Rise of the Living Forge - Chapters 503-504

“You can’t do that,” Thane said.

Vireth stared at him.

He stared back at her.

“What?” Vireth asked, so stunned that the malice in her voice completely cracked.

“You can’t just go around claiming people,” Thane said. “That isn’t how it works.”

“Do you have the slightest idea as to what I am?” Vireth asked. “Are you dense? Esmerelda told you what I am. What we are. I know. I overheard it.”

“Well, yeah. She did.”

“And you still refuse me?” Vireth’s red eyes narrowed in anger. “You refuse the power that I hold?”

“I didn’t say that,” Thane said. He swallowed, but he was far too deep now to change his mind. “You keep saying you want a wielder. Not a slave.”

“They are one and the same. You will be my vessel.”

“No,” Thane said. “I won’t. And they aren’t the same. You’re a Devil bound to the form of a weapon. And, just like you said, Esmerelda has told me about your kind. You’ve existed for hundreds upon hundreds of years, and you’ll live long after I’m dead. But you won’t just settle for someone to mindlessly swing you around. You’re picky. That’s why it takes so long. But if you’re picky, that means you’re looking for more than just a pair of hands to hold a weapon. You need someone who is actually working with you.”

“What are you implying, boy?” Vireth asked, her words a dangerous whisper.

“Cursed weapons wait so long to find somebody because your true strength will remain hidden unless you’re working together with your wielder,” Thane said. “And if we’re going to work together, you can’t just go throwing ultimatums around. That isn’t what a good business relationship is based off.”

“You think you know better than I?” Vireth let out a cold laugh. “You think that you bring anything to bargain with beyond your mere existence?”

“Yes,” Thane said. “Because the alternative would mean that you really don’t give much of a shit who you’re bonded with. And, if that’s the case, we can just find you some random drunkard in an alley.”

Vireth paused.

Neither of them spoke for a second. Then her eyes narrowed.

“You realize that you are attempting to bargain with a Devil,” Vireth said. “That does not tend to end well. It is in your best interests to avoid getting on my bad side.”

“I think it’s probably in my best interests to avoid getting walked all over,” Thane said. He swallowed, then set his jaw. “I’m done with that. Either kill me now or come to an agreement that suits both of us. It’s up to you. But I’m not going to just be a tool.”

“Do you think I’m bluffing?” Vireth asked. Her voice dropped to a soft whisper as she closed the distance between herself and Thane with a single, blurred movement. “I am a Devil. We do not bargain. We take.”

“Then kill me,” Thane said. “And enjoy sitting in storage for the next few hundred years — assuming Arwin doesn’t eat you.”

Vireth’s fingers twitched. She held his gaze for a long second.

Then, to Thane’s surprise, her lips pulled up into a grin.

“I would accept nothing else from my wielder. Very well, Thane. Let us discuss exactly what it is you demand. We shall see if we can come to an agreement. And, if we cannot, I will kill you and the consequences can be damned. That, boy, is a promise.”

***

Time snapped back into motion. Thane stumbled, a lingering frost still pressed against his neck like the fingers of the reaper himself. The purple magic flowing around Esmerelda’s fingers swirled to life in misty streams and Vanessa finished her jump back — only to find that the black smoke pouring from the axe was gone.

 “Run!” Esmerelda snarled, finishing the sentence that she’d started only a mere second ago. “Find Arwin! I’ll deal with this!”

Thane jumped forward before Esmerelda could let the magic fly. He put himself right between hers and the Axe, throwing his hands up.

“Wait!” Thane yelled. “Stop! Don’t do anything! It’s okay!”

Esmerelda’s magic flinched back as if in surprise. Her eyes flicked from Thane to the axe behind him in an instant. Then her lips went thin in anger as realization flashed through her gaze.

“Release the boy, Vireth. He is not yours to take. That is my assistant. Do not think you can deceive me. I have worked with your kind longer than any other. This one is under my protection.”

“You’re not speaking to Vireth,” Thane said. “It’s me, Esmerelda.”  

“What’s going on?” Vanessa asked.

“Be silent,” Esmerelda snapped. Her eyes didn’t leave Thane for so much as an instant. It felt like she were trying to bore a hole through his soul with her gaze alone. “Bare your soul to me.”

“Bare my… huh?” Thane blinked. “How? I can’t do that.”

Esmerelda’s lip curled into a sneer. “You expect me to buy that? I will not give you another warning. Leave the boy, Vireth. Now. We will find you a different wielder. But if you attempt to steal my assistant, then you will discover exactly what the Curse Broker is capable of. I am no mere merchant subject to your whims. Do not forget the full extent of my powers… or the other Devils that I have contracts with.”

