Chapter 503 - Yes, Yes, a Thousand Times YES! (Patreon)

This is the chapter for December 18th.

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I decided to tackle the angel in the room first - [Angel of Mercy]. It represented such a large departure from everything else that it was worth evaluating first. If I was going to take it, great, that killed the rest of the discussion. If I wasn’t going to take it, that neatly eliminated a single class from contention.

I’d earned [Angel of Mercy]. I had no issues taking it in that respect, and the idea of flying around with wings and a halo was appealing. My understanding was mana and resources weren’t as much of a concern, but time was always a problem.

It’d also mean leaving life on Pallos. I didn’t regularly see angels flying around smiting evil. I didn’t personally know about any angel guardians, although stories were filled with them. My time on Pallos would basically be at the end, moving onto the next level of existence.

I’d love to be an angel. I’d love to fly around like one. But I wasn’t ready to leave Pallos. I wasn’t ready to leave Iona. I wanted to see what stupid trouble Artemis got into next. I had long walks with Night to go on. I had dinners with Susan to attend. I had drinks with Julius. I needed to make Katerina Immortal, and I wasn’t ready to leave my brothers and sisters of the Sixth Legion behind.

I had mangos to eat, books to read, and magic to learn. I just wasn’t ready. It was too sudden, too much of a surprise.

If I’d known ahead of time, if I’d gotten the warning or had a few decades preparing my ‘final approach’ so to speak, I’d be more willing to take the class and ascend. Out of the blue like this, as a complete surprise?

The timing was super unfortunate.

My Radiance class was approaching its own 768 upgrade, and I loved flight. Hopefully I could get an angelic theme going there, and get 95% of the benefits, with none of the downsides.

With a heavy heart I leaned back in the plush chair.

“Alright, bring me back in, I’m not taking [Angel of Mercy].” I told Librarian. She flicked a hand at me.

“Bring yourself back in, I’m not your chauffeur!” She complained. I stuck my tongue out at her, but she was just as entitled to being lazy as I wanted to be. I mentally flexed, and floated the chair inside with me still sitting in it. I mentally summoned the six books, spreading them out in front of me.

[Saintess of the Dawn] was next up. It was a fantastic class. I could see myself taking it, handing out peace, protection, and healing to everyone who came to me. It had a dizzying array of spells and skills I could take, a thousand and one options for me to use. It scratched so many itches I never knew I had until I saw the class.

It was also far too weak, and I couldn’t believe I was saying that about a blue class. The Dawn Sentinel was ‘only’ dark green, and just barely dark green at that. [Saintess of the Dawn] was unquestionably a large qualitative upgrade.

It just wasn’t good enough. I knew what I wanted to do primarily - heal people. I could heal more people, better, with every other class I was offered. For the remaining aspects, the buffs, the protection, I could lean on my wizardry for most of it.

The only thing I was truly saying goodbye to were proper, strong shields and barriers. Preventing people from getting hurt in the first place was admittedly superior to patching them up after from the harm reduction perspective, and it wasn’t like I was sitting in the backlines waiting for patients to be brought to me.

No.

I was usually in the thick of things, perfectly positioned to throw shields into the way of approaching harm.

I reluctantly put [Saintess of the Dawn] at the bottom of the pile, with a little mental note that if I decided to take up the path of shields and protection, to revisit the class.

That left the five healing classes.

[The Elaine] was a fame-based class, one with amazing leveling speed and pretty decent improvements across the board.

[Healer of the Stygian Dragon, Rainbow Phoenix] was the expansion class, one that let me heal far more than any of the other options. The ‘going wide’ aspect naturally lent itself to ‘going up’ next time I classed up power-wise.

[Arbiter of Life and Death] was the Sentinel option. In many ways, its identity was clearest, and the questions posed the easiest.

[Savior From the Stars] was the pure healer upgrade. It won across the board in numbers and boosting my healing abilities, but lacked any of the charming ‘extras’ from the other classes.

[The First Oathbound Healer] was the [Oathbound Healer] upgrade. It was like a mix of [Savior] and [The Elaine], a little bit of a halfway mark between the two.

The first question I asked myself was simple, and sort of useless.

Were there any classes I would be unhappy taking?

I rapidly arrived at the answer of no. I would be perfectly content with any of the offered classes. Even [Saintess of the Dawn] was an acceptable result!

Okay, great! I couldn’t make a wrong decision here. I wouldn’t be tormented by my decision. Unlike [Firebug], which looking back on what an idiot I’d been as a kid still made me wince, I doubted any of these choices would cause me regret.

The question was, which one was me? Which one did I most resonate with?

Or did I want to do some min-maxing, and select a class that best boosted my powers?

