Elder Midnight Hauntings

Night shift at the smithy had long since started by the time the rest of us finally left the armorer's business so we hurried in that direction. Along the way we received word from the rest of the group that they had finally arrived in Sierra and I quickly invited them to the party.

The names Stonewall, Merc Merch, and Oleander appeared in the party and all of them were level seventeen, the same as Go and Ivana. They probably used the tree vermin dungeon down south while they were their and hunted their entire way north on foot to get their levels that high while traveling. Sadly, this meant that they would probably need new armor by now.

Since Stonewall was our shield guardian who used a shield for their primary and the base for their skills, their weapon would not be that hard to make but the size of their character would require large amounts of materials. Of course, as our main line of defense, every investment in his character was worth it!

Merch was literally a merchant character who, like the classless, did not have much in the way of skills and even suffered a debuff in weapon and armor proficiency but Merch still used large daggers like a rogue or ninja out of preference. Merchants, though, had the specs for magic with Intelligence points and some building set to Agility and Luck while the other stats only received plus five points for the class.

Why he chose the merchant class over being a rogue or swordsman who could advance to ninja is because he liked money.

Oleander was the only odd one out, though, because she did not like to use weapons at all but was purely a support character who used items. She would use weapons if I made her, but she preferred pure magic or magic item combat.

. She was a halfling Fey, the human-dryad combination which was the only one of three fairy races, and her class was Naturalist. They made the best alchemists and healers with full magic stat and Luck build of fifteen points apiece but without any additions made to the other base stats. The base stats for her race were fifteen in Luck, twenty in Intelligence and Willpower, and the base human build of ten in the physical stats.

All three of them, like Papi, were a little on the eccentric side because of how seriously they played games even though they were all adults between twenty-one and thirty-one. Plus, they had their individual quirks. Little ones.

Stonewall was the oldest and had this thing about playing a character but I talked him out of using accents and antiquated languages. Merch was an antisocial introvert who preferred to play as a solo assassin and trader in games until he tried to kill me in a game and now claims to be honor bound to serve me until he can kill me- he has yet to kill me. Oleander… well, when we met it was in a game that had demonic races and she was a succubus who got me blind stinking drunk and actually succeeded in killing me.

However, her intent was to actually seduce me and kill me with her character powers. I tried to run away and got thrown out of a sixth floor window. Onto a fence.

I also met stonewall because he tried to kill me, but he was defending a dragon so it was for completely different reasons than the other two. His character in that game was a druid and he was trying to befriend the dragon I hunted for one of its eggs and I just wanted the eggs. After twenty minutes of stalemating each other magic-to-magic and staff-to-sword, we finally just beat the bloody hell out of each other with our fists.

We became the best of friends and compromised that I would let the dragon live for just one egg and some of its hoard. None of the three of us were in any condition to continue fighting, so we all accepted everyone's terms. Then they lived happily ever after, the end.

"Stonewall!" I call out from one of the smithy archways when I finally spot my friend's seven-and-a-half foot tall halfling-giant character. Beside him was a tall and lithely built lady with ivy green locks and pale greenish hued skin while on their other side was a slightly short elven man in a quilted canvas doublet and similar 'armor'.

Stonewall was wearing what looked like a hand-made horror suit of stitched together tree vermin skins in different layers while carrying what appeared to be a section of fence on his back for a giant wooden wall shield. The shield had two layers of thick oak boards and were pinned together with long iron spikes that poked through the front. I could not see clearly if he wielded any other weapons, but I was sure he had some form of sidearm or a preferred tool of some odd sort.

When they got closer I could see that Oleander was wearing some kind of shiny and silky dress that looked like it was made up of layers upon layers of extremely fine and almost transparent dark green vines. It was the special ability of her race, a natural armor that started as grass before becoming vines that eventually grew thorns before becoming various forms of bark. If her skill was already this level then she probably wore her natural armor for clothes and constantly recast it.

As I expected, she wearing several belts outfitted with small and large vials or bottles as well as a pair of simple wooden batons. I could only imagine all of the different concoctions she had made from the ingredients that could be found in the surrounding region. However, she would still need proper armor and I definitely had upgrade material for her batons.

Since Ivana's and Merch's characters would benefit from it the most, when they arrived and we said our hellos I sent Merch and Ivana back to the armorer's place to make new suits of armor for everyone with money for the materials. Then I led Stonewall and Oleander into the forge to rent us an area for the night. However, instead of smithing, I gave Oleander an elder root spear and an Elder Bokuto and said, "Do better."

She did. It took more than ten minutes of the elder root spear constantly shifting its shape and mass into a new distribution and then another few minutes spending the rest of her mana imbuing and enchanting the object. However, when she was done she had made an Elder Bokuto+ that did an even twenty-five damage in my hands.

It was only a little better even though the description claimed the enchantments were literally the next level up from the previous Elder Bokuto design. Add twenty-plus Strength behind that sword and Ivana could two-hit a goblin with only one critical. Thinking of how an item Ferithar made had been gilded, I gave Oleander our stock of elder root spears and five hundred gold to talk to Agar about metals to gild or galvanize with.

Now that we had an alchemist that I could put to work and had them working, I could confidently turn my attention to blacksmith. Taking everybody still here to some neighboring scrappers, I load their boxes with twelve pounds of iron, two sticks of vanium, two pounds of arcanite, a quarter-pound of cobalt, and half of an elder root spear. Then I made them start grinding.

Loading up my own hopper the same way, I call over Canley and casually pay him sixty gold to work spare scrappers for everybody who liked to dual wield as well as the people who were not here.

