Chapter 3

"Sorry you had to walk in on that," Akane said.

"I'd prefer we not acknowledge it, so I can pretend it didn't happen," I said flatly.

It was properly evening now, and enough time had passed for me to milk the cowgirls for the second time today, and then eat dinner- simple yet hearty fare made primarily from grains, supplemented with vegetables grown in Usagi's farm, and soaked in unconscionable amounts of butter. Seriously, there was so much butter. I knew why, of course- butter was very calorically dense, and as a household with sixteen productive dairy cowgirls, we had a lot of it that we didn't have to pay for. That didn't make me feel much better about eating a quarter pound of butter with dinner every night.

Anyhow. The source of my unpleasant bowel movements aside, the day had reached my favorite part: hanging out with Akane. Now, of course, this started as "hey, I'm a Wizard who aspires to join the Guild, and you're a Wizard who's currently receiving Guild training, can you share some tips with me?" and, to be fair, it still was that to an extent. But, well, after three months of talking shop about a shared interest every evening, I felt I could safely count Akane as a genuine friend, and not just a friendly acquaintance I lived with.

Which was part of why I very much did not want to be thinking about her in a sexual manner.

"If you're worried about embarrassing me, don't be," Akane said. "I'm pretty shameless, you know."

Akane, unlike myself, wore her robe as ordinary clothing. As a Wizard, of course, it was perfectly natural that Akane would wear a blue robe everywhere, although it was a bit noteworthy that Akane's robe was cut in the style of her homeland, rather than in the local Dornish style. And, admittedly, more and more Wizards these days were forgoing blue robes for more conventional shirts and trousers, often- but not always- accompanied by a blue longcoat that was rarely buttoned in the front.

Oddly, despite Akane's flirtatious manner, her robe wasn't in any way immodest; oh, sure, it was being worn by an absolute bombshell of a woman whose fat-ass knockers couldn't be concealed by anything, but when you considered that her robe, despite naturally opening in the front, displayed precisely zero cleavage, and that the skirt was not slit up the sides to expose her legs, you realized she was, in fact, wearing a perfectly ordinary robe as it was intended to be worn.

Well, I say 'robe.' I'm pretty sure it's a kimono, given that Akane, Usagi, and Haruna are all Japanese names, and a lot of the conspicuously non-Dornish things they do are very strongly reminiscent of the Japan of my home world, and also the fact that the robe is cut and styled very much like a kimono, but I am not going to just blithely assume that this robe she's wearing is in fact a kimono.

"I do know," I said dryly. "Look, can we go back to the productive chat about system mechanics? I've only got another hour or so before I need to be in bed, and I'd rather not spend it on a conversation designed to embarrass me."

"Fair enough," Akane said, shrugging. "Alright, so. Base Stats. There are sixteen of them, and they're organized in a four by four grid with two well-understood axes. With me so far?"

"That's stuff I can see just by looking at my character sheet," I noted. "Well, aside from the 'well-understood' part, but I kinda assumed it was well-understood, since it looked obvious to me, and I'm not a history-making genius."

"Technically, you are a genius, according to your base Intelligence stat, but I get your point," Akane said. And, well, she was right- when I'd said all my stats were across-the-board average when I arrived, that had been an oversimplification. I'd had precisely two stats that were above average, and of those, Intelligence had been higher, sitting in what was apparently the 99th percentile of the general population. Which, according to Dornish customary classification, made me a genius, in about the same way that being six foot two made me tall- an evaluation of my capabilities that was a bit congratulatory, but not very. I didn't even get to lord it over people I knew; Akane's own base Intelligence stat was in the same league, and she had the added edge of having grown up here. "You're smart, but there are plenty of other smart people, and they've had a lot longer to think about this than you have. Now, let's talk about what they've figured out that isn't written on your character sheet."

"Oooh?" I perked up.

"The first axis is called Arena," Akane explained. "The four Arenas are, in Dorn, named Body, Mind, Face, and Soul; Body and Mind are pretty obvious, while Face refers to raw social capabilities, and Soul refers to raw magical capabilities. With me so far?"

"Yes, although I'm a bit concerned with the existence of system-backed social stats," I said. "Feels a little mind-control-adjacent to me."

"It's not," Akane assured me. "These stats are only able to directly affect the person who has them; someone with a high Manipulation stat is better at manipulating people because they're better at it, not because their stat makes everyone around them worse at resisting it."

"Mmn, fair," I said, sighing. Manipulation, funny enough, was one of the stats I was notably below average in.

"Anyway!" Akane said, forging onward. "The other axis is called Facet, and it divides each Arena into a set of four stats that's analogous to its neighbors in the other Arenas. The four Facets are called Power, Finesse, Resistance, and Affinity. Affinity is a special one, and rather than directly affecting derived stats, it mostly affects how easy it is to train up the other three stats in its arena."

"Training?" I asked.

"Mhm!" Akane nodded. "See, base stats aren't forever fixed once your system awakens and you can actually see them. They can be trained, mostly through practice. At high levels, base stats don't matter that much, because the modified stats are so high that training up the base stats to their maximum is pretty trivial, and so everyone who tries even a little bit has the same maxed-out stats. At low levels, though, the training is harder, and a lot more time-consuming, and so most people consider themselves basically stuck with whatever base stats they have to begin with, unless the life they were already living counts towards training that stat."

"Such as, say," I suggested, "longshoremen and the entire Body Arena."

"Exactly," Akane said, nodding. "Anyway! I've noticed that you've been growing your Soul Arena stats pretty quickly!"

