Sealed in Steel [ Tank Litrpg ]

Elian slightly wobbled while walking back to camp. It had been a long time since he had drunk this much. If not counting his past life, then this really was the first time he had drunk this much.

He was only a social drinker back on Earth and didn't have a high tolerance for alcohol. But even though he had several mugs at the Rusty Anvil, it wasn't that bad because beer made the old-fashioned way had a lower alcohol content compared to most modern beers on Earth. Some places on Fellenyr even drink almost exclusively beer or ale, inadvertently avoiding diseases found in untreated water. This was one of the downsides of living in a medievalesque fantasy world.

Elian once thought it'd be great if the Abyssal Eye's Curse affected beer, recalling that he had tested this in the original timeline. He wasn't sure of the exact requirements for the Curse to consider something as a potion.

Probably a stretch to include beer in that category.

The beer of the Rusty Anvil had a strong smoky flavor. Their supplier malted the barley over fire, as was the original method. It also didn't have that familiar bitterness of Earth drinks. The hops plant didn't exist on Fellenyr, so brewers used different herbs and spices to flavor and preserve their ales and beers. Someone from Earth drinking those for the first time would find them odd. To Elian, it was a nostalgic taste, something he had drank when there was still enough peace to brew beer.

Pretty hard to make beer while fleeing from the Giants. He should enjoy himself now before those building-sized bastards arrived.

"I think that trip was a success," Elian told the hazy half-moon above. And he wasn't talking only about drinking.

He learned plenty from Bufford and also had some assurance that Thalman was being watched by the other priests. But he couldn't get rid of the feeling that something was about to go wrong. Was he just paranoid? His previous life was full of situations becoming worse and worse that he couldn't help but worry when things seemed fixed.

"Just wait for the next bad thing to happen and then react," Yanira would say whenever Elian voiced his worries during their adventures. And he had a lot of worries back then exploring this new world with no clue.

Her wise advice applied to Fellenyr, Earth, or any other world. Still, it was hard to follow.

"Guess I'll have to wait and see," Elian muttered to himself. "And test stuff while I wait."

Good thing that Marlowe and Frederick had hunted a costrahastan earlier that day. They had a spear arm and the front half of its head left unsold, parts that Elian needed to study. They gladly sold those to him at a discount. He lugged the costrahastan body parts in a sling over his back. Guards stopped him a few times. His prepared explanation was that it was his share of a hunt and his buyer wasn't available today. Not the greatest of excuses.

A golem scanned him and they'd let him go. Was the golem looking for Thalman clones in disguise? This odd search made sense in that context.

So… was Thalman really the culprit?

For the next two days, Elian took apart the costrahastan arm and head, and studied them. Viney wielding Aether-made tools was there to help, as well as Casimir and other pilgrims.

As more fights broke out, Borlen's group resolved to stay in camp. They formed their wagons into a circle around the tents, tied them together with chains to make a sort of fence, and ringed it with wooden stakes pointing outward—it made it clear they didn't want visitors. The men wore the armor and carried the weapons previously gifted by Thalman, taking turns patrolling the perimeter, especially at night. Elian helped them out while training, spreading his Aether constructs through the forest as an early warning device. According to Borlen, this was the most strained relationship among the various groups of followers he had experienced.

Many people had been arrested for committing crimes, at times even against their own groups. The culprit's plan to fan the flames of chaos was working.

Accusations against Faridar of being the thief started to spread out of nowhere. Faridar may be stronger than Tharguras, but that didn't mean he would always be unsurpassed, murmured the new rumors. Best to get rid of the competition was supposedly Faridar's thought.

To Elian's mind, the easy way to calm things was to tell all pilgrims to go home. Make sure to stop this obvious attempt at starting a… civil war or something.

What's the term for civil war in a religion?

But no way Tharguras would agree because he had to prove he could survive a Tribulation without the stolen armor. Now, Faridar couldn't leave the hills either because people would say he didn't keep his promise to help Tharguras. Everyone was trapped in a pot that was slowly heating to a boil. All of them would be cooked soon if no one could figure this out.

