Chapter 25: What One Does For Experience

  There were now 19 days left in the second stage of the Tutorial.

  Teresa had lost some time due to her initial expedition out into the desert, but it hadn’t been for nothing. Her healing skills had both reached level 4, and she had figured some things out on her trip back. For one, there were random, peculiar things she could not heal.

  Healing her hair had proven impossible, or at least beyond Teresa’s current abilities. Fixing split ends wasn’t an option, and she had a few guesses as to why. Her hair was made of keratin and dead cells, and Teresa probably couldn’t heal the dead.

  Actually, that was another experiment Teresa wanted to try once she got the chance. The next time she killed a monster, she would see if she could heal the corpse’s injuries for practice. Based on what she learned from trying to heal her hair, this likely wouldn’t work. Still, she was curious.

  The same extended to her fingernails. Dead cells, no healing. She could use the restoration Mana on her hair follicles and some parts of her nails, but there weren’t many uses for that at the moment. She could probably cure injuries to people’s scalp and fingers, but she wouldn’t be able to make someone grow a head of hair or replace someone’s nails.

  Her healer class had also leveled up. She hadn’t picked a new skill yet, but she had noted a few things on how class level ups worked. The first time she leveled up her class, she had been offered

  as a potential skill. It was a skill that could destroy toxins at a similar level or lower using healing magic, and she had been offered that same skill once again.

  This meant that each skill was not offered only once. As a matter of fact, all of the previous options were still available to Teresa. She had also been offered and . The first of the two was automatically crossed out as a potential option, as it prevented her from using any other skills that required Mana at the same time. It might be useful if Teresa was a single soldier in a massive army where she couldn’t use on everyone, but that clearly wasn’t her current situation.

   was a contender. It seemed to function similarly to her , which would give a buff to someone’s Intelligence and Wisdom. If she used it on herself and then began healing someone then it would provide a solid boost to her healing capabilities.

  The issue was in the descriptions of the skills.

  

  Type: Restoration Magic

  Channel Mana to your palm and create a projectile of carefully crafted restoration Mana. When impacted by this projectile, the target’s body will naturally convert Mana from their surroundings into restoration Mana that will assist the body in its healing processes. Restoration Magic used on a target affected by this spell will see an increase in efficacy. Duration is dependent on Mana cost. Control over familiar properties of the spell is slightly enhanced.

  

  Type: Buffing Magic

  Channel Mana to your palm and create a projectile of low quality buffing Mana. Use this energy to grant a small buff to Intelligence and Wisdom. The efficacy of the buff is directly affected by your Intelligence, Wisdom, the skill level, and the stats of your target. You may only cast one buff on any given individual, and the duration of the buff is determined by the Mana expended.

   had the caveat that any given individual could only have one buff, but did not have that same caveat. Did her healing skill even count as a buff? It would suck to waste her skill choice on an option she couldn’t even use with her other skills.

  Instead, she turned to gaze at new skills that had appeared as options.

  

  Type: Restoration Magic

  Create a temporary totem capable of emitting low quality restoration Mana. This totem will be entirely incapable of movement, and can be destroyed prior to its standard lifespan. Restoration Mana generated by the totem will be under the control of the caster, and may be used actively or passively. Skill cooldown scales with Intelligence and skill level. Current Cooldown: 9 days, 11 hours

  The first new option was an interesting one. It was essentially with the caveat of being immovable and having a massive cooldown. Nine days!?!? Jake had gotten a skill right before he left the Tutorial with a cooldown, and apparently it had only been five seconds. Teresa didn’t know any of the details of the skill, as Jake had needed to leave shortly after getting it, but nine days was a lot longer than just five seconds.

  Teresa was admittedly tempted by this skill. It would certainly be very inefficient, but it would help save Sarah. Truthfully, Teresa didn’t want to be a healer forever. Magic was real, and it could probably be used anywhere. Before the System, Teresa hadn’t been able to choose a career to stay on for the rest of her life, and magic didn’t change that.

