Susie and I took a detour to an area she insisted would be mostly safe, a little off to the side, and dived into a technical exploration of Enhancement Sage, my class, and her own.

"Soulforged sounds neat," she agreed as she played with some menus I couldn't see, "but you're still limited a lot by the Dungeon, aesthetically if nothing else. The Iconoclast class started by letting me change the form of items without affecting their stats, but I later unlocked a lottery system where I break down things for points and create random equipment with the points. I've been improving it since then, but..."

"Iconoclast? Seriously?" I smirked at her. "I figured it was going to be steampunk engineer or whatever."

She shrugged. "You'd be amazed just how useful the class is. These gloves," she tapped a leather-and-brass stylized pair of elbow-length, half-finger gloves, which I was pretty sure were separate from the gauntlets that looked like a pair of punching weapons waiting to be deployed, "used to be a set of full-plate mail, and give me the same defensive bonus, as long as I block with my hands or forearms. The ear studs I have," and there were like four in each ear, "were all various accessories. The amulet--"

"Okay, okay," I held up my hands. "I get the picture. I do the same thing just by moving enhancements back and forth, except that raw stat improvements are still locked." I frowned. "How expensive was the lottery thing? I tried to get my power to let me condense my customized abilities back into items, but it was deemed Tier 4."

She winced. As a woman with her own self-made class, she was no stranger to budgeting Class Points. "Making it a lottery cheapened it a lot," she admitted. "And breaking an item only provides a fraction of its worth in Forge Points. I can throw a whole shit-ton of money into a project and get what's basically a dud out of it. Though, if this new skill works out like it should..." She frowned. "...eventually, anyway, I should be able to have a lot fewer of those. And then, maybe, someday... truly custom items." She grinned. "That'll be a heck of a thing."

I just nodded, looking at my own interface window. I'd broken a few old and unwanted enhancements for Forge Points--things like elemental skill boosters that I didn't care for--but the rewards for doing so were pretty low in comparison to the cost of upgrades. It wasn't completely useless, and it was at a very low skill level, but it was clear that if I wanted, for example, to increase a Skill Booster for Telekinesis, the cost per level wasn't flat, nor was it small. Meanwhile, each broken Enhancement net me less than half of what I calculated it would cost to raise the enhancement to that level.

"The efficiency is absolute shit," I summarized, and left the skill sitting there for the moment. Instead, I looked at the skill information through Skill Sage, discovering a few things of interest there. First, the levels I'd gained in the skill were leaving it at Growth Rank E, meaning I was probably still using it 'wrong'. I frowned at that--not that I disagreed that I was using it wrong, but if the skill itself agreed, then that meant I had to be missing something.

How did one take advanced control over a skill like this? What would an S-rank Sage skill even do? Telekinesis was out there in the real world with real consequences. But a sage skill was...

I blinked away each of my open windows and looked at Susie, who seemed to be concentrating intently on something. I ended up staring, after a moment, at her gloves. Stylistically, they fit the look she was working on perfectly, to say nothing about being the correct size. Did her class provide her some kind of UI, or was it some kind of S-rank-equivalent advanced control over the skill? Or both?

Okay, hear me out, offered Merry, but I think she's basically diving into her items like you dive into your Skill. From what I see, she's reaching into that belt that she's holding and trying to grab onto something inside.

I considered that, with a frown. It did, and didn't, make sense. My original understanding of Telekinesis was that I could affect everything that I could sense, and so when my forced the skill to open up and let me sense everything, then I could affect everything. It was only later I realized I was also getting a lot more power and efficiency out of it than I had before.

But, even assuming that Enhancement Sage gave me some kind of ability to sense the details of what I was doing, it seemed like the most... or at least, the most obvious thing I could get out of it was more efficiently moving Forge Points. Even lossless, it would require a lot of sacrificed Enhancements to raise levels.

I don't think it's just that, offered Merry. Skill Sage let you unlock skills with points. Maybe you can convert Enhancements to, uh, similar ones? Or directly merge similar ones? Or merge different ones into a hybrid? These things are pretty complex.

I listened to Merry, stewing on it. It didn't make intuitive sense to me. Maybe it's just how the mental Dungeon interface made everything into numbers, but it felt like those things were concrete, not analogue, mushy, adaptable things.

You said it yourself, pointed out Merry. You can't sense the stuff.

I tried focusing very hard on an Enhancement when I destroyed it. I tried focusing very hard on it when I increased one by a level. If there was any feeling anywhere, I wasn't detecting it.

I kind of do, offered Merry, but it's kind of echoing from somewhere else, not where I expect it to be We gotta do a lot of it before I can pin it down.

"You ready to go?" I heard Susie say, and snapped out of my reverie.

I looked up to find Susie and Louise standing side by side. Susie wasn't actually talking to me--Louise responded immediately, and I realized that they had probably been talking while I was busy. "Whenever Jerry's ready. He does tend to get distracted by these things sometimes."

"Yeah," Susie replied, looking over at me, catching that I was awake. "High skill stuff takes your attention. I've done all I can for now, Jerry. You wanna sprint for the Tower, or do you want to take some more time to level up along the way?"

I considered that. It wasn't a really hard choice; I had only so many levels to gain before I would be locked out of Armand Bayou, which was part of why I needed to learn this Cultivation stuff or whatever. While it might be as simple as throwing Experience at my stats, and I'd certainly try that, I figured that learning before I gained levels was probably going to be easier on me.

"Might as well sprint for it," I said. "But... I'd like to at least sample the enemies as we pass by."

"Mmm." Susie frowned. "You should also help out with the bosses. If I have to solo them all to get you to the Tower, even with Louise taking her share, I might have too high a level to enter Armand Bayou again."

I shrugged and stood up. "We may have to experiment along the way, then."

