Author's Note: Okay that's finished, going to go work on a personal project right now bye! Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 88: Shield Hero's Ingredient Hunt Log
To escape from Rishia's weapon Kuro ran all the way to the Dragon's Hourglass in the now abandoned Zeltoble, which in turn led to the question of just how stupidly long the range of the vassal projectile weapon really was. Come to think of it the main purpose of a Atlatl was to extend the range of throwing spears, even if it was only by a few yards if 'all' of Tanya's bows were converted into range extending Atlatl's then that means the very real possibility that thing has increased it's range by 'a few yards' thousands of times over. Using the newly established 'Return Dragon Vein' Kuro escaped deep into the wilderness, oceans, deserts, basically anywhere with lots of strong high level monsters and few people to deal with. Why? In order to force that Projectile flinging monster to take a break for a few hours after levelling up enough and deal with more of the weapons it had been made to take in. Finally Kuro's gambit paid off as Rishia's weapon shorted out and Kuro arrived back at the village.
"Rishia-Chan~!" Oh Kuro was using honorifics. This was bad.
"Fue!?" Rishia had come to an understanding that when Kuro starts cracking her knuckles while smiling like that she should run, actually she should run when Kuro smiles at her like that period!
"I've managed to improve my Sacred Gear Lots and lots thanks to you! But you haven't had the chance to improve yours at all yet: in the spirit of helping my junior allow me to help you out~!"
"FFFUUUEEE!" Rishia ran away screaming in terror, and Kuro chased after her Pepe Le Pew style, hurling noble phantasms at her all the way along.
Truthfully, Kuro was indeed helping Risha to improve her Sacred Gear. Of course for every ten minutes Rishia spent in life threatening danger one level worth of weapons was unlocked, which by Kuro's estimates meant about three dozen new weapon forms the Projectile had to figure out a way of dealing with, so while Kuro was genuinely helping Rishia develop her Sacred Gear, she was doing so for entirely selfish reasons. By Kuro's estimates the Projectile should only be able to break down about ten or twenty weapons a day, though she didn't know what kind of reinforcement method it had that could accelerate the process, so she was erring on the side of caution. On an unrelated note Maple was conducting work using her own Sacred Gear today, the Bishop form of her Sacred Gear, the Bio-Plants.
"This would be a lot easier if I didn't have to stop every few minutes to get something else." Most recently Maple had to cobble together a centrifuge, of course she didn't have a centrifuge in this medieval fantasy world but understanding what she basically needed to do she realised that the same thing could be done with a home made children's toy. Essentially she took a piece of wood the size of a dinner plate, drilled four small pin sized holes in the centre and twelve the size of quarters around the border. Maple strung string through the middle holes, wound them up, and tied them between two rods. By pulling the rods the disk spun around at a high speed and by moving them back together they spun again also at a high speed. Maple took vials, filled one with the fluid she needed filtered, corked it with Roots from the trees from the Spirit Tortoise, and then stuck another empty vial on the other end. By sticking the vials into the quarter holes Maple could harness centrifical force to make the liquid pass through the roots, filter them of unnecessary components, and get the liquid she needed. That was step five, right now she was on step six. "So what do I need now?" Maple sacrificed more of her potion crafting shields and unlocked the next level of 'Potion Craft Mini-game.' "Really? How am I supposed to do that?" Maple just let out a sigh as she switched over to the communication crystal shield. "Um... Trash was it?"
The man in question was managing his elementals while he simultaneously fought against the beam spamming Fohl.
"Ah young Maple, good to see you again." One of Trash's elementals deflected a beam attack from Fohl. "Is there something I can help with?"
"Um... do you know how I could unlock a lightning skill?" Maple asked as she scratched the side of her head.
"Why not ask Rishia?" Trash asked since as he understood it Rishia had a considerably powerful lightning weapon Maple might be able to copy.
"FFFUUUEEE!" Rishia was running by as fast as her Support magic could carry her.
"She's busy right now." Maple replied simply.
"Her sacred gear training, right." Trash stated nodding in understanding, he was technically correct but Maple wasn't sure that was how Rishia would classify this. "What about Kuro?" Kuro ran by Maple, shooting her blades that had been combined with some kind of auto lock Noble Phantasm at Rishia via rail gun.
