I woke up late. While I was doing my wake-up stretches, I learned I weighed more so it took me a while to get used to my new weight. It looks like my subdermal armour upgrade seemed to have come with the small disadvantage of it weighing more.

The weight wasn’t too bad and honestly, I was getting kind of used to my body changing fast. After the stretches, I took a moment to just look at myself in the mirror. While I never really looked like a child I now looked like a proper man and kind of a scary one.

Currently, I am 6 feet 6 inches with wide shoulders and a lot of muscle mass. My muscles weren’t too big which allowed me to keep my flexibility. There was still that big scar from the goblin shaman, and I have a lot more scars all over from the battles I have had. I have been keeping my hair short, but it looks like my beard will finally start to come in.

If I flexed, you could see the subdermal armour pieces basically everywhere that won’t compromise movement. The one thing that I still didn’t know was how strong this armour really was. For that, I took out the healing potion and my knife.

Just using the knife itself didn't even damage my skin so I needed to power it up with my ability to start the testing. I was able to cut my skin without adding too much strength to the knife but when I hit the armour plate the knife wouldn’t go any deeper.

I slowly ramped up the power and when I reached 40% of my maximum empowerment of the knife it finally started to leave a scratch. At around 80% the armour became useless. If I wasn’t careful and only lightly put pressure on the knife, I could have accidentally cut my whole hand off.

Then I used my armour ability to boost myself and then I once again wasn’t able to do anything with the knife. I wasn’t going to try testing empowered strikes. I was just glad that this armour seemed to be better than normal steel. The one thing I did notice was that while my armour ability did work it didn’t seem to be able to boost as much as it did my regular armour.

Pouring the healing potion onto my wound quickly sealed my skin. It seemed to even be working on the subdermal armour which I was glad to see. It was at this point that I noticed the pool of blood on the ground, “Shit.” I should have done this outside.

The pain was barely there, and it seems like I’m still used to seeing a lot of blood. Letting out a big sigh kind of helped. At least I was quite practised at removing blood. The key to it is to keep going at it, it will take a while but eventually, you will be able to clean it up. With that, I went back to the routine that I have been having for the past few weeks.

Making proper armour out of the beetle boss was not practical. The material was just too thick, and I didn’t have the appropriate abilities to make it work. Apparently, there were specialized crafters that work on chitin and my current skills weren’t up to the task.

With the knowledge I had gained, I just sold all those armour pieces for a good amount of credit. Which I used to get some more iron and a few more interesting lumps of metal that the miners have been able to gather.

Energy and mana and I guess even holy power can change regular materials into having special properties but figuring out if a material has changed into something useful or worthless can be hard. The workers who were handling the changed materials noticed me being certain about my choices. When I explained to them that I could identify accurately what those changes were, things got a bit out of hand and after about a few hours I was made the official appraisal of unique materials.

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While it will be more work and a bit more responsibility, I didn’t mind it. Examining and understanding new materials and how they work is extremely interesting to me and every time I get an opportunity to check a new changed material, I feel like someone was giving me a Christmas present.

Unfortunately, even for my abilities, some materials proved to be difficult to understand which is why I now find myself in my smithy testing out small pieces of different materials to find out what they could do. I already needed to make two cabinets and three shelves to store the new materials as too many of them were coming in for me to keep up.

Our miner population boomed so there were a lot of them making groups to mine. They were quite happy to leave unique finds at my home so I wouldn’t have to go to the village to pick them up and they wouldn’t need to haul them there.

With the new materials, I was able to make even better weapons for the Vikings who were willing to pay more to have better materials. I was learning a lot, but my smithing skill was climbing slowly only gaining 4 levels bringing me to level 17.

Pretty sure this is supposed to be the normal levelling speed after talking to a few smiths in the village. It looks like my past life’s knowledge helped me to level up to a certain degree but that was now definitely over for smithing.

Like this time went by quickly and I found myself gearing up to join the marching army that had left about a week ago. Our main defensive force left to deal with monsters that were occasionally invading our land were the wolves and Goose. They were all now first rank and could be a valuable asset for the battle, but we were going to have a more defensive battle which they aren’t well built for.

For the fight ahead I still spent a decent amount of time making myself new armour even though I knew that I was going to grow out of it in about a month. The weather now was a lot colder, and the leaves were already falling. It seems that my meditation on the weather was correct, and winter will come early this year. I did a last check on my gear and then started to run.

I didn’t stop at the village and just kept going. There was no need to go at full speed so I was going relatively slow but steadily so I would catch up with the army. It took three days before I made it there while running without taking a break.

From this point on I assumed control of the entire army numbering 383. It was a small group, but I wasn’t going to recreate the spartan success. In the end, all of the 300 died but all that it would have taken to break the Persian army would have been to kill their God king.

It will be difficult to anger the enemy while keeping their confidence up so I would be able to fight Vivienne “The Slicer” Hearthweaver without our armies engaging in battle. Taking down a first-rank mage should be impossible for a first-rank fighter, but I have unique advantages and more importantly a stupid amount of energy to use. With The Slicer killed the enemy army will lose their last heavy hitter so even if they attack it will be a simple but time-consuming battle that will kill a lot of enemies.

While I’m certain that there will still be a fight afterwards, hopefully, we will be able to get the soldiers who were forced into the army to come over to our side. If that happens, we will be able to gain a lot more citizens and enough supplies to make sure that none of us starves even with the influx of thousands of people. None of the people in the army know the complete plan. I felt a bit bad about lying to them as I looked at the marching columns from a small hill.

But I can’t reveal the plan as a few council members were marching with us into battle. They would never support me taking such a big risk but if I succeed, we will be gaining so much. If I fail, I will make sure that The Slicer will use up most of her mana so our fighters will have the best chance of winning. Despite the number differences the defenses that we will set up will not be just for show. They will give the best chance for my army to win even without me.