Milo materialized on his feet in a simple lamplit stone room about the size of an average bedroom. It had a single door, closed. In front of him lay his belongings from the cave, he was relieved to see. He felt the weight of a pack on his back, and his clenched hand held something small and hard. He opened it to find a pretty stone. Milo spent a few moments admiring its deep turquoise luster for a few moments before realizing his fly was still open. Remembering that he was supposed to be meeting up with others, he hastily zipped his pants. He still had to pee, though.

Putting that aside for a minute, Milo glanced around. Directly behind himself he found who he was looking for, lying on the ground.

Unconscious.

Leaking blood from numerous fresh wounds.

“Gah!” Milo exclaimed in a mixture of surprise, horror, and frustration. This was who the system had sent to help him get out of here alive, after what was apparently more than a year searching? A single near-dead person? Stuffing the mana stone back in his pocket, he quickly knelt next to the bleeding body.

It was a man, human, and surprisingly dapper-looking. He appeared to be a few years younger than Milo, with a neatly trimmed mustache and beard and a thick head of long, shiny hair that was almost black. His clothing was well-cut and brightly colored, not something you would expect someone to go dungeon diving in. All in all, he looked rather lordly.

Milo lifted the man’s shirt to inspect his wounds, finding him better armored than he initially appeared. He wore a fine chainmail tunic beneath his richly dyed blue coat. It hadn’t protected him much from whatever was responsible for his current state, however. He had numerous bleeding holes and gashes in his body, several of which appeared to pierce all the way through him.

Not good.

That was Milo’s amateur opinion. He looked at the man helplessly as blood continued to spill from the many wounds. There wasn’t really anything Milo could do, not with this level of damage.

Suddenly the man coughed convulsively, spraying blood from his mouth. Milo jerked back, startled. Then he heard the tinkling of something hard like metal or glass clattering on stone. Looking for the source of the noise, he saw that the man’s fingers had unclenched and released a small vial of red liquid, which had rolled a little ways across the floor. Oh. That might help.

Darting for what he could only assume was a healing potion the man had wisely chosen as his Boon, Milo unstoppered it, struggling a moment one-handed before managing to get the cap with his teeth. He propped the man’s head up on his thigh and held his mouth open by pressing on the man’s chin with his left forearm while gently pouring a trickle of potion down his throat. The man gagged and sputtered at first, wasting a bit of the precious substance in a line of drool down his chin, but soon reflexively began to swallow. Either that or Milo had just poured potion into his lungs and essentially drowned the poor bastard.

The effect was very fast. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. Just like that. Curious, Milo used the man’s clothing to dab away some of the blood and inspect the wounds. To his amazement, they were simply gone. Jeez, wasn’t that a lesser potion? How much better could they get?

The guy was still unconscious. Milo checked his breathing and his pulse, but he seemed to be doing okay. He was in the middle of breathing a sigh of relief when the system bombarded him with notifications.

-

You have entered the preparation room for your Descent. You have one hour to make ready.

Congratulations! You have chosen (Elite) Scholar for your class and have been awarded level 1. You have been granted 3 open skill slots. You may now tap into your mana pool to power skills that require mana.

For slaying a level 3 Puma Raptor, you have gained 39 XP

For slaying a level 14 Swamp Lurker, you have gained 336 XP

For slaying a level 13 Screaming Leatherwing, you have gained 299 XP

Rank up! You are now a level 2 (Elite) Scholar. You have been granted an additional skill slot.

Rank up! You are now a level 3 (Elite) Scholar.

You have 4 open skill slots. Please choose from available skills:

Speed Reading: Devour text at a rapid pace while retaining the same amount of information you would at your normal speed. Active, 1 mana/minute.

Perfect Penmanship: Your handwriting is flawless. Passive.

Skim: Focusing on a question or topic will cause relevant items to be highlighted in your vision. Active, 1 mana/15 seconds

Pause For Thought: The world appears to slow around you as you take all the time you need to consider. Active, 1 mana/second

Bane of the Bookstore: You may choose up to 5 books at a time. A copy of those books will be available for you to read from your system interface until you replace them with others. Requires physical contact. Active, 2 mana/book.

