"Ugh, it's finally over, another mission completed successfully! I can't wait to get back home already." I voiced my complaints loudly as we took in the devastation surrounding the rift. Despite how I sounded, I knew our work wasn't entirely done just yet.
While we had effectively taken care of the main problem by forcefully closing the rift with one of Aurelia's space-grenades, there were still invaders running around freely around here. Well, 'running' was a strong word for the kind of movement the majority of them were capable of. While the higher-level, more humanoid ones could very well run to a certain extent, the less fortunate ones moved with some sort of sloshing mix between stumbling and crawling.
On top of cleaning up our surroundings, we also had to quickly get back to Jane, in case she was struggling more than anticipated with the three strong opponents I left her with.
"Hold your horses, Mary. We'll have to deal with the dirty work first before we can leave." Carl replied to my not entirely serious statement, apparently not noticing my meager attempts at humor. Sucks to be me, I guess.
"I know, that doesn't make me want to leave any less, though. Don't tell me that you actually want to comb our surroundings for hours to look for any traces of disgusting mushroom monsters stumbling about, or do you?"
"Well, if you put it that wa—"
"Can you please cut it out, guys?" Dahlia interrupted our attempts at squabbling with each other. "What you are doing is very much not helpful right now. Let's get the team together again first before deciding about our next actions. I'll shoot up a makeshift flare to signal them to come back."
True to her words, Dahlia didn't hesitate a single moment before throwing three fireballs up into the sky that exploded loudly at the very peak of their trajectories, about a hundred meters above the ground. She didn't have the ability to noticeably modify the color of her fireballs or explosion, so we had to resort to the more archaic way of signaling through the number of flares sent up.
Three flares in this context meant something like 'main mission successful: rift closed. Meet up here as soon as possible'. We didn't know where the others, especially Leyvin and Yakov, were, so it was better for us to call them back to us before going off to search for them.
To our surprise, the first one to arrive at our temporary meeting point was neither Leyvin nor Yakov, it was Jane.
"Jane, you're back!" I sprang up from the floor I had sat down on and wrapped her in a quick hug, in response to which she just awkwardly touched my back with her hands. Hehe, that's the Jane I know.
"Ehm, yeah, I'm back, I guess? Couldn't have been that long since we last saw each other, right?"
I promptly ignored her questioning my enthusiasm, dismissing her voiced confusion by asking a question myself. "What happened, were the opponents you faced weaker than we thought at first?"
I had honestly expected her to just drag them along with her to our meeting point so we could fight against them as a group, but here Jane was, alone and very much not fleeing from a flock of disgusting mushrooms.
"Yes and no, I mean, kinda? They were very strong at first, and I could barely hold my ground while I stalled for time to let you guys finish off the rift so we could maybe meet up and eliminate them together, but suddenly, probably in the exact moment the rift ceased to exist, their regeneration got a lot worse for some unknown reason."
"Hmm, yeah, that is a bit strange." Dahlia jumped into our conversation from the sideline. "Maybe they are somehow connected to the rift and draw energy from it in some unknown way? It would certainly explain the sudden drop in their strength that you noticed. We should maybe mention that in our report to the research unit when we get back. If anyone can find out about this in detail, it's them."
"You're right, we shouldn't burst our heads over this. We aren't really the best experts on physics and laws in this realm, anyways. Knowledge from Earth only helps so much when mana and magic are added into the equation."
"Yeah, let's relax a bit while we wait for Leyvin and Yakov to come back from wherever they went off to. If they're still not back in half an hour, I'm going to send another flare triplet into the sky. Maybe they somehow missed the first one."
We fell into a comfortable silence while we relaxed for a moment. I used the time to look at my status to see if I had gained anything new. I was only marginally useful today, though, so I didn't expect much. I had slain a few weak invaders and supported Jane in combat a bit, but that was already it.
Participating in the closing of the rift should have netted me a bit of experience, but a fair share of that should have actually gone to Aurelia, as she was transitively responsible for closing that rift with her mana, even if we slashed our way to the rift and threw the grenade.
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It was still a lot of experience for us, especially since this rift was above average in size and already the site of an active invasion. In the end, this whole ordeal today brought me 3 new levels, bringing me from level 38 to level 41.
[Name: Mary Ashflower
Race: Human
Level: 41 (Tier II)
Mana: 1731/2502
Achievements: [Hero Candidate], [Predator I]
Class: Eye of the Storm (Rare+)
Active Skills:
[Storm Bow Lv. 12]
[Anti-Gravity Shot Lv. 7]
[Thunderbolt Arrow Lv. 4]
Passive Skills:
[Nimble Fingers]
[Archer's Agility]
[Eye of the Archer lv. 11]
General Skills:
[Identify]
[Mana Sense Lv. 4]
[Favorable Breeze]]
Even after this I was more than ten levels behind Jane before she even received her experience from today. With today added onto that, the gap between us had probably only widened.
