Chapter 76: Finding Mistakes

“So to be clear, you won’t be able to afford anything better than you have right now.” The youngish, surprisingly ripped girl behind the counter at the blacksmith’s shop said, glancing at the weapons strapped to various parts of Sean’s body and trying not to grimace. “Not that what you have isn’t… nice.”

“Oh, yeah. This isn’t exactly a buying trip. My class has some pretty crazy restrictions on weapons, if that makes sense.” Sean motioned towards the forges, anvils, and other equipment in the back. “I just think this is cool. My friend is off spending most of our credits on materials and supplies right now. I’m just trying to take in the town.”

The rest of the meeting with the human group had been nice but pretty boring. Spike went on another trip through the town and found Brady, a thirty-something woman who had managed to get a light-manipulation class by nature of a creative use of laser pointers early in her growth. Sean himself scooped up Scott, a man much, much older than the rest of the group who had a kind of hybrid combat and debuff class built around music.

After everyone had agreed to generally work together and not kill each other, there wasn’t that much business left to attend to. With everyone being eager to get some prep work done before the system called them up for the next weird challenge, the meeting didn’t last long after that. Brett agreed to take the lead on buying the two of them supplies, leaving Sean with 20 credits of pocket money and saying he was going to spend the rest of it on “stuff.”

Which left Sean with time to wander and explore the system’s version of manga-town, something he was incredibly excited about.

“So your first day in a crazy system village comes around and you choose to explore… here?” The girl brushed some hair behind one of her short horns with a red-skinned hand and waved at the shop. “You know I just bang on metal all day, right?”

“I get that. It’s just that blacksmiths in our culture are… Okay, so I don’t know how it is where you are from but my planet basically evolved past the manual process of blacksmithing long before the system hit. There are a few blacksmiths who do it as a hobby or who make bespoke custom stuff but mostly it’s just machines. Trust me when I say this is cool. It’s very cool. Plus, I wanted to get some ideas.”

“Well, I’m not going to stop you. Look around, ask questions if you want.” She leaned on the counter and smiled. “Don’t count on that being the case forever, though. As soon as custom orders start coming in, I don’t want you underfoot.”

Sean nodded then turned towards the weapons rack. Some of the weapons were easily recognizable. Short swords, for instance, seemed to have followed basically the same evolution everywhere. The shop contained about twenty of them made from various metals, with a variety of hilt designs and embellishments. Still, they were mostly just long knives for doing the stabby-stabby.

Some weapons were a bit more exotic. Sean spent some time trying to understand a plus-sign shaped weapon made out of four long, thin spears connected at their butts with a weird, circular clip coming out of the bottom. Eventually, he gave up and turned to the girl with questioning eyes.

“Not everyone has hands like you do. Some beings can hold that at the bottom and spin it. It’s a weapon that splits the difference between offense and defense.”

“But how do you fight with that?”

“Ranged. Almost anyone who chooses that weapon is fragile. Don’t ask me why, it’s some weird cultural thing for those worlds.”

Sean reached out and touched the metal on one of the spiny weapon’s spear tips, only to have it start humming under his finger like a musical instrument.

“That’s for if the user wants to channel sound magic through it. Any time the metal looks frosty-white like that, you are probably dealing with someone who is using sound magic. Or ice, but the metal for that is pretty expensive.”

“That seems oddly specific. Will this actually sell here?” Sean hoped she’d say no. So far most of the weapons he had seen on offworlders wandering around the town had been things he understood. Fighting something like this would mean having to learn a bunch of things on the fly.

The girl shrugged. “Probably not. But there’s no way of knowing what people are going to want before I come here. I just threw together some of the more specialized stuff I had, things that would go for a fortune if I got lucky and someone actually wanted it. The rest of my space is raw materials and fuel to run the forge. That’s where the actual money will come from if I get it.”

“I don’t mean this the wrong way, but I’m surprised there’s much market for your work at all. What with the system handing out weapons and all.” The system hadn’t really offered him any weapons after his class shift, mostly giving him rewards in the form of armor materials and achievements. But he understood that that wasn’t the case for everyone.

She shook her head. “It’s not like that everywhere. The system is stingy with weapons, and in the greater system universe, even when it gives them to you, they tend to be pretty standard-issue stuff. If you want something special, you either need to get really lucky or have someone like me make something custom for you.”

“And here? Where the system does hand out weapons?”

“Customization, tailoring grips, sharpening… there are a lot of things people need. It’s possible that it will be a bust, but getting chosen as town smith for this apocalypse is a very, very big deal for me.” She smiled. “Life changing.”

