Volume 5 - CH 1.17
「It would?」
「Yes. But if you managed to fuse the Monster Skill Crystals with a piece of armor that would then have 「Resist Water」effect added onto it, then such a piece of armor would definitely make for a nice protective measure against Needlewoods and their Water Magic attacks on higher floors of the Labyrinths. As for which pieces of armor to fuse such a Skill Crystal with….. I think that the best possible choice would be Leather Mittens or Leather Armor. Yes, such pieces of armor would definitely be useful, but we still need to take into account the fact that the fusion might fail, and then we would not only lose the Skill Crystals used in the fusion, but the Leather Armor that we would use as a base would be broken down into their base components, meaning leather, and if that happened, I do not know how long it would take me to process the leather in such a way that it could be used to make armor out of it again. With Leather Mittens it would not have been so bad, because even if they were to be broken into their base components, remaking the mittens is significantly easier and less time-consuming than making Leather Armor out of unprocessed leather.」
Sherry gave me quite a lengthy explanation about the fusion process, the risks involved with it and how we could have recovered ourselves from a potential fusion failure. All of that might have seem like something a little bit excessive, but you have to take into consideration the fact that unlike me, Sherry does not know that the fusion of a Skill Crystal with a weapon or a piece of armor can only fail if said weapon or piece of armor does not have an Empty Skill Slot assigned to it. As long as these conditions are met and you will be fusing the Skill Crystal with something that has at least one Empty Skill Slot, there will be no way for your fusions to ever fail. But since Sherry has yet to figure it out because she does not know that Empty Skill Slots are real and they are not just an urban legend or a hollow theory conceived by a bunch of scholars, then she is still pretty desperate to make sure that each fusion was going to be successful so that she would not be subjected to any form of punishment for failing the task that she was entrusted with, even though I have already told her time and time again that there is no way that I would ever do something so cruel to her, and I fully intended to stick to that decision.
「All right, so if we do end up buying the Mermaid Skill Crystal, then I am counting on you to fuse it together with the Leather Mittens.」
「Y-Yes, of course! I-I will make sure to do everything in my power to make that fusion a successful one!」
From all of the equipment that my Party has, no armor would qualify for the fusion, not even the one that I am wearing, because it was not something that I bought in the Armor Shop after carefully picking it up from among a ton of others. This Leather Armor is one of the remnants of a Party annihilated by Pan on the seventh floor of Vale’s Labyrinth.
Because of that, the Leather Armor that I am currently wearing does not have any Empty Skill Slots in it, which essentially renders this Leather Armor useless to me for the purpose of fusing it with the Monster Skill Crystals. On the other hand, the Leather Mittens have been bought in the Armor Shop after carefully selecting them from among a myriad of other similar items after confirming that they had at least one Empty Skill Slot in them, so I know that as long as they are going to be the ones infused With Mermaid Skill Crystal, then everything is going to be okay and the fusion will definitely be a successful one. Boy I sure am glad that I did not decide to sell them somewhere along the way thinking that they are not going to be of any use to me anymore. Now they can be integrated with the Mermaid Skill Crystal once I will obtain it, and their usefulness to me will be increased even more!
As for the effect that the Mermaid Skill Crystal is going to have on my armor, it is exactly like Sherry said. Since the Needlewoods start using water-based magic once they are of a sufficiently high enough level, then having something that would allow me to either partially reduce or completely resist the damage from such magic attacks is certainly going to be useful, even more so since somewhere along the way there is bound to be a Floor Boss, but the nearest location where we could put this equipment to the test would probably be the eighth floor of the Quratar labyrinth. That being said, is it going to be that I would have to prepare different equipment for every floor of the Labyrinth to have it being effective for different types of enemies and their elemental strengths? Because if so, then that is going to be quite difficult to pull off, not only financially, but purely from the perspective of obtaining the Skill Crystals from the enemies, which is going to be heavily chance-based.
