army of Wyvern-Fish, then is needed far more. Repeated and continuous use of her movement skill often wound up taking more resources than what Teresa used while fighting with just her sword. The sword was extremely efficient for longer fights, and it was large enough to offer close range crowd control. Teresa just needed to get good and she’d be set.

  After a few minutes, she had returned to the Wyvern-Fish Portal to be greeted by a horde of angry monsters. There were a few hundred monsters at this Portal, or at least there had been. Now, the number of remaining monsters was closer to 150, which was still too many for Teresa to take on at once.

  She fired in an arc across the crowd of Wyvern-Fish, fatally injuring a few before they could return fire with a volley of their own golden fireballs. She was here for experience to level herself up just as much as improve her sword skills, so speed in killing the monsters was still important.

  A couple quick instances of shotgun later and there were a lot more dead Wyvern-Fish and a group of them chasing after her. She had wiped out the faster Wyvern-Fish first, not because it was a part of her plan or anything but simply because the monsters with more points in Agility often caught up to her first.

  She still needed to use to get away and not be swarmed, even with many of the quickest Wyvern-Fish dead. A slower level 95 Wyvern-Fish still had more Agility than her, she was just glad their Agility wasn’t in the upper end of the 200s.

  Teresa weaved through the forest, dodging fireball after fireball. Tree trunks were blown to pieces and craters of scorched land littered the terrain. The Portal was actually closer to the tundra than The Mall, and she generally ran in that direction away from the settlement. She didn’t want to accidentally lead a high level monster capable of wiping out half the population into a city. It was unsettling to think about. Teresa had gotten to the point where she viewed monsters as a resource, something to hunt for experience, but the rest of the world likely wouldn’t see it that way.

  If a patrolling group of these Wyvern-Fish found The Mall, then a lot of people would die. There were even quite a few high level Portals in the area. Sure, in reality they were dozens of miles away from The Mall in a massive forest expanse, but that distance could be covered in minutes if one knew where to go.

  Seeing she lost a couple of the Wyvern-Fish, she turned to face her remaining pursuers. Monsters fell as she began using her sword, struggling to face off against a level 81 Teresa. Her attributes were at 169 across the board, so the Wyvern-Fish still had her beat in a few places.

  It wasn’t enough for them.

  Attacking enemies that didn’t immediately die upon having their heads cut off had its quirks, but after getting used to it there weren’t as many problems. She had started out struggling to kill two at a time without taking a hit in return, now she was pretty confident in taking out three with a single attack safely. Four is where she was currently pushing it.

  Monsters didn’t wait politely to attack one at a time. When fighting several at once, things got tricky. Teresa could cut through them all at once easily, but doing that without getting hit as well was difficult. had been getting a bit of training as well thanks to that, though ideally she wouldn’t get hit at all.

  When attacking a single monster, one has to take into account what the monster is doing. Is the monster in the middle of attacking? Is it chasing Teresa haphazardly? Is it inhaling and about to shoot a fireball? There were a lot of things that influenced when and how Teresa could attack. With multiple monsters at once, she had to consider whether any of the four Wyvern-Fish would be able to counterattack.

  If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  Teresa was getting a lot of practice thanks to that, becoming more comfortable maneuvering herself. Sometimes she saw an opportunity to take out just one monster with a well timed stab, sometimes there was a good moment to decapitate several at once, and Teresa was reacting fast to these situations and repeating them until hopefully her reactions would become second nature.

  She stabbed a Wyvern-Fish in the head as its arms were angled down, then shoved a Wyvern-Fish off balance using the edge of her extended blade. Resisting it lacerated the monster’s weak flesh, leaving a long cut down its right arm that began rapidly healing.

  It tried to lash out with its good arm, but Teresa had no problem blocking it with her weapon before cutting horizontally at the monster, slicing it in half. Three more tried to pounce on her while a fourth was charging a fireball. Teresa stepped out to the side and swung at the three monsters up close. Two of them were cut in half while the third was just too far away from that, taking a deep cut to the hip instead.

   shot out towards the Wyvern-Fish preparing to shoot Teresa with a fireball. It wasn’t enough to fully negate the fireball, but it was good practice for using the skill. A golden fireball was released from the mouth of the Wyvern-Fish, only for Teresa to have already moved out of the way. The fireball smashed through a tree and exploded as Teresa cut through the Wyvern-Fish, killing it and moving on through the rest of the group.

  About thirty Wyvern-Fish and a short break later, Teresa was walking back to the Portal again. She was gaining a lot of experience from each kill, a little under 1% of a level for every kill. Once again, she came across a couple low level Wyvern-Fish on the way back to the Portal, but she didn’t bother checking how much experience they gave. It was too small to be even a rounding error.

  When she returned to the Portal once more, she felt it was time to wrap things up here. Her resources were mostly full once more, and she felt comfortable enough taking out the rest of the Wyvern-Fish. Teresa charged towards the Portal, cutting down a surprised monster as she got closer.

