Chapter 29
1.
“Whoa.”
Before starting the enchantment.
[It seems like the place has completely exploded?]
I received Yuna’s report and quietly opened the community.
[Is he really a descendant of fire??]
[When are you going to make equipment? Seriously.]
[(Firsthand account) I just climbed to the 88th floor and actually saw a pattern being engraved in the sky]
It was nothing but talk of the descendant of fire.
As for what had happened, naturally, I had no idea.
Apparently, when a descendant of fire passed through apprenticeship and became a full-fledged blacksmith, some kind of emblem was engraved on the floor where the Sun Dwarves lived.
It seemed to have been engraved at the exact moment I made two-star equipment and became a full-fledged blacksmith.
“……Hmm.”
- Clatter, clack.
- Clatter, clack.
I crossed my arms and enjoyed the countless reactions.
“Great.”
This felt different.
The whole world was curious about me and searching for me.
In my ten years of using a verified account, I had never been this popular….
Anyway.
The descendant of fire was a very busy man right now.
As much as I wanted to enjoy the reactions a little longer.
I had something to do.
I stood up, holding the Enchant Hammer.
Rhythm game players had all kinds of preferences.
Among them was a type that had little interest in the songs.
They believed that as long as the chart was fun, nothing else mattered.
Personally, I respected people’s tastes, but….
The song had to be a little more exciting for the hits to feel satisfying.
“Yuna, do you have any Sun Dwarf songs?”
[I do~]
And I happened to be a descendant of fire.
Dwarf songs were quite lively.
I was already getting hyped up, so let’s go all out today with a traditional dwarf song.
- Boom, boom, ba-dum-boom.
Lively drumbeats began to play.
- Bam, ba-bam, bam-bam.
My hammer struck the gloves in time with them.
Without missing a single narrowing hit circle.
This feeling—yeah, this was it.
- Baaang!
The final circle burst at exactly the right timing.
─────────────────
[Total Polishing]
[Marvelous] [88]
[Excellent] [1]
[Normal] [0]
[Bad] [0]
[Terrible] [0]
─────────────────
Mr. Marvelous.
Along with a result sheet praising me.
─────────────────
[Final success rate 48%]
[Failure rate 52%]
─────────────────
【Attempting……】
─────────────────
【Enhancement successful】
─────────────────
[Apprentice Blacksmith’s Warming Gloves][★☆☆☆☆]
[15 Enhancement → 16 Enhancement]
─────────────────
The enchantment succeeded.
[Enchantment Log]
[14->15]][Failure]
[14->15]][Failure]
[14->15]][Failure]
[14->15]][Success!]
[15->16]][Success!]
It had failed five consecutive times at 50% while going from 14 to 15.
I thought my luck might be bad, but then they started sticking one after another.
“Woohoo~”
I hummed as I prepared the next enchantment, but.
- Rustle.
- Rustle.
“Huh?”
No matter how much I rummaged through my pockets….
Unfortunately, I had run low on Enchantment Powder.
I was nearly out.
“…Tsk.”
Was that it for today?
If there was something I had realized while working.
Even when enchanting with the minimum amount of powder at the highest possible difficulty.
The minimum powder requirement had risen quite a lot now that there was one star attached, compared to the unstarred plain gloves.
Naturally, I was consuming it faster too.
Also, the charts had become considerably more varied overall.
Maybe it was because the number of stars was different, or because they were unique equipment.
But another thing I found puzzling was….
“There’s no destruction chance…?”
That was quite puzzling.
Both the requirements and the charts had become much harder, yet there wasn’t even a hint of a destruction chance.
If I simply played well, I could still glide all the way to 16 Enhancement without destroying them.
It was because they were still one-star, right?
“Hmm….”
I rested my chin on my hand and fell into thought for a moment.
There probably still wasn’t enough data. I had run out of powder too.
And the enhancement level seemed fairly high by now.
I pictured Doloris in my mind.
At once, her equipment window appeared before my eyes.
