"I've made a full duelling set."
As with Henry's weapons, he’d forged several interchangeable pieces that maximised a range of functions, from physical attacks, to magical power, health, and mobility. However, since armour swaps weren’t core to his art, he would only show Hannes his main duelling equipment.
For those following his saga, most of the gear slots for this had already been accounted for.
His head, one ring, necklace, leggings, and belt were pre-assigned to his Syncretist set, The Cap and friends valued for their exponential joint bonuses. Through The Pendant, the damage output of 16 summoned flying weapons exceeded his own without the Godspeed potion. Through The Leggings, its extra Stamina helped for sustained, multi-minute duels. Through The Belt, its extra Universal Productivity (the crafting resource) helped for sustained, multi-hour duels, when Henry weaponised the entire Civilian-Class kit to build towers and command armies and whatnot. All the Syncretist items, despite their shabby appearance, conferred decent protection. As scalable items, they were near impervious to normal cuts and stabs – although they didn’t stop magic, and The Cap left his face exposed. Finally, for mundane but not trivial reasons, one of the set bonuses increased his accessible inventory space and his equipment load had amassed into literal tonnes.
As for other item slots, for cloaks, he’d stick with the elemental Legendaries won through last week’s quests, their transformations useful for dodging and pseudo-stealth. His relic and second ring slots were likewise taken up by the previous Reliquarian creations, the
So, minus these prefigured instruments, minus the new
These three, he would now flaunt.
“Due to the inherent fragility of my lowbie character,” said Henry, “and that of these materials, I’ve all-inned on a glass cannon build, on mobility and function. If I get hit, I lose. However, hitting me won’t be easy when I’m scuttling about in these speedy sons: Utsu’s Companion of The Stars Transporters.”
He gestured to his feet, now shod in a pair of open-toed slippers. Their soles were carved from a tangerine-hued wood, their straps woven from a dried vine speckled with pinhole lights. A golden, pineapple-y mist whirled around them - this, the inventor ‘explained’, was illusory.
Hannes, while inspecting the shoes, caught a bizarre, intangible scent, of sunshine sparkling in the crystal-clear run of a river.
“The smell’s illusory,” Henry whispered, his closing eyelids teleporting him to a wondrous memory of growth and layers. “The wooden soles are also illusory…”
For Hannes listening, the tale of the shoes’ creation that followed was utterly incomprehensible, so he had the system translate him a summary.
Apparently, 96% of the potency was concentrated in the straps.
They’d been sewn from a cultivar of the ‘Pliant Vine’, a jungle creeper in Yamalai that manages to grow beneath the region’s dense canopies through magical absorption of the filtered sunshine. At some point, Henry—separate from his martial art research—had devoted two decades to the Forest Farming methods of this vine’s namesake tribe.
As for the chief duelling motivation behind The Transporters, that'd come to him from the previously-mentioned ‘Starhunting’ style, from the ardours of dodging blows from giant monsters and the dream of a speed to equal their gargantuanity.
Amongst the many methods of increasing his mobility, he’d searched into a pre-Redeemer art, ‘Lightning Sword’, whose Blitzdemon Class possessed a multi-charge lightning teleport. The idea of that—but not the magic itself—would end up in this Legendary. Instead of the Blitzdemon’s elemental magic, these slippers harnessed Light. The mechanics of that, even in summary, were too much for Hannes’s comprehension, uniting properties of the Pliant Vine, Earthfriend Celestial Energy, Arcaneworking, and dozens of other esoteric masteries.
“…and thus, as often is realised in the twilight of one's pilgrimage,” concluded Henry, “what began as an obstruction, the unanswerability of that thunder taunting in the faded heavens, would ultimately transform into a blessing. Mother Lightning – we, who meet you as you are today, when the beauty of your youthful face has flashed and waned, we reject you back. You, decrepit crone, don’t quite contain the nimbleness for which the never-ageing Duelcrafter strives. We, whose hammers chase the nimbus peaks, have clothed our toes in Light itself!”
