As they ate breakfast, Wiz looked over at Dominic with a smile.
"You know, with you being awake all night, we didn’t have to keep watch at all, nothing came close enough to the farm with you banging away. Are you normally on a night schedule?" He asked.
Dominic shook his head. "Not really. I am normally in the shop during the day, I just got excited last night.
I’ll probably be in the forge all day again today after a short nap, working on armour from that recipe Bella traded me. With a bit of luck, I might have enough materials to improve my own gear and then make a second piece for sale."
Wiz smiled and looked down at himself. "It might take a bit of extra material to make gear in my size. Good thing that the drop items from the monsters fit themselves to the one who gets them. If they didn’t, I’d never get gear."
Terry laughed at his son’s antics, then sighed and looked out at the field.
"Before we get too far into planning, can I borrow Dominic for a bit? The harvester has some broken blades, and the scythe needs a fresh edge. It’s not often that we have a proper blacksmith around and all." He began.
"It’s no problem at all. Bring what you need fixed, I’ll have the forge hot all day anyhow, and I can work on it while I’m reheating the armour." Dominic agreed.
He was a guest here, but room and board weren’t really free when you were on a farm, every hand was needed to get things done, and if that meant fixing tools as he crafted gear, then that was his room rent.
Everyone split up to go to their morning chores, and Terry followed Dominic to the forge, which was still hot from his overnight work. He looked down at the pile of coal, barely touched, thanks to the teaching of Pops on how to keep a forge properly stoked so that it gave off the heat you needed with a minimum amount of fuel.
There turned out to be far more than a little wrong with the harvester. The teeth had broken on the reciprocating cutter because they had gotten caught on each other. They had gotten caught on each other because the upper blade had rotated downward, and that had happened because the frame had been bent by what looked like multiple kicks from the plow horse.
Wiz’s family couldn’t afford a steam tractor, so the horse still pulled all the farm implements, and from the condition of the harvester, the creature wasn’t particularly impressed with the situation.
Dominic didn’t say anything as he took the machine apart and contemplated how he was going to get it bent back straight. Pops had a magical torch to make this job easier, and so did the mobile forge in the caravan.
But there wasn’t one among the basic tools that Pops had gifted to his new apprentice.
The only real solution seemed to be to take the whole side off the harvester and heat it on the forge so that it didn’t crack when he started to hammer the dents out.
Terry was looking quite sheepish by the time that Dominic had finished the disassembly process, as he was ultimately responsible for leaving the horse unattended with an expensive piece of machinery that it despised, but Dominic wasn’t judging him at all, just collecting the scraps of iron from his storage cube and tossing them into a crucible.
"How much steel do you need for that armour plate?" Terry asked while Dominic sorted through what looked like a pile of salvaged trash.
"Not too much. A kilogram or so is more than enough to do a chest plate with shoulder and upper leg guards." Dominic replied with a shrug.
Terry ran out of the forge building and quickly returned with a large chunk of something rusty in his hands.
"It’s not pretty, but it’s iron. More than enough for the job, I daresay. I picked it up in the woods a few years back where a caravan had left it by the road as unsalvageable. I was hoping to cut it down and use it to fix tools, but I never got around to practising." He explained.
"That will do perfectly. Just let me get out the saw and I will cut it down small enough for the crucible." Dominic agreed with a smile.
It would have to be smelted down to get rid of all that rust, but there was bound to be some good steel left in a bar that heavy.
The clanging became a constant counterpoint to everything that Wiz and Bella did around the farm that day, setting a rhythm that they worked to, and eventually even made up silly songs in time to, much to his mother’s annoyance.
The harvester was finished in only a few hours, but still, the noise continued as Dominic worked and Terry kept bringing him broken items from anywhere he could find them. Even the damaged kitchen cleaver and one large pot managed to make it out to the forge by the middle of the afternoon.
"Aren’t you working him a bit too hard? You know he’s been up all night." June asked her husband.
"He’s still working on armour plates. They’re going to be right pretty, I reckon, with all that work he’s putting into them." Terry replied with a shrug.
The clanging ended just before dinner was ready, and Dominic came in with a large sack slung over his shoulder and a smile on his face, wearing dark steel shoulder plates with a matching steel chest plate over the tattered black mage robe that he had gotten from the trip to fight goblins, and thigh guards strapped over his leather pants, though those weren’t visible while he was wearing the robes.
"That’s crazy, you’re better armoured than I am, and you’re the spell caster." Wiz laughed.
Dominic dropped the bag on the floor between them.
"Not for long. Your father had some spare steel, and I practised my blacksmithing on it to get my skills up before I tried doing my own armour. I’m up to level three on my Blacksmith Trade Skill Core, by the way. Now, try that on and we will see how it fits." He announced.
Inside was the first attempt that he had made at the [Cogwork Plate Armour]. It had come out as Uncommon, but only barely.
The armour rating on it was fairly decent, as it was a solid steel plate armour piece of Uncommon magical quality, but the only other bonus it had was a single mana regained on hit. It certainly didn’t seem impressive, but the shoulder pads were the same way, for a second mana on hit, and the full leg plates he had made were extra durable.
That seemed like a good enough bonus for the set, as the legs were the most often attacked body part in a fight against goblins.
Plus, the three pieces had the Cogwork Armour Pattern’s signature magical effect. The pieces latched together on their own when you put them on. It was a small bit of magical circuitry, making the armour technically a form of technomagic, despite its mundane function.
Wiz hurried to equip them over his work pants, smiling more and more as he manoeuvred the plates into position. Getting into a full plate set actually required two people most of the time, but if you attached the shoulders to the chest before you put the larger piece on, or if you had a bit of flexibility, all the pieces of a Cogwork Armour set could be equipped by yourself.
For Wiz, as he was a frontline fighter, Dominic had pounded out a skirt of overlapping steel strips to protect his hips and lower belly, where the plate might ride up as he moved. It gave him nearly complete coverage from his boots to his neck, far better than the common grade goblin items he had been wearing, and stylishly blackened to take off the shine and prevent rust.
"I didn’t have an opportunity to do your arms, but the rest of you looks very stylish." Dominic congratulated the stocky Crusader before being engulfed in a hug that rang with steel plates colliding.
Maybe he was too soft, giving away a fully functional test piece. But Pops had done the same for him, and the Sabre was much higher quality workmanship.