Angie pretended she didn’t like hopping. Her body was made to move, her long legs were most comfortable when she was running, and even when she stood it felt better to be shifting from side to side.

  Angie loved movement. It was other people’s reactions she didn’t appreciate.

  First there were the jokes, and people always thought they were original with every rabbit joke.

  They never were.

  Then a more recent issue was boys. The leers ever since she’d started to fill out made her wish she had better control of her transformation. She’d long wished to dispense some corrective scratches, but she could only ever manage terminal maulings.

  That was until today.

  She bounced around the common room of the dorm. She almost slid into the cold box, felt the wave of cold from it and decided she needed some insulation. Letting the lunar mana flow just to her arm, she let fur grow to shield her from the cold and pushed off.

  The glowing power within was no longer gripped desperately with all her mental might but safely caged in her unique skill. The flow of ethereal silver could now be tapped and dispensed drop by drop, rather than released in a tidal wave.

  Still moving, she marvelled as the power flowed further. Letting her fingers change, claws coming through, skin growing fur, but stopping before it spread. She nearly squealed with delight.

  She twirled around Chops, whose black-furred paws thudded after her with the blind enthusiasm of a creature who hadn’t been invited but had brought snacks anyway. One head barked while the other chuffed happily. He didn’t understand the game, but he understood she was happy, and that was enough.

  The two-headed dog had grown on her quickly. Now that she wasn’t running in fear through the woods she could see the muscular, clawed, two-headed beast as a total sweetie. She found herself pausing to lavish him with scratches, the two heads chuffing and their eyes rolling at the attention.

  Chops also gave her a perfect way to train her new skill.

  She could feel the mana flowing in her eyes as she observed the Familiar. The magic leveraged her [Evaluating Eye] skill. She picked up the subtle ways the dog moved, understanding moment by moment the power and limits of Chops.

  “So my class includes this [Evaluating Eye] skill. It’s incredible, I can pick up so much about a person’s attributes, resistances, and also if I watch them use a skill I can learn more about it. It’s so perfect for an Overseer role!” Angie realised she’d been talking this entire time and looked around, noticing that Oz had apparently left her alone.

  She blushed, a little embarrassed, but that didn’t last. She was too happy. She had a class!

  Even better, she no longer had to be terrified of taking a knock and ending up with a repair bill and a desperate need for new clothes.

  “Sorry, were you saying something?” Oz asked. He was coming out of his room, having changed back into his spare clothes, and was watching her with a faint scowl. It was an intimidating look, heavy bristling brows of dark hair over the orange troll eyes that looked like iron fresh out of the forge.

  Angie reminded herself the scowl was permanent. It seemed like even if you ironed his face flat it’d snap back into place before the steam had time to disappear.

  “I’m ecstatic, it’s so good! It’s a perfect fit for me! Look, so I know we’re meant to keep our classes kind of secret, but you’re super nice, and I don’t think you’d tell anyone, and I just have to tell someone!” Angie had planned to just tell her father, and while she knew it would be best to keep things to herself, she felt she’d explode if she didn’t speak about it.

  Also, it was Oz, the strange man who seemed made of jagged flint, who knew the Keeper of the Colossi, and who’d run the Gauntlet. He was clearly a man so laden with secrets that adding her own would just mean it was lost amongst the rest.

  She felt oddly comfortable around Oz, which was weird considering he gave off the social warmth of a brick. But there was something grounding about him, like he’d already seen the worst of her and decided to shrug rather than run.

  It was probably because Oz wasn’t most people. Most people didn’t chat with her casually after she wolfed out on them. Even her parents got a bit weird after it happened, making more of a fuss about how ‘fine’ and ‘normal’ everything was despite claw marks in the walls and blood splatter on the ceiling.

  Oz’s reaction to having a werewolf try and claw him open was to compliment her and offer to help her train. It was a refreshing response to a problem that had haunted her for years, until today.

  “I can keep a secret.” Oz nodded, only for his words to be followed by a quick pair of barks. “Chops can too.”

  “So my class is called Shifting Catalyst! My signature skill is something called Evaluating Eye! It’s an identification power that works with my enhancements, which is amazing!”

  “Yay?!” Oz was clearly doing his best to sound enthusiastic, but it was obvious the man was totally lost as to why she was so ecstatic. She paused and tried to take a step back, remembering that Oz, despite being at Noxarcer—one of the premier centres of dungeon academia—had a frankly baffling level of knowledge. She struggled to imagine someone who didn’t even know the basics of most popular dungeon sub-categories.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Angie was the kind of fan who assumed that all knowledge of their chosen obsession was common knowledge. It didn’t occur to her that other people might just not be interested. It was like talking to any sufficiently entrenched sports fan. Even if you said you didn’t know anything, her first question would be, ‘But you must know—insert name of large event name here—don’t you?’

  It was taking some adjustment to realise Oz really didn’t know anything.

  “Oh, I forgot, look, I want to be an Overseer? That role is about working out a team’s powerset so the dungeon can adapt and check there aren’t going to be any problems. There’s nothing more embarrassing for a dungeon than having a team come in with the right powers which just let them turn the delve into a cakewalk.”

  “The difficulty curve thing again, so you, what, advise people to switch out weapons and such? Change traps?” Oz asked, and Angie nodded, pleased he’d caught on quickly.

  “Exactly! The skill gives me more information on how skills, resistances and other powers work! Also, if you make a Template out of me, I’ll be a good asset in a battle, helping support other minions on the field. I’m focused on mobility.”

