Rebirth of the Nephilim

With all of the tension and excitement of Alex’s new class going on, it was easy to forget that the whole controversy started because Jadis had been trying to power level her lovers to CLR sixty before reaching the city of Kastoria. Technically, Alex becoming a Demon Lord was a milestone achievement of that plan, which meant that only three more of her lovers still needed to level up. Namely, Sabina, Maeve, and Noct. Noct was the closest of the three to unlocking her tertiary class as her CLR was fifty-five and thus would be the easiest for Jadis to empower in the shortest amount of time. However, Noct was able to do some level on her own or in small groups with the others, thanks to the fact that she was actually a powerful combatant even without a boost from Jadis. So, to level the final three as efficiently as possible, Sabina and Maeve were the primary focus of Jadis’ efforts, while Noct worked with others in the meantime.

Between Sabina and Maeve, the smith beat out the spy by a single level, having recently achieved CLR fifty-two. With that factor kept in mind, Jadis had decided to approach her assaults against Kastoria from a different perspective, with Sabina in tow. The bombing runs were too dangerous to attempt while carrying her lover along, but other avenues of attack were available to her that would whittle away at the enemy’s defenses, while also offering Sabina the chance at valuable experience. And coincidentally, an opportunity to field test one of her most recent experiments.

“Incoming!” Syd called out as her other selves approached her position. “Two o’clock!”

“What about clocks?”

“That way!” Syd yelled as she pointed emphatically.

“Oh! Right! The clock is meant to indicate a direction based on—”

“Sabby!”

“Firing!”

A loud chunking noise resounded over the foggy hill as Sabina’s ballista hurled a bolt into the air at a speed that no purely mechanical device would be capable of. Tracking the projectile with multiple sets of eyes, Jadis mentally cursed when she saw that the steel-tipped bolt wasn’t going to hit either of the stymphalia that were pursuing her Dys self. Adjusting her Dys self’s course, Jadis had that body loop back around the two possessed birds so that she could catch the bolt before it was lost somewhere in the ragged landscape of the Volto’s coastline.

“Adjust left,” Syd told her lover. “More! Yes! That should do it!”

“Firing!” Sabina called out again as she yanked on the modified ballista’s release lever.

The base sound of the weapon launching another projectile was audible even to Jay as she soared at a purposefully slow pace nearly five hundred yards away. This time, as the bolt approached, she saw that the aim would be true, and so turned around midflight so that she could see the impact.

Sabina’s bolt slammed hard into the possessed bird’s body, entering below the left wing and piercing all the way through to come out on its right side. The stabilizing fins caught on the stymphalia, otherwise Jadis was sure the power of the ballista would have carried the bolt clean through the bird’s flesh. As it was, the demonic creature was rocked by the piercing blow, forcing it to tumble through the air.

And then the enchantment activated.

Lightning spread like a spiderweb across the stymphalia, electrifying and paralyzing the creature as it convulsed in midair. No attempt at catching itself before hitting the ground could be made, not with the high charge enchantment pumping who knew how many volts into the unfortunate Demon. The effect only lasted a few seconds, but those seconds were crucial ones, and the stymphalia hit the ground with the force of a falling boulder before the enchantment wore off.

“That’s a confirmed kill,” Syd said as she held up one palm towards Sabina.

“And that’s a confirmed enchantment!” Sabina jumped up to slap her hand against Syd’s. “Another successfully crafted enchanted bolt!”

“Let’s just hope that crash landing didn’t damage it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sabina deflated slightly. “Well, if the sheathing didn’t hold up, I can probably fix whatever part of the enchantments broke, or if they can’t be fixed, I can reuse the materials when I make more enchanted bolts! They are designed so that the shaft should be the weak point that breaks, since wood is a lot easier to replace, but some losses are to be expected when you’re hurling spikey chunks of metal at targets half a mile away!”

“Speaking of,” Syd took the opportunity Sabina pausing to breathe gave her, “I’ve still got one more stymphalia chasing me. Are you going to shoot it?”

“Oh, right! Aiming!”

With all of the new and, frankly revolutionary, inventions that Sabina had produced in an extremely short amount of time, the most impressive aspect was just how much work the smith was able to accomplish all on her own. Yes, she had help from Tiernan on the technical details of various enchantments, and yes, she purchased pre-existing mechanisms wherever possible and simply modified them rather than building them from scratch, but it was still amazing that Sabina could do so much with basically no help. In fact, Jadis was certain that Sabina absolutely would not have been able to manufacture so many new items while traveling inside the Leviathan if it weren’t for two factors. The first factor was Sleep of the D; Sabina was the lucky sort who didn’t need much sleep and functioned normally on just four or five hours. With Jadis’ ritual active, Sabina barely needed any sleep at all and thus could dedicate even more hours to her crafting. The second factor were the skills she gained at level nineteen and level twenty-one in her enchantment class.

