“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get down into those caves, and I’ll farm while you spend skill points. I could do some catching up anyway.”

I smiled. I didn’t want to delay looking through skills yet again, but she wasn’t wrong. “Sounds good.”

“By my math,” she said, “we should be ready to fall asleep in a few hours. I’m pretty excited about it—I’ve never lost consciousness that way before. But that should give us some time to pick up more levels.”

A guard held us up as we headed into the mountain, questioning us as to where we were going—but when her eyes moved from one amulet to the other, seeing the evidence that we’d helped to defend the town, she let us through. Cuby had the good sense to ask how many other players there might be down in the inner cave network, but the answer was simply: not many.

Once we were down into the cave network, we talked while we walked around in search of a rock worm.

“I think I’ll get all, or most of, the experience for killing a worm if you don’t have your Elemental Weapon enchant on my dagger and don’t Mana Shield me or anything—we shouldn’t need to drop group or have you stand very far away.”

“Okay.”

“Just in case we get ambushed.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. I wanted to be searching my menus right away, but the floor of the caves wasn’t even enough for me to read and walk at the same time.

At last she found her worm—a level 5, and I leaned against a stalagmite and opened my skills.

So many skills.

I had 14 General Skill Points, 6 Mage Skill Points for Magic and Lore skills, and 15 Psychic Skill Points for Magic and Talent skills.

As Cuby fought, and as we moved from one worm to the next, I searched and tabulated, occasionally asking her opinions. But eventually, I’d composed a short list, most of which came from the skills that weren’t professions.

For starters, there were skills that gave an extra ability slot—but I could only gain one such slot, and the cost was dependant on the slot’s specificity:

Extra Ability Slot

Type: None

Cost: 10

You gain an extra Ability Slot, which can hold a Spell, Technique, Spell Augment, or Metatechnique.

At present, you may only gain 1 more extra Ability Slot (no matter the type) from spending skill points.

Extra Spell Slot

Type: Magic

Cost: 10

You gain an extra Magic Ability Slot, which can hold Spells or Spell Augments.

At present, you may only gain 1 more extra Ability Slot (no matter the type) from spending skill points.

When I found these skills, I had to frown in great displeasure at my failure to buy them earlier, when I’d first taken the boon. I could have done the entire battle at the beacon with the Unnatural Confusion spell, or even something else.

Nonetheless, the extra Spell Slot—since that was undoubtedly what I’d be taking, as both my class skill points could be spent on it—was obviously the best improvement to be bought with points. The next-most obvious improvements were the elemental affinity buys:

Elemental Affinity: Fire

Type: Magic, Martial

Cost: 12, or 8 if you have another Elemental Affinity skill

You gain an innate Fire affinity. By spending 5 seconds in focus, you can disable this affinity.

If you already have an Elemental Affinity skill, you don’t gain an innate affinity from this skill. Instead, you gain the ability to change your old affinity to the type granted by this skill by spending 5 seconds of focus.

All the elements that were on my Potion of Primeval Resistance—Fire, Frost, Lightning, Nature—were choosable. I didn’t know how it would interact with my current affinities, except that a spell like Magic Arrow which required the magic affinity wouldn’t drop that one.

Still—the ability to switch my affinity, combined with some lore skills, or even just the lore skill I had, would help me optimize my damage against, well, everything. Provided I could spend the skill points, that was.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

But therein lay the problem. I had a lot of skill points—or felt like I did. But not enough to buy up a handful of lore skills and elemental affinities, especially if I was spending 10 on a new slot. There were more skills that looked attractive:

Hardy

Type: Martial

Cost: 8

Gain 100 Hit Points.

Endurance

Type: Martial, Talent

Cost: 4

Gain 100 Stamina.

Spirited

Type: Magic, Talent

Cost: 4

Gain 100 Mana.

Pack Mule

Type: Profession, Talent

Cost: 4

Gain 5 Inventory Slots.

Sneaking

Type: Talent

Cost: 6

You are adept at moving silently and unseen, and at discerning through study when conditions are favorable for doing so.