  “I kind of forgot about the whole being turned into a template thing.”

  “You’ll be fine. Your class will convert to a template better than mine, given you’re all about up-front confrontation. My powerset is already likely to be best used in a pilot format. Also, your style thing is great, it’ll give your template plenty of variety, way better than all those people who can only use a sword or some other specific weapon.”

  “I didn’t mention the weapon aspect of my style enhancement.” Oz said, his scowl creasing with confusion. Angie flinched. She was doing it again! She’d been told by her parents so many times to stop talking about people’s powers. She’d done her best to stop watching for it, but Oz was the first fellow student with a class she had a chance to examine up close. What was she going to do? Not watch every little thing he did for hints of his power?

  “I’m sorry, you just mentioned the name, and it affecting your cravat this morning, and I saw you grabbing the kitchen knives and that meat tenderiser earlier and empowering them, I can’t think of anything that would enhance random kitchen implements without it being a style thing.” Angie paused as Oz fixed her with that scowl that might just be his resting look, or could mean he was upset. “I’m sorry…”

  “You apologising for having eyes? Not your fault,” he scoffed, waving it away. “You even need this observer power? You literally just sussed out my powers with a glance, how does this help you?”

  “I don’t know everything!” She nearly blushed at the man’s forthright compliment. Oz might look like the exact kind of miscreant her mother had warned her loitered in the big cities, but he was genuinely a nice person. That or he didn’t appreciate exactly how much prying she was doing into his secrets, which was equally possible. She shook her head and focused on what mattered now. Her super cool skills!

  “The real power of this is that the more I see a skill or power used in front of me, the more information I get from it. But that’s not all. I can also build up this insight pool, which I can then use to buff myself or others to deal with an issue.” She hesitated from explaining the details. She’d nearly cried when she’d got the power; it fit what she wanted perfectly. She could already imagine standing at the back of a group of minions, watching delvers pile in, watching the spells fly, and then when the delvers got into rhythm, disrupting them, pushing them back, adding that touch of chaos to the fight with some well-timed buffs.

  A difficulty curve without a few bumps was just a boring slope.

  Oz paused, clearly spending the time to organise his thoughts. His brows suddenly shot up. “That’d mean you could watch a fight and if some bugger was turtling up you could help another crack his shell?”

  “Exactly,” Angie replied, throwing caution to the wind while hopping from one foot to another.

  “Well, congratulations, that sounds amazing!” He shot her a big grin, which then fell away. “How does that help with the transforming though?”

  “That’s the incredible part! My unique is [Mana Cage]. It allows me to safely store large amounts of my mana for deployment later.”

  “Err. Look, I don’t know your whole situation.”

  “As a lunar rabbit, my heritage means I constantly create and store ‘lunar mana’. That gets released from my core when I stop focusing. That’s why I transform when I’m knocked out. It’s also why I lose control. Too much lunar mana makes the wolf side really strong, so I transform and instantly go full wolf. That burst wears off after a while but by that time…”

  “Things are already manic. So now your unique allows you to store it safely. Seems a right curse that it took us having a scrap to get you sorted.”

  Angie turned away, hiding her face. It wasn’t that Oz had said something wrong, but he couldn’t know how much more it had taken to get to this point. Just getting a class didn’t always guarantee a fix. She’d needed Noxarcer, or an equally powerful dungeon willing to give some nobody an E-rank class, to really see the difference, to get the unique.

  “Let’s go out, I want to see my dad to celebrate! And we need to get you some clothes.”

  “Yeh, sure? I don’t want to step on your family time. Seems important.”

  “Oz, getting you something other than dungarees to wear is an essential service. No one’s going to take you seriously like that.” Angie looked him up and down with a mixture of pity and aesthetic horror. She’d put real effort into her own wardrobe, carefully chosen cuts, intentional colour palettes, accessories that hinted at confidence and control. She didn’t want to look like just another junior scholar. She wanted her clothes to say adult, loudly and clearly.

  Which, ironically, only proved she wasn’t one.

  The first trick of adulthood wasn’t getting others to believe you were grown up, it was convincing yourself. And on that front, she was definitely lagging behind Oz.

  Oz had the kind of look that didn’t ask for approval. He dressed like someone who’d grown up in a place where ‘clean-ish’ counted as formal wear, and where you only bothered dressing up for two events, funerals and tax audits. And of course the funerals of the taxmen, though that was more of a ceremony to convince them to leave. Few hung around after the effigy burning.

  Ironically, that same unapologetic scruffiness made Oz far more adult than her curated wardrobe ever could.

  Most of the other scholars dressed like Angie, intent on sanding down any visible trace of their origins. Long sleeves to hide a farmer’s tan. Clothes that were just expensive enough to whisper ‘upward mobility’, bought from dungeon brands designed to imitate prestige without threatening it. It was all very tidy. Very intentional. Very beige.

  Oz’s outfit screamed that he’d just fallen off the tractor that morning and his face dared anyone to ask about it.

  “Look, don’t you want people to take you seriously?”

  “I mean, people not taking me seriously works in my favour, makes it easier to take them down,” Oz replied, and beside him Chops barked in agreement. Angie put her hand to her face and sighed.

  “You don’t have to fight everyone, you know?”

  “If someone’s got a big enough head to look down on me for wearing dungarees, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up fighting.”

  “You know, I’m really starting to understand how you made it through the Gauntlet.”