In the end, I finished Overload Armor’s trial first. As was often true of my Armorist trials, it largely focused on hitting me over and over again. Pain, as it turned out, was a good teacher.

  And so it was that, after getting pelted with all manner of attacks and subtly adjusting my mana output to handle them, I was faced with a list of much-appreciated upgrades.

  For overcoming your class trial, you have been offered class skill upgrades.

  The strength of Overload Armor now scales better with your Intelligence.

  The maximum mana usable with your Overload Armor and the speed at which you can channel it into the skill now scales better with your Wisdom.

  Nothing life-changing, but extra power was extra power. I’d have to run some tests to see how big the difference was, but with how high my Wisdom was getting these days, perhaps now I could actually tank a full Ore Muncher punch if it came to that.

  After that, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Unlike some of my other class skills, Overload Armor had no restriction against using it with advanced mana types. Mana Feet’s trial had made movement skills class aligned just like Arcane Vision’s had made detection and identification abilities class aligned, but I doubted Overload Armor would do anything similar.

  Perhaps to be expected, then, there was only one remaining upgrade. Far from underwhelming me, however, it was many times stronger than I’d anticipated.

  Overload Armor is now passively active whenever you are wearing armor enhanced or conjured by Arcane Armory. The strength of this passive is equivalent to what it would be if you activated the skill with 5% of your maximum mana. This effect does not consume any mana.

  A passive. When I had a bunch of mana and some time to prepare, it wouldn’t help me that much, but in all other cases, the upgrade would be invaluable. Hell, now that I’d grabbed Perpetual Armor, the passive would run while I was asleep, too. At my current maximum mana of 625, that was a full 31 points of mana worth of protection working around the clock.

  And if the defensive version was well appreciated, for once, I was even more excited by its offensive counterpart. A few days later, I managed to clear Overload Weapon’s trial, and the bonuses were almost verbatim the same. I was excited to get some extra oomph for my fully charged fire arrows, and I almost wished we hadn’t killed the jungle hydra just so I could test them out on its thick scales. Really, though, the passive was the clear winner. Every single strike now came with a full 31 mana worth of empowerment.

  It was almost a shame that we were on our mini-vacation, as I would have loved to fully test out my new upgrades in a real fight. I took a day off from crafting to hunt down some gryphons and revisit the sea to fight some squids, but all of those monsters had been well beneath me for a while now. Still, it was gratifying to see glancing blows now sink deep into rocky feather-packed hides and smooth rubbery flesh alike, and now I could try out some more calamari recipes, too.

  If there was a singular disappointment, it was that I was now out of class trials to run. Arcane Augmenter’s path was closed off until I finished my crafting quest, and I hadn’t maxed out the next tier of skills in either of the two other rooms. I half considered throwing the necessary points into Resist Magic, Enhanced Physical Hardiness, or Spellsword/Swordspell just to have open a new trial up, but with only two class points left to my name, I was hesitant to spend them so freely.

  Obviously, that was the only reason. I definitely was not holding on to my class points just to keep myself from having to run more trials. If I was secretly a bit relieved to get a break from dying twice a day, well, that was neither here nor there.

  With my trials taken care of and less than half of our month-long break remaining, I quickly threw myself back into my crafting, eager to see just what I could accomplish in two more weeks.

  Smithing has reached level 4!

  Woodworking has reached level 15!

  In a way, I’d already failed to follow Sett’s enchanting advice. Back when I’d asked him to help me learn the skill, he’d created a series of example matrices for me to copy, each of them coming with a label.

  The first was the standard enchanting matrix, and it was labeled “levels 1-5.” Already, I’d hit level six, yet I hadn’t moved onto the next example. While I planned to now that my mana manipulation was better, first, I tried my hand at making some genuine enchanted items.

  My options were admittedly limited. To begin, I could only recreate spells I already knew, and all my attempts to enchant with a targeted spell or a higher-tier spell had failed. Constrained to my more basic cantrips, that left me with Illumination, Flameploof, Conjure Water, Summon Pebble, Gust, and Pest-Killing Aura.

  With that short list to choose from, I spent a while making some knick-knacks.

