Thirty-Five

Thirty-Five

The first thing I decided to do was have a nap. My body was rested from my time in the Boundary, but the fatigue was still piling up mentally, especially after all the intensive concentration required to train my Chakras. Setting my alarm for ten in the morning I quickly settled back into my bed and closed my eyes, drifting off into a peaceful sleep...

... To be woken by my alarm what seemed only minutes later, though several hours had passed. Yawning I dragged myself out of bed and had some breakfast. Once that was done I went for my usual jog and then did several hours of practice with my training spear and weights. Once that was done it was lunchtime, so I had some rice balls and tuna, before doing a few more hours of raising aether through my Chakras, as well as gathering what wind energy I could.

Once this was complete I settled down at my computer with a bottle of iced tea and some snacks. It was time to take a risk. Configuring a Virtual Private Network to set my location to The United Kingdom rather than Japan, I opened up a gaming site and registered. Entering my bank details from the account I had set up on my trip to the bank, I transferred out my funds. This was technically illegal in Japan, which had very strict rules on gambling, but I didn’t feel too bad about it, as it wasn’t hurting anyone, and was perfectly legal in my mom’s country. So it is only half a crime at best.

Clicking on the window to load up a roulette application I swallowed down nervous spit and waited for it to start.

Man, this is risky, but if it works...

The key here was my Fortune statistic. When it was at 2 I found it was roughly a four percent boost in games of chance, but now after levelling up my Fae-Bonded class it had reached 5 which in theory should be around a ten percent increase in my chances of winning luck-based games.

Ten percent doesn’t sound a lot, but in games like roulette and blackjack, where the house edge is only a few percent... I would be the one with an edge, so if I kept playing long enough I should show steady profits. Of course, luck was hardly absolute, and spiky clusters of random events did happen frequently, so without huge sums of money to smooth these out I could still lose everything. There are no guarantees. But with success I can cut down the time I need to work dramatically, which allows me more time to train my other skills...

The first thing to do was to take it slow. I had a bit under two thousand British Pounds to play with, with each pound currently being worth roughly one hundred and forty yen. In wasn’t a small sum, but it was one I could afford to lose, even if such would hurt me. Of course I can only think that due to the extra work Hayato-san passed my way...

I had run over the calculations earlier. For example betting on red or black there were 18 numbers out of 37 that would double my money, or a 48.6% chance of winning. This meant the house had an edge of 1.4%. With my ten percent boost from my Fortune though, my chance of winning would be roughly 53.5%, which was an edge of 3.5%, more than twice what the casino enjoyed. On paper this meant I should clean up, but the table limits and capital limitations I had compared to the casino made it anything but a sure thing.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I placed five pounds on black and watched the computer spin the ball. The result? Number 8, Black. Five pounds was mine.

A good start. But I am a man of logic. I know that odds-on doesn’t guarantee a win. Replaying the bet I watched the ball start spinning again, taking a mouthful of tea to steady my nerves...

*********

When I arrived the sky was riven with glimmering flecks of rainbow light, with what looked like coloured lightning shooting through it at a rapid pace. The white flakes were falling like quite the snow-shower, not thick enough to obscure vision, but definitely enough to be distracting. It was certainly beautiful in an eerie way. As I was checking my Territory to see how construction had progressed Shaeula arrived to greet me.

Hmm, it looks like nearly eight Astral days have passed. Time has really sped up here... the secondary queue is complete and the Barracks has just over three days to go. My ether stockpiles have shot up too. Etheric tides are great!

“Akio, are you listening to me-me?” Shaeula grumbled, and I snapped back to reality.

“What was that, sorry? I was just admiring our ether stocks.” I apologised.

“Bah. You should-should listen to me when I am talking.” She complained. “There has been-been trouble on our border with the Raven Knight’s Territory. The Etheric tide-tide has stirred up some predators, and one attacked his lands. They beat it off but it may-may return.”

“I see. That would be troublesome. Do you think we should fortify that border? We can use that as a staging point for an invasion later anyway?”

“I think that would-would be wise.” Shaeula concurred. “I fear the predator is beyond our means to kill-kill right now, so driving it off is the best-best we can hope for. As the tide deepens, more-more may descend as well.”

“Is the tide going to get much deeper?” I asked, interested. Time was tight if my plan was to reach fruition while leaving me time to visit my sis and Eri-chan back home as well.

“Us Noble Fae have a sense-sense for these things.” She replied proudly. “It is a relatively shallow tide, but its peak will be a little deeper, within a few-few days. It will then decline and fade-fade away.”

So if I assume a couple more days of acceleration... hmm... running the numbers in my head I came to a decision. “All right then, time to get building.” The upgrade to the Elemental Silo was next as planned. I then queued in a couple of Defensive Emplacements to be built on the chokepoints near to the graveyard that served as the Raven Knight’s Territory. I topped this off with the upgrade of two of my new Ether Spires, leaving me with just under a thousand ether left in the Silo.

That left both queues running at ten or eleven days, roughly, and if the tide was deepening and I took two more days to return in Material time, they should be finished by the time I made it back here. That was still a little wasteful though. Ideally I could save up enough to queue in one or both of my last two Spire upgrades, to maximise efficiency...

If time is running at roughly four to five times the Material at the moment, that means by morning on Earth two to two-and-a-half full days will pass here. It’s going to be an endurance marathon, but I can do it...

Smiling a wicked grin I turned to Shaeula. “I hope you’ve been practicing, because we are going to be veeeeeeery busy now...”