Dix was having a hard time deciding between being excited or pissed. On the one hand he was almost done with all these tests and training and could finally get to Mantra. On the other hand he still had to get through this last test, that he was obviously going to destroy, before they would let him head on down. Eventually the prospect of more combat, the chance to test out all this new magic on something other than himself or a training dummy, and the soon to be realized dream of a new world all won out over the negatives, so he settled on excitement.

The training he had done since he got his valves had produced interesting results. While working to get the rest of the skills for his composite weapons skill he managed to get Mage Weapons and Tools, or whatever it was called. But there was a different surprise waiting for him. When he had finally gotten Shields, Improvised and Bar weapons, and he suddenly had the feeling that there was a similarity to all weapons. After a few more minutes of attacking things with different weapons, it suddenly sunk in completely, and he knew he’d gotten the composite skill for weapons. It really was a strange feeling. Anything that was a weapon, or could be used as one, was now more important to his senses. He could sense how they could attack or defend, how he could take them away and use them for himself, and even how to break them.

With the massive difference in how important weapons were now in his mind, he realized that something might be off. Passive skills, from what he could understand, were supposed to have very minor effects on people. This didn’t feel minor at all. As he experimented a bit more with other weapons he created through Conjure Weapon, he remembered something that he had originally mostly ignored.

Crossroads had told him that all of his skills were still only level one, and couldn’t increase while he was here. Normally he wouldn’t think about that at all, but there were a few problems with it that Dix could see. The most immediate was, of course, that his new all weapons skill didn’t feel at all like a level one skill probably should. However, far more importantly, could you really merge skills into composites, or upgraded skills, when they were still at level one? To Dix, it seemed ridiculous that he could get so many higher skills just through a little bit of work and ingenuity. Something else had to be going on here.

Someone else had referenced skills being easier to learn here than they would be on Mantra. What if they were artificially inflated to make them easier to learn, but also to merge with others?

In his mind Dix saw skills like balloons underwater. Normally a skill balloon would be completely underwater, and gaining the skill was the equivalent of waving your arms about under the water until you found it, gaining the skill. If skill levels were analogous to how high out of the water a balloon was, then to upgrade or merge skills you needed to have your balloon completely out of the water. Dix theorized that in this space ALL skills were balloons completely out of the water. This would make getting the skills much easier because you could already see them, so you didn’t need to flail about underwater looking for them. This also meant they were immediately available to upgrade. It would also explain why his composite weapon skill was so powerful already, it was behaving at its maximum level.

The only question left was how could he make this work for him going forward. It was a bit of a letdown that he only figured it out at this point, but he still had some time to get the most out of this opportunity. For the moment he needed time to think, and a mindless task to keep himself busy while he tried to come up with new skills to gain, or better yet, old ones to upgrade. It was too bad he didn’t have any kind of skill list that would show him either what he already has, or what he could try and learn.

He decided to work on his resists while he puzzled out his next moves. He wanted to keep the clothes he had, having no idea when he could get more, or if anyone would repair them again, so he took his pants off. He quickly gathered up some more of the mage weapons scattered around, and set them out for easy access on a nearby shelf before sitting down in the midst of them all. Grabbing a wand he started blasting his leg with Fire Bolt, then healing it with Light Heal using a cane. It was painful, but he slipped back into his meditation and let his mind wander to find a solution to his latest problem.

At the moment his largest concern was the number of skills he had. If Crossroads was correct, he could control how many skills he had, thus reducing the chance of losing the more important ones when he finally went to Mantra. Upgrading seemed to be his only hope of making enough of a difference. But what did he have that was upgradable other than the weapons he had already done? He was quite frustrated at not really knowing what skills he actually had. While going over what he thought he had, he absentmindedly switched from fire to earth, and then eventually wind and water.

Around the time he switched to using Force Bolt with a summoned Healer and self cast Regen, he had what he thought was a reasonable listing of possible skills. He figured he couldn’t do anything about his passives, they were too nebulous to really pin down, and Crossroads had said his movement skill had absorbed a lot of them anyways. That left his active skills. The ones he figured he could do the most about were three specific groupings.

