The metal devil lurched forward, dripping slag from its mouth as it came at me.

With no weapon at my disposal, I figured trying to fight the thing was a fool’s errand. So I didn’t bother, simply dropping to the ground and kicking its legs out from under it.

Despite its weight, the action was enough to unbalance it. Another kick and it was tumbling over the side of the mountain. It’d been a while since I’d had to use any of my pit fighting experience, but the old drop and kick still worked. Not ideal when your opponent could get back up but it’d won a few surprise ring outs. As the metal devil thunked against the side of the mountain, I rubbed at my hip. A stone mountain peak was almost as bad as a concrete floor, it seemed. Once on my feet, I stepped forward to watch the devil fall.

Or fail to fall, if I was unlucky.

Sure enough, halfway to the clouds below, it managed to dig its claws into the stone. Then it started hauling itself back up.

Looking at the other peaks, I wondered if they’d all have metal devils on them. Seemed likely.

Glancing down, I grunted in annoyance once more. Without magic, I either had to give up some of the hard won resources in the crate or let it get close enough I could smash it.

A proper inspection of the crate revealed that there wasn’t much inside. Definitely nothing club sized. There was cord and several heavy ingots though.

Another glance over the edge told me that the metal devil wasn’t a fast climber. Assuming it didn’t speed up, I figured I’d have a couple minutes before it reached me. Standing next to the crate, I pulled out an ingot and started tying a… wasn’t actually sure what the knot was called. But it was a sort of cross-shaped knot that came together in the middle. It should let me swing the ingot without losing it.

In theory.

Moving over to the edge, I found the metal devil only ten feet below the edge. When it spotted me, it growled.

Its growl was cut off when the ingot smashed into its face, my aim proving true. Turned out I didn’t need to swing it. Before it had figured out what happened, I’d drawn the ingot back up, ready to chuck it again.

On my second toss, I waited until the metal devil didn’t have both hands dug into the cliff. The ingot smashed into its shoulder, which was unfortunate, since I’d been aiming for its elbow, figuring the joint would be a weaker target.

Still, the shoulder was enough to cause the devil to lose its grip, and go tumbling again. It still caught itself on the side of the mountain, but that gave me enough time to rig up another couple of the corded ingots. This time I used a different knot, since the original one had almost come loose. I waited until it was twenty feet beneath me, then dropped them all at once.

Might’ve overestimated how much force I needed, cause the first one smashed directly into the elbow I hadn’t even been targeting and sheered the arm right off. The next two smacked into the metal devil and sent it tumbling down through the clouds below.

I watched for nearly a minute, but there was no sign of it climbing back up. Even took the time to circle around the peak, just to make sure. Still no sign.

Glancing over to the other peak at roughly the same level, I saw a second crate of supplies, along with another metal devil watching me.

We stared at each other for a minute before I shook my head.

If each of the peaks was going to have one of them waiting for me, that meant I had some choices to make. Now that I’d secured extra supplies, there were more options.

Returning to the forge was much easier than getting up in the first place. After securing the cord properly, I used the much more generous supply of cord in the new crate to produce a heavier duty rope by weaving three strands of cord together.

Then I used the heavier duty rope to move the supplies down to the forge. Which was how I discovered I could get tuckered out in the strange trial space, even if the effects went away after a few minutes of rest. I also realized my hip didn’t hurt anymore, despite the nasty fall.

A few hours later, I returned to the first peak I’d reached with a new and improved kite along with a couple improved tools for taking on the metal devils. Getting a grappling hook across to the parallel peak was much easier. Managing to drop it so I hooked the metal devil took a little more effort.

Once I did, I drew the monster forward. To my surprise, it barely resisted. Then it was falling off the front of the peak. I was suddenly very glad I’d thought to secure the line before making the attempts, even if I’d done so expecting it to try to pull me towards the distant peak. With gravity on its side, it pulled with a great deal more strength than I’d been expecting.

The rope caught, and I was tugged to my knees before I could drop the rope, my fingers caught underneath. Before I could even curse, the devil smashed into the mountain with a resounding boom, almost as loud as Conflict tapping its chin.

A second later, I fell onto my back, the rope suddenly going slack. Looking over the edge, I found both the metal devil and my grappling hook were gone.

Good thing I’d made spare hooks.

The second peak had exactly the same supplies as the first, mostly more ingots and cord, though the crates themselves provided me with additional wood as well.

I brought all of it back to the forge before ascending to the next set of peaks. My practice with the kite was starting to pay off, and I was able to land the grappling hook on the next level up after only two attempts.

Only to have a metal devil walk to the edge with the grappling hook in hand and… throw the hook off. It stared at me for a second before turning around and moving out of view.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I grumbled even as I dragged the hook back in.

Half an hour later, after another trip to get more supplies, I made my next attempt. And when the metal devil dumped my grappling hook, I dropped a second one on its head.

