The project began in earnest.

Rhek barked commands, and, somewhat to his surprise, the Sorceress’s daughter obeyed without question—once more raising his estimation of her. Climbing the hierarchy had meant Rhek had needed to work with gigantic egos more and more commonly. Someone who would just listen for once was a breath of fresh air.

He discovered quickly that the woman had not lied about her rank. Her presence trivialized several steps of the process. Rhek assigned her to the tanning liquors first, since that normally took days of boiling, and most collaborators had skills to speed it up. While she reduced the [Wyrmwood Ash] into a potent concentrate, he began the delicate work on the [Unseen Reaping Shade] pelts. By the time he finished with the fleshing knife, several liquors of varying strength were ready. Before he’d even carved the pelts. Shaking his head in amusement, he brought the hides over and submerged them in the first. Another activation of a skill reduced the tedious process to minutes, the pelts darkening before his eyes. He moved them to the second, and they tanned with similar speed.

While they soaked, he had Nysari pulverize the [Crystalback Goliabeetle] shell into a shimmering dust and render the [Owlbear] fat into oil. He took the leather and cut the patterns for the armor—sizing them for a thirteen-year-old girl, a little large to be safe—then began conditioning them. The rigid pieces he submerged into a hot wax bath mixed with the beetle dust and a half-dozen other materials he’d helped Nysari prepare.

And so on and so on. When the hides were ready for stitching, the woman laid enchantments into them. That could be done before or after the item’s formation, though doing so early influenced the armor’s quality, so, in some circumstances, it was better to do first. But only if the enchanter was higher-ranked than the main craftsman…which didn’t happen often, since Rhek was a Master Leatherworker. A woman of many talents, this mage.

Even with a Grandmaster collaborator aiding him, leatherworking could be painstaking work. And nerve-wracking, for once. It had been a long time since Rhek had gotten his hands on a project this promising, and he didn’t want to squander the opportunity. He had a goal today. He always tried to make the best product he could—as any craftsman worth their salt should—but this project especially, he put every ounce of his concentration into every step of the process.

Because he wanted a masterwork.

Rhek had devoted himself to leatherworking for many years. By now, and for a Master-tier craftsman, a normal quality result meant he’d messed something up; getting one would decimate his mood for the rest of the week. But they did happen on occasion. Good was his baseline, his worse-than-average but not embarrassing outcome. Superior, he would grunt and be happy with. Extraordinaries rolled around a few times a year, typically for the projects commissioned by orichalcums with self-harvested materials. Those were the undertakings he put the most blood and sweat into.

But he had never managed a masterwork. Of the four Titled he’d worked with, each collaboration had yielded an extraordinary. They’d been pleased, because even that was a difficult-to-attain quality for a craftsman in the 70s.

There was a single tier higher than masterwork, but transcendents were for Grandmaster and Legendary craftsmen, and mostly the latter. There was an average of zero legendary craftsmen for each profession in the mortal lands. A handful across all disciplines, their names known throughout the world, more prestigious than Titled, if less glamorized. Grandmasters were more common, but still vanishingly rare.

Rhek wanted a masterwork under his belt. Desperately. And this was his best chance in decades, with a Grandmaster collaborator next to him, and a fully self-harvested material lined up with the rarest requests he’d thought to make—and then even more outrageous materials thrown in as an apparent afterthought.

After a grueling two hours—which was no time at all, to craft armor from scratch—he stitched the last lines of dark cobalt silk into the cuirass, finishing the first of four pieces of gear he had planned. He released a breath and stepped back.

Done.

He might have managed it. He hadn’t faltered once; several weeks of retirement hadn’t made his hands or mind clumsy. The relaxation might have done him good, in fact.

A masterwork? Maybe. He waited with bated breath for the item to recognize its completion. It always took a few seconds after the last stitch for it to realize it was whole.

In the end, the gods themselves were who judged the quality and worthiness of a piece, bestowing blessings unto the work by objective measure. Whether Rhek thought he’d done a good job mattered not a whit. Indeed, he remembered a number of instances where he’d smugly thought he’d worked a miracle, only for his efforts to be decried a moment later as ‘normal’ or worse. And to his disgruntlement, when he inspected those items with a keener eye, he did find flaws. The judgment of the gods was absolute.

He felt the cuirass settle into its final form. He hesitated, afraid to check. Plowing forward anyway, he activated a skill—that basic one even children had access to.

[Inspect].