Power, Precise, Quick or Rapid, and Multi or Split. He wasn’t positive about the names, but they seemed right, or at least close enough, based off of what he had experienced with all of these attacks. Between the prefixes, there was a minimum total of twelve skills in these groupings alone. They were all Attacks, Shots, or Throws. He had earned the melee versions of these skills while working on Improvised and Bar weapons. By his best guess there were two ways he could reduce these all down to a manageable number of skills. Either combine them by prefix, or base. Prefix would probably get him skills like Precision, a skill he could actually understand and apply, but the others were a little more confusing as concepts. Going by the base, he would need a skill that was either variable, or all at once. If he got to choose, he was taking variable; all at once would be too expensive and only situationally useful.

When he finished with Force, he moved onto Lightning. Unlike the other spells, this one affected more than just his leg, often sending him into convulsions. It was virtually impossible to maintain his meditative state during these moments, so he quickly moved on to Ice, vowing to come back to Lightning when he was done planning.

A variable based skill might actually take care of more than he originally thought. There was nothing that said he couldn’t use more than just four modifiers. He also had things like Seeking, Bounce, and Ricochet. Dix refused to use things like Flaming, or Exploding for these combination skills, as he wanted them powered by stamina instead of mana. For some reason he was fairly certain that his mana based skills would be going away when his race changed. And Precise rolled right into all three of the ones he wanted to add. Power could even be the base for Quick, which was the base for Multi. Now he only needed one more add on in there to balance it all out, and it would have to be based on Power not Precise. Maybe Crushing for melee, and Pierce for ranged. Both need an increased amount of power behind the attack to get the effect. Can’t think of anything else. Let’s hope it works.

With Ice finished, and his planning mostly completed, he went back to Lightning again. While his body was convulsing from the current, he tried to think of anything that he may have missed. By the time he had the resistance for lightning the only thing he had thought of was that the Multi Bolt spell might have other elements that he didn’t have direct access to, but he didn’t want to just blast himself in the leg for an hour hoping something would eventually show up. Instead he summoned a few different elementals and spent a good ten minutes blasting them before he was satisfied that Multi Bolt either only used what he had spells for, or it only had the same elements assigned to it. No matter how you looked at it he was seven resistances richer, and he had a plan for moving forward.

Dix’s plan to combine all the skills into a single variable skill was to make them laddered. So he actually visualized an A frame ladder in his head. One side was Power, the other Precise. While the two skills were different, they were both necessary to keep the ladder upright and stable. You couldn’t climb to the top without both sides of the ladder. The steps were the other skills. He started with melee. On the Power side was Quick Attack, then Crushing Blow, then Multi Strike. For Precise it was Seeking Strike, Bouncing Blow, and Ricochet Attack. He struggled a little with adding Bouncing and Ricochet to melee attacks, but eventually he just applied the same principles as he had with the ranged versions. Bouncing would be an attack that could use a wall, tree, or the ground to redirect and amplify the strike. Devastating in a small cramped hallway, or tunnel. Ricochet would simply bounce off of everything, redirecting each into another attack. It would be perfect for facing two opponents close together, or the legs of large monsters.

His intent was that these skills would complement each other, and their user in combat. They would work together, each leading to the next, step by step, lesson by lesson. The concepts of one would lead into understanding the next. All it took was hard work, sweat, and sore muscles. He would need the stamina to use these skills as one.

And then he was attacking. One strike after another, each in order. Up one side of the ladder, and then the other. Over and over. And then combining the strikes. Power Seeking Strike, Multi Crushing Ricochet. In the end it was all a blur of multiple attacks until they were all one strike, with multiple ways to apply it.

After that, he did the same with bows, and thrown weapons. Each was easier than the last. He had no idea if it would reduce his skill count enough to get him the skills he truly wanted to keep, especially the ones he had just made. Other than his composite weapon skills, he was most proud of the skills he had just created. Maybe he would be less impressed if he knew exactly what his movement skill had done, but for now he would have to remain ignorant.

Now he had excellent skills with melee, and ranged weapons, but he needed something that was equivalent with the mage weapons, or at least spells. Once again, he was worried that mana based skills would disappear when he was integrated with his new race, but he had a thought on one he might be able to keep. Crossroads had pushed him to get the skills to use all of the mage weapons and tools, meaning they would still be useful after he became a Runeborn. Maybe he could create a skill that worked with these weapons. The only problem was where to begin.

