Teresa took in her surroundings once more as she cast
Sarah was wide eyed patting her body down, and Randall was winded on the ground. Preston was fine aside from a few scrapes and bruises, but after spamming her healing spell a few times everyone would be fine.
“What the hell happened?” Saylee asked, confused. Things had happened very quickly, maybe 10 seconds passing from the first arrow to the shotgun
“They had someone up there with a level cap, I didn’t want to give any actual names or locations.” Teresa explained, pointing at where the archer woman had attacked them. “Only people with a level cap we’ve seen aren’t from this universe. In the middle of our conversation, they decided they wanted us dead and tried to kill us. Why exactly, I don’t know. Also, I accidentally conquered New Haven.”
As a matter of fact, Teresa’s stats slightly increased after she had done so. This came from a title upgrade followed by two more titles.
You possess the authority and privileges granted to the Ambassador of The Mall, capital of The Mall.
+1 All Stats at city level 4.
+1 All Stats at faction level 1.
Her Ambassador title gave an extra point in all stats for their ‘faction level,’ which previously hadn’t been present in the description. It also mentioned that The Mall was the capital of The Mall. If Teresa had to guess, by taking possession of multiple City Monoliths The Mall had become sort of a county, though the country name defaulted to the name of the capital city, The Mall in this case.
You possess the authority and privileges granted to the Leader of New Haven, The Mall.
+3 All Stats at city level 6.
+1 All Stats at faction level 1.
You have conquered (1) city for your faction.
+1 All Stats.
The two new titles also gave her a bunch of stats, but she definitely wasn’t planning on keeping the Leader title. It’s not because she was particularly averse to being in a position of power anymore or something, but rather due to one glaring issue.
Staying in power.
“We’ve got to go, if we stay here we’re fucked.” Teresa touched the City Monolith and began flipping through screens visible only to her, looking for an option to either forfeit or abandon the city.
“Why? Didn’t we just conquer the place? I even got a title for it.” Preston asked.
“It would be extremely dangerous to keep it.” Saylee explained. “At the moment, no one knows who we are or where we came from. Meanwhile, every single person with a city title will have just lost that title, and is likely heading right back here to see what just happened. It’s likely some of them will attack on sight, and they may bring a lot of people with them.”
“We can just explain what happened then, tell them about the multiversal traffickers and stuff.” Preston countered. By this point, they were all talking much faster than a normal human, though not at top speeds due to Saylee’s level.
“It’s likely a few people are involved even within the upper levels of government, it only takes one of them getting here first and spinning the story to make us the target of potentially hundreds of people at once. Teresa, would you feel confident taking on the city with the people here?” Saylee asked.
“No, the average level here seems really low, but a lot of higher level people might be out hunting monsters right now. It might be possible with preparation, but no offense, we would have to defend you and we’re missing Jake at the moment.” Teresa answered. Fighting a lot of people at once was much harder than fighting a lot of monsters at once. Teresa really did feel like she could probably conquer the place with her party if they fought on her terms using hit and run tactics, but even then it would leave a lot of problems for the long term.
“Plus, it would make future meetings with other cities significantly more difficult if we conquer the place.” Saylee added. “Nobody would want to meet with us if we have a history of conquest, the people in the city wouldn’t take kindly to being annexed, and even if it was all in good faith to save people from traffickers other cities might not believe us. Even further, it might put a target on our city, leading to either our eradication or the targeting of our families on the other planet. Teresa managed to dodge that bullet once, but we can’t be sure it will work twice.”
“Have you already thought this through? It seems like you’ve already considered the repercussions of this before it even happened.” Randall asked.
“We’ve already considered it in the past. While trying to figure out how to handle the traffickers, a lot of violent solutions were proposed. War was decided against due to the inherent risks even against weaker opponents. Ultimately the best plan we came up with involved assasination, but even that had a lot of risks. Nevertheless, we’re in this situation, and it would be best if we skipped town before anyone can figure out our city had something to do with this.” Saylee answered.
“Found it, I’m forfeiting the city and it can be claimed pretty easily. Let’s get going.” Teresa said as she began running towards the door they entered through. The building was collapsing, and there were a few low level people she had to worry about. Eli and the receptionists were in danger, something as simple as falling rubble could kill them.
“We have plans for assasination?” Randall asked, sounding worried.
“Not any specific plans, but it is something we’ve been looking into.” Saylee confirmed. “We want to assassinate human traffickers, not charity workers and union leaders. What we definitely didn’t have any decent plans for was killing compromised city Leaders, so we really need to get going now.”
Teresa at this point had entered the lobby and looked around. The receptionists were both gone, though Teresa could see them running down the street to get away. Eli, however, was taking cover while hiding behind a counter, but Teresa could hear his breathing and knew he was there. At his level, Teresa was confident he hadn’t heard anything. Even then, just in case, none of them had spoken the words ‘The Mall’ out loud should there be someone with a high Perception stat nearby.
“Eli, we gotta go!” Teresa grabbed Eli by the shoulder and lifted him up as he immediately yelled in protest.
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“What have you done?” He screamed, though there was literally nothing he could do to harm Teresa or even run away.
“New Haven was being led by human traffickers, they tried to kill us and now we’re here.” She explained as the group all ran out the door. She handed Eli over to Preston and looked at her party members. “Get out of the city as fast as you can, regroup at the city we just came from. I’ll go get our other guy.”
