The library was a unique experience. It wasn’t quite similar to the libraries that I was used to. I remember there being a pretty big one in the city I had lived in, it was a multi-story building with bookshelves that stretched all the way up to the roof.
This one wasn’t quite that extravagant. You also had to pay a small fee for books you checked out.
Thankfully I was actually being paid for the training period so I had some spending money. Maybe I should have been charging people for the fruits and stuff that I was making.
Their reason for taking money for the books was as a form of collateral. It incentivized you to take better care of something that wasn’t yours. I could get behind that reasoning, it always bothered me to pull a book from the library and just see it torn to hell and back.
The books weren’t quite what I had been hoping for though. They were… somewhat in the vein of what I had been searching for, but at the same time didn’t fully cover what I had hoped.
If there had been anyone who documented a high-level technique with electric-based classes, the NSA didn’t have a copy or know of such documentation.
So my next endeavor had been to possibly find an index of classes along with their requirements. The closest they had to that was basically a collection of confirmed and rumors of classes.
I had gone ahead and grabbed that one since I might as well look at it. The next thing I managed to grab was biology and anatomy books. If I couldn’t find a book that told me how to do the techniques safely I was going to have to start slowly figuring it out on my own.
To do that I needed knowledge on the human body structure, although I wasn’t sure how much that would apply to me since I wasn’t a human anymore. For all I knew my brain and muscles looked completely different, in fact, it was probably in my best interests to assume that.
I could figure out the general idea though. I wasn’t sure how reasonable it would be for me to try and catch an elf and then dissect it for science.
I didn’t want to test my luck on that front, most of the elves I had remembered even getting a chance to see had been stronger than I had been. I’d only gotten a short glimpse after acquiring [Identify], but that had been enough to determine that what the Sentinels had pulled off in attacking the citadel was really impressive.
I still wasn’t sure what to make of that group. Why had they ignored me on the road that day? What made them decide not to go after me? I know now that they probably didn’t even kill the people on the roads that day, that was more than likely Ili’kithari, trying to make it seem believable that they were after me and that somehow I just managed to escape attention. If it had been them it didn’t make sense for them not to also just go ahead and take out Vinwood at the same time.
They’d already made it apparent they were going scorched earth tactics.
But they had deliberately ignored me and I wasn’t sure why yet. Were they truly the ‘good guys’ or were they just another faction that I had to figure out how to manage?
I didn’t believe for a second that the other gods were doing this for altruistic reasons. The only reason they had even worked together from Ili’kithari’s point of view was because she was winning that fight.
She was winning and they didn’t like that. Some of them probably had ideas that they should be the ones in charge and were just waiting for the right moment to place themselves on a pedestal.
No.
I wasn’t certain I could trust them.
The problem was that I wasn’t sure I could get away with not using them to my advantage. They were a faction deliberately aligned against Ili’kithari. I’d have to be an idiot to not make use of them for that reason alone.
I wouldn’t even be all the surprised if they decided to pay me a visit soon simply because of what happened at Vinwood. I was a lead for them, one that they could probably easily find and reach. My only major concern now would be the possibility of them killing me when they were done with me simply because I had the appearance of an elf.
That was actually a frighteningly likely prospect.
I definitely could not let them find me if I had the chance. Not until I was much stronger.
Maybe even then.
Well, as it was right now I wasn’t in a position to be able to actually do anything about this. So right now I just need to concern myself with gaining knowledge and strength. When I was stronger I’d possibly be able to do something about this.
No, not possibly.
I would do something about it. Ili’kithari killed Penny.
I planned to make her pay dearly for that.
***
Reading through the books I couldn’t even be disappointed. They were not the founts of absolute wisdom I had been hoping for, but I had a sneaking suspicion that was going to be the case.
I let out a sigh as I leaned back in my chair, thinking back to the moment that Adrian had come across me in the hallway.
I was probably a little too curt with him at the time. I feel like I might have been justified in that situation simply because I had just come off a panic attack and was suddenly surrounded by tons of people I didn’t know on top of the fact that I’d been given genuine reason to believe most people had it out for me.