Delicate Touch

Passive Skill. The penalty for crafting enchantments on a smaller scale than normal is reduced, including a decreased chance of catastrophic failure. The steadiness of your hands is increased. This skill does not help you see fine details.

The skill allowed for smaller, far more compact enchantments than Sabina would have otherwise been capable of, which was the whole reason why she had been able to make the magi-buzzers. Without that skill, she would never have been able to make the devices small enough to carry, at least not reasonably. Additionally, Delicate Touch didn’t just make her hands steadier when working on small enchantments; her tactile movements were massively improved all around, to the point that working on a moving airship was barely even a detriment at all, so long as no major maneuvers were occurring.

The real game changer, however, came when Sabina reached level twenty-one in Enchanter Smith of the Reborn and she unlocked the next step in her keystone class skill.

Freeform Greater Enchantment Creation

Passive Skill. Design and craft enchantments of a Greater value or below. The effects of your enchantments are dependent on the type of spell you try to replicate. The power of your enchantments are directly linked to whichever magic attribute you use to copy the intended effect. There is no magic power or material penalty applied to crafting your enchantments for items that you did not craft yourself or are a type of product you are not capable of making. Items you have personally crafted have a 0.2 increase to their applied enchantment power.

Previously, Sabina’s enchantments had been restricted to Minor and Lesser levels of quality. With level twenty-one, she could start working with Greater enchantments. Considering how powerful Sabina’s relatively low-quality enchantments were, the greater variety were expected to be on a whole different level. And from what Jadis had seen during Sabina’s field test so far, those expectations were right.

“Bullseye,” Syd clapped Sabina on the back as her bolt struck the last stymphalia chasing Jay.

“Yes—oh! That had a stronger effect than I thought it would.”

Jay whipped around and fought to slow the decent of the giant block of ice and feathers that the demon-possessed bird had been turned into. On impact, the enchantment in Sabina’s customized ballista bolt had frozen the target solid, covering it in a solid crust of ice. The Demon inside the bird was already dead, as the effect was easily powerful enough to kill with one shot, but Jadis didn’t want the heavy object to crash to the ground since the impact could damage the bolt. Materials were limited, after all, and the more they could recover during this test run, the less Sabina would have to remake later in preparation for the true assault on Kastoria.

“How many more types of bolts do you need to test?” Syd asked as she watched Sabina make adjustments to the automatic loader she had attached to the ballista.

“Including the one I missed? Just three more,” she answered without looking up. “That one you caught is a wind-based enchantment, and I still have these two alternate versions of water enchantments to try. This one was Tiernan’s design, so I’m confident that it’ll work, but I based this other one on a mix of water and fire so it should make steam, but I’m not sure if it’ll have an actually useful effect on impact.”

Finishing her adjustments, Sabina turned to look up at Syd and asked an earnest question.

“Do you think you can draw more enemies this way? Or should we pack up and move?”

Syd did her best not to laugh at the sight of Sabina’s mask as she gave her answer.

“I think if I go for another pass so soon, I’ll draw too many to be safe. Let’s pack up and move to a new hill, and we can see what Demons we can strike from there. Maybe the east side?”

“Sounds good to me!”

As her other selves flew to reunite with them, Syd helped her quirky lover pack up. There wasn’t too much they had to load into the cart, but there were a few things of note.

The ballista Sabina had modified was a major achievement, but not technically anything new. Enchanted weapons were relatively common, at least in concept, on Oros so an enchanted ballista was certainly something that had been made before. The changes she made to the one she had procured via one of the Roc’s supply runs to Eldingholt were enhancements to speed, accuracy, and range, for the most part. The really big alteration was the auto-feeder she had built, which was essentially just a large box that sat on top of the ballista that would automatically reload bolts, with a capacity of ten. Reloading was still manual, but the enchantments she had made to the mechanisms meant that one person could do the reloading themselves with much more speed than the unmodified version. Overall, the ballista was a superior version of what others had made, but nothing revolutionary.

The enchanted bolts Sabina had crafted existed in the same vein as the ballista. They were excellent in quality and were the sort of thing that very few enchanters would be able to produce thanks to the extremely small and delicate eleria runes that were necessary, but ultimately nothing unheard of. The power that Sabina was able to put into the bolts was the best thing about them, thanks to how high Lewd Lover’s Bond had boosted her Arcane stat, and the kinds of spells she was putting into them were… varied, to say the least. Still, they weren’t the real prize of the equipment Sabina had crafted.

“Ready to go?” Syd asked as her other bodies landed next to Sabina.

“Yes! Actually, wait,” Sabina said as she pulled the helmet off of her head, causing her curly black hair to flop wetly around her ears. “It’s a little stuffy in there! I might need to include some kind of air or maybe cooling enchantment so that I’m not sweating so much. Or maybe I can find a way to add some form of automatic rehydration using Divine magic?”

