Following the novel, and profoundly powerful utilization of what was considered a fundamental power of magery, Ulric had to set about getting an idea why the boy was so sketchy about using it, if it was considered a relatively novitiate working.

  “Have to admit Brighteyes, I’m not sure anybody should be allowed to use this thing. It’s way too creepy.” He said bluntly.

  A pained chuckle from the elf prince agreed with that claim, before the young Elf stumbled through his reply, “Is so. Easy. Powerful. Not number, I mean many…Damn Valin tongue biting speech! Er…often. Not often used, Ulric Glade Chief.”

  “Is that why peeking at someone else’s status is considered rude?” Ulric asked, ignoring the lad’s probably deserved frustration at navigating human language.

  Being multilingual himself, he understood well the aggravation with struggling to put thoughts to proper words when you weren’t comfortable with vocabulary or grammar. They’d work on it together when the kid taught him Elvish, he’d help dial in the prince’s Human.

  A nod and a frown, the young man was trying to figure out how to say what he wanted to say as carefully as he could. His host did not appear to know even basic etiquette, even if he was not entirely a savage and this was important to avoid extremely uncouth behavior that might compel an accounting in violence.

  “Part. Also angry, no, wrong, hostile. Is often done before war or ambush of warrior. Always ask, or may start fight.” Brighteyes explained slowly.

  Ulric nodded along with that, having suspected as much.

  Time was a wasting though, he had stuff to do, [Scan] was a big deal, but life in the glade had pressing demands. The idea of escorting an injured elf child through the wilderness was daunting. As of right now, he considered it impossible, there was too much that needed to be prepared to leave the safety of this little homestead behind.

  Seeing the descriptions of the Aes’r-Iriel’en youth’s hurts, Ulric had a good idea of Brighteyes' condition and he knew there was no chance of making the trip through the wood to wherever that village might be in the nearest future. The boy wasn’t quite crippled, but obviously wincing at certain motions, especially when he had to bend over to pick anything up, or when he took a hard step, it became swiftly clear that Brighteyes was in pain and hiding it.

  Hiding it well, to give a child his apparent age credit.

  But, tough as nails as he might be, taking a child out into that forest and attempting to traverse who knows what would be a death sentence if they needed to run. Ulric knew he could probably carry the kid and move pretty fast, he'd carried him down from the canopy, after all. Not to be forgotten though, it'd taken him about twice as long to make that return trip as to get up the tree to the canopy. He'd give himself good odds, he'd improved his climbing skills tremendously in the month he'd been regularly ascending the towering trees. However, one of those snakes catching them going up or down and there was no chance Brighteyes would manage an escape.

  Nothing for it.

  Ulric looked over to Brighteyes, who'd taken on a patient waiting posture, sitting at the camp fire. Might as well get the cards on the table.

  "Brighteyes, you know you can't travel like that right?" Ulric was pointing to the status window only he could see as he said it.

  At Brighteyes nod he continued.

  "Good. You take the next few days and do not much. Eat. Sleep. Recover your strength. I'm going to work on a few projects and get us ready to travel. Meantime, think of anything you know we'll need to travel. You let me know now, and I will prepare. Understand me Brighteyes?"

  "Understand you, Ulric Glade Chief. Brighteyes hear and obey." the boy sounded almost deferential.

  He must have been in more pain than Ulric thought. Or maybe it had to do with his own recent change in status. The status had him recognized as [Lord of the Ancient Glade]. Probably meant he now possessed a higher standing than some random hermit in a distant wood. Enough to get a polite tone from Brighteyes, anyway. Good enough, it wasn't like he was a "Yes, sir. No sir." type of guy but he'd not be putting his ass in the wind with someone who didn't respect him enough to listen. Besides, with the trip upcoming he didn't want to take chances that a bold youth with too much pride would fuck something up and get both of them killed, simply because he wouldn't follow directions.

  The rest of the day went by quickly. Another shared meal, a few camp chores. Ulric stripped the corpse of the Beastman warrior and made plans to retrofit himself some armor. He was relatively sure he could use bones from the Forest Lord in the place of those metal plates. Speaking of those were stronger and lighter than any steel he'd known of in his past life. And, yet, the Forest Lord’s bones were still superior. Fucking magic. He'd make a bone version of the scale armor to start.

