166, 2/2

Five hours of sleep were more than enough.

Soon, Erick and Poi were back out on the town. After a pass by the bank to get some numbers, the two of them went to the Smithy. Erick worked a bit with the people in the Smithy’s head office to put down some payments to the people who had taught him about Smithing, and then it was back to learning how to work metal. It seemed none of the head Smiths were willing to devote time to Erick, though, which made sense, since the head Smiths had work that needed to be done. They weren’t really teachers, anyway.

And so, through Idalial this time, the head Adamantium Armorsmith, Erick was able to meet with another Smith able to teach him, named Origotha. Both Mordog and Obrik were not there; they were probably sleeping.

Through Origotha, Erick learned a bit more about everything that a Smith needed to know. The Smithy apparently provided a standard, introductory education to most people who wanted to pay for it, and though Erick’s education was not standard at all, he fit enough of the molds that fitting him into the established structure wasn’t too difficult. Origotha apparently had students most of the time, but today had been her day off, for her own work.

Origotha seemed fine with this, though.

She went on to explain how, according to what she heard from Obrik, Erick was ripping through the normal five year apprenticeship in much less time than expected. The ‘five year’ time limit was more of a suggestion than a reality, though; some people took longer while some only required a year. The actual graduation requirement was more of a ‘can you make a perfect sword/shield/armor’ than anything numerical.

It turned out that Origotha was a rather good teacher, too, but she was about as scared of Erick as most other people.

She had a way of hedging her words with him that she never had with actual apprentices, as evident by the few times they were interrupted by actual apprentices, and her voice turned harder, and more authoritative. Origotha seemed to be incapable of using that tone with Erick, though. She had a really hard time telling him what he was doing wrong until he finally told her to relax and treat him like he was a first year apprentice. At that point, she seemed to open up, and her words came easier.

Still rather stilted, though.

Eventually, when Erick was in the middle of making yet another dagger, Origotha finally spoke up.

With eyes full of concern, and a voice half-full of the same, she said, “You know you’ll never be a Smith without the actual Class, right. You can only guess at the phase changes that you’re causing in the steel, and at the strength you’re moving around inside the metal.” With finality creeping into her words, she said, “You will never know how to forge like a Smith.”

Erick smiled softly, saying, “I’m okay with that, Origotha. I need functional and strong. Not perfect. If I can do 90% of what a Smith can do, then that’s fine by me.”

“… Okay. But your cap might only be 75%. Maybe 90% on a really, really good day.”

Erick laughed. “That’s fine, too.”

Origotha watched him for a lie, and finding none, she said, “Then you can throw that dagger back into the melting pot and start again. You’ve got stress fractures all over the place; it’s ruined.”

“… Eh?”

Erick frowned as he held up the dagger. He had finished the tempering and the annealing and he was almost ready to start sharpening it, and it looked fine. He stared at the metal with his mana sense, and saw nothing amiss. The blade truly did look fine.

He handed the dagger to her, asking, “Where are the fractures?”

Origotha took out a piece of chalk and drew on the unworked blade. “Here in the hilt, there’s a tiny one on the back of the blade, and this one by the tip will ruin the point, all the way down to here.” She handed the knife back to him. “Take it and slam it into that stone tester, and watch it break right where I lined.”

Erick was briefly skeptical, but then he got over that emotion because Origotha knew a lot more about metal than he did. So, he took the unfinished knife in his hand and slammed it into the stone tester.

The metal snapped at the point. The hilt broke in half in his palm, causing his [Personal Ward] to flicker white at the damage. The tiny break in the middle turned into something much larger and proved to be the true breaking point of the dagger, ruining the knife as the metal tool broke nearly in half.

With a frown, Erick gathered the broken bits with a flick of light, to join the piece still held in his right hand. He looked down at them, and at the chalk markings that perfectly lined the breaks.

He asked Origotha, “Is your Metal Sense more of a future sense?”

