This time, however, as Andrew began preparations to craft the leg armor for Hoshimi Miyabi, he made a deliberate departure from his usual method of simply designing everything himself from the start.
Instead, he chose to ask Miyabi for her input first.
The reasoning was simple. As a combatant who had reached the level of a Void Hunter through her own power alone, Miyabi possessed an incomparably clear and intimate understanding of her own capabilities — her strengths, her limits, and everything in between. Since this armor was being made for her, it only made sense that its specific requirements should be shaped by her vision, not his.
She knew what she needed better than anyone else could.
Crafting armor based purely on his own ideas and preferences, only to end up with something that failed to support her — or worse, actively hampered the full expression of her abilities — would be getting things exactly backwards. That was the one outcome Andrew refused to accept.
Facing the blueprint Andrew had sketched out, along with the detailed specifications annotated in the margins, Miyabi studied it in quiet contemplation for a moment before offering her thoughts.
Under her direction, the leg armor's design underwent a dramatic transformation.
In its original, complete form, the Gore Magala leg armor was designed to cover the wearer from the foot all the way up to the upper thigh. But at Miyabi's request, Andrew stripped away every piece of plating above the knee — every last section of shin guard and beyond, gone.
What had originally been a set of leg armor protecting the entire lower half of the body was redesigned, in one decisive revision, into a pair of boots that covered nothing more than the lower leg.
The black stockings that the original design would have largely concealed were now once again fully, unobstructedly on display.
This wasn't because the original armor was inferior, and it certainly wasn't because Andrew had some particular fondness for the aesthetic combination of boots and black stockings.
The truth was purely practical. If the leg armor were kept in its complete form — even accounting for the reduced weight of the immature Gore Magala materials — the sheer volume of plating involved would have inevitably pushed the total weight of the armor to a level that would meaningfully impede Miyabi's movement.
In combat, the drag of excessive weight on the legs was more than an inconvenience. It was potentially lethal. Speed was survival, and survival was the whole point.
Even with a reduction of this magnitude, the resulting load was already approaching the upper edge of what Miyabi could comfortably manage. Push it any further, and it crossed from "acceptable" into "liability."
Looking at the revised blueprint — its specifications now perfectly refined and final — Andrew had been ready to call it done. But out of habit, he glanced up and asked Miyabi, who stood waiting beside him:
"Miyabi, is there anything else in this design you'd like to change?"
Contrary to all expectations — she had been waiting for exactly this.
The moment the question reached her ears, Miyabi's eyes lit up in an instant, as if she had been holding that very thought in reserve the entire time. She straightened her spine, her posture sharpening to absolute attention.
Then, with an expression of complete and utter seriousness, she looked directly at Andrew and put forward her proposal:
"Andrew, doesn't this design offer rather too few style options at the moment? Are there really no other variants to choose from?"
"Style options?"
Andrew blinked, momentarily thrown off. He reflexively looked back down at the blueprint in front of him.
Having to be honest about it...
Now that Miyabi mentioned it, the style variety on offer did seem to be... rather limited, didn't it?
At the end of the day, the Gore Magala set came in two flavors: a variant cut for men and a variant cut for women. That was the entirety of the selection. Nothing beyond those two.
Miyabi was a young woman barely past twenty, and it was entirely natural for someone her age to care about how things looked. Andrew understood that perfectly well.
But understanding it didn't make it any easier to solve. This was where things got tricky for him.
He'd heard that in the Old World, Gore Magala armor existed in other styles — but the only designs he had personally studied were the two he'd learned from the illustrated monster compendium Gemma had shown him. Those were all he had to work from.
Scrubbing the back of his head in mild consternation, Andrew probed cautiously:
"Not enough style options... Miyabi, is it that you don't like the look of the design? Or is it that you don't like the Gore Magala aesthetic in general?"
But Miyabi immediately shook her head in denial.
"Neither," she said. "There's nothing wrong with the design's style or aesthetic. I'm quite satisfied with both."
Realizing that Andrew had gone off in entirely the wrong direction — and that he had completely missed the point she was actually trying to make — Miyabi wasted no time correcting him. She looked at him with full, earnest seriousness and elaborated:
"My concern about insufficient style options is this: women of different builds should each have a boot style that's properly suited to them. One size does not fit all."
"Especially for a woman like myself — a woman who stands a full one hundred and seventy centimeters tall."
And there it was. The map had been unfurled, and the dagger had finally revealed itself.
Miyabi's tone had remained perfectly level throughout the entire conversation — measured, composed, entirely undramatic. But the moment those three specific digits were spoken aloud, something shifted. Each syllable landed with a weight and gravity that was utterly, improbably solemn, as though she were reciting an oath before a court of law.
Word. By. Word. As if she were genuinely afraid Andrew might not hear her clearly enough.
"...Huh?"
For a split second, Andrew was convinced he'd misheard.
"Miyabi, you're... 170cm?"
He looked at her — this young woman who, by his own completely unambiguous visual assessment, stood at least two full heads shorter than him — and his gaze dropped instinctively from her face to the top of her head, then slowly down again.
