Mary was one of the few people Cole could fully tolerate. She had been a loyal piece of his business for nearly three years and had made his life so much easier. Mary was a social chameleon. With customers, she could be enthusiastic and supportive of their idiotic ideas. She drew in business with practiced skill and guile. Once she had managed to convince some rich guy to buy a second whole set of armor and a sword so that he could have 'one for display and one for use.' The suckers ate it up, and the profits swelled.

With the smith himself, she toned down some of her cheer. It was still there, Mary was an optimist and just a generally happy person through and through. But she understood and accepted that Cole was simply not a people person and kept most of the conversations to business. She had loosened up a bit over the years as he acclimated to having someone to talk to, and now she was perhaps the only person in the world he would call his friend.

The smith was a self-centered person, he knew that and encouraged the behavior, and yet he couldn't stop himself from worrying if Mary had been hurt in the incursion of mana. He genuinely cared for her as a friend, because she was the only one he had and ever likely would have. His old friends had moved on to bigger and better things, he never had the greatest relationship with his parents, and the less said about his old classmates the better. Talking to Mary was the only social interaction he enjoyed.

And here she was. She was peeking out of the doorway of his old forge, clutching one of the display daggers and bracing herself to run. She had never been an athletic person and didn't bother to learn how to handle the weapons she sold. If one of the wolves had attacked her, she would have stood no chance. He walked over with a smile as she continued her frantic rambling.

"I-I had forgotten my wallet in the store so I was walking back, and out of nowhere the sky lit up and the ground started shaking. Some sort of shockwave knocked me out and when I woke up I had a weird symbol on my wrist? And then the streets just broke and a bunch of trees came out of nowhere and I heard howling and-"

"Mary," Cole said once he was close enough. "It's all right."

Those three words had a profound effect on the woman, taking a visible tension out of her shoulders and relieving her face of some of its mania. She trusted him, despite how impulsive he could occasionally be. If he wasn't panicking, he likely had some sort of solution. After a few calming breaths, she grabbed his hand and dragged him further inside, resuming her explanation with a voice that was calm and all business.

"I hid in the back room once I heard the howling start, and I'm glad I didn't take my chances against those things. I have no idea how you managed to kill one. I saw one eat a street sign through a window. Eat a damn street sign! Whatever they're made of, it isn't natural.

I have some weird blue brand on my wrist calling me a Merchant. Don't know if it's the stress hallucinations or something else kicking in."

At this Cole was interested. From what he could guess, his situation was out of the ordinary. It wouldn't exactly make sense for every person on Earth to be able to summon pocket dimensions and access ancient runic knowledge bases. If his guess about the Classes being about pursuing a path was correct, the fact that his was 'Chosen' was very likely important. Mary would have more data that he could build off of, as Merchant sounded a bit closer to the baseline.

"What exactly did it say? According to mine I'm 'The Chosen Creator'. Sounds pretentious to me, but I do make a lot of stuff."

"Okay, I'll go down all the columns. My name is Mary Suthers. My Class is Merchant, but had a little explanation attached that said I can upgrade or change it by meeting certain qualifications. My 'Rank' is Mortal one. Whatever a Sponsor is, I don't have one. I have an affinity for mind, whatever that means. My Signature Ability is Galactic Market. That last one pulls up some kind of screen where I can buy or sell things for a kind of currency called credits. I tried to sell some of the display weapons and buy other stuff, but I had a maximum of Credits per day I could exchange and it got used up with the selling. So I have a few hundred Credits, but I can't spend them until tomorrow."

Well, that was quite the information dump. Mary hadn't gotten anything as dramatic as himself, with only a single affinity and a class that just sold things easier. Seriously, why was there an entire Class dedicated to automating 'heres a good or service, give me money'? Just make the deal in person! Unless...

"Did you say Galactic Market? Not planetary or regional or anything like that?"

"Yes? Mr. Vance, are you alright? You're shaking!"

He was trembling with excitement. Galactic implied that it accessed the rest of the places with magic, not just Earth. Which meant places that already knew about and had mana metals. He could get mana metals. He could forge mana metal weapons. Imagining an artic steel great axe with a fire rune engraved on it was almost enough to have the smith drooling. The claymore was amazing, but moving his mana to the reinforcement rune had felt like moving his arms through molasses.

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The only other practice he had was with forcefire, and it seemed like that already being solid made it easier to control. Moving pure mana outside of his body was so slow it was almost painful. In the fight with the wolf, he had meant for the last three strikes to be strengthened by the rune, but it only activated in time for the final slash. It was obvious why his Rank advancement had focused so much on mana control if that was the baseline even after the first upgrade.

