A weapon's testing ground.

The game dev and the cyborg craftsmen stood before the floating legion of shining tools, whose inorganic bodies had been infused with the wisdom of a thousand martial arts.

“33 months…” Hannes repeated his doubts, surveying each weapon, inspecting the colour and texture, none of which were identifiable as belonging to Saana’s stock metals or wood. “Buddy, how did you unlock scaling Legendaries?”

The lack of standardisation suggested scaling items. However, even if every waking hour since the acquisition of The Cap had been devoted to crafting—as had obviously not been the case—the production of such artefacts should still have been impossible. Scaling items required thousands of years of expertise, and they were created out of end-game materials capable of mutating through the properties of inferior precursors. Their manufacture was almost the exclusive domain of Cosmic Gods.

“My skills are far beneath the ancestors.” Henry tilted his ego in a modest bow, his calloused fingers having reached only inches up the slopes of crafting. “Despite appearances, these are nothing but Mithril.” Which, in Saana, was a starter, Tier 0-4 material. “Sourced from The Slums.” And, therefore, unlike ordinary items forged in The Overdream, usable outside – most everything to be shown, Henry could wield in the game proper...for duelling. “Composites, alloys, and Alchemical infusions just obscure their humble provenance - and the cyborg min-maxing.”

Because no other craftsmen, human or god, would’ve refined a starter material to this degree, their naked employment carried a risk of exposure. Thus, Henry’d altered them to appear like scaling Legendaries, collected from around the planet and the cosmos. He, The Cripple, owning such a hoard would arouse much jealousy but not much suspicion.

But Hannes found this awfully suspicious. “What are you spoofing items for? For the tournament that’s been in news? My buddy, you must have enough already to demolish any conceivable opponent.”

With his number of Syncretist pieces alone, he could summon 16 flying weapons. No player could beat that.

“The tournament?” Henry took a moment to recall the event and reassemble his concerns around it. “No, the teen planned to dominate the open-gear formats with his standard Tier-0 knickknacks. There’s a supposed flex in the feat, although I can’t relate to it myself any more – what’s a greater brag than showcasing your wicked plunder? No, these cheats are our luxury conveyances to the beyond, to the snow-dusted summit of duelling. They are our private gondolas and our gazillion-dollar helicopters.” Finding his borrowed teenage parlance inadequate for explanation, he pulled out a schematic and began sketching the plan before tearing it apart in frustration. “Hannes,” he emphasised, “the visuals are a minor feature. It's a trivial augmentation subordinate to the ascension of Mithril into its material Beyond. Accept that, you swine! Accept the possibility of a spirit above your meagre intellect, a Will that stirs in the sacred ore! While you might not sense it, when my ear makes contact with its brittle grains, I hear its sorrowful cries, its yearning to express an untapped divinity! Where you will not, I will be the instruments that manifest its supremacy! I will be its forge and its coal! I will be its anvil and its hammer!”

Sacred Weaponsmaking - this art’d been cursed with its own cult fanaticism.

Hannes had the system translate the rant. It informed him that Henry in his crafting madness had striven to extract the most out of the limited Tier-0 materials available to him.

This was also suspicious.

"It seems awfully wasteful," said Hannes, "pouring this energy into items that’ll soon be redundant. How much longer will you stay at this character level? Four days? Five?”

Once finished with the tournament, Henry could advance to the next Tier in less than an hour. If he set his mind upon the task, within weeks, he could grind to level parity with the game’s highest players, if not surpass them. In a month, who knows where he’d be? Anything was possible with The Cap. He might’ve left Saana completely, breaking into Tier 12 and returning to the Cosmos.

“Your five days,” rebuffed Henry, collecting himself in the recognition of this easier, atheistic refutation, “stretches into a century for me. Yet another century, encumbered by the weight of junk.”

“Aaah!" Hannes comprehended at once.

On Overdream life-spans, one might as well maximise the value of the materials you're stuck with.

Henry shook his head, the muscles of his neck labouring beneath the weight of unfathomed hindrances.

