It was just one of many incomprehensible bits of nonsense the alien was feeding him. Like the concept of hell. That had popped up earlier, too—some mythical afterlife prison? Ridiculous. Your soul either respawned, or unravelled into a mere memory in the Nether.
The voice in his head was buzzing with anticipation. Oz, to his irritation, was also a little—no, very interested. Begrudgingly. The screen would show him the skills and stats that now defined his future.
The text flickered, and then blinked into clarity.
Ozren Grimbrow
Class: Delinquent of Noxarcer
Grade: E
Current Essence: Calculating - upgrades paused
Class Enhancement Skills:
Mental: [Locked]
Empower: Hoodlum
Environmental: [Locked]
Cohort: [Locked]
Aura: Aura of Menace
Unique: The Mutt
Racial abilities - 1 Racial evolution available once Essence is availible
Dwarven heritage
- Dwarven stubbornness
- Dwarven constitution
Troll heritage [Volcanic variant]
- Frightful glare
- Trollish regeneration [Ice Vulnerability]
Class Skills
Twice for flinching
(Locked)
(Locked)
(Empty)
(Empty)
Personal Skills
Runic empowerment
(Empty)
(Empty)
Attributes
Physique: E3 (improved from F0)
Deftness: E5 (improved from F1)
Vitality:E4 (improved from F1)
Awareness: F0 (improved from F2)
Processing: F2
Will: E5 (improved from F0)
Presence: F2 (improved from F3)
Special -
Authority: E5
Legend
Blessing of -&#@%-
The easiest thing to do was explore his attributes.
Well—no. That was a lie. The actual easiest thing to do was ignore the blinking red weirdness labelled [Legend] and pretend he hadn’t seen it. And he would’ve succeeded if the damn thing wasn’t flashing an unknown blessing followed by a string of characters stolen from the first draft of the alphabet:
[Blessing of -&#@%-]
Trying to inspect it just gave him:
–[Error – stndisekai.pkg not found]–
Comforting.
The alien half of his brain was very concerned about this. Kept insisting it was of critical importance or some other dramatic phrase like that. Oz decided to focus on something more manageable. And less endlessly worrying.
Like his attributes. Punching-turned-into-math.
That also explained why he skimmed right past [Authority]. That was a new stat he didn’t recognise and therefore—by his own ironclad rules—automatically filed under ‘somebody else’s problem’. He could get to it later, maybe. If it didn’t explode.
[Heritage] sucked at him even as he tried to ignore it. Even classic Oz had thoughts about his heritage. Did he accept the influence of his kind-but-mad father? Or his dedicated but long-lost mother? He shook that off, letting the voice’s excitement drag him out of the mire.
More magical powers, less crippling questions about cultural identity, that’s the way!
The rest, though? Those were familiar. [Physique]. [Vitality]. [Deftness]. Stuff he’d been grinding for years through squats, sparring, and rage-enhanced calisthenics. And apparently, all that effort had paid off, because now he was strong enough to casually use a door as a club and not immediately tear his arms off.
He’d always heard your first big power boost felt natural. The Weave smoothed over the weirdness, like putting on weighted clothes and somehow forgetting they were heavy.
But this wasn’t natural. It was absurd.
He hadn’t planned to rip a door off its hinges and use it to batter a jackal-faced student-monster into unconsciousness. It had just happened. Like scratching an itch. His body had done it, and his brain had only caught up after the second swing.
The nearest he’d come to that level of power was kicking a door off its hinges, but that’d been an outhouse someone had tried to lock him in. It was some flimsy planks, not steel-bound timber.
The voice in his head wouldn’t shut up until they quantified things. It wanted numbers, categories, context—so Oz gave in and ran through the basics just to get it to pipe down.
Right. So.
F-rank was your average, F-classed, or unmagical baseline. People are just getting started in their careers. The sort of people who sprained something doing laundry. F-5 was rock bottom. F-0 was the best you could be without any magical help.
Of course, that didn’t tell the whole story. A gnome at F-1 [Physique] wasn’t the same as a minotaur at F-1. You could still get pancaked by someone ‘equal’ if they had six hundred pounds of bone and muscle on you. Build mattered.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
But once you had a class, you could channel essence into your attributes and start climbing the alphabet ladder. A basic F-rank class might let you squeak one or two stats into E-rank territory. But an E-rank class? Now you were in business—everything could be enhanced.
Everything except his [Processing], apparently.
