There I was, sitting on the ground of the approximation I had ideated for an ‘isolation chamber’, donning the signature off-white clothing of those that had been [Transferred], and a relatively cheap but sturdy leather cloak.

I was working my now impressive mind into concocting a new weapon for Sheeno, my [Party Member] turned mate, solely out of the prerequisites that it had to enhance her [Aberrant Ice Mana], and could be wielded with no impediments in all four of her arms; that had made my thoughts turn towards a sort of ‘knuckle duster’ made from the bones of an [Ice Dragon], with the inner circuits containing the [Enchantments] made out of mithril, since it just was that good at conducting [Mana].

Easy to say, but hard to do… at least for those that weren’t me.

I looked at the shard of Dragon bone, and like every time I did so I pondered just how massive the fucking thing had to be for it to generate such a big shard, which had no smooth edges, which meant that it came from the inside of a bone much bigger than it, while still being as big as my forearm.

That idle thought aside, I quickly went to work with [Manakenesis] on the bone, so I could manipulate it through its own [Ice Affinity] and morph its physical structure with only [Mind Over Matter], without the need for a forge, or any other pesky external tool.

“Do you want it to have a smooth edge on the outside, some sort of spike, or can I go wild with the design?” I asked the [Banished Princess] behind me, who took a moment to pause her reading, by putting a finger amidst the pages before closing the book, and then reclining on her plush chair to think about it.

“How wild is your ‘wild’? Because if this works I’d like to keep the result in clear view of any observer, not only to show off but to also make it clear that I am still important enough to have such an excellent backer, and that means that the weapon should still have a somewhat conventional aspect. Now, if we were to go into preferences, I am partial to intricate knot-work and don’t really care about spikes, just like my normal outfit would imply, so keep that in mind. For the rest, I’ll trust your judgment this time: You’re the crafter here.”

And Sheeno was right, her blood-red leather armor had always impressed me with the symmetry of its design, while still maintaining its intricacy in how the bands of leather were knotted with one another, covering her completely from neck to ankle, while leaving her pale arms bare. It took only a moment for me to go back to ignoring her lack of footwear, or the absence of the metal chest piece normally covering her impressive assets, which she normally took off while at home together with her shin guards and armbraces.

“Got it, no spikes, but [Runic] doodles are A-OK as long as they aren’t too explicit”, I conveyed my intention.

“That should be fine, yes”, Sheeno nodded at my judgment and went back to her book.

I examined the Dragon bone once more, and seeing that it looked like it was just enough for 4 knuckles I dug through the bag where all the rest of the materials bought during my shopping spree were kept, pulling out a couple of nuggets of mithril.

I rolled the ore in my hand for a second, before turning around back to Sheeno.

“Are there any other [Affinities] that you’re normally using, but just less overtly than [Ice]?” I asked her.

“Mhh? Of course there are, I already told you I had six. To be more specific they are [Abberant Ice], the one that you know, then there’s [Air], that I use for a few movements [Skills] and to speed up my projectiles, [Body], for self-strengthening, [Construct], the one were your most used [Aberrant Affinity] comes from, which I use to improve the control over my conjured weapons and armor, [Earth], which I primarily use to increase my sturdiness and weight, and finally [Weapon], a particularly unusual one since I normally can’t use it, but everything should change if you’re successful in your endeavor”, Sheeno came completely clean.

That was unexpected, to say the least.

“What? Shocked that I trusted you with this much?” She asked me with a raised eyebrow.

“Well… yeah!” I exclaimed, still slightly shocked by her sudden bout of sincerity.

“Love, I intend to spend a long time with you, possibly eternity if we are able to reach a high enough [Level], so secrets at this point are only counterproductive”, she said, sending me a meaningful look.

“…fine. I have [Aberrant Create], [Aberrant Empyrean], [Aberrant Void], [Summon], [Support], [Enchant], and [Life]. Happy now?” I decided to reciprocate her with the same level of trust.

If Sheeno thought she could put up with me for as long as she said, who was I to go against her decision?

“Very happy. I’ll show you later, if you keep being a good boy~” She sultrily replied, sending me the strongest ‘bedroom eyes’ I had seen from anyone ever.

