Chapter 49: Leaving the ground

Chapter 49: Leaving the ground

Ema and I poured over the repair list for the arm, settling on a final list of what we were going to leave out once we were ready. When we were done the list was eight parts long, having to do with its connection to the Odin Force, the ability to control it remotely and several other parts of what drove it. It also apparently had its own repair function that could fix minor issues, which we regretfully added to the list. Having armor that could slowly repair itself over time was nice, even if it was minor things, but the chance that one of the things we didn't want would be re-created was too high.

When we were satisfied with the list I disconnected the repair tablet and got it working on my undersuit, before lugging the arm outside and setting it on a nearby rock.

"What are you doing?" Ema asked as I adjusted the position of the arm, pushing it around until a small portion of the broken end was hanging off the edge.

"A few of the thing's we don't want to repair are still partially intact." I said, getting a slight bobble in agreement. She had after all seen the same list I had. "But if we repair it from an even smaller chunk?"

"Then those things might be fully offline." Ema finished. "That's a solid idea but how are you going to get that chunk?"

I pushed out my sword from its card, flourishing a bit before checking the blade.

"I stacked twenty different swords and a dozen plates of magic super metal into this one sword." I explained. "The cutting concept blows past anything I have ever made before."

I touched my marksman's ring, turning it into my melee ring before cranking the blade's power all the way to its maximum. I lowered myself into a falsely familiar stance, held the sword at ready and swung it downwards. The blade impacted exactly where I wanted, letting out a reverberating thunk as it lost a significant amount of its momentum. It still carved into the metal, cutting off a few twisted ends of the arm, scattering four pieces of metal onto the ground.

I reached out and carded the arm before picking up the chunks of Asgardian mystery metal. I was headed back to the tent when I carded my sword and froze. It now had a noticeable damaged concept to it. With a flick I pushed it back out and examined the normally sharp blade, noting a serious chip and noticeable hairline crack.

"What the hell?" I said. "Look at this!"

Ema scanned the blade and let out a humming noise as she focused on the damage.

"You really messed that up." She said, floating away, backwards. "What did you do?"

"I I don't know." I admitted. "I mean if there was anything that could damage it I'm not surprised it's the destroyer armor but still."

I carded it, examining the concepts in detail. When I had put the sword together it was a bit of a rush job. I had attempted to make it stronger by adding in sheets of super metal, but I had a sneaking suspicion it hadn't been enough.

"Its cutting concept is extremely high, way higher than its strength concept, even with its super metal aspects layered in." I eventually said, shaking my head as I realized the problem. "It has an edge that can cut through almost anything, but it isn't strong enough to do it without damaging itself."

I quickly headed back into the tent and hooked up the universal repair tablet to the blade, setting it to repair everything when I read it would only take fifteen minutes. With the tablet occupied with my sword I took three of the four armor shards and put them into a small bag from the shed before carding the bag.

With nothing to do for the next fourteen minutes Ema and I made a final brainstorming list about how we would achieve flight. In some ways we were spoiled for choice in how to get the concept of flight, but in practice I was worried whatever we made wouldn't be realistic. Drones, paper airplanes, helium balloons, model rocket engines, RC planes and helicopters. Hell you can buy miniature jet engines at the right hobby shop!

To help narrow it down, Ema and I broke up what we needed to four points. It needed to be fast, it needed to be safe, and it needed to be precise. I couldn't just strap rockets to my back and blast off, I needed a way to control myself, the more precise the better. However, if it wasn't safe and fast then being pinpoint accurate meant nothing. The final point, and probably the most important is that it needed to be practical. I couldn't fly around the city with spinning propellers strapped to myself, or risk starting fires every time I took off or landed because I had rockets strapped to my feet.

Soon I was riding around the quarry, making slow loops and turns. It was a little nerve racking flying around like this, and I soon found a rather large problem. While the board was intuitive to use, its turning speed was way too slow. It wasn't a problem when I was doing lazy turns to get used to it, but I could feel myself losing even more maneuverability as I sped up. Thirty miles an hour I was struggling to turn around inside the quarry clearing. I landed, which was an interesting experience in and of itself, and tinkered around with it some more. I was able to work in a little more maneuverability with some additional parts from the RC planes but the drop off was still too high when I reached any reasonable speed.

