Chapter 28: To Business, You Say?

The mine had only gotten deeper and darker, but we'd happened upon another rest room. This one was a bit nicer-furnished, though it didn't have any of the same fruity smell as the one I'd vaporized a ton of slimes in. Have I mentioned how goddamn weird it was to smell fruit in there? If I wasn't on a quest, figuring out how to mass-produce and monopolize air fresheners and colognes and shit would be on my to-do list for sure. 

But no. This was simply a very nice bunk area of some sort. Well — I say bunk, but it was moreso a collection of bedrooms. In fact, it was a bedroom area which we were sleeping in. To hell with the previous occupants — it was extremely clean, with very little grime or dirt beyond a thin layer of clean dust. And, well. We all got our own rooms. I wasn't really sure, but I did want to bunk on my own tonight. To... I dunno. Prove myself, I suppose.

That's what led me to sitting down on the bed I'd taken for my own late at night, looking out the window. Because of course there was a window in the dungeon. And of course rather than it being directly out into rock and stone, it was out into a gigantic cavern lit with sparse crystal-torches casting prismatic light and shadow over every available surface. It was sickeningly beautiful. People back on Earth — my earth, I suppose — would have paid millions to see this.

But the view wasn't all I was considering. In fact, it was mostly what was directly in front of the view that took up my mind: my stats screens and the like, organized neatly into several windows in front of me.

Because, well... I'd really interacted very little with the systems given me by the game thus far. It just wasn't a thing I'd found time to do — mostly, I was getting my code set up stronger, or fighting off monsters, or keeping a vigilant eye out, or having an existential crisis. And right now was a rare moment when I was doing none of those things, even though to be entirely frank I probably should have been standing watch or coding more.

No, right now I was carefully considering what stats I was going to assign points to, what abilities I wanted to unlock, and what... generally speaking, class I was going to try for. Because there was a reason people specialized — it was to make their combat efficacy better. Being a generalist denied you access to some things irrespective of what reality you were in, and I was. Well, I was considering whether it was worth it to me.

My magic afforded me a lot of flexibility. But a major issue was that I had to constantly be fighting or acting to use it — which meant that, fundamentally, it was built for combat. Unless I wanted to look like a fucking idiot in front of everyone, strutting around like I was some kind of narcissist intruder into personal space, I'd be working with a massively limited pool of mana. It wasn't even clear if I could manage the activation energy for some of the more complicated utility spells that Flurry had been casting.

However, if I started to spec into class abilities, I could mitigate some of these issues. And I could even bolster my magic with passives — like a lot of archetypical media involving RPG mechanics, Beyovaria functioned on an Active/Passive ability system. You want an active? Make it. You want a passive? Make it. The one thing connecting the two was that they didn't function off of the spell sigil system.

That meant that rather than it being as simple as Plug 'N Play between my spellcrafter and the ability creators, I'd either have to settle for stock or reverse-engineer an unknown system with a limited number of random tries. Still — I'd somehow built up around 8 levels, which meant I was well on my way to having a decently-defined class already. Stock would be fine: the editors for abilities were much more in-depth than just a points system. I was pretty sure of that. Maybe 50%.

Stats were easier, though, and they'd help define what kind of build I'd go for. Nora had gone over them back on the... second? Day? Of me being here? Around then, at least. In order, we had: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Willpower, Ingenuity, and Insight. Given my propensity for melee, I'd initially considered dumping everything into Strength and having that be the end of it, but... no, actually, that sounded kind of dumb.

It was pretty simple to see what my current build was like. Nora had said my stats were "high for a level zero" back in the first town — and since I'd not allocated any stat points, they hadn't grown at all. But I had a small inkling of the power-scaling that they were using — because I'd made a spell specifically to increase one of my stats by a single point, and it was... well, interesting. I'd had to cap the spell's power for experimental safety and control reasons, which had been a whole separate issue, but increasing my DEX by one point made a very small but noticeable difference. For most, it was likely imperceptible — however, having servo data for your hands allowed me to discern that it'd made me at minimum 5% more accurate with my fingers.

