The levels came flying in, even with a noticeable experience penalty. Corporal Beholder was a massive help, even before she'd taken the time to figure out some of the class skills. A proper physical affinity skill made an incredible difference to how easily she could track the projectiles. The class's bonus to her senses let her feel the subtle fluctuations in the air as the guards paced back and forth.

  Just keeping everything she needed to watch in focus as she dodged and weaved through the arrows was several orders of magnitude easier. And with her rapidly improving pool of mana — six thousand more for every level she got, the strain of shoving all three of them through the air died down and Zoe even managed to start channelling some of her mana into Devastation, ripping one of the guards out of existence a few times every day.

  Breaks became few and far between. A quick lunch midway through the day, and a nice rest overnight where Zoe played with some of her new Corporal Beholder skills. None of them seemed like they would make any light so her downtime every night felt much less frustrating than when she had to stare at an array of skills she couldn't justify trying with Blinding Beholder.

  Though both Stilled Flesh and Farsight seemed rather pointless in the dead of night. Tom and Jeff couldn't see her with their eyes anyway — and however Jeff perceived the world magically didn't seem to notice when she used the skill.

  What really interested Zoe in the class though was how costly everything was for her Stamina. Assault of the Beholder and Beholden Bestowed were identical copies to what she tested with Arcane Beholder but the rest were entirely based on her Stamina — which as it turns out regenerated far far slower than either of her other pools did naturally. A couple stamina every second, maybe a little more but not by much.

  Enough for her normal magic usage — and with a pool of almost forty thousand stamina enough to last her through a day of even rather intense magical activity. But mending a wound with Corporal Renewal burned through her entire pool in mere seconds, leaving her winded and gasping for breaths as she collapsed to the cold dirt floor in exhaustion.

  Corporal Barrage was a strange skill, though she supposed it was no more strange than the plethora of magical skills the system had granted her. While taking a new Manipulation skill gave her a sort of intuition for the element, Corporal Barrage seemed to give her a new muscle memory she could pull on to unleash rapid punches. Rather weak punches, Zoe found as her fists embedded themselves into the earthen walls. Though that was likely due to her having taken a purely physical class with a mere one hundred strength.

  For all of her feats, and all of her skills, when it came to Corporal Beholder she may as well have just been a meek level thirty or forty with far more Stamina than she should have.

  But the weirdest of her new skills was Corporal Quell. It moved her, in a very literal meaning. She could define an area that sound couldn't leave and her body would move to block any sound that tried to. Shouts, claps, stomps that countered the sounds. On occasion leaps as she physically placed her body on the boundary of her area, every muscle in her body quivering, beating down the wave of sound that tried to push through her.

  Corporal Bracing felt almost similar, a forced tensing of her body, muscles she didn't even know she had bracing against an impact. Jeff tried to pierce her with what he described as a minor sinkhole, but the earth shattered against her forearm's rippling muscles.

  Frankly, Zoe thought the class to be somewhat unappealing just for that one flaw. She liked having a lithe, diminutive body. The Vampyric enhancements were one thing — claws and fangs. A near complete lack of melanin in her skin and hair. She didn't mind those. They were even fun at times, useful for cutting through papers and packages she might have left by her door.

  But this new class went too far. Most of the clothes she'd had packed away didn't even fit — and more than one shirt had been ripped just trying to stretch the fabric around her far too wide neck. She'd ended up with a red sundress with black lining that poked out around the bottom of the skirt and much more than it used to around her upper torso. She picked it because it was flowing and light, though now felt almost form fitting as it clung to her.

  Maybe if she'd worked for the muscles, she'd have enjoyed them. If she felt the pain and the soreness day after day as she worked after it. If they were some reward for her hard work.

  The system just forced them on her, though. Without much warning, and while she was more or less stranded in an area with no clothes that fit her new body properly. It was almost offensive, and she just held out hope that the combined class would accomplish the same raw power through magical means rather than enhancing her physical body quite so much.