With my first experiment technical success but a practical failure, I passed the board to Ema to experiment with while I returned to the tent, eager to start on my second attempt.

It started with combining a wing suit with a pair of Cessna wings, then another wingsuit with one of the now fully repaired hang gliders. I took both of those and combined them with a few sheets of extra light magic super metal and a half dozen gyroscopes. When I was done with that I grabbed one of the most important parts of this attempt, an unreasonable amount of real wing feathers from various hawks and owls.

The feathers were surprisingly expensive, but I still emptied almost a dozen stores of their entire stock. I took the feathers and combined them together in groups, combining two sheets of the extra light magic super metal so that they belonged in a group together. The result was twenty eight feather groups, each of them filled with two dozen enhanced, metallic feathers. I set aside half of the groups to potentially make a second version since I was now out of usable feathers.

I broke down two of the feather groups and added them individually to the wingsuit combos I made earlier, before combining them both together. I quickly put together six thrust packages, then blended them with magic and another two groups of feathers, combining them until they were just feathers with the concepts of thrust.

I added three of the thrust feathers to the wingsuit conglomerate, before carding one of the fake wings. I studied the concepts, realizing that the biggest hurdle here would be minimizing the concepts of fake that it held. Before I could talk myself out of it I combined it with a few sheets of my new flight metal combination, before mixing in five whole stacks of my enhanced feathers, followed by my remaining thrust feathers.

"God I hope this works." I mumbled to myself as I combined the new enhanced wings with the wingsuit combination, finishing it off with a single spark from Thor, one of three remaining.

The final result was an A ranked card that was a complicated mess of flying, magic and other enhancements. I had no idea if they would work. I pushed my newest creation out into my hands, and was surprised to catch a back pack of sorts. It was metal, a complicated harness system that probably came from the original cosplay wings. The metal pack itself was a foot and a half long and a foot wide, a streamlined shape that looked like an upside down teardrop, the thinner end pointed down.

After a minute or so of trying to figure out how to slide into the harness I gave up and carded my deployed chest armor off of myself, recarded the back pack and combined them together. I was already working on better armor, so I wasn't too concerned about what would happen to this set. The wings on the other hand had to work.

Silently praying that I didn't just royally screw it up I quickly put my armor back on, shrank it then redeployed it. Both forms had the same long teardrop shaped pack, the extra mass barely even noticeable. Anxious and eager I stepped out of the tent and closed my eyes, focusing on my desire to fly.

Slowly I could feel something shift behind me, almost as if an extension of myself was emerging. I opened my eyes and flexed, and sure enough, wide metallic wings pushed into view. I reached out and touched one, running my fingers through the feathers. They were cold, but still soft to the touch, but tough enough that I couldn't break or damage any of them by hand. I focused on stretching them, feeling them move and how doing so changed my center of balance. I had a wingspan of twelve, maybe fourteen feet.

Now for the important part.

I took a slow breath, releasing it out after a moment, before flapping my wings experimentally. It was bizarre that I could feel them, and yet I knew they were a separate part of me. I beat and flapped, feeling how the different movements worked. After a few minutes of experimentation I pushed off with my feet and flew into the air.

Working the metal wings was intuitive and easy, almost like second nature. For a moment I wondered if it was a side effect of the magic, of Thor's spark or a combination of the two. I didn't dwell on it long however, as I quickly realized that my feet hadn't touched the ground yet!

I looked down and saw the ground becoming farther and farther away. I couldn't help but laugh as I pushed harder, my wings whipping in the wind as I darted forward. In the distance I saw Ema, pushing the limits of the hover board. With a grin I darted forward, the land whooshing by underneath me as I flew towards her. As I moved I rolled back and forth, feeling the air pushing against my metal feathers, tugging at my wing tips.

She noticed me before long, slowing and turning, lowering to the ground. I followed her in, flaring my wings out to slow myself down, landing in a half stumble before catching myself. Her pure emerald eyes trailed back and forth over my wings before focusing on me.

"So Are you making mine next?"

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