The air inside the **Red Dragon's Lair** split open with a rabid roar that shook the walls of the seventeenth floor. The stone ground cracked beneath the feet of a battered party, and the front-line tank fell first—that massive fighter who had never once been late to guard the rear—then the priest collapsed to his knees, eyes already dead before his face met the dirt.
Jary stood in the back row, exactly where a Level-Three fire mage was supposed to stand: behind everyone, far from the fangs, close to the shame. He stretched both palms forward and launched an orange fireball barely larger than his own fist. It struck the dragon's scales and died like a cheap candle-spark flicked by a child against a stone wall. The beast did not even turn its head.
Kailo screamed from the right flank—Kailo, the companion with whom Jary had spent four full years trading dungeon corridors, sharing night-watch camps, and telling long winter tales about cities neither of them had ever visited. He screamed once, a single thick cry, then charged at the dragon's belly with his honed dagger—the very dagger whose handle Jary had sat repairing one rainy night with a strip of tanned leather and a thin copper thread, because the city blacksmith refused to fix it for less than two silver coins. Kailo drove the blade into the gap between the lower scales, and thick black blood gushed for two seconds before the dragon's tail came down with absolute vertical force on his chest. The breastplate shattered—the same breastplate whose side grip Jary had mended with his bare hands just a week ago—and Jary heard a wet, muffled sound that did not belong to the world of the living. He knew without looking that Kailo would never tell another story.
Jary ran. He ran on legs ranked E, in a body whose fire resistance amounted to a pitiful (+3), armed with offensive magic that a guild assessor had once classified as "sufficient to light a kitchen stove." He ran until he cleared the floor gate and vanished into the escape corridor while the roar chased him like a curse that would haunt his sleep for months. That night, in a cheap inn in the city of **Agu**, Jary sat on the edge of a rotting wooden bed and stared at his hands—still trembling, still reeking of ash and helplessness—and decided, in a silence dry and stripped of all theater, that he was done. No heroics, no glory, no adventure, no new party. An E-rank adventurer who had failed to advance in four years could not afford the luxury of dying slowly.
---
Jary turned twenty-three that month—an age considered among adventurers the first peak, when a fighter should have reached at least C-rank or settled into a stable support role. He had achieved neither. Rather than stay in Agu, where the gate guards knew him by name and pitied him with sidelong smiles, he bought a seat on a trade wagon heading south and traveled two full days along narrow dirt roads flanked by pale wheat fields and low rocky hills until he reached the village of **Fil**: thirty stone houses, a single morning market, a small church, and a pig farm owned by the village chief—a man who had never heard of the Red Dragon's Lair and had no desire to.
Here, his father had been born long ago—an adventurer of B-rank who had left for the city as a young man and built a solid reputation in the deep basement floors, before being swallowed in a confrontation with a Calamity-class beast. They did not bring back his body. They did not even bring back his sword. They brought only a dry notice the guild delivered to his mother in a sealed envelope.
And here, too, had lived his paternal grandfather: **Garon**, the dwarf blacksmith who had settled in Fil forty years prior and married Jary's human grandmother. This was why Jary had inherited a normal human frame but disproportionately broad palms on a lean body, and dense wrist bones that a guild physician had once described as "clearly dwarven," despite the fact that he carried only a quarter dwarf blood. Garon's workshop still stood at the western edge of the village: a low-ceilinged stone building with a wide black chimney and a heavy oak door into which the old man had carved the hammer-and-anvil sigil before dying quietly in his bed—a death far too peaceful for a man who had hammered metal for fifty years.
---
Jary pushed the oak door with his shoulder. It did not move. He kicked it three times with his heel before it swung open with a screech like the groan of a sick animal, and pale light poured over a scene that tightened his stomach: the workshop had been ransacked. Thieves—or perhaps drifters passing through during the years of absence—had taken everything portable and sellable: the stored ingots, the brass measuring tools, the set of four tongs Garon had forged himself, even the protective anvil apron, ripped from its hook. What they left behind was not worth carrying: a massive rusted anvil bolted into a stone base that would require a team of oxen to move, a worn-out leather bellows with one of its vents torn open, a coal shovel with a broken neck, and on the far wall—a wooden shelf holding seven decrepit swords with cracked blades and rotting handles, clearly training pieces or failed samples the old man had forged and then abandoned. Hanging above the shelf by two iron nails was a shield grip ringed with fine dwarven engravings that climbed its surface like the roots of a silver vine. This was the only piece no one had touched—perhaps because it looked worthless to an untrained eye. But when Jary's fingers closed around it, he knew: the metal beneath his grip had not rusted a single atom in twenty years, and its weight-to-size ratio was wrong—far too heavy for its dimensions. No ordinary blacksmith made metal like this.
