Summon Air Drone scaled with both of the mentioned Stats. But there was still Zap and Overcharge. The former scaled with just Intelligence and the latter with Wisdom.

Jordan turned to the side, facing a direction where he was certain he couldn’t accidentally hit anyone else. Between the two Skills, he decided to focus on trying out Zap first. He held out his free arm, and began to concentrate.

In the back of his mind, he also went ahead and unsummoned his drone. Just because it’d be pretty unfortunate if it accidentally drained his TP before he could finish trying these Skills.

But as he focused, there was a flash of light as two TP were used up. In that same moment, Jordan once again gained an intuitive understanding of how Zap actually world. As it turned out, raising his hand hadn’t even been a necessary gesture. The Skill could appear from any point of his body and just needed a thought to be activated.

At that moment, a bolt of electricity shot out from the tip of Jordan’s middle finger. It moved through the air… and that was it. The bolt had barely managed to get about half a foot away from him before it just disappeared entirely. While Jordan was currently in a spot with a lesser concentration of tall grass, the fact that it couldn’t even get far enough to hit some spoke for itself.

Well then, that’s… kinda meh. Actually, range aside, maybe I’m being too harsh. If I’m forced into melee range, it looks like this will be my only real option. Like if there’s ever a scenario where I’m unarmed, for example. Since this doesn’t require any movement and can come out of any part of my body, it could make for a good sneak attack, Jordan thought.

Plus there was another point in the Skill’s favor. He could sense that it actually had something that made it stand out from the blasts of his drone and pistol. While their beams seemed to be made out of plasma, it felt like just some kind of pure energy. Something that Jordan only now realized after he had Zap as a point of comparison.

Zap’s energy signature was distinctly based in electricity. Which when directly said, because of course it would be. Normally, such a statement would be so obvious that it was borderline idiotic to point it out.

But in the case of his powers under the System, it felt deeper than that. Like there was a fundamental concept of electricity that went beyond the obvious. It was hard to put the exact feeling into words. All he could say was that it felt baked directly into his intuitive subconscious.

In any case, Jordan moved onto the third Skill, Overcharge. Considering how it’d been described in its description, he readied his Energy Pistol. Once again he started to focus on both the Skill while imagining it affecting the weapon in hand. And once again, there was a quick response.

Jordan again received an influx of knowledge upon the Skill’s activation. He looked down at his pistol. There was no difference in its visual appearance. But he could already tell that due to the Skill, there was a temporary connection between him and it.

He quickly double checked exactly how Overcharge had been described.

Description: Push a piece of technological equipment past its usual limits and enhance its performance for a short time.

With it now in use, he now had an understanding of what exactly this description meant. Jordan understood that pushing it past its usual limits effectively meant he’d get more bang for his buck.

Rather than spend 5% of the pistol’s charge in one shot, this would allow him to double the spending for a single shot. And that single empowered blast would actually be stronger than if he’d just shot two regular blasts in a row. From what he could tell, it felt like it was three times the power for the price of two charges. Now that was a good deal if he said so himself.

Then there was his Passive Skill, Tinker. While it was obviously one that could be actively tested like the others right now, it did scale with Intelligence and Wisdom. Something in of itself was very good to know. Because as the only other Skill with dual scaling, it provided some potentially valuable insight.

Tinker scaled with Intelligence and Wisdom, listed in that specific order. While Summon Air Drone, on the other hand, was the reverse. If both Stats just uniformly provided the same amount of benefits, then the listing would be in a default order, right? One that would remain the same for both Skills. But that clearly wasn’t the case here.

Based on this, Jordan believed that it was a safe assumption that multi-Stat scaling was in order of importance. So for Summon Air Drone, Wisdom was likely its primary Stat while Intelligence was its secondary.

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The only issue with this belief was that he didn’t know what was the actual impact of the scaling. Did increasing his Wisdom make the drone faster, stronger, or perhaps improve its range? Did Intelligence provide the same benefits but to just a lesser degree? Or maybe they actually improved entirely separate functions, but the ones from Wisdom were the more important ones?

Even after getting the general information about the Skill downloaded into his head, the System hadn’t felt it necessary to add that key info in. Out of all the details to be left out, this one was arguably the worst. Since how were they meant to know which Skills to build their Stats around if they didn’t know how the scaling actually worked?

