Chapter 180: Awakened Armament

Harvey turned the knob, letting the hot water drip down his face before grabbing a towel and drying himself off. He’d finished his most important projects before the invasion began, but still couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed to do more. It reminded him of the night before a big final exam in college. Back then, he’d learned that staying up to cram in a few more hours of prep wouldn’t do him any good since it would leave him exhausted during the actual test, but was it the same when the test was fighting an army of demonic monsters? He stared at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, letting all the changes his body had undergone sink in. His once dark-brown hair was now tinted gold, courtesy of his evolution from a Veilstrider to a Gilded. His eyes were familiar, yet slightly alien. To anyone from his old life, it would look like he was wearing designer contact lenses to try to stand out at some elaborate Halloween party.

Slipping on his pajamas, he crawled into bed. Try as he might to fall asleep, his heart was pounding, and he found himself staring at the ceiling.

[Can you go to bed already? I know I can’t really sleep anymore, but at least I get a break from your mind racing for a couple hours.]

[Here we go…] Julius grumbled.

[I hear you. If we’re going to be up all night anyway, we might as well use the time to find something that fits.]

[Then we lean into that. You were talking about robot drones earlier, so why don’t you make a skill like that?]

[I think you’re still stuck in the mindset of having to do something yourself before you can make a skill to do it for you. What happened to the Harvey path you and Elena used to talk about so much? Do you think Cash could conjure a lion out of thin air before he got his skill? Do you think Hannah could make arrows that explode like an RPG before she got hers? Hell, do you think she could talk to a deer?]

Harvey conceded.

[Exactly. The fun part about magic is that it’s magical! This isn’t some engineering problem where you have to understand how all the parts work before you can build the plane. Sometimes, you just gotta accept that it flies.]

Harvey thought about it for a long time, with Julian leaving him to brainstorm without interruption. He thought about his Class, starting with the name the System had given it.

Forgefire Arsenalist.

He’d embraced the forgefire, even gaining a Mark that would eventually power his many fire-based skills like Fireball, Flamestrike, and Fangburner once he managed to evolve it into an imprint. But so far, the only skill pertaining to that second word was his Innovator’s Arsenal skill. That let him conjure massive essence projections of his real weapons, turning his handgun into a small cannon and crushing Ossari with a hammer the size of their entire body.

That was definitely not something he could do before the System, so who cared if he’d never built a drone before?

The key was finding something scalable that the Loom could help him explore now and then refining it later when he eventually evolved to E-Grade. Part of the problem with all these new weapons he was creating is that the old ones were just gathering dust inside his spatial ring. But what if he could make them fight alongside him? He only had so many hands, but he had a powerful aura and experience embedding his weave inside his creations with Soul Forge.

[Where are you going?] Julius asked as Harvey swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up.

[Right now? It’s the middle of the night!]

Harvey chuckled as he pulled on a t-shirt and slipped on a pair of street shoes he’d bought from John’s. Despite the warmth of the morning sun still shining down on the asphalt streets, nobody else was out roaming the neighborhood. The church doors were unlocked, and the angel waiting at reception was snoring loudly. Harvey didn’t wake her up, padding quietly towards the chapel where the Loom awaited him.

Placing his hands on the crystal ball resting atop the pedestal, he began searching through the sea of vision floating amidst the rainbow haze cutting him off from the outside world.

He had a pretty good idea of what he wanted this new skill to do, but unlike most of his other creations, he was walking in without a plan of what memories to use. Luckily, nobody else would be waiting to use the Loom at this late hour, so he had time to peruse everything that had happened since the integration began.

He started with Soul Forge. It was the fourth Profession skill he’d created, and allowed him to imbue his creations with his weave. That exposed his soul to physical damage – a risk that had been exploited multiple times since that first F-Grade elemental managed to beat him so badly that he nearly broke his own weave – but it also empowered both himself and his equipment with extra stats. That had been key in helping him keep up with his contemporaries despite taking a more well-rounded approach with his stat allocation instead of focusing on one particular niche.

There were multiple memories he could pick to represent Soul Forge, but in the end, he went with his first time connecting to the silver armor he now wore every day. It had been the largest single stat gain he’d ever experienced with the skill, providing 46 points in Vitality and 22 in Endurance while also strengthening the armor well past what silver – even magically reinforced angelic silver – should be able to bear. He hoped that this new skill would allow him to embed his weave into his creations from a distance, not just empowering it, but allowing him to animate it to fight alongside him using the ever-increasing strength of his aura.

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Animating it this way was likely to further expose his weave, but the extra 2% Endurance and 1% Willpower he’d gained after his injured weave recovered were proof that what didn’t kill you really did make you stronger. The bonus was minor for now, but if exposing more of his weave let him fight alongside his own creations, then it was a risk he was willing to take.

After perusing his life for more relevant experiences, he stumbled upon the memory of detonating Veils End to blow up the Ossari. He hadn’t managed to kill Marcus or his dragon with the elaborate trap, but the gambit killed over 300 of those skeletal bastards and gained him multiple levels in the process. It was one of his greatest uses of Modular Array, the Capstone skill of his G-Grade Profession that let him activate, suppress, and overload any of his own inscriptions that were within range of his aura.

He hoped it would aid the Loom when it came to animating his creations. If he could activate his arrays from a distance, why couldn’t he bring the equipment they were inscribed upon to life with the combination of his weave and his aura?