  Nothing had yet put noticeable damage on the leather made from Forest Lord hide, not broken branches, thorns, a wild antelope’s attempted goring, or anything else he'd run into so far. Thankfully he hadn't had the toughness of his coat tested by that cruelly barbed trident, which looked like its stiletto thin tines could punch cleanly through a light armor.

  However, just because he hadn't run into trouble didn't mean he wouldn't. Especially not when his first encounter with men had resulted in violent conflict. Future conflicts Ulric wanted to be better geared to face.

  As his hands moved over the foreign Viking’s protectives, his mind wandered.

  Ulric had never been much of a craftsman during his first life, at least, not for fun. He had an obsessive attention to detail, honed during his years of engineering but his mind frequently turned to the abstract rather than the concrete without a schematic or specific objective. He enjoyed the use of his tools to meet particular goals, to streamline processes in his research when necessary, or to manufacture solutions, but not as a hobby. Methodically planned hiking trips to pale shadows of Earth forests, occasional paid game hunting excursions, socio-sexual interactivity quests, and relaxing in his chair reading history books out of morbid obsession with how things could ever have gotten so bad was how he spent most of his free time, back when his legs could take it.

  Later, after losing the leg, virtually, he did a lot more drinking. He did the third thing almost not at all and a hell of a lot of regretting being unable to do the first two.

  Glade life changed his inclination to muck about with handicrafts early on.

  Long days spent sitting in his shelter during the rainy season had produced an unexpected enemy: boredom. With his essential needs met, Ulric had been faced with a surfeit of useless time. He'd been unable to gather food, but had plenty, thanks to the Forest Lord. Water was everywhere. He no longer burned fires simply for the sake of burning them as he had a sufficient number of furred hides preserved to stay warm, thus wood was not an issue. The stove in his shelter was stocked for a week at a time and pulling stocked wood from under a small wood shed wasn't involved enough to occupy him. A profound boredom began to eat at him over those first few days and he nearly had a nervous breakdown from overthinking.

  Towards the end of preserving sanity, Ulric took on projects.

  Magic occupied his thoughts initially. Figuring out how to control and manipulate mana, determining the exact nature of his stats, the elemental breakdowns of magic, so far as he could measure them, and crafting the full set of elemental spells was enough to satisfy him. But this led to the problem where, once he'd exhausted his mana, he returned to having nothing to do for long periods of time. Lack of occupation led to his exploration of handicrafts.

  Sewing, carving, fletching and bowyer work, to start. He'd harvested enough materials of exceedingly high quality from the Forest Lord's corpse to be able to experiment. The method for how to treat and process leather was an early success that hadn’t required much experimentation, other than to rough out how long to tan the hides. Recall of several discussions with a taxidermist who handled his few hunting trophies provided most of the details. The man had been “old school” which Ulric found himself appreciating when it came time to try the preservation of animal hide himself.

  Sewing wasn't hard, the knots and stitches an exercise in remembering some knot theory, heh get it? with a healthy dose of trial and error. Carving was a complete unknown but a week of steady practice following spell-crafting got him the gist. Two weeks into the isolation chamber and Ulric had an epiphany: he could make a bow.

  He'd bow hunted occasionally in his past life, almost exclusively when he got time away from work to do such things. Gun hunting had grown instantly stale from lack of challenge, there was simply no point to using a firearm to slaughter a creature that had no way to even understand what was happening when a gun was able to kill it from hundreds of meters away. Although he'd stopped hunting when his knee was ruined and the depression set in, he'd fantasized occasionally about making his own bow back in those days. Reality was that you would spend half a day carving, uncover a crack or flaw in the stave and have a very involved walking stick. His second Steelwood bowstave that shattered on first pull nearly drove him over the edge.

  That ended when Ulric remembered how to make glue from antlers and hide. Hours watching a master bowyer make a laminated horn bow on holonets, before he considered the behavior too self-punishing, too despairing, gave Ulric inspiration.

  A day spent boiling Bladefern Elk horn, scraping and liming hides before boiling them as well, resulted in a clay pot full of glue solution which he poured into a thin mold for cooling and drying. This took days due to the humidity of the plateau’s Autumn monsoon season, even when the hide mold was pulled over top of fire heated stones. As the glue dried, Ulric decided to use the incredibly hard wood he’d discovered to make a laminate stave with a thinned rib bone core.