"Mary, how much is the amount of Credits you have worth? And how much do metals cost?"

Mary seemed to be understanding now, although she had a slight scolding look to her as she realized he was still only thinking about forging. With a wave of her hand, a transparent blue screen appeared, like a tablet floating in the air. She deftly navigated a few menus of the market, narrowing done the hundreds of billions of offers and orders to just metals. Even then, there were still millions of listings.

She currently had the list sorted by price, from highest to lowest. The most expensive item available, for seven point three trillion credits, was a single ingot of something listed as true void steel. Damn, how rich were the customers here? That brought a grim thought to Cole's mind. If he wanted to buy enough mana metal to gain the experience needed to conjure it, he would likely need a lot of Credits. Which meant he might need to sell to customers after all. Damn it all to Hell. At least he had Mary to handle the parts that weren't forging.

After a few more menus and search functions, Mary called up the cheapest metals that weren't mundane. Deep iron was the winner, standing at two hundred Credits per ingot for the cheapest vendor. A glance at the top of the screen showed the Merchant's funds currently capped at seven hundred fifty. Not enough for another claymore, or for any good armor. Perhaps he could make Mary a better weapon? If he did it would have to be something simple. The apocalypse was a horrible time to try and pick up non-magical swordplay.

"Tomorrow, when your Credit limit resets, can you buy a few ingots of deep iron? I'm going to see about making you something to defend yourself with. The fact that it's a new metal I've never forged with before has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all Mary. Trust me."

She didn't believe his bullshit for a single second, but gave a tired nod. He would have his deep iron. Feeling like a kid on Christmas, he conjured some bread to celebrate. Mary immediately grabbed a piece and tore into it. She hadn't had the opportunity for dinner yesterday, she couldn't just magically summon food, and with her Credit limit she couldn't buy it either. A brief mana recovery session, this time devoid of reading, precluded the conjuring of two mugs of water. They wouldn't have to worry about food.

"The bread tastes horrible and the water is somehow blander than water."

Well, not running out of food at least.

Mary passed out almost right after they were done, obviously not having gotten any rest the night before. She was just curled up in the corner with one of his daggers, trusting Cole to defend the shop. While she slept, the smith went around and collected all the materials that were still in the forge. A handful of display weapons, none of them his best work, were deposited on the pocket forge's storage rack.

The spare materials, mostly steel, iron, and leather were likewise tossed into the room for later use. He could just conjure things, but waste not want not. His mana regeneration went towards building up a stockpile of the bread and water imitations in case he ever ran out of mana for a prolonged time. The random sentimental bits and bobs were placed on the pocket forge's bookshelf, and on his way back he grabbed the enchantment book for further study.

The beginner's book was mainly just a compendium of runes and their uses, but there was a small section on multiple rune items at the end. If individual runes were words, these enchantments would be phrases. For example, he could improve his claymore's enchantment by changing the singular rune from reinforcement to the runic phrase control reinforcement. The original rune just increased how strong the weapon was, as that was its natural effect. The phrase could let him turn the effect up or down, focus it on certain places, or even inverse the effect and weaken the weapon.

These runic phrases were still beyond him, as they required the engraving of interlapping runes which hurt his head just to look at. For now, he would focus on single runes and how to use them most effectively. Cole didn't even want to think of what a three-rune enchantment would look like. In one of the most advanced books, there was a diagram of a seven-word rune that roughly translated to 'Control the fate of battle to crush the future of those who oppose me.' It used the runes for control, luck, fate, conflict, destruction, identification, and loyalty. The symbol drawn on the page was outside of geometry, or even common sense in general. A brief glance was all it took to make his eyes sore for half an hour, so the book was banished back to the shelf.

Runes aside, Cole practiced his magic by tossing a ball of forcefire from one hand to the other until his mana was empty. The silver-red fire was still sluggish in the air, but its stronger base as a mixture of affinities and its physical form made it orders of magnitude faster than pure mana control. The ball still fought against him, not daring to hurt him but plenty happy to just resist. It would be a long time before he got anywhere close to mastering the strange stuff that flowed through his channels, but he would enjoy it.

Once Mary woke up tomorrow, she would purchase the deep iron. They would see if she was allowed in the pocket forge as Cole made her weapon, and then he would have her pick out a rune to place on it. What could he make for her? Another claymore would be way too heavy for her, as with almost everything he could make. Either a light spear or a small sword. A saber perhaps? Maybe a javelin? Either way, tomorrow he would forge his first mana metal blade.