Tristan remembered thinking that a tier eight beast would be comparable to a tier six fighter, as the people making those ratings were ignorant about forces. After meeting the sloth, Tristan realized that he might need to curb his overconfidence. If the civil protectors and elders had been involved in the rating system, forces might have been taken into consideration. They were aware of them, as they had recognized that Shadow Fist had one, they were just ignorant of how to attain them.
No more fighting unknown beasts without doing his research. With prep, the bone sloth would have been easy to kill. He could have made a pit trap with decay covered spikes at the bottom. The beast was not attentive to its surroundings, so it would most certainly fall in given the proper motivation. A compressed fire blast should be enough to shove the spikes through the weakened bones and win him the encounter.
The same had to be true of the drake. It hadn’t broken into the caldera yet, so that meant preparation was able to drive it off. That also meant, at least for now, Tristan needed to treat it as a genuine tier eight and give it the proper respect.
“So, what exactly are drakes and dragons? Dragons were in the temple’s biology tomes, but not much was said other than ‘stay away,’” Tristan asked.
Vulcan chuckled, “There’s a good reason for that. Dragons are one of the few sentient beasts, which means that they can be bargained with. Information suppression was a common item for them to bargain for. Any group unable to fight them would gladly restrict knowledge to avoid being attacked. Typically, they have fire breath, metallic scales which are great for crafting, and somewhat weak air manipulation that allows them to fly within an atmosphere.”
Tristan almost derailed the conversation by asking what an atmosphere was. From sentence context, he could work out that it was a fancy word for sky.
Vulcan continued, “Dragons, especially elder dragons, are among the strongest naturally occurring creatures. The weakest adult that I had to deal with was around tier eleven, and the strongest I have read about was tier twenty. Humans can get stronger due to possessing a spirit that can hold an extra force, but barely anyone reaches that high. So yeah, stay away from dragons.”
“Drakes, wyrms, and wyverns are the attempts of alchemists and flesh crafters to create dragons. While none of these measure up to a real dragon, as they are not sentient, they do possess a few of their traits. Drakes have hard scales and fire breath, wyverns have air manipulation and hard scales, and wyrms are the ones left out, getting only the metallic scales. And before you ask, you aren’t ready to fight any of them, even a knockoff dragon is still a knockoff of a dragon.”
Tristan had no frame of reference for how powerful a dragon was. Except that they were capable of tangling with gods. Tristan imagined a creature capable of fighting Viral and had to agree with Vulcan. Even a creature with a fraction of that power would be out of his league.
“How many dragons are out in the world?” Tristan asked, he would need to make plans to avoid them.
“A few hundred, with only a handful of elder dragons,” Vulcan answered, “Don’t worry about running into them, they can hibernate for decades at a time and don’t view humans as a wise food source.”
“Why is that?” Tristan asked. From his point of view, the caldera would be a great source of food. Before the ghost crabs, there were nearly sixty thousand people waiting to be eaten. Cattle and work animals would be more than large enough as a meal to facilitate hibernation.
“My uncle. An elder dragon killed his first wife and kids, so he attempted to exterminate the whole race. Came pretty close to accomplishing it too. Before they finally handed over the guilty dragon, he had dropped the species’s population into the lower double digits,” Vulcan sent a mental shrug, “with a species as long lived as they are, that sticks pretty well in their memories.”
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The wave of relief from that statement made it feel like a weight was taken off his shoulders. Now he only had to worry about the dragon’s ferrel mutated relative. Yeah, he wasn’t sure that made him feel any better. He had enough food from the fight that had gone on above ground, he would just have to wait for the drake’s interest to wane. Thankfully, he had something to occupy his time with.
Turning his attention to the kharkodine ore, he inspected its odd properties, “What would be the best use of this thing?”
“Well, I would make an energy based bubble shield out of it, but you're about ten tiers too early to put something like that together,” Vulcan sent him an image of himself wearing a chest plate, covered in runes and pathways that projected what did look like a soap bubble. Tristan felt that there had to be more to it than just absorption and soap. Vulcan continued, “For you, forging anything might be a bit beyond your ability which is a bit of a disappointment. However, an alchemical augmentation is not beyond your abilities.”
“I thought you said you did not know much about alchemy,” Tristan said.
“That is mostly true, but some things do overlap. Have you considered why the metal you call tower steel doesn’t dissipate like the adamance plate you like to make?” Tristan nodded, “Well it's simple, force constructs are made of pure force, which is not natural and cannot be sustained without constant infusions of force. Tower steel is a metal that has one aspect of itself enhanced via alchemy. I used it all the time to make my products better. Your alloys fall under the same umbrella, as they are augmentations of standard constructs, it's also why your force has less output when it comes to combat.”
“So you want me to give my knife an alchemical bath?” Tristan asked.
“No, I want you to give your body an alchemical bath. Remember how I said that some alchemists would cut off body parts to make themselves more powerful? That's what we can do.”
Tristan frowned, “I am not cutting off an arm or leg to give myself power, the risks are too great.”
“Why, you’ll be wasting a good half of the kharkodine’s efficacy if you don’t,” Vulcan said, “with the healing alloy it isn’t even a risk.”
Tristan would have eventually buckled to his nagging, but he frowned as he looked over at the skull in his bag. Vulcan had said part of it would wasted. Somehow a skull had been alchemically modified, something that should be impossible if one needed to remove a body part before augmenting it.
“So, what you’re saying is that I don’t need to slice off body parts to use it?” Tristan probed.
The feeling Tristan got from Vulcan was one of shock. If he had a body, his mouth would have been open, shocked speechless at the wastefulness that Tristan displayed. Once Vulcan collected himself he answered, “It would be a waste. Are you that afraid of removing and reattaching appendages.”
“Making comments implying I am a coward will not make me more likely to listen to you,” Tristan said, “Now how does the nonsadist method work? I was under the impression that a soul would prevent any augmentations.”
Vulcan grumbled a bit before finally answering, “A soul does not interact with the forces and the world, that does not make it impermeable. Thats why the essence reservoirs dissolve when you eat them, your soul has an intent the reservoir does not, so it dissolves. This kharkodine ore is more than potent enough to overwhelm any resistance your soul puts up. Though a good portion will be wasted, by that I mean you could augment one limb instead of all four.”
That made Tristan uncomfortable. Did that mean a strong enough entity could forcefully warp his body? He hoped that someone like Viral did not take prisoners. Whoever had owned the skull in life had been a very unfortunate person.
“That is fine, the cost of failure in your scenario is death, I can’t survive out here without arms. My way will lower that cost dramatically while not removing the possible benefits of success,” Tristan explained his thought process.
Vulcan huffed but acquiesced. Tristan could tell that he was dissatisfied, not that he could do anything about it. Tristan was unwilling to maim himself.
“Well,” Tristan prodded, “How are we going to get this done.”
“What’s your level of pain tolerance?” Vulcan asked.
He would have been offended at the question if he couldn’t feel Vulcan’s concern and curiosity, “It's pretty high, I think. I don’t know that much can top getting one's heart ripped out.”
“Fair enough, have you ever heard of gout before?” Vulcan asked.
“Yes, it is when a large volume of something is expelled,” Tristan had heard the term applied to blood after an artery was nicked.
“Uh, no, it's a disease that causes crystals to grow within softer tissue. We’ll be doing something along those lines, but with metal instead of crystal, “ Vulcan calmly explained.
Tristan’s eyes widened, that might just be worse than getting his heart ripped out.