Right before he could make the final jump and deliver his newly designed spell into the boss’ face, Ronan was struck by the biggest bolt of lightning the storm had produced in the entire battle. It paralysed him momentarily, but not because of the electricity. Instead it was everything in his vision suddenly going white that caused him to falter, lest he jump in the wrong direction.

  It took about two seconds to blink his vision back to something resembling normal. The boss had retreated another forty metres, but Ronan wasn’t about to let his quarry get away. He sped up, leaping between platforms on the air that he formed right beneath his feet, gaining height as well as catching up to Karadaxos.

  When he was directly above the boss’ orca-like jaws, he stopped forming the platforms of mana beneath his feet. It was time to strike. He began to fall, but he wasn’t fast enough. The boss would be able to avoid his attack. He formed platforms just below his feet and used them to push himself off, rapidly accelerating.

  The boss tried to scramble out of the way of the human missile, but the sudden burst of speed Ronan experienced allowed him to perfectly divebomb its face. He thrust his left hand right into its open mouth and turned it so that the explosion of his spell was aimed towards its insides.

  There was a brief instant where all the mana held in his spell vanished. A fraction of a second passed with nothing happening. Then the world flashed blue. Then white. Ronan couldn’t hear anything; his sight was gone, as though his eyes had been erased in that instant. Even his mana senses were blinded, feeling as though he was submerged in an endless ocean of the stuff.

  Then he started to regain awareness of his own body, which was when he realised his eyes had in fact been erased, as had most of his face and a large portion of his torso. A sense of unease washed over him. The spell was supposed to direct all of its energy in a narrow cone, which he had pointed away from himself. If there was this much of a backlash the boss might have survived.

  He needn’t have worried.

  When his mind recovered from the sudden detonation he realised there were a few notifications which awaited his attention, the first of which informed him that he had killed the boss.

  Why didn’t the level ups restore me? Ronan was confused, then he cursed his own idiocy. I haven’t been restored once during a nightmare tutorial, but I either died too fast or just didn’t get injured enough to require it that I barely noticed.

  So it was that he found himself sinking into the ocean while bleeding out from more than a dozen critical wounds across his body. There were other status effects which he suffered from, but he wasn’t bothered to check them. There were five minutes until he was taken to the next stage, but he doubted he would even make it that long.

  Instead of wasting his time worrying about what he couldn’t control, Ronan turned his attention to his surroundings. He lacked the strength to move as he had during the boss fight, but he still had the strength to swim back to the surface. Once he breached the waves, he stared at the mutilated corpse of the boss. Or what remained of it, at least.

  Chunks of flesh littered the ocean, looking as though they came from a variety of marine creatures, except they were simply parts of the weird abomination that Karadaxos had been. He spent a few seconds simply basking in the scene, the fact that he’d actually won sinking in.

  Ha. I honestly wasn’t sure about my chances for a while there. That was tense. Though I suppose I can’t really consider this a proper victory, given that I’m going to die, too. At least I took the fucker out. More multipliers for me. Whoo. He tried to raise his fists in the air but found that one of his arms was missing. The left one, specifically, which had been the hand that delivered the spell.

  He tried to conjure his memories of the moment just before the spell activated. What went wrong? It had certainly packed enough of a punch—the dead boss and his mutilated body being the evidence of that—but it had not been directed in the manner he expected, nor had some of the other parts of the spell he tried to create worked as intended. Unfortunately the loss of his senses obscured most of the memory and he wasn’t able to immediately analyse his mistakes.

  Ronan resolved himself to do more sorcery experiments in the next iteration to see if he could figure out what had gone wrong. Right now he had limited time and there were some things he could only do while he was still here in the tutorial.

  The first notification to appear was not what he had expected to see. Then he realised he had been interrupted by the boss’ appearance before he could originally check which of his masteries had increased. He suspected a few of the tier ups had come about after his defeat of Karadaxos, though.

  You have reached the mastery cap for [Mana]!

  Mana VII has evolved to Mana VIII!

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  Mana VIII has evolved to Mana IX!

  Mana costs for skills are reduced by a moderate amount. Activation and channeling times for skills which cost mana are reduced by a moderate amount. Wisdom potency +35%. Wisdom efficacy +40%

  You have reached the mastery cap for [Spellcasting]!

  Spellcasting I has evolved to Spellcasting II!

  Spellcasting II has evolved to Spellcasting III!

  Spellcasting III has evolved to Spellcasting IV!

  Casting the same spell multiple times will form mana memory, allowing you to cast it faster and more efficiently up to a limit based on the tier of this mastery and your intelligence and acuity. Intelligence and Acuity +4%

  You have reached the mastery cap for [Sword]!

  Sword VI has evolved to Sword VII!

  Weight and balance penalties for all swords are reduced moderately. When inflicting [Bleeding] with swords, gain an 18% chance to inflict a second instance of [Bleeding] for 85% of the damage as the first. Natural sword talent is multiplied by 2x

  You have reached the mastery cap for [Spear]!

