Chapter 296: Minor Gear Upgrades

“Honeyyyyy, I’m home!” A voice called out as Rory already felt himself rolling his eyes, both he and Zoey having teleported within the Fortress only moments after the other three Founders.

“How did things go?” Zoey asked, glancing between Eric, who was pantomiming hanging up a coat and hat on a rack as he continued his bit, and the other two, who eyed their theatrical compatriot.

“About as expected,” Tom answered before tossing something to Rory, who snatched it out of the air. “That was the hidden cache reward. The rest of the monsters were rather boring, as were the generic rewards. Also, Slime Fiends aren’t fond of the cold.”

“Noted,” Rory said. Not every monster den or hive was as interesting as the orckalite ant hive from the first few days on The First, and sometimes the only things they contained were a fuck ton of monsters to clear and a single hidden cache.

Inspecting the item Tom had tossed over, Rory nodded to himself. It was an apex-grade Rare item, which, while not as outstanding as something aberrant grade or higher, was still rather nice.

Nebulous Form Gel

A mysterious gel inherently tied to the concept of shapeshifting. It can seemingly take any shape, and while the direct uses of such an item are few, the indirect applications are as wide as an artisan's gifts allow.

“Not too surprised something like this came from a slime den. How many locks were needed?”

“Only an item from one of the neighboring dens.”

“Which explains why it’s rather whatever as far as rewards go,” Rory nodded along. Over the last year and several months, they’d collected a myriad assortment of items and rewards from the adventurers and the endless slaughter of the denizens of The First. Some had been repurposed, while others remained locked up.

Rose Orckalite, for example, had found a usage as the conceptual core in the new and improved version of the Mountain’s Moment brew, granting a greater durability boost while draining less vitality overall, something Zoey had been ecstatic about. Rory had figured that, due to being physically softer, it had less severe side effects, but maintaining the same conceptual strength as a rare-grade metal meant it was stronger than Mountain’s Moment brews made using lesser metals as the conceptual core, or otherwise equal to the most extreme versions of the brew that were made using promethium as the conceptual core.

Which was good, because Rory was fairly confident that they were going to be using some of those improved Mountain’s Moment brews relatively shortly.

Another item that resulted from the repurposing of rewards gained was the pendant the Monk was currently wearing, tucked just beneath his tunic.

Silence of the Frozen Lands – Pendant

A pendant made from alchemically refined Frozen Schist, Drop of Depressed Gloom, a Pearlescent Core, and Rose Orckalite transmuted into artificially procured Blue Rose Orckalite. Due to the heavy emphasis on Stillness and Frozen concepts during its creation, it now naturally carries an innate field of Frozen Stillness that harms anyone who attempts to wear it.

It was a rather odd item at first, because who would want to wear an item that actively hurt and hindered them through an innate field carried by said item? For others to utilize such an item would require forcefully ‘breaking’ it down and bending it to their will, which would only reduce its overall potency.

But.

But it wasn’t technically made for everyone . It had been made for the First Monk, who already had an aura of Frozen Stillness, which was only amplified by the pendant, without sacrificing the pendant's effectiveness by breaking it down and forcing it to play nice to begin with.

In truth, it was one of the items Rory was prouder of, a clever manipulation of the trade-off, give-and-take Eon seemed to love. By making the item effectively a curseditem, though it wasn’t actually literally cursed, it was far stronger than it had any right to be.

Frozen Schist had been bought from the reward shop, the Drop of Depressed Gloom was the hidden cache reward from a den of Gloom turtles that Zoey and Allison had cleared out, a pearlescent core had been plucked from Rory’s endless back of goodies, and finally Blue Rose Orckalite was the result of alchemically transmuting ordinary Rose Orckalite to carry now traces of coldness, possible only thanks to the name itself that Rory was able to latch onto, Blue Roses had been a thing of Earth after all.

The Blue Rose Orckalite had also been sturdier than it ought to be, but that had more to do with Rory meticulously True Folding the metal until it was closer to what a regular rare-grade metal was expected to be.

Then there was the item Zoey now carried around, looking almost like an arc reactor core set within the very center of her chestplate. Except that instead of fancy technology, it was just a really dense green stone.

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Jade x3

While most items are made with a specific principle in mind, this artificial treasure is an application of True Folding, reinterpreted as the principle of metamorphosis through heat and pressure. Growing through the expenditure of durability, each layer requires twice the conceptual energy as the last. Aside from serving as an extremely dense item, the uses are minimal.

Rory didn’t feel he was being arrogant when he said he was second to none in most fields, be it crafting or skill alteration. But when it came to attribute manipulation, none could beat Zoey, who’d been messing around with attribute inversion longer than anyone else. So practiced was she with it that she could actively ‘split off’ some of her durability factor and feed it elsewhere, her body attempting to ‘recover’ the lost durability through regular healing mechanisms. While novel, there wasn’t much reason for it in most cases.

In most cases, but the artificial treasure he’d managed to create for her was not most cases. It drew in excess durability and grew over time. Now, the stone itself wasn’t all that useful; it didn’t boost her durability by being on her or whatnot, but it did stabilize her ability to manifest World on Fire, the still-work-in-progress skill now capable of being used in short bursts without putting her into extreme recovery for the next week.

