Chapter 179

“Finally,” Tyler sighed as the painful light branding the Mark into his skin receded.

“What do you mean, finally?” Harvey laughed.

“It feels like I’ve been waiting forever to get my first Mark.”

“Oh sure, because waiting an entire week is way too long,” Harvey replied, shaking his head in mock confusion.

“Dad’s already got an Imprint, and you’ve got three!”

“And another Mark,” Harvey added, pouring salt in the wound.

“Exactly! I’ve fought just as hard as you two, so I deserve a Mark!” Tyler complained.

“Nobody deserves a Legacy,” Cash interjected. “I will say, it’s common for younger people to have a harder time establishing their first aspects. You’re still mostly untapped potential at your age, and the System doesn’t want to box you in before you’ve had the chance to get to know yourself a little bit, since turning away from your legacy can turn those aspects into Stains and Scars.”

“That makes sense. My friend, Hannah, complained a lot about how she hadn’t formed her Legacy yet, while Julian and I both already had Imprints. Compared to her, you formed yours wicked fast,” Harvey told Tyler.

“Shouldn’t we be celebrating right now? I don’t know how this turned into a lecture,” Tyler groaned.

“You’re the one who started complaining,” Harvey chuckled as they gathered in close to read the screen hovering in front of them.

Mark | Unstoppable Force:

You’ve felt the glory of victory and the sting of defeat. You’ve experienced hard-fought wins and heartbreaking losses, and through it all, you’ve learned that the game is never over as long as you keep pushing forward. That relentless drive has turned you into an Unstoppable Force willing to sacrifice blood, sweat, and tears until only you or your enemies remain standing.

Effect: +5 Strength, +5 Vitality, +5 Willpower

The tattoo was hidden under his armor, but the image floating at the top of the screen looked like twin bolts of silvery-red lightning that stretched down the outside of each leg. Based on the glow Harvey saw coming out of his legs, he assumed the bolts covered from his outer thighs down to his ankles, making it one of the largest sigils Harvey had seen from the System.

“You could do a really cool Flash cosplay with those,” Harvey said.

“Really? That’s the first thing you think of?” Tyler exclaimed.

“That’s a great Mark. Definitely fits everything I’ve seen from you, which should make upgrading it a lot easier,” Cash interjected.

“Are some Marks easier to upgrade than others?” Tyler asked.

“Definitely. This Mark isn't something you've developed since learning about the System. It's the embodiment of the person you've become through years of hard work. Upgrading it should be as simple as continuing to demonstrate to the System that you really are an Unstoppable Force, even when you're fighting monsters instead of playing baseball,” Cash explained.

Hearing that seemed to mollify Tyler a bit after Harvey’s jokes had gotten under his skin. He wasn’t trying to be mean, but old habits died hard. What kind of brother would he be if he didn’t poke a little fun at Tyler’s accomplishments?

“Well, unless you have another catapult sitting in that ring, I think we’re done harassing the demons for the day,” Celeste sighed.

“That was the only one I built, and it would take too long to make another one,” Harvey replied. “Especially if they’re just going to send another squad of dinosaurs out to tear it apart.”

“Alright. Adrian, take the others and see what you can do to help the artificers lay their traps. Harvey and Tyler, you can either come along or get back to whatever else you have going on. Doesn’t matter to me,” Celeste said.

“I’ll stick with you guys,” Tyler replied.

“I’ve got my own projects to work on for our little excursion tomorrow night,” Harvey explained, receiving a pointed look from Celeste.

“That excursion isn’t happening,” she warned.

Harvey lifted his hands in surrender. “Whatever you say! Glad to hear you guys are working on a few traps. Maybe we won’t have to stick our necks out after all.”

Harvey knew that whatever the angels were working on wasn’t likely to be enough to turn the tides, but he knew it wasn’t a good idea to push the issue right now. Celeste would be easier to convince if she came around to the idea herself. Trying to pressure her now would only make her less likely to join them when the time came if she was as stubborn as he expected.

With that, the group split up. Tyler, Cash, and the rest of the angels walked towards a cluster of tents where he recognized the blacksmith he’d met in Elysium handing out shovels and pickaxes. Harvey didn’t know what sort of traps the angels had prepared, but it looked like his brother had a hard day of digging holes to bury them in ahead of him.

Harvey walked down the wide street towards his home. Despite the annoyingly short battle, he’d reached level 55 and had a new Class skill waiting for him, but he opted to wait on creating it. With everything going on that week, he hadn’t had as much time as he would’ve liked to workshop the direction he wanted his Class to go.

