And up... clench at the top, and down.
And up... clench at the top, and down.
And up... clench at the top... hold...5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and down.
A breath of relief escaped me as I lowered the buckets filled with scrap steel to the ground and unwove the ropes from around my hands so that I could unhook my legs and lower myself to the ground. I had to lay down and stretch myself out slowly because the inverted crunches I'd been doing wiped me out every single time I performed them; my hip flexors were screaming at me until they were finally relaxed enough for me to lay my legs flat against the dirt. My face felt like an overripe tomato because I had been hanging upside down for so long, but thankfully I didn't get a nosebleed this time around.
The afternoon sun faded away as I cracked my eyes open and caught sight of Tsubaki's grinning mug. "Finished for the day, Bell-kichi?"
"Yeah, just give me a few more minutes so that I can actually get up. My core is shot." I grunted and weakly gestured over to my Whisperwood staff leaning against a bench just outside of my reach. "However, if you gave me my staff, I could get up maybe a few minutes sooner."
The smooth, light wood smacked into my outstretched palm as the half-dwarf replied. "Well, go ahead and get ta' chant'n there, oh Great Mage of the Hephaestus familia! Our Goddess wants you in the forge and as fresh as you can be. She wants you to get your feet wet in a time-honored tradition here- your first project."
My first project?
I didn't need any more cajoling as I spun up my Mind and began the initial weaves for the Soothing Touch spell as the chant started to leave my lips.
"My body aches from the day's labor, my form is weary from the struggles of the past."
"I seek relief from the pains that ail me, and find refuge in the grace that the Heavens provide me."
"Let my pains be eased, my wounds mended, and my vitality returned."
"Soothing Touch."
I pressed my now-glowing hand against my belly and felt my muscles immediately respond; the micro-tears mended and the inflammation in the connective tissues lessened. I felt some of my strength return to me, but it was more akin to having a caffeine dope from a particularly strong shot of espresso; this spell wasn't nearly as powerful as the Spring Vitality spell I had been eyeing for the better part of three months, but just from speaking to the old Witch I was far away from having the control needed to learn that spell. That spell was noted to rejuvenate the person healed as if they'd had a rather significant rest, but for the floors I was on, it would be considered overkill.
I managed to struggle my way to a seated position and I looked up at the woman. "How long that time?"
When I was casting a spell, coaxing my mana through the required weaves, I made sure to take my time to do them right. Ignis Faatus was extremely painful to endure- like having one's muscles seize up in a charley-horse- and the main lingered for a good long while after fucking up the cast. Control first, speed second, power third; that was my modus operandi for my self-taught magical lessons.
"Three and a half minutes, there abouts. Give or take a few seconds." The woman reached down and grasped my outstretched arm and pulled me to my feet. "Not bad for being self-taught, Bell-kichi; most people don't make it past their first Ignis Faatus, so the fact that you're still sticking with it even now without a teacher to guide you is pretty darn good in my opinion."
I felt my lips purse. I wouldn't be healing myself mid-combat with a cast time like that- I'd have to start practicing concurrent chanting; even taking a single step each time I chanted a line would be an improvement.
It really drove home just how much easier Bell Cranel had it - the kid was gifted a super intuitive spell worth a Hundred Million valis and here I was slumming it with the other kids hoping to learn.
It also kept me focused. Grounded. Just like archery, sword fighting, Dungeon diving, and blacksmithing... magic was the journey of a thousand steps.
"Just put one foot in front of the other and take another step."
I had been excited to present myself to Hephaestus, even in the filthy, tired state I was in; yes I was sweaty and nasty, but I was about to go into a forge where I would get sweaty and nasty anyway.
She smiled at me and proudly presented me with my very first smithing hammer, a simple 3-pound hammer with a rounded face. Next to the forge on a small podium covered in a purple velvet cloth was to be my first challenge.
Every damn smith seemed to be in attendance, all of the gruff-faced men and hard-faced women were all packed in tightly in the small corner of the forge as Hephaestus gripped the edge of the cloth between her pointer finger and thumb.
