14 Making Friends In High Places

The next day on what should have been a normal day of rest lounging around Lucinda's house on a variety of internet and gaming devices, I received a notice from the Bureau.

I had been pinged, reviewed, for not just one but three different portal assignments within the state. The first thing I noticed was that all of the dungeons were over my pay which meant it got paid overtime. However, the very first case file for me to review was an E-rank insect portal with more than one type of bug and neither of them were arachnids.

Case file number one was a hard pass while case number two would have once been tempting. If I had not already taken a slime bath in an E grade slime dungeon. The last thing I wanted was to deal with another over-tiered slime boss even if the team leader that pinged me was an ice mage sub-healer.

This really left me with only case file number three. Even if it had turned out to be an underground portal with subhumans and slimes, I would have had no choice but to accept. Luckily, it was an outdoors subhuman portal in the area of what was described as a nomadic settlement.

These goblins and lesser subhuman mobs would be good live training for using my revolvers. As well, it would be the practice I had been waiting for when it came to my big sword. The goblin settlement was confirmed to possess stone weaponry which included some archers.

However, the headcount was roughly one hundred in number with only a pair of larger hobgoblins and a troll for leadership.

Lucinda would be fine with a high-population low-firepower E rank dungeon like this one, right? There was a starting team of five seeking multiple ranged members and the leader was an F grade healer in his older years. They would definitely play it safe, just the way Lucinda liked.

Right?

Lucinda was currently away on a management trip running monthly security and staff checks for a C grade territory in the neighboring state only a couple hundred miles away from us. She would not know about this assignment until she got back if I procrastinated accepting it. Even if I accepted it, now, there was nothing she could do about it.

As my legal guardian, even if she could not really deny my access to a portal she still had full access to my reviews and requests. She could, though, do pesky and petty little things like turning my portal grade permissions off before changeover deadlines. She kept me from doing two assignments a month for the first two months that way.

Contrary to all of this, though, I accepted the subhuman assignment BEFORE updating my profile with my new gear.

The portal had opened less than a hundred miles away from my 'home' address and the leadership assignments had gone out the same day. Yesterday. The actual raid was planned to be in two days with the potential for one day of stalling. If I was drafted quickly enough, though, Lucinda could do nothing about it.

Apparently, I was even one of the first ten people who was reviewed by the first accepting team leader.

I was actually really happy to see that my ratings in the E grade were so high for me to be in the first ten F grades in the E lists. Ms. Gwyn must have said some really nice things about me. Now I could only hope the team turns out decent.

Since today was a rest day I could not allow myself to make any physical preparations. However, I could still allow myself to kill time making a few phone calls to different parts of the Bureau. Even though I was of low rank, I was an academy graduate and my guardian was a longstanding government agent so I had SOME access to the inner workings.

I had one friend on the inside who kept me up to date on technology advancements, such as research on how to send and receive information with mana. One of the biggest issues between the rest of the world and portals was the inability to record valid audio or visual information inside the portals. Old Polaroids and stuff still worked, but a handful of still images of combat or carcasses was not the same.

There were people out there who thought there was big money in recording and selling dungeon raids so it was something that I was frequently checking on.

Aside from trying the stream portal raids, a few other development projects were things like mechanized armor suits and various magic-integrated forms of weaponry. There were some things that were successful, like beam rifles that fired rays of mana to replicate a common attack spell. However, the difference in attack power made the mana rifles a B grade weapon that cost a couple million dollars.

The lethal range on such a rifle, though, was only around one hundred yards. Even the range, though, outclassed most magic users under B grade. The weapon currently in the works that had my interest was a more compact handgun version. The current lethal ranges on such a weapon were only twenty yards and the output was in D lower D grade, but the weapon was on the fast track to C grade modifications to increase its lethal range by another ten or twenty yards.

Twenty yards really was not much distance, but a beam of concentrated mana would burn a hole through anything between me and that twenty-yard point B. Slimes showed resistance to this heat-light magical attack because they were mucus, but sustaining the shot within effective ranges for a couple seconds at a time can make up the difference.

