Meanwhile.
The Labyrinth City, in the early morning, usually woke to the clamour rising from the base of Babel Tower.
By this hour, the place was already packed.
Adventurer parties gearing up for a Dungeon dive were taking inventory of their supplies, while those who had crawled out after a sleepless night underground dragged their exhausted bodies into line at the Guild windows to settle their accounts.
The voices of a dozen different races all jumbled together into a noise that made your head throb.
Loki was crouching beside one of the stone pillars near the Dungeon entrance, completely devoid of dignity.
She had a meat bun in her hand — swiped from some stall somewhere — and took a big bite, leaving juice smeared all over the corners of her mouth.
Finn stood at her side, his thumb resting habitually against his lips.
He glanced down at the pocket watch in his palm and ran a quick mental calculation on the time.
Grayse stood ramrod straight nearby, arms folded across his chest, his thick brows knotted so tightly together they looked like they might never come apart again.
Ever since he had heard about Loki's visit to Hephaestus's forge yesterday, the old dwarf veteran hadn't been able to shake it off.
"Semi-living weapon… just the sound of that term gives me the creeps," Grayse huffed a breath through his nose, his great beard quivering with it.
Dwarves were the Lower World's born blacksmiths.
In their understanding, forging was a rigorous and exacting discipline.
"Mithril, Damascus steel, adamantite — in my years I've laid eyes on plenty of top-grade ore," he said.
"But no matter how keen the blade you forge from them, when it bites into the hard carapace and bones of those monsters, it chips when it ought to chip and curls when it ought to curl.
"When something breaks, you send it back to the furnace and fix it properly, honest and square.
"Claiming that a first-class rapier can knit its own chips back together mid-battle against monsters…
"That is simply impossible."
Grayse held fast to the common sense he had spent decades building, and he clearly wasn't buying a word of what Loki had told him last night.
Finn listened to his companion's grumbling and could only manage a wry smile.
As captain of Loki Familia, the things he had to worry about on any given day were without number.
The one that gave him the worst headaches, without question, was the weapon repair bill for the main force of the First Army.
Every time the Familia returned from a large-scale expedition, their weapons and armour were essentially scrapped across the board.
Just the invoices for sending those high-grade pieces to Goibniu Familia for overhaul — tens of millions of Valis, gone in a blink without so much as a wince.
"If Haimer-sama's craftsmanship can genuinely break that law, then ordinary common sense probably doesn't apply," Finn murmured, lowering his hand.
Then, right at that moment.
From the wide passage leading into the Dungeon came a considerable stir.
The crowd parted like water pushed aside by some invisible weight, rapidly clearing a broad path through the middle.
A handful of Lv. 3 adventurers who had been shouting loudly a moment before took one look at who was walking out, shut their mouths immediately, and retreated very obediently to the edges.
Ais was walking out side by side with Riveria.
A night of dusty battle had left the equipment of both women unavoidably reeking of blood.
Ais's silver-white light armour was covered in the dried remnants of green monster viscera.
And yet.
Ais's expression remained serene. Only her golden eyes shone with an almost alarming brightness, the fierce battle-hunger that had driven her through the night not yet fully faded from them.
Loki immediately tossed what remained of her meat bun into the nearby rubbish bin and jogged over.
"Ais-tan! How did the test go? Are you hurt?" Loki called out, already reaching out to take advantage of the situation as she approached.
Ais simply tilted her head slightly to one side, evading Loki's hand.
Not a word.
Ais raised her hand, closed her fingers around the hilt at her hip, and pressed her thumb against the guard.
Shing —
Despair Blade was drawn cleanly from its scabbard.
The clear, sharp ring of metal on metal echoed through that corner of the hall.
Grayse was the first to stride forward, bringing his face right up close to the blade.
What he saw stopped him cold.
The old dwarf veteran's eyes, already wide as saucers, went completely still.
There was not a single chip along the blade.
Not a single curled edge.
Not even the dull darkening of the metal that was the most common thing you'd see after a night of intense combat. None of it. Not anywhere.
"This…" Grayse sucked in a sharp breath.
His rough, calloused hand moved along the spine of the blade. The feel of it was exactly — exactly — the same as when it had come out of the forge the previous evening.
"This makes no sense whatsoever."
Riveria stepped forward, her expression carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who had spent an entire night witnessing the unreasonable.
She glanced once at Grayse, who was still standing there completely dumbstruck, then began to describe the night's test.
"Last night, we went straight down to the Great Tree Labyrinth on the twenty-fourth floor.
"Our aim was to probe the limits of the sword's semi-living state.
"Ais almost never stopped swinging."
Riveria described it calmly, but what her words described was anything but.
"We deliberately triggered a Monster Rex feast. Mixed in among them were even two Moss Giants in a state of rampage.
"By the second half of the night, down in the underground swamp zone, we actively engaged a Lv. 4-class mutant Wyvern."
"From start to finish, it was all brute force, high-intensity fighting."
Finn nodded.
A full night of gruelling attrition warfare — even if Despair Blade possessed the [Indestructible] property and could not be shattered outright, that alone should have been more than enough to curl its edge and dull its flat.
"But," Riveria said, pointing at the sword in Ais's hand.
"Right at the moment Ais killed the Wyvern —"
"The blade directly captured and absorbed the fragments of Magic Stone that the monster dropped."
