Teresa Of All Trades (Books 1 & 2 Complete),Chapter 149: Tempest Ranger,My Virtual Library Empire,Already happened story

  Chapter 149: Tempest Ranger

  The night passed without incident, though Teresa still took some precautions. Primarily, she blocked the door to her room with her extremely heavy sword. That had been pretty difficult since the weapon was heavy enough to crush through most furniture just by having the sword lean against it, but she just had to lay it flat and it was still able to block the door from opening easily.

  She also rested a few arrows against the window so they would clatter if opened, laid arrows out along the ground all over so it was difficult to walk without stepping on one, and moved her bed to be out of sight from the window.

  Was this excessive? Maybe, especially since nothing happened, but it couldn’t hurt to be too careful. Sure, she’d probably wake up from the slightest noise inside due to her Perception, but what if someone had a skill to reduce sound? What if someone managed to shoot her through the wall or something?

  Alright, even Teresa could tell she was being a bit excessive in her worries, but complacency could result in her death. Even her acknowledgement of her excessive measures was laced with anxiety, but once again to be fair she had just killed some pretty important people.

  Once morning came, they convinced Zackery to let them teleport Eli and Mitsuki back to The Mall. Teresa needed to spot both of them the cash to do so, but since they were so low level it was practically pocket change to someone like Teresa.

  Stormwreck had ultimately agreed to keep Teresa’s involvement in New Haven secret, so they had less to worry about on that front. Once Mitsuki and Eli were sent away to The Mall, it was time to continue their travels.

  Next stop, Preston’s dad. He was southeast of Arconette and east of Stormwreck, likely in a city named Nouarosso. It was relatively close to Stormwreck, but apparently they had less than positive relations with one another. Nouarosso had rejected any and all attempts at diplomacy with other cities, and they had the least amount of external activity of anyone Stormwreck had met including New Haven.

  As Teresa and company were being led out of Stormwreck by Patrick, he seemed genuinely worried for them.

  “When you get there, they aren’t going to willingly let you into the city. We know nothing about the interior of the city itself, as it’s contained within a mountain.” Patrick explained as they walked. “We attempted to send an Ambassador there in the past, and they were turned away by the guards. This was two weeks ago, and at the time they said they spotted someone level 45. Given the time that has passed since and the fact that it didn’t seem to be anyone particularly important, it’s safe to assume they have a few powerhouses in Nouarosso.”

  “They don’t let anyone in or just diplomatic parties?” Saylee asked.

  “Not sure, we didn’t really stick around long.” Patrick replied. “From my understanding, the further south you travel from here the higher the human population density. If Nouarosso doesn’t want any outside interaction, we didn’t see the need to force it when it’s not that hard to find more people south.”

  “What about nonhuman life?” Teresa asked.

  “There’s still plenty of Portals and a few cities made up of nonhumans, but a lot of them got wiped out.” Patrick answered. “At least that’s how I understand the situation. We haven’t had a lot of time to get the lay of the land, but we know of two nonhuman settlements that got taken over.”

  “Does it ever go the other way?” Teresa continued. “Like, aliens conquering human cities?”

  “If it’s happened I haven’t heard of it. We interact mostly with New Haven, Camelot, and Arconette at the moment. New Haven doesn’t like us very much either but it’s not bad enough to completely stop trade. They buy a lot of wood from Camelot, and we buy a lot of products New Haven makes with said wood.”

  “Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to tell us that?”

  “I don’t see the harm in demonstrating we’re open to trade negotiations.” Patrick said.

  “Fair enough.”

  Once they reached the edge of Stormwreck, it was time to head out. They thanked Patrick for the information and began running. According to Patrick, it had been a two day trip for their Ambassador who had been level 39 at the time with a light warrior archetype class. Saylee and Jake were the slowest in the party, and since both were being carried in typical fashion it shaved their expected travel time down a good deal.

  Sarah, Preston, Jake, and Randall were each levels 46, 48, 46, and 52 respectively, and they all had the title giving a small percentage boost to their stats. This all excluded Saylee, of course, as she was only level 15. Despite Saylee being the lowest level herself, she had one of the highest class levels of anyone present.

  She had the class Exploratory Cartographer, which was one of the few classes Teresa had encountered that wasn’t focused on combat. She got a lot of experience from traveling, making maps, and collecting data. Saylee was capable of fighting, but most of her skills were related to mapmaking and exploration. While she had less skills than Teresa, she had more than anyone else in the party.

  Apparently, maps she made were System recognized items now, and a lot of the reason behind her traveling with Teresa was related to her class. Of course, she had a lot more formal experience with meetings and discussion than anyone else present, and she was also an Ambassador since The Mall had leveled up a while ago already, but her traveling was extremely beneficial to her class.

