Teresa Of All Trades (Book 1 Complete)

Teresa's arm was broken again, but it didn't really matter. She pulled her sword out from a dead mosquito and quickly healed her injuries.

One of them had caught her from behind as she had been fighting a particularly large group of the monsters. There had been eleven of them, and they had been all relatively close to her level. She got the notification for another level, and invested the point into Agility again.

Status:

Name: Teresa

Race: Human (Earth)

Level: 14 (F) (2%)

Class: Healer lv 2 (F) (26%)

HP: (70/98)

Stamina: (22/98)

Mana: (301/499)

Strength: 10

Fortitude: 7

Endurance: 8

Vitality: 8

Agility: 15

Intelligence: 39

Wisdom: 35

Perception: 22

Unallocated Points: 0

<Skills> {

<Translate: lv 0 (1.3%)>

<Mana Control: lv 7 (12%)>

<Healing Touch: lv 4 (81%)>

<Facilitated Restoration: lv 5 (72%)

<Identify: lv 4 (96%)>

<Totem Of Life: lv 0 (11%)>

}

<Titles> {

<System Newcomer>

<Tutorial: Power Hungry>

<Tutorial: First Stage Completionist>

<Tutorial: Level Pioneer>

}

Over the last few days, her leveling speed had drastically slowed down due to a multitude of factors. For one, it was getting harder to find monsters near the Statue of Liberty. Teresa had killed them all. At one point, she even started running in the opposite direction of the <Tutorial Compass> in search of monsters she hadn't already killed.

Secondly, they barely gave experience anymore. She was happy to get more than 3% from a kill now on anything but a Clubber, and even those experience sponges barely gave more than 5% per kill now. If Teresa had to guess, it had to do with their levels relative to her own. Killing a bunch of level 6 and 7 monsters as a level 14 wasn't exactly a fair fight, but it was hard to find a fair fight.

To find stronger monsters, Teresa needed to venture deeper into the desert. To go deeper in the desert and still have time to make it back to Liberty Island she needed better Agility. To get better Agility, she needed to fight stronger monsters and level up. That required more Agility which required more monsters which required more Agility which required more mon-

Damn it that was frustrating. Teresa was feeling the pressure now, having spent a week in the second stage of the Tutorial. She opened the questline menu to see how much time was left.

Questline

Newcomer Tutorial (2/3)

Seize Destiny

You have successfully defended your land, laying claim to it as your own. Monsters will no longer attempt to trespass in this territory without significant motivation. Now that your land is secure, it is time to conquer. Seek out the monster strongholds within the desert and gather the artifacts needed for the upcoming war. Monster strongholds can be located using the <Tutorial Compass>.

You have one month to gather these artifacts. The next stage of this questline will not wait for the completion of the current stage.

Time until next stage: 13 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, 35 seconds

She had just under two weeks remaining now and she had not gotten to a single monster stronghold yet. How many of them were there anyways? At least the first stage of the questline had shown how many waves there were. Also, what was with this desert? It was so empty. It hadn't been more than a source of curiosity for Teresa at first, but now it was getting annoying.

Teresa wasn't the most mentally stable person, obviously. She knew that much. She had been doing better since the start of the Tutorial, at least compared to how she was feeling beforehand. Now, she was catching herself wondering if this was even worth it.

Could she even save Sarah? That was the whole reason she was still here, fighting these monsters. Sure, she had gotten far closer. Hell, if Sarah had gotten injured just now right in front of Teresa, she might have actually been able to save her.

But Sarah hadn't just gotten injured right in front of Teresa. It had taken multiple seconds for Teresa to get there, and Sarah had taken a couple more to leave the Tutorial. There was still no chance Teresa could save Sarah as she was right now.

Why was she even bothering? How well did Teresa even know Sarah anyways? Really they had only known each other for a day or so, if she wanted to live so badly maybe she should have just left the Tutorial before the Clubber could bite into her.

She shook her head, ignoring the intrusive thoughts as she continued out into the desert on the hunt for more monsters. Teresa had someone relying on her, wasn't that enough?

The desert was getting to her. A lot of things were. In between the fourth and fifth wave she had spent a week constantly working on her healing magic, practically nonstop. Wake up, practice magic, eat, sleep, repeat. She had managed to get through that knowing Sarah was counting on her and by having her party around her.

Now? Teresa was alone, in a completely flat and featureless desert, killing everything she saw. She was confident magic was somehow impeding her vision, as she began seeing diminishing returns from her rising Perception stat. She could see at close to mid range unbelievably well now, her vision had never been clearer. Regardless, she wasn't able to see anything particularly far away. Monster packs had to be a certain distance from her before they became visible, and by then they were relatively clear to see.

