Devourer Of Destiny - Chapter 148
Finished with his work well before the expected time, Ebon Dirge laid out the thin-bladed sword on the worktable and then stood there leaning against its edge while he watched his opponent, still in the early stages of his crafting.
Master Harford was a consummate forgesmith of the school’s most orthodox path, and his preparations and processes were in keeping with this status. He meticulously monitored the temperatures of each of his three furnaces, ensuring that the materials were heating to just the right amount so he could work them. Each gesture and movement was elegant, practiced, as he put on a show for an audience he couldn’t spare a glance for, so great was the mental effort he was invested in.
That, of course, also meant that he had absolutely no idea nor care for what Dirge had been up to so far, let alone an awareness that while his work was just beginning, his opponent had already finished. The audience was likewise mostly engrossed in the process, although a few had been paying attention to the upstart on the other side of the stage and had various degrees of thoughtful expression.
Eloise, on the other hand, was putting away a wooden slip. Despite her status as a Foundation Building expert with an unlocked spiritual sense, her recent experiences with failure had left her with a habit of recording demonstrations for later review. That habit may become a problem later depending on what the young woman recorded, but for now Dirge wouldn’t bother snapping her out of it; time and renewed confidence in her capabilities would do the best job of that.
There was one other notable individual who had noticed what had already happened: the gray-bearded man, who maintained a stoic expression as he monitored the entire proceeding from his center seat at the adjudication. Dirge gave the man a quick glance and got a momentary slight twitch of a mouth corner and a wink before the fellow’s stone-like pose resumed.
If Dirge’s guess was right and the plump woman was the antagonistic female from the Review Board, then the gray-bearded man was likely the same fellow who had been chairing that meeting and had seemed friendly if not partial to him. Trying to pin it down with just a voice was difficult, even with his memory, as the means of transmission were hardly perfect and any number of “adjustments” may have been involved in the system to try and maintain some level of anonymity.
Dirge was far more curious as to why the man was so helpful. It was easy enough to imagine myriad possible reasons for the woman to be hostile — protecting seniority, connections inside the school, sheer vindictive wrath inflicted on a younger woman — but it was far harder to figure out apparent altruism. Was this a side episode in some power struggle? A sense of duty to the younger generation? At the very least he was sure it wasn’t out of licentiousness, as those who made decisions for that kind of reason weren’t very capable in masking that motive.
As Dirge tried to unravel the mystery of the higher level situation, Master Harford continued his work. There were occasional exclamations and bits of commentary floating around the more knowledgeable audience members as they called out the fanciful names to techniques he was using in processing the bits of heated metal — Sixteenfold Shaping Strikes, Flameforging Metalsculpture, and the like — and as time plodded on the pieces of the weapon were taking shape.
In the largest furnace, he had hammered and sculpted two lengths of metal that would join lengthwise to make the blade. Once those had been completed to his satisfaction, Harford took out a black metal stylus-like tool and started etching the interior surface of one half, methodically carving out the structure of an internal diagram for essence distribution in the blade.
Part of Dirge’s research for this contest came in having Eloise provide him with the details of the orthodox school of forgesmithing at the Academy. He could only shake his head at the painstaking effort this method took, and how it had only developed in that space between mundane mortal smithing and the true artificing of experts. Mortals had no need to worry about things like spellwork and do they could heat and hammer metal; higher level experts had better control and could more directly infuse and manipulate power and substance, and so they had no need for handling the intricacies of the internals out in the open like this.
Once Harford was satisfied with the process on the internal surface of one half of the blade, he then had to duplicate it with a mirror image on the other half; precision in this step was seen as a significant part of mastery in forgesmithing. Minute errors were more or less inevitable at this stage of the construction, but for a master of this level there might only be a couple dozen of them in all, leading to a highly rated weapon.
After the etching was completed — accompanied with a generous helping of commentary from the forgesmiths in the crowd who appreciated the precision work of a true master — Harford then had to turn to the heated crucibles on the furnace that had processed the crystals he had supplied into a liquid. Carefully, slowly, he poured the liquid crystal to fill the etched diagram on one blade half.
This was a taxing process: Harford had to keep the sword metal heated to an appropriate heat for its future fusion while also handling the length and putting precisely the right amount of crystal into carved grooves. Too little and it would be flawed; too much and it would overflow and ruin the fusion of the blade halves. He was then obliged to repeat the process on the other blade half.
Dirge could only shake his head at the entire rigmarole. Since these experts weren’t expected to practice precise control, they had to involve all of these complicated manual processes in the forging; it was assumed that for a true master on the rise that they would eventually reach Nascent Birth and open up the realm of true artificing for which all of this work was only a foundation.
This was where Dirge’s expertise and practice outstripped what these so-called masters could teach. Directly infusing properties and materials together like a Nascent Birth expert could was mostly out of his capability at the moment, but he could still manage the entire process in the reverse direction and in a fraction of the time: form the diagram first and cast the weapon’s form around it, precisely controlling both structure and temperature.
