Chapter 19: Weaponsmith – Chapter 19: Magic is weird, so we’ll just be using clay instead because its easier

“Magic is a weird thing,” says Hineni, looking at the piece of metal that Rhine is flicking around with his small hand. It’s not a wand just yet, rather, it’s just a metal cylinder. The first thing that he did was to take a bar of copper-iron alloy and to split it into several pieces. One ingot of the alloy, like every standardized ingot, has a weight value of five kilograms. But for this, somewhat easier to work with density, and given the thinness and length of something like a wand, he can make about eight cylinders from one ingot.

 

However, eight cylinders doesn’t exactly add up to eight wands. Given that the ingot is shorter than a wand needs to be, they need two cylinders for one wand and then a lot of it needs to be shaved down to a snubbed end. Plus the handle needs to be grooved inward a little too and smoothed out on the base. A lot of material is going to be lost during this process of refinement and from the two cylinders that had weighed a combined total weight value of one-point-two kilograms, only zero-point-seven will remain.

 

Then the two separate pieces need to be fused together into one longer ’stick’, but this is a highly precise process. If the fusion is done wrong, then the magical energies channeled from a caster’s hands out through the wand will get caught in the middle, where the separation of the two pieces is. It could cause the wand to explode in their hands during spell-casting if this were to happen.

 

“That’s why wands are usually made from one long piece of material,” explains Hineni to Rhine who, despite the torrential dripping of sweat down his body and face, still stands there and nods, listening intently.

 

“So how come we don’t melt it again?” asks Rhine. “And then just take it out as a longer, flatter bar?”

 

Hineni nods. That’s a very good question, actually. By simply melting the ingot to be longer instead of thicker, they could cut out cylinders in the exact length that they needed instead of combining two shorter ones. But there’s a problem with that plan. “It’s a good idea. But I don’t have a mold,” he explains, pointing at the furnace. “We’d need to get a mold with the right shape and then melt it back down into it.”

 

Rhine rubs his lower lip with the back of his thumb. “Can’t you use a crafting spell?”

 

“I could,” says Hineni, looking at the bar.

 

“So?”

 

“I can’t,” shrugs Hineni.

 

“Huh?” Rhine tilts his head, not understanding.

 

Hineni picks up a cylinder and looks at it. “I don’t have the crafting recipe for this kind of ingot-manipulation,” he says. “We’ll have to do it by hand.”

 

“Can’t you ask the owl-god?” asks Rhine. “Can’t she just give it to you?”

 

Hineni wants to say that she can’t do that and that it obviously doesn’t work like that. But then again, Obscura had given him his advanced-class as a weaponsmith, even if he wasn’t exactly ready to become one. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that she could give him a minor crafting recipe like this one too. He really wants to sit down and talk with her about her ‘godliness’ sometime, just so he can get a clearer understanding of it.

 

“She’s not here right now,” is all that Hineni says, looking back at the boy. As the two of them stare at each other for a moment, each of them trying to come up with a new argument for their plans. Hineni finds, in a strangely unusual moment of clarity, that the boy isn’t looking at him oddly, not in the way he expects people to look at him.

 

Sure, he still feels a need to adjust his hat lower to hide his own eyes and he still feels the need to pull on the leather-wrap that he wears in the forge, to hide his face. But he does neither of these things, having decided to leave that fearful person behind in the past. However, Rhine doesn’t seem to care at all, really. He doesn’t seem disgusted or scared or even just like he’s forcing himself to be polite. The boy is just thinking about the problem at hand, entirely indifferent to what he looks like and Hineni appreciates that a lot.

 

Even if he has already decided that they’re just going to use the two long pieces fused together. “Let’s get started,” says the man, turning back to the anvil.

 

“How about clay?” asks Rhine. Hineni turns back to look at the boy. “There’s a lot of clay by the river,” he says excitedly. “I know where some is!” exclaims Rhine. “What if we get some clay and some gunk and stuff and make a mold ourselves?”

You are reading story Weaponsmith : [A crafting litRPG] at novel35.com

 

Hineni looks at the boy for a moment, already ready to shake his head ‘no’ and to just meld the cylinders as is. This idea sounds troublesome. They’d need to go outside. They’d need to go to the river. They’d need to find ‘clay and gunk and stuff’ and make some molds with the right shape and size and then they’d have to test them to see if they’re even heat-safe, let alone safe to be used with molten metal.

 

It’s too much work. Too much effort. He has the two cylinders right here. A single spell will fuse them together before he even finishes this train of thought. It’s just too -

 

Hineni stops, lowering his eyes to the boy, realizing that a familiar man had almost caught up with him. “I almost did it again,” he says.

 

“What?” asks Rhine, not understanding.

 

“Good idea, Rhine,” praises Hineni. “Help me put out the forge. We’re going to the river,” he says, looking up at the high-windows of the forge to see not only if the sun has retreated for the day, but to see if a familiar owl is sitting there with eyes only for him. But she isn’t there, rather, the metal owl statue sits there on its perch, watching him from above and, despite not being as good as the real thing, it brings him a sense of relief to see.

 

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Oddly enough, Hineni had expected there to be frogs at the river. But there aren’t any. There isn’t any croaking or anything of the sort. Instead, he hears a quiet running of water and the chirp of night-haunting crickets, singing their song from low perches atop blades of tall grass, dangling out over the starlit waters of the river.

 

It’s still night-time. The two of them had made their way out to the side of the city, to the outskirts, past the walls, where the river runs towards civilization, out over the grass-lands. The landscape in this direction is rather plain and featureless, simply being a lush, fertile meadow that goes on for days. But that can’t be seen now, beneath the cover of darkness. Only the river seems to be aglow, as if lit up especially for the two of them, as the light of the star-shine above comes down to meet the ebbing waters, as the glow of many fat, orange fireflies floats above the surface as if illuminating the world for them to see what they seek.

 

“I’ve never been here before,” says Hineni.

 

“Nobody ever comes out to the river,” says Rhine, walking along its bank. He jumps up onto a dead log, holding his arms out at his sides as he walks along it. “I come here a lot.”

 

“I guess it’s part of the job, huh?” asks Hineni. “So what’s up with the river-wizard thing anyways?”

 

“What do you mean?” asks Rhine. Hineni shrugs, not really sure what it is that he’s asking either. He looks around. “Are you going to get into trouble for being out here?” he asks the boy, before then wondering if he himself is going to get in trouble for being out here. As someone from the tower quarter, it won’t look good for Hineni if anything happens to Rhine. Any slip from that log, a cut on a branch, a scuff of mud on his robe, which is, to be fair, already pretty dirty, would be blamed on him.

 

People from the tower quarter are rich. Owl-god or not, he’s poor. That’s just what it is.

 

“No,” says Rhine, shaking his head as he pokes a cat-tail frond sticking out of the embankment. “Nobody cares,” he says. “Anyways.” The boy turns around, stepping off of the log, his fists at his side. “The thing that’s up with the river-wizard thing is that -” Hineni rolls his eyes. He’s going to do the thing again. “- I’m RHINE! THE RIVER WIZ-!”

 

“WHO!”

 

“-AAAAAH!” Rhine in his startled panic, falls over, flailing his arms in terror as Obscura pops out from behind the cat-tails in her half-human form and hoots at him.

 

Water splashes everywhere as the boy falls into the frigid river and is carried away by the current. “Help!” yelps Rhine, the river-wizard.

 

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