5% may not sound like a lot, but... well, it adds up. And besides — that's only a single point. I wasn't sure if everything followed the same curve, but it made sense (albeit I assumed there would be diminishing returns; levels seemed fairly easy to come by right now, and minmaxing had always been a little broken in games I'd played... whenever I'd played them. It was a little hazy.) So if I assumed that every point into a given stat had me get a 1.05 multiplier on my already-existing skills, I'd be able to make a readout viewing my skill multipliers.

It was simple to make. Any bugs would be inconsequential — this was cosmetic, after all — so I'd implemented it quickly and returned to staring at the stats.

Honestly, it hadn't helped a ton. Everything was still numbers, but... what to do? Choice paralyzed me in the best of occasions. I sighed, rubbing my eyes despite not needing to. What was my goal? What role do I take in combat? Flurry, Nora — someone had called me a mageblade, or a spellsword, or some combination of the two. What did that mean?

Actually, what did I want it to mean? This was a game, after all. What did I want to play?

I mean, the choice was obvious, strategically. I was excellent at one-on-one encounters, but engaging multiple enemies at once wasn't as in my wheelhouse unless they were susceptible to one of a few elemental AOE attacks or distracted. And an acrobatic, tightly-maneuvered style of combat felt... right, somehow. More me than whatever the most "tactically sound" strategy was; I wanted to spin and slash through the battlefield, either a pointed laser of doom or a whirling blade cutting through the fray. Integrating magic was a little foreign, but it also felt right in a way which left me sorely confused, sometimes. The term I'd use in certain games would be "roamer": someone who you send off because you know they will cause chaos among the ranks, almost as an offensive support. Since my magical repertoire allowed me extra generalism in addition to my already-decent swordfighting skills, it just made sense for me to opt into an ever-changing fighting style to keep my enemies on their toes.

From that, three stats stood out to me: Strength, Dexterity, and Endurance. I wasn't so sure what the other three mental stats did in relation to magic — they seemed a little more ephemeral, from what I'd heard — but a quick series of swaps on my enhancement spell allowed me to test it easily.

Willpower was a magical strength of sorts. It seemed to act as a power multiplier — any magic I pushed into spells would be multiplied by 1.05 for each additional point, almost on the dot. It was particularly strange that my WPR was my least-strong stat, considering my magical strength, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

Insight, on the other hand, allowed for my spells to execute faster. The mana propagated faster, which made them activate sooner — but this seemed to be more of a side effect to a better focus on the mana's actual path than anything. A quick test gave off a slightly-brighter light than normal at the same STYLE level when I had the buff on — probably, the spell was just a bit more efficient? Or it could be that elemental effects were increased. Either would work.

Ingenuity was a bit of an oddball. From the title, it sounded as though I'd suddenly have some sort of eureka moment wherein I exclaimed something silly before finding out a base truth about the spellcrafting code I'd been writing, or my own psyche, or something like that. But... nope. In fact, all it really seemed to do was allow for my spell sigils to become physically larger in size by a very small amount while giving a tiny buff to all spell-related stats. At first, this seemed relatively useless — but, hey. I didn't really know anything about it, and testing a bit more revealed that the extra space physically allowed bigger and more complicated sigils in the same sort of "memory" — this was the efficiency stat. It already gave a very small boost to spell speed, power, all of that — but the real meat came when I did a quick redesign exploiting the extra space afforded in the design to add another light point to my test spell.

Rather than the spell becoming noticeably slower, it executed at the exact same speed as normal. In fact, it was just a touch faster. There was obviously still more to discern, but I could draw a comparison to something a little strange from Earth: Jet turbines.

Turbofan engines work on a simple principle for higher efficiency: it is more efficient to increase the mass of the air used in a jet engine, rather than the velocity of the exhaust. That's why they are — were, I guess? — so big: the main thrust comes from a fan, which is spun around by a smaller jet engine which uses less propellant. The bigger the fan, the more mass you can move — which means less energy needed to spin the fan to get the same energy, which means a more efficient jet. As for how this connected to magic, it's simple: The optimal size of a jet engine was 4 meters. The optimal size of my magical sigils changes based on my Ingenuity.

