Chapter 409: A Dangerous Idea!
He looked Sol up and down, his eyes squinting hard as he felt the heavy, dense air vibrating around Sol’s body.
“You hit Layer 2. I can feel the soul in your body… it’s wider and heavier than before. The old armor would have been too light for you anyway. You would have stretched the seams just by breathing.”
Teshar turned around, walking over to a large bundle wrapped in thick, protective cloth resting on an obsidian slab. He uncovered it with a dramatic flourish that bordered on the theatrical.
“Behold,” Teshar whispered, his voice dropping into a register of profound, religious solemnity. “Your new shell. The Rockhorn Inner Lining Carcass Armor.”
Sol stood up, stepping closer to the table.
The armor resting there didn’t have the silver-gray, flexible look of the Badger hide.
This gear was pitch black.
It was crafted entirely from the highly compressed, shock-absorbent inner carapace of the very beetle Sol had killed… the dense layer of biomatter that sat directly above the beast’s vital organs.
The plates were woven together with the thick, black spider-silk of the Layer 2 Omen-Bloods, holding a faint, iridescent oily sheen that seemed to actively swallow the light in the workshop.
“The outer shell of the beetle is too rigid,” Teshar explained, his fingers lightly tracing the dark breastplate. “It fractures under a concentrated strike, which is how your Dreadwing blade pierced it.
But the inner carapace… it doesn’t shatter easily. It is a highly compressed lattice designed by nature to disperse massive physical trauma. I had to soak these plates in three separate acid vats just to make them pliable enough to shape, then flash-freeze the essence pathways using ice-toad venom to lock the earth-aspect inside.”
He looked up at Sol, his eyes bloodshot and intense. “It is heavy. Absurdly, terrifyingly heavy. A normal warrior would have his ribcage crushed just by strapping it on. But you have a Layer 2 foundation with Dreadwing’s reinforced body. Try it.”
Sol didn’t wait. He grabbed the heavy chest piece. His muscles rippled under his skin as he lifted it, surprised by the sheer, dense mass of the biomatter.
He slipped it over his head, buckling the thick leather straps across his ribs and shoulders.
And man, the fit was uncanny.
The moment the final bone buckle clicked into place, Sol felt a profound, heavy shift in his physical baseline.
The armor didn’t slow him down; instead, it felt like an added layer of hyper-dense muscle, a protective exoskeleton that hummed with a low-frequency vibration whenever his Sun Core thrummed.
The dark carapace molded perfectly to his torso, intentionally leaving the jagged pink lightning scar on his stomach visible between the interlocking abdominal plates.
The silver-gray plates of the old armor had felt like a shield. This black carapace felt like a vault or more like second skin.
Sol rolled his shoulders, feeling the plates shift with a fluid, silent precision. The Great Badger soul within his solar plexus grew completely quiet and satisfied, recognizing the thick, earth-aspected energy of the beetle shell and finding a new kind of peace within the familiar texture.
“Stop flexing,” Teshar snapped, though his chest swelled with pride as he watched Sol move. “It was designed to keep you from getting turned into meat paste, not for you to preen like a bird. If you pop a stitch before you kill a Zerith general, don’t bother coming back to me.”
Sol ignored the jab, grabbing the Dreadwing Blade from the table and strapping the scabbard to his belt.
He gave the eccentric craftsman a short nod of genuine respect. “You’re a lunatic, Teshar. But you’re a genius too.”
“Of course I am,” Teshar barked, already turning his back on them to pull out a new piece of obsidian. “Now get out of my forge. You’re dirtying everything by just being here.”
Sol chuckled and didn’t mind his eccentric behaviour, and got out.
…
As always he bypassed the main gate repair crews, scaling the rear palisade with a single, effortless jump. He landed in the thick, rotting mud of the jungle and sprinted.
He didn’t just run; he blurred. The Layer 2 Dreadwing spirit made him feel weightless, his boots barely touching the ground as he cleared miles of dense undergrowth in minutes.
He stopped in an isolated, deep ravine… far away from where he’d met Elyndra (he kinda had PTSD from that place)…dominated by a ten-foot-thick petrified ironwood tree. Its bark was as hard as granite, and its core was dense enough to stop a ballista bolt.
He took a deep breath and drew the Dreadwing Blade. The sapphire-blue wing-bone saber hummed in his hand, its high-frequency vibration resonating perfectly with his Layer 2 foundation.
The blade felt alive… eager, almost weightless, yet brimming with restrained power.
He stood before the tree, breathing slowly. He was about to try something he had always thought about but didn’t get the chance to try until now.
The use of modern science with primitive powers.
In his past life, he was just an ordinary guy, maybe a bit more curious and interested about all the technical science stuff.
Before falling into depression, he was super interested in researching and knowing how all this modern stuff, like he was the type who spent nights watching documentaries on how jet engines worked, how Formula 1 cars sliced through air, or how rockets managed supersonic flight.
He knew the principles of aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, and cavitation like old friends, but even then he had zero martial arts training.
But in this world, those casual modern concepts were deadlier than any ancient “spirit technique.”
Native warriors just swung hard. They relied on “intent” or “the will of the beast.” Sol, however, was thinking about Fluid Dynamics and Aerodynamic Cavitation.
If the Dreadwing Blade ignores air resistance…
The weapon’s unique property was legendary: it cut through the air without drag, without sound, without the normal shockwaves of a swinging blade.
To Sol, that meant something much more dangerous.
Sol theorized, then I can use that to manipulate the atmospheric pressure at the exact point of impact.
Novel Full