Armaments

A click of a button on an ephemeral screen transformed the field of rusting scrap into a primeval forest darkened by a dense canopy overhead. The ill tended gravel path underfoot solidified into an ancient stone brick road rutted by travelers long absent. Its abandonment evidenced by the encroaching woods whose trunks threw up the road’s outer bricks and whose roots weaved circuitous paths through the masonry’s seams.

New Quest: Escape the Land of the Lost
Objective: Slay the dungeon boss
(Optional Objective): Slay 20 monsters
Reward: $1000, 1 rare crafting component
(Bonus Reward): 500 exp.

Shock and exhilaration surged through John as he read through the absurd bounty that the Quest would provide. The Quest’s monetary reward was greater than any sum he had ever personally possessed. The bonus experience alone would be enough to trigger a Level Up. Whatever was gained by defeating the required enemies and a boss could reasonably trigger a second. The rare material, least exciting by virtue of its unknown identity, stood at least a tier above the common metals that he had thus far collected.

If every Instant Dungeon provided a Quest like this, then he might become very rich, very quickly. That the monsters scaled to his level was of little concern given that he would have the assistance of someone nearly ten times his level.

‘Daryl’s going to want a cut of the reward, isn’t he?’ John grumbled internally.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to demand as much. He had both caught John stealing from the scrapyard and saved him from committing a potentially deadly taboo. John would have to consider himself lucky if he retained any material rewards from this Quest.

‘Wait, where is he?’ John whipped around finding only an empty road. The stillness of the surrounding forest suddenly became unsettling.

“Daryl?” John asked the empty road. The rustling of branches under a gentle breeze was deafening.

He shouted, “Daryl, are you out there?” When he again failed to respond, John threw up his arm and willed his escape.

Barrier Escape Failed - The dungeon boss prevents your escape.

Fear gripped John’s throat. He clenched his fists to steel himself as nausea and trembling swept through his body.

‘I’m an idiot. I’m a fucking idiot. Why did I jump into a monster infested magic bubble on the advice of someone I just met. I had no reason to trust him outside of “he hadn’t killed me yet”. He didn't even need to be lying. He had just told me that my powers break the rules of magic. This one already broke one rule. Why wouldn’t it break more? The monsters scale with my level. Why wouldn’t it lock others out?’

As his stomach began to churn, John lowered himself to the stoney ground, pulled his knees to his chest, and tried to calm himself.

“How am I going to get out of here? I can’t kill a boss. I’m a wimp, I have no combat magic, and my only experience with fights is getting my ass kicked.”

He sat a little while taking deep breaths and racking his mind for some means of escape. Before long, it became apparent that he had no other choice but to fight his way out. In resignation, he opened his crafting menu. At the very least, he could arm himself.

The menu had changed slightly since that morning. A new panel on its left side displayed the quantity of all workable materials and available components contained in his inventory. John’s salvaging trip, as brief as it was, had not been unfruitful as he managed to collect several pounds each of iron, copper, and some tin. Surprisingly, he had also collected a few ounces of zinc, although he wasn’t sure from what. Bronze and brass also appeared on the list, a small plus icon overlaid on them indicating that the alloys could be produced from their base metals.

‘What gives me the best chances of surviving this mess?’

His thoughts quickly drifted to that alien train of thought that had vexed him a few hours earlier, a weaponized emitter.

It was an excessively simple design. A siphon mounted in the grip would draw mana into a blank emitter which would then radiate into the surrounding air, engulfing the iron obelisk in a torrent of destructive, arcane energy, if the mana flow was high enough. That was, without question, beyond John’s current capabilities, but even for low mana flows, the design could still be dangerous. Direct contact between the emitter and anything with a lesser resistance than its own, such as organic tissue, would functionally short circuit the component, destructively discharging the mana it contained along the new, more favorable path.

But, there was one critical consideration: for how long could John sustain the effect? Without the regulating effects of an enchantment, the weapon would drain his mana as quickly as the siphon would allow. After, it would be little more than a dull hunk of iron strapped to the end of a stick. Although, even that would be an improvement over his current situation.

John navigated through the numerous rows of components until he found his few artificing recipes. While the focus and the battery remained grayed out due to missing crystalline materials, the siphon appeared in full color, the meager amount of zinc in his inventory barely enough to produce the necessary brass. Needing to verify his design’s viability, he tapped the item’s tooltip.

Basic Mana Siphon
Material Cost: 2 ounces iron, 1 ounce brass.
Component Effect: This component drains 10 MP per second from any contacting creature.

‘Six seconds to dump all of my mana,’ he thought dourly. ‘Two hours to recharge. I could mount the siphon just above the grip, then I could prime the emitter by contacting it with my thumb. That would at least make discharges manageable.’

Weaving his fingers together behind his head, John laid back onto the stone road, and tried to weigh his options. Should he weaponize the emitter or resign himself to more practical, more mundane weapons?

If he reserved his mana until he faced the boss, the emitter might deal decisive damage to the boss, but there would be at least twenty monsters between now and then. What use would it be against them?

He was not physically competent. The emitter was the only thing he had that could utilize his mana, and it would be insane to leave it untapped when his life could be on the line. The same could be said of the near pound of iron that comprised it. What else could that afford him? A longer sword? A broader shield? A helmet?

A deep rumbling gurgle emanated from his stomach, breaking his concentration. He’d skipped lunch.

He was overthinking again. The emitter wasn't worth the effort. Dejected, John resigned himself to a simple sword and shield.

‘If it’s good enough to be the newbie weapon in Monster Hunter, it's good enough for me.’

