Just a Guy and a Gate to the Multiverse - Chapter 23 (Patreon)

Chapter 23 - Eldar Armor

Watching the elves take care of the deep surgical wounds, letting flesh mend around metal without any trouble thanks to the magic behind their singing, made me envious. The port for the Automail had healed without any trouble in just fifteen minutes after installation.

Normally, that process alone took a year and was exhausting on the patient’s body, followed by at least another year of physical therapy. At best, the entire process could be cut down to one year if the patient had a strong will and was ready to outright torture themselves.

And here we were, with the natural process cut down to less than an hour.

Magic could really be bullshit. No wonder that, from a worldbuilding perspective, cursed wounds were needed to nerf it.

Yet, there was no point in me learning it for now, since I would need an World Attunement to use it. Right, now there is no practial use for me. And I have my future World Attunements already planned out for a while. It would take more than a century for me to get this form of magic.

There are better ones I am planning to get earlier.

“Good job. Now wake our patient up!” I ordered with a lot more confidence than before. This had been the most complicated and dangerous part of the entire procedure. Things usually went wrong while installing the port on the patient’s body.

While we were not in the clear yet, since we still needed to test the functionality of each nerve connected to the port, fixing any problem would only take a minor additional surgery. As long as the entire thing didn’t fuck up, we were fine.

We would have known already if that had happened.

As Glaedr woke from his magically induced coma, he didn’t show any obvious signs of pain, which was good.

“Glaedr, how are you feeling? Does anything hurt?”

No, there is no pain. Just some itching around the metal, the golden dragon communicated mentally as he regained his wits.

I nodded. “That’s normal. Your flesh is getting used to the metal. I just wasn’t sure if that would apply to a dragon, too. Now then, we need your cooperation. I am going to test each nerve connection. It will feel a bit uncomfortable, which is normal! It would be bad if you didn’t feel anything. That would mean we have to perform another minor surgery to connect that specific nerve. So please answer truthfully while I test every nerve.”

It’s fine.

Fortunately for us, it seemed we had done everything right, and every nerve had properly connected to the port.

At this point, our audience had returned. Everyone wanted to be there for the moment of truth.

“All right, Glaedr. This will be the most uncomfortable part for you. While connecting your new arm, there will be… well, not really pain, but an intense shock going through your body. It is a natural reaction. I still need you to try to hold still as best as possible.” A group of elves and Saphira had positioned themselves around the golden dragon, ready to keep him in place. “The others will help hold you in place, but you know, a dragon’s strength is no joke. So please try to suppress your instinctive reactions as much as possible, or we risk damaging the port.”

I will do so, came the reply, accompanied by a short nod.

We positioned the golden, dragon-claw-shaped Automail directly at the port on Glaedr’s stump.

“Now then, on three. One… Two… Three!”

With precise movements beyond human ability, the elven medical experts swiftly connected the Automail to the port. Glaedr’s body only shuddered slightly. With the help of the others, he remained almost completely still.

Rhunön and I quickly secured the Automail to the port, fixing the necessary screws and finishing the connection process.

Everyone took a step back once we were done, giving the golden dragon some space.

“Glaedr, try to carefully lift your foreleg. If I did everything right, it should be no different from moving your regular foreleg,” I instructed, watching him with anticipation.

Another problem I had considered was the fact that his foreleg had been missing for a century. Maybe he had forgotten how to move that foreleg. It was my biggest concern, and not one I had a real solution for. After all, in the Fullmetal Alchemist world, you got an Automail pretty soon after losing a limb.

Nobody wanted to spend a large amount of time as a cripple. Waiting a few years was already rare, not to mention a century. Humans just didn’t live that long.

But it seemed my concerns had been unnecessary!

Only moments later, Glaedr began to move his new limb. And he did so without a problem. At first it were just slow and careful moments, before he began to put more pressure onto the new limb. Finally he took into the air, rushing towards a nearby before crushing it with a single strike of his metal appendage.

There was not even a scratch.

It was rare for elves to show any intense emotions. They were a very calm race. But at that moment, joy and happiness were on all their faces.