And the optimal size mattered. The range of spells I could cast right now was fairly slim — it seemed that there was a minimum size and maximum size that spells were cast at, which meant I was getting losses on both ends. Ingenuity increased that range, which was sorely needed. The statbuff spell I'd made was cumbersome as hell — anything more complex was anathema.

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Well, to be fair, it wasn't impossible. It was just that the more complex you make a spell, the slower it was to execute — the mana has to trace all the paths, which I assumed took a static amount of time. But actually, it's got a lot to do with the size of the spell sigil when drawn in space — if you draw a complex spell sigil at a normal size, it's slower due to what I could only assume is a resistance force along the tracers, which adds additional magical strain. And it was inversed at small, low complexity sigils blown up to large sizes: the magical pressure is too low to keep a high-pressure stream of mana, because the sigil is so comparatively wide that you could have likened it to filling the ocean via a kitchen sink. Try to execute one of those, and you start filling the spell up with unnecessary mana — though, for most spells, this wasn't as much of an issue.

With a start, I realized something. This was probably why spell circles or rituals could — did work. The one in the fountain was more complex than I could hope to get out in a timely manner at a compact size (the size which all magical sigils defaulted to when drawn from memory or from a spellbook), but at the size of a fountain's base? It must have been perfect for its use. 

Ingenuity allowed me to increase the default ideal size of my spell sigils, making their complexity much easier to handle. In fact, I expected it had several more surprises in store — to be fair, a lot of the stats probably did, but this was extremely interesting in that all the functions seemed to be hidden from normal players. And the ability for me to subvert the limits of my spellcrafting? Maybe Ingenuity was the stat I wanted to minmax. Hell, I got the eureka moment after all. Ha.

I went over the descriptions I could find in my head again. Strength was raw power, the amount your muscles could exert. Dexterity was speed and accuracy. Endurance was how long you can hold out for. Willpower was magical power modification. Insight was base magical speed and possibly targeting enhancement. And, the star of the bunch, Ingenuity allowed for higher and lower-complexity spells to be cast at an ideal efficiency. So, with all that in mind, what do I choose?

Ingenuity was obvious. Even if there was a tactically or logically better option, the possibility of making more complicated spells was too appealing to me. That would be my main core stat — and hey, if I could figure out a way to make my statbuff spell faster, I could probably make up for my dump stats in magical potential anyways. Eight levels meant 64 points, meaning I increased my Ingenuity from 14 to 36 in one fell swoop — 22 points. That was an approximately 110% boost to my complexity range: Suddenly, my light spells were smaller by an inch or two, and were able to use even my ambient STYLE gauge while staying at around 50% intensity. Compared to what, 1%? Barely a hint of light? The change was incredible.

Next was Dexterity. My katana was a bit unwieldy at times — and though I'd been told that my sword's sheath would "shift to fit whatever weapon I put in", I'd sort of developed a bond with this one for now. A nice boost to my dexterity would help a decent amount with that, and I invested a good 15 points in: from 19 to 34, a 75% boost. It certainly didn't feel like nearly twice the grace or agility or speed I'd had initially, but I did note that I felt a bit off-balance. It was probably a thing that'd come with time and effort, if I had to guess, and the awkwardness I was feeling was an adaptation to my new scale. Maybe I should have spent these a little more gradually.

Ah, well. My third most important stat was Endurance. I needed that hold-out power, the ability to take hits and just keep going — not like I was planning on taking many, but the ability to keep walking for days without getting my feet hurt would be blessing enough. I invested 15 points into this as well — from 9 to 24, leaving me with 12 remaining to divide among the last three stats. As expected, I felt as though I'd been staying up for days and not eating — probably my newfound stamina being added to my maximum, rather than a flat boost to everything. Eugh. This felt like shit, but at least I'd have a good night's sleep to bolster myself before tomorrow.

As for the last three, it was... well, I just wanted to divide among them equally. 

