Path of Dragons

Carmen knelt next to her forge, staring at the smoldering coals. The apparatus was mostly enclosed, which meant that it was insanely hot, but due to her technique, Resist Fire, she barely felt it. She’d yet to truly test the resistance to its fullest extent, but she suspected that she could shove her hand into a normal fire without any detriment.

But inside her forge was no normal fire.

Instead, the forge had been carefully assembled from blocks enchanted by a true Bricklayer, and the fire itself burned Ethera soaked coal. It wasn’t quite a graded item, in and of itself, but it wasn’t truly mundane, either. As a result, the fire was more than just fire, and hopefully, that would help with the forging process.

Once Carmen was satisfied with the state of the flame, she pushed herself upright and grabbed a specially prepared bar of steel. It had been merged, via Meld Metals, with titanium she’d harvested from a wrecked and abandoned sports car one of the scavenging teams had found, and then, she’d mixed it with a bit of aluminum. The result was an alloy that shouldn’t have been possible.

She had further refined the resulting alloy by using Decontaminate and Refine Materials multiple times. Finally, she had used Ethereal Infusion for two hours a day for two weeks, bathing it in Ethera until it practically glowed with magic.

Hopefully, it would be enough to take her crafting to the next level.

The bar of metal had a silvery sheen, was almost ten feet long, two inches deep, and at least four inches wide, and if she hadn’t invested so heavily in her Strength attribute, there was little chance she would have been able to lift it, much less work with the metal. For what she intended to create, that excess weight was more than appropriate.

With a grunt, she shoved one end into the enchanted flame. Then, she waited for it to heat up before removing it. After slamming it onto her anvil, Carmen used her summoned hammer to fold a ten-inch piece over, then back again. Over and over, she repeated the process until, finally, it broke free. She set the smaller piece aside, then shoved the end of the bar back into the forge.

Normally, Carmen would have just cut it with a saw, but the alloy was far too hard for any of her tools, so she’d had to resort to more of a brute force method. And over the next few hours, she repeated the process until she had twelve identical pieces. She stacked the ingots on top of one another, then used Bond to bind them all together.

But she wasn’t done. So, grabbing the brick of dense alloy with a pair of heavy-duty tongs, she thrust it back into the forge. Once it had reached the proper temperature – which took far longer than it should have, likely due to the innately magical material – she pulled it out and started to hammer.

Gradually, using various other summoned tools in conjunction with her hammer, she shaped the hunk of metal into a rough approximation of a war hammer. However, because of its size, Carmen knew that only someone with immense strength would ever be able to wield the massive weapon.

Which was perfectly within her expectations.

Once she’d achieved the rough shape, she started in with smaller tools, giving the item a more refined appearance. One side was big, brutish, and aggressive, while the opposite bore a long, tapered spike. Meanwhile, the top looked almost like the tip of a spear. When she’d finished with the hammer’s head, she started in on the haft, which was also made of the same alloy.

Finally, she attached the two via Bond, finishing the base weapon.

But that was only the beginning, and after she heat-treated the entire thing – in oil she’d also treated with Ethereal Infusion – Carmen started in on the engraving. At first, she’d intended to do that before hardening the weapon, but according to the guides she’d bought from the Branch, that was a suboptimal path. So, even though it was much more difficult to carve embellishments into the hardened metal, Carmen was more than willing to endure the hardship if it meant a better result was possible.

Gradually, the carving, which was nothing more than Celtic style whorls, took shape, and it complimented the Damascus-like pattern of the folded metal. Once that was finished, Carmen took the teeth of a Voxxian beast and used Bond to merge them in a ring around the base of the hammer head.

With the two Embellishments finished – her current limit – Carmen started in on the enchantment. At present, she only had two available. One for durability, and the other for power. She chose the latter, reasoning that the alloy and sturdy construction would make it functionally indestructible with her current strength.

Finally, she wrapped the grip in supple leather she’d gotten from a local Leatherworker, finishing the weapon.

“Finally!” Carmen sighed. She’d made hundreds of weapons since she’d created the [Spear of the Dragon Lancer], and she’d yet to exceed its grade of Crude. “Until now,” she amended.

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The weapon itself was impressive, but that was largely due to the Ethera wafting off of it. From a visual perspective, it was primitive and brutish. But that suited Carmen just fine. It was a weapon meant to kill, and in that endeavor, it would be very effective.

“I suppose congratulations are in order?” came a voice from the forge’s door.

Carmen whipped around, hefting the hammer in a fighter’s stance. She was far from the most effective combatant in Easton, but due to her high level, she could definitely hold her own. On top of that, she’d spent quite a bit of time working on her ability to wield the hammer, so she thought she was a match for all but the city’s elites.

Not so with the man standing in her doorway.

“What do you want, Roman?” she asked.

He sighed. “Most people call me Chancellor, now.”

“I’m not most people, chief.”

He ran his hand through his dark hair and said, “You’re definitely not. How have you been?”

“I’m getting by.”

Indeed, ever since her brief outburst of self-destruction following Alyssa’s death, Carmen had thrown herself into her work. And that effort had paid off, sending her level skyrocketing past everyone else in town. She had even managed to reach the ladder, which was something no one else in town had accomplished.