  Spear IV has evolved to Spear V!

  Gain mastery over spears and spear-like weapons significantly faster. Gain a 35% chance to restore stamina equal to 80% of a blow when that blow is parried while wielding a spear or spear-like weapon. Successful strikes with spears gain a 40% increased chance to deal a critical hit. Weight and balance penalties when wielding spears are moderately reduced.

  You have reached the mastery cap for [Stamina]!

  Stamina VII has evolved to Stamina VIII!

  All stamina costs are reduced by a moderate amount. Whenever you expend stamina to activate a skill or item, regain 20% of the expended stamina. Efficacy of endurance +30%

  You have reached the mastery cap for [Health]!

  Health V has evolved to Health VI!

  All health costs are reduced moderately. Vitality efficacy +30%. Vitality potency +18%

  There were far too many to read. He skimmed through the ones he used most often but frankly couldn’t be bothered with the specifics. Almost all masteries gave similar bonuses which boiled down to improving his talent with certain weapons or forms of energy or boosting his stats. It was more important to check when they reached tier milestones which were multiples of five, as that seemed to be when they gained a new ability rather than simply improving the buffs they already gave.

  Aside from those he’d bothered to read, Ronan had also gained a plethora of other masteries: Javelin II, Throwing Knife II, and Focus II. He also had gained a new mastery called Creativity which hadn’t increased in tier, as well as earning quite a few more points in Crafting mastery, though he guessed that had been when he made the chestplate and the seafood spear, rather than during the boss battle.

  With the mastery increases out of the way, Ronan could get into what he’d just received for killing the big fucker. And it was more than he could have hoped for.

  You have killed [Karadaxos - BOSS][Mutated Abyssal Orkrakstacean Lv.275]!

  Enemy killed with a critical hit, 2.8x experience earned!

  +103 Bronze Credits

  +752 Copper Credits

  …

  +Mutated Abyssal Orkrakstacean Blubber Lv.275 (Epic)

  +Mutated Abyssal Orkrakstacean Claw Lv.275 (Epic)

  +Mutated Abyssal Orkrakstacean Tentacle Lv.275 (Epic) x2

  +Mutated Abyssal Orkrakstacean Scale Lv.275 (Epic) x4

  +Karadaxos’ Heart Lv.275 (Legendary)

  +Boss Shard Lv.275 (Body)

  +Boss Shard Lv.275 (Energy)

  You have leveled up to Lv.156!

  …

  You have leveled up to Lv.276!

  +1,815 Vitality

  +1,815 Endurance

  +1,089 Wisdom

  +484 Regeneration

  +242 Resistance

  +1,089 Intelligence

  +1,089 Acuity

  +11,495 Charisma

  +133,705 Luck

  +40,293 Free Stat Points

  There were a few more notifications after the kill message, but Ronan was so shocked by the stat gains that he almost passed out. He was glad he didn’t because that would have robbed him of the time he had left alive. Time he desperately needed to make use of what he’d gained. He couldn’t waste any more, so he narrowed his focus to what needed to be done.

  He barely read the congratulatory messages for reaching level 200. There was nothing about evolving his race further, but he wasn’t surprised given that he had already earned an E-grade race the last time he reached that level. No, what he cared about was his class evolution. And what an evolution it was.

  Paragon Fate-Dancer (Galactic)

  You were already an oddity with far too much luck to exist fairly. Yet somehow despite facing unbeatable odds over and over again you continued to gain the favour of the fates. Having learned to dance the line between destruction and glory, you become something that has never been seen before in this multiverse.

  You cannot assign free stat points to any stat besides luck. All stat gains from any class or race are converted into luck. All bonus stats are converted into luck. All of your skills, traits, and masteries which contain scaling based on any stat have that stat replaced with luck.

  Luck efficacy and potency +5000%

  All rewards from consumables, as well as all loot drops, are near infinitely more likely to be of a higher quality and quantity than usual

  Negative consequences of any kind, arising from bad decisions or wagers by the one who has this class, are near infinitely more devastating and difficult to overcome

  +3500 Luck on level up

  Class skill [Wager of Fated Potential (Celestial)] will evolve into [Dance with Fate (Galactic)]

  Class skill [Luck of the Devil (Heavenly)] will evolve into [Flirting with Fate (Celestial)]

  Unlock requirements:

  Challenger possesses the class [Gambler of Fate (Celestial)]

  Challenger has 200,000 or more luck at Lv.200 or lower

  Challenger has at least one Legendary or higher fate-related skill or trait

  Honestly Ronan didn’t try to read beyond the rarity and the first line of the description. He didn’t have time. He just accepted it. The infusion was more painful than the previous, but not that bad compared to some of the ones he’d experienced.

  Bonus stats for evolution have been retroactively applied

  There was no need to open his status to know that his luck was beyond ridiculous. It had to be almost half a million by that point. Which would be fantastic for what came after the class evolution.