Chapter 653 Three-Layer Leather Armor
Eisen questioned the Champion about what sort of items she would like the old man to build. For the most part, it seemed like she really just wanted improved or newer versions of her current equipment, so it wasn't anything all too special with the exception of those dual daggers connected to each other by an extendable chain.
Otherwise, she only had a regular leather armor as well as some tools that she could use in different situations, a secondary weapon, and some consumables like potions. Those were rather straight-forward things, and after Eisen managed to talk about what exactly she wanted these items to be like, the old man got started on creating them. This time, he would make the special weapon last.
For the most part, everything was pretty easy to make. First, he started with the leather-armor. Actually, the Champion had some pretty interesting ideas about this as well, although it was just made interesting by the base-material.
She wanted the leather to be made of three different basic layers. The first, outermost layer was a thick, strong type of leather that would allow it to easily defend against weaker attacks right off the bat. There would have to be some cuts made into the different parts, more than usual at least, to allow for proper movement with this sort of thick material. Eisen could also soften it a little, but if he overdid it, then it would definitely impact the quality of the overall item as well as the defensive capabilities in those softened spots.
Either way, then there was another layer, the innermost layer, which was supposed to be something that, instead of defending against attacks, directly helped the Champion by slowly but surely healing her.
For this, Eisen used something that he had actually been playing around with as well for a while now. He was trying to figure out whether or not it was possible to cause different special effects by treating or dying leather with special materials.
In this case, he just treated some summer-troll leather, a monster with a particularly good health-regeneration to the point that they were able to heal any sort of wound within a few minutes, but rather weak and thin skin that allowed them to receive a lot of damage in the first place.
It wasn't a material that was fit for something like defensive armor in the first place, but Eisen figured that he could try and use something like this to create something like special healing-gloves, or maybe reusable leather bandages if it was necessary. After all, here in this world, nothing really got permanently dirty due to the powers of the God of Comfort, so it wouldn't be that big a deal to reuse them as long as you made sure to clean them at least a little bit.
Either way, Eisen left this summer-troll leather inside of a bath of heavily concentrated health-potions for a few weeks now. The leather itself, which was dark brown before, was now a bright red instead. And of course, Eisen didn't just put it into a simple potion-bath and that was it. The actual tub that he placed everything into was a special item as well.
It was an item created to use the item-fusion skill to slwoly but surely fuse the effects of whatever was placed inside of it together in specific, determined ways. In this case, Eisen made it so that the leather would absorb the healing effects of the potion.
It was hard to just fuse the basic, conceptual effects of some items with other at this point just by using the skill regularly, but Eisen found that this kind of thing worked after prolonged exposure, so he hoped to be able to achieve something with this. Either way, at the same time, this special tub was supposed to make sure that the leather wouldn't somehow end up breaking down due being placed into this strong potion for so long, and instead was supposed to be a bit strengthened instead.
And now, Eisen took the large sheets of leather out of the different tubs that he created for this infusion, before making sure that it had properly worked.
"Hm… Good, it's pretty evenly colored, at least. That's a good sign." The old man pointed out as he rubbed his fingers over the slightly roughened-up surface of this leather after it had spent this much time in this liquid to make sure that the little strength the leather had to begin with wasn't further weakened.
As far as he could tell, it really wasn't an issue in this case, and instead a complete success for Eisen's experiement. As such, the old man quickly placed these sheets of leather down where he would then later layer the different sheets to combine them into a single base material.
But first, Eisen had to get the last of the three layers finished. The middle layer. Instead of leather, the Champion said she wanted it to be some form of strong cloth that would be capable of more easily catching thrown projectiles. Eisen immediately understood what she wanted, of course. She wanted the middle-layer to be a layered mesh of metallic fibers and threads that would end up working quite similar to chainmail armor.
In the end, Eisen chose a few different materials that seemed a good fit. For the most part, Eisen of course chose innately strong materials that he sometimes had to fuse with some highly infused mythril that was supposed to be capable of basically nullifying any sort of impact.
Since it seemed like this part was intended as a defense against projectiles, it wouldn't have made sense to use Eisen's 'Blazing Core of the Mountain' mythril like he had considered at first. After all, there was no reason to repel any sort of attack.
Instead, Eisen made sure that he really concentrated on using parts of his mythril batch that were capable of absorbing impact the best. The old man alloyed this material with some of the other sorts of metals and then ran them through the thread-making mechanism before turning them into something similar to cloth.
Of course, in the end it wasn't just 'something similar to cloth', but just basic cloth, but since the gaps inbetween the threads were mostly too large so that Eisen could create a proper mesh, the old man wasn't sure if he should really consider this a sort of cloth.
Eisen made sure to layer the different, thin cloth-meshes and slightly shifted them each to the side somewhat randomly, to make sure that in the end when looking at this final piece of cloth there wouldn't be any sort of gap that one could use to aim at skin, while the mesh-effect would still properly work.
And so, the old man got started finalizing this special material using an item that he just quickly improvised. He took two large two by two meter planks and covered one side of each in a thin layer of mana-crystal so that he could inscribe them properly, and then created enchantments that were really just supposed to assist in a targeted compression so that Eisen could thin down the three layers that were each relatively thick into a single thin layer that Eisen could work with properly.
Along the edges of the the two planks, Eisen added some spiraling holes that he could use to basically screw the two pieces together and hold them in place for a while. The actual screws were just made of a long metal bar that was leftover after a project Eisen had been working on before. He simply used transmutation to turn them into screws that could be used for this more than easily. In total, creating this whole thing took Eisen about ten minutes with the expert-like help from Bai and Eisen's elemental spirit.
Now, he just placed the special, bright-red summer-troll leather down onto the lower plank, placed the meshed metallic cloth down onto that leather, and then added the thick, defensive leather on the outside before placing the second plank on top and screwing everything in place so that there would be equal pressure on every part.
Eisen even placed a few weights onto the center to make sure that it was as equal as possible. And meanwhile, Eisen would end up working on some other items while the leather was finishing up and being pressed into a sheet that he could use.
These other items were simple small blades and daggers that had different uses, whether climbing, distraction, or combat, as well as other generic tools like lockpicks. In this champion's case, these might be useful after all, in case the arena created a field with different structures that one could hide in.
And so, the old man finished all of these things and even prepared everything that he needed to prepare for the final item of the gearset, the champion's main-weapon.
But before then, Eisen quickly removed the weight from the leather-press and quickly started to mark the places where the sheet had to be cut into pieces specifically with the help of his visualization, before Eisen and his elemental spirit quickly got to work. It didn't take long before all the pieces for this leather-armor were finshed, and all that Eisen had left to do was put them together.
This was a rather relaxing and quick work actually, since Eisen only had to use his hands for it instead of his whole body like forging often required. Either way, like this, he could speak to the champion some more about these other arenas that she suggested to him, and it didn't take that long until Eisen had finished this special leather armor-set for the champion. Just like that, Eisen had finished another part of Gonor's quest, and was now six out of ten steps there.
With a satisfied expression, Eisen handed everything that he had finished so far to the champion next to him so that she could get a look at it already while he started on the last item.
He looked at everything with a curious smile on his face, even inspecting the different parts of the weapon that the champion had been using up until now. It really just seemed to work in the way that Eisen assumed it did.
It had an incredibly long chain hidden away inside of spatial-gems placed onto the handles of the two halves of the blade. This seemed like something that would work for a while, but Eisen had another idea, although he would still use spatial-gems on this.
At the same time, this was something that let him play around with another thing that he wanted to automate for a while now.