Chapter 159 – Weighing Class Options

They were sitting at dinner laughing together. Kang giggled away as he waved his one good hand demonstratively from where he sat in the wheelchair. He opened his mouth expectantly and a blob of jelly of the size that would fit on a teaspoon floated from the tray and into his mouth.

Kang sucked it down a broad grin on his face.

Not for the first time, he found himself admiring the tray that his friend was eating off. It did it all. Fed him, cleaned him and itself. Tom, or very occasionally one of the girls, had to load the tray up each mealtime, but that was it. After that, it did something that no amount of electronics could have achieved on earth. A telepathic interface, telekinesis and a configurable clean spell were the extent of its features and that might not seem that incredible until you saw the freedom it gave his friend.

While physically Kang was still an invalid; with the wheelchair, this tray, his levitation belt and the changing cubical in his room, he could do almost as much as any of them. At least when it came to living a standard life.

“What bullshit! We should be casting freaks out not giving them stuff.” A voice that broke midway through the sentence proclaimed.

Silence deadened, and a hurt expression crossed Kang’s face. Joseph was standing just a metre behind him with an ugly expression on his face.

“This,” he poked the chair. “His a waste of resources. Stupid retard.”

An inarticulate scream tore itself from Eloise’s throat as she launched herself at Joseph. Briefly, she was moving far faster than a human child should have been able to manage.

Tom recognised a quadruple attribute burst when he saw it. Eloise, unlike him and Briana didn’t have to conserve her uses for duels, but even she was rarely foolish enough to use the more powerful version of the ability in front of others.

Tom was wincing before the punch even landed. Eloise’s chicken leg like arms struck with the strength of a professional weight lifter from back on earth. Joseph had never been a stocky boy and having just gone through a growth spurt was almost as skinny as Eloise, but had none of her trait enhanced vitality.

The breath was blasted out of him as her fist sunk into the stomach almost to the wrist.

If she had targeted a more delicate area that amount of power channelled through a child’s fist would have sent someone to the healer.

Joseph must have felt anything but fortunate as he gasped and involuntarily doubled over, which meant her second blow a vicious horizontal roundhouse collided unblocked against the upper arm. The thud Tom was sure could be heard on the other side of the hall even over the babble of conversation.

It sent him spinning to crash on the floor and between the stomach strike and the savage impact to his shoulder he was rattled and he only barely got one arm out to cushion the fall before his face crunched into the hard tiles probably doing more damage than all the injuries that had proceeded it.

The entire sequence had taken a handful of seconds. To those unused to battle it would have been a blur. One second Joseph was throwing insults and the next Eloise would have almost teleported next to him, a thud and a bang and then the taller boy would have been left prone on the floor.

Joseph’s friends reacted, but Briana had not hesitated like them. Her spell was already formed, and she flicked her fingers, and four columns of water shot out of the ground like his earth spikes did to slam into the stomach of the potential reinforcements.

They were sent sprawling, and only now was the room reacting to the confrontation. Silence fell as everyone looked over at them.

Tom did nothing to interfere. He knew Spark, with its range extended by his domain would finish the fight in moments, but he resisted the impulse because there were too many eyes on him. Yes, his name was providing him with almost the perfect shield to stop the assassins coming after him, but it was not something he wanted to risk.

“Why would you defend the waste of space?” Joseph spluttered from the ground, a tiny bit of blood leaked out of the corner of his mouth. It might have been the adrenaline pumping through his system, but Tom had to give the boy credit. He was brave.

Just continuing to function after that combination of hits was impressive.

Keeping the trash talking going after being spanked was however stupid.

The words registered with Eloise, and she used another burst. She shot forward and kicked him in the side right on top of the lower two ribs. There was a crack, and he was lifted partially off the ground. It was amusing to watch the ten-year-old girl dominate the older boy, but she had taken it too far.

“Eloise, stop,” he yelled.

One of Joseph’s friends started to scramble to his feet his face a rictus of anger with all of his ire focused on the now seemingly harmless Eloise. He froze as he saw Briana standing with not one but four dangerous looking water missiles hovering over her outstretched palm.

There was a blur, and a large physical presence stood between the two opposed sides.

“What’s happening?” Dimitri demanded as he waved a hand and caused the white light of healing to wash over the prone boy.

Joseph’s pained expression noticeably softened. “She just attacked me.”

“You called Kang a waste of space.” Eloise yelled.

“Did you?” Dimitri asked.

“No.” Joseph said indignantly.