To demonstrate the slippers’ function, he gathered ten Celestial Charges to his fingers, then he stood 200 metres from Hannes, waving back across the traversed distance.
In case the dev mistook him for cheating with The Overdream’s relocation, he performed the move again, slower.
After refreshing his ten Charges, he retraced his journey, halting between each 20-metre leap to distinguish them. The interval between some was so short that an observer would perceive multiple of him.
All of the images, including the last in front of Hannes, held up an index finger to interrupt the next logical refutation.
“You’re thinking, ‘Cute, but these cleats of yours are not invincibly mobile’,” Henry parodied a petulant critic of his immortal gizmos, “’Why, in a real 1v1, you’ll have to pause to gather those Celestials. 0.5 seconds. Each. 0.5 static seconds…during the peak of duelling, that’s no different from death. Pathetic fool, you’ve sealed your feet in blocks of lead!”
“Buddy...I'm not thinking that whatsoever.”
Henry—rejecting both refutations, having comprehended that the separation between this Finn and his fake Finn doubter was as illusory as that between the ore, ingot, and dagger, all being but materials building towards the one immortal 1v1—spat on the researcher’s unbelieving shoes, too disgusting to share the ground with his noble Transporters. “For you that might be the end, but, I—the god-emperor hyper-tyrant of Legendary crafting for duelling purposes—have already forged beyond your spit-toed quibbles.”
Refamiliarising himself with human conversation after decades, he was beginning to have some fun with it. Smirking, he raised an arm, dressed with a shield of diaphanous glass, the next Legendary.
80-centimetres wide, as thin as seven layered butterfly wings, it offered the holding appendage no apparent weight. Aside from a faint tinge of milky pink, it lacked any distinguishable features - no visible auras, no dazzling etchings. For anyone unaware of its Legendary status, Henry would appear to be holding up a pane of glass with a simple hand fixture.
Hannes, however, at their close proximity, felt a vague presence. In his intestines swam the sensation of a laboratory, all its plastic shelves and metal instruments and glass containers vibrating in an artificial lighting’s buzzing heat, the whole room stainless and sterile…unsettlingly sterile.
“The material’s…worthless,” Henry winced in mild pain. “Just some sand pocketed from one of Suchi’s beaches while out joy-sailing, blended with a few pinches of the local dirt. It’s fragile.” A stone, whistling from behind Hannes’s ear, struck the shield dead centre; upon impact, the item shattered into a glitter burst of shards, which then vanished as a duplicate replaced the first rendered useless by a pebble. “However, while its grains retain a solid shape, this wonder stores a companionship with the unforgotten aeons…”
Another mad account followed that Hannes once again simplified.
This Legendary contained a triple blend of the Overdream’s most secretive, time-obsessed experiments.
First was the Arcaneworking permeating all these artefacts and The Cap itself. The second was The Contours of The Unrelenting Clay, Henry’s fractional imitations of The Deathless One’s millennia-stretching dive into his region’s terrain.
As for the third, the most obscure of all, this was not be found anywhere in Saana. These secrets originated in Henry’s private studies on his new planet. They'd been derived from his investigations of the hyper-speed Elementosaurs and the peculiar grass that absorbed Nature Energy, from his mineralogical explorations into the 16-elemental-compound of the Indrite, from the decades of cultivation aimed upon the taming of its mighty power for himself.
These three sources of hidden knowledge then melted together into his greater studies of the hippy class with which he duelled, into the glass of this Earthfriend contraption. 'The Aegis of The Revivifying Sun'. This gadget replicated the functions of the mysterious grass, collecting Nature Energy and converting it to Charges.
So what did that mean practically? The shield refreshed Charges on the wielding hand as they were depleted. It was a simple effect, despite the complexity of the path to unlock it.
Hannes—made no wiser by the summary either—skipped to the end of Henry’s monologue, to a demonstration.