 “It’s me, Esmerelda,” Thane said. He held his hands up. “Vireth can’t speak right now. I’m not holding her. It’s just me.”

Esmerelda stared at him. A terse moment dragged by. Then her hands lowered slightly, confusion playing across her features.

“…Do you really expect me to believe that?” Esmerelda asked. “The smoke vanished. That means Vireth has bonded with someone. It certainly wasn’t me, and it clearly wasn’t Vanessa either. That only leaves you.”

“Right,” Thane said. “It was me. She froze time or something and then we spoke. But we made a deal.”

“You expect me to believe that a child managed to convince a Devil to come to a contract? One that left them with free will over themselves?” Esmerelda asked with a snort. “I am not a fool. Last chance, Vireth.”

“Can’t I prove it somehow?” Thane asked. “There has to be some way, right?”

“Insult Vireth,” Esmerelda said instantly. “No Devil would ever allow their wielder to—”

“Vireth is… uh, clunky. Her axe is clunky.”

Esmerelda stared at Thane.

Vanessa did the same.

“That was awful,” Vanessa said. “You can’t call that an insult.”

“I did my best,” Thane protested. “What am I supposed to say? I don’t want to be mean!”

“Call her fat,” Esmerelda said.

“She wasn’t fat,” Thane said.

“That’s also just a shit insult,” Vanessa said with a scoff. “You gotta be more creative. Cut deep. An insult should hurt.”

“How am I supposed to do that? Just tell me what to say!”

“That’s not how it works,” Vanessa said. She patted her heart. “An insult has to come from here. The heart. Nobody can give you—”

“Say Vireth a pathetic little shadow with no more power than a field mouse. One who has to beg for even a scrap of power and would be better off used as a shit-shovel for a pigsty,” Esmerelda said, her eyes narrowed. “And say it now.”

“Wow,” Vanessa said. “Color me wrong. That was a good one. Say that.”

Thane repeated the line, wincing slightly.

No sooner than the last word had left his mouth did Esmerelda’s eyes go as wide as saucers. The obsidian axe behind him trembled in the barrel.

“Godspit,” Esmerelda whispered. “You were telling the truth. Vireth never could have debased herself like that. She’s too proud. You really managed it? You made a contract with her?”

“Yeah,” Thane said, blowing out a relieved breath. “We came to a reasonable agreement.”

“Unbelievable,” Esmerelda muttered.

“What’s the agreement?” Vanessa asked, tilting her head to the side. “Do you have to sacrifice a bunch of people every full moon? Because I can think of a few that would be good sacrifices. I can make you a list.”

“I—”

“Stop!” Esmerelda barked, throwing a hand up to stop Thane. “Don’t say it. Never tell anyone your contract. That stays between you. The fact that you’re able to speak freely at all means you maintained control over your body. That’s… impressive. I hope you didn’t give up anything too important.”

“I didn’t,” Thane said. “We came to a mutually beneficial agreement.”

Esmerelda pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “Yes. That’s what everyone thinks. It rarely is. Do you really think you're going to outsmart something that’s lived for more than ten times the years that you have? Damn it, Thane. This never should have happened. I—”

Thane yawned.

“Sorry,” Thane said, covering his mouth. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Esmerelda’s eye twitched. “I am trying to scold you, boy. Your idiocy just got trapped you with a Devil. For life. Do you understand the severity of this? We’re going to have to speak with Arwin. Not even I can break this kind of contract, but I’m sure he could. Maybe we’ll just feed him the damned weapon. I don’t care about the rules. I’m not losing the only competent assistant I’ve ever had to some damned hussy of an axe.”

“Hey!” Vanessa said. “Watch your words. Have some respect for my people.”

“Sorry,” Esmerelda said.

“It’s okay,” Thane said through another yawn. He rubbed at his eyes, but the urge to flop down on the spot was nearly overwhelming. Thane swayed. Darkness prickled at the edges of his vision. It felt like he’d been awake for weeks. “I think I covered everything. We were discussing the contract for a while.”

Esmerelda started to say something, but she paused midway through when a thought struck her. A pensive frown crossed her lips.

“…just how long did you spend determining the details of your contract?” Esmerelda asked. “A few hours shouldn’t have tired you out that badly.”

“Well, I wanted to make sure we covered everything,” Thane said. Every word was a fight to push out. The darkness pushed further inward, swallowing the world until nothing but a tiny pinprick of light remind. But even through it, he managed to find the strength for one more response. “I think it took something around a week.”

“A week?” Esmerelda exclaimed in disbelief. “You kept her stuck in your mind making a contract with you for a week?”