Couldn't the Tutorial have put her somewhere nicer? Maybe a massive garden, or maybe a tropical paradise? Did she really have to be in the middle of a vast endless desert of all places?

Enough complaining, it wasn't going to make herself feel any better about her current situation. Sure, she probably hadn't spoken aloud in a few days, but she could deal with it for now. She had to.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Wind rushed through Teresa's hair as she dashed out into the desert, still following the <Tutorial Compass>. By now, she was faster than any human before the System. It was amazing, her legs moved faster than ever before and each step launched her farther. If she could have gone back to before the System with these stats, she would have been a worldwide sensation.

She wondered what she looked like when she ran. Did it look dumb or just really funny? Teresa knew if she had ever seen a five foot three woman running a three and a half minute mile she would be absolutely gobsmacked. Baffled. Astonished. Confuddled, even.

Regardless, it was exhilarating. Running had kept her somewhat sane over the last week. She had never been a huge fan of cardio before the System even if she ran a lot anyways to stay in shape. Now, however, her opinion had changed a bit. Of course it had, she would never have been able to run this fast before the System, even if she trained for her whole life.

She had found a screen that showed where she had put all of her unallocated points. It turned out her status screen was customizable, and she could tweak it if she willed it to change. At first, she had tried reorganizing it, but she didn't like any other way to arrange her status screen. She had already gotten used to it, why change it now?

Additionally, she could change how precise some of the numbers were. For example, her <Translate> was at 1.3% experience. If she wanted, she could shorten it to just 1% or expand it out to 1.30%. Weirdly enough, tinkering with her status screen had actually given her <Identify> skill some experience as well, but she still wasn't sure how useful that was.

She had leveled up the skill but didn't notice much of a difference. When her <Mana Control> or healing skills leveled up, she could sense an increase in power and efficiency over the skill. Either she would be able to manipulate Mana just a little bit easier or she could get more out of her restoration Mana.

But <Identify>? Nothing really seemed to change. She had no way of testing if she could use it on a target from farther away, and it didn't change anything about the information she saw while looking at a monster. At the moment, leveling up her <Identify> skill was pretty useless, but she still liked to see the level go up as she used it fairly often.

Additionally, her <Facilitated Restoration> skill was now well and truly past her <Healing Touch>. Of course, the buff provided by <Facilitated Restoration> couldn't heal nearly as fast as <Healing Touch>, but purely in terms of levels it was stronger.

Today, Teresa was farther out than she had ever made it before. Admittedly, most days she made it farther out than the previous day, but still. Some progress was better than none. She would have to turn around soon if she wanted to make it back to Liberty Island by sunset, but honestly she wasn't ready to head back yet. Her leveling had already slowed too much, if she really wanted to get stronger she would have to push herself.

She had still seen the occasional monster pack she had no chance of fighting. More than once she had used <Identify> only to see multiple monsters were beyond level 25. She had never seen a monster above level 29 before, though she was happy to keep it that way for now.

Maybe if she had some attack skill she would feel more confident in pushing her limits, but she didn't. Truthfully, the monsters were stronger than her level for level. Teresa's stat points mostly just helped her healing, her fighting capability improved much slower than it would for the monsters. The healer class really did not seem suited to combat on her own, so it was a tough situation to be stuck in.

Teresa spotted a group of deer and got to work. There were only three of them, and they were all around level 13. How lame. They wouldn't give very much experience, but it was better than nothing. A couple of arrows later, Teresa was up a few points of experience and back on the move.

She still wasn't quite as skilled with the bow as Sarah was. Sure, she got a lot more kills with it than Sarah ever did, but Teresa was always on the front lines. Sarah had always been taking the long shots, and still managed to land some lethal hits sometimes. It was one thing to shoot a monster in the face as it charged at you in a straight line, but it was another thing entirely to shoot a monster at an off angle from on top of a balcony while avoiding friendly fire.

The fights had gotten almost… boring? Teresa was a better fighter now, though she felt her progress in that regard was being limited by her enemies. They all attacked her in familiar patterns, and she had gotten used to them now. Sometimes the goblins would use poison, sure, sometimes there would be a bigger and tougher mosquito or deer, but a lot of the time the fights felt monotonous now that she had gotten used to them.

She barely even risked her life at this point. Breaking her arm didn't really count much as an injury when she could heal it in a second, the worst injury she had gotten came from a Wyvern-Fish setting half of her body on fire. That had been actual hell on Earth, but Teresa had survived. Her hair was burnt and she now had the most atrocious haircut she had ever seen, but she wasn't dead.

