BOOK 10: CHAPTER 29: RUNEFALL

“One for them, one for me,” Carmen said, staring at the hunk of metal in the forge. It was a unique alloy made from uldrite, runesilver, and mithril that had been forge welded to include trace amounts of the nuclear waste she’d used to create Elijah’s Shackle of Penance. It wasn’t enough to emit harmful corruption, but she hoped it would give the final product a little more kick.

But that was the thing about the system – it often worked based upon unspoken rules that she only partially understood. Doubtless, the end result would be more powerful for the inclusion of the irradiated material, but it could just as easily end up as a pseudo-curse that harmed anyone who used the item.

She didn’t think that would be the case, though. Her confidence, such as she felt it, was based almost exclusively on the steps she’d taken to contain the radiation and focus it inward. Hundreds of glyphs, etched into each layer of the metal and held in place during the forging process by her newest ability – Enchant Raw Materials. With it, she could imbue her materials with specific properties. In this case, that meant a multitude of traits that she hoped would combine and show up in the final product.

The only problem was that she had no idea if she’d taken enough precautions. Or too many. Or if she’d used the wrong glyphs. A thousand other potential issues troubled her, but there was nothing she could do about any of them. The only guides available on the subject were far too expensive – at least for her – and she’d prefer to use what money she had on better materials.

Hopefully, she wouldn’t ruin what she’d bought instead of the guides.

The most expensive was the uldrite, largely because she’d had to buy it from the Branch Marketplace. However, the runesilver and mithril were nearly as expensive, even if they were available on Earth. Not from Ironshore’s mine, but a few other extensive mining operations had sprung up over the years. And given humanity’s characteristic industriousness, it wouldn’t be long before many more were founded.

Good for people like Carmen, but she wondered about the environmental effects.

She shook her head. That wasn’t her purview. She’d let people like Elijah worry about that sort of thing. Instead of splitting her focus, she intended to devote the entirety of her concentration to doing the one thing she was really good at – smithing.

As soon as the metal reached forge welding temperature – as denoted by the deep orange color and the purple waves of energy flowing through it – she used her tongs to remove it from the flames. After setting it on her anvil, which glowed with its own enchantments, she slammed her hammer into the billet.

The ringing sound of metal banging against metal echoed through the forge. With her high strength attribute, she could bring the force of a power hammer to the task, and what’s more, she could do so for hours at a time. Still, the intense vibrations that came from the act left her fingers numb.

Once the billet cooled, she returned it to the forge to return it to the proper temperature. As she waited, her mind drifted to the same subject that had occupied her thoughts for the past few weeks.

Miguel.

Since his return, she’d barely let him out of her sight. Or that had been her intention. He’d had other ideas, spending most of his days in the grove or with that girl. Carmen didn’t dislike Hope. Indeed, she believed the girl had a good heart and wanted the best for her son.

“God. I never though I’d be the jealous mom,” she muttered to herself.

But it was true. Fight against it though she might, she very much wished that they could go back to the days when Miguel would hang on her every word and cling to her hip. But those days were long gone.

And they had been for a long time.

Now, Miguel was preparing to go back to the Hollow Depths, training hard and spending as much time as he could with the girl he probably thought he loved. Was the relationship real? Carmen hoped – for Miguel’s sake – that it was, but she knew enough about young love to recognize how rare it was for it to turn into something meant to last into adulthood.

After all, Carmen had spent years going from one woman’s bed to another. She’d even tried men for a while. Just a phase, but it was representative of how lost she was when it came to looking for relationship material. Then, she’d finally found Alyssa, and everything had changed.

Often, she found herself wondering if she’d have recognized how special her future wife really was if she’d met her only a few years earlier. Probably not, and that would have been a tragedy.

The reality of it was that relationships were complicated, and the odds of finding the one true love of one’s life at the age of seventeen were extremely slim. But there was a chance, and Carmen hoped that her son had found the person that would make his life more joyful. Even if it didn’t last, that was all anyone could really hope for – just a bit more happiness.

She sighed, then returned to the billet, which, by that point, had achieved the proper temperature. Over the next few hours, she repeated the process a dozen times until she was satisfied that it had forge welded properly. Even then, she took a few minutes to grind down the edges so she could see the pattern.

Thankfully, there were no cracks or cold shuts, which meant the piece was ready for the next step. Once again, Carmen retrieved her engraving tool and began the process of enchanting the finished billet. With previous projects, she’d been limited to enchanting only after the forging was done. Now, she could engrave the appropriate runes at each step, which would allow her to impart more traits upon the finished product.

Maybe it would be enough to push her to a new high in terms of grade.

One glyph after another, she engraved a string of enchantments meant to strengthen the metal, increase its durability, and influence the eventual attribute bonuses toward strength.

Then, it was back into the forge to heat the metal enough to enable her to shape it properly. It was sizable hunk of metal and infused with a ridiculous amount of energy, so it took quite a while to get it up to the right temperature. During that time, Carmen pushed her errant thoughts to the side and focused intently on her vision for the eventual weapon.