They nodded at her and began moving, though Randall looked reluctant to do so. Thankfully, nobody hesitated, and Teresa ran in the opposite direction. She arrived at Mitsuki’s cabin pretty fast, as she didn’t obey any of the speed limits. Were there established speed limits in the city? Probably not, but if there were she certainly broke them.
Teresa ran up to the cabin door and knocked repeatedly.
“It’s me! Open the door now, we’re leaving!” Teresa yelled. A moment later, the door opened to reveal a concerned Jake and his grandpa behind him.
“What’s going on?” Jake asked.
“Traffickers tried killing us, we accidentally conquered the place and need to get going.” Teresa summarized, though Jake’s eyes were not focused on her.
{Human (F-) (lv 60)(MAX)}
Teresa activated
His mental stats all plummeted as his physical stats skyrocketed, while also locking his opponent within a set radius. Teresa had to be careful about using
Their attacker moved silently, making no noise even when his sword cut through the air. Quiet or not, he was in a terrible situation. Jake was a hard counter to single, fast opponents thanks to his
Teresa’s sword cleaved horizontally towards the attacker, quartering off a section of Jake’s
Within only three seconds, the man was trapped against the edge of Jake’s
You Have Slain {Human (F-) (lv 60)(MAX)}
Experience Granted
Maybe getting stabbed through the torso would be a big deal pre-System, but Teresa was able to easily heal Jake almost immediately. If not for Jake’s
“Jake!” Mitsuki yelled, stumbling forward as fast as he could towards his grandson who just got stabbed.
“I’m fine, don’t worry.” Jake said, hugging his grandpa before picking him up. “Where are we going?”
“Follow me.” Teresa put the body in her
The main gate of the city was likely already locked down, or at least Teresa assumed it would be if they knew what they were doing. She wasn’t going to check it out though, and instead they ran towards the nearest part of the wall surrounding New Haven. The wall was made of logs with sharpened ends placed side by side, though Teresa wasn’t sure where they got the logs from. As a matter of fact, where did they get any of their wood? For the carts, carriages, homes-
Okay, now was not the time to question that.
They were towards the southern edge of the city, not far from another gate that Teresa hadn’t known about. Rather than rush through the gate, Teresa and Jake found a secluded part of the wall and each grabbed a part of a log. Together, they lifted one of the tall logs making up the wall out of the ground, making an opening that they passed through. They placed the log back into the ground behind them, and continued to escape from the city.
There was another trail leading south from New Haven, but that’s not where they were planning on going. Instead, they ran a solid distance away from the city and began to loop around, gradually making their way towards Stormwreck.
Only once they were completely clear of New Haven did Teresa begin filling in Jake on what happened. Mitsuki, Jake’s grandpa, also had a lot of questions, including one subject Teresa wasn’t sure about.
“What’s going to happen to Eli?” Mitsuki asked. Shit, what was going to happen to Eli?
“Did he have any family in New Haven?” Teresa asked.
“Not direct family, no, but he has a lot of folk from his church there.”
“Then he’ll come with us for now. Leaving him there will make him a target, he brought us to the city hall and has connections with you. This way, we can at least make it look like we kidnapped him.” Teresa explained. “Well, I mean, I guess we actually did kind of kidnap him.”
“So what’s the long term plan?” Jake asked.
“Well, I don’t think they know that we’re from The Mall, but we also don’t know how well they can track us either. They might have a karmic skill for it or something, really I don’t know anything for sure.” Teresa answered. As she ran, she was actively trying to use
“Are we going to tell them what happened?” Jake asked. “Stormwreck, I mean. They knew we were leaving for New Haven, I think it would be a little too coincidental for them to overlook.”
“We might have to.” Teresa admitted. “If we don’t, they might figure out we were involved on their own, and who knows what conclusions they’ll come to. It might be best if we get ahead of it ourselves, they already know about the trafficking so hopefully it won’t be too hard to convince them.”
“It’s not like we went in there with any ulterior motives, they attacked first.” Jake said.
“It’s not about the truth, it’s about what people believe. If people believe The Mall is a warmongering threat to cities far and wide, we might have multiple cities go to war with us. We know there are multiple multiversal factions invading our universe, if too many of them hear about us they might target us as well. Killing a couple people in New Haven probably won’t solve their problems, and it’s only a matter of time until it’s in the same situation.” Teresa said. “If we want to be capable of doing anything to help, we need to get stronger and connect our planets with the teleportation network.”
It’s not as if Teresa had just been willingly ignoring the trafficking issue. Even Arconette seemed compromised in some capacity, and they had worked together to take out the Contaminated Zone. The issue was she could only do so much as things were. Her family could suffer horrible consequences if she overstepped, but that didn’t mean she was planning on letting things stay as they were.
No, Teresa wanted to help where she could, but she had to be smart about it. At the moment, she was reliant on George figuring out space travel, which might not be possible for a while. Teresa was well aware she was just one random person, she wasn’t going to singlehandedly save the universe or something ridiculous like that.
For now, they would deal with the situation at hand. They still needed to find Preston’s dad and Sarah’s sister. Once that was taken care of, Teresa would need to get stronger if she wanted any chance of keeping people safe.
That, and killing people who needed to die.