“Yep, they’re lower than yours, Radd,” I finished with a gentle smile. “The reason I was able to fight so well was thanks to the skills I was using.”
I had known from the start that neither training nor leveling up were realistic methods of making Rex stronger. But that hadn’t meant I’d given up on getting stronger. So instead I’d turned to skills that didn’t rely on stats.
“For starters, I have better equipment than you guys.”
Radd and the others were wearing crappy armor because it increased their growth rates, but since I wasn’t planning on leveling, I could wear actually useful equipment. I’d given up on raising my Defense and all of my enchanted equipment raised my Strength instead. As a result, I was able to keep up somewhat with Radd and the others in terms of offensive ability. Furthermore, the weapon I’d used was the Metallic King Sword, which was the casino’s top prize. Unlike the Goblin Slaughterers, this weapon was strong enough to be effective even against enemies of this level. In fact, it was powerful enough to be a viable endgame weapon even. But of course I’d had both of those things before.
“What’s changed are the skills I’ve learned. In particular, I’ve picked up a lot of passive skills.”
Instead of training or grinding levels, I’d spent all my time acquiring various Class Skills that would make me stronger. In order to increase your class proficiency, you needed to use a Class’s Skills over and over. The higher tier a class was, the longer it took to gain class proficiency. However, Rex was a weirdo who’d acquired every single skill associated with the lower tier classes, which meant the only skills I needed to learn were ones that belonged to unique classes like Treasure Hunter, or Trickster, or Blademaster.
The important thing here though was that I needed to be able to grind out class proficiency efficiently in my spare time. The class Prana was using, Trickster, had a few skills that you could grind out pretty easily. The first skill the class got was Fast Swap. It was a simple skill that let you immediately swap out your equipped weapon with anything in your Inventory. Because it was so basic, it was the perfect skill to use for proficiency grinding. Offensive skills required you to actually hit an enemy before they gave any class proficiency, but Fast Swap gave proficiency just by using it. Whenever I’d been listening to someone drone on about whatever I’d been swapping weapons constantly under the table, and since I’d been swapping to the exact same type of weapon no one had even noticed what I’d been doing.
In this way, I’d found various tricks to grind out proficiency while doing other things with my time. In fact, the one Blademaster skill that I’d thought had been somewhat meh—Blademaster’s Presence—had proven the most useful for proficiency grinding. The skill unleashed a non-damaging shock wave that woke up any nearby characters afflicted with the sleep or drowsy status. It could be useful in some situations but frankly not that many enemies used sleep, and besides you tended to have a dedicated healer to take care of these things, not a Blademaster.
But now I understand the true value of this skill.
Sure, it was certainly not very useful in combat, but it cost next to no mana to use, and had a very short cooldown. Best of all, it gave class proficiency based on how many people it affected, which meant if you spammed it in a crowd you got a shit ton of class experience all at once. Unfortunately, you couldn’t really take advantage of that in the game. For one thing, huge crowds didn’t gather in too many places in-game, and furthermore you weren’t allowed to activate the skill unless there was at least one sleeping person in its effect radius. But in this world those restrictions were gone, and I’d discovered I could use it even when everyone around me was wide-awake. Furthermore, I myself had created a situation where huge crowds gathered around me once a week when I gave my lectures on manual Arts and when I appraised people. I’d been constantly spamming Blademaster’s Presence on them every week, getting rid of any drowsiness they might have had as a side benefit.
When I explained all of this to Radd, he said, “Old man... I can’t believe you were doing this the whole time you were giving lectures and appraising people... I actually liked some of those speeches, but now I know you weren’t even taking them seriously...”
“O-Oh come on, it’s fine isn’t it? Besides, everyone got their drowsiness blasted away for free.” I stuttered, before quickly regaining my composure and going back to explaining my grinding process.
Thanks to the Blademaster’s Presence spam, I’d managed to quickly get a lot of class experience for Blademaster, which was known to be a notoriously hard class to raise proficiency on. With just normal combat it would have taken a few months to master the class, but I’d managed to do it in a few days while idling in the city. It was honestly hilarious.
My goal had of course been to acquire the Twin Arts skill, which allowed you to copy the effects of a skill you used with one weapon to the weapon in your other hand. But I’d gone even further than that and also acquired the greatest passive skill, Ultimate Sword Mastery. It was entirely possible not even Nirva had this skill yet, considering how little time had passed since the goddess’s message which signaled the “start” of the game.
“What does Ultimate Sword Mastery do?” Radd asked, and I grinned.
“It has a simple but very powerful effect. It doubles all damage you deal with sword-type weapons.”
“...Come again?”
Nirva was stronger than most characters got, even at the endgame. Ultimate Sword Mastery was your reward for beating him, although you’d still also have to spend what the devs probably assumed would take dozens of hours to grind the Blademaster class up. It was an unbelievably powerful, game-breaking skill, but considering the stringent requirements to unlock it, that level of power made sense.
“Ah, by the way, there’s a weaker version of the skill called Sword Proficiency that the Swordmaster class learns which increases your damage with swords by thirty percent.”
“Really?!”
Sadly, passive buffs of the same type didn’t stack. So there was no point in me getting the skill, though it would be pretty helpful for Radd.