Wish upon the Stars chapter 947

The interior of the metal temple was surprisingly cramped. Most buildings I’d seen were spatially expanded, and this one might have been as well, but if it was, it was expanded and THEN filled with an absurd number of walls and hallways, making every step I took feel like I was walking through a maze.

Normally, that would have been pretty immaterial to my interests…except right now I was exhausted and carrying an INCREDIBLY heavy box of metal bars. The bars were all B-rank, and Impact interacted strangely with gravity when it came to certain concentrations and environments. Or maybe the metal was just literally hundreds of thousands of pounds, I couldn’t say. What I could say was that it was really heavy, and I was having trouble keeping on my feet dragging the box.

“Why?” I wheezed as I trailed behind Donovan. “Am I carrying this? I have four different B-rankers working for me, and they’re all less than ten feet away and could take this off my hands in an instant.”

There was a slight whistle and I staggered as something smacked me upside the head. “OW!?” I snapped, glaring at Donovan. “What the hell was that for?”

The red haired smith was holding what appeared to be a long blue LEEK, at least if I knew my vegetables as well as I thought. He sneered at me. “Fool! I’m here to design you the most effective suit of armor possible for you. I need to see how you move under pressure, how you comport yourself when tired, and I need those bars in my forge and don’t feel like carrying them.”

I grimaced, but eventually nodded, sighing in frustration. “Ok, yeah, I guess I can see wh- OW!” Another slap across the face.

“Fool!” Donovan barked again. “You’re humoring me! If you have a problem with my methods, speak up, boy! No one is going to respect a leader that panders to his subordinates like some whimpering child.”

“If you hit me with that thing again, I’m going to-” another slap. “Ow! Shit will you stop that?”

He snorted. “Fool! Don’t make idle threats. Makes you look ineffective. And don’t talk back to your elders!”

I bit my tongue, glaring at him hatefully, but he didn’t seem to notice, scurrying off into the hall as he caught sight of a room that had just revealed itself. I turned to glare at Fade. “You couldn’t have warned me?” 

The Lord of the Hall of Steel shrugged. “Wouldn’t have helped. He does what he does. You’re lucky he played nice until you got inside. He must like you. The leek of education usually comes out with the first bit of criticism. I was expecting you to get smacked for being late. Speaking of which, I’d hurry inside with those bars.”

Cursing, I scrambled into the room after Donovan, hoping to avoid that weirdly painful leek hitting me again. When I arrived inside, I was relieved to find Donovan stoking a forge, clearly focused more on the act of doing so than my presence. I was intrigued, because rather than use a lighter or some ability, he had his pipe out and was tapping the ashes into the forge, which roared up with each tap.

I cocked my head at him as I dropped the box with a rattling thump. “Magic pipe?” I asked with interest.

He popped it back into his mouth, puffing it, and I was surprised to see the bowl of the pipe start to glow. He winked at me. “Something like that,” he grinned, his teeth bared as they clamped down on the stem. “Now, dump the box.”

“What?” I asked in confusion. “But I just- OW! Fuck, will you stop that?”

The older man just raised an eyebrow, not even bothering to yell at me. I sighed, then leaned over and grabbed the box, tipping it sideways and sending a bunch of random bars of metal across the floor. “Your focus item,” he demanded, pointing at the forge. I withdrew the shackles, tossing them into the forge directly as he gestured for me to do.

He weighed the leek in his hand, then, with a blurring flick of his wrist, he slapped one of the nearest bars of metal. Then another. Then a third. Each bar was…different. Color, shine, they all had slight variations, but more than that, each time the leek hit, they made a slightly different sound.

Donovan didn’t break eye contact as he smacked them. Meanwhile, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shackles slowly start to glow. Very slowly. “Sarcassian Pit Steel,” he said musingly. “Unexpected.”

He smacked one of the bars again, squinting. “Desrick Phase Iron. That one makes more sense.” He tapped five or six more, stopping and going back to one of them.
Pallax Platinum. And…Wraithcopper. Is that enough?” He finally broke eye contact, looking over the bars musingly, lips twisted uncertainly. Then he smacked the rest of the bars. Twice. “Arcadian Lifeiron. And Verixian Tin.” He sniffed the air a few times, then flicked the leek sideways, knocking the dimly glowing shackles to the side, and then nodding.

I blinked at him. “Wait…was that why you were hitting me? You were using the leek to like…calibrate my armor?”

He smacked me upside the head again, too fast to track. “Fool,” he said, this one much milder. “Don’t question your elders. Pick up the bars I just gestured to, and dump them in that crucible over there.” He gestured to a colossal bowl made of some kind of rock set on some kind of metal tong setup. Sighing, I grabbed all the bars and carried them over one by one. Before I dropped in two of them, he held out the leek, pressing it to my chest and stopping me cold. “Not those two,” he corrected. He had me separate out the tin and copper, dumping the rest in the crucible.

