Chapter 15: Forging a New Weapon.
....
Running into Ryuu Lion had been a minor footnote. All Kihara knew about her was the surface-level information — waitress at the Hostess of Fertility by appearance, Level 4 adventurer underneath it. He filed it away and moved on.
He took the mine elevator from the fifteenth floor back to the surface. The sun was sitting directly overhead when he emerged, the midday light hitting the white stone of Orario with full force. Half a day, there and back — the elevator had compressed what should have been an exhausting multi-hour descent into something trivially short.
Under persistent pressure from Shinobu, he headed straight for the Hephaestos Familia.
The Orichalcum needed a smith who was actually equal to the material. Handing something capable of forging a final-tier Saint Cloth to a random blacksmith would be the dungeon equivalent of using a legendary weapon as a doorstop. If Hephaestos wasn't willing to take the commission personally, the project would simply have to wait.
The connection through Hestia made the introduction easy — no lengthy application process, no waiting. He was shown in without difficulty.
The forge room was the temperature of a controlled fire, the air carrying the dry heat of constantly burning coals. Hephaestos sat in a chair and looked him over with her single red eye, visibly processing the fact that Hestia had apparently accepted clothing from a man and then shown up to flaunt it.
"If you're looking for Hestia, she and the small-folk girl left about ten minutes ago."
"I'm not. I'd like to commission a weapon from you."
Hephaestos shook her head, a short, unhurried sound of amusement. "I rarely forge equipment personally. And you're still Level 1 — even a powerful weapon won't perform to its potential in your hands at this stage."
Kihara reached into his cloak — into the dimensional storage behind it — and placed the ingot on her desk.
It looked different from when it had gone into Shinobu's mouth. The metal was the same impossible density, the same faint stellar luminescence — but now crimson veins ran through it in patterns that had no business existing in any conventional ore.
"That's Orichalcum— no. No, it isn't."
Hephaestos was on her feet before the sentence finished. She stared at the ingot, then at Kihara, then back at the ingot. "The properties are there but the structure is completely different. Where did you get this?"
"That's a personal matter. What I can tell you, Goddess Hephaestos, is that I don't think there's anyone else in Orario who could do this material justice."
The flattery landed where it was aimed. Hephaestos was a forge goddess, and forge goddesses had professional pride — a material with Orichalcum's fundamental properties but an entirely novel structure was exactly the kind of challenge that made declining feel like a waste.
"I'll take the commission. Given what this material is, I'll give you a fifty percent discount — fifty million falis. Any specific requirements?"
Kihara produced two things from his pocket: a coin pouch containing the full amount, and a design sketch that Shinobu had prepared well in advance of this conversation, rendered in precise and confident lines.
Hephaestos took the sketch and studied it.
"A two-metre odachi?"
Her brow furrowed slightly. "At your current level, operating on the floors you're operating on — you'd have no room to swing this properly."
"That won't be a concern for long."
She looked at him for a moment, then set the sketch down with something that might have been acceptance. "Fair point.
Someone who could beat a Level 3 before they even had a Falna — floor numbers are just numbers to you. Come back in a week."
Kihara gave a slight bow. "Thank you for taking this on."
"If you come across more material like this in the future, the fifty percent rate stands."
"Understood."
He walked home in the afternoon light, turning the day over in his mind.
The ingot Shinobu had returned to him — after whatever internal process she'd subjected it to — had come back transformed. It was now listed in his storage as Sin-Cursed Orichalcum, and she had explained, with complete confidence, that this was the only correct method of preparing material for a weapon that was genuinely and exclusively hers.
He had no objections. Shinobu's weapon was effectively his weapon, and it would slot neatly into the Phantom Blade skill's framework — the more weapons of genuine distinction the skill absorbed, the more powerful the techniques it could unlock.
He'd briefly entertained the idea of testing whether kitchen knives qualified. The prospect of unlocking something called Infinite Cleaver Style had a certain appeal. The skill's apparent requirement for weapons with meaningful special properties suggested this was probably wishful thinking.
He opened the front door and Lili crashed into him approximately one second later.
"Lord Kihara, where did you go?!"
"Quick trip to the dungeon. Went down to seventeen, but someone had already killed the Goliath — the respawn timer's running, so I'll need to wait two weeks."
"What."
The colour left Lili's face with remarkable speed. Her hands were already moving, pushing aside his cloak, checking for injuries with focused urgency. Floor thirteen was known across the adventuring community as the First Deadline — the point where the dungeon stopped being a place that tested your skill and started being a place that killed you if you weren't paying attention. The monsters below that threshold were smarter, used ranged attacks with something resembling magical properties, and had produced casualty rates that prompted the Guild to formally recommend Level 2 party composition from that floor onward.
A Level 1 adventurer going down to seventeen alone wasn't bravery. It was a category error.
Hestia came to the entryway at the sound of voices, hands clasped in front of her, smiling — then registered what Lili was doing, and the smile became something more complicated.
"Lili-kun. Kihara-kun. What exactly is..."
"Lady Hestia, come help Lili — he went to the seventeenth floor alone, I'm checking for wounds—"
"The seventeenth floor—?!"
The shriek was loud enough to reach the neighbours. Hestia launched herself forward with the force of a small but extremely motivated battering ram and took both of them down.
Three hours later, the lecture concluded.
The terms agreed upon: no dungeon exploration for one week. After that, no solo expeditions — Lili would accompany him every time, without exception.
"Lili-kun, since I can't enter the dungeon myself, keeping watch over Kihara-kun falls to you."
"Leave it to me, Lady Hestia. Lili will not fail."
"I came back completely unharmed. What exactly are you both so upset about?"
"You don't get to speak right now!!" — in unison, without hesitation.
Hestia needed most of the remaining afternoon to bring her emotions back to something manageable. When she finally unpacked the source of the anger, it wasn't the seventeenth floor itself that had gotten to her. It was the absence of a word beforehand — the fact that he'd walked into genuine danger without telling her, as though the possibility of not coming back wasn't something she deserved to know about in advance.
She didn't say that part out loud.
By evening she'd told herself it was fine. By the time she was in bed, she'd convinced herself that her reaction had probably been excessive, that the expression on her face during the lecture had been unbecoming, that he might have come away from the afternoon with a worse impression of her than she wanted.
The more she turned it over, the less she could let it go.
Eventually she sat up, made a decision, and got out of bed. She was wearing the white backless one-piece she slept in. She knocked on his door anyway.
"Kihara. Are you awake? There's something I want to say."
....
Thank you for reading.