“Uhh…” Origotha was caught off-guard by the question. She frowned a bit, confused, saying, “It lets me know the problems the metal has? Not sure what it does beyond that.”

“I’ve heard of what Metal Sense allows, but would you mind telling me what it is you actually see? What Metal Sense does for you? Start at the beginning.”

“Sure.” Origotha said, “No self-respecting Smith goes without Metal Sense, and they’d all tell you the same about what it does. It… Actually. Try crafting another knife, and then we can pick up this topic again. [Mend] is not useful here; start from the beginning.”

Erick saw no reason not to comply, and so he did. Not half an hour later, he had taken another block of forge steel and turned it into another unfinished knife of comparable quality to the previous one. It had no edge, and it still needed to be ground and polished using all the other tools in Origotha’s arsenal, but it was unmistakably a knife. He had gotten a bit faster at the creation of it, too.

“This is a rather decent knife. Only one stress line in this one; here.” Origotha took the blade in hand and marked a chalk line across a three centimeter stretch of the blade, near the center of what would eventually become the blade’s edge. “You might be able to grind that problem away during the edging and polishing process. But the problem would still be there. If you struck the knife in that spot with as much Strength as some people have, then the whole thing could crack right there, for sure. This is good enough for a kitchen knife, though.”

“So what do you see with Metal Sense?”

Origotha nodded a little, but she didn’t speak right away. “I’ve been thinking how to tell you that, so you’ll have to forgive me but I’m not good with lightwards. But I guess I have to make a lightward.” Origotha held up a hand, and paused. “Yeah. This isn’t going to be pretty.” And then she cast.

An exact lightward copy of the knife sprung into being, about five times larger than the actual thing.

Erick instantly said, “That’s a great lightward!”

Origotha had a small smile. “Thanks, but if I’m not coddling you, then I expect you to not coddle me; that lightward is shit.”

They obviously had different teaching methods.

“I can see what you’re trying to tell me, and that’s what’s important.” Erick looked over the lightward, comparing it to the actual knife, and said, “So. I can already tell you that I can not mana sense the metal inside the knife like you Metal Sense. What you see is… rather different.”

The lightward image was chock full of tiny, irregular honeycomb-bubble-like grains, with each of those grains jumbled up, but with a flow to them that matched the forge lines that Erick had created in the forging of the dagger. The wardlight showed more than a microscopic picture of the material, though. Unseen flows of some sort of unknown power circled through the weapon, moving like water, or air, but frozen in time. The only place where Erick saw a disruption to this flow was exactly where Origotha had marked with the chalk.

In that fractured point, some of the grain structure was… aligned, for lack of a better word. A lot of the grains were very random, but for some reason, the grains in that area were about half lined up in a weird, broken sort of way. It was sort of like if Erick had thrown down a bunch of bricks on the ground, but in a random way some of those bricks decided to line up next to each other, creating a fault that was only half there. If any stress was applied, that fault would surely widen, sending cracks through the whole piece, or at least chipping the steel right there.

Erick went silent in contemplation, his gaze switching between the lightward and the actual dagger, looking for the truth of Origotha’s markings.

He found nothing of what Origotha had found.

Erick asked, “Explain?”

Origotha explained, “So you’ve got a lot of parts right. The grains are well made and not too irregular, and they flow in the directions they’re generally supposed to flow. The weapon won’t break under normal stresses, but anyone with a Strength over 20 will easily break the weapon if they hit it in this disrupted spot, here.” She offered, “Try to [Metalshape] a dagger and I’ll show you the difference?”

“Very well.” Erick grabbed his broken, failed dagger, and Shaped it into a proper dagger. While the result was a perfectly pretty weapon, he knew it was only good as a utensil, and nothing more. He handed the ‘weapon’ to Origotha.

Origotha took the weapon, and concentrated upon it for a long moment.

Then she cast another lightward into the air, saying, “There are too many problems for me to show you all of them, but I got the largest ones.”

“I… see that.”