Although that hadn’t necessarily been the case here so far, that didn’t mean I should throw caution to the wind either.
But at the very least I know that Adrian was genuine in his feelings, he didn’t seem to be all that prejudiced.
I wonder what the defining feature was, supposedly everyone in this world was still supposed to be fairly set against elves. And yet I’d also met more than a few people that just weren’t. And while I had met a few people who were, they didn’t overwhelm the statistics.
I looked back down at the book I was reading through. I had been leafing through the biology one in hopes of discovering some more about the anatomy of the body and maybe figuring something out. It had… a diagram. If that’s what you could call this.
It was very subpar in its depiction. It had the outline of a human body and a couple of the organs listed, but beyond that, there wasn’t much else. This was supposedly one of the most advanced depictions of the inside of a human body that they had in this world. Except that it didn’t list things like the liver or the appendix or a number of other organs that were useful to human biology.
They had managed to discover that humans had kidneys. But as far as they were aware we only had just that one. Unless the human anatomy was drastically different compared to Earth they were missing one there.
I don’t even know how you go about only finding one of them when they’re symmetrically placed in the body. If you were doing an in-depth analysis you would find both of them. I guess unless the body was missing half its organs, in which case one of the kidneys might be missing.
Except they had both of the lungs listed so that theory didn’t hold up particularly well.
I closed the book with a sigh.
Adrian ended up not coming back to our room that night.
***
Friday passed by pretty quickly, leaving me waking up Saturday with a fair amount of trepidation.
Looking out the window I could see that the sun was only just starting to rise. Given that it was spring currently, that still left me about an hour to get to where I needed to be going. It was pretty nice having such a precise internal alarm clock. If I slept the way I had on Earth I’d easily be hitting 12 hours every night if I didn’t have something to wake me up.
Even when I did, there was still a pretty good chance that I would just go back to sleep once I had turned it off.
Looking over to Adrian’s bed, it was empty again. Knowing him, he was probably spending time with some friends and had ended up just crashing in their dorm. It wouldn’t have been the first time it happened.
He was a fairly responsible person, but he enjoyed a good time just as much as anyone else. Especially when it included drinking or sex. Preferably both.
I hadn’t really gotten a chance to talk to him since the other day either. We’d both been terribly busy, so our schedules just never really aligned for us to have a moment to talk.
I sat up and let one of my 29 minds run free to magic up an arm for the day. I was down to having one crafted in seconds now. I still remember it taking me hours to craft that first one. And an obscene amount of mana.
I had not been terribly precise with my control back then. But now I had control and efficiency. So I wasn’t losing mana due to me not having a firm grasp on it, and I needed less to complete the same task.
The arms I was making now were actually good as well. The first one I had made was pretty clunky and imprecise. It moved decently enough, but for fine motor skills, it had been lacking. My arms up until around the second tier of [Wood Manipulation] had been pretty crap.
Now they were almost indistinguishable from my real arm in terms of dexterity.
Standing up, I pulled on my tunic. I still hadn’t gotten rid of this thing. As much as I disliked where it came from, I couldn’t deny its usefulness. I didn’t need to clean it, I didn’t need to repair it, I didn’t need to do anything with it because it was magic.
It took care of itself. No matter how dirty it got, it would clean itself, and no matter how torn up it got, it would repair itself. Truly a marvel in elven engineering. Or would it be enchanting?
I guess it didn’t matter. It was useful so I was somewhat hesitant to get rid of it. Especially when it meant I would have to spend time cleaning and repairing clothes going forward, or even spending money on buying new ones regularly.
No, it’d be better for me to hold onto this one despite my misgivings about it. No sense in throwing out perfectly good clothes just because I didn’t like the people who gave them to me. I wasn’t in a position to be picky about things right now.
I double-checked that I had everything on the right way, first impressions would probably be important here. I definitely didn’t want to leave a bad first impression.
I started making my way down the hallways deciding that I’d like to be there early. Even if early entailed being thirty minutes early in this case.