Harford — and those trained in the same way as him — used a pure crystal lattice for the spellwork; if they tried to replicate the casting method, even with the same level of control, either blade or diagram would crack in the cooling process. Dirge, on the other hand, had a far greater library of knowledge at his fingertips and could match the blade metal and crystal-metal mixture in their rates of expansion and contraction under heat.
It was a bit of esoterica that didn’t matter much to higher realm experts as they had their means to fudge such things, but one particularly dusty-brained old fellow had spent millennia cataloging materials and that listing had ended up in one of Dirge’s acquisitions. The memorization process of all of his collected techniques and lore was absolute, and so that list was now available to him and, for once, useful for something.
Following the filling of the diagrams came the last difficult hurdle for Master Harford: the fusion of the two blade halves. In great contrast with the slow and methodical technique so far, the joining was swift and deft and met with a collective cathartic sigh from those watching raptly once it was complete. The joined blade was quickly hammered and quenched, as too much time in this step could result in the same disparity in sizes that could cause a fracture of the internal diagram if it was left too long.
From there, Harford finished the blade and joined it with a hilt forged from the metal in the middle-sized furnace. The blade then took sharpening, polishing, and a few etched designs to finish off a signature work. After over six hours of forging, the sword was complete.
It was at this point that those who hadn’t noticed before saw that Dirge was just leaning against his worktable, watching the process. Several eyes blinked in surprise; they hadn’t noticed a thing about Master Harford’s opponent even starting her work, not a flare of the furnace nor the ringing of a hammer.
“Miss Sable,” the pudgy woman remarked with her nasal voice, “did you not understand that this was to be done in tandem and not sequence?”
Dirge hid his smirk and only gave a look to the gray-bearded man, who nodded understandingly. “Clodiana,” the man chided his fellow judge as he stood, “Mistress Sable finished her work a good while ago. Were you not paying attention to both contenders? Ah, it doesn’t matter, we’re only here for adjudicating the finished product, so it’s fine if you missed it.” The man then stepped over to the podium. “The teachers have done their work, and now it is time for the swords to be presented. Master Harford, please do go first.”
Master Harford had a small frown at the exchange between the judges that he quickly masked as his name was called. Hefting his blade, he approached the man at the podium with it. “This is it, sir. A bastard blade, hand-and-a-half, engraved with my very own signature spellwork. In the hands of a fire-attributed expert, it can unleash flame slashes that can be launched at a distance.” The blade erupted in flame for a moment in a demonstration of this effect and then extinguished. He then grabbed the blade and offered the hilt to the man at the podium.
The plump woman, Clodiana, was smiling proudly as if she had made the weapon herself, while the others were nodding at the recital. The gray-bearded man took the sword by the hilt and gave it a few swings in the air. “A classic make,” he remarked. “It is light enough to be comfortably held with a hand while long enough to get some extra mileage should one use two. The diagram work is high-grade and functional. Let’s see how well it works as a weapon on its own merit.”
With the flick of the man’s wrist, three orbs materialized in mid-air near him, two looking like a pale jelly-like substance while the last was a black metallic sphere. “First, there is stabbing.” Smoothly, the man stabbed the first pale sphere and then drew the sword back out, looking over the blade afterward with a nod. “Second, there is slashing.” The man hefted the sword overhead and brought it down through the second orb, splitting it in half easily. “And lastly, we must look at its resilience.” The man repeated the same action on the dark orb, and the blade rebounded with a clang.
The gray-bearded man held the sword aloft, looking up at its edge while also giving the other four judges a good view of the state of the blade. The collision with the metal orb had dulled the edge a bit, but the structure of the blade was still very much whole. A quick flaring of flame showed that the internal diagram was still functional.
“Congratulations, Master Harford,” the gray-bearded man announced. “It pierces, cuts, and can weather an impact while maintaining its properties.” The man gripped the sword by the blade and offered its hilt to the forgesmith, who accepted it back. “You may step aside for now.”
The gray-bearded man then turned to Dirge with a smile. “Mistress Sable, you may present your sword.”
Returning the smile, Dirge pushed himself away from the worktable he had been leaning on this entire time and turned and grabbed the sword he had made by its hilt. When he turned around, there were some gasps as well as a couple chuckles.
Held out in front of him, the thin blade was wobbling, drunkenly swaying back and forth under the movement of his hand.
“Miss Sable, this is a serious competition!” Clodiana shouted as she rose from her seat. “If you wanted to play a farce, we could have referred you to one of our extracurri–”
“Silence, Clodiana,” the gray-bearded man interrupted gravely. “Mistress Sable, can you explain this to the panel and our audience?”
Dirge grinned wickedly. “You bet I can.”