There was unmistakable disbelief in Riveria's voice as she said it.
"I saw it with my own eyes. A tiny metal nick that had formed when the blade clashed head-on with the Wyvern's claws —
"When it made contact with the Magic Stone fragments scattered by the monster's death, in under three seconds, it filled itself back in, smooth and level.
"The metal at the fracture grew back on its own. Then it joined perfectly, without leaving so much as a trace."
Riveria's words detonated inside that small circle like a grenade.
Grayse's eyes went wide, and he reached up and seized his own beard and yanked — pulled out several hairs without even feeling the pain.
Metal that grew back on its own.
This had thoroughly demolished everything that constituted a dwarf blacksmith's understanding of the world.
"There's something even more outrageous," Riveria said, dropping her voice, her gaze settling on Ais with a complicated expression.
"This sword — it is adapting to Ais's mana."
"What happened to its internal mana circuit?" Finn's eyebrow shot up; he had seized on the key point immediately.
"It is actively adapting to Ais's Wind."
As Riveria finished speaking.
Grayse and Finn were left utterly speechless.
As someone who frequently used [Ariel], Ais was exquisitely sensitive to the flow of mana.
In the past, forcing that dense, wind-attribute enchantment mana into a weapon had always produced a grinding resistance — like forcing open a metal circuit too narrow to hold it.
But this time.
Ais raised Despair Blade in one hand, holding it level.
Whoosh —
A pale blue vortex spread from her palm and wound itself around the entire blade in an instant.
The wind-edge did not slash outward in its usual wild, shrieking fury.
Instead, it flowed along the new web of veining that had formed inside the blade, melding into it with perfect, effortless smoothness.
As though this sword had been grown, from the very beginning, to carry exactly this wind.
The pale blue wind-aura was contained and steady, radiating a killing edge far more lethal than before.
Riveria delivered her final summary.
"After a night of high-intensity combat, its internal mana conductivity has increased.
"In other words, in order to adapt to Ais's combat habits and the specific properties of Ais's mana, this sword restructured itself internally."
"Despair Blade can now be said, without any exaggeration, to be far more than a weapon capable of self-repair.
"It is a living weapon capable of self-evolution."
Silence.
That corner fell into a brief, total silence.
The noise of all the adventurers around them seemed to be shut out entirely from this small space.
Finn and Grayse were absolutely, completely dumbstruck.
Because a weapon that could repair its own damage — and beyond that, actively adapt to its wielder's combat style and the particular character of their mana, restructuring its own internal composition to do so —
If Riveria had not said it with her own mouth.
Finn and Grayse would obviously never have believed a word of such nonsense.
Because at first listen, it clearly and completely surpassed the bounds of any weapon known to the Lower World. It sounded less like a weapon and more like some kind of terrifying, dangerous living creature.
But that was precisely what made one thing clear.
The deep-layer materials they had sent to Haimer-sama had not merely been put to good use — they had returned a staggering value that was almost beyond estimation.
A weapon that could grow on its own was absolutely singular across the entire Lower World.
And beyond that.
Once deployed on an expedition, Ais's endurance in battle would far surpass anyone else's.
"Unbelievable — not just the growth speed of Haimer Familia, but even the weapons Haimer-sama forges are this terrifying."
"Well? Shocked? Scared?" Loki crowed.
"Now you understand why I was so generous yesterday, don't you.
"I told you, I told you all along — when that guy gets serious about making something, it's guaranteed to knock your eyes clean out of your head."
Loki planted both hands on her hips, the most infuriating smug grin plastered across her face.
On the other side of things.
A few steps away.
Ais was entirely removed from that whole frequency.
She stood with her head lowered slightly, her golden eyes still fixed in earnest study on the completely reborn Despair Blade in her hand.
From guard to tip.
It was whole and seamless. There was not a trace of metal fatigue anywhere to be found.
Holding it felt like holding an extension of her own arm.
By Goibniu Familia's standard rates — the smithy she frequented — even a single routine maintenance visit for a first-class weapon, just sharpening and rust removal, produced an invoice with a string of zeroes long enough to buy out an entire shopfront.
To say nothing of an upgrade and complete reforging that had directly shattered the common sense of Lower World smithing.
Thinking about it.
Ais reversed the blade and slid it back into its scabbard.
She reached into the small leather pouch at her hip.
She pulled out a linen coin purse that had clearly seen better days.
Her fingers nimbly worked the drawstring loose.
She lowered her head, peering past the edge of the cloth bag, and looked inside.
"…"
A few figurative crows flew over Ais's head.
Seven or eight silver Valis coins lay there in pitiful clusters in the folds of the fabric, clinking against each other with a faint, forlorn little sound.
Not a single gold coin — the kind that represented a large denomination — was anywhere to be found.
She was a Lv. 5 top-class adventurer.
Yet nearly all of her personal income, on a regular basis, went into maintaining Despair Blade.
Her personal savings had genuinely been hovering near the danger line for years.
This amount of Valis was more than enough for food.
But if this was meant to buy a gift for a god…
Ais pressed her lips together slightly, thinning them.
In that airheaded mind of hers, for the very first time, a visceral, concrete understanding of her own poverty had taken shape.
____
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🔥 New history: Samsara Game: Starting in The Long Dark with My Waifus
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