It was a box on a desk in one corner of the room.
The box was a long rectangle, and the thing inside it was clearly long and narrow as well.
Leo had reason to believe that what lay inside was a sword, or rather, a weapon that was about to belong to him.
Seeing Leo's eyes fixed on the long box, Loki laughed.
"Look at you, can't wait, huh. Go on and take a look already."
That line was as good as confirming what was in the box.
Leo stepped forward, reached out, and picked up the long box from the desk.
The weight in his hand was not light. Heavy, even. A sturdy Dwarf might have to put his full strength into lifting it, and only Leo, a first-class adventurer at Lv.5, could raise it in one hand with ease.
Then Leo opened the box, and the weapon inside was finally exposed to the air and came into his view.
The first thing to reach his eyes was a dazzling platinum color.
It was a brilliant platinum, as if it could shine through darkness, and from the moment it appeared it was bound to be the most dazzling thing in the room. Leo narrowed his eyes slightly.
Then the weapon in the box entered his sight completely, and he took in the whole of it.
It lay on a layer of padding inside the box, blade and sheath separated, one set above the other, so that the bright blade came into Leo's view with nothing to conceal it.
Platinum-colored throughout, about a hundred and thirty centimeters long, the blade roughly five centimeters wide, the guard roughly seven, done in a round openwork pattern. The grip widened at the top and bottom and tapered toward the middle, with a gold gem set at the pommel, the picture of luxury.
Mysterious veins of fine gold ran all over this platinum sword, gold patterns engraved on both blade and grip, and at the center of the round openwork guard sat a many-sided diamond-shaped gem, answering the gold gem at the pommel and making it more luxurious still.
Leo could feel that both the gold gem at the pommel and the diamond-shaped gem at the center of the round openwork guard held extraordinary Magic.
These two gems were plainly not ordinary decoration, but the source of magic power that nearly every staff had: magic treasure stones.
And the fine gold veins covering the blade and the grip in fact connected these two magic treasure stones, carrying the magic power within them across the whole sword, so that the entire sword ran with an exceedingly abundant flow of Magic.
Leo was not by nature a person who liked things too ornate or too showy, but for whatever reason, he liked this excessively luxurious and exquisite weapon from the first glance.
He reached out without thinking, gripped the hilt, and lifted the sword out of the box.
The platinum blade cut through the air, bringing a slight sense of vibration.
Holding the sword, Leo found that under the guidance of the magic treasure stones and the fine gold veins, his own Mind was stirring, eager to turn into a thread of magic power and flow through his palm into the blade, lighting up the magic treasure stones and the gold veins one after another.
"So smooth..."
Leo looked at this with some surprise.
His magic power could pour into this platinum sword this smoothly, more seamlessly than when he touched a high-grade staff.
"Course it's smooth." Loki poured liquor down her throat and said, grinning, "To make this sword work like a staff and draw out the power of the stones on it perfectly, the smith had no choice but to refine a whole lot of mithril into it."
Mithril, a refined metal lighter and harder than iron, and far easier to forge, whose value was in no way beneath that of orichalcum (the hardest metal) or Hardsteel (the ultra-hard metal).
Its hardness might not match orichalcum or Hardsteel, but it had extremely high magic conductivity, and it was the first-choice material for making virtually every magic item that required metal.
The main forging material for Bete's pair of metal boots, which could absorb magic and attach that magic's power to themselves, was mithril. Without a metal with mithril's extremely high rate of magic conduction as the material, that pair of metal boots could never have released the magic they absorbed.
So when Leo demanded that his custom weapon had to be a sword-staff hybrid type, needing to serve as both sword and staff at once, the main forging material for this weapon was bound to be mithril, not Udaeus's Black Sword, which he had originally intended to forge a weapon from.
"This sword is made of refined mithril from end to end, and the fine gold veins on the blade and grip were poured with a synthetic magic liquid mixed from the resin of the Great Sacred Tree. The veins themselves are actually Hieroglyphs, countless tiny Hieroglyphs joined into lines to trace out those patterns, which pushes an already high magic conduction rate up to an astonishing degree."
"The magic treasure stones in the grip and the guard were made with the highest craft they have over in the Magic Kingdom of Altena. The materials are outrageously expensive, but it's the technique used that's priceless, a secret rite among secret rites. They say only Spirits use it."
"Put the two together, and this weapon has both top-grade sharpness and the strongest magic power."
Loki held forth with enormous satisfaction, like she was showing off.
"As a sword, its power and quality are First Class, and among the very top of that tier."
"As a staff, it's First Class among First Class too, performance probably only a bit under the Five Greatest Staves, Magna Alfs in Riveria's hands included."
"Freya Familia's Hildrsleif has a sword-staff called Dizaria, and compared with this, even that comes up a notch short."
This was the crowning achievement of the lower world's highest craft, the most top-tier thing among all the divine arms that had ever appeared in the lower world across all of history, of incalculable value.
"I actually got serious this time, pulled every connection I have to get a custom weapon like this together for you. Wore me out something awful."
Loki said it in a put-upon tone.
She really had spent both thought and effort this time, burning through who knew how many favors and how many connections to get a weapon like this put together.
There was nothing for it. Leo's Star Sword Crossing effect was right there in front of her.
The higher the quality of the equipped blade, the stronger the Skill's effect. With it written out in black and white like that, how could Loki not find a way to make this custom weapon as close to perfect as possible?
The higher the quality, the stronger Leo would be, and the Familia would gain another pillar strong enough to hold it up. On top of that, Leo grew so fast that if this custom weapon weren't made as fine and as strong as it could be, he'd probably be forced to change weapons again before long.