And Erick did. For the first time, he actually saw the problem of [Metalshape].

The Shaped dagger was a mess of scrambled grain sizes, some large, some small, many looking like amoebas stretched all over the place, while some that were perfectly spherical. Those tiny spherical dots —almost ball bearings, actually— of metal were terrible for the ‘flow’ of the dagger; they acted like boulders in a stream, or mountains in a jet stream, sending the flow wildly off course, and even dragging bits of the honeycomb along for the ride. Some of the grains were jagged and fractured, too, which was equally as bad as the ball bearings, but bad in a different way.

This was all well and good. But. Erick saw none of that with his own mana sense. Well. Almost none of that.

Erick said, “I can only see one of the tiny spheres. But you’ve got several up there in the lightward.”

“Ah. There are hundreds in that dagger. My lightward is off.” Origotha said, “But, to explain: [Metalshape] introduces those spheres into the metal, but they’re not hard to get rid of with proper forging. Heat and a hammer will get rid of most of them, though that’s a pretty poor way to make a weapon. Don’t want to ever start with [Metalshape]; you wanna keep that spell far away from your tools.”

Erick said, “Maybe I’ll look into the [Future Sight] angle, but from what I am seeing, your Metal Sense does not appear to be a [Future Sight], or at least not fully—” Erick glanced toward the door, adding, “But I’ll have to do that later, it seems.”

Origotha looked to the open door, her face full of confusion—

Grosgrena walked through the door and locked eyes upon Erick and Origotha.

“Hello, Grosgrena.” Erick said, “Something the matter?”

“Yes!” Grosgrena said, “We’re not taking your money! You’re taking our lessons and you’ll take them for free, and you’ll appreciate it, and that’s that. Appreciation. If any of my Smiths accept money from you, then they’re no Smiths of mine!”

Origotha reeled back, her eyes going wide.

Erick stood stunned for a brief moment, then he said, “Okay? Uh. Sure?”

Behind him, Origotha froze, and then she let out a tiny, disappointed sigh.

Grosgrena nodded. She had solved a problem, and that was that. She added, “Aside from all that nonsense: Barir is asking after you. Wants to know if you have time to kill some monsters. They’re ready for you, if you do.”

“I can do that.” Erick set down his borrowed tools, telling Origotha, “Thank you for all your instruction, but duty calls.”

Origotha bowed, saying, “Anytime, Archmage. Thank you for gracing my forge with your presence.”

Erick whispered to her, “I’ll find a way to get that money to you, anyway.”

Grosgrena narrowed her eyes—

Origotha briefly lit up like the happiest woman in the world, but then she crushed that wayward emotion down, and said, “No thank you. Old Smith Grosgrena is right. I cannot accept your gold. It would be dishonorable. It would taint the good works you have done for us already.”

“Ah…” Erick asked, “If you’re sure?”

“I am.” Origotha nodded. “Thank you for the thought; it is enough.”

Grosgrena smirked a tiny bit at that, but she said nothing.

As Origotha returned to her regular work and Grosgrena saw that everything would go as she wanted it to go, Erick left the forge and walked with the Old Smith down the way, back toward the gate. They spoke of small things, and of how a Smith could see the faults in metal, while a normal mana sense could not. Was Metal Sense based on [Future Sight]? Or some other variation of that magic?

Grosgrena said, “A Smith’s Metal Sense is possibly [Future Sight] related, but I don’t know about that; that’s esoteric magic. Not sure who would know…” She glanced off to the left, then turned back to Erick, asking, “You ever heard of the Orrery of Rozeta?”

Erick blinked, then he said, “Yes. I have.”

Grosgrena eyed Erick’s weird look for a moment, then continued, “I heard that people make pilgrimages there all the time, looking for answers. Sometimes people even find what they’re looking for, but mostly they find answers from other pilgrims. The priests of Rozeta don’t give up any answers to anything.” She shrugged. “But I’ve never been. Have you?”

