Chapter 31: GrindDay 25

  I took off early today to buy some fresh eggs to make ham and eggs on toast. This turned out much better than burning oatmeal while managing a chemistry experiment. Hmm, speaking of, maybe I should go ahead and improve the soap. Well, ter, I guess. Certainly don’t want to ruin this meal.

  Breakfast was well received though the idea of stacking it all on bread seemed a bit too silly for them. I’m probably supposed to include some sort of sauce — maybe holndaise. Whatever, good enough.

  “What are we going to do today, David?”

  “I want to follow the same pattern for a few days, Nordselm and Curatar. My guess is that the nobles in Elven Territory will be too busy to bother us while they deal with the floods. With luck, they’ll continue to leave us alone.”

  “Um, why would they want to bother us?”

  “I guess I didn’t tell you that the duke asked me to become his vassal. I turned him down, of course, but I seriously doubt he’ll let it go so easily. Also, the duke told his family that we had merely helped with the brigands, not fought them on our own. Somehow the duke’s team was the main force. I don’t know if he just wanted the glory or if that was to take the pressure off of us.”

  “Odd that he’d even need to lie to his family.”

  “Yeah, good point. The duke also cimed that I had gifted him the ring we found. Was that to make it appear that I was trying to win his approval? I sold that damn ring to him for well over market-price, just as he knew I would. It was all pretty weird.”

  “David, didn’t you say that it was a Ring of Determination?”

  “Right, you went to Luke’s with me. Why’s that important?”

  “Well, the count got one of those from the duke to be allowed to marry Cassia. It could just be a coincidence, but that ring was stolen a while ago.”

  “Hmm, that’s certainly possible — no, it’s actually very likely. The duke said it was an heirloom. Hard to imagine he meant one of many of the same kind of ring. Now I definitely don’t want to interact with those guys. Bh.”

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  We started our work day with the kobolds of Nordselm’s fifth. It seems that the talk of Selmer reignited Alina’s enthusiasm for stabbing miniature, green ‘Jakobs’. One of her surrogate victims rewarded us with a crystal, a Kobold skill crystal. This is the very first we’d found. Our luck continued by finding the boss room quickly.

  I didn’t want to keep bothering the vilgers so I took us back home for lunch and then off to Curatar’s eighth a bit early. Fortunately, this floor wasn’t very busy so we could follow the map to reach the boss room pretty quickly. I had Alina fetch the resulting leaf — I’ll show her the trick ter.

  Curatar’s ninth floor introduced ants. I wasn’t sure about the spiders, but I’m certain that these are poisonous, at least, I think so. Hmm, the HUD says ‘Sck Ant’? The manga called them NT, which probably meant NEET. Generalizing that to NILF would be weird so Scker seems reasonable.[1] Has some sysadmin for this world carefully tweaked the monster names or was this done with some simplistic transtion engine? Are the original names in Japanese or was that just a transtion from the true original names?

  “I’m pretty sure the ants on this floor are poisonous. Alina, take some of my antidote pills to keep with you. The rest of us already have some. If someone gets poisoned, it’s quite possible that they’ll need help taking the antidote — force it down their throat if needed. Um, it’s fine, though. No problem. Really.”

  And there were no problems. We made it through about half the floor before dinner break.

  “Theo, please keep most of the poison needles we got from the ants so we can use them tomorrow.”

  “Um, poison?”

  “Oh, they’re perfectly safe when handled normally. They can only be triggered when used as a weapon — like, when thrown at a target.”

  After resting for a while, it was time to return to Curatar’s ninth. At this point, I used magic to attack unless I needed to recover MP. Even if it wasn’t that long ago, it feels weird that I tried to hide it before. Sure, I could have been more careful around nobles, but no one cares what I do in here.

  Eventually, we reach the empty waiting room.

  “I guess someone must be… oh, they must be done. Our turn now.”

  The doors open to a room where the boss is already waiting for us, rather than spawning after the door closes.

  “Let’s go!”

  We all sprang into action and slew the boss ant in record time. I really didn’t need to tell the others what happened — wait, yes I do.

  “The boss was already here because the previous party failed.”

  Alina, probably the only one of us who wouldn’t already know this, looked a bit confused. “Failed?”

  “Yes, ‘failed’ as in ‘died’.”

  “Oh, does that mean we get to keep their stuff?”

  Absolutely no sympathy for the dead. “Yes, Alina, that’s the rule. This stuff belongs to us now.”

  It looks like there were three party members — probably all fighters. They had one blue and two purple magic crystals. Judging by this and their cheap equipment, they probably tried to squeeze too much time out of their entrance fee and got clumsy. Not that I know this to be true, but sure would be nice if they could be convinced to just let people come and go freely like the other byrinths. Well, at least like the few I know.

  “Since Theo mainly has monster drops, I’ll put their stuff in my inventory.”

  “Hey, this one had a steel spear. Can I have it?”

  Oh, it even has an open skill slot.

  “Yes, Alina. We’ll clean it up at home and you can have it.”

  Adding their low-level crystals turned mine from green to yellow, worth about 100k even without my haggle skill. Happy with our little bonus from someone else’s misfortune, we left the boss room and warped back home.

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  Day 26

  Alina woke me up a bit before dawn so we could go for a casual run, also known as a rematch to recim her honor. After a short warm-up, Alina suggested that we race, as if she had just thought of it. Can’t just let her win and I don’t want her to lose so I set a limit at 100 meters, with the excuse of having a lot to do today.

  Just to tease her, I bsted off at the start using Overwhelming. That extra push helped me keep the lead all the way to almost 60 m, where she overtook me and I had no chance of regaining before the 100 m limit. Sure, Alina knew I’d set that for her sake, but she seemed especially happy with my surprise sprint at the beginning.