  Sweat dripped from his forehead, his forearms knotted, the muscles clamping down as he drew his knife through thin segments of Steelwood, one hand on the hilt and the other on a leather wrapped point to protect his hand from slips. Eventually, he graduated to tapping the spine of the knife with a heavy stone to drive the blade through the seam he’d created, following the natural grain to make thin strips. It was the diligence of days, following wizardry exercises, to work his knife through a Steelwood bough to produced quarter centimeter strips. Fortunately, the wood proved incredibly straight grained, something for which Ulric thanked the Watcher and all the stars in the sky.

  Shaping he’d known from the holovids required steaming. That took him a minute to figure out. Eventually, Ulric had boiled water in a covered pot and then poured it into a nested wood channel, which allowed the steam into a hide blanketed chamber holding the strips. This allowed him to expose the wood strips to large amounts of hot steam. It took some time but steaming the wood then gluing the layers around the bone core, and with all the strength he could muster, using wood shims and sinew cords to wrap and tie the laminate stave to match a properly rounded stone got the shape he wanted. Layers of Steelwood, glue, and a core of Forest Lord femur dried under a boiled leather wrap, the drying leather compressing the materials even as the glue set and the steamed wood settled in its bindings, the recurve holding true under all that tension.

  The tremendous investment paid off. The juice was well worth the squeeze, and Ulric only had to repeat the process twice to get a useful bowstave, when his first delaminated after a week of practice. It was worth it, says he. What resulted was a masterpiece of bow technology. His braided gigabear tendon bowstring dried about the same time as the first stave attempt. It was with a shocked grunt that he found it a serious effort to string the bow, even with his far above the Before enhanced strength. Fletching was simple, if tedious in the extreme. The same glue used in the lamination held feathers and helped bind glassresin broad heads which were near a hand long and two fingers wide. Far bigger than anything he'd have hunted with on Earth. Then again, they were going to be used on things far more dangerous than deer.

  That bow had ended up saving the elf prince. High velocity broadheads drove right through the bodies of Vikings wearing light armor. The speartipped glass-resin heads, those had done a number on the kidnappers.

  At one point that afternoon, while the Reforged man tinkered with the armor, Brighteyes wondered over to the strung bow in the corner of the dugout wood cave and asked about it. Ulric preened and told young Brighteyes about its creation, how he’d used it to help save the lad, and the young prince remarked that the bow would “Inspire a riot” which was all the praise Ulric could ask for. Were Elves all archers, like some fantasies seemed to suggest for no good reason, or was it simply that composite materials weren’t widely utilized materials? He’d find out sometime soon, he supposed.

  Brighteyes provided a new mission, outside of immediate survival through Winter. Contact the natives of this land, learn what he could, and return a boy to his parents. Easy. Ulric just had to navigate several kilometers of wilderness with a child he could only communicate to in pidgin before free climbing down an escarpment that made El Capitan look like a playground see-saw, and venturing into a vast woodland with only said child for guide. Easy peasy.

  These thoughts occupied him while Ulric used his bone chisel to split a giga bear tibia and several ribs into sections of straight and gently curved bone which he then had to grind smooth on a roughened flat sanding stone. Smooth strokes of bone on stone occupied his hours and night fell before he'd finished producing the segments he'd theorized would mimic the scaled patterns. He ate a quick meal of smoked meat and raw turnip things and turned in for the night. Brighteyes had beat him to bed hours ago, while obsession was driving him. He rolled up in his fur blanket and slept on the woven reed mat floor of the cave-shelter.

  Ulric woke before the sunrise, as had become his norm. For reasons probably involving his reforging and the lack of access to easy artificial lighting, he had slept about three hours after sundown and rose just before dawn. According to his best estimates he only needed about five hours sleep to feel fully rested. The longer, seven and eight hour sleeps of this waning solar season were downright slothful. Whatever the case, he had breakfast done and was already experimenting with some leather scraps by the time Brighteyes woke.

  The thought of magical mending or joining of leather seams wouldn't leave him alone. Seams always caused problems. They were natural weak points, places for water to invade a previously watertight material, and vastly increased the time to produce a complex shape. His leather boots in particular had taken a great deal of time to make comfortable as well as protective. He'd never appreciated the wizardry of cobblers before he'd been pressed to make his own footwear.

