Serum

Dirk left Pandora behind. And as he left, Spyte jumped onto his shoulder with a most curious glint in her eye. 

[What the hell was that?]

“Oh right, you weren’t conscious for that conversation.”

Dirk smiled before digging through his memories and visualizing the conversation he had with Grandpa Qoi. 

Spyte received the data and quickly understood the contents of the conversation. This gave her a realization. 

[I see.]

“I plan to live that way from now on. I’d say I’m adapting well since I was able to easily step beyond my comfort zone and do that to Pandora, something I definitely wouldn’t do before.”

[But why did your instincts tell you to do that?]

“Don’t know. I was just thankful for her consideration. She’s also pretty, so I felt like it.”

[...Wow. I never thought I’d see this day. You’re officially a normal horny teenager.]

“Hm.”

Her words made him smirk. 

Not long after, Dirk arrived in the command center. There, he found a lot of people he didn’t know, some of them doing actual work while others were just socializing. 

Everyone glanced at him once when he entered before going back to their business. What caught Dirk off guard though was how in sync everyone was when glancing at him. There was an instant and total silence upon arrival, and he could feel both eyes and magic falling upon him for a brief moment. 

It was clear that every single one of these people were trained. Dirk could sense varying depths of ability, but in general they were all extraordinarily sharp. 

Of course, after that momentary glance, everything went back to normal, everyone acting like he wasn’t even there. 

Surely they would all know who he was though. Thinking that, Dirk looked around before noticing that Exos wasn’t there. 

“Hey, where’s Exos?”

Dirk asked a random man nearby, not particularly caring about his identity. The man faced him before nodding. 

“Greetings. Exos has moved into his own room and workshop. He’s on the second deck near the west wing, just past the material storage facility.”

“I see. Thank you.”

“Of course.”

The man politely said goodbye before Dirk left in the general directions he was given. 

After Dirk left the room, the man looked back toward the friend he was initially speaking to. He had a weird smile on his face. 

The friend asked. 

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I just think some people need to learn better manners. Calling me like I’m some sort of servant. What an arrogant boy.”

The man smirked, but the friend actually frowned, making him confused. 

“What’s wrong with you?”

“You don’t know who that is, do you?”

The friend muttered. But before the man could question it, they turned around to see Dirk walking back in. 

His face was neutral, and he walked over to the man calmly. 

The man turned to face him, not sensing anything out of the ordinary. But then, he watched as Dirk disappeared as if he’d never been there. 

That moment, he felt his body weaken as his mind screamed in panic. But he couldn’t move or react. 

Then, only a second later, that panic disappeared, leaving behind confusion and anxiousness as Dirk reappeared in front of him. 

When that happened, he saw as hair fell from his head and felt a cool air grace his now bald scalp. 

Everyone in the room froze just like he did, all eyes falling on Dirk who had shaved a man’s head in but a fraction of a second. 

Dirk let out a small huff as he remembered the area he was sent to. It was an animal storage room that held a dozen or so large beasts, for what he didn’t know. But it carried an amazingly heavy stench considering it had just been moved into. 

“The stench of that room hit me rather hard. I admit, it was a funny joke. Now, would you kindly give me directions to Exos’ actual room? I have business with him.”

“...”

“...I will.”

Someone else spoke up as the man remained mute. 

After that, Dirk got the actual directions. And with a smile he left, no longer returning. 

Once the room calmed down, the friend hit his now bald colleague. 

“Dumbass.”

“Shit, nobody told me!”

“Just don’t be an asshole next time. You’re lucky you didn’t get scalped. He shaved your head almost perfectly.”

The friend admired Dirk’s work for a moment, causing the man to retreat in embarrassment. 

Meanwhile, Dirk arrived at the east wing where a large workshop was located. 

This was where Exos set himself up, and upon walking in, Dirk could tell how at home the dwarf made himself. 

Couches, tables covered in papers, dozens of gadgets on both the floor and ceiling, plus a large cooler full of food and drinks. 

Exos sat behind a desk, operating a massive holographic screen that displayed hundreds of symbols and lines of runic code that Dirk couldn’t even begin to understand. 

