DannyGhost: I’ve got it.

Michaka: I can’t believe you talked anyone else into this.

DannyGhost: It wasn’t that hard.

Michaka: Really?

DannyGhost: Not everyone’s a pretend prude like you.

Michaka: I resemble that statement!

DannyGhost: Point. And Devilman lowered the price to half.

Michaka: I didn’t think he would.

DannyGhost: ACs aren’t everything.

Michaka: So what did you promise?

DannyGhost: Video recordings of everything.

Michaka: Ah, that would make more ACs in subs.

DannyGhost: Yeah, he wanted half the shares.

Michaka: You gave it to him?

DannyGhost: Only way he caved.

Michaka: So what now? Why haven’t you gotten her?

DannyGhost: I know the place. But she’s not there.

Michaka: So you paid for a dud?

DannyGhost: She isn’t, but others are.

Michaka: You’ll pick them up?

DannyGhost: Why not. Four for the price of one?

Michaka: Half a bil isn’t the price of one any way you slice it.

DannyGhost: I’ll take any victory I can. Besides, they all look like dolls anyway.

Michaka: So they’re for someplace filled with beautiful women?

DannyGhost: There’re two guys with them too. Here. [Link]

Michaka: Oh REIon! I’ve got to have those!

DannyGhost: I’ll sell them to you.

Michaka: hm?

DannyGhost: 100 mil

Michaka: 10

DannyGhost: Only if you help.

Michaka: Fine, 100.

DannyGhost: Pleasure doing business.

Michaka: Yeah, sure.

___________

Time’s flow seemed to stutter and ebb. Yuriko’s mind was in the dance. It was in what was whole, and what was missing. Explosive. Flow. Speed and Agility. Steadfast Defense. Each Phase mirrored the sword dances, but four disparate directions seemed limited to her. What was missing?

She flowed into battle with ease, her steps either danced or shuffled across the floor, each movement concise and precise. She carved the blobbies then killed them with something else. She could have just as easily used her Radiant energy to do the same using the sword, but she wanted to extend the moment. She wanted to feel.

Her Anima suffused her straight sword, and she was confronted with the fact that it was far from ideal. The forging was messy, but that could only be expected from factory-made weapons. It held none of the charm of Fri’Avgi, or even her Arclight Sword.

Metal Elemental energy. She had not encountered any version of it in the Chaos Sea, the Myriad Planes, or the varied Fysallis she’d been to. The only time she saw and felt it was in Bresia. She could suppose that there were a few on the Imperial Path that had Facets related to it, but the flexibility of Animus, which was potential incarnate, allowed anyone who possessed it to power their myriad techniques without resorting to gathering specific energies.

It had been vastly different in the Arcadia Region where spells and other such techniques require the presence of such energies. Elemental Hearts were cultivated within Magi to allow them to store such energies for when the atmosphere did not have enough, but it was still limited compared to what was naturally available. It was what made Magi of the more common Elements more powerful.

Her thoughts were spinning around and going all over the place, but she felt it all flowing together, and eventually, the varied rivulets would collect into a grand ocean.

Metal Elemental energy was suited for technology, she knew. Firearms in Arcadia, swords, and other such weapons. Tools. Metal is something foundational to technology, at least to most humanoids.

So what was her expression of the Metal Phase of the Sword?

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Every particle within her straight sword was imbued with her Anima. It highlighted how inadequate the thing was. A straight sword, but it wasn’t quite in the pattern of an arming sword. The blade itself was twenty inches long, and the hilt, along with the crossguard, was six inches. It was shorter than the sideblade, but it was sharp on both sides, which wasn’t really doing much for it, she realised. The blade wasn’t that wide, an inch and a half. And with both sides sharp, it didn’t leave much of the centre to keep things stable. It was why the sword was a bit more fragile than she was used to.

But then again, in her early years of fighting, she’d gone through sideblades like water. And she didn’t have the senses back then to really check how sturdy Imperial craftsmanship was.

Probably better than here, honestly, considering that weaponsmiths back home would have Facets made for such things.

She also trained with numerous types of swords, and she’d long settled on the shape of her sunblades. But perhaps that was a mistake.

No, she was sure it was. One weapon did not fit everything, much as she’d prefer it to.

The straight sword was starting to annoy her. It was merely adequate to her needs, but…

Could she do something about it?

Her Anima was infused into the sword, hence, it took but a thought to allow Radiance to infuse into it as well. The metal softened but did not deform. Not when she held its shape with her Will and Anima. She didn’t use it to kill the blobbies though.

Still, there was the question of where she was going to get extra metal. The heat and her Will softened the sword and ruined its edge. The hilt wrapping was made of rubber mixed in with some other materials, and she carefully kept them from heating up. She wanted to extend the hilt though, so she could use it for two-handed fighting. And she needed to extend the blade. For all of that, she needed more metal, and while she could get it from the guns and ammo in her backpack, she didn’t want to destroy looted weapons. Well, it would be easier to use them, come to think of it, but she’d also have to separate the gunpowder from the bullet casing and she wasn’t sure she could do that without touching them off.