  “What does a skill for making maps even look like?” Teresa asked. They were going to be traveling for a while, and she figured she might as well learn about skills related to other classes. She would be able to change Scavenger out for another class pretty soon, though admittedly Teresa wanted to get a few more skills from it first.

  “Ironically my most useful one is , which lets me erase parts of a map I’ve made.” Saylee explained. “We don’t have a lot of paper, or resources in general for that matter. Another one is , which lets me draw on maps with Mana. If there was one for making paper that would be nice, but I haven’t seen anything like that. Then there’s

  , which lets me know if a Portal appears in an area depicted by one of my maps, though it doesn’t have a 100% success rate.”

  “That’s pretty damn useful actually, you get experience from doing all of this?” Teresa continued.

  “Only class and skill experience. Some of them, like

  , can only level up when the information it provides is acted upon with my own involvement. So if I just leave a map capable of sometimes catching new Portal appearances in The Mall, eventually the skill will get to 99% experience. If I want it to actually level up, I have to be there monitoring the map and I have to be the one to report that information to others.” Saylee answered. “I can also use . If you touch certain parts of a map I make, you can see what I saw when actually there. For example, I can make a map of Stormwreck and if you touch the city hall, you’ll be able to actually see the city hall. It only shows what I saw when I was there, so it can be outdated. It also limits you to 5 Perception while looking at the image, so it’ll be a little blurry.”

  “So you’re like a human Google Earth then?” Preston asked.

  “Sure, you can put it that way.”

  “Badass.”

  They continued traveling for a while, with Randall occasionally course correcting using with Preston. While he was acting like he always does, Teresa still got the vibe that Preston was nervous. Looking at him didn’t reveal any obvious signs of it, and maybe it was her imagination but Preston was physically tense.

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  It could be explained away by the fact he was carrying Jake, who was wearing a suit of metal armor, but there were a lot of small things. His eyes were slightly more open than normal and had frequent periods of rapid movement as he took in his surroundings. His breathing felt off, and-

  “He’s alive and he’s not in any immediate danger. We’ll find him.” Sarah said as she ran closer while carrying Saylee. She placed a hand on Preston’s shoulder, and he just nodded in response.

  “I guess if he’s living in a mountain it’s gotta be pretty secure, right?” He replied.

  “I have a hard time imagining monsters attacking an underground mountain city.” Sarah confirmed.

  “If they don’t let us in then what are we going to do?” He asked.

  “Whatever we have to, we’ll beat some people up if it’s needed.” Sarah replied, getting an amused exhale out of Preston.

  “Tell them Rebecca Flynn is visiting.” Preston said with a smile. “Can you imagine if there actually is a Rebecca Flynn living in a place called Sanctuary? What are the odds of that”

  “Hopefully low, I don’t want to get some random person in trouble.” Teresa replied.

  “Man, how does Rebecca Flynn of Sanctuary do it? We arrested her last week, but somehow she just conquered Noura- however you pronounce it.” Preston joked, the mood lightening up again.

  “It must be a different Rebecca Flynn from a different Sanctuary.” Sarah added, continuing the joke. “We got to check every city named Sanctuary. Damn, there are like twenty of them!”

  “Ah, uncreative city names strike again!” The group shared a few laughs, any subtle signs of Preston’s nervousness dying down. Teresa hadn’t considered how a high Perception stat would eventually make other people’s emotions slightly more apparent. Post-System Poker probably had a massive boost to its skill ceiling.

  “At least Stormwreck is original, but why would you want the work ‘wreck,’ in the name of your city?” Sarah asked.

  “Seriously, they should have named it Bikini Bottom. They literally have a guy named Patrick working as the Lead Developer, and it looks like an underwater city! If we find a pineapple and a sponge we should leave it in front of the city hall.” Preston said.

  The trip wasn’t bad. They came across a few Portals here and there, but nothing particularly high level. It was decent experience, and if the Portal was weak enough even Saylee managed to get something out of it. She wasn’t a fighter, but the boost to one’s stats earned from levels was a huge improvement to anyone’s quality of life.

  They even encountered a zombie horde, which was disappointingly easy to deal with. Teresa just used in both hands and melted through a small army of sprinting zombies, fast by pre-System standards but stupid enough to not be a problem. Teresa didn’t even get much experience for it, and the fight was over in just a minute since they willingly ran into her flames and died.

  At the end of the first day of travel, they finally found a high level Portal Teresa might be able to get something decent out of. Admittedly, they could have found a high level Portal at any time using , but since their goal was to find Preston’s dad they didn’t want to go out of their way for something like that.

