Progress Check

"See? This is your current level and skill distribution."

After leaving the church we'd parted from Crow, so for the first time in a while Ciel and I were alone. Well, alone except for Catra, who lay against me as she slept.

"Wow... That high already?"

"Level" was a term used when referring to the overall synthesis of various skills and abilities. It was similar to "stats," but generally speaking, "level" referred to the big picture and "stats" was used more to talk about the detailed breakdown of specific abilities. What the Appraisal skill revealed was mainly one's level.

"Level 80, seriously?"

"Seriously," Ciel said.

"Okay, actually, I don't really know if that's good," I admitted. Since routine Appraisals were limited to a very select few, the technical specs for stats and levels meant basically nothing to me.

"Hm, yeah... To put it in context, I'd say a B rank adventurer would generally be between level 40 and level 60. Level 70 is about average for A rank, and the bottom tier of S rank would be about level 80."

"Whoa..."

"Congrats. Just based on level, you'd be S rank. Of course, you don't yet have the necessary achievements."

It was hard to wrap my mind around, but it must have been true if Ciel was saying it. And by this point, with everything that had happened, it's not like I was completely lacking self-confidence. Still, it was hard not to feel skeptical at the thought that I'd already hit a level worthy of an S rank adventurer.

"Think about it, Remille. That former party of yours, rotten as they were, made it to S rank, right? You should be used to this level."

"Oh, yeah... I guess that's true."

"Mmhmm. Especially that leader guy. With proper training, he should be around the high 70s by now, I'd say."

Margus. He was seriously strong. So in other words, he could already be about at his peak from previous loops...

"Well, unless he has a truly exceptional teacher or awakens in the heat of battle, that potential most likely remains unrealized."

"Oh."

"Nevertheless, at your current level, there's a good chance that you'd lose."

I was surprised to hear such a statement from someone who had just been insisting I needed to gain self-confidence.

"Here," she said, "I'll explain the plan." She pulled out a piece of paper. "Why was your confidence so extremely low? It took me a while to put the pieces together, but I finally realized." She paused for a moment. "First of all, what do we mean by level? We could describe it as a general synthesis that takes into account all of a person's different stats, right?"

"Right." In other words, a high level means high stats, and vice versa.

"But that's not all. There's something else that has a major effect on someone's level. Do you know what that is?"

It wasn't hard to guess. "You mean skills?"

"Bingo." Ciel added a column to her paper. "Level is the overall combination of stats and skills. And when it comes to your current state..." She filled in the stats and skills sections of her paper with a rough bar graph.

"Wow, that big a difference...?" The bar for skills was fully twice as large as the bar for stats.

"I had been focused on using your XP to build up your skills. But the reason that you didn't have confidence proportional to your ability level is right here." She tapped her finger on the stats graph. "Clearly, your base stats are not up to speed with your overall strength and abilities. I'd wager they're not even at your previous peak from past lives."

"I think that's true..." I could feel it, somehow. My peak... That would be right at the end of the fifth loop. I was stronger then than I am now. I'm sure of it. At this point, I was still quite weak in basic things like raw physical strength, tactical analysis, reaction time...

Although, to be fair, maybe it didn't make sense to compare how I was now to how I was after three years of real-life experience.

"In any case," Ciel went on, "the fact is that right now only your skills are disproportionate. That's partly because your tamer skills are so highly developed."

Catra perked up at Ciel's words.

"Just like a typical trainer, most of your XP has gone toward progressing your skill tree rather than your own base stats. But at that rate, if you go up against a god, you'll be finished before you can make a single move, let alone tame them."

"Meeeep..." Catra yowled as though to protest Ciel's claim.

"I know," Ciel said to her. "You want to become stronger, but we're talking about facing a god. If you don't want to take the risk of getting your master killed, Remille himself has to be strong too." She turned and fixed me with a solemn gaze. "You said you wanted to tame a god, Remille. To do that, you have to get stronger."

"Yeah..." I braced myself for the worst. Buffing my stats would probably involve enduring some really severe training.