Most surprisingly, I saw actual tears on Oromis’s face as he watched his closest partner get his limb back. If intense emotions were rare among elves, then tears were even rarer.

He turned toward me and bowed his head. “I am in your debt, Matt! How can I ever repay this?”

I quickly shook my head. “There is really no need, Master Oromis. You are already teaching me so much. Just keep doing that without holding back. That is already payment enough.” Or, in other words, teach me even the dangerous things you try to keep secret.

“Not only Oromis and Glaedr are in your debt, Matt. All of us elves are.” Queen Islanzadí stepped forward, looking regal and graceful as a true ruler, yet emanating the happiness all the present elves were radiating. “I declare you a Friend of the Elves. You will always be welcome among us, and we will aid you to the best of our abilities. I already instructed my people to prepare a banquet in your honor.”

“Thank you, Queen Islanzadí,” I said gratefully.

“There is no need to thank me. We have to thank you. Your gift will be spoken of among our people for a long time. We have also prepared a gift for you.”

An elf stepped toward me with a finely crafted wooden box, its lid open.

Atop a cushion sat a ring. I had seen a similar ring on Eragon’s finger before. The ring Aren, that one had belonged to Brom before being passed to Eragon.

It carried the symbol of yawë, or Elf-friend, in their language. While Eragon’s was made with a fine sapphire, mine had a nice red ruby.

“I gratefully accept this gift. It is an honor to be considered a friend of the elves,” I thanked them once again. I had been trying to acquire something like this ring for a while. More specifically, a gem like this.

That was not an ordinary jewel. Gems like it were specifically cut by the elves to store energy, which could be used for magic, and they were extremely valuable. A magic user with such a jewel was definitely more powerful than one without.

After all, as long as a magic user patiently stored the energy he didn’t need every day, he had another source of energy to draw from besides his own lifeforce. Add to that the fact that only the elves knew how to make these, and I already had an advantage over the majority of human magic users.

A rough voice spoke up. “Not only the elves,” Orik said warmly. “What you did here today affects all the people of Alagaësia. I, as the representative of King Hrothgar, declare you a Friend of us dwarves as well!”

“I am happy to be considered a friend of you dwarves, too.” I smiled, and I truly was. I had always wanted to see their capital city, which had been carved into the inside of one of the largest mountains in this world. It was said that several mountains could fit inside it.

Who wouldn’t want to see something like that at least once in their life? A real dwarven city hidden inside an enormous mountain!

———

Things changed considerably for me after I granted Glaedr a new limb, solving the limitations of his crippled state. The most notable difference was how the elves treated me. I had never noticed it before, but they had always kept their distance from me, except for a select few.

I always attributed it to their aloof and calm nature, not to the fact that I was an outsider. If I approached one of them, they would be polite and answer me. There was no discrimination or anything like that. But since that day, every one of them had started to treat me warmly, include me in their community, actively seek me out, and give me gifts like fresh fruits, new sets of clothes, and so on.

The experience was noticeably different.

It even seemed like, before that, they had kept their children away from me. Funnily enough, those children were the elves closest to me in age. Children were rare and precious to the elves, and as an ageless race, they seemed to have a hard time reproducing.

Right now, there were only two among the entire population of the elves: Alanna and Dusan. Both were twelve years old and immensely beautiful in an ethereal way. They had a silvery glow around them, as if they were leaking energy.

Apparently, elven children were blessed with gifts of grace and power beyond those of adult elves.

And since that day, they would often come to visit me. Before that, I hadn’t seen them at all. Now, they even started learning from me, getting a new perspective in life, often asking questions while I worked on my Power Armor, one of my current main projects.

Thanks to creating Glaedr’s arm together with Rhunön, I had gained massive insight into how to process this metal from a comet called Brightsteel. And thanks to all that research, I could produce more of it now. With a metal harder and more durable than any I knew, yet lighter at the same time, I could do quite a lot.

In the Fallout universe, the challenge of Power Armor had always been developing the right balance between the protective functionality of the armor while keeping it flexible enough to move around.