  Ulric was now trying to mold mana to the shape of the leather. He had a clear vision of what he wanted. He wanted two pieces of the same material to be one piece, smooth and continuous. He had a vague idea of how to do it. Make the leather as liquid and malleable as water so it flowed together, sort of like a metallic vacuum weld with magic. Keep the edges that should meld isolated and then make like join to like using magic to weld them. Last came the Will. This task was easier, in a way, than a fireball or a lightning spell. Ulric just had to infuse mana with matter and convince two pieces that they weren't separate at all. He failed. Utterly.

  It was more difficult in that matter seemed to have its own "mana shape" and you needed to match the mana to the substrate or it wouldn't bond and, therefore, wouldn't accept the change you were trying to enact on it. He was seeding graphite again. It was the same problem only with magic instead of metal atoms. The thought made him curse viciously in multiple languages.

  Ulric had died before solving the problem, but, before he had, he had created a simulation that had demonstrated a working concept to resolve the issue. It had been impossible. Needed impossible conditions to operate. Like, removing all atmosphere in a perfect vacuum. Something he could do now with air magic, right?

  Oh, if only life on Varda could ever be that easy, dear man.

  Break the big problem into small ones, he chided, and decided to start with the vacuum idea. He’d worked with vacuum pumps constantly, half his career had required working under zero atmosphere conditions to prevent oxidation or limit unwanted chemical interactions mediated by dissimilar metals at nanomolecular scales under high temperatures.

  Several minutes intense concentration and Ulric was certain he had a workable method to craft the spell he needed. The first instinct was to use Infrig, cold mana. Just…harder. After all, cooling air decreased its pressure.

  An inspiration from ideal gas law pulled him in a different direction, making him focus his efforts on Caelum instead, on air. Intent focused on absence of air. Visualize the emptiness, the mana drawing air molecules, moving them elsewhere and staying elsewhere or staying still. Understand the pressure lowering to zero, as the molar concentration of gas went to zero, temperature following it, the gas law dictating the relation between mass, pressure, volume, and temperature. Will the void to form around the leather.

  With the image and the understanding set in his mind, he applied his core’s magic. His core flared, some unspoken transformation of power surged through channels, what had been Caelum became instead, violently, Infrig and exploded into reality, drove the very molecules of atmosphere to stillness.

  Leather flash froze, shattered like glass, whose shards fell dissolving into a fine powder which then dissipated to smoke before they hit the floor, cruel cold hammered his face and chest, Mana ripped from his core’s reserves at an incredible rate, trying to meet the demand of what he asked of it, forming according to his desires and condensing in the space he'd emptied of everything surrounding the leather pieces. Slumping forward Ulric distantly heard the status as his breath harshly grated on lungs seared by cold beyond description, rapidly dissipating as his effort lost focus, which was followed by a loud rushing bang as air moved into the disturbed air around where the leather had been.

  *PING*

  The once engineer panted, confused. What the fuck had he done? He leaned back and reviewed his methods. When he inspected his status a minute later, he saw what he came to suspect after further review. His spell was a failure. The zero suggested as much, there was an incompleteness to the constraints of the magic, a critical flaw to be addressed before it could, in his Akashic link, be completed. It was a also success, he'd never imagined, hence said flaw.

  He'd created a pristine, perfect vacuum. A zero-pressure space. And, as predicted by the scientist Kelvin, that zero pressure had resulted from a zero kinetic energy condition. Other laws then applied. He created a zero pressure around a real object. Thermodynamics had their say and the energy of the leather was drawn out, the heat trying to fill the stilled space, burning his mana as that energy was dissipated, until the leather was also without energy. At which point it Varda’s Field, as far as he could tell, inflected, twisted to pure cold, Infrig so complete the leather fell apart, since the very electrons holding it together stopped moving, bonds failing. Total destruction of the material. The blow back of that cold reaching out, equilibrating had created a shock of sound.

  It worked. And ye gods the cost. Ulric's core was exhausted, his mana tapped completely. He'd made a vacuum in a space a little less than a basketball, destroyed a couple of pieces of leather the size of his hands, for about half a second, and it had run him dry. A spell-work beyond his strength, or, just damn near it. What happened if he hadn’t had enough strength to complete it? Would the Thaumaturgy, once enacted, find that energy from sources other than that which resided in his core? Such as his life?

