That night, Ben once again decided to give up on getting any proper sleep, instead spending all of his time in his god’s realm, thinking of how he wanted to approach the problem that was the coming trial and making plans with the little info he had on the topic, trying to figure out what he’d need to have the best chances of surviving with minimal injuries.

He’d need to pack plenty of food of course, and potions too to be on the safe side. Even with both Thera and Yuzu around, he didn’t want to risk needing them but not having them. He also needed to pack something to sleep in as well. He didn’t know how long to expect the trial to take, but he didn’t want to go into things and regret not having something as simple as a proper blanket to rest with if there was the chance that completing the trial would take days. 

Then it came down to the tools he would need to make, tools that would need to be based entirely off of his own conjecture about what the trial would entail.

On that account, he at least had a bit of luck. Namely the knowledge of what the earth floor of the dead god’s trial contained, but he couldn’t trust that alone. There were going to be five floors of this for them to get through and he tried to envision how he could imagine earth magic being used, knowing full well that he would end up missing something. It mostly just came down to manipulating the earth itself to varying levels of complexity, the more intricate spells that could be done with it depending on how it was combined with other affinities, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t put his best in as he got up and jotted down some ideas before leaving a note for Thera and heading to the shop for the first time in far too many days.

It was still dark out when he left, meaning it was nice and peaceful as he made his way through the cool streets before finally arriving as he opened up and began heating his forge.

The first thing he did was going to be small but important to keep him working as he grabbed what bits of wax he could find and shoved it into his ears to help block out any noise from his work before he began.

In the past, during his very first time doing the trial of a god, he’d made his barrier bombs, items designed expand into anything that bit them, ideally killing them in the process. It hadn’t particularly worked out like he’d hoped, but now he was going to try and make what would essentially be the opposite.

Sticky pads, or at least that was what he’d decided to call them, items that were meant to look only a little bigger than a coaster, but once activated would cause a barrier to expand around it, only penetrable from the outside, meaning that it would not only attach itself comfortably to any ground or wall it was placed on, it would also be able to act as a catch for something that came in contact with it, trapping it to wherever it touched. He couldn’t be certain it would even see any use, but it was something he wanted to have just to be safe, with the idea having plenty of potential in his other work anyway.

<TRAP KNOWLEDGE LEVEL INCREASED>

Once done with that, he continued on with other things that would be using barrier magic as its base, trying to create something that could act like a shelter or a wall if the need arrived before focusing on the far more important enchantment that had saved him on more than one occasion now. The one on his shoes.

He’d remade it a few ways in the past depending on the effect he needed, but this time he wanted to focus on three things. Making it as strong as possible, ensuring it was only solid from the outside, letting him get off any attacks he needed to from within, and what would be the biggest change by far, letting him walk with it activated.

That was something he hadn’t been able to manage before he’d awakened his skills, instead needing to be locked in place as the barrier went up, but he was feeling confident it could be done, it was just a matter of how.

In the past, I built it to spread out from the ground around me before rising up to create a nice, safe dome, but I don’t want to find myself in a place where I need to choose between running away or blocking, I want to do both so how do I manage this?

It was a far harder problem than making the sticky pads as he wracked his brain, doing his best to only push the half of his minds he was letting himself use as he fiddled with making the enchantment on a smaller scale to try and test out different options as he did, experimenting with having the barrier expand and contract in different ways depending on both any external stimulus as well as depending on how he ran his mana through it, but in the end no option felt truly right. 

Forcing it to activate through an external cause felt like it left too much room for error while making it react based on how he ran his mana through them was just going to complicate things. What he wanted was to set off the enchantment and then be able to run without having to think about anything else, no matter how many minds were currently squeezed into his head.

It was with that goal that he started pouring through his skill library, hoping to find something that would inspire him, only to come up blank there with the solution elsewhere, namely within his own status.

The bind skill, the skill that linked him to Thera, ever pointing him in her direction if he let himself notice it, was a hard skill to use for enchanting, but he had figured out how to put it to work, mixing it with other skills to let it act as a tracking device by adding it to an item and a compass, but the skill wouldn’t just detect where its counterpart was in one of the cardinal directions, for those who possessed it, it pointed in elevation too.

That was the key to making it work, making enchantments on both feet, adding a small, simple spring to the soles of his shoes to let them feel if they were being compressed by him standing on the ground, and setting up the enchantment to work off the foot that was firmly planted, letting him move around with which shoe governed the final effect switching with every step.

The solution was complicated to build and needed multiple rounds of testing, but once done was well worth the effort.  When measured against the enchantment that had been put in place before he’d even awakened his current skill, what he was making now would not only be more powerful, it would have a significantly lower mana cost to go along with it thanks to his divine enchanting.

 He did need to clean it up a bit, designing it to react in the event both of his feet left the ground while he had them on, but that was a much smaller fix as he tested them out, putting them on to walk around the shop with the enchantment activated and seeing Falk had arrived as he was working, his teacher giving him a small wave as he pulled the wax from his ears and walked over.

“Wasn’t expecting you back for another week boy, you feeling better?”

“Er, not exactly,” He said truthfully. “Honestly, I could have used some more time to try and recover, but it looks like I’m going to be having some pretty crazy plans in a bit and I don’t want to waste a minute of the time I have trying to recuperate.”

“Coming from you in particular, I really don’t like hearing the words ‘crazy plans’.”

“Ha, yeah well, it’s actually your niece that’s agreed to do something crazy, there’s just no way I’m letting her do it without me.”

Ben gave his teacher a rundown of just what they’d both been invited to do and why they’d each agreed, as the yeti only looked more and more stressed to learn what two of the people he cared most for in town were going to do in what felt like such a short time.