She gave me an odd look. "Experiment with what?"

"Cultivation. The thing I mentioned before. It eats up Experience." I shrugged. "That'll help keep our levels down."

She shrugged at me. "Okay, well, whatever. We have a nine floor sprint to the next Town, with two more biomes to the Tower, and it's only gonna get more hectic from here." She pointed up the hill, where the fort we had to take was now empty, waiting for new challengers. "The first whole biome is us against armies. You make sure our Priestess is safe, and I'll cut down on the numbers. Then you can have a little fun, if you like."

I smirked. Somehow, if Mel had said I could 'have a little fun', I would have imagined her being resentful or somehow misunderstanding. Susie, though, seemed to understand the mindset, not just begrudgingly accept it. "Sounds good."

"And, hey, in exchange," she scratched her chin like she'd just thought of something. "Do you think you can throw me over the wall? My jetpack is good, but way too loud for a surprise attack."

"I can put you anywhere you'd like to be," I promised with a grin.

"Awesome. Let's wreck some shit."

When we got to the wall, it all went down like a heroic action movie. The guards along the wall didn't notice us until it was too late; Susie landed in the middle of a bunch of them and screamed violently as she tore most of them to shreds, then kicked open the gate, more for show than anything else. I came in and had a dramatic battle with some dangerous people that looked for a moment like I might be in over my head, but then I hit my stride and made them look like chumps.

Given how many floors we still had to go, that was actually a little bit of a shaky start, but I'd had worse.

After the fort wall, and the courtyard beyond, there was a bridge over a swift-running river. The enemies remained the same--Vikings and Valkyries--without even an obvious leader to grant a bonus on the horde. Instead, the sheer number of them in a confined space would spike the difficulty up over the wall assault.

We just went around. They didn't seem to care.

After the bridge was a narrow pass carved through the hill. It wasn't a tunnel--as the hill went up, a section had been carved straight up from the path to the top of the hill, leading to a very narrow, claustrophobic passage that ended with a wider circle, surrounded by larger than life statues, with the floor exit at the center. Susie promised me that this section was harmless, but it felt like we were walking into an ambush, especially when the statues came into view, twice my height and standing imperiously on pedestals with their weapons held, at rest, before them.

An NPC stood off to one side, but he didn't say or do anything as we went on to the next floor.

The next floor was essentially a copy of the first, to the point where I was momentarily confused. The main difference, from a challenge perspective, was that there were elite and leader units mixed in randomly with the hordes of foes, and as a visual marker, there were two suns instead of one hanging over the horizon. Also, that was annoying, but not worse than that.

Susie left me one of the elites to play with after the first fight. At first he didn't look much different, except he had a spare axe on his belt. When I was able to single him out, he threw away his shield and took up the spare axe, and his style immediately got more aggressive, his moves faster. He was, I realized quickly, just a bit faster than me.

Of course, so was my pocket Caesar.

If the Executioner weighed half as much as it looked like, there was no way I could have out-maneuvered the elite. Even essentially weightless, the bulk of it was a hindrance when moved to block the quick moves of his axes. I counted on my telekinetic sense more than my eyes to track his movement, but he frequently drove the tip into the ground or turned an attack into a feint when it definitely hadn't been one to start. I gave myself a nice long time to adapt to his speed before trying to counterattack, because there was no question I would open myself to attack when I did.

When I finally moved, I got a good critical strike to his shoulder that might have torn the arm off of something closer to my level, and forced him to drop his weapon, but he got a good strike on my weapon arm as well. Even using Telekinesis to limit the damage, it hurt.

I could just about hear Julius in my head reminding me of the basics again. Your wind-up is too slow. Make many, smaller attacks instead. Hide your intent. Return to guard position. Be ready to dodge at any time. I grit my teeth; a battle of small gains against someone like this was plausible, but it would take too long. I tried, anyway, rehashing some of the moves he'd taught me as Louise's healing magic brought me back to full health, and while the damage was less than I'd like, I also managed to keep his axes away.

Can I try to support you with Psychokinesis? Merry was watching intently, I thought. Since you are getting tired of this as a duel, I mean. I wouldn't ask if you were enjoying it.

And in truth, I wasn't.

Julius was more fun to duel with. In spite of his face being consistently serious, Julius seemed to enjoy fighting me. This Diamond Elite Viking was brutal, in contrast. He seemed to want to see me bleed, and there was a fleeting look of eager anticipation on his face every time he thought he saw an opening. It was, in fact, helping me read his motions, but it was also disheartening. It was like this fight was designed not to be fun. In fact, it probably was.

I signaled assent to Merry, and steadied myself as a thread of violent emotion poured from my core. With Merry controlling it, it was only slightly distracting; she wasn't trying to demonstrate it for me like she was when we experimented before, but the emotions were still a part of me, just... under control.

I kept my full attention on dueling the bastard, and Merry lashed out at him from odd angles like a scorpion tail, stinging him repeatedly in odd places on his body. They were, I noticed, usually not critical hits, but...

Hey, I'm new at this. I'll get better. Merry did seem to be struggling, and of course, the skill was still at low levels. I just nodded to myself, taking a stab at the Viking's face when Merry stung him in the back of his thigh. This knocked him over, and I used Telekinesis to leap and put everything I could into a follow-up smash, which was enough to kill him.

I took a deep breath, noticing Susie was applauding.

"Yeah, I think that was Merry," Louise was explaining to her. "Jerry didn't look like he was thinking about it."

She nodded. "Still, two mental skills at once, plus swordfighting. Pretty damn cool." She moved forward and gave me a slap on the shoulder. "Need a breather, or should we keep going?"

I had a little headache, but nothing major, and I just shrugged. "I'm fine. You're doing most of the work anyway."

"That's the spirit." She said, as she moved on to the wall.