Second Genesis

Grey stood over a table with his palms pressed down onto it, his eyes darting back and forth as though he was trying to make himself dizzy.

After some begging, Elowen managed to sneak her way into the crafting room and she stood at a corner right now with her eyes wide with awe, trying to figure out what Grey was doing.

Grey had exchanged for twelve blueprints. They seemed divided into two halves, about six each. One set seemed somewhat suited to the Star Swallower that he had taken, though not quite. And the other was completely unrelated and seemed to have some troubling aspects to them.

Grey wasn’t thinking as hard as Elowen thought he was, though.

’Umbral Gauntlet? Nightlock Pauldron? These names are fucking lame.’

The other problem with all these blueprints was that they were all designed to be used with knights in mind. They wouldn’t go with his fit at all.

’Ridiculous.’

The gauntlet was a literal gauntlet, and there was even a blueprint called "Shadowstep Sabatons" and they were finished with these gross pointed metal tips.

’Do I look like a fucking cowboy to you?’

Did he grow up on a farm? Yes. But you wouldn’t catch him in anything reminiscent of something like that.

’I can fix this... maybe.’

These were the highest quality selection of mechs there were. Even though their SA-index was poor, the underlying quality was there. It didn’t take long for Grey to confirm with his Cyber Space that they were legitimate blueprints. Though, this had never really been a worry.

The odds that they’d sell false blueprints in such an establishment were small.

If they were prosthetic mechs, sure. The odds of that would be higher.

But for normal mechs, there were too many experienced professionals to let anything like that slip through the cracks.

That said, Prometheus’ existence was the real reason Grey was so confident in doing this. He could be an arrogant prick sometimes, but so long as his ego didn’t get in the way, he wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t take a chance on something with low odds of success when he had so few loops left.

All he had to do was try to combine these into something useful for himself. But that was easier said than done.

None of these blueprints were of the same kind. For just the six he had picked out for the Star Swallower, there was the Umbral Gauntlet, the Nightlock Pauldron, the Shroudframe Grave, the Dustmantle Utility Harness, the Shadowstep Sabatons, and the Nightvault Helm.

Aside from the literal chest piece, all of these things were individual pieces of armor that could be used to build out a set.

The mechs themselves didn’t actually have such a connection between them, and most people would overload their Neural Frames trying to control this many items at once, let alone this many mechs. But the point still stood.

How was he going to apply something he took from a gauntlet into a pauldron? Or a sabaton into a greave?

Grey’s eyes darted back and forth continuously for what must have been over an hour. He expected that by now Elowen would have gotten bored, but she was just staring at him with the same light as though she was still anticipating something to happen.

Grey was too focused to notice. He instead closed his eyes and then downloaded all of the blueprints into his Cyber Space.

To his shock, the moment he did this...

—

[Improve Synergistic Accuracy?]

—

’You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.’

If he knew that was possible, he would have done it from the very start.

’No, it’s fine. Without the influence of the original creators being too strong, I managed to accomplish more I think.’

Still, Grey shelled out the Cyber Cores he needed to pay for it. Surprisingly, it wasn’t nearly as much as it would cost to improve the blueprints themselves.

It only cost him less than 10,000 Energy Units total to improve the SA-index of all of them to 100%. However, Grey only did it to confirm something and to double-check that the purpose for the various raw materials was as he had deduced.

A higher SA-index made the original intention of the creator more obvious, which by extension made it more clear the purpose of every chosen raw material and design quirk.

There were a lot of raw materials here that Grey had simply never seen, many of which seemed like slight tweaks on ones he had seen before.

The differences in these raw materials seemed less to be that they were actually vastly different chemical structures, and instead a difference in how they were prepared.

For example, Twice Tempered Voidsteel was just Tempered Dusk-Iron tempered once more. However, whether it was Voidsteel or Dusk-Iron, what gave them their properties were the darkness attributes used by the blacksmith that prepared them.

Blacksmiths seemed to be on an even lower rung than technicians, but seeing their importance, Grey couldn’t see how that was possible.

’Yes, this should work, then. The best structure for this would be...’

Grey cringed.

The Shadowstep Sabatons were undoubtedly the best choice, but he’d be damned if he was walking out with pointy metal shoes.

The good news was that sabatons went over footwear and weren’t the footwear itself. That meant that if he took their structure as a starting point, he could change it even further.

Grey grinned. ’Let’s make it a blacksteel metal frame for the Shadow Forces... make it almost look like a boot or something... give it some steel spikes and a steel toe... yes... now we’re cooking... and if we push it far enough...’

The moment the last of Grey’s ideas clicked into place his arms began to move within his Cyber Space. He shattered the six blueprints he was looking at apart, their bits and pieces flying about as he took them, morphed them, and then pressed down to force them together.

—

[Error. Blueprint Documentation Failed.]

—