Then he had me lift the absurdly heavy crucible and carry the thing over to set it in the forge, to one side of where the shackles were still sitting. Once he had, he reached under a nearby bench and pulled out another crucible. Slapping it down, he used the leek to hook the red hot shackles and drop them into the crucible. He twirled the leek three times, and there was a rumble before a bolt of blue lightning crashed through the ceiling (literally THROUGH it, there was a hole) and sheathed the baton shaped weapon in electricity. 

When the electricity cleared, the leek was gone, replaced by a lang handled ballpeen hammer. The hammer crackled with azure lightning, and he swung it sideways and slammed it into the crucible where the shackles lay.

There was a mighty gong sound, and the electricity on the hammer jumped to the crucible. The stone bowl began to glow, and the electricity did…something Reacting with the banked flames in the coal of the forge. The crucible started to shake, glowing an orangish blue color as the heat began to climb rapidly. “Throw them in,” he said, gesturing to the last two bars. “Quickly now, boy, we don’t have all day.”

I did, and as they plunked into the crucible, Donovan turned and whirled his magic hammer. Once. Twice. Three times over his head before bringing it crashing down on a table nearby. A stone table.

When the hammer struck, there was a resounding crash, and the stone splintered. About three quarters of the slab collapsed into rubble, clattering to the floor like a rain of teeth and leaving behind what appeared to be a perfect stone approximation of…well, me. Donovan turned to smirk at me. “That, boy, is why I was hitting you. Now go get the big one. We need to do this right. Timing is crucial.”

As I hefted the huge cauldron of melted black metal, he easily lifted the other one with a single hand. He gestured for me to head over to the stone idol of my body, and when I arrived, he had me tip the crucible over onto it. Faster than my eyes could track, his hammer licked out, smacking several spots on the stone. Lightning clung to the rock, attracting the melted metal like it was magnetized.

The black metal flowed over every inch of the statue, coating it, and started to thicken, seeming to expand outward like it was gaining mass. He tipped the second crucible, the gleaming bronze metal spearing into the black mass and burrowing in like a river wearing down a canyon. He tapped the metal a few times, reaching down to SPIN the table on an axis I hadn’t even seen before he used it. It whirled sideways so fast it almost turned into a circle, and the hammer flashed a few more times, deflating or shaping the black metal so fast I could barely track it. He turned and grinned at me. “Now, for the fun part. Back away, boy, unless you feel like experiencing life as a pile of ash.” I did, and he turned on his heel, hauling back on the hammer and SMASHING it down into the steel floor.

Another gong, this one resonating through the whole building, split the air as the electricity roared over the walls and floor. He swung again, and the voltage seemed to climb. The armor still spun, and with the third strike, he slammed the hammer dead on into the chest. The floor shook again, and all the electricity in the walls and floor jumped to the armor. There was a sort crack and the armor…shrank.

The next hit did something similar. And the one after. He struck the spinning armor like a master potter shaping clay, carefully altering and smoothing in ways I could barely understand. The ballooned hunk of black metal with bronze traceries started to writhe and twitch, collapsing down on itself. As the dark metal condensed, shrinking to the proportions of a normal suit of armor.

As it shrank, the bronze crawled over the surface of the plate, sliding into the spots where joints would be, over plates as runes, and finally congregating in the center of the chest into a circular bronze plate sporting my own symbol, the one I hadn’t seen in ages, not since my time back on Callus.

With one final swing, the electricity exploded off the armor in a wave of unseen force that ruffled my hair and pushed me back a step. Donovan was panting, leaning over with his hammer as a cane. “Almost done,” he told me. “Just one last step.” He hefted the hammer with a grunt , bringing it down hard on the exposed head of the stone statue where the metal had pulled away from it during the plate formation.

Blue energy surged into the stone and it cracked, spiderwebs of blue energy crawling over the surface of what I could see. Then it collapsed, turning into grey dust that blew away from inside the armor, leaving just my suit of plate lying on the table base the stone had been sat on.

I stepped closer, in awe at the new suit. “It’s…it’s beautiful.”

“It is,” Donovan said proudly. “You gonna name it or just stand there and stroke it like it’s a fuzzy puppy?”

I grinned down at it, running my fingers over it. It was exactly what I wanted. I considered a possible name. This suit was different than my Tree. It was part of me, sure, but not the same way. This wasn’t Shane’s armor. It belonged to my other self. The symbol, the traceries of bronze lighting up the midnight black iron. My lips pulled back into a wolfish grin.

My fingers flitted over the bronze plate with my symbol on it. This armor would contain and enhance my forms, would work with me and augment my power. Every demon in my Goetia staff art would be bound within this plate. I knew exactly what its name was. “I’ll call it…the Seal of Solomon.”