Chapter 161: Breaking Every Bone In Preston’s Body

  The trip back was rather uneventful.

  They were a little more than two days of travel time away from Stormwreck, perhaps closer to three days. Teresa’s understanding of how far they were was at best an estimate, as with Benjamin their travel time was increased even further.

  Not to say Benjamin wasn’t making good progress. Since they looted a few bodies, they had an extra sword for him so he didn’t have to use Preston’s. This also allowed them to spar in order to train their respective skills. Initially, Benjamin didn’t want to attack his son with a lethal weapon, but after some reassurance he gave in. They weren’t attacking each other with full force, that would be silly. Even Benjamin needed to take the sparring slowly to focus on doing things correctly, though more intense sparring would eventually take place.

  Higher intensity sparring was important in learning how to fight. There was a lot of repetition in training, but a lot of that muscle memory had a habit of going out the window after getting punched in the face. Good sparring sessions not only solidified gains from other forms of training, but it helped with thinking while being attacked. When Teresa did kickboxing, she heard stories of people who trained various martial arts for years only to get beat in a random fight since they never sparred. She wasn’t sure how true that was since it was purely anecdotal, but it was undeniable that sparring was essential, especially if Benjamin was actively planning on getting into a fight with monsters.

  He had an easy enough time with training his , but ironically enough struggled with leveling his despite all the traveling. While yes, the party was traveling on foot and theoretically would get a lot of practice from that, Benjamin wasn’t running with them. He was too slow, even with .

  None of them used much while travelling anyways. It took more resources than just running, and not everyone had . This all meant that Benjamin could only really train during the same breaks he would be training his .

  They only took a few breaks a day, during which Teresa often took the time to hunt monsters for levels. It was increasingly difficult the closer they got to Stormwreck. Not because the monsters were powerful, rather the opposite.

  Teresa couldn’t find anything over level 80.

  Okay, she probably could if she really went out of her way, but limiting herself to hunting within a few miles of where they would set up camp for a break drastically increased the difficulty of finding high level Portals. It was often a tough decision, she could either wipe out multiple Portals in one fell swoop that were in the 60s, or she could make an hour long trip to find a Portal that might be the same level as her.

  Teresa still thought it was likely to do with overhunting monsters in the area. At a high level, one singular person needed to kill hundreds of monsters for a level up. Even low level hunting affected this, as Portals needed to exist for a while before reaching a high level. There were hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions even, within 1,000 miles.

  Doing the math for the area that came out to a little over three million square miles within a 1,000 miles radius. If there were only one million people in that area, to make it fair each person would only get 3 square miles to hunt monsters in.

  Of course, not everyone would be hunting monsters, but at the same time Teresa could clear 3 square miles easily. Even if there were only 10,000 people who regularly hunted monsters, 1% of the reasonable population, everyone would get 300 square miles of hunting ground. Assuming each square mile had, what, a couple Portals maybe, then at most that would come out to 900 Portals. It definitely wasn’t 900, but Teresa was actively trying to make the math as opposed to her theory as possible.

  Assuming Teresa could theoretically hunt around 20ish high level Portals in a day depending on the monsters, it would take 45 days to cycle through all 900 Portals in her allotted space. That… actually wasn’t bad. It poked a big hole in her theory that overhunting was the reason there were so few high level Portals compared to The Mall. Sure, she had been doing the math with a heavy bias towards proving herself wrong, and the math did show there weren’t enough monsters for everyone, plus it revealed some long term problems.

  What would happen as Teresa leveled up more? Currently, she considered her abilities absurdly powerful, and the System still considered her an F rank, bottom of the barrel. Would the area be able to sustain her at E rank? What about D rank? A small army of the most powerful people Teresa knew nearly got wiped out by a single E rank, she didn’t want to imagine what a D rank would be like.

  Regardless, there were a lack of powerful monsters in the area, and assured Teresa she wasn’t just missing them. She had managed to jump to level 76 pretty fast, though with how each level took more experience that was slowing down. By the end of the second day of travel, she had only hit level 79 despite taking out quite a few Portals.

  The closer they got to Stormwreck, the worse the problem got. Most of the monsters wouldn’t even provide any experience if Teresa killed them since there was such a drastic level gap. She could find a few decent Portals, but they were increasingly spread out. A few were hidden away in hard to reach locations due to the terrain, though revealed them to Teresa just fine.

  Teresa began sparring with the others rather than hunt once the monster levels got bad enough, at that point she’d get more out of leveling than anything else.

  Preston had a very annoying method of fighting. He was much faster than Teresa, and his mental stats were catching up to his physical speed. He still couldn’t think or react nearly as fast as Teresa though, resulting in a weird stalemate where they struggled to hit each other.

  If Teresa started using her more offensive skills then she’d be able to hit him, but they both agreed to use only supporting skills like , , and weapon mastery skills so they wouldn’t accidentally seriously injure one another.

  , , , and were all off limits amongst others.

