It turned out there were three possible fusions for his new class.  He was excited at first to realize that one of them was his current class, Scholar, but ultimately it was another dud: Medical Researcher.

Neither of the other two were particularly exciting either.  He could fuse with his Strongman class to make a Physical Therapist, which sounded incredibly boring to him.  The last one struck him as odd; it turned out that smashing his two healing classes together, Emergency Medic and Medical Doctor, could make him a Surgeon.  Perhaps the pure practical focus of the Emergency Medic class was what did it.

In any case, none of them were particularly useful at the moment, but it was certainly possible that having an advanced medical class would help him if he wanted to get some kind of a healing Mage class.  It all depended on what he might get for fusing Scholar with Mage, and whether that class would fuse with a medical class.

Too many ifs in there.

He looked around himself, pondering on what he should do next.  Backlebutt would probably be asleep for a few more hours.  Milo wanted to wait before dropping rocks on any more of the zombodiles; if Backlebutt had a way to kill them, he might get a level.  A level might provide a new skill that could give him a better method to contribute in the continued absence of a bow.

So, monster murder was out for the time being.  He supposed he could study some more, but he wasn’t sure if it was worth it.  He’d gotten two different classes from studying, which was already better than he had expected.  It was possible there was another class waiting for him, but it no longer fell in the category of low-hanging fruit in Milo’s opinion.  The information itself might come in handy, but fusing up into the most powerful class possible was sure to be handier.  He wanted to focus on that.

(Elite) Scholar was an Advanced class.  The way he currently understood it, he would need to fuse with another Advanced class—or a Master class—in order for the resulting fusion to be a Master class.  That was what Milo was gunning for, and he already had enough fusion points to get there, he was certain.  It might even be possible to use just a single point, so long as the coming mage option turned out to be an Advanced class; he hadn’t asked Backlebutt.

Milo was already thinking beyond that, however.  In order to achieve whatever class level came after Master, he would need another Master class to fuse with, which was likely to eat up a lot of fusion points.

He also needed more information about what classes were possible at later tiers, what fusions.  Fortunately, he had an idea about that.

He’d found himself using Skim a couple of times while studying when his mana was nearly full, more to keep his mana in a state of regeneration than because he truly needed it for anything.

He’d gotten to thinking about the skill itself.  It had been frustratingly hit and miss since he’d first gotten it, but after thinking about it some more in the last couple of hours he’d come to a hopeful conclusion as to why that might be.

There were some circumstances in which he’d asked the skill for information that he himself had no way of knowing.  In most of those cases, the skill had simply done nothing.  However, there was one particular case where the skill had known something that he hadn’t: the method by which to achieve a Mage class option.

And actually, he realized just now, it was even better than that; if he remembered correctly, he’d asked the system how he could become a Mage.  That implied that the system was telling him not only how to get the option, but also confirming that his current class could successfully fuse with that option.

In short, Skim worked off of information that he knew or was readily available in front of him, but it also probably worked off of system-known information...within his interface, anyway.

It was game-changing, if true.  It hadn’t occurred to him before because he’d asked some poorly-worded questions of the system that had obfuscated the truth.  He’d asked it things like “what is the best” or “what is the most powerful” without stopping to consider that the questions were subjective, with no ready answers.  When the skill hadn’t responded, he’d drawn the incorrect conclusion that Skim was more limited than it actually was.  But now he thought he’d figured it out.

And it was time to test it.  Milo pulled up his skill options, activating Skim.

-

Basic Class Pool (12): Emergency Medic, Explorer, Juggler, Sketch Artist, Tumbler, Lumberjack, Primitive Weaponwright, Strongman, Hunter, Warrior, Miner

Journeyman Class Pool (1): Sniper

Advanced Class Pool (1): (Elite) Scholar, (Elite) Medical Doctor

-

First question:  Which classes will fuse with my current class?

The expected two lit up, Miner and Medical Doctor.  That was just a warm-up question.

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Next question:  Which classes will fuse with a Mage class?

Emergency Medic, Medical Doctor, Lumberjack, Primitive Weaponwright, Warrior, Miner, and of course Scholar all lit up.

Whoa.  That totally worked.  Also, that was way more than expected.

He felt a fleeting disappointment that Strongman wasn’t one of the classes that could fuse with Mage; it would’ve been awesome to be some kind of magical master of body and mind.  Although, for all he knew, Warrior might result in something similar to what he was envisioning there.

Alright, now for the real question: Which classes will fuse with the class that results from fusing my current class with Mage?

All of the classes that were previously lit up went dark except for one: Primitive Weaponwright.

Interesting.  Why that one?

Milo was pretty disappointed that neither of the healing options stayed lit.  He only had a little time left on Skim, so he didn’t dither too long wallowing or wondering.  Instead, he asked his final question, which was very similar to the previous one.

