An Unwavering Craftsman

Damien stared in awe at the pool of molten adamantite. Adamantite! It wasn't supposed to melt! What temperature was dragon fire, for goodness' sake? And how did it stay molten? It had been hours since the dragon had blasted it with its breath. There was obviously magic that Damien didn't understand at play, but that just made it even more impressive as a casual display of power.

Of course, just because it wasn't supposed to be physically possible didn't mean he wasn't going to take advantage. He nestled up close enough that the radiating heat was pleasantly warm against the frozen backdrop of the Thief's Wastes. No-one had said it out loud, but a single glance at the bowl was enough to make it obvious where they were. The three source-lights were visible, but they were distant and dim, and none of their warmth reached this far.

The Kingdom of Hrellflan was visible across the bowl, although Damien struggled to pick out Thale. Maybe it was just the distance, or maybe the maps he'd seen weren't accurate, but the western coastline wasn't quite the right shape. He'd never had the chance to view the island from the outside before, and the real thing was a lot different than a paper image.

Lana was a lot closer to the pit of molten metal, pulling out goblets of it and pouring it into clay moulds. Too close—Damien could smell the burnt flesh. At least she'd stopped whimpering; with the resources the dragon had piled on Greenhair, he'd been able to make her a batch of numbing potions. He'd need to learn to make regeneration potions, too, before the stock the dragon had given them ran out, or else Lana would have a very bad time indeed. For that matter, so would Damien.

Damien had asked what they could do for the dragon, and the dragon had roared with laughter, which was never a good sign when you'd just been saved, or possibly kidnapped, by such an ancient and powerful being. Once it had settled down, it said all it wanted them to do was continue levelling. Except that they didn't have the two years Damien's previous rate would have required.

The dragon was quite clear that the Five would throw every last one of their followers into stopping them. While a city caught unprepared was a soft target for even a single dragon, the entire world, prepared for what they would face, was a different matter entirely. They were a threat. The losses to humanity would be devastating, but that didn't matter to the Five as much as the threat to them.

Something else no-one had said out loud, but that was just as obvious to everyone as the fact they were in the Thief's Wastes, was that they were this dragon's slaves. Or, to be charitable, pets. Lana hadn't volunteered to effectively be tortured in order to level faster. The dragon had just politely pointed out that if it ever looked like the armies of the Five would overcome the island's defences before they reached their level goal, it would kill all four of them and hand over their corpses as a peace offering.

And so while Lana was cooking herself, Greenhair was handling highly poisonous materials of the sort that no alchemist without a toxicity resistance feat would normally even dream of touching, and even then they'd do so with thick gloves inside a warded workstation. While Lana was only still alive due to a constant supply of regeneration potions, Greenhair was drinking antitoxin as if it was water.

Unlike Lana, he was perfectly happy. Damien was a little worried he'd snapped. He'd been slightly upset at falling behind the other two, no matter the effort he put in, and he welcomed being pushed harder to catch up.

As for Damien himself, he was deeply regretting his earlier musings about liquid fabrics, and if he could copy Lana's moulding techniques. He shoved both hands into a slime, contracted to Grace. Standard slimes were tier one monsters, weak enough that Grace's taming skills succeeded, and not a threat to even an unclassed child.

Not a threat as long as you didn't do something so incredibly stupid as sticking your hands into one, anyway.

The slime followed Grace's order to treat the irritants inside its body as something indigestible, causing it to harden in a thin layer over his hands and wrists, in a fast-forwarded version of the process by which pearls were made. A minute was all it took to build up a layer thick enough for his [Tailoring] skill to identify it as a tier two glove and grant him experience.

Gloves that were completely rigid, locking his hands in position, but once again, practicality took a back seat to experience gain. He withdrew his hands as Grace gave the slime new orders, then tensed up and thrust them back in.

Even through the numbing potion, he felt some pain as the slime dissolved not only his 'gloves', but also the top layers of his skin.

"Sorry, I overshot again," said Grace.

"It's fine. There's not even any blood this time."

"But the dragon says we're going to switch to a tier two slime variant tomorrow. If I can't even control a tier one properly, I'm going to melt your whole hand off!"

"You're getting experience here as quickly as I am. You should check in with Ariana; you can probably pick a new perk or two."

Grace paused, as if she hadn't considered the fact that controlling the slime was granting her experience too. "I think I will indeed do that."

When the dragon had first told them it expected them to level quickly enough to outpace an invading army, Damien had assumed Grace would be left in a support role, cooking and taking care of their needs. It wasn't as if the dragon would cook for them, even if it provided ingredients from somewhere.

He'd been wrong; there were humans living here.

Sanctuary wasn't what the dragons had named the entirety of the Thief's Wastes, but rather it was a town at the base of the mountain where their rescuer kept its lair. It was occupied by those lucky or unlucky enough to catch the interest of dragons over the centuries, or who had fled here in desperation for whatever reason, as well as their descendants.

