Lucky for me, there was some quality steel sitting by the workstation.
I hadn’t brought any of the metal from my old forge in that city with me—It would have weighed too much to take with me.
Also, I will say that this smithy was much better stocked than the makeshift one I had set up before. It had a proper anvil, while the one I had been using before had just been a large clump of metal with a flat top. The forge could also burn at a hotter and more even temperature then the small one I had set up. Partially, this was because I never really used the old one. I normally just heated the metal with fire magic, though most smiths wouldn’t be able to control the magic well enough to keep the heat at an even temperature.
I decided that this time, I would be pulling out all the stops. Why?
Well, those two guys helping the smith-master seem to be keeping an eye on me.
Likely, they didn’t think I was worthy of the metal I forged.
I intended to prove them wrong.
Grabbing a few bars of steel, I looked at the marks inscribed into them, denoting their type, weight, and melting temperature. I could tell that this was likely the work of the smithy apprentices, who were required in most cases to do these sorts of route jobs to familiarize themselves with the metals they’ll be using in the future.
I channeled my mana, using a fire magic to heat the metal. Quickly, it took on a red glow, and I stopped, not wanting to melt it.
I held the glowing bar of metal in the heavy tongs I had made a while back, and placed it on the anvil.
Using my favorite hammer, I drew out the metal slowly, pounding it into a long bar. I repeated this for the other metals I picked, until all of them were about the same length and width. In total, I now had seven bars of metal. Three of them were darker, and softer steel, while the other four were harder, and lighter colored.
It was after these bars of metal had been prepared that the real smithing started.
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The two senior blacksmiths Rob and Foule were the two most experienced in the academy’s forge, and worked under the man who had earned the title 〖Divine Hand〗 for his abilities as a craftsmen—Master Giden.
Like everyone else, they had worked their way up from the bottom, starting as lowly apprentices at twelve years old. There was no jumping the line, and no such thing as immediately becoming a smith worthy of working the metal itself.
You wouldn’t even be allowed to touch a hammer until at least two years had passed.
So, it was with a slight bitter feeling that they watched a young girl walk into the smithy, and gain permission to immediately start smithing. Of course, they would watch, and keep a close eye on this outsider who hadn’t done any of the painstaking work that they had. They began criticizing the things she did, such as the steel she chose, the old and well used long-coat she wore, and the hammer she wielded.
To them, the hammer was the greatest fault. It looked unwieldy, and too heavy for her small frame to lift. Even more, it wasn’t designed like any other hammer they’d ever seen. Unlike the hammers used by everyone in the smithy, which had two heads and formed a T shape with the handle, her hammer had a single head shaped like a J, where the top of the J was attached to a handle.
Curious and disdainful, they watched as she held a single piece of steel in a pair of tongs, with the hammer in her other hand. However, she made no move to approach the forge fire, to heat the metal.
Foule smirked at this moment, sure that the girl had no idea what to do next, and would prove herself a fool. He, like many other people, enjoyed seeing others come across misfortune, or dig themselves into ditches.
Rob was more kind, and thought along the line of not wanting to see the small girl hurt herself.
It’s worth noting that all three of the men in the smithy had noticed that she at least had demon-blood, and Giden had felt her elven blood as well. However, being veteran smiths, they held an honest appreciation for all artistry, no matter the race it had come from. Instead of discrimination based on parentage, country of origin, or race, they only saw ability. That said, if you have none, they simply didn’t care about you. And gods forbid you pretend to have ability, when you did not. No artisan would ever look upon you kindly for that.
Anyway, these two men were waiting to see the girl demonstrate her lack of ability, and show that she’s not capable of working in a smithy. They figured she must be the child of someone important, like a merchant or demonic nobility, who had thought she would try her hand at the craft, skipping past all the preliminary steps.
Needless to say, they weren’t expecting anything from her.
That expectation was flipped on it’s head only a moment later, as the metal she held in the tongs suddenly started glowing red hot, becoming malleable enough to hammer into shape.
She proceeded to draw out the steel, into a longer bar of perfectly flat metal, long and thin. This left the two experienced smiths flabbergasted. It was rare that a smith was capable of using fire magic to heat and shape the metal, due to the mana control required. Most fire magic required the flames produced to continue to grow larger and hotter, until the spell is released. It’s extremely difficult to maintain a constant heat.
And that’s not even mentioning the mana pool requirements. While it’s true that a constant heat was required, that heat still had to be really hot, emptying most lesser mana pools in bare moments.
The astonishment from the two men only grew when the girl proceeded to do the same to six other bits of steel, and hammered them all into unnaturally even and equal bars.
By this point, they had realized exactly why Master Giden had let her use the smithy. She wielded that strange hammer with a grace and ease that contradicted both the shape of the hammer, and the size of her body. The skill was such that they could see it in every blow, her talent actively shaping the metal.
It didn’t end there. They had begun to find themselves more than a little curious as to what the girl would do with the seven pieces of metal—Nothing they had ever done needed anything like that.
The girl took up another tool shaped like a wedge, and reheated the metal. She pressed the new tool onto the red-hot metal, and tapped it with her hammer. Even though the tap looked light, the metal indented in a straight line, diagonal to it’s length. She repeated this down the length of the metal, until it looked bumpy—A stark contrast to the scary straight and even sides it had had before.
