Contrary to Thunk’s difficult thoughts, Error and Dix were on cloud nine. They were both looking forward to the future, although for slightly different reasons. Error didn’t normally get too excited about the new trainees he sometimes took on, but Dix was an intriguing one. He had crazy, never before seen skills that he had made himself, and actual combat experience. It wasn’t the first time someone made new skills, but everyone who had ever done so had something no one else had had before: an original thought. Most of these people only managed to create a single skill, but Dix had two. Really he had four, but three of them were essentially the same one, just with different mediums for use. In addition to that, he also had the very same Devouring Stride as Error himself. While he might not have any new sub skills that Error didn’t already have, if the elf passed along his current knowledge, then Dix would likely reciprocate in the future with any new skills he did learn.

The original skills aside, Error was most excited about the bonus of having another Devouring Stride user in his debt. With the original skills, it wasn’t so much the skills themselves, but more the mind that led to them. Anyone who could perceive things in a unique enough way to create a new skill was worth cultivating as a friend. It wasn’t that they would necessarily go far, or even make another skill. In fact, history showed that both of those things were very unlikely to happen, as most of those unique personalities met a bad end sooner rather than later. The benefit to Error was that these sorts of people were exactly what he thought he would need to really push past his current bottleneck on Devouring Stride. Maybe someone with a different view of the world could more easily find skills that could be absorbed by the greedy skill.

Error, being a native of Mantra, didn’t have a divinely mandated quest to complete so that he could go home. Instead he had a driving need to not get eaten by the source of his own power. If he was being honest, it was stark terror that was driving him. In his youth, just after he earned his class, he went to see the local Oracle. Unlike the Oracles in the tales that his friends from Earth told him, the Oracles of Mantra couldn’t see the future events of the world. Instead, they looked to the future of your skills, telling you the possible upgrade paths, and which of them a person is most suited to follow. The Oracle told him that his iteration of the Devouring skills was far hungrier than the norm, and that there was no way it wouldn’t eat him if he failed to keep feeding it skills.

At first he had ignored the warning. The elf had been brash and bold when he was young, forgoing advice, warnings, and rules from his elders, leaders, and more experienced adventurers. It wasn’t long until he started neglecting his training, focusing more on the money he could make as an adventuring assassin. It took almost two years before his Devouring Stride dropped below twenty five, as he had picked up a few new skills earlier on. In that time he had almost completely forgotten the warning of the Oracle, but the moment his skill dropped that low he could suddenly feel the hunger.

It was strange having a skill that felt like it was starving inside of you. As the feeling pervaded his body, it meant he was constantly hungry as well, but no matter the amount he ate, it never lessened. By the time it hit twenty he was desperately seeking out a new skill to feed the ravenous beast. He could feel it watching him, waiting, wanting. It was even more terrifying than an actual starving monster hunting him. Those he could run from. But the thing inside of him that wanted to consume him? There was no running from that. The only thing he could do was feed it, but food for a Devouring skill was fairly rare, and so was time.

Suddenly that advice he had ignored came back to him all at once. They had all told him over and over again that he needed to be prepared for when the skill got hungry, to always be on the lookout for new skills he could feed it. And to not learn them all at once. They needed to be rationed out until he had enough to keep the beast sated for years to come, long enough that he could find the necessary skills to eventually satisfy it. He hadn’t listened. The few skills he had learned early on had been the low hanging fruit. Easy to find, easy to learn. Even then he hadn’t saved them for when they were needed, instead learning them as soon as he found them for the boost to the power of the skill now seeking his death.

Of course, he did eventually find that desperately needed skill, but his skill got down to nine before he had it learned. Even then, it was one of the weaker skills, so the time was dropping almost the moment he learned it. Still, it bought him enough of a reprieve that he was able to start accumulating knowledge on new skills to be learned down the line. Now, while his skill level with Devouring Stride was ninety seven, he had the information needed to learn another six skills. Seven if they combined like he expected. It wasn’t enough, but he never stopped searching now.

The need to keep from learning some skills, and to properly ration them out to the beast inside weren’t the only lessons he had learned from that experience. The other lesson was that it was important to cultivate friendships with odd characters. There was no telling when one of them would be there with the life saving, yet ridiculous, skill when you needed it most. Burrowing Toad was Error’s most prized sub skill. Not because it was powerful, it wasn’t, or useful, which it also wasn’t, but because it was a lesson learned and a life saved. His life. Since then he had taken it upon himself to properly enforce this same lesson on every Devouring skill owner that he came across. Furthermore, he freely gave away his knowledge of any skill that could be consumed by a Devouring skill, even the ones he didn’t have. The favor had already been returned many times, and he hoped it would continue to do so for as long as he lived.

