In Loki's Honor

I sat on the rooftop terrace of Barbara's castle with the Baroness and Miriel. It was night but the planetary ring was still illuminated by the non-Euclidean sun. Seriously, someone had to fix those spatial shenanigans. Was this planet even round? It surely seemed so but...

A problem for future me.

The ring seemed to be spinning fast. Even with my improved eyesight, I couldn't see the individual rocks, it was just a solid band of pale green but I could sense the energies gathering in the ring, forcing the rocks to collide and gather. It was a paradox. The rocks were flying at breakneck speeds, yet it would take a long time before they accrete into a proper moon. They were held from flying out of orbit and staying in the band by magic, though.

The starry sky didn't resemble anything in the star charts mom had seen back on Earth. The constellations were alien and had weird names that shifted every age as people "rediscovered" astronomy and astrology.

The culprit was the pursuit of magic. Science takes a backseat when confronted with the arcane. Why ponder on the natural laws of the universe when you can bend them to your will and impose it on reality? I suspect most magical worlds remained thusly mired in this pseudo-medieval-renaissance world. Revolutions and social change didn't happen unless they came from above.

Those in power had the strength to fight back against a hundred peasants. When the [Royal Aura] of a fourth-tier [King] not only brings said peasants to their knees effortlessly but also killed the weaker among them, how would they fight back? When a weak arrow aimed at the forehead of the tyrant causes but a nick on the person's skin, how do you kill them? Hardly at all, that's the answer.

Even if a country is successful in overthrowing its rulers, the neighbors won't sit idly. The risk of facing their own rebellion was high and they would squish their friendly neighborhood revolutionaries swiftly as an example. Whether they fear being overthrown too is irrelevant. The loss of productivity caused by a population in arms was enough to prompt them to move.

I hoped the downtrodden and oppressed find succor in religion. In the Matriarch's religion. I had warnings and advice for every [Bishop] and [High Priest] of every country that they should be a voice for the population. To avoid harsh taxation, and to educate the future rulers in both economics, governance, and in faith. And to warn those who didn't heed the first advice of what happened to Auvani's Royal Palace and many others across history.

But the people needed to solve their problems on their own. I didn't wish to take over and control the world. It was the same thought that kept me from going to the Scorched Continent to fight the Demons. What would I do? Purge everyone, innocent and guilty alike? I already knew it was impossible to shut down the passage between here and the Demon realm. Wyxnos took most of the energy of the System to keep the gauntlet shut and it was still sometimes pierced.

Right now? I'm kind of missing the guy. The System didn't have enough energy to maintain the Gauntlet, not unless all deities chipped in their Divine power. Not unless I eradicated all other religions and convinced most of the people to worship me.

A hand brushing against my cover brought my focus back to the stargazing session.

"Nethe, we came here to relax, not to brood about the fate of the world," Barbara warned me. She couldn't read my thoughts but my emotions. She knew me enough to know what I was worried about.

"Yeah, brother. You've been overworking too much," Miriel chimed in.

*

*

Besides serving as a resurrection workstation to recycle soldiers back into the war, I also had to take some decisions regarding a few subjects. Some intrepid pirates hijacked an airship and were now on the run with their stolen vessel. I tasked Arista and Lily to go after them and retrieve the airship. We couldn't let any fall out of control.

Auctions of Truesilver slag chunks were held in Auvani, Ackerton, Espero, and Yutis. We sold a lot of the byproducts of my failed alloy experiments and earned a significant amount of money. Reclaiming the Truesilver in the slag was not impossible but it was still harder than just making more myself. The influx of money allowed us to buy more materials for airship crafting and supplies for the war. We still added tens of thousands of gold to Clovehaven's treasury. Which was kept independently from mom's item box treasury.

Five Crystal Fairies spawned in the grotto during these two years. We left them to be fairies and roam freely in the meadow and surrounding villages. Though people wanted to make them follow in Kalael's footsteps, All the aspects, Barbara, and I agreed that it would be bad. They were people, not tools. We also got confirmation from the Elder Fairies that Crystal fairies do require a sizeable chunk of Truesilver to spawn. Just making a gemstone grove doesn't work. They also agreed that we shouldn't put large amounts of Truesilver in fairy groves because it would attract treasure hunters.

