CH10

Falk arrived at his shop, silently hoping the boy would sleep in or not show up so he would have an excuse to dismiss him, but no such luck. The brat managed to show up before even he did and was sitting outside the shop, laying against the door.

All he could do was groan a bit, forced to accept what he agreed to. “Alright get up, first things first give the shop a sweep and we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

Ben immediately got to it, cleaning up the shop with enthusiasm while Falk had no choice but to use the few minutes he had to focus on something he had been wracking his brain about all night, just how to train the brat.

Unfortunately for him, Ben was thorough but quick, too quick. The shop looked fine to open and he was standing in front of Falk, looking up at him expectantly.

“Huuuh, alright kid, first I guess you should make me something. We’ll see where we should go from there.” He brought him to a room in the back that looked like a combination of supply closet and work area. Buckets and drawers of materials were piled around, with a desk and tools hung around it, and a small shelf of books nearby.

Ben’s first thought seeing all of it was basically that it looked like fun. It was definitely somewhere he could sink a lot of hours if he was given the chance. He just had one minor problem.

“What am I supposed to make?”

“Whatever you can for now, I just want to watch your process and see where you could improve at first. Help me pull the desk out front unless you’re going to want to use the forge, then grab the supplies you’ll need. To be clear, I’m only letting you grab from my stock today, in the future you’ll have to supply yourself.”

Ben did his best to help move the desk the Yeti worked at into the front of the shop, before going back and looking around.

There were metals and materials of all sorts. He saw the bones and teeth and skins of a variety of creatures, the woods from all kinds of trees and materials that were clearly organic in nature but that he had no clue as to what they could be. There was also an unusual amount of stone, of various types, all organised in a back corner.

He wondered about the room for a minute, taking it all in, making a mental list of what to explore in the future, while he tried to figure out what he was going to make. The options before him seemed limited. He originally considered himself something of an artist, dabbling in a variety of arts, but he didn’t think that would work. He could stitch together furs to make a cloak or jacket but that didn’t feel right either.

It wasn’t until he came across some metal wire that he remembered an unfinished project he would never get the chance to complete, giving him a good idea of what to do.

Taking the supplies and tools he would need to the front workshop he sat down at the desk and got to work as his teacher stood above him, watching as he went.

It only took two minutes for him to stop Ben from his work. “What are you doing?”

“I was going to make chainmail, I thought I would add stealth to it while I went to at least give it a bit more benefit.”

“Yes I can see that, I more meant why are you doing it so wrong?”

Falk seemed genuinely confused which kept Ben from being too annoyed. He came here to learn and that’s what he would do. “What exactly am I doing wrong here?”

“God’s where do I even begin, you’re going to make all that wire unusable if you keep this up, and it doesn’t even seem like you’re crafting.”

“Falk I’m going to need you to give me a bit more than that.”

Realising he hadn’t properly explained himself, Falk took a second to put his thoughts together and started again. “You look like you’re trying to enchant every single individual wire. That can be possible at a higher level but right now you can’t do that for something so small, the enchantment won’t take and you’ll render the material unusable.” He picked up the wire Ben had been using and ground it between his fingers. It seemed to have lost all of its malleability, causing it to break into shards and dust. “What you have to do is slowly add the enchantment to the entire thing as you go, spreading the enchantment across the entire item. Aside from that, do you not know how to use your crafting?”

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He clearly did not with what was being asked, but he had to confirm anyway. “Is it not just a way to have a better idea of how to put stuff together while also making you better at the process?”

“Well you’re not wrong, but it’s also like most other skills, you have to burn up a little Mana to get its full effects. Since you can enchant you should know how to do that, yeah?”

He did, it had taken a fair amount of trial and error at the church, as well as a lot of questions to the priests to figure it out, but when he got it was incredible. “Alright so just use Mana with the skill and try again.”