A New Kind Of Grind

A revolver was an unusually good weapon for low-level delves. A submachine gun absolutely trivialized them. An assault rifle with armor-piercing goldsteel bullets extended the range of trivialization by a little bit, but not by enough to carry me to the endgame.

So naturally, I looked at my growing superhuman Body Stats and my capacity for enchanting stuff, and started to question the very definition of "man-portable firearm."

I wanted to just reinvent the tank. Build a thickly-armored assault vehicle with a direct-fire artillery cannon, and roll that into the dungeon, crushing everything beneath my treads. However, that wasn't really practical. The dungeons, as it turned out, were all exclusively indoor areas with person-scale doors and hallways connecting the rooms. A motorcycle would be a very tight squeeze; a tank was simply out of the question.

So, I set rules for myself: if I want to put a wheeled bipod on the gun to make it more portable, I had to stop and make it smaller and lighter.

There were other problems, too: I was already starting to bump against resource constraints on ammunition. Bullets may be cheaper than my life, but that didn't make them free, especially when I wanted to make them out of a material even more valuable than the metal that's literally just gold but even better.

"Oh holy shit, I just found the holy grail," I said.

The thinking was simple: I took the Farmer class with my last open Class Slot, and made Lisa take Miner so I could craft with Miner synergies. With Farmer, I could make an automated machine that turned magic into herbs for a magic recharge potion, which could itself be burned for magic. The idea was to reduce weight by having the gun, instead of carrying all of its ammunition, carry a module that made its ammunition out of magic. A compact autominer or two, a potion engine for directly converting the magic recharge potion into magic that the autocrafter could use to turn raw mythril ore into usable ammunition, and now we just have to carry potion, which is way less of a load than an equivalent amount of bullets would be.

It wasn't perfect, of course- that autofarmer and the autobrewer that actually used the herbs to make potions would need to be fueled with magic, and so I'd really just be converting my personal magic pool into a liquid that anyone could use. But, in the process of me fretting over efficiency and filling multiple whiteboards with calculations, Lisa made a sarcastic suggestion: just hook up a potion engine to burn the magic potion to fuel the machines that make the potion.

"...Did it actually work?" Lisa asked, slowly picking herself up out of her human-sized dog bed and stretching.

"It did," I said. "This herbs to potion to magic to herbs loop is magic-positive. It's making more magic than it uses. Even if this is the sweet spot and I can't make it bigger, I can just make more of them, and... and, we don't have to ever worry about refueling, fucking, anything magic I make. Holy shit. Holy shit. Lisa, thank you for being sarcastic and suggesting I make something impossible, because it turns out, it isn't."

"Will I be getting a reward for being such a good girl?"

"Let's see what we can do," I said, unfastening my pants.

The Level 9 Dungeon saw the first field testing of my terrifying, six-barrel, gatling-style minigun, with the chainsaw grips and the spray of spent brass and the whirring motor.

It was glorious. And, also, terrifyingly effective.

"I'm starting to see why this was the only weapon your people thought they needed," Anzerath said, once the motor was winding down.

"It is pretty effective, yes," I said primly. "Anyhow, I hear the XP curve changes somewhere around Level 10?"

"Right, that," Anzerath said, nodding. "So, a Level 9 Dungeon gives ten times as much XP as a Level 8 Dungeon, which is as much XP as you need to go from Level 7 to Level 8. But, a Level 10 Dungeon gives a hundred times as much XP as a Level 9 Dungeon, and that's enough XP to go from Level 9 to Level 10. There'll be a bit of an XP gap for you guys, so if you delve a Level 10 Dungeon you're going to end up as Level 9s who're short just a few more Level 9 delves to hit 10, but... if you're after the least number of delves, then you'll want to solve that by just delving the Level 10 Dungeon a second time before moving on, instead of getting to Level 9 before tackling the Level 10 Dungeon."

"Right, because that would involve doing this Dungeon nine more times," Elendar said.

"Precisely."

"Right, well, onward and upward," I said. "Let's go."

