"Is this really such a terrible quality sword?" I passed the sword that I'd just made in my stomach over to Rigur.
"Well…" Rigur hesitated, looking the sword over with a fine eye, "It's made out of high-quality materials… They're all together, and it's sharp, too…"
"But?!" I didn't see what was wrong with my swords! I made perfectly good swords!
"But, umm…" Rigur took a test swing against a nearby tree. Midway through his strike, though, the blade slipped from his hands, flew twenty feet, and embedded itself into the ground between Gobta's feet. "Sorry!" Immediately, Rigur shouted an apology.
"Don't worry about it! Thanks to Mistress Cr- Risa, I recently got Stab Resistance! Pain Resistance, too!" Gobta called out cheerfully. From testing, though, I knew Stab Resistance wasn't exactly a strong skill on Gobta, since hobgoblins were naturally very weak to stabbing. I doubted that it'd have done much if he'd been skewered by that sword.
But Gobta was rather dull, so he simply grabbed at my sword's handle and began trying to pull it free of the ground.
"NRRGH! NNNRRGGHHHH!!! GAAH!" Pulling with all of his might, Gobta finally, barely managed… to pull about half of the blade out. It'd broken in half inside the ground.
"Aww…" Dejected, I reabsorbed the sword from Gobta's grasp, as well as the magisteel underground. I'd have to work on it later. "Well then. Guess I'd better get going, now!"
Turning my mind from my failed attempt at blacksmithing, I decided now was time to leave.
"Wait, Risa! You can't just attack the dwarven kingdom!" Rigur immediately began doing everything in his power to stop me, but my mind was made up.
It'd all started three days ago. After Kaijin's swords were finished, Big Bro had convinced Kaido to take Gobta and I with him out of Dwargon, so that we could connect with Rigur and the others while he finished things up with Kaijin. I'd argued against it, but apparently a bunch of Kaijin's friends were really sensitive, and couldn't be around multiple monsters, or little girls, for long periods of time, so I had to go. He'd promised to meet up with us in a few hours.
But three days had passed, and not so much as a message. Rigur had stopped me so far, but I couldn't just leave Big Bro in the city forever. All I was gonna do was go inside, find Big Bro, and come back, but Rigur kept saying 'No!' pleading with me about carnage and death and the like.
Luckily for Rigur, he didn't need to stop me, today. Just as I got around to leaving, I sensed something, and immediately bounded off into the forest at top speed.
"Big Bro!!!" Transforming into my Goblina form, which I'd gone a long way into mastering over the last few days, I immediately picked Big Bro up and hugged him to my chest.
…
(Rimuru POV)
"Big Bro!" Suddenly, I found myself in the arms of Risa's Goblina form. From the viewpoint of the four dwarves beside me, it probably seemed like a heartwarming scene.
'Report. Intense anger detected behind Risa's smile.' Yeah, I didn't need Great Sage's warning to know that Risa was, while not exactly pissed, definitely annoyed. After all, I kinda ditched her for three days with the excuse of finding people other than Kaijin, Garm, Myrd, and Dord. Then, I came back with just Kaijin, Garm, Myrd, and Dord. I was almost regretting going to that Butterflies of the Night elf club. Almost.
…
(Risa POV)
So, apparently Big Bro had been arrested again, along with Kaijin, Garm, Myrd, and Dord, before he could start negotiating with any of Kaijin's other friends. They'd then been exiled from the Dwarven Kingdom after spending a few days in jail.
Honestly, for a second, I'd thought that Big Bro had lied to me or something. I really should trust more.
Either way, it was time to go home. Kaijin rode with me on Raya's back, while Rimuru used his Tempest Starwolf form to carry Garm, Dord, and Myrd, since Ranga's back wasn't exactly big enough to carry four people at once. Ranga seemed a bit pouty about that, but he perked right up when he realized that he'd get to see his next evolved form in action.
Originally, I'd wanted to pick Kaijin's brain about why my weapons were so 'bad' while we rode back to the village, but the poor dwarves spent the first day-and-a-half or so unconscious, so I only got a day or so of time to actually talk with him, before we arrived.
On a side note, Big Bro's Tempest Starwolf form was overpowered. Thanks to it, he'd learned a skill that I didn't have: Black Lightning, which was pretty self-explanatory. When he tested it, he literally pulverized a gigantic boulder, before turning around and whistling a tune as he walked right back to camp, pretending that nothing had happened except for a passing storm. Apparently, the skill's power put it past the realm of A-rank, stronger than the breath of ten Tempest Snakes all at once.
…
The final day of travel was actually really informative for me. I spent most of it talking to Kaijin with Thought Communication, and he told me a lot of things that Big Bro either hadn't known, or hadn't thought to tell me.
None of it would make me a better blacksmith, though.
Firstly, I learned about how the 'Free Guild' classifies monsters.
Essentially, anything below D-minus rank was classed as a pest. That included goblins and normal slimes. Some of the slimes in the Sealed Cave that I was born in actually had reached D-minus rank in terms of pure magicules, but that just made them about as strong as the average untrained adult human, physically.
Normal hobgoblins were classed as D rank as well, but Gobta, Rigur, and Rigurd, our three hobgoblins who had 'classes,' were all somewhere between C-minus and C-plus.
Shortly after joining back up with us, before we'd begun heading back to town, Big Bro had walked up to Gobta, said "Man, you've had it rough, huh?" And promoted a crying Gobta to Captain Goblin.
Rigur's title was General, and Rigurd was the Goblin Lord.