After Charges had been gathered via the conventional constellation method, a latticework of microscopic, alien-looking runes within the shield’s glassy surface lit up in connection with the Charges at the tip of each finger, while motes of Nature Energy condensed around the item’s rim. When a Charge was burned, the pooling motes were absorbed and converted into a new Charge of the same type. The refresh rate was 0.2 seconds. That applied to both a single Charge and a full hand’s worth, the mechanism independent for each. At its max rate, The Aegis of The Revivifying Sun collected Charges 1,250% faster than manual gathering.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“How does this one rank with the previous devices?” asked the game dev, clueless as to its relative power. “The fragility doesn’t seem justified.”
“Alone, it’s hardly worth the labour. It’s the type of one-off curiosity a Cosmic tinkerer (or cyborg) makes while developing towards the higher goods. For me, who juggles many tools, the strength is only in the combination. Thus, we return to The Transporters.”
He grabbed a fistful of Celestials. Then, activating his slippers again, he leapt five skips away for a total of a hundred metres. After a fifth of a second, he’d jumped another hundred. Then another. Then another. Within a breath, he’d gone beyond the horizon.
Hannes, receiving no warning, had simply lost sight of the teen. But he did catch a sudden seizure of flashing flickers.
Turning, he beheld, in the sky kilometres away, a thunder cloud, raging as it spewed an annihilation of scorching forks upon the unseen earth below.
A moment later, Henry could be spotted hop-scotching his return from the same direction. Between each leap, he was briefly visible, both the glass shield and his shoes radiating as they churned in unison to vacuum up motes and convert their energy to speed.
The craftsman, with a smug grin, returned to the game dev’s side.
Then, over the pair rolled the thunder’s cracking roar.
Henry cackled back against the sluggish grumbles. “We mortals, with our feet of flesh, outrun the heaven’s trespassed shouts! Hear Zeus upon Olympus cry, ‘Prometheus, return the flame!’. To him, below, let’s whisper down: ‘No. Not till we’ve set these clouds ablaze.’”
He, through the titan daring of his crafts, had surpassed the speed of sound, had surpassed the speed of most of Saana’s pantheon!
Hannes clicked his tongue – not in speech but suspicion. “Is this combo permitted? It seems…”
The dev didn’t know himself what acts or items risked cyborg exposure. Leak probabilities were determined by the game’s background super A.I., calculating thousands of steps in advance for every observer. An Aevitas participant would be warned when approaching danger. (As for players who might ever want to expose the project, the system eliminated them in the rigorous pre-selection quests. If you finished one, you were a committed nutjob.)
After Hanne’s question, the background thunder vanished, dismissed with a killjoy thought.
“In most arenas, no.” Henry sighed, lamenting the cyborg-racist state of 2050's politics. “The full combo’s a bit…revealing.” He sighed for more grievous reasons. “To split The Aegis or The Transporters, that was my Solomonian conundrum.” He swapped to another glass shield, one with a visible internal mesh of metallic fibres. “2.5 second Charge time - same as manual gathering, but—critically—without pauses. This version happens to be more robust.” A random flying stone bounced off the surface. “But that ‘advantage’ pales compared with the loss of speed. This bow-legged kid will have to learn to alternate defensive turns with an obese cousin: ‘The Geomancer’s Haunted Portal’.”
In a barely-noticeable switch, he leaned to one side, and the muscles of his adjacent shoulder sank beneath the multiplied weight of a different Legendary shield.
This one dwarfed The Aegis, being a block half the size of a door. Its frame consisted of human bone - Henry’s own. The rest was a swamp-soaked timber, a material too heavy to lift in a fight - although not for a player with
Simultaneous with the gear swap, the scenery around them had shifted.
They were transported to a forest of sparse acacias. The trees were stunted by malnourishment. Separating them were patches of dry grass poking out of soil baked and cracked by the un-cloud-filtered rays of sunlight. A breeze whipped up a chalky red dust.
