The second knife took shape with far more speed, the confidence of having a completed product sitting on the bench, and the knowledge from the blueprint working to streamline the process. The increased size of the bone did leave him with more material to remove, but that was also relative to the size of the knife itself, so while the scale increased, it wasn’t by quite as much as he had first thought. The process was practically identical to the first one, first rounding down the handle and then planning the sides of the blade down into an edge that was as thin as he could manage with his growing familiarity with the exact amount of material that vanished with each small touch.
August tried not to linger for too long on each piece because getting drawn into spending half an hour trying to perfect a single edge was going to end up wasting a great deal of time. The third knife, longer than the previous one by another two inches, came next, the same uninspired shape coming into existence in a few short minutes. His mana had started to actually deplete again, which meant that he’d drained the reserves of the battery down to nothing and was now stealing away everything it was absorbing as it was doing it. Once the third knife was about as good of a match for the first two as he could manage, he set it down beside the others.
The fourth and fifth knives, each a step larger than the previous, came next, and by the time he’d finished them, Boko, Kalter and Melon were working on the corner wall, the last piece they could manage before needing more structural pillars to continue. The sixth knife—the one that was approaching the size of a machete—took him all the way down to zero mana, the amount of material he needed to shave away, increasing the time the task was taking substantially. He sorted out more of the bones while he waited for his increased mana regeneration to bring him back into a decent state, and then once it was topped out, he began shaving down the blade again.
As large as it was, he started resorting to longer, deeper passes, and the imperfect state of his technique became far more noticeable, with odd, rounded and groove-like patterns crisscrossing the face of it. He managed to smooth it most of the way out before he ran out of material, and the final [Bone Knife] joined the rest of them on the right-most edge of the bench. He ran his hand across the bench, trying to scatter the mess of bone debris he’d ended up covering it with, and eyed his slow reduction in the workspace. It was starting to get a bit cluttered now, and he didn’t want to stash them in his inventory because that would defeat the purpose of making it easy for everyone to find something. He’d have to come up with a few containers to stack the tools in, or else he was going to run out of room.
“What’s next?” August murmured. “Axe heads?”
August already knew how to make them because he’d already done it—he pulled over the thickest pieces he’d selected for that purpose and then started working. The sheer weight of the bones still felt odd to him, and there was an odd pattern that seemed to emerge more readily the deeper he carved—the surface became almost pockmarked, but that was the extent of the changes. If they were supposed to be some kind of hollow cavity inside of the material—like he’d first expected—he’d yet to actually find evidence of it. He switched between all three axe heads at once, carving them all down in roughly equal steps to roughly mirror the one that already sat within his inventory.
He almost moved on to the process of finding branches to use as handles and then just decided to use bone for that as well. August carved down a test piece that looked about the right size for the Voithos—and then tapered the top of it down until it would slip into the hole he’d left in the axehead. He shaved a bit more off when it wouldn’t slide through, smacked it against the bench, and then beat it with another axehead until it actually poked through the top. Eventually, it would probably come loose, so he needed to secure it—he carefully etched a hole through the top of the protruding handle, just above the axehead, before poking a small but thick bone through the hole to act as a stop.
He took a length of twine and spent a few minutes carefully winding it around and through the hole, the stopper, and then the handle, making it as tight as he could manage, before tying it off. It looked a little bit bizarre, but there was no way for the axehead to slip free while it was in place. August gave it a few test swings to make sure it wasn’t actually a complete disaster, rated it as a relative success, and then moved on to copying the process for the two other handles—Haiko’s render burst into existence just as he was tying off the handle for the third and final [Bone Axe], crossing over his range and causing him to fumble the tool at the suddenness. August barely managed to catch it by the tip of the handle before it could slip off the bench.
“I thought I’d be able to get just a little bit closer before you realised,” Haiko said, sounding more than a bit amused. “I may have to start paying considerable attention to the possibility that you possess a pair of eyes in the back of your head.”
August carefully placed the tool back on the bench and turned, unimpressed by her very apparent—and more than successful—attempt to sneak up on him.
“Give me a couple of weeks,” August said in an effort to play off the fact that he’d so visibly jumped. “Then you won’t be able to sneak up on me at all.”
Seeking Direction: Revised Edition is now live; It's a revised RWBY fanfiction following an OC with Direction Manipulation as his Semblance.
If you like my writing and want to see more of it, you can find links to my original books on Elbowsnapper.com
If you want to show some support, get early access, or see my first drafts, go check out my Patreon
Love you guys, keep on keeping on!
