Time passed. [Classes] were offered. [Classes] were dismissed.

  Lessons sat through, lessons internalized.

  Information obtained, schemes made.

  Derek wasn’t too sure what it said about him that the very first place his mind went to when learning of a new facet of this world he lived in was “how can I weaponize this,” but that was how things usually went, and that was that.

  Years came, and years went by until, eventually, his fifth one at Seoul academy had come about, and … and he felt stuck, very much so.

  Epic [Classes]?

  Oh, he had those, but he’d had those for a while. He’d killed monsters, he’d gained sufficient “mastery” of hellfire, his rapier, and the flow of combat to be offered ones in reference to all of them … but it still been almost a year without a new offering, which was how he’d decided to measure his progress right now.

  All epic. He was also still being offered melee combat [Classes], but he’d stopped having those show up on the “offering screen.”

  He did like learning. And he loved the idea of being able to gain direct power through it, not in the general “knowledge is power, the pen is mightier than the sword” kind of way. Nor was he talking about using an encyclopedia to bash someone’s head in, which was a weirdly widespread joke nowadays … but to put the humoristic quibbles aside due to a lack of relevance, it was an excellent [Class].

  And the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to pick this kind of [Class], just not this specific one. Just what would it take to get the legendary equivalent?

  This [Class] was the one least changed from the previous offering, just a stronger version of what he’d already had available. It improved his hellfire, could form the foundation for a mage or elementalist build, and was unsuitable as a starter due to the absurd power requirements of the element in question.

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  Great, but neither excellent nor perfectly suited to his goals. Also lacking anything extraordinary or new to draw the interest, therefore leaving him unwilling to divert from his chosen challenge of starting with a legendary one.

  And this offering stung. Not because it wasn’t good, but because the flavor text was … ah, he’d had this little “crisis” far too often in the past few years.

  Sure, in a training scenario, going the intended route was how you got out of it what you were supposed to get out of it.

  However, just getting shit done worked in the real world, even if it was in an unusual or unexpected way, was only a problem if done in strictly regimented surroundings, or while working under someone with a stick up their ass.

  It was simple, it was comprehensible, it was logical.

  So why the hell was everyone so desperate to hammer that point home over and over again? It was starting to seriously grate on him, and Derek’s efforts to ignore that were starting to crack.

  But ultimately … solid [Class] with a grating flavor text, but he’d grown out of the whole “breaking stuff just because he could” phase, at least insofar as he’d ever been in it.

  Great for a revolutionary, great for a prankster, only somewhat good for him.

  As for this last one … he didn’t want it, period. No Bloodline [Class], ever, even if it was a good one. And this one didn’t seem to be, not in any way, beyond the rarity rating.

  Also, there was one small issue of his Bloodline being designed around letting him walk his own path, but if his chosen path was, quite literally, “do what I want, how I want,” how would that go?

  Best-case scenario, it’d help him settle on something in the first Evolution. Less-than-best-case would be a godawful mess, basically.

  Of the lot, it was the learning [Class] that intrigued him the most, almost enough to tempt him into picking it … but he’d set a goal, and he’d go for it. He’d keep this up for five more years, or until he got a legendary [Class], though the chances of the latter happening before the deadline were looking less and less likely.

  Hell, he wasn’t really feeling like he was going anywhere at all.

  So what was he going to do now? That was certainly worth thinking about ...

  ***

  In the end, the solution wound up being rather obvious: pick a path and stick to it, put his nose to the grindstone until the ten years were up.

  He’d avoided the more specialized academies because he wanted a more well-rounded education, but perhaps there was something to be said for going to one.

  As for where … Akashic Academy was still out, because the family academy was a bad idea, The Boot Camp in Antarctica was all about the physical, but if he was going to go for something specialized, he was going to go somewhere else, and Australia’s Crucible was for insane people.

  Which just left The Tower, in New York.

  It wasn’t exactly a hard decision to choose to go there, though it would likely take a bit to figure out the logistics.