Jordan just sighed to himself. Welp, it is what it is. I guess the only thing to do is take it in stride and just roll along with it. I’ll just have to do things the old fashioned way and try to manually keep track of how my Skills improve as my Stats increase.

Now for the matter of hand. Just which of his Stats was he about to increase? Jordan considered it for a little bit, taking into account both everything he knew and still didn’t know. For starters, he enacted the good old strategy known as the process of elimination.

Strength was the first thing to get crossed out. The decision to do so was almost immediate. He didn’t need to be a burly close-range warrior waving around a large weapon. He was a ranged fighter considering his gun, so getting up close in battle likely meant something had gone wrong. As far as the physical Stats went, Strength was the one he would have the least use for.

The second to get dismissed was Will. It was one of the assumedly mental Stats, however, Jordan just wasn’t sure what it actually did. But what he did know was that it didn’t have any impact whatsoever for the scaling of his Skills and Class. He’d probably ask around if anyone else with a magical Class actually made use of it. For him though, it just didn’t seem like a necessity.

Jordan took a moment to think about the next one to get axed. But after a bit of consideration, he decided on Vitality. While it was one of his naturally highest Stats already, he just didn’t feel confident in investing in it. If his prior assumptions about its properties were correct, having a higher tolerance to poisons and disease would be nice.

However, that was where the problem was. In a world where you had an incentive to kill because it led to further power, what was more likely: to eat a toxic plant and die, or getting stabbed? Whether the one doing the stabbing was a dangerous creature’s horns or maybe another person’s sword, the result was the same.

But with Vitality dismissed, that led to the first true conundrum. How did Jordan want to actually deal with the whole potential unpleasantry of getting stabbed? Would he rather increase his Dexterity to dodge the blow, or his Endurance to simply tank the hit? Both ideas had their own merits. And perhaps ideally, there was a path where he could focus on increasing both.

However, every Free Point spent toward either had the opportunity cost of not increasing his actual Class Stats. So keeping both balanced seemed like it would only drive up said cost. Something which he could later come to regret if it compromised the future effectiveness of his Skills.

Hmm. Of the two, Dexterity is already higher by a single point. So that’s technically a higher base to build from, even if it’s not by much. At the same time, I’d really rather not instantly die just because something super powerful decided to flick me on the forehead. But if I’m fast enough to just avoid that flick in the first place…

Jordan did also have his equipment to rely on. The Engineer’s Reinforced Uniform did promise in its description that it would provide protection from an array of damage types. However, it specifically said that protection would be “a low amount”.

As far as he could tell, it didn’t seem to be made from any clothing material he was familiar with. At least when it came to how it looked and felt to the touch. So he didn’t know what said low amount of protection actually meant, relatively speaking. He had to hope that it was at least pretty decent though. Since if a Combat Engineer was meant to run around a battlefield to maintain the machines of war, they would surely get good equipment to wear, right?

It really was a question of how much he trusted his Reinforced Uniform to do its job. If he focused on Dexterity but still got unlucky, would it make up for that. Or would he instead just rather rely on his Endurance even if meant being slower and less likely to dodge those attacks in the first place?

Jordan’s mind went back and forth on the issue for a good bit. But then he decided to take a deep breath, and step back. Right now, his mentality had tunnel visioned and gotten worried over something that was too narrow. What he needed to do now was try to look at things from a bigger picture. And to do that, he needed to decide on something important. What exactly would be his overall goal for survival and how he intended to win any future battles?

He reviewed how each of his Skill testing had gone. Jordan could cast Summon Air Drone and let it fly around and fight for him. He could enter close range and use Zap to electrocute his enemies. And lastly, Overcharge would allow him to rely more on his pistol by buffing it, potentially alongside any other offensive gadgets he might get his hands on.

Huh. Actually, between those, that’s a super easy choice to me. It’s barely even a contest, Jordan quickly thought to himself. In a sudden moment of clarity, an image for himself had already become clear.

Of course he would let the drone do all the dirty work for him! Who was he kidding? Jordan wasn’t some kind of fighter. If circumstances permitted, he’d always take the ability to just sit as far as possible and let the drone do the fighting. It was what he had done just now with the Rabbits, and if possible, he’d love to just stand within its outer range and watch the EXP pop-ups roll by.