Tracking

Type: Talent

Cost: 6

You are adept at discerning the tracks that creatures make through most types of terrain, though some creatures leave less obvious tracks in different types of terrain. Identifying which kind of creature made a certain kind of tracks typically requires the relevant lore skill.

Heightened Sense

Type: Magic, Talent

Cost: 6

You choose sight, hearing, or scent when you select this skill. That sense becomes heightened—you are better able to detect things with it. If you choose sight, you grow better at seeing things at a distance and in darkness. If you choose scent, you are better able to distinguish scents and from which direction they are coming. If you choose hearing, you are better able to make out sounds and from which direction they are coming.

Hasty Memorization

Type: Talent

Cost: 6

You gain the ability to quickly commit things to memory, such as reading a page only one time but recalling the information on it with profoundly good accuracy a day later.

Sprinter

Type: Martial, Talent

Cost: 6

You increase the speed at which you sprint by approximately 20%.

[Sprinting is the highest speed at which you can travel by foot. While sprinting, you cannot use abilities that require the use of your hands, though you may still carry objects.]

There were some more abilities, such as Mount Training, which looked like they would be very useful in the future. But for now, these were the ones that caught my eye.

I bought the Extra Spell Slot skill with my Psychic Skill Points, then, seeing that it was a 20% increase to my 500 Hit Points, I bought Hardy as well—with General Skill Points.

I decided to leave the Elemental Affinity until I knew a little more about what it might accomplish. Then I was left with 6 General Skill Points, 6 Mage Skill Points, and 5 Psychic Skill Points. A lot of good skills would need to be bought with general points—but I wasn’t sure if Stealth or Tracking would be better, and they were my top choices in that regard.

I decided to save my Mage skill points for Lore skills as they came up, given that the information they gave felt like it would become more and more useful as the breadth of my abilities increased.

As for my Psychic Skill Points, which could buy Talent type skills, I decided to spend them—along with 1 general point—on Heightened Sense. The only question was: which sense? Sight seemed like the easy pick, but hearing might be a better choice for dungeons, given the usefulness of listening at doors and around corners.

Eventually, I chose sight. I suspected that Cuby already had Heightened Hearing, and that she’d made use of it in the lower mines earlier that day. This all left me with 5 General Skill Points and 6 Mage Skill Points—and, importantly, a new spell slot.

The encounter earlier had convinced me that I wanted that spell to be Glide, which I had the scribe’s recipe for—the only thing it needed, other than the card stock and paints that I already had, was a feather. Hopefully I could get it in town from a shop—or from Karrol Stir.

I watched Cuby fight a rock worm after I’d finished. I’d have to lie to her if she asked me what I’d bought—maybe just ignore the extra spell slot. I had more skill points than I was supposed to from both my classes.

I thought again about telling her. I knew it was a bad idea, but I wanted to. I could have been speaking to her in thought speech—could kill the worms faster if I used my Fragmented Implosive Missiles.

“All right,” I said, putting the thought from my mind. “Come get a weapon enchantment. I’m joining you.”

She looked up at me, grinning as she dropped the 28-slot worm carcass from her inventory to the ground beside her.

“Also,” I added, “you don’t need to loot that way. Dead monsters are containers.”

“Huh?” she asked. Then her eyes got a little glazed look as she looked down at the worm. She crossed her arms. “How did neither of us think of this?”

I shrugged.

“But hey!” she said, her face sliding back into its near-permanent expression of exuberance. “You actually knew something that I didn’t! Good job, Alatar.”

I chose not to answer this, instead proceeding to cast Elemental Weapon.

Then we ground. There’s no need to give a play-by-play of how we killed successions of worms, Cuby protected by my Mana Shield and bolstered by the extra damage. She struck level eight, and I was… probably the same. The chosen status didn’t tell me what level I was counting as for experience gains, just that it was whatever level I’d be at if I only had one class but gained the same experience, and not, like everything else it granted, as if I were level 10. By the time we left to find a place to sleep, I was just shy of hitting level 6—but I was pleased with this. In the event of an attack, I had set myself up to potentially level mid-combat.

Though truthfully, I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

Awkward as my conversation with Oderion had been, I definitely preferred saving people to killing them.