Golden Experience

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.

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