Any further thoughts I had dissolved into nothingness as I stepped into the spray of steaming water, the heat cleansing the exhaustion that clouded my mind. It wasn’t until nearly an hour later that I was able to pull myself out of the bathroom, feeling much more rejuvenated and awake.
Glancing around the apartment, I found myself still completely alone knowing that it would still be hours until everyone else finished with their day and logged off for their rest cycle. After a few moments of consideration, I decided that I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day waiting for everyone to log out, nor to be awoken once they did. It had been quite a long time since I had some peace and quiet to myself, which I felt was something that I really needed, given how busy I had been over the last few weeks.
So, with that in mind, I grabbed a warm change of clothes, scribbled a note telling everyone where I had gone, and left the apartment to go back to my condo, which had sat largely unused for the last month and a half.
Which means there’s no food in it, I reminded myself as the elevator door opened on the ground floor of the building. With a resigned sigh, I realized that I would have to make a stop before heading home to pick up something to eat.
Moving with purpose, I left the building, briefly stepping out into the freezing winter air that refused to acknowledge that spring was here, before hailing a cab and practically leaping inside the moment that the car ground to a halt.
“Quiet Mode,” I pre-empted the cab’s question, then told it where to drop me off. As the car began to move, I reached to dig my phone out of my pocket, deciding to take the opportunity to catch up on what I knew would be a large number of messages and emails.
It had been quite an unwelcome shock the first time I had logged out of Ascend Online to realize that Reality had continued onwards without me, leaving me with hundreds of messages to sift through, and at first glance, this time was proving to be no exception either. Scanning through my phone, I found that I had several updates from Ætherworld Productions in my inbox and flagged them for later review, mentally cataloging them as earnings reports from our feeds.
Slowly as the car navigated its way through the automated traffic of the city, I paged through my inbox, eventually reaching the bottom of my list with the two most recent emails catching my full attention. Bringing the phone slightly closer to my face, I read the subject lines of both the emails, feeling my heart skip a beat in surprise.
Subject: ‘Mom and I are going to be playing Ascend Online!’ From: Dad. Sent: Today, 10:15am.
Subject: ‘Hey, on my rest cycle too! Want to chat tonight? :)’ From: Sonia. Sent: Today, 1:53pm.
I paused for a moment as I considered the two emails, a wide smile slowly spreading across my face. With barely a second thought, I clicked on an email and began to read, completely oblivious to the fact that I had already arrived at my destination.
Chapter 29
Thursday, March 21st, 2047 - 6:07 am
Aldford – The Crafting Hall
“Phew!” I exclaimed as the familiar kaleidoscope of colors faded away from my vision and I suddenly found myself in the heat of the Foundry, with a rhythmic hammering sound echoing around me. Taking a sharp breath, I felt a momentary wave of disorientation as images passed through my mind, the game world rapidly updating me on what had happened while I had been offline.
Pausing for a moment to sort through the new memories, I put my hand down on the stone table before me and shook my head, waiting for the information overload to pass. I saw Sierra and Constantine’s journey back to Aldford as they escorted my digital avatar back to the town, which then blurred into crafting as my automated tasks took over. I saw glimpses of myself working away at mass producing items that would eventually be needed for the construction of the palisade or the guard towers that would be built into them. From everything that I could tell, there had been no issues over the last day, and everything was proceeding on schedule.
Almost everything at least. I felt my heart drop momentarily as I looked around the Foundry and saw Léandre’s digital avatar working away at the smaller forge, a small tag notifying me that he was still offline.
[Léandre] – Offline – 121 Tasks Pending
The only reason why I could see his current status, was because before logging off, Léandre had given me permission to assign and modify his task list, a feature that we had all found to be very useful when it came to making the most of offline time. Unfortunately, on the other hand, since I could modify his task list, I could also see that he hadn’t logged on in the last day while I was offline.
It was beginning to seem that Léandre’s treatment hadn’t worked out for him. None of the emails that I had sent had been returned, nor did anyone reply on his behalf. The only sliver of hope that I still had was that I hadn’t found an obituary with Léandre’s real name listed above it. With a shrug of resignation, I silently wished that I had thought to ask the elder man where he was getting his Age Regression done, so I could have called for an update, but I didn’t think of it until after Léandre had logged off.
“Well, that’s enough of that,” I told myself with a shake of my head, trying to pull myself out of my funk. I had no way of finding out what had happened to my friend, and knowing Léandre, he would have insisted on me to keep working instead of spending my time pining. I just had to be patient and hope that he had pulled through.
Speaking of working, I looked down at the table I had been standing in front of and realized that it was the broken fragments of Razor I’d managed to collect when I recovered my Soul Fragment. Shattered almost beyond recognition, the bronze blade and core underneath had given up from all the strain that I had placed on it over the last month, and its final battle when that wolf spirit, Valefor, shattered it in its jaw. Despite my best efforts, I was forced to admit that the blade was beyond repair. At least in any state that would make it combat worthy once again and I couldn’t quite bring myself to smelt it down to raw metal for use as nails or something equally mundane. Razor had been my first major find in Ascend Online, and I was reluctant to simply toss the weapon away or reuse it for parts.