Maybe it was a good thing I was showing up early, maybe I could make them little gift baskets. Have some fruit and stuff in there, people here really like fruits and veggies. Probably because it was expensive to be buying extra stuff like that so people only ever bought exactly what they needed.
The hallways were relatively clear as I made my way down to training room 31, people were still sleeping in the early morning on a weekend when they didn’t have classes. Probably sleeping off the hangovers they were likely to have after a night of drinking.
A thing most people don’t think about, the average constitution in a world with system-enhanced people is significantly higher than what it would have been on Earth.
Now that sounds obvious, right? Because of that, the flu, or a cold, isn’t really a thing people get.
On the other hand, alcohol is significantly stronger to make up for that. If people want to get drunk, they need something that can push through their insane vigor stats and actually get them drunk.
So the strongest alcohols on Earth didn’t even remotely compare to what they had here. Hell, even drinking just straight ethanol wouldn’t compare. Some of the stuff here was just straight-lethal to people below certain vigor stats. Granted that number was like 1,000. So not something unreasonable for people to achieve, even mages.
There were some that wanted you to be around two or maybe three thousand. But those ones wouldn’t kill you if you were below the recommended threshold, mainly because once you hit a certain level you could kind of just shrug off instant death poison effects from something that wasn’t specifically designed to just kill you.
There was some nuance to it that I didn’t fully understand, nevertheless, the alcohol ran strong here.
I stepped into the training room, and as expected, it was empty. I was roughly thirty minutes early so people wouldn’t start showing up for a while.
I wondered what the plan was, did they give a plan to the team leaders? Or did they expect them to come up with something to do on the spot? I figured there was more to our meeting here than just an introduction, otherwise, they could have set that up anywhere else. Instead, they had us meet here.
What was the intent?
I decided to go ahead with the idea I had earlier and started making some gift baskets. I decided to make four. I didn’t know how many people would be on our team, but I decided to assume the high end, which would be four people in total, and then make one extra just in case.
It only took me a few minutes and a fair bit of mana to have decently sized baskets filled with various foods.
No levels for the effort, unfortunately. Not that I really expected one, but I was slowly starting to get to the point where just doing this over and over again wasn’t netting me a lot of experience. I’d have to find a way to bump that up a notch.
Fifteen minutes after I entered the room another person stepped into my awareness as they entered the room.
I turned to get a look at the person. She was of average height, with straight blonde hair, green eyes, and a small smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, right under her eyes. She carried a sword on her hip and there was also a bow slung across her back. I wasn’t sure what position she was supposed to fill, but she at least had versatility.
Maybe she was similar to me in that she was more of a damage dealer rather than a tank, or someone who sat behind lines and bombed their opponents like an artillery unit.
I guess I could always just ask.
“I’m surprised, I thought I would be the first one here. Glad to see at least one member is taking this seriously.” She spoke with a calm confidence that belied someone with plenty of experience. Something I had noticed about how Garrus had spoken, and Fiona as well. They both were confident in their decisions.
They never second-guessed themselves, everyone’s decision was the right one, and if it wasn’t? They would make it the right one by force.
[Level 42³]
She definitely had the levels to back it up.
“I was up early so I decided to show up early,” I replied with a shrug, “feel free to take a basket. I filled them up while I was waiting, figured I’d try to leave a good first impression by having a little gift for everyone.”
She laughed good-naturedly, it was a fairly pleasant sound to listen to.
“Well, you’re definitely sitting in my good books right now,” She stepped forward and held her hand out, “I’m Leathine, team leader, but you can call me Lea.”
I grabbed her hand firmly and shook it, “Alex.”
She looked me over, “So what level are you? I can’t actually see it.”
“Ah, right. I forget I just have that on usually.” I focused a little bit and turned off the racial ability that allowed me to hide my level.
She raised an eyebrow as she got a look.
“Recently ascended then?”
I nodded, “For the most part.”
“Well, as long as you can pull your own weight I doubt anyone will care.”