“Not yet.”

“Now I ain’t know much about Metal Sense aside from what it shows me as compared to a normal mana sense.” Grosgrena asked, “I can ask around for specifics, if you want? Someone around here has to know something. Lotta that esoteric shit is buried in books in libraries, too. Might take me a while to get you an answer.”

Erick smiled. “I would take that offer. Thank you.”

“Nothing to it.”

– – – –

The Bastion Down Below looked as though someone had taken a series of double-ended black castle towers of different sizes, bunched them all together, wrapped them in curtain walls, and then plunged straight through the lowest platform of Enduring Forge. A third of the structure was exposed on both the top and the bottom of the platform, while the central third was fully encased in the platform itself. The interior of the lowest platform was riddled with passageways and checkpoints and a whole lot of oversight, in the form of hundreds of people casting varied and odd detection spells over all the ore and people who passed through this place. The infrastructure in the platform probably accounted for another four or five Bastion-sized areas of usable space.

It was a sight to see, for sure, and Erick saw a lot of it as he stood upon a Teleport Square a hundred meters from the main entrance to the upper Bastion. Ophiel flitted about, with one on his shoulder and nine scattered around, both on this side and the other side of the platform, investigating as surreptitiously as they could. The people on watch —and there were a lot of those types— didn’t seem to mind. Some waved. Ophiel even waved back.

Erick stepped off of the Teleport Square with Poi at his side.

Not too far ahead stood a checkpoint for entrance into the Bastion, with a few people already in line.

Erick did not need to wait for the line, though, for Jalrock, their guide from the other day, stood near the checkpoint wearing what appeared to be grey army fatigues. He waved, and came right on over.

“Archmage! Welcome to the Bastion Down Below.”

Erick smirked. “I didn’t expect to see you down here?”

“Oh? Well. I get around.” Jalrock shrugged, saying, “Everyone is required to be a part of the army if they want to get anywhere in Enduring Forge, and I’m no different.” He gestured back to the massive black structure, asking, “General Barir Adama awaits, along with a few Team Leaders and Scouts. Allow me to escort you?”

“Sure.”

Erick and Poi skipped the checkpoint line, but they did pass through more than a few detection spells on their way to the half-meter thick main door of the Bastion. A few of those detection spells even went off, including one large blue flash that sent streamers of blue light in every direction, but Jalrock waved off the lightshow and the nearby guards made no fuss. More than a few of the nearby guards even smiled at the blue light, as though they had seen exactly what they thought they would see, but it was still nice to get confirmation.

Jalrock explained, “That blue one is for major artifacts or any other items that pass through here containing a large amount of mana. The smaller red and green ones are for smaller, still notable items, which is expected of an archmage and entourage.”

Erick and Poi followed right along, and they entered the main hallway of the Bastion. Beyond that door they took a left, down a hallway with a blue line of paint down the center. Erick checked out some nearby signs, and saw that the blue line was for army personnel only. Green was for miners. Red was for guests. Every hallway also had a white line with arrows in it, pointing the way toward the nearest exit. This main entrance was pretty solidly blue, with only a single red line that went off in a direction opposite of Erick’s apparent destination.

This place had a rather expansive runic web, too, but it was different from the one on the middle platform, or city hall’s platform. Erick saw anti-[Teleport] runework on this one.

And there were a lot of people here. They weren’t ten meters in the front door and they had already passed a good dozen people already. Some of those people even bowed to Erick.

They went up a winding staircase and down another small hallway, passing another four checkpoints as they went, which Jalrock explained were mostly detectors for biological threats, and which didn’t go off. Eventually they reached what might have been a main command station, or at least one of the well-used ones; a place like this probably had a dozen command stations.

