Chapter 24: Congratulations

Chapter 24: Congratulations

By the time Isaac was walking back into the university building come Monday morning, Isaac had calmed back down again. It’d taken him well over 24 hours to reach a state of mind fit to be amongst other humans with, but he’d reached it, clambering over the bodies of countless monsters to do so.

Flippancy aside, however, he’d gained a lot of stuff during that little, impromptu, grinding session. He'd leveled up once again, bringing his Level up to 6, then saved the rest of the XP.

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Rogue

Species: Human

Level: 6

XP: 2179/700

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 150/150

Stats

Fortitude

30

Perception

25

Strength

12

Agility

18

Magic Power

15

Magic Regeneration

30

Free Points: 0 Stat, 15 Skill

Skills

Hundred Faces VI

Stealth VIII

Power Strike XI

Piercing Strike XII

Sundering Strike X

Knives XI

Sneak XI

Sweeping Strike I

Far Strike IV

Manifold Strike I

General Skills

Gralloch

Alchemy

Aspects

Aspect Skills

Specter

Spectral Shift

Hydra

Hydra’s Regeneration

He’d levelled up three more times and hit Level 6, putting points into Magic Regeneration and Fortitude until they’d both reached thirty. He now only needed two hours of sleep each night and regenerated 10 mana every minute, putting him well on his way to gaining a proper combat regeneration of the stuff.

Most video games operated on the scale that you were expected to get into a fight every minute or so unless you were exploring and forcing you to wait between encounters for longer than strictly necessary because your mana still hadn’t reached max capacity was boring. Video games were not meant to be boring.

Unfortunately, this was the real world where it would take half an hour to fully regenerate ones mana, and that was if Magic Regeneration was the same as Magic Power, which not everyone had because they’d chosen to pursue the shiny new Spells with a mana cost that was beyond them.

In the original timeline, Isaac had primarily focused on Magic Regeneration to the point where he got back mana every second, giving him incredible staying power.

He hadn’t had any big, expensive finishers among his [Skills] and even his strongest attacks were merely a properly combined set of lesser [Skills]. Having a bunch of tiny, cheap, yet well levelled attack [Skills] had carried him far and let him reach the point where could fight one of the strongest [Raid Bosses] to ever exist in a party of just three people, the only problem was that he hadn’t reached that level of power early enough to save humanity.

He wouldn’t be changing his general approach, just doing it a hell of a lot quicker.

And yes, a couple of points had gone into both Agility and Perception to give those a slight boost as well.

Unbalancing one’s Stats like that to optimize farming with very little need for sleep and a high Mana Regeneration actually wasn’t the greatest idea in the world, simply because it left you fighting monsters with your stats somewhere other than where you wanted them.

He’d fix it soon, though. Increasing Fortitude to ward off sleep had diminishing returns

Isaac actually had enough XP to bring himself up to Level 8, but he’d decided to wait to keep the XP boost for fighting above his Level as high as he could. There wouldn’t be any actual penalties until he was fighting enemies that were more than ten Levels beneath him, but a loss of a boost was still hardly optimal.

As for the [Skill] Points, he’d saved them, simple as that. Most people bought a bunch of [Skills] with them, especially when they sounded good without them actually having seen it in action.

While there were arguments to be made for having a lot of different [Skills], the fact of the matter was that there was only so much mana to go around. If you could grab a bunch of good, solid passive [Skills], that was great, but most [Skills] were of the active variety, meaning you had to pay to use them. In the end, a lot of people would end up focusing on their core [Skills], their favorites, which they not only knew everything about, they also levelled it up to a very high Level.

An old quote from Bruce Lee sprang to mind “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

When practice translated to a literal, measurable increase in power, that was all the more true.

Isaac, meanwhile, knew what he wanted, what he needed, which [Skills] could take him to the peak of power, allowing him to save a lot of those mostly wasted points.

“Nice weekend, Isaac?”

“Yeah, I went camping.” Isaac told him “Also, catch.”

Isaac tried to toss him an Aspect of the Specter, but Bailey ended up fumbling the catch, which ended with the gelatinous orb dropping to the ground. Then, when Bailey tried to pick it back up, it ended up slipping out of his grasp. And again, until he eventually managed to grab it. Then, his eyes went wide.

“Wait, you actually got one? Do you have any idea how much these go for?”

Isaac actually didn’t know what the current price was, it was still in constant flux, just that it was insanely expensive, far more than the ten thousand he’d sold his first batch for. He might even have been upset about essentially taking a loss on that sale ... if that whole thing hadn’t been mostly about setting up supplier relations with Calise. And the money he had gotten would be enough for any short term expenses.

“Obviously. I hit the maximum number of Specters, though.”

“And? What was it?”

“A little over a hundred, but I’m not sure, I didn’t keep very good records in the beginning.” Isaac said. It should have been exactly one hundred, but he’d killed a lot of them while under levelled, thereby raising the threshold.

"Seriously though, do with that what you will. Use it, experiment with it, something I haven't thought of, anything that would help you with your research." Isaac told him.

"I think I'll be using it once I have the XP." Bailey said, sounding a little shaky "I won't forget this, promise. Thank you."

“Anyway, why did you call me here?” Isaac asked, smoothly ignoring the sudden rising awkwardness.

“For ...” Bailey opened the door to the post office, revealing literal piles of mail “... all this crap.”

“Holy shit! What’s all this about?” Isaac yelped.