Jary set his leather pack in the corner, shut the door behind him, and stood in the center of the gutted workshop breathing air thick with rust, dust, and ancient charcoal. Then he rolled up his sleeves slowly.
---
On the first day he did not even touch the anvil. He spent hours scrubbing the floor, clearing spider nests from the chimney, and patching the bellows' torn vent with a piece of leather cut from his own pack strap. He tested the chimney by lighting a handful of dry kindling gathered from behind the building. The smoke rose with a suspicious sluggishness that suggested a partial blockage in the upper flue, so he climbed to the roof, reached his arm into the chimney mouth, and pulled out a petrified bird's nest, three stones, and a clump of dried moss.
On the second day he examined the seven ruined swords one by one: blades of poor iron with inconsistent carbon content—he could tell from the fracture color on one blade, where the coarse, uneven crystalline grain pointed to a hasty melt and careless quench—and handles of wood never treated with oil, so they had absorbed moisture, swollen, then split. He could not find a single forging hammer anywhere in the workshop; the thieves had taken them all. He walked out to the village morning market and bought a heavy hand-hammer from an agricultural tool trader for four copper coins. It was not a proper forging hammer by any professional standard—its head was too wide and its neck too short, robbing each swing of momentum—but it was all he could afford.
---
On the third day, the real work began. He fired the forge with mineral coal purchased from a neighboring farmer for the last handful of copper coins in his purse, and pumped the patched bellows with both arms until the heat climbed and the coals turned to white embers dancing at the edge of a thousand degrees. He took the first ruined sword and pushed its blade into the heart of the fire and waited—waited while sweat rolled from his forehead and evaporated before reaching his chin from the heat reflecting off the forge mouth—until the iron glowed the deep red of ripe cherries, then shifted toward yellowish orange. He pulled it out with makeshift tongs he had bent by hand from an iron rod found behind the anvil, laid the glowing blade on the rusted anvil face, raised the farm hammer, and struck.
The first blow landed crooked. Pain shot through his right wrist because the angle had drifted off the blade's center. He adjusted his stance and struck a second time, a third, a fourth. With each blow, flakes of oxidized scale burst from the iron surface like tiny fire-insects and stung his bare forearms, leaving red dots that would later become small white scars that would never disappear. He returned the blade to the fire, pulled it, struck. Returned, pulled, struck. For eight consecutive hours until he could no longer feel his fingers and could no longer tell his sweat from his tears. When he finally looked at the result on the anvil, he found a misshapen iron strip with uneven thickness and a lateral curve visible to the naked eye. It was not fit to be a blade, a pick, or even a door nail. He looked at the wall where the legendary shield grip hung with its perfect silver engravings, and he compared his grandfather's craft to the abomination in his hand, and felt the weight of that comparison settle on his shoulders like a stone.
But he did not stop. He melted the misshapen strip and re-smelted it in a small clay crucible he found buried in the old forge ash. He poured and hammered it again, melted it a third time and a fourth, and each time he noticed that his strikes were landing a fraction closer to center, that the hammer's rhythm was steadying by a slim margin, and that the metal responded more smoothly when he pulled it from the fire at the right shade of orange before it slid toward pale yellow. He hammered through the entire third day. The moon set and the dawn of the fourth day rose and he was still standing before the anvil—eyes bloodshot, shoulders trembling from exhaustion, a hammer he could no longer feel because his hand had turned into a numb wooden extension of his arm.
And in that exact moment, as he raised the hammer for what might have been the one-thousand-and-hundredth blow, the air stopped.
