Aster Loka
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Chapter 87
🕑 Added 2022-03-01 17:41:01 +0000 UTC"We agreed on one day of answers in return for the treasure," Levi told Gordon, while Laurence wrote down his last set of instructions. "So we'll be able to head north in another twelve hours."
Frosty ran over to Gordon and started gesturing emphatically, while Flomper looked more and more grumpy. Frosty scampered in place gleefully. "I see someone got a level. Congratulations!"
"Where are you going?" Laurence asked.
"Oregon, eventually. At least I am. Gordon?"
"My life is over, you're stuck with me."
"I suppose I'll have to put up with you a bit longer, oh well."
Gordon huffed a soft laugh. "Not that you're the ideal company either."
"This isn't counting against my day, is it?" Laurence interrupted their banter.
"No, carry on."
"You mentioned class evolutions can be impacted by sub-classes?"
"So the rumor goes. I don't know anyone personally who dual-classed with any great success."
"But you do know it can be done?"
"You have to understand, the division I was with mainly focused on Fighters. We had a handful of Ranger and Mage types for support, but it was easily 80% Fighter. The specialty classes are far less explored. I only knew a handful of Tamers, and of their available evolutions there are probably twice as many available as what I've even heard rumors about. My knowledge is far from exhaustive. I know a lot, yes, but there's still far more that I know nothing about."
"You said that subclasses are almost useless, but if they can give additional ability points and be used to evolve the base class into something more specialized?"
"Anything is possible. I only know what worked for my group. I can tell you a lot about Fighter and Swordsman, and even a bit about Blademaster. Mage and wizard are common enough, but if there are combinations of advanced subclasses, I'm not familiar with them." There had been a fad for a while of multi-classing, but all the people going for Fighter and Mage, or Scout and Ranger, had ultimately ended up choosing one evolution or another from one of the two paths. Rumor claimed that pairing a subclass with an already-evolved class gave a rarer specialty class, but Levi had never heard any proper substantiation of that rumor.
Charles returned midway through the morning, to demand the other items Levi had offered, and the rewards from clearing the dungeon this time. Levi had quietly pilfered the blank elixir base from the final treasure room, replacing it with a stamina restorative, but otherwise left the treasure pile alone. He didn't need any of the items at present.
Rather than argue or fight over the allocation of what he'd offered, he just handed it all over. He'd kept back one of each type of power stone, two of each type of token, and four of each restorative. He hadn't let on that he even had things like the 5-slot tracing or the lens. They were rare enough that they'd be hard to replace. Any of the rest of this, he could replenish his supply with two or three days of dungeon running. With his current team, he foresaw no problems whatsoever in trading away all the low-level miscellany.
Charles didn't so much as acknowledge his generosity, counting everything and verifying it against a list he and Doug compiled, complaining when they felt shorted. Levi didn't budge.
"There were three of these power stones, where's the other one?" "You promised me that sword, remember?"
Levi did his best to ignore their nonsense, and Laurence even came to his defence (and tried to get the others to stop wasting their time) but all they accomplished was Charles storming off, leaving Doug to gather up the items and haul them away to wherever their guild stashed things.
The others came back in and out throughout the day as they thought of their own questions or had time to spare. Once they had six of them together, one suggested they go to another dungeon, which Levi and Gordon agreed to. The group moved another basic Destruction dungeon in the area and continued their training.
Rachel wanted to show off her perfect mana control, activating and deactivating her manablade flawlessly about half the time, with only the occasional stutter or flicker. She was apt to running out, though, leaving it on a bit longer than necessary and not taking her low regen into consideration. Laurence, with his more balanced stat build, outperformed her in practice.
Levi offered some guidance to their fighting as they made their way through the dungeon, correcting poor stances and showing them how to aim with their swings better instead of flailing around as though trying to look cool.
He also took the opportunity to initiate Gordon, running him through stamina drills while the others fought. Gordon glared at him, but complied without more than minor grumbling.
The boss fight was challenging only in so far as Levi had a half-dozen more people to keep track of and protect, but his minions were more than capable of handling it.
Becca has reached level 5!
Rift Cat threshold 1 attained.
Evolution threshold advancement progress: 1/4
Becca has 1 stat point available.
Becca has 3 ability points available.
Levi didn't have time at present to go through all the options, and Becca wasn't the only one to reach her threshold.
"I made it to level 5! Yeahhh!!!" Rachel clapped and jumped with far more excitement and energy than Levi would have expected of someone her age.
Levi walked her through the process of locating abilities and spells, dictating the path to the handful of other options he'd located in his searches. There were a lot more he knew that branched off Swordsman, but he didn't know how to access them except from that class. Trying to jump straight to them didn't work with however the system was organized; it required linking through related concepts to locate anything reliably.
"Try thinking of anything you're interested in learning more about at every possible point," Levi suggested. "Focus on any key concepts or related ones, try thinking of it in different ways. It gets easier once you get used to it. If you think of the system as an encyclopedia assembled by a drunk foreigner, it might help alleviate the feeling of absurdity that interacting with it sometimes causes."
“That’s weird,” Laurence commented. “Why are there convenient buttons for some things, while others you need to go rummaging around in back-end for?”
Levi shrugged. “No one knows. Everyone has a theory. I’ve come to believe it doesn’t matter. It’s a strange gift, but it’s come in our moment of direst need. I won’t turn it away.”
“Who would turn away something like this? It’s magic. Real magic! Who wouldn’t want that?”
“You’d be surprised.” In those first years when society had limped along, pretending that the rampaging Demon Lords were some kind of natural disaster that could be gossiped about and forgotten, innovators finding workarounds to the elecromana interference problem… Levi remembered plenty of people who’d decried the system as untrustworthy, a trap. Some even claimed that the demons were only here because humans had accepted the system, and if they’d ignored the dungeons instead of playing along nothing would have happened.
“The sooner you get used to navigating the system, the better. You can train it to do things over time, a bit like computer programming. The minion details I shared on the wiki are from a custom table I compiled that I can bring up on command now. Things like that. If you want your information to appear in a different way, you can adjust how it’s displayed. It takes time and extreme focus, but it’s as powerful as it is opaque.”
The discussion of custom tables brought to mind a project Levi had worked on about two years before the end of the first timeline, well into the chaos period, but when there were still several pockets of resistance across the globe. He’d still been with a tactical unit at the time, and one of their side projects was compiling data from demon encounter survivors.
He tried to remember how they’d set it up… it had been shared through the system somehow, and they could all access the same tables which updated in realtime. It hadn’t been his creation, Theo had been the mastermind, but if he could remember how to recreate it, if they could expand it…
The table appeared in his mind. Complete, detailed, expansive. Every demon encounter survivor’s best recollection of the fight, the compiled guesses for demon strength at different tiers and creature type, compiled together into a document that could provide an incredible tactical edge.
Levi stared at it for a full minute, not even blinking.
He hadn’t memorized it. And he’d stopped checking it after he was transferred from Theo’s division. The information here was more recent than what he’d last seen.
The system had stored it.
The system had stored information from a different timeline.
“Oh shit,” Levi breathed, as the implications trickled into his mind.
The system was directly linked to whatever had sent him back in time. That was a little obvious from the way it had reverted him to the first day he encountered a dungeon creature and Awakened, rather than earlier or later, but it was still concrete confirmation.
More concerning was the fact that this proved he wasn’t the only thing sent back in time. It had sent his memories, as well as unrelated data.
What else had it sent back?