Sean tried not to be too salty about the girl’s obvious enthusiasm for the opportunity that the end of his entire world afforded. It wasn’t like she had caused it and there was nothing she could do to stop it. There wasn’t anything wrong with her providing a service related to it, all things considered.

He still hated it. Hated the fact that it was even an opportunity for her to take advantage of. But the fighting he needed to do to make a difference would be done elsewhere.

Sean milled around the shop and looked at weird fist-based weapons for offworlder fists, helmets that wouldn’t fit human heads, and a bunch of other oddities before the girl finally warmed up to him a little bit and invited him back to see the shop up close. Sean eyed a pile of roughly forged blade blanks hungrily, actively angry that they were too processed to use as a starting point for one of his projects.

“So what’s this?” He asked, pointing to a bucket of lumps of metal.

“A system alloy, similar to your planet’s iron but better in almost every respect. Pretty all-purpose stuff, and it takes enhancements well.”

“What kind of enhancements?”

“Sometimes the system hands out materials that are meant to be used in alloys or embedded in weapons or mixed into a project in some other way.”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” Sean said. “I’ve seen those before. You can’t just put them in anything?”

“You can, it’s just that some materials respond better than others. The more special something is, the less room the system considers it to have for enhancements.”

“Got it. And this?” He pointed to another bucket full of small, reddish ingots.

“Earth-silver. I’m guessing the translator is calling it something stupid and literal. It actually has a prettier name on my planet. It’s not going to be useful here. It doesn’t look like any more of my kind made it in and it’s very, very specific stuff for a very specific type of mage. I might end up making some art out of it in my free time.”

“I guess they can’t all be winners.”

“Nope. I’ll show you the biggest loser of all if you want.” She rooted through a pile of boxes, eventually pulling out a metal-reinforced crate about the size of two stacked shoeboxes.

“See this stuff?” She asked, opening the box to reveal a bunch of pellets of dull gray metal. “It’s the heaviest, softest shit you can find. The whole universe is lousy with it. The closest metal your planet has to it is lead.”

“It’s heavy?”

“Try picking up the box.”

Sean grasped the handles of the box and lifted. It wasn’t like he couldn’t get it off the table but it was substantially heavier than he had expected it to be.

“Shit, yeah. What do you even use this for?”

“That’s the thing. You don’t, at least not for weapons. It’s really heavy and the only thing that’s special about it is that in the process of melting and remelting, it consumes itself to raise the density. It melts at a really low temperature, so it’s good for making shit like doorstops or adding weight and mass to things that aren’t going to see a lot of abuse. Otherwise, it’s pretty useless.”

It’s useless to you, you beautiful demon blacksmith lady. Not necessarily to me.

“What would it take to convince you to offload that? I’m thinking about messing around with casting things so it might work for me.” Sean got a side-eye from the demon girl that illustrated how badly he’d failed his deception check. He held his hands up in front of him.

“I’m in business here, you know. The blacksmithing business. Not the undercutting myself by selling people materials for DIY work business if I can help it.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” Sean dropped his hands. “I shouldn’t have tried to be sneaky. But look at my weapons. I wasn’t lying before when I said I had a weird class. I can’t use anything you’d make for me and everything I can use looks like this stuff.”

“Honest?” She eyed his weapons then cast her perceptive gaze to his eyes.

“Honest. As much as I might like to, I’m never going to be a customer for the conventional stuff. But I do need materials for my projects and I have some needs for scrap in general, anything you can’t use. I think we can figure something out.”

Objections about being in the blacksmithing business aside, the girl wasn’t eager to pass up on business if she could get it. The conversion rate of apocalypse credits to her local currency seemed to be just as good as it had been for the ramen shop vendor. Once she was assured that Sean really wasn’t able to take advantage of her skills in any productive case, she was willing to deal.

By the time Sean negotiated her down, he was able to get the box of earth-silver, the space-lead, and a few other pieces of scrap for 18 of the twenty credits in his pocket. Two credits wasn’t a particularly useful amount of currency, sure, but every cent saved mattered.

He might have still been getting fleeced, negotiations notwithstanding, but he didn’t care. Relative to the kind of funds he might get later, it seemed like a good investment. And he was pretty sure apocalypse credits didn’t carry over to the after world.

Carrying the stacked boxes out of the shop, he managed to drop both as he caught a jangling pile of metal with his toe, almost tripping in the process. It was a long section of chain, heavy and rusted, coiled on the ground.

“You do love finding my mistakes.” She shook her head. “I used to use that to lift casting crucibles out of the furnace. I made something better last year. It’s pretty much garbage now.”

Sean smiled. He knew where his last two credits were going.