I put the Apprentice Blacksmith’s Warming Gloves into the empty glove slot in her window.
[Would you like to equip it?]
Yes.
─────────────────
[Apprentice Blacksmith’s Warming Gloves][★☆☆☆☆]
[Unique Equipment][Compatibility][33/40]
[Enchantment Level: 16]
─────────────────
[The warming effect of the Sun Inscription suppresses the wearer’s amplified yin energy.]
[Alleviates the Severed Meridians symptoms and advances the opening of 7 of the 9 meridians]
─────────────────
I mulled over the numbers and read them several more times, but.
“Hmm….”
Nothing in particular seemed to have changed.
It was a pair of gloves enhanced to 16, so the stats must have risen considerably, but.
“Nothing really changed.”
The parts I had actually been aiming for.
The alleviation of the Severed Meridians, a change to permanent opening, an increase in compatibility.
None of them was any different from before the enchantment.
Well, maybe all it did was make it stronger.
As expected, treatment wasn’t something that could be achieved through enchanting.
It was at that moment, as I was shaking my head.
- Poof!
─────────────────
【Latent Ability】
[5 Enhancement ─ Choose a Branch]
[Warmth] Envelops and protects the wearer with accumulated heat.
[Residual Heat] Releases accumulated heat to attack the enemy.
─────────────────
“Huh?”
I blinked.
I had just been disappointed that nothing had changed.
Then, something entirely unexpected appeared.
‘……Latent ability?’
Once the enchantment reached a certain level.
A completely new ability that had never existed before appeared on the gloves.
And now it was asking me to choose.
Between Warmth and Residual Heat, if I were to choose a direction, the former was the obvious choice since I was currently looking for something related to treatment.
Because it enveloped and protected with heat.
“Warmth.”
I naturally chose Warmth, and.
─────────────────
【Latent Ability】
[5 Enhancement ㅡ Warmth]
[Absorbs emitted mana (cold) and stores it as heat.]
[10 Enhancementㅡ Containment]
[Envelops the wearer with the contained heat to protect them from attacks.]
[15 Enhancement ㅡ Mirage]
[Spreads the accumulated heat in all directions, deploying an area. Projectiles that touch the area burn up before they can even reach it.]
[20 Enhancement ─ ?????]
[???????]]
─────────────────
When I chose Warmth.
In accordance with the direction I had selected.
A latent ability was granted at each enchantment level, at 10 and 15 Enhancement.
Even 20 Enhancement was locked like a secret, presumably because I hadn’t reached it yet.
So raising the enhancement level added new abilities to the equipment?
Then why hadn’t they been added to the plain gloves I had enhanced before? Those were even at 20 Enhancement.
Just as my thoughts grew complicated.
“Yuna!”
[Yeah~ I’m already looking into it~]
- Flip-flap.
Yuna quickly skimmed through countless documents.
And began investigating whether there had ever been a case of such an effect manifesting in equipment above 15 Enhancement.
“Ah, could you look through the Sun Dwarf documents too?”
[Yeah]
She searched every nook and cranny like that, but….
[…There’s nothing.]
[There really isn’t anything?]
As expected, there was no precedent anywhere.
If so, the answer was actually simple.
What I had just done itself was unprecedented in the world.
Namely, enchanting unique equipment.
Then this situation, too, was one of those unprecedented phenomena caused by enchanting unique equipment.
A power absent from basic equipment, obtainable only by those who enchanted unique equipment.
Despite taking on the absolute risk of destruction with no possibility of recovery….
Even so, a privilege that only those brave enough to swing the Enchant Hammer could obtain.
“This is insane.”
So this was….
A stat that could only be possessed by the death-defying manliest men…?
I closed my eyes.
Exhilarating.
I had become the first member of the Manly Men’s Club.
Because this was a realm no one in the world had ever dared to challenge.
“Swing it.”
Swing the hammer at unique equipment.
There was an incredible reward waiting at the end of the risk.
A true man was supposed to throw himself into battles with risks like this.
“Doloris? Bring the stockings.”
