Once the training session was over, Hops being included in it as apparently chucking floating sigils was different than chucking stones, Roge asked the elf to fire paint at him. Yes, he needed to get better at aiming his magic tools, but in order to get the [Dodge Magician] class, he also needed to dodge. So using the inscription wand, Hops would launch little paint spheres at Roge, not harming him in the slightest, but everyone could see where he got hit. It made the dragon think of paintball, but even safer, though that analogy made him get drenched in several layers of orange paint.

  Even as he got better at focusing, he found the movements felt slightly off, his low [Agility] probably the issue, as was Hops’ guess. He’d need to raise it higher to get any use out of dodging, and at that point he felt like a tanking, con class might work better.

  “One sec,” Roge called out, Hops lowering his wand and huffing.

  “You’re not going to get any better without better stats, Roge. Why not put the points in-“

  “Or I could just go with a con class,” Roge stated, his breathing coming in gasps before he had the thought to heal his exhaustion.

  “Come on, Roge. The logic is sound,” Sean encouraged, taking his own break to cool off. “Even dodging is going to be hard to level with me in the party. A pure con skill is going to be glacial. And you need all your skills to go up five levels to level up the class, as you know. It’ll slow down the progression of your class.” He in fact, did not know that, but it was good information to have. Meant his single skill classes would level up easier, as well as just being generally stronger.

  “I just don’t get why I’m not getting it…” he grumbled, earning a laugh from the rest of the group. “Oh don’t laugh. I got my other classes ridiculously easily. Dodging attacks and using magical tools should be *easy* to get. I desperately want both.”

  “And since you’ve only been around for a week, having important memories to draw from should be easy. Yeah… that doesn’t make sense…” Hops mumbled, Roge freezing as he thought about what the elf said.

  ‘Maybe it’s because dodging the normal way is not something I’ve wanted for a long time?’ he thought to himself, knowing that magic related things were good wants to pick from since he’d wanted magic since he was a kid. ‘Do I need… magical dodging? What would that be…?’ As he thought some more, a sudden noise made him jump, his heart pounding in his chest.

  Marge had a sheepish expression on her face, her practice dummy on fire. “My bad. Mistook one of my enchanted arrows for a normal one.” As he felt his heart rate slow down, Roge latched onto the feeling that he’d had when the sound had gone off. Fight or flight. Wanting to jump to another location to avoid danger.

  ‘What if I could just… jump to another spot. Does teleportation exist?’ he asked himself, looking over at Hops and thinking it over for another moment before deciding, ‘No harm in trying.’

  “Hey Hops? Can I have another one?” The elf turned to Roge and shrugged at the request, gathering a single point of mana at the end of the wand and firing it forward. Instead of tensing his muscles and focusing on the physicality of movement, he instead thought of just the movement. Like changing a character’s position in a video game by adding a few numbers. Just a short JUMP-

  The next moment was a swirl of feelings; nausea, movement, and colors were tasted across his tongue. An instant that felt like a few seconds of compression. Swirling into another location, the moment over as he flopped to the ground. Not because of any remaining feelings from the experience, but because of the sheer shock that blue screened his brain. The popups he received from that stunt didn’t bring him out of his temporary fugue state, but the slap to the face certainly did.

  “Ow!” Roge shouted, placing a hand on his muzzle and wincing at the forming bruise. “What was…” He trailed off as he finally noticed his prone position, his three friends crouched and looking down at him worried. “Oh. Uh… that was…”

  “So cool!” “Too dangerous!” “So dangerous!” three voices called out when he trailed off, causing him to wince as he slowly sat up.

  “What exactly did I… do?” he asked, somehow the calmest of the group in that moment. “I just remember wanting to dodge and then… movement?” As he tried to recall the experience, it kept slipping from his mind, like oil on water. Like a dream only half remembered.

  “You straight up appeared about a foot to the side of where you were!” Hops exclaimed, that dissection look back in his eyes as he wrote things down. “Movement is inaccurate though. There was no time in between you being in one spot and being in another. I have never heard of this!”

  Roge blinked at that statement, looking to Sean and Marge to see both of them calming down after the dragon appeared to be fine. “People haven’t done… teleporting before?”

  “Tele… port?” Sean sounded the word out, Roge feeling ice traveling down his spine at that.