Spoiler alert: the amount of Truesilver required to spawn a single fairy was already a large amount. Heck, the amount we sold at the auctions already... oh. Maybe we could saturate the market with Truesilver and lower the price.... no, that wouldn't work. It was a commodity so rare and valuable that even if we dumped tons of it, the price would still be a bit higher than gold. It had tons of applications. From alchemy to metallurgy. Even adding a pinch of Truesilver dust to a steel ingot caused the System to greatly increased the quality of the items crafted with it. With the raised awareness of demon infestation, every noble wanted to have a Truesilver amulet.

*

*

We decided to only do resurrections three days a week. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That gave me four days free to do other stuff.

At my workshop and in Haru's shape (books have problems with fine manipulation), I tried my hand at making some magical alloy of Truesilver. Pulling up my notes (after Loki's Autobiography gift, all notes are automatic anyway), I checked the most stable and promising alloys I made. It was obvious to me that something was missing, a secret ingredient, a catalyst.

I now had a huge suspicion that catalyst was magical in nature and related to the Crystal Fairies. I called Miriel to help. When she arrived, I explained the problem to her.

"What do you want from me?" She asked, suspicious. "Wing shavings?"

I grinned like a hungry fox. "Exactly."

"No, you can't!"

"They'll grow back. It will only itch a little."

"Mom!" She hollered.

I laughed. "I'm right here, child."

"No, I want a divorce!"

"Where did you learn this?"

"At the village!"

"Miriel, look at me. I am not going to hurt you."

"Liar!"

"Look, I don't think I can even scrape your wings and get shavings out. You're almost invulnerable, Miriel. What I need is to give you the [Fairy Dust] Perk and ask you to gather the dust for me."

"Do it yourself!" She blew me a raspberry and flew away.

I slapped my face with both hands. What a dunce. All I needed to do was to shapeshift into a Crystal Fairy and use the Perk on myself. After I (painfully) collected several pinches of Crystal Fairy Dust, which had a metallic sheen to it. I ran some tests to confirm it was different from normal fairy dust. With everything ready, I started to do my experiments.

Long story short, those experiments took two months to provide results.

I alloyed Truesilver with common Silver, Platinum, Copper, Tin, Vanadium, Molybdenum, Chromium, Iron, and Cobalt. The alloy was 40% Truesilver, 20% normal silver 25% copper, 7.5% Platinum, and 5% Tin, with 2.5% split among the trace metals. The crucible needed to be made out of enchanted graphite with an inner Living Silk mesh to circulate the magic inside in a specific pattern. It needed to be smelted in a furnace under an inert atmosphere, with almost no oxygen. I burnt some graphite first to capture all the oxygen first. After the metals melted and were glowing like lava, I needed to remove the dross, then add the Crystal Fairy Dust and stir.

The ingot cooled immediately after pouring out of the enchanted crucible, sending a shockwave of heat at once in all directions. It was white and had an inner glow as it captured the light.

I cackled madly at my discovery. It was as magical as Adamantite was inert and I knew what I had to call my new discovery.

Mithril.

Goddess-damned Mithril! Cue in Howard Shore's famous movie theme.

*

*

Working Mithril was hard. You couldn't hammer it. Whenever I tried working the ingot in an anvil, all I got for my troubles was a ridiculously loud ringing sound and a cracked anvil. No. To work Mithril, you needed to soften it in the forge, then slowly mold it into shape. Applying pressure was the best way and I quickly decided on using the [Shadow Workshop] to make a hydraulic press with molds. The temperature inside was scalding to keep the Mithril from cooling. The metal didn't like to be worked fast.

After days of work, I got a spearhead, a sword, a breastplate, and a mail shirt out of the white metal. The mail shirt was thin, like fabric, because mom had some ideas. She left me a note:

> "Wear the Mithril chain shirt and let a troll strike you!"

Something about a movie she liked. I asked Lakerta to wear the shirt, then shapeshifted into a troll. Holding a massive mace, I struck the Lamia [Defender]. A rattle, like chains and metal chimes, rang, and the Lamia laughed.

"I almost didn't feel it! This thing is as good as it is noisy!" She cheered. "Damn, and it is just a shirt."

