Jax was happy to hear Melayne accept his invitation.
"I’m glad you accepted my offer," Jax said. "And since I can’t wait for you to be done with your quest, I’ll help you."
"I told you, I cannot take your stones. I need to earn them."
"And you will," Jax said. "I’ll buy those weapons you’ve made off you."
Mel paused for a long second. "You’ll... buy my weapons?"
Her inventory was full of weapons that she had crafted during her training phase, which were ready to be sold.
"I’ll have to charge you the fair price, so it may cost a little," she said.
"I’ll buy what I can," Jax said. "Even my axe upgrade. Charge me for it."
"But I did it for free."
"I know. Charge me for it."
Mel understood and nodded. "How many stones can you give me right now?"
Jax looked at his inventory quickly. "200. I will need to keep a few for myself, just in case."
"200..." she murmured. Her eyes seemed to be lost somewhere, staring into nothingness. Jax was about to call out to her when he realized that she had been staring into the Inventory screen.
A few seconds later, Jax received an Inventory notification, asking to have a few things transferred to him. He looked at the list and saw that it was 3 swords, 2 spears, 2 bows, 25 arrows, 6 daggers, and 3 knives.
He accepted it, and it immediately filled his Inventory space.
"That’s 198 stones," she said.
Jax nodded and passed it along. Once it disappeared from his Inventory, he got another notification.
<Inventory Transfer Requested>
<You are being transferred [1 ’Black Lead Armor’]>
<Do you accept?>
Jax’s eyes widened as he was finally going to receive his armor.
He accepted.
The armor arrived in his inventory, falling into a single square on the grid on his screen. He reached out for the grid where his palm vanished into and pulled out a heavy chunk of metal.
It was a small armor plate, either for his shoulders or his arm, with a thick leather strip meant to strap it onto him. Jax felt at the thickness of the metal in astonishment.
"It’s so heavy and yet so thin," he said. The metal plate was less than half an inch thick. "This single plate may be as heavy as 10 slimes, and yet... just how dense is it?"
"Quite dense," Mel said. "I had to use my spell to reduce its size so much because you wanted to be more flexible in the armor."
There was a layer of leather underneath the metal to protect the wearer, which added to its thickness. So, in truth, the armor was actually much thinner than it looked.
"Its durability isn’t compromised by making it thinner, is it?" Jax asked.
"What do you think?" Mel asked. "Try attacking it."
Jax took those words as an invitation to test her armor right there. He added a lot of Navi into his palm, strengthening it in particular while the skill strengthened the rest of his body as well.
Then he punched.
A resounding boom shook the air from the punch.
Jax shook his arm in pain at the hardness of the material underneath and stared at it in surprise at the lack of any sort of blemish. He couldn’t help but be pleasantly surprised.
"Thank you. This might actually work wonderfully," Jax said, opening the strap and placing it on his arm. He tried to fiddle around with the strap with one hand and failed to place it on properly.
"Hey, can you help me?"
He waited for Mel to approach, but she didn’t. He looked up, confused. She was staring at him.
"Uhh, I asked for your help," Jax said. "Did you..."
"Are you stupid?" Mel asked.
Jax paused. "What makes you say that?" he asked.
"You’re trying to wear armor," she said.
Jax found himself getting rather angry. "The fuck else am I supposed to do?" he asked.
"Equip it!" she said.
"Huh?"
"The Inventory!" she said.
"What about it?"
Mel seemed to be nearly losing her mind at that. "God, have you never worn armor before?" she asked. "Just have the Inventory equip it for you."
Jax frowned. "I’m not sure what you mean," he said, looking at the Inventory. "There’s no such option."
"It’s not about the option. It’s about envisioning it," she said. "Just imagine yourself wearing armor directly from the inventory, and it will appear around you."
"Oh, does it?"
He looked toward the floating ball of light. "You never told me something like this was possible."
"You never struggled to wear armor before," Gemma said from the side. "I would’ve told you if there was ever an issue."
"But this is something you should’ve let me know," he said. "I could’ve used it during my fights when I needed to change armor after my previous one was destroyed."
"That’s part of the reason I didn’t tell you," Gemma said. "Because you can’t."
"You can’t equip armors or weapons from the Inventory during combat. It’s disabled," Mel said from the side. "That would be too much of an advantage to us warriors."
"I see," Jax said. "Then it’s only really useful outside of combat, huh?"
He didn’t feel as bad about Gemma keeping this information from him now. It wouldn’t have been useful to him anyway. And with the armors he had, it would have saved him a few seconds at most.
Jax did as he was told and simply envisioned the armor appearing around him. The moment he did, he saw a black flash of light that appeared from his inventory and surrounded his body.
In the next moment, it turned into plates of armor that strapped themselves into the correct position, tightly fitting against his body.
The moment it all came together, Jax didn’t just feel its tightness. He felt its weight.
And it was heavy, ridiculously so.
Jax was barely keeping himself up with just his body. However, as soon as he used his Body Fortification skill, it became a lot more manageable.
Once stable, he activated the other skill.