And Elian didn't know what to do. This was like murder mystery movies where the detectives needed to wait for the next victim to gain more clues.

"My strike barely did anything to it," Casimir said, lowering his hammer as he examined the small cylinder that was a combination of Barkskin and Aether materials. "I gave it my all. My arms are shaking; the impact traveled up the hammer's handle."

"There's a crack here," Elian said. "But it didn't go through the layers. The softer middle is a bit squished too."

Casimir reached for his axe. "Should I try this next?"

He swung the axe down in a wide arc, adding his weight to the descending blade. The force, concentrated to a narrow strip that was the axe's edge, did more damage than the hammer. The blade sunk half an inch into the hardened tendrils. Elian felt a couple of Aether layers below the crack. The force was dissipated.

Small damage. Otherwise, it was all good.

Another pilgrim stepped forward to test with his short sword. His friend also brought a hunting bow and shot arrows at the cylinder. And so continued the group's entertainment of trying to destroy Elian's creations.

The new Barkskin and Aether combinations had improved much from the initial models in just two days. Some of the pilgrims were craftsmen by trade and helped Elian analyze the structure of the costrahastan shell. They were amazed at the layers of the spear arm. No one thought about this stuff, not even beast tamers, save for some specialized faunamages. Back on Earth, probably only a handful of scientists studied the composition of mantis shrimp shells. Even fewer, if any, applied it to body armor technologies and the like.

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As Elian had suspected, the costrahastan's spear arm wasn't one solid object. If it were, it'd suffer from rigidity, gradually breaking down from the impacts of each powerful hit. It'd be like the head of a hammer squished shorter over years of use.

It turned out that the spear arm was made of three layers. The outermost was a very hard shell.

Taking a closer look with a reading stone—they borrowed the expensive item from Borlen—they could see its finer details. Elian amplified it with some glass and water tricks to make basic lenses. It also helped that the shell was huge, its patterns bigger than if the costrahastan were the size of a regular Earth lobster.

What they saw was a network of material woven into a herringbone pattern, a sort of staggered zigzag.

Elian immediately tried to copy it. Using Barkskin, he didn't let Viney's tendrils grow whichever way and then harden them. Instead, he tried to weave them, each tendril sprouting several smaller tendrils to wrap around each other. He couldn't copy the pattern of the costrahastan shell because it was too difficult, so the granny pilgrims, expert at working the looms, came up with an alternative that he could manage with Viney.

The result looked messy, barely unrecognizable as a pattern, be it herringbone or anything else. Elian lacked control and practice. But the increased toughness was noticeable.

"Fascinating results," Borlen said during their tests the day before. He caressed Viney's Barkskin on the ground that they were hitting. "This is the same material as before. The only difference is this weaving. How can this be?"

Elian snapped his fingers. "It's like graphite and diamond."

"Graphite and diamond? Does combining them result in tougher material? How are they—?"

"No, no. I meant it as an analogy. Their 'molecules'…" Elian paused. The pilgrims' faces were full of confusion, especially at the word 'molecule', which he uttered in English since there was no Angloise translation for it.

Elian muttered that he should try studying the structures of hard materials like diamonds. The pilgrims accepted it and went back to hitting the Barkskin.

High school science classes had left Elian's mind long ago, but he remembered that graphite, like that in pencil, and diamonds were both made of carbon. It was the structure of their molecules that resulted in graphite being soft while diamond was the hardest natural material. Still, diamond was brittle. But it was a good example of how the impact of structure. Perhaps, if Fellenyr didn't have magic, its people would've been focused on the science of non-magical things.

The strength of structures wasn't all the costrahastan shell had taught Elian.

The next layer of the spear arm was also a shell-like material but softer than the first. The difference probably allowed the shockwaves of impacts on the harder outer layer to disperse through the next.

Interestingly, this second layer was itself made of many, many thin layers. The trick to them was that each layer had its grains running straight across, and then, the layer beneath would be slightly rotated so that the lines of grains were slightly offset at an angle. So did the next layer, and the next. It was like the lines spiraled all the way down.

