You have gained a level.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed at the text within his brain. This was an unexpected gain, but, to be fair, he had made two colossal advances; he could now communicate with his summons over extremely long distances and manually control his mana.

With a thought, Ethan brought his Panel to the forefront of his mind.

Subject: Ethan Cross

Class: Summoner (Uncommon)

Level: 5

Rank: 0

Attributes:

Agility: 1.6

Creativity: 1.5

Fortitude: 1.4

Insight: 1.2

Magic: 2.5

Processing: 1.4

Strength: 1.1

Impartments: Summon Goblin

Impartment Available

1 Minor Physicality Attribute Points available.

1 Superior Attribute Point available.

Ethan’s eyes were glued to the third-to-last string of text, ‘Impartment Available’. Moving to his desires, his Panel was temporarily swept aside to make room in his mind.

Choose an Impartment.

1. Summon Hobgoblin.

2. Summon Body

3. Summon Minor Golem

4. Summon Ferrow

5. Spirituality Bank

Out of the three new additions, two were very simple. He could summon a Ferrow, the little ferret-thing he and Gadget had killed, or a hobgoblin, which were probably just bigger, stronger and maybe smarter goblins.

He lacked any guesses on what the fifth was, though. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to receive their descriptions.

Impartment Description: Summon Hobgoblin allows Subject to summon a hobgoblin, the evolved leaders of the goblin species. Moderate mana cost. Moderately autonomous.

Impartment Description: Summon Ferrow allows Subject to summon a Ferrow. Moderate mana cost. Moderately autonomous.

Impartment Description: Spirituality Bank allows Subject to create a Spirituality Bank, which stores the consciousnesses of certain summons, allowing them to retain knowledge, skills, and et cetera. Ranging mana cost.

It wasn’t hard to cast aside Body and Minor Golem again, but the remaining choices were difficult. Based on the description, hobgoblins were also the goblins’ leaders, meaning that they’d make the regular goblins work far more efficiently as well as being overall superior.

Ferrows likely weren’t even as smart as a goblin, meaning that they wouldn’t be very useful in the scouting and mapping role that the goblins took, but the Ferrows were also far more dangerous than any other option, and would be even more lethal with a decent mind to direct them.

Spirituality Bank was arguably the least useful. None of his summons were worthy of its usage aside from Fred, but… was Fred really worth an entire Impartment selection?

…No, he probably wasn’t. Ethan felt a bit bad about the admission, as he’d grown a bit attached to Fred, but it was simply not worth it. Moreover, his summons weren’t real creatures- his very first Impartment had made that very clear to him. The little bit of personality that they did have was caused by Ethan’s desire for it, and the consciousnesses he had to create with the fourth Form were closer to artificial intelligences- he supposedly literally, since they were being artificially created- than a real living creature’s.

Realistically, then, Spirituality Bank only allowed him to retain the skill and knowledge of any summons that died even after their deaths- and maybe decreasing the cost of making a replacement, since he wouldn’t need to create a consciousness from scratch. He could see that being very useful, but only in the future.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

So, it was down to Summon Ferrow and Summon Hobgoblin. Hobgoblins would be more adept at everything compared to his current goblins and would even make them more efficient, whereas Ferrows would be useful for little more than combat… but they would be damn good at it.

‘What do I need the most right now?’ Ethan wondered. Three goblins, two humans, and a Overloader dog. That was pretty decent, he was pretty sure- maybe capable of consistently fighting Wyrdfurs, albeit with the likely losses of his goblins. Ethan was pretty sure that the Wyrdfur they’d managed to kill had simply made the mistake of conserving its energy and mana for too long- once it finally began using its powerful fur stuff, they’d already been in a decent position to gamble everything and barely take it down. If it had gone all-out from the start, they would’ve died- point blank.

On the other hand, Ethan, Alyssa and Gadget were starving and dehydrated, with no clue what they were doing, where they were, or how to finish the Tutorial. The regular goblins could scout around decently enough, but Ethan needed better.

“I choose Summon Hobgoblin.” Ethan told the System.

Impartment will be imparted upon Subject’s willingness.

Receive Impartment?

“Obviously,”

Information flooded into his mind, the influx of information greater than it had been the first time. Ethan’s head ached at the strain put on it, but it all settled in soon enough and Ethan took his time going through it all, unlike his first Impartment.

There were eight Forms necessary to summon a hobgoblin. Compared to the goblin summoning ritual, which had compressed a hundred different aspects of the body into a mere four rituals- only possible due to how simple goblins were- this one’s forms were more specialized.

