Author’s corner: HELLO HELLO! Small chapter today, but some more tinkering!

ANYWAY, today just happened to be one of those days that even thinking is difficult, so I had a bit of a hard time with this chapter, thus its shortness. Sorry about that guys… (T.T) I may also not update anything tomorrow since it’s mother’s day here (I’m not sure if this date is shared around the world) So I will probably spend the day with my mother.

ALSO, Some time ago, I received a request for a permission to write a fan-fic about my story (*SQUEES HAPPILY LIKE A GIRL*), and now that person has completed the story. After some talk, we decided that I would post it here for you guys, probably as a side-story, but I will first ask a mod if it is alright to do that, since I wasn’t the one that wrote the story. It will probably be alright, but better safe than sorry.

ALSO(2), Altough I did have a bit of a hard time writing this chapter, I guess that playing the Splatoon demo and monster hunter MIGHT have impacted a bit, but might just be my imagination…

Have a good read!

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I got out of the elevator and saw the old red-tainted scenery, even the air seemed to be screaming in pain of the intense heat emanated from all the raging forges. It actually seemed to be a bit more heated than usual, but I can’t say for sure, since the ring I had kind of cancelled it out.

As I walked towards Torg’s place, I heard many hammer beating down on anvils and some dwarves having a good laugh here and there. Some random passersby even greeted me for no apparent reason! And funnily enough, there was a guy who actually even offered me a mug of ale!

When I reached the big guy’s house, he was also humming happily as he browsed through some ingots in his workshops that I had never seen before. When he saw me, he turned to me in a happy mood.

“Oh, little Gon! What a happy day is it!”

“What’s up with all the excitement down here? Did I miss something?” I asked him as I went to a nearby forge and started to heat it up.

“Why, yes! The council just announced us this year’s black fair not even half an hour ago!” He said as he picked a slightly bluish ingot and put it into his huge hands.

“Black fair? What’s that?” My question mad Torg burst into a hearty laughter.

“It’s an annual crafting fair held every year here in Eldor, lots of people come here to see and buy gear and apparels, so us, the blacksmith rejoice and pump out our forges non stop for the next days until the fair!” He laughed heartily once again. “We also use this time to compete and see who’s the best around! The last three times, I was left in third or fourth in the weapons competition, but this year I’ll get the first!”

A gear fair? I better be sure I’m not around when that happens, don’t want to stay around when I see top grade badass gear laying around ready to be bought. It’s bad for my pockets health.

As the forge showed itself to be ready, I started pumping out some iron ores I got from my last adventure and started by refilling my throwing knives inventory, making sure to have at least eight of each. The same for the arrows. Luckily, I managed to find a good amount of veins on the way back, so I had more than enough crystals this time.

Mid-way through my small effort, I earned an awesome window that popped up.

Your Crystal Tinkerer skill has achieved Intermediate rank. Skill: Crystal Tikerer [intermediate] [lvl 1]

[8%] Your experience with this craft now allows you to also works with mana crystals as well as some other Crystals of mineral origin.

You have received the modifier: Pressure activation. Can be applied to any Crystal creation. Passive

Well…

How do I say this…

BOOO YEAH BABY! TAKE THAT!

Pressure modifier? Activate on impact? Just what I needed!

But what really caught my attention on this was the other bonus. Now I can also use mana crystals on my toys? How does that works? And what does it means by other crystals of mineral origins? Oh, the questions! Oh the ideas!

But let’s leave the crazy scientist mode for a bit later, now I have a more serious objective that I have to work over no matter what if I want to produce ideal armor for me. I focused my mind on finishing my special arrows/knifes and went back to the forge, once again filling it with iron so I could start my work.

“Oh, yeah, Gon.” Torg called my attention as I waited the iron to melt. “Do you know that whole crystal thing you just did? I’ve been tinkering with them too!” Oh, the blacksmith too?

“Got anything interesting as of yet?” I said with my eyes shining in excitement.

“Nothing useful…” He said in a slightly sad tone. Then why did you get my hopes up? Torg, you meanie! “I tried to see if I could make an ingot that isn’t so brittle, but no matter what I did it wouldn’t work…” He sighed out loudly.

I sighed out loudly while nodding.

“It would be so good if we could do that… I wonder what kind of things we could do with them...” I said in a half-hearted tone. “Maybe there is some kind of skill that does that?”