---
Not figuratively. Literally. The forge flame froze in place like an embalmed tongue of fire. The scale-flakes in mid-flight hung in the void like miniature stars suspended in the workshop's darkness. A drop of sweat sliding from the tip of Jary's nose halted in the air between his face and the anvil and did not fall.
Then the screen appeared.
Not a screen in any physical sense—no frame, no glass, no surface that could be touched—but a translucent rectangle of dark red light the color of iron at twelve hundred degrees, floating an arm's length from his face. Letters the color of white embers formed across it, pulsing with a slow, calm rhythm like the heartbeat of some vast sleeping creature.
The letters read:
**"System of the Great Ascetic Blacksmith — Activation conditions met: uninterrupted smelting and refining exceeding three days. Qualified user will: confirmed. Partial dwarven bloodline: confirmed. Initiating bond…"**
Jary felt a sharp prick at the center of his chest—not true pain, but the sensation of something invisible driving a needle into his sternum, drawing out a thin thread, and tying it to a place he could not name. Then the red screen shifted, and a stat sheet appeared—numbers and symbols he read slowly, his eyes widening with every line.
**"Continuous Smelting Reward: Dermal Heat Endurance (+4). Fire Resistance (+7). Skill Unlocked: Striking Speed (+5). Magical Weapon Appraisal (+3)."**
Then a line appeared in a different color—cold blue, stark against the surrounding red—and it read:
**"Bond Cost: Swordsmanship (−2). Title Granted: Amateur Blacksmith."**
Jary stared at the loss before the gains. Two points of swordsmanship. He let out a short, dry laugh that bounced off the workshop walls. Swordsmanship—a skill that had barely reached five points to begin with, a skill supposedly meant to let him fight with a blade when in his entire life he had never managed to cleanly cut anything more than a rope in a single stroke. He said, in a voice hoarse from three days of silence:
"Take it all."
---
The air lurched back into motion. The flame danced again, the flakes completed their fall, the drop of sweat struck the anvil face and hissed into nothing, and the red screen faded slowly like an ember covered by a film of gray ash. But Jary felt the difference immediately—not in a dramatic way where supernatural power floods your veins, but in a precise, practical way: the heat pouring from the forge mouth that had been scorching his face for three days was now just a heavy, bearable warmth. He extended his left hand—after a brief hesitation—toward the tip of the glowing iron blade on the anvil and touched it with his fingertips for two full seconds. Hot, unpleasant, but he did not burn. Three days ago, the same contact would have raised a blistered welt on his skin in under half a second. Now the skin stayed intact, merely flushed red. Four points of dermal endurance and seven points of fire resistance had produced a tangible, measurable difference.
Then came the second discovery. Jary ignited his right palm with his fire magic—the same pathetic little fireball the Red Dragon had mocked—and found it slightly larger than he remembered, its heat noticeably higher in a way he could sense down to the bones of his fingers. The System had added (+2) to his fire capacity implicitly—not because he was a mage, but because he was a blacksmith who needed fire as a tool, not a weapon. He pressed the fireball into his palm and directed it into the forge belly. The coals caught at double speed and the temperature climbed steadily toward the bluish-white that meant thirteen hundred degrees—a temperature an ordinary blacksmith would need a double bellows and premium coal to reach. Jary reached it with a patched bellows, cheap coal, and a modest touch of fire magic that was now two points less modest.
He took the second ruined sword and pushed its blade into the new fire, and when he pulled it out minutes later and struck it with the farm hammer, he felt the difference in his hand before he saw it with his eyes. His strikes were faster—not by much, perhaps two extra blows per minute—but five points in Striking Speed meant his rhythm had grown more regular and the dead time between raising and lowering the hammer had shrunk just enough to keep the metal in its workable heat range for a longer window before it cooled and stiffened.
And more important: when he looked at the blade after twenty consecutive strikes, something strange stirred in his eyes—no glow, no magical light—just a cold clarity in his perception of the metal's quality. Three points in Magical Weapon Appraisal did not grant him the ability to see deep magical stats, but they revealed with painful precision just how poor his work still was. He could now see that the crystalline distribution in the blade was uneven, that two microscopic air bubbles were trapped near the cutting edge and would cause the blade to crack at the first real impact, and that the overall durability of this blade did not exceed a rating of six—a sword unfit to slaughter even a stubborn chicken. The enhanced perception (+5) let him see flaws with a sharpness he had never possessed before, and instead of discouraging him, that clarity handed him a precise map of what needed fixing.
