Midsunsfall was close now, some four hours of daylight remained. Ulric handed off the enspelled staff to a gaggle of Celestin running a food stall dishing strips of roasted something or other and a pot of boiling grain porridge with instructions to see the prisoner fed as much as she cared to eat and watered, whether she liked it or not.

No hunger strikes around here, if Ulric had to make a funnel and a hose to pour it down her he would.

The Aes'r accepted their Lord's task with loud groans and immediately knives came out to play a game of skill to determine who would be forced to feed the "chewed up enslaver". Ulric was glad Elf society had formal rules to the age old practice of "Shotgun, Not It!".

One of the tasks on Ulric's plate today was to try to fix his armor. The sunlight weaponry of his beaten foe had been impressive, but the bones of the [Forest Lord] retained a large degree of the formerly unkillable monster's resistance to magical assault. Bones soaking the mana of the [Plateau of Ancients] for thousands of years had ended up being, more or less, only workable using its own teeth and claws, from which Ulric had shaped his tools back in the Ancient Glade. That or whatever specialized arcane smithing equipment and craft employed by Uldin within his workshop. The scorch marks to his armor's plates was merely cosmetic, penetrating a bare half millimeter into the surface of the material. That damned strap holding his pauldron in place was the problem.

Originally, it had been broken by Ulric taking a savage blow from the Svartalfin assassin's hammer, a glancing hit that had instantly snapped the leather bindings. Ulric had tried his hand at crudely fixing the thing. Sadly, the Jury-rigged pauldron hadn't been up to the task of withstanding the Captain's deceptively powerful strikes. The wound Ulric had taken across his shoulder still burned with the sweat that he worked up as he took to his tasks, or you know, just moving generally.

That could have been much, much worse. A few degrees difference and the shoulder joint would be a cauterized mess, his entire right arm useless as the Captain's own severed limb. Therefore, in the interest of not having a gaping damned gap in his armor's life saving defenses, Ulric needed to fix the pauldron. And this time, he needed to better than half ass it.

Ducking through the entry flap of his shared home away from home, Ulric started scrounging through his pack. He'd kept a bag holding strips of the [Forest Lord's] tanned hide somewhere in the bottom of the thing, just in case. Now was a perfect time to make use of some of this precious resource.

Carefully, so as not to bend anything, Ulric cut free the buckle Uldin had smithed for the strap and discarded the ruined leather into the small fireplace. Next, he had to figure out how that burly Elf had affixed the binding to the pauldron and its attachment site on the chest plate. He found what he had afeared: rivets. The Master Smith had intended his work to last and wanted only the strongest joinery for his craft, therefore, the straps were all riveted in place, their repair and maintenance intended to be done by himself only.

The finicky craftsman wouldn't have trusted anyone else to service the gear he'd made. None of the true artisans ever did. It would be like letting a total stranger hold your child.

Uldin's choice was now Ulric's problem. He had to get those rivets out and replace them, without a forge or proper tools. Punching a hole through the [Forest Lord] hide wouldn't be a problem, his knife, still blackened and slightly warped from biting into a Pyromancer's fireshield and then conducting an overcharged [Lightning Javalin] to destroy said Pyromancer completely, was a fang from the old terror. Its sharpened edge and tip would have little trouble managing a tiny starter hole for the rivet he would drive.

Fidgeting hands changed the angle of the armor a couple of times, manipulating the cuirass around to find the best angle from which to view the problem. Eventually, holding it upside down in front of himself, Ulric figured he could probably fish one of his [Forest Lord] claw awls through the pauldron and cuirass joint and then run the replacement rivet, whatever material he could manage to find that would serve that purpose.

They had some metal on hand but Ulric wasn't so sure that he would trust his life to subpar mystery steel. Especially not a tiny rivet that he'd have to raise to heat for flattening the tail. Softening the metal often led to it losing some of its integrity, or becoming prone to oxidation, which, sitting on top of his body while he sweated inside it, would be a problem. Heating the rivet was another problem. He didn't have tongs and a campfire wasn't going to get to temperature. None of the forges would be done for at least a week.

Decisions, distractions, and damnation!

Wait! Ulric realized he had all the heat he needed, right between his fingertips. Induction heating! Ulric could use the trick of a fluctuating field around a metal to cause it to heat by the resistance of the metal trying to oppose the constantly shifting electric field he'd create around it! That method was used in industrial capacities for riveting, it was a one to one method for solving his current puzzle.

Grinning at the armor, Ulric set about planning how to get the rivets out. Normally, you'd use a punch or a drill press. The softer material of the rivet would pop out or be machined away. He had neither of those things, however. Hmm…could he fine his [Voltaic Riot] down and use it like a plasma cutter?