  This, Ulric realized, was the power, the danger of magic. A man could create the impossible, or no, he could do the only theoretically possible. With magic, a man with the know how could take reality to the asymptotes, to the edges of physics, where the math started to break down. He had little doubt that, without the knowledge of exactly how the properties related the resulting cost of the spell would have been completely beyond him. Knowledge was Power, indeed.

  The problem was, Ulric realized, he had known exactly what he wanted. He wanted zero pressure. Magic gave him zero pressure. Then it extracted the cost, the monkey's paw curling a finger as the rest of the world got a say. Causes had effects, even for magic. Maybe especially for magic. You don't go mucking about with existence at the extremes of what is possible and not stumble across some fairly terrifying realities. Such as that he'd nearly killed himself breathing super cooled air for a fraction of a second. Like dipping your hand in liquid nitrogen, you only got away with it because you had the thermal energy to spare and there were already gases in the vicinity to take the majority of the cooling. A millisecond more though and the alveoli in his lungs would have solidified and torn as one. Spooky.

  Ulric took a few minutes in a cold sweat to think these revelations over, hoping Brighteyes hadn't seen the supposedly responsible adult in the room nearly suicide through stupidity. He might have gone about that all wrong, a thought which nearly summoned all the gods of obvious that had ever existed to smite him.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The problem in his old world had required vacuum, to prevent the metal from oxidizing or reacting while it was seeded into the graphite lattice. Maybe joining the leather didn't have such a harsh requirement. For one thing, it didn't seem to be reactive. Maybe the answer really was to envision two pieces becoming whole the edges melding to one, without extra steps. That meant shaping mana to match the material.

  Ulric had skipped that first experiment since he didn't necessarily know what was involved with fusing mana to an object.

  "Stupid." he muttered, "Blind stupid. Just because it seems hard doesn't mean it's incorrect. Went with something different than I intended just because I thought I already knew enough about something else to feel like it was progress."

  It was a common failing amongst junior engineers. Handed a new problem they tried to use tools and methods developed for other applications instead of thinking about what exactly they needed to do to work around the given situation. When you have a hammer…

  This time he'd lucked out. The mistake had only cost him time and a little pride. Was the [Absolute Zero] a good spell? Yes. For the very specific situation of needing to render something down to its atoms that weighed maybe a kilogram, wasn't moving, and was close enough to touch, while costing his entire mana pool. For essentially anything else? No, the spell was garbage.

  Ulric resigned himself to working on his armor pieces while he waited for his mana to regenerate. He'd go slower than planned, now that he was in mana exhaustion and suffering the headache it inflicted.

  Taking up the bone plates he'd ground smooth yesterday, Ulric started laying them out in a pattern which allowed the curved plates, about a hand long and eight centimeters wide, to overlap. These curved plates would go on his sides, matching the curve of his body. The flats he'd use to cover his abdomen, the squared plates being suitable to cover his front. He'd already decided that he'd try to make shoulder, breast, and back plates out of the [Forest Lord]'s scapulae. They were more than broad enough. He could probably fuck it up twice and still have enough to do the job.

  There would be gaps, but not many. He was going for a Lorica Segmentata kind of affair. The Romans had conquered the known world with it, and the professional soldiers had been able to march nearly a hundred kilometers a day in it, carrying their gear. Furthermore, if he didn't dick it up, he'd still be able to climb and shoot his bow in the stuff. It wouldn't do what plate armor did, but he wasn't planning on fighting on horseback either.

  Problem was that a proper Lorica had something close to forty pieces, and they each needed to be secured to a leather under coat because he didn't have any intention of tying the thirty or so straps to assemble it. He'd need to punch at least four holes in each piece to secure them.

  With a monster bear tooth awl and a hammer.

  Sighing at the mana exhaustion headache, the lost time, and lamenting his lack of mana to simply bore the holes with magic, Ulric got to hammering. It would have been far faster, of course, to use [Hydrocutter]. But he would have to do this the hardest way possible, another punishment for his stupid just earlier.

  Brighteyes wondered over at some point while Ulric worked.

  The convalescing youth took an interest in the project, a fairly technical and demanding craft was armor making, not something he’d expected to find from the strange host who had, it seemed, a vast diversity of skills. He watched raptly as Lorica segments were placed over marked locations on his hide vest and punched to mark the bore holes.