"She's busy helping Rishia." Maple wasn't sure that was how to classify this either but it would take too long to explain.
"I see. I'll send a message to Miss Seatto to escort you to Castle Town then." A trio consisting of Eclair, Filo, and Maple were all brought to the castle town in order to do some shopping. It was for the best after all, even with the bio-plants there were still other things that they needed to pick up while they were here but that still left the question.
"Why do I need an escort?" Maple asked looking at Eclair suspiciously.
"Really?" Eclair just looked at Maple like she just asked a stupid question thinking 'because every time we let you out of our sight you either ruin the environment somewhere or nearly get yourself killed.' "Because people keep trying to kill you." Rather than say what she really thought Eclair opted to approach the situation more diplomatically. "Why do you need lightning magic anyway?"
"Potion Crafting Minigame." The Mini-game can be thought of as a step by step instruction guide for brewing difficult potions, the issue here though was that 'it was a game' meaning that it didn't have the common decency to give her the entire process at once, she has to complete the 'levels' to reach the next step. "I need to do something called 'electrolysis' to the potion, for that I need lightning magic." And luckily she knew just the man to talk about it.
"Sorry can't help you." Erhard stated as he shrugged his shoulders.
"You did lightning swords before though." Maple stated as she looked directly at the weapon in question.
"That was a sword. This is Melromarc: shields are not the most popular weapons." Erhard explained as he let out a sigh. "It'll take a few days before I can have it ready, if you just want something that'll spit lightning for you then the magic store is probably better for you."
"Um okay." Maple pulled out a scroll from her shield. "Can you make these?" Erhard took the scroll and opened it.
"Oh boy." The kid was ambitious, he'll give her that. Maple had asked Rat about a list of lab equipment used by Alchemists, she made her a shopping list, and blueprints because most of this stuff apparently would have to be custom made. So while Erhard went off on the latest act of madness that Maple had gone into the girl herself had went to go pick up a magic orb.
'Lightning Orb Shield. Equip Bonus: Lightning Barrier'
It was functionally identical to the Meteor shield, sadly though vastly inferior. This one created a barrier made out of lightning as oppose to Meteor Barrier's mana, the issue here though was the the lightning barrier would be reliant on offensive power to keep anything out, which Maple severely lacks in. Instead she took the half finished potion she had been working on before, held them in a set of tongs, and used the extended reach to plunge them into the lightning barrier thereby successfully completing another level.
"There now what else does this need?" Maple went to the monster dealer to pick up more Filolials.
The village's economy was starting to take off, partly because of her experiments with the Bio-plants meaning that there was a huge crop of Bio-fruit at the village, not only that but there was a huge amount of monster meat flowing through the village too. The waves increased the base level of monsters in the world, but the monster-like 'age as you level up' phenomena was still in effect. Monsters grew at an accelerated rate, necessitating that they hunted at an accelerated rate, level up at an accelerated rate, which meant that they grew at an even more accelerated rate. With the Whip power up method they could level down the slaves and power them up that way as many times as they liked. What this meant was that their food carriages were starting to reach the point where they didn't have enough monsters to pull them. But also Maple needed a specific type of monster both for her Potion Crafting and in case they ran into anymore reincarnated.
"Monsters that eat souls?" The Trader was twisting his moustache as he thought about the implications. "I am sorry miss hero, but I am afraid that there is not any monster like that here, that I know of anyway."
"'That you know of?'" Maple asked looking at the little man suspiciously.
"It's not that such a create doesn't exist, it's that we have no way of knowing about it." The Soul was an intangible and unknown thing, they know that it exists because of the reincarnated, but that is a new discovery. Aside from the appropriately named Soul Eater boss they had no idea what kind of monster had the capacity to eat souls. "If I might suggest sir hero. Your weapons have something called a 'Monster Book' which can provide information about the various monsters, materials and weapons your weapons have unlocked yes?" Maple nodded her head in the affirmative. "The Seven Star Weapons have been accumulating transformations for far longer than you have. Perhaps one of those knows of a monster that you seek?"
Maple nodded her head at the Trader's words. Reincarnated have been plaguing this world for thousands of years, the weapons go so far as to yank people off from their homeworld's to deal with pests like this, so why wouldn't a possible defender against this particular chink in their armour be a thing?
