A New Kind Of Grind

"So, first things first," I said, with the whole polycule gathered. It wasn't everyone who had the Succubus class, as Rachel was back in the Red Forest, and Akane's parents (plus Cecilia, who had yet to so much as suggest that Akane should call her 'Dad') weren't in the polycule. "There are five books from the Emperor, and they are all sealed in such a way as to require the Incubus class. Volume 1 just needs the Incubus class at all, but Volume 2 can only be unlocked by a Level 5 Incubus, 3 by a Level 10, 4 by a Level 15, and Volume 5 requires a Level 20 Incubus to unlock."

"...What level are you?" Akane asked.

"Level 4, but, only for now," I said. "See, I've already unlocked and read Volume 1, and wouldn't you know it, the basic primer on how the Incubus class works happens to include information on how to level it up."

"How is that done, by the way?" Elendar asked. "It's occurred to me that, despite being a Level 2 Succubus, I have no idea how I got that way, aside from the fact that I wasn't one of those two weeks ago."

"Well, honestly, it's so simple that I'm disappointed I didn't figure it out sooner," I said. "Y'know Reified Lust, that resource that our classes generate when we indulge our lusts, from as light a thing as sexy daydreams to regular ol' sex, and that we spend to do sex magic and/or unlock crafting synergies? Well, it turns out that's our XP, too, and when we gather enough of it, we level up without any real fanfare, or any real clue how much was necessary. Thankfully, there is a written table of how much Reified Lust is necessary to level up both Incubus and Succubus, with some more data given for how much Reified Lust certain common activities give, although it seems to be there mostly as examples and ballpark estimations for building up a basic intuition, rather than as hard numbers we can do ecumnomics with."

"Did you just say ecumnomics?" Ariel asked.

"I'm going to spare you the numbers for now, although of course you are free to peruse the book yourself if you're curious, because the important thing about all this information is that it outlines the path towards us getting even more power, as well as providing some tantalizing hints about what leveling up can get us," I said. "The simple version is this: I can siphon the Reified Lust produced by y'all, my Succubi, so for me to level up and unlock more stuff, we don't need me specifically to fuck a lot more."

"I mean, it's not like you're not pulling your weight on that front," Lisa pointed out.

"I'm not terribly possessive of my Reified Lust, considering how much of it was made by you," Nicky began, "but I do need to ask if concentrating all of our resources into one person is the wisest idea?"

"There's tradeoffs," I said. "As the level of the Incubus or Succubus goes up, so too does the amount of Reified Lust they create, and therefore, there is good sense in y'all leveling up first, so that you can make Reified Lust faster. However, I've done the math, and come to a few important conclusions. One: I fuck way more than any of you do. The only person who comes close to fucking as much as I do is Akane, and I can tell this because she's the only Level 4 Succubus in the group- everyone else is a Level 1 or 2, except for Nicky, who's a Level 3. Two, a Succubus is inherently bound to an Incubus, and whatever level their Incubus is, that's their level cap. So Akane can't level up any further until I level up, and I need to take y'all's Reified Lust if I wanna do that sooner."

"Hrm," Anzerath said, tapping her chin. "...Should we pop back over to the Red Forest so you can make a bunch of Succubi among the wood elves? They certainly fuck a lot."

"That's not a terrible idea, and in all honesty I do think it'd be fun and hot to gather a bunch of volunteers and strap them into a conveyor belt so I can clock into a shift at the creampie factory and bang an endless succession of curvy redheads, but there is also the fact that going back to the Red Forest would take a lot of time, and we are now on the clock. Also, possibly more importantly, there is a limit to how many Succubi I can have at my level. There's eight of y'all, plus three more from Akane's parents and their new girlfriend, and I made Rachel a Succubus, bringing me to twelve... out of a maximum limit of sixteen."

"Four wood elves fucking their hearts out are definitely going to be more productive than no Succubi in those slots at all," Nel pointed out.

"I'll consider it," I said. "However it is I get to Level 5, it'll involve me spreading my load, and it's all but guaranteed to happen before the new year. The next thing that needs to be discussed are some important sex magic techniques that can improve the efficiency of lust harvesting."

"That's the most disconcerting phrasing you could've used," Elendar said, frowning.

"The most important one, which I've just unlocked for myself and will be giving to all of you, one way or another, is an ability that gives you Reified Lust from the passions of any other participants in the act," I continued. "It seems to the weaker form of an ability that comes fully online at a higher level, but it is still, on average, a 150% increase in the Reified Lust gained from sex, even if it's between us- if Akane and I fuck in a way that'd normally give each of us 100 lust, then with this ability, we would both each get 150 lust, and nothing would be lost."

