The loud sound of metal slamming repeatedly against hard stone woke Kanos up. He opened his eyes slowly. His back was incredibly stiff from sleeping on a cold iron table all night without any mattress or blanket. But the excruciating headache that felt like a drill spinning inside his skull was finally gone. Eight solid hours of sleep had completely reset his mental exhaustion.
Kanos sat up slowly and rubbed his face. The air inside the giant concrete workshop felt incredibly dry and still smelled faintly of sulfur. He looked toward the source of the noise. About ten meters away near the broken steel gate, Belida was sitting cross legged on the floor. The giant knight was holding a heavy chunk of leftover iron ore. He was using the metal chunk like a massive mortar and pestle to brutally crush something on top of a flat stone block.
"Morning, boss," Sili greeted cheerfully from the other side of the room. The skinny broker was busy brewing something in a small rusty pot over a makeshift campfire. "The knight has been hammering those crystals for two hours straight. I told him to wait for you, but he said his muscles needed stretching."
Kanos slid off the iron table. He walked over to Sili and accepted a cracked wooden cup filled with a steaming dark liquid. It smelled like roasted tree bark mixed with mud. Kanos took a sip anyway. It tasted absolutely terrible, but the bitter warmth instantly woke his brain up entirely.
"Where is Papuyu?" Kanos asked softly while scanning the empty corners of the vast workshop.
"She went back up to the ninth floor perimeter," Sili answered while adjusting his cracked glasses. "She wanted to check if the Sensor Bureau actually had the guts to send their magic hounds down here. My guess is no. Those royal dogs are completely terrified of losing their system privileges in the Dead Zone."
Kanos walked over to Belida. The knight stopped his hammering for a second and looked up. Sweat drenched his gray hair, but his breathing was perfectly steady. In front of Belida, there was a small pile of pale gray powder. It was the result of crushing dozens of the mana sucking crystals they harvested from the blind gargoyles last night.
"The texture is weird," Belida spoke flatly. He wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand. "These rocks look brittle like glass. But the moment I hit them with iron, they push the impact force back. I had to coat my arm with a little bit of aura just to shatter them."
"Because they are designed to absorb energy, not physical trauma," Kanos squatted next to the pile of powder. He pinched a tiny bit of the gray dust using his thumb and index finger.
The moment the powder touched his skin, Kanos felt a very sharp stinging sensation. It was exactly like putting his finger on a block of dry ice. The powder immediately tried to suck the natural mana out of his blood. Kanos dropped the dust back onto the stone block. He smiled. The quality of this material was absolutely insane.
"This is enough," Kanos said. He pulled three empty glass bottles from his cargo pocket. "Help me scoop all this powder into these bottles. Do not let a single speck blow away. This dust is going to be the main ingredient for our counterattack."
Belida nodded. The knight carefully scooped the gray powder using a folded piece of thick parchment paper, funneling it precisely into the glass bottles Kanos was holding. Sili walked over bringing his wooden cup of bitter tea. The broker looked at the bottles with greedy eyes.
"So, what is the master plan, boss?" Sili asked eagerly. "Are you going to mix that anti magic powder with your purple smoke ink? Will it not just explode again like the red spider blood experiment in the basement yesterday?"
"The red spider blood exploded because it was a highly reactive fire element meeting raw monster energy," Kanos explained calmly while corking the first glass bottle tight. "This gray powder is completely neutral. It is basically an empty sponge. It does not react. It only consumes."
Kanos stood up and walked back to his giant iron table. He placed the three bottles of crystal powder neatly in a row. Next to them, he placed his main bottle of thick purple shadow ink. His artist brain was already spinning incredibly fast. He had the perfect concept, the ultimate material, and an entirely safe workspace.
He unrolled a fresh sheet of high tier parchment paper. He did not use his brush yet. He picked up a small piece of wood charcoal from his pocket to start drafting the basic blueprint. Kanos closed his eyes for a few seconds to visualize the final product.
He did not want to create another giant, slow moving golem like the black void stone one. The void golem was an absolute tank, perfect for blocking massive magical bombardments. But it was terribly slow and lacked hunting instincts. If they were going back up to the city to ambush the Sensor Bureau, Kanos needed speed. He needed lethal agility combined with the absolute terror of mana nullification.
Kanos started drawing on the parchment. Sharp, decisive strokes. He drew the anatomical structure of a hound. But he heavily modified the joints. He elongated the spine to allow for massive leaping distances. He removed the excess muscle mass from his sketch, focusing purely on a lightweight bone frame that could cut through the air resistance perfectly. He gave the jaw an interlocking dual hinge design, allowing the mouth to open impossibly wide to snap a human neck in a single bite.
"That does not look like a normal wolf," Belida commented from behind. The giant knight was watching Kanos sketch with a deeply serious expression.
"Because normal wolves have physical limits," Kanos answered without stopping his hand. The charcoal scraped loudly against the paper. "I am designing a pure hunting machine. No internal organs to slow it down. No flesh to feel pain. Just a hollow frame designed to run fast and kill faster."
Kanos finished the blueprint draft in under ten minutes. He took a deep breath and tossed the charcoal aside. Now came the incredibly dangerous part.
He opened the bottle of purple shadow ink and poured a generous amount into a small iron bowl. The thick smoke immediately began to billow out, dropping the temperature around the table instantly. Kanos then opened one bottle of the gray crystal powder. He did not hesitate. He poured the anti magic dust directly into the swirling purple smoke ink.
Sili instinctively took three steps back and covered his face with his arms just in case it blew up. Belida tensed his leg muscles, ready to pull Kanos away if things went wrong.
But there was no explosion. The moment the gray dust touched the purple ink, a very low humming sound filled the workshop. The purple smoke violently sucked the gray dust in. The color of the ink rapidly shifted. The bright neon purple darkened significantly, turning into a terrifying shade of deep, bruised violet. The smoke no longer floated upward. Instead, it clung heavily to the bottom of the iron bowl, acting like a highly dense liquid shadow.
Kanos dipped his wooden brush into the new mixture. The tip of his brush hissed softly. The ink felt incredibly heavy, almost like stirring wet cement.
"It stabilized," Kanos muttered with a satisfied smirk. He looked at Belida and Sili. "The ink is ready. Now we just need to bring the blueprint into reality. Give me some space. This might get a bit chaotic."
Belida and Sili immediately moved back, giving Kanos a wide open area in the middle of the concrete workshop. Kanos picked up the iron bowl. His heart beat faster. He was about to test the absolute limit of his Illustramancy class using a completely illegal combination of materials. He walked to the center of the room, his eyes burning with intense focus. The true creation process was about to begin.