When Pops woke up the next morning, the first thing he did was to check the apprentice quarters to see if Dominic had made it to bed or if he was still working.
There was no need to go inside the room, the door wasn’t fully closed to soundproof it, and he could hear the boy snoring away and mumbling in his sleep about spearheads from down the hallway.
It was a rite of initiation for the new Apprentices to work day and night most days until they got their speed up to par, and none of the Journeymen actually expected that the apprentices would be able to get the first task that they were assigned done by dawn.
Instead, they would pretend to relent in the morning after breakfast and send their apprentices to bed for a few hours, only to drag them out of bed for lunch and put them back to work finishing the previous day’s tasks.
So, as the new apprentice candidate had made it back before he woke up, Pops went to the forge after breakfast to see how Dominic had done.
As he walked, the old Dwarf realized this vetting process was all just for show. There were no other Weaponsmith Apprentices in the forge for the Intake Exam. There were farriers, one Armourer, and a number of other trades, but no other Weaponsmiths.
How could Dominic lose a contest when there were no other competitors? The Palace had tricked them into a guaranteed placement. The Royal Family knew his personality well enough to know that he wouldn’t simply abandon his Apprentice once they were already settled in here.
Pops strolled into the forge, where he was met with a round of thunderous applause, and a line of smithy workers forming a walkway to the workstation where he had left his apprentice working last night.
The first thing that he noticed when he arrived was the sand table that had been set up to make spearheads ten at a time, and the row of forge tools carefully rearranged on the wall in the order that they were needed to craft spears, instead of the standard order that they had been in the day before.
Then he saw the bundle. Fifty spears, tied together in a bunch, like a sheaf of wheat.
"Where are the failures?" Pops asked as he took in the workstation.
"There aren’t any. He worked until the small hours of the morning, but he didn’t fail a single spear, they are all right there." One of the forge workers informed him.
"Were you on night shift?" Pops asked.
"I was. But you can ask Journeyman Deckard as well. He was on this side of the Forges all night overseeing the other apprentices who had work to do, and he saw everything."
Naturally, most tradesmen would take the word of a Journeyman over that of a forge worker, but Pops just nodded. He had somewhat expected this, and the boy’s reputation would be ruined if the others found out that he’d lied to the new Master Weaponsmith.
Pops opened the bundle and spread the spears out along the wall.
"Nice uniformity. A bit of an odd stylistic choice, but they should be combat effective. Perhaps that is part of the secret to his success? Two thirds are Uncommon, that’s highly unusual for an Apprentice. Where is his oil bucket?" Pops asked.
"I believe he took it with him, sir. Something about it being a lucky bucket." The Forge Worker replied.
The other smiths laughed at that. Superstition among craftsmen was pretty common, and he wouldn’t be the only one that had a lucky tool that they used all the time. Though, none of them had heard of a lucky oil bucket being blamed for their success.
The Journeyman who had been on duty for the night shift tilted his head toward the row of spears.
"I must say, for a first day at the forge, he certainly made a good impression. Once he attunes more closely with that Blacksmithing Core, he’s going to be a monster. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that he was cheating somehow."
The Forge attendants nodded in agreement, while one old Master chuckled quietly to himself in the corner, where he was etching ornate pin striping into a piece of plate mail.
"You lot didn’t notice at all, did you? Of course, the Sorcerer was cheating. Why would he not cheat? The assignment was to make fifty magical spears, not to make life as difficult as possible for himself." The old man quietly muttered to himself.
The armourers near him all turned to catch his words. The old man always had good advice, but he hated people, so he rarely talked to them directly.
"Armourer, what do you mean by cheated? Did he not make the spears himself?" One of the other weapon smiths asked.
"Of course he made them himself, you halfwit. They’ve all got his maker’s mark on them. But what can a Sorcerer do that you can’t?" He scoffed, gesturing with his hands to emphasize his point, then his voice dropped back to a more normal volume, and he coughed for half a minute before continuing.
"He added mana to his oil bucket every time he made a weapon so that they would all turn out magical. How did you watch him all night and not figure that out? Perhaps you spent too much time staring at his horns instead of his hammer? If you weren’t so damned stupid, you would have been a Journeyman by now." The old man ranted.
"Alright, that’s enough. No making the Apprentices cry this week, you promised." Journeyman Deckard reminded him.
"Not my fault if he cries because he can’t see what is in front of his face."
Deckard gave the old man a glare, and he huffed, then returned to his work, decorating the ornamental armour piece he was working on.
Pops bundled the spears back up into a sheaf before looking out over the gardens outside the forge.
"I should probably send my apprentice to take his spears out to the line. They’re going to need them soon, and they should know who they come from, since Dominic’s maker’s mark is a new one to them." He decided.
"He did get the job done in one night. We might have to update the way that the rest of our apprentices make spears, though. Those look vicious, and they’re sure to cause some real damage as you pull them free." Journeyman Deckard noted.
"Well, he’s been asleep for a few hours, I’m sure that he’s up for another Goblin Blood Bath with the Princess." One of the farriers joked.
Pops sighed and rolled his eyes. He couldn’t even refute that. If he sent the boy to the front lines with a bundle of spears, he was definitely coming back covered in Goblin blood.
He had likely killed more of them than the rest of the apprentices in the forge combined, and he was the only one under Journeyman level that was fully familiar with the proper use of Core Dust.
Raising a proper apprentice really was a hassle. But Pops wasn’t one to give up halfway. He would just have to push the Palace to formalize the intake early and make him a proper Apprentice.