In that respect, [Healer of the Stygian Dragon, Rainbow Phoenix] was the clear loser. With minimal buffs to my abilities, and the lowest stats, what it had going for it most was sheer diversity. The other classes all had strong points in their favor.

Which one let me be the most powerful healer?

From a healing perspective, [Arbiter of Life and Death] was in fourth. It was the class to take if I believed myself to be Sentinel Dawn deep in my heart, but it wasn’t as cleanly focused on healing as the other three. It did include more personal protection and protection for others, along with a suite of interesting abilities, but the pure number crunching had it a little weaker.

Where it shone was active experience gain, and that led me on a wild tangent down that path. Everything was interconnected. Experience led to levels, levels led to stats, stats led to healing abilities.

I’d ranked [The Elaine] as the fastest leveling class, but that was assuming a long measure of peace. [Arbiter] leveled from far more activities than [The Elaine] did, and when push came to shove and I was screaming in battle with the rest of the Sixth Legion, it would level faster than any of my other classes.

That was if shit hit the fan…

[Healer of the Stygian Dragon, Rainbow Phoenix] once again was bottom of the ranking in terms of leveling speed, and was slowly making its way to the ‘do not consider’ pile. With enough power and mana at my fingertips, it didn’t matter if I was eating a modest to large penalty healing Fenrir and other dinosaurs - I could simply brute force it. Not being able to heal plants hurt a little delicate part of my heart, the one that liked blooming flowers and lush fields to run through, but if it came down to one old man or a hundred million stalks of grass, I’d be picking the man every time.

Four classes left.

[The Arbiter of Life and Death] was the one sticking out the most, and I figured I’d give it the [Angel of Mercy] treatment, and ask myself if that was what I wanted to do, if that was what I wanted to be.

The answer was a swift yes.

I’d spent most of my life working as a Ranger or a Sentinel. Yes, the fae had utterly fucked me over, but I was proud of myself, of my accomplishments. Of what I’d done as one, of what I could do. Of my training and abilities. I was fucking good at my job, and took deep pride in it.

It was a home for me. Fertile ground for me to plant roots in. A rock throughout the ages that I’d been able to tether myself on. Night was living proof that being a Sentinel could be a satisfying eternal commitment, out to help others and push back the forces that would destroy civilization and lives.

Acceptance of my role as a Sentinel, of the class itself, didn’t automatically mean I was going to take it though. Was it the best class to act as a Sentinel as? If yes, was there more to me and my goals than simply being the best Sentinel possible?

It went to the top of the pile, but just barely. It didn’t knock away the competition in a way that made it a clear winner, but it certainly didn’t lose.

Who was I? What was the beating heart of Elaine? Which class reflected that the best?

[The Elaine] was an obvious contender for that question, the class literally named after me.

Medicine was at my core, and at the core of my first class slot. From lowly [Apprentice Control Healer] to [Light of Hope], going to [Constellation of the Healer] and [The Dawn Sentinel], I was all about fixing people up.

Which one of my classes did that best?

That wasn’t an easy question to answer at all. [The Elaine], [Savior from the Stars], and [The First Oathbound Healer] all had different strengths and weaknesses in that respect, and the math was complicated. It hurt that I had nobody to double-check it, and Librarian was me - she couldn’t do it any more than I could.

[Oathbound] had the ‘obvious’ aspect of [Oath] moving into a Class skill slot and gaining a healing cost reduction. Except [Savior] was getting [Celestial Spirit] instead of [Celestial Mastery], letting each point of mana and control gain more oomph, and it stacked on top of a larger healing efficiency gain than [Oathbound] was getting. The two greater efficiencies combined might be more potent than the skill moving up… for now. Future upgrades might change that.

[The Elaine] had similar efficiency gains as [Oathbound], but could boast a higher leveling speed. With how potent each level was at a black-quality class, ‘only’ a dozen levels more was a world of difference.

Except then [Oathbound] countered that by having more bang for its buck per level thanks to the improved and capped [Oath], and…

The math was a fucking mess.

In the end, [Oath] was simply too strong, the singular core of my entire life. Yes, [Savior] had better buffs to my healing on an individual skill basis, but three skills improving things was better than two.

After the math came the application, and it became a goddess-damned mess again. [Savior] and [The Elaine] both had the best increase in range for the new and improved [Wheel of Sun and Moon], but [Oathbound] shot back hard with sheer numbers. 8% was dramatically more than 5%, and that was before [Sentinel's Superiority] came into play.

My head hurt.

Slowly, piece by piece, possible questionable calculation after possible questionable calculation, a picture was made clear. [The First Oathbound Healer] was my strongest pure healer class, thanks to the weight of my [Oath]. Which was no surprise.

