Golden Experience
Chapter 7: “Subordinate”

After all that brainstorming, Rare had come up with three major possibilities:

• First, [Mental Magic]’s [Control] had potential.
• Second, there might be something hidden in the [Discipline] and [Summon] skill trees.
• Third, there could be some kind of relation between [Necromancy], [Discipline], and [Summon].

She had no basis for any of this, and her plan was starting to seem more and more desperate, but at least she had come up with something. Based on her calculations, she did have enough XP to start testing things out.

However, once she committed her XP into any single investigation, Rare wouldn’t be able earn any more XP here. To earn back the XP she used, she’d have to go somewhere else to defeat stronger enemies. But if she only picked up weird skills, the chances of her being able to beat enemies of an appropriate difficulty would be, frankly, low. No matter how prepared she was, it wouldn’t be enough to mitigate all the risk. Setting aside the most expensive tree, [Mental Magic], she would first try [Discipline], [Summon], and [Necromancy]. It cost 60 XP to unlock those three skills. After that, she double-checked each of their skill trees, but the list of unlockable skills hadn’t changed at all.

—Well, that wasn’t exactly outside expectations. No need to panic yet.

If the prerequisites could be met with just these skills, then someone should have figured it out by now. Which meant the next one to try was [Mental Magic]. In order to unlock up to [Control], first [Stupefy] required 10 XP, then [Charm] and [Fear] were 40 XP each, and finally [Control] itself cost 60 XP, so she needed a total of 150 XP.

Thinking it over again, if this plan was a complete bust, in order to earn more XP with all her trash skills, she would at least have a decent [Mental Magic] spec to use. [Mental Magic] wanted MND, so if she dumped all her leftover XP into it, then she could at least fight competently. Boosting MND would also increase her MP pool for using all these skills, so that was a convenient silver lining.

With that decided, there was no more reason to hesitate. Rare used 150 XP to grab all the [Mental Magic] skills up to and including [Control]. If her hypothesis was correct, she should have unlocked additional skills.

—All right then, I’ll start checking from [Discipline]…

The [Discipline] skill tree didn’t have any new skills.

The [Summon] skill tree also didn’t have anything new.

The [Necromancy] skill tree—had a new skill: [Bind Soul].

—Yesss! Got it! I was right!

Excited, she didn’t hesitate to spend the XP. Her new skill [Bind Soul] read: [Steal the soul of a corpse that died within the last hour. When using [Necromancy] on a corpse that still has a soul, the [Necromancy] target cannot resist. If you have a soul in stock, you can spend it to make [Mental Magic: Control] usable on [Undead], [Homunculus], and [Golem] targets.]

—This is amazing! …I think, maybe? Hmm…

At first glance, the [Steal the soul of a corpse] part felt too vague: its effects and usage weren’t intuitive. It basically felt like flavor text. However, to learn this skill, you’d have to have at least [Necromancy] and [Control], and each of those skills had significant downsides in the forms of “low success rate” and “can only be used on living targets.” This new skill eased those limits, giving it immediate value. The “soul stock” must refer to the souls stolen using [Bind Soul].

However, the skill cost 60 XP, and setting aside the cost of all the prerequisites for a moment, it was the same cost as [Control]. When aiming specifically for this skill, everything up to and including [Control] and [Necromancy] required 170 XP, making it impossible to reach with just the starting XP from character creation. It was easy to reroll during the closed beta, but innate characteristics didn’t exist then, so right now there shouldn’t be very many players who have discovered this skill. Even if they did know about it, not many would immediately take it and build around it. So it was probably unlikely that anyone knew about the existence of [Bind Soul].

Furthermore, [Bind Soul] only worked on corpses that had died within the last hour. Considering this along with [Necromancy]’s fine text, you could extrapolate that the souls in this world only remained attached to their corpses for an hour. Surprisingly, no one had verified [Necromancy]’s “if the soul was still attached to the corpse” condition in the closed beta; everyone assumed it was just lore or because the corpse degraded too much after an hour or something.

Anyway, she now had a skill that passively improved both [Control] and [Necromancy]. She had spent two-thirds of the XP she had earned, so she hoped she could make do with what she had gotten. She still worried that she stood no chance against field or dungeon bosses, though, since they had unnaturally high resistances.

—Well, this build isn’t like, a super-specialized meat cleaver that can literally only be used to cut meat. I do still have other options.

Rare relaxed a bit. She had avoided the worst possible outcome where there was no possible path forward, so now she felt pretty blasé about it all. She decided to recheck [Discipline]. Nope. Nothing changed at all; the skill tree still only contained [Discipline] and nothing else, which made it a pretty lame tree. With these idle thoughts floating through her mind, she opened the [Summon] skill tree.

She had unlocked a new skill, [Contract].

She half reached out to buy it just on impulse.

Its description was [Forge a contract with the soul of a successfully summoned target. You may now choose to summon a contracted target when using [Summon]. Undead created with [Necromancy: Bind Soul] can be added to the contract list.] Just like with [Bind Soul] and [Necromancy], it was a pure upgrade to the base [Summon] skill. Furthermore, it improved [Bind Soul], one of its prerequisites. This was really powerful. It had cost at least 310 XP in order to get all these skills. Right now, it was fair to say that Rare’s three pillars of combat were [Mental Magic], [Necromancy], and [Summon]. It was an expensive journey, but it was well worth it.

All of her earlier postulating was being proven correct. Rare now had no doubt that a new skill would appear on the [Discipline] tree.

And just as she hoped, the [Discipline] skill tree did in fact now have a new skill. She had finally unlocked [Subordinate].