  As a matter of fact, it only reinforced her desire to branch out and try new things. Sure, had some drawbacks and wasn’t the most efficient skill, but it solved her immediate needs as a healer. It would also get stronger with time, as Teresa was sure she would still use her healing magic even if she found a way to stop being a healer. That is, if she was even able to without being a healer. There were too many uncertainties regarding classes to make long term decisions, but Teresa was adamant she wouldn’t stick to one thing forever.

  She looked over her next skill option, which was also the last.

  

  Type: Debuffing Magic

  Channel Mana to your palm and create a projectile of low quality debuffing Mana. Use this energy to grant a small debuff to Intelligence and Wisdom. The efficacy of the debuff is directly affected by your Intelligence, Wisdom, skill level, and the stats of your target. The duration of the debuff is determined by the Mana expended.

  This was the first debuffing skill Teresa had seen. If she understood it right, this skill would lower the Intelligence and Wisdom stats of a target. In other words, she could make something dumber by shooting it with a ball of stupid. Honestly? She was kind of tempted to take it just for the bit. It would be insanely funny if she reunited with her brother and immediately shot him with to make him temporarily dumber. He would probably appreciate the bit.

  Unfortunately, she had actual responsibilities she couldn’t skirt for a joke. She really, really wanted to take the skill, and she probably would if someone’s life wasn’t literally in her hands.

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  It might be useful in combat, except that Teresa’s opponents weren’t exactly that sharp anyways. It was the exact opposite of , and a part of her was curious what would happen if someone was affected by both skills at the same time. Her real choice was between ,

  , and .

   might be really useful, but it also might really suck. If it couldn’t coexist with , then it may as well be a net negative. It was a gamble, and Teresa wasn’t sure she wanted to take any risks with Sarah’s life.

  was an experience grinding choice. If she constantly emitted poison with her new staff and used

  on herself, she could probably grind out a lot of experience. She might even be able to experiment with the skill, and she already had a few ideas. Could

  be used for cleaning? Teresa got a lot of blood on her from fights, and she meant a lot of blood. Her robes would clean themselves with Mana, but it didn’t get rid of the blood from everywhere else.

  Using wasn’t enough to clean blood off of her face or hands, but maybe she could find a way to get

  to work with removing blood. Monster blood might be considered a toxin, who knew what was in it anyways. Using this skill might grant Teresa some experience towards another class level, but really it wasn’t a great choice still. She could deal with being covered in the blood of her enemies for a little while longer.

  Lastly was . This was probably her safest option. She certainly would not be able to level it up very much, if at all, before leaving the Tutorial. Still, it would provide a guaranteed benefit to Sarah as opposed to a possible benefit like what provided.

  It may be cowardly but she was going to play it safe. She chose , figuring she could always choose the next time she leveled her class up if there wasn’t a better option.

  Teresa intuitively understood how to use her new skill, but didn’t test it out yet. She would wait until she was in combat, then immediately activate . So far, using skills while in a fight seemed to give more experience than using them outside of a fight. Since the skill had such a ridiculous cooldown, she would wait until she was in combat to maximise her experience gains.

  Actually, looking over her stats, she was 8% away from level 10. That would grant an increase to her Intelligence, which would decrease the cooldown time. Slightly new plan: kill something, level up, use skill. Great plan.

  Teresa set out into the desert once more, bringing less supplies as she did not plan on staying in the desert for too long. She paced herself at a light jog, which was still faster than most people’s sprint. Teresa would probably be an Olympic athlete at this point, and she would certainly be faster than any other human on the planet who was her height.

  It didn’t take long to find more monsters. She found a pack of Wyvern-Fish, all of which were “atrocious” according to and relatively low leveled. Teresa did not hesitate to draw her bow and begin shooting, the oncoming Wyvern-Fish were already having their numbers cut down.

  There had originally been five of them, but they never managed to reach Teresa before they were all killed with arrows. Teresa did not receive a level up until the third kill, so she did not get the chance to use . That was alright, plans need the ability to adapt a bit as circumstances changed. Using the skill with only two enemies would barely grant more experience than using it out of combat, so she would just use it in the next fight.