Why couldn't healing magic grow hair? She was missing an eyebrow now! Not even both of them, just one eyebrow was gone! She looked ridiculous, who knew how long it would take for that to grow back? Teresa looked like a murder hobo.

Admittedly, she kind of was a murder hobo, but that wasn't important. They were monsters, it's not as though she was going around slaughtering people like a serial killer. Plus, she totally had a home. It was the Statue of Liberty. What? No, of course she wasn't crazy. It was true after all, and what's wrong with a bit of monster hunting? It builds character, everyone should hunt monsters at least once in their life.

Teresa laughed to herself, wondering if this counted as her losing it. Surely not, if she was insane she would just run around without a thought in the world killing stuff like a psychopath. Surely the line between "sane" and "insane" was whether you at least tried to keep yourself entertained or not. Shit, was Teresa going insane?

Thankfully, she was pulled from her ramblings by a structure suddenly appearing within her vision. Wooden beams stuck out from the ground, forming a wall around a small camp. Teresa couldn't see past the walls, but she knew she had found what she was looking for.

A monster stronghold. Finally. Teresa wasn't sure what she was expecting, but this wasn't exactly it. She had sort of imagined laying siege to a castle, though in retrospect that would have made this quest impossible. Single handedly taking on an entire castle? Yeah right.

This was more reasonable. Still, depending on how many monsters were in there, it would be incredibly difficult. Regardless, Teresa was ecstatic to at least see her target. If there was a hill or something she could peek into the camp, but it was flat desert all around. Still, running in there without a plan would be suicidal, and Teresa was trying to cut back on that.

She decided to watch the camp for a while as she stayed as far away as she feasibly could. Teresa laid low to the ground, hoping not to get spotted by any monsters. If Teresa wanted to actually take on this stronghold, she would probably have to come back tomorrow. There was time to take it on now, but that would be a rush job assuming everything went perfectly.

Things wouldn't go perfectly. She couldn't get complacent. Teresa and her party had nearly been wiped out by a single monster in the fifth wave, what if Teresa didn't do her due diligence and got killed by a high leveled monster? There didn't even need to be anything particularly high leveled, if some of them had wings like the Wyvern-Fish miniboss had then all it would take is picking her up and dropping her from a high altitude like what happened to Preston.

The stronghold looked like it had a single entrance with no gate, though Teresa wasn't exactly at a good angle to see inside. Hell, for all she knew there was another entrance on the opposite side of the camp. She decided she would watch the camp for another hour, spend some time running a massive circle around the camp to examine it from every side, then head back for the night to make a plan.

There was a time constraint, and she didn't know how many strongholds there were that she had to get rid of, but half-assing the job would result in more consequences than benefits.

Eventually, there was movement by the entrance. It was only for a moment, but a monster within the camp walked through Teresa's field of view revealing what kind of monster inside.

It had been a skeleton. Humanoid, tall, and alive. The fuck? How would that even work? Sure, Teresa had played games with skeletons in them, but she didn't exactly expect to see one walking around in real life. It made no sense! What did they eat? Could they eat? Well, surely they had to. They expended energy by walking around, where did that get that energy from? Magic?

Oh right, magic. Yeah, probably magic. Magic eating skeletons. Sure, why not? Hold on, backtrack a minute there. Teresa had only guessed they eat magic based on the laws of thermodynamics. They also might be like plants, able to do photosynthesis.

No more side tangents, she had a goal here and it was to kill everything inside the camp. She waited longer, occasionally seeing a skeleton walk past the entrance. Each one carried a sword and shield, which posed multiple problems to Teresa.

For one, shooting them would be incredibly difficult. Ignoring the shield, they were skeletons. Where was she going to shoot it, the stomach? Only a direct hit onto a bone would deal any damage, odds are the arrow would fly right between their ribs knowing Teresa's skills. Maybe a headshot would work, but that wasn't the same as shooting a monster charging with reckless abandon at you. If these skeletons played it defensively, they could just wait for Teresa to run out of ammo.

That was assuming they were smart enough to strategize, which may not be the case. Still, they had a little camp set up in the middle of a desert, so maybe they weren't that dumb. Where did they even get the materials for this stronghold? The System probably gave it to them and it was hypocritical of Teresa to get upset that the monsters would receive any System support, but she could use a little more help after being alone for a week.

Teresa cased the perimeter of the stronghold and began thinking about a plan of attack. After watching for another hour she felt pretty confident it was just humanoid skeletons in the camp. The thought that skeletal versions of monsters like Clubbers might be present had passed through her mind, but thankfully there didn't seem to be any. After confirming the exterior layout of the stronghold and getting a glimpse inside through the entrance at a distance, Teresa began heading back to Liberty Island.

She would finally get to fight something different again.