But there was a source of iron nearby, and she was punching them to oblivion. Each blobby was made from that yellow blood, and she could sense the little bits of Metal within them. Less than a percent of their mass was iron, a thousandth of a percent probably, but there were hundreds of thousands of the things just by basing things on how long the route was to get here.

She slapped one to death, infused her kinesis into the mess, then pulled it out. Her hand held molten metal in the shape of a sword, and she added the tiny bit she found from the blobby into it. She squished it down into an orb when she felt how different the allies and metal were from each other. She didn’t know anything about forging beyond what her idle curiosity led her to, but she knew that fragments merged inexpertly would have their fault lines as a weakness. So if she wanted the sword she was forging to work, she needed to do it properly.

But she was probably botching the process, huh? Still, she could feel it. She could feel the metal within the orb. The rubber hilt wrappings had been unravelled and were sitting inside her hip satchel. As she killed more and more blobbies, she gathered the little particles of metal she found and joined them into the molten orb sitting above her right palm.

She must have gotten through a thousand of them before she determined that the metal would be enough. So, she started spinning the orb to stretch it out into a vague sword shape. Well, a molten rod would be more accurate.

She pressed her Will and Intent into the metal, and since it was all infused with her Anima, it was moulded with it just as easily. In less than a blink of an eye, she pressed the rod until it was the appropriate width, then shaped it to a longsword. Thirty-inch blade, and about eleven inches for the hilt and crossguard. Sharp at the tip and ok both edges. The crossguard she kept as a simple bar. The particles along the blade and edges weren't quite smooth, but she did her best to get it serviceable.

All the while she avoided getting piled on by the blobbies, counter attacking as needed, and killing afterwards.

It might have taken an hour to finish the forging, and she didn't know how to pull heat off the metal. She simply cast a spell, Water Sphere, from transformed Radiance, and quenched the blade.

The edges weren't sharp! What did she do wrong? Boo.

We'll, she still had her Anima infused, so she simply spent her Intent to sharpen the blade and clean it up. Another ten minutes, and she had her longsword. She didn't bother wrapping it with the rubber strip and used it to fight.

Eh, it wasn't much better than the straight sword, so maybe it was wasted effort? She did find out that she could use the blood of her enemies to forge a weapon, so that was nice, heh.

Her sword style could be practiced with any shape of blade but the longsword, which was in between the greatsword and the arming sword in usage, was not one she utilized outside of practice. It was nimbler than the greatsword and could be used with one hand or two. For her current foes, the flexibility was quite useful.

Her dance grew more heated as she apes up the slaughter. She continued to father the metal from the blood, turning it into a molten sphere hovering around her hair. If she killed another thousand, she might be able to forge another sword, huh. She had no intention of becoming a weaponsmith, but this was interesting for now.

As she wielded her new longsword, she allowed her senses to linger in he metal. She did this to further her insights in the Metal Phase of the Sword, and… she was sure there was something.

Tiger Lao and Elsie, even little Matsumi, spoke of how their Anima infused into their chronian gear allowed them to feel through it like it was their flesh. Well, not Elsie, but the other two.

When she initially infused into the straight sword, she hadn't felt any such thing, but with her freshly forged longsword, there was something. A resonance.

There was not enough Metal Elemental energy to actually do anything, but the resonance was between herself, the sword, and the molten orb.

She continued dancing, and suddenly, she was aware of time. She'd been fighting for a couple of days now. Huh.

With a shrug, she continued. The tunnel, which suddenly felt like arteries or veins, continued on. Was the name Dragon Fall literal? Was it the entire mountain range that surrounded the city? Who could…

Who was she kidding? She knew who did it. The memory surfaced, but it was only a glimmer in the dark. The unmistakable figure of that perverted old man, surrounded by a golden halo of Anima shaped into a colossal avatar, striking down an equally colossal figure of a long, reptilian, thing. A dragon, she supposed.

And she was right in the middle of it's corpse.

Or was it a corpse? What would it take to kill something hundreds of longstrides long and billions of MiJin in mass?

She shivered and the blobbies, probably an aspect of the creature's internal defenses, pressed closer.

The molten orb grew big enough that she would be able to make another longsword if she wanted. Ah, she was still missing her belt knife. She could use one now, and come to think of it…

Grglgrl.

She was hungry. She was still in the smaller tunnels, but it should be easy enough to secure a rest area. She moved away from the wall with the pustules, spread her Anima perception carefully, and spotted a gap that would lead her back to the bigger tunnel. Ah, those were probably the arteries and this was a mere capillary wasn't it?

Maybe she should venture deeper into the corpse and make sure the Dragon was really dead, huh?