The room was large and multi-leveled, with the center of the room slightly lower than the rest of the room. There was a ring-like table in that center space, with a very intricate lightward hovering in the air in the center of that ring. It appeared to be a map of the surrounding three hundred kilometers. To the sides of the room were workstations, filled with people with [Viewing Screen]s attached to the runic web. Overseers oversaw operations, each of them with ten telepathic tendrils coming off of their heads, as they coordinated whatever was happening further down below the Down Below, in the lands beyond the cavern which held Enduring Forge.

General Barir and several other important-looking people stood in the center of the room, near the lightward, some inside the ring-table near the lightward, others outside and sitting; all of them waiting for Erick’s arrival.

At Erick’s entrance, the people in the room turned to him, some faster than others. And then they stood, and bowed. Three seconds passed, and then most everyone returned to work.

Erick stepped forward—

As General Barir stepped closer to meet him, saying, “Welcome to Greater Command.”

“Thanks for having me.” Erick asked, “So how do you want this spellwork to go out?”

Barir nodded quickly, then turned back to the giant map, saying, “This is a map of the Underworld for 350 kilometers in every direction. My people here—” He gestured to his people, saying, “Will be coming behind your cleanup with various seeds of various anti-monster plants and fungi, as well as eggs and pregnant beasts from a few monster species that are easily controlled and deterred by those anti-monster plants. It’s mostly different types of rats for the terrestrial biomes, and some crab species for the aquatic biomes. It’s a system we’ve worked out well with our Beastmasters, but it’s a system that breaks down when you’re not looking at it, and reestablishing the broken system is easier said than done.” He turned to Erick fully, saying, “So what we want out of you, is to flood the land with your [Withering]s or whatever spells you want to use, and we’ll take care of the rest.” He added, “[Withering]s should be enough, though.”

Erick looked over the map. He counted a hundred and thirteen tunnel systems stretching out from the cavern of Enduring Forge. Those tunnels wound and joined and split as they were wont. Most formed cramped tunnels, maybe only four meters wide but a few hundred meters long, and winding. Some wound down, or up, into massive caverns multiple dozens of kilometers across. And the problem got even more complex after that. Multiple paths opened up everywhere. Erick imagined being down there, in the deeper parts. He imagined it would be easy to get lost, especially when gravity started to pull in odd directions, like the books all said it did.

But this close to the surface, getting lost was not possible.

Ophiel would do fine out there.

Erick said, “Beastmaster monsters would still be subject to [Withering]. They’re not out there right now, right?”

“As soon as you agree to this action, and as soon as we understand a timetable of what you’re able to do, then the Beastmasters will get recalled.” Barir said, “All of them already know the dangers your sort of spell represents to their charges and we’re ready to pull out as soon as you say you will begin.”

Erick nodded. “Next question: Are there shadelings out there? I would prefer not to kill people unless I have to.”

“There are not.” The question didn’t even faze Barir. “But even if there are, I understand your spell kills by drawing water out of the body. A threatened shadeling would retreat to the shadows, providing you with no egress to harm them.”

“That’s a good point,” Erick said, “But sometimes shadelings aren’t under their own control. If I stop the killing early, it will probably be because I encountered one in my Kill Notifications and I would need to investigate.”

Erick had no reason to suspect that there was something sketchy going on here, but he wanted to be upfront about what would happen if the worst should happen. At the very least, Erick would stop [Withering], and he didn’t want Barir to be upset when he called the whole project off for a while. Barir seemed to understand this.

“Acceptable.” Barir turned to his people, and began, “Let me introduce you to some of the Farmers and Beastmasters who will be following your [Withering], or whatever other spells you might be using. This is Madriag, Beastmaster, and Sarigal, Farmer, and…”

Introductions went out.

And then an odd thing happened.

Erick found himself delighted at the informality of it all. Barir treated these people not as his soldiers, but like his family. He spoke of Beastmasters raising special lineages of rats that could trace their heritage back to the founding of Enduring Forge, and of the mushrooms that his people had cultivated to fight back the Shadows, no matter how deep they got.

It reminded Erick a lot of Spur, actually.

