Chương 87: R&R2 Ch. 26 — Soul Crafting

Jasmine was feeling a lot better after the sleepover and spending the weekend helping out a city and making the world a better place. It wasn't a solution to her problems, and it wasn't like she could forget what had happened to her or anything like that, but it was relaxing. In a mortal combat, trying to ignore her problems kind of way. It wasn't actually that relaxing, but she was working with what she got. And she wouldn't be able to make a deal with her grandma until they were at least D-rank.

C-rank would be preferable, but they weren't going to get there anytime soon. They were on the road to one hundred thousand accrued belief and karma. To get to C-rank if the pattern held, they would need to get one million. Jasmine was pretty sure they would get to that point in time for the tournament, but she wasn't sure how much before that they could get it. If she wanted her plan to work, she needed to get it done before the tournament. There was no other choice. So she pushed the team as hard as she could.

Nicholas did well under those conditions. Eva less so. Eva was slowing the team down, that much was obvious, but she had already decided to be a solo hero that regularly worked with them, which had solved most of it but Jasmine couldn't help but be a little concerned about her friend not keeping up. There wasn't anything she could do about it besides train and encourage her, so Jasmine did her best cheerleader impression for both of them, and they supported her too.

Right now she was in her soul forge; it was finally time to make a new armor. The gravity and force build was a great generalist set, and it was her favorite. The flying swords build wasn't great at fighting normal humans; it was hard not to just cut them into bits, but when it came to offensive ability, it was second to none. She wasn't going to let that build fall by the wayside. Her gunslinger build was mostly just the one she used when there wasn't something else calling her, which she felt bad about.

It was a proper load-out, and it was fun to do a consumable-based load-out. It was definitely a set of gear that she was going to give more love in the future. Next was her defender and healer set up. This hadn't been used since the train entrance, and before that had been the wave. It wasn't a build she used that often because it made her fully rely on others. And Nicholas had admitted that as much as he wanted to be more than just the multiplier for her ability, the defender armor was stressful to work with.

When she wore that one, it was all on him and could be hard to work with. And she was now going to make another armor like that, though it was not supposed to ever see combat. She knew it would but there was only so much she could do. The list of powers she wanted for the armor was pretty extensive already. She needed a way to detect people; she needed telekinesis or something like that, and she needed it to be able to teleport herself and what she was carrying.

Just those three would have been significant, but she also wanted it to have some illusion capabilities, shielding, and physical enhancements. She had taken the physical enhancements out of all of her other armors except the defender set up so having one for more physical oomph made sense to her. And while this was going to be her search and rescue armor, there was a lot of crossover between search and rescue and sneaky rogue armor. So she figured it would be best to try and kill two birds with one stone.

At least this one wouldn't need a weapon for it. Jasmine had the perfect weapon already built for this armor, not the spear, obviously. The spear was an emergency-only weapon. The emerald-green carving knife appeared in Jasmine's hand. To her, it was just another friend she had made, and it was gentle. But both Nicholas and Eva had said it screamed danger, and it should. It cut souls; it cut them really well.

One time she and Nicholas had caught a Beyonder that they thought was dead but had turned out to be in some kind of stasis. Its death scream had been horrifying; the soul knife was perfect for this kind of work, even if she didn't want to admit it entirely. Thankfully, she didn't have much need for assassin armor; this was to save people with the potential to play ninja if she had to fight without time for a costume change.

She had requisitioned two weeks off for the whole team so that she could make the armor and have people to hang out with to recover soul damage. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Rend unsurprisingly had decided not to do that and just keep working both on the train and in the city they would stop in during that timeframe.

Nicholas had taken it all off to spend time with her and make sure that she was okay, so she was endlessly grateful for him. Eva had decided to take most of it off, but said she needed the time to catch up with the two of them so she would be doing some work. Jasmine wished she could have talked to someone about the design of her armor; there was a lot going on that she couldn't be sure of. But nobody here was a soul smith, and she wasn't going to talk to family that would defeat the purpose of it.

Instead, she tried to quadruple-check her designs, making sure that nothing was out of place. She would be able to adjust on the fly as she was making it, but that would take more energy and make a weaker product. She only had so much soul to give. After seventeen hours to make sure there was nothing she could see wrong with the armor, Jasmine got to work. With a steady hand she cut into her own soul, shearing off a good forty percent of it in one go.