  Art came first. Hoping to combine some of my other professions with Enchanting, I carved a basic wooden owl, large enough to come up to my thighs. From there, I hollowed out part of its body, hiding two enchanted cubes of iron inside and gouging out its eyes. It took a few attempts to get the positioning right, but when I held the carving and channeled some light mana into the twin matrices, two purple orbs flickered to life within the owl’s eye sockets, giving it a vaguely ethereal, haunting quality.

  I hadn’t spent that long on the carving, and any cursory inspection would quickly find the exposed metal I’d shoved into it, but it was a neat proof of concept. Once I got better with my enchanting, I might try something similar for a few cabin decorations.

  From there, I tried to make some less artistic and more functional items. Imbuing a thick metal rod with the spellform for Gust, I staked it into the ground and shoved some air mana into it. Far fancier than any Dyson airblade, the magical fan released a steady supply of wind to cool me off. Of course, the moment I stopped feeding it mana, it ended, and it wasn’t as useful as just casting the spell myself, but it was still fun.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  A lighter was an easy choice to make next. Actually getting the spellform small enough to make it convenient was its own issue, which meant that the end product was a bit unwieldy, but I successfully created an iron rectangle that could produce a small flame.

  Branching out, I forged a cup, though for similar reasons, it had such a bulky base that I would have been embarrassed to ever sell it. Frankly, the rest of it wasn’t overly pleasant to look at either, as it was essentially a cylinder of cast metal that I’d welded to the bottom of a poorly smithed cup.

  Even so, the end effect was gratifying: With a dash of water mana pushed into the base, an orb of water formed directly above the cup before splashing into it. It was imprecise, the water overflowing and splashing everywhere, but still, I’d created a cup of endless water!

  On the surface, the cup seemed like the sort of thing an adventuring team would pay an arm and a leg for. In actuality, though, it was next to useless.

  To start, I was still enchanting based on the principles of Sett’s beginner-level matrix. To activate the enchantment, someone would likely need at least a level of an external mana manipulation skill to push their mana into the cup’s base.

  The matrix Sett had labeled “levels 5-8” would partially help with this. Rather than forcing someone to push a thread of mana through the entire pathway, the new matrix came with a complex pattern at the start that grabbed onto your mana and shoved it through the rest of the path for you. While not outright eliminating the need for some mana manipulation, this addition simplified the activation process and sped it up dramatically.

  Beyond that, though, it wasn’t until the “levels 8-10” matrix where the true issue was addressed. To cast Conjure Water, you needed to supply the enchantment with water mana. Anyone who had water mana, though, could almost certainly already cast Conjure Water on their own. The third matrix addressed this with a sub-enchantment that somehow took in neutral mana and shifted it, turning it into a different mana type. The only example I’d been left with turned it into light mana instead, but I was sure the concept extended to other mana types as well.

  For the level 5-8 enchantment, I was relieved to discover that my mana manipulation training had finally borne fruit. The physical shape of the new sub-enchantment was like a coiled spiral pattern, made up of inwards-facing jagged teeth, and while I wasn’t able to perfectly move my mana into such a shape, I made a barely workable imitation. I added it to the start of the next enchantment I made, and while the pull wasn’t nearly as powerful or clean as what the grand magus had managed, the matrix successfully grabbed onto my mana and started yanking it inwards.

  Enchanting has reached level 8!

  That, unfortunately, was about as far as I got. For a solid week, I mapped out each section of the level 8-10 sub-enchantment, committing the entire thing to memory. Even with Understanding giving me an instinctive sense of magic, the entire thing was nonsensical to me, and I had no idea how it was transforming basic neutral mana into light mana. Which was fine -- I didn’t need to understand it if I could just recreate it. Sadly, I could not, though the attempts did net me another skill level.

  Intrinsic External Mana Manipulation has reached level 7!

  With the extra boost from the augment, I got a bit farther, but the enchantment technique was still just barely out of reach. Despite the solid gains I’d made across multiple professional skills, by the time our vacation came to an end, I was left more frustrated than not.

