"You expect us to believe that?" Jonathan asked, incredibly skeptical. The settlement was having an emergency council meeting after the death of their only prisoner. Her party had heard that Teresa went to guard the man on her own early, and when her <Totem Of Life> started to act up, multiple people had rushed over expecting a battle. "Some god is harvesting people like cattle? I think you killed that man."

"Shut up Jonathan, holy shit." Sarah said, fed up with him. "The guy was liquified! If Teresa had killed him, he would be a charred corpse. How is this outlandish?"

"Yeah it's pretty obvious Teresa didn't kill him, we should be worried about the whole planet harvesting thing." Jake said.

"Alright fine, let's assume she's telling the truth. She just goes mouthing off like a damn child to a literal god and expects everything to just work out now? What the hell are we going to do about this?" Jonathan asked. Teresa had recounted the events for the whole council to hear, telling them exactly how it went down by replaying the memory in her mind.

"She just risked the wellbeing of everyone she knows just so she wouldn't have to sell people, and you're complaining?" Saylee asked incredulously. "If anyone else had been in her shoes, I think people would start disappearing."

"None of it makes sense! She just had a lovely little sit down with a god, didn't get his name, doesn't know where he's from, threw a temper tantrum and now she's gonna hunt evil multiversal arms dealers for them?" Jonathan continued. "What were you even doing with him alone?"

"Alright, what should I have done instead then Jonathan?" Teresa asked. "Come on, tell me. Tell the class. What would you have me do instead? What the fuck was I supposed to say? I spoke only when necessary, and got him to explain a lot about what's going on. So go on, what would you have had me do instead?"

"I don't know, be respectful? Get his name? Not act like a damn child?"

"Oh right, let me get down on my knees and beg the mean old god for mercy and hope that works out in our favor. You are right about one thing though, we need to prepare something for this." Teresa replied. She was angry and it was showing. She thought everything had already been too damn complicated, and all of a sudden evil multiverse gods? Jonathan getting on her nerves was not helping.

"Should we set up an army, maybe get ready for war?" Theo offered. "We can't just give up, there has to be something we can do."

"Getting a militia going isn't a bad idea, but to be honest I don't know how much of a chance we would actually stand." Teresa admitted. "As nice as it would be to fight back, who would we be fighting? Where? They can travel between universes, I wouldn't put it past them to have nukes. If we become too much of an annoyance, I don't know what is actually stopping them from wiping us all out. From the sound of it, sending people into our universe is incredibly difficult and comes with a lot of sacrifices, but we don't know the details. Is traveling between universes always hard, or is it just our universe? It also might have something to do with universes that are newly integrated to the multiverse, but anything that hasn't been directly confirmed is an educated guess. Personally, I think our best option is jumping ship and finding another universe."

"That sounds a lot like giving up." Jonathan said.

"Not at all, it's knowing better than thinking we can take on entire civilizations that likely existed before our universe even existed. The way he talked about a universe's lifespan felt like such a given that he has to have seen the death of a universe himself. Let's say we were way more advanced than we are now. Imagine we could travel at 99% the speed of light, could colonize multiple planets, and had a whole bunch of interstellar spaceships or something, I don't know. None of it would involve magic, and even then we would still consider ourselves behind. I don't think we're gonna pull an Independence Day and fight off aliens way more advanced than us and win. Considering the universe lost and finding somewhere else to go just feels like the best solution."

"I don't like that idea." Theo admitted. "But I can't think of an alternative. Should we start thinking about a mass evacuation?"

"I don't know, how would we even leave? Where would we go? I don't think leaving the universe is something we can do in the near future." Teresa replied.

"Can we live in another universe?" Saylee asked. "If other universes operate on different laws of nature, would we be able to eat their food? Drink their water? Do other universes even have water?"

"Also a good question, and I don't know. I just… I don't know what to do about this situation. I don't want to give up, but I can't think of a good outcome to all of this." Teresa said. "I'm trying to be optimistic, I'm trying to think of some way out, but nothing is coming to mind. We don't know what we're dealing with, and I think until that changes we can't properly formulate a plan."

