“...I have two suggestions. First, you may be able to temporarily modify your sleeve to be more conducive for your needs; it is an artifact of protection, so the concepts which drive its magic are adjacent to what you need it to do. By creating specialized talismans and affixing them to the armor by binding them to it with certain seals, you may be able to finagle the artifact into working the way you need it to. I must warn you: The preparations for this alone will be difficult, you will need someone well-versed in ritualistic magic, glyphology, and talisman-crafting, and once it is done, the effect will not last long. A potent ritual site and appropriate sacrifices will be required, but neither of those is hard to come by here, doubly so for one of your skillset. Even if the Impelling Arm’s spirit is cooperative, it will inexorably press against the restraints you place it within, attempting to spring back to its original form, and it will inevitably destroy its “restraints”. If you try to prolong the altered state for too long, the artifact may become deformed permanently or undergo a catastrophic failure of the sort you are trying to prevent with your blade. That is to say: Just be careful.”

“And your second suggestion?”

“Harden your arms; a temporary hardening ritual could work, but you would do well to go the extra seven leagues to make it something permanent, elsewise you may not be able to withstand your own weapon’s power once it is reforged. You already have an accord with the earthen spirits - draw on them to cause permanent bodily change. Which metal can you access? Iron?”

“Iron and Bronze.”

“Two of them? How-”

“I have the Dualism trait.”

“Oho, you devoured a shapechanger’s Azoth? What was it, a werewolf? A kikimora perhaps?”

“Maneater of Retribution.”

“Ah. The Ikesian False Wendigo. Don’t eat me in my sleep, alright?”

She smiled.

“A Dungeon Core purified it for me. I only gained Dualism alongside a means of harnessing the creature’s concept of retributivism to “consume” the attacks of my enemies, so to speak.”

“Well, that’s reassuring. If there’s anything that can purify something so accursed as a False Wendigo, it would be a dungeon core… Reality-warping cheats that they are. You know, for such wonders of human creation, dungeon cores are insultingly simple in concept, it’s just that if the basic idea is extrapolated to its logical conclusion you end up with what we know as a Dungeon Core, a Deus Machina by its original name… Er, right. Sorry. I doubt you give a shit about my petty disagreements with a dead man’s creative mentality.”

“My arms - how would you suggest I harden them? You’re the artifact-smith here.”

“...Right, yeah. I had some specific suggestions for the regimen, before we got uh… Sidetracked, with the wendigo thing and what not. There’s the obvious stuff - saturating the limb with the appropriate form of Metallum and keeping it that way, constantly moving it, ideally for the purpose of doing some pretty heavy body-hardening exercises. Punching target blocks is good, but punching an actively-resisting target is better, so long as said target is tough enough to withstand the impact. Sparring, holmgang, hunting some hard-shelled beasties with your bare hands, whatever. Obviously, taking alchemetal pills is key if you want the change to be permanent, if you can get your hands on the things.”

“Can you not make some, master blacksmith?” she asked facetiously.

With the same degree of facetiousness, Ingvald answered: “Oh sure, sure, do you have some ultra-high-purity crystallized aether?”

Rather than give a verbal answer, Zel took her Tablet and retrieved one of the helix-shaped, milky-white crystals from the Willowdale Dungeon, smugly grinning as she brought it out and felt the smith’s gaze trace its path.

He sighed: “Of course you do, why did I even think to question? Alright, give it here. At least I will get some use out of those bullet moulds I wasted all those hrivns making… I reckon you’d do best to get some sixty doses so you can just down the things a couple times a day before and after meals, but anything will help. Let me take a look at that crystal, see how many I can get out of it.”

The smith took the crystal, touching it all over and turning it every-which way, examining it, listening to it, licking it, lightly tapping it with his finger… And then he smiled.

“You weren’t kidding, this baby is straight out of a Dungeon Core it is. Give me three, four more like this and I’ll get you enough pills for a year. Hell, give me five and I’ll make you enough pills to turn your nerves to bronze, assuming you don’t turn your brain into a metal brick by accident. You can afford access to at least a Secondary Spring, right? Sort of the bare minimum for this kind of thing.”

“You’re… Trying to figure out how much you can get out of me without fleecing me, aren’t you?”

“...Yeah,” he admitted. “I had half a mind to ask for ten of these things just to see if you’d give them over, but I value my good health too much to go tickling a Razorflayer’s tails like that - no offense, but you’re not good at hiding your aura. I could feel you scanning me to see if you could kill me in one movement when you walked in.”

“I will not pretend that I am not on edge. The pills, you were not lying about those, were you?”

“Hm? No, no, I am not a liar of that sort. I mean to keep what scraps are leftover once I’m done and use them for a pet project down the line, same as with your main payment.”

Zel looked at the man for a few moments, then willed her Tablet to spit out the appropriate Aether crystals, catching them in her left hand as they popped out.

“Any other supplies you need but don’t have? Stuff you’d need to source at expense.”

“...Alkahest. High-purity stuff, the sort they make with those building-sized alchemic reactors, strong enough to be used as the base for geopolymerase. It should be able to melt stone on contact.”

He looked like he wanted to add: “You wouldn’t happen to have some of that, would you?”, but stopped himself just short when he saw the look of recognition in Zel’s face and her Tablet’s Fog Vortex re-forming.