Getting back to campus didn’t seem to take any time at all, we ran into little to no traffic on our way and found parking pretty easily in the evening gloom. With such a low number of students in the program these night classes would be a god send in terms of parking. I figured having other students not be around for the classes was probably the main point of having these so late. Seemed like normal people seeing mages throw fire or berserkers throw cars would be a bad thing, at least for the normal people.

We parked nearest to the woods, a notation on our schedules saying the first class of the night was going to be an intro course at the fairy ring. Since they had all of us doing all the classes once, presumably to get the skills so we could decide which fit our style, having us head back to somewhere we would find familiar sounded like a good plan. It might’ve seemed strange to let us go and then call us back but I saw the wisdom in giving people a few hours to digest a crazy paradigm shift like the interface. God knows I wouldn’t have heard a word they said if they had tried to teach us mechanics after dumping that on us.

The trees seemed at once more soothing and more ominous in the dark of the shadowed wood as we followed the trail we had taken earlier. Having been this way once before it wasn’t so novel this time, the wildness in the wood seemed… more comforting than it had before, like we were part of the forest and any danger would be strictly the worry of our enemies. I could see the same relaxation in the eyes of my party members, and smiled at the look of blissful peace that crossed Abby Shawn and Theos faces. I had to admit to a bit of jealousy at the obvious joy and zen they felt here.

The trip to the faerie ring seemed to take longer than last time, but only because we all took our time and really enjoyed the scenery as we walked. When we finally made it to the faerie ring, it was just as crowded as before. Dean Kelloway and Professor Malgrim were back up at the altar, joined by about a dozen other men and women who I assumed were the other professors.

The sheer variety in the teachers was…staggering. Young and old, tall and short, male and female, some of them with radically colored hair and some in crisp suits, I was beginning to suspect we weren’t going to be going through ALL the classes as a group, we wouldn’t have the time. As if in response to my suspicions, Dean Kelloway stepped forward from the crowd of teachers to address the group.

“As you may have noticed, there are too many teachers here for us to go through every single class, before morning. This is because while I wanted them all here for you to meet, there is some overlap in basic skills for most of the major disciplines. You’ll get a basic description and after we give you the major ones, feel free to approach any of the teachers for a more thorough list of what they teach.”

As opposed to the last ceremony where we had all been called up one by one, the next hour or so we were all bombarded with skills as a group. We were all given basic skills for all the different classes that were most common, and informed that we could request other skills if we were interested. It appeared that rather than just inventing random classes like I had suspected, the class system was a bit more interesting. Basically a class could be created using any skill or skills, it seemed like the more skills you used the less certain it was what you would end up with. You could create a class with any skill or combination and you could make anything a skill, but skills weren’t all created equal. Some skills were ranked higher, and some lower, but your class came out as an average rank based on the skills you put into it.

More than an edge in raw points, this was the major advantage of a high starting score in a trait. Those abilities played heavily into what rank a skill was when you learned it. Someone with a one for instance who learned to fistfight, would unlock the fisticuffs skill, An F ranked skill, where someone with a four could unlock the Pugilism skill which was C ranked. Using the first as a basis for a class would make you a brawler, using the second would make you a boxer. Using more skills would increase the flexibility of your class but usually that would lower its rank, making it objectively weaker.

Not all skills learned with a specific trait would end up at the max rank of course, the higher the rank the rarer it was, but your starting points decided how feasible it was to reach your cap in rank for any skill in that category. With Luck being mine I figured I had a decent shot at at least one max ranked skill (whatever the hell rank that was, since no one had ever seen a seven there was no way to see). The big problem was that I hadn’t actually seen any Luck based skills. The teachers had given us tons of skills and I’d gotten mostly trashy ones but none based on Luck.

Oh well, I would find some, you could make a skill from anything, so worst case I’d start creating my own. Hopefully the Luck bonus would get me a high rank in some skill, with all the bonuses a class like that would give me, I might actually be able to keep up with my crazy overpowered friends. As broken as my own ability was, it applied to my whole party, and with their own passives they would all pass me up pretty fast without some kind of edge of my own. I was going to need all that Luck to keep up.

Another thing of note was the way leveling worked. You could have up to one class for every ten levels, but you gained levels only in the class you were using when you gained the experience. Most highsiders tended to focus on a single class for combat, and occasionally some crafting and support classes. I briefly wondered what an A ranked cooking class would be like. It was more than possible, by reaching level one hundred in a skill you could rank it up, though higher ranked classes and skills took more time.

The ranking caps still applied though, at least to human hybrids like us, so if you had a starting stat of one in charisma, no charisma skills could rank past F unless you leveled them up, and from F it would take longer to level one skill up to A than even most Highsiders live. This was where having multiple skills involved in a class was useful. If you have a few B or C rank skills, you could mix in a low rank skill for a stat you were weak in to get the effects but balance the lower usability. Unfortunately the highest ranked or most prevalent skill would decide the stat designation for the class, so unless you tanked the class’s rank with a bunch of F rank skills, you weren’t getting a high ranked skill with that Charisma stat.

The whole system seemed a bit odd, but flexible and easy enough to understand, even if listening to the Dean drone on in the background while I was bombarded with skill prompts had started to give me a headache. It made me think of how powerful some of the professors had to be. The Dean had mentioned at least one was a six, I doubted he had Luck as an attribute, but with all these different Highsiders around someone else probably did even to a lesser degree. I was sure I could find a teacher or someone to give me some direction. I glanced over at my friends, seeing them getting the same avalanche of prompts I was, lucky bastards, though all got easy straightforward stats. My only other shot was my Charisma, which at 3 was…uninspiring at best.

Annoyingly, for both me and several of my friends, almost none of this massive number of ”essential” skills, were Charisma based, so I was kind of double screwed. Luckily I was positive Charisma based skills were fairly common, no way somewhere like a college with all this social interaction didn’t have a metric fuckton of them floating around. I suspected not all the teachers had participated in this little cram session, since any Bard classes would undoubtedly have Charisma based skills galore.

During the cram session my friends had mostly drifted away, dispersing in the crowd, but I waved them all back over and gestured off to the side so we could go over what skills we had gotten, none of their expressions seemed too distraught, though none of them were exactly beaming either. Thinking back, I wondered about the focus that the Dean had mentioned, presumably this was something we could access now that we were part of the system, but no one had mentioned it yet. I had the impression this was going to be important long term, and I couldn’t wait to see what new surprises this school would bring us.