Improved Memory: You find it much easier to retain information. Passive.

Improved Cognition: You think more quickly and clearly. Complex concepts are easier to grasp. Passive.

Just One More Chapter: Allows you to temporarily ignore your body’s need for sleep. Active, 1 mana/10 minutes.

You have unspent modifier points.

You have unspent status enhancements.

-

Milo stared slack-jawed at the torrent of messages. Wow, good thing it didn’t show me all that when I first popped in here. That guy would have bled out and died while I was sorting through everything. Did it wait intentionally?

Also, I was definitely overthinking the mana thing. Apparently it was automatic on picking a class.

Feeling a little foolish now that he knew the truth of it, he reread the notifications line by line. Okay, so I have an hour here. Hopefully my new buddy wakes up by then. Let’s see, I gained some XP and levels like I expected, but not quite as much as I was hoping. Maybe I got penalized for being unsporting? Still, level 3 is better than level 0.

Before he did anything else, Milo wanted to see what was up with that Scholar fusion. He'd been surprised to see that it was available. There hadn't been any fusions possible with it when he'd gotten it. Opening his class screen, he realized what had happened. The fusion was for his most recent class option, which he hadn’t even checked because of how little he’d cared about it. Hooray, I can fuse with Miner and be a Geologist.

-

(Elite) Geologist: Mining is dirty work for dirty losers. Instead, be a clean man with a keen plan! You say "dig," they ask "how deep?"

-Gain a deep understanding of geology and skills that will allow you to find promising dig sites and extract precious resources from underground.

-(Elite) Geologist is an Advanced class. Advanced classes award an additional two skill slots and modifier points at level 1 and an additional two Legacy Skill slots.

Fuse (Elite) Scholar into (Elite) Geologist? This choice is permanent. If chosen, all future fusions for your class must include this class (or its future variants).

-

No thanks. It looked like a class for gaining wealth, which was currently pretty low on his list of priorities.

This did provide useful information, however. Apparently the 'elite' tag stayed, which was nice to know. Also, fusing didn't always result in a higher-tier class. It looked like fusing classes of two different tiers simply resulted in a class at the tier of whichever was highest, in this case 'advanced'. It was either that, or classes didn't go beyond the advanced level. Milo hoped that wasn't the case. How boring would it be to already have maxed out in that regard?

And now…skills. Milo felt a shiver of excitement. He was about to get his first superpowers.

Looking at his selection, he was actually fairly pleased. He’d been worried there would be nothing useful at all for fighting monsters. However, there was at least one skill that looked like it could be pretty powerful depending on how it worked in practice. Pause for Thought. With no further hesitation, Milo selected it as his first skill.

He was excited to try it out, but before he did he wanted to check something. He brought up his status screen:

-

Name: Milo Jemison

Species: Homo Sapiens

Class: (Elite) Scholar

Level: 3

Next Level: 324/390 XP

Cap: 14

Constitution: Unmodified, (-)Crippled, (-)Wounded, (-)Exhausted

Strength: Unmodified

Health Regen: Unmodified

Perception: Unmodified

Mana Reservoir: 10/10

Mana Regen: 1 MP/HR

Skills (1): Pause For Thought

Basic Class Pool (11): Emergency Medic, Explorer, Juggler, Sketch Artist, Tumbler, Lumberjack, Primitive Weaponwright, Strongman, Hunter, Warrior, Miner

Journeyman Class Pool (1): Sniper

Advanced Class Pool (1): (Elite) Scholar

Class Fusion Points: 3

Modifier Points: 5

Legacy Skill Slots: 3

-

Milo’s heart sank when he came to the lines he was looking for. 10 piddly mana? 1 per hour? That was really not good. He could spend just ten seconds pausing for thought and then the next 10 hours recouping that loss. He would need to be extremely careful with his mana.

