A New Kind Of Grind

"Identify the nation highlighted in yellow," I said, wordlessly casting [Static Illusion] in the form of a map.

"That's Shem, Dorn's next-door neighbor," Akane said, pointing at the nation to the south of Dorn. The two nations were fairly large, occupying nearly 80% of what was, admittedly, a somewhat small continent, with the remaining 20% being split between a number of tiny island micro-states and Arnhold to the north.

"Correct," I said, moving down the list. "What is the dominant religion in Shem?"

"Their official name for themselves is The Grey Faith of the Rusted Spear Unbreaking, but the name Shemmism is more commonly used."

"And how has that religion influenced their relationship with Dorn?" I asked.

"The Grey Faith holds that the land Dorn is built on is sacred, in the sense of belonging to the gods," Akane said. "This leads directly into a view that the Dornish people are, at best, trespassers who profane a holy site, and at worst are arrogant, hubris-laden invaders who think themselves fit to conquer the gods. Whiiiiiich has led to a lot of wars between Shem and Dorn, and Shem and Vega, the last of which was seventy years ago, and so ruinously destructive for both sides due to advances in military technology that it scarred the psyches of both nations, rendering war a nearly unthinkable prospect. The leaders of the Grey Faith still shake their spears and rattle their sabers at Dorn, but Shem is not a theocracy, and the leaders of Shem are wholly unwilling to risk the creation of another Glass Desert."

I blinked.

"Okay, I've got to read your history books at some point," I muttered. "This world has some fucking history."

"Were you expecting otherwise?" Akane asked.

"Well, not really," I said. "I mean, the stories I'd read about people being whisked off to another world were generally pretty light on exposition about the world's history, except for the explicit purpose of setting up the main plot- you wouldn't hear about a war or a prophecy unless it was going to be relevant to the protagonist's future in that world, and..." I shrugged. "Well, if I'm going to lean into talking about my life like it's a story, then I might as well point out the fact that, hey, so far this story seems to be very much preoccupied with my sex life, and getting into a holy war of extermination where Wizards are throwing around spells that create Glass Deserts is maaaaybe a bit out-of-theme with getting into your pants."

"I don't wear pants," Akane protested, before grinning. "Also, you should be trying to get into more than just my pants. There's a whole world of hot babes out there, just waiting for you to meet and fuck them."

"Yeah, yeah," I muttered, closing the book and handing it over to her. "C'mon, you horny bitch, let's get to the Guild."

The Dornhelm Delver's Guildhall was an imposing monolith of a building. Dornhelm was a planned city, built on a square grid of one-hectare blocks- that's squares of a hundred meters, or 330 feet- and the Guildhall took up nine of them, and that was just the horizontal sprawl. It was tall, too, towering a full six hundred meters above the streets, and forming a major part of Dornhelm's skyline.

What's more, though, the building was even bigger on the inside, to an extent that put Usagi and her home improvements to shame.

And so, when I'd been told to show up at 8 o' clock sharp to meet someone, I'd felt it prudent to show up early, so that I could actually locate a front desk with a receptionist and figure out where the hell I was actually supposed to meet Cecilia Ironborn.

Thankfully, Cecilia Ironborn didn't have any other appointments today, and was also a bit of a morning person, and didn't make me wait until 8 to see her. But, since we had a good half hour to spare, by her reckoning, this meant that I got to learn why a smokeshow cougar of a celebrity bunnygirl delver was single enough to casually make out with strangers in a warehouse:

Cecilia Ironborn wasn't just a delver. She was also autistic as hell.

"-so really, as long as you can get to Level 5, Spellblade is a much more efficient use of a Class Slot than Wizard is," Cecilia explained. "Sure, Spellblade has lower Soul and Mind Stat Multipliers than Wizard, but they do otherwise still have full Wizard spellcasting, and they've got a bunch of Fighter powers and higher Body and Face Stat Multipliers, and once you've got Mystic Artificer unlocked, you can make gear that narrows the gap in Soul and Mind Stats."

"Yeah, but I'm already a Wizard," I said. "And if I have the option to stop being a Wizard and become a Spellblade instead, I am wholly unaware of it."

"Oh, for sure you do," Cecilia said, nodding vigorously. "See, there're a few ways of doing it, in fact, and there's this one method I've been helping to refine a bunch, which lets you swap one class for another and keep all the XP you gained for it, so if you're a Level 4 Wizard, you can become a Level 4 Spellblade."

"Huh. That's... a bit more compelling than being told my build is inefficient," I said. "I mean, I personally disagree with the assessment that lower Soul Stats are an acceptable price for higher Body Stats and some Fighter tricks, but that's probably because I'm not a delver by nature. I'm a magician, and I want to work great magics."

"You sound like my sister," Cecilia said. "Well, half-sister, but. Anyway. She's a Dragongirl, so she got Sorcerer, and she just will not shut up about how amazing it is to have such high Soul Stat Multipliers. She isn't even using it to do System research!"

"Speaking of System research," I began.