  Ulric had decided he'd do the breast, back, and shoulder plates together and strap them to the semi jerkin he was making rather than fixing them directly. It would let him shed the bulkiest part of the armor when needed, while still keeping his abdomen protected. It was also easier. An important consideration given that he was finding his skills not quite up to the task of precisely shaping the hard bones with the tools on hand. A bone rasp or file, or belt sander-grinder would have been tremendously fucking useful.

  Once the segments were all marked, Ulric overlapped them to check that they would provide the cover he was imagining. No way to really know until they were secured and he was moving around in it.

  "What you doing bones Ulric Glade Chief?" Brighteyes had watched quietly for nearly an hour and wanted to confirm his suspicions.

  Ulric looked up from the one thousandth hole he'd just finished punching. At least, it felt like a thousand. He'd broken two awls. The third didn't look like it would hold much longer. He'd run out of bear teeth at this rate. Frowning at his pace, Ulric thought about how to answer Brighteyes question.

  "I am making a suit of armor, in case I need to fight more dangerous monsters than those I normally hunt. Including fighting against warriors like the ones who took you. The design for this armor, inspired by the shitbag whose body donated its overall shape, comes from, ironically enough, the design of those my ancestors fought eons ago. They ruled a vast empire and changed warfare. The first professional army commanded by career soldiers. I'd not begrudge them their genius, not when I can make their strength my own. Much like I am making the Forest Lord's strength mine by using its bones and hide to fashion this equipment." A long discourse for Brighteyes to chew on.

  Should keep him busy enough to not bother Ulric too much.

  "This artisan trade. But you warrior Ulric Glade Chief?" Brighteyes looked even more curious now.

  Damn. So much for that.

  Ulric looked back down to the holes he was drilling. A rotary hand drill would be just the thing. But how to make drill bits? Shaking his head he decided how he'd answer Brighteyes.

  "Not a warrior Brighteyes. Not in my own mind at least. I am…was…an engineer. A man who provides solutions to improve the world of my people. That part of my life is over now, I think. Now I am simply doing as I must to survive in a new land amongst fantastic peoples and powerful creatures. I killed the Forest Lord because it attacked me. I killed the men who took you because it seemed right to destroy people who would hurt children. This armor, is a necessity that I had not made before because I didn't think I'd need it. I was wrong, and so I am correcting that mistake in preparation. Fortune favors the prepared mind, after all."

  Again, he'd hoped to buy some peace. He wasn't trying to confuse the lad but he didn't mind giving him enough to think about to be able to work without distraction. Without telling the kid to stomp off somewhere, at least.

  Brighteyes looked confused now. Good, probably—

  "Is wrong word? Warrior is hunter, guard of people in Elven home." He pointed to Ulric's bow and spear and the armor to be at Ulric's feet.

  "What else Ulric Glade Chief if not Warrior?"

  Brighteyes was indeed not stupid. And he'd aptly called Ulric out on his bullshit.

  What if not a warrior? Ulric had fought a monster to the death. He'd then taken its place as alpha predator of the forest floor, despite not having had to defend his position from anything. Yet. He'd then ambushed a group of bandits or poachers or whatever the hell they were, besides kidnapping, bushwhacking assholes, and killed one in an honest to gods duel. On top of that, here he sat making the armor of a legionnaire.

  "Well, alright, I guess you got me there Brighteyes." Ulric admitted scratching his beard sheepishly.

  "When you put it like that, I can't really say you're wrong, at least not according to the reckoning of your folk. Amongst my own people soldiers were sort of a career, at least a temporary one. It was something you decided to do for a living and I just happened to do most of the things I've done here out of necessity. Still. I have to admit I'm pretty much doing warrior shit and planning to do more of it if I have to. So yeah Brighteyes. I might be considered a warrior in a way."

  The realization was strange to him. Especially to say it out loud. It was as well as declared outright in his status. Warrior's instinct and all. Important to keep in mind he wasn't LARPing around out here. Shit was real. And it got realer in a goddamn hurry sometimes. Ulric had long since decided he'd live on his own terms and that meant being strong enough to face or escape his enemies and to prevent his own will being seconded by another's if he didn't want.

  Fine, Ulric thought, I am a warrior.

  *PING*

  Ulric didn't even open his status. He knew what happened. He'd classed, somehow, the details would wait until later. Right now, he had an armor to finish.