But Thane didn’t hear her. He’d already collapsed to the ground, unconscious. There was a lot of sleep he had left to catch up on.

Chapter 504

Arwin wiped sweat from his brow. His arms ached. He couldn’t remember the last time that he’d actually gotten sore from smithing. Arwin also wasn’t entirely sure how long he’d been working.

He knew it hadn’t yet been a week. If it had, somebody from the Menagerie would have come to get him by now so he didn’t miss the deadline they’d given the Blacktongues. Even though the deadline was completely fake, he still had every plan of looting the actual vault near the day they’d promised.

They’d need the rewards from the Vault if they were going to properly leverage the Dwarven Council into dealing with the Blacktongues for them, not to mention getting them to support and participate in the auction house.

But Arwin’s thoughts only managed to linger on the future for a short while. They were quickly pulled back to the anvil before him. The results of the work that he, Koyu, and Wallace had done laid before him.

A large black lump of metal roughly in the shape of a ball was all they had to show for their efforts. It looked more like a chunk of molten slag that one might have found deep within the Setting Sun’s volcano than it did like a Core. The obsidian material was actually metal, but it was so craggy and beaten up that it seemed closer to stone. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it at all.

Nothing, at least, in physical appearance.

But that was where its inadequacy ended.

Even from where Arwin stood, not even in contact with the Core, he could feel it. There was hunger. Power. Desire. It pulsed in a rhythmic hum, too high pitched for any human ear to pick up on but somehow simultaneously impossible to completely miss.

Making the Core had been… strange. Arwin had expected there to be some differences caused by Sunsetting his class. The Core was the first major project he’d undertaken since then. But he hadn’t realized just what those changes would be.

There was no way to describe them other than that he’d been working half-asleep before. The song of the materials he worked with was a thousand times louder, as if it came from within his own body rather than some outside source.

He understood the song. It was the closest he’d ever gotten to a proper conversation that wasn’t an outright Vision. Every single minute request, every single desire of the metal he worked with, all of it became clear to Arwin.

There were components that had seemed like they would have been perfect. Ones that he would have previously used without a second thought, but he now set to the side. They bore subtle differences in desire. Ones that were small enough to easily be looked over — and ones that would inevitably cause disagreement and reduce the quality of the final product in the long run.

Sunsetting his class hadn’t just made Arwin stronger. It felt like, for the first time, the world no longer treated him like an outsider. Everything was one massive symphony. He wasn’t just listening anymore. The Mesh, the materials, Arwin — they were all one and the same.

Arwin didn’t get any notification of a new skill activating, nor did the information on his old ones change. This change wasn’t a magical one. It was a change of being itself.

And the results were beyond evident.

This rather unimposing blob of black metal was, without a doubt, the most powerful Core that Arwin had ever created. It had so much magic packed into it, woven in and between the layers of metal that composed the rough orb, that Arwin didn’t even want to think about what would happen if it were damaged.

There was a good chance that the power would go off like a bomb and wipe a fair portion of Milten off the face of the Kingdom. He, Koyu, and Wallace had completely drained their magical reserves several times over in the process of getting it to this point. Even the Infernal Armory had dried its reserves bare.

The only thing that had kept them all going were repeated deliveries of Lillia’s cooking. One of her imps would routinely show up with several plates of meals and drinks. Some for them, and some for the Armory itself.

If it hadn’t been for them, the core never could have been completed. Their magic would have run out entirely and the Core would have collapsed long before getting anywhere close to a stable state.   

And they had still yet to get a single reward from the Mesh for their efforts. That wasn’t because they’d failed. It was because, despite all the power within the Core, it still wasn’t done. There was still one step left.

“I’ll be damned,” Wallace breathed from the other side of the anvil. His beard was singed from the heat of the black Soul Lava that they’d been using to forge, but the dwarf barely even seemed to notice. His eyes sparkled with awe and delight as he looked upon the nearly finished core. “This… it’s beautiful. I’ve never seen its like before. We’ve made art. Art like the world has never seen. Not even the Dwarven Council has produced anything like this.”

“We’ve made a weapon,” Koyu said. The lich rested against the wall of the Infernal Armory, his pale flesh somehow even paler than usual. Soot and stains covered his pure white hair to the point where he probably could have blended into a herd of zebras without much issue at all. “I’ve seen power like this before, but only during the war. And only in explosives that were used to level cities. To contain it within a Core… we grow dangerously close to the path that my former master walked.”

“Except all the materials are entirely on board with this,” Arwin said. “There was nothing forced to act in a way it didn’t want to. This Core is formed by metals that want to be part of a Soul Guardian. Pieces from the Devil’s Den and the Infernal Armory. From us. There is nothing at all here like the vision you showed me of your master.”

