Alright, the first class that I should consider is pretty obvious. Peerless Dimensional Duelist would be a direct upgrade from my current class, likely boosting the bonuses I am already getting from my dueling skills. It would allow me to more easily take on enemies that are more powerful than myself, and could help close the gap in stats between me and them. That was all well and good, but there was one major question in my head that was holding me back from immediately picking this as an option.

  Would specializing further be as big of a power boost as branching out into other sources of power? Sure, it would make some of my core skills far stronger, but I highly doubted it would straight up double the stats I was receiving from them. I won’t completely discount the possibility of that being the case, but if it was true then that would mean I could potentially take on enemies dozens of levels higher than myself. Given everything I knew about how power scaled throughout an evolution, that really didn’t seem too realistic.

  In other words, I would pretty much be gambling on it being a better choice than the next class of interest.

  Dimensional Warden also seemed pretty centered around closing the gap in stats between me and my enemy. The only difference between this class and Dimensional Duelist was that it would be working from the opposite direction. Instead of raising my combat abilities, it would lower that of my opponents. Problem was that I didn’t know exactly how much it would do that. If I ran into an enemy that could somehow resist the weakening effects of the skills I would gain, that could also be a big problem.

  The next potential pick for my class was Auric Annihilator. If I am being honest, it is pretty hard not to have a little bias towards the class with how badass the name sounds. Reading through its description, it seems focused around suppressing my enemies by either attacking or outright destroying their aura. I knew that outright destroying someone's aura, even with skills specially made to do it, wasn’t an easy thing.

  Way back during the goblin raid event, I had tested out my newly upgraded aura skill on a few of the monsters. I could pretty much instantly kill any of them 10 levels below me, and significantly hamper any that were around my level. By the time they had 10 or more levels than I did, I could only slow them a bit.

  Despite the overwhelming power my aura had over the goblins, I hadn’t been able to completely destroy the aura of any of them. Perhaps it was because I didn’t know how or simply because I was still getting used to using my aura as a weapon, but even considering all of that, goblins are still goblins. They are weak for their level and easy to kill for even non-combatants.

  On top of all of that, it also just didn’t fit my fighting style very well. Leveling this class quickly would probably involve finding hordes of monsters who were just barely weak enough to be either killed or nearly killed by my aura. That didn’t sound particularly fun.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized the class was probably not what I would be picking. It was just too focused around killing enemies that were around or just a bit above my level. Sure it might be great for levels given its potential to wipe out massive amounts of enemies quickly, but the only thing about the class that was appealing to me was the name.

  Mana-made menace fell in the same vein. It was focused around killing many weak enemies quickly. Sure, having the ability to take on a lot of weak enemies or 1 strong enemy would be nice, but the other two choices I’d been offered would let me take on 1 really strong enemy instead.

  Now that just left me with Dimensional Warden and Peerless Dimensional Duelist as my choices. Both seemed great for a multitude of reasons, but since I didn’t have any idea how good the skills would be I would have to make some assumptions.

  Let’s say that my stat total is about 10000, and the stat total of my enemy is 20000. I knew from experience that fighting an enemy twice my strength gave a massive boost to my stats, closing the gap by about 40%. That meant that as it was currently, I’d have a 14000 total in my stats in a fight like this. This left a gap of 6000 between our totals. In my opinion, the most likely result of further specializing my class would be that my current abilities get a 50% boost in strength. That would mean closing the gap by 60% instead, resulting in a total of 16000 stats and a 4000 stat difference.

  Now instead of getting that 50% bonus, let’s say that Dimensional Warden allows me to hamper the strength of my opponent by about 10%. That would bring them down to an effective stat total of 18000, just 4000 higher than my total of 14000. This left the exact same difference in stat total. You did also have to take into account relative differences though.

  If I do that, then some back of the napkin math tells me that with the Duelist class, I’d be 20% weaker than my opponent. With the warden class, I’d be about 23% weaker.

  Simply looking at the math, Dimensional duelist seemed like the obvious pick here. It would provide the best increase in stats and would be an easy stepping stone from my current class.

  However, I knew from experience that numbers weren’t everything. Most of the skills granted by my current class were all about numbers. They increased my stats and the damage I did to my opponents. I had a few tricks such as arcane tags, but other than that all of my spells and skills were made and upgraded by me either through my own efforts or the tutelage of Talus.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  With the Warden class, I had a feeling many of my skills would be less focused around numbers. The skill I would gain upon selecting it seemed like proof of that. Dimensional Chains sounded like it would hamper the movement or strength of my opponent in some way, which could prove to be more valuable than lowering the difference in stats.

