NOVEL WEB Chapter 5: A Truly Rational Alpha Protagonist
Before Aria went off to continue her little experience-farming adventure, she needed to invest her stat points.
“Alright,” Aria said, looking her status window over. “I’ve got… 41 stat points to spend from those achievements. It looks like I can’t put points directly into health, mana, or energy. That means those are probably tied to the stats themselves. In that case, let’s put a point into each just to figure out what’s tied to what.”
And so, it was time for science.
“If this was a web serial, I’d probably get to advertise it as ‘rational’ now for doing the bare minimum amount of thinking on how to get the most out of a system. I swear, those ‘rational’ readers will jerk off to common sense logic harder than anybody else. I wish I could mind break one. I bet they’re a bunch of nerdy bottoms. Well, I’d have to turn them into girls first and then mind break them. I don’t think any cute girls read that stuff.”
Aria shrugged and got back to what she meant to be doing: placing a single point into each stat and then checking on how her health, mana, and energy changed.
A single point into strength bumped her health up to 75.
A single point into vitality bumped her health up to 77 and her energy to 69. “Nice,” Aria said.
A single point into dexterity then increased her energy up to 71.
Next came intelligence with a single point into that boosting her mana up to 94, and a point of wisdom increased that to 95.
A point into charisma didn’t change anything else.
“If my head math is right, it looks like health might be… vitality plus half of strength multiplied by two. Then mana is intelligence plus half of wisdom multiplied by two, and energy is dexterity plus half of vitality multiplied by two. That means vitality is the most useful since it primarily affects health and secondarily affects energy, charisma is seemingly useless at the moment, and intelligence is what I need to focus on if I want to boost my mana as high as possible. Not sure how balanced that is, but I doubt whoever came up with this system is an entire team of educated game developers with expertise in how to balance an RPG system. Well, at least it seems like there’s some logic to this compared to most LitRPG worlds where all the numbers are pulled out of thin air fueled by pure plot convenience.”
Aria spent the next couple of minutes thinking about what to do next. While it was true that she very much did want to just dump every possible stat into intelligence to get her mana up as soon as possible, she was well aware of the fact that min-maxing to that degree always came with downsides. For example, all the points spent boosting her mana would be points not spent increasing her health and energy via vitality dumping. Or alternatively, since she only fought with melee attacks so far, they would be points not spent on strength to further increase the amount of damage she could do.
If she really wanted to be like a generic, boring, over-achieving “rational” protagonist that she kept on thinking of in her mind, the best choice would have been to split the points up between vitality and strength. That was what would give her the most immediate and effective increase in combat capability which might help her grind levels and achievements even faster.
But there was a reason why Aria never once enjoyed reading rational fiction nor ever even considered trying to write it.
And that reason was because… it was the most dreadfully boring thing in the world.
“Why would I try to be some rational tryhard when I could be a lewd futanari goddess who just wants to turn everything into waifus?” And so, Aria pumped all 35 remaining points into intelligence, bringing her up to a total of 69 intelligence. “Nice. Okay, so now my total MP is… 165! That almost brings me halfway to what I need for Raffy’s waifufication. It’s going to take way too long if I don’t just dump everything into intelligence, so that’s what I’ll be doing. And let’s see. Mental math, go! If my MP is intelligence plus half of wisdom multiplied by two, and turning Raffy into a cute girl is going to take 375 mana, then I need… 105 more points in intelligence. That’s a lot of achievements, but I should also gain stats by leveling, I’m assuming.”
Aria then thought of one potentially system-breaking idea and took out her tome to write the following edit.
Aria Paizuria will suddenly receive 105 more points of intelligence!
“Commit Edit!”
~Invalid edit.~
“Yeah, I should have assumed that wouldn’t work. Oh well. I guess this is the part where, if this was a book, things would either fade-to-black for me to grind a bunch of slimes and then summarize it afterward, or the entire grinding process would be painstakingly detailed to fluff up the page and word count so that the LitRPG fans can stroke it every single time they see a status box pop up with damage being done and experience being gained. Hmm. If I was the one writing it, I would probably skip most of it until a waifu is acquired and then give the LitRPG fans the fap bait they need.”
Aria shrugged and walked over to Raffy to give the plant a couple of pats on its side.
“I’ll be back soon! Just gonna go slaughter a bunch of slimes for the sake of experience. Bring out my inner murder hobo that LitRPG protagonists always need for success and to avoid salty readers calling them pacifist beta cucks. After all, if you’re not willing to commit borderline genocide against a monster species for the sake of experience, then that means you’re a pacifistic beta cuck in the eyes of the readers! Ah… if I would have known I was going to get isekai’ed and not have to deal with the repercussions, I would have called out all those idiotic commenters before coming here. Oh well. Time to embrace the 'alpha' protagonist way of life.”
And with that, Aria’s murder hobo spree against the forest’s local slime population began.
Raffy didn’t exactly understand the overly specific and wordy rambling of her new addiction, but the plant monster didn’t care. It was too happy sitting there with a “mouth” filled to the brim with her seed to care. After all, if there was anything that went with plants, it was seed. Perhaps a different type of seed was the intent, but this new type of seed was better than anything else imaginable to the plant! So, while Aria went off on her slime killing spree, Raffy stayed behind and used its tentacles to scoop up any cum that accidentally leaked over the brim of its mouth to drop it back in. Not a single drop could go to waste!