Dungeon of Chance: Even Odds: A Dungeon Core Novel (Serious Probabilities Book 1) Jonathan Brooks (book recommendations txt) 📖

every 15 seconds – and the cooldown for that was 2 minutes.  The second, “Repel” was relatively useful for her, because it allowed her to live a little longer; it was basically the opposite of Arcen’s “Shouting Taunt”, as it prevented any monsters from targeting her for 10 seconds.

Rosara…oh, Rosara.  She was having a blast with her new Skills, and they were very useful for the group as well.  The Mayor’s daughter had already mastered her sexy dance that made two of them more powerful and her song that held a monster frozen in place; but now she had two new songs and an additional dance that had other effects.  One song was for a single groupmate, which would decrease cooldown timers by 10% for 2 minutes; the other song was something that slowed down every monster in the room by 5% of their normal speed.  The effect was noticeable, but only just; it wasn’t significant enough to really affect most fights by that point, but it was nice to have, if Rosara wasn’t doing anything else.

That was unlikely, though, because her new dance was something she wanted to use all of the time.  While her “Dance of Strength” was a sexy dance that Buffed the Power of two members of the group, her new “Puppet Master” was targeted towards monsters.  Instead of freezing them in place with her “Captivating Melody” song, the “Puppet Master” Skill – which was more of a sedate formal dance than her other raunchy sexy dance – allowed her to take control of a monster and move it around the room based on her own movements.  She couldn’t get it to attack or anything, but she could (with a bit of practice) cause the monsters she controlled to get in the way of other monsters, even slamming themselves into their forms.  It was somewhat limited: Because it only worked on 1-Star monsters, she had to be able to see her target and her target see her, and she had to literally move around the room – which the “puppet” would mimic.  So, if she wanted to make it smash into a wall, she would need to smash herself into a wall…which was unlikely to happen, voluntarily.

Despite all of these advantages, they still weren’t powerful enough to advance.  Intuitively, she knew it was because they were all still Tier 1 Classes; even their Skills, as powerful as they seemed, were only Tier 1.  Even accumulating enough Skillbooks to “Upgrade” them wouldn’t help them – as she had found out the hard way.

“Look!  I have enough Poison Touch Skillbooks to upgrade it!”  Jeska had been ecstatic at the time, even though it was one Skill she rarely ever used.  She didn’t want to get close to the monsters if she could help it, and actually touching them to use a Skill wasn’t the easiest thing to do; the few times she had tested it out, however, showed that whatever “Poisoned” Debuff they acquired from her touch was powerful – it killed most 1-Star monsters within seconds.  She was hoping that it would be even more effective if it were Tier 2.

“Go for it!  I think you’re the first one to accumulate enough Skillbooks to upgrade it, so I want to see what happens,” her brother told her, equally excited.

In her Class Skills chart, she concentrated on the Upgrade column and saw that Poison Touch now said 5/5; when she focused on it long enough, something finally happened.

Do you wish to upgrade Skill: Poison Touch?

Yes / No

Warning: This will consume the pertinent Skillbooks in your Inventory.

She chose Yes, obviously, and she felt as if something were being ripped out of her mind. It only hurt as a temporary spike of pain, however, and she was so fascinated by what she was watching that she forgot about it.  A small orb of greenish light appeared from the middle of her forehead, before floating 2 feet in front of her chest. Suddenly, 4 Skillbooks appeared (from her Inventory, she assumed) next to the green light orb and opened up.  The pages started riffling through the books, similar to how they all learned their Skills; this time, however, they closed when they were through, morphed into another green orb of light, and then combined into the existing orb.  Once they were together, they expanded a little before contracting back down to its original size…and then it shot back into her forehead.

“AAAAHHHHH!” was all she could manage to get out as pain slammed into her head, radiating out to the rest of her body and causing her to fall to her knees as her legs became weak.

“Are you alright?  What happened?”  Her brother was by her side in an instant, helping her to her feet.

She held her head for a few moments before responding, and already the pain was starting to fade.  “Yes, I think so – that was just unexpected.”

In her Class Spells chart, she now saw that her Poison Touch was Tier 2 – so it had been more than worth the pain.  “It worked!  Now, I want to try this out—”

Unable to equip Skill.

You cannot use Tier 2 Skills without the appropriate Tier 2 Class.

“Noooo!  I can’t use it anymore!”

It should’ve been obvious, because they had managed to acquire a few Tier 2 Skillbooks but were unable to use them.  Jeska had figured that it had been a Tier 1 Skill before, so it should still be accessible; unfortunately for her, that clearly turned out not to be the case.  She attempted to play around with the Skill in order to reset it back down to Tier 1, but it didn’t seem like it was possible.

“Hey, at least it was one that you didn’t use all that much,” Rosara unexpectedly comforted her.  “That would’ve been bad if you had used it on your Ice Shards or other ranged