"Hah?! You're saying that Dungeon outbreak a few days ago was your fault?! Do you have any idea what you made me miss?!"
Inside Twilight Manor, Loki leaned over from her chair in the divine room and shouted directly into Shiro's ear. Shiro had already changed into fresh clothes and was sitting with his back to her.
Her ominous feeling had come true.
The culprit responsible for making her miss the girls in swimsuits had been right under her nose all along. What irritated Loki even more was that she could not even do anything to him.
"Damn it... I wasn't this frustrated even when I used to argue with that shrimp back in Heaven...!"
"Yes, yes. So, are you done with the update?"
Ignoring Loki's grumbling behind him, Shiro reached one hand back and waited for her to pass him something.
Now that he had finally returned to Orario, there was naturally only one thing he wanted to do first.
Level up after far too long!
From Loki's perspective, Shiro had only been gone for a little over a week. In reality, however, the amount of time he had spent away from Orario was far longer.
He had already lived with Edelweiss on that isolated sword peak for more than a year, never mind the academy life that followed and all the time he had spent in another world afterward.
During that period, Shiro had fought in more than one battle worthy of being called a great feat. He had most likely met the conditions for leveling up long ago.
Now it was finally time to see the results.
"Forget everything else for a second. How the hell did you raise your Endurance this much? Come on, tell me so I can have a good laugh."
Before Shiro even saw his updated Excelia, Loki had already ruined most of his excitement.
Falna stats rose according to a person's daily actions. Attacking increased Strength, while using magic raised Magic.
Endurance, meanwhile, increased by getting hit.
Translated into plain language, Loki was essentially saying, 'Tell me all the miserable things that happened while you were away so I can enjoy them.'
A few words might have been lost in translation, but Shiro was absolutely certain that was what she meant.
Judging by the way Loki was struggling not to laugh, his Endurance must have risen to a ridiculous level.
"If I had to pick the biggest increase, it was probably when I fought a swordswoman and she rammed a stone pillar as thick as a person's head straight through my abdomen. My upper and lower body were basically held together by a strip of skin."
Even now, remembering his battle with Edel-chan made Shiro's stomach feel strangely cold. Still, the result had ultimately been favorable.
So, to stop Loki from misunderstanding, he added one more thing.
"Technically, I won that fight. Though both of us ended up in pretty awful shape."
Loki went silent for several seconds.
"...You're serious?"
"...What do you think?"
Shiro rolled his eyes, took the parchment Loki handed him, and finally looked at his newly updated status.
[Torajirou Shiro - Lv. 5]
[Strength: I0 -> SSS1599] [Endurance: I0 -> SSS1599] [Dexterity: I0 -> SSS1599] [Agility: I0 -> SSS1599] [Magic: I0 -> SSS1599]
[Development Abilities] [Hunter: E] [Abnormal Resistance: B] [Magic Resistance: C]
[Magic] [Device] [Unbound] [Life Creation]
[Skills] [Desperado] [Celestial Star Spirit's Protection] [Intuition] [Companion's Bond] [Witch Factor: Inactive]
Aside from his Development Abilities, almost every one of Shiro's basic stats had reached SSS.
The value of 1,599 was probably the absolute limit of a Falna stat.
Otherwise, considering everything Shiro had gone through over the years, along with the skill that accelerated his growth, his stats should have risen far beyond this point.
After all, it had taken him less than a year to go from Level 1 to Level 5. There was no reason his stats would still be unfinished after more than another year had passed.
It was slightly unfortunate that he could no longer improve them once they reached the limit, but Shiro understood that gaining something always meant giving up something else.
If he obsessed over his stats and returned to Orario every month or two just for updates, the constant travel would waste an enormous amount of time.
More importantly, he would never have been able to settle down and train properly. Mastering Twin-Wings would have taken far longer if his attention kept getting interrupted.
As for the new entry in his Skills section, [Witch Factor: Inactive] was almost certainly the Sloth Factor that had attached itself to him after he killed Petelgeuse.
If possible, Shiro would rather get rid of it entirely.
Besides that, the only thing worth paying attention to was...
"What's with that new magic of yours?"
Loki's voice came from behind him again, but this time all the teasing had disappeared.
"The effect is ridiculous. It's already on the same level as some gods' divine powers. Where the hell did you get something this broken?"
"New magic?"
Shiro looked toward the final entry in his Magic section, the spell that had appeared for the first time during this Falna update.
[Life Creation]
[Chantless Magic]
[Consumes Magic to create life. The created life's abilities depend on the amount of Magic consumed.]
Just from the description alone, it was obvious how absurd the spell was.
First was the fact that it required no chant.
There was not much else to say about that. In a world where most magic required long chants, being chantless alone made a spell extremely rare.
As long as its actual effect was not completely useless, there was almost no way such a spell could be weak.
Of course, compared to chantless casting, which Shiro already possessed through another spell, the real focus was the effect itself.
Consume Magic and create life.
Even creating something as simple as a minor spirit, a creature with barely any consciousness, would normally be extraordinarily difficult.
Yet [Life Creation] could not only create living beings from nothing, it could also grant those beings special abilities.
This had already entered a realm normally reserved for gods.
From a certain perspective, if Shiro possessed enough Magic, he could continuously create lifeforms with different abilities and achieve something approaching omnipotence indirectly.
Of course, that sounded better in theory than it would work in practice.
For Shiro, aside from creating minions to help him fight, the spell mainly served to cover a few weaknesses.
He certainly did not believe his own Magic was enough to create an underling stronger than himself.
If a real battle broke out, wasting Magic to create a crowd of minions and gang up on someone would probably be less efficient than simply drawing his sword and attacking personally.
Even so, calling this magic broken was hardly an exaggeration.
As for where such a ridiculous spell had come from...
"Ah... That was actually what I wanted to tell you about in the first place."
Remembering everything that had happened before he returned, Shiro let out a long sigh and turned slightly toward Loki behind him.
…