Rolling around at the speed of sound

Thinking about it for another couple of minutes John came to one conclusion: the hummingbird style just fitted him better. Sure, the temporal and local displacement of the serpent style sounded interesting, but what would that be really? Portals? Portals would probably mean that he had to be kind of stationary to an extent, opposed to the apparently quick movement of the bird style that just was more up his alley, also by now his Agility and his Intellect were both his strongest stats, leaving one of them out would just be disadvantageous.

So, he clicked on the Buzzing Hummingbird style with a good feeling in his chest that he made the right decision. As the new skills popped up that he got through the style, he was even happier:

New Skill: Acrobatics, Lv.1, Passive
You move with a lot more flexibility and agility. The higher your Skill level is the more acrobatic moves do you know, the higher your agility is, the more of them you can perform.

New Skill: Flash Step, Lv.1, 1 MP
Create a single invisible Mana construct at the bottom of your feet or the palms of your hands which you can use to push yourself off of. The construct will exist for one second if not interacted with and will disappear after a limb leaves the construct, will always be the size of the used extremity, and will always be perfectly formed for you to move in the direction you want to. You can use these steps in the air to perform a double jump. Can also be used on the ground to instantly change your direction.
You can create [Skill Level/4] steps at the same time and only [Skill Level] steps in the air until you touch a solid surface with both feet or hands again.

New Skill: Flurry Strike, Lv.1, 10 Mana per second
Strike [Skill Level +1] times per attack in almost an instant. Impalement damage will not be added, but if a single strike would critically hit, so do all the attacks. Physical multiplier will be applied normally.
Can be performed for [Skill level] seconds. Cooldown: 5 Seconds

New Skill: Mana Dagger, Lv.1, 5 Mana
Create a mana construct in the form of a dagger that you can throw. Deals [Intelligence/2] + [Skill Level x 2] magical damage. Can be created every [10-Skill Level] seconds with [Skill Level/3] Daggers at a time (for a single cost). Daggers last for [Skill level x 2] seconds.

Fighting style updated, new list of skills. Use skills to level up fighting style. Each five levels in the overall fighting style will add 1 Skill Level to every skill below the level of the fighting style.
Sheet rearranged.

Ooh boy, this was the right decision indeed. Those skills were amazing! He could already see how he would use those in the fight, especially since they were pretty low on the mana cost. But considering that he would use them a lot in a long fight, he could also see how he would need a higher mana pool and a better mana regeneration.

The three free level-ups went into Flash step, Mana Charge, and Acrobatics to get them up to snuff with the rest of his skills and the two stat points went into his Endurance and his Wisdom, to get his HP to rise a bit and to raise his MP regen as well.

Next thing on his list was trying out his new alchemy skill. Hopefully, he could do that without pulling anything out of his inventory, because no matter how inconspicuous he looked right now, that wouldn't hold once he pulled out an oversized pelt, glowing in some color. Looking at his inventory he clicked on the stack with the furs (John still didn't get why they were stacked together even though they were imbued with different elements) and held his finger on it. A small list of options appeared after a second or so of holding his finger on the slot, giving him these options:

Drop
Split stack
Extract (Essence)
Extract (Material)
Craft
Bond

Oh, right, he could also bond with items he had kinda forgotten about that fact... Maybe he should bond with his spear, then he could always know where it is should he ever lose it. But for now, he was more interested in the things he could do with the essences he could gather out of the furs. Clicking on Extract (Essence) revealed another pop-up, showing him the chances of getting specific essences:

Type of Essence
50% Essence of Element (correlates to the element of the fur)
20% Essence of Life
15% Essence of Rage
15% Essence of Hunger

Quality of Essence
66% Meager
15% Flawed
11% Normal
5% Pristine
2% Perfect
1% Corrupted

Extract Essence from:
[x] Elemental Fur (Frost)
[x] Elemental Fur (Frost)
[x] Elemental Fur (Lightning)
[x] Elemental Fur (Water)

Proceed? (Y/N)

At the end, he could select which furs to extract from, and John decided to go all in on this and use all of the furs that weren't currently used to heat the egg. Hitting Yes, John could instantly see how the furs disappeared from his inventory, filling it with essences instead. Counting five of them, John could see that one use of the skill yielded a critical success. So now he was in the possession of these essences:

2x Meager Essence of Element (Ice)
1x Essence of Element (Lightning)
1x Pristine Essence of Rage
1x Meager Essence of Life

Extract Essence, Lv.2

His inventory also revealed to him that the essences had no size and required no 'official' slot. The images for these essences showed small translucent orbs, different in color. Also, the higher the quality was, the less translucent was the essence, probably showing the potency of it. Looking at these things made John feel like he was looking at raw elements full of power, ready to be molded back into something usable.