"Just over a year ago Bell Winters came to us a boy. He was incredibly experienced for one as young as him- an accomplished archer, a decent fighter, and an outstanding hunter." Hephaestus' gaze swept over every smith as a small, wry grin tugged at her lips. "Since that day, Winters-kun has been hard at work for the familia, accomplishing every task set before him, be they homework, chores, or various other errands. Tsubaki-chan has informed me that he's performing exceedingly well in the Dungeon for his age, and in my own classes with the prospective apprentices he has been attentive and curious."
"I think that he has the same fire that dwells within the heart of every smith, to seek out knowledge so that it can be better applied to our craft. To forge the blade of the next Great Adventurer, or to put a solid blade in the hands of the poorest among our numbers so that they can come home from the Dungeon safely." The Goddess' gaze turned towards me and her lone eye shimmered, "We are gathered here today to witness the unveiling of his very first project."
"This is something that every smith here has gone through, and I remember all of your surprised faces fondly." Hephaestus looked back over the crowd as the smiths chuckled and elbowed one another with hushed whispers.
"Bell Winters, you have watched me and the various smiths here perform their craft for over a year now, and you've tried your hand with the very hammer in your hands more than once. It is time for you to take the next step forward in your journey of becoming a smith so that you can brush shoulders with the fellows surrounding you." She tugged lightly at the cloth, dragging my attention away from her plump, oh so kissable lips and towards the podium, "You have eagerly devoured every introductory lecture I can give without making you an official apprentice. You have learned, so now it is time for you to do."
"Pass this test and you will be an official Apprentice of the familia. Should you fail... well it is better we don't talk about what would happen." Her smile twisted into a smirk as a pair of dwarves broke into boisterous laughter.
She tugged the velvet off and to my eyes was revealed-!
A coat hanger and one of those old-timey nails. My face scrunched up. "I wasn't expecting you to ask me to make a greatsword or anything... but I guess this fits."
Spoiler: The Grand First Test!
Her pearly white teeth were revealed as her smirk transformed into a lip-splitting smile. "I need forty of these coat hooks and 500 nails by next week. A restaurant near the Tower called the Hostess of Fertility opened up a few years ago and requires some repairs after a recent brawl there caused some damage, and since she makes the best meat pie I have ever tasted, you're going to be helping her out by getting these to her on time. Any questions?"
I arched an eyebrow before one of my Big-Brain NCO thoughts came to my head. "Can I ask my fellow smiths for advice?"
The answer was, yes, I could ask my smiths for advice, however, they weren't required to give me good advice.
"Oh yeah, my advice to you is to stop asking for help and get back to work. Those nails aren't going to forge themselves."
"Bah! Questions? Questions are cheating my boy! Get back to work!"
"It is really cute how earnest you are dearie, but I think you might want to move your hammer more and your mouth less."
Come on, Darlene, you were my only hope!
There was one resource that I did have, and it was the smithing directory; while not all of the Hephaestus familia's methods and techniques were written down- for obvious reasons- there were hundreds of methods to make mundane items that had been immortalized on print in a small little library in the center of the compound. Without an indexing system of any kind, it took me almost three hours to find what I was looking for, but the directions for the particular coat hook and the nails that Hephaestus wanted were indeed written down.
In the end, it saved me a lot of trouble because while the nails weren't like the wire nails I was used to, they could be forged from a single long bar and then cleaved into smaller nails and finished off. No doubt everyone expected me to try and forge them individually, but nope! I copied down all of the directions for both and made my way back to the forge.
I might be a Ranger, but I can be SMRT too!
I had access to a fully stocked forge and all of the tools I would need to get the job done, and the first order of business was to take the three-inch nail blanks back to their positions and grab an armful of 1/8th inch wrought-iron bar stock. They were about a meter long and my forge just so happened to be a meter in depth. Perfect! I grabbed some starter coals and fired by forge up and tossed a dozen bars to heat while I wandered around the workshop and grabbed every empty container I could get my hands on.
