Most of the rest of Arcane Beholder's skills proved much less of a problem, now that Zoe had some renewed familiarity with the process again. Arcane Barrage was simple, a brute force barrage of her mana. There was a tricky part right at the beginning of the skill, an intricate web that tied a chunk of mana together to something resembling a physical projectile to be launched.

  But it was similar enough to skills she'd used before, and only took the better part of a day to recreate well enough for the system to give her the skill.

  Arcane shielding was interesting — almost identical to Arcane Barrage, and at first Zoe couldn't understand why the mana was surrounding her instead of firing off at a nearby stump. But after a few hours of careful comparisons between the two skills, she isolated the part that controlled the shape and managed to create a decent replica of the skill for herself.

  She stored away her notes on the process in a separate notebook. If there were two skills that used the same web of dense mana then there would be more. What would happen if she forced that dense mana into the shape of an arrow, or a shield or sword? What if she made a floating platform from it?

  Zoe considered stealing Arcane Beholder's version of Scrying, but decided against it for the time being. If she thought there would be some benefit to it later she'd come back and try it again, but the possibility of locking in this version of Scrying and not being able to steal Omniscient Beholder's superior version of it was more than a little concerning.

  When she started working on Assault of the Beholder, she almost thought it would be another identical skill to Arcane Barrage and Arcane Shielding. A dense packet of mana shot from her eyes.

  But it couldn't have been any more different. Arcane Barrage was a powerful blast, but Assault of the Beholder was a violent, twisting assault of mana. Mana congregated in Zoe's eyes and then was shot out in bursts, only a millisecond or two between each. If even that. Each blast, ripping through the air with wanton rage and malice, settling in on whatever Zoe was looking at for just the briefest moment before exploding in violence.

  Piecing the skill apart was difficult just because of how fast it was. Each entire cycle of the skill took a couple milliseconds at most. Mana gathered, mana was twisted, and mana was shot off. All in the span of an instant.

  There was a hint of something resembling light magic within the patterns Zoe could see. Some kind of twisting string that raced around the pattern, pulling the entire packet of violent mana along with it. It wasn't quite the same as how Zoe's light skills looked, but it was so close. Like a distant relative of light.

  Vision, Zoe wondered? Was there an entire element dedicated to vision? She wasn't sure, and there wasn't enough of it in the skill to be able to put together an entire manipulation skill of it, but she made a note of it in her book that she rarely checked back on anyway.

  Obnubilate was the one Zoe expected to be the hardest, but was somehow the easiest. Mana Cloak was gentle and precise with its movements — because it did more than just obscure her from mana. It hid her very presence, each and every ray of light, every possible way she could be seen needed to be twisted around her as though she weren't there.

  Obnubilate on the other hand had no regard for visibility. It was for stopping mana senses, at the cost of all else. An inelegant surge of mana rushed out from Zoe's body, shoving all of the ambient mana back to its boundary. They weren't gently pushed aside, they weren't dragged around her presence like she wasn't even there.

  They were pushed back with overwhelming force. Recreating the skill only took a few minutes, and made Zoe wondered why she'd never considered trying the effect before when she'd wanted some privacy.

  By far the most interesting part to Zoe as the days passed though, was how the memory of Eliza's fabric changed. Each day when Zoe woke up, she'd used Beheld on the fabric and watched how the scene changed.

  After the first day, nothing even seemed different at first. It wasn't until her third attempt that she'd noticed the faint difference in the background. Trees that weren't there when they were supposed to be. Bushes that were there when they weren't supposed to be. A faint breeze that wasn't present before.

  On the second day, the changes were a little more drastic. Eliza herself looked different. Still like Eliza, but like Eliza if she'd had a particularly bad day. Or a particularly good day, depending on the memory Zoe was seeing. But no longer like what Zoe knew Eliza to look like at the time. Wrinkled clothes beyond what even Eliza would be okay with. Freshly ironed clothes that Zoe would be shocked to see Eliza in. Hair that was tussled and dirty, fingernails that were chipped.

  But even on the second day, each time Zoe looked at the memory she saw her friend say "bibbledebom" just before the vision ended.

  The third day was even more drastic — sometimes Eliza was a somewhat feminine man, sometimes it was raining or snowing. Sometimes there were distant howls that shouldn't have been present, rustling in the woods that never happened.

  Things kept changing bit by bit, day after day, until the eighth day when the most important piece finally changed.

  Eliza — a timid younger boy maybe ten years old at most in this vision, looked down at Zoe and spoke to her before the vision ended. "Bombedebip!"

  Zoe finished writing her daily letter to Eliza, describing how the memory had changed and then smiled as it was whisked off to her friend. A happy reminder that Eliza was still alive, somewhere.

  With Arcane Beholder's skills finished — barring the inferior Scrying and redundant Beholden Bestowed that she couldn't practice now anyway, Zoe replaced the class with Blinding Beholder.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Luminary Manipulation was the first skill Zoe tackled. It was similar to Light, almost identical at its base — though unlike the trail of mana within Assault of the Beholder was far more complicated than Light. Within the twisting, winding paths of blinding fast mana were slow trails of different elements she'd already recognized. Heat, time and Space flickering around within the pattern along with a few other sprinklings of mana Zoe couldn't recognize.

  At least a dozen different elements of mana all culminating in a blinding, prideful ray of light. Just picking apart all the different pieces of the skill took weeks. Notebook after notebook burnt through, filled with scribbles that made little sense as Zoe came back to them days later.

  There was just so much to the element. At its core, the structure that made up the light itself was a near copy of the Light skill itself. There were a few differences to the structure, but so little that Zoe wondered if they might have just been minute differences between when whoever made the system created the two skills.

