A New Sword

The condensed rack of horns from the second 'antler' of my first kill was a long cylindrical tube as long as the dagger I had made from the first. The thought of making a second ivory dagger had always haunted me, but now had come a time when I actually needed it. I had already saved up a few high class materials to craft something out of around this tube as a core, but I no longer had time to make something so great.

Quick and simple was the route I needed to take.

The first step was probably the hardest, getting over my attachment to the dagger I already had. It was a wonderfully made weapon with the enchanting concept of an all-purpose wand and probably a high tier creation worth a lot of money. Sadly, I was now about to overload the Conduction with energy and break the enchantment as well as the overall magic of the weapon.

A few minutes later when my room was filled with an eruption of uncontrolled mana, the deed was done and I let my wisps out to play in the ambient energy. With a blank ivory weapon in hand, I used a telekinetic abrasion to grind the weapon down into a fine calcium powder enriched by both the ambient energy in the room and the indirect magic of the abrasion.

Once the entire dagger was nothing but a floating cloud ball of dust, I used transmutation to turn the individual particulates into liquids to individually enrich them with direct methods before using their liquid state to bind them all into a single watery orb. Because the second antler rack had never been given a proper enchantment, I could simply transmute it into a liquid and bond both ivories together.

Opening a chest near my bed containing general materials and components, I procure a common bottle of holy water without any elemental imbuing or blessings. This was promptly poured to the mass of liquid ivory. Even though one of the antlers had already been imbued with mana and both antlers had originally been treated with holy water, making a single body from two objects after one was stripped of mana severely thinned the other's energies.

This was basically retreating the ivories with holy water to align them with holy elements and raw mana. The next step was solidifying both of these substances not only together but in two separate bodies of one whole. The trick to this project was willfully playing on the fact that the antlers had originally been two individual entities.

Transmuting them together and then apart would simply allow me to redistribute mass where I needed it. The original dagger had a blade around eight inches in length and five inches of handle. The new weapon would be a sword with eighteen inches of thin and narrow blade with seven inches of hilt.

All of which would be contained in an ivory scabbard from the leftover second antler. However, the ultimate purpose of this weapon was to keep it sealed as a single item until the last minute. Instead, I could only use my will to inscribe Conduction runes into the end of the scabbard and bottom of the hilt. Along the sides of the blade and insides of the scabbard were carved my own variations of runes using religious icons to target holy elements.

Now that I had incorporated the essentials of the indirect imbuing methods I had uncovered recently, I was ready to use my own magic channeled into the holy trinity of elements to directly imbue my weapon. With the weapon's natural alignments, even if I gave it a simply wind cutter enchantment it would still be the bane of most undead and demonic entities.

However, all jokes aside, the size of the weapon really did matter.

Even though a powerful mage warrior could channel enough magic through a decent dagger to send a sword slash traveling through the air, the size of the slash and the distance traveled required exponentially more energy than with a larger conductive weapon. Now that I was using a small sword, even my base kinetic attacks would be more than twice as strong as before.

Once the sealed sword and scabbard were uniformly completed through willed circulation and the lightly engraved inscriptions had melted away, it was time to give it a new enchantment. The sword itself was given the best Conduction enchantment I knew of- from my mother's family- in the handle while I willed the flow of mana into the blade into its own enchantment. Whereas someone like Gryn would rely on wind cutters for their affinity, I had the ALL affinity and a personal preference to telekinetic and psychokinetic attacks.

The Conduction enchantment fed straight into my personal kinetic slash enchantment. The actual kinetic slash, like telekinesis, was cheap even at greater ranges until I exceeded my physical stats. Even though I was stronger than the average adult from back home, I always new that my early stats really only mattered during my childhood. I would eventually face SOMETHING so much stronger than me that it simply had extra digits in its stat.

For that purpose, I designed an enchantment that instead of casting its own slash could amplify one of my own slash's strength and range. My own will plays a large part in the control of this magic, so the same enchantment would probably overwhelm somebody without the same magic I had. I could gauge and feed for the desired reach of a minimum slash to achieve the maximum affect while somebody without will would probably be sucked dry for an all-out slash.