Adventurers who could best C-ranked monsters were considered to be pretty skilled. Adventurers who could beat B-ranked monsters like the Armorsaurus and the Evil Centipede from the Sealed Cave were considered to be elite veterans.
A-ranked monster, meanwhile, were incredibly rare. The black snake wasn't even technically an A-ranked creature, but A-minus, due to how easily it's killed once you get past its breath. Technically, I was somewhere on the wall between A-rank and Special A rank. A-plus rank, if you would. Strong enough to beat ten Tempest Snakes at once, but not quite as strong as a Greater Demon, or a Superior Spirit, which could completely eradicate small towns. With his new transformation, and his bigger magicule stores than me, Big Bro was roughly low-Special A ranked.
The difference between us came from our base compositions, by my Processor's guess. Rimuru was a Unique monster born directly into the deepest caverns of the Sealed Cave, with the Predator skill, which allowed him to store magicules a lot easier than Processor could. On top of that, he was constantly adapting and taking in Veldora's excess magicules, before sending them back to the dragon in his stomach.
Meanwhile, I was actually pretty old by slime standards. Apparently, my white color was partially because of a mutation, and partially because of how old I was. I'd begun to lose what little color I'd had, after what I guessed was about eight-or-nine years of living on instinct alone. I wasn't sure, though, because it didn't really matter anymore. After I acquired Processor, my ability to store magicules made me strong enough that my lifespan was basically stretched to infinity… Perks of being a slime.
Anyways, at the time of Rimuru's birth, I'd been using Processor to gather magicules from the Sealed Cave for about a year… yet again on instinct alone. My magicule stores had been pretty close to B-ranked back then, apparently, and all of the experience since had ballooned it to what it was now. If we'd been rated back then, I'd have been about a half-rank stronger than Big Bro, but he'd shot past me to B-plus the moment that he'd gobbled up Big Bro Veldora.
Apparently, high Special-A rank was the realm of near-demon-lords. Beyond that were S-rank, the rank of Demon Lords, and Special-S rank, which were said to be reserved for True Dragons alone, though it was rumored that there were some Demon Lords who were Special-S level as well. Just goes to show just how terrifically powerful Big Bro Mr. Magic Man was. One day, I wanted to be Special-S ranked, too.
As for my swordsmithing skills, from what I gathered from Kaijin, I figured that it was, once again in the difference between my skills and Big Bro Rimuru's. Basically, Big Bro had two Unique Skills, one for calculation, and one for eating and manipulating whatever it was that he ate. Meanwhile, I only had the one skill that was meant to do both. Since all three skills were roughly on the same level, it only made sense that my own skill would be notably less versatile than Big Bro's.
That wasn't a terrible thing, though. Essentially, my Processor augmented my own brain, allowing me to be able to better manipulate it. But I still had to do everything by hand. Meanwhile, Big Bro had a skill that basically acted as a medium to allow him to control it all with incredible precision. Unfortunately, that also meant that he couldn't 'feel out' things, like I could. If he had a sword, or a form to copy, then he could do so. He could even modify it as he saw fit. But if he didn't have a base, he was sunk. His skill wasn't quite developed enough to create things from scratch simply by 'feel.'
Technically, my Processor was actually just as good as both of Rimuru's skills. Right now, at least. It'd likely fall behind as Rimuru gained more information, but Processor did have a few aspects that Predator and Great Sage didn't, to make up for all of the other inferior aspects.
First off, I could run experiments with Processor and learn from them. Most anything that I could do inside my stomach, I could learn something from. This made up for the fact that I couldn't read skills from my target's soul like Big Bro could.
A good example of this were herbs. By simply plucking a random weed off of the ground and chucking it into my stomach, I could infuse magicules into the herbs themselves and test how they interact with the excess cells that I store in my stomach. For example, if I found a grass with latent healing potential and infused it with magicules, it'd become a hipokute herb, and its extract would then 'heal' my cells.
By analyzing that inside my stomach, I could reproduce the effect, healing someone so long as I understood what the injury was, which wasn't difficult with my magic sense. That also worked with poisons, antidotes, anything, really. Some effects were too complicated for me to reproduce, especially antidote-type herbs, but Big Bro couldn't do that sort of thing at all. In order to heal someone other than himself, he needed to splash the potion itself on them.
Plus, by doing things manually, it offered me a lot of freedom. For example, I could transform into a goblina, reproducing their outward appearance, even though I couldn't actually add cells to my body via magic the same way Big Bro could, and had never in-depth analyzed one inside my stomach before. In fact, I was keeping myself in goblina form as much as possible, while keeping certain effects that I'd gathered from other monsters as well.
Right now, my 'second' form, as I called it, had the base of a goblina, the leg muscles of a direwolf, the same skin color as the dwarves behind me, since that seemed more 'human,' a layer of 'skin' right below the first layer, which was as dense as an armorsaurus's skin, and senses from direwolves, bats, and the Tempest Snake. Technically, if Big Bro and I were to battle, I honestly wasn't sure who'd win, even though he had more skills and magicules, thanks to my stronger body.
Anyways, the reason that my swords weren't of a very high quality was simple. They weren't uniform. Basically, I was smoothing out the surface of the metal, making it look like a sword, then adding a half-assed handle to it. With the sword I'd first made, there'd been medium-sized empty spaces and tiny cracks all over the blade. With the second one, it'd been slightly better, but there'd been a single, fairly big empty pocket in the very middle of the blade, where it'd cracked. I'd need to put a lot more effort in to make a good sword.