Sometime later, after Franziska had sent them off to bed, John was sitting on the floor of his room. He looked up, reaffirming that Ronnie was still scribbling away at his diary. With that out of the way, the boy beheld his spoils of war.

The three marbles – Greg and Franziska stopped giving them to him once they realized that those stealthy beasts were almost exclusively targeting him – laid heavy in his hand. They glowed with a dull tint in the moonlight, looking and feeling more like smooth stone than something that had been lodged in the brain of beasts not too long ago.

Swallowing these things would increase the aether in his core, or at least they said so. It was a most macabre way of gaining power if you asked him, not that he would complain. They came at just the right time, too. With his aether generation having been halved, he desperately needed every source of aether he could possibly get his hands on.

Picking the smallest core to examine it more closely, John licked his dry lips. The fact that it had been dug out from the head of a beast didn’t particularly help his appetite.

He closed his eyes and popped it into his mouth.

It felt hard, smooth and tasteless as it rolled across his tongue. He didn’t dwell on it and reflexively swallowed, gagging a little as it passed through his throat.

Greg had said that keeping it in your mouth would also do the trick, but swallowing was the obviously faster and more efficient choice to ingest the stored remnants of aether. Curiously enough, dissolving it in his core was similarly dangerous to drawing in raw aether from the surroundings. Perhaps foreign aether was poisonous? But if so, why was he capable of dissolving coins just fine?

The boy sighed. Unsolvable mystery by unsolvable mystery, John was starting to accept that he would have to put off researching aether until he had more time and resources on his hands. Preferably at a time when he would be taken more seriously.

His musings were interrupted by the feeling of wrongness in the channels passing through the stomach.

‘Wait, they’re what? How do they even do that?’ John shook his head. This was no time to be distracted by foreign anatomy. Like a stomachache gone wrong, the feeling spread upwards, directly towards his head. Fortunately, it gradually lightened along the way. By the time it reached his core, it almost felt like his own aether.

It swallowed the foreign aether like a black hole, leaving nothing behind even as bigger waves came from the stomach.

“Ugh… ,” John groaned as the process unfolded. The process of aether pushing its way towards his head was nauseating to say the least. John closed his eyes and breathed, evenly and deeply, waiting for things to tide over.

Mercifully, it quickly stopped. Hoping that the reward would be worth the ordeal he put himself through, John checked his aether reserves. He furrowed his brows at the frankly bafflingly small result.

Greg had warned him that he would only be getting a minuscule part of the aether contained inside, but he hadn’t expected that it would only replenish the equivalent of two days of cultivation.

That was, frankly said, a ridiculous result for a task that involved killing beings that were far, far stronger than himself.

It was so little, in fact, that John was starting to suspect that a large part of it had been misappropriated along the way.

Having an inkling as to who was responsible for this phenomenon, John suppressed the sigh that was building up inside him.

‘Was it you?’

“Oh, yeah, yeah ‘twas me,” the marble drawled. It sounded…intoxicated?

‘What the hell? Do you get high off cores?’

“Aah, no, not quite. But the aether is delicious. Very. Much.”

“…”

A moment of stunned silence passed before it spoke again. “Do me a favour and eat the rest, will you?”

John thought for a moment. The marble had done him a favour by doubling his aether production, even if it was in their mutual best interest to do so. Plus, it wasn’t like he could stop it from doing whatever it wanted anyway.

Ten minutes and quite a bit of gagging later, John finally swallowed the last of the marbles. ‘Wait, if it’s already this hard to swallow them now, what about the dragon Greg has slain? Do cores scale with size? If not, does that mean that small animals are incapable of bearing cores?’

He ignored the satisfied moans of the marble and rubbed his eyes before yawning. Soft scratching sounds could still be heard from the other side of the room, their rhythmic sounds pulling him ever closer to slumberland.

Yawning once more, John shelved the questions and crawled into his bed.

“G’night,” he mumbled just barely loud enough for Ronnie to hear.

The scratching stopped. “Nightie night,” Ronnie said before he resumed writing.

John closed his eyes. He felt like falling and spinning and plunged into the land of dreams.

The next day, Greg made them gather on the plaza. The old man seemed to be even more serious than usual, his stern glare shutting the bubbling conversations down. For some reason, he had also insisted on them bringing the suits of armour he had provided them before.

The two layers of armour – a thick padded jacket and trousers as well as chainmail that went from their heads to the middle of their thighs – were arranged on the dusty ground before them. They were surprisingly heavy and silent, the interlocking chains producing almost no noise. Coming from a civilization that had long since left such things behind, John had no idea whether that was normal or just a special property they had been crafted with

To be honest, he heavily suspected the latter, but he couldn’t exactly replicate them to test it. The chains were too small and fine to reliably create, and the other chainmails were just as eerily silent as his own.

The soldiers didn’t have time for him either in a trying time like this. They were too busy resting, marching or organising to pay the questions of a small child much heed.

