"..."
Inside the cluttered God's Chamber, an indescribable silence hung in the air, and it stretched on and on.
Leo checked the numbers on the parchment three times over, made sure he wasn't seeing things, then locked eyes with Loki. Mortal and god alike fell into wordless silence.
The two of them staring at each other looked faintly ridiculous, especially Loki, whose face wore the expression of someone questioning the very meaning of being a god. Leo almost cracked up.
And he did have the right to laugh.
"All abilities, total proficiency gain over 3,000..."
After murmuring it under his breath, Leo took a deep breath.
"This isn't some kind of prank, right?"
The look on his face, the one that said did your hand slip and you copied it down wrong, twisted Loki's expression all over again.
"I can't read that broken Skill of yours, sure, but I've been a Familia's goddess for a few decades now, and the number of times I've updated a Status has to be tens of thousands at the very least. You really think I'm illiterate, can't even read or write the most basic proficiency numbers right?"
Loki had the needle pinched between her fingers, looking like she was about to jab Leo in the face with it, gritting her teeth.
"Don't go blaming the parent every time something goes wrong. Try thinking about whether it's your own problem sometimes, okay?"
To be fair, Loki had also doubted herself at first, wondering if she'd misread or miswritten it. She'd even opened those divine eyes she normally kept squinted shut. But if she'd opened her squinty eyes that wide and still gotten it wrong, wouldn't that make her a genuinely blind goddess?
She wasn't that great god back home, Odin, who'd handed over an eye for some broken well of water. How could she possibly be blind?
And illiterate? Even less likely.
Hieroglyphs were just Hieroglyphs. To the people of the lower world they were certainly arcane, but to gods, Hieroglyphs were no different from common script. She'd been reading them for over a hundred million years. There was no way she'd misread.
So no, she wasn't illiterate. She just genuinely had never seen anything like this.
"But this is impossible."
Leo checked the numbers on the parchment one more time. His mouth had gone dry.
He'd had an inkling that his Skill Stranger from Another Star might be even more outrageous than the original protagonist's Liaris Freese. If the effects of this Skill could apparently lift even the limits on Magic and the potential of his own race, then surely the restrictions on his basic abilities' growth speed and growth ceiling had been lifted too.
So before this, Leo had quietly hoped his growth rate might catch up to the original protagonist's, maybe even surpass it.
But actually seeing the growth in front of him, he was still stunned.
All abilities, total proficiency gain over 3,000!
What did that even mean?
The original protagonist, with that broken early-bloomer Skill Liaris Freese, gained only a hundred or two hundred total points across all abilities a day at Lv.1. The most he ever got was maybe five or six hundred.
Of course, that hundred or two hundred was a single day's worth of growth. Leo's number was ten days' worth. If you ran the math properly, his rate of improvement was still a bit higher than the original protagonist's.
That alone was hard to believe.
What he hadn't realized was that compared to him, Loki was the one finding it truly unbelievable.
"Otherwise why d'you think I asked what you'd been doing? You call this a growth rate that any Human should have?"
Loki tugged at her hair, looking half out of her mind.
For an ordinary person of the lower world, even after a full day of grinding their hardest, the proficiency gain across their basic abilities was absolutely not going to clear a hundred.
Sometimes ten-something, sometimes just a few points, sometimes a whole day went by with no gain at all. And the further along you got, the harder it was to gain anything. That was the normal growth rate for the people of the lower world.
Even those blessed-from-birth geniuses would struggle to clear a hundred total proficiency points across all abilities in a single day. Ten days might net them two or three hundred, but that was about the ceiling.
For your average newbie adventurer, putting in honest work exploring the Dungeon, fighting through floors that matched their level, it would still take about half a month to push one or several basic abilities from I0 up past 100, into the H range. In other words, a total proficiency gain across all abilities of two or three hundred was the limit. Five hundred was hard to reach.
And Leo?
