Over the next few days Jason settled into something of a routine. First he’d wake early and make breakfast for Kera, Lumi, and himself. That was followed by spending the morning setting up the refinement of more and more alchemy ingredients, slowly building up a stockpile of vials filled with an array of alchemical properties he planned to use on a regular basis. As noon rolled around, Jason would head down to the guardhouse for some physical training alongside the other members of his group, after which they’d all stop at either Arn’s inn or the Lodge for a late lunch.

The rest of his day would then be filled with either actively applying enchantments to a variety of gear for the townsfolk, or spending time poring over his books. Between the training sessions, his own alchemical work, and the books he was learning from, Jason acquired a number of new runes, particularly in the realm of additional elemental aspects.

These new runes went into the creation of new weapons for both Lumi and Ravs. Jason fashioned an enchanted longsword for Lumi that would slowly freeze her opponent’s weapons and armor with every hit, making them brittle and prone to breaking, while a direct strike on flesh had a small chance to encase the opponent in ice, disabling them entirely or killing them outright. For Ravs, he crafted a set of daggers with an enchantment not unlike the one on his new wand; a mix of enchanting and alchemical infusion had produced a pair of weapons that would deliver a series of painful shocks to the victim, and could be thrown at a distant target to release a burst of dense, electrified mist that swirled and clung, disabling anyone caught within much in the same way a taser might.

As for armor, Kera received a few further minor additions to her robes in the form of lightning and shadow resistance enchantments, which would compliment her fire immunity and render her heavily resistant to the most common offensive spells. Jason discovered that any items Kera was wearing when she used Beastmorph still functioned in her transformed state, and as a result Kera ended up opting to take [Dire Beast] as her third class just as Aldin had suggested. As far as she was concerned, if she could still cast spells and benefit from enchantments while shapeshifted, there was little reason for her to hold back on that front.

Unfortunately, Jason also learned that there were limits to the number of separate enchantments he could place on a single object, based on his rank and skill, which put a serious crimp in his immediate plans for modular enchanting. His first attempt an an arm-piece similar to Lumi’s [Shield of the Elementalist] was an abject failure in that regard: while he was able to slot three separate enchantments into a combined vambrace-and-gauntlet that would interact with items he held, slotting in the fourth and final piece caused the whole thing to overload as the mana involved overran the runic structure’s ability to hold it.

The end result was a heap of molten metal that Jason was extremely glad he hadn’t been wearing at the time. He ended up having to request Tersk send over an expert to help pry the resultant mess off the surface of his transmutation circle.

Lessons were learned though, mainly that what was holding Jason back on that front was skill ranks. Now that he had a good array of runes, Jason decided he didn’t specifically need so many ranks in Arcane Sight anymore, at least not for the near future with the raid in only a few days, and he was likely to need more than just three enchantments for his eventual greenhouse space anyhow.

So he consulted with Lumi and Kera, neither of whom had any objection to Jason taking another Elixir. Kera claimed she was highly satisfied with her race change and was even happier with her new classes, and thus didn’t see a need for any more Elixirs in the near future. Lumi meanwhile requested he simply reserve one for her use at a later date; after realizing that she was limited to only six equipped classes and that she needed [Spellblade], she had decided to skip out on equipping [Nightscourge] for the time being since it was the least defense-oriented of her classes. However, it wasn’t a priority for her to remove, so she wanted to wait until her next set of specialization choices to try taking one.

Thus Jason prepared a new batch of [Elixir of Rebirth] using the inert core they’d gotten from Vittorio, and reallocated some of his skill points, pushing [Engrave] up to rank fifteen, which would allow him to add the one additional enchantment to so that he could complete his work. The following day, Jason spent most of his morning engraving a new attempt at a multipurpose armor piece.

Kera and Ravs were present when he finished inscribing the final runes into the armor. Kera was mostly idling about, practicing her shapeshifting, currently taking the form of some sort of thin, blue-skinned humanoid with small horns that she’d met down at the market the other day. Ravs meanwhile was present because she had expressed an interest in the work Jason was doing, so lately she had been the one helping him catch up academically.

“So, explain to me what this will do again?” Ravs asked as Jason prepared the arcane powder that would, hopefully, activate the enchantment. “It seems overly complex.”

