Status Window (2)
Truthfully, I'd expected my Intelligence to be low compared to my other stats. I'd poured everything into filling out the numbers my role as a vanguard demanded, and I'd never once made a deliberate effort to raise Intelligence.
Intelligence:58
But isn't this a little too low?! What level am I even at right now, and it's 58?!
Shocked by a number far beneath what I'd anticipated, I reflexively snapped the pen in my hand and had to dig through my desk for a fresh one.
Calm down. Calm down. Think about it rationally — there's no way the Intelligence of a rotten-water veteran among rotten-water veterans could actually be this low.
Right. This is, after all, a status window from inside a game. These are simply Lucy Aln's stats. The dumb one is Lucy, not me!
Yes! That has to be it! Having rationalized it to myself in that fashion, I forced my eyes away from the Intelligence stat and began copying the status window onto paper from the very top.
⚡ Strength:105
"And what might you be writing down this time?"
"The abilities of my current body."
"Strength would refer to physical power, would it not? Where does a value of 105 fall?"
"Hmm... an ordinary adventurer sits around 50, and a standard knight around 80. That's fairly high, isn't it?"
Even judged against in-game characters, this was a considerable figure.
Breaching 100 before the end of the second-semester break wasn't something a mere rotten-water player could manage — you'd need to be at least a seasoned expert to pull it off.
What counts as rotten-water, you ask? If you abandoned everything else and dumped every point into a single stat, you could push it to 207, and a realistically built character could reach the 130s — but all of that is meaningless unless this world is one that exists beyond a monitor.
In the real world, you can't force yourself through the deranged regimens you'd inflict on a video game character.
💨 Agility:91
"Rather low compared to your strength."
"Well, I never trained agility as my main focus."
Physical attributes are organically interconnected — train one, and the others naturally follow along.
But that growth only trails behind whichever attribute you've chosen as your primary; it can never come close to matching the one you actually cultivated.
"Besides, isn't this more than enough for me? I'm hardly someone who needs to be fast."
The reason I'd never bothered with agility-related training in the first place was simply that I had no need for it. As a vanguard who stood her ground stubbornly behind a shield, a certain baseline of agility was all I required.
"Hmm. Well, so long as you're not lagging far behind, it's no problem."
Grandfather seemed to share my line of thinking, for he didn't take issue with the low agility either.
💪 Stamina:121
"You said the gap between an adventurer and a knight was thirty, did you not?"
"On average, yes."
"Then how am I to interpret a number sitting forty points above your average knight?"
"Grandfather, wouldn't it be easier to measure it against the Aln Knight Order instead of your ordinary knights?"
"...Hmph. That does carry a certain persuasiveness."
Even as I shamelessly fed Grandfather that line, I was secretly working to calm my own astonishment.
I had expected my stamina to be high, but I never imagined it'd reach this level. All that hellish training in House Aln really did pay off.
Back when I was undergoing it, I'd been convinced I'd die of overwork in the knight order rather than at the hands of some evil god — but seeing it laid out in numbers like this, I couldn't help but laugh.
Maybe I should push myself with even more brutal training going forward. And next up is Intelligence... no, let's just skip past that one for now.
✦ Mana:75
"Would that be because you are a holy knight?"
"Yes, probably."
I'm someone who handles with Divinity what mana is supposed to accomplish, so it stands to reason my mana wouldn't be anything special. I've never done a single mana-related exercise in my life, after all.
But wait — the stat I've never touched is somehow higher than my Intelligence? What exactly is wrong with me?
No. Don't think about it. That's a bug. A bug. It has nothing to do with me.
Divinity:192
"...One hundred and ninety-two? Did you mistake a nine for a zero?"
"Grandfather. I may not look it, but I am the Chief God's Apostle, you know."
The Divinity stat was abnormally, almost unnaturally high compared to everything else — but it wasn't particularly surprising.
Of course it wasn't. I'm the Chief God's Apostle. My divinity has ascended to such potency that it physically transformed my body; a number like this is simply what's normal for me.
Staring at the lofty figure, though, a twinge of regret crept in. Normally, once your Divinity crossed this threshold, it fell under the administration of the Holy Land or the Church of the Chief God, unlocking all manner of quests to undertake.
If I weren't currently in a position where I needed to avoid contact with the Church of the Chief God, I'd have tossed everything else aside and sprinted straight for the Holy Land.
Luck: ???
"Now you are simply toying with me, are you not? Surely?"
"...I was thinking the same thing."
"Then why do you speak of it as though it were someone else's affair, when 'tis your own hand that copied it down?"
Because that's exactly how the pathetic scrub of a Chief God decided to display it on the status window he handed me, that's why!
What the hell is ??? supposed to mean?! I've been playing games my whole life and I've never once seen a stat like this!
Seriously, what is this? Is my luck so high it can't even be expressed as a number?!
I couldn't say for certain, but staring at it any longer didn't seem likely to produce an answer, so I decided to gloss over it.
Given how well my blind guesses turned out on exams, it's probably high. Probably.
The moment my hand stopped moving at that thought, Grandfather voiced his puzzlement.
"Hm? Are there no attributes for Intelligence or Wisdom? Judging by the format, it would hardly be strange for such entries to exist."
But I ignored his voice entirely. I could already imagine exactly what he'd say the instant I wrote down an Intelligence score of 58.
"Ho? And?"
"...There's nothing like that."
"Ohh. Is that so? Nothing of the sort, you say?"
Grandfather let out a distinctly unpleasant chuckle, as though he'd caught on to something, and I did my level best to look away from it, dropping my gaze instead to the various skills I possessed.
Iron Wall — the skill that had protected my life since the moment I first set foot in this world.