I snorted, “Unless we get a designated healer on our team they won’t be complaining for a number of good reasons.”
“You have a healing skill?” She asked, surprise tinging her tone.
“Yep,” I said, popping the ‘p’, “two actually. Touch ranged and AOE healing. They’re not the greatest, but they’re significantly better than potions.”
She nodded, ”Yeah, that’ll be good. Healers are a rare commodity, especially designated ones. Nobody likes being the person stuck in the back lines, people enjoy being the flashy person at the front. The one that all the ladies will flock to when they save them.”
I laughed at that, “Too true.”
Lea looked like she was about to say something else when another person stepped into our awareness as they entered the room. She closed her mouth as we turned to get a look at the newcomer.
“You know, normally when I enter rooms people are bowing. I think it would be appropriate for you two to do the same.”
The man spoke in a haughty tone absolutely drenched in narcissism.
Oh no, please let this just be sarcasm.
I might actually hurt someone if he’s not joking.
I glanced over at Lea who just raised an eyebrow back as we waited until he fully approached.
The man had a well-trimmed beard that covered the entirety of his jaw, and short shaggy brown hair that reached just past his ears. His face also sported well-defined cheekbones and a prominent nose that all accentuated his features, along with his clothing, to scream nobility.
Along his back rested a long, thin metal rod. It didn’t look to be designed specifically for martial use, but I wasn’t certain.
He took a glance at both of us before his eyes came to a stop lingering on my ears, his lips then curled up into a sneer, his voice laced with absolute condescension, “I didn’t realize they put a demi-human on my team, I still can’t understand why they’d allow you sub-human freaks to join the NSA.”
[Level 22³]
I gave a look at Lea before looking back at the newcomer.
I was absolutely going to punch his teeth down his throat. In fact, I think I had a great way to go about doing that.
“Lea, are we expecting anyone else?”
She shook her head, “No, why?”
I smiled maliciously, “I have a great idea for a start on getting us acquainted with each other. I figured, high and mighty over here could have a friendly spar with me.
“Show me how superior humans really are.”
The library was a unique experience. It wasn’t quite similar to the libraries that I was used to. I remember there being a pretty big one in the city I had lived in, it was a multi-story building with bookshelves that stretched all the way up to the roof.
This one wasn’t quite that extravagant. You also had to pay a small fee for books you checked out.
Thankfully I was actually being paid for the training period so I had some spending money. Maybe I should have been charging people for the fruits and stuff that I was making.
Their reason for taking money for the books was as a form of collateral. It incentivized you to take better care of something that wasn’t yours. I could get behind that reasoning, it always bothered me to pull a book from the library and just see it torn to hell and back.
The books weren’t quite what I had been hoping for though. They were… somewhat in the vein of what I had been searching for, but at the same time didn’t fully cover what I had hoped.
If there had been anyone who documented a high-level technique with electric-based classes, the NSA didn’t have a copy or know of such documentation.
So my next endeavor had been to possibly find an index of classes along with their requirements. The closest they had to that was basically a collection of confirmed and rumors of classes.
I had gone ahead and grabbed that one since I might as well look at it. The next thing I managed to grab was biology and anatomy books. If I couldn’t find a book that told me how to do the techniques safely I was going to have to start slowly figuring it out on my own.
To do that I needed knowledge on the human body structure, although I wasn’t sure how much that would apply to me since I wasn’t a human anymore. For all I knew my brain and muscles looked completely different, in fact, it was probably in my best interests to assume that.
I could figure out the general idea though. I wasn’t sure how reasonable it would be for me to try and catch an elf and then dissect it for science.
I didn’t want to test my luck on that front, most of the elves I had remembered even getting a chance to see had been stronger than I had been. I’d only gotten a short glimpse after acquiring [Identify], but that had been enough to determine that what the Sentinels had pulled off in attacking the citadel was really impressive.
I still wasn’t sure what to make of that group. Why had they ignored me on the road that day? What made them decide not to go after me? I know now that they probably didn’t even kill the people on the roads that day, that was more than likely Ili’kithari, trying to make it seem believable that they were after me and that somehow I just managed to escape attention. If it had been them it didn’t make sense for them not to also just go ahead and take out Vinwood at the same time.
