Note: You must spend 12 more General Skill Points on common skills before you can spend them on uncommon ones.

Note: You must spend 6 more Mage Skill Points on common skills before you can spend them on uncommon ones.

Note: You must spend 3 more Psychic Skill Points on common skills before you can spend them on uncommon ones.

These were the messages that greeted me as I browsed the new skills, the uncommon ones I’d unlocked at level 10. I had 16 General, 9 Mage, and 6 Psychic skill points—only those points I’d gotten at level 10 could be spent on the uncommon skills.

“Okay,” I said, scrolling. There was another Spell Slot that I could buy for another 10 points, better affinities, some options for the professions… but right now I had to spend the 21 points I had saved first. And because I’d already taken all the common skills that interested me, I was left with a bunch of options I’d already passed up.

In the end, I spread the required skill point expenditures across the following:

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.

Pack Mule

Type: Profession, Talent

Cost: 4

Gain 5 Inventory Slots.

Two classes meant that not only did I have more skill points than a normal character, but I had fewer weaknesses to overcome: the mana and stamina increasing skills, for example, were utterly useless to me.

Hasty Memorization was the only skill I really felt I needed, and for a few reasons. One was to read game features like debuffs and remember their contents, another was to compose lists of spellcraft requirements and cast times for Rune Trap spells and the hierarch’s investiture ability.

Pack Mule was obviously going to come in handy, seeing as my inventory was already almost full and we were about to assault a dungeon.

It felt bizarre to ignore all the profession skills… but Cuby had made it clear that nothing they produced, like the grenades, actually required the profession itself. And since I was chosen… somehow I figured that the wealth we earned from the dungeon would let us just buy our craftables, much like we had in Aranar.

I didn’t want to take another elemental affinity—my lightning was enough. I thought of learning acrobatics, dancing, and how to play a musical instrument just because. But really, none of these would help me in adventuring.

Instead I bought lore skills, spending 1 more General Skill Point than I needed to to buy four of them—bringing me down to 3 of each kind of skill point.

My four new lore skills were: Diabolical, Empyreal, Undead, Wildlife. It sucked that I couldn’t go back and see what the diabolical lore had to say for the devils, but I figured the others might help at some point, and they were cheap.

The real prize was the uncommon skills. There were a few new faces—several skills to buy now under Scribe Training and Mechanist Training, some resistance skills, and affinity skills for the four basic affinities—all in addition to the next rank of skills I’d already taken. And there were weapon training skills that would add 1 to my effective level, though they were expensive, and I didn’t know what my preferred weapon was, yet.

My real prize was this:

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.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

… And I couldn’t take it because I’d overspent my General Skill Points by 1. I sighed. Next level, then—I’d be able to buy it without spending any General Skill Points, anyway, as I needed them for the next rank of Toughness.

“All right,” I said to Cuby. “I’m ready.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I want to try out all my new stuff.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, looking ahead at the mountain. “This Purging Radiance spell has the same damage as Implosive Missile—except its base cast time is 4 seconds, not 6, and it has higher range.”

“I just want to let a monster attack me,” Cuby said, “and not feel a jolt of terror every time I actually take a hit.”

Soon enough, we had walked into the growing shadow of the mountain, and soon thereafter we found the harbinger of the clusterfuck, a muscular ramthorn.

And what happened after that was… extremely gratifying.

I lay two Supercharged Unnatural Terrors on the ground as traps, then stored a Supercharged Purging Radiance as my Fragmented Spell. Then I attacked the ramthorn with my increased range, alternating between Purging Radiance and my Hardlight Tether.

Another ramthorn and a corrupted mountain lion came out of the woods—and Cuby grabbed the ramthorn with a weapon throw, dodging its initial attack by somersaulting over it. I grabbed the cat, ignoring all crowd-control efforts in favor of just nuking it to death in 10.8 seconds with Purging Radiance.

But the true glory belonged to Mana Shield. It tanked almost everything—the cat missed a few attacks against me, but those that hit were fighting a difficult battle against 43 absorption regeneration per second on a target with absurd resistances—I assumed it did Divine and Physical damage. When my higher Defense Rating from my armor spell was factored in, the cat just wasn’t up to the task—its various misses meant that my shield had more than half its absorption by the time the cat was dead.

And Cuby, who had flat reduction from her resistances as well as the same aegis spell I had, who had a 20% increase to the strength of all her buffs, and had gained enough Defense Rating to have the monsters start to miss her naturally, fared only a little worse—her shield broke just as I finished off the ramthorn, watching my bolt of blue power strike it and consume it, its body becoming nothing but blue-burning cinders that drifted away on an ethereal wind, its horns and other items clattering to the stony ground below.

And through the mind link, I communicated a simple thought to Cuby: oh, those mediocre mages.

Hey! I meant that as a lone class! It’s different when you’re also a psychic and you’ve got a rogue!

I sniggered as we moved back to the rune traps, eyes on the sky for the spirefiends that had announced their presence with their signature cries, but not arrived in the first twenty or so seconds of combat.

Both of the spirefiends dove for me, and so I stood between the runes, ignored their fire breath, then released both the fear traps when I knew they’d target the spirefiends. The morthoth attacked, lashing out at me with his chain whip—but I cracked Moment of Mastery to dodge it, leapt onto his spirefiend’s back, and threw my Fragmented Supercharged fear at him.

And beside me, Cuby leapt onto the other spirefiend to engage the cultist there. As my morthoth cowered and both spirefiends rose, I managed to throw out a single, basic, 2-second fear at her cultist.

Then, happy with the 50% damage throughput increase over Implosive Missile, I threw three more Purging Radiances into the wyvern and then hammered the morthoth to the ground. I threw two more Purging Radiances—and then the morthoth must have broken out of his fear, because the wyvern rolled to throw me.

I let it, gliding to the ground to land next to Cuby and the broken body of the cultist. The morthoth charged at us as the two wyverns dove for us—and Cuby leapt at the demon commander and blinded it, dodging a blow from its sword.

A moment later I had leapt at the demon commander, hitting it with another Unnatural Terror just to give me the time I needed to store a Fragmented Supercharged Purging Radiance, which I threw at the wyvern I’d hit five times already, dropping it to fewer than 10% as their sickly fire engulfed Cuby and I.

And my Mana Shield still wasn’t broken. It had almost broken when I’d taken two shots of fire—but then it had regenerated through the damage-over-time effects as I’d boarded my spirefiend. Now it was at half, and still regenerating.

I killed my spirefiend with another Purging Radiance, wasting a perfectly good heal of what was probably 350.

The morthoth came out of it, whipped me with his chain and knocked me to the ground, leapt through the air to strike a powerful blow, finally getting through my Mana Shield before I rolled to my feet and began backing away from it.

But it didn’t matter: I was at almost 100%. It was as threatening to me as a basic monster, and once I’d hit it with a Supercharged Psychic Parasite, I danced through its attacks with ease, purged it from the world, then turned to finish Cuby’s spirefiend, leaving us both at full health from our steadfast crusader items.

“We tank better than trees,” I said.

“They don’t even do half as much damage as they did before,” Cuby said.

“And I do more than half again as much,” I said. “And if things get bad, I can heal you for something like 250 in 2.7 seconds. I’m telling you, we’re steadfast crusaders now. It says so on the items.”

Cuby looked up at the mountain. “There’s probably a few more packs like this that we can kill,” she said. “I think there are two-spirefiend patrols, and they’re coming down when we attack their demons. We could try and circle round the mountain some more… or we could climb it and try to get inside.”

I grinned at her. “Let’s do it,” I said. “They’ve got bigger demons than these around here—I know it.”