I would need eight to get this working, one bucket for each step of the heat-treatment and tempering process, times two for the coat hooks and the nails. Darlene asked me why I was doing it all, and when I explained myself the woman smiled and patted me on the head with her soot-covered hands.
"Such a diligent boy you are, Bell-kun."
Once I finished scrubbing away the soot from my snow-white hair and pulled on a handkerchief and got to work.
First step is heating and forging the rod- taking it from its cylindrical shape and pounding it to a more rectangular base. Then I made cuts using a wedge and a hammer in the material about two and a half inches down as once I was finished forging each nail the material would stretch out to the three inches requested.
The Second step is room temperature normalization cycles- taking it up to its critical heat temperature of about 900 degrees and then letting it air cool; there was this nifty little magnet on the end of an iron rod that let me know when I reached this point as it was a bit difficult to tell from color alone. A more seasoned smith could probably do it, but most of my experience was from watching, but thankfully I didn't need all that experience because once the iron was up to temperature it stopped being magnetic! Huzzah for shortcuts!
I did this three times with each batch before I moved on to the next step, which was the oil quench. I had to get creative and use a metal pale of which I used a punch to fill full of holes, but when it was time for the quench all I had to do was pour the nails into the bucket and lower the bucket into the oil with a rope. Even with the step stool, I had to use I still roasted my arm hairs off as the superheated metal ignited some of the oil- the flames licking over my arms- but thanks to my Endurance it felt little worse than a sunburn. I was even able to practice my magic by healing myself!
The final step was tempering, which was putting the oil quenched nails into a steel tray and letting the stresses introduced by the forging and heat-treatment process get released over time by low heat for a few hours. I just put the nails in the tempering oven and moved into the next batch.
The nails were completed in three days, and then I moved into the coat hooks. It was a little tricky to get the curvature right every time, but after watching Darlene use chalk to line out where on her anvil horn she needed to forge her curves around - I'm pretty certain she was low-key helping me without helping me- it was a simple matter of hammering everything into shape. Getting the spade tips right was a pain, as they needed to be able to grip a coat without cutting into the coat, but after a dozen fuck-ups that were consigned to the scrap bin, I felt like I finally got them just about as close as Hephaestus wanted them from the example she gave me.
I almost fucked up by forgetting to punch in the nail holes for the hooks, but I caught myself thanks to my handy-dandy notebook an Army Approved Checklist. You don't know how much ass pain it would have been had I heat-treated and tempered the damn things, only to realize that I had forgotten the fucking mounting holes. I would have been forced to reheat them back up, punch the holes, and then go through the treatment process allllll oooovvvveeeerrrrrr aaaaagggggaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnn.
When I expressed how happy I was that I caught my mistake, the other smiths just guffawed and Darlene gave me another indulgent pat on the head. "Good job, dearie."
It took me a day and a half to finish those up, and after scraping the scale off with a hard steel brush I was two and a half days ahead of schedule when I called for Hephaestus to come and check my work.
The Goddess picked a handful of nails from each completed bucket and looked them over with a critical eye. "Hmmm... walk me through your process again?"
I proudly walked her through my process step by step, from my time savings using available bar stock rods instead of hand forging each and every single nail blank, to each step of the heat-treatment process and the little organizational system I used to keep my workflow nice and smooth.
"It was clever of you to think about the directory, not many of our apprentices do." She smiled as she put all but a few back into the bucket and handed them over to Tsubaki. "You followed the instructions step by step, yes?"
The half-dwarf carefully bent and snapped the nails before her expression became only what could be described as 'exuberantly-mirthful'.
I blinked. "Yes."
Hephaestus chuckled and shook her head. "You do realize that these are just going to be facade nails, right? They aren't structural; those would have been six inches in length at least. These nails didn't need to be heat-treated or tempered at all."
A frown marred my face as I thought about the many, many hours wasted getting all of that bullshit done.
The Goddess reached out, bending over slightly to pinch my cheek; whether giving me a slight peek at her cleavage because the top button of her shirt was undone was intentional or not, I didn't know. I just enjoyed the view from out the bottom of my vision as I kept my eyes locked onto her single red orb. "You did very well though, Winters-kun. So well in fact I think you deserve a reward."