They’d already made it apparent they were going scorched earth tactics.
But they had deliberately ignored me and I wasn’t sure why yet. Were they truly the ‘good guys’ or were they just another faction that I had to figure out how to manage?
I didn’t believe for a second that the other gods were doing this for altruistic reasons. The only reason they had even worked together from Ili’kithari’s point of view was because she was winning that fight.
She was winning and they didn’t like that. Some of them probably had ideas that they should be the ones in charge and were just waiting for the right moment to place themselves on a pedestal.
No.
I wasn’t certain I could trust them.
The problem was that I wasn’t sure I could get away with not using them to my advantage. They were a faction deliberately aligned against Ili’kithari. I’d have to be an idiot to not make use of them for that reason alone.
I wouldn’t even be all the surprised if they decided to pay me a visit soon simply because of what happened at Vinwood. I was a lead for them, one that they could probably easily find and reach. My only major concern now would be the possibility of them killing me when they were done with me simply because I had the appearance of an elf.
That was actually a frighteningly likely prospect.
I definitely could not let them find me if I had the chance. Not until I was much stronger.
Maybe even then.
Well, as it was right now I wasn’t in a position to be able to actually do anything about this. So right now I just need to concern myself with gaining knowledge and strength. When I was stronger I’d possibly be able to do something about this.
No, not possibly.
I would do something about it. Ili’kithari killed Penny.
I planned to make her pay dearly for that.
***
Reading through the books I couldn’t even be disappointed. They were not the founts of absolute wisdom I had been hoping for, but I had a sneaking suspicion that was going to be the case.
I let out a sigh as I leaned back in my chair, thinking back to the moment that Adrian had come across me in the hallway.
I was probably a little too curt with him at the time. I feel like I might have been justified in that situation simply because I had just come off a panic attack and was suddenly surrounded by tons of people I didn’t know on top of the fact that I’d been given genuine reason to believe most people had it out for me.
Although that hadn’t necessarily been the case here so far, that didn’t mean I should throw caution to the wind either.
But at the very least I know that Adrian was genuine in his feelings, he didn’t seem to be all that prejudiced.
I wonder what the defining feature was, supposedly everyone in this world was still supposed to be fairly set against elves. And yet I’d also met more than a few people that just weren’t. And while I had met a few people who were, they didn’t overwhelm the statistics.
I looked back down at the book I was reading through. I had been leafing through the biology one in hopes of discovering some more about the anatomy of the body and maybe figuring something out. It had… a diagram. If that’s what you could call this.
It was very subpar in its depiction. It had the outline of a human body and a couple of the organs listed, but beyond that, there wasn’t much else. This was supposedly one of the most advanced depictions of the inside of a human body that they had in this world. Except that it didn’t list things like the liver or the appendix or a number of other organs that were useful to human biology.
They had managed to discover that humans had kidneys. But as far as they were aware we only had just that one. Unless the human anatomy was drastically different compared to Earth they were missing one there.
I don’t even know how you go about only finding one of them when they’re symmetrically placed in the body. If you were doing an in-depth analysis you would find both of them. I guess unless the body was missing half its organs, in which case one of the kidneys might be missing.
Except they had both of the lungs listed so that theory didn’t hold up particularly well.
I closed the book with a sigh.
Adrian ended up not coming back to our room that night.
***
Friday passed by pretty quickly, leaving me waking up Saturday with a fair amount of trepidation.
Looking out the window I could see that the sun was only just starting to rise. Given that it was spring currently, that still left me about an hour to get to where I needed to be going. It was pretty nice having such a precise internal alarm clock. If I slept the way I had on Earth I’d easily be hitting 12 hours every night if I didn’t have something to wake me up.
Even when I did, there was still a pretty good chance that I would just go back to sleep once I had turned it off.
