BXBX NOVEL Chapter 376 - Warforged
"I can help you, but only if you help us as well." Eisen told Fluke, who swiftly nodded his head in response.
"What can I do?" He asked, before Eisen crossed his arms after the bugs finally started climbing off him. "For one, not invade my privacy like that. At least ask me beforehand. And then, help us find the ruins of the town that are somewhere on this island." Eisen told him, but Fluke just raised his brows surprised.
"Ah, you wanna go there? I ain’t so sure if that’s a good idea, the Golems appear there, and only the strongest ones stay behind. Especially the King Golem on the island is really annoying to deal with. Its Core may be exposed, but it’s even tougher than the rest of its body." Fluke sighed annoyedly, "I sent some drones into the Boss room, but they were destroyed nearly instantly. One of them managed to climb on top of the King Golem, but even then, it was just destroyed with a smack after it tried to destroy the core."
Slowly, Eisen began to move his fingers through his beard with a nod, "Well, show us the way anyway, will you? We need to get there pretty soon." Eisen explained, so Fluke just slowly nodded his head.
"I guess so. But I’m not sure if I’ll really be able to be of much help within the town. Being a Tinkerer is awesome, but when I’m facing enemies like that, I have to make a lot more drones than I have available right now." Fluke pointed out, so Eisen just slowly nodded his head.
"Don’t worry about that, just show us where the town is. You don’t even need to come in there with us if you don’t feel like it." Eisen told him, so Fluke just shrugged and nodded his head.
"Sure. But in return, you help me out a little here as well." Fluke said with a smirk on his face, before the old man chuckled in response. "That seems fair. Then come on, we should get going as soon as we can, right?"
"Ehh, yeah, just wait a moment, I’ll switch out some of the stuff in my big guy here." Fluke explained, before tapping the arm of his Golem, and then made his way over to the area of the room where a lot of different cubes and spheres were laying around, before he turned around toward the old man with a grin, "Help yourself to some of the materials here if you want to!"
"Thanks, I’ll take you up on that. Oh, and could I take a look at some of those broken items over there?" Eisen asked, and Fluke immediately nodded his head in response. "Of course you can! Do anything you want!"
"Alright everyone, go ahead and take a break. Eat and drink something if you need to as well, we’ll probably be walking for another good while." Eisen told them, before everyone slowly nodded and then sat down on some steps near the entrance, while Eisen quickly stepped over toward the broken parts that were laying around all over the place, and was swiftly followed by his youngest tamed monster, Sal.
"Awe, what a good boy, at least you want to spend some time with this old man, huh?" Eisen asked with a smile, before the small spider began to dance in response and climbed on Eisen’s hand, up to his really large shoulder now. After all, Eisen was a bit more than four meters tall now. Although, that changed pretty swiftly when Eisen shrunk down to a size more suited to fiddling with these kinds of small mechanisms, meaning his smallest size possible. And using the cover that his huge leather apron gave him, he changed into his out fit for that size and placed his other clothes to the side. He really should make something to keep his clothes in, huh?
Either that, or he should get onto making items that could change their size even more than usual. The latter would probably be the better idea, and considering his Size change ability, that would probably be relatively well-executable.
He just had to play around with that later, for now, Eisen just moved on and started playing around with the broken parts a little bit, grabbing some of his tools while Sal, who was pretty excited seeing that Eisen was so much more like his own size now, danced even more excitedly.
"Alright..." The old man muttered to himself and swiftly grabbed the piece that seemed to be most intact, properly trying to inspect it. It was really incredibly well made, even if there seemed to be a few shortcomings when it came to the state of the interior materials. Outside, everything was really in a great condition, but inside, it was pretty scratched up, and even the different gems that were inside there had scratches on them.
One of those gems was a ruby, so Eisen was pretty surprised to see that Fluke managed to get his hands on a diamond-tipped tool. Or rather, that he was using one at all. For the most part, things like shaping gems was much easier done using transmutation, and it was a lot safer as well. Gems were easily shaped using transmutation, it was easy to re-attach parts you accidentally removed too much of, and when it came to gems and crystals, ’evening out’ the density within an item was pretty easy, so you didn’t have to worry that much about making certain parts denser than others, especially when it came to small pieces like that.
And Eisen knew that this wasn’t done with a mana-crystal tool as well for a very simple reason. Mana-Crystals were outside the Mohs Scale.
