Chapter 48: Chapter 47 – Progress

A tall young man of about 183 cm of height was standing next to a large anvil. He was wearing a cotton shirt and had a large thick blacksmith’s apron over it. The shirt was quite loose which allowed for more airflow and better ventilation. Still, there was some sweat forming on his brow.

His build wasn’t very bulky but you could see quite a lot of tone on his arms and chest. It looked like the youth’s body didn’t have a chance to build enough muscle to go with his growth spurt.

The youth was standing in a blacksmiths workshop and had a flat piece of steel in his hand. It was already heated up and red after he took it out of his forge. This was obviously the material he was working on, he placed it on the anvil and started delivering hard hammer blows to it.

The piece of steel started to slowly take shape. The blows were delivered consistently over the whole length at high precision. His hand didn’t shake and he never missed the correct spot. From time to time you would see his hands stopping and an ethereal glow filling his eyes. Which after the hammering process continued.

The previously angular piece of metal started getting stretched out. There was a lot of back and forth in this forging process. The piece of metal needed to be reheated multiple times and hammered into the correct blade shape. Soon it was noticeable that the young smith was making a long bladed weapon.

There was nothing more to it, just consistent hammer strikes were enough to get the piece of metal into a sword shape. One end was pointed while the other one was left smaller for the handle and the crossguard. This end was called the tang and he needed to make it thinner at the end to fit it through the pommel.

Before the crossguard and pommel would be made, the rough-looking sword needed a lot of grinding. The whole piece of metal needed to be filed down and sharpened to the utmost perfection before the next process.

There were no power tools in this world but the youth had something similar. It allowed him to make the process of polishing and grinding faster but at a small cost. After that task was finished the hammering of a piece of steel that would be the crossguard started.

The shape that was hammered looked cruciform at a slight bent that would be going outwards from the sword grip. The young blacksmith punched a hole through the middle that would be used to attach the crossguard to the blade. He made sure to first test if it fit before continuing with the hammering so that it would take the desired shape.

After the blade and the crossguard were ready only the pommel remained. It would be placed below the grip and would have a circular shape. After this was done the process of normalizing the steel remained. Forging created stresses and normalizing relieved that stresses.

After completing that process he only needed to attach all the parts and polish everything to perfection.

Without drills in this world, the swords were held in place by a certain technique that was called peening. This was done by hammering the steel part that was poking out through the hollow pommel. Thanks to this the sword hilt wouldn’t slip anymore and everything would be nice and tight.

If he managed to create a drill, he could just attach the round sword pommel by just screwing it into place.

After some time the youth was left with a working product. He looked at it while nodding but this wasn’t over yet. He grabbed another hammer from the side, this one looked different from the rest and it had a strange runic pattern on the face side.

The process of runecrafting had started. The youth hammered away, this time with much less force. The strikes were slow and precise and each time one landed a part of a rune was formed. This process took almost as long as the whole forging did. The youth had a couple of accessories helping him out with managing his mana so it sped things up a bit.

Still, it took him a week to get this sword done. This was already a big improvement considering that he was creating a special kind of rune.

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