Ten days and he'd gained over 3,000 in total!
Other people, after half a month, would push a couple of basic abilities up by one rank, from I to H, and that was it. In ten days he'd pushed his weakest ability, Endurance, from I straight to E, four full ranks. Strength and Dexterity had each climbed five ranks to D. Even Agility had gone up six ranks to C, and Magic had jumped a hellish seven ranks all the way to B!
B. As in B.
Back when my Ais was Lv.1, didn't it take her something like half a year to push her strongest basic ability up to B?
This brat had ten days, and he'd matched what took Ais half a year?
And that still wasn't what Loki couldn't accept.
Looking at the Status glowing faintly on Leo's back, blinking on and off like a light, Loki spoke with feelings she couldn't sort out.
"You, kid. You can Rank Up right now, you know that?"
The moment those words left her mouth, Leo's head snapped up from the parchment. He went blank.
"What did you say?"
He wasn't sure he'd heard her right.
But he had.
"I said, you can level up."
Loki fixed her eyes on Leo and said it one word at a time.
"Your great deeds are already enough. The moment you want it, you can go to Lv.2 right now and become an upper-class adventurer."
This was what Loki truly couldn't believe.
"..."
Leo fell into total silence.
Normally, leveling up only required two conditions to be met.
One: at least one basic ability had to reach D.
Two: accomplish great deeds, gaining a certain amount of high-grade excelia.
The first one Leo had obviously already cleared. Except for his weakest ability, Endurance, every other ability had reached D, and his highest, Magic, had even reached B. He'd long since cleared the basic threshold for leveling up.
As for the second, when he actually thought about it, Leo realized he could meet that too.
On his very first day venturing into the Dungeon, he'd hit a dead end on Floor 4, surrounded by an entire army of Kobolds. Even after wiping out the whole army, he'd been left covered in wounds, bleeding everywhere. Without a High Potion to heal him, he might not even have had the strength to crawl back to the surface. He'd have had to lie there waiting for some passing adventurer to rescue him, or get killed by whatever monster showed up first.
After that, Leo had pushed on into the Dungeon's Floor 5, Floor 6, and even Floor 7. There'd been plenty of danger.
The first time he entered Floor 6, he ran into a War Shadow, the one that, alongside the Killer Ant, was called a newbie killer.
He'd been extra wary of it then, fighting cautiously the whole time, finally finding an opening to kill it. What he hadn't expected was that a second War Shadow had been lurking in the shadows. The moment he relaxed after killing the first, it ambushed him. Its sharp claws came within a hair of punching straight through his heart.
Half-dead, Leo barely managed to deal with it, then quickly downed his last High Potion to close the wound. Otherwise he'd almost certainly have died from blood loss.
On Floor 7, Leo ran into danger twice. Once when he couldn't take down a Killer Ant fast enough, and it called in a swarm of its kind, leaving him surrounded by a Killer Ant army. The other time he'd run into Purple Moths shedding poison scale powder and gotten himself poisoned.
In both of those crises, if Leo hadn't been carrying potions on him, there was no way he'd have made it through.
Even so, he'd burned through a lot of precious potions in those two fights. The single Magic Potion he owned had been used during the Killer Ant army's siege, along with three stamina potions and an Elixir. The two top-quality antidotes had been used during the fight with the Purple Moths.
Thanks to all that, Leo had been able to push through one crisis after another and come out of it alive.
Without question, every one of these counted as a venture worthy of the name great deeds, more than enough to generate the kind of high-grade excelia that elevates an adventurer's container and lets them level up.
On top of that, Leo had pushed all the way down to Floor 7 of the Dungeon and fought there in the state of all abilities at I0. That experience alone was extremely valuable.
A great feat didn't have to come from combat. It could come from other things too, like forging some powerful weapon, or inventing something strange, anything the world could call a great undertaking. Those all counted as great deeds. Even an adventurer making a breakthrough within themselves, that kind of "transcending oneself" experience, was a feat in its own right, capable of producing high-grade excelia.