Sighing, Milo closed his screens and moved on to figuring out how to activate his new skill. Having worked with the system quite a bit by now, he found it to be rather intuitive. He simply focused on a desire to use it, which triggered a pressure in his mind that he sort of nudged, and suddenly he was in slow motion.

It was extremely odd.

Since he was in a small room without much going on, he actually didn’t notice his surroundings slowing down so much as himself. His entire body, his breath, his heartbeat, everything came almost to a standstill. The smile that tried to spread across his face in response to this novel, magical experience oozed into existence at the speed of molasses. He attempted to move his arm, finding it impossibly slow. Even changing the focus of his vision took an excruciatingly long time. It felt like there was a delay between telling his body what to do and his body actually responding. Super speed it was certainly not.

Still, he could definitely see it being a useful skill to have in combat. He might be able to activate it at crucial moments to analyze his enemy, or maybe dodge projectiles or something. If he had to guess, the dilation was something like a tenth of normal speed, or maybe even a bit more extreme.

Not wanting to spend too much of his precious mana, he released the skill. The return to normal speed was a little jarring. His arm jerked up, his muscles apparently still responding to his command from earlier. That…could be a problem. He would need to practice to make sure he didn’t trip and die or something similarly embarrassing. Checking his status screen once more, he found that he’d only spent a single point of mana in what had felt like at least 10 seconds, so the cost was actually better, in a way, than the 1 mana/second shown.

He brought up his skill selection screen once more, perusing his other options. They all seemed like pretty cool abilities to have, with the exception of maybe penmanship. He would have loved them back on Earth. The problem was that they didn’t seem super useful for the much more dangerous world he now found himself in, with most of them geared specifically for use in more of a library setting.

The two exceptions, besides Pause for Thought, were Improved Memory and Improved Cognition. Intelligence upgrades? Yes, please! However, he didn’t want to be too hasty and make a decision he might regret later. What if he got more skill options before he unlocked more skill slots? He needed to be careful here.

Figuring he’d be able to make the most of this (or any other) situation with more brainpower at his command, he selected Improved Cognition for his second skill. Taking just that single one would still leave him two more skill slots to play with.

The effect was far more subtle than his previous skill, but he did notice a difference almost immediately. For some reason his surroundings felt a little brighter and sharper, which Milo thought was weird. The weight of tiredness that had affected his ability to focus on studying just a short while ago felt lifted, at least from his mind. His body was still quite tired. Also, he suddenly felt a niggling urge to carefully reread all of his skill options, an urge that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

Shrugging mentally, he went with it.

He read through the list carefully until he got to the Skim skill, at which point he realized what it was that his newly prescient brain had wanted him to know. He hadn’t noticed before, but the skill actually said nothing about books or text of any kind. All it said was that relevant items would be highlighted, which he’d unconsciously interpreted to mean words on a page. It was something Milo would probably have realized on his own in due time, but it seemed Improved Cognition had gotten him there faster. Handy.

So, assuming this Skim skill works on stuff other than text, how would that work? If it can highlight relevant information in a book or passage, then wouldn’t that mean the skill is intelligent? How intelligent? Does it know things that I don’t know? Can it make connections that I wouldn’t necessarily have made on my own? Would it work in another language? If I’m in the wilderness somewhere, could it tell me what plants are edible, or is it more just like it would highlight fallen fruit I already knew was edible and make it slightly easier to find?

He really didn’t have much to go on here, but it seemed like it might have some pretty huge potential. He may as well pick it and experiment, right? Given that classes could be fused and changed, it seemed pretty unlikely that skill choices were totally permanent. He could probably exchange it at a later time if it turned out to be a dud. I’ll still have one slot left over if anything amazing comes up in the next level or so. Although I do still really want Improved Memory…whatever. Crossing his fingers, he selected Skim for his third skill. Hopefully, he hadn’t just made a huge mistake. He'd find out soon. But first, there was something else that had been pressing on Milo's mind.

Closing his menus, he quickly checked on the status of his supposed teammate. Still unconscious.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Milo finally went and emptied his bladder in the corner of the room.