Viney couldn't make this design because it required unconnected parts layered together. Or maybe it was possible if it staggered hardening, cutting a segment off before hardening the next. But it was beyond Elian's current level of control over Viney.

Applying Thalman's miniaturization tips and tricks, Elian made around thirty sheets of Aether constructs for his first try at this technique yesterday. The layers were all mere level ones with five Armor each.

When Casimir struck them with a hammer during yesterday's test, only the first few sheets completely shattered, and a few more cracked. Elian expected them all to break because they were so weak. This was a promising avenue to explore. It was also taxing on the mind. King Idum-Ani could've made each Manifested Armor of the Golden Army much tankier with specialized composition, but he went with balancing quality and quantity. Elian didn't know how to do that yet.

Even the last layer of the costrahastan's spear arm had its lessons to teach. They were muscle fibers running down its sides, sort of partially wrapping the second layer while pulling at the first layer.

Elian couldn't understand what this was supposed to do when he first saw it. Borlen offered a good hypothesis.

"I believe this is similar to a knuckle brawler wrapping his hands before a fight," he had said. "A strip of cloth offers no protection upon impact. And yet, because of how it is utilized, the wrapped cloth protects the hands and wrists when punching by keeping the bones in place. In doing so, it also strengthens the strike."

"That's a really good point," Elian said. "But how am I going to copy this?"

A problem for the future.

For today, Elian was proud of his creation of a layer of Barkskin and several layers of Aether underneath. It was still just Viney on top of Aether constructs, but he could confidently say this was a good first step on the right path. In time, he'd figure out how to merge them.

"Why do you want to use both the Barkskin and Aether constructs, brother Elian?" Casimir asked while they rested, joining the ranks of many others who had asked Elian the same thing. Casimir picked up a broken fragment of the Barkskin. "There's a saying in Tellerin, 'Stack all your sand blocks for one tower to make it the tallest it can be.' Forgive me if I'm mistaken in my view, but I believe it is better to focus your efforts on either strengthening your plant symbiote or training Aether Magic."

"He's saying it out of concern, brother Elian," Borlen quickly said. "None of us can criticize your efforts in preparing for your Tribulations."

"Have any of you seen the pyramids of Sarhat?" Elian asked. Made by the extinct kynonids, jackal-looking humanoids, the buildings looked like the Pyramids of Giza on Earth.

"Majestic structures, from what I've heard," said Borlen, raising a brow at the seemingly odd question. "I'm yet to see them. Likely never will."

"Since Casimir mentioned sand blocks," Elian said. "I thought the Sarhat Pyramids would be a good illustration for what I'm doing. The ancient kynonids wanted a structure reaching the heavens to talk to their gods—five hundred feet tall, is what they had decided for some reason. They wanted this to last for thousands of years and didn't use magic that could crumble over time. Their magic wasn't very good anyway, the scholars say.

"What did the kynonids do? Pile blocks, each taller than a man, into a pyramid as large as Temple Hill. A pyramid gives the most stability for making a simple tall structure, that's why they went with it. Forward a couple of thousand years to our time, we have the towers of the imperial palace of Solvi reaching seven hundred feet. Those towers required much less labor and resources to build."

"That's because they're not giant pyramids," said Casimir.

"They didn't need to be to reach those heights."

"I may have not seen the Sarhat Pyramids," Borlen said, "but I have beheld with my own eyes the formidable architecture of Solvi. If one stack blocks into a narrow tower of that height, it wouldn't be stable. It might not even reach half of its height before toppling."

"Exactly," Elian said. "However, we're not confined to putting blocks on top of one another. We have all sorts of building techniques using different materials." He pointed at the Barkskin piece Casimir held. "I can achieve much focusing on that. But I can achieve more by exploring merging it with other materials."

"You are truly wise, brother Elian," Casimir said.

"I'm just observing the world around us," Elian replied, scratching the back of his head. "Usually, the answers are around us. Part of the answer, anyway. I still haven't figured out how to put them together. Succeeding is a different thing."

"Brother Elian?" One of the pilgrims assigned to guard the camp approached them. "Someone is looking for you." He pointed at a couple of people standing outside the fence of stakes.

Thorren and Jadewell?