B6C14 Molten Armour

The metal fell in on itself as it finally became liquid. Modulating the heat with my hands in order to alternate between fully liquid and not, just a little solid, I drew it up onto my body. There was a gasp from nearby, someone no doubt seeing what they must have perceived as pure suicide. It would have been were it not for my Passive. I was still forging, after all, so to me it felt like tepid water all across my body.

More and more came, until my body was covered. With my hands and my mind, I smoothed it as best I could, allowing one piece to cool enough to become solid and then, with a combination of my hands and my Engraving Skill, scraping the area flat until it resembled armour. At least enough so to adhere and attach to my body. If it were anything less, or too much a liquid, it would fall or slide off. Piece by piece, minute by agonising minute, I built the suit of armour up, starting with my feet and legs before moving onto my thighs, hips, stomach and then chest. It was a hideously constricting suit of plate that covered every segment of my body, movement only allowed by intersecting plates at my joints.

The final piece was the helm, which I shaped up by pulling molten metal with my fingers over my cheeks and face, closing my eyes as I worked. When it was done, I could barely breathe, but a quick pull of my fingers across my mouth and eyes created space enough to see and draw breath. The rest of the Guild was staring at me.

"Okay," Nora said, "I'll admit, that was pretty cool."

"I'm not sure what a full suit of armour will do for you, though," Ren said. "Surely, it would just melt. If you didn't cook inside of it."

That was a risk for sure. Conventional armour would indeed conduct heat to an incredible degree and kill me faster. But that was conventional armour. This wasn't armour, at least not properly. If someone were to take a spear and plunge it into my stomach, the tip would pierce through with ease and kill me. My breastplate was still soft, after all, still in a state somewhere between solid and liquid. More the former than the latter.

More importantly, I was still forging. So long as the heat was high, and I continued to work on the armour with my Engraving Skill, my Passive Skill considered this a work in progress. The armour was incomplete.

"Stay safe," I said. "I'll deal with Cinder."

Before they could ask how or why, I turned and stepped into the inferno. I took a breath a second before I did and held it, running a gauntlet down over my faceplate to once more cover my eyes and mouth. The fire from Phoenix could still steal oxygen and dry my eyes to the point they popped, but only if it touched me.

Right now, the fire could not. That was the thing about fire, really. It was the differences in temperature that caused the consequences of injury by fire, and no matter how it was summoned, this was still fire. It was hot, incredibly so, but fire itself did not have the energy to burn at temperatures hot enough to melt steel. That was why coal fires were used, because the coal itself would help the fires burn hotter. This had no such fuel.

When I stepped into the fire, my body – my mass – was hotter than the fire itself. The flames licked at my molten armour, but they were cooler than it. If anything, heat was stolen from me, but I kept that going from the palms of my hand, constantly using Stoke the Forge to maintain my ridiculously high temperature.

A temperature I did not – could not – feel. My skin did not burn, nor did my organs cook. Trapped as I was within the armour, my own molten steel created a buffer against the fire, a shield of hotter fire that kept Phoenix's away.