The Apocalypse Grinder - Chapter 313

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In the next iteration Ronan managed to not break the second bucket when learning how to forge ingots. An unfortunate quirk of how Brand of the Temporal Artificer functioned was that anything inside the Survivalist’s Portable Forge remained in the same condition across iterations. Any tools or equipment he broke would stay broken until he fixed them or found a replacement. Thankfully it had come equipped with a collection of metal buckets for melting metal inside, and Ronan hadn’t shot himself in the foot at the first hurdle. Or rather, melted his foot off.

His first few ingots were not pretty, and neither were they entirely pure, based on the weird streaks that ran through them, but they were successful. He knew that he hadn’t failed because he had received a slew of notifications informing him he had successfully crafted an iron ingot twice, an aluminium ingot three times, and a copper ingot. Whether the aluminium and copper would be useful for weapons was questionable, but he had gained some mastery points for the effort.

Ronan spent a while just working on making ingots. He wanted to ensure he had a good technique and was able to create a quality metal to begin making weapons from. In total he went back out into the city about twenty more times to hunt for scrap, but it was well worth the effort. After melting down and forging all of it into ingots, minus the failures, he had about fifty ingots of iron, and sixty of other assorted metals. He suspected the iron would be the most useful for weapons, with the rest being bad, but at the same time Ronan wasn’t sure about things like mana conductivity or other properties that might have arrived with the integration that weren’t considerations in forging before that point.

So it was that he began to start figuring out how to turn an ingot into a weapon. There were so many different weapons he could use by that point that he would need to spend thousands of iterations learning how to make them all, but he figured that starting with the basics would work for the time being. That was swords, spears, and an assortment of different knives. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too difficult.

Unfortunately he shouldn’t have been so optimistic. The first ingot turned into a mangled mess, broken into two parts. Ronan wasn’t sure which looked uglier than the other. Neither resembled anything close to the shortsword blade he had attempted to make. There were many problems in his technique that led to the bad result, but the most glaring of them all was one he hadn’t even considered; his strength was far too great for the ordinary metal to handle.

As a man who had gained control mastery, Ronan was not a wild brute, but he certainly wasn’t able to limit himself so much that his few thousand points of strength became worthless. Then again, he had too many ingots made to simply start a new iteration and not over-invest in his stats. Ironically, he realised that the ingots made from the ‘useless’ metals just became a hell of a lot more useful than the others, given that they would be the perfect tool to practice his hammer swings and figure out the right amount of strength to use.

He knew it wasn’t just a matter of strength. His technique also sucked and he knew that he wasn’t heating the ingot properly while hammering it, but those were things he would gradually figure out the more he practiced. To be honest, given that I’m back on my homeworld I might be able to find a human or alien who actually knows how to do this shit and get them to teach me. It was an interesting idea that he seriously considered for a moment, until he realised that finding every single living being in the sector and asking them if they knew how to blacksmith and could teach him would probably be more effort and waste more time than just learning through trial and error.

At least the second way would earn him a bunch of mastery points along the way, which would likely help the process along. Ronan was all about hard work at that point of his journey.

He continued in that manner, hammering away at the various ingots of metal he had created until he felt that his technique was passable enough to start working with the iron ingots once again. About half of the test ingots had been turned back into mangled scrap metal, but the latter portion of them turned out resembling squashed or misshapen blades. They would be utterly useless in a battle regardless of the properties of the particular metal that they were made of, simply because they had been forged by an incompetent.

However, the final few ingots ended up being somewhat usable daggers. Unfortunately the aluminium dagger crumpled when Ronan tested it. The copper ones seemed as though they would be sufficient to kill a few goblins, but would likely blunt very fast and fail completely against more powerful foes.

However, that was only the starting point of his crafting journey. He hoped that by the time he ran out of iron ingots to use for forging, he would have some weapons that might even stand up against Vulparis or Veloxis. He figured the two fox bosses were the best targets, being the highest level monsters around. Actually, maybe I should give them a break this iteration… That last conversation with the boss made me feel a little guilty for killing them all for no reason. I do know a royal pain in the arse who I could test them on instead. A grin appeared on his face as he imagined testing his daggers in all sorts of ways on the irritating Lord Rockmore.

First he had to make the damn things. Ronan took out the first of the ingots and began to hammer away. His first dagger was a bit misshapen, and the blade leaned to the side slightly. It was usable, but, for lack of a prettier description, it was a piece of shit. He worked hard as he continued, with each new creation being slightly better than the last. Once Ronan finally made an almost-perfect dagger that could likely hold up against any monster the first phase of the integration could throw at him, he felt ready to move onto making something else.

He made some speartips, but they proved to be of little challenge. They weren’t much larger than a dagger and the shape was only marginally different. Of course there were different kinds of spears, but the variation was just a matter of hammering the metal in various ways that he eventually figured out during his experimentation.

There were plenty of times where his Insightful Artificer stepped in to fix mistakes or influenced the outcome of his crafting, which he could tell by the fact his weapons made from scrap metal actually had decent stats a lot of the time. They did often have a disclaimer about lacking durability, but that was simply the tradeoff for the power boost.

Ronan finally decided to start making swords. His first attempt was at a shortsword. After so many successes in a row, it was humbling to utterly fail on the first try once more. He began at the weapon’s tip and it turned out okay, but once he started hammering at the flat of the blade the rest of it deformed and a crack appeared. Ronan tossed it and started on the next.

In total it took him about eight attempts to get a shortsword right. Even then it was a pretty crappy shortsword. So crap in fact, that it broke when he stabbed his leg as a test. Whether that was down to his stats or the poor quality of the weapon could be debated, but the fact of the matter was any weapon that couldn’t hurt him wouldn’t hurt the truly powerful enemies he fought. So he returned to his forging, hoping to learn from the constant hammering and the searing heat of the forge-flames.

He didn’t learn much, but it was enough. By the time Ronan reached for the next ingot and returned empty-handed, he had managed to make a few usable shortswords, a longsword that might last a couple of battles, and even a greatsword—though the hefty blade technically might be able to hurt a boss monster, it would likely shatter in the process. Ronan was satisfied with how far he’d come, tiering up his crafting and even earning a few specific masteries related to forging and smithing. Why they were separate was a point of annoyance to him, but he wasn’t about to complain about having three paths to make gains on.

He decided to head out and find more metal scraps in the city when a notification appeared in his vision, one that was both familiar and novel. He had seen a similar one before, but on the other side of the battle.

Attention all challengers in [Sector 46592], the Sector Pillar has been claimed by [Vulparis the Trickster]!

Until its claim is usurped, [Vulparis the Trickster] is now the [Knight] in charge of [Sector 45692]!

Phase 2 of the integration will roll out on a regional basis once all pillars within a region have been claimed, use the remainder of your time to either defend your new [Knight] in its claim, becoming a member of its faction, or form your own and fight to stake your own claim!

Good luck, challengers!

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