The Mohs scale always had a really easy concept to it, and basically every crystal or mineral structure could be included in it. It was a simple 0 to 10 scale, with Diamonds being a full 10. If a crystal or gem was able to scratch another gem, it had a higher Mohs value than the gem that was scratched. It was a really simple concept, in the end.
But Mana-Crystals were outside of that Scale, because neither could they scratch any gem up, not even something soft like Talc, which was a simple 1 on the Mohs scale. But on the other hand, Eisen once managed to test this kind of thing out with a small decorative diamond he found, and even that diamond wasn’t able to scratch a mana-crystal up. They were able to be crushed up using the right methods, sure, but even so, they couldn’t be scratched by other gems or minerals. So, that’s why Mana-crystals were outside of the Mohs scale, completely without any assignable value in that system.
So, it was pretty surprising that an enchanter with obvious alchemy abilities, judging from how he spoke about being unable to decompress the rocks earlier, would use a tool integrating a diamond. Was there any special reason to do that?
Could there in some way be a direct benefit to using this method? Surely there had to be a proper, well-explainable reason to it, besides just saying ’It’s more fun that way’. Sure, it is, but it’s vastly more inefficient that way.
Either way, beside that Ruby, there was something else that Eisen was pretty interested in, which was the actual material that was used for everything. On first glance, it looked a little like brass, but when Eisen could feel all of the small bug-like things crawl all over him, he noticed that it very much wasn’t Brass at all.
"Hmm... a bit of silver, a little gold... copper... there’s some crystals mixed in as well... And the base is iron?" Eisen muttered to himself after trying to figure all of it out properly, before Fluke stepped up behind Eisen.
"That’s right, but... What the hell is going on?" Fluke asked, looking at the figure of the half-meter tall old man, who was just four meters tall a few minutes ago, so the old man swiftly raised his brows and hid behind his huge clothes for a moment while changing, and then swiftly grew in size again to quite literally ’grow into’ his clothes.
"I’m a Half-Giant. It’s my size-change ability." Eisen explained, so Fluke slowly nodded his head before handing Eisen an ingot of the seemingly very same metal that was used to make all of these items.
"Got it. Anyway, that metal is a creation of my old man. Or rather, of my old man’s body. As you know, we warforged are born with metallic parts in different parts of our bodies, but the actual metal is rather random. My father’s was that, at least from what we could tell. It’s rare to have crystal-alloys, though, at least where I grew up. The Daughter of the Chief of the Village I grew up in is especially rare, she has purely crystal parts for her non-biological pieces." Fluke pointed out, before Eisen slowly nodded his head before moving his fingers through his beard.
"I see, so your Father’s Metal parts were so sturdy you figured you should use it?" Eisen asked, so Fluke shrugged and nodded his head. "Yup, basically. My original metallic parts were an alloy of Silver, Copper, Iron, and about 50% Gold." Fluke said with a sigh, "Those ratios were the same as with my Dad’s, but because of the crystals in the alloy, and because he was just a guard, the heavy weight didn’t bother him. On the other hand, it was a bother for me as a Tinkerer." Fluke said with a sigh, and Eisen nodded his head with a smile.
"I’m sure it was. So you switched your metallic parts out?" Eisen asked, and Fluke scratched the back of his neck with a nod, "Yeah, although nobody in my village was really happy about it. They let it pass because I at the very least didn’t replace my sigil. So that’s the piece on my forehead here." He explained, pointing to his head, where Eisen swiftly saw what he was talking about. Eisen didn’t recognize the shape, so he didn’t think much about it.
"Huh, so that’s what that was." Eisen muttered to himself, but Fluke just raised his brows in response.
"You’re saying that like you don’t know about it." The Warforged said with a frown, and Eisen swiftly smiled at him and moved his fingers through his beard in response.
"Well, that’s because I don’t. I don’t have memories of my life before a few months ago. My skills and levels were reset as well, by the way, so I might not be able to help you out as much as you think I can." Eisen explained, and Fluke immediately opened his eyes wide in response.
"So you really were speaking about a reason to level up then! I thought I misheard something..." He muttered quietly, before Eisen nodded his head in response.
"Yes, so I’m sorry if I can’t uphold my part of everything to the extent you would like. At the very least my body is still immortal." Eisen said with a smile on his face, before Fluke just sighed and shook his head.
"That’s fine, you apparently made those Golems from before a few days ago, so you’re still good enough to give me some great insight into my own body."