Koyu was silent for a few moments. Then he slowly pushed himself to his feet. The weariness was evident in his stance, but his eyes still burned with the same intensity that they always did.

“You are correct,” Koyu said. He looked down upon the Core in silence for another moment before speaking again. “This is something new. I do not know if I am scared or excited to see what it is capable of.”

“Well, it ain’t done yet,” Wallace said. “And me mum always told me not to think too hard about things that haven’t been finished. Great way to botch it all up by daydreaming.”

“She’s right about that,” Arwin said. “It needs to connect with the Devil’s Den. The only way something this powerful will be able to properly interface as a suit of armor is if we let it really soak in more of the Den’s essence. We need to—”

“Have Lillia stick it in her oven,” Wallace said.

“I was thinking in the basement, but the oven might actually be better,” Arwin said after a moment of thought. “The oven is probably about as close to the deepest part of the Den as you can get — and it’ll have a constant application of magic soaking into it as she cooks.”

“I’ll bring it over,” Koyu said. “It is likely this will take several hours to steep properly.”

What is it, a tea?

“I think a whole day would be best,” Arwin said. “The metals were settling down… but there was still some mixing going on. I think letting it stew inside the oven for a while should really let the Core get to know itself.”

Koyu nodded. Then he lifted the Core gingerly, cradling it in his arms like a slightly misshapen child, and strode out of the Infernal Armory to ferry his payload over to Lillia.

The Armory didn’t even say a word. Arwin could feel its presence, but the building was so exhausted that manifesting itself in the typical pillar of red mist was too great an ask. The only thing it managed was a faint sense of smug satisfaction.

Well, that and anticipation.

Arwin got the feeling it was looking forward to seeing the new body for the Devil’s Den.

“Should we keep going?” Wallace asked through a yawn. “The body still has to be built. We have the materials prepped, but—”

“Not yet,” Arwin said with a shake of his head. “I don’t want to make the other parts of the armor without the Core present to choose them.”

Wallace blinked. “You think it’s going to be that intelligent? It’ll be able to select the pieces you make its body with?”

“Yes,” Arwin said. “I already felt the intelligence inside it. Not human intelligence, but intelligence all the same. After its finished bonding with the Den, there should be even more of it. You wouldn’t want a custom tailored suit without any input into what it looks like, would you?”

“Do I look like the kind of dwarf to wear a suit?”

Arwin shrugged. “You get my point. Custom tools, then.”

Wallace nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. It makes sense. I just never thought such a thing was possible. Magical items don’t typically have this level of intelligence. Not unless they’re at a level only spoken of in legends. This isn’t something I’m familiar with.”

A prickle of something between annoyance and catty satisfaction rolled against Arwin’s mind from the Infernal Armory. He got the feeling it didn’t like the implication that it might not have been as smart as the Core.

Arwin ignored it. He shook his arms out, reaching for the magical energy that he’d managed to recover since they’d stopped working. A fair amount of it was back. More than enough to make sitting around and doing nothing pointless.

There was still more he wanted to accomplish before the day was done.

“Discovery is half the fun,” Arwin said. “How’s your magic doing right now?”

“It’s fine,” Wallace said suspiciously. “But I thought you said we weren’t going to start on anything until the Core was done soaking.”

“Not for the Core,” Arwin agreed. He cracked his knuckles and looked down at the anvil. “But it’s been a while since I’ve updated everyone’s armor. With everything I’ve learned recently… I think I’ve got quite a lot that I can improve upon. I reckon we can get a few pieces made before the core is finished, don’t you?”

Wallace stared at Arwin in disbelief. “What is wrong with you? Does the idea of rest bring you physical pain?”

“Oh, come on,” Arwin said. “It’s just a few pieces of armor. Maybe a set. Should be easy. We’ll be done well before the Core is.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Wallace muttered under his breath. He brushed his hands off against his apron. “Just making a few more magical pieces of armor. Stuff that people would pay thousands of gold for, and you’re going to bang it out in an afternoon because you’re bored.”

“Are you helping or not?” Arwin asked. “You can always sit this one—”

“You kidding me?” Wallace snorted. “Untwist your head, boy. ‘Course I’m helping. No way am I sitting this out. So… whose the lucky one that we start with?”

“I was thinking we might make a victory present for Rodrick’s triumphant return. He still doesn’t have anything custom from me. I want to fix that.”

“Isn’t he meant to be out a while?” Wallace asked, blinking.

“Maybe. But underestimating Rodrick… that’s generally not a good idea.” Arwin smiled. “I get the feeling he might be back sooner than expected.”