This testing ground reproduced the worthless strip of land Henry’d bought across the river from The Slums. The real place looked quite different now. It’d been fertilised by imported resources and populated by the richer tournament migrants.
Henry, propping up the weighty instrument, stooped and whispered something to the clay. At once, the surroundings clouded red, as a circle of geysers ejected multiple tons of dirt.
Hannes—inhaling by accident—choked and sputtered. However, within three breaths, his lungs were clear. Weirdly, he felt the particles being vacuumed out as, in a reversal of the initial explosive momentum, the dust was sucked away, into the shield, on which its whirling mass condensed to form a coating adding slightly to its weight.
The air had also been cleared – in fact, it was less dusty than before. Aside from that and the crust on the Legendary, which—when one listened close, shrieked—there were no other remnants of the explosion. Hannes couldn’t even find the geyser holes, not until the system pointed one out - the width of a coin but inestimably deep.
“The wood is illusory,” Henry declared dismissively, “as are the souls, as is the shield itself. The true defence is the sleeping parent whom this infant’s weeping wakes.”
Hannes, hearing the crunch of marching boots, saw thousands of troops swarming through the woods. Archers in the vanguard squads about the enter range were already nocking their bows.
As they fired, Henry flicked his non-shield hand through a couple of gestures.
Between the pair and the whistling arrows, the soil vomited up a dense curtain of earthen clumps. The missiles, passing through the rising veil, exhausted their magic and most of their momentum. The few that reached Hannes and Henry bounced off them as harmless as a fist of straw.
Henry hastened through further earth manipulations. In seconds, he’d summoned walls and ditches. In a couple more, a bunker's exterior—as it continued to grow outwards—was pushing away the arriving soldiers.
“And thus,” he declared, within the impenetrable shelter of hardening clay, “is another of the immortal shields! In the breaths between our sky-defying leaps of sand, we, who dominate the strip of man between, will rouse our brother clay to stand! Hahahahahaha!” He laughed, his chest exhuming thousands of years of The Contour’s plunders, of clay and sand, of blood and soul and time. “Every random piece of research is our tool! Every hidden fact is our shield and dagger! Upon our solitary limbs, we wear the planet’s buried skeletons and command them forth as us: Duel, ye famished sons! Duel! DUEL!”
Hannes listened through the walls to the muted clatter of spells and weapons. “This is not suspicious?”
Henry—with an abrupt mood shift—shrugged, equally clueless. “I guess The Cripple should possess some astounding cheats? Objectively, these Legendaries, compared to those with which I duelled the Cosmic villains, are...”
A slight hesitation snuck between the sentence’s conclusion, its utterance paining him after becoming a fanatical duelling craftsman.
For those who’d picked up the hammer, the carving knife, the needle, or the rune-brush—or, in his case, all of them and more—one’s creations were endowed with at least two statures. The first was how they ranked impartially. How did they compare to the inventions of others in their duelling velocity, their duelling devastation, their duelling etcetera? The second magnitude, intangible, was more personal, spiritual. How many centuries of duelling memories were invested in their manufacture? How significant was the opponent whose blood would baptise them into living entities?
To Henry, these Tier-0 artefacts, forged by his hand, for his duel, felt of an infinite magnitude beyond those wielded in the past. To speak otherwise would be deception and betrayal.
“…insignificant.”
Hannes nodded, having watched the younger kid blow up planets - hence his general lack of reaction now. “That spiked my curiosity before. How’d you pull those off back then anyway? I've never reflected on it, but that was peculiar, right?”
Players were not supposed to reach the Cosmic Plane for several instalments, the young Henry skipping decades of progression.
“The Cosmic duels? The answer to that teen mystery precedes my derangement. You’re safe to—”
“Use words,” Hannes repeated his refusal to receive this cyborg's brain-hijacking clicks.
“Pathetic. No, we won't be insulting the highest duels with chatter. Spy on what you must, and then fuck off. This is the last of the armour—"
Hannes, hurt by being sworn at, interrupted again. "My buddy, if I'm annoying you, you don't have to expose these items. You never had to. Just the one that triggered the inspection."
