The cobblestones hurt my ears.
That's what struck me first about Celestian's grand entrance—not the white horse (seriously, who rides white horses anymore?), not the gold armor that probably cost more than my entire workshop, definitely not the crowd losing their collective minds over him. Just the sound. Ten thousand people stomping and cheering, and all I could think was how the vibrations were going to mess with my current project's molecular structure.
I was three days into a delicate carbon lattice manipulation. Three days! And now this.
"People of Astoria!" His voice carried that particular brand of heroic pompousness that made my teeth ache. "I have come seeking the one you call the God of Blacksmiths!"
God of Blacksmiths. Christ, I hate that name. It started as a joke—some drunk knight couldn't pronounce "materials engineer" and I was too tired to correct him. Now everyone uses it. Marketing, I guess. Though I never asked for marketing.
From my workshop window, I watched the crowd do that thing crowds do. The whispered telephone game of half-truths and wild speculation.
"—doesn't see just anyone—" "—turned away Lord Vaelthorne—" "—talks to himself constantly—"
Well, they got that last one right. When you're the only person in a medieval world who understands thermodynamics, you tend to have a lot of one-sided conversations about entropy.
Mrs. Hendricks from the bakery was holding court near the fountain. "He threw out Duke Aldric! Right in the middle of— what do you call it when they want to pay you extra for making things shiny?"
"Negotiations?" someone supplied.
"That's it! Said he'd rather... what was it... 'finish tempering' something than listen to 'political nonsense.'"
I mean, she wasn't wrong. Aldric had wanted me to put little gems on a breastplate. Gems! Like I was running some kind of medieval Etsy shop instead of trying to push the boundaries of metallurgical science.
The crowd kept building their mythology. Half of it was wrong (I don't make pacts with ancient powers—I make pacts with the laws of physics), but half was uncomfortably accurate (yes, I do forget to eat, and yes, my workshop probably looks like a crazy person's conspiracy board to anyone without a PhD in engineering).
Little Tam from the food delivery service piped up: "My mum says he stares at metal for hours! Just stares! Muttering about... carbon something?"
"Carbon lattice structures," I muttered from my window. Then louder, because why not: "And molecular bonds, you little eavesdropper!"
Tam jumped and looked around wildly. The crowd laughed. I went back to watching their unwitting hero march toward my workshop.
Look, I didn't ask for this. Five years ago I was Dr. Marcus Chen, associate professor of materials science at MIT, working on my paper about stress-testing nano-enhanced steel alloys. Then—well, then I died. Car accident. Very mundane, very final.
Except it wasn't final.
I woke up in a world where people swing swords at dragons and think "advanced metallurgy" means folding metal more than eight times. My PhD was suddenly about as useful as a chocolate teapot. My twenty years of research? Might as well have been written in ancient Sumerian for all the good it did me.
But here's the thing about being a materials engineer—you adapt. You improvise. You look at a medieval forge and think, "How can I turn this into a plasma containment system?"
Turns out, magic makes an excellent catalyst for nuclear fusion. Who knew?
The workshop doors slammed open. No knock. No appointment. Typical hero behavior.
"I am Celestian Radiance, Hero of—"
"Yeah, I know who you are." I didn't look up from my work. The tungsten alloy I was folding required precise timing, and heroic interruptions weren't part of the equation. "You're the guy who killed the Demon King with the power of friendship and really good PR."
Silence. Then footsteps. Getting closer.
"How did you—"
"Kid." I finally turned around, because the metal needed to cool anyway. "When you've been doing this as long as I have, you learn to read the signs. Your sword's resonance frequency is all wrong for whatever's coming next. Eldritch entities don't follow standard physics—you need something that can cut through reality itself."
His jaw dropped. It was almost cute, in a 'golden retriever meets theoretical physics' kind of way.
"The Void Awakening," he whispered. "How could you possibly know about—"
"Because I've seen enough fantasy novels to know how these things go." I turned back to my work. "Demon King was just the warm-up act. Now comes the real cosmic horror show, and your current gear is about as useful as a water pistol against a hurricane."
The star-forge pulsed behind me. I'd spent two years figuring out how to contain a miniature sun using crystallized mana and some very creative applications of electromagnetic fields. OSHA would have had a field day. The insurance company would have just burned down their offices and started over.
But it worked. Boy, did it work.
"I can make you something that'll actually put a dent in an eldritch god," I said, feeding the metal back into the containment field. "Assuming you're ready to see what happens when someone who actually understands particle physics gets access to magic."
Celestian stood there, probably trying to process the fact that his world's mysterious god-smith was actually just a very displaced, very caffeinated professor who missed having access to peer review.
"Welcome to the Crimson Workshop, Hero," I said, watching atoms dance in ways that would make my old colleagues weep with joy. "Try not to touch anything. Half of this stuff violates several laws of nature, and I'm not entirely sure what happens if someone without a physics degree gets too close to a contained nuclear reaction."
The star-furnace hummed louder. Somewhere in that impossible heat, a weapon was taking shape that would make even the gods pause their cosmic plans to ask, "Wait, how did he do that?"
But honestly? I was just a professor who refused to let a little thing like dying in a car accident stop him from pursuing his research.
Even if that research now involved preventing the heat death of two universes instead of just writing papers about it.