The echoes of the fireball faded, replaced by a stunned, ringing silence.
The swamp, which had been filled with the menacing growls of the wolf pack, was now eerily quiet.
The villagers stared at the patch of scorched earth, then at their Baron, their faces a mixture of terror and awe. They had seen a man command fire with a thrown rock.
Seraphina was the first to break the silence. She slowly sheathed her sword, the soft shing of steel on leather unnaturally loud. She looked at Kaelen, her eyes wide with a question she didn't seem to know how to ask.
"How?" she finally managed, her voice barely a whisper.
"Swamp gas," Kaelen said, his own heart still hammering in his chest from the adrenaline. He needed to demystify this, fast, before they started thinking he was a sorcerer. "Rotting plants in the mud release a flammable gas. Your spark just gave it a way to ignite."
He made it sound simple, a basic chemical reaction. To them, it was anything but.
He turned to the pale-faced villagers.
"The wolves are gone. The 'curse' was just a pocket of bad air," he declared, his voice firm and steady, cutting through their fear. "This is a safe work site now. Let's get back to it. Those rocks aren't going to dig themselves up."
His calm, business-like demeanor was bizarrely effective. It grounded them.
The Baron wasn't acting like he'd just performed a miracle. He was acting like a foreman whose lunch break was over.
Reassured, if still deeply unsettled, the villagers hesitantly returned to their work, though they now gave the bubbling patches of ground a very wide berth.
Seraphina, however, did not move. She continued to stare at him, her mind clearly struggling to reconcile what she had just witnessed.
"You knew that would happen," she stated. It wasn't a question.
"I had a working theory," Kaelen admitted. "The probability of success was... acceptable."
"You gambled our lives on a 'working theory'?"
"I gambled our lives on a better solution than you fighting a pack of five territorial swamp wolves alone, Captain," he countered gently. "Even as a 1-Star Knight, those are not good odds. I chose the option with the highest chance of a zero-casualty outcome."
She had no response to that. His cold, brutal logic was, as always, infuriatingly correct. She had been ready to die to protect him and the villagers. He had simply solved the problem with a rock and a bit of obscure knowledge.
For the rest of the morning, Seraphina stayed close to Kaelen, her usual stoic silence replaced by a thoughtful, observant one. She was re-evaluating him. He wasn't just a strange, demanding lord. He was something else entirely. Something dangerous and unpredictable, but not for the reasons she had first thought.
✧✧✧
They returned to the village just before midday, their carts laden with the first haul of the lumpy, reddish-brown bog iron.
The news of the expedition spread like wildfire, embellished with every telling. The Baron had faced down a pack of demonic swamp wolves. He had commanded the earth to breathe fire. He had tamed the cursed swamp.
Kaelen ignored the rumors. He had work to do.
He directed the villagers to dump the ore in a pile near the forge. Borin came out, wiping his sooty hands on a rag, and looked at the mountain of ugly, muddy rock.
"So, the ghost stories were true," the blacksmith grumbled, picking up a piece. He hefted it in his hand. "It's heavy. Good density. But it's full of filth."
"I'm aware," Kaelen said. "This is the test. Melt it down. Let's see what you get."
Borin shrugged. "Your choice, my Lord."
He fired up the forge, the bellows operated by his apprentice pumping life into the coals. He selected a few of the better-looking ore pieces, smashed them into smaller chunks, and placed them in a crucible, which he then set into the heart of the roaring fire.
The entire village seemed to hold its breath. This was the moment of truth. This rock was the key to their new plows, their future.
They waited. The heat from the forge was intense. Borin, his face beaded with sweat, used a long pair of tongs to pull the glowing-hot crucible from the fire.
He carefully poured the contents into a simple ingot mold.
The liquid that flowed out was not the clean, shimmering silver of molten steel. It was a thick, clumpy, dull-orange sludge.
As it cooled, it didn't solidify into a solid bar of metal. It cracked, crumbled, and settled into a brittle, porous mass that looked like dried lava.
Slag.
A collective sigh of disappointment went through the watching villagers.
Borin poked the useless ingot with a steel rod. It fell apart into dust and chunks.
"Told you, my Lord," the blacksmith said, though there was no satisfaction in his voice. He had hoped, just like everyone else. "Filth. My fire isn't hot enough to burn it clean."
The villagers began to disperse, their brief flicker of hope extinguished. The swamp was still cursed. Their Baron had failed.
But Kaelen wasn't disappointed. He was smiling.
He walked over to the pile of useless slag and looked at it with the satisfaction of a scientist whose hypothesis has just been proven correct.
"Excellent," he said cheerfully.
Borin stared at him as if he'd gone mad. "Excellent? My Lord, it's garbage!"
"Exactly," Kaelen said, turning to the blacksmith, his eyes shining with a brilliant, predatory light.
"This is the failure I predicted. This is the justification I needed." He gestured towards the forge. "Your current system is inadequate for this new resource."
He bent down and picked up a piece of charcoal.
"Now," he said, a grin spreading across his face as he began to sketch on the stone floor.
"Let me show you the solution. Let's talk about building you a real forge. Let's talk about building my inferno."
.
.
.
Author's Note:
Thanks for reading!
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