Greg clapped, dragging John’s attention back to reality. “I have noticed that quite a few of you have begun creating your own armours,” he started. “That’s a good thing.” A few tense shoulders relaxed at those words. “Your safety and that of your comrades should always be your second-highest concern, right after accomplishing your objectives in battle. Today, we will be learning how to create functional armour that will serve to protect you from beast and man alike. Whoever has already started on their armour should bring them out now. Place them next to the ones I have provided for you.”

An unsurprising majority brought their works out, putting them on the ground with a variety of sounds. The old man eyed the wide array of metallic, stony and sometimes mixed plates critically before sighing. “I suspected as much, but we have quite a lot of work to do. Put those away for now, we will get to them later.”

John felt a strange sense of schadenfreude welling up before squashing it. He shouldn’t be laughing at children trying to protect themselves, no matter how laughable their efforts might turn out to be. That’s what they were here for, after all. To learn, and hopefully grow from it.

Whilst John was thinking, Greg had conjured a set of plate armour. “This is what you should aspire for.” He presented the gleaming plate armour to them with a passionate brandish. “Sleek curves and flowing lines that deflect incoming arrows and blows. A polished sheen that can blind your foes if necessary.” His fingers followed the neatly overlapping plates, all rounded to a certain extend. It didn’t exactly look exciting or cool – the two door guards at the Golden Gate had much more impressive armour – but it definitely looked functional.

“But the exterior is not actually the most important thing. What makes every Warrior’s armour special, and the reason it has taken so long for us to have this lesson, is the fact that any warrior worth his title gives his armour special properties. Let me show you.”

The old man casually plunged his bare hand into the armour. His weathered fingers punched a hole into the plates, then pried them open with contemptuous ease. It was a surreal sight, most of all to John, who may have intellectually known the warriors of this world to be inhumanly strong but hadn’t quite internalized this fact yet.

The children oohed and aahed as Greg methodically tore the armour apart. Metal shavings and splinters broke off with every move, and by the time he was finished, they had accumulated into a small pile. Finished, Greg nodded at his work and smiled at the children. He pointed at the bunched-up scraps that were left of the once pristine armour. “As you can see, I tore this armour apart. Nothing but useless junk is left now, right? Now watch-“

As soon as he finished his sentence, the metal scraps began wriggling. Barely discernible at the beginning, but the motions quickly intensified until they were all vibrating. Then, they started to unfold themselves. The metal unfurled, then straightened and smoothened out. The bouncing and vibrating parts started approaching the biggest remaining piece, adding themselves in the right order and quickly reassembled in a rough replica of the original.

Not one to miss out on such a spectacle, John had naturally activated his aether sight to observe the process and perhaps learn a trick or two. He winced as only blinding light greeted his eyeballs and turned it off again.

By the time his vision cleared up, the armour was good as new.

“This is one of many functions you can embed in the items you create in your core. It draws upon the ambient aether in your core to repair itself. For those of you who don’t know yet: We call such effects that draw on your core to work enchantments. In this case, it is a self-repairment enchantment. Your task now will be to create your own armour and incorporate this at the same time. To do this, you need to concentrate on the effect, imagine it into reality, and let your aether do the rest. It will take its toll on your reserves, so be careful not to make it too powerful.”

He put the practice armour forward again. “This will be the guide for those of you who haven’t created their own armours yet. It will come on top of the one I already provided you. Ah, and don’t forget to enchant the rest, too, alright? Do any of you have questions?” He waited a moment in order for all this new information to sink in.

A few hands shot into the air. “Yes, Jessica?”

“Do our armours absolutely have to be made out of metal? Stone is much harder, so wouldn’t it be a better material?”

Most of the hands retracted after she formulated her question.

Greg put a hand to his chin. “First of all, not all stones are equal. Some stones may be harder than most metals, but they are, in turn, more brittle and hardly suitable for armours. An armour that has pieces breaking off of it after every strike is anything but safe. Metals may lose to stones in hardness at times, but they more than make up for it in elasticity.” The old man’s eyes glazed over for a moment. “In the future, you can fashion your armour however you want it to. However, as long as you are under my tutelage, your armour will be made of metal. Understood?”

The children nodded collectively. He spent some more time answering questions before stepping back and letting the children surge forward, keen on studying the armour and all its details. John was no different. Although he knew that modern armour from his former life was far, far more effective, he unfortunately had even less of an idea how those were supposed to work and what materials they were composed of.

Even more unfortunately, the marble knew just about as much about it as him. They had had a long and extensive conversation about things they could import from their former lives in which they were forced to realise that A: They really didn’t know enough to really replicate most modern conveniences and toys and B: Even if they did more or less know how something worked, they either lacked the aether to turn it into reality or lacked the required precision.

As such, stuck as he was in his childish body and this faux-ancient time, he had no choice but to prepare himself for another long and exhausting session of creating, dissolving and perfecting his very own armour.

It was going to be a long day.