"Well, I'm also a longshoreman," I halfway bluffed- none of what I was about to say was untrue, but there was one key detail I was leaving out, vis-a-vis the Incubus class and jerking off for power. "Trick is, I'm also a Wizard, so I've been using magic to move heavy objects around pretty much from the beginning. Even back in the beginning, when I could only levitate a single fifty pound sack at a time, I could still do it faster than someone else could do with a hoist, so I've always been called upon to cast spells at work." And, well, while I hadn't known the precise theory and definition behind the stats to begin with, I had still had the insight necessary to recognize that 'Magical Affinity' was probably the first stat I should be raising as a Wizard, as well as the fact that all my other magic stats were going up over time.

"That makes sense," Akane said, thoughtfully. "I can only really get a rough idea of your Soul Arena stats from just Wizardly Intuition, but if I'm right... I think you're just shy of the stat caps already, which puts your adjusted magic stats on par with the average Level 4 Wizard."

"Oh, hey now," I said, blinking. "That's... a lot more than I was anticipating. Wow. Also, uhhh... adjusted?"

"Right, right," Akane said, nodding. "So, every level in every class, including the first level, comes with stat multipliers. These multipliers do not stack with each other, mind you; you only get the highest individual multiplier for a stat. And what this means is that, a Wizard can have a higher base Strength score than a Fighter, or a lower base Magic Capacity score, but the stat multipliers offered by the two classes mean that, unless one of them is low-leveled, the Wizard is still going to have a higher adjusted Magic Capacity than the Fighter, and the Fighter is still going to have a higher adjusted Strength than the Wizard."

"So, if I were to, say, spend my second class slot on another spellcasting class, like... Spellblade is one of 'em, right?" I bulled onward, not waiting for an answer. "Then I'd still get the higher Body multipliers of Spellblade, but they wouldn't stack with Wizard's own, smaller multipliers, and Spellblade's Soul multipliers most definitely wouldn't stack with Wizard's multipliers."

"Exactly!" Akane confirmed. "Which is why delvers who do take more than one combat class are advised against taking classes that heavily overlap with the class they already have. However, something I think you might be missing is that, since magic is an important resource for speeding up the abilities of the crafting and gathering classes, you'd actually be really good at those."

"True, and it'd probably be more useful for daily life than another combat class to squander and misuse," I mused.

"As soon as I can," Akane continued, "I'm gonna get you a dungeon pass and carry you up to Level 5 Wizard, so you can get the automatic Slotless Mystic Artificer unlock, and you can try crafting without having to worry about wasting your second class slot."

I blinked. "...Wait, Mystic Artificer doesn't take up a class slot if you reach Level 5 Wizard?"

"Level 5 of any spellcasting class, really," Akane said. "Which is two of the four mono-role combat classes, five of the six dual-role classes, and all of the four triple-role classes. It's something that single-class Fighters, Thieves, and Swashbucklers complain about every time it comes up."

"Are any of the other crafting classes like that?" I asked.

"Nope!" Akane said cheerily. "It is only Mystic Artificer that's like that, and nobody knows why. It'd make sense if the Warrior-role classes got Blacksmith, or if Ranger and Druid got Alchemist, Farmer, or Rancher, but they don't. Mystic Artificer is the only class that gets unlocked for free like that, and nobody knows why."

"That's fucking weird," I muttered. "Well, okay. Whatever. I'd really like being able to make my own enchanted gear, yes, if only because my understanding of comparative advantage and why specialization and trade are vital to civilization are insufficient to make me like the fact I'm reliant on others for enchanted gear, so... I'm not going to pull at that thread. I'm just going to wait patiently for the day when I don't have to pay four entire gold pieces for an enchanted set of underclothes that boost my Body stats."

D&D had fucked up my sense of how much a gold coin should be worth; the fact that four gold pieces felt like an extravagant expense to me rankled, but then, when I considered that a decent meal at a tavern cost three copper, and a gold piece was one thousand copper, I could concede that, yeah, over a thousand meals was a pretty extravagant expense for someone who had to pay attention to how much food costs.

"So that's what Dad's been working on," Akane said, nodding carefully. "Hey... Roxy?"

"Yes?" I asked, a little on edge at that sudden change in the tone of her voice.

"I know you have to go to bed soon, but... would you mind if I went with you?" Akane asked. "I've been horny all afternoon, and that cowgirl didn't scratch the itch."

I closed my eyes, realized that this simply gave my mind's eye a greater ability to make me rewatch that memory of Akane riding dick, and then opened them again as I sighed.

"I'm going to have to say no, but it's not because you aren't hot," I said. "I'm trying very hard to avoid thinking of you in sexual ways, Akane, because you are, ultimately, my landlady's daughter. And even if we do set aside the possibility that Haruna or Usagi would be mad about me shtupping their daughter, something we can't set aside is that I have a history outside of this world, and that history involves a failed relationship."

"I'm willing to try," Akane began.

"And I'm not, because if I fuck this up again and you decide you never want to see me again, you can have me evicted. Now. Do I have some recourse for that? Of course. I make enough money down at the docks that I could get my own apartment, albeit a smaller one that hasn't been made bigger on the inside by a Level 5 Mystic Artificer, and costing a lot more money. But it'd still fuck me over, even if it didn't completely ruin my life."

Akane frowned as I inhaled deeply.

"So, no," I said. "You're very attractive, and you're a good friend who I like greatly, and I'd rather we stayed good friends who liked each other. I don't trust myself to not ruin that by being a selfish and inadequate lover, so I'm just gonna nip that in the bud here and now, because being blueballed is preferable to being evicted."

"...Okay," Akane said quietly. "Sorry, Roxy."

"It's okay, just... I hope you understand why I can't say yes."

"I do."

"And with that, I should probably be heading to bed. Goodnight, Akane."