The next memory to make the cut showed Julius and the Thanefire Drake dragging him out of Marcus' Legacy vision. Harvey wasn't interested in the Imprint itself, and showing off to the Loom that he was capable of refining Legendary inks wasn’t going to help him with a skill like this. What mattered was the impossible thing he'd witnessed. Julius had no body, yet he'd still managed to act upon the world through the medium of the inkwell. If a soul could influence reality from beyond the confines of flesh and bones, then perhaps a creation imbued with his weave could do the same.

Finally, Harvey added two visions of summoned creatures turning the course of a fight. The first showed Cash’s golden lion fending off the demon’s flaming serpent. Harvey had been a little preoccupied at the time to sit and watch the creatures fight, but the abstract perspective provided by the Loom let him see just how powerful those essence-based creations could be. Accompanying it was the fight he and Tyler had with the Nighstalkers that very morning, where Tyler fought side by side with the teammates he summoned with Championship Dynasty.

[Are you going to tell him that he inspired your skill?]

Three tattoos floated off Harvey’s body to join the cluster of visions, his Architect of the Veils End, Tempered Heart, and Guardian of the Gilded Return Imprints. He considered adding all four aspects of his Legacy, but the vibrant glow of his potential skill noticeably dimmed when he tried to add his Forgefire Mark to the mix. He didn’t know if it was because the Mark was so much weaker than the Imprints or if the concept was simply a bad fit with the skill, but he figured three Imprints were enough to ensure whatever the Loom created was a good fit for his path.

With a nod, the visions sank into the Loom, causing the silver, blue, and gold spools of thread to release a torrent of thread that began weaving into his new sigil. The image of a steel helmet like the one he used to wear back in Veils End appeared, except instead of his own face peering out of the visor, he saw a formless blue head with piercing golden eyes. Thinking back to his other tattoos, the blue matched the sigil for Soul Forge, while the golden eyes looked more like the leaves of the massive tree surrounded by a fortress in his Guardian of the Gilded return Imprint rather than the holy gold that dominated most of Steve and Tyler’s skills.

The helmet peeled off the Loom and floated towards him, circling his head before sinking into the base of his skull just above the Cognition Matrix. Sigils being hidden until they were activated at F-Grade had largely solved the problem of awkward tattoo placement, but Harvey was still grateful he wouldn't have to endure endless jokes about having eyes in the back of his head whenever he activated the skill.

[I always knew you were two-faced.]

[No,] Julius admitted. [but you have to swing when the joke’s tee’d up that perfectly.]

Harvey shook his head and itched the skin still burning under his hair. With a thought, a screen with the description for his new skill appeared in front of him.



Awakened Armament | F Grade | Rare:

The ultimate goal of all creations is to be useful to their creator. By imbuing a piece of your soul within them, you can awaken your masterpiece to serve its true purpose. Embed a single item, both forged and inscribed by you, with a sliver of your weave, granting it motion and allowing it to act as an extension of your will while it remains within your aura. The speed, strength, and precision of the awakened armament scale with your focus, Wisdom, and Willpower.



[Wait. This isn’t going to actually bring a sword to life or something, is it? We’re running out of space inside your skull as it is. I’m not sharing it with one of your guns.]

Harvey chuckled.

Pulling out his empty revolver, he activated the skill and filled the aethersteel with his aura. Just like Soul Forge made his armor feel like an extension of his body, he suddenly felt like he had an extra limb that his mind instinctively understood how to use. The concept should feel completely alien, but after using the inkwell so many times, he was getting used to the shape of his soul subtly changing as he interacted with magical objects.

He felt clumsy at first, but the revolver slowly lifted out of his hands and hung in the air in front of him. It felt like he was controlling an RC helicopter with his mind, and he could feel the mechanisms within waiting to be activated. He was relieved to find that the strand of his weave embedded in the gun let him use Echo Forge to conjure a set of Heaven’s Wrath bullets directly into the chambers, letting him load the gun from afar. He could feel the trigger waiting to be pulled, but instead of shooting up the chapel, he disengaged the lock holding the cylinder in place, letting it fall clear of the handle before tilting the gun up and letting the bullets fall harmlessly to the carpeted floor.

[You kinda suck at this. Here, let me try.]

Harvey was stunned to find a tug on his weave as Julius tried to take control of the revolver. The pull was weak, but he was so shocked the AI could move it at all that he let the gun slip out of his grasp.

The revolver moved even slower than when it was under Harvey’s inexpert control, but his mind was completely free to focus on other things.

[No? Not normally. I don’t know. For some reason, I could just feel that I could control the skill once you activated it.]

Harvey remembered that one of the memories he’d included was Julius breaking him out of the vision he’d been trapped in inside the inkwell. Could the Loom have used that to give Julius the ability to control the skill?

[How much essence does it take to maintain the connection?]

Harvey turned his mind inward, noticing that after the high cost of connecting with the gun, only a trickle of essence was needed to maintain the link.

[Awesome. I get pretty bored just sitting around all day. Now I can help you fight! Ooh, maybe you can connect me to a hammer, and I can help you in the forge!]

[Nope! Not unless I kill us both,] Julius said, turning the revolver to point right between his eyes.

Harvey said as he snatched the gun out of the air. He felt some resistance as Julius tried pulling the gun away, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Harvey’s strength. He’d have to be careful putting his armament within reach of his enemies, but he was satisfied with the force even Julius’ weaker willpower was able to exert.

[As long as we survive long enough to explore it.]