Author Artemis
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Chapter 12 - Pride
🕑 Added 2025-01-31 18:47:32 +0000 UTCThe next day James woke with the other slaves and headed into the mine. He was stopped by the grey-eyed boy. “You’re not supposed to mine for five days.” he said.
“I need iron to make a forge. They told me to mine it myself.” James replied. The other boy frowned.
“That’s going to confuse everyone.”
“So?”
“That’s going to cause problems.” the boy emphasized.
James paused a moment, unsure what to say.
“How much do you need?” the boy asked.
“Uh, probably ten ingots worth. Fifteen would be better.” James said.
The other boy’s eyes drifted up as he did some mental calculations. Then he looked James in the eye again. “Get what you need today. But you still gotta clear rubble.”
James nodded. “Sure, of course.” They then continued into the mine and James overheard the other boy whispering to all the other slaves. “Smith’s on a special project and mining on his own today. Stay outta his way, got it? Spread the word.”
Nobody bothered James in the mine for the rest of the day.
As he cleared rubble, he looked around the mine. It had one main tunnel leading slightly down straight into the mountain, with smaller branches to either side where the slaves had followed veins of iron until they dried up. The roof of the mine was reinforced by earth magic, but James had never seen it done. He just recognized the different, artificially consistent texture that covered the ceiling and the upper parts of the walls. Here and there, as he had seen on his first day in the mine, there were smaller veins of ores that were not just plain iron.
[Ore Identification: Brown Iron Ore]
[Ore Identification: Red Iron Ore]
[Ore Identification: Blue Iron Ore]
James was able to identify the differing types of iron thanks to his skill, but he wondered how the grey-eyed boy had been able to tell. They looked basically the same in the dim light of the mine, although the veins were clearly much smaller than regular iron veins.
In the end, James wound up stopping in the largest of these small veins of non-standard iron ore.
[Ore Identification: Green Iron Ore]
Remembering the time he tested his elemental affinities, which felt like a lifetime ago, he recalled that green was the color associated with the element of air. But James, having not completed any kind of training as a smith, did not really understand what kind of effect this would have on anything he created with iron he smelted out of this ore. It was truly just dumb luck. In any case, James spent the rest of the day mining out that vein of Green Iron Ore.
Now, many recountings of the Legendary Smith gloss over this part of the story. They will handwave it as the Smith choosing the most optimal ore from what was available in the mine, and that he then forged it into a lightweight, personal anvil which he took with him through the next part of his adventure. But keep in mind: at this point, the Smith was a slave working in a mining camp on the side of a mountain, with the absolute most primitive tools imaginable. Contemporary sources do attest that the Smith used Green Iron Ore for the anvil he built in that slave camp, but the Smith’s writings, which can be found at the University of Lundbruck, include a letter in which he states very clearly that he did not intentionally choose Green Iron Ore with the intention of keeping a lightweight personal anvil on his person. It was simply the largest vein of Colored Iron in the mine on that day.
Editor’s note: the author appears to take umbrage with many young smiths who, in imitation of the Legendary Smith, visit mines and collect their own Green Iron Ore to make a personal portable anvil for themselves. Although the evidence does suggest that this was a coincidence more than a sign of genius on the part of the Smith, many bards throughout the ages have portrayed the event as a sign of his wisdom.
James hefted his pickaxe and swung at the wall of the mine. Pick. Pick. Pick.
[Smith] Class Skill [Mining] acquired.
James paused. He’d never heard of a Smith Class Skill for Mining. He knew Miners could get such a skill, obviously, but he had never known that other Classes could. As he continued mining ore, he noticed that each swing of the pickaxe felt lighter and dislodged more ore than before. Not a huge amount more, but noticeable. He quickly put it out of his mind, though. Perhaps all the other slaves eventually developed mining skills after enough time spent mining.
That evening James smelted fifteen ingots worth of Green Iron Ore. The Green Iron Ore melted at a somewhat lower temperature than the regular iron ore he normally smelted. The next day he started to work on producing an anvil. Unfortunately for James, he had never seen an anvil forged before. Nor did he have a forge with a full set of tools. After some time thinking about it, unsure how to proceed, he decided to dig a mold as best he could with his hands in the dirt directly under where the smelter output the molten iron, in the area where normally he dug impressions that would become ingots. He vaguely approximated the shape of a small anvil as best he could, digging somewhat deeper than normal, but thankfully the sandy dirt extended some ways below the surface. He used a flat stone to firm up the edges and bottom of his new mold, smoothing it out as much as possible.
