In order to try out my idea, we needed to get back to the city. Petal suggested it would be a bad idea if any other elves saw us inside the wall, so we agreed to return to the city that night. We tried to give back the cloaks we’d borrowed to disguise ourselves when we went back to the wall earlier, but she insisted we keep them as gifts.
“Before the Blight it was rare to give one of our cloaks to an outsider. Since then it has never happened. Having one is the mark of being a friend of the elves, and if you do not count as friends after what you’ve done, and all you hope to do, then we have no friends at all.”
“You mean it?” Jane said. “I’m a friend of the elves?”
Petal laughed. “And I am proud to call you one.”
Elven Cloak of the Green
Imbued with the power of the Green by the forest elves, this cloak makes the wearer nearly impossible to detect when hiding among the trees.
Powers:
One With The Green - Camouflage in natural surroundings
We thanked her for the precious gift, but I just needed one more thing. With Petal’s help and permission I located the perfect tree, a young sapling about ten feet tall with a trunk as big around as my forearm. Now ready to leave, it was decided that the best course of action would be to undo the creation of an opening in the wall, at least for now, so after saying goodbye and promising to come back — and with the assurance that the guards would allow us inside again — I used Shadow to close up the gap I’d made, and we began the trek back to the city.
I was ready to start work on my idea right away, but Sigrid lectured me on the importance of sleep to my health so I was forced to go to bed. I could barely sleep for all the things churning around in my head, but I managed to grab a few hours of rest.
The next morning Sigrid had me up early for a run, then there was kung fu training that I could not miss lest I face the wrath of Sifu, but once all that was over I wasted no time knocking on Nina and Byron’s door.
“Daniel, what can we do for you?” Nina said after answering the door.
“I need a favor.”
“Of course,” she said. “Anything for you.”
Byron came to the door behind his wife. “What do you need, buddy?”
“Can I borrow your Artifice forge?”
“Sure,” he said without a moment’s hesitation, “but it won’t be of any use for you without the Artifice power.”
I grinned at them. “I was planning on borrowing that too.”
The rest of the day I spent in the courtyard with Byron. As far as we knew then, there were three different powers that were used for crafting. Byron’s power was called Artifice, but it had two parts: fabrication, which allowed him to fabricate objects from basic raw materials, and enchant, which could enhance items with special abilities. Back on Earth, he had been a computer programmer for one of the big video game developers, and there were a lot of parallels between what he did back then and the mental part of using Artifice.
At first he could only fabricate simple items, but now his mastery of the power was up to Adept and he was able to make more complicated objects, even things like simple machines with moving parts inside.The other part of Artifice was used to enhance items. For example, if he made a basic sword, Byron could then use his power to add special abilities to it. The exact ability imprinted into the item depended on two things: the will and intent of the Artificer, and the materials used.
Morgan’s Alchemy was another crafting power, primarily used to create potions, as well as to combine raw ingredients to create new materials that could be used to craft items. It was the perfect power for a chemist. She and Sifu had worked together on the mimic potion, using bits of the Jackalope, Chimera, Gorgon, and Doppelganger, and probably no small amount of will, to make it. I was hoping that Byron and I could work together like that on my idea.
The last crafting power was the one I had, Synthesis. And we already know what it could do. Along with any crafting power came the Gift of an extra-dimensional inventory, and each of the crafting powers required the use of a corresponding forge, which Byron and Morgan had both been given in their inventory from the start. You may be wondering where my Synthesis forge was, since I wasn’t given one. Because Synthesis was used to combine my own abilities, I was effectively my own forge. The other thing about crafting powers is that they all required affinity with Void.
For my plan I'd need a new item fabricated, but I wanted it to be quite intricate and use rare and valuable materials, so Nina was off designing it and collecting the materials with the help of Sigrid and Jane. My hope was that I could combine my crafting powers with Byron’s to imbue one of my own powers into that item, so my first step was to copy Artifice, then use Synthesis to combine it with Synthesis and make a new power capable of doing what I needed. I was worried it wouldn’t work, or worse, would mess up my Synthesis power somehow, so it was with great relief that I read the System notice of the results.
System: Synthesis successful
The name I’d chosen for the new power was, as Sigrid would say, ridiculous, but it made me happy.
Regular Artifice looked like this:
Artifice - Novice: Fabricate items and imbue them with special properties; Artifice Forge Required; Affinity with Void required
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And this was my new, synthesized power:
Isn’t It Enchanting - Novice: Fabricate items and imbue them with special properties, including the user’s own abilities; Artifice Forge Required; Affinity with Void required
So far, so good.
Step two was to quickly improve my mastery of the new power. I’d need to be more than a Novice to accomplish what I had in mind, even with Byron’s help. I’m sure you’ve guessed my plan by now: I was going to make a magic item with Everyone Gets A Heal on it that the Magikist could use to cure the Blight.
I spent the entire afternoon and most of the evening doing two things: enchanting items to level up my power, and eating to recover mana so I could keep enchanting. Using the Artifice forge consumed a lot of mana, and using my customized power required exponentially more than basic Artifice. Also, with basic Artifice you could use the mana crystals collected from dead monsters to fuel the forge, but my power could not, so I had to use all my own mana. Hence the gluttony.