Even in the short time he had known Dix, Error had seen how different the man was. He was eager to fight, made intelligent conversation, and asked good questions. More importantly, he made leaps of logic that would lead him to all sorts of interesting discoveries. The elf was quite convinced the man would be the one to get his friend home to Earth, but found himself hoping Thunk would stick around to see how far Dix would go first.

Adventurers were a strange breed when compared to the other people of Mantra. They purposefully went out seeking danger. They fought monsters, delved into dungeons, and took ludicrous quests. There were few things an adventurer wouldn’t do for a bit of coin, but there were some that were a step beyond the eccentricities of normal adventurers. They were the ones that went into the unknown and came back with stories of myths, and the loot of legends. These were the ones that gave all of the others the name Adventurer. They didn’t do it for the money, the fame, or even the power. They did it for the thrill of it. Driven by curiosity, wanderlust, and the need to see things never before seen by man, these people were a rarity even amongst adventurers. Most likely because they often wandered into the unknown and died. Error was convinced that Dix was one of these, and if he lived long enough, he too could be great.

In the end, with three very good reasons to see Dix succeed, Error set forth to teach him everything he knew about life on Mantra. All the things he had learned about the Devouring skill they shared, and the horrible end that could come from it if not prepared. The variety of skills available, the classes they could lead to, and how to kill them. The basic classes and the understood ways to acquire each of them, as well as how they fought and many ways to kill them. Even some of the upgraded classes each of the basics could evolve into, and the best ways to kill them. He was an assassin after all. If he didn’t teach his apprentice how to kill all of the other classes, then what exactly was he teaching him?

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Dix was literally of two minds about the events of the day, but both of them were excited. While his subconscious mind was mostly just soaking up all of the information that Error was passing along, his active mind was daydreaming. Perhaps a strange activity for the active portion of his mind, but it was actually one of the benefits of having his mind separated. He was dreaming about all of the crazy things he could do once his training was done. He never even thought of not participating in whatever insane training a priest and an assassin would come up with. It was literally a life and death equation, and he never even considered not choosing life. Instead he was attempting to envision the strange new things he might discover, but that quickly devolved into exciting new women he might meet.

Even without a direct connection to his emotions, and after being whatever came eight steps past satisfied by Lust, he was still horny enough to start fantasizing about all the varieties of women he had seen on his way to the dungeon. It wasn’t that he hadn’t paid attention at the time, his mind had sorted and categorized them all into his memory, simply that he had had other things to get to. Now that he had a little down time, he immediately launched into figuring out how to deal with a tail during doggy style. If actual animals could deal with it, then he figured humanoids could too. As he thought up more and more alien and improbable scenarios and figures he started sending them off to his subconscious to get some help solving the problem.

It was moments like these that amused him the most with what he had done to his own mind. Instead of it being a nice, neat separation of powers, it more often felt like a small house with very odd roommates that tried desperately to avoid one another. He, the active mind, was obviously the whimsically debonair one, whereas the subconscious was more of a stodgy old curmudgeon who never wanted to have any fun, but was so capable at everything he couldn’t actually be ignored. Instead he had to drag him out of his brooding cave for fun and excitement every once in a while just to remind him why life was for living. Eventually, as the randomness of his thoughts started to get just a little out of control and dissolved into giggling, his subconscious actually started sending back the revised sex plans. These ones actually had labels, diagrams, and instructions. Sadly, they also had far more realistic proportions of the participants. Still, with new material to work through, his active mind was quite happy to let his subconscious keep working away at learning the boring parts of their new life.

Dix’s subconscious found the information anything but boring. The new world he found himself in didn’t work by the same rules as Earth, nor as those found in video games. Or at least none that he had played. Instead of choosing your own class, one would be chosen for you based upon the skills that you had acquired. Gaining a class was fairly simple. Get to level ten of Classless, and then undertake the Assignment. Dix found the name to be ridiculous, but simplicity was apparently key.

The Assignment was as simple as its name. Go to the altar of the cathedral and pray for a class. You would be taken to a dungeon specifically designed to allow a person to showcase their skills, preferred role, and combat style. For combat focused people an imaginary group would be provided, and the person would rotate through different roles to see which they filled best. After fighting through a number of waves, their performance would be assessed and a class assigned. Non combat people would instead have a series of tasks associated with their skills to complete. People wanting to be crafters would have to make something, merchants would assess the value of items and barter for better prices, and administrators would be given a series of issues to solve. Much like the combat classes, their performance would be judged, and a class assigned.