  Every other element just grabbed onto that winding pattern of speeding mana, bolstering its impact. Heat that was dragged along by the light, time and space that pushed the light along that little bit faster. Something Zoe attributed to Gravity, pulling in the ambient mana through sheer force. And something else entirely that seemed to only enhance the bewilderment Zoe felt, looking at the skill.

  Luminary was almost like a minor Elemental skill on its own. So many different components within the element combining together to create something more powerful than the sum of its parts. Much to Zoe's dismay, unlike an Elemental skill which contained the entire definition of every element that made it up, Luminary only contained the bare minimum needed to make the element work.

  Days passed with her getting distracted, trying to reverse engineer a Gravity skill from the element, but all she could manage to do was bolster the light near her. An interesting effect — and even more interesting that it didn't give her a skill for accomplishing. But not what she had hoped for.

  Soon after, she'd managed to recreate the skill and upgrade it to a pure Luminary skill. Which itself was a much larger boon than she'd expected. Luminary Manipulation only worked when she was under the light of a star. If she were underground, there was no starlight to manipulate. Even on some cloudy nights or stormy days, there was little to no starlight to manipulate.

  But the pure Luminary skill was capable of creating starlight. Even in the depths of caves, she could pull on the power of starlight to bolster her skills. And that had the absolutely incredible effect of helping all of her other Blinding Beholder skills function where they wouldn't have normally.

  Stargazing was still probably the most powerful Scrying ability she had access to when it came to how far away she could see something. Even compared to her Omniscient Beholder's Scrying. In theory, she could pick a star in the sky and view something unimaginably far away. Omniscient Beholder could maybe do that, at some point. But with Stargazing it felt almost close.

  The one big drawback to Stargazing was its complete inability to see anything in shadows. She couldn't see beneath the tree canopies, within a cave or dungeon she was going to enter, around a corner or beyond a wall.

  But with the pure Luminary skill? She could create starlight wherever she wanted. It wasn't a perfect solution, since she still couldn't use the skill while she was peering through Stargazing. But she could use it in places she couldn't, normally.

  Which were all places that were close by — anywhere further would have stars in the sky shining down on them anyway. And in that cast, her Omniscient Beholder scrying was far superior in every respect.

  But the synergy between Luminary creation and Stargazing was fascinating to Zoe regardless.

  The rest of the skills were fairly simple after Zoe had figured out the Luminary element. Each one filled with the complicated, but now familiar element. Luminary Cloak was similar to Mana Cloak though the effect was achieved through luminary mana rather than pure mana. Starry Night was also almost identical to Obnubilate though with a forceful push of Luminary aligned mana.

  Luminary Aegis and Luminary Flare both used the same web of mana to bind the element together before they were put to work to their purposes. Another note Zoe added to her notebook. If the web was more generalized, then could she do the same thing with other elements. Could she create a Shadow Barrage, or a Gales barrage?

  Stargazing was the only other skill that gave her some pause, though Zoe attributed that to her not having already acquired the Scrying skill for some experience with the niche. The mana was split into two separate components that communicated through twists of time and space.

  One part went to wherever Zoe was going to be viewing from. Mana twisted around a small spherical shape, grabbing all of the light that passed it and then letting it continue on its path after the light was ripped through the pathways. Then, a web of mana was ripped through space and time to Zoe's eyes where the second component was.

  This one had twisting, pulsating mana that undid the web of mana and recreated tiny pulses of light that matched what the other component was seeing.

  It was the first instance of visual encoding Zoe had seen in the system, personally. She'd seen it used before — even back a thousand years prior when she first met the king through a visual illusion. But it was fascinating to see for herself, to be able to spend time studying it and breaking it apart. To be able to fill her notebooks with every little tiny component of how the skill worked.

  Recreating the effect took a few days — with several hours spent healing her eyes after she'd made the effect a little too powerful. There was a delicate balance between letting herself see the visual stimulus being sent to her and not destroying her eyes with an overwhelming display of Luminary aligned mana.

  And then, Zoe turned her attention to the next of the beholder classes. If she continued the same path, Corporal Beholder was next. She grimaced at the thought of it. The skills were interesting, and something she definitely needed to get.

  But going through that rippling, muscular experience again wasn't quite as exciting. She would need to, but she still had at least one distraction to keep her from having to deal with it just yet.

  Zoe turned her attention to the one Beholder class she hadn't gotten a chance to experience, even in passing. Unseen Beholder was ripped away from her the moment she'd acquired it, merged into her Omniscient Beholder class before she could even see the skills it offered.

  She pushed the system to give her Unseen Beholder, eager to see what kind of element it might govern.

  *Ding* You have unlocked the Unseen Beholder class. Your body and soul will be adjusted to accommodate the change.

  Effects:

  - Unseen Beholder: Gain 32 stat points for each level in this class.

  - Unseen Beholding: See the world around you through the shadows.

  - Unseen Source: Maximum Mana, Mana Regeneration and Stamina Regeneration increased by 200%

  - Unseen Form: Increased experience gained while in shadows.

  - Unseen Might: Umbral aligned effects are boosted by 290%.

  Available Skills:

  - Umbral Affinity: Increased Umbral affinity.

  - Umbral Manipulation: Manipulate the raw Umbra of the world to your will.

  - Umbral Cloak: Shield yourself in obscuring Umbra.

  - Gloom: Witness a distant view, covered by Umbra.

  - Enshroud: Form a small area of darkness that rejects light.

  - Umbral Shielding: Shield yourself in a dense layer of Umbra.

  - Umbral Barrage: Blast outwardly with forceful Umbra.

  - Assault of the Beholder: Rend apart that which you see.

  - Beholden Bestowed: Imbue your allies' eyes with mana.

  - A Nice View: Remove dirt and grime from objects.

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