It had barely been a week since he’d created Legacy’s Redoubt, and although he liked the skill, it didn’t exactly fit with his other ones. In fact, none of his Class skills seemed to overlap enough to give him a coherent direction for his inevitable evolution to E-Grade.

Fireball and Flamestrike were both good when it came to simple, essence-efficient attacks, but they didn’t exactly fit with his growing reliance on guns instead of swords and hammers. Fangburner was a great mix of shielding and retaliatory damage, but he’d like to avoid letting any demons get close enough that he needed to use it. Innovator’s Arsenal and Inkbound Ordnance were the two skills that worked best with his goal of becoming the ultimate adaptive fighter since they focused on empowering his tailor-made creations rather than only serving a single function.

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[There’s going to be plenty of fights you don’t have the time to forge a magic bullet for. You’re going to need a few simple skills you can rely on.]

I know. I don’t regret any of the ones I’ve made so far, but I want to make sure the rest of my F-Grade skills are more cohesive. We’ve been spoiled by the 5 extra slots we got from starting at G-Grade.

[Any idea where to start?]

Honestly? Not really. I really like Tyler’s skill that lets him summon projections to fight with him. Maybe I can make something similar. Use my Profession to build some sort of drone or construct that my Class skills can power?

[That sounds cool, but good luck making it work.]

I know, right?

Walking back into his garage, Harvey got to work on something he did know how to build.

His shotgun.

The parts were all still sitting in their half-dissolved essence molds, roughly cast and waiting to be refined. Normally, he wouldn’t want to wait this long and let them cool completely before hammering them down to size, but he simply had too much else on his plate. Piling coal high inside the forge, he used Booster to shoot a thin blast out of his finger and set it ablaze.

He was happy the rest of his family was out working or sitting in angel school since there was no one home to interrupt him as he meticulously heated, hammered, quenched, and tempered each piece of aethersteel. Artificer’s Eyes and Perfect finish helped him bring every part to the exact specifications provided by the AI residing inside the Cognition Matrix. Anything that couldn’t be hammered out got filed down. The extremely durable aethersteel ruined multiple of his files that were usually reserved for steel, but that was a sacrifice he was willing to make. He bought more during a quick visit to John’s shop, where he searched the collection of Earth items for a bottle of gun-cleaning oil to lubricate the many moving parts.

Steve walked into the garage right as Harvey finished assembling the gun, looking stunned when Harvey racked the slide. He’d yet to make any shells, but that didn’t stop him from hearing that glorious sound he’d waited so long to hear.

Chk-Chk!

“You finished it?” Steve asked.

“Oh yeah,” Harvey beamed. Aiding his dramatic flair, a System notification was accompanied by searing light bursting from his weave.

A new creation has been made | Aethersteel Shotgun | Major Essence Gained.

Your profession, Runeforged Artificer, has reached Level 50. +8 Endurance, +10 Strength, +4 Dexterity, +12 Willpower, +8 Free Points

“Congratulations,” Steve laughed.

“Thanks!” Harvey exclaimed as he gently set the gun on his workbench, then wiped the oil from his hands onto his apron. “How was church? Your profession hit Level 25 yet?”

Steve sighed, loosening his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his dress shirt. “No, and it’s not looking like I’ll be able to get it there in the short term. I really don’t want to evolve without it, but I know I need to get stronger if we’re going to make it out of here alive.”

They were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Every day he waited before evolving was another day of not getting any stronger, but on the other hand, how much stronger could he get in the one battle they’d have before infiltrating hell? If all went according to plan – and that was a colossal if – then his dad should have time to finish leveling his profession once they’d killed a demon lieutenant and evened the odds. It was like he’d told Tyler. They had to think about the rest of their lives, not just the rest of the week.

“It’s up to you,” Harvey finally said. “But for what it’s worth, I’m not sure evolving now is going to change much. Sure, a few skills would get bumped up to F-Grade, which is definitely a noticeable jump in power, but the real concern is raising your stats. At most, I’d guess you get 3 or 4 levels during the battle tomorrow. My real concern is you being strong enough to survive our assassination attempt on Sunday.”

“I…” he paused. “Let me talk to your Mom.”

“Sounds smart to me,” Harvey said with a reassuring smile. His dad turned to go back inside, but Harvey called out to stop him, “I finished your shield by the way!”

Steve poked his head back out from behind the door, “Really?”

Unbroken appeared from Harvey’s spatial ring, almost banging into the ground when he forgot just how tall the silver tower shield was. He held it out, and Steve rushed to take it.