Looking over to Adrian’s bed, it was empty again. Knowing him, he was probably spending time with some friends and had ended up just crashing in their dorm. It wouldn’t have been the first time it happened.
He was a fairly responsible person, but he enjoyed a good time just as much as anyone else. Especially when it included drinking or sex. Preferably both.
I hadn’t really gotten a chance to talk to him since the other day either. We’d both been terribly busy, so our schedules just never really aligned for us to have a moment to talk.
I sat up and let one of my 29 minds run free to magic up an arm for the day. I was down to having one crafted in seconds now. I still remember it taking me hours to craft that first one. And an obscene amount of mana.
I had not been terribly precise with my control back then. But now I had control and efficiency. So I wasn’t losing mana due to me not having a firm grasp on it, and I needed less to complete the same task.
The arms I was making now were actually good as well. The first one I had made was pretty clunky and imprecise. It moved decently enough, but for fine motor skills, it had been lacking. My arms up until around the second tier of [Wood Manipulation] had been pretty crap.
Now they were almost indistinguishable from my real arm in terms of dexterity.
Standing up, I pulled on my tunic. I still hadn’t gotten rid of this thing. As much as I disliked where it came from, I couldn’t deny its usefulness. I didn’t need to clean it, I didn’t need to repair it, I didn’t need to do anything with it because it was magic.
It took care of itself. No matter how dirty it got, it would clean itself, and no matter how torn up it got, it would repair itself. Truly a marvel in elven engineering. Or would it be enchanting?
I guess it didn’t matter. It was useful so I was somewhat hesitant to get rid of it. Especially when it meant I would have to spend time cleaning and repairing clothes going forward, or even spending money on buying new ones regularly.
No, it’d be better for me to hold onto this one despite my misgivings about it. No sense in throwing out perfectly good clothes just because I didn’t like the people who gave them to me. I wasn’t in a position to be picky about things right now.
I double-checked that I had everything on the right way, first impressions would probably be important here. I definitely didn’t want to leave a bad first impression.
I started making my way down the hallways deciding that I’d like to be there early. Even if early entailed being thirty minutes early in this case.
Maybe it was a good thing I was showing up early, maybe I could make them little gift baskets. Have some fruit and stuff in there, people here really like fruits and veggies. Probably because it was expensive to be buying extra stuff like that so people only ever bought exactly what they needed.
The hallways were relatively clear as I made my way down to training room 31, people were still sleeping in the early morning on a weekend when they didn’t have classes. Probably sleeping off the hangovers they were likely to have after a night of drinking.
A thing most people don’t think about, the average constitution in a world with system-enhanced people is significantly higher than what it would have been on Earth.
Now that sounds obvious, right? Because of that, the flu, or a cold, isn’t really a thing people get.
On the other hand, alcohol is significantly stronger to make up for that. If people want to get drunk, they need something that can push through their insane vigor stats and actually get them drunk.
So the strongest alcohols on Earth didn’t even remotely compare to what they had here. Hell, even drinking just straight ethanol wouldn’t compare. Some of the stuff here was just straight-lethal to people below certain vigor stats. Granted that number was like 1,000. So not something unreasonable for people to achieve, even mages.
There were some that wanted you to be around two or maybe three thousand. But those ones wouldn’t kill you if you were below the recommended threshold, mainly because once you hit a certain level you could kind of just shrug off instant death poison effects from something that wasn’t specifically designed to just kill you.
There was some nuance to it that I didn’t fully understand, nevertheless, the alcohol ran strong here.
I stepped into the training room, and as expected, it was empty. I was roughly thirty minutes early so people wouldn’t start showing up for a while.
I wondered what the plan was, did they give a plan to the team leaders? Or did they expect them to come up with something to do on the spot? I figured there was more to our meeting here than just an introduction, otherwise, they could have set that up anywhere else. Instead, they had us meet here.
What was the intent?
I decided to go ahead with the idea I had earlier and started making some gift baskets. I decided to make four. I didn’t know how many people would be on our team, but I decided to assume the high end, which would be four people in total, and then make one extra just in case.