There were no temples or priests, and worship of the Five was banned, which meant no ceremony of paths. It wasn't missed. Ariana was a tier eight [Class Supervisor], who not only had the ability to allow others to select perks and feats as a skill, but even had a feat to grant classes. Thanks to Ariana, everyone in the town gained a class on the day they reached seventeen.

Damien had never heard of such a thing. There had never been so much as a mention in any of the textbooks or class documentation of a feat that could grant classes to the unclassed. Admittedly, tier eight was high enough that it was possible an appraisal class of that tier had never turned up, but after his experience escaping Thale, Damien was starting to lean towards more conspiratorial theories. Did the Five not grant classes with that ability to keep control over the classes people got? Or did they kill off anyone who planned to take that feat, just like they'd planned to kill off Damien?

Ariana's feat was qualitatively better than the ceremony of paths. She offered a choice. Just like selecting a perk or feat, targets of her [Bestow Class] feat were shown a list of classes they qualified for, and could pick whichever one they wanted. Damien had heard that the options varied by person, but had no time to investigate what sort of things influenced what was available. Socialising was pretty much restricted to meal times, and even they were rushed, extracting every minute possible to get back to training.

Damien repeated the process over and over, like a mindless drone, forming a pair of gloves and recycling them, usually along with a layer of his hands. Drinking a numbing potion or regeneration potion whenever the last wore off, or a healing potion whenever Grace slipped up and accidentally melted his hand down to the bone.

That had, thankfully, happened less often the previous couple of days.

A couple of days that had earned him more experience than a couple of weeks under his previous regime. Yes, the materials were tier one instead of nine, dropping his experience by a factor of eighty-one, but rather than one bracelet per day he was managing a rate closer to one every few minutes. Two, actually, since his two hands counted separately.

On top of that was the ten times bonus for succeeding. It was utterly ridiculous that a 'glove' that couldn't be removed and paralysed his hand counted as a success, while his dragon-bracelets didn't. Yes, they were messy, but at least they could be worn and removed, and if you squinted a little, they looked kinda like the picture in the book. Skills were stupid.

The net result was that working twelve-hour days, the rate of his already high experience gain had leapt by a factor of eight. And apparently, it still wasn't enough. Switching to tier two slimes would boost it by another factor of four. At that rate, he'd hit level eighty in under a month.

On the bright side, he wouldn't need to experience the sensations of having his hand melted repeatedly for much longer. The numbing potions dulled the pain, but they didn't exactly make it pleasant.

"Okay, time to stop for the night," declared Grace a couple of hours later. "Let's head back into town and get some grub."

"With pleasure," agreed Damien, flexing his stinging hands.

"Be right there!" shouted Lana, dumping the crucible of adamantite she'd just picked up back into the pool, and fleeing from it like it was about to eat her.

The three of them headed for Greenhair, who had set up a socially acceptable distance away from anything with nostrils.

"Dinner time," stated Grace with a finality that brooked no argument, but an expression that suggested she expected to get some anyway.

"I am not yet hungry. I will finish this... eep!"

Lana and Damien, used to the procedure by now, each grabbed an elbow of the workaholic elf and started dragging him back towards Sanctuary.

"I would have caught up!" he complained.

"No, you wouldn't. We've made that mistake once before. Never again."

"The young master is quite correct," agreed Grace. "You're all skin and bones as it is. You must eat properly."

"I really am full, though," he grumbled, his stomach sloshing with antitoxin. Alas, antitoxin wasn't really known for its nutritional value.

It was a short walk back to the walled town, ringed by a wooden palisade, snow-drifts rising up to half its height in places. The path itself was kept clear, as was the interior of the town, [Snow Mage] being a popular choice of class. It showed up for about half the population, suggesting some amount of environmental influence on the class choices.

Given the tundra, food production was difficult, and the town was largely communal. Families had homes of their own, but most ate in a mess hall near the centre of town, where food was prepared by a tier five cook with an [Enhanced Nutrition] feat. It was there that the four newcomers headed, loading themselves with calories with the same efficiency as that with which they sought their experience. It was also there they bumped into Ariana, eating her own meal, and Grace shyly sidled up to request access to her status, having gone years since last seeing it.

She wandered back to the table in something of a daze. "Level twenty-seven... I got two new perks..."

Damien smiled, the previously stuck house-maid finally able to put her skills to use. "What'd you pick?"

"[Puppetry Finesse Improvement] and [Target Tier Penalty Reduction]."

Damien nodded at the sensible choices. The finesse improvement would improve the fidelity with which she could control her tame monsters, and hopefully lead to fewer melted hands, while the tier penalty reduction would reduce the impact of switching from a tier one to two slime species. "Keep it up a few more days, and you're gonna get your first feat," he pointed out. Not to mention another pair of perks. How high did slime tiers go? From two to three would more than double his experience rate again. Then again, sticking his hands inside something like a void slime sounded like an epically bad idea, even if there was someone friendly controlling it.

Almost as bad as summoning a demon in the middle of Thale...

Grace, faced with the prospect of earning her first feat after more than thirty years, flopped onto the bench with bulging eyes.