Honestly, Ulric hadn't really tested the full potential, hueh heuh, very droll Ulric, of his [Voltaic Riot]

The magical arc of pure Ceraun had proved sufficiently powerful to boil stone and cut through the armor worn by the schmucks he'd fought in Trachn'ir and Bartala. None of them had worn what might be considered topflight gear though, the metals they used were common as pigeon shit, totally lacking the alchemical or enchanting work of the truly gifted masters of smithing that he'd picked Taipan's brain about. Even their leathers were fairly mundane, not being harvested from the dangerous Greater Beasts, whose awakened cores saturated their very bodies with the aether, conveying incredible properties on them that made the corpse of one of those beasts a prize, highly sought.

Galed Uldin would have sooner swallowed his smithing hammer than use [Dire Ox] leather on his work. The least he'd tolerate was [Silverstreak Wyvern], or [Hammer Cyclops], or, if he could get it, [Crimson Bull]. Each a lethal monster in its own right, with notably tough skin that made supple, resistant leather.

The rivets were going to be a bitch, but Ulric had faith he could burn them out without slagging the rest of the armor, Taipan's Uncle wouldn't have used something so vulnerable to Ulric's own power.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Alright! Putting it all together, Ulric had a methodology to attack the repair process that made sense. He had the strap, the hide from his personal inventory. Now, he just needed to find an acceptable material from which to fashion rivets.

He could figure something out a bit later. First, though, he needed to test his hypothesis regarding tuning the [Voltaic Riot] to a more focused, precision lance of Ceraun. The randomness of the spell was mostly thanks to the sheer unbelievable ease of his awakened core in reaching breakdown potential. That permitted the arc to connect to ground to whatever was closest. In combat, it was a boon, the spell actually had some degree of tracking in close quarters, snapping to a target that was nearby, if it was conductive. Most living things were full of water, which made that not a hard ask.

Looking around, Ulric saw his first test case. Tragically, he'd had to leave behind the vast majority of his belongings in Bartala, when he'd fled the city aboard clan Hora-Bitsnez's massive trade vessel. The same vessel from which Ulric had rained fire down on the ports they came across and from which he'd visited death to every single Magister who attempted the crossing of the direct trade routes between Prosper and Bartala. That meant he lacked many of the miscellaneous items and spoils of the Hunts he and Taipan had accumulated on their journey.

Fortunately, or, perhaps not so much, Ulric had been accosted near constantly since reuniting with Taipan in their brief crossing across the Prespang Highlands. Ulric knew his first victim had to be a horn from the [Thunderhorn Sheep]. If that material didn't have a heavy dose of resistance to electrical energies Ulric would be ready to eat the damned things.

Putting aside the armor to be repaired, Ulric took up a gnarled, massive horn, its ridges prominent, like those of an ibex, thought the tips curved into a tight spiral at the ends, unlike that long extinct Earth mammal. He huddled on his knees over the horn, laying it down next to the stones of the firepit, to keep it from the furry hides that insulated himself and his partner from the ground.

Excitedly, Ulric's fingers snapped at his thighs as thoughts of how exactly to manipulate the energies of his spellform, how to modify the construct to focus the [Voltaic Riot] into a denser, more controllable prominence. It had to come down to magnetic fields. Ulric knew that a confinement would be able to create a "hard" path to keep the ion trail between his spell and its target. He also had to make sure to maintain a relatively concentrated connection between the surface he was cutting, to prevent conductive slag from coming back towards him, possibly shorting his arc or just bathing his face in molten dust.

Perhaps Caelum had a place in this. An accompanying jet of air, in addition to the electromagnetic arc, that would "fuel" the plasma jet with material, giving it the momentum to blow through the metal, pushing it away from himself and thereby preventing those fragments from interfering with the ion trail of his spell.

How would he ground the…Alright, Ulric, quit being a fucking idiot. You're just gonna hold the damned thing, anything you touch you can include in the circuit, keeping it grounded.

Blond moment passed, Ulric practiced forming a tight jet of air from Caelum. It wasn't difficult and the force, while nothing capable of harming most of the creatures of Varda, would be more than sufficient to sling the plasma and particulate material away, preserving the integrity of his magical plasma cutter and keeping him safe from blowback. The divot carved into the dirt below him from his Caelum practice reminded him of an air compressor's nozzle. Perfect.

What if he made that kind of a jet and directed it into an enemy's mouth, wouldn't the pressurized air hitting their lungs just kind of shred the soft tissue? Alright, there, you friggin psychopath, calm down, we're doing science, not murder, Ulric scolded himself, but filed that thought away for investigation at a later date. It was intrusive thoughts like that that had produced most of his first set of basic spells, back when he was just learning to manipulate the basic elemental forms of mana.

Back on track, Ulric now needed to make sure that he was able to keep [Voltaic Riot] confined to a very linear track, instead of snaking around with random discharges and along whatever path of least resistance the magic managed to carve through the air.

