Optimizing Your Isekai - Progression Fantasy w/ Slice-of-Life and Biz Building Elements

Chapter 44 Part 2 - Optimizing Your Isekai


As promised, Nina Asani again woke me at first light, though this time she was far more cordial.

I followed her to the same restaurant and into the same warded room as the day before. They had brought in a high chair just for Steve, which I thought was a nice touch.

He made a mess while Nina and I talked.

Maybe I need to get him crayons and a menu to color.

"So, what do we think about the Pitola proposal?" I asked. After looking it over far more thoroughly the previous night, there weren't any changes to my or my team's economics so I had no issues with it.

Essentially, I couldn't trust Chazin Mark to provide competent teams so it was the Pitola offer or we simply left early. Nina and I were both very confident the Chazin Mark Council would recognize the previous delving contract had been breached.

All delves, including the team delves with The Order, were postponed a day. That meant the only thing I had to do for the day was attend the Council hearing.

Nina grouched, "It seems fine, I'll admit. They are making Velez whole in the deal and increasing some fees we receive so I can't reasonably complain, even if I don't love it. And no, you will not be renegotiating your delve fees again." I grumbled slightly but she continued unabated. "Accepting this deal will make an enemy of Chazin Mark, or at least of some members of the Council. I want you to understand that."

I had considered it but really didn't mind.

Worth the trade.

If the city couldn't hold up their end of the bargain, I had to look out for me and mine first and foremost. I was sure Aras could take care of himself if the Tier 3 came to Chazin Mark on a delve contract but I couldn't imagine how I'd feel if Milda or Vesna, the people I'd given null essence affinity, died here because the city was sloppy when I could easily prevent it. Their contracts would also involve Pitola teams if they came to Chazin Mark.

The meeting with the Council was contentious but not as bad as I imagined. They were still in their silly robes but the platform had been lowered significantly so they weren't towering over us, only about two heads above.

"You breached the contract. We can send the evidence to Zalano for an arbitration if you wish to dispute it. But I don't think you want that," I said.

The robes all shifted uncomfortably again. Apparently sending disputes to the capital was not good but I hadn't received a great answer into why just yet. When pressed, Nina said she'd have Lurka fill me in when I returned to Velez.

I stepped back and held my hands out like I was sorry, putting on my practiced 'let's just get past this' smile. "So it's either accept the Pitola deal or we simply walk and you get nothing. With this deal, you get your rifts back into proper shape now and Velez still sends our other teams here in the future. You also never have to see me again. I think those are all wins."

"Chazin Mark shall remember this," Middle Green said ominously.

I barely held back my snort.

Nina had spoken via AAI with five of their Council and most seemed to not hold too much of a grudge. It was just business and they hadn't lived up to their end of the contract.

But they needed to save face so I let them.

As we exited, I ran into my teammates Inara, Pavel, and Romie, Steve hiding in Romie's hood, clearly preparing to jump out and try to scare me. I could feel his absolute exhilaration at the thought.

Inara hooked her arm in mine as I gave a slight nod to Nina, who was going to spend the day securing additional trade deals before she travelled back to Velez at the end of the following day.

"We've got a whole shitload of stuff planned," Inara said with a smile as Steve leapt out, surprisingly timing his jump perfectly to clamp across the front of my head like a facehugger.

***

As I was heading to bed, I reflected on my day after the meeting with the Council.

First, Inara took us all to see a play. We later found out that it was the backups to the understudies for the local playhouse. Literally the third string cast.

That explained why there were two amazing performances mixed with some actors even Steve knew enough to 'say' were bad. He tried to throw some of our popcorn in disgust but I intercepted before it could hit any of the other seven whole people in attendance.

Still, it was a nice break before we saw a trainer that worked with local delving teams. He was so different in philosophy and demeanor from Risto, our usual trainer, that it was refreshing and we picked up a few new ideas.

Ratmir pulled Romie away to talk rift measurements and observations after lunch. Ratmir's extreme excitement about figuring out why spells behaved strangely in the rifts near Chazin Mark was luckily not contagious. The mad scientist tried get me to go with him and Romie but I declined, choosing to tour the city with the rest of my team and a few of my contacts.

It was a nice, meandering walk; but Chazin Mark felt like a rust belt town in the US just before it hit a decline. My consulting work took me to many cities that had just that vibe: in the late stages of 'the before times' but with the writing on the wall. It gave a bit of a sour taste to everything but we still had fun.

I finished the day with a lovely, quiet meal with a merchant that moved to The MM a few years prior. She explained the incredible legal hurdles she had to jump through and was only able to emigrate thanks to her significant connections and bank account balance.

