Yunyun x Reader (God's Blessing For This Poor Lonely Girl!)

Chapter 16: If We Can Make It Through December

A few months later.

While there was yet to be any snow, a frost had swept in across the city known to be good for beginner Adventurers.

A thin sheet of the frozen morning dew had settled across everything, and those that were up this early, setting about for work, worked their breaths like small chimneys with the stream they huffed out into the frosty morning air that the sun's rays were soon to bless with warmth any minute now.

Under his boots of leather and splint-steel, the frozen grass crunched as it was bent over by his foot.

Fresh from his return, this Adventurer had spent his first night back in Axel after all his nights of travel in foreign places. He had intended to arrive back before the beginning of the cold season, but now, well into it, he had finally returned.

Behind him, his cloak of deep blue helped keep the biting cold breeze off his body.

While most of his original armor had long been lost, the remaining pieces seemed to have finally begun a synthesis of their lingering enchantment to these new articles he'd acquired.

It only took them a few months...

In his months of travel at the side of the newest head of the Axis Order's Axel Chapter, this now less intensely armored juggernaut hadn't been able to find a single piece of armor that would have begun to stand up to the thickness of his previous full set.

With respect to that, he had bought, scavenged, plundered, and commissioned what he could to replace the old pieces. Never on his travels had he found a blacksmith willing to reforge pieces of the same thickness he had before. Any that would have agreed would only do so under the pretext that they be given a non-refundable deposit, and had no obligation to actually create something of the former quality.

To all this, the armored juggernaut from before, with his mobile-bunker-like armor, and a shield to match, all coated in its patina of rust, had been forced to entirely switch up not only how he fought, but how he Adventured.

Gone had been his style of hiding behind a wall of a shield he had once used, only to stab forward with the wide, short sword he had from before.

Such a rigid style of going about things on an Adventure or Quest wasn't flexible enough to deal with all the challenges one might face. With so much armor, one is still slow to react, even if that armor is feather-weight from their own abilities. Inertia from movement wasn't something one could easily thwart.

Large armor everywhere on one's body could make traversing in difficult terrain a pain. Huge armored greaves offered little grip on bad ground. Mud was hard to remove from it. Vines and branches snagged and clung onto it. Cold weather could freeze it stiff if there was ambient moisture in the joints.

Its size too, meant it was harder to fit into tight spaces. While the weight wasn't a factor against his stamina, it could be on brittle structures, like old, rotten wood bridges or crumbling stone stairs.

Having adventured so far and expansively in the company of the Priestess, he had come to know that flexibility was everything to success.

He still used armor, but only where it truly mattered. After all, his abilities made it so that this weighed nearly nothing to himself, but with the need to be flexible, he could no longer 'min-max' his skills and abilities, as this left him too vulnerable in other areas.

If I can't keep myself safe... I can't keep others safe either.

Ultimately, his defense needed to be curtailed if he hoped to be more well rounded.