Tim's POV
A year.
Three hundred and sixty-something days of disciplined study, and zero level-ups.
Zero.
I sat at my desk in the grey morning light and looked at the ceiling and allowed myself, privately and briefly, to be genuinely annoyed about this.
The annoyance was useful data, actually. It meant my instincts were correct and my earlier strategy had been flawed in ways I hadn't fully appreciated when I designed it. I had been thinking too narrowly, on the vertical climb through priest levels and the careful growth of specific useful job classes. The approach had logic to it. Build genuine capability in meaningful areas, grow steadily, arrive at the crisis point of Ainz's appearance as a person of real power rather than a scattered generalist.
The problem was the clock.
I was eight years old. Barbro had been two when I first confirmed the timeline, which made him approximately five now, which gave me roughly twenty-seven years before the canon story began. Twenty-seven years to go from wherever I currently was to somewhere capable of surviving, and more than surviving, actually mattering, in a world that would contain Nazarick.
I did the mathematics again, because I had been doing the mathematics compulsively for months and kept arriving at the same uncomfortable answer.
My current level was seven, seven levels in eight years. Even granting that the early levels had come faster, and even projecting accelerated growth with better training and resources, a straightforward extrapolation of my current rate arrived somewhere deeply insufficient.
The vertical strategy assumed that depth of power in a few but strong job classes would be enough. But depth in a few classes meant a level ceiling that reflected those classes' individual limits, and individual class limits in this world were real constraints. A high-level priest was formidable. A high-level swordsman was formidable. But the people who genuinely transcended, the people of this world who operated at the level of Ainz Ooal Gown's, were not human [Dragon lords, but at least one was half-human [level 85].
I had understood this academically for years. What I had failed to fully internalise was the time constraint it created. Breadth required time. Time was the one resource I could not acquire more of.
Which meant I needed to change my approach fundamentally.
I sat up straighter and started working through it properly.
Once I let myself look at it directly, was almost embarrassingly simple. Level one hundred was the world's threshold. That was an almost unachievable that produced a person of extraordinary depth and almost no flexibility. Level one hundred total, distributed across however many classes it took to get there.
The mathematics of distribution were interesting. One level in one hundred different job classes was, as a strategy, almost perverse in its breadth. It would make me genuinely mediocre at everything, a fighter who could barely swing a sword, a mage who could cast tier one spells unreliably, a craftsman who knew the theory of a dozen trades without mastery of any. The weakest possible level one hundred.
And even the weakest possible level one hundred player, is still, at level one hundred, and it can and will defeat nearly every single living thing in the New World.
Because the gap wasn't about skill expression at lower levels, it was about the statistical foundation that levels built regardless of how they were acquired. Every level, in every class, contributed to the base architecture of the body and mind. Strength, agility, magical capacity, resilience, these grew with total level regardless of the specific class that provided the increment. Everything stacked.
And the fifteen-level differential rule, the one I had read in the Overlord novels, which meant that a level one hundred person fighting a level eighty-five person was operating in a different category entirely. No matter what, the level eighty-five person will never win that fight.
The shotgun strategy plan, get any and all job classes i can.
The immediate question was sequencing. Which job classes first, Some classes were simply available to me right now, in this building, with my current resources, and availability mattered when time was the constraint.
I was still working through my plan, when the bell rang.
Lunch Time.
I stood up from my desk and the thought arrived with the clean simplicity of the obvious: *the kitchen, but of course.*
Of course. It was right there. I had been eating food prepared in this church's kitchen for three years, Chief was a basic class, available to anyone who engaged with food preparation seriously and consistently. It wouldn't contribute anything dramatic to my combat capability. It probably had no meaningful prerequisites for anything.
But it was a level, i Need levels.
And I had just committed, with full conviction, to the principle that no available level was a wasted level.
I was moving out the door and down the corridor toward the smell of midday cooking.
Tim's stats ( he can't see his true stats)
level: [7]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]
Preist: [1/10]
Gardener: [1/15]