"Rishia could use a break from Sacred Gear training anyway." Saying that Maple attempted to contact Rishia but got no reply. "Right her weapon isn't working right now." But she knew someone whose weapon was working. "Hello Kuro." Maple stated in a singsong voice, watching, through the crystal ball Sword, Kuro materialise blades in her hands before chucking them at someone with a look of gleeful madness on her features.
"Can't talk right now, busy helping Rishia train." Kuro replied not paying attention to Maple.
"Rishia told me the Projectile weapon reinforcement method." A lie of course. Maple hadn't thought to ask her before Kuro started chasing her, and she hasn't had time since. Kuro immediately closed the communication link. The Legendary Sword immediately reopened the communication link.
"What are your demands?" Kuro asked in simple uncertain terms.
Maple portaled over to Zeltoble along with Filo, Eclair, Rishia and Kuro and looked around at the ruins of the country.
'Soul Vaccumer: A large worm like monster composed of Spirit Energy that devours souls for nutrition.'
Is what the description says. Not only does the monster book tell you what the monster is, but it even has coordinates for where the material came from.
"So the Monster Book says that the Soul Vaccuumer is around here?" Maple asked while she looked at Rishia questioningly.
"Well. We don't know how long ago that was." Rishia stated looking around at the ghost town concerned. "I mean there's no way that they would just let such a dangerous creature run wild would they?"
"Aren't the odds actually pretty good?" Kuro picked this time to pipe up. "The monster eats SP, which everyone spits out as a by product of casting magic but never uses." Mana and spirit comes from Ki, when mana is used Spirit is produced as a by product and when Spirit is used Mana is the by product. "Given how much mana is used up here I imagine there must be a lot of left over spirit for that thing to pig out on."
"So it's a friendly monster?" Rishia asked looking hopeful.
"Not really, or haven't you noticed that things have changed around here?" No one was poring out mountains and mountains of buffing and debuffing spells to rig the fights, no one was desperately casting magic as if their lives depended on it, no monsters were killing people in droves or getting killed in droves in return, in fact the only source of food that had wandered into that thing's midst in what was probably months was...
"FFFUUUEEE!" Rishia's voice echoed in the empty ruins of what was once a city.
"Well if it didn't know we were here before." Eclair stated as she smacked herself in her face and Rishia covered up her mouth with both hands fearfully.
"Well we're looking for it anyway so it's good if it comes out to find us on it's own anyway." Maple stated as she looked through her shields. "You're confident." Eclair commented as she tapped her fingers on her arm. "We've got two Legendary Weapons and a Seven Star, and one of them is at Balance Breaker." Maple pointed out holding up her shield.
"We have two Legendary Weapons, and Seven Star that's going through a system crash." Kuro countered bluntly.
'And whose fault is that?' Was the look that Eclair shot Kuro in return for that comment. "After the past couple of days it should be properly overwhelmed too, and I can't imagine fighting a giant soul eating worm monster is going to make it less overwhelmed than what it was before."
"How do you know that it's a giant worm monster?" Rishia asked looking very concerned all of a sudden. No one said anything about 'giant' it could be a regular sized dune like the one that her family use to use to fertilise the ground back in her home village.
"Cause I can see it." Kuro stated casually letting out a sentence that would make many quake in terror.
"...wh-what was that just now?" Rishia asked but Kuro ignored her.
"Filo, we should make some preparations while we still have the chance." Saying that Kuro walked over and planted a kiss on Filo, and considering that she could make most of her Noble Phantasms now without needing a external source of mana...
"So I take this means that you're pulling another Atla on us and giving Filo a Noble Phantasm?" Maple asked sounding concerned.
"The Troias Tragoldia, it was Achiles Chariot." What Kuro used Filo's magical power to create was a giant black crescent shaped chariot with a relatively normal sized compartment for the rider, as well as two knee high bladed prongs going to either side. "It'll be perfect for a speed freak like Filo." The harness snapped itself into place around a Filo in her Filolial form, horse leather. Kuro had reached the point where it was theoretically possible for her to have her sword make things out of the material that she can trace into existence, as part of her Sacred Gear 'Forger of the South' that let's her create original works. In this case she already had the data of the divine horses Xanthos and Ballus who would originally pull this thing, since Kuro couldn't making living things she did the next best thing and made something out of those living things. This Saddle and harness should Grant Filo the same power as those horses.
