The final products of alchemy were typically one singur object.

  A fact that John aimed to abuse. Possession and its adjacent Skills required that his target be one object, which had caused many design issues in the past. Design issues that Scarlett had solved through creative application of material conditions or enchantments. Solutions that Delicia saw as a challenge. A challenge that John fully believed she would overcome.

  What she was doing, he already knew was possible. He had yered several materials himself, to get the Golden Boy model of his Creator Puppet done. However, that was not his area of expertise and Delicia did have more tricks up her sleeve than he did using Create.

  What he did not expect was for her to get it done within 24 hours.

  “Ta-da!” Delicia decred and gestured at a curtain.

  “I think you’re supposed to pull that back while you say that,” John sarcastically commented, while he had a look around.

  Delicia had made herself comfortable in the biggest boratory at the top of the highest tower of the Alchemy Lab. It was one vast space, filled to the brim with multi-yered gss and metal constructions that filled several square metres each. Each was a monstrosity of connecting tubes and fsks, cylinders and elongated cooling mechanisms. Where standard chemistry had the decency to be at least generally modest in the amount of utensils employed for a single production step, alchemy had no such restraint. The liquids, gases, and occasional solids were moving through complicated systems that even John had trouble following.

  It got even worse when one considered that every single one of these walls of metal and gss were connected to each other in one form or another. The vast tower chamber was defined by these alchemical constructions spiralling up to the underside of the pointed roof, then coming back down in a pilr of brass, doubtlessly containing many more complicated refinement steps.

  That it all came to a stop with a simple wooden table and a fsk getting drip-fed a light purple liquid was equally comedic and worrying.

  Inside this open boratory, some segments had been cornered off for other projects. John saw what was effectively a butcher’s shop, devoid of product but with bloodstains still marking the wood. There was a retively normal workbench with instruments that appeared futuristic, especially in the otherwise Middle Age inspired environment of wooden beams and cobblestone. There was a furnace and a loom, for some reason.

  John currently stood in a corner, more isoted than the rest, with various metals and rocks scattered about the tables. At the centre of it all was a mixture of operating table and frame. Outlined by metal were the dimensions of his body.

  “You really did a lot over 2 days,” he had to say.

  “It helps when you don’t have to sleep and don’t get tired in general,” Delicia chirped, then threw her hands presentingly towards the curtain again. “Ta-da!”

  “Again, you have to pull the curtain back as you do that,” John told her.

  “Ta-da!”

  “Are you just trying to annoy me?”

  “What, no, would never.” Delicia waved off repeatedly and, with a giggle, pulled back the white cloth. “I present: Perfect Puppet Mark 1 – Swirls!”

  Before John stood a mannequin of metal and rock. It had his dimensions, even the details of his definitions. The origin of the name was apparent in the seven different colours that swirled over the surface, glistening metallically in the artificial light. Brown, green, red, blue, purple, silver and gold, the colours of an elemental of each kind and Elementium, all mixed together into a trippy, dense, asymmetrical dispy.

  “Does that have any benefits?” John asked and gave the potential puppet an interested squeeze. To his surprise, the metallic outside yielded. It was like he was touching a particurly dense foam cushion. It resumed the previous shape swiftly.

  “It’s the Swirling Effect, creative I know,” Delicia told him. “When you liquify materials into a dense enough union, they retain their individual visual characteristics upon hardening but share their physical and magical characteristics.” She smiled broadly. “You’re lucky you’re rich. Takes a particur selection of metals with simir magical matrices to make this work. Hmmm… should I tell you how much the liquification costs…?”

  “I saw already,” John told her. “I check the Guild Bank bance every day.”

  “Psh, paranoid much?”

  “Literally one of my foremost character traits,” the Gamer responded drily. “Different question – Perfect Puppet Mark 1? How can something be perfect and be the first iteration?”

  “Hey, you chose the project name!” Delicia stated. “You gonna stand there and be all compin-y when someone else does the work for you?”

  “Of all the things to get defensive about,” John hummed and cast Creator Puppet. The old Golden Boy was already parked back in his Puppet Room.

