Chapter 20: Chapter 19: Reforged

Caleb woke up, chilled to his bones but no longer on death’s door as he’d been before. A sharp pain poked him through his thick clothing, and he rolled over to see he was lying against one of Bog’s head ridges. The dragon had curled around him in his sleep, putting Caleb between the dying woodstove and hot-if-no-longer-scalding creature.

“What’s going on with you, buddy?” Caleb asked, patting the dragon on the head.

Bog sent pain through the bond and whimpered.

“Something you ate? Who knows what was in that pile of scrap you dug through.”

Bog rolled over away from Caleb, not in the mood for a lecture on his eating habits. On that topic, Caleb go up to find what they had left for him to eat. He found half a dead bat and some mushrooms, but elected to save the latter for battle. He’d exhausted his mana completely twice the day before, and he would certainly be looking into more ways to refill his mana pool if he ever survived this cave.

“We need to get out of here before those troglodytes comes looking for us.”

Bog groaned.

“But it doesn’t look like you’re going to be able to dig out that side passage.”

The next gurgle out of Bog was apologetic.

“It is what it is. We’ll figure something out. I’ll be right back.”

Caleb grabbed a broom off the wall and made his way out into the cave, following the many tracks they’d made and obscuring what signs of their passage he could. All the while, he kept a mental eye to the air lest more bats show up. His efforts were mostly futile, as Bog’s claws scoured the stone and ice in ways a broom couldn’t mend. The best he could do was remove the remnants of their battles and hope that the scratches went unnoticed.

Back at their camp, Caleb got to work lighting the forge, then paused to examine the ruined breastplate he’d recovered. He sent his metal sense within, tracing the lines and patterns with a mental finger.

Wherever the lines passed through damaged sections of the plate, they stopped, severed by the deformation of the metal they’d resided in. In other places, the rust had eaten deep enough into the metal to mar the enchantments, though the damage in these locations was small enough that Caleb was certain he could repair it. It was as if someone had erased a few sections of a circle: while he couldn’t be certain that the original had been a perfect circle, odds were good that it had been and replacing the missing parts would be simple.

The first thing he had to do before he could get to that, however, was clean the plate. Rust covered every centimeter of it. He reached for a wire brush, but then thought better of it.

“Bog…”

***

Despite his stomach pains, Bog obliged Caleb in licking the rust clean off the breastplate. The dragon’s tongue was like a flexible rasp, and in performing this task for Caleb, he learned he could modulate the grit of his tongue to better suit his goals. In short order Caleb had a partially enchanted, dented and pierced breastplate now only discolored in places where it had originally been red with rust.

With that gone, Caleb’s view into the workings of the plate was much clearer and a lot of the flaws he’d originally detected in the weavings within were no more. Once he felt he had a good sense of it, he began heating the metal, paying close attention to the mana inside lest it start to break down.

As the metal heated, he pulled his mana pool tight into himself to prevent himself from passively drawing the mana out of the weapon. Once it had reached temperature—something Caleb determined not by the glow as was customary, but by his magical sense of the metal—he pulled it out of the forge and placed it on his anvil.

Trying something new, Caleb activated Vortex at a lower power level. Then, leveraging his Mana Manipulation, he imposed his air-splitting technique on the skill. Unlike the last time he’d modified Vortex to be more powerful than he could normally achieve, this time he made it more precise. The mana cost to keep it active was roughly the same as what it would be for Caleb to split the air freeform, but the mental load was far less.

Methodically he hammered the piercings closed, lining up the edges, reheating and hammering them to weld them together. Here he was worried about the intrusion of foreign mana and the depletion of the enchantments, as these were the sections of the breastplate where the enchantments had been completely lost. Once the armor was whole once more, Caleb moved to the rust pits. This step he performed with much greater care and less speed. Wherever there was a pit, he examined the enchantment within, visualizing its path and deciding what seemed to be missing from it.

To Caleb’s bewilderment, he could tell what was missing by intuition.

He’d memorize the pattern around each pit and then hammer that pit flat before evening it out with the surrounding material. His work inevitably destroyed more of the enchantment, but as he evened out the thickness in the area, he replaced it with the repaired version he’d devised. Over and over he repeated this until no more pits remained. He tried donning the breastplate at that point to see if his work had been enough, but unfortunately the gaping hole in the center of the enchantment was a real problem.

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So he got to work filling it in. While the gaps elsewhere were small enough for him to confidently intuit the original pattern, this huge gap was not. Instead, he took the severed lines and reconnected them to corresponding lines that seemed correct. His lines were mere gentle arcs when he was certain the pattern in the missing section had been equally as complex as the rest, but as he worked, he continued to intuit which threads belonged together and connected them as best he could.