For the scabbard, though, was an enchantment from a branch of magic I was not allowed to experiment in anymore. Because of my father's work, I noticed early on that certain objects were larger than they appeared, such as his rucksack and coin purse. I have reached in and found an empty bag only for my father to playfully pull out a large golden coin. Later on, I realized that the enchantments were spatial distortion just like in games and shows but they were severely limited.

The size of the bag or container determined the size of its distortion, whether by the opening or by the width, only one dimension could be distorted and that was usually the depth.

For something like a coin purse, this was not a problem, but if you wanted to store the corpse of a giant magical reptile you needed a giant freaking bag or good enough skills to skin and butcher it on the spot. My experiment had been to try and turn a simple ring into a dimensional storage device, something small and discreet that could be overwhelmed by will into an all-consuming void. Kind of.

I have no idea if it really worked or not because I made a big noob no-no. I transmuted a simple silver and steel band around my finger to make sure it was the right size. This was fine. Leaving it on my finger while enchanting it? Fucking stupid.

If I had taken the time to ask and learn more about it slowly from my mother, I would have known that anytime a contained distortion is opened for the first time it pops the seal on a giant vacuum. Luckily, I had designed it by will so that the opening was facing down my finger instead of both sides being entrances because the giant vacuum sucked my entire middle finger into what should have been an average walk-in closet sized space.

I screamed like a little girl who had just stubbed their toe and did not care in the slightest, as soon as the ring fell off of my hand a mist of blood shot out from my middle finger nub. The worst part was that some of the mist was sucked into the ring that was still filling its void. After I was found by my parents, the ring was taken from me and that was the last I ever saw of it.

From this venture, I knew that I had not only succeeded in spatial manipulation but also that I had exceeded the norm. Air was distinctly being sucked in around my finger and even the initial bleeding was contained. The opening for the void was larger than the ring.

Since I was caught, though, I could no longer experiment in spatial magic but despite this I still theorized and studied and came to several epiphanies. One of them was both an awareness of the vacuum and another was that a void designed to contain a specific thing would only vacuum that thing. The entire scabbard was given a spacial distortion and trigger, drawing the blade would trigger the vacuum and the void itself was made to contain only intangible mana.

Even when the vacuum was breached no air or foreign material would be able to flow in, which meant that it would never fill. However, just as I gave it a trigger to start I also willed it to stop drawing in power once the blade left that scabbard. At this point, all of the captured energy would be circulated through me and into the Conduction enchanted hilt.

The initial affect of this would be to pre-load my sword with several folds worth of energy for kinetic slash. The continued affect was that sheathing and redrawing my sword would perpetuate the augmentation. Under normal circumstances, this would make me untouchable by melee fighters who were more than twenty feet out from me.

For the preemptive, though, this would only take some of the stress off of my own mana supply. If I was only using that enchantment and my own mana supply, that is. Of course I would have other tricks up my sleeve.

Back on earth there was a natural alloy called electrum which was basically a mixture of copper and gold with just enough gold to look pretty and enough copper to tarnish green. This eventually made the gold turn a pretty green. Electrum has been used in all sorts of ways and variations both fictional and non-fictional.

This world was no different from the fictional, electrum had high magical properties. Natural electrum was a deposit of combined copper and gold and had thirty-percent conductivity with affinities for earth and fire and lightning elements. Processed electrum was a combination of all natural metals except iron, and natural metals were the good ones.

In my stockpile was both natural green gold and the processed all-naturals alloy of copper, silver, gold, and platinum. Once mixed with other natural metals, green gold electrum lost its affinities but this loss was made up for by a steep rise in conductivity. For that conductivity and because I was not focused on natural elements, I used the processed alloy to inlay my personal mana rune from the recent hunting trip into the top and bottom of the scabbard.

The lines of the diagram were filament thin and the points were replaced by small pieces of quartz, but the top transmuted diagram used the opening of the scabbard as its central point to feed into the sealed void. The lower mana concentrating rune was left without a central point and instead had both of its end points connected to the top rune's end points by an intricate double-helix.

The method of connecting the runes did not matter and if it did then using a straight line would have been better, but I wanted it to look nice as one rune fed the other which fed the void. These runes would perpetually supply my next sword strike with more and more mana even while the blade was sheathed.

Tomorrow, it would probably have enough mana to a chunk out of the town's perimeter wall. During the preemptive, I would feed my weapon everything it could ever ask for.

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