Evil Avalon - Volume 2 - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Our First Change of Jobs

My mental projection of numbers and letters shifted whenever I focused on a particular section of the text, making it difficult to navigate. Yet I selected the Thief job, which caused a list showing my current stats to appear. I quickly jotted the numbers in my terminal.

Name: Souta Narumi

Level: From 1 to 19

Job & Job Level: Thief, Level 1

Adventurer Class: Rank 9

Status

Maximum HP: From 7 to 103

Maximum MP: From 9 to 53

Strength: From 3 to 35

Intelligence: From 9 to 51

Vitality: From 4 to 88

Agility: From 5 to 31

Mind: From 11 to 60

Skills From (1/2) to (2/6)

Glutton

Basic Appraisal

(Empty)

(Empty)

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The numbers displayed my current stats and what they’d become after I changed jobs. I’d noted that the stats of an ordinary person outside the influence of a magic field would have values between three and eight. When I was level 1, my stats had appeared in that range. Now that I was level 19, however, my stats had increased massively. With these stats, I was a superhuman. I could outrun an Olympic athlete while carrying a hundred-kilogram weight, or I could spar against any martial artist with no risk of losing.

My stats were becoming lopsided as I noted my HP and vitality were high, but my strength and agility were low. That was due to my Glutton skill. Basic Appraisal indicated it gave me a bonus to increases in HP and vitality whenever I leveled up, an insatiable appetite, and a thirty percent reduction to my strength as well as fifty percent to my agility. There was also an effect that I couldn’t view.

Ordinarily, going from level 1 to level 19 increased my stats forty to fifty points. With the bonus, my HP and vitality were double that, and it surprised me how big that seemed. I’d imagined it would give me an extra ten percent or something small.

Maybe I should keep the Glutton skill for a bit longer, I thought. But I hate being hungry all the time!

I debated whether to keep Glutton or get rid of the hunger for good, but Kano noticed that I had finished. So, she began shaking me by the shoulders.

“Move over. It’s my turn!” she called out, eager to take my place.

Well, I guess there’ll be enough time to evaluate my options, so I should just let Kano get on with it.

Kano sat by the crystal ball and looked up at me, seeking an explanation of what to do. I told her how to change jobs, and she nodded as she listened. When I was done, she successfully acquired the Caster job.

“And I’m done,” reported Kano. “I don’t feel any different, though.”

“That’s just how it is,” I said. “Let me know what your stats look like now.”

“Let’s see...” Kano told me her stats, and I recorded them in my terminal to not forget. When she finished, she said, “That’s everything.”

Name: Kano Narumi

Level: From 1 to 19

Job & Job Level: Caster, Level 1

Adventurer Class: Unregistered

Status

Maximum HP: 70

Maximum MP: 59

Strength: 61

Intelligence: 54

Vitality: 47

Agility: 73

Mind: 46

Skills (2/6)

Dual Wielding

Basic Appraisal

(Empty)

(Empty)

(Empty)

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“Kano, you’re, uhh... Ridiculously strong...” I uttered.

Her stats were high even though she didn’t possess a skill that gave her bonuses like mine. If I didn’t have the Glutton skill, she would’ve beaten me hands down. I’d heard rumors during my DEC days that said that certain lucky characters would increase their stats faster. Could that be why she scored so highly?

Thinking about this wouldn’t change anything, so I moved on.

“Now we just need some equipment,” I said. “I’ll buy you a weapon if you find one you like, and you can spend up to fifty lir.”

“Yay!” Kano cheered. She jumped to her feet and ecstatically charged over to the weapon section. “The daggers were easy to use, but it scared me that I’d bend them if I gripped them too hard.”

I began searching for other items, with the first price tag I looked at being a magic bag. The digestive system of a monster called a giant worm was the material of these bags. You could store twenty times more stuff inside than the size would suggest. However, you’d need to be careful because the items placed inside still weighed the same. If the bag ripped, they’d all spill out onto the floor. We’d need a solution to store bulky items we might get on future raids, so it was worth checking out.