“You could always put bottles on either side of the helmet,” Syd held back a silly grin as she spoke. “Put little pipes on the undersides that run to your mouth inside, so you can take a drink whenever you want.”

“That could work,” the smith nodded in serious thought, unaware of the mental image Jadis had in mind. “Though it’d probably be a little unbalanced and top heavy. I’ll have to draw some diagrams and check what materials would be needed for something like that. Thanks for the idea, Syd!”

“No problem,” Syd chuckled as she waited for the smith to pack her latest invention away.

The Vision Helm, as Sabina had dubbed it, had been inspired by the ancient Nephilim helmet that Jadis had been given by the dragon Korsregon. With the aid of several translated texts from the Hall of Memories, Sabina had cobbled together her own version of the enchanted object, though with a far more specific purpose than the ceremonial original. Made of plain steel and lacking any of the typical decorative embellishments that would have normally been applied, Sabina’s Vision Helm looked a lot like a big shiny bulb. When worn, it erased all of the features of the wearer’s head to an almost comical degree, especially since it had no holes or visor for the eyes, and only a few small slits around the mouth for ventilation. When Sabina put the helmet on for the first time, she had actually looked a bit creepy, as the lack of eyes created an intimidating effect. Sabina’s solution to the comments made by everyone else had been to draw a big eyeball on the front of the helmet, so that instead of being featureless, it looked like a child had used a black marker to scribble a simplistic version of cyclops on the front.

Jadis internally promised herself that she would have Sabina remove the badly drawn eye before they went into real battle where others would see the half-elf’s work. But for the moment, the ugly eyeball helm was just too funny to erase so soon.

 Internally was where the Vision Helm truly showed its worth. The item was too small for Jadis to fit one of her heads inside to see for herself, but Sabina had designed it so that it mimicked the effect of the ancient helm, creating a visual illusion of the world for the wearer to see. The enchantment wasn’t a perfect copy; Sabina’s version only created a small, round window to look through, rather than a full peripheral vision image. However, the excitable smith had been able to add features that the old helmet lacked. Namely, the ability to zoom in. With only a small amount of magic to power it, Sabina’s helmet could act as a telescopic sight, letting her focus on distant targets. Jadis wasn’t exactly sure what the range limit was on the helm, but considering Sabina had been hitting stationary targets at up to a mile away, she figured the enhancement was pretty good.

“You should make a helmet like that for Kerr,” Jay commented as she lifted the cart with the stowed ballista into the sky. “It could really improve her accuracy.”

“Maybe!” Sabina nodded from where she was strapped to Syd for flight. “But Kerr already has skills that enhance her vision, so a helmet that does it for her wouldn’t necessarily be good for her, unless the distance it covers is better than her skills, but even then it might not be good for her since it could impact whether or not she gets the better versions of vision enhancement skills if she isn’t actively using them. But in that case, she could use those skill slots for other skills instead of vision, which would be good for her! At least, it would be good so long as she always has the helmet, and magic to power it too, which she doesn’t have right now, but she could get if she put a few attribute points into Focus and Will, but that’s sort of a big investment. Definitely worth discussing with her! Actually, I want her to try using the ballista once I set it up on the Leviathan! Even though most of her bow skills don’t apply to siege weapons, she still has way better Dexterity than me, so she should be able to hit targets better than I can.”

“You still managed to shoot those stymphalia at a long range with only a few misses,” Dys pointed out. “You did well. Don’t sell your accuracy short.”

“Thanks! Your suggestion to put a cross-rabbit in the center of the image helped! I need to make the next version so that it can be dismissed, though. It’s a little distracting sometimes. Maybe varying levels of transparency?”

“Crosshair,” Syd sighed as she carried Sabina to the east side of Kastoria. “It’s called a crosshair.”

“Right! That! I think I can make some adjustments to the design on my next iteration, maybe even give it a way to dim the light of the sun so it doesn’t hurt my eyes when I look at the water and the light reflects of it. And a way to see in low light, too, if I can find a way to copy Bridget’s skills into an enchantment. Oh, and I reached level thirty-two in Passionate Smith, so I’m only six levels away from my tertiary now. Anyway, what do you think about a way to maybe highlight enemy targets in the illusion, to help keep tracking them when there’s fog and other visual impairments?”

“Wait, hold on, you leveled again?”

“Yes! But that’s not important right now, since we can talk about the skill options I have later with everyone. What if I can find a way to add some sort of Divine enchantment to the helmet that highlights Demons? Do you think Jocelyn and Lucia will let me study their spells so I can try to make something like that?”

Rolling her eyes at her lover’s sense of priorities, Syd sighed and patted Sabina’s head affectionately.

“We’ll ask them when we get back.”

“Great!”