Teresa very well could have taken his head clean off, but settled for a nasty hit that broke his jaw followed by an immediate <Facilitated Restoration>. Fair enough to say, Teresa was pissed. Even some of the members of his own party looked at him incredulously, Teresa guessed they hadn't known about the other planet either.

As a result, nothing really happened in response to Teresa punching Ezio. After he admitted he knew about the other planet, she got one freebie. She had immediately proceeded to use it, and based on the way a few others were looking at Ezio she wasn't the only one who wanted to punch him.

Thankfully, they seemed content with Teresa's hit.

"What the hell?" Ezio yelled once his jaw healed up after a brief second.

"I'm going to help the healers, I'll go refresh <Facilitated Restoration> on however many people I can. After that, I'm going to lay down and try to get some sleep." Teresa responded, not at all addressing the fact she just punched him.

"I understand you're angry, but you can't just-" Ezio started, but Elaina actually cut him off.

"That sounds like a good plan. I can help out." Elaina said, shooting a quick glare at Ezio.

"You knew about Elaina and I's situation and you didn't think to mention another planet?" Mordecai whispered to Ezio, his face returning to a neutral mask. "Even Lilith mentioned her family before."

Teresa glanced over to see Lilith looking at Ezio with pity. Teresa wasn't sure what was going on there, but it seemed like a discussion for their party. She was a bit confused why they didn't mention anything about Axton's family, but decided that wasn't her place to ask.

Randall looked at her with a mixture of emotions that were hard to read. She didn't blame him, she hadn't been nearly as prone to violence pre-System. Now, maybe she was getting a little too comfortable with it.

She left the discussion with her party, Elaina following behind. Teresa showed her dad where her party would be staying, then proceeded to make the rounds with Elaina.

"You don't heal Soul damage the normal way, it's got to heal on its own." Elaina said, unprompted, as they both used <Healing Touch> on a pair of people with injuries that hadn't been fully treated yet.

"What?"

"Restoration Mana won't put a Soul back together, at least mine can't yet. At most, the best thing it can do is work as a cast." Elaina explained. "The Soul isn't a physical thing, and it won't absorb someone else's Mana. Targeting it with a healing spell won't do anything normally. You just have to encase the Soul with Restoration Mana and keep it firm. I did it enough times and it changed the description of my <Healing Touch> to include a bit about slightly accelerating Soul healing speed."

"Why are you telling me this?" Teresa asked.

"We've seen where being secretive has gotten us." Elaina replied. "Medicinal science should be freely exchanged, and in a way Restoration Magic is medicine. Maybe one day you'll have to deal with that issue, it's better to know what to do now rather than figure it out on the go."

"Thanks." Teresa replied as she stored that information away for if she ever encountered Soul damage. "I'm not sure if it's something you already have experience with, but Restoration Magic only returns your body to what it thinks it should be. You can use <Purify> to eliminate certain illnesses and diseases if you consider them toxins, but if they were born with it then <Purify> won't work. I'm not really sure about the nuances to be honest, I don't know nearly enough about biology or medicine to fully get it but that's what it seems like when I heal people."

"Huh, I always felt like Restoration Magic was just following some hidden blueprint." Elaina said. "Like it just returns people's bodies to a design hidden from our senses, but I never really understood how that design works, you know? Like why is it that we can almost never fix type 1 diabetes but sometimes we can cure type 2? I wondered if it was due to lifestyle versus genetic predisposition, as really either kind can run in families. I don't know, most of my pre-System training involved keeping someone from dying long enough for a doctor to see them."

"I've heard you guys were already curing cancer, though it takes multiple people. It's possible with one, I've done it a lot myself, but when it comes to the brain you have to be careful. <Purify> too much at once, the patient will die. Not sure why, but I didn't want to keep replicating the situation to figure it out." Teresa added.

"What about congenital cancer?"

"I'm going to be honest, I don't know enough about cancer to know what that is."

"It's cancer that's present at birth. You said if someone's born with an illness then you probably can't fix it."

