“Get lost.”

“Wait! I’m telling you, I know a bit about metal! I know you need to heat iron to get it white-hot to bend, and that different metals have different melting points. And that better steel has more carbon in it!”

I wracked my brain to come up with every morsel of useful info I could. “You shape the metal with a hammer. And then you sharpen it on a grindstone.”

The blacksmith looked at me like I was a stray dog.

“I said… Get lost. You come here spouting drivel like you’re some kinda journeyman? Waste of my time.”

“No, wait!”

It was no use. The blacksmith had already gone back in.

“If that’ll be all, please leave,” the woman who’d negotiated with Aerion said, giving me an icy stare. “Or you will be made to leave.”

The only reason I’d gotten in to see the blacksmith was thanks to that woman. I’d lied, saying I was there to sell more stuff, but that I absolutely had to see the blacksmith to ensure I was getting an accurate assessment.

Admittedly, not the best way to start a relationship with an employer, but I was at my wits’ end. I’d visited a half dozen other smithies, and forget being accepted as an apprentice—I couldn’t even convince them to let me talk to an apprentice smith!

I turned away, walking idly down the road, hands in my rough fabric pants’ pockets. I’d never realized just how comfortable modern denim was until now. How people put up with the itchiness, I’d never understand. The moment I had some real spending money, I was going to have something soft custom-made for me.

“How are you gonna get out of this one, Greg?”

Sure, I could just let Aerion join the Hunter’s Guild and bring in the income, but if I was going to mooch off someone else’s hard work, why did I even bother coming to this world?

No, I needed another angle. Nobody was going to take me on as an apprentice. Sure, I might know more than the average layperson about the mystic art of blacksmithing, but that wasn’t nearly enough. Aerion was right. I was too old.

I mulled over the options as I walked down the busy streets back to our inn. Aerion and I had spent the past day walking around town, mainly so I wouldn’t be so dependent on her to get around. I hadn’t exactly memorized the city yet, but I at least knew the general direction of things and how to get there.

Being a circular city, it helped that you could just keep walking on the same road and end up where you began. The beautiful sunny day made me just want to walk around town to explore more, but I had to solve this issue first.

Moving on autopilot, my legs took me to the other side of town—my last-ditch attempt at becoming a smith’s apprentice.

Of course, I could just tell people I held a Blessing. The downside of that was I’d also have to announce I was a Champion. Regular Blessings were like what Aerion got from Dominion—a lightning spell, or a shield spell, or something that sped you up for short bursts.

There were only seven people in this world who received anything resembling a full class.

Aerion had the luxury of having two, which was why she could register at the Guild without drawing eyes.

I wasn’t so lucky. There wasn’t any great way of faking it, either. I literally handed out Blessings like they were candy. People would flip the moment they saw what I could do.

I dodged traffic, starting to get a hang of the rules of the road here, slowly threading my way across town.

Now, there was an argument to be made for just revealing to the world that I was a hero.

That wasn’t a bad plan, per se. Except for one thing. Well, a few things, actually.

Everyone hated Order. At least, everyone in this city seemed to hate Order, and according to Aerion, that was true for just about everywhere in the world except his own territory. Outing myself here sounded like a great way to get lynched.

Either that, or I’d be hailed as a messiah—I gave it 50/50 odds. It seemed that these Cataclysms—monster hordes that plagued the world every hundred-odd years—would end when Order summoned his Champion, and when all the Champions worked together to defeat the Archon. The Big Bad.

And that led to the crux of my concern. By now, I had to admit that there might be more to Cosmo—Order—than the easygoing, slightly annoying bartender I knew. Why summon me to this world? Why beat around the bush for easily answered questions? And most of all, why not just tell me why I was here?

I couldn’t think of a single reason for Order to hide that I was here to slay the Archon. It wouldn’t have taken more than ten seconds. Yet, he’d refused every time I’d brought it up. Aerion had said that all the other Champions knew their purpose the moment they set foot in this world, after all.

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All of this gave me pause. It made me wonder. Revealing myself as a Champion was a one-way door. Once I stepped through, there was no going back. On the other hand, I lost nothing by biding my time—revealing myself when the time was right. Well, nothing except some connections and gear, maybe. But money wasn’t an issue for now, and Aerion was pretty resourceful.

I told her I’d work to help the world, and I would. I just wanted to go into this with eyes open.

