I was waiting at the rendezvous point Clarissa had set up. It was to the Northeast of Truth. We would be crossing a single level 3 zone and then be in range of the grinding teams of Normandy. I had spent this time exactly like I had planned. Beefing up Acid Shot and Aqua Sphere to ten upgrades each.

The dungeons in the level 2 zones around East Bastion had been quite easy. I just breezed through them. I did make note that two dungeons had the same skill Imbue Force and there were a couple of interesting skills. Drain Heat would freeze and area and there was Depressive Gaze and Decay Gaze.

I wasn’t that interested in changing out my skills, but I was hopeful for the future. The heist had given me hope that I would live through whatever the Astrologer had planned and the superweapon that was being developed gave me hope that the Divine Empress would be killed off.

It certainly wouldn’t be easy and there was a lot of risk. But for the first time since I got launched into orbit by the Divine Empress, there felt like there was a path to survival. It had been mentally draining to constantly worry about if all of this was pointless.

Hope was incredibly powerful. I had been losing mine, but now I had it made. The heist was a huge confidence boost and every day I felt more self-assured I could at least survive all these disasters heading right for me. The tower was no longer a death sentence in my mind either.

That was one reason I was willing to do all these support tasks for the super weapon. Before I had figured I would die on the climb. But now there was a good chance I would survive with my stats. Clarissa had helpfully given me two flasks with life crystals in them once again.

I noted she had kept one on herself. They had saved my life earlier and I wouldn’t say no to them again. Simple yet effective and almost idiot proof. I never underestimated the power of idiots, or at least I tried to. After the heist had worked, my faith in humanity had dropped by a large bit. People truly were idiots, but I wasn’t going to complain when I benefited massively from their incompetence.

Now we just needed to get the super weapon working and then build like 50 of them. Once that was done, the only thing to do was to get the Divine Empress in position. I had no doubt Clarissa would handle for information to be leaked from one location to another location, so the Divine Empress would go to find the kid, but then learn he was moved to another location. The Divine Empress goes there, where her kid is and we blow her away with maximum firepower.

I had mentioned to Clarissa, that high level enchanted blankets, or multiple of them, would be useful to hide a lot of crystals at the kid’s location. That way the impact of the cannons was even more. Clarissa said she would handle it and I trusted her.

Honestly that woman was saving my life at the moment. If I had to do everything she was doing, I would have died from overwork and stress. If she managed to kill the Divine Empress, she was getting all the raises, a retirement, minions, I had no objections.

It was frankly mind boggling that she could have everything somehow working while hiding out, not in a city and relaying orders and getting people to obey. It wasn’t just any one thing that was impressive, but everything together.

I could see how she did each part, but holding it all and building a super weapon was a masterclass in organization and people management while hiding out in a rebel camp. At least our rebel camps were nicer than the camps of the Rising Sun Alliance. They were trash compared to what Clarissa had set up.

All of this confirmed in my mind that I was not a good person to be in charge. Clarissa had come along way from that woman who had cut her eyelid to apologize to me. I had looked at her stats and she only had a couple of thousand. Nowhere near enough to be threat to me personally.

Teamwork was surprisingly the key to making our relationship and our possible empire work. I was hesitant to declare anything until the Divine Empress had been killed off. Once she was though, it would be perfect. Clarissa would set up the administration which would run itself and we would collect crystals passively.

My overwhelming stats would ensure compliance while she could sort out the administrative headaches. It would be perfect. I would also be able to finally relax and take a vacation. I didn’t know where I would go, but there would be a vacation to mentally detox.

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But all of that was contingent on killing the Divine Empress and getting the super weapon working. I now saw a path forward. The first step had been to upgrade Acid Shot and Aqua Sphere to ten upgrades each.

I had picked gestureless, speed, shape, multi-cast, nullification, and silent for the next six upgrades for Acid Shot. The cost had increased to 80 energy, but I was okay with that. I wasn’t going to be grinding again any time soon.

For Aqua Sphere I had gotten five more upgrades consisting of cohesion, shape, minor effect death, nullification and gestureless. Now all my skills were silent and gestureless, exactly what I wanted for my trip to this enemy city, where I would be facing off against people primarily.

