Free Web NovelChapter 9: Benefits of SSS-rank
He found he didn’t mind the gap between what they saw and what was true. If anything, he preferred it.
Ran had never actually needed a porter in the first place.
Every player had an inventory, a personal storage system that existed outside physical space, accessible by thought, capable of holding equipment and drops and items without any of it manifesting as physical weight or bulk.
Having a person walk behind you and carry your excess had been dissolving for years because the excess didn’t need carrying anymore.
Everyone had somewhere to put things. The role had been fading into irrelevance long before Leon had ever been handed it.
Ran had known that when he assigned it to him.
All of them had known it.
They hadn’t kept him in that position because they needed someone to move their equipment from one place to another, but to mock and humiliate him.
’Status.’
The word formed quietly in the back of his mind as he walked, and the window opened in front of him, visible only to him, floating at the edge of his vision in clean organised lines.
[STATUS WINDOW]
[Name: Leon Allister]
[Race: Human]
[Talent: Legendary Draw(SSS)]
[Class: Swordsman]
[Title: None]
[Level: 3(0/200EXP needed to level up)]
[H/P: 220 <Vitality X 10>]
[M/P: 300 <Mana X 10>]
[Magic Damage: 30 <Mana X 1>]
[Physical Damage: 28 <Strength X 1>]
[Magic Resistance: 30 <Mana X 1>]
[Physical Resistance: 27 <Endurance X 1>]
[Attributes]
[STR: 10 >> 28]
[AGL: 7 >> 25]
[VIT: 4 >> 22]
[MANA: 12 >> 30]
[END: 9 >> 27]
[Skills: None]
[Attribute points: 36]
Leon’s eyes moved across the numbers slowly, and something in his chest that had been wound tight since the moment he’d woken up on that dungeon floor began, quietly, to loosen.
The corner of his mouth pulled upward before he could stop it.
’My attributes,’ he thought. ’They’ve increased... so much.’
Every single number had climbed by eighteen points since the last time he’d looked at his status, each attribute pushed upward by a margin that would have seemed unreachable to him even this morning.
And then there were the attribute points.
Thirty six of them, sitting unused and waiting, which was a number so far from the zero he had been carrying around before tonight that looking at it still produced a faint sense of disbelief somewhere behind his sternum.
He understood why, of course.
He had understood it in theory for years, but there was a significant difference between knowing something intellectually and watching it play out across your own status window in real numbers.
Talent rank was everything.
The amount by which a player’s attributes increased with each level was not a fixed value that applied equally to everyone who hit a threshold.
It was determined entirely by the rank of their talent, scaling upward in a clean progression that made the gap between the bottom and the top of the ranking system almost incomprehensible when you did the arithmetic.
Those with F-rank talents, the lowest rung, the rank that had been stamped onto Leon’s record until recently, received a single point added to each attribute per level.
Those with E-rank talents received two. The increase continued climbing by one additional point for each rank above that, moving through D and C and B and A and S in steady increments that compounded into enormous differences over time.
Which meant that he, sitting at SSS-rank, received nine points added to every single attribute with each level he gained.
He had levelled twice tonight inside that dungeon, which meant each of his attributes had climbed by eighteen points in a single session, a number that a player with an F-rank talent would need eighteen levels to accumulate in a single stat. Most F-rank players never reached eighteen levels at all.
The free attribute points followed the same logic, though the scaling there moved by two rather than one.
F-rank talents produced two free attribute points per level, and the number climbed by two with each rank above that, which placed SSS-rank at eighteen free attribute points for every level gained.
Two levels meant thirty six points sitting in his pool, unspent and waiting for him to decide where to put them.
’For so long.’ he thought, thinking back to his life before now. ’For so long, I’ve been at the bottom. Merely a useless level one porter, treated like something people scraped off the bottom of their boots. And now... I finally see the path to the top.’
He let that sit for a moment, feeling the shape of it, the way it filled in spaces that had been hollow for longer than he wanted to count.
Then he turned his attention to his talent.
’Legendary Draw. Show me the details.’
[Talent Details: Legendary Draw(SSS)]
[Effect: Legendary Extraction — You can extract legendary treasures or items from anything you wish.]
Leon read it twice.
’The description is...’ he thought, ’surprisingly simple.’
Two lines. One effect stated in a single clean sentence with no conditions attached, no limitations written in, no fine print lurking beneath the surface to undercut what it appeared to be saying. Just the ability, stated plainly, and then nothing else.
It didn’t matter. The simplicity of the description did absolutely nothing to reduce what the talent actually was, and he was clear-eyed enough about that to not let the plainness of the wording mislead him.
The ability to extract legendary items from literally anything he chose to apply it to meant that the only ceiling on what he could accumulate was how often he decided to use it.
He could simply get legendary items whenever he wanted. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
And legendary rank was not a small thing to be taking freely.
It sat at the absolute top of the item ranking system, the highest classification that existed for weapons, armour, treasures, or any other category of item the world had produced. freēwēbηovel.c૦m
The last time anything of legendary rank had appeared anywhere in the world had been hundreds of years ago, far enough back that most players treated the rank as theoretical, something that showed up in old records and history and nowhere else.
’Until today,’ he thought, and the image of Excalibur’s golden blade catching the dungeon light moved through his mind with a warmth that felt almost proprietary.
"You’ve been smiling for a while now, haven’t you."
Leon blinked.
Orat was glancing back at him over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised slightly, his tone carrying the particular quality of someone who had been watching something quietly for longer than they’d let on and had decided now was the moment to mention it.
"Haven’t you, Leon?" he repeated.