She took some inspiration from her work with Sadie’s sword. Specifically, the size. With enhanced strength, she could handle quite a lot of weight, and she ascribed to the notion that bigger was usually better when it came to weapons. So, with no real detriment to the idea, she’d chosen to make the new piece as big as she could.

That meant a lot of metal.

Which in turn meant a long, long process.

Carmen committed to it fully, and as soon as the enchanted billet reached the proper temperature, she sank into the crafting process. Heat and the ring of her hammer filled the smithy, and sweat drenched her entire body. Her advancement in body cultivation helped to mitigate the oppressive heat, but it didn’t negate it entirely. For Carmen, that was proper. She would have been quite alarmed to work in a forge where she was completely comfortable.

A little sweat was the price of good smithing.

Shaping the piece was both easy and difficult. The first, because she’d done similar things thousands of times, so she knew the techniques like the back of her hand. The latter, because perfection was the goal, and the material was so difficult to work with that said aim was a constantly moving target.

Still, Carmen persisted, her hammer blows precise and well-measured. And gradually, over the course of hours of work – and many trips back to the forge to reheat the piece – it took shape.

Then, finally, she completed the first stage, rough-shaping the hunk of metal into a recognizable form. Once, she might’ve looked at such a result and considered it a finished product. The lines were crisp and clean, the heft all but perfect. No grinding necessary. Yet, for the current version of Carmen, it was barely better than a sketch.

It would take quite a bit more work to bring out the true art beneath the surface.

With that in mind, she took it to her foot-controlled grinder and got to work. That took another two days, largely because she was forced to keep changing belts. She also took a few short naps and made herself eat a couple of hasty meals. But she never left the smithy.

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Sometimes, she got like that, where her focus on a project far outweighed any sense of self-care.

Every now and again, someone would enter the smithy, but after recognizing her current state, they quickly left her to her own devices. She barely noticed them, so focused was she on her project.

Eventually, she was satisfied with the grinding work. So, she then shoved the thing back into the forge, so she could begin the heat-treating process. Unfortunately, that was where she encountered her first major issue. The initial attempt just didn’t take, so she was forced to re-do it three separate times, increasing the temperature with each attempt.

It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but she knew from long experience that at some point, the metal would reach a point where those repeated attempts became detrimental. If that happened, she’d need to start all over.

From scratch.

So, after shoving the half-completed piece into the forge for a fourth time, her heart beat just a little faster. The pace continued to increase as she watched the metal start to glow. Then, the arcing currents of purple energy spiderwebbed out. But she didn’t remove it. Instead, she continued to wait until the entire thing was covered in a thin mesh of violet ethera.

That was the sign.

She yanked it out of the forge, then dunked it in a specially prepared vat of oil that had been made from leviathan blubber. The vat hissed and steamed, then let out a huge gout of purple flame that raised the temperature of the forge by more than a hundred degrees. It would have killed a normal person nearly instantly.

For Carmen, it was just enough to redden her skin – like a moderate sunburn, easily ignorable.

Regardless, she wasn’t focused on her comfort. Even if the heat had blistered her skin with third-degree burns, she wouldn’t have trembled. Instead, the entirety of her concentration remained on the piece itself.

She heard no pings that might indicate a crack. The feel of the piece remained the same. And when she finally withdrew it from the still-bubbling oil, Carmen was happy to see that it hadn’t warped.

In short, it was the closest thing to perfection she could achieve.

But it still wasn’t finished. So, after letting it cool, she returned to the grinder to remove any accumulated scale. As she did so, she couldn’t keep the smile from spreading across her face at the sight of the gleaming metal, which looked wholly different than any alloy she’d ever created.

The layers were only barely visible, but any time the light hit it, a purple glimmer rippled across the surface. What’s more, she could feel the power in the unfinished piece, and she knew that even if she did nothing else special, it would achieve Sophisticated grade.

But she still had a lot of work to do.

With that in mind, once she’d finished grinding, she went at it with a piece of fine-grit sandpaper. The process was long and tedious, but that was the nature of perfection. No one achieved it without tedium.

Hours passed as she scoured every square inch of the piece, and when she’d finished, it gleamed so brightly that it almost seemed to emit its own light.

That was when she truly beheld the full form of the hammerhead.

It was almost three feet long and half as wide – a truly unwieldy piece that should have been unusable, at least by normal standards. One common misconception was that warhammers were huge hunks of metal, but the reality was that their heads were typically quite small. Maybe a few inches across at most, and even that was pushing the bounds of human strength necessary to wield such a weapon in battle.

But now that people had the inflated attributes of levels, impossibly huge weapons had become much more viable. That was the lesson Carmen had learned while crafting Sadie’s sword, which would have been wholly impractical in the old world. When she’d first conceived the hammer, she’d worried that she’d taken the idea too far. Now, she couldn’t help but wonder if she hadn’t gone far enough.

Either way, once she’d completed the sanding, she set the hammerhead aside, then headed to the other side of the forge where she’d left a shaft of grove wood. According to Nerthus, it came from one of the older trees, and it had been further reinforced with the spryggent’s sap. Not a gift he would normally give to outsiders, but one that would make all the difference.

