“Officially, the requirement for a C-ranked bandit quest is to destroy one band of bandits. Officially, that is ten Bandits. A troop of Bandits would be 50. A murder of Bandits would be 100. Anything more would be an army. Given your current rank as an F, completely a single C quest would be enough to bring you to E. Another 5 would bring you to D, and 50 to C. So, in short, to reach C, you’d need to bring down 500 bandits by yourself to be able to just reach my rank.

“In general, I’d say this was the worst way to gain levels as an Adventurer, and I’d advise anyone else to do something else. However, I’m also aware that you were ordered by the future King to help clear out bandits, but a single formation cannot reverse the tide of a battle this bad. It’s going to take the army and powerful generals to be able to recover this land. I guess what I’m saying is that this mess is outside of our pay-grade. If it wasn’t for your need to level and your promise to the King, I’d have already returned and paid the cancellation fee myself.

“I recommend that we play it safe. We engage when other people engage. We work with the town to repel them. You gain a few levels, and then we can see about finding you other missions to complete.”

I knew that Ruby was just expressing her genuine feelings at this moment, but she also hadn’t seen my group fight. I supposed she was basing us on her experience with other groups. However, my girls were not like other groups. It wasn’t the fact their levels were higher that differentiated them from an average Adventuring team. Rather, it was all the boosts they gained from being close to me. As slaves of a Slave Master, they were stronger. As girls of a Harem Master, they were stronger. As the party of a Hero, they were better. Any given boost might be small, but they were adding up, and this discrepancy would only grow as I grew as well.

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It had been a long time since I had last done some serious leveling, and I had to admit I was eager to gain levels and get stronger. Every time I faced a powerful foe like Alysia, I was reminded of just how inadequate I was. It felt like a never-ending race with no finish line. The first thing I did was call out Map and then use Sense Life. My Sense Life could be spread out farther as long as I pushed mana into it. If I wanted to, it could work for the distance of a kilometer or two.

I was actually surprised at how well it worked here. The miasma of a dungeon, even with my high miasma tolerance, still restricted the distance of Sense Life. The often winding passageways further lowered it. I had never used it before on the surface. Although life was basically everywhere, it was able to determine all the enemy’s movements around the city in an instant. With me on a wall, I also had a good vantage point, and was able to take a good look around the perimeter of the city.

In short, it only took me seconds to gain more intel that this city likely had in the weeks before this. I almost wanted to act a bit smug about it, but I realized it wasn’t a good time for acting that way. Either way, it was time to make our first strike. I just needed to figure out how.