"So the plan is to do nothing then?" Jonathan asked.

"We can make sure more people are prepared for combat, we can spread the word about this everywhere we possibly can, we can try to pit them against each other, but I don't know what else we can do right now. This is beyond me, I want to find my family, have some fun with magic, and live my life out trying new things. I'm not prepared to fight a war, I'm not prepared for any of this. Why the hell would I be? At my last job I stocked the shelves in an understaffed retail store, and at the job before that I was detailing cars until the company went under. I don't know what to do about this, I'm figuring everything out with the rest of you with the same set of information. I'm sorry, but I just don't know." Teresa was trying not to spiral, but this was absurd. She beat the Tutorial, mostly to save a friend, and now there was a multiversal war she had to worry about? Why did major events have to keep happening during her lifetime, couldn't everything just slow down for a while?

"We can stall them." Nikolas said. "We can't win, but we can buy time. I'm not sure how long we have but we can at least take out their agents wherever possible. If they are talking to us, then they've interacted with other settlements as well. You were already planning on going out to find your family, I think you should use the opportunity to spread information and get as many people prepared as possible. Other settlements might even have a leader under another faction's thumb, maybe we can go from settlement to settlement auditing their rulers to make sure nobody else has been compromised."

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"That's not a bad idea, but it's still a temporary solution." Teresa replied.

"Perhaps, but we would still be saving lives. Every dictator stopped could be thousands of lives saved. We don't have to save the world Teresa, I don't know if we can, but we can at least save somebody." NIkolas answered.

"I think he's right." William said. "Even if it's just one person, that's one person who would still be alive because of our efforts. I'm not capable of much, but tell me what to do and I'll do what I can."

"Everyone capable should start hunting monsters." Preston said. "Anyone with <Identify> should start checking for people with a level cap or an F+ rating, scan everyone. We should coordinate with the sapient creatures nearby as well, the Albino Gorillas and the Scilians are in just as much danger as we are. We were able to find two different species capable of communicating in under a week, there has to be more."

"That's a good idea, we should make sure there are no spies in the camp." Nikolas said. "Teresa, those bandits that were robbing George's party, did they have a level cap?"

"No, but at least one of them had an F+." Teresa said. She opened her notifications and began scrolling back, trying to find the kill notification for them. "Got it, only one of them were F+ and it was the guy with the gun. None of them had level caps, and none of them had a corrupted Mana Crystal."

"So maybe looking for an F+ race isn't all there is to it, but it still seems rare." Nikolas replied. Suddenly, Teresa had an amazing idea.

"We can heal everybody." Teresa said. "Using <Facilitated Restoration> on him made me sick, we should just have everyone get hit by a healing spell and see if it causes any reactions."

"Not a bad idea, but what exactly are the side effects?" Nikolas asked. "Doing it once might make you sick, but what if you heal an agent multiple times, or if you heal several different agents? The corrupted Mana Crystal said using it would draw the ire of the System, maybe healing an agent does the same thing. Can you guarantee there will be no long term consequences?"

"I don't know, there might be. That's a good point, and I'm not sure I want to find out the answer." Teresa admitted. "Looking for level caps might be the best option, but they also might send people who haven't reached their level cap to make it harder to spot them. Maybe we can check the monoliths in other settlements? It has a bunch of statistics available for viewing, maybe we can check the population over time and look for any sudden drops."

"Only if it is still available. It might only be visible to the ruler of a settlement, and the monolith mentioned statistic assistance only lasting for a month." Preston said.

"You're right, it might. What other ideas do we have?" Teresa asked. Everyone was silent. This may be beyond Teresa, but it was also out of everybody else's league. Everyone present was just a person, what were any of them supposed to do in this situation? "If no one has any ideas, then I think it's even more important that my party and I leave once we get the chance. Our main goal is still to find our family members, but now we just have an additional objective."