No, I had decided that I would preserve the weapon by including a fragment of it in every weapon that I made going forward, so it would always be with me, one way or another. But while all of that was very sentimental, it didn’t address what I had to do next, something that I had been both avoiding and looking forward to for several days now.
It was time to make myself a new weapon.
I was feeling much more confident with the Æthertouched Iron that we had recovered from the Tower to try my hand at making a weapon using the magical metal. In the few days since we’d brought it back, we’d managed to splinter enough fragments from the massive piece to give me enough to work with as I practiced smelting the iron. The experience had raised my blacksmithing all the way up to level seventeen while also teaching me how to work around its rapid cooling, at least when it came to smaller items. Larger pieces were still notably more difficult to shape due to the amount of work needed, and more often than not, simply fell apart when I tried to reheat them in the forge to make them more malleable.
But that had been several levels ago and I thought that it was time to put all my practice to use and try to craft a new weapon for myself, if not with the Æthertouched metal, then with something else that I had lying around the Crafting Hall.
“First thing first, let’s light the forge and make something easy to begin with…like a hilt,” I told myself as I mentally prepared myself to get to work. With a motion as I walked, I decided to call over Léandre’s avatar to help me through the crafting process with the forge, having learned that two sets of hands with the forge made things much easier than just one.
Well used to the process, it took me only a moment to prepare the forge, the familiar azure-hued fire greeting my eyes as Léandre’s avatar finished pouring the Æther. Signaling the man to stop, I pulled out several fragments of the Æthertouched Iron from my i
nventory and began the process of smelting them down into an ingot, remembering to toss in a fragment of Razor before the process was complete.
Pouring the metal into a cast, I waited for a while for the slag to cool, going on to smelt other, larger, shards in the meantime. After I had deemed the metal cool enough, I pulled it free and began crafting the hilt for what would become my new weapon.
Now that the metal had been refined, it only took a minute for the metal to heat, and barely three for me to hammer it into shape, the relatively small object strangely retaining the heat from the forge much longer than larger pieces I had worked with. Finishing the last strokes with the hammer just before it cooled, I carefully inspected the finished hilt for any defects or flaws, and to my pleasant surprise found none as the finished item description appeared in my vision.
Æthertouched Iron Hilt
Item Class: Magical
Item Quality: Mastercraft (+20%)
Durability: 120/120
Weight: 0.3 kg
“Well that turned out better than expected,” I said with surprise. I had never managed to hit Mastercraft quality with the Æthertouched metal. The closest that I had ever come had been ‘Good’ quality on a simple drawing knife I made as an experiment. “Guess that little piece of Razor was lucky.”
Heartened by my success, I put the hilt off to the side before I pulled out a larger ingot of metal and began to heat it in the hopes of making it into a blade, having long since decided that I would stick with a sword as my primary weapon. Given the amount of metal involved compared to the hilt, I had to wait patiently until it had heated enough before beginning to work it.
After a few minutes, I pulled the now gleaming azure ingot out of the forge and hefted my hammer high as I set to shaping the stubborn metal. Heavy hammer blows echoed through the air as I brought it down on the ingot, my hands dancing faster than they ever had before. At first, the metal easily gave way to my rapid strikes, gradually flattening as I worked it into a blade-like shape, but as the minutes passed, the metal hardened and refused to budge, forcing me to place it back into the forge and reheat it.
Hopefully, better timing will do the trick, I thought nervously as I mentally counted the seconds that the metal was back in the heat of the forge. So far, I had never been successful in crafting a piece that I was forced to reheat. Every time that I had done so, the metal reacted strangely afterward, either becoming badly misshapen at the first strike with the hammer or simply continued to melt itself down to slag, even after I had pulled it free from the heat.
“…eight, nine…” I counted aloud as I waited for the metal to heat, pulling the now faintly glowing ingot back out of the forge at the ten-second mark, this time aiming for the bare minimum of time.
Wasting no time, I set the metal back down and swung my hammer down at it, seeing it begin to shift under my rapid strikes once more. Feeling a sense of excitement surge through me as the metal continued to take shape, I redoubled my efforts, hoping to finish as much as I could of the piece before it hardened once more.
No sooner did the thought pass through my mind than a loud cracking sound filled the air just as I brought the hammer down. Wincing, I looked down at the half blade I had managed to create, seeing that I had somehow managed to crack it completely in half.
“Well, fuck; that’s new,” I grumbled in disappointment as I inspected the broken item, noticing that it had somehow turned brittle and even begun to flake. I set my tools down with resignation, then began to clean my workspace, tossing the scraps into a crucible for later use.
“Maybe there’s something I’m missing?” I asked Léandre’s avatar, not expecting a response. “I understand that it’s a magical metal…but why can I forge a smaller piece in perfect quality, but larger pieces just don’t come out at all? I tried once sticking it into the regular forge to heat it back up but ended up with the same problem we had before. It just doesn’t do anything…”
Léandre’s avatar stared at me blankly, before shrugging vaguely at my question but saying nothing.