Hero's Mettle — the driving force that let me endure that hellish training, renamed now, yet still the most precious skill I owned.
Fear Overcome — the skill that had kept me from being thoroughly schooled in one crisis after another.
Beyond those, countless more skills filled the passive skill column to bursting.
"You possess this many blessings?"
As I was transcribing them one by one onto the paper, Grandfather let out a shrill cry of disbelief.
"Like I keep saying, Grandfather — I'm the Chief God's Apostle."
"Beloved of the Chief God though you may be, this is still—"
"Weren't you in a similar position, Grandfather? You were part of the Hero's party, after all."
Back in an era unlike this one, when both the benevolent gods and the evil gods actively meddled in the mortal realm, it was Grandfather and the Hero's party who stood at the front lines of the war against the evil gods. Naturally, the number of skills they'd carried must have been substantial too.
So if anyone could accept this without blinking, I figured it would be him.
"Even in those days, this many... no. Wait. Is it possible now, in this age, to carry such a thing?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Never you mind. Pay it no heed."
No. Grandfather. How many times do I have to tell you I hate it when you brush things aside like that! I let my irritation show as plainly as I could, but he kept his mouth shut.
Once he clams up like this, there's no prying an answer out of him.
Fine. If it were truly important, he'd have told me.
Grumbling under my breath, I kept my fingers moving — only to furrow my brow as I checked the proficiency levels of my various skills.
Nearly every skill I used as my mainstay had already hit its growth cap.
Ah, damn it. How long has it been like this? How much proficiency have I been bleeding this entire time?
This is exactly why you grind levels consistently. Ever since I blew Nakrad to pieces, I'd gotten far too comfortable coasting through real life.
The moment I'm back at the estate, I'm grinding. I can't afford to stack up any more losses than this.
Chewing on my lip as I filled the notebook, I was forced to a dead stop in front of a single skill — because the skill's constraint compelled me to act.
Mesugaki
Proficiency: A- (Current Cap)
My gaze as I looked upon the name of the skill that had thrown me into this world could by no means be called a kind one.
Do you have any idea how much grief I've suffered under the Mesugaki skill's compulsions? How exactly am I supposed to smile at it?
And yet, whenever I recalled how the skill's power had let me slip past danger and protect the people dear to me, it was hard to let my eyes rot with pure resentment either.
So this is what they call love-hate, huh. As I regarded the Mesugaki skill with that ambivalent tangle of feeling, my eyes drifted to the proficiency listed beside it, and a hollow laugh escaped me.
Well, fair enough — it's a skill like any other, so of course it accumulates proficiency. Whether I should be happy about that or not, though, I honestly couldn't say. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't see that stacking doing me any good.
Since staring at it wasn't going to produce answers either way, I wrenched my eyes away from the Mesugaki skill. And just like that, my hand regained its freedom.
I kept the pen moving for a long while after that, but once I finally closed the notebook and turned my thoughts to what lay ahead, I came to a sobering realization: a considerable portion of the game story I knew had just been rendered meaningless.
Too many variables.
I had no idea how the Church of the Chief God would react now that I knew Phoebe had earned the Chief God's recognition.
It was equally hard to guess how the evil gods' faction — robbed of nothing less than Darkness itself in barely a single year — would respond.
Then there were figures who didn't exist in the game at all, like Karia or the Apostle of the Art Order, and no telling what ripples they'd send through everything.
The First Prince, who seemed subtly different from the man I'd known, and the Second Prince, who appeared changed in any number of ways — both variables.
And the shift in the political landscape born from the very existence of House Aln, myself included, was bound to reshape the world in its own right.
If I'd possessed any real talent for politics, I'd have steered these variables toward the outcome I wanted.
Setting myself aside, the influence wielded by the people around me was by no means a light thing — it would have been entirely possible.
But I'm an idiot with an Intelligence of 58. Whenever I picture myself attempting some cunning maneuver, all I can see is me tripping over my own two feet.
Laughing at my own self-loathing, I scrubbed away all the absurd schemes etching themselves into my head and looked back at the status window.
Stick to what I'm good at. If things ever get truly desperate, the Chief God will guide me with a quest, so all I need to do is build the strength to survive that moment when it comes.
And the very next thing I needed to do for that was decide which stat to raise with my elixirs.
Thinking about it rationally, the correct answer was to drink an agility elixir and round it up to an even 100.
So long as there was no way to know exactly how high a stat marked ??? actually was, raising Agility was the safe choice.
I knew that.
And yet the Intelligence stat kept gnawing at me.
No! What is 58 even supposed to be?! Fifty-eight!
If you actually raised a mage character properly, you'd hit 58 before the first-semester midterms of freshman year even began — so why, with my second year about to start, is my Intelligence sitting at 58?!
I refuse to accept it! I am not that stupid!
How would a drooling moron have become a rotten-water veteran of Soul Academy, huh?!
Right. Clearly, the elixir should go toward Intelligence.
The luck stat marked ??? is definitely sitting above 100 anyway. And even if it isn't, I can always grind my Agility up to 100 through sheer effort later. Problem solved.
Besides, where's the downside to getting smarter? Fighting well is ultimately a matter of intelligence too!
As I assembled every reason under the sun for why I ought to drink an Intelligence elixir, I finally opened my inventory — only to discover that the only elixirs in my possession were ones tied to Strength and Stamina, at which point I slammed my forehead into the desk.
...So that's why my Intelligence is 58.
...Once the sun rises tomorrow, I'm paying another visit to the Newman family people. I need to ask about elixirs anyway, and I should get their recommendation on where to have armor fitted around here while I'm at it.