As an aside, Rory was also considering whether, in the future, he could chip off pieces of the jade and use its literal crystallized durability for something useful. But that was an idea for the future; the stone was still too small, and any such efforts might completely shatter it.

Eric’s biggest change was his daggers. Or rather, they were meant to be, except Rory had been having issues with them. Oh, sure, he could have just made him better daggers, but Nightfall: Singularity didn’t really give a damn what the original items were made of, to the point that it almost seemed pointless.

“Eric,” Rory suddenly spoke up. “Can I see your daggers again?”

“Ahh, this shit again,” the Rogue sighed before handing over the twin daggers. “At least I get the honor of being the only person with an item Mr. Architect can’t just improve upon.”

The daggers had been an Eon-obtained reward long ago, carrying an Akashic Record that was partly responsible for Rory's trouble figuring out how to improve them. Holding the daggers up, Rory glanced between them and the Nebulous Form Gel, as a smile appeared upon his face.

“I think I finally have my angle.”

“Angle or devil?” Eric said, as absolutely nobody bothered to humor the man.

Aside from the daggers Rory finally had an idea for, the main change in man’s equipment had been his armor, his old armor thrown away as Rory made a face just looking at it. It had been second-rate , at best . Besides just being stronger, the new armor Rory made for him focused on reducing the main weakness of his shadow stepping: the instant after he stepped through the shadows, he was unable to reactivate the skill. Eric’s new armor, therefore, had been entirely shaped around shrinking that window as much as possible.

And lastly, there was the Spear, who’d seen the biggest gear upgrade of the group. Not because Rory was trying to win her over –he wasn’t some fawning teenage boy– but because his inspiration for her gear upgrade revolved around being the only one who’d finally made use of their share of the Spectro Orckalite.

To put it bluntly, Allison had a watered-down version of Toon Force , born from her amalgam attribute cartone . She would never be a magic wielder in the way any of the others could; she’d given that up. Instead, her body behaved almost as if it were rubber, with resistance to electricity-based attacks, the ability to warp reality around her, bending things that shouldn’t reasonably be able to bend, and was only empowered by her heartbeat as she got more and more invested in a fight. There was, of course, an upper limit, but that limit was one that realistically only a territory alpha could reasonably expect to bring out of her.

The inspiration for her gear upgrade had been based on her aura’s black-and-white appearance, resembling the cartoon section of a newspaper. Spectro Orckalite itself revolved around the concept of the light spectrum. One thing had bled into another, and struck by inspiration, Rory had managed to create a set of armor as strong as Zoey’s strongest promethium armor, while barely a fraction of the weight, armor that had even given her limited ability to bend and break light itself with her minor degree of reality warping.

But.

But technically, Rory wasn’t even done with her. As anyone who looked at her new armor noticed, it seemed almost like a skinsuit , as if it were meant to be the underlayer of another piece of armor.

Unfortunately, the second part of that gear improvement would require the Spectro Orckalite Epidermal Armor, her prior armor, and perhaps a World Crucible or two. Which meant either getting extremely lucky and finding a hidden one, which, given the scrounging of their current region and having revealed nothing, was unlikely to happen anytime soon, or, most realistically, something for after they’d defeated their first Kaiser.

Finally, there was Rory’s gear upgrade, which… didn’t actually exist.

And that came down to the fact that, unlike the others, Rory already had gear that met his standards and hadn’t had any moments of inspiration or needs to be met.

So, rather than working on a personal gear upgrade, he’d instead spent that time working on something he’d been thinking about for years , currently the bones of which were suspended in a hangar in one of the fortress buildings. Once they had more self-sustaining income from Anomalous Beads through additional Anomalous Spires, Rory felt confident that the pet project would finally make major progress.

Rory did have one other thing he could have been working on, a certain weapon, but given the timespan until the next earliest encounter with his Bane, he had plenty of leeway to mull it over.

Though.

Based on initial estimates, it would be around the time they were hoping to claim victory over The First that his Bane would likely pay him its final visit.

Things to think about at another time.

“….Rory?”

“Huh?” Rory finally snapped back to attention, having accidentally sunk several layers deep into his mind until he’d nearly completely blocked out the outside world.

“We were asking how long until the dagger-work is done,” Zoey said.

“Ehh, a week, maybe?” Rory offered. “Why?”

“Because, after clearing the last den of monsters, we did pick this up,” Allison said, holding up an item that Rory briefly examined, which looked like nothing more than a random shedding from some reptile.

Shedding of they who were once whole

Amongst the many generals belonging to the Phosphorus, the Light Bringer, once there was one who believed it was broken. In order to rectify such problems, it split itself into three. Split among three minds, they believed themselves to be siblings rather than fragments of a greater whole, each becoming their own independent existence. Having been vanquished, the essence of the three ‘siblings’ has slowly drawn back together. If one should dare, all that remains to restore the fragmented to a singular whole is to feed the final remaining totem of their physical form into the conduit of anomalous flame.

“Conduit of anomalous flame?” Rory asked as he finished reading the description.

“We talked about it,” Allison said. “We think it's just a fancy way of saying that if we drop it into the shop, it will probably spit out something that will allow us to resurrect this ‘general’ of Phosphorus.”

“Makes sense,” Rory said. “So, all that we’re really waiting on is Eric’s daggers.”

Grinning wildly, Eric looked as if he’d been given some grand present.

“And then we get to kill ourselves a big fucking snake.”