Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One - Potential and Percentages

  I could have been productive.

  Instead, I rode my bike home, regretting the purchase the entire time. Maybe I could get a car? Some old beater that I wouldn't have to give a shit about?

  Anyway, I made it home, 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 bedframe. I had a long charging cable, so I didn't need to get out of bed.

  I then spent the next six hours watching documentaries and hugging a heatpack. It wasn't the best education, but it was something. 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 remembered at some point. There were training videos and courses on there. I could even get 'credit' for taking some of them.

  Experience told me that those credits were worth jack, but that didn't mean that the lessons themselves would be all bad. There were some 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 geometry and some of the more practical aspects of combat and then some live footage of a D-ranker from somewhere 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, somehow.

  Then I found something interesting.

  An hour-long video, named A Discussion on Potential. It had a lame ass thumbnail, and it was only base boredom that had me 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 potentiometres and how to read them and what the numbers meant.

  Honestly, the only reason I kept with it, was because the woman being interviewed through most of it was a forty-something year old scientist lady with serious meek-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 me 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 some things, but left a lot unexplained.

  The hour-long doc filled in the gap, though it wasn't exactly made for someone entirely new to the field. The start of each segment 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 measure 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 seemed to sneer at the idea.

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  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 somewhere 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 seemed.

  The second number was something else entirely. It was a measure of one's compatibility. The number didn't make sense right away. The letter was basically which rank the measured person was past . So, D-28 meant that I was 28 points of compatibility past rank D.

  And that meant... fuck-all to me at first, but eventually I caught on a little.

  Compatibility in that sense was more of a measure 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. Someone 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 measurement that spat out hundreds of distinct bits of data, but that basically required professional knowledge to read and understand.

  I found some 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 become 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 me far ahead of even the better projections.

  Not bad.

  That night, there was a city-wide test of the alarms. I remembered as much from when I looped through this week the first time. 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 some conversations about the whole thing, then yawned and Reloaded.

  This time, 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 some 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 some 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 some of her foes.

  Eh, I could do better. As it was, I could barely keep up. The French accent was too much, sometimes, 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 same day that Bloody Violet would hit up that portal that Seraph had messed up. Same day that some 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 some medium-term plans that I ought to look into.

  ***