Because I was going to go all out.
Ah, and bring some powder too.
Please. I’m all out.
My hands were already trembling a little. I had only been enchanting for four hours.
I wanted to see what latent ability would unlock if I reached 20 Enhancement right now.
Unfortunately….
“…At least business is over for today.”
I had gained more than I expected.
Of course, the enchantment hadn’t helped improve Doloris’s condition at all….
Life in this world didn’t proceed so easily.
Things might be difficult for now, but I could just make good equipment for her to wear in the future.
Who knew? Maybe the latent ability would allow Doloris to climb the tower again.
I was ignorant, so I didn’t know exactly how good that ability was, but let’s leave the judgment to Doloris.
It was precisely then.
- Ding.
“Huh?”
This sound….
“Could it be the Grand Chieftain?”
She had kept prying for my home address last time.
When I left her on read, she had gone completely silent afterward.
It seemed her cooldown had finally reset.
I opened the DM window with little interest, and.
A message had arrived from someone other than the person I expected.
[Sun Dwarf]: Hello? ^^
[Sun Dwarf]: New descendant of fire and great blacksmith?
After reading this far, I quietly pressed my forehead.
“Are these guys the fairy folk?”
A reasonable suspicion.
Since I kept saying I didn’t want to, maybe they had disguised their name entirely.
However.
Thinking about it, there was no way the fairy folk could have thought I was connected to the Sun Dwarves.
They had no basis for it.
From their perspective, I was simply one hundred percent fairy folk.
[You remember what the fairy folk planted in the document last time, right?]
“Right.”
[But we just opened the Sun Dwarves’ literature, didn’t we? It seems they detected it and reacted on their end too.]
Now that she mentioned it, that did seem to be the case.
We had just rifled through every document here and there.
So dwarves had that kind of ability too, apparently.
Maybe because I had already fallen for that trick once, I wasn’t even surprised.
How devious.
Still.
Even if it was the same trap, the Sun Dwarves seemed somewhat more friendly than the fairy folk.
I had never even seen their faces, but I felt some kind of swelling sense of belonging.
After all, I was a descendant of fire in name.
“All right, let’s organize the current situation.”
I didn’t want to say anything wrong.
This required cross-checking.
“They know me as a descendant of fire who just became a full-fledged blacksmith, and only know roughly whether I’m inside or outside the tower. Is that right?”
[Uh, but the latter part is a little different. I modified Oppa’s location information.]
“……Huh?”
Could she mean a VPN….
[Ah, not that.]
[The fairy folk had identified Oppa’s location as outside the tower last time, remember?]
Right.
At first, I had opened it without knowing anything, and when I heard that was what happened, I had been pretty frightened.
[Yeah, so I completely blurred Oppa’s location information to make it look like he was inside the tower.]
[It’ll probably naturally look like he’s inside the tower to them.]
“Clean.”
The moment the trap was triggered, they could determine whether I was in the outer or inner tower, so she erased that information.
“…But in the first place, do fairy folk or dwarves even live outside the tower?”
I was suddenly curious.
Could one even leave the tower from inside it, to the outside?
[It’s not like there are none. Apparently, people do rarely go outside?]
[But they say it’s not common… so the moment Oppa’s location showed up as outside the tower, they’d probably think, ‘What on earth?’ and I just erased it.]
“As expected of Kim Yuna.”
I applauded.
A reliable strategist, a reliable little sister.
Then the preparations for “Did you think it through before saying that?” were more or less complete.
All right, what is it you want to ask, dwarf?
I opened the DM window, extremely tense.
“Hello.”
Yuna typed my words in exactly as I said them.
And then.
- Ding.
The reply was immediate, but.
[Sun■ Dwarf]: Yes! Nice to meet you! You live in the Outer Tower■, I see? ^^
[Sun■ Dwarf]: Do you have any plans to enter the tower? Or are you unable to enter?
“……Huh?”
[… …Huh?]
I take back what I said just now.
The worst little sister in the world, Kim Yuna.
I’m reporting you.