The old plasma cutters used a high voltage, high frequency generated pilot arc or a direct contact. The capacitance method worked too, creating a big discharge to kick off the ion jet, but Ulric didn't want to necessarily have to focus on holding a spell at ready. Easiest was to put his finger on the target surface but then Ulric risked having his finger sitting near what was about to be a high intensity electrical arc boring into electrified molten metal. Not a method consistent with his plans to grow old with all of his fingers. Pilot arc it was!

That wasn't actually a big issue, [Voltaic Riot] was the pilot arc. A streamer of Ceraun, sort of like he used to create his [Lightning Javalins] would work just fine to give his magic a path to ground against the rivets he was going to cut out. The big question mark was whether or not he could restrain the spell's destructive power to only that one small profile point, without having it slop to the sides or jump randomly, at sufficient intensity. High quality cuts demanded a large yield device in his old workshops. That would prove true today, since the greater the flow of power he was able to maintain, the cleaner the resulting cut would be, which meant he was less likely to have to file out partially bored rivet material.

Ulric raised his hand, finger pointed down toward the test material of the mutant sheep horn, and began to cycle his core's energies, maintaining the mental construct for his [Voltaic Riot], even as he tuned some of his mana to unaspected magic, before harmonizing it to wind attunement for the Caelum jet. All the parts in place now, the weaving of elemental magics began in earnest as Ulric fed the energy of his core into the workings. Air whistled from the down pointed finger, raising a blast of fine dust from the horn, scouring loose dirt from its surface, and Ulric's finger began to glow violet with the building potential, [Voltaic Riot] moments from following the Ceraunic leader down through the charged air jet, into the surface of the horn on the dirt floor below.

"What do you think you are doing inside the walls of our tent, Ulric Einar?" Came the piercing call of his Shadow, her musical voice now leaden with disapproval.

Sheepishly, Ulric looked up, his finger aglow, and tried to play off his experiment with a casual statement of "Just running a bit of a small test, Taipan."

"No big deal." He fibbed, hopeful that she'd buy it, not being a greatly experienced mage in her own rights.

"You have three heartbeats to stop that finger glowing." His Wife threatened.

"Yes dear." Ulric conceded immediately, caught red, well, violet, handed doing something moronic.

He let the Caelum and Ceraun bleed away to nothing and his core went back to its normal muted humming tone within his chest.

"We have already spoken of boots in the shelter Ulric, which I am gladdened to see was not a discussion I have had to have twice. Let me add that you will do any magic outside, Husband, before you destroy our bedding. My bedding, if you think to conduct any more worms in the head 'experiments' as you call them." She warned.

"I, uh, was trying to fix your Uncle's armor." Ulric defended himself lamely.

Taipan closed the flap behind her, cutting him off from reinforcements and cornering him without chance of reprieve. The skeptical expression on her face, a single fine eyebrow tilted high, full lips pursed, and a single finger resting against her cheek, the other hand resting on her hip as she stared down at him with emerald and bronze flecked eyes said she didn't buy that for a sack of [Bark Weasel] dung. Damn. He was routed and surrounded. This was a loss, for absolute certain. A wise man knows that there is only one thing that can be done to salvage such a situation with his wife: Time to beg for mercy.

"Sorry Taipan, I wasn't thinking. I won't do it again." He pled.

"That was not the question in my mind Ulric," the unyielding woman said, her voice pinning him in place, "The question was why you were trying the first time. Inside our home. With furs nearby. And you with your tendency to start fires with your little 'projects'."

She had him cold. And her predatory instincts were alight behind those wonderful orbs, telling him for certain that she knew it. Damn! If only he hadn't got so excited about a new engineering project! This was gonna cost him.

"The way that I am seeing it, Ulric," Taipan led, gloating already, "You are now mine pet for the evening. I had made wonderful plans for you earlier this day, while weaving. Some of the suggestions my fellow 'fairer sex' cousins provided I discarded as being too unwholesome. Those are back on the table."

Uh oh. He'd had to banish the use of ropes in the bedroom after one of her wilder outings. Other things had required forceful intervention to preserve his dignity. I'm in danger, he told himself.

"My ears unsettle you, do they?" the athletic woman purred menacingly, shrugging off her coat.

"I admit a fondness for your own, Ulric, but most especially when I am allowed to warm them between my thighs. Prepare yourself, Husband. It is Taipan who will hold the high ground today." His mate proclaimed baldly.

Ahh well. You win some, you lose some, Ulric took his defeat gracefully. Taipan made certain that her sudden reversal of fortunes was not brief, nor overly gentle. Nor to be forgotten by either of them any time soon. Marriage to a venomous serpent was full of pitfalls, it made him a better person learning not to do things that were obviously stupid. Especially when his wife liked to use athletic sex to reinforce her lessons. He faded away while contemplating positive reinforcement and Pavlovian training.