"Will Filo be alright pulling this thing by herself?" Maple noted that there were two more places for harnesses to be snapped into place.
"It's fine, Filo has a lot of high stats so she can make up for those horses. The biggest issue here is the mana consumption after all." Kuro stated dismissing what might've been a big deal.
"That's fairly important Kuro." Maple stated making her displeasure known. "The three of us can supply it for her, in any case we're out of time." As Kuro explained and hopped into the chariot the ground started to shake.
Eclair, Rishia and Maple all jumped onto the chariot with Kuro, of course that might've been a little too cosy, so Kuro jumped onto the saddle she had made and attached to Filo's back.
"Maple, if there was ever a time for you to kick in the boosters." Suddenly several white spikes pierced through the ground mere feet away, which then rapidly grew, and grew, and grew some more until a giant transparent white tower like creature emerged from the ground, opened up it's spiky maw, and roared.
"Knight!"
Shouting that the shield armour turned into the a form that was both familiar and yet different, the mech armour of before had turned into a dark green colour, the four arms had shields mounted on them, wooden with pictures of a snake's nest on them. With a mechanical grinding noise the shields split apart and unfolded to reveal machine guns, which then aimed backwards and fired. The combination of a speed oriented Noble Phantasm, combined with what amounted to a set of rocket boosters, produced a combination that sent the group rocketing forward. Even as huge as it was the worm couldn't keep up with them and they quickly escaped the borders of it's territory.
"I'm surprised..." Needless to say, after the mech transformation took up the entire passenger compartment, there was no room for Rishia and Eclair anymore, so they ended up spending the entire trip pinned to Maple's mech suit by the g-forces. "...that you didn't just try to feed that thing to your shield like you usually do."
"Raphtalia would get mad at me if I let the Soul Vacuumer eat me." Which was also a perfectly logical statement to make it was also filled with so much insanity that you would go mad just from trying to comprehend it. "Rishia, what do you need to get your weapon working again?" The Projectile weapon lit up briefly, before giving it's answer and going back to what it was doing again.
"Um... it says that it needs money." Rishia reluctantly relaid the contents of the message her weapon had given her.
"Is that all?" Oh they didn't like the way Maple had said that. They portalled back to the village, Maple immediately went to the treasury and came back with a bag of copper, silver and gold coins. However rather than giving it to Rishia she put them inside of her shield.
"What are you doing?" Nothing Maple was doing was making Rishia feel better. "Just a minute... there we go!" Suddenly the ground started to rumble. From a empty space just outside of the village a large set of stones rose out of the ground, a mixture of Gold, Silver and Copper ores.
"Fue?" Rishia stammered flabbergasted.
"... I should be surprised but I am not." Eclair simply stated as she watched Maple go over and suck the ore rich boulders she just grew out of the ground into her shield.
Maple tapped on her shield a couple of times activating the craft function and moments later dumping out thrice the number of coins that she had fed to her shield before into a pile in front of Rishia. To answer the confusion: before when she was experimenting with the Shield of the Beast King the structures that would pop out of the ground were bigger than what she would put in, a random stick of fire wood could become a bench, a Bio-plant seed could become a fully grown Bio-plant. What this basically amounts to is that if you put a raw material in and convert that into a building then it will be more than what you started with. She'll have to talk to Raphtalia about this later when she gets the chance, her proficiency with the skill is of course going to be much higher after renovating an entire country as opposed to one small town. The Lord Camelot ate the Shield of the Beast King, or rather part of it, she'll have to learn what the blending of those two shields would do later but Maple simply got Kuro to make another copy for her to weapon copy, figuring that would be the safer of the two to work from.
"Well this has potential." Kuro stated letting out a smile.
"This is only to help Rishia fix her weapon Kuro!" Maple snapped before Kuro started getting any ideas. "For one thing if we started doing this and our currency was put into circulation it would break the economy!"
"Um... The Projectile says that it needs more." Maple didn't have any problems giving it to them, after a while the Projectile seemed to finish it's system crash, and was just about to continue its campaign of retaliation against Kuro.
"If you attack Kuro again, I won't give you any more money." The Projectiles it had summoned into the air vanished.
Instead Rishia was given a notification to read aloud.