“Y-yes ma-am!” I shouted, hurriedly going back to work.

“Pretty sure I’m going to get some tonight!”

Ugh, gross!

“Can’t you feel the love, tonight~?”

Sure Simba, now get back to work.

And I did just that, just not before failing to hold back a snort that earned me a quizzical look from Sheeno but that she thankfully lets quickly go.

I was about to work on the Dragon Knuckles, when another idea struck me: I now knew about all of Sheeno’s [Affinities], so couldn’t I make something vastly superior for her now?

I’m sure that what I’m doing could have been accomplished by the best crafters in her kingdom, back when her father was still alive and her brother had yet to wrestle control from her mother, reducing her position to one of an outcast to her own people; so this thing that I’m making must be nothing short of exceptional… [Legendary] even.

She deserves nothing less.

Fishing through the pack again, I plucked four palm-sized [Air Dragon] scales out of it, and a couple of twigs of Living rock, a sample coming from a plant known for its vast vitality and [Earth Affinity].

The knuckles had just been upgraded from bone with mithril veins, to bone with a scale exterior, wooden padding, and mithril circuitry.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Yes, that will work splendidly.”

I activate [Manakenesis], and the various parts I had chosen started floating while being surrounded by a halo composed of the same type as their own [Mana Affinity]. I then start bending the materials a little with [Mind Over Matter], since it only generates [Fatigue] and I wanted to keep most of my [Mana] for what was going to come later. The first material to show notable changes was the Dragon bone, which started morphing into a more even shape, but once that was done it split into 4 pieces with equal mass; putting that aside for now I repeated a similar process with the plant twigs and the mithril, which mainly meant that I was just dividing the mass into 4 equal shares.

I stop for a moment to take a breather, having started to feel a slight headache towards the end, feeling grateful that Dragons have their scales grown to maximize symmetry, resulting in those I had to require little to no work to equalize them in mass.

After massaging my forehead for a bit I use [Repair] with a bit of [Mana] to stave off the worst of it, and check my [Fatigue] after it has returned to a more reasonable level.

Feeling good enough I started on what was probably going to be the hardest part: Innerving the knuckles with mithril.

I looked at the knuckles… and they weren’t knuckles yet.

“Oh, yeah, I still need to reshape them fully.”

Right now, they were little more than rectangular rings that could roughly fit Sheeno’s hand inside of it, but to be true knuckle dusters, that didn’t restrict fingers in their movements, I had to add the notches for each finger, and then bend the design a bit.

As they were, they would probably work, but I wanted something more unique; I toyed with the idea to add a separate opening on the inside to insert the thumb, but it made the design feel clunky whenever it wasn’t in fully gripped, so I just added an ergonomic handle that would be held against the palm of the user.

Overall, the design ended up being very similar to a modern iron knuckle from Earth, except each finger didn’t have its individual hole, but everything was left more open to leaving the digits free to move as normal. It also lacked the indents on the outside to further harm the recipients of the weapon, but that was what the scales were for, so I kept it completely smooth for now.

With all the other ingredients on the ground, I was able to focus [Manakenesis] fully on the bone, further enhancing the efficiency of [Mind Over Matter], and so I was done relatively fast, leaving me free to make thin mithril threads that would be inserted to better circulate [Mana].

Of course, I started on that only after another round of massaging my forehead and using [Rapair] on myself.

Getting back to work I first had to decide on how to arrange the circuit… which was pretty easy to do, since I could just make [Runes] that Sheeno could activate herself, after a bit of training naturally, while sending normal conduits towards the palm and to where the notches for the fingers were.

Now, imagining it was one thing, actually inserting mithril under the influence of [Metal Mana] into the Dragon bone under the influence of [Ice Mana] made for a borderline infuriating experience.

For each millimeter I managed to insert the mithril into the bone, I had to spend minutes fixing the imbalance with the fluctuating reactions the materials tried to commit to on their own.

And that was with me resorting to doing one knuckle at a time!

“No wonder her father didn’t commission something like this so soon in her career. This shit is making even me crazy!”