The woman also used to date Nikolaj so I had many juicy tales to tease him about the next time we spoke.

She excitedly shared her plans to pitch the idea of banking for 'the underlings', as she called them, to her higher-ups in her corporation. It was similar to our debit card idea if not exactly the same. Underlings wasn't a derogatory term even, it was the literal title of anyone not in the upper echelons of a corporation.

She claimed it would be a tough sell but I thought it was worth giving it a go.

As we entered our room for the night, I turned to my bond. "Steve, despite the start, it was a good day. And tomorrow, we'll be safe in the rifts for once. I think we did a good job today." I took his hand for a high five and he squawked in pretend indignation so I gave him head scritches instead as we laid down to sleep.

***

She swung at me, her dagger whooshing in front of my face.

I readied my shield, preparing for the next attack.

She leapt into the air and I positioned my shield just as I felt something wriggling behind me.

Tickling my butt.

"Point, Terry," Romie said with a smile.

Inara started to protest to which Romie smiled again and shrugged, miming locking their mouth.

"Babe, that was three violations and you know it," Pavel said with a grin.

Then, he waved me towards the reward distortion as our team leader pelted me with small pebbles in retaliation for 'winning' our competition. While the use of [Restricting Vines] to harry my backside showed extremely impressive control, it was also the third time she'd done something to cheat, breaking our no enchantments or skills stipulation.

Steve swung his little hand through the shimmering crack in the air. A solid bar of silvery metal descended into his waiting paw, almost falling out before he got a good grip. It was decently large for a rare metal drop, a bit larger than my middle finger and nearly the size of all of Inara's fingers on one hand combined.

I tossed it over to Romie for inspection. Our archer smiled. "Platinum, I think," they said, handing it to Pavel.

The spear wielder started throwing out numbers until Romie nodded, a way to work around the restrictions of Romie's Innate Capability where the more they communicated, the less effective at everything they were. Our archer estimated it was worth about 30 gold, which was a great change from the mostly mediocre hauls we'd seen recently.

Upon exiting, Steve handed over the bit of metal, only slightly reluctantly, to our delving guide Natalia. She whistled appreciatively as our entire group headed to the next rift. While often my team wouldn't go to the carried delves, it felt like the right call for us all to travel together for the entire day after all the craziness of the previous few days.

The two teams from Pitola were waiting at the second rift. They greeted us with a round of introductions and an explanation of their roles and their approach to the rift in particular.

After I informed them of the strange issues happening with spells and skills, where both used more mana than typical and were harder to cast, they adjusted a few strategies on the fly. Both teams collaborated on how to best provide me protection while clearing the rift efficiently and safely.

"Wow, it's nice to be working with professionals again," I said to an indignant scoff from Inara.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

I rolled my eyes at her while she stuck her tongue out at me as we both knew I didn't mean The Order. That got a few chuckles from the Pitolan teams before we headed through the undulating tear in the fabric of the world.

A verdant forest of towering deciduous trees met me on the other side, the light of a noon sun filtering through their canopy to bathe the world in green. About 50 feet (15m) away was a deer, looking innocent and docile. My desire to run forward to pet and hug the creature was strong.

And it was a lie.

A rift beast with a mental skill wasn't that rare but this rift was famous for three things.

The first was the incredibly strong aura that permeated the entire rift itself, not actually coming from the monsters, which was entirely unique on Putijama. The pervasive feeling told delvers they were safe and the monsters were friendly.

Only those with a strong focus on mild cultivation, often useful for casting difficult spells or enchanting, could easily resist the pull. I was literally leashed to my protection team from the start for good reason as I pulled against the Tier 2 rope immediately. However, if a team had strong mental resistance, the monsters were little more than fast-moving fodder.

The second reason was the meat of said monsters was considered some of the best eating in all of The Verdant Kingdom and there was a waitlist for people to bag their own game; oddly enough though, the meat spoiled within two days no matter the treatment, even jerky, and spoiled nearly immediately if handled by someone who hadn't been in the rift when the monster died. Chazin Mark and Pitolan restaurants were still trying to find a way around the restrictions.

The final quirk adding to the rift's fame was that it often gave incredibly strange rewards. Most were highly magical oddities – though many called them garbage – like a pen that would erase its own ink as soon as it dried or a bowl that very slowly refilled with water that was not sanitary, couldn't be boiled, and wouldn't sink into soil.

Many rewards were outright bad, the sword that gave people nose bleeds in the presence of someone they found attractive being the most famous example.

To my dismay, an arrow blossomed from the deer's eye within a second of entering the rift, my stomach threatening to bring up breakfast at the wanton butchering of such an innocent creature. Steve seemed to give me grief through our link, his intelligence-enhancing circlet clearly giving him resistance to the rift's aura.