  Since they were already going to set up camp for the night, Sarah and Teresa decided it was a good chance for some archery practice. It was a level 73 Portal, with monsters called Telchis. They looked like humanoid sea demons, reminding Teresa a lot of the Atrocious Wyvern-Fish from the Tutorial. They had crab claws for hands, fish-like skin covered in black scales, flippers for feet, and heads resembling a dark brown wolf.

  The Portal was surrounded by coral similar to what one could find in Stormwreck, though the terrain wasn’t hollowed out into living accommodations. There was a lot of plant life and cover around the Portal, which gave Sarah an idea.

  “Since these guys are relatively humanoid they’ll be good practice, there’s some stuff I want to try anyways.” Sarah whispered after they scouted the place out.

  “They’re level 73, you sure you want to be involved?” Teresa asked back.

  “Not even a week ago I was shooting magically enhanced robots with a bow and arrow, I’m sure this will be easier than that.” Sarah replied. “Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about using a bow. I’ve been trying to consider all of the reasons someone might choose to use a bow instead of a gun, and with pre-System logic there aren’t a lot of benefits. Even now, I can’t shoot a bow as fast as someone can shoot an automatic gun, but using a bow is a hell of a lot quieter.”

  “So what do you want to do? I’m sure we can pick a few of them off with a bow, and I feel pretty confident using my sword and , but if you want to try something new I’m all ears.” Teresa whispered back.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking…”

  A few minutes later, the encampment of Telchis, or Telchines plural, came under attack. An arrow planted itself in a Telchis’ skull, coming from over two hundred meters away. The arrow was fast, likely thanks to Sarah’s passive skill , which increased the velocity of specifically her arrows. Not the most creative name for a skill, but it was fitting.

  Immediately, the Telchines began swarming to where the arrow came from. Liquid darkness seeped out from their claws and took the shape of various weapons, and soon the entire encampment was armed with weapons made of shadows and metal.

  The Telchines found nothing but footprints, and moments later the swarm realized they were missing a few. Several Telchines lay dead, arrows penetrating the back of their heads.

  They looked around, trying to spot where the arrows had come from, only for two more to drop dead as a single arrow shot straight through one Telchis and into the head of another. It was almost impossible to determine where the arrow had come from, as it had altered its trajectory after exiting the first Telchis.

  Another arrow killed a Telchis, hitting it in the torso before bursting apart with a sudden infusion of air. This time, they saw where it came from, and they sprinted towards the source with terrifying speed courtesy of their high Agility stats.

  Once more, there was nothing there. They were confident they had seen it come from this direction, but no matter how much they spread out they couldn’t find their attacker.

  This scene played out again and again, each time the arrows came from somewhere different. Sometimes the arrow only killed one, sometimes it ripped straight through a Telchis and killed two at once. The Telchines grew increasingly frustrated, and began to destroy the landscape around them.

  If their attackers wanted to hide behind cover, then they just had to get rid of the cover.

  “You’re fucking terrifying.” Teresa whispered as she watched Sarah kill one Telchis after another, barely moving the whole time.

  “I’m already running out of resources so you’ll be able to take over here soon, it’s not a strategy I can maintain for a prolonged period of time without improving my stats a lot more. If they had a decent Perception stat this wouldn’t work.” Sarah replied.

  What Sarah had done ultimately boiled down to two skills. and . Sarah had been firing arrows far away from herself, then used to make the arrow bounce off a distant surface towards the Telchines. From their perspective, it would look like the arrow is coming from an invisible attacker that keeps moving, but in reality Sarah was just making her arrows bounce off different locations.

  From there it was a toss up between using or . Additionally, she had two skills that sped up her arrows. was an active skill that allowed the arrow to use air to propel it forward, while was a passive that just increased the speed of her arrows all the time. The passive skill had less of an effect, but it didn’t consume extra resources to use. Plus, their effects could stack.

  Now that Sarah was done with her experiment, it was time for Teresa to clean up a bit. She drew her own bow and began picking off a few Telchines, though the only skill she had that helped with archery was . It was still an incredibly useful skill that also helped with aiming any ranged attack, though Teresa’s archery was a lot more limited.

  As a result, their position was quickly found once Teresa began firing. The two of them were able to pick off quite a few using just bows, and when the fight shifted away from archery Teresa wasn’t particularly upset about it.

   melted through Telchines swiftly as they got within medium range, and

  combined with her heavy ass sword broke through any attempts to block. The weapons of the dead monsters vanished into thin air shortly after death, meaning there wouldn’t be any fancy loot to recover.

  By the time the two returned to camp, Sarah and Teresa had each leveled up, with Sarah leveling up twice thanks to the high level of her opponents. Additionally, Teresa’s class had leveled up. That being her main class, Jack Of All Trades.

  It was time for a new skill.