A had barely begun with innerving the first weapon when I was interrupted.

“Lunch break?” Sheeno suddenly asked.

I was slightly hungry, so I saw no reason to refuse.

“Sure, lunch sounds good right about now, especially since it will be an opportunity to decompress”, I responded.

And so it was that I took a well-earned break to eat and rest a little. I and Sheeno also took the opportunity to discuss our dreams for the future, which mainly boiled down to me wanting to become so powerful and/or important enough to not be easily influenced by others, while she wanted to free her kingdom from her brother and get rid of other people like him, like the entirety of the [Temple of Purity].

That, in the end, made me all the more self-conscious about my selfishness, and how much she still cares about the people that forced her to flee from everything she had known and loved.

Not wanting to make the situation heavier I kept my thoughts to myself and we went to work with no further issues. And I said ‘we’ because apparently, Sheeno had been reading about some specific method of how to ‘rewrite’ a [Skill] without losing anything from the original and still managing to improve upon it.

Honestly, I had almost forgotten that others couldn’t simply [Modify] their weaves whenever they wanted, but had to mechanically delete the old version through the help of the [System] and replace it with another they did at the moment; which didn’t feel was all that arduous when you relied on the [System] for the weave in the first place, but all the best did it on their own as much as they could, kind of like how I free-formed it, which meant that they would meet harsher hills to cross whenever they had to modify something in their kit.

And that is how we ended up back in the isolation chamber with a divisive screen separating it into two halves, because Sheeno wanted to keep what she was doing as a surprise, going as far as threatening with a seriously bad time in case I spied on her with any of many ways I could circumvent normal occlusions.

“I still don’t know how she knew that I was ticklish…” I muttered to myself, glancing unsatisfied at the one skeleton of the knuckle I had almost finished.

One might ask why I was unsatisfied with my own work, and the response was that it did not look like ‘my own work’: In my endeavor to make it as conforming to the norm as possible, I made it look extremely boring, with an uninspired design.

The weapon would still come out strong, don’t get me wrong, but it would leave me unsatisfied if I were to keep going like this.

Karping the diem that Sheeno wasn’t watching anymore, I went and drastically modified the knuckles.

First off, the handle on the palm was slimmed into a simple band that wouldn’t need to be gripped, one that run around the back of the hand to further increase stability, but without being so tight that it would decrease the flexibility of the hand. Then came the part where you were supposed to rest your fingers, which I ended up making ‘more normal’, with simply the holes for the fingers, but with the added capability of separating the upper and lower parts by making the upper one float with simply a trickle of [Mana], and with only a little more a tiny shield of [Mana] would be projected outwards that would automatically attune itself to the user’s [Mana].

I have to admit: That was incredibly hard to achieve.

Here I am, explaining it only with a few words, while it took me literal hours of trial and error to find a way that it could be utilized by others that didn’t know how to use [Runes]; and it was at that point that I re-discovered a love for [Enchant], my [Ability]: Who needed [Runes]?... Ok, I did, but not everyone else, and there still were cases where an automatic [Enchantment] from the [System] could work perfectly without cutting corners, or result underwhelming to the user.

Well, anyway, I added wooden padding on the inside for comfort, the scales on the knuckle part, and then added other weird [Enchantments]: Like having the wood mold itself to the hand, and have it follow along with the user’s movements for maximum comfort, and having the scales on the outside rearrange themselves into jagged edges, spiked edges, or a blunt surface, just to cover every type of damage even when Sheeno is out of [Mana].

Obviously, as a finishing touch, I added what I thought was best for a melee weapon.

Finally happy with the result, I used [Gaze] on it.

Name:

Supreme Dragon Fist

Owner:

Unowned

Type:

Gauntlet/Knuckle

Rank:

Legendary

Properties:

Elemental Amplification; Adaptability; Mana Shield; Repulsion;

Materials:

Ice-Dragon bone; Wind-Dragon scales; Living-Rock Wood; Mithril

“Oh, now I have a [Material] tab, neat. But when the fuck did I add [Adaptability] to it!?”

That aside, now I had three fucking more of the thing to craft.