After that conversation, they were picked up by the capital ship a few minutes later, and Sam was introduced to one of the many smiths that had taken up residence on the ship, a man by the name of Granth. He was a stocky, older specimen who had a faint patina of wrinkles on his scaled forehead, which was a strange sight indeed. Apparently he had been one of the greatest smiths in the entire Grakoth race before the System had come, but had been dying. Now that the System was here, he had been able to reclaim some of his lost youth and propel his craft to unforeseen heights. George would have liked to meet this man.
“So you can work with a suit of armor that is made for a being smaller than yourself?” Sam asked as he laid out his armor on the man’s anvil.
They were in a dingy shop that seemed to be organized in a way that only its proprietor knew. Piles of metal scraps lay around the room, and dust was thick over everything. However, the few pieces of work that were on display were masterpieces in every sense of the word, and they more than made up for the dingy appearance. Three swords stood by a long halberd, each of which gleamed like a polished star, even in the dim light. Their edges looked sharp enough to cut through stone, which was probably accurate.
“Such a task is well within my abilities. What do you take me for?” Granth said in a raspy voice. “Also, I can see you ogling my other works. What do you think?”
Manarox sighed, and the smith gave the man a hard stare, at odds with the way that most of the Grakoth treated their leader. It was clear that Granth served some sort of esteemed position within this ship if he was on such friendly terms with Manarox.
“Don’t sigh at me, young man! Your armor is one of my finest works. I might be proud of my craft, but what would a brute like you understand?”
Sam almost choked trying to keep a laugh down, and Manarox glared at him. However, the man did not speak again, likely afraid of being embarrassed once more.
“Good. How long will this take?” Sam asked.
“Depending on the metal that I need, from ten minutes to an hour. I can see that some of the metal is a mithril alloy, which takes a bit longer to work with. You should wait around here though. I can sense that you have taken a few steps on the path of smithing. Maybe you can get a few insights.”
“How did you-” Sam began. “Never mind.”
He sat down on the ground next to the anvil, and watched as the smith started to tap the armor with his fingers, trying to get an estimate of its dimensions. A few minutes later, he was done and he started to pull pieces of metal out of a storage device. It seemed that the piles of scraps were just for show. Absent-mindedly, Sam picked up one of the nearby scraps, and was surprised when he found that it was a perfectly functional ax. Its light seemed to dim in the face of the four masterworks that were at the back of the shop however, and that was likely why he had dismissed them as mere scraps. However, the ax was perfectly balanced, and it felt like it would be a fine weapon.
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“What’s the story behind these weapons?” Sam whispered to Manarox.
“Granth has very exacting standards. If a weapon is not a true work of art, he will simply discard it. He uses some sort of skill to warp the light around the weapons to make them seem like failures, but in reality they are better weapons that most of my people are equipped with.”
“Interesting. I can see that he is much more skilled in this sphere of work than most other smiths within this universe.”
“Yeah. He’s gained all of his levels from smithing thus far, and he's already almost level 75. His skill before gaining access to the System was such that he was sent straight to the third tier of mastery instantly.”
“I’m trying to work here!” Granth called out as he started to hat up his forge with a quick pump of his bellows. “I appreciate the conversation topic, but I need to focus.”
Manarox nodded, seemingly abashed, and Sam did the same. It was strange that the alien overlord had such respect for someone much weaker than himself, but it was likely to do with the venerated status of smiths within the Grakoth society.
The next half an hour passed by, with Granth slowly folding in bits of molten metal into the structure of the armor, using various System skills to do so. By the time that he was done, the armor was in perfect shape. Even then, the smith started to buff it with a piece of cloth before handing it over to Sam.
“At your level, you’re going to need some sort of upgrade to this set with the amount of damage that you seem to have been taking. Either that, or get better at dodging.” Granth barked out a laugh at the end of that, and went back to his work.
Left with that little nugget of insight, Sam left the smithy, and walked back into the main area of the ship. The gleaming hallways were at odds with the dim lighting of the smithy behind them, and Sam felt a moment of disorientation as he adjusted to the light. Then it was gone, his superior stats showing themselves.
“What did you think of Granth?” Manarox asked, giving Sam an indecipherable look.
“He’s… an interesting man.”
“That he certainly is. Our species generally lives to about a hundred and fifty years of age, but that was before the System came. When he was inducted into it, he was already 25 years older than the average for our race, and was about to die. However, he, and all of us by extension, have thousands of years to live, if not more, at the rate that we are progressing.”
“Hmm,” Sam said as the two men walked down the hallway.
“On the subject of progression, what sort of trials did your home planet have to go through in order for you to be able to leave? Our planet is still stuck in the grips of the initialization.”
“Well, ours is not exactly out of it yet,” Manarox admitted. “We had the technology and the numbers to create dozens of ships that could carry our colonizing forces to other worlds and plunder them of their resources. Although the overall number of our species had diminished, there were still enough to easily boost our faction coffers into the trillions of credits. With all of that money, such expansion was easy enough.”
“Right. I remembered taking advantage of something like that in the early days of the System. I taxed my followers, and even though they only contributed a small amount each, it still added up to a considerable sum,” Sam replied.