  As enchantments, the skills were somewhat interesting at least. Several were just copies of ones she already had — Farsight was identical to Scrying, Stilled Flesh seemed to serve the same purpose as Stealth and two of the skills were just the same skills from the other two Beholder classes.

  But the other ones were fascinating. Corporal Bracing made an object very, very hard. Far beyond anything she'd been able to accomplish with other skills at such a low level. Once she had her Enchanted Mirror skill back, it would be an incredible addition to her standard offensive enchantment just to keep them from shattering against summoned walls or shields.

  Corporal Barrage made an object vibrate at incredible speeds, as long as it had mana. Corporal Renewal was yet another self repairing enchantment though it worked much better on anything that could be considered flesh than anything else she had. Still not good enough to make an infinite supply of regenerating food that actually tasted great, though.

  And the last skill, Corporal Quell, seemed to be a more effective version of the skill than using the skill was itself. Any sound in the area was drawn in to the enchantment, and the laten energy within turned to some pittance of mana that helped power the enchantment a fraction of a microsecond longer.

  As much as she didn't like the class, it ranked rather high on her list of classes to steal from when she had some time next. Recreating the skills was a very different experience though — since none of them used any mana, her thousand years of experience with recreating skills with mana patterns was almost entirely useless.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Her best guess was that she'd have to disable the skills and then accomplish the same feat without them, through sheer force of will and power of body. But it was an entirely different process to what she was used to, so Zoe spent what time she could on it but decided it would be okay if she had to come back to the class later down the line. Maybe after she'd bought some clothes that would fit better.

  Things began to slow down after the first few dozen levels. At first she was getting a level every guard they slew, then every two. After level 150, it had begun taking eight or nine for a single level. Even if they were speeding up as Zoe got more mana, the rate her experience gain slowed down far exceeded it. Soon as she reached past 180, she was only getting one level in an entire day.

  What made the entire process even worse was how long the guards took to reform after they'd been killed. For her first few class caps, it hadn't mattered. A couple dozen guards a day was all they could manage and there were far more than that patrolling the stairs.

  But now they were grouping the guards up, taking advantage of Jeff's spikes and the occasional area of effect arrow Tom fired off. The entire surface of the dungeon was cleared out each day, leaving just the towering statue like being at the entrance, which they chose not to bother with for the time being.

  When they'd finished clearing out the guards for each day, they changed their focus to giving Tom opportunities to fire off arrows at the tower itself, anywhere he noticed one of the arrows coming from. He didn't get many kills at the effort, but every so often one of their levels would bump up after an arrow exploded inside one of the tiny holes the archers must have been firing from.

  Some of their spare time was spent relaxing, chatting about the dungeon and their plans for it. Brainstorming different class options Zoe could take after she got her merged beholder class — laughing at how Zoe would be forced to hang on to her mutated body when the merged class made her muscles even bigger.

  Weeks flew by as Zoe used her spare time to try and recreate her Corporal Beholder class skills before she inevitably lost them. The process — at least what she assumed the process to be, felt goofy to her. Blind punches on walls that just felt somewhat off from how the skill showed her to do them, leaps and senseless clasp as she tried to block sound itself from leaving their conversation.

  As they got quicker and quicker at clearing out the dungeon, Zoe even found time during the daylight to try out her Blinding Beholder class skills too.

  The Luminary element was fascinating to Zoe. She had quite some experience with Light — many enchantments as lightbulbs, several defensive enchantments like the rings she gave Tom and Jeff. It was one of her favourite elements, even if it wasn't all too useful offensively.

  Luminary was so similar, but with far greater power behind it. It felt weightier, somehow. It was still light, it still lit up the forest, it still cast shadows behind everything it touched. But it touched on several different elements as it acted. Some that Zoe was familiar with — heat, time and space. But some that Zoe wasn't familiar with. Something she could only describe as gravity, and another that she couldn't even wrap her head around. Something so incredibly fundamental that she had no words to describe it. It didn't seem to do anything, but it filled the light with heft and pride.

