Chapter 42.2

That went over about as well as one might reasonably expect.  And being the subject of the ensuing, I felt my wisest move was to crawl under the bed and dig my way to safety.  However, lacking the necessary tools, I settled for the far less appealing option of holding very still and waiting for the lilim to return to sanity.

After all, how dare this Faen assume any right to me?  As an unbound whatever-she-was, her position within the hierarchy had already been far more tenuous than their own.  With this act, she had unequivocally proven herself an outsider.  It was a complete betrayal of my trust.

Mia disagreed on all points.  From her perspective, she was something like my own avatar, and as such, nothing she did could be a betrayal of any kind.  It would be akin to me betraying myself.  If anything, her position ranked even higher than the First.

No one else found her argument particularly compelling.  Least of all, Jax.

Or so I gathered.  The whole of the room was awash in thrown furniture, shredded bits of stuffing, and the sounds of everyone yelling over one another.  Stitching together some semblance of a reasonable argument out of all of it was an exercise in futility.

As a side note, I should mention that the lilim could hear Mia perfectly fine as long as she was in my head.  The particulars were still unclear but, as one might surmise, other matters had taken precedence.  To this, Lynnria appeared excluded, though given her situation… well, I will come back to her in a moment.

On my end of things, I was… flustered.  To put it mildly.

Coming from a largely monogamous culture, I had been unprepared for these sorts of arguments.  All this talk of hierarchy and rights seemed like complete nonsense to me—to everyone else’s immense frustration.  Where I came from, this sort of thing would usually end up being resolved by the police… probably by way of throwing me into the back of a squad car.

That said—and despite how intensely embarrassing it all was—I will admit there was a shameful sort of thrill to it.  After all, how often can a man expect to have a bunch of gorgeous women fighting over who is first in line to hop on his junk?

So instead of trying to deal with any of that, I opted for the head-in-sand approach and began delving into figuring out exactly what Mia had done to me.  Starting with the Stat Page she had flung into my face.

The Intelligence investment was doubly upsetting.  Not only had she pulled the point I had wanted from Toughness—something that was becoming increasingly critical for my build considering the heavy Life Energy expenditures it required—she had put it in a stat which did not benefit from Ahnbe’s little gift.  So I had also missed out on one of the points I could have gotten in Charisma.

And that sucked!  Far from being some narcissistic contrivance, Charisma was proving itself actually helpful.  It was a central component in my ability to improvise magic.

Or so I had gathered.  It was a working theory.

If that were not bad enough, I noticed two other items of rather extreme concern.  One was the Layer Gain settings.  Since Jax had been revived without my knowing, it had never occurred to me to change them, and because she was capped, that meant literally every point of Power that should have gone to her had been wasted.  Fully a third of the Gems we had consumed during our mad dash through the labyrinth had just vanished into the ether.

And that included a Grand Rank III—a Gem fully powerful enough for me to gain nearly ten Layers.  Not that I could have survived the process without our ritual, but that is beside the point.  I could have bought a house with that thing!

As it was, I had only gained the one Layer, though I knew from experience there was an enforced delay between them.  I assumed that was what the ‘pending’ notice was about.  It did not indicate how many Layers I had saved up, but I should have at least two more under my belt.

And for Arx… well, the math got a little funky there.  She was still in the Foundation Layers, but what with the exponential differences in Gem quality between ranks, I figured she would have enough saved up now to put her all the way to the Boundary.  After that, I could not say.  If she got capped like Jax had, the rest might go to waste.  Or not?

None of which was Mia’s fault exactly.  But when you’re already upset, trying to remain objective and fair can be challenging.  However, the same could not be said for the big, fat zero skill points I was staring at.  Because she had spent that, too.

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I always feel like stat tables and the like are used by a lot of authors to pad their word counts, especially when they are posted at the end of literally every chapter.  However, you guys haven't seen Donum's stats in quite a while, and this new skill is going to be a fairly interesting component in my plans for book 3.

So if you can see any possible exploits, flaws, or what-have-you, let me know.  It could influence how things move forward.