Unbound-Chapter Nine Hundred And Ninety Six – 996

Archie was bored. Six hours wasn't a lot of time to prepare for a new battlefront, but to him, it felt like an eternity. Felix and his council of warrior princesses had all decided on the timetable, citing various logistical issues that Archie couldn't be bothered to remember. As far as he was concerned, as long as his knife was sharpened and his potion pouch full, he was ready to go.

He paused next to the Beacon at the center of the Crafting Hall to check the blades at his side. He still possessed one of his Molten Daggers, a dagger imbued with a hefty amount of fire and earth Mana. Its twin had shattered on the Omen Path, but thankfully he’d found a replacement. It sat on his opposite hip in an unassuming sheath despite being a great deal more impressive than his burning blades.

He pulled it free.

Analyze.

Name: Melee Artifact #232

Type: Weapon (Dagger)

Lore: Taken as tribute by the Red Shield Clan from the Boar Spear Clan during the unification of the Hold, this weapon’s true provenance has been Lost. The odd, undulating shape of the blade and the wide crossguard suggested an origin from the southern Continent, but little else is known. The connection it once held has been diminished by its creators’ subsumption by the Ruin.

Stat Lock XX - Damage dealt by this weapon scales with the bonded user’s Strength and Agility.

Arcing Echoes IX - Up to two phantom blades can be launched from the weapon, each spinning in separate arcs before returning to the user’s hand. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Wayward’s Return IV - If the weapon is thrown directly, it will physically return to the bonded user’s hand.

Part The Real XII - The weapon can strike through solid surfaces as if they did not exist, though the damage is reduced if the bonded user’s Strength cannot overcome the material.

A series of complicated glyphs were etched just below the surface of the curved blade, barely visible except where they lit up whenever Mana was channeled through it. Archie’s first Analyze of the dagger hadn’t gotten him nearly as much information—only after using it a few times did he spot the enchantments someone had laid on thick.

Archie turned it over in his hand, checking with his eyes and fingertips that it still existed. He’d pulled the thing out of the Omen Path, something he didn’t think could happen, and half expected it to fade away at any moment.

He really didn’t want that to happen.

His training with the blade had gone well. He had spent quite a bit of time out in the field. In fact, after an hour of getting proper food down in the Scale market and navigating the festival that seemed to continue endlessly, he had torn himself away at great personal cost from the festivities and went outside the walls to practice with the Echoblade. That's what he decided to call it—not Melee Artifact #232. It had a much better ring to it.

He soon found out that utilizing the Arcing Echoes enchantment was a tricky thing. He’d been haphazard with his application of it before, hurling the phantom blades all over without much concern for accuracy. It had served him well in the latter portions of the Omen Path, and again when they’d emerged to find a raging goddess trying to kill them all. Admittedly, Noctis hadn’t required finesse—he’d have a better chance of missing the side of a mountain.

Outside of the walls, he’d focused on honing that accuracy. After three grueling hours of practice, he was fairly confident in his ability to hit what he intended. Guiding his phantom blades scaled off of his own Agility and Dexterity, which were quite high, and added a significant boost to the learning curve. Same too with the Wayward's Return enchantment. He didn't love throwing the entire weapon at once—it deprived him not just of one weapon, but three—but Archie could see it as a last resort.

The strangest enchantment of all was Part The Real. What struck him wasn’t the function itself, but how it complimented his own Skill set. It made Archie question things that he had no answer to: did the Omen Path bring this to him? Did his Skills draw it out? Why hadn’t he found it in the Vault of Nine Kings originally? The questions nagged at him. He hadn't mentioned the dagger to anyone except for Shadow and Evie, who’d both been there in the Path. Neither of them cared about why he had the weapon. Shadow thought it was “really awesome” and gave him “sick DPS” while Evie had merely grunted.

“Maybe now you can keep up with me in a fight,” she’d said.

Bah. Jerk. It irked him that she wasn’t lying. The woman was cocky, sure, but for good reason. Her Skill in combat was incredible, especially against a horde of enemies. Archie, by comparison, was not a fighter. He didn't like the word assassin—it was too heavy with implications—but Archie was practically custom built to seek out and destroy singular targets.

Adding a ranged option changed things up a bit. Already he’d brainstormed ways to alter his attack patterns to affect enemies en masse, though he’d only really practiced the moves on shrubbery. Still, the damage the phantom blades outputted could have taken down a whole slew of godslaves already, let alone when he got tricky with it. How much better would he have been in the Omen Path when those starlight monstrosities had attacked?

Fanblade is now Endless Cut (Transcendent)!

Evasive Gait is now Ghostly Reckoning (Transcendent)!

Dagger Mastery is now Earth Shard Command (Transcendent)!

