It turned out that Arthur managed to make quite a mess in the one day that he was directly in charge – not only did he completely trash the main council chamber, but somehow put several dozen people in the dungeons for questioning him.
Additionally he reassigned all the patrol routes and locations, making them effectively nonsensical.
Sufficed to say the emergency council had their hands full, and Calen and his companions haven’t seen Nickolas for almost two days after returning.
In other news, Alfred developed a sudden interest in becoming an instructor, insisting that the job will help him polish his fundamentals.
He wasn’t very subtle about his real intentions but Nickolas let him do it anyway, probably thinking that he might as well do something productive while flirting with Morgan.
But speaking of people trying new things, he wasn’t the only one doing so.
Calen took a deep breath as he approached the forge – the only sound usually coming from this place was the ringing of metal, but this time he could clearly two voices engaged in a very passionate exchange.
The people arguing inside turned out to be Thomas and Greg, and they were apparently discussing the best alloys to use for weapons as opposed to armour.
It was the first time Calen saw Greg out of armour but the lack of metal plates didn’t make him any less intimidating – in fact the blacksmith get up he was wearing only accentuated his naturally massive build.
"What are you doing here?" Calen asked. "I thought you had things to do related to organising the tournament."
"I did until Nickolas realised that I have never done anything even remotely similar – I suggested that I do something more aligned with my abilities, so here I am, giving some pointers to Thomas."
"Right." Calen nodded and looked at Thomas. "And how are you finding this insights of his?"
"He’s a bit patronising, but I can’t really discard the knowledge of someone who did this for literal centuries."
"I don’t mean to sound like that, I’m just giving some minor suggestions." Greg defended himself.
Thomas just shook his head.
"Anyway, what are you doing here? Did you somehow manage to get skewered again and need your armour repaired?"
"No, nothing like that – but I do have a request."
"I want to learn how to make weapons."
Greg and Thomas looked at him in surprise – it was quite clear it was the last thing they expected to hear.
"To be clear I’m not exactly against it, but I have to ask why?"
"You already know that the divine flame can be used to forge things, but what use is it for me when I can’t make even a nail? I want to learn how to use my abilities to their fullest potential."
"That’s fine, but I must reiterate that you won’t be able use those flames for forging for quite a while – you will need the correct materials and an extremely resilient forge, not to mention hundreds or even thousands of hours of training before you’ll be able to make something decent."
"Master always said I pick up things quickly, I’m sure it won’t be that difficult."
Thomas cocked an eyebrow and chuckled.
"Let’s see how good you are then."
Forging turned out to be extremely difficult for Calen – but not for any regular reason.
It was his new superhuman strength that caused him problems; it turns out that you need to hit the heated metal with measured and precise strikes, something that proved near impossible for him.
Apparently due to the fact that he used his newfound abilities mostly for fighting, he never bothered to learn how to control his titanic strength.
Why would he after all? His fighting style was based around dealing powerful blows and winning as soon as possible, the increased power hasn’t bothered him so far.
Well, now he was learning – slowly and clumsily, but he was making progress. Fortunately for him Thomas had plenty of scraps he could train on, as a lot of things he made were experiments and they often went terribly wrong.
During the process both Thomas and Greg were giving him pointers, which were ultimately useless due to the fact that he was still trying to just control the strength of his hits.
Three hours of hammering later, he finally started to get the hang of this whole strength control thing.
During that time he made a few interesting discoveries – for one fire or anything hot simply couldn’t hurt him. He could grab a white hot piece of metal with his bare arm and he would be completely fine.
He also apparently had a small degree of control over mundane fire; it wasn’t anything that would be useful in battle yet, but he was able to make the heated metal maintain its temperature longer, making the process of foraging a bit easier.
By experimenting a little with true sight while recieving advice on how to hammer he noticed a few correlations between the flaws he was seeing and where the blade was supposed to strike.
Thanks to all of that combined he started to make rapid improvements once he managed to properly adjust his strength.
He won’t be making legendary weapons anytime soon, or even a functional sword for that matter, but by the end of the day he did manage to hammer out something that roughly resembled a blade.
Thomas picked up his latest creation and weighed it in his hands and hit it a few times before scratching his chin.
Calen raised an eyebrow.
"Really? It looks awful."
"I mean, the balance is horrible and the shape is a bit wonky, but in terms of durability this it’s a decent piece. I would be hard pressed to call this a weapon, but it technically could be used as one – if I hit Greg over the head with it a hundred times it probably wouldn’t break. I’d say that’s a great success for the first day."
Well if an experienced blacksmith was saying so, who was he to disagree?
He just stepped on the path of a craftsman without any expectations, but maybe he will be able to eventually make something useful.
Only time would tell.