Luckily, all of the scrappers were loaded with the same materials besides my own. Into my scrapper went Blackened Fuller Haunting, a quarter pound of cobalt, a quarter-pound of arcanite, and the broken piece of Warrior's Elder Spear I received from the second hobgoblin warrior wave.

After grinding it all up into pieces, I emptied the hopper into a melting pot before once again loading my hopper with the same contents as before with the replacement of a normal elder root spear. Lil quickly called for me after that and explained that Papi had given her the spear he was given and she wanted me to use it in his weapon.

Canley had not even started on loading a scrapper for him, yet.

So I had no problem with letting her use half of the spear for him as long as she made herself another weapon with the 'special' grade material. Since Canley was currently working on smelting the steel for Merch's weapons, I went ahead and ground up the bottom third of a giant elder club in a scrapper before adding the rest of the metals I would use to make a pair of axes for Go. Go's current weapon he was working on was a replacement battleaxe.

When I finally got my two pots of material into the giant shared furnace most of the others were already there and the furnace was sweltering the area more than the forge well. Since they were working on weapons they would actually use, even though I originally said I would replace their primaries, the others wanted to hire assistants as well.

I told them that the only thing stopping them was their own pockets because Canley was a business associate. To prove this point, I even had Canley present whatever suits he had completed to reveal four pristine suits of soft goblin armor of such a nice quality that even though I did not make them they still offered eight points of defense to me.

After all of our current metals were smelted, stirred, and poured into molds they each went to go get their own assistants with their own damn money. I covered the cost of materials but still made them work, what made them think I would pay for them to buy help?! The reason I used Canley was because it was my money and he had good character!

While Canley himself continued doing the light work of preparing alloy ingots I moved on to remaking my Fuller Haunting for the second time. This time, though, I was finally going to do it as properly as I could with my current stats. This meant I would finally be folding the steel for my sword.

Just like any other time I would make my weapon, I started with heating the bar and then stretching it out. However, instead of giving it the multiple sides of a tang or blade I just kept stretching the bar out until it was almost doubled in length and half of its original thickness. Then I heated it up again and started folding it.

Once it was folded down ten times into a tall stack only a few inches long, I called Canley over for his assistance in heating and holding the folded bar of iron. Once it was glowing so bright it was almost entirely yellow, Canley pulled it from the forge and held it to the anvil for me. Wielding a hammer that was now several pounds heavier than before, I lightly work up my combo counter before hammering the middle then corners then sides of the bar to control its bonding and distribution.

When the layers were bonded together into a solid entity once again and the block had been shaped out into a new bar, I let Canley return to scrapping while I heated the steel once again. Once the ten-layer bar was hot, just started repeating the process of stretching the bar before heating and folding the same as before.

This time, though, after calling Canley back to hold the steel while I bonded the ten folds of ten layers, I stretched the now one-hundred-layered bar out while keeping Canley around to help in shaping the tang. Then, four more heating steps in, it was time to paint the cutting edge area thickly with wet clay before opposing the grade of the outer parrying faces.

Once the sword was tempered I was quite satisfied with the results, not only because the black had lightened into a midnight blue while receiving a new name.

[Strength raised by 1]

[Endurance raised by 1]

[Successfully Crafted: Elder Midnight Hauntings for One Hundred Layers]

[+225XP]

[+225 Blacksmithing XP]

[Blacksmithing Leveled x2]

[+30XP]

Midnight Hauntings now did an even thirty-three damage and the description no longer mentioned ridium in its contents. On top of this, Geist now performed seventy-percent of true damage with point-two-percent increased likelihood for every one of its layers and more Geists. Geist now had a thirty-percent chance to trigger and could cause between one and three ghost blades.

Satisfied with my new weapon that could be considered third-tier because it exceeded thirty damage, I help Canley finish prefabricating alloy bars before having him help me get to work making Go's dual axes. Since Canley himself had not folded the steel for his battleaxe I only folded this steel for ten layers. Then I hammered the stack of folds into a tight square plate before dragging out one corner from the bottom half for the handle.

Pulling the handle portion of the axes out from the corner and middle of mass like this will change the once vertical grain into a diagonal one. This would help make the fifteen inches of handle more resilient to impact shocks naturally even before I gave the handle some slight curvature to increase the leverage of its weighty head in a swing. The handle of the ax ended up being about four or five pounds, leaving seven or eight behind in the diamond-shaped head.

Having Canley hold the axes with its designated front corner placed on the anvil, I start hammering down at angles under and above the back point of the three-pointed head. This process not only started flattening the blade face of the axes but also allowed me to guide Canley in angling the face of the axes to create roughly triangular faces.

When the blade faces were mostly complete, they had a centered rounded triangle face with four inches of low blade than angled down toward the handle with eight inches of bladed spike that rose up and ever so slightly back from the top of the ax blades. In the process of creating this, I had hammered the back point of the head out into a stretched spike about seven inches in length like the back of a tomahawk.

[Strength raised by 1]

[Endurance raised by 1]

[Successfully Crafted: Elder Midnight Tri-axe x2]

[Saved Quick Crafting Recipe: Elder Midnight Tri-axe]

[+150XP*2]

[+150*2 Blacksmithing XP]

[Blacksmithing Leveled x2]

[+30XP]

"Temper these whole and quench them at the dull orange point," I inform him, choosing the initial point when the steel transitions from six or seven hundred degrees up to the lower softening points for a decent overall hardness after quenching. Their blades were meant for being abused chopping into bodies and armor so the blades would receive a slightly rounded apple seed style cutting edge to withstand impacts and could bear the hardness of light armor tempering.

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