“Who knows?” He answered with a shrug.

I have the feeling that he wouldn’t stop there, so I guess I can count on him to find something about it. As we chatted a bit, the iron finally melted, so I put myself to work with it.

I started with making a few scales with the ingots. I had a plan that I had no idea if it would work, but I guessed that it wouldn’t hurt to try it. Somehow Torg noticed that I had something else in mind before I even started with working on the armor per-se.

Telling him the idea I had, he suddenly looked surprised to me, then started to nod as he started thinking about it. In the end he decided to help me and see where this was going, so he started making a bit of chainmail for me.

When we each finished our part, I took a small leather-glove I made with the Red-tail hide, and he guided me on how to link the chainmail’s edge to the leather. After a quick work of putting the chail-mail on the under-part of the gloves, I stitched the scales on the upper part. As soon as I had done it, a window popped up.

Cinder-proof Scale-mail Gauntlet (Hands)

(requires level 8) Def: 18 M. res: 6 Quality: Good Durability: 30/30 Description

A scale-mail gauntlet made with the help of a fire-aligned magical beast hide. Provides a small resistant against fire.

+6 STR +3 AGI +2 VIT

FIRE RES +5

(Made by Wargon)

Hmm. Not bad! Not bad at all! Just by this it’s already better than my actual equipment. But…

“Hey, Torg, how does elemental resistance works? As a status, I mean?” I have to admit that I was kind of expecting something of the like: -x% of damage against the element, but this doesn’t seems to be the case.

“Oh, it got fire resistance? That’s interesting!” He said with a slight surprise. “Usually you would only get it with sulfur-infused ingots from a volcano. Or with the help of an enchanter…” He was looking curious at the gauntlet for a moment. “Anyway. As you asked, elemental resistance works as if it were both toughness and mind when it comes to that specific element.” Hmm… I see…

But, this isn’t yet the test I wanted to make. What went further? I’m going to hold back here just to build up a bit of expectation, because I’m evil. But it’s nothing too much, so don’t expect too much, ok?

Anyway, I can at least tell you guys this, the first time it didn’t work, but when we tried to add a tiny little bit of fire crystal (half a crystal for the whole gauntlet) to the metal, it worked, and we got what we wanted.

For now, lets say that I achieved my objective, but since I still had to wait for the Blazing-tail hide to pass through the whole curing and tanning process, I could only sigh in defeat as I would have to wait before putting my plan into motion.

We also made a few other try-outs with the remaining leather I had, but we kind of ended up with the second try, since the others didn’t work. In the end, I wasted all of my ingots in the try-outs, but I did leave blacksmithing within level 9 and at 90%, so, all is good. I left Torg to his own workings since he still had that whole black fair thingamajig.

As I left the sector, I took a quick look at the mini-map, where it was showing Aura’s and Lieutenant’s actual location. Following it as I climbed a few floors to the place indicated by the two, I noticed that the sky had already darkened, so it should be the start of the night by now.

During the whole time as I had been working in the forging sector, I was keeping an eye out for the two. Although they did move around a lot, it didn’t seems to me that they were in a hurry nor worried. Although lieutenant’s life did drop slightly at one point, it wasn’t much, so I assumed that it was an accident or something.

Still, that antenna-cat never ceases to amaze me.

When I reached the two of them, I found them on the entry of a small alley, with Aura quietly sitting there while she watched Lieutenant. And this one, was actually walking back and forth in front of a line of ten or so street cats, who were sitting straight while looking slightly up. A big and scarred one who was slightly black eyed.

They kind of looked like a line of soldiers following an officer…

As lieutenant walked back and forth while meowing almost nonstop, sometimes he would give a slight break where the cats would answer with a unified meow, to which he would nod and keep meowing.

Aura noticed me approaching and quickly brightened up as she got closer to me and jumped on my chest. I grabbed her and petted her happily before turning to Lieutenant.

“So… What’s he doing?” I asked her, and she sighed slightly.

Lieutenant heard me and turned to greet me with a salute, which clearly surprised the alley cats. He turned to them and started to hiss and meow furiously, until I saw all the cats turn to me and try to make a salute. Lieutenant sighed and turned back to them, where he meowed a bit more and made a last salute, to which the cats answered before darting into different directions.

Lieutenant nodded in satisfaction at their fast scramble and turned to me.

“Nyaa-na Nyii-A, Naa-nyna! Nyynaany, nyaaaa nyyynana-yyyyna!”