Oz wasn’t surprised. “Of course the thinking stat is the one that stayed put.”
At the poking at what he was now coming to think of as 'Other', he rubbed his temples and tried to remember one of the many lessons he’d half-slept through. Something about [Authority] being an unusual stat. Rare. Mostly used by judges, commanders, the kind of people who didn’t get called ‘a concern’ in every report card.
Still, weird stat or not, the rest of the upgrades made sense. His class was clearly designed for smashing things, intimidating people, and bulldozing his problems. The [Will] boost in particular made sense—half his life had been pushing through stuff sheerly out of stubbornness. That and working on runes. If he wasn’t working out, he was working on runes.
It was a pity he didn’t have his tools here in the dungeon or he’d be able to whip up some really decent runic gear.
Putting that aside, he focused on the now and how he could use his new abilities to clobber everything before him.
Attributes mattered. He knew that much. He had to work hard to hit the Ranger recruitment milestones. Attributes weren’t just a measure of ability, they also fed into your skills, determined how much magic your body could channel, and equally, some skills fed back into your stats, boosting them beyond the raw numbers. Like his racial passives.
Like [Dwarven Constitution], which turned his already thick-skinned body into a poison-resistant cardio machine.
“Cardio…” Oz said aloud, almost wistfully.
He didn’t know what the word meant, exactly, but it conjured glorious visions of mechanical devices designed to make you sweat aggressively in place. Something about that concept called to him. Maybe this soul-butchery nonsense wasn’t entirely awful.
The voice called him a meathead, and Oz found he didn’t necessarily disagree.
Skills. That’s what he needed to understand next. First on the hit list: [Hoodlum].
He narrowed his eyes. “Why did that skill care about a door and a cravatless uniform but not a sword or buttoned shirt?”
Magic was meant to make sense. Kind of. Sort of. Okay, not really—but even dungeon magic shouldn’t be this petty.
He knew the basic category: Empower. You pumped magic into something—armour, weapon, your fists—and it got stronger. Blademasters did it to swords. Vanguards boosted shields and helmets. So why was [Hoodlum] empowering his fists and a bloody door?
[Hoodlum] (Type: Empower, Sub-type: Style)
You may empower weapons and armour when they fit your class’s style. You can empower unarmed attacks and your body in addition. This improves the durability of weapons and armour as an expression of your Vitality, and can empower damage done with weapons as an expression of your Physique. Continued use is required to understand the skill in more detail.
“…Style?” he muttered, reading it twice just to be sure.
The word echoed in his skull, triggering a brain-blitz from the other. With an abrupt cascade his mind was filled with images: pierced lips, surly teenagers, studded jackets, spiked clubs, chains, cigarettes, eyeliner, snarls. An aesthetic. A vibe.
An image of a gang of magical reprobates. Smoking, drinking and generally being a nuisance.
Oz blinked hard, shaking the images out of his head like water from his ears.
“What the hell kind of style is that? This isn’t a style, and it's not my style! I mean I might look like that by chance sometimes but I’m not trying to be intimidating, it just happens.” And yeah, okay—he might’ve headbutted a few lockers back in the day, but that didn’t mean he wanted to look like a cautionary poster.
He didn’t like people defining him. Didn’t like people deciding what he was. This whole thing was starting to feel less like a magical blessing and more like an emotionally devastating personality quiz.
Still… [Hoodlum] had worked. The door had held up. His boots connected like they were made of bricks.
So maybe it wasn’t all bad, but was this really who he was? He wasn’t trying to cause a hassle, the hassle was other people!
He was never going to get through this if he kept having an identity crisis, so Oz focused on a skill that he was pretty sure he already understood. Aura abilities were the power that kind of rolled off you. They pulled on the magic in the air, interacting with everything from the environment to your emotions to affect enemies and allies alike.
The next skill he actually kind of understood why he’d got it. Maybe just a little.
Aura skills were simple in theory: you gave off a vibe so intense it affected the battlefield. Magic met emotional manipulation. Some classes radiated bravery, others calm. Oz apparently radiated… menace.
Figures.
[Aura of Menace] (Type: Aura, Sub-type: Personal Enhancement)
Your skills and attacks have more impact against those who have stacks of fear or rage within your aura. Your defensive empowerments are also increased marginally for every stack in range. The range of this aura is an expression of your Physique and Presence. The boost your powers get is an expression of your Authority. Continued use is required to understand the skill in more detail.