"Right, the Class-swapping procedure," Cecilia said. "Okay, so, it still isn't perfect, and it does have a 67% failure chance as of the most recent revision-"

"How many times did you test it to arrive at that number, because one success out of three attempts is wildly different from thirty three successes out of one hundred attempts."

"The sample size was thirty attempts," Cecilia said. "Anyway, as I was saying, it still isn't perfect, but, failure just means losing the XP. You still keep your Base Stats and everything else, and, so long as you're below Level 14, it's really easy to get you back up to where you were previously. Hell, if I wanted, I could carry you up to Level 13 in a single day, just by dragging you through a Level 13 delve."

"...Okay, so I was going to ask a different question when I brought up System research again," I said, "but now I have to ask, like... how? Pretend I'm from another universe, and while I speak the same language as you, I did not grow up with the System."

"Neither did any of us, actually," Cecilia said. "People only get System access when they turn 18. But, I take your meaning. So, for delver classes, the XP curve is exponential, but for delves, the XP curve matches it perfectly, which means, really, that the number of on-level delves you have to do to level up is a constant, and that constant is, incidentally, 100. You're Level 4, so it will take you no more than 100 delves in a Level 4 dungeon gate to get to Level 5. Buuuuut, the thing about an XP curve is that it suddenly becomes an important question what happens when you delve off-level."

"Okay, I'm with you so far," I said.

"Up to Level 10, the XP requirements to level go up by a factor of 10," Cecilia continued. "So if 100 delves at Level 4 will level you up, it'd take 1,000 Level 3 delves to level you up, or it'd take only 10 delves at Level 5 to level you up, or just one delve at Level 6 to level you up. However, Level 11 requires 100 times as much XP to reach as Level 10, and 100 becomes the new factor for all levels following after it."

"Ahhh," I said, nodding. "So, one delve in a Level 13 dungeon is enough to raise a Level 12 to Level 13... and at that point, the XP difference between a Level 1 and a Level 12 is a rounding error."

"Precisely," Cecilia said, nodding. "And then you get to grind out a hundred Level 13 delves to reach Level 14, and then ten thousand if you ever wanna reach Level 15, like me."

"What, are there no Level 14 dungeons?" I asked.

"Dungeon gates, and no," Cecilia said. "Dorn is special because it's the only place in the world with Level 13 dungeon gates. Hell, this continent and the one that Vega's on-"

"It's called Azel."

"I'm not a geographer. Anyway, these two continents are the only ones that have Level 11 dungeon gates; on the rest of the seven continents, the highest level that dungeon gates go up to is 10. But no matter where you go, the truth is still the same: two levels higher than the highest level Dungeon Gate you have access to is the absolute limit of what you can achieve." She shook her head. "I've run the math, you know? There's three hundred and sixty days in a year, and if you're a very talented delver like me, who can complete one full delve every single day without ever taking a bad hit that lays you out for a week while you recover? It takes only a season to go from 13 to 14, but it takes a little over 27 years to go from 14 to 15. And going from 15 to 16?" Cecilia shook her head. "That'd take twenty seven hundred years. And absolutely nobody lives that long, not even the elves. Well, not these days. There used to be truly immortal elves, supposedly, but according to legend, they all died three thousand years ago, which is where the Elven Epoch comes from."

I hummed quietly. So, if I wanted to reach Level 15- because let's be honest, I am not doing ten thousand fucking dungeon crawls, even if it's something other people can do- I'd need to find a new way of getting XP that the entire world up to this point somehow managed to miss- after at least three thousand years of recorded history.

Which, y'know. That'd ordinarily be the sort of thing that should be impossible, and which only the protagonists of particularly solipsistic power fantasy would be able to pull off without having some kind of cheat code. I, however, did have a cheat code: the Incubus class, which I already knew pretty intimately offered its own, unique, and very sexual path of progressing otherwise not-very-sexual System stuff.

Which, of course, brought me to the actual thing I wanted to ask Cecilia about.

"So, here's my actual question about System research," I said. "Is it really the case that there are only the fourteen delver classes, three crafter classes, and three gatherer classes?"

"There's actually eighteen delver classes," Cecilia said. "Sorcerer, Trickster, Swordsage, and Oracle are alternative, mono-role delver classes that are only available to people with the right Trait, and have the highest Stat Multipliers of any class. Aaaaaand, in the event someone can get all three crafter and gatherer classes, which doesn't happen often on account Class Slot Unlock items aren't exactly readily-available, you automatically gain the slotless class Dungeon Master, which can't be gained any other way, and lets you create artificial dungeon gates."

"Well, yeah, aside from those twenty five classes, no, there aren't any others," Cecilia said. "Well, not that I'm aware of. There're legends about other classes, but they're always pretty apocryphal, and not the kind of thing you can really treat as a historical record. Why do you ask?"

"Pique of my interest, mainly," I said with a shrug. "Would it be too much to ask for you to help me look into these legends anyway? I am still pretty curious."

Cecilia grinned at me, and I grinned back.

"I," Cecilia declared, "would love nothing more. But, before we get into System research, we first have to deal with that bandit gang you got sentenced to community service."

"Ah, right, them," I said. "That shouldn't be at all awkward to deal with."