---
He re-smelted the blade for the fifth time. This time he changed his method: instead of striking straight down with vertical blows, he began hammering at a thirty-degree angle to push the metal horizontally and drive the bubbles toward the edge where they could be removed through cold-working. Then he flipped the blade and struck the other side at the same angle. After a series of heat-and-quench cycles—heating the metal, plunging it into a trough of cold water, returning it to the fire, plunging it again to harden the crystal structure—he noticed the blade's quality had risen: durability from six to seven, potential damage from four to five. Not a spectacular leap, but the steady five-percent improvement the System had promised through the heat-and-quench skill implicitly acquired.
Jary spent the next five days in a closed loop: smelt, hammer, quench, repeat. He ate a chunk of dry bread and hard cheese on the edge of the anvil without sitting down. He slept four hours on the workshop floor wrapped in his old cloak, then woke to the sound of the bellows inside his own head before he opened his eyes.
On the eighth day since arriving in Fil, he stood before the anvil and examined the finished piece in his hands: a long dagger—not a sword, for he did not have enough metal for a full blade—with a thirty-centimeter edge tapering from four centimeters at the base to one at the tip, and a wooden handle wrapped in a leather strip tanned with linseed oil and fastened with two small copper pins. It was not beautiful. The right edge was visibly sharper than the left, and the handle was half a centimeter longer than it should have been. But it was solid. He looked at it through his appraisal skill, and the numbers surfaced in his mind with the clarity of cold water: durability twelve, damage ten. Not a weapon any adventurer guild would purchase, and no respectable smith would stamp his name on it—but it could cut, it could stab, and it could endure two hundred strikes before needing a sharpening. That was more than Jary had ever made in his entire life.
---
On the morning of the ninth day, he heard a knock at the workshop door. He opened it and found a girl with chestnut hair tied behind her head, a round face dusted with freckles, and pale gray eyes that moved with a quick, evasive intelligence—looking at his hands before his face, at the anvil before looking at him, at the shelf of ruined swords and then at the gleaming dagger on the table. She said:
"You're Garon's grandson. I've been hearing the hammer for three days. I thought his ghost had come back."
Her name was **Roa**, from a family on the eastern edge of the village. Jary had never heard of them and did not ask. She needed a weapon for protection against the wild wolves that came down from the hills during the dry season. She looked at the dagger and said:
"How much?"
Jary answered too quickly, betraying his inexperience at selling: "Two silver coins."
She raised her left eyebrow in a slow, deliberate motion and said: "A dagger with no sheath, no maker's mark, and a handle that's longer than it should be—one silver coin."
Jary knew she was right on every point, but he held firm with the stubbornness of a man who had nothing else to hold: "One and a half."
Roa gave a sideways smile that did not show her teeth, reached into a small leather pouch at her hip, drew out a single silver coin, and placed it in his palm. Then she drew out an additional copper coin and said:
"This is for the right edge being sharper than the left. I liked that—it means you don't lie about your craft."
She took the dagger in one hand and tested its balance with a quick wrist rotation that did not belong to an ordinary village girl. Then she disappeared into the morning light without looking back.
---
Jary stood in the workshop doorway holding one silver coin and one copper coin in his right hand, the farm hammer in his left, while the cool morning air brushed against the burns on his forearms and soothed them. He looked at the two coins and counted in his head: coal cost four coppers, leather two coppers, the hammer four coppers—his net profit from this dagger did not exceed two copper coins after materials. Two coppers for nine days of work.
He laughed a real laugh this time—the first real laugh since the Dragon's Lair—and shook his head and said aloud to himself:
I'll become the richest blacksmith in this village that has no other blacksmith, then the richest in the region, then…"
He stopped. His eyes drifted to the shield grip hanging on the inside wall, its dwarven silver engravings still beyond his understanding. He did not finish the sentence. He walked back inside, shut the door behind him, lit the forge again, and raised the hammer.
The translucent red screen flickered once at the edge of his vision