As Erick asked questions about protocol and planting, and he got answers, Erick was delighted again at how well these people knew their land. They knew all of the monsters and resistance that Erick should expect to run up against, as they pointed out problematic points here and there in the lands beyond Enduring Forge. They had been protecting this land for a very long time, and everyone here was a pro, while every new soldier was taken under the wings of the old soldiers until they, too, were strong enough to lead their own forays out into the Underworld. After today, after Erick took back the nearby Underworld for Enduring Forge, and after Enduring Forge installed flora and fauna which would ensure the land remained under their power, Enduring Forge’s soldiers would have a much easier time of it all. And that was good.

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Not half an hour after arriving at the Bastion Down Below, Ophiels launched from dark towers, flying into the cavern of Enduring Forge. The air around them began to glow a ghostly white. They might have resembled moons, brought down to the Underworld, each trailing an individualized tsunami of thick air that poured downward, into the tunnels and the darkness beyond.

The Kill Notifications started rolling in immediately.

– – – –

Ten hours later, with most of that time spent talking to the people around him and with a few breaks here and there, the cleanup was over. There had been no tricks from Enduring Forge. There had been no unexpected kills; no shadelings, no cannibals living outside the city walls, no overly-deadly monsters. The ‘reset’, which is what some of the guys on the ground had taken to calling the take-back of the lands around Enduring Forge, went about four times faster than the army of Enduring Forge had expected it to go, and mostly because Erick was extremely proactive in putting Ophiel in danger over risking the lives of the men and women on the ground.

Erick did not clean out every single monster infestation. He did not kill every single threat. Such a project would have taken months, if not years, due to the fact that if you killed a monster in one location, the rest of the monsters of the Underworld just moved into that newly opened real estate. No; Erick simply killed 75% of the monsters living around Enduring Forge, and only the most obvious ones at that.

Which was more than good enough according to Barir and everyone else in the army.

There had been no surprises that Erick and Ophiel could not handle, for though there were some giant leeches and hidden spider colonies and ravenous oozes here and there, which sent everyone else running for cover, Erick simply solved those problems with sweeps of starlight, or mandalas of lightning. One thing Erick did not expect, though, was that he never encountered a single animal larger than his thumb.

“So animals have a tough time down here, don’t they,” Erick said, when he and Barir and only a few other people were left in the command room.

Those other people were mostly at the monitoring stations, but they weren’t seeing anything unexpected on the monitors. Just a bunch of now-empty tunnels, some inquisitive rats exploring their new, freshly [Grow]n Underworld fungi forests and otherwise, and many, many crab eggs hatching in the cleaned-out Underworld lakes, next to gently growing Underworld underwater grasses. There were people in all of those Screens, but the Screen watchers weren’t monitoring the people themselves; they were looking for threats to the people. All of the team leaders and other high ranking people were out there right now, solidifying the Reset, alongside the rank and file.

Barir said, “There are lizards and fish and a few other things of that size out there that will evolve into monsters and become a problem for our rats and crabs, but our Beastmasters will be handling them as they become problems. It’s a never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth down here, but we can keep it in order with enough well-applied pressures.” He said, “Taking back the Underworld is the hardest part, but keeping it? This we can do very well.”

“I didn’t see any mines out there, though. Where do you guys mine?”

Barir smiled. “So you didn’t notice the pathways?”

Barir had gotten comfortable enough with Erick to lose a lot of his stiffness, but he still played most of his cards close to his chest. He had revealed a bit, though.

Erick guessed, “The mines are far away, and [Teleport] links them with Enduring Forge? And the miners bring their hauls with them? Or. No. [Teleport] doesn’t work that well if you go down even a hundred kilometers deeper— When does [Teleport] stop functioning altogether?”

“Around here, [Teleport]’s distance capability drops down to the single-kilometer range at 535 kilometers deep, but even at this hundred kilometer depth, you can only get a hundred kilometers on a horizontal [Teleport].” Barir said, “Other places are different.”