This time, it tried to keep from being pulled over. However, it was already standing at the edge, so a second later, it was swinging down to smash into the peak I was standing atop of. The screeching and smashing of rock told me it’d caught itself, and was ascending.

I let it, and when it got to the top, I welcomed it with fancy club 2.0. Barely letting it get its head over the top, I brought fancy club 2.0 down on its neck. The shriek it let out made me wince, but didn’t stop me from swinging again, separating the head from its body. As the body tumbled away, I kneeled down to inspect the head, which snarled at me once before the light in its eyes faded. It was different than the first one I’d fought in the original trial, with more teeth and a rougher set of ridges over its eyes.

Once the light within those eyes went out, I nodded to myself before bringing the thing back down to the forge.

After all, most of the things we made used monster parts. Why would it be any different in the trials?

Turned out I was right.

After a few minutes of experimentation, I discovered the metal devils were made of a very strong alloy that could be worked surprisingly easily with relatively little heat. Didn’t even need flux to keep the metal clean. Which meant it probably wasn’t a steel alloy. At least, I was pretty sure that was the case. Much as I’d learned from Inertia, I still wasn’t an actual blacksmith. I knew stainless steel didn’t oxidize after the initial coat if it took properly but that didn’t seem to be what was happening with the unknown alloy.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Just as important as its strength was how light it was. The entire head, which was bigger than my own, couldn’t have been more than five pounds.

Which kinda explained why they were so easy to tug around.

During the process, I discovered some sort of mana source near the back of the skull. Unfortunately, I’d destroyed it during my initial testing of the metal.

The new metal let me forge a few new tools, and I was off to deal with the next metal devil. This one I wanted to take in its entirety. It should’ve been easy enough. Smack it into the mountain, then wrap half a dozen grappling hooks around it by the time it climbed up.

Unfortunately, it smacked against the mountain and fell into the clouds. I stared after it, watching my improved grappling hook bounce against the side, still on the line. With my prey beyond my grasp, I sighed and started carting the supplies from both peaks down to the forge.

By the time I was ready to tackle the third set of peaks, I’d had to redo the kite again, since several of the paper sheets were starting to rip and give way. I’d also re-secured the ropes leading between the peaks I was using as my main path, after one of the initial cords had snapped when I was still untying the harness. That had been an annoying hour to get back to the forge. Was just lucky the snapped cord had still been bound up in the harness.

Looking up at the third pair of peaks, I sent the kite above the one on the right, carefully watching for any sign of the metal devil. Figured that since the second set of peaks had resulted in an increase in their awareness, the third might have another escalation.

If it did, there was no immediate sign of it.

There was no sign of the devil either. Even after I dropped the grappling hook and confirmed it was secure.

It was only as I approached the peak that the new metal devil made itself known. By swinging a metal tail at me.

A flash of reflected was the only warning I got.

I’d been expecting some sort of attack, so I was able to avoid the blow easily enough. However, the tail was tipped with a scythe-like blade. The same blade that had reflected the light. The same blade that easily cut through the rope suspending me in the air.

“Ragssssss,” I yelled out as I took my turn swinging back down towards the mountainside. Thankfully, after my earlier issue with the cord snapping, I’d considered what might happen if the rope broke part way. I’d figured out a brake that clamped when I put pressure on it. It was little more than a rough wedge shaped gap that would bind when the rope was at an angle, but it was enough the I didn’t have to catch all my weight myself.

When I hit the mountain, I tried to soften my impact with my legs. If I was Calbern, I’m sure it would’ve worked perfectly. Then again, if I was Calbern, I could’ve probably run across the ropes instead of having to rig up harnesses to shimmy across.

Of course, I wasn’t Calbern, so when my legs hit the mountain, one slipped, and the other took the brunt of the blow. The pain almost caused me to let go of the rope, but my brake and harness system gave me enough time to recover. Much like when I’d slipped during the earlier encounters, the pain eventually went away, though I’d managed to climb my way back up to the top of the peak by that point.

It reminded me that the only way to fail these trials was to give up. I suspected that even if I fell into the clouds, there’d still be a way forward. Maybe I could’ve climbed down and made my way over to the highest peak and then attempted to scale it. Which made me wonder if there were other ways to get to the highest peak I wasn’t considering.

Staring up at the peak where the metal devil waited, I noticed an odd pattern in the stone. One I’d just been staring at in great detail a minute before. Moving over to the edge I’d just climbed over, I confirmed it held the same almost random seeing collection of ridges and cracks. Moving to the other side of the peak, I found a similar set of mirrored features in the peak I was standing on and the one below. There was a third set leading between my peak and its twin. On the far side, where the peak faced only open air, there was nothing.

While I was tempted to continue with my existing strategy, since I was sure it wouldn’t be that hard to deal with the metal devil now that I knew what it was bringing to the table, my curiosity was piqued.

So, I spent the next hour trying to figure out what the matching patterns were for. And it was only when I smacked one with a vastly upgraded version of my cord-ingot flail that I discovered their purpose.

