Chapter Forty-Four - Morning After Blues

Chapter Forty-Four - Morning After Blues I didn't set a new Save point until the next morning, and even then, it was after getting up early and going through my morning routine. Some part of me was a little paranoid that I'd wake up to my door being kicked in, maybe by Special Operations, or some members of the kidnapper's gang. So I took a shower with my revolver, then got dressed and finally sat down at my new laptop and booted it up to look for news on Francisca. She'd made it home. That was a relief. Apparently she'd just taken a (very expensive) cab back to her hotel. Some paparazzi caught her walking back into the hotel, covered in dust and grime, a glare on her face and... were her eyes glowing? Damn. I mean, I hadn't really looked at her too much in the portal world. At the time she was more of an obstacle, so I wasn't really in the 'check her out' mood, but she looked good all bloody and angry like that. The news had gotten out she she'd gotten out, and five kidnappers were in custody. Of seven. Hmm. Concerning. The news didn't put our names or pictures, so I didn't know who got away. Timothy, probably. Carrying an unregistered gun into a café was a 'slap on the wrist' kind of crime in Fortress ENE. Anyway, no one seemed to be after me, personally, so I took it to mean I was safe. I'd tried to make sure that I didn't leave any signs of my passage. It took three loops to perfect the run through of the portal, but once I had it down, I could rush through it pretty quickly. I think the portal was on the lower end of difficulty for a D-ranked dungeon. The undead were entirely immune to a lot of tactics that delvers used. Small arms weren't as effective against them. But they were also relatively slow and very weak to magic. Overall, lesser undead were on the weaker side of things, but the higher-ranked ones were an issue. A C-rank dungeon might have as many undead as the D-ranked I faced, only instead of zombies and skeletons, all of them would be undead knights like that boss, which would make things tough. I Reloaded to before I started doing research and wasting time online. It was a nice distraction, but I had work today. I did not want to go to work today. It was so much less fun than even trying to push through the puzzle that was a new portal, but I supposed I didn't have much of a choice, did I? I stepped out and started to make my way to the nearest bus stop. There were some serious benefits to hitting that portal. For one, Miss Ojou did need saving, and it looked like the saving hadn't robbed her of her ascension to D-rank, so that was cool. Then there was the obvious magical benefit. I didn't have access to a good magical measuring device, but I was sure I'd jumped up a couple of points. Maybe more. I'd killed every monster in that portal that the kidnappers hadn't wiped themselves, and the boss. Plus taking the exit portal. It would be split with Miss Ojou, but whatever. It was a lot more juice than a single E-rank dungeon gave. I appreciated the progress there. More than that, I could feel it. My core felt a little larger, a little more active. Not enormously so, but a little, an amount that was appreciative. I think Sol had said that hitting an E-rank portal gave between one and two points of 'potential' which was... not a lot. But that was assuming that the E-rank portal was hit as part of a squad. Solo probably gave two or three times as many points. I think he'd said that a D-rank dungeon gave between five and ten points. Again, as a squad, and the variation was probably due to complexity. The undead portal felt relatively easy, so it was probably on the lower end, and others had cleared some of the rooms out, so it wasn't full solo. But it was mostly solo. Magic and potential was so wishy-washy that it was hard to tell, but I think I was maybe five to ten percent stronger? Or something like that? I could probably cast one of my cantrips an extra time or two without too much difficulty. The increase felt big, I could remember my talk with Sol. My potential sat somewhere between 150-160. I'd need it to get to 500 to jump up to rank C. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. That was... eighteen to twenty solo D-rank portal runs. Well, maybe one less now? I swallowed. That was a lot. There were other ways to increase that too. If work continued to give me weekly E-rank portal runs, then I might not need quite so many D-rank solo runs to make it to rank C. Besides, what use was potential if all I did was increase the number? I think there was a direct correlation between that number and the physical benefits that came with being a D-ranker, but I wasn't sure. Basically, I could have that 500 potential now, but it wouldn't mean that I knew more spells, had more carved out, or had the experience to use magic the right way. Conversely, my save scummy little ability was insanely good at gathering experience several times faster than anyone else, which had to mean something. I bounced a few times on the spot next to the bus stop. Damn, going through a dungeon felt good. I think it was all the magic settling into me. A lot of it, I felt, was probably wasted, but some of that felt like... like a really smooth sugar-and-caffine rush. Was this what drugs felt like? No, it was probably not quite like that. Drugs felt strong, right? This was subtle. Probably the drug equivalent of smoking a smooth cigar as opposed to snorting a line of coke. ... Damn, I should do drugs one of these days. Not having consequences was dope. I cringed internally at the pun. Right, time to refocus. I had short term objectives to look into. For one, I wanted to revisit Jane. I had some portal loot to look over. There was a sword currently sitting in my closet at home, as well as a thick old book. The book was cool as shit. All old leather, with each page covered in detailed, hand-written notes. Unfortunately, it looked like it might be in latin, or something like that. There were diagrams and drawings and runic circles. But what caught my eye most were the diagrams that were very obviously spell paths. Complicated ones, over several pages. Nothing like the easy-to-read spells in the database I'd gotten from Luna Corp. From what I could tell, the book had three spells in it. They looked a fair bit more complicated than the cantrips I was playing with. Actually, maybe I could ask someone at work about that? They'd know better. The sword was magic. I didn't know how it was magic, but it had little runes carved near the ricasso. The hand guard was a bit fancy for me, but the hilt and scabbard were all blue. I think it was a smallsword? I didn't know enough about swords to really tell, but what I searched online pointed to that. It was only sharp on one side, except for the last foot or so, which was double-edged. The hilt had a fancy ring around it made of curved metal pieces, and the handle was leather-wrapped wood. It was obviously meant for one-handed use, and was surprisingly light. I kind of loved it. Like, I wasn't sure if it fit the look of Deadline... but it was cool as shit. What kind of self-respecting woman would say no to a magic sword? I just needed to figure out what the magic was. Okay... short-list of things to do: > Visit Jane to find a good appraiser. > Ask Terry or Dharti about spells. Yeah... that was it for today. A few days of staying under the radar would do me good. I was wasting time on the bus, waiting to get to work and trying not to glare at some twenty-something guy who kept staring at me and seemed to be trying to build up the courage to make a move. I glared him down, then crossed my arms and hopped onto the net through my augs. On a whim, I went to one of the bigger forum sites for Fortress ENE. It was one of those old, old sites that was kept up by some basement dweller somewhere. Portal Battles. It wasn't social media, and it wasn't corp-owned, which made it pretty decent... as long as one ignored the swears in the comments. Unmoderated old-school websites were their own kind of nightmare, but it was better than the too-clean corpo sites. I started to look into spells. It was probably time to start looking for a good first-level spell to pick up and the opinion of a few hundred people who were obsessed with power levels and such was always good. ***