A New Kind Of Grind

"Alright, well," I said, looking around. "I don't think anyone has another legendary monstergirl to tell me about?"

"Nope," Anzerath said, her confidence having returned now that I wasn't fucking her. "As far as we know, I'm the only one on the continent... well, aside from Lisa, but she's not in the public eye."

"That actually raises an interesting question: would legendary monstergirls typically be in the public eye?" I asked. "It's the sort of thing that I can imagine people being willing to use violence to take for themselves, so I can't imagine I'm the only one being quiet about the fact I have a legendary monstergirl for a familiar."

"Does it matter?" Nel asked. "If they don't want to be found, what exactly can we do to find them?"

"Well," Anzerath began. "It just so happens that I'm a Level 14 Sorcerer and a Level 14 Wizard, with insane Mind and Soul Stats for all my spellcasting needs. And there are some spells for finding people who don't want to be found."

"So, what, you're going to scry for an angel and a demon that're already out there in the world, pretending they either don't exist or that they're something else?" I asked. "So that we can... blow their cover and ask for a sperm sample?"

"I mean, it'll also find ones who aren't hiding," Anzerath said. "And are, y'know, just on other continents, where we aren't hearing about them. Most of the world isn't connected to Dorn's internet, after all."

"Mmn, true," I conceded. "Iunno, it's just kinda uncomfortable to think that someone's in a similar situation as me, and then I come along and ruin the whole thing. Honestly, I think we'd be better off just... putting that on a shelf for now, and getting on with other stuff. Let the invisible hand of the System throw an Angel or a Demon at me for hitting Level 10 or whatever. And if it doesn't happen, then, oh well. I'll live."

"So, what next?" Akane asked.

"Well, I'm gonna finish my breeding projects, make a breeding population of the various monstergirls I want, and then get bored of them, put them in storage, and move on," I said. "From there, I wanna work on my guns some more, because they're currently struggling against Level 5 Fighters with unenchanted steel armor, and as we go into higher-level delves, they're gonna fall off pretty quickly if I don't make any improvements."

"Good luck," Anzerath said. "Guns fall off pretty hard at Level 5. That's just a fact of life."

"It's also a fact of life that a gun can only manage like three shots a minute, but Roxy managed to make a gun that shoots ten bullets a second," Nicky pointed out. "If she says she's got ideas for making guns scale, then I believe her."

"The problem itself is pretty straightforward," I said. "Lead and copper bullets are heavy, which is good, but they're also soft, which is bad. As such, they're bad at getting through armor. Steel would be better, because it's less likely to deform when it hits a steel breastplate, but the fact it isn't as dense as lead means it won't store as much kinetic energy, and will slow down from drag faster than lead will. Buuuuut, there is a metal that's as hard as steel and two times the density of lead: orichalcum."

"You want to make a gun that shoots orichalcum bullets," Anzerath said.

"That is my current idea, yes," I said.

"Ten orichalcum bullets a second, to be more precise," Nicky added.

"Eh, I've got a lot of orichalcum," I said with a shrug. "Turning some of it into bullets isn't going to be expensive."

"If orichalcum is so much heavier, would it still get going fast enough to do any damage?" Nel asked.

"It depends on how much powder we use," I said. "I'll do some preliminary tests to find out, and then, uhhh... well, see how hard I need to redesign my guns to fire these little hellions without exploding in your hand."

"Okay, hang on," Anzerath said. "Let's see one of these magic guns of yours, if they're so good."

"The main mechanism is purely mechanical," I said. "The enchantments are mostly for accuracy and making it quieter so I don't get hearing damage from setting off explosions in small stone rooms multiple times a day."

Nonetheless, I produced my submachine gun from my inventory, and pulled back the priming handle.

"Weapon is live, fire in the hole in three, two, one..."

A spell created a person-sized pile of sandbags about twenty paces away, and I opened fire, dumping the entire magazine into the sandbags in a few seconds.

"...I see," Anzerath said quietly, once the brass stopped tinkling.

"Oh, and now that I'm a Mystic Artificer, I can do my own bespoke enchantments, and make a big ol' machine that makes orichalcum bullets bigger on the inside so I can fill 'em with high explosives."

"Fuck a duck."

I grinned. "Yeah, there is a lot of room for improvement, trust me."

