Chapter 22: Done Before Perfect

[06:03]

Three and a half hours of sleep were not ideal on a good day, let alone a day when she’d require all her faculties to be working at peak efficiency. However, her internal clock was what it was, and complaining about it would do nothing to change it.

Scarlet went through her usual morning routine, only this time, instead of picking up a book to break fast with, she would be working through her Status.

Interacting with the Interface was quickly becoming second nature.

Name: Scarlet Bourne
Level: 4
Tier: 0
Stats Per Level (SPL): 10

Free Stats (FS): 20

System Credits (SC): sSC 1000

Titles:

• Early Adopter
• First Bond
• First Kill

Traits:

• Anomalous Soul
• Primordial Psion
• Psionic Shroud
• System Guide

Stats:

• Strength: 5/13
• Dexterity: 7 -> 8/10
• Vitality: 4 -> 5/11
• Perception: 11 -> 13/16
• Intelligence: 9 -> 11/13
• Willpower: 9 ->10/10
• Mana: 6 -> 8/10

Skills:

• Bond Communication (T1)
• Empathy (T1)
• Inspect (T2)
• Mana Sense (T1)
• Meditation (T2)

Bond:

• Maus

Those were a lot of changes since she last opened the full sheet. She had some decisions to make.

Looking at her stats, she noticed that Willpower had advanced to the cap. Scarlet hoped beyond all hope that she hadn’t accidentally hindered her Willpower gains by not adding any of her free stats and raising her stat potential.

It was a frustrating oversight, and one she wouldn’t allow to happen moving forward. It appeared her progress and notifications were something she was going to be habitually tracking to make sure she was keeping up with any changes. She pulled out a new notepad – yes, a new one was necessary – and added Interface optimization to her morning routine.

The new Skills were expected, if a bit worrying. She only had the seven slots until she passed whatever threshold she needed to pass to become Tier 1 and she’d already used five. She didn’t even know how many more slots she’d get at the next tier, or how to get to T1 in the first place.

Then there was her level.

It looked like killing that shadow bat had bumped her from three to four. She checked the log.

[You have been attacked by Shadow Bat]

[You have been attacked by Shadow Bat]

[You have killed Shadow Bat – Level 5]

That’s right, Level 5. Well, it did have two active Skills, and whatever stealth passive that had allowed it to bypass her CCTV. Those were just what she’d witnessed. No wonder she’d jumped a level. She wondered just how far into level four she was.

More than her level though, was her MNA. Eight. She had eight MNA. Something told her that had as much to do with Mana Sense as it did Meditation. She made a note to meditate before bed, and during moments of leisure. As well as to constantly push and stretch her mana and empathic senses, and to try and understand just what her psionic senses were supposed to be, considering they were part of her literal soul.

Before any of that, though, Scarlet needed to allocate her free stats. She didn’t want what had happened to Willpower to happen again if it wasn’t entirely unavoidable.

She had 20 FS, which was just enough to bring all her stats up to fifteen, save one. However, she didn’t feel that was the most optimal distribution. Some of her stats had a lot more room for growth than others, and while a few had a higher growth rate than the rest.

There must be an optimal way to allocate these., only she didn’t have access to it. Did she? She tried querying the Guide.

[Optimal Statistic allocation is different for each individual and their unique paths.]

Alright, that made sense and was what Scarlet had been assuming. Only, there had to be common or even uncommon wisdom about how to know what was ‘optimal’ for each individual.

The Guide did not respond.

Scarlet wasn’t even disappointed. Frankly, she’d received more from it than she’d expected to. She supposed that meant she was on her own until she had a better source of information. Maybe there was a reward like the resource tome somewhere in the portal. Or she and Maus would butcher some other awful creature, and the System would reward her with knowledge?

Well, that was a future consideration. For now, she needed to figure out her FS allocation. Instead of going for a flat distribution, she figured it would be best to see if she couldn’t give all the stats the same room to grow. Her lowest stats, Vitality and Strength were both at five. However, because of their lower starting point they had comparatively more overhead before they hit their ceiling. STR had eight more stat points while VIT had six. MNA on the other hand had only two while WIL had reached its cap.

Her goal then, was to make sure all her stats had at least three points to grow into before she began thinking about where she should focus the rest of the points.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Strength, Vitality, and Perception, were at or above three, so she went in and added one point to Mana, three to Willpower, one to Intelligence, and one to Dexterity, leaving her with 14 FS left to allocate.

She looked at Maus.