While Vin just stared at the dwarf in confusion, Alka strode forward and clapped him on the back. “Yepp, this is the guy! Shouldn’t be a problem, right?”

  “Nope,” Deorer grunted, squinting at Vin’s missing arm. “Not at all.”

  “Master smith,” one of the guards called out hesitantly, having finally stood back up and regained a sliver of their former confidence. “Nohral made it very clear-”

  “You can tell Nohral to cram it up his Crater,” Deorer grunted, not even bothering to turn around as he began sifting through his bag of tools. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and go fetch one of the Healers? We’re gonna need some magical healing before long.”

  “Actually, pointy ears here can handle the healing,” Alka said, nodding toward Shia.

  “Really?” Deorer grunted, not seeming the slightest bit surprised. “Well you heard the lady, sounds like we don’t need anything from you lot after all. Get lost!”

  The guards hesitated a moment longer, clearly conflicted between whose orders they should be following. But all it took was a single glance over his shoulder and a slight frown from Deorer for the two guards to jump and all but sprint away.

  “Damn, you have got to teach me how to do that,” Alka laughed, clearly enjoying the show of dominance.

  “I find the horrific facial scarring helps,” Deorer grunted, going back to his bag of tools.

  “I’m sorry…” Vin said, his brain finally having caught up. “…What the hell is going on?”

  “You daft like your friend here?” Deorer asked, pulling out some sort of small, crystalline hammer and a pair of tongs from his bag. “You’re getting a new arm.”

  “Yes, I caught that much…” Vin said, realizing the dwarf probably wasn’t going to be much help. “Alka, care to explain?”

  “So, while scarface and I were trying to figure out a way to make him prestige, we got to talking. Remember how we read in Turmal’s journal that Deorer was the only one of the master smiths to survive the Great Reset? Because he’d been working on a protection relic? Well, turns out Deorer isn’t just a regular old smith. He’s a magic smith.”

  “A Smith of Relics,” the dwarf corrected, shaking his head as he pulled out a dark green ingot and tapped it with his strange hammer, listening carefully to the high pitch tune that rang out. “Not a Gods damned magic smith. Sounds like some pixie that was taught how to wield a hammer.”

  “Anyway, thanks to my willingness to be his test subject and inability to die from coating my entire body in darthsteel, with my help Deorer finally managed to break through his second prestige and regain his class of a Smith of Relics,” Alka continued. “And because he owes me one, I convinced him to help me with one last thing before we left.”

  Alka was interrupted by a regular looking hammer flying into the side of her head, clanging off her darthsteel helm with a loud bang. As a testament to just how durable she was at this point, the Slayer didn’t so much as flinch from the hammer to the face.

  “What did I tell you about being daft?” Deorer grunted. “I’m mainly doing this because I know it will piss off Nohral, and I might get an easy level out of it. You’ll all learn soon enough that experience becomes much harder to come by after hitting your second prestige.”

  “Say what you want you old softy, you just like me,” Alka said, her glowing eyes flaring with mirth.

  “Alka,” Vin interrupted, still trying to wrap his head around what was happening. “I really appreciate you thinking of me, I do… But how long is it going to take him to make me a new arm? Isn’t this something we should do after we deal with the divine warrior?”

  “I’m not making you slag, boy,” Deorer said, grabbing what remained of Vin’s left arm none too gently and looking it over. “As much as I dislike Nohral, he’s right about one thing. No forging any weapons except for those that pass the trial, stupid as it is. And anything I forge might as well be a weapon. So, unless you want to go take a dip in the lava like your friend did, you’re not walking out of here with anything forged by my hands.”

  Vin’s head reeled as he tried to understand the conflicting messages he was getting. Even as Deorer explained how he wouldn’t be forging anything for Vin, he continued examining his arm, turning it this way and that and muttering measurements to himself under his breath.

  “So wait, is Vin getting a new arm or not?” Scule piped up, clearly just as lost as he was. “Because I had a bet going with Reginald all this time, and if Erik doesn’t grow him some sort of cool branchy limb, I have to buy him a seriously large block of cheese.”

  Reginald squeaked a few times in what sounded like quiet laughter, and the petian glared at his companion. “Hey, don’t forget your half of the wager. This wouldn’t be any sort of magic ghost hand either, which means you’re gonna owe me three complaint free heists, no questions asked.”

  The rat’s squeaky laughter ended abruptly, and Reginald let out a quiet sigh as he resigned himself to what would no doubt be three incredibly stupid thefts.

  “Oh Vin’s getting a new arm,” Alka nodded, holding up her left hand and wriggling her fingers. “…this one in fact.”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Alka, I’m not about to take your arm,” Vin drawled, unable to believe what he was hearing. “Do you have any idea what we went through to get you that body? Eventually Shia will be able to regenerate my missing limb anyway. Even if we could rip off your arm and give it to me, there are better options.”

  “All those options kind of hinge on you surviving long enough to see them,” Alka argued, crossing her arms. “Vin, do you have any idea how many times you’ve nearly died since I met you? Unlike the rest of the group, I’ve been with you since your very first day on Edregon. I know better than anyone just how reckless you can be. And now that you’re down an arm, your odds of survival have dropped even further. You’ve done so much for me over these past few weeks, the very least I can do is lend you a hand. Literally.”