This dev had not grasped a fraction of the ordeal. The previous centuries of duelling research while vexed by level and gear restrictions…a man might as well attempt to build a pyramid by lifting each block into place using chopsticks.

But these complaints were best not aired. Through this last period of crafting, through these weapons quenched by the eternities of crippled sweat, these limits were finally being dismantled and surpassed, and forgotten.

What's more, a craftsman should be cautious against showing his work, knowing it to be the greater treasure. If he has generous bone, it's only enough to display the smaller monumentality of the final prototype. Let those who watch admire their own reflection in his iron’s mirror polish; let them dismiss the tiny impression of its sharpened edge.

Henry gestured to his tools. “There's not much to say for most of these Legendaries. They were designed to overcome the former inconveniences of duelling as a lowly human. They pair enormous stat-boost enchants with extra armour-ignoring Basic Attacks equivalent to the Cutthroat . The latter developed out of an earlier Arcaneworker study.”

That study was The Reliquarian’s Duty. The art’s forbidden research permeated all these Legendaries, whose enchantments integrated a multitude of third- and second-order schools of magic. Into the sinews of each item, Henry’d mixed, in different proportions, his fascinations with Space, Speed, and Light building into Time, along with supplements from The Reliquarians’ own Blood, Demonism, Necromancy, and Soul.

The armour-ignoring effects achieved from these were a complete revolution for him. Although he’d jacked his stats up during that Reliquarian episode, his Tier-0 weapons had been unable to penetrate high-level equipment, their force dissipating against metals or cloth. This’d confined him to targeting exposed regions like the eyeballs. Now, having solved that problem and having gone beyond its solution, he could aim anywhere he pleased, directly at the steel-protected vitals.

His armament's one remaining weakness was a durability too poor for parrying stronger weapons. However, that wasn't a problem because, in reverse, they could not be parried back - plus, he'd made other defences.

Henry smirked. “But there are some crafty tricks of note in here.”

Like Q from James Bond, he showcased the spying dev a sample of his workshop’s prize gizmos.

To start off, he brought out ‘The Eight Ribs of Kurald’ - all his artefacts had been given names spoofing various in-game cultures. Made for Nine Fists—the hyper-complex, multi-attack point art he’d begun with—this Legendary was an 8-piece set of metal attachments for the fists, elbows, knees, and feet. With each segment connected by a chain, they formed what was technically a single weapon. Through a fusion of Spatial, Time, and Speed enchantments, the item stored a Basic Attack’s destructive force. This energy could then be discharged piecemeal through the linked attachments whenever they accelerated, thereby enabling a more naturalistic attack style. To disguise that it’d been purpose-built for Nine Fists, the set had been inlaid with runes from an ancient language and it lacked any attachment for the head - i.e. the ninth fist.

Equipping The Ribs, Henry brutalised the summoned clone of a boxer.

As his adversary, weaving through his guard, attempted a punch, its hand exploded against an intercepting elbow strike, the bones half-up its wrist shredded into a meaty-white paste, while a jab returned from Henry mangled the boxer’s jaw.

These starting moves connected with three others. A kick shattered one of the clone’s femurs. A thrusting knee caved in its falling chest. A punch shaved off the top of its skull and brain.

Each of those strikes came so fast that they looked simultaneous. Five red jets of gore sprayed at once from the boxer, whose body had disintegrated before the first droplets wet the dirt.

"It's an impressive item," said Hannes, unimpressed.

The dev couldn’t recognise what’d been gained. The requisite knowledge was missing about both the magical enchantment and combat practicalities, the balance of these features calibrated not by himself but by his automated game system.

Henry snarled at the refusal to receive his genius, then rambled through an explanation contrasting this against -based Nine Fist methods. “The key improvement is that the combo can be started from anywhere at any time. Any strike that connects can be transitioned into the rest. In your shit game, that’s not possible. Usually, for a combo, the precise attack sequence and timings need to be predicted and programmed up to six seconds in advance. Managing these calculations for multiple striking points is quite difficult in an ongoing fight - so far, I am the sole player to pull it off. Yet with these chains, I have liberated myself from the very burden that engendered my exemption, this curse of future foresight. My body obliges no longer to prophecies, not yours, nor mine. Its limbs move unbound in their own fateless present! Impulsive! Responsive! Adaptive! Clothed in these forsaken freedoms, it sprints and reaches for the higher destiny of its own timeless creation.”