“Wow! A information network? Yeah, that’s actually helpful! Good job!”

I nodded in agreement and Lieutenant smirked proud.

Damn, isn’t he full of tricks? I turned back and took the two with me for a walk around the city. While we walked, I checked what Aura bought, and could see a cooking pot, a frying pan, a kit to store spices which only occupied one slot, oil and other cooking apparel. Somehow, there was also an apron there, and I have the feeling that Cyg might have a hand on that.

In lieutenants inventory were the knifes and flash-bombs, so there wasn’t much change here. Except, that I have the feeling that he might have used a flash-bomb, but I can’t be so sure since I don’t remember what was the amount I gave him.

After a few minutes of walking around, I decided to go out and farm for some minerals as I waited for the next day to come. I had nothing to do for now and was out of ore, so it seemed a good decision for me.

Since it would be mostly only walking around and finding a few veins, I asked them if they wanted to come or wait for me in the city. Lieutenant decided to stay back and further his network. Aura decided to stay with me as I searched around.

At first she was always by my side, but she would suddenly dart out when she smelled something, and by the time she came back, she would be carrying a small amount of herbs before picking the spice kit from her inventory, storing it there and then putting it back.

After the third or so time, I decided to ask her to also start picking up some alchemy herbs and gave her the book with the formulas that Sol gave me some time ago.

Meanwhile, I was happily mining away at the various veins I found around the mountain. And for those of you wondering, yes, the vein do respawn, but it seems to take around one or two days for the basic, and up to one week to rare ones.

When I was satisfied with the amount I got, I sat down on the ground and decided to start working on a few flash-bombs. After I made three more of them, I started working on the new toy, and that is, how to add the mana crystals to the equation.

Firstly, lets start with the obvious, so the first thing I tried was to activate the mana crystal by itself. Nothing happened.

Well, at least I expected that. Then, for the next part, I tried combining the mana crystal with the elemental crystals, but I was met with a slight problem. I couldn’t break it. Different from the elemental Crystals, that are brittle and break easily, the mana crystal was surprisingly durable, and wouldn’t even bend when I tried to force it.

After a few failed attempts on roughing my way to breaking it, I decided to go and pummel it with a piece of rock. After some more seconds of simple-minded violence against the crystal (disclaimer: no crystals were harmed in the making of this chapter) I finally managed to break it into small fragments.

I picked half of the fragments and mixed it with half of a fire crystal in a leather-ball bundle before trying to activate it. But it didn’t work again.

I was kind of sure that this time I would get myself some results, so it left me kind of sad… As I looked up while thinking, I turned towards Aura and saw that her fur had changed to a silver coloration while she was sitting and looking at the crystals in a pensive pose.

“What? Are you going to give me some tips or something?” I asked half-mockingly.

“Hmm?” She blinked surprised and looked at me before shaking her head. “No, I don’t have access to this information, so I’m as in the dark as you are…” She said in a slightly bothered tone. Then she approached the fragments from both crystal and pushed them towards me. “Try activating both of them together!”

I blinked in surprise, then shrugged. I opened the bundle and put everything together in it before closing it and trying to activate.

And yes, there was a reaction! It exploded in a fireball!

-8 (472/480)

Ouch.

But I didn’t really see much difference from when I used the elemental crystal alone, so I was left a bit disheartened at the situation. That was until I noticed that there still was some weight in my hand, something that never happened before.

When I looked back at it, there were the remains of a charred leather ball, as well as some crystal fragments. When I looked down to the ground, I also saw the remaining of the fire and mana crystal on the ground.

I blinked in surprise. Shouldn’t the crystals disappear after using them? I noticed Cyg looking at me slightly confused, and since she didn’t have much contact with the crystals, she didn’t seem to understand my surprise. I quickly gathered the crystals and separated them, leaving the fire crystals to one side and the mana crystals to the other.

The fire crystals still seemed to be just as usual, but when I looked closer at the mana crystals, they seemed to have become a bit more duller in its coloration. When I analyzed it, it now had a “(depleted)” besides its name.

Just to be safe, I tried repeating the experiment, but as expected, this time the fire crystals simply poofed out of existence after the fireball. So… The mana crystal works as a battery for the elemental crystals to spend the energy, without needing to destroy itself…

This is really interesting.