“Last Thursday. Or maybe Friday? That mess got pretty late.” Bailey told him, scratching his chin thoughtfully.

“So, congrats and thanks?” Isaac asked.

“Congrats, thanks, requests for data, suggestions, corrections, bribes for you guys to butter you up before they poach you ... a lot of stuff.” Bailey explained.

“So, what pile is ours?” Isaac asked, looking around the room that looked incredibly messy.

“All of them. They already handed out everything else, but this department isn’t exactly laid out to transport this much on top of everything else.” Bailey told him.

“Yeesh. Please tell me there are bags to gather everything in?”

“Yep.” Bailey said, giving him a pair of folded up plastic sacks. Isaac just sighed and began to shove every envelope he could into them, wishing he’d invested a few more points into Strength.

Ten minutes later, he stumbled down the corridor towards the meeting room with one bulging sack slung over each shoulder.

Rather than fumbling with the sacks while opening the door, or, God forbid, putting them down, Isaac just phased through the door.

“Holy ...” Patrick yelped and jumped away from him, fists half raised in a surprisingly decent combat stance, though he dropped them once he recognized Isaac.

“Ah yes, you get superpowers and all you do with them is go through doors without having to open them.” Amy chuckled.

“So, mail?” Raul asked.

“Mail.” Bailey announced, having come in through the door the normal way “A metric ton of mail. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to help me with that, let’s separate them into normal congratulations or brownnosing, requests for data or suggestions for corrections and one just for hate mail.”

“You really think we got hate mail?” Raul asked.

“Yes, but it won’t be obvious at first. The kinds of phrases where someone insults your mother to your face but dresses it up in so many flowery phrases that by the time you realize you want to smack them, they’ve already run off.” Amy suggested “Academia can get nasty.”

“Actually, that’s exactly what meant. Hardly worth reading, but it helps to know who your enemies are.” Bailey added “Just read all of these and when you see something that you think everyone else might like to hear, read it out loud.”

So that was what they did. For hours. Only occasionally did something deserve to be even just commented on.

“I think I got one of those disguised insult ones.” Patrick announced “It’s from a professor from California and he’s complaining about us snatching up his research topic and writing a paper while he was still writing the funding proposal.”

“Too slow.” Bailey shrugged “Fighting for funding eats up so much time, it’s great to have a proper mandate.”

“And that is?” Isaac asked.

“Hm?”

“What is our mandate, exactly? I think knowing the actual wording might be useful.” Isaac clarified.

“Find out anything about the [System] you can. Get any data that is available. If something is liable to blow up, ask first.” Bailey told them with a grin “Basically, it’s that simple.”

But once that little discussion was out of the way, things returned to normal. Requests for data, people pointing out flaws in their arguments, complaints about research topics being stolen and, of course, congratulations from people who weren’t being sore losers.

Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, Isaac burst out laughing.

“Hey Adam, do you actually know Dr. Frankenstein, or just have a friend with a ... unique sense of humor?”

“What are you ...” Bailey started to say, then caught the name on the envelope and froze “Please tell me that isn’t something too offensive?”

“Eh, depends on your definition of offensive. It’s a humorous description of new experiments that are possible now that there are humans that can survive that kind of stuff, obvious satire. I can see how someone could easily take that the wrong way though.” Isaac shrugged, only for Bailey to grab the paper out of his hand.

“You’re ... not mad?” Bailey sounded puzzled.

“Mad? This is dark, dark shit. In other words, exactly my kind of humor. Might want to separate this stuff from official mail before someone else reads the contents, right?” Isaac suggested.

After some begging and cajoling, the letter was passed around, but then things returned to normal. Finally, two hours after this thing had started, they were almost finished.

“Alright, so we have the commendation from the police, which will go on the wall once I’ve had it framed, a bunch of nasty messages for the files, and some requests for data that we can pass on to IT. Now, it’s time for the gift baskets!” Bailey announced, finally letting them at the things they’d been looking forward to since the very beginning.

“Who is ‘Samuel Barnes’?” Amy asked, looking at Isaac “And why is he sending you, personally, booze?”

“He’s a friend, the guy who hosted that party.” Isaac said, slightly grumpy.

“What’s wrong?” Amy raised her eyebrows at his reaction. Clearly his poker face had been insufficient.

In response, he grabbed the bottle of Stroh 80 from the basket, opened it, and held it out for her to sniff.

“Smell that and tell me I should enjoy it.” he told her.

“... how can anyone drink that?” she grimaced, holding the bottle as far away from her as she physically could. Patrick and Karl wisely decided against taking a sniff, but Bailey and Raul did stick their noses above the open bottle and subsequently proceeded to treat it as it were a biohazard.

“Once again, how can anyone drink that?” Amy repeated herself.

“You don’t. You put it in a cocktail and light it on fire, or use it in a cake, but you never, ever drink it raw.” Patrick said.

“I can see that.” Bailey said, distaste still evident on his face.

“Oh, and by the way, Isaac, I’m working on getting you dinosaur bones. Mensch und Natur actually did give up a T-Rex tooth, but that species it so big it’ll end up Tier 4 and we’re not allowed to summon those yet.” Bailey told them all.

“Dinosaur?” Amy asked.

“I’m guessing we’re taking advantage of the Prehistoric Summoning List?” Patrick asked.

“Ye-“ Isaac started to answer, but was cut off by a [System] Screen popping up without his input. A very familiar screen. Uh-oh.