It took a surprising amount of force, but when I’d bounced the ingot off a rock roughly the size of my fist, it had sunk into the peak. A second later, a loud grumbling started, and a staircase stretched out of the peak, leading halfway up to the next.

“Huh,” I said, testing the stairs with a single foot before tying myself off and ascending. Sure enough, when, after several missed attempts, I smacked the distant matching pattern, a second set of stairs ground out of the other peak to meet the ones I was standing upon.

Another half hour later, and I had all the staircases unlocked, with the lower tiers of the peaks connected, and only one last toss to connect to the third pair of peaks. Then I set down some simple traps, just in case. Three tosses later, the stairs started their grind towards me, the metal devil right behind them.

Before it could reach me, I’d already retreated back to the previous peak, where I waited for it. To my surprise, it came straight for me, ignoring the ropes I’d laid across the stairs.

“Guess you’re not that smart,” I mumbled as I kicked the first of the weights over the edge, sending all the ropes snapping into place and tangling the metal devil.

Its tail snapped out even as it tripped and got tangled. I was already swinging fancy club 2.1, bringing it down on its neck. With a new metal edging, courtesy of the previous metal devil, fancy club 2.1 took off its head in a single blow. And with its body all wrapped up in the ropes, that meant none of it went spilling off the mountain.

Rather pleased with how the trap had turned out, I proceeded to repeat the process with the other peak. This metal devil had a hammer tail instead of a bladed one, which made it even easier.

At this point, I was sure I could’ve continued forward and easily finished the trial. Yet, just like the first time I’d taken one of Conflict’s trials, I figured that how I finished it mattered.

With two intact metal golems to work with, I carted them back to the forge and once more, set to work. This time, I was careful in my examination of their heads, and was able to draw out what looked a bit like a two-sided comb, except made out of crystal. Without magic, I couldn’t be sure of their affinities, but metal of some sort seemed like a safe guess.

As I lamented the lack of suitable tools, I set them to the side before hauling down all the materials in the crates on the third set of peaks. Which was when I discovered they were a little different than the crates that came before. Not only were they larger, roughly two feet by two feet, they also each had new tools in them.

One of which was a basic scribing pen. A design that would let anyone enchant things, even if they didn’t have access to mana. I stared at the tool, wanting to take it apart to study it. It was…

Forget the trial, if I could get this into people’s hands… I needed to ask Keeper if it had access to such tools. If we could train people to be enchanters without needing magic…

I did all I could to study the scribing pen. Even to the point where I broke it. To my pleasure, unlike the materials, the pen regenerated. But without access to my magic, I couldn’t examine most of what made it work.

So… I used it to build a set of runes that let me use Reveal Magic.

It took… well, honestly, I lost track of how long exactly it took to design it. Whenever I got frustrated, I would switch it out for other designs or experiments. Despite the challenge, I enjoyed it, being able to spend my time simply designing and iterating on things without distraction.

When I finally succeeded, I had to have spent days, if not longer working on everything. It was enough I was starting to feel a bit of fatigue. Which wasn’t supposed to happen during the trials.

Still, I had a pair of enchanted glasses frames that fit over my eyes. Not any actual glass, just the frames. Still, they allowed me to study the scribing pen. It was… annoyingly simple. If I’d dedicated half the amount of time attempting to design a similar pen as I’d spent on the frames, I’d have probably figured it out. It was little more than a series of Mana Draw enchantments combined with conversion runes and a special core that could store multiple affinities of energy, though only one at a time.

As I set the frames to the side, I let out another sigh.

While I’d been working through the initial design, I hadn’t forgotten my desire to shape my path. To that end, I’d assembled a giant balloon of metal with a firebox hanging beneath it, gathered up thousands upon thousands of pages of paper, set up a fire enchantment in the firebox, and launched the balloon to take my grappling hooks higher.

Then promptly had it get caught in the wind and watched as it smashed into one of the nearby peaks. Turned out it was harder to fly a balloon remotely than it was to fly a kite.

Still, since I’d kept it anchored, I only lost a tiny fraction of the material I’d put into it, and I tried again. Soon I was dropping grappling hooks en masse from the balloon. After clearing the next two sets of peaks, and collecting all four of the metal devils upon them, I brought everything down to the forge to start on the last design I wanted to test before I left.

A proper zeppelin.

By that point, I had a fairly constant thrumbing in my head, but it didn’t stop me from enchanting several sets of filter and air runes. It took me nearly as long to assemble my zeppelin as it had to design the glasses, but I considered every minute worth it. There was so much I was learning. Plus, when I was done, I had a flying machine.

It took me longer to figure out how to fly the damn thing with the constant winds than it did to float over the final peak and drop every last one of the ingots I’d stocked up onto the giant metal devil waiting there.

Only then did I open the deflation valve and land atop its body, finishing the trial.

I’d come to get a favor from Conflict, to maybe get its help designing the engine for our airship.

What I’d managed even on my own… well, it had certainly been worth the trip.