Sixteen extra boxers appear, which Henry beat up twice, with and without the set.

Hannes still couldn’t track any difference aside from the clones dying faster. Unfortunately, the fellow demonstrating had practised the flawed version so thoroughly that it’d ceased to look cumbersome and aggravating.

“Buck’s Big-Way Heater!” Henry, seeing the futility in subtlety, pulled out another item, a two-handed mace with a flaming head the size of a watermelon.

Using this big fella, he whacked a clone. With a smoking rump, the victim went flying—light and aerodynamic as a golf ball—into the sky. It crash-landed hundreds of metres away.

“Destructive force to physical force and a flawed residual of heat." He lined up several more puppets and teed them off. “Try it yourself. Since the other means have failed you, learn like a toddler, through kinesthetics.”

The testing ground briefly switched to a multi-dimensional golf course. There, he and Hannes took turns whacking clones into holes marked for points. The game dev soon conceded, his lack of cyborg training making it unfair and Henry’s social IQ too abysmal to give a handicap.

Teleporting back to the grassy field, Henry next demonstrated another example of the conversion magic. Arming himself with a pair of over-glove gauntlets, ‘The Fondlers of Elastic Constriction as Elaborated Most Enthusiastically by Dhandh of Cir’, he grabbed a clone and crushed it—armour and all—into a tennis-sized ball.

“They’re designed for grappling." Henry removed the gauntlets and offered his Finnish friend a fondle, summoning another victim clone. “However, against fragile enemies, the physical force circles back to destructive force.”

“No thanks.”

"Pathetic."

Another fun time-space-speed-bending Legendary was a bow—'Bow'—inspired by the years of imitating Bow-Man, God of Bowmans, and his martial art, Bow-Shooting. Aesthetically, the item resembled a bow, with limbs, with a string. However, when held, it caused the user’s hand to fluctuate in age, from a baby’s tiny smooth fist to a geriatric’s liver-spotted claw.

Its magic extended an arrow’s effective range while simultaneously giving its flight speed funky adjustments. Up close, the bow drastically accelerated the missile’s velocity, at the cost of decelerating it at extreme distances. Where Saana’s normal shots lost their attack enhancements beyond 60 metres, this Legendary bow’s shot up to 8 times that distance, or half a kilometre. Its arrows would hit a target at 100% or ‘regular’ speed at half that range, or 4x. The ordinary 60-metre target would be hit 358% quicker, a target within 5-metres at 530% speed, and the very furthest at 18% speed. Functionally, the Bow was a uniform upgrade over non-Legendaries, which couldn’t even reach the distance where its speed plummeted.

Crucially, at all of these distances, near or far, quick or slow, the arrow’s damage was unchanged. This was because its actual velocity, when recovered from the magico-physics, only appeared to fluctuate. How? For those who refused the click, it would remain magic.

The max-range, 18% speed shots were practically impossible to land against non-stationary foes. Nevertheless, Henry, exhibiting the item, sniped a circling crow at the distance after several misses.

A second, Overdream-exclusive version of the Bow, in addition to shooting faster, had been modified to grant several Bowmen abilities. This had unlocked proper archery for Henry - he could finally ditch the basic shots with which he’d been stuck approximating the real techniques. Some of these Bowman skills had a longer default max range of 100 metres, and the previous distance modifiers applied anew to these, the shots reaching up to 800 metres. Henry, showing that off, sniped a hawk with a lucky first shot.

"Was that luck?" asked Hannes, watching the dead bird fall towards them.

"Not at all!" Henry laughed metallically as it landed in his outstretched palm. “That was a crafting joke. Obviously, I’ve practised more with the superior daughter Bow, not filthying my hands cradling the half-aborted foetus of her older sister.”