“Boy, be careful of your words. Do you really think you can get away with lying to me.”

“I just said that magic chair and feeding tray’s a waste of resources.”

“You also called him a retard.” Eloise snarled angrily. “He’s better than you’ll ever be.”

“Are you saying I made a mistake with resource allocation?” Dimitri inquired in a dangerous tone.

“No, Sir, I’m not. I wouldn’t.”

“You did too,” Eloise snapped, thrusting a finger at him. “He’s lying!”

“Hush, child. I can handle this.”

“She’s not a child she’s a demon.”

Dimitri clicked his fingers, and it was clear he had used a spell to stop them both from talking.

“This is unacceptable. We treat people with respect.” He glanced around the room, assessing the situation. “Joseph, Eloise and Briana you are going to have supervised detention for the week.”

“No,” Briana exclaimed. “That’s unfair. What did I do? I was stopping them from piling in and making it worse.”

“Did you use magic on fellow students?”

“Um… yes… but detention is so smelly. It’ll be unfair if I have to go”

“Was anyone’s life in danger.”

“No!” She was tearing up.

“Then were you allowed to use magic?”

“No… but. I was just trying to help, and I didn’t hurt them. Did I hurt you?” she asked the very wet kids she had knocked to the floor. They glowered at her and unsurprisingly weren’t leaping to her aid.

“And your relative restraint is why you’re only receiving a week. Even these two idiots weren’t stupid enough to resort to magic. But Eloise you used excessive force and Joseph.” Dimitri shook his head. “You’re getting punished for being so unkind.”

Then he was gone.

“Stupid retard,” Joseph muttered toward Kang. “This is your fault.”

Tom winced, but the volunteer he expected to appear and reprimand the kid further didn’t turn up. With a snort, the bully stalked off.

Eloise looked like she didn’t care about the punishment, but Briana had gone white. “It’ll be okay,” he offered. “Maybe not for Eloise, but you’ll be fine.” He winked at her and she notably brightened when she realised what he was suggesting. If she could use the divine trial to skip boring classes, she could do the same for detention.

An invitation came from Kang and his rising spirits vanished.

Shit, he thought as he accepted it, hoping the cruel words from Joseph wasn’t going to affect his friend too badly.

As always, he appeared standing two metres from the base of the bed. “You okay, mate.”

“Ya… ret.”

“You’re not a retard.” Tom said quickly.

Kang shook his head. “Jo, Jo.”

“Joseph?”

“Ret, ret. Jo, ret”

Tom grinned. “Joseph’s the retard.”

“Ya.”

“Yes, I agree. An absolute wanker. I know he’s a kid, but honestly. I’m not happy with him.”

Kang just lay cheerfully with his lopsided smile stretching wide. “Ret, Ret.”

“Exactly.” Tom glanced around the room. There had been a change to the usual very hospital like room that usually greeted him. The single addition was a stuffed toy that looked like a life-sized trident. It sat against the wall, mostly balanced, but even a four-year-old could topple it if they wanted. The other interesting detail was that it was ridden with big metal darts that had torn into the soft fabric and revealed the internal fluff. There were over ten of them.

“What’s this.” He pointed.

Kang smiled, and then a dart appeared above his arm and then launched like it was shot out of a crossbow. In a flash, it crashed into the teddy with an eruption of fluff. Fate flooded out of his friend at the precise point of impact.

“F… F… Fun.”

“Stress relief is it?” Tom smiled as he counted the darts in it. There were twelve now in less than a day. If every strike was a release of fate, then the accumulated impact must be getting close to forcing a meeting. “Hopefully, I’ll meet it soon.” He mused. “It’ll be good to kill it.

“Me, me… make.”

“You’ll make sure?”

Kang nodded.

“But I thought you couldn’t control your fate release.” He grinned a shit-eating grin.

“Not.”

“You still claim you can’t.”

His friend nodded vigorously.

Tom laughed. He was sure on some level Kang was lying, but he had read the blessing description and Kang should have been incapable of directing it. He guessed he would find out soon. If he met the trident before it aged out, then it was likely what he suspected was real that Kang was actively helping him despite the boy’s own personal struggles. 

The question was once the trident died could Tom push the eight hundred plus fate that Kang produced each day in a direction that would continue to help him.

