The Rise Of A Porter

'It would be better if I try snooping around at night. The people here are way too active during the day.' Arnold thought and reconsidered about digging around for since info about the suspicious guy, 'I could ask Nathan for some help regarding this but that guy already has too much to deal and I don't wanna burden him more with such small matters. In the end, if things gets serious, then I will reach out to him but for now... I should fix my gear first.'

As soon as the platoon of soldiers disappeared from his sight, he turned around and went inside the workshop. He felt like someone might try to snoop around the workshop again, and thus with the help of his golems, he covered the windows with the blankets that were used to cover the equipment inside the workshop.

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Once the windows were totally covered up, he proceeded to take out his gears from his inventory, which consisted of, The Vindicator, his Phoenix cloak and the Specter gloves. The gloves were in the worst condition among other gears. It was due to the reason that, Arnold had been using them for the longest amount of time. Well technically he had been using his guns, the Vindicators, for the longest duration, but as he regularly maintained and enhanced them they were in a great condition. Sadly, he couldn't say the same thing for his gloves.

'I should use a bit of Wyvern's hide to make a new pair of gloves. Specter gloves had served me well but it's time to move on...'

After thinking about it for sometime, Arnold decided, since his summons couldn't use any elemental abilities giving them the gloves would be useless. He then considered handing them down to someone else, only to realise that he had no one else he could hand over his equipments to, this with a little bit of regret, he threw the gloves into the blazing flame of the forge.

"Well now let's focus on the guns first." Arnold mumbled and lifted one of the dual handguns, "Their power is off the charts, but they're only a viable option for close combat scenarios... their range isn't very long, I should do something about that first."

He thought of many ways to do so, like extending the barrel of the guns, but he quickly let go of that idea, as extending the barrels of the guns would make them heavy which could end up with hindering his movements, which was not at all desirable. Agility and Evasion, were two things he couldn't compromise with. The more he thought about it, the more frustrated he became.

"Argh! Rather than trying to upgrade their range, it'll be easier to make a long ranged weapon from the scratch!"

In the end he decided not to upgrade the vindicator and focused on his cloak, as he already had a vision on what he was going to do with it.

Arnold quickly took out the Wyvern's hide and bones from his inventory before taking a diamond cutter from the equipment shelf and started cutting the hide, which had toughness of a diamond. He roughly shaped a part of the hide into the shape of his already existing cloak.

His idea was simple. He would reinforce the cloak with the Wyvern's hide to increase its defense, but that wasn't all, he was planning to use Wyvern's bones in it as well because not only it would further increase his defense, it would also help him to increase the strength of his physical attacks, just in case, he ever needed to use his hand to hand combat skills. This essentially made him tankier while giving him enough strength to engage in hand to hand combat without worrying about his defense. With this he started working on the cloak.

First he carefully made a frame out of the bones, then laid them over the Phoenix cloak and then he proceeded to do something very unusual.

Since he knew that the bones, Wyvern's hide as well as the Phoenix cloak were all immune to the effects of fire, he thought rather than sewing all of the three components together, he used molten iron to fix the bones and the Wyvern's hide together. Once it cooled down, he proceeded to chip away the excess part of the iron, then he repeated the same process again to permanently fix the Wyvern's hide over the Phoenix cloak.

Arnold thought that adding all of these upgrades would make the cloak bulkier but it didn't. The cloak was surprisingly light, it felt like it was still the same cloak, apart from the fact that it was shining more than before. He quickly checked the stats on his new cloak.

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• [ENHANCED COSMIC PHOENIX CLOAK] : A cloak made up of ashes left behind by the last of the Phoenix which was enhanced by reinforced it with the remains of the Queen of Wyverns.

Grade : S

Defense (DEF) : +106 (physical)

Strength (STR) : + 30

Armour Type : Cloak

Weight : 0.60 kg

Additional effect : [TITAN'S BLESSING] - Reflects 15% of damage received as physical damage to the attacker.

Additional effect : [BLAZING PHOENIX] - Boosts the effect of fire affinity by 25%.

Additional effect : [WYVERN QUEEN'S BLESSING] - Damage dealt to beast type monsters permanently increases by 10%.

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"..."

Arnold was dumbstruck... he couldn't believe what he was reading. Not only that he successfully managed to upgrade his cloak's stats by a huge margin, he successfully made his first S grade gear as well! The good news didn't end there, he now had one more additional effect attached to his cloak.

Like a lightning bolt Arnold quickly started working on making a set of gloves, as he didn't want his luck to run out on him. He used a similar process for making the gloves as well, the only difference being that he used two layers of Wyvern's hide to make them. But the creativity inside Arnold's brain didn't stop there.

He used Wyvern's bones to make a couple of claws and inserted them between the layers of Wyvern's hide. He also made two triggers and connected them with the claws and sealed it up. He wore them and quickly checked the stats as well.

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• [?????] : A glove made using the bones and hide of the Wyvern Queen. A specific trigger has been placed inside the gloves, which when pressed, pops out a vicious claw made of Wyvern's bones.

Grade : A+

Defense (DEF) : 25 (physical)

Strength (STR) : 35

Armour Type : Glove

Weight : 0.15 kg

Additional effect : [WYVERN'S CLAW] -

When a target gets scratched by the claws of the glove, the target enters a poisoned state, making the target numb and limiting their visibility while making them lose 5% of their total health per minute. The duration can be extended by continually inflicting damage to the target.

Additional effect : [WYVERN QUEEN'S BLESSING] - Damage dealt to beast type monsters permanently increases by 10%.

<Would you like to name your new creation?>

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Arnold was feeling ecstatic! He was happy with the results of his crafting even though the gloves weren't graded as S, like his cloak, he was specially happy that his weird idea of making a claw had worked! Now he could finally fulfill his childhood dream... of being the Wolverine!

But before he got too excited, he wanted to test it out first. So he summoned Panzer, the golem which had the highest defense among his summons apart from the Dreadnought. That thing was in a different league of its own.