It only took me a few minutes and a fair bit of mana to have decently sized baskets filled with various foods.
No levels for the effort, unfortunately. Not that I really expected one, but I was slowly starting to get to the point where just doing this over and over again wasn’t netting me a lot of experience. I’d have to find a way to bump that up a notch.
Fifteen minutes after I entered the room another person stepped into my awareness as they entered the room.
I turned to get a look at the person. She was of average height, with straight blonde hair, green eyes, and a small smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, right under her eyes. She carried a sword on her hip and there was also a bow slung across her back. I wasn’t sure what position she was supposed to fill, but she at least had versatility.
Maybe she was similar to me in that she was more of a damage dealer rather than a tank, or someone who sat behind lines and bombed their opponents like an artillery unit.
I guess I could always just ask.
“I’m surprised, I thought I would be the first one here. Glad to see at least one member is taking this seriously.” She spoke with a calm confidence that belied someone with plenty of experience. Something I had noticed about how Garrus had spoken, and Fiona as well. They both were confident in their decisions.
They never second-guessed themselves, everyone’s decision was the right one, and if it wasn’t? They would make it the right one by force.
[Level 42³]
She definitely had the levels to back it up.
“I was up early so I decided to show up early,” I replied with a shrug, “feel free to take a basket. I filled them up while I was waiting, figured I’d try to leave a good first impression by having a little gift for everyone.”
She laughed good-naturedly, it was a fairly pleasant sound to listen to.
“Well, you’re definitely sitting in my good books right now,” She stepped forward and held her hand out, “I’m Leathine, team leader, but you can call me Lea.”
I grabbed her hand firmly and shook it, “Alex.”
She looked me over, “So what level are you? I can’t actually see it.”
“Ah, right. I forget I just have that on usually.” I focused a little bit and turned off the racial ability that allowed me to hide my level.
She raised an eyebrow as she got a look.
“Recently ascended then?”
I nodded, “For the most part.”
“Well, as long as you can pull your own weight I doubt anyone will care.”
I snorted, “Unless we get a designated healer on our team they won’t be complaining for a number of good reasons.”
“You have a healing skill?” She asked, surprise tinging her tone.
“Yep,” I said, popping the ‘p’, “two actually. Touch ranged and AOE healing. They’re not the greatest, but they’re significantly better than potions.”
She nodded, ”Yeah, that’ll be good. Healers are a rare commodity, especially designated ones. Nobody likes being the person stuck in the back lines, people enjoy being the flashy person at the front. The one that all the ladies will flock to when they save them.”
I laughed at that, “Too true.”
Lea looked like she was about to say something else when another person stepped into our awareness as they entered the room. She closed her mouth as we turned to get a look at the newcomer.
“You know, normally when I enter rooms people are bowing. I think it would be appropriate for you two to do the same.”
The man spoke in a haughty tone absolutely drenched in narcissism.
Oh no, please let this just be sarcasm.
I might actually hurt someone if he’s not joking.
I glanced over at Lea who just raised an eyebrow back as we waited until he fully approached.
The man had a well-trimmed beard that covered the entirety of his jaw, and short shaggy brown hair that reached just past his ears. His face also sported well-defined cheekbones and a prominent nose that all accentuated his features, along with his clothing, to scream nobility.
Along his back rested a long, thin metal rod. It didn’t look to be designed specifically for martial use, but I wasn’t certain.
He took a glance at both of us before his eyes came to a stop lingering on my ears, his lips then curled up into a sneer, his voice laced with absolute condescension, “I didn’t realize they put a demi-human on my team, I still can’t understand why they’d allow you sub-human freaks to join the NSA.”
[Level 22³]
I gave a look at Lea before looking back at the newcomer.
I was absolutely going to punch his teeth down his throat. In fact, I think I had a great way to go about doing that.
“Lea, are we expecting anyone else?”
She shook her head, “No, why?”
I smiled maliciously, “I have a great idea for a start on getting us acquainted with each other. I figured, high and mighty over here could have a friendly spar with me.
“Show me how superior humans really are.”
