Sara reached a trembling hand out to the stone effigy of her father.
Her midsection strained with effort as she leaned forward and brushed her fingers against the cool, rough surface, and her legs gave out underneath her.
She had wanted to vomit when the realization first hit her. Was it irony? Misinterpreted intent? Or maybe just some sick cosmic joke?
Her father's resting place was the same one Pathfinder had led her to, over and over again. How many times had she come here in hopes of being able to 'stay with her dad just a bit longer', or to have him 'stick around as long as possible'?
Marlene hadn't wanted her to come here, but she couldn't tell Sara what to do. And her mother had simply nodded at her with defeated eyes. Mark offered to come with her. He waited a hundred feet away, ready to build a shelter over her father's petrified corpse so it wouldn't be worn down by the elements. Bile built in the back of her throat at the idea of rain slowly eating him away.
She'd taken the long walk, still struggling to breathe properly because of the recently closed hole in her neck. A walk that brought her right back to this goddamn rock.
The tutorial timer ticked down in the corner of her vision.
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0d 3h 20m 26s until Tutorial begins.
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Sara raised herself back up, and sat on the Titan's tail. She balled a fist and punched down into the petrified salamander until her knuckles turned bloody.
When she'd used her skill to figure out how to spend more time with her father, she'd also intended for him to be alive.
Fuck this skill, and fuck this world.
His eyes remained closed, face locked forever in a smile. Why was he smiling? Why the hell would he do that?
Sara lifted her head, and screamed at the sky.
#
#
The flat, two-note error sound bounced off Sara's ears once more. She wanted to smash the proctor machine - but that wasn't going to work. She knew, because she'd tried it multiple times already. Queen's Edge was still cracked where it had slammed into the absurdly tough material the thing was made out of.
The Tutorial started off with remedial universal lessons, and Sara was already over it. Instead of just letting her off with some multiple choice problems or something, it actually prompted her to respond to it, in her own words, to show she understood the lessons being provided. She took a long breath, and swallowed some of the water that had been provided for this 'exam'.
"Earth was awakened by a conglomerate, but there are many other sects, alliances, and corporations that offer awakening services. Natural system awakenings do occur, but are exceedingly rare. It is safer and recommended to awaken with a contract. Failing to do so could harm you, or others. That is why personal awakening services are provided free-of-charge to all sapient species during and after a planetary awakenings."
The lines felt like a combination of real information and wedged-in corporate mumbo jumbo. It made Sara wonder just what the relationship was between the system and these organizations.
"All newly awakened planets are given a kickstart to skill awards. Skills have rarities, and these are generally defined as Basic - the lowest, followed by Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. I'm not going to recite the probability tables of someone receiving a skill of those rarities, because that's dumb, and you're not even giving the whole picture, because I read about Mythical skills in the contracts and resources available here."
A warning chime told her she'd earned a demerit against her answer. Two more and she'd fail - again. She ground her teeth and continued.
"Flora, Fauna, and Minerals or other Materials, as well as crafted items are associated by Grade. Grades go from G to B - Except that's just a translation into my local language, and you wont tell me what they originally represent. AND just like rarities, you decided to hide the fact that the letter A exists. Way to go."
Another warning chimed.
"FUCK. Fine. Living creatures generally have a level in association with their Grade, and level determines one's power within the grade system. Grade G is level 1 to 24. Grade F is level 25 to 49. E is 50 to 99, D is 100 to 249, C is 250 to 499, B is 500 and up... and you won't tell me what A is." Sara rushed her explanation so the proctor wouldn't have time to call her out for mentioning A Grade. It was absolutely stupid - there were A grade materials, somewhere in the older, more evolved planets. There had to be A grade people, too.
"Any living being may gain experience energy to increase their level. Energy requirements double between each level, and jump between grades. This is why it is vastly more difficult to rise from level 15 to 16 than it would be to go from level 3 to level 4. Similarly, the experience to be earned by killing living things outside of one's grade varies. An F grade that kills a G grade beast earns a negligible amount of experience energy. An F grade that kills an E grade being will earn energy an order of magnitude higher than what they would earn for killing another F grade. Just like a videogame, kill stronger stuff, get stronger yourself. Oooh. Ahhh. Crazy complicated power system, how will I ever begin to understand numbers and letters?"
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The proctor's light pulsed quickly... like Sara had made a request. She rushed back into the remedial explanations. She did not want to have to start over again.
"My planet is protected by system-enforced rules, which disallow higher-grade beings from entering the world while it grows and its people level. The system also establishes events, quests, and the tutorial itself to challenge awakened in semi-structured situations that will push them to greater heights." The last few words dripped out of her mouth like venom. This is where she'd lost her cool the last four times. Calling the proctor and the system pieces of shit wasn't going to get her through this any faster. She squeezed her hands together in frustration, and continued.
