Belly of the Forge was the most obvious of them. He could use it to eat things. It was even more efficient than his Vampire Lord Frame was as converting things into his direct Stamina, so much so that it could even directly increase his Free Stat potential and Free Stats in the right circumstances.
What was more interesting to Grey were these other abilities that he hadn’t seen just yet.
Hide of the Forge was the Body Resistance Ability for good reason. It was similar to the Metal Body Skill he had had in the past, but far more comprehensive. While he could build out the defenses of his body with raw materials and metals, he didn’t have to do that alone.
It was called "Hide" of the Forge for a reason. He could gain help to improve his defenses from all sorts of things. He could eat a powerful beast and benefit from their muscle structure, he could eat the black diamonds that Duko produced and begin to produce them himself, he could even eat poisons, and so long as Belly of the Forge could grind them down, he could gain resistances to them.
Scraps of the Forge was a true surprise. It was the Body Combat Ability, and when Grey meditated on what it was, he couldn’t help but chuckle.
His voice was especially powerful when he tapped into the strength of his Mechanical Jaw Spirit. Now, it was on another level entirely.
The Mechanical Jaw Spirit wasn’t just an extension of himself, he had truly become the purest blooded gnome he could possibly have been. It could be said that the only reason he didn’t look like a Gnome, or a Goblin, or a Witch or Vampire, or any of the other bloodlines he had absorbed, was because his own foundational bloodline—that of a human—had taken utmost precedent, allowing him to maintain the form he was most comfortable in.
What Scraps of the Forge essentially allowed him to do was maintain that balance. He could gain the abilities of anything he ate, but it was likely not smart for him to do so. He should only take on the things that enhanced himself, and ignore everything else as every Gnome before him had done.
Scraps of the Forge essentially allowed him a method of expelling those unwanted products as concentrated beams of energy.
Essentially... he could breathe fire except a lot cooler.
Now, his voice wasn’t just powerful for the strength of its rupturing of sound and its violent cadence, but also because he could literally breathe out laser beams.
The more he ate, the more of this residual energy he would have, and the stronger his beams would be.
That said, this was still just the simplest application of Scraps of the Forge. At Core Sync, Grey could pick and choose what energies he wanted to expel.
If he was facing an enemy with strong fire abilities, maybe he could choose to expel water type energies. He could select what weaknesses he wanted to target and nail his enemies with them.
That left three Abilities to comprehend—or, rather, three Abilities he had already naturally comprehended. And those were his three Mind Abilities: Eye, Fault, and Revival of the Forge.
Fault of the Forge was his Mind Combat Ability and it tied in well with Eye of the Forge.
Eye of the Forge allowed him to view raw materials, treasures, and mechs alike in terms of their structure and composition. It was essentially like he was looking at the world as though everything was a blueprint and not yet fully formed.
Fault of the Forge worked in conjunction with this Mind Enhancement Ability to allow him to find the flaws in these materials.
What was amazing about this was that Grey already naturally did this in combat. He could reverse engineer mechs in his mind and target their weaknesses on purpose. That was a large part of the reason he was able to kill Terran in the past, and also deal with Raze just recently.
These two Abilities gave him a systematic method of doing exactly that. But what was even more curious was that Grey was certain he could synergize them well with Prometheus as well.
Wasn’t Prometheus also able to find the faults in blueprints? If Eye of the Forge allowed him to convert anything he saw into a blueprint, then Prometheus would certainly be able to help Fault of the Forge find weaknesses more efficiently.
The vice versa was also true. If Fault of the Forge improved, then the cost of Cyber Cores for finding faults in blueprints would decrease and Grey would have to pay less for the same results.
Finally, that left the last of the Abilities, Revival of the Forge.
There was a lot of mental attacks and corruption involved in absorbing the bloodlines of other Races. Grey had experienced this himself when he almost took a bite out of Elowen’s neck. But even with the Mechanical Jaw Lineage itself, he felt a great amount of hunger just looking at certain things.
Like the Old Ones, for example... that was basically as close as Grey could get to cannibalism without it actually being cannibalism.
The Old Ones were technically humanoids, and not human. And they were technically dead, not alive. But the latter mattered less, and did it really matter if they weren’t technically human if they were close enough to human?
Grey had felt his body urge him to eat Duko after their battle as well, but he had chosen to hold off because it just... felt weird.
He wasn’t sure yet how he felt about just eating people. Drinking their blood felt a bit less wild.
Revival of the Forge was essentially a reset that was built into the Mechanical Jaw Frame. It allowed a backtrack when you went down the wrong route, and it allowed you to wipe your mind clean of outside influences.
But honestly, his time in the rebirth waters had left Grey with one final conclusion of everything. Those moments had impacted more than he let on. So now, he was absolutely certain that he wouldn’t allow anything to stop him.
He would do whatever he needed to for strength. So long as his own moral code was followed, he’d eat whatever it was he pleased.
Grey slowly opened his eyes, brought out Duko’s corpse from his inventory, and took a huge bite out of the alien’s arm.
As he ate, he watched Thi Lan and Amunet struggle in silence.