Which classes, if fused with the Mage class, will result in a fusion that will then be eligible to fuse with my current class?

Still Primitive Weaponwright only.  It made sense, but he wanted to make sure; maybe there were some cases where it was necessary to fuse classes in a specific order to make something special.  That still might be the case, even, just not here.

So, I still don’t know what class will result from fusing Mage with Scholar, but it looks like, if I want it, I can be some kind of magical weapon builder.  Or maybe an enchanter?

It was an interesting possibility.  Having the ability to produce items with unique magical effects for any given situation could be hugely helpful, and it also opened up the possibility of maybe not risking his life on a daily basis in a classic adventurer’s lifestyle.

He wasn’t sure that being a crafter was the kind of lifestyle he wanted, though.  It sounded a bit dull.

Do I want to be an adventurer?  Kill monsters, get levels?  What’s my goal here?

Immediately, of course, his goal was surviving the plunge through the Descent.  But beyond that?

What do I want, big picture?

It was an impossible question.  He’d never been able to answer it on Earth, which was why he’d been bouncing around ever since leaving the Navy.  It honestly started to depress him whenever he thought about it too long.

Backlebutt had his struggle, his quest to take back the dungeons from the nobles, which was all well and good for him.  It kind of felt like...not Milo’s problem.  He wasn’t particularly motivated to “fight the power” just now.

Should he try to go home somehow, see if his wild theory about being copied was right?  What if it was?  What would he do, use his new powers to erase original Milo and take his life back?

Okay, this is getting dark.

He could find some pretty peasant girl somewhere here in Altabar, start a simple life.  Milo tried to imagine it...settling down, getting involved in the local community, creating a family.

The same thing happened that always happened when he imagined anything like that; he began to get claustrophobic.  He could already feel the monotony and boredom gradually peeling away at his sanity, his will to live.  And then he began to think about all the people who were born, grew up, wondered in futility at the meaning of life, and gave up, only to spawn a new generation of souls cursed to follow in their footsteps, ad nauseum.

And...back to theorycrafting.  Note to self, get more sunlight soon.  If possible.

Milo had finally figured out recently with a little Google-fu that simply getting some extra sunlight, especially in the morning, helped his body produce enough serotonin to mostly ward off the mild depression he’d battled for much of his life.  He was honestly a little indignant about how much of a difference such a stupid, simple thing made.  And why didn’t someone tell me sooner?

Shaking his head, Milo did his best to force away fatalistic thoughts about the future and focus on the here and now.

He had another idea for wringing information out of the system.

Opening his binder, he selected one of the pieces of paper he’d tucked in the back cover’s sleeve.  He was annoyed to see the stack of pages had rippled a bit on the edges from moisture; it must have been from when he'd sat on the binder with wet pants.  Unfortunately, he didn’t have a safer place to put the paper.  If he let them simply ride around in his backpack, they’d get all crumply in no time.

He was about to start writing down the alphabet when a thought stopped him: he was being wasteful here.  Tucking the paper away, he instead opened his system screen with the most text, the one with available skills.  He activated Skim.

Highlight the letter that starts the name for the class fusion of Scholar and Mage.

Every ‘R’ on the screen lit up.

It works!  Excited, he continued.

Second letter.

U

Third.

N

…

E

…

M

…

A

…

G

…

E

It ended there.  Runemage.  Or Rune Mage.  Unclear, and irrelevant.

Runes.  Stereotypically, the very language of magic.  That was...kind of awesome?  Milo could see a lot of potential with the class, not being locked into a particular element like Fire or Nature or something.  He hoped it wouldn’t be slow and unwieldy in combat.  It greatly depended on the skills that would be available to him.

And it can combine with the Weaponwright class.  What would that be?

Using the same method as before, Milo found that it would fuse into a class called Runic Enchanter.

Hm.  Probably not worth getting, given Primitive Weaponwright is a Basic class.  It won’t do anything to get me more Legacy skill slots.

What more could Milo do here?  The System had shown him that it was able and willing to reveal information about classes.  How could he abuse that?

There was the possibility of trying to create a compendium of all available classes, but he could probably only get something like 2 or 3 classes per use of Skim.  Given the variety of classes he’d stumbled upon in his short time here, there was bound to be a huge number of them.  It was a possibility for a future project, but not a good use of his time right now.

What he wanted was to get the System to tell him what class options he could gain with his immediate resources, but when he tried to Skim the System for that information, it remained silent.  He wasn’t sure what that meant.  Were the requirements for skill acquisition subjective or malleable somehow, or was it just that Skim wasn’t up to the task of assessing Milo’s capabilities?  Probably the latter.

Since that was a dead end, Milo revisited his idea about the Skill compendium, but on a much smaller scale.  What if he could make a short list—just the classes that would fuse with Runemage? He had no reference for how long that list was likely to be, but it seemed like a worthwhile use of his time.

He got to work.