Allen and the others checked into an inn that afternoon. It was a different one than two nights before since nobody wanted to test how well they would have been received after stealing everything that hadn’t been nailed the floor.

  The agreement was that they would leave for the capital of the East Sylvan Federation, Rotherham, by train in the morning. The ESF was a mostly rural and a fairly large nation in the far end of the Western hemisphere. Beyond that was Unnamed Word’s equivalent of the Pacific Ocean.

  The East Sylvan Federation was not named for its place on the world map though. Rather, it was named for the Sylvan Forest that occupied more than half its landmass. It was a temperate forest, being in the Northern half of the country, which was itself in the Northern hemisphere. There was a sister forest on the same continent, unsurprisingly named the West Sylvan Forest, only it was actually more South than it was West of the Easter Sylvan Forrest.

  Allen didn’t make the maps, he only read them, and the one he was holding then was not the best. He was trying to decide whether it would be best to sail across the Ocean to the West or take an airship to the Nash Republic on the other side of the sea to the East. Both options would take around the same amount of time. Airships were much faster than seafaring vessels, but they were harder to get on and it was more than likely that none would take them straight to Kr?ztland, the country where L?densburg and all Allen’s stuff was located.

  Allen folded the map away and glanced over at Christopher. “Shower first, then I’ll ask him what he thinks.” He got up a moment later and wordlessly walked into the cramped yet functional bathroom.

  Personally, Allen favored the idea of crossing the sea by airship and then traveling the remainder of the journey by land. The ocean would be boring, and they still had time to spare on side quests. Andy would show up again eventually, and Allen figured they should try to reach as high a level as possible before then. Sitting on a ship for weeks would be a waste of time.

  Allen groaned under the stream of steamy water. A nice, scalding hot shower right after a dungeon delve was one of the best things that Unnamed World had to offer. An understatement in certain circumstances, yes, but it mainly depended on his mood at the moment.

  With nothing in particular to think about, Allen turned to his status. He had one hundred stat points to spend, which was quite the sum. For a moment, he thought about min-maxing more aggressively, but that could wait for more specialized jobs in the later levels. Until Advanced jobs were unlocked at level two-hundred, min-maxing was not really worth it. More well-rounded stats were better in the lower levels, especially when the secondary stats could end up becoming dangerously low or high.

  “A hundred and twenty-four dexterity is already pushing it with my perception where it is…” High dexterity is great, but useless to Allen if he didn’t have the perception to go with it. “You can only dodge an attack that you can see coming,” Allen thought.

  With a thought, he distributed his points almost evenly. He put ten points into every stat, and then another ten into strength and endurance. Lastly, he split the remaining twenty points by putting five into intelligence and fifteen into focus.

  Stats:

  Primary:

  Secondary:

  ---

  Satisfied, Allen moved onto his jobs. Advancing a job would change the skills that it offered, so it was a good idea to advance jobs first and choose skills after. Something almost always changed in his list of available skills when Allen had advanced one of his jobs. He’d figured that out even before getting any real training from the Spades.

  He did notice that there were fewer options than he had expected. He usually went the Elite Assassin route, and he was tempted to switch over to it just for simplicity, but the other Assassin job caught his eye. It was more than the high tier; it was the reference to the Dusk aspect that stood out to Allen. Dusk was the same aspect that mind magic fell under. Allen chose Silent Lurker in the hopes that it would have some Dusk aspect magic. That way it would synergize with his illusion magic which was also Dusk aspect. That is, once he got around to picking up the Mentalist job again. At the moment, there were still better ways to spend his other job point.

  The choice was between Breaker and Vital Striker. As was typical of the System, the blurbs were nearly useless, so Allen had to choose based on intuition alone. He figured Breaker would probably be more versatile than Vital Striker since it wasn’t limited to vital zones like Vital Striker seemed to be.

  Allen stood under the hot shower for a few minutes. He used the entire contents of the little shampoo bottle to wash his hair twice. It was absolutely filthy, even after splashing some water on it. Incidentally, since the Well of Gloom didn’t actually have any water in it, the group had ended up quickly washing themselves off in a nearby stream. They had looked ‘passable’ when returning to Hillford, but simple water couldn’t get the caked over black ooze out of anyone’s hair.

  A few moments passed after Allen had rinsed himself. He mentally shrugged and chose both Silent Lurker and Breaker with a quick thought. The boxes popped into his mind’s eye an instant later.

  Allen smirked at the descriptions. There was a lot of fluff in the lower level jobs and not a lot of useful information. Of course, there really wasn’t much to the lower level jobs in the first place since they tended not to have any real effects or modifiers themselves.

  Silent Lurker was an exception though. It did provide a mana shift modifier that would allow Allen to use Dusk miasma directly instead of pure arcane miasma like he had been doing. The benefits were many, he assumed, but Allen would have to talk to Christopher to refresh his memory. What he could remember was that the aspect of Dusk included mind, void, fate, end, repression, corruption, and anti-magic. Allen assumed Silent Lurker would mainly give him suppression magic to make him quieter. Something like void magic was pretty end game, especially for a non-mage.

  Allen glanced over the new skills before deciding to max out all of the ones he had. Doing so used twelve skill points, which was better than he had expected. Getting a few free tiers was always a good thing.

  Allen barely had the chance to go over the changes to his skills before someone banged on the bathroom door. His eyes flew open again and he peeked out through the shower curtain. “Yes?” he said.

  “Allen, get the hell out of the shower already!” came Ty’s voice. “You’ve been in there for-fucking-ever,” he continued, banging on the door twice more.

  Allen groaned. “I haven’t conditioned yet!” He quickly searched around for the little bottle. “Why don’t you join me then?” he said with a smirk.

  There was a brief moment of silence before the door clicked, coming unlocked. “If you insist,” Ty began as the door creaked open.

  “Wait… he wouldn’t. I’m pure!” Allen quickly snatched up the bottle of conditioner. “Fine, just give me a few seconds!” he said aloud. Relief filled him when he heard the door swing shut again.