Another three months passed and there was no question that Kang’s fate was working. Whenever he stood in front of the three doorways, he could feel fate, thick and cloying, filling the air around him. Three months of accumulation pushing for an outcome. Opposing fate, the rules, or the GODs pushed back, but every day the pressure mounted, and he got the feeling the dam was going to break soon. That was only a consideration for five minutes twice a week while he prepared for the duel. Right now, with his age approaching ten and a half he went into the isolation room just like he did every day. Most of his energy was focused on the issue of classes and not the ones the orphanage forced him to attend If he wanted to get the right one, he was going to need to dedicate most of his remaining training time while he was a child towards getting past the difficult prerequisites that all the more advanced classes possessed.

He had settled on a strategy. He’d pick the sixteen best and then use five questions to resolve which of them to focus on. The first question would be directed to see if the best class was in the group he had selected. If it wasn’t he would go to his discarded classes to try to find the gem that the oracle question would have to be pushing him toward. It was not foolproof, but with the classes he had to select from there were no wrong choices. They were all ridiculously powerful.

He had already selected twelve of the final list. Two with a spear focus, three teleport skirmishers, four with a magical bent and another two dedicated to amping precognition and of course Attribute Modification. Just because he had decided it was no good didn’t mean the oracle question would share the same opinion.

The classes didn’t fit into categories quite that neatly. Most of the classes had multiple aspects. For example, his second sword class could arguably be classified as precognition.

Class: Instinctual Legendary Spearman – Cost 120,000

This class combines devastating spear fundamentals with precognition to create a unique fighting style.

On acquisition gain

·        The Instinctual Spearman Battle Art – This is a method that chains knowledge of the future to create unstoppable openings to allow you to be beat otherwise superior opponents.

·        Predictive combat – Provides the mind power to calculate all possible personal movement and precognition to predict the enemy’s response to those movements over the next eight seconds to best plan out specific actions.

The per level improvements this class offered were substantially different from that of the other legendary spearman class he was considering. This class was focused on improving the two signature abilities and while it facilitated improvements to generic spear skills, the gains were nowhere near as impressive as what the pure class offered. For example, maxing out Power Strike in the other class would cost the acquisition bonus and ten further levels. To gain the same outcome in this class would take close to forty levels.

The prerequisites for this precognition adjacent class were also easier to obtain, at least for him.

He only needed a battle precognition skill over tier three and the same for a spear skill along with an affinity of over ninety in precognition, a hurdle he easily surpassed. It was just the two Tier three skills that he would need to get, and he had no doubt that he could manufacture both of them within twelve months, let alone four years.

Then there were the teleport skirmisher classes, which were basically designed to maximise hit-and-run tactics. One had a bias towards spear, another possessed a focus on long range magic and the last had precognition as its trump card.

They were all drooling levels of power. The kind of thing that would almost instantly turn him into a deadly piece in any battle where strategic positioning mattered or there were lots of open spaces. It was incredible how every one of them, if he took them would by necessity warp his fighting style. There was no class that was just a Tom style. Every option would require him to adjust his battle approach to extract the maximum benefit.

On his list there were eleven legendary and one mythic option and unfortunately the mythic for all of its immense power had its drawbacks.

Class: Magical Tier Empowerment—Type: Mythical; Cost 395,000.

This class empowers low tier magical spells to be more powerful.

On acquisition gain

·        128 magic.

·        Skill: Supercharge Spells—Invest extra mana into a spell beyond its natural limits at a rate of every 3-mana invested increases the power of the spell by 2.

·        Skill: Tier Empowerment (Grade 3) - Any spell whose tier is less than half Tier Empowerment’s Grade rounded down will be empowered. Once empowered, it will act as if its tier is equal to Tier Empowerment’s grade.

While the worded description might have been wordy, the magic of the system room ensured that he understood exactly what it did. Basically, if he had this class, his tier 0 spells would behave like they were Tier 3. As the mathematics worked that meant they would be landing with triple their normal punch. His tier one spells would also improve, but the bonus they got would be substantially less.

That might not have seemed that great until you factored in the per level bonuses that also came with the class.

·        Gain 24 magic per level.

·        Improve the efficiency of Supercharge Spells by 0.5% each level.

·        At each threshold level (i.e. 16, 32, 64, 128…) upgrade Tier empowerment by one.

·        At each threshold level (i.e. 16, 32, 64, 128…) double the range of all spells eligible for Tier Empowerment.

That basically meant once he got 128 levels into the class every spell under tier 4 would act like it was a tier 8 spell. Spark, Earth Manipulation and Touch Heal and any other tier zero spells he might acquire in the future would function like they were twenty-five times more powerful. He could create all the different tier one missile spells and have them hitting with seventeen times more power than usual. Even the tier two chaos bolt would get boosted by eleven times.

