The next week or so was mainly a blur of preparation and training. We all had our own individual classes helping us (I use this term loosely in my case) get ready for entering “the tower”. I had learned after asking around and bribing some of the older students that the tower was a sort of manmade dungeon construct housed inside the school. No one was sure if it was here before Hellstrom and they put the university on top of it, if the faculty built it, or if it just appeared on its own but I had been told the majority of Hellstroms training for highsiders centered around the tower.
I spent most of the time in that week leading up to our first time entering the tower with Star and Theo because they were in class with me and we needed to focus on similar things. Despite not actually planning to enter with us, Star was easily the best resource we had for the class, taking meticulous notes on everything the professor said. She seemed so excited she was almost vibrating for the whole week, the normalcy of working on a group project for a college class making the maenad almost glow with joyful enthusiasm.
As we got to know her better, Theo and I grew a lot closer to Star. Aside from just being happy to have a life, my new bodyguard loved learning, and was always happy to help out when it came to classes. She would still make unusually violent or sexual comments in casual conversation without noticing but it just became one of those quirks friends have that you don’t really notice. Her tendency to walk around naked in the dorms while we studied was substantially more difficult to get used to, and I suspect if I wasn’t at least a little afraid of putting my dick anywhere near the mouth of a cannibal I would probably have taken her up on the numerous offers of oral sex.
Over the course of the week though, even that became something of a routine, the blunt maenad just making herself part of the group. Even the other girls in the group didn’t actually care about the propositioning (maenads are nymphs, and nymphs are notoriously sexually fluid) hell, based on the giant smile I saw Ali sporting after some “girl talk” on Wednesday, I suspected she had taken the bouncy blonde up on the offer. Guess maenads eat men and women.
After plenty of studying and some serious outlines based on a vague bullet point list the professor gave us, we finally managed to set up a training regimen. As I was told was the norm with class creation, making my official class had given me two skills. Of those, one was useful in combat and the other one…well, honestly it was just odd. Much like the class that spawned them, these two skills were S rank. S rank skills, much like revelation, apparently never had any quantifiable number in them like lower ranked skills. But both skills were still going to be damn useful.
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Precognition (S): While standing still, glance a short time into the future of your immediate surroundings. Warning, actions taken as a result of information gleaned from this skill change the way events around you unfold, rendering any information past the point of change unreliable.
That one was my only real combat usable skill. Despite having to stand still to use it, being able to predict an enemy’s movements would be crazy valuable. The only real issue with the skill besides having to sit still was that as soon as I used it to change what I was I would need to use it again. I had a few ideas for getting around that, the most obvious being to only act on information that would enable me to finish the fight quickly. That said, it stayed active as long as I was motionless, so I could use it to run overwatch on group battles and any changes would be obvious in real time. I wasn’t sure what the short time part meant though, I suspected using the skill was probably very strenuous. The second skill I’d gotten was slightly more…esoteric in nature, less useful on the battle field but definitely nice to have.
Murphy’s Flaw (S): Once a day divine some details of something bad that will happen to or around you within twenty four hours.
This one was honestly the more useful of the two long term. Short term predictive ability was neat and made my class combat applicable but my real utility would be these daily prophecies. Being able to avoid disaster would probably save my life and the lives of my friends dozens of times in the future. I would have to be careful to remember that just because I avoided one calamity didn’t mean we weren’t still vulnerable to danger. Not to mention the skill didn’t say I would learn the details of the worst thing that would happen to me, or what details I would get. It honestly gave me a headache that even as an actual prophet, somehow prophecy was still vague bullshit that was probably only going to make sense in hindsight.
Coming up with a method of training this had taken some doing honestly. Well the first one. Murphys flaw needed no training, and I used it every day. I successfully avoided breaking my foot in a pothole and getting food poisoning. I’m also fairly sure I may have prevented someone from being kidnapped by a criminal syndicate..or a cult, honestly my read on that situation was a bit unclear. Either way somewhere in the surrounding city were some very unhappy guys in a van wearing ski masks.
After consulting Star and Theo we finally settled on a training method. Star and Theo each got a paint ball gun and the would shoot at me with a regular tempo. I had to try to practice stopping and activating Precognition in the split seconds between shots. I could manage with ten second breaks between shots, so I had a long way to go. We also did some drills where they would fight and I had to guide one of them from Precognition. Though the results weren’t amazing, between my progress and Theo’s I was confident we would at least be useful to the party. Before I knew it, it was already time for our first foray into the tower.