  In a weird way, though, that worked out just fine. Having hit a wall after a month of what was essentially hermitude, I found myself eager to meet back up with the others. Partly, I wanted to show off everything I’d made, including a few new recipes I’d been working on since the creation of my oven.

  More than that, though, I was ready to set off again. Now that the forest, the graveyard, and the spatial region had all been cleared, we were rapidly advancing towards the next mana-collection site. With a bit of luck, we’d only need to make it through one or two more regions before we hit the next one.

  It seemed I was not unique in holding this sentiment, either. When at last the three of us returned to the cabin, there was a sort of anticipatory energy suffusing the space which -- after the requisite small talk -- Cal ignited with a simple statement.

  “So, I did some looking around, and I found where we’ll be heading next. How do we feel about a fire region?”

  While Cal had found a few new regions, only one of them lay directly between us and the next mana-collection site. Had there been any reason to suspect we were up against another advanced mana type, then perhaps we would have discussed going around it, but when it came to fire, I wasn’t too worried. The basic element was easily ignorable by Cal’s Apex Shroud, and with my own frost enhancements, Heat Resistance, and Chill spell, I doubted I’d be in any serious trouble either.

  Of course, that only made for two of us. Fire was just about the worst possible matchup for Verin’s frost magic, and it felt pretty obvious from the get-go that she’d be staying behind.

  Obvious to me, at least. Somehow, Verin herself didn’t get the memo.

  “I would entreat you two to stop speaking as if I will not be coming along.” Fixing us with an icy gaze, the noble dared us to say anything to the contrary.

  Naturally, Cal had no qualms taking that dare. “Verin, level with us. Why would you be coming? Your whole shtick is sitting around in a giant block of ice. Not that it’s a bad shtick. It’s a great shtick, even! But it might not be the best skill set against a full region of fire. It’s no biggy. I’ve sat out regions before.”

  Undeterred, Verin threw the tiniest dash of mana into her signature class skill, a sheen of frost forming over her skin as the air grew crisp and frigid. “You may not be aware, but frost classes are notorious for having hidden class quests related to fire. If I repel enough flame attacks to satisfy a quest, I would not be surprised if I unlock some manner of fire resistance option for my Advancing Glacier. Better yet, if I slay some of the elementals by lowering their temperature enough, I could imagine receiving quite a number of class points from whatever quest I inevitably complete.”

  Left unsaid was that the word “if” was doing quite a bit of heavy lifting. The alternative was that the fire attacks would burrow straight through her defenses and fry her to a crisp. Having died from fire in my class trials before, I could testify that it wasn’t a very fun way to go.

  Still, Verin looked resolute, and I could tell she wasn’t going to budge. A part of me wondered if this was really just about class quests, or if there was something else going on beneath the surface. Was she worried we’d get stronger without her? She did like to joke about being the only one of us without a Legendary skill. How much of those jokes were fueled by genuine frustration, though?

  Or maybe I was just reading too much into it. For all I knew, she was just antsy to go fight something new. Of the three of us, she often struck me as the one with the least to do during our breaks, and I could imagine her dreading another long stretch of time by herself. Or even more likely, she needed a concrete win after the spatial region debacle.

  “Fine, I think it’s kind of stupid, but I’d be dead from boredom a long time ago if we weren’t allowed to do kind of stupid things. But I’m calling anti-dibs on being the one to carry you around! That’s all Tess this time.” The princess’s acquiescence only earned a thin-lipped nod from Verin, but that ultimately settled it.

  Whatever the reason, it seemed that the party would remain together for the next leg of our adventure.

  In a brief manner of days, all of our preparations were complete, and the three of us left the comforts of our cabin behind. Over the forest, past the graveyard, and through the now-mundane remnants of the spatial region, Tal’Ket carried us unwaveringly to our destination.

  Though it should have come as no shock to any of us -- and least of all Cal, given that she’d been here while scouting -- it was the princess who said what we were all thinking.

  “Damn. It’s hot.”

  A sentiment which we would soon find to only grow truer and truer as we proceeded.

  And thus, with that cheery observation, we set off into a land of flames and brutal heat, ready to triumph over whatever the dungeon would throw our way.

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