Swiss Arms

Chapter 2

-VB-

I made a pickaxe!

[Wooden Pickaxe]

The most primitive mining tool. Go get some flint, bro.

Grade: Bad

*+1 Damage

As its description will tell you, I could do better. When my own system dissed me, I don’t exactly stand by and do nothing, you know?

Grade of an item was how good an item was, and had effects of their own. Though I have not seen it, the highest quality an item can be was Deific. Like the name suggested, “only gods can make it.” From there, it went Legendary, Artifact, High, Moderate, Common, Ubiquitous, Bad, Junk, and finally Useless. Useless was a -50% in stat efficiency; i.e., using a Useless pickaxe would not allow me to use all of my strength and endurance to chunk away at rocks. Junk was -30%, Bad was -20%, Ubiquitous was -10%, and Common was +0%. From there, Moderate gave +10%, High gave +15%, Artifact gave +25%, Legendary gave +50%, and Deific gave a x2 multiplier.

This was on top of whatever the item did.

So I made another one.

[Flint-tipped Pickaxe]

Better pickaxe than a wooden pickaxe.

Grade: Ubiquitous

*+2 Damage

Better.

Now, I wanted a private mine, so I built a different kind of shack. Instead of using triangular foundations, I used eight square foundations arranged into a square with the center foundation missing. Instead of walls, I added slanted roofs to all but one foundation so that there was only one entrance and exit. Oh, and yes, I added a Deed and a door with a lock. Can’t forget those.

“Ah,” I muttered as I turned back around to my house. “I need ladders.”

Once I got my hands on ladders and came back to the hole, I started digging.

-VB-

Diggy diggy hole~!

I am a dwarf and I’m digging a hole!

Diggy diggy hole!

Digging a hole!

God, I missed the internet.

-VB-

I got bills~

I gotta pay!

So I gotta work work work everyday!

I got mouths!

I gotta feeeeed~!

So I’m gonna make sure everybody eats!

God, I missed the music!

-VB-

I coughed like a asthmatic patient as I climbed out of my newly made mining hole.

My entire surface of my body was covered in dirt and dust, my face and body were sweaty, and my character status had a very distinct debuff for me.

[Miner’s Dust Lung: -25% Stamina]. I needed to be breathing fresh air for a full hour before it would disappear.

“Hans!”

I looked up and blinked. Why was Derrick here?

“Hey yo!” I greeted the son of the Travaos village chief. “What are you doing here?”

The man looked nervous. “You have to come quick! The baron’s called for levies!”

“... Uh fuck,” I muttered.

I could say no, but that would make me an enemy of the village. After all, refusing to join the levy was tantamount to treason, but more importantly, I would be foisting off my burden as someone who lived in these valleys. Whomever was the lord of the area could take my refusal to help as a reason to punish them.

But war…? I came all the way over here to avoid war, because I knew that historically, my hometown was part of Uri, which would become one of the founding members of the Old Swiss Confederacy, or as the Germans and Swiss would call it, Corpus Helveticum.

“Is it a general call to arms? Is someone invading us?” I asked hurriedly while moving towards my house. I opened the door, closed it behind me, and quickly dumped my mining bag's inventory of everything I’d just mined over the course of a whole day.

“I heard from dad that the baron is having some kind of dispute with the prince-bishop over land. I think he means to go to war over it. We’re gathering the men to choose who’ll be picked to go as our promised levy of fifty.”

“Fifty? Doesn’t you village only have seventy-three able men? He wants to take two-thirds of the working men population?” During this era, women were rarely counted in such a thing, which was both good - because their population didn’t count towards required levies - and bad - because discrimination.

Derrick grimaced. “What else are we supposed to do?”

I gulped.

Truth be told, I also didn’t know what to do. A lowly baron up here in the alps the Baron of Vaz may be, but he still had knights in his employee, and I was honestly nervous about fighting knights despite my near superhuman stat.

Yes, I had four times the strength and five times the endurance of a normal average man, but I didn’t have proper weapons nor armor while knights did along with years of training.

“... Okay, let's go then.”

There were, as I heard before, seventy-four of us, including me, at the center of the village by the well.

Standing there was someone I hadn't met before, and he carried the banner for some noble house. With him were two people who I had to assume were men-at-arms, if the armor and weapons said anything about them. All of them were color-coordinated, or rather they wore the colors of their lord’s house: white and red, with a black eagle on the red side. The men-at-arms had mail armor on top of their gambeson, and just like the herald, had tabards on top of the mail.