As a result, she had a waiting list for her services that was a mile long. Everyone in the city – and even some of the nearby towns with whom they’d established trade relations – wanted a weapon made by her. So, she had money, power, and the ability to advance her craft by experimenting with expensive materials.

The only thing she didn’t have was Alyssa.

No. Aside from Miguel, who was increasingly busy with training for when he acquired an archetype of his own, she had no one. Whatever friendships she’d managed to cultivate had fallen by the wayside, leaving her with nothing but her forge for company.

“That’s a nice weapon,” Roman said. “Personal use?”

She nodded. “I still like to do my part on patrol.”

The statement was a bit misleading. While she did participate in her fair share of patrols, her reasoning had nothing to do with communal safety. Instead, she reveled in giving herself over to the violence. Without that release, she would have long since done something incredibly self-destructive.

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“I’m aware.”

He sighed again. “Carmen, I know I’ve said this before, but –”

“What do you want, chief?”

“I can’t just want to check on my friend?”

“Is that what we are?” she asked. “I don’t dislike you, Roman. I really don’t. But we were never close. At best, we were acquaintances, and we’ve grown further apart since Alyssa died. I haven’t seen you since her memorial. So, I’ll ask again – what do you want? And please, for both our sakes, stop bullshitting me.”

“I want to offer you a job.”

“I do consulting on potential commissions every Thursday. You can come by the shop and –”

“This isn’t about you making weapons or armor,” he stated. “This is about a unique opportunity. Last week, some of our scouts discovered an abandoned iron mine. It’s about two-hundred miles south of here.”

“Okay?”

“The Ethera density there is like nothing we’ve seen before. And they found this,” he said, tossing something underhanded to Carmen. She caught it easily, her Dexterity more than up to the task. But the moment it touched her skin, she let out a little gasp of surprise.

“What is this?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” he said.

Carmen opened her hand and gazed at the item resting on her palm. The bulk of the small ball of earth was just normal rock, but there was a vein of some sort of metal passing through the center. It pulsed with Ethera strong enough to make her carefully prepared steel-titanim-aluminum alloy seem mundane by comparison.

She used Tradesman’s Appraisal, but because the bit of ore wasn’t her creation, the technique did nothing. “Give me a minute,” she said before crossing the forge to the bloomery she’d built.

“What is that?” asked Roman, following her.

“It’s a special furnace meant for smelting,” she said. “You’re in luck. I had to build this a few months ago so I could smelt copper more easily. Now shut up.”

“I’ll remind you that I’m the chancellor of this –”

“It’s my forge. Shut up, or get out. I don’t care who you are.”

Thankfully, he went silent, which let Carmen get to work. The process of smelting wasn’t nearly as complicated as most people thought. It started with heating the ore up to an appropriate temperature, reducing it with something like charcoal along the way. Once it was hot enough, the blacksmith simply needed to beat it with a hammer until there was only pure metal leftover.

Of course, that was only if the ore behaved similarly to iron, which wasn’t a guarantee. If it was more like gold or silver, she would have to add another couple of steps to the process. However, given that Roman had described it as coming from an abandoned iron mine, Carmen was hopeful that it would react the same.

Thankfully, that hope proved well-founded when she saw the bits of metal collecting at the bottom of the furnace. Soon enough, the process was complete, and Carmen extracted the bloom – which was a combination of slag, metal, and other impurities – and put on the finishing touches via further refinement.

That meant lots of heating and hammering, which she took to with gusto. Eventually, she had a little less than a pound of gleaming, green metal. She used Tradesman’s Appraisal:

“It’s called cold iron,” Carmen said, holding the pierce of green metal with her tongs. “And this little lump might just be worth more than this entire forge. If I had enough of it, I might even be able to make Complex items.”

Roman nodded. “Then it’s settled,” he said. “We must protect that mine at all costs.”

“Okay? What does that have to do with me. I mean, don’t get me wrong – I want to work with this stuff, but that mine isn’t –”

“I want you to run it,” he said. “I intend to spare no expense in getting that mine up and running. We have a few Scholar archetypes we think might make good miners.”

“And they want that?”

“They want to eat. They want shelter. They want advancement. This is how they get it,” Roman stated. “They’re useless right now, and you know as well as anyone just how thin our margins are. We start letting people freeload, and –”

“I don’t want to talk about this, Roman. I resigned from the council because I’m not cut out for leadership. I just want to make my weapons in peace.”

“This is important. We secure this mine and use it to make weapons, and we’ll have a leg up on everyone else in the region. Maybe the world,” he said. “Or do you think people are just going to let us be? There are roving warbands out there. And we’ve gotten word of budding kingdoms. If we don’t do the same, they’ll wash over us like a tidal wave.”

Carmen didn’t doubt him. She wasn’t nearly as idealistic as Alyssa had been. She was a historian, and so, she knew just how ruthless people could be when it came to power. It wasn’t a question of if someone would try to conquer everything, but rather when. Still, she had little interest in running anything, let alone a mine.

“I get ten percent,” she said.

“Of what?”

“The cold iron. I need materials.”

“Five.”

“Seven.”

“Deal,” Roman said.

“And I want a full contingent of warriors. Real Carpenters, too.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t intend to half-ass this, Carmen,” Roman stated with a wide smile that didn’t really touch his eyes. But then again, most of his emotions never did. Not since Trish had died. “You’ll get everything you need to make this a success. I guarantee it.”

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