It took a second but I started to fight against the feeling too.

I was only partially successful.

Luckily, I managed to keep my food down as the teams systematically slaughtered the adorable monsters. One of the protection team members brought me to a corpse; I shed a tear, thinking of Bambi.

Then they took my hand and put it into the dead monster's muzzle.

Holy shit, that thing's mouth is like a meat thresher! That's like the quintessential 'maw' from fantasy novels.

When I looked, I only saw flat teeth that seemed like they could probably hurt a bush but not a person.

Other than the constant feeling of sadness at the death of the lovely and harmless creatures, it was an anticlimactic delve. Our reward, which I let Steve collect since he wanted to show off that he was not impacted by the aura, was a strange metal rod with a stylized star on one end and the words 'pew pew' down the shaft. In English.

What the hell?

The leader of the clear team collected it from Steve a bit forcefully with a cloth-covered hand. "Exposure to some of the rewards has caused people to go a bit… funny…"

I explained to Steve as best I could through our link and pulled out his ball for him to play with instead. He rolled his eyes at my reaction for a second before taking the ball happily.

That circlet better not make him a moody teenager…

I got a small cut of the deer-like meat to put in my spatial storage ring to see if it had any impact given it somehow accelerated decomposition of food.

We exited the rift and handed over the rod to Natalia; she planned to take it into town to be appraised while I delved the third rift of the day.

Chazin Mark bumped the number of delves for the day to six total rifts, four with teams from Pitola and two with my own team.

As I recovered from the mental effect, I chatted with the two teams I'd just delved with. Both planned to stay in the area for a few days and delve other rifts. The clear team had actually done a few delves with Vesna near Pitola.

"Oh yeah, that girl was a hoot full of hollers, she was," their mage said. I had never heard the phrase but got it meant she was fun to work with.

Good, hopefully she's returning to her old self and we can get past the weird life-debt shit.

Genuinely interested in how the Pitolan Mayor had put things together so quickly, I asked about logistics.

The same woman excitedly shared, "Oh yeah, that ol' lass said 'nyone who wadn't too deep wit' them there Adventurers Guil' should have a looksie. Weird ta say, ya know but still, we be liking our independence." I was surprised that my AAI caught the weird accent but thought it was pretty interesting.

Inara noted it was a bit strange that the teams didn't know each other and travelled separately.

However, both teams refuted that, saying most teams in Pitola didn't know each other and they were told to make their own arrangements rather than forming a big group to travel.

The third rift was, if anything, even more of a ho-hum one for the teams with me.

The hopping beasts, a cross physically between a kangaroo and a sloth, were dispatched with such brutal force, it was incredible to watch. The clear team easily avoided the long, clawed hands that swung fast enough to make a noise and parried the vicious kicks that could disembowel a low Tier 2 with ease. I took video to analyze with my team for how we could work so efficiently.

The reward was unfortunately rather lackluster, a small bit of silver falling into Steve's hand.

The teams heard Steve was on a roll from getting a decent chunk of platinum and an interesting wand so they figured he might be lucky. The little sugar glider – though not nearly as little as he once was – chittered sadly upon seeing everyone's face fall at the mediocre drop.

Finally, it was time for the rift I was most apprehensive about for the day.

***

SHRIEK

I swung to the right, obliterating a cheap plastic chair.

Feeling through our bond the direction Steve indicated, I'd missed the exact target.

While the little bugger wasn't subtle in pointing out enemies, he was the second best mimic detector on our team.

Upon realizing where he meant, I smashed my morningstar into the giant sub sandwich while pumping mana into its weight-increasing enchantment.

Instead of bits of sandwich flying everywhere, the disgusting-looking. meter-long party meal let out a strangled screech, transforming into multiple blobby, sticky limbs and a slavering maw, reaching for me as it bled profusely, silver blood dripping to the floor.

The rift had different themes and we were delving the shopping version. It took from all four of our memories to create a mix of an open-air bazaar and an outlet mall.

Some of the stalls had bright and colorful clothing that disintegrated when touched while another had something like handheld gaming systems and games if they were designed for André the Giant, so massive even my huge mitts looked rather small holding them. Of course they didn't work and were more like stylized rubber than actual electronics but I still grabbed a few for use as decoration.

As a team, we all used the rift for training our spiritual sense in addition to our visual spotting capabilities. Mimics were incredibly hard to notice until they started moving, as that was their entire gimmick.

A monster that looks like a chair isn't really anything without being able to surprise people.

Romie was the best at detecting the creatures that could pretend to be anything but the mimics were an odd drain on our archer's Innate Capability.