“I am a messenger of the Honorable Free Baron Fredrick IV of the House of Tommentak of Vas!” the man shouted. “Our lord is wary of the tyranny of the Prince-Bishop of Chur, and has called out to his people in case a conflict breaks out! This village of Travaos owes its lord, the Baron of Vas, a total of fifty able-bodied men to join the fight! I am here today to ascertain whether or not this village is capable of fielding such a number!”

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He looked over us.

“And it seems that you are. I will have the fifty levies show themselves to me now.”

The chief made his way to the front and had a bundle of straws, and the men formed a line. I got in somewhere in the middle, and the line slowly moved along.

And then it was my turn.

I wasn’t afraid of war.

Was I?

I reached out, hoping for some reason that my hand and arm were steady, and then plucked out a straw too fast for my liking, as if I was afraid.

Blank.

I wouldn’t be going to war today.

Pity.

… Did I want to get picked?

Did I want to go to war?

As the crowd dispersed after the last pick, I left and got back home that afternoon. Feeling safe within the perimeter of my home, I thought.

What did I want?

I wanted a house to call my home, a variety of smaller things like my new mine and fishing traps to call my own, and … a few women, if I was honest. I knew that I could use magic, so maybe I'll build a tower for myself or something.

I also wanted to fight. I didn’t train for eight years, spending all of my free time swinging practice swords I made on my own and exercising physically, to not use any of it. However, I was not keen on using my skills for the sake of some nobles fighting over land in petty squabbles.

How could I get everything that I want?

The answer didn’t come to me.

Undeterred by the lack of an answer, I got up and continued my home improvement.

Next project: a furnace.

-VB-

By the start of my second week, I had a house, a vertical mine, and now a smithy. To be blunt about it, it was just a small furnace, no more than twice my volume, and a rock anvil.

With it, I began to smelt the copper and iron I got out from my mine.

[Construction] went up by another level and a new skill, [Blacksmithing], got made.

[Blacksmithing] LvL.1

Reduces cost of materials and speed of crafting while increasing quality.

*0.5% reduction in material cost per LvL

*0.5% reduction in crafting speed per LvL

*1.0% increase in quality per LvL

*At LvL 50, handless crafting for Blacksmithing may be engaged.

Inexperienced as I was, I was at the very least enthusiastic about it. It was something new that I was learning, so I put my back into it as I pounded on the crudely heated ores to remove the impurities.

By the end of the day, [Blacksmithing] was level 4 and I managed to create a very crude cast iron slab for future crafting. I would need to refine it later.

“You’re a blacksmith, too?”

I jolted and whirled around.

Standing there was Derrick.

Why was he here again?

He looked upset.

“What happened?” I asked him as I set my wooden mallet down. Unfortunately, metal was hard to get, and so instead of an iron hammer to hammer down on the ore, I had to make do with a wooden mallet. For the record, this was the fourth hammer I made for the beating; the other three broke and burned.

“My father is going to fight.”

“...” What did the man want me to say? Sorry your dad is going to war and might not return? I turned back to my forge. I still had some more ores to melt down today. “I see.”

“I need to know.”

“Know what?”

“You’re a warrior, aren’t you?”

I paused before hammering away. “No,” I lied as I moved the ores by hand and dropped them into the bloomery furnace. Once I had coal or charcoal production, I might be able to make something like a mini-blast furnace. I also needed a lot of materials I didn’t have now to make such a thing. For now, this would have to do.

“But your hands. My father said you had to be a warrior. No common peasant like us -” he hissed the word as if it was a curse, because it honestly was. “- have callouses like yours. I need to know -”

“I’m not going to go and replace your father in the levy call. I need to get my own home set up,” I grunted as I grabbed the bellow handle and started pumping air at an even pace.

I waited for the ore to be heated within the furnace. The Gamer system told me that it would be fifteen minutes.

“I just need to know if I can replace pops on the roll!” he shouted desperately.

I paused.

I turned around.

I looked at him up and down. He was older than me by a few years, but he wasn’t anywhere close to being a warrior or a soldier.

“No. If this isn’t the first time he went to war, then he’ll have a better chance of living than you,” I replied honestly before turning around again.

“... What do you know about war?”

I glanced over my shoulder before sighing. Derrick was that kind of guy, huh? He needed to smash himself into a problem at least once before he gave up.

“Wait here.”

I walked into my house, closed the door so that he couldn’t see, and pulled out two wooden spear shafts from the wooden locker. I walked back out and tossed one to him. He caught it deftly.

