"Congratulations! You have successfully forged a scale armor. Due to usage of a variant material, the armor created had been upgraded."

Jack breathed out the air he had been holding since the notification started. But he was soon surprised by another notification.

"Congratulations! Your Blacksmith job has upgraded to Intermediate Apprentice."

Jack was thrilled by his Artisan job's level up. The success in making the scale armor into an upgraded version must have given him lots of proficiency that he was able to level up the job.

After calming down, he took a look at his armor that he had crafted.

Blood Guard Scale Armor, level 15/35 (rare medium armor)

Physical Defense: 31

Magical Defense: 29

Durability: 50

Dexterity +3

Reduce all ranged damage received by 30%

Rare armor! With this, he now had two rare armors, and this one looked to be even better than his Shadow Bear Tasset.

"This is one cool armor," Jack exclaimed, "do you know where I can find more scale material? If I can produce more of this rare armor, I can get rich quickly just by selling it."

"In your dream!" Peniel retorted, she had already come out of his separate dimension since Jack entered the room and was floating around observing him at work. "The reason you got a rare armor is simply because of that rare variant material, in addition to your incredible luck stats. Otherwise, the scale armor you produced will only be an uncommon grade."

"Really?" Jack's excitement was doused a little. After some thought, it is really unreasonable if he could get rare equipment so easily. After all, three out of the four materials could be easily procured from shops, and not that expensive as well.

He immediately replaced his current armor with this Blood Guard Scale Armor. With the addition of the Shadow Bear Tasset, his appearance was completely different from the mainstream players at large now.

He looked at the time, he still had a bit over half an hour left. Not wasting further time, he took out all his non-medium armor equipment. There were one magic hat, one leather bracer, two leather shoes, and one leather pant. He clicked on the dismantle option in his still open blacksmith interface, and dumped all these armors inside. The system asked for confirmation if he would like to proceed with the dismantling, he selected Yes.

A loading bar appeared while the armors were being dismantled. After ten seconds had passed, the loading bar filled up and several materials popped up in front of him. He checked the materials. There were 4 leathers, 1 cloth, and 5 iron ores. All of them were common materials. He stored the materials, then checked his stock of iron ore, he had a total of 37 ores.

"Time to upgrade the equipment level," he said. The one he wanted to upgrade the most was his Storm Breaker sword. Unfortunately, that sword was not being upgraded in a normal way. He would need to visit the weapon shop and bought many one-handed swords in order to upgrade it. But his fund was limited, so he would need to put that plan on hold first. The next most valuable equipment would be his newly acquired rare chest armor and the rare Shadow Bear Tasset. He then decided to upgrade the chest armor first.

He opened the interface and input the iron ore for the upgrading process. To his amazement, the success percentage was still 100% even though he was upgrading from level 15 to 16.

Peniel who saw his surprise, told him, "It was natural, you already upgraded to Intermediate Apprentice Blacksmith. At this level, the percentage reduction only starts at level 15, so any equipment below this level has a 100% success rate as long as you have the material. The reason why you still have 100% when you are upgrading this level 15 equipment, that was due to the assistance of the rare tools."

Hearing her explanation, Jack decided to not waste this chance. He immediately upgraded his Blood Guard Scale Armor continuously. It only started showing reduce percentage when he hit level 21. He also found out that after level 20, he needed two iron ores to upgrade instead of one.

Since he had limited iron ores, he only focused the upgrades to his rare armors and staff weapon. He upgraded the Blood Guard Scale Armor, Shadow Bear Tasset, and Repeater Staff, all to level 21 since that was the level where the success chance was still 100%. After these upgrades, he had used up 24 iron ores and only had 13 left.

He then continued to upgrade the Blood Guard scale armor to level 22, the percentage was 95% and used another two ores. The upgrade was successful. He continued again, the percentage decreased to 90%. He kept on going. When he was on his way to level 25, he failed twice, wasting 4 iron ores, but succeeded on the third attempt. He only had 1 iron ore left. He kept the last piece and stopped the upgrading process.

He inspected the three equipment which he had upgraded.

Blood Guard Scale Armor, level 25/35 (rare medium armor)

Physical Defense: 56

Magical Defense: 54

Durability: 50

Dexterity +3

Reduce all ranged damage received by 30%

Shadow Bear Tasset, level 21/35 (rare medium armor)

Physical Defense: 35

Magical Defense: 33

Durability: 40

Endurance +3

When HP is below 50%, defense is increased by 80%

Repeater Staff, level 21/25 (uncommon magic weapon)

Magical damage: 57

Range: 10 meters

Attack speed: 1

Energy: 60

Energy automatically refills when out of combat

With the upgrades of these two rare armors, his defense had skyrocketed. He would be able to go toe to toe with stronger opponents without the need to keep on worrying about dodging.

He checked on the time, he still had less than five minutes left. But since he had run out of crafting materials, he just packed up and walked out of the forging room.

When he came out of the blacksmith workshop, it was close to noon already. He decided to use the remaining of the day to start his hunting trip while making his way to the marked location for tomorrow's meeting.

He exited the capital from its Western gate, then proceeded South West. He met and fought several Wolf packs and Goblin packs on his way. When he arrived at a rocky area with a series of deserted mines and broke down mining equipment, he started to encounter new kinds of monsters. They were Gnomes and Gremlins, which were also on his hunting list.

The Gnomes were halfling creatures with green skin. They mostly held pickaxe which they used to mine for ores around the rocky area, but when Jack came into their range, they started to run after him while swinging their pickaxe as a make-shift weapon. Jack gladly met them in combat. He sent some range magic attacks first while waiting for them to come near before engaging in melee.

They were roughly like the Goblins, with childlike appearance and fighting in a group. But their group was considerably larger than a normal goblin pack, numbering around ten gnomes for each group. They fought without any sort of cohesion and mostly just did random attacks. With some cunning, Jack might even cause them to bump into each other on one or two occasions. Once they lost more than half their group, the remaining started to scatter, ran away into the cave mines around the area, making it harder for Jack to score his targeted 100 gnomes.

Jack used his staff's ranged attacks to kill some of the fleeing gnomes, but didn't waste time in chasing the ones that managed to flee into the mines, instead he looked for another group nearby. He prioritized efficiency as he had limited time.

The Gremlins sometimes joined in the attack when he was dealing with the Gnomes. These slick creatures were much difficult to deal with as they mostly use tools to attack from range. Luckily, Jack only needed to kill 30 of these creatures to complete his hunting quest. The Gremlin's weapons were mostly slingshot with some higher-level ones using crude bows and arrows.

Jack dealt with them using his Magician's range attacks, and used Charge when they least expecting to get into a close distance with them before finishing them with a Swing.