  Multiple Wyvern-Fish died to her sword as they were initially spread out, and once they got closer into a group began to melt through them. One good way to keep a Wyvern-Fish from using a fireball was to melt its head off before it could shoot, which was something Teresa was entirely capable of.

  A continuous stream of fire wiped out scores of monsters, Teresa moved through them rapidly. Shotgun obliterated a group of Wyvern-Fish just for her to begin stabbing and cutting the monsters as they spread out again. There was no situation they could win in, and it showed as Teresa whittled down their numbers while taking only minor injuries in return.

  Some Wyvern-Fish were panicking and shooting fireballs that wound up hitting other Wyvern-Fish. The friendly fire was even more deadly than anything Teresa could do, as their fireballs were lethal even to her.

  Teresa was able to use the crowd to her advantage in that regard, attacking them one line at a time while refusing to let herself get surrounded. Cuts started accumulating on her, as eventually gave out about three quarters of the way through the monster horde. She cast it on herself again once she got the chance, but she didn’t get to supercharge it with .

  Her HP would get a bit lower than what most people would be comfortable with, but it was fine. A third of her total HP was still more than the entirety of Jake’s HP, her bigger concern was her Mana and Stamina. Even then she was fine, and by the time the last Wyvern-Fish died she didn’t drop below 500 of any resource.

  She contemplated destroying the Portal. Should she? The Wyvern-Fish had been great practice, it was hard to find monsters with good builds like that. A lot of monsters had enough weaknesses for Teresa to jump on and take advantage of to the point where it wasn’t even a difficult task to kill hundreds of them. Now, Teresa had hit level 82 and was 90% of the way to level 83.

  That was really good experience gain, though the Portal had taken quite a while to clear. Roughly two and a half hours for a single Portal was insanely slow for Teresa, but she felt it was worth it. She wished she had a clock or something to accurately measure time. There were a lot of tools she would like to have, she didn’t have a solid way to measure anything really. Time, distance, weight, measuring those exactly was useful.

  She would like to do the math to figure out the experience gained per minute clearing different Portals. Was it faster to take out a bunch of slightly weaker Portals or a single high level Portal? How much did her sword actually weigh? How fast could she run? These were all things that she couldn’t easily figure out without the right tools, things she just had to guesstimate.

  For now, she chose to leave the Wyvern-Fish Portal functional. She could always come and destroy it again later, and it would take time for it to make more Wyvern-Fish anyway. They were perfect for quality training. She cut monster cores out of the Wyvern-Fish and tossed them into her until her Soul was full. even got some action, giving some love to her secondary class.

  With the Portal taken care of for now, Teresa began making her way back to The Mall. She could keep going, but it was about time she upgraded her sword by using the Glyph of Self Repair. Once that was done, she could get back to it.

  A few minutes later she was back at The Mall. George was still at Arid Junction, so she would either have to teleport there or send someone to go get him. She figured she hadn’t seen Arid Junction since The Mall began renovating it, and chose to teleport there and back.

  She was burning through a lot of money, she made a lot of it back pretty fast. What was the point of having money if she never spent it? Teresa made her way to the City Monolith where she found a short line of people waiting to access the building with the structure in it. There were two parties in front of her, though thankfully the line seemed to be moving rather quickly as the party in the lead was let in all at once.

  “You guys selling monster parts?” Teresa asked the group in front of her. They turned back and looked at her before their mage archetype answered.

  “Yeah, are you?” The mage asked.

  “Yep, Wyvern-Fish. Found them by the tundra up north, they were at the edge of the forest.”

  “We got some Treants, they were Fortitude focused so that’s why we’re here and not by one of the shops.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’ll buy information on monsters with good Fortitude stats, especially if the monsters are made out of something useful. Durable wood has gotta be useful for something, right?” The mage said with a smile. Their ranger archetype was glancing between Teresa and the mage suspiciously, though Teresa shrugged it off.

  “I just killed a bunch of fire breathing fish so I doubt they’ll be good for much other than food, but I had some fish soup in Stormwreck that was fantastic so maybe they’ll be worth something.”

  “You’ve been to Stormwreck?”

  “Yeah, cool place. Bunch of zombies though, but they’re easy to kill.”

  “That’s crazy, I don’t know anyone who’s gone out further than Arconette.”

  “Dude.” The ranger elbowed the mage, looking at him like he was an idiot.

  “What?”

  “No shit she’s been to Stormwreck before.”

  “How am I supposed to know that?”

  The door to the building containing the City Monolith opened, the previous party leaving while the next party entered. Teresa and the mage each waved bye, then it was back to waiting. He had mentioned something about shops, though Teresa would have time to ask someone about them later.

  Eventually it was her turn to enter. As she walked past a guard stationed in front of the door, the guard whispered to her.

  “You know you didn’t have to wait, right?” The guard asked.

  “It was just a minute, it’s fine.” Teresa said before accessing the City Monolith. The first thing she did was sell off the monster cores from the Wyvern-Fish, earning herself a couple hundred dollars. Great profit from such a short work period, though she immediately was about to spend it all and then some as she opened up the interface to teleport to Arid Junction.

  FWOOMP