Miyabi's expression did not so much as flicker. She was giving absolutely no indication that she had any intention of walking that number back.
Andrew hesitated for a moment, then managed a careful, neutral:
"That's... your height?"
Faced with the thinly veiled skepticism of Andrew's question, Miyabi straightened her spine to its absolute maximum and answered without a single moment of hesitation:
"That is correct. This is the official figure recorded during the Hollow Special Operations Department's physical examination. It is completely accurate. There is no error and no exaggeration whatsoever."
Andrew's internal monologue ground to a complete halt.
...Seriously?
If memory served — and Andrew was fairly certain it did — Evelyn's height was 173cm. He knew Evelyn. He was very familiar with Evelyn.
Which meant Miyabi at 170cm was only three centimeters shorter than Evelyn?!
Then why...
Relying on his mental image of Evelyn standing in front of him, Andrew lifted a hand on pure reflex and held it out in the air in front of him — tracing, approximately, where the top of Evelyn's head would reach relative to his own body.
Then, as he instinctively began to adjust that mental marker downward to account for the supposed three-centimeter difference that would place Miyabi just below it —
A sharp, piercing gaze drilled directly into him from close range.
Staaare——
"Ahem."
The moment Andrew registered that Miyabi had caught him mid-gesture, he immediately lowered his arm. Smoothly. Casually. As if it had never been raised in the first place.
It was only in that moment — slightly late to the realization, as the thought finally clicked into place — that Andrew noticed the single most significant difference between the Gore Magala boot design and the footwear Miyabi had been wearing before.
As a piece of outdoor field equipment, the Gore Magala armor boots — whether the male variant or the female variant — were designed with one universal feature shared by both:
Flat soles. Every single pair. No exceptions.
...Hold on.
Did the "170cm" that Miyabi had just reported... include the height added by her heels?!
But wait — that didn't quite add up either. Miyabi's current heels weren't anything outrageous. No matter how he looked at them, they weren't the kind of platform stilettos that could bridge the gap all the way to 170cm on their own. He could see them clearly. They were not some legendary twenty-centimeter heel-of-resentment.
And yet, as Andrew puzzled over this in growing confusion, his gaze drifted to Miyabi's ears — those elegant fox ears sitting atop her head, currently swaying with small, involuntary little movements that perfectly telegraphed her simmering displeasure at his earlier gesture.
And all at once, the truth crashed over him.
Miyabi's 170cm...
She wasn't just counting her heels. She was counting her ears too, wasn't she?
Is that... is that just how Thiren measure their height in New Eridu?!?!
Andrew did not understand. But Andrew was absolutely, profoundly shaken.
Because if Miyabi needed to add both the height of her heels and the height of her ears just to reach 170cm... then her actual, base height without either of those additions would be...
Under one hundred and fifty centimeters.
Staaare——
Like some form of psychic resonance, the thought had barely taken shape in Andrew's mind before Miyabi's razor-sharp gaze had already found him and locked on with lethal precision.
Andrew very much wanted to use the entirely reasonable argument that high heels were impractical footwear for extended wilderness operations as grounds for refusal.
But under the full force of Miyabi's silent, unblinking, wordless stare — a stare that communicated volumes without requiring a single syllable — Andrew ultimately caved.
With a quiet sigh of surrender, he revised the blueprint. The flat soles were out. The heeled boots were in — specifically, a heel height that precisely matched the heels on Miyabi's original boots. Not a millimeter higher. Not a millimeter lower.
With the ears factored in and the matching heel height locked in, the number on the design sheet added up to exactly one hundred and seventy centimeters.
Only then did Miyabi retract the ferocious, unrelenting stare she had been leveling at Andrew. A small, satisfied air settled around her.
The honor of the 170cm had been successfully defended.
...
Actually, hold on.
Among all the women Andrew had come to know in New Eridu, 170cm was a height that firmly placed someone in the category of the mature, statuesque "big sister" type — the kind of woman who commanded presence and attention just by standing still.
Even Rina was only 173cm.
Which meant Miyabi absolutely, unquestionably, by all rights and metrics, belonged squarely in the "mature older-sister" classification. (Controversial take. Treat accordingly.)
The reader may take that at face value.
Fortunately, Andrew had plenty of other monster-material armors to reference as models — and among them, heeled variants did exist, providing him with ready-made precedents to work from for the modification.
To ensure the heels would be sturdy enough to withstand everything that lay ahead of them, Andrew used the wing membrane as the boot's sole — achieving a balance of cushioning softness during wear while maintaining the underlying structural integrity the field demanded. The immature wing membrane from this particular specimen was even softer than the standard variety by several degrees; layered together and used for the sole, it was genuinely hard to imagine a more fitting material for the job.
As for the heel itself — the single point that would bear the greatest concentrated force with every step Miyabi took — Andrew used the Gore Magala's antennae as the core material. The antennae's natural properties ensured it could handle the load.
Combining those two materials, Andrew had achieved something that was, within the constraints he was working under, as close to an ideal balance of sufficient height, genuine comfort, and unrestricted mobility as was realistically possible.
As for the second piece of equipment — the gauntlets.