“Ah, Dirk!”

Exos jumped up from the desk when Dirk appeared in front of him, surprised and happy to see him. 

“I’m glad you’re here. I have something to ask of you.”

“Oh, okay. Go ahead.”

Dirk ran with it, motioning for Exos to continue. 

He nodded and spoke. 

“You see, I’m good at enchanting and designing software, as Pandora would call it. But I can’t forge the hardware for all this gear. Since I can no longer employ the help of various dwarven forgemasters at the Haven, I was hoping to receive yours after hearing Pandora’s praises of your work. Of course, I don’t intend to make you work for free. In fact, I already have several ideas about various weapons and gear I could make you in exchange for your services.”

Exos laid out his proposition, and for a moment it made Dirk smile. 

Weapons and armor, especially good ones, were almost always enchanted. Enchantments could turn a lifeless piece of steel into a conduit for devastation, or turn a basic sheet of leather into a tome of endless magic knowledge. 

The field of enchanting was limitless, especially for someone like Exos. The best enchanters were even considered gods of creation. To them, enchanting was no different from rewriting the world in their image. 

Of course, software couldn’t go without hardware. Forgemasters were equally important, even if their general standing was diminished since more people could forge than enchant. However, forgemasters would never be able to give the life of their creations any intelligence. 

Case in point, Dirk’s armor. He had spent a long time making that scale armor, only for it to simply be just that. While the armor was imbued heavily with the elements, that power wasn’t given any direction. 

It would take someone like Exos to enchant it and give it some utility. Dirk knew about several enchantments that would be good to have, like response enchantments, active ability enchantments, passive boosts, and more. 

And currently, Exos was the best enchanter he knew. Coming from a world of cybernetics and complex software, he was more than okay with receiving Exos convoluted enchantments so long as they did the job. And he would no doubt get stronger in the future, so building this symbiotic relationship where he forged the hardware and Exos wrote the software would be endlessly beneficial. 

So Dirk easily agreed. 

“Sure, I can help you. I enjoy forging and have nothing to work on, so I’d be happy.”

“Great! I look forward to our cooperation.”

Exos clapped in glee before shaking Dirk’s hand. 

Then, he got down to business. 

“Pandora said we have about a week before arriving at our first stop. I’d like to work with you until then in order to get familiar with your capabilities. Right now, my Processors have several limitations with the hardware. I put it together with a bunch of scraps and using my metal magic, but that leaves much to be desired. Are you capable of metal manipulation?”

“I am.”

“Good. It will be needed. Now, I have several schematics drawn up. I’d like to see if you can make pieces of them. The best case scenario would be for most of the gear to be singular constructions, but we’ll need to build our way up to that. Over there is your forging equipment. Pandora says you’re familiar with it and decided to set everything up here.”

“Mm.”

Dirk nodded and looked over. Beside Exos’ workshop was a forge room, and inside it was everything that had been inside Pandora’s forge vault that she had given him. 

Not only that, but there were several other facilities and tools, some of which Dirk had only ever seen in a high class forge room like what Tobasden had at the Academy. 

It was fully equipped to make anything he could dream of, and Exos was similarly given all the tools he could ever ask for to enchant. 

Since their rooms were side by side, it was clear that they would be working together. Perhaps Pandora planned for that a while ago. 

There was a gate between the forge room and Exos’ workshop, which the two walked through. Exos took with him several sheets of paper and laid them out on a steel table by the anvil. 

After that, he started explaining all of the different parts and his requirements. These were little pieces that he had designed explicitly to gauge Dirk’s abilities as a forgemaster, so some were large, some were really small and intricate, and all of them were made of different elemental metals. 

Infernia, the fire metal. Aeralite, the air metal. Geode, the earth metal. Prismatika, the water metal. There was even some Void Metal and Hallowed Steel, the dark and light metals. 

They all had different attributes. Some were denser than others, some more malleable, and they all reacted differently to different forging methods. 

