“I see what you mean about the descriptions. Very minimal,” Matt said. “We’re still under the communication block?”

“We are. Thought ya might have something to say.”

Matt pulled a stool away from the wall and sat down. “Without going into details, more than a few of these armor pieces have names and functions that indicate they know about my past. I don’t even think I have to distrust you, since I don’t have any idea how you’d even know. But how does the armor know?”

The old man shrugged. “It’s one of the mysteries of crafting. Sometimes the hammer knows things ya don’t, like it’s pounding history into the piece. I burned a question token on it once. The system said it didn’t know. Damn waste.”

Derek’s eyes bugged out. “A question token? Where’d you manage to get that?”

“Don’t ask.”

“What’s a question token?” Matt hadn’t heard of them, and at his question, the old man threw in a few more pinches of powder over the fire. He probably had a bit of time.

“Ultra-rare item. Can’t buy them, can’t make them, the system seems to award them at random, but there’s a tiny chance of one dropping even when you’re doing big things. Historic things. If you use it, the system has to answer any question it knows the answer to.” Once again, Derek was surprising Matt with the amount of knowledge that he head. Access to arcane knowledge didn’t seem like his cup of tea, but it apparently was.

“Any question?” Matt asked.

“Close. Ya can’t ask things like ‘what should I do’, or anything that’s about what decision ya should make. But ya can ask it something about the world, something it can answer with a simple fact. Where treasure is buried, where enemy weak spots are. That sort of thing.”

“And you burned it on a crafting question?” Derek asked.

The old man shrugged again. “It was a more peaceful time. We were winning, then.”

Matt didn’t know if he could trust the old man absolutely, but nothing about this seemed suspicious, at least to the extent the old man understood it. Matt wished he could have gotten a look at the exact wording the system had used. It seemed odd it wouldn’t know about something that was under its purview.

That said, it was time to put on the armor. Matt wasn’t immune to cool shit, and this was the coolest armor he had ever seen. Gone was any jealousy he had hidden over Artemis’ cool ranger gear or Derek and Brennan’s light armor. He didn’t even have to ask to know this was better. He could almost feel the special boiling off it.

Luckily, the walking-around clothes the laundress had given him would fit under the armor just fine. Matt slipped off his boots and cloak, and put on the pants, chest piece, leg guards, and arm guards.

“One last thing, boy.” The old man stopped Matt before he put on his helmet. Instead, he fished around in a drawer before coming up with a small slip of parchment. “Almost forgot. Part of the service. Once you put on that last piece, it marks you as the owner. Makes it easier to sort things out if there’s a dispute over ownership, but woulda kept me from doing this.”

He slapped the parchment down on the chest piece, which suddenly grew hot as the enchantment etched in. “All-purpose enchantment. It helps clean and mend the equipment, and makes it a bit easier to get on and off. Had it sitting around for another project that went wrong. It’s expensive, but means I don’t have to tell ya how to take care of the armor. The chest piece should spread it around. Now, you slap on that helmet, and it’s yours. Fully and truly.”

Matt grinned. That fit his life just fine. With a sweep, he pulled the mask down over his face, completing the set. And then, suddenly, he was burning to death. With an alert noise, a system window popped up in an unexpected color.

Ding!

Gaian Authority activated. Modifying enchantment…..

Enchantment modification complete. Previous function maintained. Equipment set bonus created.

Effects: Soul bound. Equipment Descriptions Hidden. For purposes of transportation, the entire equipment set (helmet, chest piece, leg and arm guards, pants) acts as if it is a part of the wearer’s body.

Matt read the description over and over. He had to, if only to take his mind off the screaming. It was several moments before he remembered the screaming was his, driven by a burning sensation that drilled all the way down to his bones. Then, suddenly, it was over.

“My god, boy. That was a hell of a thing. Ya all right? I’ve never seen a set bind like that.”

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Matt, holy shit. What the hell? Can’t even put clothes on without causing a major calamity?” Lucy was pissed, and not aiming her rage very well. Matt didn’t blame her much. It had been a busy couple of days.

“Nothing’s wrong. Just… that interference still up, old man?”

The old man nodded.

Matt gasped in some more air, trying to forget the pain of that process as quickly as possible. “Something from home, that I didn’t think followed me here, messed with the process. Soul bound the equipment, says it hid the descriptions. I have no idea how.”

Lucy gasped. “Gaian System shit?”

“How do ya mean, followed you here? That’s not something most things can do, son.”

“It’s… I mean, it might be something that’s a bit more connected to me than you’d think, I guess. I don’t really know how it works. But I hope it doesn’t do it again. That was horrible.”

“I’d wager it was if what ya say is true. Soul binding is something only the system is supposed to do. Not exactly easy work. Some demon magic brands the soul. I’ve seen it happen. Ugly stuff, that.” The old man shuddered at some old memory. “But enough. Looks like you got something out of it, anyway. And the dust is almost done. Anything else to say?”