  The Swirls model came to life to a dramatic, “IT LIIIIIIIIIVES!” from Delicia, complete with a mad scientist cackle. John did her the favour of taking a few stilted steps off the presentation ptform. After the dramatics, he moved about. As expected, there were no issues with moving itself, the Skill made sure of that more than the quality of the body did.

  “You did it,” John told the alchemist.

  “I did? I mean… of course I did!” Delicia had to regain her smugness after hearing the good news. While John kept walking in the new body, she asked, “What part of the goals exactly did I hit? 200% bonus Strength?”

  “I never set such a ludicrous goal,” the Gamer protested. “Let’s see, you upped base Endurance by 250, increased the percentage buff from 25% to 40%, upped Physical Resistance from 40% to 60% and created a new Attribute that gives 100 ft Strength.”

  Delicia clicked her tongue. “Ft? That’s a failure then.”

  “I think the system itself won’t allow you to give the Creator Puppet a scaling bonus to Strength or Agility. Would be odd if you could do something that’s usually enabled by a Perk. Also 100 ft is pretty damn good.”

  “Psh, pretty damn good, like that’s good enough.” Delicia crossed her arms. It only now occurred to John how simultaneously fitting and absurd she looked, a big-boobed maid in a rustic alchemy b. “I didn’t do what I set out to do, so that’s a failure. Easy as that.”

  “Well, whatever motivates you to keep on working,” John said, personally pleased with this outcome.

  For the purposes of Inkaryl alone, getting this upgraded body had not been strictly necessary. Usually, a better Creator Puppet was only reflected in it being better defensively. Strength and Agility were tied to his Mental Stats, so he could have tried wielding Inkaryl with a puppet made from pin rock, if he so desired.

  The reason why John wanted to get a better body regardless of whether or not there was a Strength upgrade involved was the obvious one. If he was capable of having a second body capable of wielding a powerful weapon, that body needed to be capable of surviving the frontlines.

  “Failure or not, want to see if it can lift the mace?” John asked.

  “Oh boy, do I!” Delicia excimed.

  “Then come along.” John and his new Creator Puppet led the way outside. They walked all the way to the Alchemy Testing Site west of the b. It was rgely unused, so the greenery was intact, contrary to what depictions on a map may suggest. With Delicia in charge, it was only a matter of time until one matched the other though.

  John and Delicia stopped at the edge of the clearing, while the Swirls Model continued for a couple more metres. Then, the Gamer extended the hand of his puppet body. He made sure the thumb pointed to the ground. Last thing he wanted was the weight to tear him down. Following an impulse, the hand closed.

  An interpy of instruments underlined a small choir of angelic voices accompanied the appearance of the mace. Streaks of elemental light wove together into the long grip of the weapon, dulled into light grey once consolidated. Upwards, it ended in a thorn with six corners. Downwards, it extended for much further, until spreading out into the head of the weapon.

  A central chunk of carefully shaped Astrotium was the heart to which six jagged bdes were bound. Each of them shone in the prismatic colour of Fusional alloys. With a sound like a metal heart beating, the bdes spread outwards, anchored to a ring located where the grip transitioned into the head of the weapon. Like the jaw of a sea monster closing, the bdes suddenly snapped back into pce, now each the colour corresponding to one of the six elements.

  John slowly turned the Creator Puppet’s hand. He smiled in pce of his third body and swung the mace. Inkaryl chimed and sung, screeching like an excited violin, as it cut through the air. The swing was steady. The mace y heavy in the puppet’s hand, but he could wield it. All it took was about three times the strength of his original body.

  Concentrating, John tried to get the weapon to shift elemental alignment. The bdes did spread out, remained like that for a few seconds, then snapped back into pce, without changing. ‘Well, that was to be expected,’ the Gamer thought. To change his soul type actively had been a part of Arkeidos’ Innate Ability.

  In other words, Inkaryl was just an impressive mace at the moment.

  But what a mace it was.

  The creator puppet dropped the weapon to the floor. The six points sunk into the dirt like they had once sunk into John’s back. It remained there, upright, while John got ready to leave. “You’re just going to leave it out here?” Delicia asked.

  “It’ll always come to me or any of my bodies when I ask,” John responded. “Plus, you want to try and lift it?”

  “Nah, I’m good,” Delicia assured. “But someone else could get here and put it in a sealed box or something like that?”

