The next morning was spent hastily getting everything ready before leaving for the dungeon. For Ty and the two girls… women in the other room, that involved a shower and a quick raid of the complimentary breakfast bar. A shower wasn’t really possible for Christopher without help, which nobody was going to offer, unfortunately. As for Allen, he simply didn’t see the point of a shower when they were just going to spend the next week in a hole.

The point could be made that not showering would waste the money that they had paid to get rooms in the slightly above average inn, but that point was not enough to convince Allen to waste time that he could use on choosing his skills. He hadn’t even changed clothes since yesterday, because why waste a clean set for no reason?

Cleanliness aside, Allen had made his decision on how to spend some of his nine skill points. Thus, he quickly brough up the list of available skills and skimmed through them.

Skills available to job: Assassin

Tier 1 – Active: Slip Step – Category: Martial Arts – Quickly evade with superhuman movements befitting an assassin.

Tier 2 – Active: Expanded Awareness – Category: State of Mind – Focus your mind on sensory inputs to become aware of more in a single instant.

Tier 1 – Active: Stun – Category: Channeling Magic – Channel a burst of mana with your attacks to temporarily paralyze your enemies.

Tier 2 – Passive: Dead Calm – Category: State of Mind – Become like a true assassin: Dead inside.

Tier 1 – Passive: Disappear – Category: State of Mind – Regulate your body and your mind to become harder to perceive when staying still.

Skills available to job: Striker

Tier 2 – Active: Strike – Category: Channeling Magic – Channel mana into a single strike to deal devastating damage.

Tier 1 – Active: Accelerate – Category: Enhancement Magic – Drastically increase your speed for a single moment.

Tier 1 – Passive: Mana Shroud – Category: Miasma Manipulation – Move your miasma around your body or your weapons.

Tier 1 – Meta: Channeling Control – Category: Channeling Magic – Control the output of Channeling skills within a certain range.

Tier 1 – Meta: Vital Strike – Category: Martial Arts – Your strikes land true and cripple your enemy.

The lack of defensive skills was concerning, but Allen figured that was most likely just due to his combat style since being reset. He quickly put that problem out of mind for the time being; the skills that he did have available were more important.

The first thing he did was put three points into Assassinate, capping it at tier five until level one hundred. The only things that changed were the values applied by the boosts. With tier five, Allen would deal two and a half times as much damage to an unsuspecting enemy and one and a third times as much damage when not in his enemy’s line of sight. It wasn’t an earth-shattering difference, but it was still something.

Skill: Assassinate

Deal more damage when your enemies are unaware.

Category: Martial Arts – Type: Meta – Tier 5 Max

Effects: 250% base damage when attacking while unnoticed by the target. 130% base damage when attacking while unseen by the target.

Cost: None

Next, he spent a point on Strike, which was already available at tier two. It was both an essential skill for the Striker job, obviously, but it would also work very well with Assassinate. After checking the tier two card, Allen decided to spare another point on it, raising the maximum amount of damage he could deal by increasing the tier and maximum charge from fifty to one hundred.

Skill: Strike

Channel mana into a single strike to deal devastating damage.

Category: Channeling Magic – Type: Active – Tier 3

Effects: Charge an attack with mana and discharge it all at once through contact to deal heavy damage; proportional to strength, intelligence, and the tier of this skill.

Cost: 10MP/min – 100MP Max

With his two main skills upgraded, Allen turned his attention to the others. Killer Instinct was fine at tier two, but Silent Step and Surge of Pain were both underperformers. The latter had been mostly useless against the ogres which had completely disregarded pain in the first place, and the former barely had any effect if Allen was moving any faster than a brisk jog.

Granted, they were both tier 1. Upgrading them would definitely improve them, but Allen wasn’t sure if it would be worth the points. Instead of making the decision then, he decided to revisit the list of available skills.

Slip Step, Stun, Disappear, and Channeling Control could wait. Vital Strike and Expanded Awareness were both good, but the others were better. That left Dead Calm, Accelerate, and Mana Shroud, the latter of which Allen was unfamiliar with.

He agonized over the decision for only a moment. “I’ve been sitting on Dead Calm for long enough. I could control it before so I can control it now.”

Satisfied with his reasoning, Allen pressed the metaphorical red button and took the skill. Then he put another point into it so the skill would actually have the added effect on his focus stat instead of just his stability.

Skill: Dead Calm

Become like a true assassin: Dead inside.

Category: State of Mind – Type: Passive – Tier 3

Effects: The furor of battle calms you; the stress of pursuit steadies your mind. As the fight drags on, your focus and stability increase; +1%/min, max of +200% modifier.

Cost: +5%SP usage while active.

Dead Calm was very familiar to Allen, perhaps just as familiar as Rage was to Camila. They were essentially the same skill, only Rage made a berserker really angry and increased their physical stats instead. Controlling the skills was a major problem that Assassins and Berserkers both faced in almost every battle.

Allen sighed. “The issue with Dead Calm is that it doesn’t make me lose control, it makes me gain control. Frightening levels of control that is… I wonder if Rage is scarier… maybe it is.”