「By the way, Sherry, I was wondering about one thing: if we would attach Mermaid Skill Crystal to both my Leather Armor and Leather Mittens, then would that mean that the effectiveness of the water damage reduction would be doubled?」
「That is a perfectly valid point that you are raising, master, but unfortunately, the exact answer to that question has not been determined yet, even though many scholars and enlightened minds have been debating over that matter for a long time now. Some of them believe that the effects of the Skill Crystals do stack with each other if you equip the same Skill crystal on more than one piece of equipment, but at the same time others advocate that something like that is not happening at all and that wishing for the doubled effects of Skill Crystals is nothing but wishful thinking. One of the most prominent examples in that debate was an old scholar who tried to put Skill Crystals that would increase the power of his physical attacks into multiple elements of his equipment, and according to his testimony he did not notice any visible difference even when he was covered with attack-increasing equipment from top to bottom, which led many more people to lean in favor of the theory that multiple copies of the same Skill Crystal do not in fact double the effects or the effectiveness of that Skill Crystal, but almost immediately after the validity of that claim started to be questioned, because those who advocated that the effects of Skill Crystals do stack were saying that Skill Crystals that increase the attack power of their user cannot be used as a model in experiments like that because their effect is a special case.」
A special case, huh? But yeah, I can kind of understand why it is impossible to do something like that no matter if it was something that the creator of the game intended to do or not.
If you could infuse all of your equipment and weapons with Skill Crystals that would increase your attack power, that would be the most broken of broken builds that I have seen in any video game, and it would make a person with that equipment a huge threat not only to the monsters in the Labyrinths, but also to the normal people living in this world.
After all, I sometimes forget that the equipment that I am using to fight against the monsters in the Labyrinths does not lose its effectiveness outside of them, meaning that it can also be used against regular people. Just try to imagine that: an Adventurer with uber op weapon like my Durandal with equipment that does nothing else but boosting his attack power to make it five, ten, twenty or perhaps even twenty five times of its regular value to kill not only monsters, but also people in one hit.
Yeah, just thinking about it from a purely theoretical perspective makes me terrified like all hell, as well as glad that shenanigans like that are impossible to pull off after all.
After we finished eating breakfast, I made my way to the Merchants Guild, and once there, I made my way to the waiting room located to the left of the Guild building’s main entrance and approached one of the people who looked like he was working here and told him to call Luke the Armor Merchant for me, which he proceeded to do right away.
「Yes. But if you managed to fuse the Monster Skill Crystals with a piece of armor that would then have 「Resist Water」effect added onto it, then such a piece of armor would definitely make for a nice protective measure against Needlewoods and their Water Magic attacks on higher floors of the Labyrinths. As for which pieces of armor to fuse such a Skill Crystal with….. I think that the best possible choice would be Leather Mittens or Leather Armor. Yes, such pieces of armor would definitely be useful, but we still need to take into account the fact that the fusion might fail, and then we would not only lose the Skill Crystals used in the fusion, but the Leather Armor that we would use as a base would be broken down into their base components, meaning leather, and if that happened, I do not know how long it would take me to process the leather in such a way that it could be used to make armor out of it again. With Leather Mittens it would not have been so bad, because even if they were to be broken into their base components, remaking the mittens is significantly easier and less time-consuming than making Leather Armor out of unprocessed leather.」
Sherry gave me quite a lengthy explanation about the fusion process, the risks involved with it and how we could have recovered ourselves from a potential fusion failure. All of that might have seem like something a little bit excessive, but you have to take into consideration the fact that unlike me, Sherry does not know that the fusion of a Skill Crystal with a weapon or a piece of armor can only fail if said weapon or piece of armor does not have an Empty Skill Slot assigned to it. As long as these conditions are met and you will be fusing the Skill Crystal with something that has at least one Empty Skill Slot, there will be no way for your fusions to ever fail. But since Sherry has yet to figure it out because she does not know that Empty Skill Slots are real and they are not just an urban legend or a hollow theory conceived by a bunch of scholars, then she is still pretty desperate to make sure that each fusion was going to be successful so that she would not be subjected to any form of punishment for failing the task that she was entrusted with, even though I have already told her time and time again that there is no way that I would ever do something so cruel to her, and I fully intended to stick to that decision.