When it came to my utility skills, [Oathbound] lost out hard. [Sunrise] was buffed in both [Elaine] and [Savior] to a great degree, but not [Oathbound]. Similarly, those two classes got upgrades to [The Stars Never Fade], while [Oathbound] was left in the dust. [Arbiter] had an armor skill, and both it and [The Elaine] enjoyed decent upgrading to my shielding capabilities, although nothing as potent as [Saintess of the Dawn]... skill-wise. When it came to power behind the skills though, [Saintess of the Dawn] would lose out after a hundred levels or so.

[The First Oathbound Healer] was the pure power class when all the numbers were crunched, with decent peacetime experience if a narrow scope. I was forced to mentally readjust various leveling ranks - it leveled about as well as [Savior] did, with extra experience from the minor fame aspect.

If healing was all I cared about, the class was a winner. Now my big question was - did any of the utility from any of the other classes outweigh the power of [The First]?

I was getting a no. Sure, there were lots of fun skills everywhere, but nothing that stood up and screamed YOU HAVE TO TAKE ME! While [The First Oathbound Healer] had its own few useful skills, the biggest win skill-wise was opening up a new General skill slot. Nothing super impressive, no fantastical magics that would change anything, but it gave me a lot of options on another axis. Some of my most powerful and useful skills were general skills, each and every one of them a cornerstone of how I lived my life. The School had helpfully given me a massive list of all of the best general skills and how to get them, and I’d get to play ‘what to take’ once again.

[The Elaine] had fallen by the wayside, the various utility interesting but nothing standing out. It was also losing in the power department. The biggest thing it had going for it was I wanted to have a class called [The Elaine]. Shame I couldn’t just cut the cover off and move it onto another book.

I circled back around to [Arbiter of Life and Death].

I enjoyed being a Sentinel, I wanted to be a Sentinel, and I would keep being a Sentinel.

What did that mean? Did I want an armor skill to stand boldly in the vanguard, telling our enemies to try their best? Or did I want to sit back, less obvious, less flashy, but getting the job done better?

At the same time, if I was alive, it was easier to keep everyone else alive. If I died, that would mean a lot of other people died. It was fairly basic resource allocation. If I failed one person, that was one life out of the equation. If I failed myself, that was ten thousand lives out of the equation. An armor skill helped with that… but with how cheap my healing was going to become in some of the classes, was the loss of regeneration really worth it? Or would I simply be burning a skill slot and regeneration for no good reason?

The math… the math suggested my own body and healing was far better armor than a skill at this point. Which was weird, and super counterintuitive to my entire life and training.

[Arbiter] felt like it was out, and I was down to two.

[Savior From the Stars], with its expanded scope of abilities and utility? With its better application of healing to people?

Or [The First Oathbound Healer], with its slightly improved power?

I went back to my math, and tried to calculate how many people I could heal in a single day after gaining 150 levels.

The results were shocking.

I’d calculated percentages and relative ratios in all my previous calculations, but when running the numbers on ‘how many people can I heal in a day’, my jaw dropped. I triple-checked my numbers, absolutely certain that I must’ve misplaced a 0 or multiplied a number wrong.

It couldn’t be right.

It undeniably was.

The difference between the two classes was ‘do I want to heal 9,000,000 people in a day, or 8,000,000 people in a day?’

In a 16 hour day. Not even a full 24 hours!

It was stupid. It was absurd.

It was right.

The added power for [The First Oathbound Healer] was getting completely wasted, vanishing into the void. Who cared if I could heal a million more people in a single day when finding that many hurt people in the first place was impossible?

I did a similar calculation for [The Elaine] and [The Arbiter of Life and Death], and the numbers told a similar story. [The Elaine] could heal quite a lot more than [Arbiter] could, but I was looking at degrees of stupid numbers no matter how I sliced it.

Fine.

The utility discussion, which I had axed earlier as ‘nothing is drawing me as much as the raw power’, was back on the table. Annoying that I had to loop back to it, but this was my main class, my core. It was worth spending the time and doing it properly.

[The First Oathbound Healer] didn’t have any true utility. I was getting a general upgrade across the board, and admittedly, a free general skill slot wasn’t nothing. My general skills were some of my most-used skills in day-to-day life, and I could do amazing things with another open slot. Still a contender, but for a completely different reason.

[The Elaine] was a little weaker. Most of its added utility was in being the healer’s healer. Boosting other healers, leveling quickly, having some interesting skills with [Sing My Name] and the like.