  As a result, Preston had more movement skills he was able to use, though Teresa didn’t mind that. She was significantly higher level, which balanced it out just fine.

  What made it annoying were the hit and run tactics taken to an extreme. Preston would run in, try to poke her with his sword, then run away before she could counter. Her own sword was great for controlling distance due to its size, but at the same time it was more unwieldy and she struggled against Preston’s superior swordsmanship. Even if she could think faster, he had a lot of tricks to attack with due to his skills.

  He’d step barely into Teresa’s range, then backwards just out of range when Teresa tried to hit him. Follow that up with a , he could get in a quick poke to the arm or the side.

  Not harming each other was actually pretty damn difficult, especially with Teresa’s weapon of choice. They had extra swords from looting, and they decided to test if one could block a half hearted swing from Teresa’s sword.

  It cut right through.

  So blocking her sword with another one was out of the question. Perhaps she could lower her own stats? It was something she was thinking about while fighting with Sarah and Sasha. She could lower her Perception to not be overwhelmed, what about her other stats?

  Turns out, not that easy. She could sort of do it with Strength and Agility, but that was less of her turning down her stats and more of her just deliberately not utilizing them. That was tricky to do, as it was extremely natural to use her attributes.

  She could just act like she wasn’t able to lift certain weights or move a certain speed, but that didn’t solve the issue they were facing. Teresa’s sword could cut through people like butter, Preston’s Fortitude was gradually increasing but it wasn’t nearly high enough for his body to put up much resistance against Teresa’s sword.

  So how did they get around this? They couldn’t use another sword. Well, they could, but both Preston and Teresa agreed she should get used to her weapon of choice. Instead, Teresa was just attacking with the flat of her blade.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Swinging her sword like that made it way harder, as she was shoving a large amount of air out of the way rather than cutting through it. Damn air resistance was being a pain in the ass again, but her Strength was enough to overcome that for the most part. It was slower, but it worked. Even if she accidentally broke every bone in Preston’s body, she could heal that. She couldn’t heal him if she cut him in half, at least not fully.

  As a result, whenever Teresa managed to land a hit on Preston, he had to take a break from sparring to recover physically and mentally. Teresa had to hand it to him, Preston was brave. Getting hit while sparring like this meant something was going to break, at minimum his arm. Even while trying not to hurt him too badly, getting hit by a high speed hunk of metal over a thousand pounds had a tendency to do widespread damage throughout his body. Despite that, he kept getting back up, something most people wouldn’t be willing to do.

  Not to say Teresa wasn’t getting hurt. His pokes still stabbed her, even if they didn’t cut very deep. For every hit Teresa landed on him, Preston got around eight stabs on her. Getting stabbed and healing automatically with wasn’t enough to end the sparring most of the time, excluding the one time Preston managed to cut something in her leg that made it completely unresponsive for a few moments. Preston had capitalized on that and won that round.

  Teresa didn’t feel bad about it, Preston was simply better with swords, and the sparring was helping her improve. When fighting other humanoids, she had the habit of preferring to put her sword away and just punch them in the face if they were going to fight in a melee. She needed to become comfortable with her sword against other people, as it was a useful tool that would only benefit her capabilities.

  If push came to shove, she could always drop her sword and punch her opponent in the face, but she’d prefer to be more versatile than that. As much as Teresa loved punching people in the face, there was a time and place for everything, and sometimes stabbing someone in the face produced better results.

  Not that they were aiming for the head at the moment. They could both kill each other with a single headshot. The risk of permanent injury and death was too high for sparring to allow attacks to the head with a sword. Teresa could shatter Preston’s skull and send shards of bone into his brain, and Preston could stab her deep enough to pierce the brain and kill her. Teresa was a fantastic healer by all means, but she couldn’t fix dead.

  The sparring was great for their increasingly absurd pain tolerance, and provided Teresa’s healing skills some experience. Even if getting injured hurts, it didn’t last long if and had anything to say about it. Maybe a second or two of pain, depending on how bad the injury was. Teresa once would have been upset with stubbing her toe. After being stabbed, cut, burned, punted by the Statue of Liberty, doused in enough radiation to microwave leftovers, shot multiple times, and whatever else Teresa was missing, she was getting good at just ignoring it. The pain was still there and it fucking sucked, but there was a comfort in knowing the pain wouldn’t be what killed her.

  They were setting up camp on the second night of travel when Sasha asked a question that Teresa totally forgot about.

  “Why does my skin feel funny?” Sasha asked the party. “Ever since I got here my skin started feeling weird.”

  Shit, was she poisoned by something? Maybe there was some medical issue? If they were lucky, then Sasha was just imagining it and it was nothing. Teresa didn’t know what could cause that, and she was getting ready to test out

  on her until Sarah answered the question.

  “It’s just her .” Sarah said, gesturing to Teresa.

  “What?” Teresa asked, confused. “My healing makes your skin feel weird?”

  “I’ve had used on me before and it didn’t do that. Plus hers is pretty fast, this has been a gradual thing.” Sasha said.