Four to Strength, for an additional 20%; this brought my total up to 16, from 12. I probably wouldn't need the raw power behind my strikes if I aimed them well enough and had the right positioning — which would be a boon if we went up against other players, who would likely rely at least partially on brute force to bolster their swordfighting skills. It'll hurt like a bitch to get hit by someone like that, but I'm saving on points in the long run. Plus, I didn't really want to feel two kinds of weak. Clumsy and tired was bad enough.

Four to Insight, making my new total 18. The speed wouldn't be as much of an issue, and I wasn't sure what elemental stuff it'd do. If I had enough ingenuity, I could make my base cast speed every spell's speed, so... yeah, no reason to minmax Insight when Better Insight is there. Probably. I was likely missing something, but this was easier and quicker.

Four to Willpower, which was my lowest stat. It'd started out at a 4, which I suspected was likely more along the lines of a baby than a normal person from what I'd heard. However, it was a multiplier — what I, ideally, wanted, was an additive modifier to my mana. Since 0.05 times 2 is 0.1, I'd be struggling a lot with my lower STYLE amounts — and the higher I went, the more I was limited by what I could force into the spell rather than my mana reserves. Willpower was lowest on the bucket list, at least for now. I also didn't like the idea of feeling suddenly very obedient, or whatever a lack of willpower would feel like.

That being said, I silently cheered a bit. Important decisions had been made! And without any help, too. I was well on my way to becoming a true adventurer. Hero. Whatever.

As for abilities, they were both simpler and more difficult. Based on your stats or actions or something AI-generated, the system gave you a choice between three — and since they were pseudo-random (from what I could tell), there was no guarantee I'd find something busted. I mean, to be fair, anything could be made busted with creativity and a lot of elbow grease, but the effort was sometimes not really worth it.

You apparently got abilities every 10 levels. Even still, you got one at your first level up — probably a hook, or something. They were extremely simple passives, which... yeah, that was definitely on purpose. The three choices appeared in front of the ability window, hovering as buttons that could be pressed to select them.

Starter number one was a passive called "Triangulate". Effectively, it gave a sixth sense; you were now able to tap into sound waves around you and... yeah, this was just sonar. I had radar and sonar already. And infrared. So, uh... I'll pass. Even if it was enhanced, or magical, the ability slot could be filled by something more impactful.

Starter number two: "Direct Impact / Slam into your foes without worrying for your own damage. Reduce all significant G-Forces by 50%." Apparently, it dampened some of the effects of G-forces. But, well... everything causes those. That's just acceleration. So it was probably a fall damage reducer of some kind — that's what it seemed flavored for — which could be useful in a lot of scenarios. It wasn't particularly good, though.

And behind door number three was "Blood Rain", which took some of your blood to make hardened arrows trail behind you whenever you hit something. It sounded cool... but I had no blood, and if it started taking my biorobotics fluids or lubricant I think I'd just flat out die, so. Shit, yeah. Only one real option, fun.

I tapped on Direct Impact, and it shimmered into my ability slot menu. There was probably some lategame use I could get out of it — maybe exploiting it to become a cannon, or something — but as of right now all three were kind of useless. I mean, at least I won't break my legs as hard if I fall off a cliff now? 50% is great, but it's not immunity. And if I just barely scrape under "significant G-force", who's to say I won't sprain an ankle really really hard anyways? God. Just my luck.

Oh well. I sighed, looking out the window at the glittering caves. That was pretty much everything I'd saved up, and irrespective of what happened now I was decently happy with where I'd ended up. Immediate gains from Ingenuity, and the potential for much higher precision as well as endurance? Sounds good, I thought, flopping back down onto the cushions and settling in for a night of rest as my lack of stamina overtook me.

Y'know, I absentmindedly pondered as I drifted off to sleep, I should probably have changed into my new clothes at some point. They did look really nice...

I realized just before passing out what a strange thought that was. My suit wasn't even dirty. Why did I want to change..? But before I could think any further, I'd passed into a night filled with dreams of ruffled shirts and flowy clothes, magical sigils burned into the fabric with blue lightning.