Chapter 862 (2/2)

The mage eyed Helen critically. Then she offered her a wide smile as if some invisible test had been passed. “Alright, but make sure you put us through our paces. These fools need the combat experience.”

*****

Randidly paused in his work to glance subconsciously at his left arm. For whatever reason, he could feel Helen practically yanking against the bindings of his Domain. A seed of a headache was slowly digging into the area above Randidly’s temple.

Closing his eyes, Randidly considered his Domain. It was already Level 43, meaning that it had risen by twelve Levels over the course of the last few days. And Randidly would be lying if he said that it had anything to do with him. He was doing his best to isolate himself so he could familiarize himself with one arm fighting and learn his new Engraving. Mostly, it was Helen’s stubborn refusal to back down against the bindings of her circumstances.

It was truly admirable. Inspiring even.

Randidly wished she would fucking quit it.

Gritting his teeth, Randidly returned to his engraving and did his best to ignore the strange sensation of tugging on his Domain. Perhaps it was due to the outside influence, but Randidly moved quickly through the rest of the pattern. His focus was razor sharp and when he finished he was surprised to find that the energy flowed easily through the pattern.

After half-closing his eyes, Randidly felt the new “world” he had created within the breastplate. It was a thin and flimsy thing, unable to hold much. That was due to how large Randidly had made the pattern. This gave him more room to correct the pattern across the contours of the armor, but it reduced the amount of space that the Skill growing within would have to grow.

This portion of the manual on engraving was a bit more amorphous. You had to prime the pattern for accepting the Skill. The understandable portion of this was you needed to ensure that the Mana depth for the engraving was uniform. This was important because any flaw would cause an imbalance that would lead to the destruction of the armor.

Randidly checked quickly and found a few places that were too shallow or too deep. Grimacing, Randidly carefully deepened the entire pattern. Making a mark too shallow wasn’t that big of a deal, Randidly realized. You could simply deepen that portion to match the rest.

But if an area was too deep, the entire pattern needed to be deepened in order to match it. The deepness didn’t refer to anything physical, but simply to the amount of Mana stored in each line. And the deeper the Mana was within the lines the easier it was to overlook small flaws in the construction of the engraving. It increased the difficulty of uniformity exponentially.

A once over ensured that the pattern was mostly complete. This time as well, Randidly’s energy pulse to check the small world for the Skill to grow also came back successful. Somewhat bemused, Randidly sat back in his chair.

Acri raised its head to consider its master. Randidly waved a hand, showing that he was fine. In fact, he was happy.

But then, thinking about Acri-

It had been a day since he had seen his two riders. He was so caught up in his Engraving that he hadn’t even thought about it. Where had they gone?

Could he just leave them wandering around? They did look a bit like monsters...

“Fuck me,” Randidly muttered as he looked down at his nearly engraved breastplate. There wasn’t any specific statement of such within the book, but Randidly couldn't imagine it was good for the engraving to have a cooldown period between when the energy was inserted into the equipment and when the Skill was added. Likely, the energy would begin to react strangely when it wasn’t put immediately to use.

He sent a mental command to the riders to return, but the distance meant that the connection was extremely distant. It didn’t seem like anything could go through their mental communication He could unsummon them and then resummon them, but he was still curious about whether they could grow in intelligence. So Randidly just threw up his hands and simply pulsed Mana along the connection to them.

They would definitely feel that and hopefully return to investigate. But for now, that would have to be enough.

After all, what was the worst that could happen?