"Um are you sure?" The Weapon seemed to flash in the affirmative. "Alright then. The Projectile says that you can use Money to buy and enhance unlocks and enhancements." A notification flashed in the eyes of the heroes present. Suddenly all of the Heroes stats jumped up again.
"NOOO!" Sadly though it came at a great cost. For starters financial, all of the money Kuro had been saving inside of her sword vanished, secondly emotional as all of Kuro's Crafting bonuses jumped up again. Then Kuro started laughing madly, as if her sanity had been the final cost of what this latest power up method had cost her.
"Kuro? Are you okay?" Maple asked looking genuinely concerned. "This is fine!" Based on the way her brows started twitching Maple quickly concluded 'no it's not.' "This much of a increase in levels is nothing now that I have a Sacred Gear." Everyone slowly started to walk backwards. Kuro was breathing deeply as Kuro felt something within her snap. "GGGYYYAAAHHH!" Screaming at the top of her lungs Kuro released a field of blades from around her, everyone quickly ran away less they get skewered. Suddenly the ground started to shake, the blades fell over as armoured hands came up from down below to grab the blades and dig themselves out like they were escaping from a mass grave.
"Ahh..."
"Go get Fohl." Maple stated and Eclair ran off to find him.
Each of the figures to emerge from the ground were all different from each other, from colours including blue, green, yellow, orange, red and purple to size barely coming up to Maple's hips to stretching taller than some of the buildings here, even their weapons were different such as swords, spears, bows, many of them gave off the impression of simply being inhuman. And yet the weapons were very quickly recognised.
"This one has Excalibur!" Maple noted looking at a blue feminine dress wearing armour holding the weapon in question.
"And this is the Yew Wood bow." Eclair stated looking at green wiry built armour holding a bow. Eventually Fohl arrived and held the gauntlet like hand of the blue armour, and was shocked by what he had seen in the process.
"'Artoria Pendragon.'" Fohl read off the notification as he took the hand of a small girl-like armour. "'Jack the Ripper.'" A huge black armour carrying the Axe like Nine Lives. "'Heracles.'" Like that Fohl continued to shake hands with the armours while the implications made themselves known.
"So these armours are..." Maple stated as she looked around concerned.
"Heroic Spirits." Kuro explained making her opinion known. "It seems that my Infinite Sword Sea has undergone another evolution." As Kuro said, the time limit on her new ability expired and the various Heroic Spirits went back to where they came from. Each Noble Phantasm contains the history and personalities of the heroes who wielded them. They understood this from the Chat box-like interactions of the weapons that they regularly find themselves a party to. The Sacred Gear took advantage of that, along with in all likelihood the various divine magics that she has been learning, to create these things. Small blades had been stacked on top of each other and welded together to form a crude scale-mail armour, not necessarily all of them were Noble Phantasms, thanks to this sword Kuro now had advance knowledge of muscle, bone and blood blades too, even organs sometimes. The Sacred Gear took advantage of that too, when it was creating her Balance Breaker. "So it seems that I'll be joining you in Balance Breaker training from here on out eh Maple?"
"Speaking of what did you want that worm monster for anyway?" Eclair asked looking at Maple suspiciously. "I want to create a way of automatically producing Yggdrasil using the Bio-plants." Maple explained as she held her chin in thought. "It's stomach is one of the things I need to refine the ingredients, according to my shield anyway."
Ah well. They'll just go back with Rishia and Kuro to bring it down now. Kuro's Sacred Gear could still use some more stimulation after all, and she had a feeling that her Rook, also known as Savagery, would be just the thing for the job here.
That night, Maple came back to the village dragging the carcass of the Soul Vacuumer and went back into her laboratory in order to finish work on her own project.
Author's Note:
RonaldM40196867: True. In her original series Tanya has a severe problem with misunderstanding the people around her do to being emotionally low functioning which constantly puts her into situations that she's equally constantly trying to avoid being in. *shrugs shoulders*
Aracade: You and I have different ideas of happy. You would too if you had several hundred Noble Phantasms injected into your brain. It had a headache, a big one, the kind that makes your head spontaneously explode.
Pokemonever1994: It's only going to get worst from here.
Halo: No. Bullets are not throwing weapons.
1302: Who said it was Kratos who was summoned? I could easily be from Faye before she died, or Atreus after his father died.