Lannah came back from watching the goblins when I called for her. When she saw me, she started a slight sway with her hips and smiled as she came. “So you said you have something for me?” She asked.

I held the knife out to her. “Yup, I knew that you said you had a knife skill as your highest weapon skill so I made this for you.”

She took it from me and started to look it over. “I see the runes but I don’t know what they mean. Enchanter’s script is easy to read even if you don’t know how to make it magical. Your runes however are something that I haven’t ever seen before. So what all did you do to the knife?”

“Well, as you can see there is a core in it now, but I also added runes before hand. If you make a successful attack with it then it will stop your opponent for three seconds. You can make them be paused for up to 10 seconds. Each strike takes 5 mana and it holds 15. It is also harder and sharper than before.”

“Wow, that is impressive magic for a knife. What level is the core my spell isn’t telling me which is odd.”

“It is a level zero still, you have to feed it more metal and mana to level it.”

“You know how to level it?” Lannah replied with a slightly shocked look.

“Yup, it is in the core interface that I can access.”

“That is amazing, people have been feeding cores everything they can think of for years to get them to level. Sometimes they go up one level and other times they jump up a few. No one knows what is needed and it seems so random. There are whole wizard’s colleges that are trying to study what is needed to level items. The only common they they have found is that they like magical items.”

I started to chuckle at that last part. “I think that is unlikely, everything I have seen says they need mana. So if you didn’t have someone imbue the item with more mana then you would need to feed it something with mana. Also several of them that I have seen are asking for metal. But it all kind of depends on what it is and what it will be.”

“I think we can make a good bit of money when we get back to Essex. We will buy some items that have cores in them and level them and then sell them back. It will cover you making cores. It should turn quite the profit.”

Lannah was smiling while looking at her new seax. “This is something that I will keep with me always. It should help keep me safe once we get out of here.”

“So speaking of keeping you safe, there are a few more things that I am wanting to make before I try the attack. But before that I have a question that you might be able to answer.”

Lannah slid her new blade into her belt and looked up at me. “Sure what is it. I am happy to answer anything.”

“Do you know why the goblins haven’t built anything to attack us up here? They have huts so I would expect them to be able to get here easy.”

“I don’t completely know, but there is a belief that they don’t build anything on their own. They use others to build, or where there are large numbers of them the orcs direct them. If it were just goblins they would live under the trees or in a cave. Anything else is because they were either being bossed around or they told someone to do it.”

I smiled with a big grin, “if that is the case then we might have time to make sure this is done right. I am mostly sure that my attack will work but I wanted to make sure that you safe first. If we don’t have to worry about an attack then we can make sure everything up here is set.”

Lannah looked a little worried. “I said that was a belief, they might still figure something out. If nothing else they might bring in more and just climb on each other to get up.”

“True, which is why I need to work on getting you safe and then attack them. There is no sense in me attacking only to have them kill you. So with that in mind, I am going to try to make you some armor so that you are better protected if something happens to me. Then we are going to get you where you can lock yourself into the storage room if needed.”

“I don’t have any armor wearing skills. So, I’m not sure how useful the armor will be for me.”

“Armor wearing skills?”

“Yes, most warriors have a skill in their type of armor. Light, Medium, or Heavy sometimes they even have that skill more specialized to the type of armor they have like medium leather, or light chain.”

“Yup, I would have thought I would just have naturally developed that skill but I guess I haven’t used it correctly for the skill. I just wear it and it protects me some. What I will try to do is the same for you.”

Lannah shook her head. “No, it would be better for me not to have armor, without the skill at a 5 or better the armor just slows you down. It does some protection but I would do better at running and armor drains stamina.”

I sat there and pondered for a few moments. It made sense that I was losing stamina when wearing the armor. I thought it was just from the weight, but it could also be from the lack of skill. When I fought in the fur, I just wore it like a shirt. I didn’t use it to block except with the geson. So if what Lannah said about skills meant anything, I should get an armor skill sometime soon if I block again.

The real problem is I needed to look out for Lannah. I wanted her to have the best chance of living if I got killed while taking out the horde. So I needed her to be better equipped than just the seax, her torn clothing, and bare feet.

I sighed, “Okay, then I will see what I can do to help you that is not armor. Maybe something that will help you hide. Head into the storage room and toss out your dress. I will fix it up and put a core in it.”

“My dress? I didn’t know cores could go into clothing.”

“Yeah, I haven’t found anything they can’t go into as of yet. Some things are just a little trickier than others. Since we have the time I am going to get this for you before I head up the wall.”

“Okay, I will drop it out here, but no peaking,” Lannah sauntered over to the storage room.

My mind was spinning as I watched her go. Women confused me. She was freaking out about me touching her, and now she is flirting with me. I knew that we had the contract, which caused some odd feelings, but she also said she was still going to get married. So I couldn’t guess what was going on.

I just needed to get her protected some and then go try to fight off the goblins. It wasn’t going to be easy. I knew that I would pass out each time I used the runes, and I would need to do that 7 times in a row. With how bad I felt after passing out once, I wasn’t looking forward to the whole thing.

Just then, I saw the door open up, and Lannah’s arm reached out and dropped her dress. Then she closed the door again.

I walked over and grabbed her dress, and pulled out my leather thread and my bone needle. The first thing I was going to do was drop cores into these items just to see what I could get from them, and then I was going to fix her dress. After that, I would add runes with the ink I made. I might see if I could sew in rune stones.

I pulled out my necklace and poured my mana in, triggering it to draw the magic out of me. Which lead to me passing out as always. Next, I pulled the mana from Lannah. I should have warned her, but I was working in the zone and forgot that it would matter.

I dropped a core into my spool of thread and one onto the needle. The thread spool would create a thread of whatever size or color I wanted by feeding it. The sewing needle was able to both change size and was self-sharpening. Each gave a plus one to the sewing skill.

I got to work on her dress. First, I was going to fix the tears since, from what I had seen, the better the product, the better the results with cores. Then I was going to give her a little more fashion from my world. Her dress might be fine for most times, but running from monsters, it wasn’t. I added a slit up the side of the leg about halfway and then reinforced it with thread.

I knew that the amount of time I was spending doing the work was far less than it would have been on Earth. This much mending and then revision on the fly should have taken much longer than the hour I sunk into fixing her dress.

It was odd doing this work knowing that just at the bottom of the waterfall was a band of monsters that wanted to kill me. Here I was with a spool of thread that never ran out and a needle that was the right size and shape for what I was working on.

Once I finished fixing the dress, I added little pockets of leather on the inside around the bottom. I was going to drop rune stones in there as I did with my weighted skirt.

I worked on the runes and the dress, freely pulling power as I needed it from Lannah. Each rune stone I made, I dropped a core into as I was linking them to the dress and powering the dress as well. Twelve runes in under an hour, each linked to the dress. I gave her 3 charges of healing, and the rest were about the dress itself.

Then I started to make the cores. I figured this would be a great test run for me to see how I reacted to using all my mana several times in a row. So I went ahead and created 16 cores as fast as I could. I would pass out, recover, create new cores and pass out again.

It was horrible. When I would normally use all my mana, I would get a slight headache when I woke up. However, by the third use, I was feeling sick and had a splitting headache. I was almost unable to trigger the last two uses. I felt like I was yelling and screaming, and my whole body was aching. There was a lingering screech that had started on the 4th refill and just kept going through the rest.