Even with all the gorging, if I didn’t have the mana battery effect of I Can Keep Going And Going, there was no way I could’ve done it. There were so many things that had to come together to make all this possible. I needed that rare mimic potion to start with. I needed the rare Synthesis power I got at random from the gacha wheel to make it a permanent power, something which only happened because I had the unique Murder Hobo gift. I needed the unique Good At Everything gift I had at the start to have multiple affinities to combine. I needed to have Byron’s Artifice to copy and his forge to use. I needed the rare I Can Keep Going And Going mana battery I got from an observer to fuel the forge.
The odds against one person amassing all of these are probably incalculable, and I was willing to bet the game designers never even conceived of the possibility that someone could get them and use them this way. If they had, they would’ve made a rule against it.
Such unbelievable luck. It couldn’t possibly last.
My efforts to level up Isn’t It Enchanting made the crew pretty happy. I used their own items as practice, so everyone walked away with a little extra on their gear. By far the most popular enchantment was adding Wayne’s Affinity Blade power onto a weapon, which I was able to do once I evolved my power to Competent. By the time I was done, everyone on Team Maple Leaf and the Round Table had a weapon they could enhance with their affinity effects.
Actually, it didn’t make everyone happy. I’m pretty oblivious most times to how other people are feeling, but even I noticed that Byron, although excited at first, started getting a bit glum as the day wore on. I knew he already felt like his abilities contributed less to the team than other peoples’, and there I was taking his power and doing things with it he couldn’t. He still had to use materials to enchant anything, while I could theoretically copy any power, Synthesize it with other powers, and put it onto an item without having to use any material components.
“Wow, this is exhausting,” I said sometime in the late afternoon while chowing down on a huge bowl of pasta. “You’re lucky, Byron. I wish I could use mana crystals.”
“Mmm,” he said glumly.
“And I can’t wait to see what you’ll be able to do once you evolve Artifice up to Expert or Master. In fact, it would be a great help to everyone if you could work on doing that as quickly as possible.”
“I know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re trying to make me feel better.”
“Is it working?”
He shrugged. “Kinda, I guess.”
I scooped up some sauce with a chunk of bread. “My blessing is also my curse, you know. I may be able to do a lot of things, but I’ll never be as good at any of them as other people will be."
"Uh huh."
"The level most people are at now in their abilities is where I cap out, so when you level it up you’ll be able to do things with Artifice I could only dream of. While I might be good at everything, I’ll never be great at anything. But that’s okay, you know? Everybody’s got their role to play.”
“I suppose,” he said. “Your role just seems so much more important.”
I snorted spaghetti at that, almost choking on the noodles. “Hardly. Listen, you know how all this is based on various fantasy and isekai stories, right? Well, if this was one of those stories, I wouldn’t be the protagonist. That’s someone else. I am, at best, a handy sidekick. No, not even that. I’m not Batman. I’m not Robin. I’m the utility belt.”
“Is that really how you see yourself?” Byron said.
“It is what it is,” I said. “And that’s okay. I'm just really happy to be useful.”
Byron considered me with an expression I couldn't figure out. “You’re weird, you know that?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
We were just about ready to call it a night when Nina appeared with Sigrid and Jane, all three of them looking very pleased with themselves.
“Is it done?” I said.
“Take a look for yourself,” Nina said, then reached into her inventory and pulled out a sheet of paper with a diagram of a long, wooden staff. Notations on the side showed what the different parts of it were made of. The shaft was to be made from the white mithril wood of that sapling we procured from the elven forest, with a delicate filigree of mithril metal like a silver tattoo etched into the wood, running along its entire length. It was based on the floral pattern on the floor of the elven meeting room; it was also stitched into the hem of the elven cloaks, so we’d assumed it was an important design element to the elves, their version of the Greek key motif. The staff’s narrow base would be capped with more mithril, and embedded in its top was a large, polished green mana crystal. More green mana crystal fragments sparkled from the center of each of the mithril flowers running along the shaft. She also pulled all those materials from her inventory as well.
“It’s going to be so beautiful,” Byron said. “You did a wonderful job, honey.”
“Thanks,” Nina said, accepting her husband’s praise with a grateful kiss on his cheek. “So, Daniel, is this along the lines of what you had in mind?”
“It’s a hundred times better than I imagined,” I said. “It’s perfect.”
Sigrid and Jane both gave Nina a high-five.
“See?” Jane said. “Told you he’s easy to please.”
“Thank you so much, Nina,” I said, ignoring Jane’s teasing. I was getting pretty good at that. “And thanks to you guys too for finding all the materials. Let’s start fabricating.”
“Are you crazy?” Byron said. “Rest up. You’ve been going non-stop at a crazy pace all day so let me handle this bit, okay?”
“Yeah,” Sigrid said, “you look like total shit, Daniel. Get some sleep, will ya?”
Byron put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll need you around for the enchanting part, but I can handle the fabrication by myself. That much I can do. Go sleep.”
“You really are dependable, you know?” I said gratefully.
“He has his moments,” Nina said, hugging him from behind.