EmEs_etherious
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Chapter 44- Frustrated
🕑 Added 2022-12-06 23:55:01 +0000 UTC~Selena Williams~
Selena was getting frustrated. It had been over forty-eight hours since she’d been tasked by Tatsumi to secure Arthur Ward's assistance. She’d gotten on the job immediately, checking first on his place of residence. When she hadn't found him there, she had quickly made her way to the locations that she knew he frequently visited from the investigations that the Zaibatsu had done on him.
When even that proved futile, she had begun to panic a little bit but reassured herself that she would find him eventually. It had been a day since then, and she was no closer to fulfilling her objective. Selena had asked anyone that even knew the young man a little about his whereabouts, going so far as to track down his old friends to see if they had seen him.
No one had.
True to his word, Arthur seemed to have gone on vacation. Either that, or he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. She hoped it was the former as she had no way to track him down if he’d actually gone off-planet as had become the rising trend for Earth’s talented mages.
Did I read him wrong? I’m sure he was interested in the job, he was just proving a point when he rejected it. Right?
By this point, Selena had practically dismissed her search as a lost cause, instead now planning on how best to break the news to her boss. Tatsumi was a man who loved power simply for the sake of having it, and despite all the financial capital he had built up, he had a surprisingly fragile ego. He was, in her most biased opinion, fucking man-child. An incredibly intelligent, ruthless and decisive one, but a man-child nonetheless.
It would hurt him, almost like a physical blow that someone had refused his offer. And a hurt CEO of a huge corporation like Zaibatsu along with all its legally questionable assets was a recipe for disaster. And like every other time Tatsumi lost his cool, it would be others that would pay for his mistakes and Selena Williams was a woman who didn't want to carry the egomaniac’s burdens when they came crashing down.
That was why she had decided to check one last time at Arthur's house to see if he was home. She wasn’t hopeful of success but how much could one last search hurt? She’d wasted so much time already on the task a few more minutes wouldn't kill her. Would it?
The traffic, however, seemed to have decided to hinder her every step of the way and her two-seater hatchback was moving at a crawl through the congested roads.
What the hell happened? Has there been a car crash for god's sake?
She didn't understand how such a mundane problem could cause such a delay in the post-system world. Humans were now long past suffering from the once fatal injuries reckless driving resulted in with their ether-enhanced bodies and a group even at the measly level of thirty should be able to deal with moving a car’s wreckage off the road.
Selena pulled down her window to see what was going on.
“What do you mean there's been some flooding on the road? How the fuck does that happen?” An angry man shouted at the police officer that was trying to explain the situation to him. Selena had to agree with the man. There’d been little to no rainfall over the past week.
Flooding? Is it the result of a water monster appearing, or a misuse of magic? Selena was getting a little excited at the prospect of meeting a powerful monster. The past few days had been a drag on her psyche, and a threatening monster was just what she needed to loosen up.
She quickly got out of her car after retrieving its keys from the ignition, and after a brief moment of hesitation, began to walk away from it.
“Hey, where are you going?” The police officer called after her.
“You can't just leave your car here in the middle of nowhere.”
Selena pulled the keys out of her pocket and threw them at the man.
“Don't worry, it's yours now,” she replied, not even stopping to look back at her former vehicle.
It pained her heart a little to give away the expensive car, but in the end, her choice came down to the fact that she just didn't care enough about a mode of transport she could probably already outrun enough that she could be bothered wasting hours of her time in traffic just to keep it. Especially when it was company property.
She’d much rather walk, and so she sauntered down the now-familiar street. God knows she’d seen it enough to last a lifetime on her hunt for Arthur Ward. As she approached her destination, she paused for a moment. She had goosebumps on her arms, almost as if the temperature had suddenly dropped, except no one else seemed to have noticed it.
Actually, that kid over there looks a little nauseous, Selena observed as she noticed a young child clinging to her father’s legs on the sidewalk. Others too seemed to have realised that things weren’t quite right here, but they mostly looked bemused at their own feelings of weary caution.
Something was definitely wrong.
Selena sniffed the air once, twice, and then cast a spell using her sonar manipulation skill. With it, she could detect the most subtle of movements from hundreds of meters away and even the more ethereal reverberations caused by ether usage.
It was what made her such a great scout and a useful asset to the Zaibatsu CEO in the wake of the system’s arrival, in addition to her already formidable analytical skills.
Sadly, it meant that she was now basically a glorified magic detector, instead of the more dignified position she had held prior to the world’s evolution. It wasn’t all bad though, as it suited her purposes just fine, perhaps better than her previous job had.
When she received feedback from her skill, the magnitude and nature of the power she detected gave her pause for a moment and she seriously considered turning back. The residual ether she could sense was on par with the after-effects of her boss’s spells. Not as refined maybe, but it was far beyond her abilities to handle.
That meant that whatever lay ahead of her was above her pay grade.
An unnecessary risk.
A liability to her mission.
Should I carry on going, or turn back now?
Indecision gripped her and Selena was unsure of what she should do. In the end, though, her decision came down to the realization that if things got too dangerous, she could always run away. After all, her highest stat was agility, by quite a large margin actually, and sat at a sky-high 155.
Speed was the most important trait for a scout, and that was where her sonar abilities shined best. As she approached the source of ether usage, some of her cautions began to fall away, replaced instead with confusion.
The effects of a spell that had so much residual ether should be visible from hundreds of meters away and yet the street she was observing looked completely fine.
What the hell’s going on here, she wondered as she looked at everyone going about their normal lives as if they didn't have a care in the world, completely unaware of the fact that a dangerous creature was in their vicinity.
Using her sonar manipulation again, she tried to track the magic to its source, and yet despite all her best efforts, Selena couldn't pinpoint its location. Perhaps it was the fact that her skills were at such a low level or maybe the magic she was trying to track was very obscure, but the only result she could get was that it came from somewhere underground.
In all her excitement, she’d almost forgotten her original reason for coming here, and so she made her way to Arthur’s house; a small two-bedroom property that looked completely ordinary.
Selena prayed that he was in this time as she stood at its entrance.
Taking a deep breath, she rang the doorbell.
It didn't work.
~Arthur Ward~
It had been twenty minutes since Arthur drank the elixir, according to the clock on his wall, meaning his time in the assembly had been sped up by a factor of three, and he was still trying to learn exactly how the core had affected him. After some quick maths, Arthur realized that the title's effects were additive instead of multiplicative like he had initially hoped for.
Still, he had plenty to be happy about. It just meant that he now had a 20% boost to his strength with the addition of his latest titles effects to his already existing underdog title which gave a 10% boost to the attribute.
Unfortunately, they would not multiplicatively affect each other, but Arthur knew that a 20% permanent increase to even a single attribute was a great boost that people would give an arm for, and he had an even greater one for constitution with a 30% increase from his half-breed status, something that Arthur was still trying to come to terms with. He didn't like that it suggested he was some sort of animal.
With this, he had fulfilled one of his goals of acquiring a new title before unlocking a class at level 100, far earlier than he’d expected actually. Now, all he had to do was absorb another monster core or two, evolve at least once and create some powerful magic skills, whilst following Erico's guidelines of course.
After that, he would be able to break his self-imposed restraints and start to power-level himself. Okay, maybe he did still have a long way to go, but the journey wasn't going to be as long as he’d expected.
Hopefully.
Just as he was congratulating himself for achieving so much in so little time, he heard a knock on the door, a resounding thud that broke the magic of the moment.
So she finally decided to come back.