Dirk had only learned how to handle the four basic elemental metals, not Void Metal or Hallowed Steel. So the schematics Exos drew for those two special elemental metals would be a challenge. 

However, that’s where Dirk’s doubts stopped. 

Many of Exos’ test pieces were complex, and if there was anything Dirk was confident with, it was handling things with precision. 

That was especially so now that he had perfect control over his body. With Spyte and his Active Biokinesis, every hammer strike and every minute bend of the metal would be infallible. Even before his advancement he would be confident, let alone now. 

So Dirk decided to show off a little. Exos wasn’t one to waste time, so the two got straight into business. 

Dirk wielded a hammer and received a schematic. It was a cubical frame made of Geode. The frame had six different interlocking pieces. The joints of these pieces had complex joint mechanisms with very little room for error. On Earth, something like this would be made with a plasma or laser cutter. 

Taking the schematic, Dirk had Spyte analyze the entire thing before storing it and overlaying it in his vision. 

Then, he grabbed a Geode ingot and got to work. 

Obsidius appeared with his call, slithering over his hands to form the Living Gloves. After that, he went to the furnace to heat up the ingot with the living flame. 

When it was hot enough he was able to split the ingot into six pieces. Then, he left five pieces to stew in the furnace while he took the sixth to work on. 

At the anvil, he equipped an earth element hammer and started pounding away. The metal formed underneath his precise strikes, taking on the general shape of one piece of the frame. 

The metal hadn’t even cooled before Dirk was done getting the general shape. Then he started using a chisel to make the cuts. 

The frame was generally flat besides the ends where the joints would be. And all the ends had three distinct cuts where they would interlock with two other pieces, making a three way joint. 

Dirk used the sharp chisel to make the general cuts. In fact, he used several different types of chisels from flat ones to pointed ones that looked like needles. 

It was only when he had the shapes of the joint locks that he put down the chisels and pulled out another tool. 

With blades and other large items, forgemasters could use their hands to smooth out metal or morph it to perfection. But there were some things that couldn’t be done with the sausage fingers of a forgemaster, and that’s where this special tool came into play. 

It was technically a type of chisel, but due to its use it was in a league of its own. Chisels were numbered based on their length and width, named things like a Two chisel or a Five chisel. But this Chisel was known as a Zero chisel. 

It was formally called the Zero Edge and informally called the Zero. They were expensive and only found in the workshops of the most skilled Forgemasters. 

To the naked eye it looked no different from a needle, but that needle point actually had the slightest flat length to its edge. That indiscernible edge gave it the utility a needle point lacked. 

And it was used only to make tiny corrections. After all, a significant portion of all high level crafts that a forgemaster would make also had to be prepared for enchanting, and there were many crafts that required an extreme level of precision, especially as they became more complex and powerful. 

Dirk had only used a Zero Edge a few times with Tobasden, and those few times only taught him about the rules when using the tool. He didn’t learn any techniques or situational knowledge with it. 

But he still found use for it. So while it took a while, he was actually able to use the Zero in order to complete the shape for one of the cubical pieces. 

He didn’t temper it or finalize the product, but that was unnecessary for the task at hand. This was basically carpentry with metal. He just needed to get the shape down. 

And unknown to him, Exos had confirmed Dirk’s ability almost immediately. Just seeing the way he moved his body with unparalleled accuracy made him excited, which only grew the more he watched. 

Exos didn’t move his eyes away once through the process of Dirk’s work. He was enraptured, wondering how a human could display dexterity that would make a dwarf jealous. 

Of course, he also noticed the lack of proper technique. In fact, Dirk did things in a brutish and direct manner, leaving little room for finesse. But the results were undeniable, and in fact, Exos liked it. 

He had learned a lot about forging because he had to ensure the production quality of his requests. And he knew that some forgemasters were outright incapable of producing some of his works simply because their technique was incompatible with his work. 

But Dirk went around all difficulties, simply doing what worked. Although he had no technique and what seemed like rudimentary knowledge, his ability to piece his way toward the final vision was amazing. 

So when Dirk finished the first piece and presented it, Exos couldn’t help but blurt out. 

“You’re hired!”