Then once the I managed to get the information and wipe the city, I would clear some level 3 dungeons to upgrade my skills some more for the tower climb and possibly test myself against a level 5 monster beforehand.

I needed to know where I stood in the power structure of the Systemic Lands and what my effective combat level actually was. The tricky part was if I was overmatch, but I didn’t think so. I could kind of take on level 4 monsters before, and now with ten billion points I should be able to take on level 5 monsters, maybe.

The scaling was the most concerning thing. Based on the Body stat and physical power, I had observed the requirements going up by a factor of ten for each level. With level 3 being matched up to 1,000 Body. If this trend continued, a level 5 would have stats reaching up to 100,000.

I would be hitting up for sure, but I was finally getting the hang of my movement down. I had been taking the dungeon clears and this waiting period to practice my movements. To maximize the force of each foot twitch to propel and adjust my trajectory.

That was why my time estimate was completely off. I had ended up speed running the dungeons. That was a huge factor behind my surge in confidence. The level 4 and level 5 monsters would confirm my combat ability and then I would go into the tower and make my way up.

I wasn’t going to upgrade my skills past four upgrades on level 4. The costs were already high. I had been debating on my last skill slot for a long time now and was holding off. There just wasn’t anything that had caught my interest.

Clarissa had showed me the lists of skills that had been compiled by her, but none of them stood out. I was also interested to see what a skill from a level 4 zone and a level 5 roaming boss looked like. Getting and upgrading a skill wouldn’t work, if I swapped it out.

My hope was something very costly, but very interesting. Either a long-range attack, healing, or something esoteric I could use as a trump card. While skills at the lower level dungeons appeared to follow set patterns, my hope was that there would be a skill upgrade in a level 4 zone.

If I had more time, I would go check out the zones first, but I wanted to be able to upgrade my other skills if I didn’t like the skill choices once I defeated the roaming boss. So that was why I was waiting instead of running off.

I was taking this time really think about and test various things with energy as well. Something I needed to do was to mentally surge my Sense stat on and off constantly to check the area and try and use my senses other than my sight.

It was headache and nausea inducing, but keep Sense on all the time would make me vulnerable to things that had a way to hide from energy but were more easily visible. It wasn’t just a matter of turning the Sense stat on during combat, but making it a constant on and off thing.

My goal was to keep the timing down to one second between on and off. It was a short time period and the flashing colors were distracting, but it was something I needed to train on. After the stealth attack from before I knew I needed to more weary.

I had become over reliant on my danger sense. That knife stabbing me had been a wake-up call. There were ways around the danger sense granted by Perception. It was still very powerful, but it was infallible as I had once thought to catch attacks from stealth.

Also that ability for that cloaked figure to hide in stealth pissed me off. To just vanish like that. They were clearly using a combination of skills if I had to guess, but it was still annoying. I learned from my mistakes, no more people trying to do stealth nonsense.

I still had no good way to train my danger sense. I had talked with Clarissa, but the challenge was, that if I didn’t view them as a threat, it wasn’t so easy to trigger with how high my stats had become. That was something I would need to put a lot more thought into, to find a solution.

Perhaps the Astrologer’s real body wouldn’t be an ass and we could team up. That would be the best case. I would even be willing to give up a quarter of my future passive income in exchange for his technical knowledge and assistance killing the Divine Empress.

Afterwards we could always renegotiate. I still hadn’t been struck down for handing off Qi Ji Long to Clarissa and planning his role in using him to kill his mother. I didn’t sense any binding or any skill activate, so I was nearly certain the Avatar was full of shit.

Still, there was that lingering doubt. Waiting until after the tower to use the kid would be optimal, just in case. I didn’t think I would make it to the thousand-day limit. But I would clear the hundred day limit and Clarissa had agreed not to use the kid before then.

The main hold up was the super weapon anyways. Hopefully Doctor Katz would work everything out once he got the information was this NUCS nation. They were about to get nuked by a Champion Michael, so the acronym of their nation’s name was quite appropriate.