Blindsense is now Dire Viewing (Transcendent)!

Trapsense is now Peer Through The Real (Transcedent)!

Seize The Deal is now Gilded Palm (Transcendent)!

Primeval Drift is now Tread the Worldvein (Transcendent)!

Lost In The Crowd is now Spectral Turn (Transcendent)!

Innocuous Suggestion is now True Glamour (Transcendent)!

His Skills had all evolved during his time on the Omen Path, not to mention all the growth. He’d gained a great deal of levels in that crazy place, and his focused training helped put him over the edge. He’d Tempered fully into Master Tier, now. Archie was powerful—there was no denying that—but he was still frustrated as he slammed the Echoblade into its sheath.

It was his Path.

Path of the Worldvein was amazing. Archie had recognized that from the first moment he’d seen it as an option. Its Lore was packed with strange mythology and a distinct hint towards greatness. When he’d chosen it, Archie had felt…uplifted, he supposed. As if the Path gave him a purpose he’d been searching for all this time—a way to matter.

The Delven once plied the earth with ships of silver-blue, slipping between stone and soil with nothing but a whisper and the rush of an ancient darkness. The Green Wilds were young then, and they sang within many Races. The Delven were called by something deeper and more ancient than the Wilds. The Worldvein—the Primordial Stone upon which all of the Continent was built as the ancient Sea was banished from its shores. The heart of the Realm, its Path was Lost along with the people who walked it, but the steadfast power of its presence still sings to those who know how to listen.

He read through the Path description again. Even now, the mystery and allure of the Worldvein stirred some hidden cockle in Archie’s heart. But after seeing everyone else's incredible Paths, the shine had rubbed off, and not even because their Paths were better, exactly. Extra bonuses and stat boosts aside, a number of them had started figuring out their Core Manifestations.

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They were leaving him behind.

Archie was still at the beginning stages of it all. The first hints of its shape had presented themselves in his final, hectic moments in the Omen Path. A blush of power he couldn’t place, allowing him to batter his way through the Door. Since that moment, there had been movement at the center of his city within his core space, but the meaning of it eluded him.

The buildings had shifted substantially, some going so far as to tilt in drunken angles as cracks appeared in the streets of his visualized city. Yet the people rushing to and fro, activating his skills, were unaware of the crevices. They leaped over them without even a glance, and nothing else had changed. There was no Skill notification or exhale of Mana. Just chasms that led into cloying darkness and hard rock.

Still, it had to mean something. He hadn't the talent Evie had, or the blind luck that Beef seemed to possess. The best hints he had toward his Core Manifestation was his Path. The Worldvein itself—a thing he wasn’t sure was even real—pulled at him. Conceptually it was compelling in a way that Archie couldn’t really articulate, and physically…well, the first time he activated his evolved form of Primeval Drift—Tread the Worldvein—he’d felt a distinct and very real drag downward. Like iron to a magnet, it had required him to expend a small but meaningful measure of Intent to keep from falling into its darkened embrace. Not a hard task, but the fact that it still persisted, even now, was concerning.

And yet Archie couldn’t put away the feeling that he should simply let go. To drop into the dark depths and see what awaited him.

He shuddered. Not today. There was too much to do here on the surface; training took priority. He couldn't vanish into the earth for who knows how long just to work at a hunch. There was no telling what lay below. Archie had heard too many stories of terrible things hidden in the earth—Domains and worse.

No. For now, he’d stick with his known problems. Which is why, with two more hours before departure, Archie had traveled to the Crafting Halls in search of one final piece of preparation.

He pushed open the doors to the Forge and found it unbearably loud. The sound of hammers, bellows, and screeching metal filled the air, reminiscent of the worst sort of city traffic. It was a massive room, much bigger than Archie remembered, but he didn’t spend a lot of time in the crafting areas. Workstations dotted angled alcoves along the walls, rising through several open floors filled with whooshing flames and heat like an open oven. The greatest noises came from the center, where the biggest forge sprawled over half the massive floorplan.

The Forgemaster’s station.

It was a massive affair even aside from the forge itself. A series of anvils ringed the platform, each made of a different material, from base iron to opalescent Fiendstone. Harn moved among them, a number of apprentices waiting in the wings to hand him tools or materials as he blurred around at top speed. The man was stripped to the waist, his body covered in a sheen of sweat as he hauled cherry-red metal from coals to anvil. His uncovered face, scarred and ugly, was twisted into an expression of fierce concentration.

Beef and Gabby were already there, talking animatedly at a side table next to the Forgemaster himself. Archie made his way over, nimbly avoiding the purposeful and relentless stride of all the other sweating apprentices.

