Two weeks had passed since I joined the Hephaestus Familia, and I was finally starting to understand, more or less, how to refine magic stones and drop items.
Of course, I had only started to understand it, not fully grasped it, so for now I was still making things out of ordinary steel.
"Garoel, can I put these Minotaur horns where we usually leave them?"
"Ah, the ones that were delivered earlier? Put this batch beside me. I'm going to try making something with them."
The man I was talking to was Garoel, a Level 3 High Smith—the same man who had figured out my experience just by feeling me up a few times before.
When I asked him about his Skill, he said it was roughly an ability that let him determine how aged or proficient something was... It really was the perfect Skill for a blacksmith. Think about it: no two materials are exactly the same, so depending on how old they are or how much they have been hammered, the way you handle them and the time required differ slightly. The people who could nail that were geniuses. But if a Skill lets you know that much, you can forcibly step into the realm of genius.
...Not that I had any room to talk.
"What are you making this time? If it's Minotaur horn, a greatsword or a dagger?"
"Hmm... This time, I'm thinking of turning several of them into thin plates and trying my hand at a shield. It's a hard material, so it'll have some weight to it, but three layers should make a shield a Level 2 can use."
Something I learned after coming here was that even hard drop items—horns, bones, hooves, and so on—could somehow be hammered like ordinary metal if you heated them in a magic-stone furnace at an absurdly high temperature. The problem was that the temperature was around 1,500 to 2,000 degrees... hot enough to melt steel, so no blacksmith without Falna could even attempt it. Well, thanks to my [Soul of Flame] Skill, I'd be fine even if I climbed right into the furnace...
And something else I realized anew was that the workshop had quite a few facilities similar to those from the modern age. The biggest examples would probably be the vise and the magic-stone-powered grinder.
It was a shame there were no electronic precision tools, but this was plenty. I wouldn't have minded even if the smithy had operated exactly like one from the real Middle Ages, but it was still nice to see tools I was somewhat familiar with.
"All right, let's hammer this thing!"
"Yes, boss! I'll use the small one!"
"Then I'll use the big one."
Clang
Clang
Bang
Clang
Clang
Bang
Clang
Clang
Bang
When he struck with the large hammer, I struck with the small one, and when the timing came, we hit together... As we repeated that over and over, a rhythmic pattern emerged. Who was it again? There was supposedly some legend about someone in my previous life discovering a major or minor key from this kind of appropriately proportioned hammering... Ah, focus, focus!
"Oil barrel!"
"Right away!"
Once the iron's red glow had faded somewhat and it reached the point where hammering it any further could instead shatter what we had painstakingly made, it was time for quenching. Normally, you used water or oil, but Garoel mostly quenched in oil. Quenching altered the structure of iron, making it even harder.
Hmm, to explain it a little more technically: when iron is heated, it turns bright red, and iron in that state is called austenitic steel. If it cools naturally in that state—air cooling—it becomes pearlitic through normalizing. But if it is cooled rapidly with water or oil—water quenching or oil quenching—the crystalline structure within the iron changes instead of becoming pearlite, creating hard martensitic steel.
Anyway, quenching was an essential process when making bladed weapons. There was a way to simply let it cool slowly, but that took longer, and quenching produced better quality, so why bother...?
Ssssss—
Whoosh!
Oh, no matter how often I saw this, it never got old.
Putting iron into cold water and watching steam spread out was nice too, but plunging it into oil and seeing flames leap up was cool in its own way. You know what I mean—juggling is cool, but a fire show is even more to my taste. Anyway, it's like that. More or less.
Then we repeated the process over and over. Since we had Falna, even a Level 1 possessed strength comparable to most of the iron-hammering machines from my previous life. In mechanical terms, a single strike had the same effect as a skilled blacksmith striking seventy times. But the materials here had to be made tougher than anything we used in my old life, so it did not save all that much time. Something that would normally take ten days took about seven.
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"That's enough for today! Let's take a break."
"Huff, huff... Good work."
"We're pretty much done shaping it now, so you don't need to help from tomorrow onward."
"Huff... Yes."
"All that's left is to work it with [Blacksmithing], after all."
"[Blacksmithing]... I'm jealous."
"You'll get it someday too! From what I've seen, you've got talent!"
No, what I was jealous of was being able to use it whenever you wanted...
"By the way, have you finished registering as an adventurer and all that?"
"Ah, Tsubaki took care of all that for me on my first day."
"But is it really right for you to call her big sister...? I hear you're fairly old yourself."
"I'm twenty-seven. Tsubaki should be a year older than me, so it's right. And..." "And?"
"Even if she were younger than me, what does it matter? As long as it's fun, that's all that counts." Grin.
Grin...
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"Achoo...!"
"What's wrong, Tsubaki? You're sneezing? Do you have a cold?"
"Hmph... No, it's not that... Is someone talking about me...?"