Henry—who'd actually been exhibiting his spawn for his own pleasure, for a complicated crafting-duelling-hybrid insult/taunt/flex/scam—replied by spitting on the nerd's machine-manufactured jersey. "The existence of that trash in my presence has annoyed me more, yet I've tolerated it without one word of complaint. Quiet these barks, you spit-coated dog. This work required centuries to loom. You will sit patient as I complete the penultimate knot of its extended tapestry."
"You said it took only 33 months."
"Another foolish bark!" Henry—since he was at it—spat on the dev's jeans, annoyed by them, too. "My whole life has been a preparation for these crafts, in whose deliverance converge the many threads of fate misread as disconnected. Now, let me introduce the last of our armoured friends, to which the paths so far have led, by which we leave these tools of men and find our flesh's higher, bestial-elemental-floral-stellar heavens...”
Hannes's goodwill had been extinguished after being spat on thrice. Thus, he skipped through the rhymed lecture on this next Legendary by fast-forwarding his perception.
The item, 'The Skin of The Path of All Paths', was a patchwork tunic, sewn from tiny strips from tens of thousands of different monsters. It had some other features - constellation inlays, an aura that gave a weird desire to decompose the item and discover the higher secrets of a forgotten golden age. Effect-wise, it seemed to be a hybrid piece, amplifying the four Earthfriend domains of Fauna, Flora, Celestial, and Elemental. Henry, beating up clones, showed off some monster-form swapping routine, then some other routine that mixed
Hannes caught nothing game-breaking or alarming, none of these fights as sensational as the sword massacre.
After the exhibition, Henry—in a field clearing of his opponent’s frozen torso shards, amidst the fading massacre of All transformed by All to Nothing—dropped his transformation, standing in the figure of a teen, decked in the full armour set created for his duel.
"Good game; easy, friend," he announced to no one.
With a drawn-out sigh, he released some noxious thing and sucked back the human air into his human lungs. Then he cast a look of finality upon the dev, a look of expectation for some comment or response equalling the climax of the Earthfriend’s multi-century synthesis.
(In truth, Henry’d already noticed the sensory skip. This spying nerd had failed to remark on a broken Celestial bonus, which'd consequently been omitted from the demonstration.)
“My buddy!” Hannes whistled. “That was something.” He nodded repeatedly, gave a thumbs up, and clapped the thumbs up with the other applauding hand. “Superb! Once again, as you might boast, you’ve pulled off another invincible swindle! So,” with the brusque thrust of another nod, he moved them to the end, “let’s see the final cheat!”
“Sure,” said Henry lightly, his voice leaping with a brevity so small as to seem immediate. “Soon as it’s complete, we’ll flip the page to the final chapter of this Duelcrafting saga. HAHAHAHAHAHA!” Erupting with sincere laughter, he stopped when he noticed the joke flop. "Sorry, that was a bad crafting pun. The ultimate Legendary is a Spelltome."
"Cool!" Hannes rubbed his palms excitedly, since Henry, a Scholar main, had likely reserved something truly crazy for this.
Twenty seconds passed.
Hannes’s rubbing decelerated to a gradual halt.
“...how long left?” he asked.
“Hmm…” Henry, woken from a meditation, did the mental math. “Now? The ritual’s about a seventh of the way done. Roughly 25,179 minutes to go.”
“17 days?”
Henry nodded.
Not only was it a multi-week manufacturing process, but it also allowed for zero interruptions. Hence, his earlier anger at this intruding dweeb.
"What the hell?" Hannes—having used the system to read his thoughts and check if he was lying—was mystified. "How are you even staying awake that long?”
Normal fatigue still applied in The Overdream, the downtime for sleep utilised to transfer memories from the replica to the real-world subject.
“My cyborg drugs are unrivalled beneath the heavens.” Henry produced a powder box of Alchemical super meth and offered the nerd a snort.