***

Heartguard of the Fleeting Shade

Transcendent

Lv. 385

Description

A cuirass crafted from the white-gray hide of an Unseen Reaping Shade.

[Wyrmwood Purification]

[Effortless Weaving]

[Enchantment: Fount of Mana VI]

[Enchantment: Sorcerous Might IX]

[Enchantment: Aegis X]

[Enchantment: Arcanic Deflection V]

***

Rhek was an old man. Even fellow dwarves would say he’d trudged well past his golden years. For one of the long-lived races to go gray in the beard was a considerable feat. He wasn’t quite there—merely some wisps of ash hidden in the black—but that was a rare sight itself.

So he’d been through a lot, and seen a lot in his centuries of life. Especially as a craftsman who’d served in seven guilds across the dwarven enclaves, the human kingdoms, and once, an elvish city. He’d been commissioned by four Titled. More known leatherworking materials had passed under his hands than not to transform into gear that had likely gone on to save its wearer’s life. He’d almost died four times, only three of them his fault. Married twice, neither lasting more than a year.

So, after everything he’d been through, he was a hard man to shock. Even realizing the Sorceress’s daughter had hired him hadn’t fazed him much. A jolt to the system, maybe, but not something to leave him slackjawed.

This?

This ridiculous item?

He knew what should come out of a set of materials. Not the exact details, since crafting was always, to some extent, a dice throw. But a ballpark. A low and a high.

This was tossing a six-sided die and getting a seven.

Nonsensical.

“Hm,” the demon next to him said. “Not terrible. Maybe I should’ve pushed the enchantments harder.”

Not…terrible?

A vein bulged in his forehead at the words. Not terrible. A transcendent quality item described in that manner fell a few hairs short of blasphemy. He was offended on a moral level.

Transcendent.

He’d skipped over his first masterwork and gone straight to transcendent. How was that possible? How? Even a masterwork was something a Master-tier crafter dreamed of. Grandmasters only managed a few in their lifetime, from what he understood.

How?

He’d done a good job; he’d thought that before [Inspecting] the item. An excellent job. But…no. He couldn’t credit himself for this. He wasn’t delusional enough to claim the miracle in front of him. His eyes drifted to the bottommost lines on the screen displaying the item’s identification.

“You fit four enchantments on it,” he said dumbly.

“I would have preferred five, but didn’t want to risk failure,” the demon said idly. “This is just temporary gear, so it doesn’t matter much.”

A soft wheeze rattled out of his chest—his pride leaving his husk of a body.

She wasn’t impressed. This was an acceptable result. For temporary gear. A masterwork would have left her disappointed.

…Four enchantments had been her safe standard? Not her ambitious one?

Like most armor crafters, he had worked with enchanters on plenty of occasions. He knew, roughly, what their capabilities were. The number of enchantments depended on the strength of each effect, though no matter what, putting in more than three was outrageously difficult.

And the enchantments themselves. Fount of Mana six? Sorcerous Might nine? Aegis ten?

Not one of those enchantments should have fit on level 385 gear. Sorcerous Might of the ninth tier especially belonged on mithril gear at the very minimum, as the sole enchantment.

And there were four of that quality! On silver-rank gear! His brain struggled to process what he was seeing.

The realization hit him like a punch to the gut.

“You aren’t the Sorceress’s daughter.”

Maybe his subconscious had been churning over that fact for a while now, but he’d been absorbed in the project. Like any craftsman of considerable rank, when he was occupied, nothing else mattered. Only his work existed. Now that he had a moment to think, the oddities added up to form a coherent picture.

The woman paused. “I said as much.” She seemed to realize his implication. Her lips pursed. “I am Nysari Keresi,” she said, monotone. Totally unconvincing.

He stared at her.

She stared at him.

She turned away. “Level three hundred and eighty-five,” she said. “Right on target. Well done gauging the materials. That can be tricky. It would have been unfortunate if we went too high.”

He kept staring at her.

“We have three more pieces to finish,” she said. “Vambraces, greaves, and boots, you said. Shall we?”

He was co-crafting with the heavens’ damned Sorceress herself.

“Don’t you have a vault with half the world’s treasures?” he asked. “Why not grab something from there? Why craft something?”

Nysari—Vivisari—gave up on the flimsy lie. “Circumstances prevent it. I wanted gear focused on defense. Most traditional mage equipment aims for sorcerous bonuses and minimal physical guards. And it’s a gift as much as anything.”

All perfectly fine reasoning, he supposed, but he still couldn’t believe it.