  That feeling of heft imbued every one of the class's skills. Luminary Cloak cast a blinding light over her that inspired a sense of awe in Tom and Jeff. Luminary Aegis formed pulsing rings of light around her that pushed everything outside them away with an immense gravity. Luminary Flare burned through everything it touched like a beam of pure flames, seeming to shape reality itself as it did.

  Starry Night formed a pit of space, spotted with bright shining stars. Rather than some barrier that blocked sound and light from leaving, it seemed to Zoe like the skill just formed an entire galaxy at the boundary. Light and Sound could leave, but they'd never make it to the other side just due to the sheer distance alone. Though that distance did not apply to anything other than light and sound — people could walk through it without a scratch, and even smells were unimpeded by the barrier.

  But the most interesting skill Zoe had, without a question, was Stargazing. Of the three scrying type skills she had, it was the most powerful. She could see through any light cast by any star — though not after it had been reflected from a surface. Zoe found that particularly curious since it wasn't possible that any of the light would reach so far into the valley without first bouncing around the dense particles in the air, but she chose not to complain.

  The further away the light she peered through, the more mana it cost. But as far as Zoe could tell, there were no other restrictions. If she had the mana for it, she could see as though she were in the sun itself. It would cost millions, if not billions of mana but she would be able to peer down on the moon, on distant planets. On anything the sun's light could reach.

  With Zoe's measly mana, the best she could do was see about halfway back to Foizo. And one rather significant downside to only seeing what light directly from a star could reach was that she couldn't see shadows. Anything in a shadow was a pure void to her. If it was only visible through bouncing around on various surfaces, rather than as a direct path from the sun, it was entirely imperceptible to her skill. That meant she couldn't even see through the windows of various houses near the valley edge.

  Curiously, as an enchantment, the skill was yet another copy of Scrying. Luminary Aegis and Luminary Cloak were almost identical, coating an object in a protective layer of dense light. Though Aegis had some minor component of force to it, letting the enchantment repel objects that approached. The mana cost was far too intense to be worth using over something like Gales though so they may as well have been identical.

  Luminary Flare was a relatively powerful offensive enchantment, letting her cast a powerful beam of the celestial light through the enchantment. And starry night coated an object in the same galaxy-like barrier which rejected light and sound, making a rather pretty enchantment that Zoe couldn't think of any uses for just yet.

  After several months of sitting outside the dungeon, Zoe reached level 231. As with any level she'd received after reaching the lowest level her class cap could be, she pushed the system to show her what class options she had available.

  *Ding* The following classes are available;

  "Ooh!" Zoe teleported the group outside the dungeon to their shoddy camp. Jeff had tried to decorate it in their spare time, but his sense of style was, in a word, dirty. Rather than a decorated home, it looked like the remnants of a battle. Spikes and holes that had appeared around their little home.

  "Did you get it finally?" Tom asked.

  Zoe nodded. "I did! Do you two think you could protect me here if this ends up being painful or should we retreat up top for a bit first?"

  "I think we'll be fine," Jeff said. "Nothing a few sinkholes can't manage. Just hide from the wanderers, right?"

  "Yeah. Alright then." Zoe walked down the steps to the much larger hole than when they first arrived, and into her own small dirt room. She sat down on a shoddy wooden bed she formed and closed her eyes.

  Best case scenario, the system would rip away all of the muscles Corporal Beholder gave her. Worst case scenario, it would give her more muscles. All while shoving even more magic into her and re-writing several classes worth of stats, skills and effects as the four classes merged.

  Either way, system shock was inevitable.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Unseen Beholder class. Your body and soul will be adjusted to accommodate the change.

  *Ding* The classes; Arcane Beholder, Blinding Beholder, Corporal Beholder and Unseen Beholder have been combined into the Omniscient Beholder class. Your body and soul will be adjusted to accommodate the change.

  entirely useless beauty-themed skills. Cause, y'know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder... class.

  Links:

  Amazon Series:

  Ko-Fi:

  Patreon: