Chapter 105. Upgrading the Rare Armors
Chapter 105. Upgrading the Rare Armors
Jack released the breath he had been holding since the announcement started. But he was soon surprised by another notification.
"Congratulations! Your Blacksmith job has upgraded to Intermediate Apprentice."
Jack was thrilled by his Artisan job's level up! His success in making the upgraded version of scale armor must have given him enough proficiency for this.
After calming down, he took a look at his newly crafted armor.
Blood Guard Scale Armor, level 15/35 (rare medium armor)
Physical Defense: 31
Magical Defense: 29
Durability: 50
Dexterity +3
Reduce all ranged damage received by 30%
Rare armor! With this, he now had two rare armors, and this one looked to be even better than his Shadow Bear Tasset.
"This is one cool armor!" Jack exclaimed, "Do you know where I can find more scale material? If I can produce more of this rare armor, I can get rich quickly just by selling it."
"In your dreams!" Peniel retorted. She had come out of her separate dimension when Jack entered the room and was floating around observing him at work.
"The reason you got a rare armor is because of that rare variant material and maybe your Goddess-granted luck. Normally you will only be able to produce uncommon grade Scale Armor."
"Really?" Jack's excitement deflated a bit. After some thought, he agreed that it would be unreasonable if he could get rare equipment so easily. After all, three out of the four materials could be procured from shops and not that expensive, either.
He immediately replaced his current armor with this Blood Guard Scale Armor. Together with the Shadow Bear Tasset, his appearance was now completely different from mainstream players.
He looked at the time; he still had a bit over half an hour left. Not wasting further time, he took out all his unused equipment: a magic hat, a leather bracer, two pairs of leather shoes, and leather pants. He clicked on the dismantle option in his blacksmith interface and dumped it all inside. The system asked for confirmation that he would like to proceed with the dismantling, he selected Yes.
A loading bar appeared over the armor being dismantled. After ten seconds passed, the loading bar filled up, and several materials popped up in front of him. There were four pieces of leather, one cloth, and five iron ores. All of them were common materials. He stored the materials and checked his stock of iron ore; he now had 37.
"Time to upgrade the level of my equipment," he said.
What Jack wanted to upgrade the most was his sword, Storm Breaker. Unfortunately, he wasn't upgrading that sword through blacksmithing. He would need to visit the weapon shop and buy many one-handed swords to upgrade it. But his funds were limited, so he would need to put that plan on hold for the time being.
His other valuable equipment would be his newly acquired rare chest armor and the rare Shadow Bear Tasset. He decided to upgrade the chest armor first.
He opened the interface and inputted the iron ore for the upgrading process. To his amazement, the success percentage was still 100% even though he was upgrading the armor from level 15 to 16.
Peniel saw his surprise and told him, "Two reasons why you had a 100% success rate when you upgraded this level 15 equipment: you got assistance from the rare tools, and you're now an Intermediate Apprentice Blacksmith. At this level, the percentage reduction only starts at level 15, so any equipment below this level has a 100% success rate."
Hearing her explanation, Jack decided not to waste this chance. He repeatedly upgraded his Blood Guard Scale Armor. It only started showing reduced success percentages when the armor hit level 21. He also found out that after level 20, he needed two iron ores to upgrade instead of one.
Since he had limited iron ores, he focused on upgrading his two rare armor pieces and his magic staff. He upgraded the Blood Guard Scale Armor, Shadow Bear Tasset, and Repeater Staff to level 21 since that was the last level where the success chance was still 100%. These upgrades had used up 24 iron ores; he only had 13 left.
He then successfully upgraded the Blood Guard scale armor to level 22. The percentage was 95% and used another two ores. He kept on going, even though the success rate kept dropping. When he was trying for level 25, he failed twice, wasting four iron ores, but succeeded on the third attempt.
He only had one iron ore left. He kept the last piece and stopped the upgrading process.
He inspected the three pieces of equipment he had upgraded.
Blood Guard Scale Armor, level 25/35 (rare medium armor)
Physical Defense: 56
Magical Defense: 54
Durability: 50
Dexterity +3
Reduce all ranged damage received by 30%
Shadow Bear Tasset, level 21/35 (rare medium armor)
Physical Defense: 35
Magical Defense: 33
Durability: 40
Endurance +3
When HP is below 50%, defense is increased by 80%
Repeater Staff, level 21/25 (uncommon magic weapon)
Magical damage: 57
Range: 10 meters
Attack speed: 1
Energy: 60
Energy automatically refills when out of combat
With the upgrades of the two rare pieces of armor, his defense had skyrocketed. He would be able to go toe to toe with stronger opponents without worrying about dodging.
He checked on the time; he had less than five minutes left. But since he had run out of crafting materials, he just packed up and walked out of the forging room.
It was close to noon when he left the blacksmith workshop. He decided to use the rest of the day to start his hunting trip while making his way to tomorrow's meeting place.
He exited the capital from the Western Gate and proceeded southwest. He fought several Wolf packs and Goblin packs on his way.
When he arrived at a rocky area with several deserted mines and broken down mining equipment, he encountered new kinds of monsters. They were Gnomes and Gremlins, which were also on his hunting list.
The Gnomes were halfling creatures with green skin. They mostly held pickaxes that they used to dig for ore around the rocky area. But when Jack came into their range, they started to run after him swinging their pickaxes as make-shift weapons. Jack gladly met them in combat. He sent some ranged magic attacks while waiting for them to come near enough to engage in melee.
Gnomes were roughly like the Goblins; they had a childlike appearance and liked to fight in groups. But their groupings were considerably larger than an average Goblin pack, numbering around ten Gnomes in each group. They fought without any cohesion and mostly just made random attacks. With some cunning, Jack caused them to bump into each other on several occasions. Once they lost more than half their group, the remaining Gnomes started to scatter, running into the mines around the area. Their actions made it harder for Jack to score his target of 100 Gnomes.
Jack used his staff's ranged attacks to kill some of the fleeing Gnomes. He didn't waste time chasing those who managed to flee into the mines; instead, he looked for other nearby groups. He prioritized efficiency as he had limited time.
The Gremlins sometimes joined in the attack when he was dealing with the Gnomes. These slick creatures were much more challenging to deal with as they mostly attacked from range. Luckily, Jack only needed to kill 30 of these creatures to complete his hunting quest. The Gremlins' weapons were mostly slingshots with some higher-level ones using crude bows and arrows.
Jack dealt with them using his Magician's range attacks and used Charge unexpectedly to close the distance and finish them off with a Swing.