Right. So the scarier he was and angrier people got, the more he benefitted.
It synergised pretty nicely with his [Frightful Glare], which, now that he thought about it, was also deeply unfair. He didn’t mean to be scary. People just got scared. There was a difference.
Still, his brain—the Other—suggested a neat loop: the aura feeds on the fear, which helps protect him to do more glares, which adds more fear, which powers the aura again. A fear-feedback loop. Terrifying and efficient.
He’d have to test it. Maybe find something bitey and rude to practise on.
Still, it was better than the skills offered to him, as his life now included a range of supernatural beatdowns. Wonderful.
Before this mess, he’d only had access to a single skill at a time—standard fare for the unclassed. But now he had more slots to fill.
He once again cursed them for taking his jacket. He’d sewn his dad’s spare skill crystals into the lining for safekeeping. If he had them now, he’d have a lot more options.
As of right now, his Skill Selection had expanded to accommodate both his class’s signature skill and the lone skill he’d been holding onto. The skill his dad had entrusted to him. Oz checked quickly. It was still there. No one had stolen it, overwritten it, nor had it been lost to the soul damage. It was useless right now as it only worked on runes he’d made, but still, seeing it there helped anchor him.
And handle the utter travesty that was his first signature skill.
[Twice for Flinching] (Type: Martial, Sub-type: Melee Enhancement)
Activate when an attack causes an enemy to retreat or dodge, you may make two swift strikes with additional magical power behind them. If both land, you have a chance to inflict a stack of Fear. The boost to your attack is an expression of your Willpower & Authority. Continued use is required to understand the skill in more detail.
Oz squinted at the description. Then made a face.
Great. A skill named like a playground threat. All he needed now was a magical wedgie spell and he’d complete the school bully starter pack.
“That’s just unfair.” Oz wasn’t the best-behaved but drew the line at malicious harm. He never went out of his way to mess with people. Yes, he picked fights if people didn’t leave him alone, but the goal was to be left alone. If they went away, job done. If they didn’t go away, he hit them. It wasn’t like he sought people out to mess with.
That said, the skill was pretty good. Adding his [Authority] on top of his attacks was a significant bonus. And the fact they’d become magical in nature would do a lot. Oz didn’t pay a lot of attention, but he had read the army handbook cover to cover, and it went into detail about things like resistances. The most common of which was resistance to non-magical attacks. Empowered stuff didn’t count, that just made you hit harder, but this mentioned actual magical damage, so it was a win in his book.
If only the name wasn’t so tragic.
Oz tried to pick himself up.
He’d saved the best for last—or at least, the one that made him the most nervous. Sitting under the [Unique] banner was the big one. The real game-changer.
You only ever got one [Unique]. It evolved as you levelled, sure, but it stuck with you forever. Like a soul tattoo. Only E-ranks and higher even qualified. According to every lecture he half-dozed through, a [Unique] could make—or absolutely break—your future.
And his? His bore the exceptionally underwhelming title of:
[The Mutt]
In his soulspace, Oz tried to calm himself down. Not easy with the Other still pinging excitedly in the background, practically vibrating with joy at the stats, the numbers, the potential.
It was loving this.
Oz, not so much.
The class still felt like an insult wrapped in bureaucratic politeness. “Delinquent.” Really? Maybe he’d been a little too punchy back at school, but come on—he wasn’t this thug. He’d had plenty of reasons for how he turned out. It wasn’t fair to slap a label on him just because he’d survived the hard way.
It’d be fine, confidence reasserted itself. He'd dealt with worse than a condescending skill sheet.
He steadied himself and willed the [Unique] to expand.
[The Mutt] (Type: Unique-Familiar, Sub-type: Summoning)
You summon a familiar to support you. This will bind the summon to you as a tattoo. If it receives enough damage to lose its form, it will return to the tattoo. The familiar's attributes are tied to your essence and experience development. Continued use is required to understand the skill in more detail.
Oz read it. Then re-read it.
A familiar. A summon tied to him. Growing with him. Comes back if it gets wrecked.
Honestly? It didn’t sound half bad. Maybe even useful. And… yeah, he’d always kind of wanted a pet. The real kind never worked out—too much noise, too many bills, and he couldn’t trust it not to step on one of his father’s landmines.
But this?
This was different.
The tension in his shoulders loosened just a little. Maybe Noxarcer wasn’t completely terrible.
Oz had always wanted a dog.
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