Jason picked up the now-engraved housing for an elemental shard. He carefully fitted it into the portion of the armor piece that would be the back of the hand, before activating [Arcane Reconstruction] to reassemble the armor piece, joining both vambrace and gauntlet into a single whole that would cover his arm up to the elbow: the first piece of what he planned to be a fully enchanted suit.

“It probably is, if I'm being honest” Jason said finally. He picked up one of the many [Lightning Shards] he’d created, carved a rune into it, and slotted it into the housing. “But that’s sort of the point.”

“The basic premise is that there’s several enchantments here,” he explained. “You’ve got your standard mana absorption so the device draws on my own mana, which is kind of a freebie. Then you’ve got the shard, which acts as a variable that determines the elemental type for three different enchantments. The housing itself rotates, causing the different enchantments to lock into place with the mana storage via a linking rune, allowing me to either project a weak barrier, fire off a simple elemental bolt, or activate the transmutation circle on my palm, which should let me alter the alchemical effect of stuff I’m holding.”

“Should?” Ravs asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Umm… yes.” Jason said. “Well, that’s the hope. All I need to do is activate each of these and….”

He sprinkled the last of the arcane powder over the central lightning shard and infused the whole thing with mana. The runes glowed, and sparks of arcane power began to run up and down the vambrace and gauntlet as Jason’s mana levels took a hefty hit. Jason winced, expecting that he’d miscalculated somehow, or perhaps made a mistake again. He braced himself for another meltdown.

It didn’t come. Instead, after a good ten seconds the lightning shard shorted out suddenly at it’s mana was consumed, but instead of resulting in failure, Jason was presented with a series of system popups.

Congratulations! Through the use of a clever combination of modular mechanical design and complex enchanting , you have successfully created your first mage-tech set item. You have been awarded the achievement [Magitechnician]! Achievement XP Granted: 19200. Cumulative level penalties applied.

Jason choked as a large number of Engineer level-up notices began swarming his field of view.

“What?” Kera asked, seeing his expression.

It took him a moment to recover. He shared his screen with her and Ravs.

Kera whistled. “Four levels in one class all in one go?”

Ravs nodded. “Achievements will do that. I’ve heard they award you an amount related to the highest level of any involved class, which is applied equally to all of them for some reason.”

“Damn, that’s actually annoying,” Jason grumbled. “I actually lost some.” He pulled up his point totals. “See? Alchemist capped out at 104,999 because it can’t be higher level than my primary. I switched around because it was warning me I was going to lose out on Artificer XP.”

“Woops,” Kera said to him with a chagrined smile.

“Oh well,” Jason said, peering at his status screen. “At least both classes are almost equal now. I should tick up into Artificer 13 pretty soon. Look, only ten thousand to go.”

Ravs was examining the gauntlet portion of Jason’s creation while he looked at his screen. She called attention to the lightning shard, which was now cracked and had lost it’s subtle glow.

“You succeeded, but what happened to your mana crystal? It looks broken.”

Jason took the arm piece from her and examined it with [Arcane Sight]. The enchantment was holding strong.

“I think the enchanting process just happened to eat through it, is all,” Jason said after a moment’s consideration. “It’s designed to pull on the aspected mana in the crystal after all.”

He removed the old shard and retrieved a new one, carving a single rune into its surface and infusing it before slotting it in. A quick examination under [Arcane Sight] showed it was functional.

“Well… moment of truth I guess,” Jason said, standing up and sliding his arm into the piece. He flexed his hand a few times; it fit perfectly, as expected. Tersk’s work was, as usual, excellent.

Jason had prepared a single-use prismatic wand for exactly this test. He grasped it, using his other hand to snap the shard setting into ‘conversion’ mode before activating it. The metal hummed slightly as mana surged through it, and he pointed the wand at a straw target dummy he’d set up in one corner.

With a loud crack, a bolt of lightning leaped from the wand to the target, which burst into fragments. Jason then deactivated the gauntlet, rotated the shard housing over to the bolt projector, dropped the wand, and took careful aim. He then reactivated the gauntlet. A small ball of electrified mana shot out from his palm, striking the dummy and toppling over what remained of it.

Kera gave a small cheer, and Ravs grinned.

Jason tested the barrier briefly as well, which manifested itself as a small, buckler-sized shield of pure energy.