Once I was done bugging people about experimental technology I went down to the basement to take out a small collection of odds and ends. The chest containing them all was an old fashioned giant trunk covered in leather with an antique black iron key. The contents of the trunk were keepsakes and trophies from my missions

From the last mission was a cracked up portion of spider face carapace that was broken off of the slime spider's head. Its empty eye sockets were still just as creepy to look at now as they were in the portal. However, this carapace which had a physical grade of E gave off a residual MP signature of over two hundred because of the boss it came from.

From the mission before that was the second highest grade slime core, the core of the slime that has tried to crush and consume our team leader. The MP rating on the core when I brought it homes was over one-ten. Now, the core had basically 'died' with less than half of its original signature.

A bloody stone ax that once belong to the hobgoblin boss of an F ranked dungeon, an umbrella sized stretch of slime skin, and a necklace of goblin canines from my first dungeon were all the trophies I managed to obtain. The ax had an MP of more than twenty, the slime skin was over thirty, and the necklace was the highest F rank signature at my own current rating of just over fifty.

Could I make anything of interest out of these things? Maybe arrows from the teeth and I could have a fire mage melt and compact the carapace into a small shield or big dagger. However, these things served a far greater purpose for me.

Whenever I was alone or simply had the time, I would come downstairs at first hold these trophies while meditating but now I circled myself with them. These might not have been long lasting cores or proper magical resources, but they still carried MP and MP was like radiation. The more you were exposed to it the more it would accumulate.

With a D grade signature directly in front of me and numerous F ranked artifacts surrounding me, I had high hopes for today's meditation session. In the academy, I could get between two and five MP to stick after exposure to the ambient release of an inorganic mana core of the same rank. When a higher grade core was emptied in the same room as me twice and I only gained four and six either time, I was no longer seen as useful for the tests.

If I could go up two or three points just from basking in the signatures of random objects from my assignments, that would be the same as spending the day working out my entire body. The benefits of speed of climbing two or three points a day on top of my missions would be endless.

Even though Lucinda did not believe me, I was fully convinced the two-point difference in my measurement after the fateful slime mission and after a day of meditating was from exposure to the slime core I brought home.

Now, though, I had a signature two ranks above my own only two feet away from where I sat with my eyes closed monitoring my breathing. In the academy, I learned to meditate early on not because it was taught to me but because it was the easiest way to pass time during the exposure testing. If you spent six hours in a small room next to a cracked goblin core with a giant mirror covering one wall and were told not to do anything at fourteen years old, you would learn to meditate.

For me, the point was to breathe evenly in and out while doing everything possible to be unaware of time. In order to let time pass without any form of measure, I had to learn not to think at all. Once you could literally go with a blank mind for more than a few seconds at a time, it became fairly easy to just turn off real quick. Maintaining the 'off' setting was the hard part.

Even now I could only spend half an hour 'in the dark' before something seems to disturb me and I come to. However, for the sake of replicating my exposure tests, I still made these meditation sessions last around six hours. Even if the affects were minimal or nonexistent, I needed all of the help I could get.

This was how I often spent my rest days and core workout days, sitting or lying around with all of my trophies.

Roughly an hour into my meditations, though, my phone went off with another review alert. I was once again one of the first ten people reviewed for a portal that had just opened today. However, the image of the team leader under the portal location on the digital case file was a familiar face.

I almost applied for the assignment then and there, but I had to stop and check the information first. The portal was just today stabilized, scouted, posted, and accepted. The environment was an outdoor mountain woodland territory with confirmed sightings of a subhuman settlement with incorporated giant rodent animals.

These giant rats were a lower D grade creature that usually spawned in D grade underground portal environments but infrequently appeared in smaller versions as subhuman mounts. These rats were usually blind underground with three tails but the topside rats had two tails and functioning eyes. Underground, they were about five feet long without their tails and four feet tall.