Once finished with the mold, he re-smelted the Green Iron ingots he had produced the night before. Much less slag formed this time, which he skimmed off as normal, producing a more refined version of the Green Iron he’d produced the previous evening. He poured the molten Green Iron into his mold and hoped for the best.
After a day of cooling, during which the slave overseers were irritated that the smelter area was taken up with James’ cooling anvil, and only mollified when James promised to have the backed up iron ore smelted at the end of the five days, the anvil was cool enough to dig out and continue cooling in the open air. The mold was a partial success, James could see, as he used a leafy branch to brush dirt off the still hot, roughly man’s head sized, chunk of metal. And a chunk of metal it was. It was more like an anvil shaped object than a proper anvil. There was no proper horn. James’ attempts had instead produced a vaguely triangular shaped face to strike against. His attempt to produce level feet, to keep the anvil steady while striking, was also only a partial success. The feet had malformed in the mold, producing more like rounded bumps at the bottom. But then, he lacked a stable, level surface to even place the anvil in the first place. It would prove workable.
Now, faced with this slowly cooling chunk of metal, James realized he had neither tongs nor hammer with which to work heated metal. Fortunately, he still had two full days left. He quickly mined some more Green Iron Ore. In fact, James was once again struck by how easy the mining was. As soon as he entered the mine, intending to find Green Ore, his feet carried him directly to another small vein that he and the other slaves had overlooked. And in mere minutes of swinging his pickaxe, he had mined enough to form a hammer and tongs.
As he finished gathering the ore and was kicking the rubble up against the wall, he spotted the grey eyed boy heading his way. Avoiding eye contact, he hurried out of the mine with his armful of Green Iron Ore, but the grey-eyed boy did not follow him out of the cave. Just glowered at him. James thought that he must have been upset that James had gone back into the mine after the first day. Was the other boy just fastidious? Or was there something else?
James soon put it out of his mind and put his thoughts back to the hammer and tongs. Lacking proper gloves, he’d be relying on his own [Heat Resistance] skill to endure the heat of the metal he would be working. So longer tongs and a hammer with a longer haft would be ideal. He started to carefully dig out a mold for the tongs before realizing that the shadows were lengthening. Hastily, in the dying light, he instead dug out a mold for the head of a hammer, roughly fist sized. He devoted most of his attention to the striking face of the hammer, which needed to be as flat as possible. He finished and quickly smelted his Green Iron Ore, just the one time, but being extra careful to remove as much slag as possible from the molten metal, trying to produce the highest quality Green Iron he could in just one go with his dexterous hands.
[Smith] Class Skill [Smelting] has reached Level 2.
He was momentarily distracted by the intrusive thought before he returned to skimming pieces of slag out of the molten Green Iron. If anything, it felt to him like there was even more slag than he had been able to see a minute ago, before the notification of his skill improving. He continued to work until he could no longer remove any slag without wasting molten iron, then stopped. Good enough. He carefully poured the molten iron into his mold, and that was it. Just a matter of leaving it overnight to cool. Judging by the rate at which his… anvil… thing had cooled, the hammer should be cool enough to dig out after one night, and then he could make his tongs.
Despite his dire circumstances, James felt excited at the thought. His own anvil, his own hammer, and his own tongs. Made by his own hands, even! With iron that he’d mined himself, and smelted himself, in a smelter of his own creation. He had of course assumed that he would start as all Smith’s did, with borrowed or purchased tools, before eventually creating his own tools to work with, but he felt that this was not such a bad start, either. Sure, just looking at his anvil, he could tell that objectively it was bad. Even a non-Smith would be able to tell it was bad, or rather, would have a hard time recognizing it as an anvil even on second or third glance. But it was still the anvil that he had created entirely through his own efforts.
This was the first time that the Legendary Smith felt a sense of pride in his work.
James went to bed, buoyed by this intense sense of satisfaction, and slept better than he had ever since the day he was kidnapped.
The next morning, James awoke before any of the other slaves in the lean to. Any other slave, that is, except the grey-eyed boy, who was squatting down, staring at him.