Recent Releases:
Ameliorate: Intersect
Reroll: Falling & Shatter
Systematic Soul Sorting: Book 1 & Audiobook. Book 2(First Draft)
Seeker's Precept: The Dragon's Marble
The second knife took shape with far more speed, the confidence of having a completed product sitting on the bench, and the knowledge from the blueprint working to streamline the process. The increased size of the bone did leave him with more material to remove, but that was also relative to the size of the knife itself, so while the scale increased, it wasn’t by quite as much as he had first thought. The process was practically identical to the first one, first rounding down the handle and then planning the sides of the blade down into an edge that was as thin as he could manage with his growing familiarity with the exact amount of material that vanished with each small touch.
August tried not to linger for too long on each piece because getting drawn into spending half an hour trying to perfect a single edge was going to end up wasting a great deal of time. The third knife, longer than the previous one by another two inches, came next, the same uninspired shape coming into existence in a few short minutes. His mana had started to actually deplete again, which meant that he’d drained the reserves of the battery down to nothing and was now stealing away everything it was absorbing as it was doing it. Once the third knife was about as good of a match for the first two as he could manage, he set it down beside the others.
The fourth and fifth knives, each a step larger than the previous, came next, and by the time he’d finished them, Boko, Kalter and Melon were working on the corner wall, the last piece they could manage before needing more structural pillars to continue. The sixth knife—the one that was approaching the size of a machete—took him all the way down to zero mana, the amount of material he needed to shave away, increasing the time the task was taking substantially. He sorted out more of the bones while he waited for his increased mana regeneration to bring him back into a decent state, and then once it was topped out, he began shaving down the blade again.
As large as it was, he started resorting to longer, deeper passes, and the imperfect state of his technique became far more noticeable, with odd, rounded and groove-like patterns crisscrossing the face of it. He managed to smooth it most of the way out before he ran out of material, and the final [Bone Knife] joined the rest of them on the right-most edge of the bench. He ran his hand across the bench, trying to scatter the mess of bone debris he’d ended up covering it with, and eyed his slow reduction in the workspace. It was starting to get a bit cluttered now, and he didn’t want to stash them in his inventory because that would defeat the purpose of making it easy for everyone to find something. He’d have to come up with a few containers to stack the tools in, or else he was going to run out of room.
“What’s next?” August murmured. “Axe heads?”
August already knew how to make them because he’d already done it—he pulled over the thickest pieces he’d selected for that purpose and then started working. The sheer weight of the bones still felt odd to him, and there was an odd pattern that seemed to emerge more readily the deeper he carved—the surface became almost pockmarked, but that was the extent of the changes. If they were supposed to be some kind of hollow cavity inside of the material—like he’d first expected—he’d yet to actually find evidence of it. He switched between all three axe heads at once, carving them all down in roughly equal steps to roughly mirror the one that already sat within his inventory.
He almost moved on to the process of finding branches to use as handles and then just decided to use bone for that as well. August carved down a test piece that looked about the right size for the Voithos—and then tapered the top of it down until it would slip into the hole he’d left in the axehead. He shaved a bit more off when it wouldn’t slide through, smacked it against the bench, and then beat it with another axehead until it actually poked through the top. Eventually, it would probably come loose, so he needed to secure it—he carefully etched a hole through the top of the protruding handle, just above the axehead, before poking a small but thick bone through the hole to act as a stop.
He took a length of twine and spent a few minutes carefully winding it around and through the hole, the stopper, and then the handle, making it as tight as he could manage, before tying it off. It looked a little bit bizarre, but there was no way for the axehead to slip free while it was in place. August gave it a few test swings to make sure it wasn’t actually a complete disaster, rated it as a relative success, and then moved on to copying the process for the two other handles—Haiko’s render burst into existence just as he was tying off the handle for the third and final [Bone Axe], crossing over his range and causing him to fumble the tool at the suddenness. August barely managed to catch it by the tip of the handle before it could slip off the bench.
“I thought I’d be able to get just a little bit closer before you realised,” Haiko said, sounding more than a bit amused. “I may have to start paying considerable attention to the possibility that you possess a pair of eyes in the back of your head.”
August carefully placed the tool back on the bench and turned, unimpressed by her very apparent—and more than successful—attempt to sneak up on him.
“Give me a couple of weeks,” August said in an effort to play off the fact that he’d so visibly jumped. “Then you won’t be able to sneak up on me at all.”
Seeking Direction: Revised Edition is now live; It's a revised RWBY fanfiction following an OC with Direction Manipulation as his Semblance.
If you like my writing and want to see more of it, you can find links to my original books on Elbowsnapper.com
If you want to show some support, get early access, or see my first drafts, go check out my Patreon
Love you guys, keep on keeping on!
Recent Releases:
Ameliorate: Intersect
Reroll: Falling & Shatter
Systematic Soul Sorting: Book 1 & Audiobook. Book 2(First Draft)
Seeker's Precept: The Dragon's Marble
