“What do you mean you haven’t worked on his class at all?” Douglas demanded. “It’s been three months!”

“Don’t you yell at me!” Eleniah snapped back at him.

“It’s been three months and he hasn’t upgraded to tier two! It takes less than one for the average person to do that! What have you been doing?!” The gnome slammed the table, making very little noise even in his rage.

“I’ve been training him to be better than the idiots that rush to each tier!” The elven woman shouted back. “Because I actually know what I’m doing!”

Kay tuned out the yelling. The past months training with Eleniah had been honestly great. He was way more in shape than he’d ever been, he felt better about himself, both his looks, and as a person shunted here from another world. When he wasn’t training his body he’d been studying with Eleniah, learning more and more about this world, from money to the system, from geography to the behavior of certain kinds of monsters. He’d had a small panic attack when he’d learned the continent they were on was larger than the circumference of the Earth. He’d freaked out demanding to know why they weren’t pancakes, which had worried Eleniah quite a bit until she managed to calm him down enough to get an explanation. In the end, she didn’t know why they weren’t dead from gravity, so Kay chalked it up to magic and moved on.

In the time between this meeting at the BOA and arriving, Kay had gotten ripped. He wasn’t anywhere near Eleniah’s level of toned muscle and abs that could literally break metal, but he was looking damn fine if he said so himself. He even had abs, and they weren’t overly skinny guy abs either, they were a real deal six pack. And yes, Eleniah had shown him how she could break metal over her abs. She was driving home the idea of not fighting people of a higher tier than himself. It worked.

“Has he even gained a single skill!?”

“Yes! He has Reading at level five and his Writing is at level three!”

He'd also leveled his Running skill to three and his Sprinting skill to two. Since level five was the highest you could get without having a class with the skill, he’d maxed out his Reading skill. He’d thought he’d get an option for a non-combat class, but it turned out that while getting to level five was enough to unlock a combat class, since most of them only had one or two skills until tier three at the earliest, most non-combat classes had at least three skills at tier one.

Eleniah had encouraged him not to take any new classes until they’d learned more about his first one, just so they could prioritize classes that would synergize with it. Even if he did end up getting a bunch of new class slots, Eleniah had explained, those would immediately be taken up by the new classes, he only had seven free combat class slots to use for non-Blood Manipulator line classes. He’d thought that was fine, but apparently that was only a slightly better than average for getting to actually powerful classes. Eleniah’s tier five class had required her to max out and then combine six different tier four classes, and it had taken all of the slots she had left to do so. And that was for one tier five class.

“No matter what your teaching philosophy is, the BOA is not going to pay for more than three months of training!”

“I don’t care about your money! It’s all been going to Kay’s living expenses anyways!”

“Can we stop yelling now?” Kay asked loudly, cutting off the shouting match. “Douglas, I am completely happy with the teaching she’s provided and will be providing. I’m fine, and the BOA did fantastic finding me a trainer. Eleniah…” He turned towards her as his tone became more stern. “Stop getting worked up! I’m not going to decide to stop learning from you just because of someone else’s opinion. Calm down.”

She looked away from him, blushing slightly.

As great of a teacher as she was, and as powerful as she could be in combat thanks to her four hundred or so years of fighting experience and tier five class, Eleniah had a few issues. One of the big ones was loneliness. She’d tried to hide it, but after spending months around her, Kay had realized that she was delighted to have him as a student, both for the sake of teaching, which she loved, and because it meant she had someone around. After figuring that out, Kay had spent extra effort to become real friends with her, which had been easy. She was a great person.

Every once in a while though, something would happen that would make her worried about him leaving, and she’d start to panic and act weird. She’d calm down quickly enough with reassurance from Kay, but he was slowly working on getting her used to the fact that he wasn’t going anywhere.

He turned back to Douglas. “Like I said, everything is good. We’re actually going to start working on my class today, aren’t we?”

“Yeah.” Eleniah shifted in her chair, trying to hide her embarrassment. “We’re going to work on figuring out his class and leveling his skill to level nine, then we’ll get him another class or two that work well with his style. That should take about a month. After that, we’ll start having him go out on jobs.”

Kay watched as she deliberately avoided eye contact with both him and Douglas. He didn’t know the story of why she was so lonely, but felt so desperate to hide it. But he’d sworn to himself earlier that month that he’d get strong enough to find whoever had hurt her and beat them a bit.

“Well, if Kay’s happy, then I’m putting in my report that the training was acceptable.” Douglas grabbed a pen and wrote something down.

Eleniah bristled at “acceptable” but Kay poked her and she calmed down.

“Right, Kay, feel free to stop by and chat or ask any questions.”

Eleniah stormed off while Kay made a few polite goodbyes, then they were standing on the street outside the BOA offices.

“So, back home?” Kay asked.

“After one stop.” Eleniah started walking off.

Kay jogged to catch up. At tier five Eleniah walked faster than he could with minimal effort. If he reminded her she’d slow down, but sometimes he just jogged along to get more exercise. “Where are we going?”

“To a butchers.”

Kay frowned. “Aren’t we having fish for dinner?”

“We’re not going to buy meat, although we might need to in a couple days.”

“What would we be going to a butcher for, then?”

“What do you mean? We’re going to buy some blood.”

Kay stopped in the street. “What? Is that a good idea?”

Eleniah stopped and looked back at him. “Why would it be a bad idea?”

“I thought the idea was to not draw attention.” He stepped closer and whispered. “If we go around buying blood, won’t it make people suspicious? I thought I was just going to cut myself.”