Taking a staff, he once more closed his eyes and opened his Mana Sense to study it. As his mana soaked into the staff, he had another thought. Why did Mana Sense not use his eyes at all? Was there a separate skill for sight? It would probably be useful to have, and much easier to get here. Pausing his scanning of the staff, he pulled his mana back out into the basic cloud formation of Mana Sense. The cloud was connected to his mind, but had no interaction with any portion of his sight based mechanisms. So if mana was the medium by which the senses were increased, perhaps the same would work on his eyes.

Smiling at the ease with which he had figured out this issue, he made a stupid mistake. Excited, he quickly flooded his eyes with mana, causing them to rupture and explode from the massive increase in pressure. Screaming and clawing at his eyes he fell to his knees. Thankfully, he had never released his Summoned Healer, or turned off his Regen spell. With how long his resistance training had taken he’d gotten a little lazy with his healing. When he eventually recovered his eyes, the first thing he noticed was that he had had a familiar feeling shortly after his eyes exploded. So, with a heavy sigh and a slight whimper, he blew up his eyes again. And again. After several more tries, he felt the diminishing of the pain and damage to his eyes from his mana run amok. He had gained something, probably mana resistance.

His mana also moved much easier and smoother, likely another skill, giving him enough delicate control to carefully infuse mana into his eyes. This time he did it slowly, with a tiny portion of his mana. He gently moved it around different portions of his eyes, checking the effects each had on his vision. It wasn’t until he trickled some mana into his retina that he finally started seeing anything different. It was still a little fuzzy, but with some mana added to the cornea and the lens, he finally had a clear picture and a skill. Most of the clarity came from the skill, as it refined the mana flows into his eye into something much better than the random fogging he had done.

Looking around, the first thing he saw was the cloud of mana that was his Mana Sense. He was shocked at how wasteful it appeared to be. Even if he could reabsorb this mana, it was still a huge amount, as well as being a huge glowing sign screaming, “THERE’S A PERSON HERE!!!” Not to mention it also impared his own vision, leaving him virtually blind while within the cloud. It was definitely not stealthy, particularly if anyone with Mana Sight was in the general vicinity. He decided that would be one of the things he would work hard to improve his use of when he got to Mantra. It was an incredible tool, but it needed a refined touch to use it correctly, or at least in the way he envisioned it.

The rest of the room also glowed, but the majority of the mana came from the various weapons. The shelves only had a faint light to them, likely the enchantment that kept them going throughout the centuries. The weapons were easy to see how thick the infusions of runes had been done, with staves outshining wands by a large amount. The brightest object around was a giant tower shield that was more of a theoretically moveable wall standing eight foot tall by six foot wide. The focusing gem in its center was the size of his head, and glowed like a small sun, even against the backdrop of the rest of the shield that looked like a blast furnace. Dix snorted at the ridiculousness of trying to use such an item in an actual battle. It would be more useful as part of a defensive structure like a castle wall or gate. Try battering down a gate when it launches giant blasts of magical energy straight into your face. The thing could pack in enough mana that it would likely blow through a hundred men without slowing down.

While faintly amused at how useless such a thing was, Dix was inspired in a way. It would be his next stop, after the staff. He turned his Mana Sense back to the staff and studied it closely. He was looking for a particular section, and quickly located it. After a period of time to get a good feel for the section, and how it functioned, he smiled and set down the staff. Strolling over to the giant shield, he stretched out his hand to the focusing crystal. Once more his Mana Sense invaded a weapon, searching out the knowledge he needed. This time it was even easier to find, due to the increased size of the chamber.

Specifically it was known as the mana chamber. After feeding mana through the runes of the weapon, the completed version would hold in the mana chamber, a part of the focusing crystal. What Dix was looking to do was both dangerous and stupid, but could get him a very useful skill if he could get it to work.

Back at the staff he quickly flowed his mana through it and into the mana chamber. The particular spell he was using was force pulse. The spell wasn’t very damaging, mostly just throwing things around near the caster. First he tried to push more mana into the spell, but the rune path had locked up. Using a different path, this time for a force bolt, he managed to get more mana into the chamber, but it was now locked into two different spells. This proved he could pour more mana into the chamber, but it wasn’t exactly what he wanted. It would take a few more experiments before he would decide whether it could be done or not.