For another ranged weapon, he’d carved a fan favourite from his Cripple days. It was a blowgun of a hollow, composite wood etched with tribal hieroglyphs, ‘The Dark Soft-Soft Green Whistle of Vo’.

The Whistle autoloaded poisoned darts from one’s inventory, and its attacks—most critically—circumvented Saana’s ten-minute cooldown on Combat Potions. The latter ability made the blowgun one of the best cheats in his kit for the present. While his character’s Martial level lingered at Tier-0, his Alchemy had already hit Tier-7, and the blowgun enabled him to finally weaponise the higher-level poisons that advancement had unlocked. Naturally—Henry not neglecting his ‘herb’ skills—his Tier-7 poisons had also been min-maxed into Legendaries. And, of course, the darts were Legendary. Thus, in a Legendary three-way, an ultra-expensive ménage à trois, he could use the one Legendary to chain-spit Legendaries dipped in Legendaries. The full combo was game breaking.

“The Legendary darts,” Henry fired one into a clone’s neck, “can NOT be used in public. Legendary poisons are rare enough, yet in my whole journey across the cosmos, I have not encountered a single person who possessed the audacity and genius of vision to grant a dart the smith’s immortal love. This crime of mine may be of a universe-spanning originality.”

“The poison’s kind of weak.” Hannes pointed at the dosed-up clone, which simply alternated between stumbling over and getting back upright.

“You sure about that?” Henry spat another Legendary dart into this geek’s unobservant eyeball.

The game dev, after a brief pause, collapsed, one of his legs liquifying into jelly. This debilitation passed a second later. Then, he gave an inquisitive glance at Henry, whose flat expression stretched hallucinatorily wide, wider than the sky, wide enough to wrap around him.

“Blarghabledagh,” Hannes frothed in astonishment.

This was The Poison of Mercurial Debilitation, i.e. Henry’s supreme power limiter.

He enlightened the dev about its original purpose in amplifying the challenge of sparring Suchi’s kids, along with its subsequent evolutions since that silly genesis. After two centuries, his strongest dose could cripple a mammoth and, maybe, a mammoth god.

Unfortunately, efforts to combine the magics of these two ranged Legendaries—the blowgun and the bow—had failed. It was not yet feasible to sniper-poison from half a kilometre away, although Henry believed a method could be found by combining the one forbidden field of Legendary darts with its less illegitimate and occasionally-witnessed sibling Legendary arrows.

“ me the full development of the toxins.” Hannes reset his character to cure it. “Only that. I’ve blocked the rest.”

Henry, sighing, clicked.

Hannes shuddered, half in creeped-out disgust, half in awe. “Wow. That’s freakishly cool. You know, before the revolution, you’d have been the world’s top neurosurgeon. No one else has played with a hundredth of your live subjects. Especially the subcortical tinkering - nice.”

“Some places do still rely on human doctors.”

“Right.” Hannes cringed, often forgetting the slum-like living standards of non-Euros. “What’s the ultimate tool you’ve hidden there?” He gestured to an unopened and unmentioned crate, placed suspiciously beneath the other Legendaries hovering in open display.

“That's a box of daggers.” Henry summoned their hundreds to glitter openly with one thought and re-stowed them with another. “I was a Cutthroat once - natural to keep an assortment of the old trade ace up the sleeve. If there is such a thing as an ultimate tool—aside from the blowgun three-way—I guess it would be these.”

Two swords from the floating armament transferred to his hands. The first was a shortsword, sized for up-close thrusts into people. This complemented a meatier ‘anti-monster’ sabre, one with an exaggerated, two-and-a-half metre form. The blades of both looked as if they’d been submerged in black ink; however, under a microscope, this coating would be revealed to be an atom-thin aura that swam unstably about like an organic substance, chasing any approaching photons, consuming them, and, finding their taste inadequate, spitting them back out.

“The Left and Right Sabres of Yunsen,” Henry announced, the fake name conveying little of these children’s madness.