  So now my choice boiled down to which one I thought would be the best fit for me. They both seemed quite powerful, and I had a feeling that neither choice could necessarily be considered worse than the other, at least not enough to make the choice obvious.

  After a few minutes of deliberation, I finally decide that for my third evolution, I would become a Dimensional Warden. What made up my mind was the fact that I enjoyed using active skills as opposed to relying so much on passive skills. A passive skill will give a flat boost through an entire fight, but using an active skill at just the right time or in a creative way could provide results far beyond what a passive skill could.

  I select Dimensional Warden as my new class, and as soon as I do I feel the rush of stats. The next notification appears in front of me, notifying me of my subclasses’ new upgrade.

  Your subclass Arcane Creator has been upgraded to Dimensional Creator!

  Arcane Arsenal (Special) has been upgraded to Walking Armory (Legendary)

  Would you like to select a second subclass?

  Like I did last evolution, I decline the second subclass. I am pretty giddy to see that my Arcane Arsenal skill upgraded to a legendary skill, so I quickly read through the new description.

  Walking Armory (Legendary)

  Using magic and willpower alone, manifest one or more temporary items into existence made wholly by your mana. Initial mana cost and upkeep are determined by the size and complexity of the item created. Grants a significant boost to the effectiveness of the Mind stat while manifesting an item. Items can be created within your aura to be equipped at a later date. Maximum amount of items that can be stored is determined by your aura stat and the size of the items.

  Two things had changed about the skill. The first was that it now granted a larger bonus to how effective my mind stat was while creating things with the skill. The second was that I could create items in my aura, storing them for later use. I could see a few uses for that. It would help me not waste mana on making weapons in the middle of a fight, saving me some more mana. Not that mana capacity would be much of a problem, as being a manaling meant it was the primary focus of my mind stat now. Still a little sour about that.

  You may now review your updated status screen. Upon closing your status screen, your evolution will end.

  I take a look at my status screen, taking note of all the changes my stats went through during this evolution. It seemed a lot more dramatic than the past few evolutions had been, but that’s just the nature of exponential growth.

  Name: River Banks

  Race: Manaling (Tier 1)

  Level: 100

  Class: Dimensional Warden

  Subclass: Dimensional Creator

  Trait: Planes Walker

  Displayed title: King Killer

  Statistics:

  Body: 4332 => 7467 (Agility-Strength-Constitution)

  Mind: 5866 => 9002 (Capacity, Potency, Recovery)

  Spirit: 3920 => 7055 (Aura-Perception-Soul)

  Class Skills: Omni-Energetic Mana Manipulation (Legendary), Auric Authority (Legendary), Dimensional Chains (Special), Powerful Presence (Special), Accumulate (Epic), Mana Harvest (Epic), Ambitious Fighter (Epic), Spell Split (Epic),

  Class Spells: Walking Armory (Legendary), Arcane Shatter (Special), Arcane Flash (Special), Arcane Fortification (Epic), Mana Thrust (Epic), Reconstruct (Special)

  Personal Skills: Empower (Epic), Inspect (Uncommon)

  Innate Skills: Dimensional Duel, Lockdown (1/5)

  Titles: S+ Tier Pioneer, S tier populous, King Killer, Earth’s Champion

  I quickly check the description of my new innate skill and my new Dimensional Chains skill.

  Lockdown (1/5)

  Effect 1: Lower the base stats of all enemies within your aura by the difference in your levels, up to a maximum of 10%

  Dimensional Chains (Special)

  Create chains in a higher dimension to shackle a target. Each chain binding the target lowers their speed and strength, with the effect scaling with your mind stat. The Durability of these chains is determined by the mind stat as well as mana invested.

  Huh, that isn’t quite what I’d been expecting. I had assumed that choosing dimensional warden would fully step away from me getting stronger against higher leveled enemies, but by the looks of it the class still incorporated some aspects of it. I remembered Talus mentioning once that changing the direction of your class gets more difficult the higher leveled you are. Perhaps this was the system’s way of still incorporating my general fighting style into my new class. Maybe it knew I still intended to fight high leveled enemies.

  Either way, this meant that I couldn't just apply the debuff to an enemy one level higher than me and suddenly have a few levels worth of stats over them. It says it scales with the difference between my and my opponents levels, so I wonder if that works the other way too. Would I be able to lower the stats of people 10 levels lower than myself? I don’t see that ever being useful, but maybe something worth testing.

  After another once over (technically now twice over) of my stat sheet, I close the screen. Just like that, everything fades to black and I am once more in Talus’ domain where I’d just begun my evolution. As soon as I am back, I see Talus’ eyes widen in surprise.

  “A manaling,” the god says, his eyes studying me. “It has been quite a while since I’ve seen one of those. Looks like you had quite the interesting evolution.”