Because of this, the first six Forms of the hobgoblin summoning ritual were just as easy as the first three of the goblin summoning ritual. The seventh and eighth, however, were far, far more complex.

The goblin summoning ritual was split into four stages. The first made the skeletal structure, the second the flesh, muscle, blood and all that, the third the organs, and the fourth the consciousness.

The hobgoblin summoning ritual’s more complex nature and greater budget allowed for more emphasis on certain aspects. The first stage made the skeletal structure, the second the flesh, blood and other vitals, the third the muscle, the fourth the natural weapons- the claws, sharp teeth, tusks and the slight horns-, the fifth the organs, and the sixth another organ- the brain.

That was where the simplicity ended. After that, the seventh stage would form the hobgoblin’s mana core. Unlike that of most living creatures, it could not be used for magic or anything- it was for the sole purpose of decreasing the maintenance cost of the hobgoblin. The mana core would take in mana from the environment- like all mana cores did, and then use every drop of mana it obtained to fuel its own body, reducing its cost massively.

Lastly, there was the eighth stage, where Ethan would form the consciousness. This one was, like the seventh, incomprehensibly difficult compared to the final stage of the goblin’s summoning ritual.

The seventh and eight even needed him to manually control his mana in certain parts of it, although the vast majority of it still relied upon Forms to control his mana. Ethan knew just from the intensive descriptions of what needed to be done and the vague visions of humanoids performing them that he wouldn’t be able to summon a hobgoblin. The forms required his body to move in ways it simply couldn’t- ways that Ethan imagined even the most flexible humans in the world couldn’t meet.

Seemingly, the only option was for Ethan to use his Attribute Points to enhance his agility, but the inhumanly difficult nature of the forms made Ethan worry that hitting a ‘milestone’ in his Agility would give him joints in places that a normal human would never have.

Fortunately, the Impartment actually had information on this- it was common for ‘Subjects’ of different species to have an easier or harder time meeting the requirements of the Forms. The easiest way to amend his inability to perform the seventh and eighth Forms was to change them.

The Forms were simply movements with assigned meanings meant to direct the subconscious, after all. They only worked because the Impartment had assigned meaning to the Forms, meaning that acting on them shaped his subconscious. It was not enough to simply decide that a certain action meant a certain thing, though- it would take hours of concentration and effort to override imparted meanings and modify the movements to abide better to the human form.

After that, Ethan would need to reorganize all of these movements into a Form worthy of creating a mana core and the moderately intelligent consciousness of a hobgoblin.

All of that together… it would take Ethan ages, at least in his current state. Ethan needed to strengthen his Agility, but even more urgently than that, Ethan needed to enhance his brain in order to speed up the learning process. Even then, it would take a long time for him to be able to properly summon a hobgoblin.

That didn’t mean that his chosen Impartment was useless, though. Previously, Ethan had very little room to enhance his goblins, but… now, Ethan had a very strange idea.

‘What if I mash together the summoning rituals for hobgoblins and goblins?’ Ethan wondered. He’d have to start off slow, for sure; Ethan might add in a few movements during his summoning of a goblin at a time- movements meant to enhance its size, strength, or natural weaponry. Making random alterations without a firm understanding of what he was doing would only ruin the summoning, so he needed to take it careful so as not to waste his mana.

‘Dammit… if I’m going to be experimenting like this, which I definitely will be even if I discard this goblin-hobgoblin hybrid idea, I’ll need to enhance my Magic Attribute as well, or drop a goblin.’ Ethan thought. The Mana Orb would serve as a decent stopgap solution until he was able to do so, at least.

Ethan finally opened his Panel again, to assign his Attributes. After concentrating on the new ‘Superior Attribute Point’, Ethan learned that it would increase any one Attribute by an entire 1- which would be a colossal improvement for almost any of his Attributes.

Ethan decided to rank the immediate importance of each Attribute. Processing definitely came first, with the colossal amount of work he’d need to put in. After that, Ethan judged that Creativity and Magic would be roughly equal; his Creativity would presumably help him to plan out his experiments and get the most out of them, and the increase in Magic would allow him to take part in these experiments more frequently. After that was Agility, and behind that was probably Insight. Fortitude came next, so that he could heal from the Wyrdfur’s injury faster, and Strength came last. Ethan was almost disappointed by how unimportant raw strength was to him right now- Ethan would’ve loved to be able to throw boulders around or something.