Eleniah chuckled. “We are going to test the controlling your own blood part of the skill, but we can’t just focus on one part of it. And there are all kinds of reasons to buy blood in this world. People use it in all kinds of crafting, and there are a lot of perfectly acceptable skills that use blood for various things. No one’s going to be suspicious.”

“Oh.”

Eleniah chuckled again and kept walking.

As usual, she was right. They stood in line at their usual butcher’s place and bought two jars of blood with no one even commenting or giving them interested looks.

“Alright.” Eleniah set the pot down in the back yard. “Don’t move.” She said, pointing at Kay. “I’m getting a chair and one of my notebooks.”

She walked off before Kay could ask his question, so he waited while looking over his class and the related skill.

[————————————————————]

Class: Novice Blood Manipulator

- The Novice Blood Manipulator is a beginner at the magical manipulation of blood. Blood is a catalyst of both life giving and destruction, and the Novice Blood Manipulator could go in either direction. Born of an act decrying the “evils” of Blood Mages, Blood Manipulators stand in defiance of them.

[————————————————————]

[————————————————————]

Skill: Manipulate Blood (Level 1)

-The ability to magically manipulate blood. At higher levels the user can control larger amounts at a greater range, and has more precise control over the blood. This skill cannot control any blood currently inside a living creature, with the exception of the skill’s user.

[————————————————————]

The skill’s description was pretty simple, which according to Eleniah was to be given, since it was a basic skill, the kind more complicated skills grew from. The class, however, had a more interesting description.

“The ‘life giving’ part means you’re probably going to be capable of healing skills in the future.” His teacher had told him, “Maybe even healing classes. The ‘destruction’ part is par for the course for most magic classes, although they tend to use a bunch of different words. The last part is really interesting, though. Some classes have parts of their descriptions like that, and they’ve been said to have to do with the Class Creator or Line Progenitor’s desires or goals when they made the class. Some people say it directs the growth of the branch or line. I think we might be confirming that here.” She’d muttered something to herself after that, then sat down and wrote in one of her notebooks.

Just then she came back outside and sat down in the chair she’d been carrying.

As she flipped open one of those same notebooks, Kay finally got to ask a question that had been bothering him. “Is it safe to be writing down information about me like that? If we’re so worried about people finding things out about me before I can defend myself?”

Eleniah glanced up. “I write everything in these in code, and these are special enchanted notebooks. They destroy themselves if anyone other than me touches them. Speaking off… I need to make sure you can read the notebooks about you too… I’ll have to teach you my code…” She trailed off, staring into space.

“Eleniah. Eleniah.” Kay clapped his hands and called her name until she startled and looked at him. “Focus, please.”

“Sorry.”

It would be hypocritical to get annoyed at her for losing focus, since he did the same thing occasionally, so he just waved off her apology and started focusing on the jar of blood.

“Remember what I told you about Water Manipulators? Your class sounds a lot like theirs, including the healing possibilities, so we’re going to start with some training exercises I’ve used with a few of them. Reach out with your magic like I’ve told you, and grab at the blood with it. Once you’ve done that, just make it float above the jar for as long as you can.”

Kay used the few training exercises they’d practiced in the last few days and reached out with his magic. It was a bit like an extra arm extending out from him, but the sensations of it felt strange. Fusing the blood with his magic was surprisingly easy. He pulled at the blood that was now his, and tried to make it float.

It slowly rose up above the lip of the bowl, stretching like a piece of taffy as it refused to disconnect form the rest of the blood.

“Don’t worry about that.” Eleniah told him as she wrote. “Same thing happens with first time Water Manipulators. You should have it floating for real pretty soon.”

It took him about five minutes, which was within average time for a Water Manipulator, and he managed to keep it floating for almost a minute before his magic failed and it dropped back into the jar.

“Nice.” She wrote down the time. “We’ll keep working on this for awhile, then move on to more tests and harder and harder types of training. Once you hit level nine we’ll stop and work on some classes I think might be complimentary.”

“Why stop at level nine?” Kay asked, already working on making another floating ball of blood.

“In case anyone uses Inspect on you, it’ll show the other class instead of Blood Manipulator, since we’ll be getting that to tier two first.”

“Oh.”

Eleniah had promised to teach him the three main “information gathering” skills once he’d gotten good enough at circulating magical energy. It wasn’t like some cultivation type of thing where moving your mana around made it more powerful or dense or something, but it did help you get certain skills that required concentrated magic in certain parts of the body. Inspect, Appraisal, and Identify all needed magic concentrated in the eyes. Inspect gave you some information about people, creatures, or monsters you used it on, while appraisal did the same thing with resources, both magical and non-magical, and created items that didn’t have magic. Identify worked on magical items, telling you what the magic they contained did. It was obviously possible to use a magical item without identifying it, but since there were cursed objects, and ones that could be potentially dangerous to use improperly, most people didn’t.

Inspect and Appraisal were both common skills for adventurers, but classes that let you level them beyond level five were rare, so most people had them capped at five. Appraisal was very difficult to get at all, and getting the Appraiser class was apparently even harder. Eleniah didn’t have Appraiser, but she did have a class that used all three of the skills, which she refused to tell him the name of.

Another minute passed and another orb of blood dropped into the jar with a plop. A small flashing icon twinkled in the corner of Kay’s vision.

With Eleniah’s help, he’d figured out how to get the system to display whenever there were notifications, in a small, non-distracting way. He focused on opening them up.

[~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~]

-Skill: Manipulate Blood has reached level 2!

[~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~]

“I just got level two.”

“Nice!” Eleniah grinned up at him. “Shouldn’t take you more than a few days to get to level nine, and by then we’ll have some ideas of classes to test out.”