Guided by the sporadic bubbling of subconscious understanding, John sorted through the seemingly endless pages of components queuing those necessary for his chosen weapons, each piece appearing in a single, combined window. Slowly, he adjusted the fit and material of each. As he neared the completion of his design, John found that he lacked a single material: wood. Lethargically, he picked himself up and searched the surrounding thicket. Upon finding a sizable fallen limb, he salvaged it, returned to his stoney seat, and continued with his final adjustments.

‘Good enough,’ he thought as he examined his completed designs.

But, as John moved to manifest his designs, his finger lingered a fraction of an inch before Craft’s confirmation button, his hand seized by some foreign hesitation churning in the back of his mind.

‘An emitter’s emission dynamics are governed by its geometry. Changes to that geometry alter the rate and shape of the mana field produced. This may result in the accumulation of a briefly stored mana charge.’

John pulled the emitter, just moments ago queued to be scrapped, into his design window. For a few moments, he toyed with its dimensions. The occasional subconscious bubbling, more defined than before, granted him a sense of the impacts his changes made. He quickly learned the criticality of the obelisk’s tapered sides.

Deviation from that ideal slope annihilated uniformity of its emission, creating a concentration mana field somewhere along its length. A longer, skinnier emitter, a shallower inclination, pushed the effect back towards the input. A shorter, fatter emitter, a harsher inclination, drew it towards the pyramid cap. Neither induced a stored charge.

“That cap’s basically just a secondary taper. What happens if I remove it?”

Without the compensation effect of the pyramid’s slopes, the emitter’s corners began to influence the field's shape, slowing the outflowing mana, concentrating it at the center of its flat faces, and inducing an internal charge. It was only a few MP. The charge would last only a few minutes, slowly draining away. But, It was something he could work with.

With newfound fervor, John began to adapt his sword to accommodate the emitter. He exchanged the iron blade for bronze. The former would have worsened the bleed, but the latter, possessing a much higher mana resistance, would serve as an insulator, protecting the weapon’s wooden grip, and John by extension, from an accidental discharge. His relative lack of the metal, **** him to shorten the blade’s length from three feet down to two. To compensate, he extended the weapon’s handle by the same length lost, producing a somewhat awkwardly shaped short spear.

The emitter would be embedded into the blade's hollowed spine. Three pairs of bronze bands, molded to conform to the component and bolted to the broad face of the blade, would secure it in place.

Lengthening the adapted component to accommodate the blade's length introduced one last problem. The longer emitter pushed the center of the mana field back towards its input, deadening the latter half so that it would never trigger a discharge.

John fiddled with the iron’s geometry, trying to shift the mana flow back towards the emitter’s far end, but doing so required a ten pound emitter at least.

“What happens if I move the input to the center of the emitter so that mana flows both ways?”

The center of the component’s emission field followed with the input as he dragged the input along the weapon’s length.

“It would make it easier to trigger a discharge. So, that’s a little better. I could redistribute the charge by adding more inputs along the emitter. Don’t have enough brass for more wire, but I should be able to just substitute with copper wire. It’s a little leaky, but the transmission loss should be minor.”

Copper had comparable, if slightly lower, mana conductance than that, and he had plenty to spare. It generally wouldn’t be used in proper artifice as the slight emission fields it produced would interfere with the mana flow within components in close proximity, impeding their flow, but that probably wouldn’t matter for the application.

John bolted upright, the bubbling of his subconscious erupting into a violent churn. “That’s it! That’s the solution! If I wrap the emitter in a tight coil of copper wire and route the mana flow through the coil before it inputs into the emitter, the wire’s inhibiting effect would significantly slow the mana bleed and increase the emitter’s capacity to store mana. It would reduce the overall charge speed, but that would just prevent it from totally depleting my mana pool.”

New Component Recipe Discovered: Archaic Mana Capacitor
Material Cost: 10 ounces iron, 6 ounces copper
Component Effect: This item can store up to 25 MP. Mana stored in this item will slowly drain over the course of an hour.

Achievement: Reinvent the Wheel
Rediscover an obsolete and long forgotten piece of magical engineering.
Reward: +1 INT

John quickly replaced the emitter in his design for the capacitor, a ten inch long, six sided rod of iron. Its wider corners and narrower faces were an ideal foundation for the tight copper coil embedded in the component’s surface.

Lacking enough copper to meaningfully lengthen the new component, John shortened the blade again, down to eight inches, so its edge would extend an inch from the iron on all sides, and extended the handle, restoring the three foot reach of the original design. He reserved the recovered metals for later repairs.

Otherwise satisfied with his work, he confirmed their creation. In an instant, materials disappeared from his inventory, his mana drained to near depletion, and his new shield and magic spear were deposited into his inventory.

Arcane Flare: On contact with organic matter, this weapon discharges all stored mana to produce a flare of arcane fire. Current Charge: 0/25 MP

Mana Drain: This item drains 5 MP per second from any creature in contact with its siphon.

A sense of pride grew in his chest as he read through the descriptions of his creation and its effects. He wouldn’t be able to make much use of Arcane Flare until his mana recovered, but it would be a godsend against the boss.

Defense:
The maximum damage reduction that an item can apply to damage applied against it.

Durability:
An item’s capacity to sustain damage. When struck, Durability is reduced by the amount of damage blocked.

John equipped both items. The shield hung heavy on his left, while the spear in his right moved as an effortless extension of his arm. With only a few MP remaining, he gave the siphon a quick tap, evoking the weapon’s brief crackling response.

“OK then,” he said with new found confidence. “Let’s try not to die."