"How come you didn't know about this ability already?" Akane asked.

"The system interface for the more permanent side of Incubus is a bit confusing to navigate, and also most options are hidden until I meet certain prerequisites," I said. "I'm gonna try checking it more often, but there's still gonna be lapses between when an option is available, and when I get around to actually noticing. You may have realized by now that I have a peculiar sort of congenital brain damage that makes it hard to manage my focus."

"We've met you, yes," Elendar said, dryly.

"So, what's next?" Nicky asked. "Are you and Akane going to lock yourselves in a bedroom for a week, or..?"

"Our higher multipliers would be better used by fucking people besides each other," I said. "If we were going to do that kind of lust-grinding, then we'd bring one or two others into the room with us before locking the door. But no, right now, we need to do... a lot of prep work before going to the Glass Desert and building a city from scratch. I need to design a modular prefabricated apartment building, and make a factory to actually build the damn things. And, uh... Oh, right, Ariel and Lucy need to be taken on a Level 13 delve to get their class levels up... Oh, and I also need to use the fluids I got from them to make those damn Trait Potions so that I can take Oracle and Swordsage. And I think that it'd be really nice if one of you, I'm not picky who, took it upon themselves to think about what kinds of services and amenities a densely-populated city on par with Dornhelm would need and/or want. We can get to the fucking later. Right now, we have other shit to deal with."

When I took the first potions to gain Swordsage and Oracle, I had a very, very pleasant surprise. There was, in fact, an actual, mechanical reward for getting all four of the legendary monstergirl classes, beyond simply having four very powerful slotless classes. That reward was that I did not have four very powerful slotless classes anymore.

What I instead had was the Hero slotless class, along with a Trait that gave it to me, which I could give to other people directly instead of having to give all four of the other Traits individually.

The Hero class was a merger class- while I no longer had the Trickster class, I was still a Trickster as far as effects that cared about such things went, and I still had all of its class features and stat boosts. I had the class features and stat boosts of all four classes, in fact, but it was all based around only a single XP pool; if I wanted to reach Level 14 in those four arenas, I only had to delve a hundred times, not four hundred, making that far, far more likely to actually happen.

And, very fortunately, because Trickster and Sorcerer were already Level 13, so too was Hero, and thereby, so too were my abilities with the Swordsage and Oracle classes, and especially the stat boosts.

The four legendary classes were best described as a set of semi-inverted mono-role classes, which was an understanding I hadn't arrived at until I was an Oracle. Where a Wizard works external magic through carefully designed and specified spells, a Sorcerer does it with an almost Clerical approach of simply asserting their will upon reality. Where a Rogue was meticulous in their skill, a Trickster was Fighter-like in simply making their skill supernaturally more effective. A Fighter, in turn, asserted their will through the swing of their sword, whereas a Swordsage formulated and performed unreasonably effective martial arts.

And where a Cleric cast spells that mucked around with the System's inner workings without actually understanding what they were doing and simply asserted their will upon it, an Oracle did so with a knowledge and understanding that surpassed a mere Wizard's.

So, uh.

Swordsage was definitely nice to have, especially since it let me combine all the other classes into a single four-role class, but Oracle was where the real magic was going to happen. I wasn't just better at inventing, in the sense of taking metaphysical principles I already understood and applying them in new ways to create new outcomes. I was also a lot better at researching, at uncovering and understanding new metaphysical principles. Already, when I thought about the four-in-one merger of the legendary classes, I could intuit the mechanisms at work that allowed this, and had a decent theory as to how I might make a non-legendary four-in-one merger class, although it likely would have the weakest stat boosts of any combat class... eh, still worth making. Why not?

Especially since, now that I was thinking along those lines, I was pretty sure I could also work out how to fabricate Class Unlock items, as well as the Slotless variants; after all, someone else had managed to figure out how to temporarily grant slotless classes, and they'd gone and published their research. I've read it.

Right now, though, the most important thing was that I was finally able to translate my Incubus-granted potion effects through enchantment and into spells I could cast. Depending on the particular potion effects I bundled into a single spell, I could create spells that did things like turn people into hyper-stacked cowgirl betas with Litter Size and Breed Speed 3... or, since it was about Traits, just grant them the Slotless Hero Trait.

One thing was certain, though: I was gonna abuse the shit out of this new class.