Since he was already meddling with Essences, John decided to open the Essence Chest in his inventory (which simply was a velvet pouch, closed with a knot). Once he clicked on the chest he was already greeted with the pop-up detailing the probabilities of the 'chest':

Essence Chest: Rare+ Edition
Open to get 10 Random Essences with varying qualities.
Chance to get:
3% Meager
75% Flawed
10% Normal
7,5% Pristine
4,5% Perfect

Proceed? (Y/N)

Ten essences? Holy shit! Given that he just used quite some resources to get five, and most of them of lower quality, this was pretty damn good. But he wasn't unhappy about using the skill to destroy the furs because he would need to level up that skill at some point anyway. Hitting Yes, filled his inventory even more with essences, most of them unique to one another.

1x Flawed Essence of ****
1x Flawed Essence of Element (Air)
1x Flawed Essence of Element (Light)
1x Flawed Essence of Lust
1x Flawed Essence of Courage
2x Flawed Essence of Life
1x Essence of Flight
1x Flawed Essence of Element (Shadow)
1x Pristine Essence of Magic

Well, he was sure he could make some interesting things out of that, even if he wasn't sure what yet... Seeing how cluttered his inventory was right now, the system seemingly took matters into its own hands and started to rearrange the stuff in his inventory in ways that made it easier for him to work with. All the essences and crafting materials got put into the backpack that was still in his inventory, and the rest in his personal inventory. Interestingly enough, there was an item John hadn't seen up until now:

Remnants of Mechanical Spider (Gary)
Remains of the mechanical spider called Gary. Use Craft to repair (Bond has to be applied again)

Oh hey, he could repair Gary! That was cool, he felt bad at how the little guy went out, trying to buy him time to craft his shield... He should probably repair him so he could help him again, and this time he wouldn't throw him to the grinder like that (or maybe he would, seeing as how he could probably repair him again).

Now that he was done with all the Essence extraction, John thought about making stuff with all these essences, but decided against it because his mana was rather low right now, and it was always a good idea to save up some mana in case of some random Barrier (and this time, he would actually be able to defend himself should he be pulled into some kind of Barrier like he was yesterday). Thinking about yesterday's Barrier made John chuckle slightly, thinking about how differently he would approach that one right now thanks to everything that had happened in the last 24 hours.

Speaking of hours, John checked his phone to see how much time was left for the period and if Brun or Astrid messaged him. There were still 20 minutes left and neither of them had written him at this moment. Seeing as how neither Astrid nor Brunhilde wanted to talk right now, John used the rest of the hour experimenting with his interface some more.

Since he got it, he either didn't have the time to properly look at it or it just wasn't filled out enough for him to properly do anything with it yet... Clicking on any of the skills revealed a tooltip telling John once again what the skill could do. Hidden in the tooltip was also a button for him to hide the ability from the main sheet while it would always be apparent in his skill sheet (he had yet to find out where that one was...).

Clicking on his Health and Mana Bar gave him a pop-up detailing how long it would take for him to reach 100% again, both with and without Meditation. Speaking of Meditation, he should probably invest some time as well to get his bars back up, but that he could do during lunch, as long as he didn't forget it.

As he clicked on his name out of curiosity, another sheet seemingly popped up, something that would've been nice to see an hour ago:

A Party Screen.

Current Party: 1/4
Members:
1.John Newman
2.-
3.-
Maximum Party Size equals level of Bond plus one (yourself)

Well, that's nice to know. Given how other party systems work, he would've gotten some EXP from the enemies that Kim killed, maybe even some loot while leaving the dungeon, but it's too late for that now. At least he could remember that for after school when he might go into another Barrier with Astrid and Brunhilde (he really hoped that that was still on).

Aside from these small things that John found inside his interface, he didn't find anything major, though, especially nothing like a settings menu or anything like that... But maybe he would need some deeper digging for that... For now, that would have to do, as the period was over anyway, and John felt no remorse that he didn't get a single word from that class.

While walking through the halls John got a text from Astrid again:
A: Do you have something to eat with you? Could I spend lunch with you somewhere where there aren't that many people?

Whoa, okay, that sounded kinda wrong, but the good kind of wrong. And thanks to his blooming imagination and pretty damn high Libido stat, there were a lot of things that were already going through John's mind. He wasn't even that mad about not being able to use Meditation during lunch if it meant getting some action with Astrid.

J: I know a place on the school grounds where we would totally be alone and no one would find us. Also it has a pretty damn good view. Interested?

John was, of course, talking about the monastery he 'created' a bit over two hours ago. That opportunity was simply too good to pass up!

A: That sounds lovely! Where should I meet you?

J: Meet me at the gym hall, it's not that far from there.

Thankfully, Ms. Stanfields classroom wasn't too far away, so he was there in a matter of a couple seconds. Let's see how lucky he could get today.