Allen once again shifted his attention back to his skills. He still had two more points to spend thanks to the two free tiers he had gotten for Strike and Dead Calm. After weighing Accelerate against Mana Shroud, he decided to put two points into the latter. He could obviously get both, but then he would just end up with two mediocre tier one skills.

“When in doubt, the more nuanced skill is usually better,” he though with a chuckle.

Skill: Mana Shroud

Move your miasma around your body or your weapons.

Category: Miasma Manipulation – Type: Passive – Tier 2

Effects: Move your miasma around inside your body or pull it outwards to shroud you or a weapon. Miasma shrouding your body will absorb a portion of damage in exchange for a portion of mana.

Cost: MP proportional to damage absorbed.

“Huh, well look at that, a defensive skill.” Allen reread his skill card again but still didn’t really understand it fully. Luckily for him though, there was a former level seven-hundred Scholar in the same room. “Hey Christopher,” he began, shifting on his sleeping mat thing to face the professor. “What exactly is miasma and how can it absorb damage?”

Christopher glanced over at Allen from his wheelchair and pursed his lips. “I suppose you have a new skill?” he asked rhetorically before humming in thought. “Miasma is strange, I won’t get into the theory though; suffice it to say that miasma is nothing more than your mana pool. It is an amount of energy attuned and bound to your will through… means that I couldn’t illustrate to you without months of prerequisite lecturing.”

“Huh.” Allen nodded. “That’s actually the clearest explanation of miasma I’ve ever gotten.”

“Miasma is not your soul though, whatever the hell that is,” Christopher continued, shaking his head. “So absorbing damage shouldn’t be a problem in the long term. However, in order for your miasma to actually absorb anything, you’ll have to invoke it first… like this.”

The professor held out his hand, which immediately started glowing with a pale light. Then a cloud of almost opaque, shimmering energy formed around his arm. It was bright, but not hard to look at with the naked eye. The professor continued his demonstration, pushing the miasma down his arm and into his hand where it formed into the shape of a steam pistol.

“This is a combination of Arcane Shaping and three other meta skills,” Christopher said, holding the gun in his hand as if it were solid. “If you have a skill that allows you to, say, cover your body in miasma, and another skill that allows you to form that miasma into some solid construct that can defend against attacks, then you would have a way to absorb damage with miasma.”

“Would it be white like that?” Allen asked, getting excited. He hadn’t been as excited over a new and different skill in a long time; usually he had stayed with the same familiar build.

“I suppose,” answered Christopher with a sigh. “Pure arcane miasma emits a range of radiation centered on the lower half of the visible spectrum, so naturally it would be white. Low-powered miasma is typically invisible since it emits infrared radiation and high-powered miasma is blueish or violet. If your miasma was attuned to a different aspect then it would be a different color, like lime-green for life or black for death and darkness. You probably already know that though.”

Allen nodded in affirmation. That was far more information than he had asked for, but the answer was nevertheless a clear yes, as long as his aspect didn’t change. Of course, the only reason he cared about the color in the first place was to make sure the skill would fit in with the theme of his outfit. His old outfit that is.

“That’s definitely the first place I’m going when I get the chance. Well… maybe getting my shit in Lödensburg should come first. If I get evicted for not paying rent, then all my stuff is getting thrown in a dumpster. Fuck, I only have like three months’ worth of rent on my account and Lödensburg is on the other side of the fucking world. Maybe the Gate can help there…”

“What’s wrong?” Christopher asked, sensing Allen’s mood.

“Oh nothing, just thinking about my bitch landlord,” Allen replied, getting a non-descript grunt in response. “Anyway, does that thing actually work?” he asked, pointing at the mana pistol the professor was still holding in his hand. “It has no fire crystal, compressed air cartridge, or ammo. It’s just a prop isn’t it?”

The professor smirked. He brazenly pointed it into the hotel and pulled the trigger. A beam of energy shot out of the weapon, accompanied by a sci-fi blaster sound. Instead of hitting the wall though, the beam of mana froze in the air barely a meter away from the gun, held in place by Christopher’s magic.

“Damn, nevermind,” Allen began with a laugh. “You know Arcane Sorcerer is supposed to be the weakest starting job for the Mage class, but that’s obviously wrong.”

Christopher laughed too, “Those who would believe such a lie are nothing more than fire flinging monkeys. If you’re up to it, I can teach you far more about miasma and magical theory than I have just now.”

“People are going to gravely underestimate him. He’s at level fifteen but already casting shit that most can’t do until the two hundred threshold.” Allen considered the offer for a moment before he smirked at the professor sitting in his wheelchair, completely paralyzed from the waist down. “Maybe another time,” he said.

The door to the bathroom opened a moment later, steam billowing out into the small and inadequately lit hotel room. Christopher dismissed his mana constructs as Ty walked out with a towel around his waist. “A’ight,” he began, clothes appearing on him from his inventory in the same instant that the towel disappeared. “I already stole all the towels and little soaps so we can bust outta here.”

Allen grinned. “Get the sheets too.”