Then, on top of all that the range would be increased by sixteen times and he could supercharge them. After that, many class levels, every point of mana he invested beyond a spell’s usual limits would be increased by a hundred and ten percent of what he invested.

Once you had enough levels into this class, it became overpowered, but that made sense. Most people wouldn’t be able to acquire it until they were already a powerhouse and developing their third class. For them, at least initially, a single level would have the same cost as fifteen for him. For a rank two hundred powerhouse, that discrepancy was even greater. There was a massive advantage in getting a mythical class early. 

As powerful as it was, the prerequisites it required definitely reflected its mythical status.

Prerequisites

·        Four tier 0 spells at a proficiency level greater than 64. – Not Met.

·        Fifty percent of all spell casting for your entire lifetime, weighed by mana must have been used on tier 0 spells.

·        Less than ten percent of all your lifetime spell casting may have been used on tier 3 spells or higher.

·        Possess 16 affinities over 60—Not Met.

·        Possess 8 affinities over 70—Not Met.

·        Possess 4 affinities over 80—Not Met.

·        Possess an affinity over 90.

·        Have created thirty-two spells from scratch—Not Met.

·        Have received thirty-two sideway evolutions—Not Met.

·        Have created a spell from scratch for every four months alive.

·        Gained more spell levels than months lived—Not Met.

·        Possess a legendary or greater class—Not Met.

The class required spell use proficiency, expertise in spell creation, raw talent with the affinities, and have had someone who possesses all those advantages having voluntarily restricted themselves to only using low-level spells. Basically, it was the type of class that you needed to know about before gaining access to your system. Then you would have needed to dedicate the first fifty years of your life working towards first gaining a legendary class to make them eligible, with every battle being a challenge because you had to restrict your spell use. Finally, there was no time to take the foot off the peddle because you had to beat the ticking clock of the per month criteria and eventually that would get everyone as there were only so many spells out there. It was nearly impossible to meet requirements, which Tom guessed was consistent with it being of mythic rarity.

As for Tom, the Divine Fruit should be able to boost his affinities over those levels with a bit of help from Known Heretic and or Dimitri for the couple of affinities that might be close but not quite strong enough. The spell levels and magic creation would be met by him focusing on creating lots of tier zero spells and using his large mana stores to raise their levels. That would be a process which would also get him the sideways evolutions..

Basically, meeting these prerequisites was within his grasp if he dedicated the remaining four and a half years to the task.

The only drawback with the class is that it didn’t play well with his domain. To get the advantage of Tier Empowerment, he wouldn’t be able to cast the spell through his domain and would instead have to cast them manually. Once he got it to a high level, the loss of range didn’t matter as even at class level sixty-four, his range on Earth Spike would be ninety-six metres, which was equivalent to his domain if he only raised its level by one.

While he said it didn’t matter, the idea of the class irked him. He hated waste. If he focused on this class, his tier eight domain skill would be rendered effectively toothless he didn’t like inefficiencies in his build, which was why he was glad he had the oracle questions. If it told him to take this class, he wouldn’t be disappointed because being able to use Spark at a hundred metres with its power boosted by twenty times with six thousand mana pumping through it was going to vaporise even things with a pseudo immunity to electricity damage.

Then there was the massive synergy with his traits. With this class, he could push all of his free points into fate and leave him with a fragile mage build. Then if something wanted to kill him, his traits would activate and boost his agility, strength and vitality up with the help of a burst to almost match his opponents. He would possess incredible magical fire power and reality warping fate while still possessing physical attributes that were at worse thirty percent less than his adversaries. Against most, he would be an unstoppable force of nature especially when he also factored in his precognition that should allow him to avoid deadly encounters and pick and choose his enemies.

In fact, when he compared this to the spear class he wondered how the oracle question could ever choose it over this mythical option. Yeah, his domain would be neutered, but against the positives the class gave him was that at all important? Against the sort of power he would receive with this class, he wasn’t sure the legendary one was actually that powerful after all.

He chuckled to himself grabbed his spear and threw himself into vigorous training. The intensity he set was exhausting and even with Touch Heal his aching joints reminded him that he was still literally years away from becoming a powerhouse with a mythical class.

After an hour he stopped and while he walked around, panting and trying to recover, as he often did he grabbed the gazette to see the latest update.