Rob and Foule had dropped all pretense of helping Giden with his own sword, and were watching the girl’s every move now. To a smith, what she was doing looked like the most perfect and beautiful dance imaginable, as she put those indentations on all of the metal bars.
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After that was done, she gathered all those bumpy bar together, and pressed them into a pile. Both Foule and Rob were experienced enough to know that she had alternated the steel in layers, the order being hard steel, soft, hard, soft, hard soft, hard.
There was a brief flash of light, centering on the stacked metal, and the smiths were fascinated to find that the stacked layers seemed to have…melded together somehow, just on the edges. It was now a somewhat solid block of metal.
While it was still hot, the girl began to draw the block of metal out, slowly lengthening it into a bar about the same width and height as the individual one that had been incorporated into the block were. She had to stop and reheat the metal a few times during the process, but the whole process was still extremely quick compared to many of the smiths the men had seen before.
Inexplicably, the girl then took the bar that she had shaped, and heated it again. She used the wedge-like tool to make another indentation right in the center of the bar. Though, this time the indentation was much deeper—almost all the way through the metal. She folded the metal in half, and there was another bright flash, where the edges once again melded together.
She folded the metal once more after drawing it back out, and drew it out to a longer, and thinner length. Each strike of the hammer seemed to do two-fold the work, both drawing out the blade of what was obviously going to become a longer type of sword, and beveling the edges into said sword.
She took this and heat-treated it, using her magic again for this. Then, she filed down the edges, and sharpened it until it would be able to barely cut something. Better sharpening would be left for when the blade was finished.
Eventually, the sword had taken shape. The blade itself was longer than most long-swords were, but a good deal shorter than the great-swords. Its edges were parallel for most its length, until around ten centimeters from the tip, where it began tapering gracefully. The tang seemed abnormally long to the two smiths, not suited for a one-handed sword. It was still shorter than the hilt of a great-sword, though.
To them, it seemed that the sword forged by the girl occupied a middle ground, between a long-sword and a great-sword. They had heard of some people attempting such a thing before, but it never caught on, due to people not knowing how to handle such a weapon.
The girl left the blade in it’s current state, and grabbed a solid slab of wood, and some leather. She shaped the wood into a good handle, and fitted to the tang. To get the best and most secure fit, she first cut a hole through the center of the handle-wood. The hole was too small to fit over the tang, so she heated the tang up, and stuck the wooden hole onto it. Smoke billowed up form the wooden handle, as the heat from the tang forced the hole to burn. Like this, the handle was burned onto the tang for a perfect fit.
She took another odd tool from her bag, and stuck it on top of the tang, which was formed into a rod. Twisting the tool, lines appeared on the top of the tang, circling down the rounded section of it.
If the men were impressed by her skill before, what she did next left them awestruck at her raw power.
She grabbed a solid chunk of steel, and held it in her hands. A blue glow suffused her hands, and the chunk began glowing. It went straight past red hot, and turned white from the heat. She began shaping the metal with her bare hands, forming an orb shape with it. Before she was done, she took a metal rod, and stuck it into the metal, and pulled it out to form a hole in the center of the teardrop shaped orb. She set it down, and the blue glow went disappeared from her hands. Small beads of sweat could be seen on her forehead as the orb cooled.
While waiting for it to completely cool, she cut some leather to shape, and wrapped it around the wooden handle. She then took some more leather and cut it into cords, tightly wrapping that over the other leather to provide a better grip. She used a liquid compound pulled from her bag to keep it down, before tying some thin leather strips at either end of the handle.
She took the orb formed earlier, and stuck it on the end of the tang, forcing it down by spinning it along those lines. It made some horrible squeaking noises as it neared the handle, attesting to the fact that it was a very tight fit.
With one final tug on the orb, or what was now the pommel of the sword, it was finished. Rob and Foule looked at the sky outside, and were stunned to see that the sun hadn’t even begun to brighten the horizon yet. It had only taken the girl three or four hours to forge a sword, from start to finish. Though, while it seemed to the men that the sword was done, and only needed its final sharpening, the girl wasn’t done.
She reached into her bag once more, and pulled out a jar. Opening it, a thick and pungent smell drifted through the smithy. She rubbed the compound on the blade, completely covering it. Then, thin tendrils of electricity arced from her fingertips to the covered blade.
She brought the blade to an up-right dunk tank, and dipped it into there, until just the handle was out of the briny water. When she pulled the blade back out, the mud like compound was gone, and there were patterns seemingly etched into its surface, like little waves undulating across the metal. The Rob and Foule were stunned to realize that these were patterns created by the metal itself, through the layering that the girl had done.
They immediately decided that not only were the patterns beautiful, but that they wanted to learn how to do this as well. Even if it meant throwing away their pride, and learning the technique from such a small girl.
However, a scant second later, they realized that there would be more techniques they could learn from her, as she swung the sword lightly towards the open-faced portion of the building, and a scythe-like blast of wind was propelled from the blade. This caught even Master Giden’s attention, since no one had a way of making a blade capable of casting magic without a rune first being engraved onto the surface. She had never carved such a rune, and yet the blade channeled her mana. It was a lost art, only found in ancient weapons
(Giden) “You…How did you learn that?”