Rise of the Living Forge

Chapter 213: Tired

The last few days of Arwin’s life had melted together into a blur. He could still hear the echo of hammered metal in his ears and feel the tingle of the Mesh at his fingertips. Every single part of him was sore and exhausted.

He’d barely gotten more than a few hours of sleep through the whole time. Every second of both the day and night had been spent either crafting, theorizing, testing, or re-crafting — and it wasn’t just him.

Every single member of the Menagerie had been hard at work. Rodrick had led the group on multiple different dungeon runs, returning with a variety of different monster parts and gemstones for Arwin to work with. Madiv and Esmerelda had procured half a dozen samples of different metals to work with.

Lillia had kept him fed with magical food, both suppressing his need to spend time making bracelets while also filling him with energy to keep pushing forward. Arwin only saw them when they came into the smithy to deliver the materials they’d gathered.

They’d only had a week to make Melissa armor. There hadn’t been any room for mistakes, and Lillia’s call that it would be impossible for Arwin to do both dungeon diving and crafting in the time they had proved to be completely correct.

He’d spent a day alone just figuring out the proper way to make boots, and then every passing minute afterward determining exactly how he could manage a suit of armor that was both powerful enough to protect Melissa and not so strong as to completely screw him over if people learned of its abilities.

Arwin had crafted. He’d tested. He’d overcorrected and undercorrected — trying to find the proper balance for the massive undertaking. He’d made a full two-piece set for Lillia, but he’d never made a complete five-piece set like this one before.

There were just so many different variables to consider. The more he worked, the more he’d realized just how immense the task before him really was. If he’d been alone, he would have failed. It simply would have been impossible.

But Arwin hadn’t been alone. Lillia and Rodrick bounced ideas off him. Lillia had helped him craft, providing extra magical energy to work with for the hardest combinations. They’d made the armor piece by piece, pushing the limits of how many enchantments he could fit into every component before putting them together.

Even the minor assassin’s guild he’d hired had proven to be supremely useful. Even though they hadn’t been anywhere near as competent as the Falling Blade, they’d used many of the same strategies.

And, after six days of work, Arwin was finally finished.

He’d settled on a metal called Rosium that Madiv had delivered him. It was light and flexible, though it wasn’t the most resilient thing he’d ever worked with. Folding it together with Brightsteel gave the material a way to absorb stronger blows.

That had been the easy part. The most difficult aspect of the entire project was working out the traits the armor would have and how it would be properly limited. The learnings he’d gotten from his gauntlets proved to be the tool he needed.

It was impossible to imbue a bunch of different traits at once. It just took too much energy and attention. The way to get more magical effects on a single piece was to split them into sections. Just like how the pair of gauntlets had been a single item, Arwin made the kneecaps of the greaves with one trait and the rest of the leg with another.

That, of course, came with its own difficulties. Not every trait was thrilled to join up with others. Some just fizzled out and failed. Others had… slightly more spectacular issues. There were several new blackened spots throughout the smithy and a good portion of his hair and eyebrows got singed off twice.

Figuring out the exact combination of traits that functioned together wasn’t easy. And, even if they did go together, adding too many could make the item drain so much power that it was completely unusable.

But difficult didn’t mean impossible, and Arwin wasn’t alone. Hour by hour, day by day, he learned more. He failed more than he succeeded, and that taught him more than anything else possibly could have.

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Arwin used centipede chitin to reinforce the armor. He used gemstones to gather energy passively from anyone that wore the armor, and feathers to fuel the powerful bursts of air that would deflect ranged attacks.

He was pretty sure the feathers had actually come from Rodrick’s team rather than Esmerelda, who was caught up getting the metals together with Rodrick. She’d tried to offer him a phoenix feather a few times, but it wasn’t any more useful now than it had been the first time he’d needed one.

Simplicity was key when he was trying to make an armor that wouldn’t stand out too much. The more complex the items that went into it were, the more unique the enchantments were liable to be.