  “It smashed through the barrier between Kingdoms, I’m fairly certain there’s nothing in this world that can keep me from it,” John responded as they walked away. “Now I would invite you to the actual testing, but I’m not sure if a Raid is the pce for you.”

  “Is there a watcher’s area for those?”

  “Not in the current arena,” John told her. In the Twisted City and the Valley of Thunder and Stone, there had at least been the potential for an outside onlooker to exist. In the Music Library, there was no potential for this. The entire shop became the arena, with no space to stand outside the battlefield.

  “Bah, I’ll just use your memory as a repcement ter then.”

  _____________________________________________________________________________

  It was several office hours ter that John managed to drum the combat crew together. It was him, his doubles, his elementals, Aclysia, Beatrice, Cire, Momo, Metra, Rave, Nia and Lee. Everyone else was either far above the challenge rating of the Raid, under it, a non-combatant, or not present. Lee was present to set-up the Fateweaving for them. A single Intermediary Barrier, for a couple of hours, without time dition, she was capable of.

  “Alright, women,” he raised his voice in that overacted, motivational speech tone, “today we-“

  “BOOOOOO!” his girlfriend shouted. “Show us your tits!”

  “Can I at least finish my joke before you start yours?” the Gamer compined.

  “No,” Rave responded and blinked, as if the suggestion fbbergasted her.

  While John grumbled something, his eyes fell on Cire. The vampire maid was jumping from one foot onto the other. “Excited?”

  “I haven’t really fought anything since getting into our contract,” she answered, reducing her excitement to merely shifting her weight back and forth. “I do so enjoy murdering things.”

  “As long as it stays at ‘things’ and not ‘people’,” John warned.

  Cire responded with a charismatic smile that disarmed him without clearing his suspicions at all. It was terrifyingly adorable and his mind just turned somewhere else. He trusted she wouldn’t do anything he wouldn’t approve of.

  “Anyway, what I wanted to say is that this will be pretty easy, all things considered,” John told everyone. “We are overlevelled, not as badly as we were for Ohmior, but still. I hope we can breeze through this in a couple of evenings.”

  “Then let’s go!” Metra demanded.

  John did as the blonde berserker demanded and turned around. One push of the door ter, he stepped into the darkness behind the I.D. Gate. A darkness that was swiftly repced with the cylinder shape of the Music Library. The room was filled with shelves, stacked with nicely sorted vinyls and CD cases. There were only five genres represented: cssical, metal, pop, jazz, and techno. Of those, the pop segment was oddly greyed out and dusty. A visual consequence, no doubt, of the Pop Queen being defeated.

  There were at least five more bosses for John to deal with. The four bosses from the other genres and Steve. The owner of the shop sat behind the register and waved. He was three metres tall, but otherwise he looked like the everyman of music store owners. Short, dark hair, covered by a cap, with an average build covered by a bck shirt and blue jeans. Aside from John’s intuition, it was also his Loottable that gave away he was going to be a boss.

  The thing was that John did not trust he was the final boss. When something was obvious, there usually was a secret attached. That’d have to be uncovered after he got there though.

  “Any special wishes for the next boss?” John asked.

  “Let’s get cssic out of the way,” Rave suggested. “I wanna keep techno for st.”

  Not exactly solid reasoning, but absent of any other suggestions, John went with that. “You heard the thorn in my life,” John said, to the protest of his girlfriend. “Put on the cssical music, if you would.”

  “Customer is king,” Steve said and pced a vinyl on an old-timey pyer he had behind the counter. The shelves all around faded from existence, while a bst door came down and hid Steve safely behind it. Left behind was a rge, empty room. The ground turned bck, assuming that specific texture of a vinyl disk. A part of the cylindrical wall slid aside and revealed a tonearm that slowly lowered onto the spinning disk. The needle touched the floor and began to trace the path.

  In the middle of the room, from the spike that kept the vinyl in pce, rose in gold and silver the boss. Like Pop Queen, his energy body cked any defining features. In details, he had only a powdered, white wig and the kind of 16th century coat that one would commonly imagine Mozart to wear. In his hand manifested a baton which, with all the dramatics of a conductor, he proceeded to swing.

  ’40 levels under us, should be really easy,’ John thought.