Encounters were more frequent and larger in number as I closed on the volcano, which was a helpful indicator that I was on the right course. Indeed, encounters were soon coming almost on the heels of one after another, which impressed me with their lack of self-preservation. Carcasses were all over the burning fields and forests behind me, and here came more to sate my need for more Karma.
My soul was Hollow. Meditation had showed it to me, cold and hard and clear in the combined wash of my ki. Even the Essence I was using was affected. I was lucky I had any Essence to devote to my Feats or into Tremble, and was pretty sure I was cross-using ki via my Diamond Vajra to pay for this stuff.
Hollow soul. The only thing that made sense was that I had to pay back all the virtua Karma I'd been granted. Yeah, that was reasonable. That meant a straight Infusion wasn't possible, but Naming Karma was totally separate from the Crafting Feats, and I was a Runesmith anyways. I Invested, I didn't Infuse, when Crafting.
Which, naturally enough, required power comps. Hellooooo, Mr. Fire Drake!
Entering a fight with a fifteen-meter Komodo Dragon that's breathing fire should have been utterly terrifying. I was Undaunted, immune to the effects of fear in this situation where any sane human of Terra would be panicking, and as cool as a cucumber. It snapped at me, I swayed left, cut right, took out its eye as it goggled at my physics-defying lightfoot. As it reeled back, I was already gliding up and cutting up against the mass of its neck, between the scales at the weakest point, with a Weapon literally as hard as diamond… and magically Enhanced higher than that.
The narrow head slammed to the ground, and rich, fiery blood spurted out of its corpse. It didn't even have the chance to bring those big claws ripping at the stone into play.
I took the choicest cuts of hide, its fundamentallum… and ate some of its spinal muscles, because I had the nibbles.
Spicy! I may or may not have cut off a chunk of tail meat the size of a really big ham to chow down on while I kept going…
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Oh, happy, happy day! Could I get much luckier?
Sun Brothers. Two of them!
A cohort of Salamanders was cooling into ash behind me. Two more magical Spears were jutting up out of my Masspack. The half-serpent half-humanoid burning bastards were the strongest of the minion races of Fire, and none of them were pleasant customers. They got along wonderfully with demons and that lot, for instance.
Sun Brothers were a pseudo-monastic 'knighthood' race of the Plane of Fire. Eight feet tall, magnificently muscled, armored with gildensteel plate and shields, with big ol' bastard swords sized for them, the blades nearly five feet long, at their side. They were found in the service of ruling powers of their home plane, seemingly driven to serve greater forces instead of pursuing their own racial agendas.
These two weren't mounted; they usually rode intelligent firemares that could walk on smoke, flames, and lava. They were instead guarding a cleft in the side of the brand-new volcano having digestion problems, out of which a continuous flow of active, bubbling lava was now streaming in magnificent streams and firefalls.
It was out of there that all this crap was coming. So, they were the guards to the intruding Portal, Gate, or whatever.
And they had +Drei Shields, +Drei Armor, and +Vier Swords, +III Flaming.
+Vier. 32k of Karma. Using Name Consumption, I could grab all of that heady Karma and transfer it into Tremble.
That would shorten things by a month… or accelerate things by a month, actually, since the road was just as long.
A shortcut. I smiled brilliantly at the golden-skinned fiery knights who were head and shoulders taller than me as I walked towards them.
They didn't lack courage, picking up their kite shields and stepping forth as I skated towards them, those big Swords rising on guard. They exuded confidence. So what if I had hacked apart a bunch of Salamanders? No doubt they could do the same!
But they had seen me killing, and weren't stupid enough to belittle someone who could one-hit one after another of the creatures.
I stopped thirty yards away, shrugged off my Masspack and set it on the ground. It effectively didn't weigh anything, but the things sticking out of it might affect my maneuverability.
Tremble was singing, two-tones of death, each note like a sword-stroke chipping at their courage. Mnecromonics in the Blade showed me every single creature I'd killed since I'd bonded with it, rode the psychic edge of the Song. The more aware you were, the more you knew what my Sword had done.
I could feel the wavering in their sword stances, just a little. I was this little impure mortal thing, not in armor, and my Sword was Singing death to Fireborn like this?
I charged, not about to wait around for them and tank.
I didn't have fancy Dragon House moves. I had no chi. I had base ki I couldn't project, and I had Feats.
Lots and lots of Feats. Like, ALL the Charging Feats.
One Strike. Spirited Charge. Leap Attack. Improved Power Attack. Powerful Finesse. Headlong Rush. Reckless Charge. Mobility. The Roiling River.
Just regretted that I didn't have Valorous on my Sword, yet.
I went at them. I covered the thirty yards in less than one second, at full speed in one step, Lightning Over the Hill. Despite themselves, I saw their molten eyes widen at my speed, at the way I swayed back and forth even as I was charging them, courtesy of the Waveskating Step and The Roiling River.