My almost 40-year-old brain thought up a number of rewards that I would like, but my undescended testicles couldn't have cared any less. Instead, I had to settle for whatever she was actually going to give me.
I grinned. "I'm listening, Hephaestus-sama."
"Come on, laddie, put yer back into it! PUSH! PULL! PUSH! PULL!" Vornir roared as I furiously worked the bellows as hard as I fucking could.
Hephaestus apparently viewed me sitting in on an Adamantium ore-smelting session as a 'reward' for officially becoming an Apprentice Smith. The ore needed to get up to insane temperatures to be smelted properly, and that required lots of coal, lots of coke, and a whole bunch of manpower. There were four bellows that pushed air into the large furnace, and each one had to be working continuously to get the Adamantium nodes up to the mythical metal's melting point. Each bellow had three Level 3s taking turns pulling and pushing the levers, and not content to let me just sit by and watch, the former Captain of the familia kicked me into the rotation on the weakest performing bellow.
It was hot as a mother fucker! I had to wear water-soaked clothing and a headdress to even stand close enough to the furnace to work the bellows, and the heat was beginning to bleed easily through the extra thick smithing gloves provided to me. I felt like I was dying, literally. I could hardly breathe, and forcing my body to push and pull was a monumental effort.
Finally, I tapped out and one of the Level 3s pushed by me with a chuckle and took my place, his Level 3 Endurance allowing him to get close enough without suffering anything more than a sunburn with his clothing and face covering.
I barely managed to stumble my way outside of the forge and tossed myself into the water-filled trough for the horses and just reveled in how cool and moist my skin felt. I didn't care that the horse slobber mixed within it gave it a slimy film. I was cool. I was wet. I was no longer a frog in a kettle of boiling water where the water was my own sweat and tears.
I lounged there for a few minutes before I heard the Level 5 dwarf cry out. "The nodes are cracking! Get the forms ready!"
Water sloshed as I hauled myself out of the trough, one of the horses lapped at my face and knickered when I walked past. I walked back into the fucking oven that was the Adamantium smelting warehouse and watched as Level 3s covered from head to toe in thick, water-logged clothing maneuvered a large steel cart with a half-dozen ingot molds into place. The Adamantium door was tugged open with a chain and liquid gold began to dribble out down the chute and into the forms.
I was... awed at how much work and resources went into smelting Adamantium into bars no larger than what you might envision would be in a bank vault. Adamantium scrapers were thrust into the hole and every single drop was wrangled out of the furnace before it was sealed up and left to cool.
The golden metal ore shimmered in the waning light of the sun as it lost its temperature and began to solidify and harden.
"Sure is something, ain't it, boy?" Vornir spoke solemnly as he saddled up next to me, the one-eyed dwarf snuffling as he used the edge of his Adamantium Hammer Hand to scratch at his nose. "I remember when I was a boy, not a few years older than yourself when I witnessed my first Adamantium smelt. Goddess, feels like forever ago. Things were different back then with Zeus at the helm."
"Drops from the deepest parts of the Dungeon flowed like water, and Adamantium was just as plentiful as Mithril is today." He grunted, "Those six ingots are worth three and a half billion valis, my boy. Thirty years ago? They were worth less than a billion. Those Zeus familia boys went through Adamantium weapons and armor like shit through a goose."
He shook his head and rested his flesh and blood hand on top of my head. "Remember this day boy, one day it might be you standing where I was, hollering out orders."
I smiled. "Hopefully not too soon, I thought I was about to die."
"Heh, did well enough in my book. Go on back to your room and get cleaned up and take a rest. I'll let Hephaestus-sama know you'll be taking the day off tomorrow." He slapped my back before he began wiping his hand on his apron, "Go on, you smell like horse slobber!"
I was filthy, I was exhausted, but for some reason... I couldn't wipe the smile from my face.
As I walked back to my room I made a promise to myself: I would never do anything to piss Hephaestus off enough to put me on Blower duty.
That probably wasn't a promise I could keep, but I would be damned if I didn't try.