[Savior] was chomping at the bit with a half-dozen extremely powerful buffs, each one packaging a number of different abilities and improvements. A few of my skills I wouldn’t drop under any circumstances, but between the open slot from [Wheel] and [Dance] merging, [Sunrise] and [Mantle of the Stars] being optional skills, I could potentially grab three powerful auras or buffs to help others.

[Arbiter of Life and Death] came roaring back onto the stage when it came to utility. It was the battlefield Sentinel class, and it packed a number of goodies. There were the significantly stronger shields - not quite [Saintess of the Dawn] level, but good enough. There was the armor skill, and there was the battlefield awareness. I was unsure how good the battlefield awareness truly was - [The World Around Me] was busted as hell, and I doubted anything could top it - but it existed.

The sheer strength and quality of the offerings in [Savior] and [Arbiter] quickly outstripped both [The Elaine] and [The First Oathbound Healer], narrowing down my options to those two.

More analysis time! At least I’d cut down my offerings down to two, and I wouldn’t be upset at either one winning.

Buffs were arguably better for an army and supporting high-level Classers - like Iona and Fenrir, a little less so with Auri - while shields were better for weaker people and individuals. My shields would be good, they weren’t going to be ‘shield an army’ good like War Sentinel Legion’s could be.

The tiebreaker ended up being a fairly simple idea.

I couldn’t heal everything. Things like the rock smashing Spec’s head in, the elf being executed by the Wardens. Overwhelming damage that was immediately lethal, even with the instantaneous nature of my healing.

A shield could stop things like that. With the increased shield, I could’ve snapped it above his head and blocked the killshot. Improved stats and buffs galore wouldn’t have helped him in the moment, not with a rock that large going that fast.

Even with [Savior From the Stars] generally having better skills healing-wise than [Arbiter of Life and Death], they both ran into the ‘healing = yes’ issue, where the improved skills didn’t matter that much for my healing, it was already at ‘utterly fucking stupid’ levels.

It wasn’t what I had expected to take at all. I was so close to taking [The First Oathbound Healer]. If I hadn’t triple-checked the math in every way, shape, or form, I would’ve taken it and possibly been left feeling dissatisfied when I realized how much it wasn’t working.

I quietly closed the books, and reshelved them for Librarian. I wasn’t going to be rude and just leave unchecked-out books lying around! Especially not when Librarian also wanted to be lazy.

I tucked the ancient leather bound tome under my arm, and turned to face Librarian.

“I would like to take [Arbiter of Life and Death], please.”

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I woke up from the world of my soul, dozens of notifications ringing in my ears. My awareness briefly flickered as [The World Around Me] turned back on, Iona kneeling by my bed.

Her smile lit up her entire face as she saw me waking up, and she held out her hands as she asked me the question I’d been waiting for years to hear.

“Elaine, love of my life, star of my world, will you marry me?” She asked.

My carefully laid plans around the sword I’d secretly forged and stashed under the bed went right out the window. My heart raced with joy as I leapt out of bed, into her arms. My lips met hers.

“Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!” I cried out.

Then my brain caught up with the rest of me, and I realized what Iona was holding.

“Wait, what’s that?”

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AN: Alright, a little bit of fun behind-the-scenes trivia!
I didn't go into this classup knowing what Elaine was going to take. I set down a dozen strong options and variations, then played 'which one would Elaine take?'

Classup chapters take a LONG time to write and iterate on, and Elaine's final choice changed several times before the final iteration!

Initially, she took [Savior From the Stars], because it was the only one with biomancy originally. She wants to help people, and that one let her help people the most. Iterating on it, I disliked how only Savior was getting minor biomancy after she worked so hard on it at the School, and it had been promised that she'd get it more broadly here. Once the biomancy was expanded, Oathbound Healer was the pick, because it was the 'heal the most people' class.

Then I ran the numbers and the math, and WOW. Elaine literally wouldn't be able to find enough people to heal! Healing = Yes.

With that done, I needed to go back to the utility skills to decide what Elaine would take, since all of them had utterly absurd levels of healing, and that iteration is what made it to final!

I want to give a big thanks to all my beta readers for helping me work through and iterate on the concept, and bonking me when I needed bonking, pointing out flaws in my logic and Elaine's reasoning.

The poll results!

The Elaine was the most popular result at a 8.04 average, 211 super likes, and only 6 super dislikes. Angel of Mercy/Saintess were tied for least popular (each in different ways - Angel had more super dislikes, but more super likes and a higher average than Saintess). Arbiter was the second-highest average, with the second-fewest super dislikes and the second-most super likes. Full numbers are here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13VN9Wj0sW3PWyk3x-bG3TVS1oj3z-UWrFImM8lq2y3Q/edit?resourcekey#gid=116005460

Cheers all! A bit of typo fixing, and book 11 will be out soon!