The Way Ahead

“Here you go,” Edwin tossed Rillah a small apparatite box, a pastry visible albeit steam-obscured inside. She snagged it from the air before it could slip past her fingers and fall to the bottom of the tower.

“Ooh, thanks. Oh wow, That’s good. Where’d you get it, and how much was it? I need to stop by there sometime.”

“Oh? I would have thought… no, actually you wouldn’t know every bakery in the city would you? Anyway, it was just down the street and…” he gave quick directions as he joined her on the tower’s roof, gratefully releasing his mana tether. Rillah nodded, “And it was pretty cheap, just a couple ager for everything in total.”

She choked on her food, coughing and spluttering to the point Edwin wasn’t sure if he should do something.

“Right. Give me your pouch. You clearly can’t be trusted with anything beyond a few ves.”

“What? Why? I’m perfectly capable of managing my own money, thank you very much.”

“Not if you’re spending more than an ager on two things from a bakery!”

“Well, I did get some other stuff...” he protested.

“Nuh-uh. Doesn’t matter. If you didn’t buy nearly the entire shop, nothing you got should have been valued in more than a couple ves.”

“What are you talking about?” he protested.

“Edwin,” she clapped her hands on her leg, “You just spent about a week’s worth of wages for a laborer on two pastries, and you thought that was a good deal. Carrying around all that money with that disconnect is probably alerting everyone with Value Assessment in the city they can charge you at least twelve times what they normally would.

“Now, give me your pouch.”

“I met you yesterday. I’ll buy you a pastry- and put my life in your hands- but I’m not about to just hand you all my money! Doubly so after you just dropped me. I’ll… lock it up or something.”

“Hey! I said I was sorry. Anyway, no! Coin-Scent is way too common for thieves here, it’ll lead them right there.”

“You live in a tower! How is that not safe? Don’t you have a vault or whatever?”

“Gimme!”

“No!”

In the end, they concealed his coins in at least a hundred layers of apparatite and locked in the vault-like safe alongside Rillah’s money- a revelation which Edwin felt extremely vindicated to discover. He did keep a single half-grai in his boot as insurance, but… bleh. Otherwise, he only had half an ager and thirty ves in his belt pouch.

Honestly, why did everyone treat him as a child? He was responsible…

He could be responsible!

“Hey, hey. It’s alright,” Edwin tried to pacify Inion, “It was an accident, there’s no reason to go so… apoplectic.”

“She dropped you!” Was it his imagination, or was the lighting on her face starting to shift?

“Look, it was kind of my fault too, okay? I probably could have prevented the whole thing if I was more careful.”

“You trusted her and then she literally dropped you! I will hurt her.”

That’s hardly new- shut up, me.

“Look, you guys got along great before! Just think about that? Like yes, she dropped me. But then she caught me! She even apologized of her own volition! Look, it’s totally fine. Completely and totally fine. I promise.”

Edwin gave a big smile to try and persuade her, but was only met with a flat glare, only slightly spoiled by a lock of her hair drifting in front of her eyes.

“…Fine,” she conceded, “But I’m keeping Identify close with her.”

Edwin took a deep breath. He could do this, no matter how painful it was. He’d faced down giant bears and spiders, this was nowhere close to the scariest thing he did on a regular basis anymore.

“Hey, sorry for storming out on you earlier.”

Lefi looked at him in surprise, “Oh? Ah, but you needn’t worry about such things! Frustration is understandable.”

“Yeah, but… I lost control of my emotions and I really shouldn’t have snapped at you. I just… was frustrated, because it felt like I wasn’t improving at all. Oh, I uh… also brought you this.”

He pulled out an apology flask of ale from his belt. It was apparently about the size of a barrel on the inside, and he’d traded two whole healing potions for it- he was probably being ripped off again, but what else was new?

“It is perfectly alright, my friend!” Lefi laughed, “All would be forgiven even without the gift! Do you wish to have some yourself?”

“Ah, thanks, but I don’t drink,” Edwin declined.

“Your loss! Ah, Rillah shall be so envious! She does love this.”

Edwin raised an eyebrow at that as the adventurer took a quick drink, “Ah! Absolutely wonderful.”

“Glad you like it,” he said, “It was the only thing I could think of.”

“You thought marvelously! I hope you were not overcharged too severely!”

Edwin sighed, “How did you hear about that already? But yeah, I might be absolutely awful at this people stuff, but I still like to try.”

