Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One - Potential and Percentages
I could have been productive.
Instead, I rode my bike ho, regretting the purchase the entire ti. Maybe I could get a car? So old beater that I wouldn't have to give a shit about?
Anyway, I made it ho, took a second shower, then slumped onto my bed and set a new Save. Fortunately, my first day was always the worst. I'd be fine...er tomorrow. It wasn't the end of the world.
I wasn't sure if I really wanted to stretch out the rest of the day, though.
Still, not doing it would be wasteful. I was sure that there were thousands of people out there who'd endure more than a little discomfort to gain a few more hours in their day.
I groaned, turned over, and pulled out my smartphone from where it was wedged between my bed and bedfra. I had a long charging cable, so I didn't need to get out of bed.
I then spent the next six hours watching docuntaries and hugging a heatpack. It wasn't the best education, but it was sothing. Plus it was kind of entertaining, and I could do it passively.
Eventually I Reloaded, still in bed, and continued to remain in bed. The second lazy loop was spent on the Luna Corp site. There was an employee portal that I'd vaguely rembered at so point. There were training videos and courses on there. I could even get 'credit' for taking so of them.
Experience told that those credits were worth jack, but that didn't an that the lessons themselves would be all bad. There were so videos on swordcombat that I watched. A little dry, but it showed how to hold a sword, how to swing, it even had animations about edge geotry and so of the more practical aspects of combat and then so live footage of a D-ranker from sowhere in eastern Europe I think fighting various lower-ranked portal monsters one-on-one.
It was interesting, if a little dry, and very much edited in that lowest-bidder style that all corpo videos defaulted to.
The first aid videos were dull, the firearm safety ones I skipped, though I did notice that there were videos on using RPGs. We... didn't get to play with those. I was pretty sure that Luna Corp was just plain not allowed to have access to them.
Well, whatever. The video made shooting a rocket boring, sohow.
Then I found sothing interesting.
An hour-long video, nad A Discussion on Potential. It had a la ass thumbnail, and it was only base boredom that had clicking on it.
It turned out to be a good click.
The video was three, four years old, so it might've been a little dated, but it talked about potentiotres and how to read them and what the numbers ant.
Honestly, the only reason I kept with it, was because the woman being interviewed through most of it was a forty-sothing year old scientist lady with serious ek-on-the-street-dom-in-the-lab vibes, and Akagi was best girl.
I'd actually had a discussion about that with Sol a few weeks ago. He'd told that to hit rank C I'd need to get my numbers up to 350 or so.
I was currently sitting at 198 - D-28. My chat with him had explained so things, but left a lot unexplained.
The hour-long doc filled in the gap, though it wasn't exactly made for soone entirely new to the field. The start of each segnt was easy enough to keep up with, then it would dip into deep, technical jargon and I'd be lost for a while.
Still, I got the gist of it.
The first number was 'potential.'
Broadly speaking, that first number was a asure of how well and how much magic was circulating through a person's body. The speed, consistency, and thickness of the magic could apparently say a lot about a person. There was actual science to back the fact that smaller people gained potential faster, which was neat.
Potential was more about magical density, then. A normal person had between 0 and 50. An E-ranker had between 50 and 150, and from there, a person would have enough magic that was dense enough to form a core. Maybe.
It wasn't exact. The video went on and on about possible reasons, but it was obviously not fully understood. There was a component that was emotional, but the cute science lady seed to sneer at the idea.
This tale has been pilfered from . If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Well, whatever. My potential was alright. Past 200 was good for a D-ranker. It was about what a corporate D-ranker would get to in their first six months of work. I'd almost gotten to that in three-ish weeks. So I was way ahead of the curve.
Hitting rank C would require sowhere between 350 and 700. The more portals one completed, the faster the growth, but the less each portal would help. The variance only grew worse as the rank grew, it seed.
The second number was sothing else entirely. It was a asure of one's compatibility. The number didn't make sense right away. The letter was basically which rank the asured person was past . So, D-28 ant that I was 28 points of compatibility past rank D.
And that ant... fuck-all to at first, but eventually I caught on a little.
Compatibility in that sense was more of a asure of how well one's body was adapted to their rank. Basically, I was 28% of the way to being a fully-fledged D-ranker. That number could climb past 100 as well. Soone could still be a C-ranker with a D-100 compatibility.
To cross over required a sort of trigger. I figured that was another emotional thing, but the little science lady had her own theories and dismissed that.
So, the first number was how good one's magic was and how much they had in store, the second number was how well their body was adapted to the advantage of their rank, and how powerful their magic was as well.
It was actually a surprising amount of information to shorthand into two numbers. Which was why a lot of science-y sorts preferred this other system of asurent that spat out hundreds of distinct bits of data, but that basically required professional knowledge to read and understand.
I found so growth charts online with just a simple search, and... yeah, it looked like the average level of growth for an active D-ranker, one who was making a concerted effort to beco stronger, was about 1 point of potential and maybe half a point of compatibility a week.
I was hitting closer to ten a week. That put far ahead of even the better projections.
Not bad.
That night, there was a city-wide test of the alarms. I rembered as much from when I looped through this week the first ti. It hadn't really worked in my area of the city, and that had caused a lot of complaints because... well, that wasn't a good sign.
I followed a few people moaning about it online, deep-dived so conversations about the whole thing, then yawned and Reloaded.
This ti, I climbed out of bed, but only so that I could get far enough to reach my guitar. I played it laying down, eyes closed, fingering my way through a few songs I'd learned, then trying to see if I couldn't figure out the chords to so more popular songs.
It probably wasn't great practice, but I figured it wasn't all bad. I'd have to learn to play by ear at so point if I wanted to have even a middling amount of skill with the guitar.
For my next loop, I watched The Count of Monte Cristo in French (with sub-titles). It was kind of interesting. Needed more magic though, and maybe if it was the Countess, and she revenge banged so of her foes.
Eh, I could do better. As it was, I could barely keep up. The French accent was too much, sotis, but I was definitely understanding one word in three and was able to use context clues to kinda understand what was going on.
It was probably not the most efficient way to pick up a language, but eh, it was fine.
I ended up falling asleep after the movie was done, then woke up at like, six the next morning.
Groaning, I rolled out of bed. Might as well keep this one.
I was feeling better, at least. Today was... Thursday. Right, it was the sa day that Bloody Violet would hit up that portal that Seraph had ssed up. Sa day that so small fry gang would cause a fuss and get themselves all riled up and into trouble.
Hmm... maybe it'd be a good day to tackle a few minor things on my end as well.
I had so dium-term plans that I ought to look into.
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