  Not every run should be a race, but we should do this a bit more often now that running in the byrinths is less common and will probably be impossible when the monsters become more challenging.

  After breakfast, we went to central Curatar to buy a few big sacks of bread and several hams. This sort of food is pretty cheap here. We warped behind Nordselm Vilge and made our way to Bernhard’s shack. With some difficulty, we convince him that it’s fine to pay us ter, when the weather clears up. They have more important matters to deal with than gathering more local goods to trade.

  Bernhard also told us that some suspicious-looking people were sniffing around the byrinth. When asked, the vilgers honestly reported that there had been some sort of conflict. After hearing that soldiers had also come to investigate, they quickly took off. Probably OK for now. Even if I wanted to look for more brigands, the range of Field Walker would make them virtually impossible to find.

  Rather than continue with Nordselm’s sixth floor, I took us to the second.

  “OK, folks, we’ll have an exercise that will seem rather odd. It turns out that the way to get the Assassin job is to kill a monster with poison. Well, you also need to have spent a long time as a Warrior so you can’t get it now. Most important is for Alina to do this to have the option to change ter. I will too for fun and you guys are perfectly welcome to participate.”

  We took turns throwing the poison needles at the trees — we decided to skip the goats since they’d just run away. Marcus decided to just keep guard, but Theo joined in once he saw that we had more than enough. As expected, I was the only one to unlock the job.

  After our dart game, Theo took us up to the sixth floor. Colgen Corals were the new monsters here. We made it through most of this floor before it was time for a break. Lunchtime has drifted a bit tely and it’s usually quite light. Seems like I’m starting to adapt ck-of-lunch standard here, except that I still insist on some sort of break.

  After the break, we went to Curatar’s tenth floor to fight the goats there. With map in hand, we skipped many of the escaping goats, avoided getting poisoned by the ants and made it to the waiting room.

  Only one party ahead of us and they were done quickly. I noticed that Alina scanned the room before we started — she was probably hoping for more loot. It seems that she likes her new spear.

  While Theo and Alina prepared dinner and Marcus maintained our gear, I sat and fiddled with my virtual interface. Nice to get a new job, but Assassin can be ignored for now. My level progression is still slow despite making better progress in the byrinth. This is partly due to my Sigil but mainly because leveling gets progressively more expensive. I’m so tempted to figure out the mathematics for level progression but it’d be really hard since I can’t see my EXP total or know how much each monster is worth. And, of course, knowing this wouldn’t actually help me.

  Anyway, not enough points to bump up my EXP skills even if I lower the number of extra jobs. Alchemist and Monk aren’t as important now, so… nah, they’re good enough for now. I’d like to see their advanced versions someday anyway.

  It’d be nice if I expined what I’ve been doing, but I know it’d only make me look even crazier. They trust me well enough so nothing really needs to be fixed, as far as I’m concerned. Instead, I’ll happily eat dinner with my party while we chat about non-supernatural topics.

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  Day 27

  Just after breakfast, I’m told that it’s time for my hair appointment. It’s nice to have someone keep track of the details I miss.

  Despite the modest level progression, I’m really happy with my friendly party members and worry-free finances. We are reasonably safe and still flexible enough to leave if needed. Hard to believe that I haven’t even been here a month, not that this pce measures time in months.

  Still, in all this time, I can’t read anything beyond pce names. Well, I certainly recognize some words, but they are so far from phonetic that they seem to have no connection to the partial alphabet I’ve been able to figure out. It just has to be some sort of interference from auto-transtion, which for some weird reason doesn’t apply to proper nouns or some other subset of the nguage.

  Ignoring my ignorance, it’s time for me to share my pns for the day.

  “I’d like to start out in Nordselm, as usual. In the early afternoon, I’ll go to the merchant’s guild in Curatar. Does anyone want to go shopping in town while I’m busy?”

  Theo says, “We’re low on some dry goods. The selection is better in Curatar than the vilge square.”

  “OK, bring some money. Buy as much as convenient since we can drop the stuff off at home before we go back to the byrinth.”

  Back on the sixth floor of Nordselm, we made it to the boss room and slew the poorly-named Colge Coral — fixing the name to ‘Keratin’ will be my first act as world leader. During the break, the three of them went shopping while I visited Luke. As usual, I didn’t have to wait long and we went to a small conference room.

  Luke won bids on two Kobold crystals at 5300 each and three Caterpilr crystals for 4100 each. Of course, I bought them all. Since I still had some deposit credit remaining, I just paid for the current crystals. Of course, I checked all the crystals with Identify and he didn’t bother to ask if I wanted to have them appraised.

  “Luke, where can I buy especially good armor and weapons?”

  “It’s sometimes possible to find a few special items at the usual shops, but the best items go through our auction house. Some items are announced in advance and others are a complete surprise. If you have something particur in mind, I would be happy to help. My own specialty is armor though I often bid on other items, including crystals, of course.”

  “I’ll keep this in mind, thanks, Luke.”

  I met up with the others and we dropped off the sacks before continuing to the 11th floor of Curatar’s Labyrinth. We basically followed the map to burn through the slugs of this floor. A few more parties here than expected, but we still made it to the boss room before it was time to return. No surprises with this battle, of course.

  Unfortunately, that was the st floor that we’ll visit without surprises. I hardly remember anything from the manga about the next set of monsters. Well, there’s some kind of shrub and, um, no, that’s all I’ve got and it’s just part of a name. We’ve had it pretty easy so far so maybe the challenge will be nice.

  Well, this was another good day even if we got home a bit te. No sense ruining it with dire warnings of rougher times ahead. We had a nice, rexing evening free from worries.

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  [1] NEET: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. NILF: Not In Labor Force. Mangas popurized the term NEET even though it doesn’t come from Japanese.