Lefi laughed, then broached the question Edwin had been waiting for, “Do you wish to continue your training?”

“Do you think it’ll actually help?” Edwin asked, “Like genuinely, actually help. Because I can certainly try, but I would like a bit more feedback on what I’m doing wrong.”

Lefi smiled, “I can certainly try myself.”

A few ager- not spent by him, but by Rillah, who knew the city best- had gotten Edwin a pauldron made to his specifications almost impressively well. The metal cuff fit snugly around his shoulder, and the line of pinholes were perfectly aligned with where he’d found them to be most effective- that had been a very long, very painful day of testing but he had a local maximum at the very least. But best of all, it articulated perfectly with his joint, barely impeding his range of motion. It still slightly harmed how much he could stretch, of course, but that just came with the territory of level 74 Flexibility. Random pieces of loose clothing impeded his mobility.

For some reason, his semi-generic tunics, let alone his pants, didn’t seem to anticipate his ability to put his knees behind his head for extended periods of time. Honestly, though, they should. Sure, Attributes may not have been that common, but apparently it was common enough for artisans to get the Dexterity attribute so shouldn’t they be able to make clothing that accommodated for that?

The answer to that was no, because Dexterity didn’t actually improve your flexibility or range of motion, just let you have greater control over your body, and it was generally focused on the fingers for the people who used it anyway.

He should probably try and get the Artisan path, though. Dexterity sounded like a good attribute for him to have, and it would at least help him with his current task. As it stood, it took an impressive amount of focus to keep his fingers from trembling and ruining all his progress.

Alchemical Dismantling helped somewhat, but not overmuch. It made the entire procedure possible, but there was still a certain amount of finesse that was required with cutting the quill out of a feather- or more accurately, the feathery parts away from the stem.

He’d found in his Refining that the quill in the lybird’s feather wasn’t helpful in his refinement of the obscuring-illusion dust. It seemed to have more to do with… fear and darkness. If he were to guess, it served as some sort of control function, helping the rest of the magic to be aimed properly.

Whatever the case, all he needed were the iridescent vanes, glittering black and green. How you could have black iridescence he wasn’t entirely sure, but it looked really cool. His initial experiments had shown that the final result was just as potent, produced comparable amounts of dust, and most importantly was way easier to Refine. The only hitch was that he had to cut right at the base of the barbs. He’d found out the hard way that just trying to shave off a bit of the feather didn’t work for some reason. It was either the entire blade of the feather or nothing.

The minced feathers probably still had some use, sure, but they were far less effective for his goals at the moment, and he couldn’t get distracted trying to find out everything about them.

Just by omitting the shaft… whatever it was called, he could cut his time almost in half, which given how much harder the process got the longer he took was huge. Sure, the bulk of the time he spent Refining was trying to get his mana into a Refined state, and that was taking less and less time as he got better and better at the process, but after about the first hour spent actually Refining an object, his mana got unruly.

Given how he could practically double his output each additional ten minutes- five minutes, now- he took Refining things, cutting the time it took to get the first feather properly Refined from half an hour to fifteen minutes was absolutely massive.

Heck, if he wasn’t careful he would have to start rationing his use of the feathers in case he found something else that he wanted to use them for in the future. That was a problem for future-Edwin, though.

Right now, it was just him, his knife, and his sample. One last deft swipe with his blade- that Knives skill was starting to look rather tempting- and the feather was done, the dismantled parts going in their respective jars.

Two thousand lybird feathers in the jar, two thousand lybird feathers. Take one out, slice it up, one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine feathers in the jar…

Edwin had asked for and been assigned a small stone workshop in the tower to perform his latest experiments in, as he didn’t want to accidentally burn down his carriage with his current project.

Simply put, he was seriously overdue for plain, no-frills explosives. He’d made flashbangs, smoke bombs, fire cocktails, and more. But he hadn’t made a single concussive bomb since either the dwarves or blowing up his kiln, depending on what he decided to count.

And that was just far, far too long. He highly doubted that many people would have shockwave resistance via Skills, and while Health would help put a damper on the sorts of internal damage that could be caused… nobody would be very well-off from having a bomb detonate right in front of their face. He could probably even manage that with Throwing Weapons and Firestarting, which was a truly terrifying prospect.

Sure, there were lots of problems with the idea, and lots of danger to be had.

But when it came to making things blow up… Edwin surveyed his tools and materials eagerly.

He could put aside his concerns.

It was time to make things go boom.