  “Never heard of it. Is that what the… skill? Is it a skill?” the elf suddenly asked, looking a bit worried. Roge looked at the first notification at that, hoping it looked like he was double checking it rather than looking at it for the first time.

  Roge completely forgot about the question at that moment, looking up at them feeling a bit scared. “…Has anyone heard of [Spacial Magic]?” he asked quietly.

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  “Spacial? As in space? Like a room?” Sean asked, Roge expecting Hops to pipe in when the elf shook his head. When Hops was equally lost as the lion, Roge knew that didn’t bode well.

  “No. I… gimme a sec.” He cursed his terrible luck as he had to pull up paragraphs once again.

  He had only thought to pull up [Spacial Magic] due to clicking on everything in his class description, feeling tempted to look up other abilities but holding off on it. “Hey Hops…” he muttered, the elf raising an eyebrow through his shock. “I’m going to need you to write all of this down…”

  After copying out all of the ability descriptions, Hops having more experience writing out faster than any of them, the group silently looked at the information in awe. Sure, the tool control skill wasn’t anything to sneeze at, but the other skill and ability made Roge want to test them out.

  “I’ve never seen wording like this on a skill…” Marge muttered, tracing a finger over the dodging skill. “It’s exact, but also vague. Leaves more interpretation for the system to activate it, which you want in a skill but…”

  “I don’t understand half of what it is saying,” Sean grumbled. “‘Fabric of spacetime’? A room isn’t a shirt.”

  “Are you getting a better sense of it, Roge?” Hops asked, tracing over the wording. “I know you don’t have a lot of experience with it, but the system generally tries to make sure you understand things if you try hard.”

  “It’s…” Roge mumbled, trying to find a way to vocalize it. “Do you know about two and three dimensional grids? For math?”

  “Mostly,” the elf shrugged, leading Roge to sigh.

  “Like let’s consider your body to be the center of the universe. So you’re zero feet away from yourself in every direction. That wall,” he said, pointing to the south wall, “Is however many feet south of you, but zero feet east or west of you. So you mark the area, or space, in a grid by relating how far away it is from everything.”

  “With you so far.”

  “Now have magic that can manipulate that. Not sure why it calls the grid a fabric,” he lied, “but it allows you to manipulate that grid. The distance between things. Where things are in relation to you.” Tossing a random shirt from his inventory, he focused on it with his new ability and halted its fall to the ground. “Like this. It… takes a bit of focus, but I can tell that shirt to stay the same distance from me in the same direction.”

  “And so when you dodge, you tell everything to move so you’re in a different place?” Marge asked, Sean still looking somewhat lost as he stayed silent.

  “More like I move myself in relation to the ground,” Roge said, patting the grass.

  “Alright. Enough,” Sean grumbled, looking at Roge with an assessing look. “Roge seems fine. He got another weird class with awesome abilities. But more importantly, you can dodge. How much mana do you have?”

  “Forty,” Roge grumbled, freezing when he looked back at the frozen shirt. “The telekinesis drains my mana. Not sure by how much, and the number isn’t changing but…”

  “Makes sense,” Hops said, waving off the inquiry. “Any magic ability like that does.”

  “So we rest and then test out the dodging?” Marge asked, looking at her quiver with a smile. Roge groaned at that, everyone else chuckling.

  ~~~

  As they waited to practice more dodging, Roge went off to the side to process, while also mentally kicking himself to check his ability descriptions. If he was to progress, he needed to use everything at his disposal.

  As excited as he was for the ability to shape his mana, not realizing the effects he’d already sensed had been from his abilities irked him. ‘Well now that I know, I can upgrade them. The [Nature Magic] effect is pretty good and I might get more things like that.’ Feeling like it wouldn’t hurt too much, he pulled out his healing wand and swapped it to the flaming spark effect. Feeding only one mana into it made a very small effect, the blue lightning only the size of the end of his finger, but he could play around with that.

  Shaping the unruly lightning was nearly impossible, sensing that at most, the new effect would make it easier to aim within his range. Once he used the icing buff, though, it was as simple as thinking to change its shape. A coin was his first thought, the shape a bit indistinct, but he assumed that would get better with rank ups. Next he tried a lightning bolt shape, giggling a bit at the blue color.

  ‘This might not help much with combat… but this will be so much fun…’