Chapter Twenty-Nine - Points

"This felt easy," I said, keeping my voice low to make sure that it didn't sound like a complaint.

Next to me, Sol snorted. The man was radiating a bit of a chill, but it was nowhere near the cold from the day I was introduced to him. "It is easy. And it's barely worth it."

"Worth it?" I asked.

I took out the paint can and set it on the ground before moving the frog corpses to one side. I didn't want to wait until Eldur told me to do it. Sol followed, not helping, but also keeping an eye out, so I was happy to have him close. Plus, the cold seemed to keep some of the humidity away. Or maybe it was just better to be cold and humid rather than warm and humid.

"You had your numbers tested before coming in," he said. "Do you know what they mean?"

"Not exactly, no," I said.

He nodded. "Exact knowledge would require a PhD, so that's fair. The first is your potential, but that's a made up term that means too much. It's a number pulled from a few smaller stats. Amount of magic in circulation, rate of flow, the energy of that magic, and a few things besides. It means that you can measure someone even if they've spent themselves casting spells and still get a somewhat consistent number."

"Okay," I said as I sprayed the first of the frogs. It looked like the others were fine with waiting. Eldur was checking on a tar-filled pond to one side with a measuring stick and typing something into a tablet, and Terry was squinting into the next tunnel. At the back. Dharti and Erde were just chatting along.

"Right, so, the best way to increase that number is to be in a magic-rich environment. Only that's not the best

way. The best, hands down, is to complete a portal. When we finish this one you'll probably get one, maybe two points on that potential rating."

"That's good, right?"

He nodded. "To reach rank C, you need about five hundred points. D starts at around one-fifty. But that's not exact. There's some C-rankers at three hundred or so, and some that only reached C in the seven hundreds. It's not an exact science." He frowned. "Or it is, and we haven't figured it out yet."

"That makes sense, I guess. Everyone's different. So, two points per portal clear... how many do we do per week?"

"One or two portals, rarely more, sometimes none," Sol said. He grinned as he saw me start to do the math in my head. "To hit the lower threshold of C-rank, if you're very lucky, might take three years, maybe four. There's also diminishing returns. You get two points per E-rank portal now, but later it'll be one, then less. More like seven years if you take any time off at all. Eldur's been with Luna Corp for nine years. Dharti for eleven."

And they were both still D-rank.

"And Terry over there, is the closest to pushing into C, but she's only been with the corp for three years. She joined as an E-ranker before."

I stood up a little taller at that. "How?" I asked.

"E-rank portals give you one to two points. D-ranked portals give you five to ten per clear."

Ah, that was a massive difference.

It was also, obviously, a huge difference in sheer risk. The monsters in an E-rank portal were usually little more than animals. D-rank monsters were smarter, faster, more magical. The majority could be shot to death just fine, but they were sometimes tough enough that small arms weren't as capable, or were extremely fast, or could use magical tricks to make modern weapons less effective. Or they were just ghostly, and non-magical attacks passed right through them.

"So, how long does it take, on average, to hit C-rank?" I asked.

"Average? Depends. Ten years is a good goal to aim for if you don't want to take too many risks. Terry over there will get to C soon, so it will have taken her about four years to go from E to C, but she jumps into D-ranked portals with Squad A all the time. Even did support work on some C-ranks a few times, and they'll jump up your potential by a solid twenty points even if you did barely anything to contribute."

Contribute? Wait, did the amount of work done in a portal matter? Sol went on before I could ask.

"But yeah, if you take it safe, ten years, with hard work and the occasional risk, maybe five. With lots of risk, assuming you don't die, two, maybe three years."

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"Alright! Enough chit-chat!" Eldur said. "Newbie, you want to take the lead?"

I stood a little straighter at that and almost said yes right away. Then what Sol said hit me. Taking so long to reach rank C meant that Dharti and Eldur both had been taking it slow and steady, and that meant that they'd been careful about it. "Is that... wise?" I asked.

From the little glimmer in his eyes, I knew I'd caught on to the trap. "It wouldn't be," Eldur said.

"In that case, it might be best not to, uh sir."

Eldur snorted. "We're not army," he said, but he didn't seem to mind me calling him that anyway.

Eldur and Terry took the lead. The next space in the portal world was across a bridge of soggy planks and through a tunnel made of tightly packed mangroves. That opened up into a much wider 'room' made up of what looked like dozens of small islands with a tree in their centre.

The space was filled with frogs, and maybe toads? There were bigger amphibians, with wide, flat bodies that were pressed into the ground. I only caught sight of a couple of them, but it was only because they were breathing. If they stopped moving, they'd blend in almost perfectly with the ground.

"Glowsticks," Eldur said, and saying so, he pulled out a stick from a thigh pouch and broke it one-handed, his other hand still holding his rifle ready. He shook the stick, then flung it forwards.

These weren't the cheap glowsticks I'd bought in a convenience store, good for roadside assistance, these were military-issues, and they glowed a fairly bright fluorescent green that lit up a space a metre across around them.

I grabbed a few and tossed them out as well, and soon we had a decent half-circle of illuminated space.

One frog leapt over, then stopped a dozen meters away and swelled up.

"Oh, crap," Sol said. He raised a hand before him, and water congealed from the ground and formed a wall that instantly froze with a snap. A second later the frog spat a glob of muddy spit that cracked into the icy barrier.

"Thanks," I said.

"They're mostly non-lethal," he said.

"Mostly?"

"That's what the wall's for," he replied.

Eldur grunted. "Fire at will, but keep it tight. Only one round per, don't ruin the meat. Dharti, give us a lure."

"Certainly," Dharti replied. She knelt down onto one knee, then closed her eyes and seemed to focus.

I turned my own focus ahead of me. The glowsticks provided an okay backdrop to spot the frogs with, but they were still well-camouflaged in the mud and swampy waters. It was only movement that let me pick them out.

Even then, I wasn't fast enough. Of the first four I saw, by the time I was bringing my handgun's glow in the dark sights around to line a shot, the frog was flinching as it was hit.

The others were just better at this than I was.

Then Dharti finished her spell.

It was obvious the moment it was done. A wave of something warm passed through me, and all of a sudden I was turning, head tilting back and up to stare at a tiny orb of faint light that Dharti held. She glanced over to me, then smiled. Then, somehow, she reached out and gave my cheek a little smack.

I gasped and returned to the moment. I was... five paces back from where I'd been, somehow.

"Focus, child," Dharti said.

"Shit, uh, I mean, yes, ma'am," I said.

There was some chuckling over the line, and I realized that I was the butt of a joke. What had Eldur called the spell? A lure? It had certainly worked on me. Now that I knew about it, I could feel it pulling my attention back, but it was easy to resist. Like... like having a TV screen in a room playing the best parts of an action movie while trying to take a test. It was annoyingly distracting, but I could push through.

I returned to my spot next to Sol. The lure was working. Frogs and toads were hopping our way, abandoning their hiding spots and suffering lethal consequences for it.

Five minutes later it was done, and Eldur pulled out two more paint cans from his backpack. Seemed like there were enough here that I wasn't going to do all the work myself, which was nice.

Still, I was a bit spooked. That lure spell... I had more research ahead of me.

***