Chapter 108: The Art Of Forging [I / Bonus Chapter]
Silas blinked, rubbing the back of his neck as a genuine laugh escaped his chest.
"You’re naming a newly discovered magic mineral Sil-Graves? That’s a little on the nose, don’t you think?"
"It’s perfect!" Thora insisted, puffing her chest out. "It tells everyone who owns the mine, who cleared the room, and whose forge is going to turn it into weapons that will cut their heads off! Good branding is half the battle in this economy, Boss!"
Morwenna smirked from across the room, leaning her hips against her anvil.
"I don’t hate it. Sil-Graves Silver has a heavy, violent ring to it. Sounds like something you use to sink an enemy fleet."
"Exactly!" Thora cheered.
She pushed the book aside and grabbed her heavy forging hammer, stepping out into the center of the sweltering room.
Her playful demeanor vanished in a heartbeat, replaced by the authoritative command of a Master Blacksmith standing in her own domain.
"Alright, Girls! Social hour is over!" Thora barked, her voice cutting through the heavy hot air. "We didn’t haul tons of rock out of that mountain just to stare at it! You all wanted to learn how to craft weapons? Today is day one of your apprenticeship!"
The girls immediately stopped leaning against the workbenches and straightened their posture.
Even Eluned dropped down to stand on her own two feet, recognizing that Thora wasn’t playing around when it came to the forge.
"Before you even touch a pair of tongs, you need to understand the golden rule of blacksmithing," Thora lectured, pacing back and forth in front of them with her hammer resting on her shoulder. "A weapon is not just a sharp piece of metal attached to a handle... A weapon is an extension of your physical frame, your mana circuit, and your combat style... If you forge a blade that doesn’t fit your natural balance, it will betray you in the middle of a fight."
She stopped pacing and pointed the blunt end of her hammer directly at Brida.
"When you buy a standard broadsword from a city merchant, you are buying a generic tool built for a generic soldier," Thora explained. "It’s balanced for an average reach and an average strength but none of us are average. We are high-tier summons... That means the gear you craft in this room needs to be tailored specifically to how your muscles move and how your mana flows."
Silas listened closely with his mind instantly connecting the dots.
In a standard RPG, you just equipped whatever weapon gave the highest raw stat boost but in reality, a poorly balanced sword with high damage would just slow your swing speed down and get you killed against a faster opponent.
Custom gear meant optimizing every single variable to match his Gold Core.
’My weapons are already optimized for my Gold core though... so I don’t hate it.’
Thora lowered her hammer and looked down the line of sweating dust-covered girls.
"So," the dwarf demanded, putting her hands on her hips. "We’re starting from scratch. I want to know what kind of weapons you actually want to build so go around the room and call it out!"
Silas stepped forward, frowning slightly as he looked at the variety of the women present in the room.
"Hold on a second, Thora," Silas interrupted, crossing his arms. "There are six of us here, and everyone fights completely differently. Won’t it be a massive pain in the ass for you to look over several different weapon blueprints and supervise six different forging styles at the exact same time?"
Thora didn’t look overwhelmed in the slightest. She threw her head back and laughed...
She turned to him, pointing a thumb at her own chest with unshakable confidence.
"Boss, please," Thora shrugged him off with a cocky grin. "I forged three hundred pieces of heavy siege armor during the Great Goblin Wars while my forge was actively being bombarded by catapults... I am a certified Master at what I do. Supervising six custom projects in a clean quiet workshop is like taking a vacation for me. I don’t mind at all. Now let them speak!"
She turned her gaze to the far left of the room, pointing her hammer at Tasmin. "Huntress! What are we building for you?"
Tasmin stepped out from behind her workbench, her skin glistening with sweat in the orange furnace light.
She unclipped one of her custom chained daggers from her belt and held it up for the blacksmith to see.
"My current daggers are exceptional for close-quarters attacks and quick throat slashes..." Tasmin explained. "But when I fight larger armored monsters... like that corrupted boar and others... the short reach forces me to over-commit to my lunges even with the daggers. I want to build a pair of customized shortswords instead of daggers."
She traced her finger along the hilt of her blade.
"I want the blades longer and heavier so they can punch through thick hide, but I need the pommels engineered with reinforced steel loops so I can securely attach my high-tensile chains directly to the weapons. That way, I can throw the shortswords to pin an enemy at mid-range and rip them back to my grip without losing my primary weapons."
Thora’s eyes lit up with professional approval.
"Chained shortswords with high-tensile retrieval rings? That requires a heavy counterbalance in the hilt so the blades don’t wobble in mid-air when you throw them. I like it."
She shifted her gaze to the towering amazon commander standing next to Tasmin. "Brida! What about you, big boobs? Still trying to build a shield?"
Brida grinned, stepping forward and rolling her broad shoulders.
The tight, sleeveless canvas top she wore was drenched in sweat, but her morale was sky-high.
"You damn right, dwarf," Brida boomed, slamming her massive fist into her open palm. "When I’m swinging the gift from my Lord, I’m leaving my front flank completely open. During that mining run, I realized I don’t want a massive full-body tower shield that slows down my footwork... I want to build that smaller high-impact assault shield we talked about."
She held her left arm up, bending her elbow to demonstrate the exact size.
"I want a heavy, reinforced buckler or a medium heater shield that is strapped tightly to my forearm. Something heavy enough to smash a charging boar’s skull in, but light enough that I can still swing my two-handed axe with my right arm without throwing my balance off."