“Three hits. If you can land nine hits before ten minutes, then I will say that you have a better chance. But if I make you fall, then I will tell you what I thin-.”

He had the balls to strike first. He dashed forward and thrust the tip of the pole towards me.

I parried it and let him back off.

“... Good. Fighting is not fair. You understand that at least.”

Then I struck.

-VB-

Derrick tried to dodge. He really did.

But Hans was too fast. The man, barely a man, moved like lightning and struck faster than torrential rain.

He tumbled backward as he took … how many times did he get hit? He couldn’t tell.

His chest, arms, shoulders, stomach, and legs all throbbed from being struck, but that told him the minimum he must have been struck in … two seconds?

His hands dropped the pole and then he dropped to his knees.

He gasped as his pain-wrecked body shuddered from an agony he’s only felt the likes of which he’s only experienced once before.

“You.”

He looked up wearily at the hidden warrior.

“Are not prepared.”

The brutally honest words of the warrior stung.

“They would give you a month at best to train you, but depending on the situation, you might not even get a single week of training. Even if they do, they will drill you into being a meat shield for them. I could train you, but proper training takes time. You could train for a full year under me, but I still wouldn’t let you go to war. You would act, know, and fight just well enough to become a target and not strong enough to be an asset.” He picked up his pole and walked back to the small smithy. “Go home, Derrick of Travaos. You don’t belong on the battlefield. You certainly don’t want to leave your parents to dig a grave for you.”

Derrick knelt there for … he wasn’t sure. Everything - body, soul, and mind - hurt.

When it was clear that Hans had no time for him as the man went back to pumping air into his furnace with that bellow, Derrick stood up and limped away.

-VB-

I felt bad.

I took out my frustration on a poor man just trying his best to watch out for his dad.

I frowned as I dipped the hot metal into a bucket of water, causing the water to sizzle and pop and the iron to cool down.

Pulling out the iron bar, I inspected it.

[Cast Iron Bar]

A block of high grade purity iron.

Resource

Grade: Common

I set it down. This made it the tenth iron bar I’ve made today.

I looked up to the sky and saw the sun just barely hanging over the mountain peaks to the west. I still had time.

I got back to work.

‘I was harsh but not wrong.’

But the echoes of the sound of my hammer striking the iron ringing in this mountain valley felt lonely.

What would be a solution to all this?

Stomp.

I paused and looked over my shoulder.

Back and shoulders nearly reaching up to my chest, a creature that I have never encountered in my life stood on four paws. With a mass that outweighed horses and claws that could rend anything but plate and mail armor to asunder, it was a creature that a single person would dare not face.

It was a bear.

It wasn’t looking at me.

It was looking towards where Derrick left.

I dropped everything and stood up immediately.

“Oi.”

The bear jolted and turned towards me. Its fur bristled as it quickly turned itself towards me before rising up threateningly.

“If you are even thinking about going after my neighbor, you aren’t leaving here.”

It roared at me.

I pulled out my only iron tool from my Inventory: the axe.

And charged.

-VB-

Derrick jolted when he heard the roar and whirled around.

That… That came from Hans’s house!

Limping as he was, he was no coward. He ran straight towards the camp.

But stopped before leaving the forest.

He watched with wide eyes. Hans was nearly flying with how fast he moved and jumped.

The bear backpedaled.

Strikes.

Blood flew everywhere.

The bear roared as it tried to strike back but it wasn’t the fearsome roar but of desperation and pain. Its strikes missed Hans, whose leisurely dodges left the bear for more retaliation.

And then-.

Derrick winced when he saw the hatchet in Hans’s hand come down in a blur and cracked the bear’s skull open.

The majestic beast slumped onto the gravel ground and stilled.

Hans merely scoffed at the bear before grabbing the scruff of its neck with one hand and dragged it away.

With only one hand.

Derrick gulped while he tried to keep his hands from shaking.

That was a bear that men in the village would be scared to fight. It would take a lot of people to take it down.

But Hans did it by himself.

And how strong was he that he dragged a fully grown bear by himself with only one hand?

Hans truly was a warrior, which made his words even worse.

‘A liability on the battlefield at worst. A meat shield at best,’ his mind repeated after Hans.

So was Derrick left to helplessly let his father go to a battlefield and die?

He hung his head and left, his footsteps even heavier than before.

‘If someone like him goes to war, then he’ll definitely survive,’ he thought. And then his mind went back home to his dad and the limp he tried so hard each day to conceal.

The world was unfair.