  She was level 10 now, and she put her unallocated point into Strength. Teresa did not want a repeat of what happened with the high Fortitude deer, though she did need to make sure to put points into Agility later. After all, she needed to be able to run all the way out to a monster stronghold, kill everything, and come back to Liberty Island in a day.

  Minutes later, she found a group of Yectin Clubbers, all at a similar level to herself. She realized she had forgotten to try and heal the corpses of the previous monster pack, but perhaps it was better that way. If it worked, she might gain extra experience for her new skill if she used some of the low quality restoration Mana it provided. Additionally, she was prepared to figure out the difference between her regular restoration Mana and this “low quality” restoration Mana.

  She began to release a poisonous cloud around herself with her poison staff as the Clubbers charged towards her. Additionally, she used for the first time. Besides her, a tall, wooden totem began to sprout out from the ground. It stood about eight feet tall, and had various carvings of heads carved into the wood.

  The skill had taken a ridiculous amount of Mana, it had an activation cost of 100 Mana. Teresa herself now had a Mana pool of 375 so she could afford it, but it was still an expensive skill.

  The totem began to emit a green haze, which blended in with the poisonous cloud. Teresa found she was able to control the green haze, as it was entirely restoration Mana. This form gave Teresa another idea to test out later using the strange magnetic properties of restoration Mana repelling other unattached restoration Mana, but it would have to wait. She could only do so many things at once, and for now it was time to kill some Clubbers.

  The fight went about as expected. Teresa kited around the Clubbers as they repeatedly tried to smash her into the ground, occasionally gutting one with her sword. There were six of them, though the monsters had become far more manageable.

  Teresa was fast enough to dodge Clubber after Clubber, and soon they were all either dead or spasming on the ground choking to death from the noxious fumes. This hadn’t been enough for another level, despite how much experience Clubbers had provided in the past. However, there were still some experiments to conduct.

  Firstly, Teresa began using some of the spare restoration Mana from to keep the choking Clubbers on the edge of life. Once again, this was essentially torture and Teresa had no illusions about that. It left a bad taste in her mouth, but she needed every drop of experience she could get. Besides, at least they were just monsters, right?

  No, that didn’t make it much better. Teresa wasn’t going to find some way to justify this, what she was doing was immoral and she knew it. This wouldn’t be for long, just long enough to get a little experience for her new skill, but still. Once the Tutorial was over, Teresa promised herself she wouldn’t torture anything like that ever again.

  Hopefully she would be able to keep that promise.

  Teresa approached one of the dead Clubbers. She had disemboweled this one early on in the fight, and it was the kind of injury she would have to help Sarah survive. Organs spilled out of the dead monster and onto the ground, and Teresa found herself disturbed by how okay she was with this. The smell was atrocious, but Teresa barely batted an eye.

  She used on the dead beast, but found that while the restoration Mana entered its body, nothing actually happened. She tried using , but once again the restoration Mana didn’t do anything. It was exactly like when she tried to heal her hair, the restoration Mana didn’t know what to do with something that was already dead.

  Unfortunately there would be no necromancy for Teresa. That would have been sick, badass even, but she couldn’t find a way to make it work. Blood wouldn’t coagulate, skin wouldn’t mend itself, nothing would happen no matter what she tried. She wasn’t going to gain any experience from trying to heal a dead body, so she abandoned the idea for now.

  She left the dead Clubber and stopped healing the choking monsters, allowing them to finally die. A look at her new skill showed it included a timer to let her know when the skill would be available, and she intuitively understood how much time was remaining. The cooldown had decreased to 9 days and 5 hours, and the skill had gained a whopping 11% experience from using it once.

  Teresa definitely wouldn’t be able to level it up in time before the end of the second Tutorial stage, but that was fine. It still worked in conjunction with her other skills, and it was yet another step closer to saving Sarah.

  For now, she needed more experience. She set her gaze out into the desert and began jogging once more, ready to get some more levels.

  A lot of monsters were going to die.