Carmen immediately started working on the shaft that had been prepared by the city’s best Woodworker. She’d have preferred it if Elijah had done it, but that would have required her brother-in-law to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. Currently, he was halfway across the world dealing with global politics. Asking him to personally tend to a bit of wood seemed like a big ask.

Besides, it probably would have bound the piece to him automatically.

In any case, Carmen was happy with the result, and what’s more, she was eager to finish her own preparations, which included another application of runes and an inlay of a soft metal known as hexensteel. It wasn’t much good for armor or weapons, but it was a great conductor of ethera that would enhance the end product’s enchantments.

Plus, it was purple, which matched the rippling gleam of the hammerhead’s metal.

When she was done, the strand of hexensteel wrapped around what would be the weapon’s handle. Once she was done with that, she wrapped a long strip of white leather – the best she could find, but still the weak link of the entire construction – between the strand of hexensteel.

Finally, she shoved the shaft into the eye of the hammerhead, then bound it together with Emberweld, and the pieces of the weapon became a unified whole. After hefting it, she gave it a couple of experimental swings. The immense weight of the piece was palpable, and it sent ripples through the air with every swing.

But it wasn’t finished.

Other than final polish, Carmen still needed to finalize the enchantments, weaving a thread through the entire piece that would tie them all together. So, without hesitation, she got down to business, leaning over the piece, engraving tool in hand.

Days passed as she worked. People came and went. She rested when her eyes felt heavy and coated with sandpaper. She ate when she started to feel weaker. And she even visited with Miguel a few times. But never for long. She was far too focused on the task at hand.

She started at the butt of the haft, engraving all-but-microscopic whorls in the leather. From a distance, they’d look like nothing so much as a rough grip, but leaning close, the order became unmistakable.

Once that was done, she started in on the hammerhead, adding similar glyphs across its broad form. There was so much area to cover that it took almost five times as long as the haft, but when she’d finished, she couldn’t deny the elegance of the design.

Carmen only allowed herself to appreciate it for a few minutes before she started putting the finishing touches on it. Embellishments were what they were called, and she knew better than most just how important they were. It wasn’t enough to simply make a functional weapon. The system expected a certain amount of beauty as well.

Or maybe that was the wrong word.

Uniqueness, perhaps. If the end result wasn’t striking in form, then the effect would ripple into the function as well.

Thankfully, Carmen enjoyed that part of the job as much as anything else, and she’d bought an entire spool of hexensteel for the task. Inlaying the softer metal was quite a tedious task, though she’d done most of the work beforehand when she’d engraved the piece. Smashing the hexensteel into place was, comparatively, the easy part.

It was still time-consuming, though.

Finally, after another two days of work, she completed that process. Holding the hammer up, she could see the makings of a fine weapon. She only needed to clean things up, grind a little excess hexensteel off, then polish the thing.

That process was simple but nerve-wracking. One stray move, and she’d mar the surface. Or foul the hexensteel inlay. And while that wouldn’t ruin the end result, it certainly would be a mark against its final grade. Fortunately, Carmen’s hands were steady, and her long experience shone through.

And after a few more hours of anxiety-inducing work, she’d finished.

A short inspection later, and she finally acknowledged that she could do no more. That was when she received two important notifications. The first concerned the completion of the hammer:

Congratulations! You have created a unique item [Runefall].

Overall Grade: Sophisticated (high)

Enchantment Grade: A

Description: Runefall is a warhammer created by a powerful blacksmith at the peak of the Mortal Realm. Constructed of a unique alloy with hexensteel-reinforced enchantments.

Attribute Bonuses:

+150 Strength, +150 Constitution, +25 Dexterity

Ability:

Meteor: Augments the power of any full-strength attack with the impact of a falling meteor. Cooldown: 24 Hours

Trait:

Exhaustion: Contact with an enemy will inflict an impairment upon said foe, reducing Strength and Regeneration. Passive.

One activated ability and one passive trait. Both were powerful. Carmen could feel that from her creation. However, her excitement over completing the project was overshadowed by something far, far more important. She had finally reached level one-twenty-five.

That meant that all she needed to do to ascend was to visit the Branch and select the evolution of her class. A huge moment for anyone, and one she didn’t take lightly. However, she also knew that she had a choice ahead of her.

She could ascend immediately. That was option one. But option two was to work on her cultivation so she would have better choices. Elijah had picked the latter route, and it had given him access to an incredibly powerful class. It was obviously the right choice for him, but her decision was more complicated than that.

For one, Carmen worried that she didn’t have the ability to improve her cultivation in any short timeframe. And second, she was impatient to move forward, to see what she could achieve with more levels. Because as much as she wanted to delay and reach for perfection, she might not have the luxury of taking that route.

The world was on the edge. People she cared about were in danger. And she desperately needed to help them in any way she could.

Letting the hammerhead fall to the floor, she lost herself in thought as she tried to sort through the consequences of both options. An hour later, she still hadn’t made a choice, and she didn’t think one would come soon.