But once again, the next words from Ciel's mouth shattered my expectations. "So, we will continue to focus on taming."

"...Huh?"

"Ability Absorption," she explained. "When I Appraised you just now, I realized that your trainer capacity isn't maxed out yet. So this is the fastest way."

Ability Absorption... So that means... "I need to tame familiars other than Catra."

"Yes. Exhaustively. Dragons, ogres, elves—every single being of this world, you must make them yours. That is the road to taming a god."

Every single being... Wait, elves? Is that...allowed? That doesn't seem right... I pushed aside my jumbled thoughts—there were more important questions right now. "So... You're saying just waiting for Catra to mature isn't fast enough?"

"Technically that's not quite accurate... But that's the other thing I wanted to talk about." For some reason, Ciel looked not at me but at Catra.

"Meep..." Catra averted her gaze awkwardly.

"Huh? Talk about what?"

"By all measures, she already has more than enough power. When she fights she grows larger, but overall she maintains this immature form, which limits your power as well. She just wants to keep letting you spoil her like this indefinitely."

"Oh... Huh." I looked at Catra. For a moment she seemed to avoid my gaze, and then...

"Meeeep!"

Suddenly she sprang right at me. And... "Wh-What the...?"

"Grrrh! But I wanted to wait until I could transform perfectly before showing Master!"

...Catra had suddenly become a beautiful girl.

❖

"I told you. Disciple of the gods."

"Yeah, but how was I supposed to know what that meant?" Gods' disciples can turn into beautiful girls? Well, Catra wasn't quite perfectly human... She still had a long waving tail and catlike ears on top of her head. In some ways, she seemed more like a cat who had suddenly decided to start walking on two legs.

"Meep, don't look at me! The transformation's not complete..." As Catra became flustered in her embarrassment her fur became thicker, making her look less human and more like an anthropomorphized cat. The hands that hid her face became paws. Still, there was something cute about her shyness...

"It's rude to stare, you know." Ciel's voice drew my gaze back in her direction. "Well," she went on, "what do you feel?"

"Feel? What do you mean?" I turned my awareness inward. "Wh-Whoa, how...?!"

"This is the power that kitten was hoarding."

"Don't call meeeep a kitten! I wasn't trying to trick Master!"

"I know that," Ciel said.

I distantly registered their squabbling, but my mind was still focused inward. "All of this power...?" I had the sensation of my stats rising across the board, thanks to finally really experiencing Catra's growth.

"There's one more thing she's been hiding from you," Ciel said.

"Oh?"

"Do you remember a time she randomly vanished from your side?"

"Ummm, yeah, now that you mention it..." I could think of one time. I had figured she'd just felt like taking a walk or something. Since I'd known she would come if I summoned her, I hadn't thought much of it.

"She used that time to bring several additional monsters under her command."

"Meep... Forgive me..." For some reason Catra apologized meekly, head bowed, even her ears lowered in shame.

"Why are you apologizing?"

"Because...I left Master's side without permission, and I made new followers without permission..."

"But that just made you stronger, right? And when you get stronger, I get stronger. You did good, Catra."

"Meep?!" As soon as I patted her on the head she jolted upright, tail raised high and a bright smile on her face.

And in the same moment, her human form seemed to dissolve, and I found myself stroking a cat...

"That's enough of that. You'll melt her."

"Meeeanie!" Catra had reverted completely to her previous form, and was rolling around on the bed like a little kitten.

"Getting back to business," Ciel went on. "This is the true power level you're starting from. But it's still not enough to take on a god. I had to figure out where to go from here, and that includes how to make use of Catra."

"So that's why it took this much time."

"But it's clear now what we have to do, and it should also fix the whole low-confidence stat problem too. It's finally time to go to war."

Well, if Catra's minions were already assembled, then the next step did indeed seem clear. And while this discussion had been focused on long-term goals, a more short-term confrontation loomed before me.

"So it's really happening..." Soon, Margus. We'll have our battle. Just because I'd beaten him once didn't mean I could take anything for granted. I knew that all too well.

After all, we'd spent seven whole loops together...