Make the plating too weak, and the armor would be fast, but a regular bullet could easily pierce through it. There was a reason why we no longer wore armor like knights once did. If the armor plating was too strong, it would not only become much slower, but also cost a ton of energy that was not sustainable.

That had been an actual problem with the first generation of T-45 Power Armor, developed before the Great War. And it had a weakness against energy weapons, too.

I could have simply kept using the designs of the original X-02 Power Armor and just replaced the protective regular steel with Brightsteel. But why? If I had a metal stronger and lighter than any other, I could simply use that to my advantage and develop a stronger, more compact design that was even faster.

Something more like one of Iron Man’s early armor designs than the bulky Power Armor from Fallout. Even the current X-02 designs I had, the best Power Armor of the Fallout universe, didn’t use my Fusion Cores to their full advantage.

Fusion Cores were something consumable to them, a fuel that needed to be regularly replaced, not a long-term power source unlike my infinite ones. That was why their armor was designed around a single Fusion Core in the first place.

I could use multiple, granting me access to much more power.

That was how I developed a completely new model of Power Armor. Since the elves’ influence contributed a lot to this model, I decided to name it in their honor: Power Armor Model: Eldar Mk-1.

Instead of directly calling it Elven Power Armor or something similar, I decided to reference a race of space elves, the Eldar from Warhammer 40k, a universe I honestly had little desire to visit for a long time. Maybe one day, if I felt like suffering in the grimdark for a while.

It was a more compact design with a dark silver color. It still resembled the X-02, but with a slightly more elvish design. Not only was it much stronger and faster thanks to its lighter build, but the addition of four more Fusion Cores also helped in that regard.

These were a necessary addition, considering the features built into it. Besides my Transmutation Arrays, which I would never want to leave out of my armor, I built it to protect the wearer as much as possible. It protected the inside from heat, cold, explosions, shock, and blunt damage, too.

I also made sure that the armor could survive in space. After all, sooner or later, I would be going to a sci-fi setting in space. That was a fixed plan. Fallout had already accomplished something similar, having fought a war on the moon, but that feature was not part of the standard-issue Power Armors, which could already survive underwater.

Additionally, it monitored my health and injected me with a Stimpack if I took too much damage. It had additional servos that let me jump high and sprint fast. Thermal vision and night vision in my helmet, besides the life-support system, were also welcome additions.

And I got a jetpack that, thanks to my infinite Fusion Cores, let me fly indefinitely. Although not that high, since the power of the jetpack design was still limited.

But the addition I was most proud of was an original idea of mine. I installed two holoprojectors on it, one on my back and the other in front, each connected to one of the five Fusion Cores by itself. Those hard-light projections could be really handy. I had a few different ones programmed into it, but I believed the standard one would be the one I used the most.

A personal force field made of hard light around myself. A personal shield made of hard light. It could tank quite a bit of damage. It would take a constant barrage of serious firepower, like a rocket launcher or a minigun, to break it.

I thought this Power Armor counted as one of my trump cards, although I would definitely need some more. Fortunately, I had made progress on another trump card I had in mind, even if I had no idea whether it would work.

At least my healing of Glaedr allowed me to get access to the knowledge I needed to test it. After I did so, Oromis finally accepted me as one of his true disciples alongside Eragon. Not just someone he had agreed to teach out of obligation, but a real student.

While he didn’t teach me all the Dragon Rider stuff, like flight techniques between Rider and dragon, combat strategy for aerial battles, and so on, he had started to fully include me in Eragon’s magical training.

Sure, he had been teaching me before. But he had held back and hadn’t taught me everything. Now, he had started the full education. Even the dangerous things, like the words of death, for example, which could kill someone without wards through a single-word spell.

But most importantly, he taught me what I had always wanted to learn here: the true depths of energy manipulation. Not only how to use my own energy for my spells or store it, but also how to draw it from my surroundings or even from others.

I knew that it was possible, and I would have experimented with it once I left the elves. But I had always preferred to learn it properly from a teacher!

[ End of the Chapter ]