By the end of the fifth day, he’d made something he was truly happy with. The armor was resilient, with a focus on preventing stabbing attacks. It could hold up to slashes as well, but not quite as well. As long as its wearer wasn’t completely out of magical energy, it could deflect ranged strikes.

Rodrick’s dungeon team also brought him the vocal cords of what had apparently been a very loud, six-foot-tall rooster. Arwin had used those to work with the shock-absorptive properties of Brightsteel to reverse powerful physical blows. That enchantment drew a lot of magical energy, so it wasn’t always active, but it was a good way to finish off opponents.

The final two enchantments were possibly the most important of the entire set.

For the first, Arwin used the essence of a shade — courtesy of Esmerelda, who had refused pay for it and muttered something about a pot — to conceal the armor’s stats from everyone including its wearer.

The second wasn’t to make the armor stronger. It was to make it weaker. The armor’s second trait was a permanent binding to himself — a mental connection that let Arwin shatter the entire set from the inside out, rendering it worthless with a thought. The item it was based on was one of Arwin’s own fingernails. He felt a bit gross hammering it into the metal, but he refused to let a suit of armor this effective out into the world without a way to ensure it was never turned against him.

That wasn’t to say it was the strongest armor he’d made. If Arwin was being honest, it had some serious flaws. It didn’t provide much protection against magic and someone suitably strong could crumple it like paper.

Lillia’s armor was probably more effective despite being a two-piece set, but this set was specialized specifically to deal with assassins. It was a little more powerful than he’d have ideally liked to make, but with the concealed stats, it would be enough to stop anyone from realizing just how effective it really was.

And that was that. On the sixth day, Arwin looked down on the completely finished armor together with Lillia, a look of mild amusement on his face. He’d finished the final tweaks and polishes to the set over the night.

It was a little strange to look down at something he’d made and be unable to see any information about it. Fortunately, he’d tested the armor so thoroughly that he knew what it could do. The presence of the faint, almost unnoticeable, connection to it in the back of his mind was the only other proof that it was anything other than a beautiful piece of art.

A tired smile crossed over Arwin’s features. While he couldn’t see the actual stats of the armor, he could see everything he’d gotten out of making it. In addition to a rather significant amount of magical energy for all the tests he’d made, he’d also gotten several Achievements.

[Full Hand] – Awarded for forging a full 5-piece set. Effects: One skill in your next Skill Selection has been upgraded. This achievement will be consumed upon choosing your next skill.

[Couple of Crafters - II] – Awarded for forging a set by linking your desires together with your partner. Get a room. Effects: The dissonance between you and your partner’s intent has been reduced for this set. Repeated instances of this Achievement are possible and rewards scale with its tier.

[Sleepless Set - I] – Awarded for re-forging an entire set with less than 1 hour of sleep in the past day. Effects: One skill in your next Skill Selection has been upgraded. This achievement will be consumed upon choosing your next skill. Repeated instances of this Achievement are possible and rewards scale with its tier. Keep at it and see what happens if you get another level of this one.

Arwin didn’t miss the mild warning in the Mesh’s last sentence. And, judging by the tired amusement in Lillia’s eyes, she hadn’t either. They’d spent nearly every scrap of energy they had. Even with her magical food fighting to keep them aware, it was a losing battle.

“We did it,” Arwin said, lowering himself to the blackened floor of the smithy with an exhausted groan. The smell of soot and metal hung in the air, but he was too tired to care. Lillia flopped down on top of him, driving the air from his lungs.

“Sorry,” Lillia said, a hint of amusement in her drowsy tone. She looped her arms around his neck and rested her head against his chest. “I’m not sleeping on the floor. Too tired to go to bed. Stay here.”

“I was…” Arwin yawned, then let his head rest against the stone, “…planning on it. We can give Melissa the armor when we wake up.”

Behind them, the door creaked open. Arwin caught a glimpse of Rodrick stepping into the room before the exhaustion finally took him and he let himself drift off into much-needed sleep.

Somehow, they’d managed to make Melissa her armor.

Now all that remained was to see if it would be enough.