“Well that’s a hell of a success,” Jason said with a grin as he lowered his arm. “Doesn’t even use as much mana as I’d feared for the conversion effect, either. It’s not cheap, but no more than a decent-strength spell if what you’ve told me.”

“That blast didn’t seem too impressive,” Kera commented.

“Wasn’t supposed to,” Jason replied as he started to unbuckle the strap that looped around his elbow. “This is a just a prototype. After my first one melted, I went with the most basic of barrier and attack enchantments. I’ll make better ones in the future once I’ve got more ranks, now I’ve confirmed it works.”

Jason removed his creation and was setting it back down on the table when Lumi came up the stairs carrying a large crate in one arm.

She grunted as she set it down on the table. “Hey Jason, got a delivery for you from Tersk. Whatever the hell it is, it’s heavy. There’s more downstairs, too. He asked me to wish you luck for him?”

Jason immediately jumped out of his chair, smiling hugely and unable to contain his excitement. He quickly conjured a crowbar with [Basic Artifice] and cracked open the crate.

Inside was several different smaller packages, all labeled, and all containing different kinds of rare, hard-to-find ores and powders.

“What is all that stuff?” Lumi asked.

“All sorts of things,” Jason reached into the crate. “But this… would be saltpeter and sulfur.” He pulled two specific packages out from the crate.

“Time finally earn that specialization!” Kera said cheerfully.

Jason glanced at Ravs. “Uh, Ravs this is kinda awkward, but um, I’m actually going to need to ask you to leave for this. I’d rather not, but understand that this is something that the dwarven clans really don’t want people spreading about, since it’s basically their invention.”

She cocked her head at him. “But its OK for them…?” she asked, indicating Kera and Lumi.

“I’m afraid so,” Jason replied. “Like me, they happen to already know, from back home. I promised Tersk though that I wouldn’t go spreading that knowledge about, so….?”

Ravs pushed an errant bit of hair out of her face before standing. “No, I understand. It would be the same were you to ask me for details of my patron, who likes her privacy. I’ll see you at practice?”

Jason grinned. “Hopefully with a few all-new tricks. Though those might take a while to build. Depends on what I get. Thanks for understanding.”

She waved airily at him and took her leave, stopping at the top of the stairs to give Echo, who’d come up to see what the noise had been about, a short head rub.

Jason took a moment to show Lumi his newly created armor piece, began conjuring some new tools, and got to work.

You have earned the skill [Basic Chemistry]. Would you like to learn it for 1 skill point?

“Yes,” Jason confirmed. He opened up his status screen and immediately dumped two points each into metalworking, clockwork, chemistry, and engineering. Thankfully, he’d gotten a real boon from his sudden increase in [Engineer] levels; it seemed that purely skill-based, non-adventuring classes got a hefty helping of extra skill points every five levels, and Jason put these to good use, knowing he’d be relying on them to some degree in the future.

Jason had spent the last half hour grinding, mixing, and then setting to dry a supply of primitive black powder, taking every precaution he knew of to make sure he didn’t expose the paste to any kind of heat or spark.

Now that Jason had fulfilled the explosive crafting portion of the unlock requirements, he had to produce some kind of complex, mechanical weapon. Fortunately, his prior discussion with Tersk had given him a distinct leg up on just how to do that: he could provide some kind of motive force with an enchantment. As long as the enchantment was simply used as a power source for mechanical energy, the system still counted it, unlike how it had excluded his [Salamander Stones] from consideration, since they were effectively magical.

Coming up with a simple, alchemy-powered motor was child’s play. A few small mana crystals provided a power source, a basic motion enchantment provided an application of torque to a bit of clockwork, and physics did the rest, allowing Jason to rig together a magic-powered, fully-automatic crossbow that threw roughly ten crossbow bolts per second from a small magazine drum mounted on the top.

The weapon’s aim was absolutely terrible and it was definitely unwieldy, but Jason had needed only a brief application of Engraving, Carpentry, and Clockwork to get it up and running enough to count. He didn’t need the weapon itself for battle, either: he had magic after all. He did, however, make a mental note to revisit the idea later, as it might make for a good, relatively low-mana deployable turret if he could manage to compress a small enough space to store the ammo.

He checked his specializations.

“Well?” Lumi asked.

Jason grinned, and made his selection.