Their Swords hacked out.
I Soaked the hits as they sheared just shy of me, my DR eating 23 from each blow, while Elusive Shadow rendered their Power Attack useless. I veered right into the Shield of the one on the left, he dropped it down to take the impact, grunting as I slammed into it with both feet, and he was forced to brace himself against the force of impact as I slammed into him at almost eighty kph. His magical Shield did a lot of the work for him, I flattened against the gildensteel, and then simply kicked off it and backwards.
And up, and down.
His comrade had taken a step forward, chopping down towards me. Now I was above him and descending, his Shield was down, his Sword out of position as I dropped down on him, Tremble orienting on the left eyehole of his helm, and I came down on him for triple damage, of double Power Attack damage, Precise Attack, Weapon Specialization, and Crystal Tears weapon form.
And Profound Artisan. Never forget Profound Artisan. I was the Sage of Swords; appreciate my Artistry!
My Grandmastery of Swords was gained when I realized that the Sword was just a synthesis of all sorts of weapons, it wasn't actually the best weapon at any job. If you wanted to slice, use a saber. If you wanted to hack, use an axe. Pound, a hammer. Crush, a mace or flail. Thrust, a rapier or spear. Stab, a knife or dagger.
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But a Sword was better at all the other jobs then any of those weapons. It was a shitty weapon, but it was better than all the rest.
And I found I could use Spear-only, Axe-only, Knife-only, Hammer-only, and other weapon-specific Feats with my sword, as long as I had Mastery in that weapon and could adapt it.
That was strong by itself. Enter, Profound Artisan.
A simple, ki-centric Feat. Pick a Skill. Gain the synergy bonus of that skill as a damage bonus in your specialized weapon.
A minor damage bonus, on the face of it. +2 damage at five Ranks, +3 at ten, representing artistry and control applied to your weapon.
But my Grandmastery said that this was basically tool-using, and applying Skills to combat. Any tool that might be a Weapon, and any Skill that could be used in combat, was basically the same thing.
And one Feat applying to one skill... became that Feat applying to every eligible Skill.
Four Smithing skills... Mastersmith, uniting them into an overskill, was the key Feat that started this, forming a template for all other Skills. Stealth, used in sneak attacking. Riding, defined combat a-horse. Perception, powered Find the Weakness, allowing you to find a hole in an opponent's defenses. Bluff, powering the ability to Feint. Insight, defending against those Feints. Gemcutter, making hard, superhumanly precise blows at a flaw. Lumberjack, hacking and hewing to and through the fiber of things. Mining, the same to stone. Butcher, taking things apart. Heal, the converse of it, still all about anatomy and how to injure things. Painting, Sculpting, Woodcarving, precise control. Dancing, perfect synergy. Drum, for pounding rhythm...
There were a lot of Skills that fed into this. The Damage bonus I received from it soared... but it required massive Skill investment, massive Feat Investment, massive Mastery investment.
Sustained let me do it, or it simply would have taken too long.
Sagedom was a Title that normally only applied to mastery of a Skill, and being the first in the game to do so. The Sage of Smithing was literally the best smith in the game.
I was the Sage of Swords, because I had turned Skills into the true power of my Swordplay, a fixed foundational bonus nobody else in the game could possibly match.
I punched down through his skull and out the back of his gildensteel helm, Tremble's quillons slamming right into his visor and smashing him over and backwards with the momentum of my attack. I drove him over and backwards and to the ground, my Sword plunging two feet into the stone of the mountain before stopping. His skull slid loudly down my Sword and bounced upon the stone under his body weight.
Combat Focus was already replacing the expended Soak at 4 pts/6 seconds, a combat 'round'.
The other Sun Brother paused as I put my foot on his brother's head, and pulled out my dark sword, ding, ding, none of the brain juices or bits clinging to the metal, his helm protesting the treatment, yet unable to stop me.
Tremble never stopped Singing.
"You have great skill, cold one," he spoke in Pyric. His gaze didn't falter, and if his sword intent didn't seem so firm to me, well, that was on me.
I saw him blink in surprise when I answered him. "Ah, I didn't expect a barbarian like you to be able to appreciate real swordplay," I retorted kindly. "It's a day for new things, I guess."
Flickers of outrage and pride across his features. "Barbarian? My Order existed before your race was born, fireless creature!"
"Ah, yes, the arrogance of decadence and the close-minded pride of the fallen." I nodded solemnly at him, which only seemed to infuriate him more. "To only be expected in savages who have failed to evolve to greater things."
"Die, you frozen, lifeless abomination!" He took a springing bound forwards, cutting at me.