“Just thank you.” Matt sat up, then stood, testing the armor as he moved around a bit in it. “It feels incredible.”

“Ya like that? Just wait. It’s about to get better.” The old man reached behind a bench, extracting a thinner, lighter steel rod, one that was a little shorter, faster, and more wicked in all respects than what he had used before.

“It’s time for testing.”

—

The system instance was almost completely out of good will for this particular invader. First, instead of causing the chaos and mixing the pot the way that the system instance had hoped, he had almost done more to maintain the balance than to change it. He had nullified the effect of the cursed hearts almost completely, countering the loss of a colony with the loss of a major demon trading hub and an entire invading army.

If that wasn’t enough, he was breaking rules left and right as he did it. That shovel he carried was an almost complete mystery to the instance. Maybe if the system knew how it was made, he could figure out what it did. But as it was, the instance could see it, observe it in almost the same way a human would, and even interact with it in the smallest fashions. But he didn’t know anything about it. He certainly didn’t know why it could cut through force fields like nothing and also ignore mana-based defenses in other beings.

It wasn’t just that the shovel did things it shouldn’t do. It shouldn’t exist at all.

Then, before the system could properly understand or register the absolute monstrosity of an armor set that the old man had made, he played some kind of trick and blocked the system’s vision with what amounted to a local-mana dust storm. And now, when the invader and his friends had exited the building, the armor had gone completely invisible to the system. No description. No nothing. It was like it was scanning the invader’s own skin.

Worse, he knew the invader wasn’t going to talk about it. He had asked in several ways, all with escalating levels of unsubtle hints. The asshole had ignored him, and hadn’t been particularly good at concealing why.

The good news was that all of this hiding was about to come to an end. The shovel might not interact with mana, but almost everything the old man put effort into did. Once the armor was working with atmospheric mana, he’d be able to see how it flowed and analyze what it did. There was a lot that the system could glean from that, if he was willing to put in the work. The system might be lazy, but he wouldn’t sit still and watch a catastrophe waiting to happen like this, and he’d be damned if this human would beat him.

—

“Hoo, good job there, boy. You kept on your feet.”

Matt didn’t feel like he was doing a good job. The old man now knew every one of the tricks he felt comfortable revealing, and was running a whole new set of tactics to counter everything Matt could do. He had figured out the motion-less requirement of charge attack somehow, and when Matt tried that, he’d literally get stuff chucked at him until he had to stop.

And he did have to. The old man threw hard.

When he didn’t charge, the old man changed his tactics to account for the shovel’s mana-ignoring abilities by just never letting it get close to touching him. He moved the rod like a spear, keeping a gap with Matt most of the time and evading like a feather on the wind whenever the distance closed.

Matt had slipped some ash into his pocket before they left the workshop, but even that didn’t help. The old man’s gloating about him keeping his feet came after he threw a handful of ash directly in his eyes, which must have hurt. Any other opponent would have flinched, or recoiled, or anything. The old man didn’t. He just tanked the pain, finished his strike, and hit Matt hard enough in the chest to cave in a tank.

Even the fact that Matt didn’t fall down was mostly due to the smith’s work. The armor didn’t block everything, but it blocked much, much more of the strike than made sense. It wasn’t just transferring the energy to non-lethal surface areas, it was also negating some of it away. And the follow-up strike had hurt, but hadn’t unbalanced him at all. The boots saw to that.

Could Matt fight the old man on even terms if he showed all his cards? Maybe. He still had some neat inertia-bending talents he hadn’t used, and some ideas for using the pit as a sort of mobile trap that might slow his opponent down. But he had no interest in that at the moment. This was about putting the armor through its paces, which meant getting hit was almost the point. And, near as he could tell without throwing up an entire force-field and burning his daily charge of power, the armor was doing its job wonderfully.

—

If the system was peeved before, now it was throwing a full tantrum. It could see mana disappear into the armor, and it could even see it get expelled in some cases. But what it couldn’t see was what in the fuck was happening between those two points. It was like a curtain was between it and the armor, blocking it from knowing how the effects were happening. Did it have guesses? Sure. But without seeing the actual process, there was no way for it to calculate exactly what was going on, much less to extrapolate what the problem with the armor’s visibility was in the first place.

And that, of all things, was the final straw. The mana on this planet was its own. When a mage cast a spell or a tank nullified a strike using it, it was with the system’s blessing and guidance. Did it take a cut? It did, and it deserved the percentage for keeping the balance. That was the whole point. Now this asshole was coming in, taking what wasn’t his, and screwing with the mana in some way.

That wouldn’t stand. Not in the system’s house. And finally, terrifyingly, it decided to do something it really, really didn’t want to do.

It phoned headquarters.