To that end, I stood in front of a wide, ancient timber building that had seen better days. Sounds of hammering came from within, and I could feel the heat of the forges even from the street.

Unlike the other place, this one had no storefront. It was industrial—like a factory.

Importantly, its doors were the large sliding kind, and were currently slid open.

I took up a spot on the other side of the street… And watched.

I watched the blacksmiths going about their business, sticking hot iron into their forges before pumping the bellows.

I saw other smiths hammering what looked like nails. Lots and lots of nails.

Yet others were barking out orders in between their own forging projects. It was bustling, chaotic, and not all that helpful.

It was clear now that I’d never be let in as an apprentice blacksmith. Not without connections or money, and I had neither.

But smith apprentices weren’t the only jobs in a smithy. At least, I assumed there would be others. Janitors, assistants, people who supported the day-to-day functions.

I was happy to work my way up from the bottom if that was what it took. Besides, I imagined janitors had plenty of opportunities to handle scrap metal and the like. Chances were good they were unsupervised, too.

Even after observing the smiths work for nearly a half hour, I hadn’t seen a single janitor—instead, the smiths policed after themselves, dusting the ground periodically.

So I circled around to the other side of the factory. It had a fenced yard of sorts, but the walls were low enough that I could peer over them by climbing onto a barrel outside.

I probably looked suspicious, but this side street was nearly empty.

Inside the yard, but outside the factory in a covered, open-air space, was another clay forge.

Except instead of hammering nails or knives or swords, these smiths had a pile of rusted out, broken pots and pans and other miscellaneous items, which they fed into it.

When they weren’t shoving stuff into it, they were working the bellows. Two massive accordion-like things made of cloth.

It looked like hard work.

Finally, one of the workers took a large metal scooper and brought out the white-hot contents of the forge,hammering it on an anvil.

When it’d cooled, they stuck it back into the forge, and after several rounds of hammering, they had a flat, rectangular-shaped hunk of metal.

Understanding dawned, and I grinned. They were recycling metal!

My mind spun through various scenarios until I settled on a plan. I now knew what I had to do.

----------------------------------------

Turned out what I thought would be easy was quite a bit harder than I’d expected.

I had to visit several more forges before I finally found what I was looking for.

This one was actually somewhat close to our inn, just closer to the outer ring of the city.

I’d seen enough smithies by now to know that this place had seen better times. Only a half-dozen smiths worked the forge—about a third of the other places—and there was only one central forge in operation. Another looked like it hadn’t been used in a while.

It was also in a somewhat seedy neighborhood, though that didn’t really matter to me.

What mattered was that this place also had a recycling forge in its yard outside, and that it had a huge pile of broken scraps just waiting to be reprocessed.

The reason for that was, unlike the teams I’d seen at the other places, there was only one person working the forge here. One elderly person who kept massaging his back after every act of exertion.

I felt kinda bad for the guy. All the more reason I had to make this work.

“Hi—”

“Go away. We’re not takin’ orders,” a gruff-looking, soot-blackened face said. He didn’t even bother looking up at me. He just kept hammering away at a knife he was working on.

“I’m not here to place an order,” I said, wondering what kind of smithy turned away potential customers so rudely.

Not one with any hope for the future—that was for sure.

“What, then?”

“I’m looking for a job. I was hopin—”

“Does it look like we can pay you?” the man said, finally looking up at me.

“Er… I’d be willing to work for cheap?” I said. “Looks like that old man out there could use some help.”

The gruff, bearded man glanced out at the yard, where the elderly man was massaging his shoulder, and grunted.

“Well, you at least look strong enough for scrappin’. How much are you talking?”

This was dangerous water, and I knew it. I didn’t have a good enough read on the value of things to be able to pitch a price that had a shot of sounding reasonable.

So I took a different tack.

I gestured to the man outside with my chin. “What do you pay him?”

“Five coppers a week.”

I didn’t know what it was, but I didn’t believe him. Maybe it was because he ran such a dingy forge out here in a crappy area of town, or maybe it was the way he stared right into my eyes, as if trying to prove he was honest.

“You know, I’ll find out real quick if you’re lying, right?” I said with narrowed eyes.

The man grunted. Aerion said there were no dwarves in this world, but if this guy were a bit shorter, he could’ve passed for one.

“Fine. Eight coppers. It’s what I pay him. It’s what I pay you. No higher. Understand?”

I nodded seriously, barely suppressing the grin that threatened to creep onto my face. “So, when can I begin?”