The first field test of the new orichalcum armor-piercing ammunition was carried out in a Level 5 Dungeon Gate- the very same one we used in our brief grind up to Level 5, in fact.

The results were... "encouraging" was the wrong word for a gun that was even more stupidly lethal than a gun firing ordinary copper-coated lead, but I did get the results I was expecting, and we were confident enough to move up to a Level 6 Dungeon Gate the next day, which proved to be just as much of a slaughter. In a fit of pique, I decided that even ten delves per level was too many for my liking, and booked a delve in a Level 7 Dungeon Gate, with a Level 8 the next day.

At Level 8, we got a Black Knight miniboss whose armor was capable of standing up to a few orichalcum bullets, but only a few; with some focused fire, we still managed to drain her stamina before breaching her armor.

I was now Level 6, though, with the attendant boosts in stats, and at this point, I reckoned I had enough magic to move past orichalcum and into mythril.

"I'm a little disappointed," Nicky said, putting her pants back on.

"What, you wanted to savor the delving experience?" I asked, rooting through the loot chest the boss had dropped.

"It's more that I wanted my chainmail bikini to stay useful and relevant for longer, but now I'm at a level where I can just wear a full suit of mythril armor and still be able to fight," Nicky said. "I put effort into this, dammit, and I wanted you to appreciate it."

"Hey now," I said, reaching out to put my hand on her shoulder. I missed and landed on her boob instead, but just rolled with it. "Watching you go through a dungeon wearing two mythril coins and floss while you kept a JiggleMaker 9000 pressed against your shoulder is something I very much appreciated."

"There's still a point in there, though," Akane said. "We're kinda cheating ourselves out of a learning experience by speeding through the delving process like this. If we did it the normal way, getting a hundred delves per level, then we'd have a thousand delves under our belts by the time we reached Level 14, and that's a lot of practice we could've learned from."

"Learned what from, though?" I asked. "Delving isn't that transferrable of a skillset. We'd be getting better at delving, but what's the point?"

"Delvers are also soldiers, in the event of a war," Nel pointed out.

"Yeah, but Dorn's been too big to fuck with for the last seventy years, and Shem's not exactly gearing up for another crusade, I don't think," I said. "At any rate, I don't like delving, and being able to get to the soft cap while doing as little delving as possible is very appealing to me. As is, incidentally, taking all the challenge out of delving by bringing in obscene amounts of heavy firepower."

"I honestly thought you did the guns thing because you did want a challenge," Anzerath said.

Anzerath had been through the traditional Delver's Guild Road To 14, wherein she delved an on-level dungeon a hundred times to level up, then moved on to the next one. At a delve every day, that was a little more than three months per level, and the whole thing had taken her about four years- she'd started from Level 1, rather than 3, and so had an additional 200 delves under her belt that a Guild trainee wouldn't have. Add in the hundred extra delves at the end to bring Wizard up to the same level as Sorcerer, and she'd done a fair amount of delving in her time... and, well. Not much else.

"Hah, no," I said. "Where I'm from, firearms are the only real options for people who fight for a living and don't do bloodsports. Swords are a quaint historical affectation, something that some officers receive and then never use. I'll readily admit that reinventing useful modern firearms and then adapting them to use local materials was a somewhat enjoyable challenge, but I did it because I expected it to work, not because I expected it to be fun. I don't delve to have fun, I delve to rake in loot and boost my stats into the stratosphere. Or should I say, the statosphere?"

"...Stratosphere?" Lisa asked.

Lisa was, like Elendar, temperamentally unsuited to delving. Unfortunately for her and Elendar both, they had slotless Trickster and Sorcerer classes that made them quite capable fighters, and I wanted them both to have the stat bonuses of being at a high level, so they got to come with us on the delves, pop a few shots off so the System judged them as having contributed at all, and awarded them with the full XP payout of clearing a Dungeon.

"It's the second layer of the atmosphere," I explained. "The first layer, the troposphere, starts at the ground, and then gets colder as you go up, until you hit the Tropopause, the point at which the variables at play start balancing in such a way that going further up increases the temperature. On my home planet, it was, I think, about ten miles up? So, yeah, 'into the stratosphere' became a common hyperbolic phrase for 'goes really really high.' Anyhow! I think another week's break is in order so I can improve my guns even further. Right now, I'm still thinking too small with these assault rifles. We can go bigger."