At that thought, Loki gritted her teeth and threw herself into preparing this weapon with everything she had, which was why the finished product could be this strong.
Leo didn't doubt Loki's words at all.
Because he had already felt it: the moment he gripped this sword, his Status climbed by a large margin, far more than when he held Udaeus's black longsword, itself comparable to a top-grade weapon.
If his Status before had been roughly on par with Ais's just after she rose to Lv.6, then his Status now was probably a large margin above Ais's, nearly a match for top-tier Lv.6 adventurers like Finn and Gareth.
At the very least, his Agility was certainly higher than Finn's and Gareth's, his Dexterity could rival Finn's, which had reached the S grade, and even his Strength probably wasn't far off Gareth's, who had trained it to S.
"This sword..."
Once Leo came back to himself from that absorbed state, he looked at Loki and said one thing.
"This wouldn't happen to be the work of one of the forge-side gods, would it?"
Leo couldn't help suspecting it.
As a sword, this weapon's quality was already at the level of First Class equipment, and in the more top-tier ranks of it at that.
As a staff, its performance was close to that of the "Five Greatest Staves," and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it the sixth strongest staff in this world.
Either one of those alone would take a legendary artisan to forge, let alone combining the two into a single sword-staff.
The two were completely different fields, after all.
Ordinarily, the smiths people spoke of only forged physical armaments like blades, spears, swords, and halberds, while the making of staves involved a profession called Mystery.
Unlike swords and other weapons used in close combat, a Mage's staff, which raised Magic and adjusted the power of magic, required its maker to be versed in magic as well, and therefore required special craft. Ordinary smiths, even if they trained the Development Ability Blacksmith to the highest S grade, still couldn't make a staff.
So those who handled magic-related items were called Mystery instead, the artisans who specialized in making staves and rods.
The staves Mystery made by hand used many holy woods from the Elf forests, or special metals and ores, as raw material, in order to raise a Mage's ability, and among these the multicolored magic treasure stones, which didn't exist in nature and which only they had the means to make, could raise the effect of magic by the greatest margin. Whether or not a staff had one of these stones set in it made a world of difference to its performance.
Under such circumstances, sword-staff hybrid weapons seemed to exist, but the number of people who could actually forge such a weapon in the whole lower world was probably a mere handful.
Versed in forging technique and in magic craft both, artisans that rare had never been heard of in Orario, and only over in the Magic Kingdom of Altena did word of such an artisan surface now and then, but finding them would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Just how Hildrsleif's Dizaria came to be born, Leo didn't know.
But he could work out that even if there were some artisan of vast ability who could forge a sword-staff hybrid weapon like Dizaria, that would probably be their limit.
And this weapon, a notch above Dizaria, Leo couldn't imagine any artisan of the lower world producing.
So he suspected this weapon hadn't come from the hands of an artisan of the lower world, but from a god of the forge school.
Leo looked the weapon over from end to end and found no Familia emblem of the most famous goddess of the forge in Orario, the goddess Hephaestus.
He'd heard that goddess of the forge was on good terms with Loki, and he'd wondered whether this sword had come from her hands, but from the look of it... apparently not?
"All right, quit looking. It's not Feifei's work, and it's not any goddess of the forge's work either."
Loki saw through what Leo was thinking at a glance and said it a bit crossly.
"Divine craft doesn't just show up whenever. Even as good as Feifei and I are, whether I could get her to lift a finger is anyone's guess."
Gods did seal away their Arcanum when they descended to the lower world, but the techniques the gods themselves had mastered didn't belong to the domain of Arcanum. Techniques of that kind were collectively called divine craft, divine skills that by rights should never have appeared in the lower world, and that towered far above the lower world's own craft.
The goddess of the forge Hephaestus had mastered forging craft of the divine domain, but precisely because she understood deeply how much of a cheat divine craft was in the lower world, she almost never lifted a finger to forge a weapon.
In the original work, even Hestia, her closest friend, had in the end only obtained Hephaestus's help by kneeling in prostration for an entire day, so that she would forge for Bell Cranel that famous little black knife which grew stronger as its user grew: the Hestia Knife.
Loki was on decent terms with Hephaestus, but wanting her to personally forge a weapon for a child of her Familia was probably more clout than she had.
Then how had this sword come about?
"Divine craft, no. But something close to divine craft, that I can get hold of." Loki lifted her head and squared her shoulders. "I just said it, didn't I? It's the technique used on it that's priceless, a secret rite among secret rites, the sort of thing only Spirits use."
That one line made it all clear to Leo.
"This is a Spirit's work?"
Loki snapped her fingers.
"More precisely, it's the masterwork of a certain Great Spirit who's been in seclusion a long time."
Spirits, as avatars of the gods, could work miracles equivalent to a portion of Arcanum to begin with.
As mentioned before, some Spirits would even take the form of weapons and accompany heroes, helping them slay their enemies.
In all sorts of legends and anecdotes, Spirits had made many unbelievable things, including weapons whose names went down in history.
The sword in Leo's hand was another Spirit masterwork fit to be counted among legends.
"By the way, it's also got that Great Spirit's blessing attached to it. It'll basically never break, won't even wear down. Even more of a cheat than my Ais's Desperate with its Unbreakable attribute."
Loki drained the last mouthful of liquor before saying it quietly.
"Barring accidents, this sword will be with you until you die."
"You could say it's your avatar and companion from here on."
"Go on, give it a name."
Leo tightened his grip on the weapon in his hand.
Gazing at this platinum sword traced with fine gold veins, Leo soon reached a decision.
Since Hildrsleif's weapon was called Dizaria, then this one would be called...
Starlight.
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