"How are you going to do that?" Jonathan asked. Sarah immediately almost started to go off on him, but he held up a hand. "Listen kid, I get that you have a lot on your plate and I'm sorry, but it doesn't change the fact that the planet is the size of the sun. Where are you going to go? What makes you think you'll find anyone? I get that you didn't ask for any of this, but at the end of the day you're in a higher position of power than anyone else here. You didn't ask to be put in that position, but you're in it. We don't know what it even means to be leader of the settlement. What if you can't resign? What if there are things only the ruler can do that requires you to be there? If you leave, that means people are going to die. There's no ifs ands or buts about it. Someone else will have to cover for the work you do hunting those monsters, and they might not be as capable. Sooner or later, somebody will die because of it."

Jonathan was an asshole, Teresa did not have a high opinion of the man. Unfortunately, Jonathan was an asshole who could make a good point sometimes. If she left the camp, then that would likely lead to somebody's death. Maybe not a lot of deaths, but eventually someone would die who might have survived if Teresa stuck around. It's not like it was some sort of butterfly effect thing either, this was an active choice she was making and it would likely have direct consequences on innocent people.

"That's not how it works." Madeline interjected, speaking for the first time this meeting. "It's also not a fair observation. No matter what Teresa does, somebody is going to die. If she leaves, someone here might die. If she stays, then someone she could have helped will die instead. You're putting pressure on her to save everyone, but that's just not possible. Teresa is one person. An extraordinary person, someone I honestly look up to, but at the end of the day she is just one person. All of us have had the exact same opportunities as her, and she's done more than the rest of us. Teresa isn't responsible for anyone's death, she's the reason a lot of us are still here."

Teresa held her breath, doing her best not to cry. That was incredibly touching, at least to her. She had been holding back a nervous breakdown for too long now, these were stakes she didn't ask for. Before the System, there had been multiple times where she wished major historical events would just stop. Whether it was just some US thing going on, a worldwide pandemic, or some war she could do nothing about, she had wondered if that was how people had always felt in history. Why doesn't everything just slow down for a few years, maybe the world could take a decade off and chill for a bit.

Now there was an apocalypse, which on its own should be enough. Except Teresa actually had the ability to do something to help people, and every choice she made could influence who lived and who died. Every wasted second felt like a punch to the gut, but all she wanted to do was lay down and breathe. Look at the clouds, watch the sky, listen to some music, and just do nothing for a while. When she was a kid, she had been so restless all the time. She always needed to be doing something, anything, but now the opposite had never been more true.

Teresa would love to turn her brain off and relax, just a little while. Unfortunately, that's not how the world worked.

"Thank you Madeline, I appreciate it." Teresa said. "We do have a plan. We were able to find multiple colonies of different species in a relatively small area, and we suspect we might be able to do the same elsewhere. We aren't necessarily going off in a random direction and hoping for the best, but we are going to visit settlements and share information. Someone might know a way to get <Familial Duty>, or we might even be able to hire someone with <Familial Duty> to help find our own families. They don't have to be human, they just have to be willing to help.

"For starters, we will head south of the settlement. The Albino Gorillas came from that general area, and they have been moving closer to our settlement since the end of the Tutorial. Reports say that they seem sick, and we have reason to believe they are running from something. I can't leave in good faith knowing there might be a threat like that on your doorstep, so we will head south to figure out what the issue is. We will also speak with the Scilians and the Albino Gorillas to see if they have encountered any other civilizations separate from the ones we already know about, so we're not going out completely blind. If we encounter any settlements under the control of a multiversal faction, I think our best option is to take out anyone involved and make them think another faction did it. I'm not sure how we're going to do that yet, but we'll have to figure it out." Teresa felt like it was a good enough plan. She had talked it over with her party members, who had all pitched in and agreed with the final result. She wasn't sure exactly when they would take off, but it would have to be soon.

Their travel plans had gotten significantly more stressful.

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