"I'm not actually sure, we didn't have anyone with that problem." Teresa answered. "Honestly it sounds kind of shitty, you know? Magic is a thing, it can cure a bunch of diseases, but you can still be unlucky anyways."

"We'll figure it out. I heard a few people talking about how we have to reconsider even the most basic principles of science now that magic is a thing. Give a bunch of scientists magic and I'm sure they'll work something out."

"I hope so."

Teresa and Elaina continued to heal whoever they could, at least until their Mana got too low. They both needed to keep a small reserve at all times in case of an attack, so they couldn't completely drain their Mana.

Once they finished, Teresa went straight to her party's tent ready to fall asleep. Most of the party was already asleep by that point, including her dad. The only one awake was Sarah, who was wide awake with a dead look in her eyes.

"You alright?" Teresa asked in a hushed tone, concerned.

"I don't know." Sarah answered, being equally quiet. No one without a decent Perception would be able to hear them. "I tortured someone today. I know that this operation is meant to save thousands if not millions of lives, and I thought that justification would make it easy. Even now I can put a logical understanding to it, but standing there in front of another human being changes everything."

"Emotions can still play out even if your mind understands the situation. I'm sorry Sarah, I wish you didn't have to do that."

"I'm glad I did, in a way at least. I don't feel glad, but logically I would rather have done it than not. If we hadn't been prepared for an attack and didn't have at least some information, who knows how many more people would have died?"

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"You're human, doing that will be traumatic even if it was necessary." Teresa said.

"Do you remember when Madeline didn't like how we were keeping monsters alive between rounds? They were always in terrible condition so they wouldn't be able to harm us, but we kept them on the verge of death. She voiced her concerns, but at the end of the day we all went through with it anyways. That had been my idea too." Sarah whispered. "Most of my ideas have involved inflicting pain on something. I think I might be a terrible person."

"I don't think so." Teresa replied. "I think a good person can do bad things out of necessity."

"Isn't that a slippery slope? It started out with monsters in the Tutorial, now I don't even know how many people I've killed. It's less than ten probably, but what kind of person loses count that fast? I feel like I should have each and every kill burned into my mind, but I don't actually think about most of them. If I was going to lose count, it should have been after like forty or something, then it would make more sense. Instead, I stopped bothering to keep track almost immediately. That's psychotic, isn't it?"

"The fact you feel the way you do is proof that you're not a psychopath, Sarah. A bad person wouldn't feel bad about doing bad things."

"I disagree. You can't do shitty things and then feel bad about it like that makes it all okay, you ever see Bojack Horseman?" Sarah asked.

"That is a wild thing to compare this to."

"The point still stands."

"You're not Bojack Horseman. You're not making these decisions out of joy or pleasure, you're doing it because you have to." Teresa said.

"But what if I get too comfortable with this? What if I could make a morally upright decision, but the alternative just seems too appealing?'"

"Well you haven't done that yet, so there's no reason to punish yourself for something like that."

"If I ever do become like that, I want you to kill me."

"The same goes for me."

"Great, if either of us ever becomes a mass murdering psycho we'll kill each other." Sarah said with a small laugh. Teresa smiled, finding it a little bit funny too.

"Sounds like a perfect plan."

"Truly. What could go wrong? All of our plans work perfectly, on the first try too."

"Exactly. I'm glad you get it."

They laughed under their breath a bit more before Sarah closed her eyes.

"I'm gonna try to get some sleep. Goodnight Teresa."

"Goodnight Sarah."

With that, Teresa closed her own eyes and drifted off. She had some concerns of her own after recent events. She had run in and snapped both of their necks without a concern, when she had just been hesitant to torture them herself. A part of her thought that unlike Sarah, she was actually a bad person who didn't feel bad to the same extent.

She caught that thought and stopped herself from going down a spiral. She hadn't hesitated to snap their necks because they had gone from being out of combat to suddenly engaged in a battle that would go on to claim the lives of several allies. It was creepy that she had such a switch in her head, that she was able to flip flop between only using violence when necessary to ensuring her enemies wouldn't get back up without her permission.