  Measure holes, mark jerkin and plate, hammer hole, align to jerkin, punch hole, tie down. This process was repeated over and over again. As his arms tired, Ulric's headache faded, his core siphoning the mana from the land and refining it. Looking up from his work, the trance broke.

  Twin suns had long since left the skywindow of the Ancient Glade. Brighteyes had made food at some point and was already asleep. A quick [Scan] revealed the princeling’s health to be improving rapidly, demonstrating that the extended rest was doing profound good to the child's bruised body.

  Wiping his brow and shivering against the cold wind that now steadily blew into camp, Ulric reviewed the fruits of his labor. A leather and bone scale armor, using the base of the Wolf-headed warrior’s, overlapping segments vaguely Roman in styling. If the thing fit right, he'd be able to fight, hunt, and travel in it without being too limited in motion. Taking a few minutes to tie the rough leather cord center laces and awkwardly fit the shoulder pauldrons Ulric tried the armor on.

  Once tied, it was clear some of the laces would need to be lengthened while others were shortened. The pauldrons leaned against the left side of his neck so he'd have to redo that as well. Range of motion was good though; the shapes were pretty much right. He could roll his arms swinging them at nearly right angle to his shoulders all the way around, the segments shifting with his motion. Turning at the waist was a little stiff, the laces tightening against his abdomen, but he could fairly well twist freely. Bending at the waist was the major limitation. Ulric hadn't been able to make it so that he could do a complete bend, only just managing to level his back to the ground. But overall? Not a bad first try. It would seem that similar projects involving cardboard as a youth had paid dividends long into the future.

  Comparing this armor to the armor worn by the Beastman he'd killed it would seem to be more robust at the joints with fewer large gaps. The lack of large singular breastplate meant it wouldn't take a direct stab as well dead center, the tip of a weapon being more likely to push into a seam on a dedicated thrust. But the overlapping layers of pauldron and chest scales would be much better at shedding an angled thrust. Not to mention it should hold up slightly better against arrows, which he'd proven were a serious threat against similar styles of armor.

  Proof of concept established, Ulric decided he'd complete the set with armored skirt, shin guards, and bracers. He'd never get gauntlets shaped correctly with bone, he was nowhere near skilled enough at bone shaping and it would take more time than he could commit to figure out how the overlapping patterns worked, even using stiff leaves to make the pattern blanks.

  A helmet would be nice too, but he wasn't sure about how to make one, it involved more complex leather work than a simple jerkin and more complex plate shapes. Maybe one of the elves in Brighteyes' village would either be willing to show him how to do it or even make one, provided he could make a satisfactory trade.

  Ulric took the prototype armor off and spent some time tending camp needs. Fire needed stoking. Food cooking. He was low on water, so he brought up a couple of heavy woven baskets strung along his carry pole up from the rock pool. After a meal consisting of some of the last remaining Forest Lord meat, soaked in water then roasted in coals alongside glade garlic, onions, and some kind of celery like stalk, Ulric was ready to retire to the trunk cave shelter.

  He was almost grateful for the destruction of his original shelter.

  It had motivated him to spend the effort to make a truly robust structure. He'd spent half a week under an impromptu lean-to while he worked, removing sections of the truck of the fallen giant whose passing had created this glade. Burning, then chopping away the charred wood, rinse and repeat, using [Hydrocutter] after he learned how, he'd created an approximately eight-meter wide and five meter deep recess some two and a half meters tall, that you only needed a small step up to enter. Some smoothing and flattening of the roof and walls had yielded a round ovoid space which he'd enclosed with driven stakes and rocks, packed with clay. A simple door of lashed branches fixed to a pole hinge completed the glade home. Crude. But effective.

  The western side of the shelter wall contained his large rock and clay oven/fireplace with its six foot chimney of clay bricks fit into the recess of a smoke channel carved to carry smoke to a vent out the shelter and up.

  When he got the thermal mass of brick and stone heated, the space got properly warm, maybe an hour of wood fire needed to bring it to comfortable temperature from the cold of the oncoming winter. Ulric had not wanted to cook large meals inside, in case a predator should investigate food smells so he nearly always prepared food outside at his rock lined fire pit. That wouldn’t be a forever thing, however, he’d make a bombproof door and commit to refining a kitchen later.

  Inside now, Ulric finally sat down to go over his status and this new tidbit of Akashic weirdness. Which, it turns out, what actually a subclass.