"You're accusing me, a mortal, harmoniously composed of all the Elements, of being an abomination, when you're completely missing Water in your beings, rendering you a crippled freak of Elementalism?" I replied scathingly, sliding aside from his blow without actually moving my legs, just twitching my soles. The heavy Sword trailed a swathe of flame as it bit down into the stone. I continued the movement around his Shield as he tried to rush and bash me, but there was no way, even with those long legs, that he could keep up with me.
I reached out and put my hand on his Shield, and began to read his motions with Sticking Shadow; the placement of his eyes and head, and his arc of vision… and I moved with it and out of his sight.
He lost track of me instantly, spinning around, only to find me nowhere in his arc of view. He kept spinning, thinking I was behind him, striking to his flank, ducking and whirling in case I had jumped above him, Shield warding his side from any attack.
I came in under his Shield as he raised it, literally sliding up the length of his armor as he straightened, and he could only look down as Tremble drove upwards, under the guard of his helm, straight up into his skull.
His entire body stiffened as Tremble inserted into his approximation of a cortex and sliced it all to pieces. I poked the top of his helm, drove the diamond point into the metal.
His body seemed to more lock up then anything else, and fell over stiffly, not limply, as he died. Different physiology, I suppose.
And I hadz magic lewts, I hadz!
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The bastards weighed over a quarter-ton each. I grabbed them by their feet and dragged them slightly uphill and around some rocks, out of direct sight of that cleft in the hillside.
After all, given all the shit I'd been fighting, there was absolutely no reason to expect that the kind of crap that was coming out of that Portal was going to expect two Sun Brothers to be standing guard out here.
Their armor wouldn't fit in my Masspack, meaning I had to render them down, or use the stuff up. Firemetals! Gildensteel was good stuff...
They actually had flagons of some Fire-realm drink that reminded me more of finely refined gasoline than anything else… tasted like wtf, too. Well, to be expected. Really rained on my celebration...
I dumped the contents out on the ground a distance from my camp (and for the next two hours had to slaughter every Fireborn with a nose eagerly racing up to that location to lick the ground for the crap) and instead drew out their blood.
Sun Brothers were worth a lot in power comps. I happened to have a deep need for power comps. What a coincidence...
If they were sentient beings, they were also alien otherplanars invading the mortal realm, and willing to kill us all. I was going to treat them with the respect they dealt the world they were trying to burn to ash.
First, though, I took the Sword of the first one I killed, made up a Transfer Pattern, drove Tremble right down through the thing, felt its nascent Sword spirit scream as I rent it and began to burn it off, sucking the power into Tremble.
Hells, the bastards didn't even bother to Name their Weapons. It should be grateful I was putting its energy into a proper Weapon!
The process would take eight hours. I'd have to stay near to it, and that gave me time to do other crafting.
They had bracers as part of their armor. I certainly couldn't adapt their armor down to me, but elements of it? Sure. And right over there was lava to use as a heat source...
I immersed the first Shield entirely into the lava, rapidly heating it near white-hot. Then I took the sledge out of my Pack and proceeded to beat on it. It was a Large kite Shield, nearly six feet high, done to the minimum of QL 29 required to hold a +III Enhancement.
Molten lava also cools pretty quickly, all things considered, which meant it was easy to cast into a rough anvil shape. One-handing a five-pound sledge, I began to beat on the damn thing.
I didn’t need a kite shape, I needed it round. It would end up close to four feet across nominally, but I pounded out the plain steel and purified the alloy down as I beat on the thing. My ki sang through it, I could see the internal structure of it, and hold the force of my blows in the metal as I redid the structure of it from a Shield to a Floating Forge, the goal a QL of 35.
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My smithing ability was inhuman, even with no magic to aid me directly. I was superhumanly strong, I could control the precision and dispersal of the force I was using with supernatural accuracy and control, and I didn't get tired with my Con being where it was at. The extreme heat of the lava didn't discomfit me at all. When I began to pound the Runes into the Disk I was making out of the thing, redirecting the power inherent in it, they actually began to suck in all that free heat there to help empower them and purify the kind of work I was doing.
Fire Realm give plenty free fire Mana, thank you, thank you, when working on fire-attributed item...
Yeah, it was a couple thousand degrees here. I had a functioning 40+ points of fire resistance, so it could all bite me. Yeah, every fifteen minutes or so, some Fireborn would come streaming out of that cleft in the volcano. Some ran on by, eager to explore this new world, ignoring the not-cold-at-the-moment figure working down by the lava.
Some decided to bug me. They became power comps, I tore them apart with my bare hands, and their fiery blood baptized my new Floating Forge.
Gildensteel has a base Hardness Rating of 15. With +III Enhancement, that spikes to 21. That meant it was slightly harder than adamant. But gildensteel doesn't really melt until 30 or so is bypassed, so it can actually hold molten adamant.
I hammered semi-molten gildensteel into the form of a shiny, polished silvery disk with swirls of gilt playing within it, moving slowly as if alive, while Runework edged the whole thing and the middle of it.