I wasn't sad or disappointed at that, though. My level, while seeming low when compared to Jane, Dahlia, and probably Blake, was about average among the rest of us. I knew that Carl and Leyvin were a few levels above me, but I was higher than Zane, Bronya, Ms. Edelwei?, and probably also higher than John and Eric, the friends of Blake.
Where Yakov was at level-wise, I didn't even have the slightest idea. The dude was really secretive about his class, skills, and levels for some reason. For all I knew, he might be lower than me or already in tier 3 like Blake claimed to be, who could possibly know at this point? I couldn't even judge his level from the way he fought, as he effectively refused to fight with anyone else at his side.
I didn't care too much about him, though. He wasn't an enemy, so his exact strength didn't really matter to me personally. I was a bit curious, but that was already it.
While I wasn't really disappointed in my level, there was one thing that pained me a bit. Even if I knew it would be hard for me to achieve, I had really wanted to be able to rank up to an epic class with tier two. The best class I unlocked, however, was also the one I picked. While [Eye of the Storm] was by no means bad, especially when seen from the eyes of a local, it wasn't that much better than my previous [Storm Archer] class. While it was certainly an upgrade, it felt more like a linear increase in strength with barely any powerful new skills.
I knew I should just be happy with what I got and move on, but my mind returned to wander the possibilities of what could have been every now and then. What would have changed with an epic class? What kind of power does someone with an epic class have?
As far as this world was concerned, epic-grade was already the peak of human ability. Blake had been spoon-fed with a legendary class right off the bat, but it wasn't earned the same way the natives of this world had to ascend through power. While the rest of us were certainly privileged to a certain degree, it wasn't nearly as much as Blake was.
Even after so long, I still didn't understand the system's decision to choose Blake of all there was. Leyvin, Jane, or even Aurelia would be such better fits that it would almost be insulting to mention them in the same breath.
Even Hanah, that poor girl, would have been way better than Blake could ever be. She was always quiet and restrained, so I didn't know much about her, but still. In fantasy and here as well, the [Hero] always ends up being a guy and only very rarely, if ever, turns out to be a girl.
Her death, even if it seems like ages ago after all the time that has passed and all the events that have happened ever since then, was still present on all of our minds. Back then, Ms. Edelwei? was so stricken by grief that she could barely be talked to normally. Even if we didn't show it outwardly as much as she did, we were all beside ourselves as well.
Seeing someone you know fall to their death right in front of you was just not something our minds were capable of processing so soon after suddenly being ripped out of our normal school life.
That incident was incredibly tragic, but we had no choice other than to move on. There was simply no magic in this world capable of bringing her back, Ms. Edelwei? checked that extensively, and we were still stuck in this avidly very dangerous world that we were unreasonably asked to save out of the blue.
Well, not everyone could move on so quickly. After all, the sudden death of Hanah had hit Bronya, Zane, and also Aurelia so hard that they completely dropped out of trying to save the world through personal combat power and moved to join the research team that was then later taken over by Instructor Carmelia and specialized entirely on researching the anomalies and now also the resulting invasion that was born through them.
If viewed from that perspective, it was Hanah's untimely demise that was directly responsible for causing Aurelia to focus so much on research that we found an effective solution for combating the invasion so incredibly quickly. Who knows what would have become of the world by now if we didn't have Aurelia to create her signature space-grenades? While it was obviously still incredibly sad, at least there was a small silver lining to all of this.
I didn't really like admitting this, but perhaps her death was exactly what we needed to continue surviving in this world. The pure existential terror this caused in us gave us a much-needed wake-up call regarding the nature of this world, like breaking through the thin ice covering the surface of the dangerously volatile lake we all stood on metaphorically. Only the awareness from Hanah breaking through the ice so unexpectedly saved us all from breaking through as well.
A sad thing to say in a context like this, but she indirectly saved all of our lives by dying that fateful day. We'd all rather have her back together with us, but if it weren't for her, I was certain that it would have been someone else soon after.
Seeing Leyvin and Yakov quickly making their way over to us in the peripherals of my very good eyes, I banished my depressing thoughts back into the most obscure reaches of my mind and called my joyful self back to the front and sprang up from my seat to greet them with a big smile.
"Leyvin! Yakov! You guys are back! What took you so long?"
"Ah, sorry guys, we got wrapped up in a mob of mushroom monsters that suddenly popped up in front of us. Since Yakov over here just refused to fight while I was here, I had to wrap that situation up myself, which took a lot longer than it would have otherwise. If you need someone to blame for the long wait, blame him."
I couldn't suppress a giggle at that. "Haha, yeah, I guess that does sound like something he'd do. Anyways, good to have you back. Let's quickly wrap up this final clean-up and finally head home again."
Leyvin sighed at my words. "Ugh, yeah, let's do that."
...