“It’s heavy,” he said, struggling to strap the leather belt around his arm.

“It has to be,” Harvey said, laughing as he helped him buckle the strap. He spent a few minutes going over the arrays he’d inscribed and showing his dad how to activate them using his aura.

“You don’t have to activate every healing burst at once,” he explained. “But it won’t hurt anything if you do trigger them simultaneously. Hopefully, the self-repair array makes sure it’s the shield taking the hits instead of you, but they’re there for you just in case.”

“I love it,” Steve beamed, inspecting the beautifully painted arrays one more time before unbuckling the strap and depositing the shield inside the slipsack tied to his belt. “Thank you.”

“Of course! Now go away, I’ve got stuff to do,” Harvey chuckled.

Steve went inside, and Harvey started melting down another batch of essence-infused iron ore that would become the steel he used for his shotgun shells. At first, Harvey had been worried that he’d need to figure out some sort of magic plastic, but according to Aurelia, the AI that made up half of Julian’s knowledge base within the Cognition Matrix, the main reason modern shotgun shells were made of plastic is that they were cheap and convenient to make. They did have a few other advantages, like expanding to seal the barrel so the gas propelling the slug or the pellets exploded outward and then retracting for easier extraction, but Harvey had engineered his shotgun for extra robust extraction since he didn’t need to worry about manually loading the next shell. He still wanted to look into making some more modern bullets down the road, but for now, steel shells would work just fine.

Once he’d cast a dozen or so, he got to work melting the silver that would become his slugs. Figuring out how to inscribe tiny metal BBs with powerful enough arrays to accomplish anything more than a fun lightshow wasn’t gonna happen in one night, so he decided to start with the decidedly more lethal buckshot shells first.

In between rounds of molding, casting, and cooling various parts, Harvey inspected the rings he’d looted from Varek. One held a large ruby set into an ornately carved golden band, and the other had a pristine diamond held in some black metal he’d never seen before. If Cash and Celeste were going to have any chance of sneaking their way into Hell, he needed to make something they could project their aura into to transmute the holy resonance within into an infernal one that fit in amongst the demons. These rings were the only items he had with the essence conductivity and resonances to make that work, but there was a risk that someone would recognize they weren’t being worn by their original owner. He could pry out the gemstones and melt down the metal to forge something new, but he wasn’t exactly a jeweler. The best he could manage would be to cast the metal around the stones like he did when he added essence crystals to his weapons. It would probably work, but he couldn’t match the fine craftsmanship of what he assumed were very expensive pieces of jewelry.

[Maybe you could meet in the middle? Grind off the embellishments without doing anything to the stones.]

Not having any better ideas, Harvey got to work filing off the skulls rising from either side of the diamond and the chain pattern looped around the golden ring holding the ruby. He had experience transmuting resonance with Tyler’s bat, and after testing a couple of variations on that array using Adaptive Inscription and the Insatiable Ink, he found a pattern that worked with his own aura. It lacked the holy undertones of the angels who’d be wearing them, but the principles should be the same. Still, he waited to add the final inscriptions until he could test with Cash and Celeste. They should still have time for a few finishing touches, no matter how bad things get tomorrow.

It was late into the night when he finished his first batch of shotgun shells. Using the bullets he’d made for his revolver as a template, he crafted shells inscribed with both his Heaven’s Wrath and Prophet’s Suffering Ink. Instead of trying to transplant an old primer from one of the bullets he’d bought from the angels, he inscribed runes that would turn the impact of the firing hammer into a tiny burst of inferno ink, igniting the densely packed shell full of hellpowder packed around his silver slugs.

A new creation has been made | Heaven’s Wrath Slug | Major Essence Gained.

A new creation has been made | Prophet’s Suffering Slug | Major Essence Gained.

Your profession, Runeforged Artificer, has reached Level 51. +8 Endurance, +10 Strength, +4 Dexterity, +12 Willpower, +8 Free Points

Your Race, Gilded, has reached Level 53. +5 Vitality, +5 Endurance, +2 Wisdom, +2 Strength, +2 Dexterity, +3 Willpower

[Two profession levels in one day?]

I’m almost glad the catapult got destroyed. Gave me the chance to hole up in here and work on the weapons that might actually win this war.

[Now we just have to pray they actually work. Can’t really test out that shotgun in the middle of the night now, can you?]

They’ll work, Harvey groaned, flipping off the light and walking into the house.

[Let’s hope so.]