Owen chose Confirm.
Nothing happened to him. There was no pain and no strange sensation running through his body, and the sword lying across his knees looked exactly the same as before. Whatever the system was doing, it was doing it to his armament, not to him.
The window stayed open while it worked. Owen sat and waited. Outside, footsteps passed now and then, and farther off he could hear soldiers finishing their duties for the evening, someone calling a name, a door closing.
Eventually, the system chimed again.
Ding!
[Integration complete.]
[Steel added to Blades.]
[New ability: Steel Reinforcement]
Owen lifted the longsword and looked it over. The dark blade, the pale silver edges and the copper markings were all exactly as they had always been.
He sent a small amount of energy toward the new ability.
A dull metallic sheen spread across the blade from the guard to the point. The surface looked denser somehow, harder, as though the sword had been forged a second time out of something heavier. He turned it slowly in the lamplight and tested its balance. It didn’t feel any heavier in his hand, and his arms didn’t feel any stronger for holding it. He let the energy stop, and the sheen faded. He supplied it again, and the sheen returned just as smoothly.
Then a thought occurred to him.
Owen held the Steel Reinforcement in place and pushed fire into the same blade.
The copper markings brightened, and flames spread along the reinforced metal. The grey sheen didn’t vanish under them. It stayed exactly where it was, and the fire simply ran over it.
Both powers were active at once.
Owen couldn’t stop himself from grinning. He had expected the Arsenal to keep his fire, but actually using two properties together was something else entirely. He could feel both of them drawing on his core at the same time, the heat and the hardness side by side in a single blade.
He thought about the boar. His fire had spent most of that fight scorching plating it couldn’t get through, and his blade had taken every collision on its own. A sword that could hold up under that kind of punishment while still carrying fire gave him another way to deal with something armored. It wouldn’t let him cut through anything he liked, but it would give him more to work with.
He tried the combination a few more times, carefully, then dismissed the sword. His body was still sore from the hunt, and a cramped room in a village house wasn’t the place to find out how much punishment the reinforced blade could take.
Gareth came looking for him later that evening.
"Have you eaten?" he asked from the doorway. Then he looked at Owen properly and sighed. "You’re still awake. And you’re thinking about your sword. I can tell."
"Is it that obvious?"
"You nearly got flattened by a boar this afternoon, and you’re sitting here looking like someone handed you a present." Gareth leaned against the doorframe. "What is it?"
Owen didn’t bother trying to hide it. "Something changed. After I held the boar’s core, my armament responded, the way it did the first time."
That got Gareth’s attention. He straightened slightly. Owen could see him thinking back to the day the sword had first appeared.
"Changed how?"
"I think it’s picked up a Steel ability," Owen said. "It’s easier to show you than explain it. I barely understand it myself."
They went out to a quiet, open stretch of the staging compound where there was room to summon weapons safely. The evening air was cool and damp. Lamplight spilled from the windows of the patrol building, and somewhere nearby the guards were changing shifts, their low voices carrying across the yard.
Owen summoned the longsword and activated Steel Reinforcement. The grey metallic sheen spread across the blade.
Gareth studied it and nodded. "Steel, from the boar’s core. That makes sense." He sounded interested, but not especially surprised. Developing an armament with a compatible core was ordinary enough.
Then Owen pushed fire into the blade without letting go of the Steel.
Gareth’s expression changed immediately. He wasn’t looking at the flames. He was looking at the grey sheen still visible beneath them.
"Turn off the fire," he said. "Just the Steel."
Owen did.
"Now the fire again. Keep the Steel."
Owen did that too, and Gareth stepped closer, looking from the metallic surface to the flames running over it and back again. He didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Gareth had spent nearly three years at the academy learning about living armaments, and Owen could see him measuring the blade against everything he knew. A bonded sword carried one core-derived power. That was how armaments worked. Owen’s sword was using two at the same time.
"That shouldn’t be possible," Gareth said quietly. "Not like that."
He straightened and looked at Owen. "At your ceremony, your core awakened, but nothing manifested. Then you held the fire core Father gave you, and suddenly you had a sword. Now you’ve held another core, and that same sword has another power, and it hasn’t lost the first one." He paused. "What happened when you held it? Did you do anything?"
"I held it, and my armament responded," Owen said. "Afterward, something was different. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know why my sword behaves differently from everyone else’s."
He understood exactly why Gareth had put the two events together. It was the obvious connection to make. But the system was the one thing Owen intended to keep to himself.
Gareth seemed to accept the answer, though he was clearly still turning it over. Then he asked the question that followed naturally.
"If you held a third compatible core, would it pick up a third power?"
"I don’t know," Owen admitted. "Two isn’t enough to say whether there’s a limit."
"Then we should find out." Gareth was starting to sound excited now. "When we get home, we’ll get you another core and see whether your armament responds again."