"But the next floor is going to be harder. It is still plains, just like this one, but the grass is waist-high, and the beasts hunt in larger packs. You stay in the middle and keep your head down. Let us handle the surprises. Clear?"
"Crystal," Jacob said.
Carlos paused, his eyes lingering on the chest plate of Jacob's coat. The leather still had residual damage where the Gatekeeper had struck him.
"That armor of yours held up incredibly well," Carlos admitted, scratching his chin. "Better than my shield, honestly. That was your enchanting work, right?"
Jacob nodded. "I used a mix of defense and impact distribution runes. It's standard runic theory, but I made sure to use plenty of power for these."
"Standard theory," Carlos repeated with a short chuckle. "Kid, that work kept your ribs from turning into splinters. Tell you what, we have a bag full of cores from this floor. When we stop to camp, you can take a look at my breastplate. If you can put some of those patterns on my gear, I'll let you keep a few of the cores for your own studies."
Jacob's eyes lit up at the mention of the cores. "Deal."
"Good," Carlos grinned, the tension finally gone from his face. "Let's go see what else the System wants to throw at us."
The second floor was exactly as Carlos had promised, which meant it was a miserable slog through waist-high razor grass.
The monsters here were denser variants of the first floor. The jackals had thicker fur that turned glancing blows, and the boar-lizards had developed a nasty habit of circling behind the party while hidden in the vegetation.
It was a tactical nightmare for a novice group, but for Carlos and his team, it was simply another day of work.
Tamsin's new skill upgrade paid for itself within the first hour. His Critical Eye highlighted the soft spots between the heavy plating of the boars, letting him drop enemies with single strikes that saved the party time and energy.
Grimmand complained about the humidity, but he swung his axe with a brutal efficiency that left a trail of monster corpses in their wake.
Jacob stayed in the center, keeping his head down. He watched the flows of mana, studied how the monsters moved, and kept his sword ready, but he didn't need to use it.
The team was a well-oiled machine. They carved a path through the sea of grass until the terrain finally opened up into a large, circular clearing paved with ancient, indestructible-looking stone.
The Safe Zone.
"Camp time," Carlos announced, dropping his heavy pack with a groan of relief. "My legs are burning. I swear the gravity is heavier on this floor."
" Gravity is the same," Elara said, checking her mana readings as she sat down gracefully. "You are just getting old, Carlos."
"I'm thirty-two," Carlos grumbled, unbuckling his breastplate. "In this profession, that is practically ancient. Tamsin, get a fire started. Grimmand, we need water. Jacob, you and I have some armor to discuss."
While the rest of the team set up the tents and started a pot of stew, Jacob sat cross-legged on a flat stone. Carlos handed over his breastplate and the bag of monster cores they had collected.
Jacob inspected the steel. It was good quality, C-rank standard, but it lacked any magical reinforcement.
It was just dead matter, shaped by a hammer and quenched properly, but the mana field was static.
"Alright, wizard," Carlos said, sitting opposite him. He gestured to the bag of cores. "Pick whatever battery you need."
Jacob shook his head, pushing the bag back toward the knight. "I don't know how to use those yet. I use the ambient mana in the air to feed the enchantments. My own magic just jump-starts it."
"Suit yourself," Carlos shrugged. "It makes the job cheaper for me."
Jacob pulled out his etching tool. It looked like a simple stylus, but the tip was made of pure mithril. It was designed to conduct magic without resistance.
He closed his eyes for a moment, shifting his perception. He didn't see the scratches or the dents on the breastplate. Instead, he visualized the armor as a three-dimensional wireframe floating in the dark.
Don't just make it hard, Jacob thought, remembering the rock he had exploded on the farm. Hardness creates brittleness. The floor is full of heavy hitters. It needs to displace force.
He began to construct a composite field in his mind.
He pulled the aspect of Strengthening, the rigid geometric locking of molecules, which he used to make things unbreakable.
But instead of applying it as a blanket layer, he wove it into a lattice structure, a honeycomb pattern that would mesh with the active field of the material to make something much stronger than it should be.
Then, he pulled the aspect of Durability. He used its flexible, shock-absorbing nature to fill the gaps in the honeycomb.
With this visualization, he should be able to put a more powerful form of his impact distribution enchantment into this material.
If he combined the rigid honeycomb of Strengthening with the spongy webbing of Durability, the result would be a plate that was as hard as diamond when struck, but instantly vibrated the kinetic energy out toward the edges rather than letting it get to Carlos's ribs.
Jacob opened his eyes and pressed the mithril tip to the center of the breastplate.
Without scratching the metal, he pushed a pulse of his mana through the tool. It flowed into the steel like water into a sponge, burning the invisible lattice he had visualized directly into the armor's mana field.
As he worked, movement at the edge of the clearing caught his eye.
Another group emerged from the tall grass.
This was not the terrified trio of novices they had met earlier. This was a five-man squad moving with a confident gait.
Their gear was worn but well-maintained, the mark of veterans who knew how to keep their equipment in shape.
They also had heavy packs that looked like they were just about to burst at the seams.
"Ho there!" the leader of the new group called out. He was a tall man with a scar running through his beard and a massive greatsword strapped to his back. "Room for a few more at the fire?"
Carlos stood up, his hand drifting casually near his sword hilt before he recognized the man.
"Brann?" Carlos relaxed, a genuine smile appearing. "I didn't know you were running the starter floors. I thought you were pushing into D-rank territory up north."
"Carlos!" Brann laughed, walking over to clasp forearms with the knight. "It's good to see you, you old warhorse. We were up north, but we heard the rumors about the drop rates down here today. We decided to come see if the stories were true."