The Mithril chain shirt granted a 60% damage reduction just for being made out of Mithril, as a normal steel mail like this would grant about fuck all protection, so thin it was. I think I could enchant it to keep the noise down or wrap the links in Living Silk. The mail links worked better than the breastplate, which had only a 50% damage reduction on top of what the plate armor granted.

Then the weapons. Those were disappointing. The Mithril would absorb the energy of the impact and resound like a bell or a gong. It also couldn't be wielded at high speeds or it would start to sing as it dissipated kinetic energy into the atmosphere as sound.

Mithril was a purely defensible metal, we decided. But even the chain shirt used a King's ransom worth of materials, not to mention nobody couldn't make it without access to Crystal Fairy Dust, a secret I would keep to my grave. The 60% reduction couldn't be bypassed by Perks as it was not from the armor but from the material, though. Further testing showed it was not constant with the Chain Shirt. It could go anywhere between 35% and 70%, depending on how the attack was delivered. Piercing attacks suffered from less damage reduction, for example.

A Mithril gothic plate was out of the question. 25kg of Mithril? Preposterous.

The solution was to capitalize on the energy-dampening effect without using too much material. I could press the Mithril into sheets as thin as gold leaf used for ornament designs and lettering. But it could tear easily, so the best workable thickness was 0.1 millimeters. A hundred times thicker than gold leaf. But using Mithril leaf for ornament designs and lettering did sound like a good idea for a luxury product.

Focusing on armor design, I asked myself. What would be the best armor plate surface to dissipate the most energy away from the inside?

A plate with parallel surfaces would still emit 50% of the received impact energy to the inside, while the other 50% would be sent to the outside.

Making the outside a 45º ridge pattern would dissipate 58.6% of the energy to the outside.

Using square pyramids would throw 63.4% of the energy away. Some of the energy would rebound on the other pyramids but it was negligible.

Making the outside a distinctive pattern had a problem. I wasn't worried about weakening the Truesilver but those surfaces would eat a lot of material. I was worried about mishaps and perhaps making the Truesilver too conspicuous. But what if I used several layers of Truesilver sheet?

One layer would allow 50% of the energy to pass through. The second layer would let... a quarter on the first pass, then reverberate and let one sixteenth... that's an infinite series. One over four to the power of X, summation from X equal to 1 to infinity. That's one-third. Wait, with three layers... it would leak an eight on the first pass. then the middle layer would bounce twice for one-thirty-twos, another... the end result was 14.29%.

Generalizing, for N layers of Truesilver sheet, the amount of energy that would get through was the sum of an infinite series, X from one to infinity, of one over two to the power of the number of layers to the power of X.

Balls to the walls. Ten layers would give the armor a 99.982% damage reduction. I squeezed and tempered ten thin sheets of Truesilver, and carefully mounted them sandwiched between two half-millimeter-thick steel plates. The whole composition was one and a half millimeters thick, half the average thickness of steel armor. Looking at it, I decided, what could possibly go wrong? That was a sobering thought. My [Prescience] and intuition decided I should do this experiment far away from Clovehaven.

So I flew north, past Espero, past Fulgen, and deep into the Dragon Mountains north of the barbarian plans. There, I found a nice summit and prepared myself. I set the prototype armor plate on a firm mount and took the [Unicorn King Spear] out of storage. With all my might, I struck the front of the armor plate.

The thin steel of the front plate shattered into thousands of microscopic steel dust fragments that were shaken and propelled at supersonic speeds parallel to the straight Mithril sheet, shredding the mountain face behind me into fine sand which was blown away in the wind. I took tens of thousands of small cuts for 1 HP each. Not even my eyes were spared and I was partially blind. My regeneration pushed the steel dust out of my body and I recovered my eyesight.

I didn't find my Mithril plate. It was all gone. The front plate, the back plate, the Mithril sheets, the bolts holding everything in place, the armor plate mount. It all became dust and flew away in the wind.

I could see groves carved on the ground underneath where the plates were, thin as the plates but inches deep. The energy ejected through the sides of the Mithril sheets dug into the rock before it all shattered.

What was the problem? Resonance. And the fact the sheets were perfectly straight. And the fact that the fasteners weren't strong enough to support the energy sent through them by the Mithril sheets.

Oh, fuck. Miracle materials came with problems that required miracle solutions.