Their Cap seemed to count shooting an arrow into one of the monsters as 'saying' something like 'there is a mimic, you should kill it' so Romie's combat effectiveness dropped precipitously at the start of the delve before we shifted their role to emergency kill only.

While my spiritual sense was apparently more honed than Inara or Pavel, I paled in comparison to Steve. My pride wanted to believe it was simply his intelligence-enhancing circlet.

But then I really considered his role in our delves: he could only really see behind and to my sides from his backpack with windows. So he was probably constantly focusing on sensing what was in front of me most delves, enhancing his spiritual perception far beyond my own.

I'll have to use that more when I'm being carried in a delve, reaching out with my spirit. Seems like great training.

As we moved forward, taking on a store filled with really awful-looking Earth-style suits and professional shirts, the rift's difficulty increased significantly. It was still hard to not laugh at the suit with Daisy Duke-style cutoff shorts.

That thing would have my cheeks falling out the bottom.

We entered the final building, stylized like the Town Hall in Velez. It was positively littered with items across over a hundred stalls and even the smallest trinket could turn out to be an enemy.

Steve let out seven quick shrieks to indicate he detected that many enemies near us.

At least four were obvious, one engaging each of us.

Mine was previously two halves of a watermelon but rose to be six feet, picking up objects to smash against me with its nine gelatinous arms.

My shield deflected the first blow, a leg of bear exploding in a shower of disgusting meat.

The second swing, one directly at my feet below my shield, was insidious.

Of course I didn't block, it was going to lightly smash against my armored boots.

Instead of a baguette, the object was another mimic, latching on and starting to ascend my leg.

Trying to block against an overwhelming force smashing object after object against me while a monster slowly climbed up my armor, sticking small needles into every potential weak spot in said armor, was not fun.

I quickly turtled up behind my shield as best I could, using my right arm to frantically smash my weapon against the smaller mimic crawling up my legs; it was mere seconds from reaching my crotch.

I do not want to find out how strong my codpiece is!

Inara called for a fighting retreat.

In one way, the mimic trying to turn me into paste helped with that.

It smashed half of a booth into me, sending me flying back towards the entrance.

Of course, the entrance doors were also a mimic, one that had stayed so well hidden none of us detected it.

Flying through the air, I activated the weight-increasing enchantment on my armor and morningstar. As my weight increased, my trajectory sunk down towards the bottom third of the giant mimic.

I hit with a bone-rattling impact, boots outstretched to utterly obliterate a large chunk of the fake doors which then nearly fell on me.

The blow reverberated through my entire body and I remembered what it was like to try to walk after a six hour flight – or a similarly long gaming session – if I didn't get up a few times. My stumbling steps took me clear enough for Inara to stab at my crotch, deeply wounding the mimic still clutched there.

Back in the open air outside the final building, three mimics that we'd missed were suddenly pretending to be boxes. Of course, they were extremely obvious with gibberish writing on the side so Inara, Romie, and I each attacked one while Pavel held off two larger mimics trying to exit the building we'd just retreated from.

It took another twenty minutes before we were able to rest and recover, having killed over twenty mimics that kept pouring from the Town Hall-like building.

The final fight was exceptionally annoying if not all that challenging. Instead of one giant creature, we had to kill tens of smaller ones before they could congeal into a larger and larger mimic. Since we were at the final fight and wouldn't delve the next day, Romie went all out, calling out each mimic before they began moving.

They couldn't actually shoot their bow well enough by the end to hit the small creatures but we wrapped everything up with their and Steve's help.

My armor came out looking pretty trashed but a day of channeling mana slowly into the self-repair enchantment and it'd look like new. Still, a hole in the exact place men's underwear on Earth had that weird fly didn't look great.

Our reward was a common natural treasure. It slightly improved the ability to hide your spiritual presence.

I was excited since it was deemed a natural treasure. However, it was only worth five gold since the improvement was so minimal.

We exited and Natalia merely raised an eyebrow at my new crotch hole before I handed over the reward.

Our rift guide took the small, mostly translucent mushroom and popped it into her mouth. At my strangled cry, she laughed. "Oh don't worry, I have a standing order. Even paid seven gold so you got a good deal! I'm going to lose money on this whole guide thing but it's worth it, see?"

She disappeared from my spiritual sense entirely.

It was utterly strange to be looking at someone and not able to sense them at all. It was like my eyes were the thing malfunctioning rather than my spiritual awareness.

I hadn't realized I'd developed such a strong reliance on my spiritual sense since starting cultivating. It made me want to train my senses that much more so I couldn't be fooled so easily in the future.

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