  “Same here, though I figured it was just from being stuck underground for so long.” Benjamin confirmed.

  “Her healing magic helps with skincare.” Sarah answered. “We’ve all had used on us over and over again. It’s good for your skin, though does it a lot faster.”

  “So that’s what it is!” Randall exclaimed. “I was wondering about that, I thought it was just my Vitality kicking in.”

  Oh yeah. Teresa completely forgot about that. Ages ago she had figured out how to use her healing magic to help her skin deal with wind burn and environmental hazards. It was something she used all the time but didn’t think about. She used to experiment with her skills a lot more, and while she still did from time to time it was increasingly rare. Teresa missed that.

  She had once figured out how to supercharge her by using in the opposite hand and holding it in place utilizing the weird magnetic properties Restoration Mana had with itself. Teresa had experimented a bit with and

  , but not nearly to the same extent as what she used to do.

  George was probably doing stuff like that all the time, or at least frequently if he managed to figure out pseudo skills. Teresa was admittedly a bit jealous of that, though she wouldn’t swap places with the guy. As stressful as things were for her, at least she wasn’t founding a space program with scrapped together resources in order to escape a blackmail scheme from multiversal factions led by gods. No, she was just telling someone to go do that, but to be fair George was clearly passionate about the subject and would probably aim for the stars even if there weren’t incomprehensible forces motivating him to do it.

  She’d help him out where she could, because honestly she had to admit she did find it fascinating. If someone told her computers had bit flips in space, her initial solution would probably be to not bring computers into space before she would consider implementing watchdogs and fault handling.

  Shoot, did they need computers? They could think pretty damn fast now, but at the same time Teresa didn’t really want to consider optimizing rocket science by hand. Space stuff was cool, and-

  “That makes sense! I suppose running all day like this would be even more miserable than it already is without that.” Benjamin said. Oh right, skin care magic. How did Teresa go from thinking about that to space computers so fast? Her attention span was terrible.

  “Yeah, I was messing around with it and had fun experimenting with what exactly Restoration Magic can be used for.” Teresa said. “I was already needing to heal myself all the time, and I was just messing around. I knew salicylic acid was good for blackheads, benzoyl peroxide for acne, moisturizer for keeping that all from burning you, and I tried to replicate it. I didn’t know exactly how those chemicals worked, but I knew the feeling and I eventually wondered if I could just treat dry skin as a really minor burn since if it dries out enough it will burn, and it worked.”

  “I didn’t know you could influence your skills like that.” Benjamin said.

  “You can really direct them in different directions. For the most part, but not always, skills are normally the same at level 0. At higher levels, they tend to be different. I’m sure my has some subtle differences from Preston’s due to how we developed it separately.” Teresa continued.

  “Huh, I want to try that. I wonder if I can use to make me kick real hard since it makes my legs move faster.” Benjamin said.

  “Tried that, it hurts a lot.” Preston told him. “Unless you have a high Fortitude or some skill for it, I’d advise against that. Teresa can get away with hitting someone barehanded since she has the Fortitude to do it, but if we try hitting someone without a weapon we’ll break our hands or our legs. Plus, despite making your kick faster, it doesn’t actually hit as hard as you’d expect it to. There’s a weird difference between speed and power that I don’t quite get.”

  “I’ve also thought about altering your stats. I can reduce my Perception to baseline human, so can I do the same with my other attributes?” Teresa asked. “I’m pretty sure I can’t, since ultimately I’m just controlling my Perception, Strength, and Agility when I do it with those. But Vitality? Endurance? Fortitude? Not sure what I’d do there, but what if someone needs to do surgery on me and can’t cut me open?”

  “In that case why not just use Restoration Magic?” Jake asked.

  “What if it doesn’t work or if I’m unconscious?”

  “If you’re unconscious then I doubt you’ll be able to affect your Fortitude anyway.”

  “Good point.”

  The group spent the rest of the evening throwing out whatever wacky ideas they had for their skills before going to bed. Preston wondered what would happen if he restricted his from firing immediately with somehow, Jake was taking tips on from Teresa, and Sarah was trying to think of different ways she could try to receive a camouflage skill in a skill selection.

  It was a nice night. Teresa enjoyed these conversations. They were figuring stuff out with limited information, and it was fun. There might come a day where they felt the things they learnt now was obvious, but for now there were so many new rules to how reality worked that it felt like they were world renowned scientists studying a new field of physics or something. It was weird to think that their messing around actually was science in a way, and that the things they did for shits and giggles were feats few currently could accomplish on the entire planet.

  Maybe even both planets, for that matter.

  As Teresa was eventually trying to fall asleep, she thought about how they needed to come up with a name for the planet. It wasn’t really Earth anymore. She was willing to bet that if someone looked at the stars, they’d find constellations that weren’t there before. Teresa didn’t know if the moon was the same, even if it looked pretty similar to Earth’s moon.

  Her last thought before sleeping was that one day, if she was lucky, she might get to help name the world itself.