"A heavy assault buckler designed for kinetic shield-bashing," Thora nodded, tapping her chin as she mentally drafted the blueprint. "We’ll need to layer the face with star-iron to absorb magic projectiles, and line the back with ironwood padding so the impact doesn’t shatter your forearm bones when a boss hits you. Easy work."
Next in line was Fenna who said what she wanted and then Elara, the junior scout who had spent the entire morning hauling ore carts alongside the heavy hitters.
The young archer looked slightly nervous standing among the other troops, but she stepped up bravely, clutching her bow.
"I... I want to make a backup weapon, Master Thora," Elara said softly, her pointed ears dropping slightly. "My primary bow is great for long-range scouting, but when enemies close the distance or ambush us in tight cave corridors, a full-sized longbow is too clunky to draw. I’d like to craft a smaller high-tension recurve bow or a compact crossbow that I can keep slung across my back for emergency close-quarters fighting."
"A compact recurve," Thora confirmed with a warm smile, showing surprising patience for the junior scout. "We’ll use seasoned ironwood for the limbs to give it an aggressive snap, and reinforce the grip with deep-earth alloy so you can use the bow itself to parry a sword strike if you get cornered. Good instinct, kid."
Finally, Thora turned her attention to the three highest-tier fighters in the room: Morwenna, Eluned, and Silas.
"Alright, heavy hitters," Thora smirked, resting her hands on her hips. "What kind of weapons are the commanders ordering today?"
Morwenna pushed herself off her anvil with her stormy gray eyes looking quite competitive.
She didn’t look at Thora... instead, she cast a challenging arrogant side-glance directly at Eluned.
"I wield a blade," Morwenna declared. "I don’t need a novelty weapon or a backup tool. I want to forge a traditional heavy-bladed cutlass. A sword built for pure cutting power."
She smirked, crossing her bare arms over her chest. "I want to see if I can manually craft a blade from this new mountain ore that can match the balance of the Astral Corsair."
Eluned scoffed loudly, stepping up right next to the pirate queen and crossing her own arms in an identical posture.
"How boring," Eluned mocked her with her glowing green eyes narrowing in competitive defiance. "A simple pirate sword for a simple pirate mind. I, on the other hand, wish to forge an elegant, double-edged elven longsword. A weapon that seamlessly channels natural atmospheric magic through the fuller while retaining a razor-sharp physical edge."
The Goddess tilted her chin up, glaring at Morwenna. "And I guarantee my craftsmanship will be significantly superior to whatever rusted scrap metal you manage to hammer together, trench-rat."
"Is that a challenge, you overgrown weed?" Morwenna snarled, leaning her forehead right against Eluned’s.
"It is a statement of divine fact!" Eluned fired back, refusing to back down an inch.
Silas watched the two SSS-rank entities instantly lock into a bitter silent rivalry.
It was obvious what was happening. They weren’t just forging swords to learn the craft... at least from what Silas could guess.
They were secretly competing to see who could build the superior weapon just so they could hand them over to Silas later and force him to judge out who the better woman was.
’I am definitely going to be dragged into judging a sword beauty contest by the end of the day...’ Silas thought, sighing internally. ’There is no winning that argument. Whoever I pick is going to be smug, and whoever loses is going to try and murder me in my sleep.’
Thora completely ignored their bickering and looked at her Lord. "And what about you, Boss? What’s on your wishlist?"
Silas shrugged his broad shoulders, stepping up to his designated workbench. \
Unlike the girls, who had intricate needs or petty rivalries to fuel them, Silas had a much simpler motivation.
"I just want to make a sword for sword’s sake..." Silas answered honestly with a small genuine grin on his face. "No crazy gimmicks, no hidden chains or magic fullers. It should just be a solid, well-balanced, heavy hand-and-a-half sword that feels good to swing. Something I can rely on if my primary blade gets knocked out of my hands."
"A purist!" Thora cheered, clapping her hands together. "I respect it! Sometimes you don’t need magic bells and whistles. You just need a sharp piece of steel that puts an enemy in the dirt!"
She walked over to the center of the room, pointing toward the heavy wooden crates they had rolled in from the carts earlier.
"Alright! Now that we know what we’re building, we move to step two: material selection!" Thora instructed with her voice bouncing off the high stone ceiling. "You cannot build a high-tier weapon out of a single piece of raw metal! If you build a sword entirely out of hardened star-iron, the edge will be sharp enough to cut through a boulder, but the blade will be so brittle it will shatter like glass the first time you parry a heavy blow!"
She walked over to Brida’s crate, picking up a dull, dark gray ingot of deep-earth alloy.
"This is why we layer our metals," Thora educated them, holding the alloy up for everyone to see. "Deep-earth alloy is dense, heavy, and has incredible structural elasticity. It bends under extreme pressure instead of snapping. We use this as the core... the spine of your weapons to give them shock absorption and durability."
She set the dull ingot down and picked up a glowing blue cluster of star-iron.
"Next is the star-iron," she continued, turning the blue ore in the furnace light. "Star-iron holds a high magical charge and takes a microscopic, razor-sharp edge. We weld this metal directly onto the outer jacket and the cutting edges of your weapons. That gives you a flexible and durable spine wrapped in an indestructible razor-sharp cutting shell!"
Finally, Thora pointed her hammer toward the locked table where the newly named white silver rested.
"And for the commanders as well as the rest," Thora smirked, looking at Morwenna, Eluned, and Silas. "Once we establish your core billets, we are going to fold a small percentage of the Sil-Graves Silver directly into the Damascus pattern of your steel. I don’t know all its properties yet, but judging by how it was avoided by that shadow entity earlier, adding it to your blades should give them an inherent resistance to dark magic and soul-based attacks!"