None of the classes originally assigned would be impressive. There were no Unique, Rare, or Legendary classes to be gained at that point. Instead the classes followed the more basic archetypes, with a few variations to allow for some form of specialization. The four archetypes the system on Mantra followed were tank, physical damage, magical damage, and support. It was within those archetypes that variations occurred.

Tank wasn’t a class, it was a description of a class grouping. It included things like various Knights, Barbarians, and even a dodge parry style Monk tank. No matter how the class did it, they were all designed to keep enemies focused on themselves, and mitigate the damage. The physical damage classes were a bit of a misnomer, what with the majority of combat skills used by them being elemental damage based, but they did require a physical weapon to use. This grouping included Rogues, Hunters, Warriors, and several others. All of them were classes based around attacking an enemy with a physical object, be that a sword, dagger, arrow, fist, or club. There was nothing about the classes that said those physical objects couldn’t also be on fire.

Magical damage classes had perhaps the largest variety, despite almost every class using mana as their primary resource. From basic mages to necromancers, summoners to elementalists, if there was any form of pure magically structured damage coming from a class, it would be found here. One of the things that surprised Dix was that one of the most sought after classes was Mage. It made far more sense once Error explained that there was a wider variety of evolved classes made from Mage than any two other classes combined. Error also explained that Necromancers were just another class on Mantra, although they were subjected to more scrutiny than most other classes as the temptation to kill people for power was greater than with most other classes. He also pointed out that if there was one class that had the greatest potential for crossing over between archetypes, it was summoners. With a host of different pets available to them, they easily fit into magical damage as well as support and even tank roles.

Support only had a small number of different classes, but they all fit into three basic categories. Healers, buffers, and crowd control. That wasn’t to say that there weren’t vast differences between classes in each category. Priests prayed to their gods for healing, while arcane healers cast spells, and druids called upon nature. Crowd control got even more varied, containing everything from barrier mages, to trappers, to people with psychic powers. Strangely enough, the psychic powers were actually something people not only could learn, but were expected to if they wanted to be adventurers. One of the most useful known skills was called Mental Connection, and while it was the basic skill needed to use psychic powers on an enemy, it was also perfect for swift and silent group communication in and out of combat. As such, it was a standard requirement before being allowed to actually go on missions from the guild, although they would teach it to those who didn’t have it when they joined.

Oddly, people added two more archetypes to those provided by the system, or more precisely separated two of the available four into two categories each. Physical damage was split into melee and ranged physical damage, while Support remained but had Healers pulled out into their own grouping.

With no ability to choose his own class, Dix would have to carefully choose the rest of his skills instead. The Assignment used skills, mindset, and performance to pick out an appropriate class. While many of the classes had the ability to turn into hybrids later, Dix wanted something less structured. Error explained that even the classes that evolved into hybrids didn’t often allow the freeform spell casting that Dix wanted in addition to both melee and ranged combat. The hard part would be finding skills that Dix actually wanted to use, while also keeping them widely spread across the archetypes and still useful. It would be a very difficult search, and there was no guarantee of success. Error had never heard of a class that could do a bit of everything, as by its very nature such a class wouldn’t fit within the archetypal system.

Perhaps the most important thing he learned was exactly what subskills did. Error, and Thunk to a lesser degree, had disparaged his Martial Weapons skill, pointing out exactly how difficult it was to level. He would need to level a prohibitive number of different weapons to actually gain skill levels in the main skill. That meant he needed to raise the subskills first. Contrary to the concerns of his trainers, Dix was actually excited about the “problem”. He saw it in a different way. Subskills passed on their benefits to whatever combination skill that they were a part of. In the case of Martial Weapons, that meant that any bonus applied from raising his rapier skill would be applied to Swords, and then upwards into Martial Weapons as well. If Rapiers gave a bonus to the speed at which he could thrust while using a rapier, it became a bonus to the thrust speed of all swords, and then of all weapons that fell under Martial Weapons. So, while it would take a very long time to raise the skill level of Martial Weapons, the bonuses that came from the skill were mostly provided by the subskills that made it up. Instead of focusing on raising Martial Weapons, he would simply continue doing exactly as he had, and use a number of different weapons of a variety of styles that fit either his budget or the particular fight he was in. As for training time, he would focus on raising whichever subskill gave him bonuses that he felt would make him stronger.

Despite Error’s concerns, Dix was excited for the challenges ahead. If he failed to get a class that fit his desires, he would just have to make sure the evolved one would. And if he succeeded, then it would be merely his first step on the road to greatness.

With their meal finished, and a good starting point for the next day, the three headed off to bed. While they started Dix’s training the next day, across the world events beyond their knowledge were starting a new round of trouble.