“Well, if this was easy, I guess everyone would be doing it,” I said with a sigh as I took another ingot that I had smelted and prepared to try again, this time planning on leaving the metal in a few seconds longer. “I guess this is going to be a bit of trial and error until we can find a process that works.”
And for the next two hours, trial and error were all that I did, focusing specifically on the ‘error’ side of things. All my testing had reduced over two dozen blades to ragged scraps of metal in varying stages of completion before something inevitably happened and ruined the process. What frustrated me the most was that the failures I had were rarely consistent with regards to the variables I adjusted.
More often than not, the metal that I was working on destabilized, simply turning into a metallic mass of slag the moment I pulled it free from the forge, but it was the rare other incidents that had me wracking my brain wondering what exactly I was doing wrong.
On one occasion while working the ingot, the metal suddenly began to boil, large molten bubbles forming in the slag before popping violently in a spray of molten metal everywhere. On another, the hammer I was holding actually caught fire after I struck the ingot, the metal I had been trying to shape then freezing itself into a block of ice. But it was my latest experience that made me decide it was time to put my hammer down for the day and consider using something else to craft the blade for my sword.
On that particular attempt to forge a blade, I had been working the metal as fast as I could, faster than I knew was even remotely safe. At the speed that I was going, I knew that one slip up would likely cost me both tools I was working with, and likely several fingers too. Yet for all my haste, I didn’t have a chance for an accident to occur, for the metal that I had been working on had simply decided to give up and explode in a blinding flash of colors, having vanished completely from the anvil that I had been working it on when my vision returned. Not so much as a fragment of it remained afterward that I could find.
“Goddamnit!” I swore in frustration as I blinked the afterimages from my eyes and threw my tools down. Whatever optimism I had started the day with, had long since vanished under the repeated failures. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
I closed my eyes for a moment and rubbed my face, trying to cling to the only silver lining that I had been able to find during the morning. All of my repeated failures had given me enough blacksmithing experience to hit level 18 in the tradeskill, even if it hadn’t made any appreciable difference for my current task.
“Okay,” I said after a moment, exhaling deeply as I glared at the Ætherfire forge with resentment, then turned away from it and began to pace. “It looks like the Æthertouched metal is out, but what else can I use? Bronze won’t be enough of an upgrade, nor will any of the spider claws that we have left. There’s that ectoplasm from the Slave-King…but that’s kinda useless in this case. Maybe I can carve myself a blade from the snake bone we found? Hmm…there’s also that piece of Ætherwarped Oak…”
I stopped as the last item entered my mind, realizing that I hadn’t given the crystalline wood a second thought after Jenkins had handed it to me.
“Would I even be able to get an edge on it though?” I whispered to myself as I pulled the length of wood out of my inventory and carefully inspected it. “And keep the edge on it?”
Glowing with a dull azure hue, the Ætherwarped branch appeared to be virtually unchanged over the last few days, the wood still cool and smooth to the touch. Staring at it closely, I could almost see a slight reflection of myself in it. Despite it having grown from a tree, it was obvious that it wasn’t just wood anymore.
Given how hard it was for Jenkins to carve through it, this could be pretty durable, I thought while considering if it would be possible to carve the branch into a sword. I had made a few swords from regular wood in the past, and I did happen to have several Æthertouched Iron tools that I had made as practice.
&nb
sp; “Why not give it a shot?” I decided with a shrug. “I don’t have any better ideas at this point, and something tells me that carving wood is going to be much easier than snake bone…”
Excited that I had another option available to me, I cleaned up my area around the forge and left the Foundry, letting Léandre’s avatar resume its tasks. Walking through the Crafting Hall, I set up shop in a largely unused workspace and spread out several of the Æthertouched carpentry tools that I had made. Taking a moment to come up with a plan for the carving, I began to carve the crystalline branch into a blade.
Initially, the work progressed rapidly as I cut off all the excess from the wood and exposed the inner core of the branch, which I found was much harder to carve as it took on an entirely crystalline appearance. Progress slowed to a crawl as I began to shape the core of the branch, the hours slowly passing by. The deeper into the core I carved, the more difficult it became to do so in a controlled manner, my knives no longer able to peel away the crystalline layers. After little progress for a time, I decided to resort to a hammer and chisel, gently splintering fragments off of the wood as I worked a single edge into my blade to be.
More time passed as I continued to work on the blade, my focus completely devoted to my crafting. The experience was nothing like my previous attempts at creating an item, where I had been mentally following a rote recipe in the back of my mind. This time I was completely in the moment, making it up as I went along. It reminded me of the time that I had made the pots and pans for Ragna a lifetime ago. I was making something completely new, that I had never done before.
I heard people walk past me as the Crafting Hall came to life around me, several of them stopping by to see what I was working on, some even trying to ask questions after seeing what was taking shape before me. But I was far too engrossed in what I was working on to reply. All I saw before me was what I had to do next, my hands moving with barely a conscious thought.
Legacy of the Fallen Page 37