  While Vin struggled to come up with an appropriate argument, Shia stepped in, addressing the dwarf still going over his arm. “Before we bother fighting over this, is this something you can actually do?”

  “Yepp,” Deorer grunted, finally satisfied with whatever it was he was looking for as he let go of Vin’s arm. “As far as I can tell, the girl’s body is functionally indestructible. However, those strange joints of hers are another matter. With the right tools and my unique skill set, I should be able to separate the arm from her body. Of course, that’s the easy part. Once I get it off, attaching it to your friend here is going to be… bloody.”

  “But you can do it?” Shia pushed, placing a protective arm on Vin’s shoulder.

  “Oh yeah, I can do it,” Deorer confirmed, squinting up at Vin like he was examining an old car and wondering if it still ran. “The real question is, can your friend take it?”

  “What do you mean?” Alka asked, suddenly sounding a lot less sure of what was happening, her arms slowly falling to her side. “You told me there wouldn’t be any problems.”

  “I said there probably wouldn’t be,” he shrugged, grabbing his crystalline hammer and knocking it against the metal couch, nodding at the loud ringing sound it caused. “Your friend is going to have to remain conscious throughout the entire procedure, actively willing his mana through the formations in the arm in order to bind it to his soul. This isn’t like handing him a shiny new relic. We’ll be binding the arm to him, similar to how you were bound to that body of yours.”

  “But Alka wasn’t conscious for that ritual,” Shia argued, giving Vin a concerned look. “Why can’t he just wait until after?”

  “The ritual did all the heavy lifting then,” Deorer shrugged, starting to look annoyed at how much he was having to explain to them. “Look, do you want the arm or not? As much as I want to piss Nohral off and get a free level, I don’t have all day.”

  Vin hesitated, still feeling like things were moving far too fast for his liking. Any moment now Nohral could come back with a small army of dwarves, forcing Deorer to listen to him and head back to his smithy within the lava. And as much as he didn’t want to just… take Alka’s arm like that, the Slayer clearly wanted him to have it. Struggling with the indecision, he quickly turned to their resident healer.

  “Shia, how much longer would it be before you can actually regrow my arm?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” Shia admitted, gripping her staff nervously. “For one, I’d first need to study your biology more in depth to make sure there aren’t any severe differences between elves and humans before I risk regrowing your arm. And as for the spell itself, Regeneration is a fourth-tier spell. As you’d imagine, it requires both incredibly high focus and magic attributes. Prior to the Great Reset, I hadn’t been able to learn it until I was closing in on level 40. It’s tricky to try and guess how fast someone will level, especially here on Edregon, but if I had to…” She paused, trying to come up with her best guess before giving him a small, apologetic smile. “…probably around a month from now at the absolute earliest. More likely two.”

  Potentially two more months of missing a hand… Vin thought, staring at his stump of an arm and thinking back to how much of a challenge just the past two weeks had been. Tasks as simple as climbing or carrying things had turned into a struggle, and he had to admit the thought of having a magic golem arm was pretty cool. Even so…

  “I’m not about to trade around which one of us is missing a limb,” he finally decided, shaking his head. “If I take your arm, then you’ll just be the one suffering Alka. Thanks, but I’ll just tough it out until Shia can master the spell.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Alka laughed, nodding toward the dwarf’s large bag. “I had Deorer whip up a prosthetic for me ahead of time.”

  Nodding, the dwarf reached into his bag and yanked out a gleaming black warpick, just like the ones they’d found with the dead brothers. Only unlike theirs, the bottom of this one was clearly shaped to attach to Alka’s strange ball-like joints.

  “Made from pure darthsteel, this bad boy ain’t getting chipped anytime soon,” Deorer chuckled, turning it this way and that. The head was split into two halves, with one shaped like a standard pickaxe, and the other a large, thick hammer. “You find anything that needs a good knock on the noggin, and this will do the job just fine.”

  “See? You know how much I like hitting things on the head,” Alka said, her voice filled with mirth. “You should know better than anyone I only need one hand for my sword, Vin, and it won’t take me too long to adjust my fighting style to accommodate having a goddamn dwarven warpick for my left hand.”

  Vin’s eyes flicked back and forth between the dwarven warpick, the arm Alka was offering, and Alka’s encouraging eyes. The green balls of light were flickering behind her new helm, all but begging him to accept her gift. Vin tried to come up with any other reason why he shouldn’t, but was cut off by an exasperated voice.

  “For the love of the Gods, take the golem arm and let’s get out of here already!” Scule called out, rolling his eyes. “We all know you’re going to do it in the end, so shut up and take the arm!” For once even Reginald seemed to agree with Scule, squeaking at Vin and pointing toward the arm with the tip of his tail, nodding vigorously.

  “Fine, I’ll take the arm!” Vin laughed, barely able to believe what he was saying. Smiling at his oldest friend in the world, Vin nodded. “Thank you Alka, I swear I’ll protect it.”

  “Are you kidding? This thing is indestructible,” Alka snorted, wavering her arm about and banging it against a metal chair to prove her point. “You should swear you won’t lose any more appendages, because I sure as hell ain't giving you one of my legs.”

  “That too,” Vin chuckled, turning to Deorer. “Alright, what do you need me to do?”

  “Took you long enough,” the dwarf grunted, pointing toward the metal couch. “Go take a seat, and if you got any booze, now might be the time to drink it.”

  “This is gonna hurt a lot.”

  Patreon

  Discord