  [Status]

  Varda certainly had a knack for the dramatic, Ulric observed. Or, perhaps this was Watcher fuckery. Or, no, probably not, that seemed to active to fit the style of the Great Boobed Voyeur, far too directly involved for the Impossible thing, if he were to guess the motives and thoughts of deity kind.

  Eh, whatever.

  Ulric was starting to hope that he didn’t have to encounter mind bending, life changing shifts in what he knew in the form of these little Akashic updates so frequently. His poor thought slug was tired of keeping track. Ah, well, bitching about it solved nothing, Ulric dove into examining the newest twist on his second life.

  Drawn to conflict!? He gawked.

  Bite me! Ulric objected silently. All he’d ever wanted was to be pretty much left alone to his own devices. It wasn’t his fault a Gigabear tried to eat him, or that scum of the earth sonsofbitches tried to do a kidnapping right in front of him. Other than that little burr under his saddle, Ulric saw nothing to complain about.

  Very basic, very vanilla, this suggested that classes and subclasses were not permanent things but shifting, fluid stages of progression down whatever distinct path a man, or woman, or any combination or gradient thereof found themselves. For himself, on the one hand, he was intensely invested in rooting out whatever secrets he could to magical fuckery. On the other, he was inclined to object with sharp pointy things to pricks that hurt kids or anything that generally needed killing. At the moment, this thing was pretty limited in how it changed his life. Perhaps that’s because he hadn’t truly invested himself into this particular way of life, it was, as things stood, a necessity of his life, not a passion.

  Hence the sub part of subclass, maybe.

  “Let’s be honest, now, who the fuck actually knows.” Ulric acknowledged his ignorance aloud, quietly.

  Ulric's first impressions were that this whole class-subclass thing was slightly underwhelming. Maybe they didn't play as large a role as he'd initially suspected. Or maybe he was a wee little baby bird, still in the nest, and these things took significant time to mature. Which was more likely.

  Well, there were slight benefits. He'd gained a somewhat significant passive enhancement to learning the use of weapons, though the vagary left him somewhat baffled as to how exactly that would play out. There were no active skills associated with the subclass, though whether that was simply because it was new or because it was a subclass Ulric knew not. In fact, there was precious motherfucking little he actually knew about much of this status nonsense. The whole thing seemed borderline useless, if anybody asked him, he thought to himself with budding irritation.

  "Don't make hasty judgements from too little data." He whispered, trying to regain his calm.

  It was too soon to tell. He'd probably gotten a significant advantage with his armor crafting by having the [Armor Fitting] trait. Misalignments in straps and an ill fit were not minor problems. They were things that could get you killed in the middle of a fight. If you brought a weapon back for a killing strike and had a shoulder piece hang up, the slight loss of speed or power could turn a fatal blow into a parried one and that could be all the difference. Essentially all of the near fatal experiences Ulric had had thus far had been decided on a knife edge. So, perhaps, at early stages the classes mostly provided basal improvements through passive traits.

  Classes represented an advantage, even if, at this stage, relatively minor ones. Which advantages did Ulric want? All of them. The shit that roamed these woods played for keeps. So did the men with balls enough to hunt in them. Ulric's victories so far had come by virtue of diligent preparation, near insurmountable advantage of position, magic, and more luck than any man had a right to.

  Sooner or later things would go tits up and Ulric wasn't going to rely on getting lucky to pull his chestnuts off the fire. And the only way he could see around that was simple: get better. He needed to be better at everything. Move faster and quieter. Shoot more accurately from farther away. Figure out how to fight with spear, knife, and axe with more lethality. Lastly, but certainly not leastly, he needed to improve his magic. It was a trump card, as demonstrated in full against the not Vikings. He'd thrown everything he had at the last two and it hadn't been much to throw. It had just been enough.

  Enough, Ulric thought, wasn't good enough by half. He decided then that every day until Brighteyes was ready to travel would be spent improving his combat readiness. He'd practice his magic in the early hours of morning. Once spent, he'd ride out the mana exhaustion doing camp chores and eating breakfast. Afternoon would be weapons training and maybe Brighteyes would have some ideas about that he'd be willing to share. Evening, when his mana had nearly recovered, he'd work out new spells to test more fully the next morning. It was a solid plan and Ulric went to sleep satisfied that he was on the right track.