Chương 1381: 1380. Purely Decorative

The blacksmith was quite satisfied with how the cuisses came out. Although the list of effects seemed a little short, many of them were compound effects with various effects under one name. The item was technically finished, now only the decorations were left.

"Did you get what you wanted from Tored?" he asked Feanys, who had waited at the side. He was looking forward to the stamps she chose for her decorations.

"Ah, yes, here!" she said and gave him a stack of matrices made of <Magic Steel>. They had the negative imprints of the designs carved in them. All Seth needed to do was hammer the foils and fix the decorations to the item, mixing and matching them into a pattern.

"Let me see..." he said and took the stack, sifting through it. As she had mentioned, most of them had a floral theme. Elegant winding vines and leaves, some blossoms, nothing too fancy or overbearing, he could get behind that.

"Okay, I will make a few and we can talk about how to arrange them," he said and went to the anvil to make a few examples of everything, using sheets of silver.

"Is this really okay? Didn't you already finish the item? Soul and everything?" Faenys asked, unsure. Seth halted for a moment before he understood what she meant.

"Oh, don't worry, since these are purely decorative, they can be added and removed at any point in time. Well, the only drawback might be that these need separate repair, if they get damaged in a fight, since they don't share any effects of the item," the blacksmith explained. As the item was already finished, mending these decorations onto it was simply like a human wearing clothes or having a piercing. The added purely to look, without interrupting anything of the items' function.

"So I will have to be careful not to get them damaged," Faenys came to her own conclusion.

"No, no. Don't give a crap about them, we can fix the in a hiffy. If you let your fighting style get influenced by flimsy decoration, I'm not adding them," the blacksmith threatened her while he was hammering the silver sheets into shape.

"Okay, okay, i won't," Faenys promised, watching Seth easily create beautiful decorations with a matrix and a few strikes of the hammer. They spent the next hour arranging and attaching the ornaments made that way until Faenys was satisfied with the look of her future armor.

"I think that's enough, let's end it for today, " the blacksmith said, when Faenys was finally satisfied with the looks of the cuisses. He also found their looks agreeable. It had already been evening when he finished the cuisses, and now it was really getting late, and Seth wanted to meet the girls one last time before they left.

"Can I come by again tomorrow, after training?" she suddenly asked.

"Are you really that bored?" the blacksmith asked doubtfully, but Faenys nodded with a sigh.

"I can't find any interesting shows to watch and as you know, I can't leave to go to a dungeon or on a trip to a different Tree Station," she admitted honestly. Right, the reason she had to stay was that Seth and the others needed her as a tailor puppet from time to time.

"How about you visit Nädel tomorrow? He is currently working on the base boots for your armor boots. I'm waiting on him for those. Maybe the presence of a beautiful woman will make him work quicker? I will call you when I have something for you to try on," the blacksmith suggested. Seth intended to start on the helmet next and there was not a lot Faenys could help with her attendance until he was mostly done. Since she was bored, it was better ti get some variation and see more than just forging.

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"Hm, fine! I will pay a visit to Nädel tomorrow and see whether I can motivate him," she joked. She left the shop first, leaving Seth alone with the finished leg armor. He put them in his inventory and got ready to leave.

"Good night, guys~" he said to the workshop assistants.

"Good night, Seth."

"Good night."

"" Sivri, Rún, and Cerberus said respectively as he vanished from the workshop and appeared back in his quarters, where he found Fin and Mina waiting to say goodbye. They had finished packing after Seth left and only waited for him before leaving.

"Promise to prioritize your safety," the blacksmith asked, after a short greeting with some tongue.

"Of course, what do you take us for?" Fin said confidently.

"Nothing will happen to us," Mina assured.

"I mean it, if anything happens that even remotely looks like you can't handle it, run. Even if you have to leave everyone else behind, escape," Seth insisted. He liked everyone in Minas Mar, but he had clear priorities. However, the girls just smiled wryly.

"Sure, sure. We will leave the mission behind immediately, if anything dangerous happens," Mina acquiesced. Fin also nodded with a sigh. Seth also sighed, because he knew that his words were falling on deaf ears. He was about 90% sure the girls would not leave anyone behind. They were simply that kind. It was one of the reasons he loved them so much, but also the reason why he held some worry.

Since he couldn't trust them not to throw their lives away for something as vain as saving the innocent or their friend, he made a different decision.

"Before you leave, let's get outside. There is something else I want to give you," he said mysteriously, luring the girls out of Minas Mar to hand them a last safety measure.... The Sky Dragon Helmet was a bascinet design, with an aventail made of <Adamantium>. This meant it was one of the typical helmets one would imagine when thinking of a knight helmet with a visor. That was, if Seth had not been part of the design team.

As a former member of the chronically online community, he had assembled a wealth of weird and curious knowledge. Rarely had it come in handy since the world fell into chaos. When thinking of a way to improve on the original design. Seth had been thinking about how to improve vision without compromising the defense of the helmet.

He thought of using clear crystals or similar materials to create a see-through visor, but all of that turned to a discussion of how this solution would actually have worse visibility or a distorted view. As he was trying to come up with a material that would not be weaker than the scales and not share the same drawbacks as minerals, a peculiar fact had surfaced from the deep well. It was a video he had seen a long while ago, about how researchers had created a method to turn bones clear as glass.

If he remembered correctly, it was a way to research the insides of bones. Coincidentally, he had an almost complete dragon skeleton he had kind of promised not to turn into a golem. He didn't know how it was supposed to work, but knowing it was possible was the first step to finding a solution. The question of how was actually solved before the Meeting of Masters was finished, by asking someone with more expertise on the subject: Neloth, at his alchemy station.

The demon maestro with even greater knowledge in alchemy than the maestro residing in the Adventurer Guild's holy land. ~You just have to leech out the lipids and stabilize the tissue, ~ the alchemy station stated as if it was obvious. It made it hard for Seth to acknowledge that he had no idea what Neloth was talking about. However, it brought them on the right track.

The solution was several chemical baths to treat the bones, before using <Energy Manipulation> and Charon's Obol to compact and densify the then transparent bone material, and forge out any unclear impurities left. This way, they had managed to create clear dragon bones that could be used for the visor. The only small drawback was that the bones lost their magical properties, which was not really that much of a problem, as they kept their durability and toughness.

The clear visor kicked off an idea from Neeco Boos, and they even went a step further. Using their combined knowledge, they found a system-native method to turn the bone glass into a one-way mirror. This way, the visor would look solid from the outside and hide the face of the wearer, while the wearer had full protection and perfect vision through the visor. Why even still use a visor instead of fixing it to the helmet as a window?

For the moments when spells had to be cast or projected, which was sometimes hard in a closed helmet. Ultimately, the design of the helmet was a great mix of modern knowledge and techniques and those of the system.