I repeated the experiment with two full crystals, and the result repeated itself. This is really convenient, now I can somehow keep my crystals without needing to remake everything after, as long as I have mana crystals!

But when I looked at the depleted crystals, even more doubt popped in my mind, after all, it still had the crafting material tag…

I immediately remembered the mana potion recipe, but sadly I didn’t have the material needed to dissolve the crystal, so I will have to pay a visit to the loli-baba later. For now, lets make more experiments! Firstly, lets try to add the depleted crystal to the some recipes.

After a few brainstorm tentative, neither me nor Cyg had any working idea, so we decided to leave the depleted ones for later, as we once again focused on the classical one. But we didn’t really get much advancement there either.

With a sigh, we decided to change to something a little bit different, and we decided to test the new activate on pressure modifier I earned.

The modifier, is something that I add after the crafting is completed and before activating the crystals. It actually change the activation method, from instant to something else. Previously, my arrows and knifes were based on the delayed activation, where I would set it to two or so seconds after activating for the effect to take place.

But now, this pressurized activation works when the pressure exceed a certain threshold. Although much more convenient, it’s also bit trickier, since if I set it too low, even the wind-pressure will activate it, but if I set it too high, even after hitting the target it won’t have an effect. And pressure is a much more subjective measurement when you don’t have any kind of measuring instruments.

As I worked and tested it, I noticed that my satiety bar had dropped, so I quickly helped Cyg prepare a campfire and lit it up, leaving her for cooking. Around this time, Lieutenant arrived, probably hungry too.

I left the choice of food to her and passed the remaining meat I still had to her as I focused on the crystals again.

With the corner of my eye, I ended up seeing Lieutenant using a nearby tree as a target while he trained throwing daggers. I decided not to think too much on how he was holding them, since it would probably be bad for my mind.

Now, back to the modifiers, I also discovered that I can mix the two modifiers, making a sequence out of them. For example, I could set the upon pressure followed by the delayed activation, which would make the crystal activate after some time of being pressed.

When I thought about this, it would mean that I could somehow make some kind of elemental trap that would activated various crystals at delayed intervals, making a long lasting trap effect trap, kind of like the shock trap…

SHOCK TRAP?

OH MY GOD!

I CAN MAKE A SHOCK TRAP!

What is a shock trap? WHAT IS A SHOCK TRAP? HOW DARE YOU NOT KNOW WHAT A SHOCK TRAP IS!

Well, it’s actually an item there is in monster hunter, that locks the monster in place while paralyzing him. You can use it to deal some good, easy hits, or to capture it if the monster have low health. It’s a very useful and practical item.

And I’m definitively am doing it! Ok, where to start… I need electricity, but how do I make it? From what I learned, electric attacks seems to be based mainly around wind damage, kind of like how ice is based on water.

But, from what Cyg talked, ice is part water part order, then what is lighting?

Let’s start with wind, since it’s already confirmed as part of the equation. Lightning would be… Energy? Cursing through the air, so… Fire? No, wind and fire equals explosion, tried and tested. Then, chaos? As in, electrons going wild and whatnots? I tried that, but what I got was some kind of weird gust that kept going back and forth with no real reason.

I kept trying a few other combinations, but nothing seemed to work at all, and I was kind of running out of wind crystals…

When I had one last wind crystal left, Cyg called us for the grub, and by the way, yes, she was wearing the apron.

She had made a vegetable and meat soup. Usually, I’m no fan of soup, but I guess I might have to review my standards after tonight.

As I sat down and ate, Cyg turned to me and asked what I was doing now.

“I’m trying to find the combination for electricity, but it’s not going very well.” I said with a sigh.

“Oh, it’s wind, fire and light. On a half, three eights and one eighth proportion.” I blinked in surprise and looked at her surprised. “Wind is the base element, so it needs to be the main portion, lightning is related to energy, so we need a high concentration of fire that represents that, and since it comes from the heavens, as they say, it does have a slight holy effect, and thus the light.”

“Couldn’t you have told me that sooner?” I complained.

“But you never asked me!”

I sighed in defeat and ate my food silently while glaring at her.

And when I tried it out later, it did work.

Afterwards, I went around to replenish my crystals stocks that went almost depleted. After a few hours, we went back to the city when it was starting do dawn. Still deciding on where I would go first, Sol’s or the gauntlet, a sudden realization hit me.

How the hell did I understand Lieutenant back at the alley?