Frostbound

Getting Sarah's last level was easy enough and didn't end up taking that long. The monsters on the first floor were still low-level enough for her to defeat, even if she thought her class was weak. She had been trying to hunt creatures far higher level than her and concluded that she was weak rather than the level gap was too much.

Her bow skill was enough to breeze by most of the first floor by herself even without my interference. She managed to get her last level mostly alone, with me having to step in only once when there was a group of monsters she couldn't take down alone.

After hitting level 10, Sarah jumped with joy before I ushered her along to find Hal and get her the last skill. I was thinking a bond skill would be best but we would ask Hal first before we went through with anything.

Even if he didn't look into those skills much, I knew Kyle would have talked his ear off about them and Hal probably had some residual knowledge kicking around in his head.

And it was a good thing too, because he pointed us in a completely different direction than I had originally planned.

"[Bond] and [Companion] skills are good but I don't think that's the direction you want to go in. You're trying to make her into Kathy, right?" Hal asked.

"Yes,"

"Then I think taking [Soothe] is a better option. It builds up to [Tame] skills and is a better path toward Beastmaster. Bond and Companion skills could still lead to hundreds of different classes but [Soothe] puts her on a direct path toward Beastmaster." He explained.

[Soothe] worked to calm wild animals and made the taming process quicker and easier. It led directly into [Tame] skills and increased their effectiveness. The reason I hadn't considered it was because it didn't directly do anything for taming. By itself, it only calmed whatever you wanted [Soothed]. It could work on humans to a lesser degree but any kind of mental defense was enough to brush off the weak skill. It wasn't meant for mind control.

What he said made sense and made me wonder what skill Kathy took to get where she did. It would have made things so much easier if she had just told us.

I felt Hal's idea held more weight than my original plan and had Sarah take what he had said.

[Soothe] didn't seem to do much on its own but I trusted it would get us where we wanted to go. There wasn't a restriction when ranking up to G-rank so Sarah could have gone ahead and done it but that would have killed the plan in its infancy.