A week later, we finished our third delve in a Level 13 Dungeon. I'd wanted to get both Wizard and Trickster to Level 13, for maximally efficient stat boosting, but due to some messy XP numbers, I'd needed the third delve to round out Wizard, bringing me to Level 13 in both classes. Sorcerer was currently at Level 12, due to a spot of XP vampirism from Wizard, and... I mean, I could spend another day getting that up to 13, but god did I not want to.

"Well, that's me all delved out for now," I said.

"Really?" Akane asked. "You don't wanna spend, what, the three whole months it'd take to breeze up to Level 14 before you start resting on your laurels?"

"Level 14 is a pretty marginal improvement over Level 13," I said with a dismissive shrug. "If I decide that I do need that extra boost, then sure, I'll go do that, but for now? Nah. I'm done. I got other shit to do."

"Such as?" El prompted.

"I wanna level up my crafting and gathering classes," I said. "Get them to a respectable level, and make some cool stuff. And..." I hummed idly. "...Eh, I'll figure out something else, eventually. I just don't wanna delve anymore. Those Level 13 delve slots are expensive, anyways."

"Whatcha doin'?" Anzerath asked, walking into my workshop.

"Working on an experiment with some beegirls," I said. "They've got a weird sex ratio- only one in sixty four beegirls is an omega, and the rest are all alphas, with there being zero beegirl betas."

"Huh," Anzerath said, taking a seat in one of the many spectator's chairs I'd put in my workshop because I knew who I was dealing with.

"She thinks that, if she makes a pair of beegirls into betas with potions, then they'll just make more beegirl betas, because betas can only make more betas," Lisa said. "What she's less sure about is if a beegirl alpha and a beegirl beta will make a normal spread of offspring, or it'll be the same sixty three alphas, one omega thing."

"Eyup," I said. "Which is why I have four beegirls, instead of just two."

"Also because beegirl alphas are really cheap," Lisa added. "They don't make honey or wax, and you get like sixty three of them for every actually useful omega you get, so..."

"D'you think beegirl betas are going to make honey and wax like the omegas do?" Anzerath asked.

"No idea, and if they don't, then they're nowhere near as useful as I thought," I said. "But, well... I mean, I've got a lot of time to burn. At the very least, having beegirls lets me harvest the Litter Size 5 Trait from them, which is... I mean, probably a little useful somehow, right? I mean, it is a bigger number than 3, and if I ever need a fuckload of monstergirls as ASAP as possible..."

I hadn't bothered getting more than nine breeding pools of bunnygirls before putting them in long-term milking trance storage, and if I ever needed, say, a thousand monstergirls for something, then I'd need a few days to make that many. But, well. I didn't anticipate needing a thousand monstergirls with any level of urgency, so...

...Actually, y'know what, fuck it.

"Where's Nel?" I asked. "I need her to craft something for me."

"So, you want a machine that makes monstergirl traps," Nel said.

"Yes, please," I said, nodding. "For some reason, that's not a thing that Ranchers can craft; it's exclusive to Druids and Rangers."

"What do you need so many traps for?" Nel asked.

"Well, in all honesty, they're better storage devices for monstergirls I don't intend to do anything with than the milking collars are," I admitted. "Those have the benefit of passively producing milk, but I genuinely do not give a fuck about that. I am not short on food sources."

"Fair, but... don't you only have, like, a hundred bunnygirls?"

"It's closer to two hundred, but also, that's how many I currently have," I said. "I want to make a lot more of them to put in storage, just in case I need a whole bunch of them at once on short notice."

"...When would that ever come up?"

"Fuck if I know, but it's not like this should be that hard to do, right?" I asked. "We've got that positive-feedback potion engine, too, so it's not like we're constrained on resources, just our own time, however valuable we think that is."

"And considering I'm an elf..."

"Eyup. Well, all of us have Long Life 3, but... you're the one who actually grew up with the knowledge you've got a good five centuries to kill. The rest of us... well, it'll sink in, eventually."

"Don't worry about it," Nel said. "You've got time."