The Sorceress

was standing in his workshop.

It had been a long time since he’d felt self-conscious about his ability. He thought he’d left insecurity behind entirely, considering the heights he’d climbed to. But here was a woman who had co-crafted with Rowena the Sinew-Stitcher herself. The woman who had crafted the gear the Party of Heroes had ridden into their final battle and saved the world with.

Rhek felt sick. He’d been grumbling about dealing with a collaborator. Had thought it would be a headache—an irritation to get through, because co-crafters were so often clueless. And frankly, she had been too; they all were. Collaborators didn't spend decades honing skills related to the discipline.

But here? He had no doubt been the one to look like a fumbling novice. The Sorceress had spent her golden years supplying and assisting craftsmen he could never dream of matching, even with a millennium to catch up.

He swallowed.

“Let’s get to the rest,” he grunted.

The Sorceress nodded, unaware of his mental turmoil. He thanked the heavens that, when he returned to his task, his hands didn’t shake. It seemed the centuries had driven that foible away no matter the circumstances. He was keenly aware of her attention now, though, in a way he never had been for a client. Having his skill judged by the most powerful living mortal—maybe individual—in the world…now there was something to test a man’s mettle. If that couldn’t make him falter, nothing could.

He was somehow both utterly floored and completely unsurprised when the vambraces, greaves, and boots presented equally absurd statuses. Three more transcendental items. Two effects each, and between three and four enchantments.

But of course that was the case, when he was crafting with a woman who had collaborative leatherworking in the…what? Nineties? High nineties? If anyone, ever, could reach that rank—well, more likely, it would have been another member of the Party of Heroes, one who’d worn medium armor, but of any living person, it would be the Sorceress.

With the enchantments laid into each piece, he’d have been more surprised if the gods didn’t recognize the armor as the highest possible quality. Transcendental. By literal definition, that was what this armor was.

Rhek realized, horribly, that he was just present, in this workshop, as a warm body. He didn’t matter. Any leatherworker would have been suitable to this task. The Sorceress herself was the driving influence on the item’s quality. And she had requested Rhek because why not? He’d been available. But she wouldn’t have minded if he’d declined. It wouldn’t have mattered much; someone else would have done just fine too.

He’d never felt so humbled in his life.

He supposed, if nothing else, he’d crafted for the Sorceress herself and she hadn’t come away disappointed. On the other hand, she certainly didn’t look impressed. He couldn’t blame her. His hands surely looked like they were clumsy blocks of steel next to the Sinew-Stitcher’s.

Next came the grading process. Testing the armor for its physical and magical durability. Rhek would always expect his work to hold against spells and attacks fifty levels higher than the requirement listed on the item description, perhaps as much as a full hundred. In fifty-level increments, though, he watched numbly as the usual tests were completely rebuffed. Four fifty. Five hundred. Six hundred. Only at six hundred and fifty—mithril rank—did the gear start showing signs of stress.

Silver-rank armor as durable as mithril-rank. How many times today was he going to have his worldview shattered? He hadn’t known that was possible. It shouldn’t be possible.

“Good,” the Sorceress said, appraising the final result: the four pieces of matching gear. “A little more distinctive than I’d hoped for, appearance-wise, but I asked for the Reaping Shade pelts. You did a good job keeping them from standing out too much.” She nodded. “Payment, then.”

She pulled out a pouch from her inventory and counted out coins. She passed over nine green bits of metal. He stared at them.

Nine orichalcum. Hardly the largest sum he’d held at one time, but dealing with coin in those quantities usually meant he was purchasing rare Titled-rank materials—of which he would make a fraction of the project’s total cost in profit and come away quite a bit wealthier.

But the materials had been provided for this project. Here was nearly a starmetal for an afternoon’s work.

“Thank you for your time, and for helping me on short notice,” she said. “I need to get going. I would appreciate it if you kept silent about—your theories concerning me.”

The Sorceress, he had discovered, was strangely polite.

He managed to return a weak reassurance that he wouldn’t go blathering about her presence. Not that anyone would believe him, even the Guild. When she left, he stared at the closed doors she had stridden through for several minutes. Maybe longer.

He wondered if he’d dreamed the whole thing. A glance at the leftover materials scattered throughout the room—their combined values likely surpassing the coins clenched in his fist—told him he definitely hadn’t.

“The Heavens’ damned Sorceress,” he muttered.

He looked at the coins in his open palm.

Today, he decided, was a good day to start drinking again.