Teresa's view of herself might not be accurate anymore. Maybe it never had been. Even when she 'caught' herself and stopped a train of thought that would send her spiraling, she still knew what she was going to think even if it hadn't been formulated properly in her mind.

Maybe everyone in the party should see a therapist after the shit they had to do.

She was woken up a few hours later to the sound of fighting, at which she immediately sat up and ran out of the tent along with the rest of her party. Several parties were getting up to see what the commotion was, which was revealed to be a group of Ethereal Treants attacking the camp.

They looked extremely similar to a normal Treant, being roughly 8 feet tall trees using a network of roots as legs. However, the roots functioned closer to flagella that whipped around to generate movement as they floated through the air with their translucent bodies.

The monsters never got the chance to advance very far, as a mage from The Mall shot <Embers> into the crowd of high level monsters. The fire from the spell burned the monsters and actually ignited them, causing the Ethereal Treants to catch fire themselves. This was a first, at least for Teresa. Typically, <Embers> was incapable of actually spreading a fire. You could have a perfect environment for a campfire, but lighting it with <Embers> simply wouldn't work.

Normally it was both a blessing and a curse. On the bright side, no one had accidentally set fire to the forest around The Mall while using <Embers>. On the not so bright side, it reduced the utility of <Embers> and kept monsters from catching on fire themselves.

Until now, apparently.

The Ethereal Treants thrashed as they burned, the fire spreading across their gaseous bodies and inflicting severe damage. Teresa approached as the monsters screamed, and she finished them off utilizing <Suffocate> which had already proven to be effective against ethereal opponents.

The group of monsters died without being able to properly injure anyone. Teresa probably hadn't even needed to get up truthfully, the situation was handled almost immediately. She turned to the original mage who had shot them with <Embers>, who seemed incredibly confused.

"How did you do that?" Teresa asked, not recognizing the man as someone she personally knew.

"I have no idea." He responded, looking at his hands. "<Embers> never sets stuff on fire."

"You don't have a skill that does that?" Teresa asked. She had been hoping to get some insight on what he had done that caused the fire to spread, but he shook his head.

"No, I have nothing like that. I didn't do anything differently either, that was just normal <Embers>." He said, frowning. "Was it because they were Treants? They're monsters made of wood."

"I don't think that's it, we've seen Treants before and that didn't happen. Maybe it's because they were ethereal." Teresa suggested, to which the mage shrugged.

"I don't know but that gave me a load of experience, I leveled up from that." He said happily as he opened a screen only he could see.

That reminded Teresa that her secondary class, Scavenger, had leveled up. She still hadn't selected a new skill from it, so she opened the selection menu to get another easy low quality skill.

<Pluck: lv 0>

Type: Looting Magic

Remove the fur of a viable corpse.

<Descale: lv 0>

Type: Looting Magic

Remove the scales of a viable corpse.

Teresa sighed as both of her available choices were hyper specific skills to loot a corpse. Well, maybe the scales of a few monsters would be more useful than fur. Or was it the other way around? Did pluck actually skin a corpse, or did it just cause all of the fur to fall off? Did it work on feathers? It should work on feathers, it was called <Pluck> after all.

It really didn't matter too much which she went with, her secondary class didn't seem like it was supposed to give her life altering skills. She was a little hesitant about <Pluck> since she wasn't sure about the specifics of how it worked, and if dinosaurs were a thing again than <Descale> would probably see more use. There were also those Giant Serpents she had killed a long time ago, The Mall had needed to make multiple trips to the Portal to collect everything there while she went and trained with her party.

She selected <Descale>, and the information on how to use the skill entered her brain. It wasn't likely to see a lot of use, but if she stocked up on a bunch of different looting skills like that it would probably pay off on its own eventually. She had some time before her secondary class could even be changed, she was sure she'd have a bunch of looting skills that would randomly come in handy.

Teresa nodded at the confused mage and made her way back to her tent, ready to immediately fall asleep again. She was exhausted, and in the morning, they were going to advance. This deep in the Contaminated Zone, it was almost a guarantee they would be fighting monsters.

She looked forward to the experience she was going to get.

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