"Planetary resources..."
#
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Sara sat on the corpse of the latest in a long line of dead boss monsters and ate the sandwich her mother had packed for her. The meat still tasted weird, but it was really nice to have some bit of 'normal' in this place. Not that it was in any way normal to have a bagged lunch from your mom to take on a three-day excursion that ended in a fight with an entire beast nest.
Compared to the hardships they'd faced with the Crimson Titan, the tutorial so far was downright easy. Time consuming, sure, but easy.
After she finally passed the remedial lessons with that god-awful proctor, Sara was automatically made the leader of their Tutorial subspace based on her Local Lord title, and her level. They'd been given advanced quests and skipped the initial ones due to their pre-tutorial performance.
'Advanced quests' meant taking on level 10 bears, to start. Despite them being tall, mutated versions of what she was expecting, they fell easily to her sword. Mark and Marlene and James and others had been able to take them out without much trouble at all. They barely had a scratch between them at the end of that first quest. And Sara had been all but invulnerable to their strikes - while she was able to rip them apart with her bare hands.
Huh. Dad probably would've had a good joke for bear hands and bare hands.
The difficulty and the 'advanced' things they were getting - it was all bullshit. Dad had made that happen. He was dead, and he was still helping to Sara push forward. He should've been here.
They'd cleared quite a few hunting quests on their own while they waited for the rest of the subspace's participants to get 'ported in. The fighting had been a decent way for Sara to blow off steam, and the XP rewards were astronomical compared to what they'd earned from the salamanders.
When the other groups teleported in later on - at the normal time - they only complained about her being in charge of the Tutorial group once. Well, only publicly complained about it once. Some cocksure asshole with a Power-focused build tried to fight Sara for her position. Marlene put him down without a second's hesitation, and the rest fell in line. Sara regretted not doing it herself. If Marlene had waited just a bit longer, Queen's Edge would've ended the man's life instead of Marlene's blade.
Sara's eyes twinkled as she reached into the bottom of the bag. Her mother had packed her an honest-to-goodness cookie. Sure, the purple eggs they had from local animals were all weird, and their sugar substitute tasted funny, but it was a cookie! Sara devoured it with glee.
#
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Sara had been ruminating recently on what she could actually do that mattered in the grand scheme of things. The Tutorial had informed them of worlds beyond their own, and what to expect as things progressed after the end of the Tutorial's events. There were things and forces so much larger than herself.
It also meant that somewhere, there was a company or an individual that was responsible for putting her and everyone else through the hell they'd faced. Whether directly or indirectly, they'd caused all of this. All the death and the pain and the loss was squarely on them.
She decided, then, that she had to take Earth. Being the planetary lord wasn't just about fulfilling her contract. She needed the title, the power, and the opportunities it would bring in order to propel herself to even greater heights, where she would be able to challenge and kill whatever enemies were responsible for everything. And she had quite a few grades to go before that would happen.
Sara finished pumping energy into Queen's Edge, and stared down at the sword. It wasn't broken - she just realized after the fight with the giant fuzzy praying mantis thing that she hadn't leveled it up in a little while. Nothing in the Tutorial - outside of the proctor machine - had stood up to it so far. Nothing came close to making it crack and shatter like the Titan had. She wondered if it would continue to be as overwhelmingly sharp and strong against her foes when she started fighting the real monsters in the universe. Not universe - the cosmos - the proctor and everything else in the Tutorial loved to call it the cosmos.
Sara was strong - and the more 'difficult' the quests grew, the more disappointed she'd become in her fellow humans. Most everyone from Sanctuary had either power or skill that put them above average. The stronger fighters - Mark and Marlene and others - were in an entirely different tier from their peers. So many more powerful people had been lost to the unfair circumstances stacked against them. Including her father. If dad had been at her level now, he probably could've ripped the guardians and the Titan limb from limb. His power, relative to his level, had been insane.
Sara bit the inside of her cheek, and brought up the bonus point panel. She'd let the total build, without touching it, since the end of the Crimson Titan's quest. Between that and everything she'd done inside the Tutorial, the bonus point pool had grown to a truly absurd number.
She hadn't touched it at first because it just didn't feel right to touch the points from killing the Titan. They should've been her father's. She didn't use any of what she'd earned since because, well, she sure as hell didn't need the extra power to complete Tutorial quests.
But if her path was to get stronger for the sake of revenge, then the points - and the levels they would provide - were a promise of violence and retribution. They were the continuation of her commitment to her father, before his passing, to put everything she could back into herself. Sara took a breath of the cool night air, and set her jaw.
She would win it all, find the culprits behind this quagmire, and drive Queen's Edge between their eyes. She flicked the option to use the experience on herself.
Her body flooded with power.
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Level: 22 -> 25
Grade: G -> F
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