It wouldn't be enough for the armor, but it would get her started. But she held off for a second. The main issues of soul damage she could ignore besides the emotional ones, and because this was her own injury made by her knife, it would heal faster than average. But that didn't mean Jasmine was immune. Blood vessels all along her body burst as her reforged body reminded her of its purpose. To take on soul damage as physical.

It would protect her soul and her weapons in combat, and it held off many of the really nasty side effects. But her body still wouldn't be happy. She heard the cracking of bone, but she couldn't feel it; she had done this enough times. She had numbed everything except her mind before she started, so whatever torment her body was feeling, she couldn't tell.

The pain wouldn't kill her, and she could already feel a portion of her power flowing into her body to heal it faster and better than a normal human could hope for. If she had more power, she could have set up a shield with her body, but that would have depleted her reserves to the point she couldn't work on her armor, which would have defeated the whole point. Jasmine shoved away the idea of her battered and broken body. It was time for her to get to work.

She was finishing up the foundational enchantments when someone entered her soul forge. But she knew who it was; there were only two people in this world she was aware of that could get in without her explicit permission. And this one had her permission on top of being able to come in if he wanted to anyway. He had warned her that he was going to do this. Jasmine felt so very loved and cared for as Nicholas looked over her injuries while she continued to work.

After he finished making sure nothing was set wrong, he acted." Recover" Jasmine wished that worked on her soul. Soul healing was rare in the first place; soul healing that worked on self-inflicted soul damage was even more rare. And someone strong enough to crush Jasmine's innate defenses on her soul? Very hard to find. It was even worse now that she was E-rank; her body made it so healing for the soul was directed to her flesh first.

For all intents and purposes, her soul was in a white room most of the time, entirely devoid of influence from the rest of the world. Nicholas probably said something else, but Jasmine couldn't hear it; she was too focused on her work. She wouldn't eat, drink, or sleep during this time. Which was going to be a big problem, one that she and Nicholas had actually fought about, but they had come to a deal. She would have a checkpoint every three days and would actually eat and sleep during that time.

The other days she was making the armor Nicholas would take care of all of that for her somehow. Jasmine hadn't asked for details. It would take roughly seven days to make the armor. And seven days after that, to go from critical soul damage to only severe. With her body and soul defenses, she would be fine enough, especially if she didn't let anyone take a look, and they didn't know just how bad she was.

Three days went by in a flash, and she had to lean on Nicholas to get her out of the soul forge and to their suite so she could sleep in her proper bed. She had a bed in the forge, but it wasn't the same and it wasn't home; the train felt much more like home for her at the time. By the end of the sixth day her armor was almost complete; all she would need to do on the seventh day was connect all the disparate abilities into one unifying force.

It was going to be delicate work, so she ended that day early so that she could tackle it at her best. Well, not her best, but her most reasonable energy she could have for the situation. When the armor was done, Jasmine sagged to the ground in exhaustion. The only reason she didn't collapse fully was Nicholas was in the way, and she didn't know why.

"Have you just been sitting here every day I worked on the armor?" Jasmine rasped. Even with Nicholas making sure she didn't die from dehydration, she was still thirsty. Nicholas handed her a sports drink from a bag.

"Yeah, I promised I would be there for you, especially when you have soul damage." Jasmine checked her soul. She had thought it was suspicious how fast she was healing; she had mostly just thought it was a side effect of her growing stronger. But that wasn't actually possible. From someone who had no powers to someone like her grandma, souls healed at the same rate. They just got bigger, which meant it actually took longer.

If Nicholas had lost the amount of soul she just had, he would probably be out of commission for months at the minimum. Jasmine should be out for another two weeks before she would be okay for light work in the field, but one week was going to be enough. It was fine. Nicholas would watch out for her, and Eva had offered the same, so until she was back in Retribution shape, she wouldn't have to worry about it. She hoped so, at least.

By the time Jasmine was actually back to normal, she had to wonder if maybe she had been overly cautious. Nothing had happened during her break week, and even less had happened for her first two weeks back in the field. It was like the world wanted her at one hundred percent before it smacked her.