The skill system did reveal some things to me I might not have noticed when I gained Apprentice Blacksmith. First things first, there was an Apprentice Blacksmith. That meant her Blacksmith job was a second-tier job which she had managed to skip to, likely by her skill and luck. Just like I had been held back with White Mage having not unlocked the other magician jobs, she was likely stifled by jumping straight to Blacksmith. Had she not been a Deep Dwarf with a class that supported such work, then she might have never been able to succeed.

The second thing it revealed to me was that Garnet had gained a new job of her own. She was now a Master Blacksmith. A check from her status showed this to be true. Her Weapon Smith had gone up only a level, but she had also added Master Blacksmith as a job. Assuming Weapon Smith, Magic Blacksmith, and Armor Smith were all third-tier jobs, then Master would be 4th tier. None of the third-tier jobs were close to 25, let alone 50. Maybe, because she had all three, she didn’t need to meet those criteria. Or, maybe it was because of the sword meeting some kind of criteria. It must be a special kind of blade.

“I will start on the binding now,” Garnet spoke up, breaking me from my thoughts.

“It’s not bound to me yet?”

“It will take about an hour to inscribe the runes.”

“Let’s Portal out of here,” I said, glancing around. “I’d be more at peace finishing somewhere we won’t be discovered.”

Knowing my luck, the Bandit Hero would walk in and interrupt the binding and end up taking the sword. It was better that we went somewhere private so that we could finish the sword. If we returned to the village, we’d be safe for a while. Garnet agreed with me, wrapping the handle in leather to create an impromptu hilt before picking up the sword and handing it to me. The sword wasn’t particularly heavy, but it was on the big side for what I was used to using. I tended to favor quick movements, and this sword was more for heavy-hitting.

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Either way, I place it in my Inventory and then started to make a Portal. I worried up until the Portal opened that there was going to be something that would get in the way. It would fit my luck of late for the Portal to fail or that Dark Priest to suddenly walk in as we were escaping. Fortunately, nothing happened, and the guards who were waiting outside the door had no awareness as we slipped through the Portal and left the cave.

The furnace was too hot and noisy, and after working for nearly an entire day, there was no telling how long we’d be. Thus, as we took a step out into the cool forest, it could be minutes or hours before the nearby bandits realized we escaped. The pair of us didn’t wait around. We quickly left, returning to the road. At this point, the sun was starting to fall, and the day was nearly over. It’d be night soon, and the sky was cloudy.

That’s why as we headed toward the village, it took a whiff of smoke before I started to notice that some of the clouds weren’t clouds at all. There was a cloud of smoke billowing up from the village we had come from.

“You don’t think the bandits ransacked the city while we were making the sword, do you?”

While the Bandit Hero was a Hero of the people, and likely wouldn’t slaughter, there was no saying what Calypso would do. The pair of us looked at each other and then started running toward the village. I had the Star sword in my hand, not wanting to reveal the Silvthril sword. Garnet gripped onto the war hammer she had gotten from the Master Blacksmith, not to be confused with the hammers she used to smith.

As we approached, we could hear the sound of fighting.