And when he was done sealing the last connection and quenching, he stood back to take in his work.

It looked terrible… at least from the outside. The metal had been surprisingly difficult to work, but Caleb was unsure why. He’d not done the best job at patching it, but as his brother often told Caleb in jest, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

Within was the most beautiful arrangement of mana Caleb had ever seen. He ignored the fact he’d only been able to see mana for a few days.

He held the breastplate to himself, not having made straps yet, and connected to the item in the now-familiar way. He felt the mana within reach out to the essence in himself, but before it could finish giving him its boost, the mana fell apart.

Ability enhancement limit reached. Unslot an item to benefit from this equipment.

“Craters,” Caleb muttered.

He knew he’d been lucky so far in not hitting the limit. No one knew what governed the stat limit in his village, as they’ve never had enough items to push it. Caleb suspected that would not be the case for long.

Currently he had a total of plus 7 to strength from his helmet, hammer, and spear. He placed the hammer on his anvil, willing the connection between himself and it to break. The strength left him suddenly, and everything on his body felt slightly heavier.

Picking up the armor, he willed the connection to form once more.

Novice Meta Steel Breastplate of Constitution (+2) (uncommon)

Weapon type: Breastplate (incomplete)

Material: Steel

Aspect: Metal

Effects: Slightly increase resistance to other metals.

Constitution (+2)

“Well… that was easy to figure out,” Caleb said, noting his total stat bonus.

He had 8 ability points from gear and 84 ability points total, at level 4. So far, it all suggested that his limit was 10 percent of his total. He already had more ability points than anyone he knew in the village. With both his rare class granting an extra point over everyone in his village and his bloodline enhancing how far those points went, he had more stats than even the level 10 Frost Dragon Hunters.

Status, Caleb thought, bringing up his screen.

Caleb Kavilson

Class: Dragon Rider

Level: 4

Human

Abilities

Strength: 15 (8 + 7)

Agility: 8

Constitution: 10 (8 + 2)

Perception: 20

Willpower: 20

Acuity: 20

Resources

Stamina: ?/120

Stamina Regen: 1.1 per min

…

Equipment

Dissonant Steel Spear: Dissonant - Journeyman

Slotted: Yes

Smithing Hammer: Cold (poor) - Journeyman

Slotted: No

Cold Steel Barbute of Strength: Cold (minor) - Journeyman

Slotted: Yes

Meta Steel Breastplate of Constitution: Metal (minor) - Novice

Slotted: Yes

A lot had changed on his screen. His ability scores, for one, but with the boosted constitution, his max stamina had also gone up from 100 to 120. His equipment section had gained a new “slotted” feature, showing items on his person though not formally equipped. The hammer he’d relinquished to experiment with his stats was still on his belt, but if he dropped it, he found it disappeared from his status entirely.

He broke out of his reflection when what he’d actually done sunk in. He’d created an item that enhanced his constitution. Already he felt the chill of the cavern retreat from him. While these 2 points only brought him up to 10—the standard score for everyone else he knew who wasn’t a child—the improvement to his base 8 was huge.

He pulled out his knife and tried to cut his arm. It cut in easily, but he let out a whoop of celebration. It had been a little harder than before, and the pain of the cut was less than it would have been otherwise.

Next he scratched a rasp along the metal of the breastplate and found that it was more resistant to the hard blade than the plate ought to have been.

“Meta, huh? That must mean its aspect is what it’s made out of,” he said, turning the plate over and examining it with his senses.

The aspect was one he’d seen before but not had a solid name for. He pulled out the hammer that had come with the forge and that he’d used to forge this armor, then compared the two. They were identical. Both hammer and plate were metal-aspected.

“That makes sense,” he said to Bog, who was ignoring him as he ate another pick. “This wasn’t dissonant because the aspect of the hammer matched what I was using it on. I wonder… if the metal aspect also prevents dissonant outputs.”

He wanted to test a lot of this, but this wasn’t the time or the place. Instead, he thought over the possibilities of the new gear and what else he could make as he fashioned straps out of spare leather in the cavern. Once it was done, he donned the plate and his helmet and began throwing everything of value into sacks. He took the metal-aspected forging equipment and all the ore he’d gathered and tied them across Bog’s back.

When he was done, the place looked barren and picked over compared to the clutter he’d been working in.

“You ready to go, buddy?” Caleb asked Bog.

He questioned him through the bond.

“To kill a frost dragon, of course.”

Bog sat down and sent refusal.

“Fine, be that way,” Caleb said, walking toward the crack in the wall they’d first entered through. “Have fun getting eaten by those troglodytes.”

Bleh, burp, blewth

Bog vomited a sea of white flecks all over the floor.