Perhaps because the most important objective had already been achieved, Miyabi raised no objections whatsoever to the gauntlet design. She looked at the blueprint, looked at the design, and approved it exactly as drawn.
No revisions required, no custom modifications requested. Andrew's pace accelerated accordingly.
All in all it was barely more than one and a half pieces of armor. By the time the sun reached its zenith overhead, Andrew had already finished crafting both.
As for whether new equipment actually fit — the only way to know was to try it on.
As Miyabi equipped both pieces and stood in her new armor, the overall silhouette she presented had not changed dramatically. She still wore the same Section 6 combat uniform, paired with the boots and the arm brace extending to the upper arm — the combination that was distinctly, recognizably hers.
The difference, however, was impossible to miss.
The original armor had possessed the clean, precise, slightly antiseptic quality of modern industrial manufacture — functional and neat, but nothing more. The new set, by contrast, had taken a dramatic leap in both color depth and sheer visual splendor.
The Gore Magala armor's characteristic dark, shifting patterns — deep black shot through with faint, ghostly traces of violet that seemed to pulse and surface from within — lent the wearer a quality that could only be described as subtly sinister. An edge. A suggestion of something dangerous lurking beneath the surface.
But then Miyabi's expression came into the picture.
That perfectly blank, utterly unreadable face of hers — the expression of someone running on standby mode, as though the concept of human emotion hadn't quite finished installing — dissolved the armor's menacing aura on contact. Whatever sinister edge the Gore Magala set radiated was completely and instantly neutralized by the sheer blankness of Miyabi's resting expression. Gone without a trace.
Regardless of aesthetics, however, one thing was absolutely beyond doubt: the defensive performance of Miyabi's new armor surpassed her previous set by several entire tiers. There was no version of events where that was debatable.
And as for Miyabi herself, standing in it for the first time —
Heeled leather boots. The same heel height as before. By all logic, the sensation should have been identical.
And yet.
The moment her weight settled onto the soles, a softness rose up through her feet that she hadn't anticipated. It wasn't the firm, neutral contact of ordinary footwear. It was something closer to standing on a cloud — the kind of give that made her feel, impossibly, as though she were walking barefoot across flat, smooth ground. As though the heels weren't there at all.
It was heavier than her old set, certainly. Noticeably so.
But the comfort it offered was, without exaggeration, the finest she had ever experienced from any custom-made equipment the Hoshimi family's tailors had produced for her. The margin wasn't even close.
The matching heel height meant Miyabi's adjustment period was cut dramatically short. After a brief walk around the workshop to get a feel for the new load distribution, her exceptional bodily control took over — and within minutes, she had already settled comfortably into the new weight.
Watching Miyabi adapt so smoothly, Andrew allowed himself a quiet breath of relief — and immediately shifted his full attention to Ellen's weapon.
According to what Belle had told him, a result would come through at the latest by tomorrow morning. The time he had left was shorter than it seemed.
Fortunately, working on Miyabi's armor had already given him a solid foundation to build from. He had a clear enough direction in his head to start.
There was one complication, though: the Gore Magala materials had been nearly exhausted by the two pieces of armor he'd just finished. What remained was barely a fraction of what he'd started with.
This hadn't surprised him. Going into it, Andrew had estimated the total supply was only sufficient to produce roughly one and a half dragon-hunting weapons' worth of material. The fact that anything remained at all was entirely thanks to the leg armor's drastic reduction in size — and the considerable reality that Miyabi was significantly more petite than a standard Hunter's frame.
As for the shortage, Andrew already had a solution in mind.
Nineveh — the primary quarry of the interception operation, and the creature Andrew had hunted and killed — had not disappeared without leaving something behind.
After Nineveh was brought down by Andrew's hand, Meow-Da had searched the site of its fall during the post-battle sweep — and discovered a collection of high-concentration Ether condensate left in its wake. The concentration was so extreme that it hadn't fully dispersed even by the time Meow-Da arrived to investigate.
Meow-Da, operating on its personal philosophy of if it's still here it must be worth keeping, had gathered everything it could find and held onto it without question. An accidental haul — but a useful one, as it turned out.
Andrew himself had only been able to identify what it actually was much later, when he'd casually asked Ray about it back at the camp before the return trip, and she'd explained it to him.
As the parent organism from which this particular Gore Magala had originated, that condensate should theoretically be highly compatible with the Gore Magala materials — much in the same way that the Rathalos and the Rathian, bound as a pair, complemented each other's properties.
Miyabi had been standing nearby this entire time, watching Andrew work with his characteristic focused, relentless energy. Unable to suppress the impulse to help shoulder some of the load, she spoke up on her own initiative:
"Andrew, is there anything I can do to help?"
Andrew stopped what he was doing the instant he heard the question. He turned to look at Miyabi.
He thought about it for a moment — and immediately landed on exactly the right answer.
"You know, there actually is."
He snapped his fist into his open palm, then looked at her without the slightest hesitation:
"Miyabi — would you be willing to head to a convenience store or a supermarket and pick up a variety of portable, non-perishable foods? We're going to need trail rations and field provisions for what's ahead, and we don't have any stocked up yet."
____
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