Leo's shift in mindset when he was cornered that first time, his decision to go on adventuring after all, and his choice to keep training relentlessly with all his abilities at I0, willing to push all the way down to Floor 7 of the Dungeon to do it, all of it could in some sense be counted as transcending himself, a "great undertaking."
For all of these things piled together to not be enough to push Leo into leveling up, that would be the strange outcome.
Why was Loki asking him what he'd been doing?
Because she'd already read it off the result. Leo had to have lived through something extraordinary that no one else knew about, otherwise there was no way he could've cleared the threshold to level up.
Just like Loki said. The moment he wanted it, he could go to Lv.2 right now and become an upper-class adventurer.
Upper-class adventurer.
A title only adventurers who'd reached Lv.2 were allowed to bear.
More than half the adventurers in Orario were just Lv.1 low-class adventurers. The remaining fraction were the upper-class.
Between Lv.1 and Lv.2 stood a wall called the gap. Only those with the talent to cross it ever made the climb. Adventurers who reached Lv.2 were Orario's middle backbone, the ones who received aliases from their gods and started carving out names for themselves.
Almost every member of Loki Familia was upper-class. Seven of them were even first-class adventurers at Lv.5 or above, which was why the Familia was called one of Orario's Two Great Powers and held the title of the strongest.
If Leo leveled up to Lv.2, that would, at least, do justice to the Loki Familia name.
But... it was just very hard for Loki to accept.
It couldn't be helped.
"My Ais spent a whole year getting to Lv.2, and that ended up being the fastest record in history."
The look Loki gave Leo was the look you'd give an alien.
"And you, kid? Ten days and you can level up!"
This wasn't breaking the record. This was a dream.
Ten days versus a year. Even a Human brat could see how wide that gap was, never mind a god.
"Seriously, how the hell did you pull this off?"
Loki couldn't hold back any longer. She grabbed Leo's shoulders and shook him for all she was worth.
"Did you find some secret to leveling up fast? If you did, spit it out!"
Leo, who'd been keeping quiet, couldn't help rolling his eyes at that.
"You think that's possible?"
His tone was flat.
"I know it's not possible, but I can't wrap my head around it!" Loki rambled on, muttering, "Ten days. Ten days and you can already level up. Other than straight-up cheating, I really can't figure out how you did it!"
...Could she really not figure it out?
Doubtful, wasn't it?
Leo glanced at Loki. He caught a flicker of something hard to name in her open divine eyes and understood immediately that she'd already guessed.
Stranger from Another Star... This special Skill that even gods couldn't read was more astonishing than Leo had imagined.
Maybe one of the reasons he'd cleared the great deeds requirement for leveling up so fast was that this Skill had lifted the threshold for leveling up too, lowered the difficulty?
After all, he'd said it before. The "all abilities" referenced in this Skill meant everything in his Status. Basic abilities, Development Abilities, Magic, Skills, and... Level.
"So what do you say?" Loki suddenly asked. "Wanna level up?"
Leo fell silent again.
Level up?
Anyone else in his shoes would've said yes without a second thought, right?
One nod and he'd be Lv.2, an upper-class adventurer. His strength would surge, and he'd get an alias bestowed by a god, his reputation climbing along with it.
So why wouldn't he nod?
And yet, under Loki's gaze, Leo shook his head.
"I feel like, at the Lv.1 stage, I haven't hit my limit yet." Leo had calmed down. "So I want to push myself a little longer and see what happens."
Come on, his highest basic ability had only reached B. How could he just level up here?
Ten days to reach B. Spend a little more time training and he could definitely reach A, even S.
Maybe he'd even do what the original protagonist did and break the ceiling on basic abilities, reaching SS or SSS.
If he did that, by the time he finally leveled up, he'd come out stronger than he would now.
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