The Forge was filled with apprentices hard at work making parts and pieces of items that Archie couldn't identify, except as components. Only at the far side of the room, where the finishing touches were being placed, could he recognize that they were sets of armor made of mithril and other materials he couldn't identify at first glance. Uniform pieces were accompanied by weapons: swords, clubs, spears, and armored gauntlets covered in thick plates or spikes.

All of them were scored along the blade, haft, or wrist by two glyphs. One was easily recognizable as House Navarre but the other was unfamiliar. It looked like a breastplate crossed by two axes.

"That's Harn's mark," Beef pointed out.

"Huh? The two axes thing?"

"Yes, it's Harn's. It's his Master mark. He's been putting it on all the pieces that his people work on. It adds an extra bit of durability to the item and helps it absorb more Mana during the forging process."

"How does that work?" Archie asked.

"Not a clue. I've been trying to figure it out, but it seems like it's some sort of smith secret." Beef sighed dramatically. "If only I had focused on blacksmithing instead of shipbuilding."

The Titan patted the big bull on the shoulder. "We've all made our mistakes with our builds. Nothing we can do about it now."

Archie squinted at the pair of them. "You two seem awfully chummy. What's going on here?"

"What?" Beef said, fidgeting and taking a deliberate step away from Gabby. "What are you talking about? We're not up to anything."

Archie switched his glare from Beef to the Titan, but the stone-faced woman gave away nothing.

“You—” A rhythmic thudding was Archie's only warning. He dove to the side as the massive undead Dragon leapt across the smithy, hitting Beef's chest horns-first.

"Fafnir! My sweet little—ow!" The dark Dragon climbed across him, slashing at Beef's snout in a way that Archie couldn't distinguish between mean or playful. She was huge now, twice as big as Archie himself. That claw would’ve seriously hurt someone not as big as Beef.

"Hell," Archie muttered. "How many creatures did that thing eat?"

"Quite a bit. She had her fill of godslaves back in Amaranth. Didn't you? You're a little terror, aren't you?" Fafnir preened under the attention before seemingly thinking better of it. It leaped off Beef's horned head and hopped across the table to land near the Titan.

The woman reached out instinctively, running her bare hand across the Dragon's scaled and horned head. Miraculously, the little monster leaned into her touch like a happy cat.

"She seems to like you more than she likes me," Beef said, clearly a little disappointed. "What are you doing that I'm not doing?"

"I honestly don't know," the Titan offered. She was smiling in a way that Archie found annoyingly disarming. He kept being reminded that this was no longer the killer that had hunted him across the Rimefangs. Archie didn’t like the feeling. Seeing the woman pet a deadly killer undead Dragon like it was a house cat muddled the situation further.

"Don't worry,” Hallow said. Fafnir gave a growl and eyes opened up across Beef's crystalline chest. "...Yes, soon. We will have more food for you soon."

"There's a lot more in the jungles," Beef promised. "Just you wait. You'll be as big as Pit soon enough." From the way the little murderer's tail wagged, she liked that news a lot.

Still, Archie wouldn't be distracted. "You two are up to something though. I can tell when people are conspiring. Believe me, I've done enough of it myself. Spill."

Beef and Gabby shared another look before the woman shrugged dismissively. "Sure, we can share. I don't mind."

With an excited grin, Beef flicked his hand and a notification rolled into being before Archie's eyes.

Dual Quest Received!

Blood And Stone

As the last living Gigas and the heir of the Path of the Exulted King, the Elder of Aeonis have deemed both Gabrielle Nevarre and Beefhammer worthy of their attention, but that is not enough to know the glory of their power.

You must earn that.

The Ruin has returned, and so must the old ways. By blood and stone, you two shall prove yourselves worthy.

Gather points to unlock bonuses.

Kill 100 Threats - 50 Points

Kill 500 Threats - 100 Points

Kill 10 Superior Threats - 500 Points

Kill 1 Supreme Threat - 1000 Points

Unique Threats - ??? Points

Rewards (Beefhammer):

Increase Risen Control Maximum By 10 - 50 Points

Increase Speed And Durability Of Risen - 100 Points

Increase Authority - 1000 Points

Unlock Memories For All Controlled Risen - 2000 Points

Rewards (Gabrielle Nevarre):

Increase Agility By 10 - 20 Points

Increase Endurance By 10 - 25 Points

Increase Strength By 10 - 50 Points

Enhance Racial Skill(s) - 500 Points

Increase Authority - 1000 Points

Beefhammer. He Who Would Be King. Gabrielle Nevarre. She Who Would Shield Us.

One fights at the head of an army of the dead. The other fights before the ghosts of her fallen Race. Champions without fanfare.

Prove your mettle.

Stand and fight.