「All right, so if we do end up buying the Mermaid Skill Crystal, then I am counting on you to fuse it together with the Leather Mittens.」
「Y-Yes, of course! I-I will make sure to do everything in my power to make that fusion a successful one!」
From all of the equipment that my Party has, no armor would qualify for the fusion, not even the one that I am wearing, because it was not something that I bought in the Armor Shop after carefully picking it up from among a ton of others. This Leather Armor is one of the remnants of a Party annihilated by Pan on the seventh floor of Vale’s Labyrinth.
Because of that, the Leather Armor that I am currently wearing does not have any Empty Skill Slots in it, which essentially renders this Leather Armor useless to me for the purpose of fusing it with the Monster Skill Crystals. On the other hand, the Leather Mittens have been bought in the Armor Shop after carefully selecting them from among a myriad of other similar items after confirming that they had at least one Empty Skill Slot in them, so I know that as long as they are going to be the ones infused With Mermaid Skill Crystal, then everything is going to be okay and the fusion will definitely be a successful one. Boy I sure am glad that I did not decide to sell them somewhere along the way thinking that they are not going to be of any use to me anymore. Now they can be integrated with the Mermaid Skill Crystal once I will obtain it, and their usefulness to me will be increased even more!
As for the effect that the Mermaid Skill Crystal is going to have on my armor, it is exactly like Sherry said. Since the Needlewoods start using water-based magic once they are of a sufficiently high enough level, then having something that would allow me to either partially reduce or completely resist the damage from such magic attacks is certainly going to be useful, even more so since somewhere along the way there is bound to be a Floor Boss, but the nearest location where we could put this equipment to the test would probably be the eighth floor of the Quratar labyrinth. That being said, is it going to be that I would have to prepare different equipment for every floor of the Labyrinth to have it being effective for different types of enemies and their elemental strengths? Because if so, then that is going to be quite difficult to pull off, not only financially, but purely from the perspective of obtaining the Skill Crystals from the enemies, which is going to be heavily chance-based.
「By the way, Sherry, I was wondering about one thing: if we would attach Mermaid Skill Crystal to both my Leather Armor and Leather Mittens, then would that mean that the effectiveness of the water damage reduction would be doubled?」
「That is a perfectly valid point that you are raising, master, but unfortunately, the exact answer to that question has not been determined yet, even though many scholars and enlightened minds have been debating over that matter for a long time now. Some of them believe that the effects of the Skill Crystals do stack with each other if you equip the same Skill crystal on more than one piece of equipment, but at the same time others advocate that something like that is not happening at all and that wishing for the doubled effects of Skill Crystals is nothing but wishful thinking. One of the most prominent examples in that debate was an old scholar who tried to put Skill Crystals that would increase the power of his physical attacks into multiple elements of his equipment, and according to his testimony he did not notice any visible difference even when he was covered with attack-increasing equipment from top to bottom, which led many more people to lean in favor of the theory that multiple copies of the same Skill Crystal do not in fact double the effects or the effectiveness of that Skill Crystal, but almost immediately after the validity of that claim started to be questioned, because those who advocated that the effects of Skill Crystals do stack were saying that Skill Crystals that increase the attack power of their user cannot be used as a model in experiments like that because their effect is a special case.」
A special case, huh? But yeah, I can kind of understand why it is impossible to do something like that no matter if it was something that the creator of the game intended to do or not.
If you could infuse all of your equipment and weapons with Skill Crystals that would increase your attack power, that would be the most broken of broken builds that I have seen in any video game, and it would make a person with that equipment a huge threat not only to the monsters in the Labyrinths, but also to the normal people living in this world.
After all, I sometimes forget that the equipment that I am using to fight against the monsters in the Labyrinths does not lose its effectiveness outside of them, meaning that it can also be used against regular people. Just try to imagine that: an Adventurer with uber op weapon like my Durandal with equipment that does nothing else but boosting his attack power to make it five, ten, twenty or perhaps even twenty five times of its regular value to kill not only monsters, but also people in one hit.
Yeah, just thinking about it from a purely theoretical perspective makes me terrified like all hell, as well as glad that shenanigans like that are impossible to pull off after all.
After we finished eating breakfast, I made my way to the Merchants Guild, and once there, I made my way to the waiting room located to the left of the Guild building’s main entrance and approached one of the people who looked like he was working here and told him to call Luke the Armor Merchant for me, which he proceeded to do right away.
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