“Two hundred and fifty lir,” I read. “So we can’t afford it now.”

In the game, the materials needed to craft the bag were commonly bought and sold thanks to the number of players around, allowing me to buy finished magic bags for as little as fifty lir. I’d known to expect a higher price in this world, but my hopes the bag would be affordable proved unrealistic. While we’d have chances to revisit this store, we would need to save more dungeon coins. I decided to rework my plan for future raids once we returned home to have more opportunities to loot coins.

I looked at a magic wand that would activate the Appraisal skill, which could reveal facts about items and skills that Basic Appraisal would not. It could also see through faked stats and made it invaluable. The downside was you could only use the wand limited times, so I’d need to find out how many.

“A wand with ten charges costs ten lir, like in the game,” I said, then turned to Furufuru. “I’d like one of these, please.”

“Thank you,” she replied, taking the ten lir.

When we got home, I wanted to use the wand to appraise Glutton and the items we’d looted from Volgemurt. I wished to run some more experiments too and expected to buy more wands later if I could spare the money.

Afterward, I bought two potions that healed status impairments for five lir each. I wanted Kano and me to have one each to protect ourselves, as getting hit with a status impairment at the wrong time could be fatal.

I then checked the price tag on the healing potions.

Two lir, I read internally. Surprisingly cheap.

These were excellent potions as potent as the Medium Restoration skill available to Priests. You’d immediately activate them by pouring the contents over your body to fix broken bones and missing fingers. High demand for the potions drove the price at the Adventurers’ Guild up to hundreds of thousands of yen for a single bottle. And we could snag one here for a mere two lir.

During the game, they’d always be out of stock at Granny’s Goods and sell for ten lir when supplies became available. The absence of other players had kept the price low, the opposite to the situation for magic bags.

Awesome! I thought. I can sell this and make a fortune!

Now for the final in-demand item.

“Do you sell unrefined mithril ore?” I asked.

“I do,” responded Furufuru. “Over on that platform.”

There was a raised platform about three square meters with various ores. Labels indicated one was iron ore, another was silver ore, and the one I was interested in was mithril ore. The sizes were all over the place, even for ores of the same metal. However, Furufuru explained that the metal content was roughly the same for each one. That made the problem of deciding which to buy simple since I chose the small ones, the easiest to carry around.

It was cheaper to refine mithril from ore than it was to purchase an ingot. This item had always been out of stock in the game because players interested in smithing had snapped them up as soon as they’d hit the shelves.

If I buy the ore here, I can refine and craft it into a weapon elsewhere, I thought. Then, we can get a full range of weapons with little expense.

The mithril content of the ore I’d bought was low, but the price for that much would be expensive at shops outside the dungeon. I could stand to make a huge profit if I could sell it. Step two in my resale business!

“Hey, bro!” said Kano, walking over with two swords. “So...I wanna get two one-handed swords. But they’ll cost more than fifty lir together...”

Kano wasn’t putting the swords down, obviously expecting she could get me to pay for both. She looked up pleadingly at me.

“How about this,” I said. “We’ll buy the ore, then we can get swords made at the factories at school.”

“We can do that?! Yay!”

I decided we would stop by the factories and get a quote for the weapons.

“Are you leaving?” asked Furufuru.

“We are. And we’ll probably return for more shopping, so we’ll see you then,” I said.

After paying for enough silver and mithril ore to craft our weapons, I spent the last of our lir on HP potions for us to sell. I planned to skip back and forth between Granny’s Goods and the shop at the Adventurers’ Guild. This left enough time in between so Furufuru wouldn’t raise her prices.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” said Furufuru. “It’s been so long since my last customer, and I’ll be alone again... Or has it? Now that I think about it, another human came in not long ago.”

“What?!” I remarked.

That was a stunning revelation.