In the light of day, they were usually four feet long without their tails and two or three feet tall. A full sized cave rat would often be seen as the portal boss' mount. The portal boss' was usually the settlement leaders as well.

This was obviously another upper E portal with unconfirmed goblin numbers and evolutions. One Lucinda would definitely yell at me if I said no to. However, if all went well and I could call in a favor to sneak it through the system… I just might manage to make it to both portal assignments.

I just might be able to START the month with two portal missions and get a third later to rake in all the money I can!

This time after checking the initial mission start date, I applied for the mission and then called Lucinda. If I was going to do something wrong, I had to do it right.

"You never call me, are you dying?" Lucinda asks after picking up in the short space between the second and third rings. She was handling matters of national security, should she really be able to answer the phone this quickly?

"No, I just wanted to inform you I accepted an upper E dungeon without your permission because Ms. Gwyn was leading the team again," I inform her in a somewhat quiet but hurried voice to emphasize what time it was for me. "It's a mountain forest outdoor subhuman dungeon with unconfirmed numbers but its upper E because they have cave mice in the settlement. The only other available option is a desert prairie outdoor subhuman portal of middle E."

"Why don't you go with the lowest E possible, then?" Lucinda asks dryly. Not caring at all that the one I wanted was with Ms. Gwyn.

"Because they have confirmed numbers of a hundred goblins… three trollkin hobs... and an actual troll," I reply simply. "Now, we both know I would take that mission in a heartbeat just to practice soloing next-level mobs. However, YOU would yell at me until my ears bleed."

Probably because it was still any team besides Ms. Gwyn's, who she had for no reason decided was building a private team to jump levels with, Lucinda seems distracted as they say, "They probably need you, then. How many people do they have and how many are they looking for?"

"Uh… the leader is an older guy but he's also the healer and comes with a pair of tanks and swordsmen, not unlike the team build from last time," I reply honestly. "They're reviewing ranged fighters and magic users for three remaining slots. This would also be an optimal build and number distribution for a full party," I add with a straight face but a smiling voice. "All they're missing is a second healer."

"Funny," Lucinda retorts sourly before being quiet for a seconds. "I'll check the information on both assignments and see what they look like. Depending and who has what builds, I'll let you know which assignment you can go on. I'll call you later around dinner time, don't start smelling like a dried up slime core."

Then she hung up on me.

Right after the call with Lucinda was over I sent a message to the original team leader through his contribution app profile and told them to accept within the next couple of hours and remove the delay potential because I was reviewed for another subhuman portal. And I was inclined to take both assignments.

After writing out that boring paragraph and hitting send, I dialed up a friendly number from the academy. The number belonged to a 'cross-combat' instructor at the academy who liked using me as a training dummy for the upper grade students. From him I got the number of someone managing portals in my area through my academy favors and got them to help me hide a future acceptance.

This cost me a future favor with the Bureau's portal registration department, but that would likely only lead to more money in the future.

Once I had secured the privacy of my second dungeon, I called Ms. Gwyn's private number and had a short talk with her about how my guardian was currently out of town and to wait until the last day of the their three-day recruitment period. That would hopefully be my day of rest after the first dungeon, giving me another day of rest before the second dungeon.

Unless I actually broke a bone or something, I would be fit for the second dungeon with two days of rest. Not to forget, I would get a month's pay in a week from doing two reckless jobs like this. My immediate monetary concerns would be satisfied and I still had more than two hundred contribution left over.

Just another hour later after I had managed to empty my mind for almost twenty minutes, my phone went off with the alerts of a few messages and a Bureau notification. I was notified I was made a part of the first subhuman portal's team, received a message from the team leader thanking me for the heads-up and my participation, as well as a message from my new Bureau friend that I had been cleared for both missions and simply waited on acceptance.

I quickly called Lucinda to let her know that I had already been accepted by the team opposing Ms. Gwyn. She turned out to be completely fine with sending me up against a troll and a hundred goblins as long as it was not with Ms. Gwyn.

*